cannylinguist

Poem by Akhmadulina

2004-07-24T02:31:13Z

Apologies for the lack of writing, but I'm in the middle of a summer hiatus. I hope to return in the Fall if not sooner.

However, I'd like to take a minute to answer a question submitted by Robin of Paraverse, who says in a comment to an old post:

Speaking of Russian poems could you be kind enough to teach me the name of the poet and the rest of the poem with the line

ti dumayesh ya iz garyesti tak priyama golobu derzhu;
ya, ne ist garyesti, ist gordosti tak priyama golobu derzhu.

or something like that -- i knew the whole thing about 30 years ago before giving up russian for japanese -- also, isit well known?

I'm not familiar with the poem, I'm afraid. However, Google finds a relatively close match in a poem by the contemporary Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina:

Не уделяй мне много времени,
Вопросов мне не задавай.
Глазами добрыми и верными
Руки моей не задевай.

Не проходи весной по лужицам,
По следу следа моего.
Я знаю - снова не получится
Из этой встречи ничего.

Ты думаешь, что я из гордости
Хожу, с тобою не дружу?
Я не из гордости - из горести
Так прямо голову держу.

Hope that helps, and thanks for stopping by.

Blog-about-your-favorite-poem meme

2004-04-28T19:15:17Z

To commemorate the end of National Poetry month, the NY Times and the City of New York have encouraged poetry lovers to carry a poem with them on April 30th and share it with their friends, co-workers, classmates and family members. {a burst of light } proposes a more mimetic and electronic version of the ritual for bloggers:

To commemorate the end of National Poetry Month, blog about your favorite poem and provide at least one link to other poems and/or a bio of the poet.

I will spend April 30th away from my computer so I'll cheat, start early, and pre-date the entry. (Mind you: This is something I can only get away with in an electronic medium. Walking up to someone in New York on, say, April 29th, and reading a poem to them will elicit very strange looks.)

I don't really have a favorite poem, though I have many favorite ones. Today I happen to be in a cheerful drinking kind of mood, and so I choose this little ditty by Akhmatova: The Last Toast:

Последний тост

Я пью за разоренный дом,
За злую жизнь мою,
За одиночество вдвоем,
И за тебя я пью, -
За ложь меня предавших губ,
За мертвый холод глаз,
За то, что мир жесток и груб,
За то, что Бог не спас.

I haven't found a translation I like, but being unable to improve upon any of them, I offer this one by Judith Hemschemeyer as consolation:

The Last Toast

I drink to the ruined house,
To the evil of my life,
To our shared loneliness
And I drink to you--
To the lie of lips that betrayed me,
To the deadly coldness of the eyes,
To the fact that the world is cruel and depraved,
To the fact that God did not save.

This entry is really just an excuse to give you this link to a page of sound files (in mp3 format) of Akhmatova's poems read by the author herself (including The Last Toast and several others). Plenty of information about the author can be found at akhmatova.org (in Russian, including more sound files of her poetry read by readers assorted) or Jilly's Anna Akhmatova (in English). Enjoy!

Old English and Minimalism Resources

2004-04-28T17:57:48Z

A couple of recent language-related resources available in electronic format for all to enjoy:

1. The Electronic Introduction to Old English is "an on-line analogue of Introduction to Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)" by Peter S. Baker. The full text is freely available on-line and includes links to on-line exercises, an anthology of texts in OE, and an OE glossary. Introduction to Old English is written in a style that seems to be intended for the student that needs to gain a basic understanding of OE in a short amount of time to plow through Beowulf or what-have-you with his glossary handy. This means that it's weak on introducing vocabulary and reinforcing its acquisition. Each chapter addresses some grammar points, and no vocabulary is included other than what's needed for the illustrative examples included in that chapter. I prefer texts with a more systematic approach to introducing new terms on a lesson-by-lesson basis (perhaps because memorizing vocabulary is the bane of my language-learning experience and I appreciate being handfed as much as possible). Personal preferences aside, this is a great resource, and an excellent example of using the web for language-learning purposes.

2. Understanding Minimalism. An Introduction to Minimalist Syntax is a work in progress by Norbert Hornstein, Jairo Nunes and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (expected to be published by Cambridge Univ. Press in the Spring of 2005). What exists of it so far (which is plenty) is freely available here in PDF and Word Document formats. (Link via a post by mitr at terra_linguarum.)

Regularize your plurals

2004-04-24T04:16:39Z

Bill Poser has an entry at Language Log discussing creative pluralizations of borrowings from a foreign language with which the writer seems to have just a passing acquaintance. This is actually a fairly common phenomenon, often observed in plural terms of Latin ancestry. The example that Bill discusses, rectii, appears in a review of The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, by the chef of St. John restaurant in London. Of course, as a famous philosopher once said, there are no rectii (recta would be the proper Latin plural). Sometimes, the all-purpose Latin plural marker -i gets attached to words that are not even of Latin origin, which I suppose is how we ended up with octopi (which has Greek etymology). But the trend is not limited to Latin and Greek. I'm reminded of this example from Cook's Illustrated (I wonder if this crops up in the world of food writing more often?):

We made panna cotti with nine extracts... and gathered eighteen tasters.

where the writer clearly got a whiff of plural formation in Italian, just not enough of a whiff to form the plural of feminine nouns and adjectives.

I don't bring this up to be fastidious, which I can be. I bring it up because the writer is clearly shunning the rules of plural formation with which both he and his audience are familiar in favor of ostensibly more scholarly and therefore more impressive forms. If you want to brandish your scholarship, then go ahead (we all like to at one point or another), but first make sure that you possess it. In the meantime, plain old English plural formation¹ will do just fine. There's nothing shameful about curriculums or panna cottas or forums or octopuses. And sure enough, there's nothing shameful about rectums.

Incidentally, I visited St. John restaurant when I was last in London, but I did not order any recta. The chitterlings, however, were delicious.

¹But not plain Old English plural formation because that would only make matters worse.

German borrowings

2004-04-20T20:48:05Z

The Duden online is promoting its tome on Fremdwörter (foreign words) in the German language and has links to a series of articles (in German) discussing the influx of foreign terminology over the last few hundred years. One of them also mentions a bit about exports, and there I find myself reading:

Es gibt jedoch auch den umgekehrten Prozess, dass deutsche Wörter in fremde Sprachen übernommen und dort allmählich angeglichen werden, wie z. B. im Englischen bratwurst, ersatz, fräulein, gemütlichkeit, gneis, kaffeeklatsch, kindergarten, kitsch, leberwurst, leitmotiv, ostpolitik, sauerkraut, schwärmerei, schweinehund, weltanschauung, weltschmerz, wunderkind, zeitgeist, zink.

(There is also the reverse process, where German words are borrowed and gradually assimilated by a foreign language, as in the English bratwurst, ersatz, fräulein, gemütlichkeit, gneis, kaffeeklatsch, kindergarten, kitsch, leberwurst, leitmotiv, ostpolitik, sauerkraut, schwärmerei, schweinehund, weltanschauung, weltschmerz, wunderkind, zeitgeist, zink.)

(In case there's any doubt where the author leaves none: the claim is not that those are German words that have given rise to English terms; the claim is that those are English words, umlauted up to the nines and everything. The lack of capitalization for the words listed, all nouns, is further proof that in that context those words are no longer German.)

Now, c'mon, says I, dropping words like weltschmerz and weltanschauung (the author inexplicably leaves out my beloved schadenfreude) is a classical leitmotiv of mine, especially when having a kaffeeklatsch with the fräuleins, but... gemütlichkeit? schwärmerei? I've encountered the words aplenty, but never in an English text. (And what in the world is a gneis?) Well, I haven't been reading enough. The author is absolutely correct (well, almost), and the OED backs him up. Here's what the OED has to say about the list (with the more rare and pedestrian terms included for completeness):

bratwurst (n): A type of German sausage.
ersatz (n): A substitute or imitation (usually, an inferior article instead of the real thing).
fräulein (n): A young lady, ‘miss’. Often applied in England to German governesses.
Gemütlichkeit, gemütlichkeit (n): The quality of being gemütlich; geniality; cosiness; cheerfulness.
- gemütlich</i> (a):Pleasant, cheerful; cosy, snug, homely; genial, goodnatured.
gneiss (n): A metamorphic rock, composed, like granite, of quartz, feldspar or orthoclase, and mica, but distinguished from it by its foliated or laminated structure.
kaffeeklat(s)ch (n): Gossip over coffee cups; a coffee party; cf. coffee klatsch (s.v. COFFEE n. 5b). Hence kaffeeklatscher n., kaffeeklatsching vbl. n.
kindergarten (n): 1. A school for the instruction of young children according to a method devised by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), for developing the intelligence of children by interesting object-lessons, exercises with toys, games, singing, etc. Also attrib. and fig. 2. transf. The nickname given to a group of young men with imperialist ideals who were recruited by Alfred, Lord Milner (1854-1925), High Commissioner of South Africa, to aid with reconstruction work after the South African war of 1899-1902. Freq. Milner's kindergarten.
kitsch (n): Art or objets d'art characterized by worthless pretentiousness; the qualities associated with such art or artifacts. Also attrib., Comb., and transf.
kitsch (v): To render worthless, to affect with sentimentality and vulgarity.
leberwurst (n): Liver sausage
leitmotiv (n): In the musical drama of Wagner and his imitators, a theme associated throughout the work with a particular person, situation, or sentiment. Also in extended use.
Ostpolitik (n): German policy towards Eastern Europe, associated mainly with the Federal Republic of Germany's cultivation of good relations with the Communist block during the 1960s, but applied also, by extension, to the policies of other western countries regarding the East as a whole.
sauerkraut (n): 1. A popular article of diet in Germany, consisting of cabbage which has undergone an acid fermentation. 2. U.S. slang. (Often with capital initial.) A German. 3. attrib. and comb., as sauerkraut barrel, cutter; sauerkraut-eater slang = sense 2 above.
schwärmerei, Schwärmerei (n): Religious zeal, fanaticism, extravagant enthusiasm for a cause or a person; an erotic attachment, esp. of one woman or adolescent girl for another; a ‘crush’.
schwein(e)hund (n): A German term of abuse: filthy dog, ‘swine’, ‘bastard’.
Weltanschauung (n): A particular philosophy or view of life; a concept of the world held by an individual or a group; = world-view
Weltschmerz (n): A weary or pessimistic feeling about life; an apathetic or vaguely yearning attitude.
Wunderkind (n): a. A highly talented child, a child prodigy, esp. in music. b. A talented or successful young man, a ‘whizz-kid’.
Zeitgeist (n): The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.
zink (n): obs. of zinc.

Issues of capitalization aside, the minor error in the author's list is the word gneiss which has taken an extra s coming from the German Gneis. The capitalization, however, is interesting: concepts that are linked to a particular political policy, philosophical view and Other Big Things seem to carry the capital of proper nouns in English. Other terms seem to have retained a capital letter for no better reason I can discern than their nominal German origins. With schwärmerei and gemütlichkeit, the OED gives us a choice of size, which I suppose comes metalinguistically handy to describe, at least on a two-degree scale, things like the intensity of female erotic attachments.

Of course, where there's an Ostpolitik there can be a Westpolitik, and in the spirit of Wunderkind you can end up with a Wunderkammer. But these, and other German borrowings, will perhaps be material for a future blog entry. I believe for now you have enough to make a good impression at the next kaffeeklatsch.

Henker- und Damenspiel.

2004-04-15T01:48:34Z

Kathrin D. Vaz is a German language instructor in New York, whose website features interactive German hangman and checkers games. The checkers game includes a dialogue box through which "Kathrin" coaches you in German, but it is the German hangman (complete with umlauts) that I find more fun and useful. I quit 3-2 while I was ahead, but I'm sure I'll be returning to it. Viel Spaß!

Berserk nominalists

2004-04-14T21:53:17Z

Desbladet appologizes to the readers from England and Wales (though not necessarily to those from Scotland) for posting a Monday "review of stuff" on a day that is not likely to feel like a Monday to those readers who extend their Easter holiday and for whom "Monday falls on a Tuesday." This last remark, (s)he adds as a bonus, "drives the nominalistes utterly berserk with rage."

Reading this reminded me of my alma matter, a place where a statement like This week Tuesday is a Monday never elicits any furrowed brows and is commonly understood by everyone without difficulty. I have never witnessed anyone around me become berserk with rage when I've heard the comment (which has been often), so I've concluded the place is devoid of nominalists or perhaps simply overflowed with pragmatists. Tuesday is a Monday is, of course, shorthand for indicating that a typical Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule will apply on the Tuesday following a Monday holiday, a measure that tries to balance the number of holidays that each group of classes is entitled to. By poking around Google, I get the impression that Tuesdays can be Mondays mostly at academic institutions: Brigham Young Univ., East Carolina Univ., George Mason Univ., MIT, RPI, Univ. of Rhode Island, and Western Carolina Univ. all seem to be places where this is possible (an aside: check out this spontaneously captured photo of young Hamlet which was up on the frontispiece of WCU's website).

When it comes to schedules, it seems that a Tuesday is not likely to be a Wednesday or a Thursday, although to my surprise sometimes it is a Friday. Mostly, I am relieved that no Saturday is ever a Wednesday, something that would drive me utterly berserk with rage.

Scientific American revisits Whorf

2004-03-25T23:01:12Z

The April/04 issue of Scientific American has an article titled Draining the Language out of Color which revisits the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though poor Sapir does not even get mentioned in the article). This hypothesis advances a position with respect to the relation between thought and language, and the question of which shapes which, that, in Whorf's own words, can be summarized as follows:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organisation and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

I am perpetually fascinated by the question. I don't particularly have a strong inclination to a position on it yet (or at least I didn't until I lived in Germany and had to deal with German and Germans ¹), but I always welcome a new article on it, especially as I think we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in the topic, as evidenced by the work of Boroditsky at MIT and other colleagues.

But the article doesn't dwell too much on this newer research (with one exceptional reference to work coming out of the Max Planck Institute). It mostly concentrates on the work of Paul Kay, now emeritus professor of Linguistics at UC Berkely, who has investigated color terms in vastly diffent languages and concluded that there are some universal tendencies in the way humans discretize the (continuous) color spectrum and allocate lexical terms to describe portions of it. Kay himself denies that his work should be viewed as a refutation of the (Sapir-)Whorf hypothesis: his work applies to the very restricted domain of color perception and does not rule out that to some extent language may condition the way we think in other domains.

Kay's raw findings are interesting: Though languages differ greatly in their inventory of color terms (English has about 11 basic terms; Dani, a language from New Guinea, has two!), the way they go about carving out the spectrum shows some tendencies Kay claims are universal. Languages that have two color terms, as per Kay, tend to group what we would call black/green/blue (and other "cool") colors and oppose this group to a white/red/yellow (and other "warm") colors. When a language has a three-way distinction, the grouping tends to go as black/cool, white/light, and red/yellow/warm. These distinctions are then further refined in other languages, leading to a more dense sampling of the spectrum, but... you get the idea: no language seems to arbitrarily group all colors of the spectrum under the same rubric except for shades of mauve, to which it devotes 20 different words.

I don't know how uncontroversial Kay's findings are. However, while reading the article, I find bits like

[i]n any case, Kay notes, the degree to which the perceived world is man-made seems to explain the variation in the number of color words. Hunter-gatherers need fewer color words because color data rarely provide much crucially distinguishing information about a natural object or scene. Industrial societies get a bigger informational payoff from color words.

This makes me somewhat skeptical and uncomfortable because these kinds of cutsey, Rousseauesque divisions always do. I also find perverse the idea that in a hunter-gathering environment color distinctions provided by, say, the basic English color terms would seem redundant. And if we accept the assertion that degree of industrialization correlates with the number of color terms in a language, what are we to make of the fact (a fact mentioned in the article) that Russian, compared to English, has an extra color term to make a two-way distinction between darker and lighter blue, a distinction which probably predates Russia's feudal days? (Of course, whether Kay or the journalist made this assertion remains open to interpretation or sleuthing.) I grant the author of that remark that he meant industrialization in a very broad sense since I'm pretty sure most of our 11 English color terms didn't enter the lexicon in the last 300 years. But even then, I'm skeptical that we have acquired a richer color palette as we have moved out of the forests (and of course, the artificial synthesis of color terms to describe items in a J. Crew catalog does not count). I don't know whether we possess the records to investigate this further, but it might be easily refutable.

For more on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, including treatment of the strong and weak versions of linguistic determinism and relativity, you can check out this site.

¹This is a joke. Maybe. Kinda. I told you I'm still agnostic on this issue.

Shodding

2004-03-11T19:09:15Z

Sally Thomason writes in her recent Language Log entry Trodding, as in Plodding? about English irregular verbs and the unusual occurrence of the word trodding (in a NYT article on Martha Stewart) as a likely slip for treading. Tread is one of those irregular English verbs that wavers between two past tense forms, treaded and trod. What seems to be happening here is that the writer has crafted a form derived from the present-tense stem (the -ing form) by using the past-tense stem instead. Thomason adds that semantic similarity with plod and the rhyme between plodding and trodding probably helped. She also writes

... replacing present-tense tread with trod ... is the only example I can think of where a new non-past form has been based on an irregular past-tense form (though there probably are others that aren't occurring to me right now).

To her example I would like to add shodding.

Shod is the irregular past participle of the verb shoe, meaning to furnish with shoes or to cover with a metal guard to protect against wear. Like tread/trod(treaded)/trodden, shoe/shod/shodden is also a relatively low-frequency irregular verb where there may have been enough disassociation in the minds of the speakers between the present- and past-tense stems to facilitate the creation of the new non-past form shodding from the irregular past tense. Or perhaps the etymology is altogether different. At any rate, examples of shodding abound. Summoning Google yields the following.

From a business wire:

Harry's London is pleased to celebrate the 75th annual Academy Awards(R) by shodding several of Hollywood's leading men for the event's red carpet, as well as for the parties that surround this very special event.

From a fiction short story at the Oyster Boy Review:

My father figured that fixing feet would be better than shodding them, so like the kid who becomes a doctor to go one step further than his pharmacist father, the old man graduated from the Ohio College of Chiropody.

From Making the Shoes Fit, an article published at The Desert Sun online:

Although it's still early, the Clarkes have been up for several hours trimming the constantly-growing feet that horses are equipped with and shodding them for extra protection and better traction.

Luath Scots Language Learner

2004-03-09T19:40:33Z

Colin Wilson works as "a saftware ingineer wi a weel-kent telecommunications firm, writin saftware in C++." He's also the author of the Luath Scots Language Learner: An Introduction to Contemporary Spoken Scots, a text being promoted as the "first-ever Scots language course." The book is being marketed with an accompanying 2-CD pack containing recordings of the material used in the text (though it would seem one needs to special order the CDs in the US). From the editorial review:

This work is suitable as an introductory course or for those interested in re-acquainting themselves with the language of childhood and grandparents. The book assumes no prior knowledge on the reader's part. Starting from the most basic vocabulary and constructions, the reader is guided step-by-step through Scots vocabulary and the subtleties of grammar and idiom that distinguish Scots from English. An accompanying audio recording conveys the authentic pronunciation, especially important to readers from outside Scotland. The course is based on General Scots with a slight emphasis on the North-East and contains an introduction, 25 graded lessons, an English-to-Scots vocabulary list, and appendices with verb tables and similar material. Each lesson itself contains dialogues, vocabulary, grammatical explanations, exercises, and - most importantly - a section giving background information about life in Scotland, for the reader to understand the material in its cultural context.

I browsed through the book at Borders the other day, and, oh, what a relief it would've been having my own copy before I tried to read anything by Irvine Welsh.

You can listen to the sound of Scots by following the soundfile links at the Scots Online site.

Simultaneity

2004-03-02T21:09:10Z

In the introduction to the new translation of Don Quixote I was talking about a couple of entries back, Harold Bloom observes:

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died almost simultaneously, are the central western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce.

I was struck by Bloom's use of the word simultaneously, and I imagined the dying Shakespeare and Cervantes lying in their respective beds, with observers standing by, chronometers in hand, ready to record their expiration dates to three significant figures.

The word to me carries the connotation of a fairly narrow synchronism. How synchronous, I can't tell, but I wouldn't find myself using the term to describe two events if they're temporally separated by more than, say, a few seconds. (I suppose that by qualifying the simultaneity with almost, I could increase that margin by another handful of seconds.)

Cervantes died on April 22nd, 1616; Shakespeare died the following day. I guess that on a cosmic temporal scale, these two events almost collapse onto each other, but that doesn't stop Bloom's description from sounding odd to me. I turned to the OED, which offers the following:

simultaneously, adv.
1. At the same time; coincidently.
2. By means of simultaneous equations.

The examples illustrating the first sense, which is the one that concerns us, do not elucidate much, as they seem to apply to events more temporally aligned than the possibly one-day span separating the two deaths:

-1675 BAXTER Cath. Theol. I. I. 28 To make the same numerical act which is a Volition simultaneously to be no Volition.
-1762 KAMES Elem. Crit. (1764) I. 127 Dissimilar emotions may succeed each other with rapidity, but they can~not exist simultaneously.
-1763 SHENSTONE Ess., Writing & Bks. lix, He introduces the deities of both acting simultaneously.
-1816 BABBAGE in Phil. Trans. 192 If in the function (x, y) we put simultaneously (x, y) for x, and (x, y) for y.
-1860 TYNDALL Glac. I. ii. 22 An exclamation of surprise burst simultaneously from my companion and myself.
-1880 HAUGHTON Phys. Geogr. v. 242 The actual banks are rarely, if ever, simultaneously visible.

The American Heritage dictionary, however, gives simultaneous as a synonym for contemporary, but then adds the following usage note:

These adjectives mean existing or occurring at the same time. Contemporary is used more often of persons, contemporaneous of events and facts: The composer Salieri was contemporary with Mozart. A rise in interest rates is often contemporaneous with an increase in inflation. Simultaneous more narrowly specifies occurrence of events at the same time: The activists organized simultaneous demonstrations in many major cities.

So, Bloom's usage still strikes me as odd or hyperbolic, but if anyone gets a different impression, I'd like to hear it.

A Little Help for Homunculus

2004-02-25T07:39:25Z

The Economist has a brief review offering an amusing look at the recently published X-Treme Latin: Unleash Your Inner Gladiator by Henry Beard, founder of National Lampoon:

First prize for devilish translating goes to "wet T-shirt contest" (certamen inter mammosas tunicis madefactis vestitas), closely followed by "sushi bar" (taberna Iaponica pulpamentorum incoctorum marinorum). The finest-resonance award goes to crapulentus sum ("I'm wasted!"). But since Latin is for lovers, special mention should go to a highly topical chat-up line containing the much-maligned future perfect: Nisi mecum concubueris, phobistae vicerint, "If you won't sleep with me, the terrorists will have won."

Read the rest of it at A little help for homunculus.

Aalsuppe

2004-02-20T20:55:17Z

Jean Anderson and Hedy Würz write in The New German Cookbook how the famed eel soup (Aalsuppe) from Hamburg contained at the start of its culinary career much of what was to be found in a regular kitchen of its time. Except for any eel, that is. The original name of the concoction is supposed to have been Aolsuppe in the local Plattdeutsch dialect, or an all-soup, a euphemism for a recipe that contained a motley assortment of ingredients like ham bones, vegetables and fruits. The story then acquires some apocryphal overtones: apparently, visitors to Hamburg not intimately acquainted with the local parlance kept understanding Aalsuppe when hearing Aolsuppe. An enterprising cook, tired of having to explain to his visiting customers why the eel was missing from his Aolsuppe, decided to add the slithery fish and thus the modern recipe was born.

Edith Grossman and Don Quixote

2004-02-18T04:44:08Z

Edith Grossman, who regularly translates such notables as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is also responsible for a recent English translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote which hit the shelves some time last year. I couldn't resist the handsome dust jacket, so I picked up a copy when I last sat down to sip a cup of cocoa in one of those cafes that are felicitously located inside a bookstore. My impressions are based on having read the introductory material and the first few chapters, but... I liked it.

The translation feels very fresh. Grossman artfully handles the different registers associated with the different characters, preserving, for example, the baroqueness of Don Quixote's speech without resorting to archaic lexicon in the English language. Without affectations, the play of reality and artifice so central to the book is, I think, convincingly rendered.

The translation is richly footnoted. The reader quickly discovers that the main character borrows his name from a piece of the armor, or the puns underlying several of the satirically named characters. Anyone who appreciates a wavering explanatory excursus over a comitted poorly approximated rendition will welcome her translation. I also applaud her choice to leave many terms untranslated (with regards to things like currency or titles), enlisting the footnotes to help with the explanation. I must admit I find her choice to retain the courtesy title Señor in the formal address to be less inspired. The title is used extensively in the book, and its use grows somewhat grating in the context of a large English text. (It brings to mind those sketches, which, aspiring to comic effect, rely on the gag of the ubiquitous Spanish-speaking waiter with a propensity to interrupt his otherwise fluent English with words like Señor, Qué or Sí. But I suppose it is really my own fault that I've seen too many Monty Python episodes, and I can't say I have a better suggestion.)

The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes published a rewiew of the book on the New York Times, which I found insightful for what he has to say about Grossman's translation and about Cervantes' book.

One from the wires

2003-12-17T04:50:07Z

In Movie spurs interest in 'Missing' dialect, Associated Press has put out a blurb about the film The Missing, and the interest that has followed its use of dialog in Chiricahua, a dialect of Apache featured prominently in the film and which has about 300 fluent speakers left:

Most adult Apaches in the audiences have said they could understand every word of the Chiricahua dialect --and the children suddenly wished they could, too.

That's what Mescalero councilman Berle Kanseah and Chiricahua linguist Elbys Hugar intended as technical advisers for the Ron Howard film, a tough tale of 19th century frontier life starring Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett that has been in theaters for about three weeks.

Eurotrash

2003-12-16T05:47:53Z

As of December 2003, Eurotrash graces the list of terms officially recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Eurotrash orig. and chiefly U.S. (depreciative), rich, European socialites collectively, esp. those living or working in the U.S.; cf. TRASH n.1 4.

1983 People (Nexis) 31 Jan. 72 ‘We are *Eurotrash,’ he [sc. Couturier] says of some of his acquaintances. ‘We are obnoxious. We are spoiled. We are brats... But... we can also work a lot.’

1990 Los Angeles May 8/1 A haven of jet-setting privilege, beloved of American industrialists and Eurotrash alike, Santa Barbara has become the most chic, most sophisticated small city in the United States.

2003 Spectator 18 Jan. 34/3 Gilver Memmer is now a middle-aged wreck, his sparkling youth as a precocious painter and sartorial icon obliterated by drink, women and general Eurotrash excess.

To the OED definiens I would like to add, if I may be so bold, that the term Eurotrash, though it may owe its origin to our old world neighbors, is not just limited to describing those that hail from there. At least in the enlightened People's Republik of Cambridge, where our unparalleled humanist sensibilities have taught us that trash knows no borders, nor gender, age political or religious affiliation, we use the term synecdochically for all of mankind. As long as it's the trashy kind. And so we have Eurotrash from Latin America and Eurotrash from Australia. I have never met African Eurotrash, but I don't doubt its existence. Asian Eurotrash? Just swing by Pravda 116 sometime this weekend.

And because the OED is committed to documenting usage, I bring it up. So, let's not be so mindful of the OED's definition, folks, and not deprive our non-European brethrentrash of a deserved title. It's a disfavor after you've invested in the designer wardrobe and the muscle car.

That's all I'm sayin'.

Primera Conference en Spanglish

2003-12-12T01:23:01Z

I saw the announcement for the 1st International Conference on Spanglish and shook my head thinking Oh, no! Not Ilan Stavans again, and hoped that I might be wrong and that there might actually be a serious endeavor behind the announcement. But no: the conference is indeed the brainchild of Stavans, who teaches at Amherst University, in Massachusetts, where the conference will be held in the Spring of 2004.

Lest my position not be clear, I should clarify that there are, to be sure, many reasons why one may wish to study Spanglish (whatever that may be; coming up with an answer to that question could be one of the things one could undertake). I think there are very few subjects, if any, not worth studying. In the case of Spanglish one may wish to document for instance, its usage to ascertain whether we are witnessing a process of creolization. Are native speakers (if the object of study in question has any) using Spanglish differently from their ancestors, and how differently? Is the "syntactic hodgepodge" that Stavans mentions subject to rules or to caprice? Are we just witnessing plain old-fashioned code switching prompted perhaps by lexical deficiencies, or is there any emergent new way of combining the two languages from which Spanglish feeds?

I suppose all these, and many more, could be interesting questions for anyone who cares to study the damn thing, but I don't get the impression Stavans is interested in much of that. As far as I can glean from his manifesto (which at times reads like the digressive exegesis of a madman), words like pidgin and creole don't seem to be part of his vocabulary though people interested in studying these things get exposed to those concepts in an introductory linguistics course (he talks about a "jazzy, hybrid language"; perhaps I'm being unfair). He mentions, however, things like standardization while lashing against the purists (except here he uses the word purista) who oppose Spanglish and prefer to uphold English and Spanish standards (and never, apparently, catches on the irony). Ironic too is that for someone who presumably is interested in empowering the speakers he studies, he has to attribute to them such ill-conceived notion as laziness (you know, the same thing that keeps black people away from grammar books and makes them talk the way they do). He also seems to be intrigued by the non-question of whether Spanglish is a dialect or a language (summoning in the process, as is duly customary in this case, the spirit of poor Max Weinreich who will never rest in peace).

He seems to have a strange agenda (sociopolitical? anthropological? certainly not sociolinguistic: people with that agenda approach their subjects with more formality; sometimes anyways) at the core of which language just happens to play a decisive role. His manifesto also permeates some anticolonialist resentment which, even if well justified, doesn't particularly add any weight to whatever arguments he may think he has.

There is no official call for papers at the conference site. Panelists will, apparently, be selected by invitation. One of the formal areas will on the linguistics of Spanglish. It remains to be seen what this will yield, and whose ideas of linguistics will guide the selection of the material.

African Speech Technology

2003-12-09T23:25:50Z

The African Speech Technology is a consortium of researchers and institutions working on creating language and speech technology applications for the official languages of South Africa. Some of the long term goals appear to include developing nifty things like speech synthesis in Zulu, Xhosa (pronounced Kosa), Sesotho and Afrikaans. At present they are focusing on a limited domain task for automatically handling hotel reservations. Albert Visagie, one of the collaborators in the project, has a small interactive (concatenative) synthesis demo at his site which generates a few test utterances in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. Play with Xhosa and hear the clicks!

An interesting remark from his site:

In Xhosa, numbers are prefixed according to the noun the refer to, and the numbers are very tedious for anything above 100. Therefore amounts and digit strings are read in English, as English numerals make more sense when the numbers don't refer to anything (digitstrings) or are too big.

I wonder whether this is frequent practice among (bilingual?) Xhosa speakers, or just a technological patch.

Memoriae

2003-12-05T21:12:29Z

My wish to retake the study of Latin, a language which I've studied formally a couple of times but of which I know (or remember) embarrassingly little, has brought to mind fresh memories of the eccentricities that distinguished the teaching of those whose job was to instill in our minds the language of Cicero.

And I don't mean cool things like rapping in Latin.

My first exposure to the language was through a first full year of it in High School with a professor who made a habit of sustaining different conversations with different aspects of himself, oddly switching to different languages unexpectedly, as he attempted to instruct the young minds of those who gave less than a rat's ass about the difference between a gerundium and a gerundivium. It was a relative comfort that his enunciation was so slurred, that one only noticed the occurrence of one of his schizopolyglot episodes in retrospective, and one could never be too sure (was that... Ancient Greek? What the...!) whether he was using the language of instruction, the common vernacular, or something else, impenetrable as his diction was in all of them. I cared very little for Latin at first, and his dismal teaching methods certainly didn't help, but slowly I fell in love with the structure of the language and by the end of the year I was one of his best students. He kind of liked me. (So did the priest, but that's a different story.)

He, however, was not the strangest of the bunch.

I didn't take Latin again until I decided to enroll in a short intensive course during the Winter Break a few years back for the same reasons that now I wish to study it. The instructor was a lady who, if memory serves me right, had retired from formal teaching and only did this as a hobby of sorts. She had also reached the age when she repeated herself. A lot. (And I don't mean declension tables.) This is how much she repeated herself:

Our daily routine began with some pronunciation exercises. The moment a mostly anglophonic class attempted to imitate the word submitted for practice, she would bring the exercises to a halt and launch into a daily (daily!) excursus in which the tendency of English to reduce vowels was thoroughly trashed. She was of the opinion that English speakers did not speak; they mumbled. The class was then reminded that they had to aim for the glorious and sunny sounds of the Mediterranean. (This is perhaps a good point in the story to remark that she was Austrian). The instant you heard the word Mediterranean, you began to worry, for you knew that the most dreaded repetition exercise was coming. And so it was only a matter of little time before she, in Pavlovian reflexive fashion, invoked the feared name: Gina Lollobrigida!

Gina Lollobrigida was her pet phrase. She inflicted it upon us daily. She made us repeat it because it would teach us to open our mouths and stop mumbling. It was her un bon vin blanc for Latin. The didactic utility of a phrase which does not even reflect all the basic vowel sounds of Latin is questionable, and one might be tempted to judge that this choice had to do more with the instructor being stuck in a time capsule from which there was no escape. But let us not be judgmental. After justifiably eliciting a few Who-the-fuck-is-that-and-why-are-we-even-talking-about-her? reactions from the classroom the first few times, she would instruct us to repeat the name in glorious sunny Mediterranean unison with her, lengthening every syllable to its limit. And because complying was the surest way to getting it over with, we would all roll our eyes and in unison chant

Geeeeeeeee-naaaaaaahhhh
Looooohhhhhh-lloooooooohhhhh-breeeeeeeee-geeeeeeeee-daaaaaaahhhhh.

And after we had done so for a few minutes during which no one dared make eye contact with a neighbor, she would be satisfied and solemnly declare

Repetitio mater studiorum est.

Germans have a word for that (1)

2003-12-03T07:50:16Z

The first installment of our informal Germans-have-a-word-for-that series is

Torschlusspanik (n. fem.): the fear of missing an impending crucial deadline or important event; last-minute panic.

Usage example:

aus Torschlusspanik heiraten: to marry out of fear you will reach middle age without having found a partner.

Leggorphological analysis: Tor (gate; goal) + Schluss (end; conclusion) + Panik (panic; fear).

William Weaver, and translating Calvino, Eco.

2003-11-29T08:02:36Z

The Paris Review has an excerpt online from an interview with William Weaver published in the Spring of last year. Weaver --who has distinguished himself with his translations of Eco, Calvino, and Pasolini as well as by his writings on music and opera (he has been a frequent contestant on Texaco's Saturday afternoon opera broadcast quizzes), shares what it's been like to work with some of these authors:

I had problems with Calvino because he thought he knew English. He would fall in love with English words. Every now and then he would fiddle with a sentence in his English. At one point he fell madly in love with the word feedback, and he didn't realize that in America feedback is like closure or spinning out of control, something you hear constantly on television. It's jargon and cliche, and you can't use it anymore. The word is dead to literature, but to him it was new and fascinating. He thought it was fun and so he kept putting it into this story where it really didn't belong, and I kept taking it out.

He also shares some amusing anecdotes about Eco, whom he calls the most pleasurable writer he's worked with. Eco's English is excellent, of course. He claims to have learned it from Joyce by reading Finnegan's Wake. If so, then he certainly had improved it tremendously by the time I had the chance to listen to him give a talk a few years ago.

I'm not Frrrench. I zhas speek wiz deez OUTRRRRAGEOUS Frrrench aksahnt.

2003-11-25T18:30:21Z

(Not a feature about Monty Python.)

Through a different forum, jasonlizard has brought my attention to a BBC News feature about a recent case of Foreign Accent Syndrome documented in a woman from Indiana who began to speak like she was from England, a country she had never visited, after suffering a stroke in her late fifties:

Mrs. Roberts discovered she had a British accent after recovering her voice following a stroke in 1999.
"When people first started asking me where in England I was from and a family member asked why am I talking that way, that is when I became very conscious that a part of me had died during the stroke," she said. Four years on, she still struggles to convince people that she is a born and bred American.
"People in America accuse me of lying when I say I was born in Indiana. "They would say 'What are you saying that for? Where in England are you from?' "I would insist that I am not."

The same site has a link to a story about a similar case, this time documented on an English patient who developed a French accent (poor thing!) under similar circumstances:

A woman who suffered a minor stroke now cannot stop speaking in a French accent. Wendy Hasnip, who does not speak French and has only been to the country once for a weekend trip to Paris, has been left with a Gallic accent. Mrs Hasnip, 47, of Sevenoaks, Kent, previously had a Yorkshire accent before the stroke at the beginning of November.

Foreign Accent Syndrome appears to be an extremely rare condition, and only a handful of cases have been documented. This, of course, makes it a likely candidate for being listed as one of those misterious and uncanny things of the mind, particularly within the non-scientific press or literature. Perhaps there's more than meets the ear, but this non-neurologist is not particularly overwhelmed by the rarity of the event. As the articles suggest, the changes that give rise to the perception of a foreign accent involve patterns of segmental or syllable lengthening, pitch modifications and other speech modulations induced by minor damage to a patient's particular areas of the brain after a stroke. That a stroke can affect speech patterns is of course not new, so the novelty, and the mystery, lies in the particular way in which it is affected. It seems to me no mystery, however, but simply a matter of stochastic realization, that in some exceedingly rare cases the stars will be aligned in such a way that the changes imposed on someone's normal patterns of lengthening, stressing, intonation, phonation and overall spectral distribution will be just so that the outcome will make the patient sound more like a non-native speaker trying to produce the patient's native language. Most of the time, of course, they will just sound like they have a speech impediment (or perhaps exhibit no significant change whatsoever). And I stress sound because I bet anything that this is primarily (or merely) acoustic similarity, and that if we were to compare the manner of production of the patterns in question between an affected native patient and a non-affected non-native speaker, we might find vast differences. So to recap, if you are really unlucky, you will get a stroke and inherit a speech impediment, but maybe if you are lucky enough, you will get a stroke and start sounding like a Canadian.

By the way, this site offers a high-level explanation of Foreign Accent Syndrome and offers two links to sound clips (.wav files of 1.3 and 1.1MB respectively) of a patient's speech before and after acquiring the syndrome. Though I clearly hear a difference, I can't come up with a ready descriptor to characterize her accent after the stroke. Perhaps some of the readers (listeners) can hazard a guess?

Genetic Clicks

2003-11-21T07:58:17Z

Discover published in its September issue an article titled If You Are on the Hunt, Try Clicking Your Tongue, describing the research of a group of geneticists who were apparently intrigued by the presence of click sounds in the language of two separate African ethnic groups and, armed with some genetic analysis tools and naive conceptions of language, set out to study the problem. Their main conclusion is about all you can get from the short abstract available on line, and it goes something like this (minus some in-house typesetting, which is mine for emphasis):

[T]he researchers found that the two groups were not related at all. In fact, the genetic distance between them was as wide as or wider than that between any other pair of African peoples. The result implies that click languages arose among an ancestral people common to both the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi before humans left Africa, at least 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. Knight suggests that click languages survived because they serve a practical purpose. The Ju|'hoansi communicate by signs and clicks when stalking prey such as antelope and giraffe. Unlike vocal speech, clicks do not scare game, perhaps because the sounds resemble the rustling of dry brush on the savanna. "So even though their languages changed over time, they kept the clicks," Knight says.

There is, of course, no such implication in their finding (though the finding may be consistent with the hypothesis)¹. The article, however, spawned an interesting thread about click languages on the Linguist list beginning with this post, and followed up notably by this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this (you can click (ha, ha) on each of those for a partial thread).

Some of the issues tossed around include the open question of why the (linguistic) use of clicks is limited to a small group of languages, as well as some physiological justification for their adoption as linguistic signs, and some hypotheses about their beneficial paralinguistic use in hunting (in what essentially are hunter gatherer communities) as justification for their preservation.

Interesting reading.

¹There seems to be a curious and dubious symbiosis lately between Discover and questionable articles about language phylogeny written by biologists.</size>

Words that'll kill you

2003-11-18T03:08:55Z

It is reported that the last words uttered by William Barton Rogers, founder of MIT, were bituminous coal. Rogers was apparently delivering a talk to the graduating class of 1882, when, upon reaching those fateful words, died in mid sentence.

I can't help but wonder if Mark Twain ever commented on the incident.

Well, duh, y'all.

2003-11-17T20:55:28Z

Somewhat amusing AP blurb about the not particularly surprising inability of speech recognizers to cope with Southern drawls: Southern drawls don't compute. I'm awfully curious to find out more about the technology they're using. I would get such a hearty laugh if they had been trained with speakers from Brooklyn or New England.