Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | yesterday
The eudæmonist is studying Armenian, and has a typically irresistible entry about the "little words, of clear and unclear meaning, these adverbs, these prepositions, these postpositions, these nebulous, numinous specks upon the (in)certitude of syntax" that "trip you up in supposed subtleties." This is exemplified by the word "էլի ( eli ), which one dictionary helpfully glosses as adv. 1) again....
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | yesterday
Ellen Barry has a surprisingly good article in Sunday's NY Times that starts by talking about the difficulties of Georgian—"its ridiculous consonant clusters ('gvprtskvni' ['you peel us'–LH]); its diabolical irregular verbs" (having studied Georgian, I was able to assure my appalled wife that the description was, if anything, understated)—and goes on to describe the rest of the region: Some 40 indigenous...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 25/08/2008
Some kind and anonymous reader has sent me a copy of The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe , by P.M. Barford, via the Amazon wish-list link. I can't even remember where I found out about it (Renee's long-gone and much-lamented blog?), but it looks great (lots of maps!) and I'm really looking forward to plunging in. So thanks, kind anonymous person!
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 25/08/2008
A comment by marie-lucie in this thread (which has now reached the hundred-comment mark thanks to the usual digressions, in this case involving edibles) is so interesting I thought I'd give it its own post: At a time when I was required to read 19th-century French novels, I was struck by a number of occasions in which a young man from the provincial bourgeoisie, sent to Paris as a student but preferring...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 24/08/2008
The delightfully named Fuchsia Dunlop , an an East Asian specialist at the BBC World Service who writes about Chinese food (she has a book Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper ), has a column in the Financial Times about one of the many efforts China has made in preparing for the Olympics: As the 2008 Olympic Games approached, the Beijing government embarked on a gargantuan task: to provide approved translations...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 23/08/2008
An article by linguist Laurie Bauer discusses the strange fate of the phoneme /r/ in New Zealand: When North America was settled, many of the early settlers came from the west or still pronounced "r", with the result that standard North American varieties still have an "r" sound in words like "far" and "farm" (such accents are called "r"-ful or, more technically, "rhotic"). By the time Australia and...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 22/08/2008
The July 19 LRB , on page 20, had a box entitled "Two Poems by Jean Sprackland." The first, "The Source," begins: Want to learn the source, the cool under the surface fire? Watch the heron: he snatches the silver voice from the throat of the river and swallows it live. The second is called "In the Afternoon" and begins: The devil likes the chicken coop. He lies on a bed of straw Watching the snow...
The Language Guy (Free subscription) | 21/08/2008
I was greeted in the letters to the editor section of my morning paper the other day with a note damning the use of "retard" as a put down. The writer was responding specifically to its frequent use in a new, highly rated movie, "Tropic Thunder, a Ben Stiller movie. Of course, it couldn't be used in that way if it weren't negative. On the other hand this is a comedy and comedy and comedians have usually...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 20/08/2008
Thanks to Wordorigins.org , I've learned one of those useless bits of information I love: André Citroën , founder of the eponymous auto company, was of Dutch origin, and, as the linked Wikipedia article says, "The Citroen family moved to Paris from Amsterdam in 1873 [five years before André's birth]. Upon arrival, the diaeresis was added to the name, changing Citroen to Citroën (a grandfather had...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 19/08/2008
I don't think I've seen languages interwoven in quite this way; if you know both French and English, it's a very enjoyable read: To answer the question I'm always asked [voyons réfléchissons] No I do not feel that there is a space between the two tongues that talk in me [oui peut-être un tout petit espace] On the contrary [plus ou moins si on veut] For me the one and the other seem to overlap [et...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 18/08/2008
David Shulman in The New Republic discusses the sad state of awareness of Sanskrit literature: "The astonishing fact is that cultivated readers of [European] tongues may have never heard of Kalidasa, or of the no less important Bhavabhuti, Bharavi, Magha, and Sriharsha." Happily, help has now arrived. In the last decade, a new library of translations from Sanskrit has begun to appear. It is called...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 18/08/2008
My pal Paul has sent me a link to an essay by Lucy Kellaway that struck me with its pure essence of language lunacy. It's basically your standard purist rant, and is nicely summed up by its first sentence: "For the last few months I've been on a mission to rid the world of the phrase 'going forward'." You get the picture: I hate this newfangled phrase, I hear it all the time, I can't make it stop...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 17/08/2008
Courtesy of LH reader Trevor, here 's a ditty by Flann O'Brien (remembered here and elsewhere) which will delight anyone who's ever studied Old Irish; it begins: My song is concernin' Three sons of great learnin' Binchy and Bergin and Best . They worked out that riddle Old Irish and Middle, Binchy and Bergin and Best. They studied far higher Than ould Kuno Meyer And fanned up the glimmer Bequeathed...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 15/08/2008
These limericks take advantage of especially odd mismatches between spelling and pronunciation, usually involving family names like St. John "SIN-jǝn" and Menzies "MING-eez" (not the only pronunciation, but the one used here). A sample: There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley, Whose bride was so mellow and colmondeley That the best man, Colquhoun, An inane young bolqufoun, Could only stand still...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 14/08/2008
When we last saw our heroes in the "war" part of War and Peace , they were hightailing it east, away from the victorious French, in the autumn of 1805, hoping to meet up with the reinforcements coming from Russia before Napoleon could trap and destroy them as he had the hapless Austrians. As the Battle of Austerlitz approached, I decided I wanted to know more about the history, so I sent off for 1805:...
