The Tailor.

Comments

1. Ransom says

   December 16, 2013 at 9:57 pm

   I was rather startled to recognize “У самовара” in the soundtrack.
   For reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-xrev6EUhE
2. languagehat says

   December 17, 2013 at 8:46 am

   Originally a Polish song; the Russian Wikipedia article gives both Polish and Lithuanian texts.
3. marie-lucie says

   December 17, 2013 at 9:45 am

   A cute little film, I liked it very much, but when I looked at it it was entirely silent (I checked that I had not muted the sound), until the final words spoken by the younger nun (and I could not make out the last word).
4. languagehat says

   December 17, 2013 at 10:18 am

   You must have the volume way down low for some reason. There’s nice music playing throughout, and if you can’t make out the last word you miss the joke!
5. marie-lucie says

   December 17, 2013 at 11:15 am

   LH, No, I checked that the volume was on, and with other soundtracks the sound is normal, in fact I oftfen turn it down a little, but it was set at top volume and I did not hear any music at all. It could be that my computer is too old, as there are many videos it does not allow me to play.

   I guessed that the last word was the crucial one, but nevertheless I missed it! I should try to rerun the video until I get it.

   Many times, people telling a joke speak the last word a little faster, or with the beginning of a smile or laugh, somewhat distorting the speech sounds. In this case, the nun was smiling! The same thing happens to me with songs: I can deal with most English speech (barring totally unfamiliar dialects) , but I often miss many words in English language songs.
6. Jesús says

   December 17, 2013 at 11:19 am

   My twisted mind and my ignorance of English carried me back to “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin (or Parsin, Peres, Fares”).
7. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says

   December 17, 2013 at 12:56 pm

   Apparently Il’f & Petrov didn’t inveigh against Masha and her samovar, or foxtrot in general, but more about situations where better voice-mail music on a customer-care 800-line replaces customer service. BTW I found a Russian word I never knew in this piece, “аэрарий”
8. Hozho says

   December 17, 2013 at 3:20 pm

   Two honey bees were commiserating about the cold spring and the lack of flowers. “No problem,” said one, “just go down five blocks, there is a Bar Mitzvah going on and there are lots of flowers…but be sure to put on a yarmulke. You sure don’t want them to think you’re a WASP.”
9. dearieme says

   December 17, 2013 at 4:12 pm

   I thought it rather jolly; the music was lovely. Of course, I have just dined well.
10. marie-lucie says

    December 17, 2013 at 6:06 pm

    Jesús: “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin (or Parsin, Peres, Fares”).

    I remember those words in the French translation as Mané (or perhaps Mani), Tekel, Pharès, but French Wiki says Parsin, which does not ring a bell. Perhaps Parsin is from a new translation.
11. John Cowan says

    December 17, 2013 at 6:58 pm

    Because these words resemble the names of coins, the American Translation of 1931 (Cyrus Gordon et al.) rendered the sentence as “You have been quartered, halved, and cent to perdition.”
12. John Cowan says

    December 17, 2013 at 7:36 pm

    OT for this post, but an important announcement for the Hattic community:

    I have now set up a service that fetches the Language Hat front page periodically and pulls in the Recent Comments information. It then publishes a Recently Commented-On Language Hat Posts page which contains a link to only the most recent comment on each page, always keeping the pages in newest-comment-first order. Currently the service runs 5 times an hour, on the assumption that there will be considerably less than one comment per minute on average (if 10 or more comments are made between runs, some will be lost).

    As of this moment, only three pages are linked, but this will grow over time as people add comments to new and old posts. Unlike the old Recently Commented On section, it is not limited in size, though I will eventually have to trim it by hand. The published page is static and minimalist, so you can hit it as often as you need to. If the page doesn’t seem to be updating, try holding down the Shift key while clicking on the refresh/reload icon; if that fails, email me via the link from my name above.

    Hat, you might want to put a link in the sidebar to this, just before or just after the Recent Comments section.
13. John Cowan says

    December 17, 2013 at 7:40 pm

    Arrgh, the link doesn’t work; WordPress is being too careful. My email address is all over the Net, but for convenience, it is cowan@ccil.org.
14. languagehat says

    December 17, 2013 at 8:01 pm

    Done!
15. s/o says

    December 17, 2013 at 8:36 pm

    Speaking of recently commented-on posts, John Cowan, you asked me what my problem with Christopher Paolini’s style was. It took me a few days figure it out and now i’ve lost the link and forgotten what the post was:
    The answer is, he’s about my age: when he published the first book I was young enough to forgive him the writing style and get caught up in the story, when the second was published, I was a few years older and it was a slog, and by the time the third came around, I found it simply unreadable. So now I’ll never know how the story ends. (But of course he has no need to care that he’s lost one reader’s royalties).
16. Paul Ogden says

    December 18, 2013 at 4:37 am

    French Wiki says Parsin

    The U at the beginning is Hebrew/Aramaic ‘and’.

    Much of the Book of Daniel is written in Aramaic. The phrase in question is the famous “writing on the wall.”

    See here for a short discussion of its meaning.
17. Jesús says

    December 18, 2013 at 7:33 am

    >Marie-lucie
    I found all these variants. I remembered “Mane, Tecel, Fares” because I had an album of the Old Testament in 1970 or 71. That picture card with that famous graffiti impressed me although it wasn’t the Rembrandt’s painting. I’m very happy because I found this album yesterday on the Internet and it brought back childhood memories.
    Curiously, once I read a spreading paper with that title related to units and measurements.
18. marie-lucie says

    December 18, 2013 at 9:32 am

    Jesús: “Mane, Tecel, Fares”

    Now that I see this, I remember that the French version also had Tecel. Wikipedia.fr has “Tekel”, but it must be a modern transcription closer to the Hebrew/Aramaic, like their “Parsin” instead of Phares. (I am sure it was not written *Fares* in French, in spite of the pronunciation – “ph” is [f] in French, as in English).

    Paul, I see now: /parsin/ with initial /p/ but /u-farsin/ where /p/ changes to /f/ between vowels. “Phares” must be the Greek trancription, which omitted the u and the final in, a prefix and suffix needed in Hebrew/Aramaic but not considered (at least by the translator) part of the basic word.
19. marie-lucie says

    December 18, 2013 at 9:35 am

    I mean that even if the final -in is actually part of the word, it might have looked like a suffix in the Greek version.
20. Paul Ogden says

    December 18, 2013 at 10:23 am

    marie-lucie: I see now: /parsin/ with initial /p/ but /u-farsin/ where /p/ changes to /f/ between vowels. “Phares” must be the Greek trancription, which omitted the u and the final in, a prefix and suffix needed in Hebrew/Aramaic but not considered (at least by the translator) part of the basic word.

    The rule for /p/ to /f/ switch also applies to /b/=/v/, /k/=/kh/ and a few other letters where today’s pronunciation obscures the change. The rule is quite complex. See ‘Ancient Hebrew pronunciation’ at this Wiki entry.

    The -in suffix ordinarily indicates the masculine plural form of a noun in Biblical Aramaic, and perhaps in all Aramaic dialects. It’s parallel to the -im form seen in such Hebrew words as cherubim. In this particular case, it’s easy for me to see how “Parsin” could be interpreted as “Persians”.

    Tekel becoming Tecel is harder to understand. The Hebrew/Aramaic spelling is /תקל t-q-l/. (If you squint, you can see how Latin Q started life as Semitic ק.) As the article I linked to above suggests, “tekel” may mean “weight”. If so, that’s because Aramaic (and at least sometimes Arabic) T is Hebrew SH, hence shekel, unit of weight or currency. My Aramaic is sufficiently weak (read: almost non-existent) that I can’t confirm this.

    Note the verse in the Septuagint: και αυτη η γραφη η εντεταγμενη μανη θεκελ φαρες. There, the third word is Thekel. Hebrew /t ת/ is sometimes rendered that way if it doesn’t have a (diacritical) dot within the letter. Persia in modern Greek is Περσία, a fair distance from φαρες.
21. languagehat says

    December 18, 2013 at 10:40 am

    Tekel becoming Tecel is harder to understand.

    Latin automatically changed k to c, so it’s natural French would have that form.
22. Paul Ogden says

    December 18, 2013 at 5:36 pm

    Latin automatically changed k to c

    Aha! That makes sense. But note that the Latin Wiki entry spells this word thecel.
23. marie-lucie says

    December 18, 2013 at 6:45 pm

    Latin thecel

    in Latin words, the sequence th only occurs in borrowings, notably from Greek. In Latin and its Romance descendants, the addition of h had no influence on the pronunciation, only t mattered. If the Greek translation used the letter “theta” rather than “tau”, Latin would have written th, but there seems to have been fluctuations in the Greek spelling, as you noted, perhaps through hypercorrection (ie being wrong through wanting to be right, the mark of an insecure writer).
24. Jesús says

    December 19, 2013 at 8:34 am

    At least I’ve found on the Internet the two homophone “words”! I waited for a charitable soul…
25. Alex says

    December 21, 2013 at 7:56 am

    Further to John Cowan’s post.

    Adding /feed to the url for any hattic post will create an RSS feed for the comments so the discussion can be followed in your RSS reader.
26. languagehat says

    December 22, 2013 at 5:44 pm

    I remember those words in the French translation as Mané (or perhaps Mani), Tekel, Pharès

    I’m reading Eugénie Grandet (and my thanks to all who encouraged me to give Balzac another try, it’s a riveting read), and I just got to this: “L’étonnement, la colère, la stupéfaction de Balthazar en apercevant le Mane-Tekel-Pharès ne sauraient se comparer au froid courroux de Grandet…”
27. languagehat says

    December 22, 2013 at 5:45 pm

    (And I discover those fateful words turned up in the Tabellion thread as well!)
28. marie-lucie says

    December 22, 2013 at 9:03 pm

    I am waiting for some more free time before I try to reread the Tabellion thread.
29. languagehat says

    December 23, 2013 at 8:38 am

    That’s wise of you.
30. David Marjanović says

    February 8, 2014 at 6:27 pm

    There, the third word is Thekel. Hebrew /t ת/ is sometimes rendered that way if it doesn’t have a (diacritical) dot within the letter.

    Could it be that כ ת פ , today simply /p t k/ when not turned into fricatives, were aspirated and therefore rendered by φ θ χ ? Note how ק , definitely unaspirated and never turned into a fricative, is rendered by unaspirated κ in θεκελ and elsewhere.
31. John Cowan says

    February 9, 2014 at 2:23 am

    It’s a question when the Greek aspirated stops became fricatives. The evidence of borrowings is not univocal.
32. John Cowan says

    April 11, 2017 at 2:16 pm

    I’ve made a small change to the Commented-on Language Hat Posts page, so that it refreshes itself from the server every 11 minutes, as the server itself republishes the page that often. In that way, you can leave the page open in a tab and it will always be either the current page or one behind the current page (you can always refresh to get the very latest). For people sensitive to battery life or paying for data by the kilobyte, you probably don’t want to have such a permanently open page, although it probably costs less than leaving Gmail open.

    The links in the lower part of the page (basically pages that haven’t been commented on since the switch to WordPress) don’t always point to the very last comment, because for those pages I assume that the page with the highest comment ID is the newest, and this isn’t always true (you occasionally see comments quoting comments that appear further down on the page). But you can always press the End key to scroll to the bottom by hand.
33. David Eddyshaw says

    April 11, 2017 at 4:14 pm

    “Could it be that כ ת פ , today simply /p t k/ when not turned into fricatives, were aspirated and therefore rendered by φ θ χ ? Note how ק , definitely unaspirated and never turned into a fricative, is rendered by unaspirated κ in θεκελ and elsewhere.”

    Exactly. The rule in the LXX is actually very simple: כ ת פ are rendered φ θ χ regardless of position and whether or not they become fricatives in later Hebrew pronunciations, while ק ט are consistently represented by τ κ. Enormous confusion has resulted because people have anachronistically tried to match up the bgadkpat phenomenon with the Greek transcriptions. It has no actual bearing on them at all: the Greek transcriptions make no distinction corresponding to bgadkpat.

    The natural interpretation is that the bgadkpat distinction wasn’t contrastive at that time at all (indeed it’s only marginally so even in the Tiberian tradition.) The Greeks just heard the glottalised (or pharyngealised) stops as unaspirated, and the other voiceless stops as aspirated.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Hebrew of that time didn’t have stop vs fricative allophones of its voiceless unglottalised (or unpharyngeal, whatever) stops, as Greek would have no way of marking the difference anyway, as it has never had contrasts of tʰ vs θ etc (regardless of when you date the fricativisation of voiceless aspirates in Greek.)
34. David Marjanović says

    April 11, 2017 at 6:29 pm

    It’s a question when the Greek aspirated stops became fricatives. The evidence of borrowings is not univocal.

    There’s a Pilipphus on a wall in Pompeii. Evidently, some Roman couldn’t remember where the aspiration went and put it on the consonant that was already “strongest”. The first Filippus shows up less than 200 years after Pompeii was lost.
35. David Eddyshaw says

    April 11, 2017 at 7:21 pm

    Coptic uses φ θ χ to write the clusters p+h, t+h, k+h. This doesn’t help quite as much as one might wish, though, as almost all Coptic stuff dates from a period where the fricative pronunciation was pretty certainly already there in Greek; so all one can conclude is that the aspirate pronunciation was still usual (in Egypt, anyway) at the time writing Egyptian in Greek letters got going properly as a systematic thing (which was before the “Coptic” period as such.)

    Cicero (according to Quintilian, IIRC) mocked a Greek witness for not being able to pronounce the Latin f. I suppose it’s conceivable that the Greek might have been pronouncing it as a bilabial fricative rather than a labiodental; still, I reckon a fine distinction like that wouldn’t have provided much of a basis for effective mockery compared with /f/ versus /pʰ/.
36. David Eddyshaw says

    April 11, 2017 at 8:16 pm

    Come to think of it, the Bohairic dialect of Coptic uses φ θ χ in place of π τ κ before stressed vowels, and this must originally have represented aspiration rather than fricativisation (though modern liturgical pronunciation follows the modern Greek values, I believe.)
    I don’t know how old the Bohairic orthographic tradition is, but I suspect that the use of φ θ χ for aspirates rather than fricatives must reflect an Egyptian tradition, and not contemporary Greek by that point.

    Similarly, the Hebrew transcriptions in Origen’s Hexapla use the Greek consonants just like the LXX, including φ θ χ for unequivocal stops, which by then must surely have been out of step with contemporary Greek.

    So perhaps there were scholarly (or just non-Greek) traditions which used the φ θ χ versus π τ κ contrasts to mark aspirated versus unaspirated rather than fricative versus stop in languages where that was the significant dimension, long after the phonetic basis of the difference had changed in Greek itself. This would have been the less troubling to contemporaries as it would be the existence of systematic contrasts rather than their precise phonetic nature that they would have been concerned with, and there has never been a contrast within Greek itself of fricatives versus aspirates, so it would be natural enough to think of (say) [tʰ] as just “the Hebrew pronunciation” of /θ/.
37. languagehat says

    October 1, 2024 at 9:51 am

    Just watched The Tailor again and enjoyed it as much as I did in 2013. If you missed it then, give it a try! (And stick around for the credits.)