tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83478878786716090572024-02-08T07:43:59.028-08:00epea pteroentalanguage, linguistics, literature, and filmzmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-47990031251104457522019-11-26T09:08:00.002-08:002019-11-26T09:25:39.379-08:00I ran across a reference this morning to the <a href="http://www.gotica.de/bononiensia.html"><i>Gothica Bononiensia</i></a>, a recently (2013-ish) discovered 7th century palimpsest MS of St Augustine's <i>de Civitate Dei</i> with the lower script being Gothic fragments of translated Bible passages.<br />
<br />
The word that led me there was Gothic 𐌰𐌿𐌶𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌹𐌻 (auzandil) for Koine Greek ἑωσφόρος (<i>heōsphóros</i>) 'morning star, Venus': related to Hamlet's (Amleth) father's name in Saxo Grammaticus <i>Gesta Danorum </i>and the name Horvendile, James Branch Cabell's alter-ego in his Poictesme legendarium: from Proto-Germanic *auziwandilaz 'wandering-dawn'. The Old English cognate, ēarendel, should look familiar to Tolkien fans, <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Eärendil</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> the Mariner, whose name as lifted from the Old English poem <i>Crist</i>.</span><br />
<br />zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-51099230139025242512013-04-14T08:11:00.000-07:002013-04-15T06:34:30.653-07:00starting over again<br />
Has it really been one and a half years since my last post? I guess so. After a six-month leave of absence, I have a new job at a shiny new startup where I’m learning a bunch of new-to-me technology: big data (in the cloud), analytics, search, Clojure, git, dependency injection, &c.<br />
<br />
I am learning and getting to like Eclipse and Maven. The former is ironic, since I used to be part of the Netbeans team at the now-defunct Sun Microsystems. I remember how many of the engineers used Eclipse, because it was better-featured than Netbeans. Before Netbeans I experimented with JDeveloper mainly because I was teaching Java to Oracle DBAs, but basically I liked writing code using jEdit and building it with Ant.<br />
<br />
I have also managed to resurrect <a href="http://www.bisso.com/ujg/">a copy of my first blog</a>, Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey, It’s far from perfect (e.g., all the CGI is offline), but the prose and comments are there for all to see. Was it really ten years ago I started blogging? The first version of this blog was hosted on one of my office machines, but it has since migrated to the cloud, running from some anonymous Google server.<br />
zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-6258152906876698292011-09-22T09:51:00.000-07:002011-09-22T09:51:48.878-07:00<p>The other day, on BART, I remember this quotation from the Bernstein character in <i>Citizen Kane</i> (1941):</p><br />
<blockquote>A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl. </blockquote><br />
<p>There I was reading Hofstadter’s <i>I Am a Strange Loop</i>, when I looked up for a second, and I saw that girl, though she was dressed in blue jeans and listening to an iPod, standing about ten feet in front of me. The next time I glanced up from my book, she was standing directly in front of me, and i could hear some music coming out of her earbuds. When I got up to leave at Embarcdero Station, she sat down in my seat. Just as I exited the station by the little trolley-shaped florist stand in front of the Federal Reserve Bank building, a co-worker, Steve, said good morning and asked how I was. All I could do was ask him if he knew Bernstein’s monologue. And he did, and we walked to our office building in silence.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-85910681517079405752011-05-03T06:21:00.000-07:002011-05-03T06:26:03.211-07:00toponymic etymology<p>In the news currently, Abbottabad, Pakistan, means Abbott’s city. It was named after a British army officer, James Abbott (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_(British_army_officer)">link</a>), three of whose brothers were major-generals.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-88711541992473488372010-12-24T10:08:00.000-08:002010-12-24T10:13:11.409-08:00devices for others<p>I finally made the decision to replace my half-broken, five year-old mobile phone with a new smartphone. As soon as I get it, I am going to create a new ringtone for it. I’m thinking Cage’s <emphasis>4′33″</emphasis> for when I’m in meetings or at a restaurant.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-49480625022199245552010-05-26T13:07:00.000-07:002010-05-26T13:33:30.393-07:00grammatici ordinis parvuli<p>Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, [ 1810–71] in his <i>A Plea for the Queen’s English: Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling</i> (1881), pp.154–7. (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=_LMCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA154#v=onepage&q&f=false">link</a>), champions the oft-maligned construction <i>it is me</i> from hordes of peevers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>192. The mention of the nominative and accusative of the personal pronoun seems not inaptly to introduce a discussion of the well-known and much controverted phrase, “It is me.” Now this is an expression which every one uses. Grammarians (of the smaller order) protest: schoolmasters (of the lower kind) prohibit and chastise; but English men, women, aud children go on saying it, and will go on saying it as long as the English language is spoken. Here is a phenomenon worth accounting for. “Not at all so,” say our censors: “don’t trouble yourself about it; it is a mere vulgarism. Leave it off yourself, and try to persuade every one else to leave it off.”</p>
<p>193. But, my good censors, I cannot. I did what I could. I wrote a letter inviting the chief of you to come to Canterbury and hear my third lecture. I wrote in some fear and trembling. All my adverbs were (what I should call) misplaced, that I might not offend him. But at last, I was obliged to transgress, in spite of my good resolutions. I was promising to meet him at the station, and I was going to write: “if you see on the platform ‘<i>an old party in a shovel</i>’ that will be I.” But my pen refused to sanction (to <i>endorse</i>, I believe I ought to say, but I cannot) the construction. “<i>That will be me</i>” came from it, in spite, as I said, of my resolve of the best possible behaviour.</p>
<p>194. Let us see what a real grammarian says on the matter: one who does not lay opinion, down rules only, but is anxious to ascertain on what usages are founded. Dr. Latham, in his admirable <i>History of the English Language</i>, p. 586, says, “We may .... call the word me a secondary nominative: inasmuch as such phrases as <i>it is me</i> = <i>it is I</i>, are common. To call such expressions incorrect English, is to assume the point. No one says that <i>c’est moi</i> is bad French, and <i>c’est je</i> is good. The fact is that, with us, the whole question is a question of degree. Has or has not the custom been sufficiently prevalent to have transferred the forms <i>me</i>, <i>ye</i>, and <i>you</i>, from one case to another ? Or perhaps we may say, is there any real custom at all in favour of <i>I</i>, except so far as the grammarians have made one? It is clear that the French analogy is against it. It is also clear that the personal pronoun as a predicate may be in a different analogy from the personal pronoun as a subject.”</p>
<p>195. And in another place, p. 584, he says: “What if the current objections to such expressions as <i>it is me</i> (which the ordinary grammarians would change into <i>it is I</i>), be unfounded, or rather founded upon the ignorance of this difference (the difference between the use of the pronoun as subject and as predicate)? That the present writer, defends this (so-called) vulgarism may be seen elsewhere. It may be seen elsewhere, that he finds nothing worse in it than a Frenchman finds in <i>c’est moi</i>, where, according to the English dogma, <i>c’est je</i> would be the light expression. Both constructions, the English and the French, are predicative: and when constructions are predicative, a change is what we must expect rather than be surprised at.”</p>
</blockquote>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-62835707938864882662010-05-03T15:39:00.000-07:002010-05-26T13:32:47.208-07:00petitio quæsiti<p>Mark Liberman in his wonderful post over on <i>Language Log</i>, <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290">“Begging the Question”: We Have Answers</a>, asks, in an aside, <q cite="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290">Some medieval translator (does anyone know who?) decided to translate Aristotle’s ‘assuming the conclusion’ into <i>petitio principii</i>.</q> I thought that would make a good blog entry. Here’s what I found out.</p>
<p>Prior to the 19th century, it was thought that Boethius had translated the whole of Aristotle’s <i>Organum</i> from Greek into Latin, but it is now thought that the <i>Analytica Priora</i> was translated by Jacobus Clericus de Venetia in 1128. This is based on a single entry in <i>Gesta Normannorum Ducum</i> added by Robert de Torigni: <q><i>Jacobus Clericus de Venecia transtulit de græco in latinum quosdam libros Aristotelis et commentatus est, scilicet Topica, Anal. priores et posteriores et Elenchos, quamvis antiquior translatio super eosdem libros haberetur</i>.</q> I found the passage in Migne‘s <i>Patrologia Latina</i> <a href="http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0480-0524__Boethius._Severinus__Priorum_Analyticorum_Aristotelis_Libri_Duo__MLT.pdf.html">54</a>, <a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4007/4572675223_fac40fe12d_o.png">703</a>.
<blockquote><i>In principio autem petere et accipere est quidem, ut in genere, sumere in eo quod non est demonstrare propositum</i>.</blockquote>
Compare this with another 19th century translation by Emil Heitz (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Od8TAAAAYAAJ&dq=aristotle%20opera%20omnia&pg=PA109#v=onepage&q&f=false"><i>Aristotelis Omnia Opera</i></a>, I, <a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4069/4573360210_cfff22cecc_o.png">109</a>):
<blockquote><i>Id autem, quod in principio</i> quæsitum erat, ut concederetur <i>petere,</i> tanquam concessum <i>sumere, si in genere accipiatur, consistit in eo, si quis, quod positum est, non demonstret.</i></blockquote></p>
<p>Now for Jacobus’ translation. It seems pretty straightforward. We drop the τό ‘it’; <i>autem</i> for the elided δή; <i>in principio</i> for ἠν ἀρχῇ ‘in the beginning’; <i>petere</i> ‘to beg, beseech’ for αἰτεῖσθαι ‘to ask, demand’; <i>accipere</i> for λαμβάνειν ‘to take, receive’. Heitz’ translation is more word for word literal. What is interesting is how the infinitive for <i>petere</i> became an abstract noun <i>petitio</i> ‘a requesting, beseeching’ and the prepositional phrase a simple noun in the genitive. What is stranger is how the Latin (or the Greek to be charitable) got Englished: <i>begging the question</i>.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-39597454548034210212010-04-09T17:42:00.000-07:002010-04-09T17:47:51.677-07:00this blog has moved to a new url<p>It turns out that <i>epea pteroenta</i> is one of the one half percent of all Blogger blogs that used FTP publishing to store the files on my own server. This style of publishing is going away on may day. I have not really been blogging much, but I was dreading converting the existing blog to the new scheme, but Google documented the process and wrote a web application that made the whole thing rather painless.</p>
<p>The new URL for the blog is <a href="http://epea.bisso.com/">epea.bisso.com</a>.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-1000751532974537902010-04-09T17:29:00.001-07:002010-04-09T17:32:42.783-07:00This blog has moved
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zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-28617123695333654162009-12-27T06:59:00.000-08:002010-01-18T06:21:23.516-08:00oel ngati kameie<p>In keeping with all the now-vanished merriment, V. & I found ourselves on Xmas eve standing in line a 1830 hours waiting with the rest of the crowd to be let in to see <i>Avatar</i> in IMAX 3D. We usually go see some blockbuster du jour on Xmas morning for matinée prices, but this year, in keeping with our efforts to shore up the Californian economy during the Great Recession, we plunked down over thirty bucks and waited to get our 3D specs and a seat not too far in the back of the theater. I wanted to see it because I had been intrigued by interviews with Paul Frommer, a USC linguist, who had designed the Na'vi conlang used in the movie. Frommer had even guest blogged over at Language Log (<a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1977">link</a>) about it. We had fun. The story is a simple morality tale with kick-ass 3D effects. The best take I’ve seen so far online is by James Kunstler (<a href="http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/12/blue-christmas.html#more ">link</a>). There were some obvious bits retreaded from <i>Aliens</i>, and V. noticed that the pacing was similar to <i>Titanic</i>, a film that I never got around to seeing. When we got home we were not sleepy enough yet to go to bed, so we watched another film, <i>Ein Frau in Berlin</i>. It’s based on a memoir published in 1954 (in English and in the USA) about the events in one neighborhood during the Battle for Berlin during the period from 20 April to 22 June 1945. Its publication caused outcries in Germany about the honor of German women being besmirched.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-16768619294004936062009-12-26T05:34:00.000-08:002009-12-26T05:50:58.906-08:00dolorous googling<p>Yesterday I joined my friends Krishnan and Sandhya in taking their nephew Balaji (and their daughter Subhadra) on a tour of some of San Francisco’s famous landmarks: the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point (where we saw a couple of dolphins), the Presidio, Japantown (Peace Plaza), University of San Francisco, and, of course Lombard Street (or the crooked street as K. called it). Our first stop, after they picked me up in front of GGU, was supposed to be Mission Dolores (or more properly Mission San Francisco de Asís). I remembered roughly where it was down in the aptly-named Mission district, but I decided to google it to be on the safe side. The weird thing is, Google maps places the Mission Dolores a little over a block away from its true location at 16th and Dolores streets on a small back-alleyish street called Dearborn (<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Mission+Dolores,+San+Francisco,+CA&sll=37.93574,-122.330028&sspn=0.013336,0.01929&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Mission+Dolores,+San+Francisco,+California&z=15&iwloc=A">link</a>). I was moderately suspicious and surprised but I figured the almighty URL aggregators knew what-for, and I was in a hurry to get to BART on time to meet my friends.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-54418915624763129022009-12-19T08:00:00.000-08:002009-12-26T05:50:58.910-08:00learning standard english as second dialect<p>While enjoying a funny entry on Language Log (<a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1975">link</a>) about a recent story arc thread on the <i>Non Sequitur</i> comic strip, I came across the following in the commentary:</p>
<blockquote><p>I took a Russian course in the 1980s, and helped out a classmate who was struggling with the material. He had graduated with excellent marks from an American high school, but I quickly discovered that the reason he couldn't make his adjectives agree with his nouns, or choose the correct noun case, was that he <i>did not know what a noun was</i>.</p>
<p>I spent hours in Canadian grade school, circling nouns, underlining verbs and drawing boxes around articles and squiggly lines under adverbs. I had to memorize and parrot on exams lists of relative pronouns and prepositions.</p>
<p>It fascinated me that my classmate could speak coherently and write essays in his native language without knowing what the components are.</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s that last sentence that struck me as odd. The idea that a person could not speak or write a language without knowing its grammar (in this case defined as being able to identify parts of speech) does not make sense to me. The grammar of a language has many components: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. To many of my co-Anglophones, grammar instead means usage, orthography, etymology, and punctuation. This latter non-linguistic view of grammar is a holdover from the days when Latin and Greek were the languages being taught in grammar schools. And, pedagogically speaking, when you’re learning a new language (as an adult), it helps to be able to speak about its grammar using some terms, hopefully from the language grammatical tradition itself. (I have been thinking about this because recently I have been slowly learning Japanese linguistic terms in my Japanese class.) Latin these days has been replaced by General American English in US schools. And GAE is for many speakers in this country a different dialect of English than the one they learned on their mother’s lap.</p>
zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-64945413261661307602009-08-23T05:00:00.000-07:002009-08-23T05:00:14.471-07:00floppy ears<p>Thanks to Languagehat, I’ve started to read a Greek linguistics blog, Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (<a href="http://hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com/">link</a>) and immediately got caught up in a thread about a rare (Modern Greek) word for the European ground squirrel (<i>Spermophilus citellus</i>) λαγόγηρως which occurs in Suidas. Read about it at Old Man Hare (<a href="http://hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com/2009/08/old-man-hare.html">link</a>). There’s a Bulgarian word for the animal лалугер (variant лагудер) that looks like a loan from Greek. There are minor difficulties such as the γ mapping to the л that could be explained by dissimilation from the second γ (and the dialectal variant has the second γ becoming д). The word analyses morphologically into λαγώς ‘hare’ and γῆρας ‘old age’ hence the entry’s title. Greek λαγώς is usually traced to two PIE roots *<i>(s)lēg</i> (*<i>(s)ləg</i>, *<i>(s)leg</i>) ‘limp, floppy; soft’ and *<i>ōus</i> (*<i>əus</i>, *<i>us</i>) ‘ear’. The ο rather than an ω as in other Greek compounds with λαγώς, e.g., λαγωφόνος ‘har-killer’ , λαγώπους ‘hare-footed’ is not a problem as there are some compounds with ο, e.g., λαγοδαίτης ‘hare-devourer’. Greek γῆρας traces back to PIE *<i>grē</i> ‘mature, rotten’.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-40330679023041325032009-08-10T18:37:00.000-07:002009-08-10T19:29:30.384-07:00mandelshtam et trubetskoj<p>Mr Verb posted an entry
(<a href="http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/2009/07/languages-dialects-armies-navies.html">link</a>) about a passage from a book he’s reading, <i>The Stalin Epigram</i> by Robert Littell.</p>
<blockquote><p>"I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said that he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects—languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without."</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s in the context of Osip Mandelshtam in transit to a correction camp where he would die of an unspecified illness. We’ve all heard the aphorism, and it has been attributed to Antoine Meillet and Max Weinreich, though the latter gave it its first appearance in the literature, and that in Yiddish (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy">link</a>).</p>
<p>So, just who is that professor linguistics supposed to be? Since it’s a work of fiction, I’d like to add my candidate to the offerings in the commentary: Nikolai Trubetzkoy (<a href="http://www.isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/nikolay_trubetskoy.html">link</a>). He too died in ’38 and likewise at the hands of a totalitarian regime, this time the Gestapo in Austria, rather than the NKVD in the USSR. And somehow I’d like to fit Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski in therre, too.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-5891808525828682712009-07-22T16:35:00.000-07:002009-08-08T06:55:26.153-07:00foregrounding earwigs<p>The 20th saw the media frenzied churning over the 40th anniversary of man on the moon (cue the Gil Scott-Heron track, <i>Whitey on the Moon</i>). That set off a long-delayed ruminating nostalgic fugue state in your faithless narrator. I went to David Bromige’s memorial service (<a href="http://bromige.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/thanks-to-the-fellow-celebrants/">link</a>) in Sebastopol on the 5th instant, and while marveling at how few people I knew there, ran into George Lakoff. I said hello and reminded him that I had taken a couple of classes from him 30 years ago or more. I read a short poem of David’s on the death of poetry. Then we all piled into the VW microbus and trundled on off to Saul’s in Berkeley for some sour dills and chicken soup. Black Oak Books next door has gone out of business. This last weekend, I went to Hackenberg Booksellers, because yet another linguist had died. And, so, I looked through stacks of books, some priced and others not. I bought 3 Malkiel monographs and a Burkert <i>Homo Necans</i>.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-31683234738955307392009-04-11T09:15:00.001-07:002009-09-02T13:09:21.761-07:00la madelaine de saussure<p>Thanks to the blog, <i>Bradshaw of the Future</i> (<a href="http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/">link</a>), I’ve come across the wonderfully named <i>Memiyawanzi</i>, also a blog, which is named after a Hittite word. (The stem of this word is <i>memija</i> ‘word; deed’ which is cognate with some other IE words meaning either ‘to speak’ (Old Russian <i>měniti</i> ‘speak’) or ‘to think, remember’ (Sanskrit <i>manyate</i> ‘s/he thinks’); see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov <i>Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans</i> p.394.) Anyway, the blogger therein has a wonderfully moody piece about bibliomania and having bought online a copy of Johannes Schweighæuser’s 1825 <a href="http://memiyawanzi.blogspot.com/2009/03/johannes-schweighusers-1825-lexicon.html"><i>Lexicon Herodoteum</i></a>. This reminded me in one powerful Proustian moment of my having bought a second edition of F. de Saussure’s <i>Système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes</i>. I got it from a marvelous used book store (<a href="http://www.hackenbooks.com/">link</a>) nearby in the next town over from where I live, nestled as it is behind an abandoned Target store. I am one of Michael’s few walk-in customers. My standard question whenever I visit is “Have any linguists died?” I bought the Saussure from the as-yet-unpriced library of an ex-Africanist, Charleton Hodge. He had acquired the book in 1961, as he duly noted on the front page. But, what really caught my eye was the bookplate on the front endpaper. The book had been in the library at Johns Hopkins University at one time as part of the Stratton Memorial Library. Who was Alfred William Stratton [1866–1902], who had received his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1902 and had been the Principal of the Oriental College and the Registrar of the Punjab University, at Lehore? The book had been donated to the library, but as was penciled in above the bookplate it had been “replaced by Collitz 1879 copy”. That would have to be Professor Hermann Collitz, Indo-Europeanist, first president of the LSA in 1924, and who had retired from Johns Hopkins in 1927. Collitz had died in 1935, and, so I wondered, when had my copy been replaced, and where had it been before Hodge bought it. Better yet, who was A W Stratton? Turns out he was a student of Professor Maurice Bloomfield [1855–1928], philologist and Sanskrit scholar. I found out that Stratton’s widow had published his <i>Letters From India</i> in 1908, and about which more in a subsequent post.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-14694894182619356972009-02-01T10:34:00.000-08:002009-02-01T10:57:25.539-08:00erzjan' kel'<p>The Russian Orthodox Church has its 16th patriarch, Kiril I (<i>né</i> Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Kirill_I_of_Moscow">Wikipedia</a>; <a href="http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=100887">Novinite</a>). According to the Wikipedia article he is of Erzya-Mordvin ethnic origin. Erzya (Эрзянь кель) is a Finno-Ugric language with about half a million speakers. Reading up on Erzya led me to the <i>Finno-Ugric Electronic Library</i> (<a href="http://www.library.finugor.ru/">link</a>). (The English interface has some problems, but for those who read Russian it’s a good resource.)</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-72143651028020436392009-01-18T07:29:00.000-08:002009-01-18T08:03:53.806-08:00mapping bad habits<p><i>Cartocacoethes</i> :- a mania, uncontrollable urge, compulsion or itch to see maps everywhere. John Krygier discusses the world’s allegedly oldest map from Çatalhöyük (<a href="http://makingmaps.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/cartocacoethes-why-the-worlds-oldest-map-isnt-a-map/">link</a>).</p>
<blockquote uri="http://makingmaps.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/cartocacoethes-why-the-worlds-oldest-map-isnt-a-map/"><p></p>The Çatalhöyük “map” provides a great case study of the perils of prehistoric map hunting.</p>
<p>The Çatalhöyük map was first brought to attention in a 1964 article entitled “Excavations at Çatal Höyük, 1963, Third Preliminary Report” by James Mellaart <i>Anatolian Studies 14</i> (1964, pp. 39–119).</p></blockquote>
<p><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1115/1448788273_b66b3b516e_m.jpg" /><br /> <span style="font-size: 65%">Image by John Swogger via Flickr.</span></p>
<p>[Via Grant Barrett’s <i>Double-Tongued Dictionary</i> (<a href="http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/citations/cartocacoethes_1/">link</a>) via Michael Quinion’s <i>World Wide Words Newsletter</i> (<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/jcpw.htm">link</a>).]zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-81265262143339834432009-01-17T07:03:00.000-08:002009-01-17T07:07:28.927-08:00ick bin ein lexikon<p>Languagehat recently posted about reading Döblin’s <i>Berlin Alexanderplatz</i> (<a href="http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003373.php">link</a>), and that got me to started wondering about the Berlin dialect. Long post short, I found a <i>Berlinisch Lexikon</i> online (<a href="http://www.germanistik.uni-hannover.de/organisation/publikationen/bln_lexikon/a_to_z/a.htm">link</a>).</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-37073871282209209872008-12-31T16:52:00.000-08:002008-12-31T17:09:53.243-08:00ad annum per gerras<p>Happy New Year one and all! And for our German friends, <i>Dinner For One</i>, a Silvester treat (<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2133551/?nav=ais">link</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_for_One">link</a>).</p>
<p><embed id="VideoPlayback" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=9105942950207814319&hl=en&fs=true" style="width:400px;height:326px" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed></p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-56410776558558720992008-12-26T12:32:00.000-08:002008-12-26T12:49:18.784-08:00be all like<p>Two things about seeing Charlie Kaufman’s <i>Synecdoche, New York</i> in a Berkeley multiplex cinema yesterday: (1) the small theater in which we saw the movie was furnished with a small number of comfy chairs and couches, and (2) I found myself drawn into the conversation of a couple of strangers sitting behind me. It started with one fellow’s lament about the abuse of <i>like</i> as a discourse marker, a quotative, and a linguistic hedge or filler (<a href="http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/NWAV/Abstracts/Paper88.pdf">link</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like">link</a>, and <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004973.html">link</a>). I held my silence, but when they were all like: “And then there’s <i>go</i> for <i>said</i>!” Still I ignored them. Mainly because I could not remember the linguistics term <i>quotative go</i> for this grammatical feature of the informal register in my own ideolect. But, they did not stop there, and finally they wondered, just a bit too loudly, about using the present tense to report something that had happened in the past. “It’s called the historic present,” I said (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_present">link</a>). And then after a awkward pause, I added: “It’s good to finally get some use out of my linguistic degree.” We all of us laughed nervously and then lapsed into silence and waited for the movie to begin. It was wonderful.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-45540806056940641612008-11-21T17:10:00.000-08:002008-11-21T18:07:34.504-08:00tycho magnetic anomaly one<p>It’s not like somebody tagged me with the Alphabet Movie Meme (<a href="http://blogcabins.blogspot.com/2008/11/alphabet-meme.html">link</a>), except maybe myself. So here comes the list: <i>Aguirre der Zorn Gottes</i>, <i>Berlin Chamissoplatz</i>, <i>A Cock and Bull Story</i>, <i>The Draughtsman's Contract</i>, <i>Die Ehe der Maria Braun</i>, <i>Falsche Bewegung</i>, <i>The Great Gabbo</i>, <i>Helsinki Napoli All Night Long</i>, <i>India Song</i>, <i>Johnny Stecchino</i>, <i>Kamikaze 1989</i>, <i>Ladri di saponette</i>, <i>La Maman et la putain</i>, <i>Nuit et brouillard</i>, <i>Ossessione</i>, <i>Pasqualino Settebellezze</i>, <i>Q</i>, <i>Roma</i>, <i>Stalker</i>, <i>Teorema</i>, <i>Unforgiven</i>, <i>Vivement dimanche!</i>, <i>Le Week-end</i>, <i>X</i>, <i>Yojimbo</i>, and <i>Z</i>.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-72704520124378598702008-10-19T16:01:00.000-07:002008-10-25T08:56:28.184-07:00tags or elements<p>Finally a web-meme I can get into! Over at <i>Mother Tongue Annoyances</i> (a blog) I found the following meme (<a href="http://mtannoyances.com/2008/09/15/dick-henry-miller-evidently-used-his-quite-extensively-but-was-also-a-major-one-himself/">link</a>) tacked on to the end of a funny rant on Henry “Dick” Miller:</p>
<blockquote><p>A simple, two-step approach for generating your own, fully personalized, 21st century, Web 2.0-based reading list:</p>
<ol>
<li>Make a list of the top three books that have influenced your life, and make a note of the authors’ names</li>
<li>Visit <a href="http://www.literature-map.com/">Literature-Map</a>, plug each author name into the text box (one at a time, naturally) and generate a cloud of related authors. That ought to keep you busy for a while!</li>
</ol>
<p>Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.</p></blockquote>
<p>OK. Easy enough. My three life-changing books, off the cuff, were:</p>
<ul>
<li>Voltaire, <i>Candide</i>. [<a href="http://www.literature-map.com/voltaire.html">map</a>]</li>
<li>Joris-Karl Huysman, <i>À Rebours</i>. [<a href="http://www.literature-map.com/huysmans.html">map</a>]</li>
<li>Aldous Huxley, <i>Time Must Have a Stop</i>. [<a href="http://www.literature-map.com/aldous+huxley.html">map</a>]</li>
</ul>
<p>The first thing which struck me was the name juxtaposed to Voltaire’s, i.e., Scott Adams. In Paris, I once stayed at a hotel on the <i>quai de Voltaire</i> (across the Seine from the Louvre), and that key was named so because the building in which Voltaire spent the last years of his life and in which he died, then housed a café on its ground floor. I ate a lovely breakfast there, with strong coffee, croissant, and plum preserves. On the other hand, I once taught a Java class for a cohort of masters students from Pacific Bell, before it morphed into SBC and finally lapsed back into AT&T. Knowing that the author of Dilbert had worked there for years, I asked each student on the first night of class to introduce themselves, give any programming experience, and tell me the best story they knew about Scott Adams when he worked there. The only memorable story was that one of the students knew the woman engineer that the character Alice was based on. Go ahead and check out the maps for each of my three chosen authors. I did and enjoyed the fact that I had read works by about 50% of them.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-44387264592837694172008-10-19T15:12:00.000-07:002008-11-16T08:48:54.061-08:00denominal adjectival suffices<p>What is it about words changing their lexical category (or part-of-speech-hood), especially by way of zero morphology, that lights a fire under the tails of word snoots and their ilk? Somebody was just blogging about the use of <i>crater</i> as a verb (as in something the world economy just did), and just generally pissing and moaning about language change and word use. The first thing I thought about was Greek κρατηρ ‘mixing bowl’, which in turn led to a <i>reverie</i> on the <i>sacro catino</i> in the Duomo di San Lorenzo in Genova, one of four or so candidates for the Holy Grail. But when my mind returned to linguistics, I marveled how the participial suffix -<i>ed</i> in English could be applied to nouns to create adjectives. (What is it about adjectives and verbs and their transgressive relationship with one another?) For example, <i>cratered</i>, <i>bearded</i>, <i>horned</i>, etc. Then I realized something similar happens in Latin: <i>aurītus</i> ‘long-eared’ < <i>auris</i> ‘ear’, <i>barbātus</i> ‘bearded’ < <i>barba</i> ‘beard’. This was not the first time I had wondered about verbal suffixes pulling double duty with nouns and adjectives: cf. -<i>l</i>- and -<i>n</i>-.</p>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347887878671609057.post-65911997504910375452008-10-18T09:19:00.000-07:002008-10-20T07:14:24.992-07:00creamling<p>Over at <i>Bradshaw of the Future</i>, goofy has a post about the etymology of <i>butterfly</i> (<a href="http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/10/helena-asked-about-butterfly.html">link</a>). I looked in a bunch of books and googled about online, and here’s some of the stuff I ran across.</p>
<ul>
<li>The idea of butterflies stealing milk or butter is is connected with a dialectal German word for the insect <i>Molkendieb</i> ‘milk-thief’. I found a great collection of German archaic and dialect words for butterfly (<a href="http://www.lepiforum.de/cgi-bin/bestimmung.pl?noframes;read=26358">link</a>). Some connect <i>schmetterling</i> with the German <i>Schmetten</i> ‘cream’, cf. <i>Schmand</i> ‘sour cream’, Czech. <i>smetana</i>, but others with the verb <i>schmettern</i> ‘to gossip, prattle; dash (in sports)’.</li>
<li>The Dutch word <i>butterschijte</i> ‘butter-shit’ has a curious parallel in Slavic: Russian мотыль, Polish <i>motyl</i>, <i>et al</i>. Here’s what Vasmer has to say about its etymology <q><i>Wohl aus ‘Mistfalter’ mit</i> -jo-<i>Bildung zu aruss.</i> motyla <i> f. </i>motylo <i>n. ‘Mist’, ksl. </i>motylo κοπρος <i>r.-kslav.</i> Motylьnikъ κοπρωνυμος <i>(s. Srezn. Wb. 2, 179), das zu abg.</i> metǫ, mesti <i>‘werfen, fegen’ gehört, vgl. MiEW. 194, Meillet MSL. 14, 333, Brandt RFV. 22, 156 (nach ihm: ‘sich hin- u. herwerfen’), Brückner KZ. 42, 342ff. (als ‘Krautscheißer’)</i></q>.</li>
<li>Pokorny <i>IEW</i> p.801: <q><i>Wörter für ‘Schmetterling’: redupliziert lat.</i> pāpiliō, -ōnis m. (*pā-pil-); <i>germ.</i> *fīfalðrōn- <i>in aisl.</i> fīfrildi <i>n., ags.</i> fīfealde, <i>ahd.</i> fīfaltra, <i>mhd.</i> fīfalter, <i>nhd.</i> Falter; <i>lit.</i> petelìškė <i>ds., lett.</i> petelîgs <i>‘flatterhaft’</i> (*pel-tel-); <i>von derselben Wurzel die balto-slav. Wörter</i> (*paipalā-) <i>für ‘Wachtel’: lit.</i> píepala <i>f., lett.</i> paîpala, <i>apr.</i> penpalo <i>(dazu apr.</i> pepelis, <i>Pl.</i> pippalins <i>‘Vogel’); čech.</i> přepel, křepel, <i>slov.</i> prepeliíca <i>(auch ‘Schmetterling’) usw.</i></q> The PIE root in Pokorny is *<i>pel</i>- ‘to pour, flow, fill’ whence English <i>fleet</i>, <i>float</i>, and <i>flutter</i>. (Shades of the folk etymological <i>flutter by</i>.)</li>
<li>Latin <i>pāpiliō</i> means both butterfly and tent. (It’s from the latter meaning that our <i>pavilion</i> comes.) Some think there is a parallel between Greek σκηνη ‘tent, booth; stage’ and σκην ‘butterfly’. The Classical Greek word for butterfly is ψυχη and the Modern Greek word is πεταλουδα.</p></li>
</ul>zmjezhdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16385280690029602212noreply@blogger.com2