September 20, 2005

KOAGA AND WORDTHEQUE.

So I was reading a travel narrative by John Verlenden (part 3, "Hama and the Waterwheels of Death," of his ongoing series "Road to Damascus," serialized in Exquisite Corpse) when I came across the word koaga in a context that suggested it was Arabic, though it certainly doesn't look Arabic: "As a koaga - an outlander - with features that marked me as a wild beast--red hair, blue eyes--I'd become inured to snickers from Arab children." And I did what we do in this ever-changing world in which we live in (to quote the wordily wordy Paul McCartney): I googled "koaga," then added "arabic" because there's a Guarani phrase Ko'aga Roñe'eta (said to mean 'now we will speak' and used as the name of an "on-line journal of human rights and humanitarian law") that overwhelms the results, and wound up at WORDTHEQUE - Word by word multilingual library, which combines an online dictionary feature with texts in languages from Afan Oromo to Zulu in ways that bear more investigating than I've so far given it.

Because I'm still obsessed with this koaga word, which seems to exist only in the Verlenden piece. Anybody have a clue?

Continue reading "KOAGA AND WORDTHEQUE."
Posted by languagehat at 02:36 PM | Comments (3)

September 19, 2005

THE STORY OF PU.

I happened across Nick Nicholas's thesis while looking for something else; its title is "The story of pu: The grammaticalisation in space and time of a Modern Greek complementiser," and it has five summaries ranging in length from "I am spending three years looking at the 1000-year history of one word in Mediaeval Greek" to the actual abstract:

This work is concerned with tracing the historical development of the various functions of the Modern Greek connective pu. This connective has a considerable range of functions, and there have been attempts in the literature to group together these functions in a synchronically valid framework. It is my contention that the most illuminating way of regarding the functional diffusion of pu — and of any content word — is by looking, not only at one synchronic distribution (that of Standard Modern Greek), but at the full range of synchronic distributions in the sundry diatopic variants (dialects) of Modern Greek, and that such a discussion must be informed by the diachrony of the form...
An insistence on diachrony is sweet music to this Indo-Europeanist manqué. (The page I've linked is HTML, but the chapters linked from it are pdf files.)

Posted by languagehat at 11:59 PM | Comments (6)

September 18, 2005

HOW WE LEARN MOTS.

Neal Durando, in An Abécédaire Fugitif, begins "My grammar has crossed the Atlantic four times since I began giving English lessons in western France three years ago," and goes on to list French words with associations they call up for him, often how he learned them:

FOIS /fwa/
time
"Cómo se dice 'vez'
?" I asked my Spanish friend Oscár as we crossed the tramway tracks to eat lunch at café Les Facultés in between classes at the University of Nantes. There were no English speakers within earshot, so Spanish was how I learned about French. We were anxious about crossing the tracks as the tramway announces itself with only a slight sighing sound. "Fois" he answered without looking at me, as he had an eye out for the tram that could have put an end to us. Vez, fois, once upon a time pedestrians had to watch for streetcars everywhere in the United States, even in Chicago, the city where I was to shortly find myself.
An enjoyable collection of motments. (Via wood s lot.)

Posted by languagehat at 07:54 PM | Comments (1)

September 17, 2005

EXAMINING THE OED.

Charlotte Brewer has created a site called Examining the OED that promises to be extremely interesting. The About page says:

The Oxford English Dictionary is everywhere recognized as a comprehensive authority on the history of English from 1150 to the present day. Both literary and linguistic scholars, as well as many others, use the dictionary in order to find out more about words and their meanings, and to study and learn from the unrivalled stores of quotation evidence provided for the individual entries (drawn from literary and non-literary sources from the earliest days of English up to the present). In particular, OED's representation of language has crucially affected literary and linguistic understanding of how English has changed and developed, and of the contribution made to this process by individuals such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other major writers.

Yet we know remarkably little about the methodology and underlying editorial practices of this enormous 'engine of research' (a term first used of the dictionary by one of its publishers, Charles Cannan, in 1905). Although OED is a landmark in lexicography and provides a reference point for many sorts of language studies, it is itself comparatively little studied. By exploring and analysing OED's quotations and quotation sources, this research project seeks to illuminate the foundations of the dictionary's representation of the English language.

You can see in detail what's available at the site map. (Thanks go once again to aldiboronti at Wordorigins, master of linguistic truffle-hunting.)

Posted by languagehat at 07:10 PM | Comments (2)

September 16, 2005

LIGHTER INTERVIEW.

Oxford University Press has put online a long and fascinating interview (pdf file; HTML cache here) with J.L. Lighter, compiler of the indispensible and happily revived Historical Dictionary of American Slang (which he's been working on since he left high school). As the introduction puts it:

The best news of the year for word buffs, amateur etymologists, professional linguists, and all who respond to the incredible richness of the American language is that J. E. Lighter has found a home for his Historical Dictionary
of American Slang
.

When Random House published the first two volumes of this dictionary, covering letters A through O, in 1994 and 1997, critics reached for such terms as definitive, absolutely outstanding, and landmark publication. Nevertheless, the publisher abandoned the project when it was only half-completed, leaving the author and his dictionary in publishing limbo—and his many fans aghast...

Continue reading "LIGHTER INTERVIEW."
Posted by languagehat at 08:21 PM | Comments (2)

RIP MURRAY EMENEAU.

The name Emeneau won't mean much to non-linguists, but he was a giant in the field, and I'm glad he made it to 101. You can find out more about him here; I was reminded to post this by reading Sally Thomason's touching tribute at Language Log, and I originally got the news at Noncompositional.

Posted by languagehat at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2005

WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS.

The online magazine Words Without Borders is trying to promote international literature:

Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated *from English,* but only 6% are translated *into* English.

Words Without Borders undertakes to promote international communication through translation of the world's best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of foreign writers and connecting these writers to universities and to print and broadcast media.

Their archives go back to July/August 2003 (Literary Border-crossings in Iran), and they've got a blog with authors from the U.S., the Netherlands, Italy, and the U.K. (Via wood s lot.)

Posted by languagehat at 08:37 PM | Comments (6)

September 14, 2005

ESQUIVALIENCE, OR RELEASING GIANT TURTLES.

I had meant to post about this weeks ago, but it slipped my mind: the New Yorker ran a Talk of the Town piece about words inserted into reference books as copyright traps:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

Continue reading "ESQUIVALIENCE, OR RELEASING GIANT TURTLES."
Posted by languagehat at 07:17 PM | Comments (24)

September 13, 2005

ODD NAMES.

An AP story brings us word of some of the names researchers at the Cornwall Record Office have discovered as they pored over their archives:

"My all-time favorites are Abraham Thunderwolff and Freke Dorothy Fluck Lane," she [Rene Jackaman] said.

Other discoveries included Boadicea Basher, Philadelphia Bunnyface, Faithful Cock, Susan Booze, Elizabeth Disco, Edward Evil, Fozzitt Bonds, Truth Bullock, Charity Chilly, Gentle Fudge, Obedience Ginger and Offspring Gurney.

There are also some great married couples (e.g., Nicholas Bone and Priscilla Skin). (Thanks, Nick!)

Addendum. Trey (in the comments) has found the complete Silly Names List!

Continue reading "ODD NAMES."
Posted by languagehat at 05:01 PM | Comments (16)

WISLICENUS.

I was reading an essay on Mark Aldanov in Georgii Adamovich's collection of criticism Odinochestvo i svoboda (Solitude and freedom, 1955), and in a discussion of Aldanov's novel Начало конца (1939, translated in 1943 as The Fifth Seal) he mentions a character, a "professional revolutionary," called Вислиценус [Vislitsenus]. This very odd name certainly wasn't Russian; could it be Lithuanian? Polish? I googled the transliteration and got one hit, but it provided a precious clue: "VISLITsENUS (Wislicenus)." So now I had the proper Latin-alphabet spelling, and quickly found this page, which told me everything I wanted to know about the name, which is German but of Polish origin, from the name of the town Wiślica: "Er leitet sich ab von dem Städtchen Wiślica in Polen (etwa 80 km nordöstlich von Krakau), aus dem Johannes Wislicenus I stammte." I love the internet.

Continue reading "WISLICENUS."
Posted by languagehat at 11:29 AM | Comments (5)

PELIGNIAN.

Looking up the word dives, divitis 'rich' (often contracted to dis, ditis) in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I found the etymology "Pelignian des, deti, cogn. w. DIVVS..." Pelignian was new to me; on investigation I learned that the Paeligni were an Italic people east of the Romans and that their towns were Corfinium (slated to be the new capital of Italy if the good guys had won the Social War) and Sulmo (Ovid's birthplace), but none of my print references mentioned their language. Now, the Wikipedia page has a fairly thorough discussion, saying the "dialect closely resembled the Oscan of Lucania and Samnium, though presenting some peculiarities of its own, which warrant, perhaps, the use of the name North Oscan" and quoting a number of inscriptions... but the Wiki page is based on the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, and I have a feeling more may have been learned since then. Do any of you know more about this? Is Pelignian still thought to be a dialect of Oscan? I always wanted to know more about Oscan and Umbrian (having a romantic attachment to the anti-Roman side in those wars), but it's one of those things I never got around to.

Posted by languagehat at 09:54 AM | Comments (8)

September 12, 2005

REVERSE DICTIONARY.

Can't think what it's called? Enter the meaning you have in mind and the OneLook Reverse Dictionary will look for the appropriate word. (Via MonkeyFilter.)

Posted by languagehat at 06:48 PM | Comments (2)

TWO NAMES.

I just ran across the information that the novelist Irwin Shaw was born, in New York to Russian-Jewish parents, Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff. This immediately struck me as an odd name, and sure enough, it does not seem to exist otherwise: a normal transliteration gets no Google hits, and the Cyrillic equivalent Шамфоров gets only a few references to Shaw. Is it just an incredibly obscure name, or is it an Ellis Island deformation of some name I'm not thinking of?

Also, this morning my wife showed me a reference to an actress named Q'Orianka Kilcher. Needless to say, I was intrigued; my first guess was that it was either self-invented or Klingon, but shame on me—it turns out "her mother is descent from the Huachipaeri and Quechua tribes of South America," and the name is Quechua for 'golden eagle.' I checked my Quechua phrasebook (not yet entered in my catalog because it's in the second row—there are even more books piled on the backs of the shelves than are visible), and sure enough, the vocabulary has "gold—qori." But wait: q is a "guttural fricative similar to the 'ch' in Scottish 'loch,'" and q' is "Quechua 'q' with glottal stop." So is there a typo in the vocabulary? Because presumably her parents wouldn't have added the apostrophe just for the hell of it. But since they did, I feel obliged to point out that it's not like Irish O', and the following letter should not be capitalized, as IMDb and the newspaper had it; online sources are split, so I'm guessing she spells it Q'orianka and it gets changed by editors or computer programs. But who knows how she says it? (Ms. Kilcher, if you're reading this, please leave a comment!)

Posted by languagehat at 04:23 PM | Comments (9)

September 11, 2005

RUSYN/RUTHENIAN.

The World Academy of Rusyn Culture has a good site on the language called Rusyn by its speakers and sometimes Ruthenian in English (or "western Ukrainian" by those who do not recognize it as a separate language):

The language territory where Carpatho-Rusyn dialects are spoken coincides with the historical territory of *Carpathian Rus’, which in terms of present-day boundaries is located within southeastern Poland (the *Lemko Region), northeastern Slovakia (the *Prešov Region), most of the *Transcarpathian oblast of Ukraine (*Subcarpathian Rus’), and a small corner of north-central Romania (the *Maramureş Region). Rusyn is also spoken in a few scattered communities in northeastern Hungary and among emigrants from Carpathian Rus’ who settled in the *Vojvodina and Srem regions of present-day Yugoslavia and far eastern Croatia and in the United States and Canada...

The difficulty in classifying Carpatho-Rusyn dialects stems largely from the fact that individual dialect territories experience an overlapping of numerous isoglosses. In other words, certain linguistic features typical of one area encroach into other areas; determining where to draw a boundary between these territories in the process of defining and classifying the dialects thus becomes difficult. Another difficulty in classification is related to the fact that the dialects have in the past and continue to be influenced by numerous sociolinguistic or extralinguistic factors from the larger world in which Rusyns live, whether in Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the United States, or Canada. When attempting a synchronic description of the language system of dialects and in classifying them, researchers must consider the larger linguistic and cultural worlds in which dialects function. The structure and function of the dialects must be described in connection with the languages with which they are in contact.

A nice find by Christopher Culver, who also posts about a projected Indogermanische Grammatik that was begun in 1968 by Kuryłowicz, "was subsequently continued by Watkins, Cowgill, and Mayrhofer, and is nowhere near completion... I wonder what the oldest perpetually unfinished project is in Indo-European linguistics." So which will appear first, this or The Last Dangerous Visions?

Posted by languagehat at 05:31 PM | Comments (14)

September 10, 2005

THAT'S MY LANGUAGE: KEEP OUT!

[Comments are now open -- sorry about that!]

While contemplating my ever-growing LibraryThing catalog (now at 1,000 books), I was suddenly struck by the odd name Gorgoniev belonging to the author of my Cambodian-Russian dictionary. I did some googling and discovered that this guy, whose name and patronymic turn out to be Yurii Aleksandrovich, is the only Gorgoniev known to the internet (furthermore, the name is not in any of my reference books). I found some discussion of him here; he sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant fellow:

Continue reading "THAT'S MY LANGUAGE: KEEP OUT!"
Posted by languagehat at 02:00 PM | Comments (3)