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Fond as I am of Georges Perec (whose name, despite what many believe, does not have an accent aigu, even though it is pronounced as if it had one, [peʁɛk] — Perec is the Polish spelling of the name usually anglicized as Peretz, and once the family moved to France it got Frenchified in pronunciation), I was unaware of his “grand palindrome” of 1,247 words (5,566 letters), which you can read here (note once again that his name does not have an accent aigu, even though it is pronounced as if it had one). I suppose someone could translate the whole thing, but apparently only the beginning and end have been rendered into English, by David Bellos (his biographer) and Harry Mathews (his friend and fellow Oulipian), as quoted in this 2011 blog post by Stephen Saperstein Frug. The former begins:

Trace the uneven palindrome. Snow. A trifle, says Hercules. Unadorned repentance, this piece born [of] Perec. [If] the bow of reading is too heavy, read back-to-front.

The latter (and better):

Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle, Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch is too heavy: read vice-versa….

For the renditions of the ending, as well as some jovial discussion, follow the link to Frug’s post. Thanks, David!

Erik at Sententiae Antiquae takes down the Aeneid:

The Aeneid had the supreme good fortune to become immediately canonical, assigned in schools as the equivalent of a “modern classic” in those early imperial days. Well, what else were kids going to study? Livius Andronicus? Ennius? Cicero’s de Consulatu suo? The Aeneid is a marked aesthetic improvement over all of these, but one must also bear in mind that Augustus’ imprimatur must have counted for something. One would not be surprised to find that any monarch’s pet poetic project had received substantial attention, especially when free and outspoken critical judgment became a dangerous luxury. It’s hard to overlook the fact that the Aeneid’s ringing endorsement of Roman empire and the (prophetically foreshadowed) personal lineage/divine right of the Julio-Claudians had something to do with its inclusion in the school curriculum at such an early date.

Why do we have all of Vergil but just a few insignificant scraps of Cornelius Gallus? Their relations to power may have some small part in this. Naturally, they objection arises: what about Ovid? Was he not on the outs? I’d venture to suggest that his survival in the face not only of imperial hostility but also of his manifest unsuitability to Christian sentiment is a testament to his tremendous aesthetic and literary merits.

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Simeon Tegel has a good Washington Post story (archived) about a linguist and his informant:

It’s a ritual that Roberto Zariquiey and Nelita Campos have engaged in for more than a decade. The odd couple — Zariquiey, a university linguist conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard; Campos, the last lucid speaker of her Indigenous language — sit at the roughhewn kitchen table of her raised cabin, overlooking a muddy stream in the village of Callería, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

“You complain a lot,” Zariquiey teases Campos.

“No, you’re the one that never stops complaining,” cracks back Campos, barefoot, with long jet-black hair that defies her 75 or so years.

Zariquiey, a 44-year-old professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, is slowly extracting the Iskonawa language from Campos. He fires off questions, listens attentively to the answers and meticulously writes down all the details Campos can share: The vocabulary, grammar and syntax of one of the world’s most endangered languages. Throughout, the pair, who have built an unlikely mother-son relationship, joke incessantly.

Over time, Campos, who communicates with Zariquiey in both Iskonawa and Spanish, has managed to share much of this frequently onomatopoeic tongue from the Panoan family of languages of the Western Amazon. It’s heavy with polysemy — words with multiple meanings — and notable for allowing users to stack multiple verbs one atop the other. […]

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We’ve discussed various foreign-flavored varieties of English over the years, but never the Thai-based version known as Tinglish; in fact, I never thought of such a thing, even though I lived in Thailand for several years and must have heard a lot of it (this was long before linguistics swam into my ken, of course). Now you can hear a few samples, along with a useful pointer about how a flavored variety can help you get the hang of the foreign original, in this TikTok video, though the final example — “toilet” for what in my native dialect we call “toilet” — was a surprise. (Thanks, Ariel!)

This must be “impenetrable French philosophical vocabulary” week here at the Hattery, because I’ve got another one (cf. Bergson’s élan vital). I’m finally reading the copy of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory I got a couple of years ago, and I ran into the sentence “Some things leaped into my memory ticketless, like a kid on a streetcar, usually a legend or a curiosity, the narrative equivalent of Barthes’s punctum” [Что-то заскакивало в память само, на правах трамвайного зайца, как правило, это была байка или курьез — словесный эквивалент бартовского punctum’a]. I remembered having come across this mysterious punctum before, and I decided to get to the bottom of it. Some googling turned up the useful Roland Barthes: studium and punctum, which says:

Barthes’ Camera Lucida, first published in 1980, assumes that the automaticity of the camera distinguishes photography from traditional media and has significant implications for how we experience photographs. To address the apparently uncoded level of photographs, which troubles the semiological approach Barthes himself adopted in the early 1960s, Camera Lucida advances a theory of photographic meaning that makes a distinction between the studium and the punctum and highlights the punctum as photography-specific.

The studium indicates historical, social or cultural meanings extracted via semiotic analysis. […] The punctum points to those features of a photograph that seem to produce or convey a meaning without invoking any recognizable symbolic system. This kind of meaning is unique to the response of the individual viewer of the image. The punctum punctuates the studium and as a result pierces its viewer. To allow the punctum effect, the viewer must repudiate all knowledge. Barthes insists that the punctum is not simply the sum of desires projected into the photograph. Instead, it arises from details that are unintended or uncontrolled by the photographer. Photography can be distinguished from painting or drawing in that its apparatus visualizes the world automatically rather than being wholly informed by the interventions of the photographer. The theory of the punctum speaks the indexical nature of the photographic medium. It also accounts for the importance of emotion and subjectivity in interacting with photographs. […]

It should be noted that presenting examples of punctum is an impossible mission. The punctum always turns into the studium when expressed in language. That is also why we may perceive that his examples do not support his theory. […] Barthes cannot dismiss knowledge as he claims. Nonetheless, he is fully aware that a theory of the punctum is not possible in language, “to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up” (p. 43).

Now, I started off nodding my head as I read: yes, I agree that “historical, social or cultural meanings” are not at the heart of any artistic creation, and I’m on board with any attempt to define what remains. But the further I read the more confused I got, and that last paragraph sent me into a tailspin (“That is also why we may perceive that his examples do not support his theory”). I was hoping the OED might provide a nice concise definition, but even though the entry was updated in September 2007 they don’t include this sense (too specialized?); the TLFi, French though it is, also ignores it. Wikipedia calls it “a term used by Roland Barthes to refer to an incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph,” which is concise but I suspect deeply inaccurate. If anyone has anything to contribute, I’m all ears.

From Liam Shaw’s LRB review of Slime: A Natural History by Susanne Wedlich:

There does seem to be something universal about the feeling of disgust that slime provokes, even if its valences differ. That ‘slime’ is an easily translatable concept helps Wedlich’s case. She links it to the risk of contamination: our bodies use mucus as a barrier to soak up pathogens which are themselves slimy. Her translator, Ayça Türkoğlu, deploys an impressive and viscous vocabulary. Both German and English have slimy words for slimy things. The smack and suck of saliva make for squelching prose. Frogspawn looks like ‘slimy star snot’. Differences in translation do exist, however. German-speaking friends tell me that schleim is more neutral than in English; you can tuck into a warm bowl of Haferschleim, for example (‘oat slime’, or oatmeal). And even in English, slime has ebbed and flowed. Wycliffe’s 14th-century translation of the Bible has God creating Adam ‘of the sliym of erthe’. In most later versions, the first man emerges from ‘dust’. The imagery has stuck in modern Christianity. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ is an oddly desiccated summary of life’s viscous circle: a euphemism posing as a proverb.

It’s unclear why ‘sliym’ slipped out of the English Eden. Perhaps it made the account in Genesis too close to spontaneous generation.

From the next issue’s Letters column:
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I’ve long been interested in Henri Bergson because he was such a huge figure in the intellectual life of the early 20th century, but I’ve kept a respectful distance because I had a hard time making sense of what he wrote and what people said about him. Now his fourth book, L’Evolution créatrice (1907), appears in a new translation by Donald A. Landes as Creative Evolution, and Emily Herring’s TLS review (archived) makes it sound like it might help me understand what’s going on:

In Creative Evolution Bergson transported the theory of time, or durée, that he had been developing since the late 1880s from the realm of psychology into biology. Rather than comparing organisms to machines, as the physiologists of the nineteenth century had tended to do, he argued that organisms needed to be considered in their temporality: they could not be reduced to repetitive physical mechanisms because, in the living realm, “to exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself” (in Donald A. Landes’s translation). He used an “image”, the élan vital, to represent life as a self-creating movement striving to liberate itself from the constraints of matter, which represented the opposite movement of self-destruction. […]

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Anatoly Vorobei has a post at his Russian blog Avva called тяжелые слова [Difficult words] in which he complains that he can never remember the meaning of “that unpleasant — I might even say stuffy — word erstwhile“:

And when I run across it, I get the vague feeling, quite wrongly, that it means something like ‘respected’ or ‘noble’ (apparently by a vague analogy with earnest and worthwhile). And I’m not the only one who has this problem with the word; I remember reading that native speakers get confused by it sometimes, too. Two or three times already I’ve learned the accurate meaning, and it still slips my mind.

And what are some words, foreign or native, whose meaning you can never manage to remember?

The first commenter mentions explicit and implicit, the second hitherto and flagrant/fragrant; others complain about the Russian words сталактиты ‘stalactites’ and сталагмиты ‘stalagmites’ (equally confusing in English, of course) and смазливый ‘pretty, attractive, cute’ (which I too have trouble remembering).

I myself have never had a problem with erstwhile, for whatever reason (and in fact tend to use it more than I probably should), but as I said here:

The Russian word for ‘nitrogen,’ azot, is hard for me to remember, because it’s so different from the English; of course, it’s straight from French azote, but that’s hard for me to remember too — I guess I didn’t have many dealings with the table of elements when studying French.

JC has linked the Graun’s story in a comment on a nine-year-old post, but I thought it was worth featuring, so here’s Phillip M. Carter’s account at The Conversation — he’s the guy who led the study being reported on:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans. In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance. According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish. […]

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There’s a book called The Cambridge History of Linguistics coming out any day now. I haven’t seen it and know nothing about it aside from the blurbs on that page (e.g., “surveys the fascinating history of the study of language, from its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the diversification of the language sciences in the past half-century”); of course I hope it’s well done, but my burning question is: do they treat Chomsky as hero (revolutionized linguistics, put it on a scientific basis, blah blah) or villain (set linguistics back decades, substituted dogma for facts, etc.)? If anyone knows anything about this impressive-sounding volume, do tell.