grammys

Back in December, when attempting to sum up the most important contributions of the year 2006, I had the following to say on the subject of "best in music":

Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way. "Not Ready To Make Nice" beats anything else hands down.

As we've all found out today, the National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences agrees. I will refrain from a Colbertesque "I called it!" (I hate balloons and I'm allergic to the stuff they're made of), nor will I say anything about vindication, mainly because I'm trying to keep this a language blog and I want to avoid needless flamewars.
But let me just say this: for the most part, I am not comfortable with late 20th century poetry. Call me whatever you want, I just don't get it. I've always found Bukowski over-the-top vulgar and I could never see the point of Ferlinghetti. And although Seifert has his moments and even Mihálik and Miłosz have a thing or two to say to me, I cannot help but think that poetry as a genre is largely dead. But fear not, my friends, all is not yet lost. While traditional poetry was slowly marching towards its demise, those who were willing to push the limits of language while confined to a set structure (for this is my definition of poetry) have found a new calling as (singer)songwriters. To me, Carole King, Chantal Kreviazuk ("Time"), Mary Chapin Carpenter (her "Jubilee" knocks my socks off every single time), Pavel Dobeš, Jakub Sienkiewicz of Elektryczne gitary and many others like them are the real Shakespeare's, Puškin's and Khayyam's of our time.
And so I firmly believe that when earlier today, the National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences honored the Dixie Chicks with 5 Grammys, at least one of those was awarded to Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison and Dan Wilson as poets for the best poem written last year. And as someone who believes that "Not Ready To Make Nice" is not only that, but also one of the most powerful pieces of American poetry ever written which will serve as a testament to the troubled first decade of the 21st century for years to come, the only thing I can say is "Damn straight!"

SSSJ part 3 teaser trailer

When we come back*, we will continue to dissect the randomly chosen entry from SSSJ and critically analyze the dictionary as a whole. In the process, we will attempt to shed light on various issues of Slovak language policy and some of its most notorious problems. Also, we will offer our final judgement on SSSJ. The verdict may surprise you...
Stay tuned.

*... which we will do once we have kicked the crap out of whoever/whatever is causing these posting problems. Seriously, wtf is "411 Content-Length required" and "Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request" supposed to mean?

SSSJ part 2

In some cases (almost exclusively borrowings, but also a few archaic or dialectal words with ambiguous spelling), the headword is followed by a short note on the pronunciation enclosed in square brackets:

dilino [d-] ...

Note that even in borrowings, this information is only supplied where there is potential confusion. Common borrowings with generally known and/or accepted pronunciation (elektrina, dentálny etc.) do not include this note.

In this entry, the [d-] indicates that the voiced dental plosive [d] is not palatalized according to the native de-te-ne-le/di-ti-ni-li rule. Elsewhere, the relevant parts of the lexeme or the entire lexeme are transcribed whenever appropriate:

girondista [ži- d-] ...
acta [akta] …
e-mail [imejl]...

The pronunciation note is followed by morphological data:

dilino [d-] -na pl. N -novia m. ...

This particular entry lists Genitive singular (-na, i.e. dilina) and Nominative plural (pl. N. -novia, i.e. dilinovia) followed by the specification of gender (m. for masculine, ž. for feminine and s. for neuter nouns).

For all nouns in the Dictionary, these data include Gen. sg. For masculine and neuter nouns, N. pl. is included by default, too. In many cases, other forms are given as well. In entries on masculine and neuter nouns this most commonly includes the notoriously difficult Locative sg.:

diel –lu L –le pl. N –ly m. ...

For feminine nouns, the equally troublesome Genitive plural is often listed as well:

električka -ky –iek ž. ...

I find it rather confusing that in case of masculine nouns, the default morphological information includes the names of the categories (i.e. N and pl.), while in case of feminine and neuter nouns it doesn't. The introduction offers no explanation as to why this is so.

Verbs are listed in the infinitive and the morphological information provided includes the following forms: present tense 3. person singular [1] and plural [2], 2. person imperative singular [3], past tense (actually, past participle) [4], prechodník (adverbial participle) [5], active participle masculine singular [6], passive participle masculine singular [7] and the gerund [8] (NB: the numbers in italics are mine, they do not appear in actual SSSJ entries):

brániť –ni [1] –nia [2] bráň! [3] -nil [4] –niac [5] –niaci [6] –nený [7] –nenie [8] ...

This is a huge improvement over previous dictionaries (which only listed [1] and [2] and occasionally [7]) and will surely please many a native speaker, not to mention those brave and admirable people learning Slovak as a second language.
As seen in the example above, while only hyphenated endings are normally listed for most forms, full forms (or even full conjugations) are given whenever necessary. Entries on verbs also indicate the aspect of the verb in question (abbreviation dok. for dokonavý = perfective and nedok. for nedokonavý = imperfective; occasionally both, see below):

čarať -rá -rajú -raj! -ral -rajúc -raný -ranie nedok. i dok. ...

For adjectives, the lemma is always Nominative singular masculine and the morphological derivations listed are N sg. feminine, N sg. neuter and N sg. masculine of the comparative (2. st.):

čierny -na, -ne 2. st. černejší príd. ...

Comparative is normally listed in entries on adverbs as well:

bohapusto 2. st. - tejšie prísl. ...

Note that in both adjective and adverb entries above, the comparative form is followed by an abbreviation indicating the part of speech (príd. = prídavné meno = adjective, prísl. = príslovka = adverb). Of all the parts of speech, only nouns and verbs remain unmarked as to their category. All other categories include the information on their function in a sentence which is optionally accompanied by other characteristics as well. Entries on pronouns, for example, also specify their respective type, while prepositions include the abbreviation for the case(s) which they govern. Why this is so is a mystery to me. It would have been more fitting - not to mention consistent - to indicate the word class in every single entry. I also wonder whether it wouldn't be more user-friendly to list the word class (followed by the gender for nouns and the aspect for verbs) immediately following the pronunciation guide. Contrast the following two versions:

dilino [d-] -na pl. N -novia m. {róm.}...
dilino [d-] podst. m. -na pl. N -novia {róm.}...

Morphological data can optionally be followed by an abbreviation in chevrons (represented here by brackets) indicating the origin of the word. As seen here, our example is a borrowing from Romani (rómčina).

dilino [d-] -na pl. N -novia m. {róm.}...

Multiple origins (e.g. Latin from Greek, German from Italian) are indicated by a "less than" sign (represented herein by a hyphen):

centrum -ra, pl. N centier s. {lat. - gr.}...
dohán -nu m. {maď. - tur. - arab.} …

When it comes to etymology, that is, unfortunately, it. Don't get me wrong: I am happy to note that the information provided is quite reliable and I‘m thankful for it, no matter how brief it is. It has even proven valuable to me, as I have since learned that bifľovať sa ("to learn by mindlessly memorizing; to cram for exams") is not only a borrowing from German (which I had already suspected), but that it ultimately derives from Greek (which figures, but is still news to me). I also learned that čurbes ("a wild party") originally comes from Hebrew and I am still trying to find out what is the origin of this lovely word. Wouldn't it be great if the respective entries contained all that information?

One more point of criticism: this note of origin is only found in borrowings, or rather immediately recognizable borrowings. Entries on borrowings which are commonly not recognized as such (i.e. "glej", "družba") do not include this note. I therefore cannot help but think that it would have been more consistent (though admittedly much more demanding from the point of the editors) to include the note of etymology with every non-native headword. E.g.:

glej -ja pl. N -je m. {lat. - gr.} ...
družba -by -ieb ž. {rus.} ...

(To be continued...)

SSSJ part 1

A little later then originally planned, but here it is: the long-awaited Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka (henceforth: SSSJ), volume 1, letters A-G. 1.134 pages, 30.293 headwords, 3.680 phrasal units. With planned 7 or 8 volumes and more than 250.000 entries in total, it is the first comprehensive (a.k.a. "large-sized") dictionary of the Slovak language ever.
This would be the right place to say something about the history of Slovak lexicography, the ill-fated 1959-1968 Peciar's Slovník slovenského jazyka  (Dictionary of Slovak) and that lame-ass waste of paper called Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka (A Short Dictionary of Slovak). Unfortunately, blogger.com and/or Firefox 2 are still persisting in their quirky behavior and the way they refuse to publish what I've written is really ticking me off (hence the multiple-part series). And besides, hey, IT'S HERE! All those years of waiting, who cares about stuff like that when you can actually open an actual dictionary of Slovak and just read it?
So tell you what, I’ll just pick it up – oy, it's heavy! – and open it at random. Ah, perfect:

dilino [d-] -na pl. N -novia m. {róm.} expr. hlúpy, často pochabý človek (často nadávka); syn. truľo, pako: správa sa ako d.; nie som d.!; ty d.!; Vyčkával na mňa ako dilino [J. Beňo]; Otrávim ich ako ten dilino kone. On to myslel dobre, ja to myslím zle, ale urobím to lepšie. [J. Balco]

Let’s dissect the entry. First, we start with the headword:

dilino ...

Aside from simple non-derived words, a headword can be an abbreviation (ARO, DOS), a fixed phrase (Čierna hora) or even an affix (euro- or even, I kid you not, -gate). Derivatives – whether created by affixation or compounds – are generally listed independently of the main headword and thus all of the following words (derived from farba = color) have their own entries:

farbiť ...
farbička ...
farebný ...
farbivo ...
bezfarebný ...
dofarbiť ...

However, regular derived forms, like the passive participles farbený and dofarbený which also function as adjectives, are normally not listed as independent headwords at all.
In some cases, the entry only contains the headword and a reference to another entry preceded by an arrow (represented here by a forward slash). These are mostly spelling variants

gay1 / gej1

and occasionally certain derivatives (like the following diminutive which crossreferences the simple headword):

fúrka / fúra

(To be continued...)