bulbulistan

published

2011-12-27T01:45:00.000+01:00

How is this for a belated Christmas present: I have just learned that the paper I presented at the 2009 SBL International Meeting (prepub PDF) has been published by Peter Lang in the proceedings volume from the session titled The Canon of the Bible and the Apocrypha in the Churches of the East (full bibliographical info below).

Hovhanessian, Vahan S. (ed.):
The Canon of the Bible and the Apocrypha in the Churches of the East
Series: Bible in the Christian Orthodox Tradition - Volume 2
Peter Lang Academic Publishers
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2012. VIII, 113 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4331-1035-1 hb.

As a budding (if not young) academic, I guess I should be proud, but truth be told, I'm not. On one hand, I'm somewhat surprised that besides from submitting the manuscript, I had no input in the editing process, which would have enabled me to correct some serious translation errors. On the other, had I had some say in the publishing process, I might have withdrawn the paper from publication completely. As I found out only a few weeks ago, the Arabic text which I thought I had rediscovered had already been published in a critical edition (Testamentum Salomonis arabicum, Córdoba: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de Córdoba, 2006) by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, who is a much more competent scholar than I am. Now true, I did make a few connections he did not plus it's the first time the subject has been presented to the English-reading public, so the paper is not a complete waste of cellulose, but then again, I did make a few horrible translation errors which shall now forever live in print and on Google Books and then there's the total embarassment of the whole thing. I wonder if that's ever happened to anyone else and how they dealt with it.
And the worst part is that this seems to be a constant theme accompanying my academic endeavors - every time I invest time, energy and money into a project that seems worthvile, just as a tangible result is about to be produced, I find that someone, somewhere has already done it, only better. Used to be one of those long dead Russian motherfuckers (and they still remain the most likely suspects), now it's just about everybody. This happens three or four times and you start seriously doubting if you have what it takes to, well, make a contribution and if you and the world at large would not be better off if you just packed it in, called it a day and went off to harvest jam in Cambodia* or build power plants in Yakutia**.

* The Slovak equivalent of being up shit creek without a paddle.
** A real option available to me.

scroll

2011-09-09T11:04:00.004+02:00

I received the following message this morning:

I sure like the 15% discount, but I love their language policy. However, it appears to be a new one, as this message from a while ago confirms:

I wonder what they thought the point of the transliteration was...

liveblogging GHILM 3

2011-04-08T15:09:00.013+02:00

~~... 'cause the hell why not.~~
~~... while the battery lasts.~~
... theme of the day: "Work in progress" (is there any other kind)?

- Intro by Thomas Stolz and Ray Fabri.
Highlight: all future publications by GHILM will be handled by Akademie-Verlag Berlin, proceedings from GHILM 2 should be finished by the end of the month. And there will be a electronic corpus of Maltese going live by the end of the month. Dammit, beaten to the punch again.

- Invited speaker 1: Thomas Stolz. A lively talk on group formation ('we three' etc.), all of it based on Thomas' bedtime reading (with statistics!). Note to self: get it.

- Ray Fabri on clitic and definite NPs in Maltese that's bound to knock the socks of Balkanologists (spoiler alert: clitic doubling with indefinite NPs. Take that!). A lot if it overlapped with my talk and the ensuing discussion actually spoiled parts of it. Great minds etc., I guess.

- Me.
Highlight 1: I didn't shit myself.
Highlight 2: Neither did the audience.
I screwed up an example (that'll learn me to make last-minute changes), but otherwise went pretty well.

- Maris Camilleri on restrictive relative clauses. Crammed full of information and - needless to say - excellent.

- Chris Lucas on negatives from the point of view of dynamic syntax. First time I've ever heard of dynamic syntax and Chris' explanation of the principles actually made sense. Plus some interesting asides on polarity items and interrogative vs. negative 'x' in Maltese.

Lunch.

- Invited speaker 2: Frans Plank on the direction of derivation, mostly nouns<-> adjectives and comparison of direction of derivation with English and German within specific semantic classes. Poor (present) Michael Spagnol got blamed for most of errors.
A comment (from the discussion) by Frans Plank a propos basic vs. derived forms: "In Proto Indo-European, what we see as basic is actually derived. Etymological dictionaries of Indo-Euroean list roots as verbs which is probably more science-fiction than science."

- Michael Spagnol and Albert Gatt on labile verbs (see Haspelmath 1993). Michael did the theory and described Haspelmath 1993 as his favorite paper evah. I almost yelled "Nerd!". Albert presented the results of an online / corpus study examining the use (transitive vs. intransitive) of labile verbs in Maltese and put together a list of verbs biased either way. Very nice. Note to self: need to steal their methodology.

Battery died. Crap.

- Thomas Mayer (et al., but he was the one standing there) with a pretty awesome talk on finding the formula for forming the broken plural in Maltese.
- Phyllisienne Gauci and Maris Camilleri again on the dual. Next time somebody claims there are no dialects in Maltese, play them the recording of all the native speaker disagreeing on this seemingly minor point. OT: "thallasanejn" = "two seas". Archaic, but still awesome.

One last item before the poster session: Albert Gatt officially announced the launch of the Maltese Language Resource Server Corpus (http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/index.php?page=3). Going live soon, this will be the big ass (over 72 million word tokens) you've always dreamed about. This surely beats the 48 million words I put together over the last few months, but at least a part of it can and will be integrated into MLRSC.

And finally, the poster session. My favorite part was the statistical analysis of possible tri- and quadriliteral roots by Mike Spagnol and Thomas Mayer (busy as bees, the Konstanz guys) and the comparison between possible and attested roots. Pretty cool stuff with wide-ranging implications.

So that's it for day 1. I'm off to bed, wouldn't wanna miss Bernard Comrie's talk at 8:30.

DAY 2
... aka "Membership drive for the International Federation of the Sleep Deprived."

Invited speaker 3: Bernard Comrie on the typology of Maltese loanwords. The data was of course obtained within the scope of the Loanword Typology project (see also this LanguageLog post and the links therein). It turns out Maltese is pretty high on the list with 37.00% of the lexical items borrowed, so slightly less than 39% for English. Surprisingly enough, the ratio of borrowings from English is very low (2-3% or something like that).
- Next up, Marie Alexander with a talk on the mixing of English and Maltese in children. Fascinating data on language choice for both parents and children.
- Sandra Vella et al. on the distribution, function and pragmatic properties of pauses and breaks.
- Matt Wolf of Yale with a very heavy and very technical optimality-theory-related talk.
- Another very technical paper by Gilbert Puech analyzing the fundamentals ofMaltese phonology.
- And yet another heavily technical, but in a different way, talk by MarkBorg describing in great detail the methods he and his team are using to create a speech synthesis engine for Maltese (it's all in the diphones). Once completed, the engine will be freely available and so will the methodology.

DAY 3
... why am I up at 7:30 on a Sunday?

Invited speaker 4: Elisabeth Hume with another experiment-based analysis, this time of word-final geminates in Maltese. It turns out that not only are the geminates kept geminated (which is rare), there is also a lengthening of the preceding vowel. This has implications for the way information is transferred in terms of redundancy vs. robustness. Work in progress, but definitely a fascinating matter.
- Next up, Adam Ussishkin and Kevin Schluter with a talk on auditory root and binyan priming. The overall question is whether the roots and patterns (binyanim) are a part of the mental lexicon. If they are, then priming should be possible - in other words, if you are presented with a word with a certain root/pattern, recognizing another word with the same root/pattern should go much faster. Test like these are usually done visually which is problematic with Hebrew and Arabic script. So the Arizona guys developed an auditory test for both superliminal and subliminal priming. Superliminal means the priming element is played as it is. Subliminal - and this is where shit gets really weird - but in the best way possible - involves playing the priming element backwards, time-compressed. It turns out that there is no priming effect on patterns and there is one for root. The really surprising part is that that effect is roughly the same for supraliminal AND subliminal priming. Really awesome work.
- Mike Spagnol with a re-analysis of Maltese derived stems. Bottom line: there aren't 10 (or 9, minus IV), but actually only 4.5, seeing as there are mutually exclusive pairs (say, if a root occurs in VII, it doesn't occur in VIII) and there are only a few verbs in X.
- Martin Zammit with a much needed reevaluation of some of Aquilina's etymologies using newly published material on Tunisian Arabic. The fun part for me was that I recognized about half of the lexical items from Tunisian Judeo-Arabic.
- Another talk on etymology by Daniele Baglioni where he offers the thesis that at least some of the Romance loandwords didn't come to Maltese directly from Sicilian/Italian, but from a variety of Italian he terms 'Levant Italian' - a variety used as an international language in the late-medieval Levant and beyond.
- Jan Joachimsen with one more OT-related paper, this time focusing on Maltese orthography and its acquistion by children.
- And last, but not least, L. Brincat with a report on a study of how chatting (not texting) influences the spelling habits of Maltese teenagers. Executive summary with a bunch of caveats: there is some correlation between the amount of time spent chatting and relatively low testing scores. The real interesting part was the examination of chat Maltese, which shows a bunch of really familiar features, such as using numbers for syllables ("4c" = "forsi" = "perhaps, 8 = '-ejt', the 1SG/2SG perfect suffix for defective and loan verbs), the total absence of the word "iva" = "yes" ("ehe", "ija" and forms like that are used) and so forth. Work in progress or not, it was a fine conclusion to what I can only describe as best conference evah.

Now let's catchup on some shuteye. Tomorrow, I'm going book shopping.

overheard

2011-03-31T11:11:00.004+02:00

... about three minutes ago here at the office, a wonderful example of Slovak-English code mixing so typical of corporatespeak:

Ísť go live s environmentom, kde nevieme restorovať produkciu, je suicide.

The items in bold are English, at least by origin. "Produkciu" is included as well - "produkcia" might be an honest-to-Shiva Slovak word, but in this context, it means "functionality" or "proper working order" and not, as it usually does, "output".

conference

2011-03-06T21:00:00.004+01:00

Finally some good news: the programme for the GĦILM 3rd Conference on Maltese Linguistics is now available online. The conference, which will be held between April 8th and 11th in Malta, is jointly organized by the International Association of Maltese Linguistics (Għaqda Internazzjonali tal-Lingwistika Maltija, GĦILM) together with the University of Malta and, as the name says, the third since the founding of GĦILM. I missed the first two, but not this time - in fact, if you look closer, you'll see my name (misspelled, as required by tradition) on the very first day with a paper on object reduplication (also known as clitic doubling) in Maltese (abstract, PDF). I can't help but notice that my paper on syntax - which is really not my field of expertise - follows Ray Fabri who is the most likely candidate for the position of numero uno honcho when it comes to Maltese syntax. So, um, yeah, no pressure or nothin'...

app

2011-01-13T22:40:00.005+01:00

And while we're on the subject, there is a debate currently raging on teh intert00bz concerning Microsoft's challenge to Apple's attempt to patent the phrase "app store". As Chris of The Lousy Linguist reminds us:

... the basic idea, as Wikipedia defines it, is distinctiveness ... While it may be the case that Apple introduced the term in 2008, it seems to have expanded to generic use in less than a year and now gets used at least semi-regularly for non-Apple products.

Well, yes, but what exactly is distinctivness in this context? As many were quick to point out, there is nothing distinctive about either "Windows" or "Office". John Gruber of Daring Fireball argues that that's totally ok, because Microsoft isn't selling actual windows or offices, a point I fail to grasp. If "Windows" or for that matter "Apple" can be trademarked, I don't see a reason why "App Store" or "AppStore" (note the capitalization) shouldn't be.
Also, let's pause for a sec and consider the word "app". Yes, the American Dialect Society word of the year, defined thusly:

noun, an abbreviated form of application, a software program for a computer or phone operating system

And this is where I say 'whoa there'. "App" certainly isn't a mere shortened form of "application". First of all, it refers specifically to applications on mobile devices with touchscreens* and applications for Macbooks (notebooks with OSX) that can be purchased through Mac App Store. Thus I have apps on my iPod touch and Palm Pre, but applications and programs on my desktop PC (Windows 7) and notebook (Vista)**. What's more, an "app" in terms of mobile devices isn't just any application for any mobile device. My venerable Palm m105 with Palm OS 5 had applications on it and they sure as hell weren't called apps. And neither are the Java applications on my trusty Siemens U600 or whatever it was I had on the iPaq I borrowed for that one trip back in '02. We all shortened words a lot even back then and yet, somehow we didn't come up with "app". Apple did, some time in 2008 with the introduction of iPhone, no doubt capitalizing on the similarity with company's name. And it's only then that "app" (and, by extension, "app store") entered public consciousness. The use of the term "app" was extended to computer applications with the introduction of Mac App Store last November, once again through concentrated effort on Apple's part.
And secondly, as Ian Bogost points out (via Daring Fireball), an app isn't just any new application. It is, for better or worse, a new way of creating and packaging functionality:

The days of the software office suite are giving way to a new era of individual units, each purpose-built for a specific function... or just as often, for no function at all.

So with all due respect to Ayn-Rand-channeling Mr. Russell Pangborn, an 'app store' isn't just a store that sells apps the same way a 'toy store' is a store that sells toys. It's a whole new platform for providing software, one that Apple invented and one that everybody else is copying. Now I'm no fan of copyright or trademarks, but if trademarks are a part of the system we use to protect intellectual property, then this one should by all rights go to Apple.

* I know, I know, but it's the best definition I can come up with.
** The Google Chrome OS is an outlier, as Google stuff tends to be.

esperanto

2011-01-12T23:04:00.003+01:00

Turning now to the world of technology, this year's Consumer Electronics Show was all about tablets and boy, what a long parade of meh it was. Thanks but no thanks, I'm still waiting on iPad 2 and whatever it is HP will be announcing in February. One product, however, did stand out and it was Motorola's Xoom. It wasn't so much the specs or the promise of Honeycomb as this teaser video:

Funny, clever (I literally lol'd at "successful Latin American distribution") and for the most part accurate. Except that one bit. With all the effort they put into getting the scripts and artefacts right, why did they have to display the English version of the Ten Commandments? How much cooler would that video be with the Decalogue in Hebrew in Paleo-Hebrew script! And they didn't even have to hire a Semitic philologist for that, all they had to do was google "charlton heston ten commandments":

The other big news item among us geeks was the decision by Google to drop support for the H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome and replace it by WebM, a move widely criticized and characterized as the final sign of Microsoftization of the formerly non-evil corporation. Ironically enough, one of the most interesting reactions came from the general vicinity of Redmon, WA. It begins with the following words:

The world’s ability to communicate with one another is a key factor in its rapid evolution and economic growth. The Esperanto language was invented last century as a politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding. Since the launch, we’ve seen first-hand the benefits of a constructed language:

Go read the whole thing and follow the links. Spoiler alert: Yes, it is a satirical piece. But darn me if the parallels aren't eerie.

qohelet

2010-12-31T17:30:00.019+01:00

The latest issue of Massorot (contents and abstracts in English, PDF) includes, among other cool stuff, a paper by Moshe Bar-Asher on Maghribi Judeo-Arabic šarḥ of Ecclesiastes. Šarḥ of Qohelet assumes a special place among all the translations of Tanakh, Talmud and targumim made by and for the Arabic-speaking Jews of North Africa. First, it is one of the five Megillot which, as Bar-Asher notes in the introduction to the paper, were traditionally not translated. Secondly and more importantly, even if exceptions were made for the other four since they were to be publicly read at various points throughout the year,

קהלת לא תורגמה לפי שלא נכללה מעולם בסדרי הקריאה של הציבור הרחב. למדנים שנדרשו לה יכלו להבין בעצמם פירושים שלה שנכתבו עברית, ולא נזקקו לשרח בערבית

Qohelet was not translated because it was never included in the readings for the general public. Scholars who studied it could understand its meaning even it if was written in Hebrew and they did not need a translation into Arabic.

Nevertheless, continues professor Bar-Asher, translations of Qohelet were done as scholarly exercises where teachers would assign to their students the task of translating the book into Arabic. If I'm not altogether mistaken, Bar-Asher lists the following such instances:
- in Marrakech at the beginning of the 20th century on at least two occasions;
- in Sefrou in 1920's or 30's;
- and from a village near Tefilalt some time between 1924 and 1926, created by Moshe Bar-Asher's late father and recorded by professor Bar-Asher in 1983-84, the subject of the paper.

I'm more than happy to add one more to the list, earlier than any of the above and not a manuscript, but rather a printed version dated 5657 / 1896-1897 from the famous press of Solomon Belforte & Co. in Livorno. This one is not a part of my humble collection of late Judeo-Arabic prints, but it can be found in the British Library under the shelfmark 1906.a.42. The booklet contains:
- Song of Songs with its targum and Judeo-Arabic šarḥ of the latter which is quite similar, but not entirely identical to the one in my collection (Livorno 5615 / 1854-55, henceforth ŠM1). The first part also contains commentary on the targum explaining "difficult words and concepts in the Targum" (המלות הקשות והענין שבתרגום);
- prayers for Pesakh (תפלת המחה של פסח);
- and finally, Qohelet with šarḥ.

The title page as well as the introduction on the following page identify the author as Chaim Ha-Kohen The Younger (הצעיר חיים הכהן) and indicate that the work was compiled in Tripoli, Libya (טראבלס המערב). Who the author actually was is still unclear to me. With the reference to Tripoli, the first name that springs to mind is that of Mordechai Ha-Kohen (1856-1929), the author of The Book of Mordechai, a study of the history and customs of the Jewish population of Libya. The other possible candidate is Joseph Chaim Ha-Kohen (1851-1921) who, so his Wiki page tells me, was born in Morocco, moved to Jerusalem at an early age, but then often returned to Maghrib. However, a quick search among the seforim would seem to indicate that either of the two used their full name and neither is identified with one of at least three seforim signed by הצעיר חיים הכהן.

The identity of the author remains a mystery for now, but one detail deserves mentioning: this is the first šarḥ from Libya I am aware of. Whether its language reflects the Libyan dialect still remains to be seen, but I offer here some preliminary remarks, old-school style, based on the first two chapters which you can find here.
(Abbreviations: QL - the British Library Livorno print; QM - Bar-Asher 2010)

Writing:
- The non-assimilated definite article is transcribed without the aleph: לִכְּלָאמָאת "deeds (lit. words)" (1:8), לְכַּל "everything" (1:14). One notable exception is אַלְכַּל in 1:2.
- The assimilation of the definite article is indicated throughout, sometimes also by means of a dagesh (אַגָֹּאהַל in 2:15,16; אַצְּלָאם in 2:13; אַרִּיח in 1:6), but usually without it: אַסִמְס "the sun" (throughout); אַצְנָאיַע "works" (2:17).
- The loss of [h] found in many dialects of North Africa (and in Malta), which results in a number of hypercorrections: הָאנָא "I", הָאש "what" (throughout).

Side note: The coolest such hypercorrection resulting from the loss of [h] has got to be the date on ŠM1. As with many Jewish books (but also everyday items) all over the world, the year is given as passage from the Tanakh with some of the letters highlighted, either through size or in some other way. Add up their numerical values (hint: final forms count as regular ones) and you get the short form year (לפ''ק = לפרט קטן), i.e. without the thousands. This is what it looks like on the title page of ŠM1:

This time the letters to be counted are highlighted using a little crown of dots above them, so השירה נא ליד left to right ads up to 4+10+30+1+50+5+200+10+300+5 = 615, which is the year 5615, i.e. 1854-55 CE. Except if you were to look for these three words in any copy of Tanakh, you wouldn't find them. The actual verse is אָשִׁירָה נָּא לִידִידִי ("Let me sing for my beloved"), from Isaiah 5:1. The author, compiler or printer knew that where they came from, ה was not pronounced and thought - or had been taught - it applied to the text of Tanakh as well. A wonderful example, indeed, but can we rely on the date being correct?

- Assimilation and dissimilation of [s] [z] and [ʃ] [ʒ] (sifflant / chuintant alternation [1]), so typical for Maghribi Judeo-Arabic writing: אַסִמְס "the sun" throughout, לִיס "is not" (1:11 and beyond), but לִיש in the first 8 verses, צַזַר "trees" (2:5, see below), וְיִזְרֶק "and rises" (1:5, see modern Maghribi Arabic šṛəq).
- Much more detailed analysis will be required to fully understand the system (if any) behind the transcription of the vowels using niqqudot. It would appear, however, that both patah and schva stand for [ə] (כְּבַרְתְ וְזַדְתְ "grew and added" 1:16), while qamats stands for [a]. To underscore the point, qamats is usually followed by aleph: מָאשִׁי "goes" (1:6), וַלְנסָאן "human" (2:21). There are exceptions to this, such as צָלְטָאן "the king" (1:1, 2:12) or עָלְמָא "wisdom" (1:16-17). Whether there's a method to this and just what it means (as you will note, in both cases qamats follows an pharyngealized consonant) will remain to be seen.

Phonology:
- Typical Neo-Arabic tafḵīm (pharyngealization): צָלְטָאן "king" (1:1).
- A particularly neat example of both sifflant / chuintant transformation and AND tafḵīm can be found in 2:5:

צְנַאעְת לִי ג'נָאנָת וסְוָאנִי . וַגְרַסְתְ פִיהוֹם צַזַר גְ'מִיע תְמָאר

The highlighted word is a translation of hebrew עֵץ = "tree" and traces back to Arabic شجر. Except in Maghribi Judeo-Arabic, it underwent double chuintant > sifflant transformation to first סז'ר (thus for example in ŠM1 1:16 כַסַזְ'רָא) and then to סזר. Subsequently, the whole word was pharyngealized to something along the lines of ṣəẓəṛ. The translator, however, only had צ at their disposal to indicate pharyngealization, hence צַזַר.

Syntax:
- Much more literal than QM, QL often employs participles where the Hebrew original does, even if fluent native Arabic wouldn't. Thus for example in 1:5, Hebrew סֹובֵב סֹבֵב "turns and turns" is translated as דָאיֶיר דָאיֶיר, whereas QM has more idiomatic יצייר תצוויר, i.e. imperfect followed by the verbal noun, a construction which indicates intensity.
- QL shows preference for the preposition לְ to translate the Hebrew אֶל, whereas QM prefers אילא.
- Like QM, QL uses לִיס for both "is not" and the negative particle.

Word choice:
In most word choices, QL is much more conservative (i.e. less dialectal) than QM. Thus for example:
- QL adopts the Hebrew הֲבֵל (as הְבֵיל), whereas QM uses the Arabic חתוף (with some exceptions).
- QL uses אַלִנְסָאן for "human", while QM uses the typical Maghribi בנאדם.
- QL has יְרוּשָלָיִם for "Jerusalem", while QM uses מדינת אסלאם.
In one instance, it's QM that is extremely literal: in 1:6, QM uses the Hebrew דארום and צאפון for "south" and "north", respectively. Interestingly, QL has here קַבְלִי and בַחְרִי, both terms I would describe as very Egyptian.
- For the relative pronoun, QL uses אַלְדִי with some exceptions, like אֵלִּי in 2:9. QM, predictably, uses the typically Moroccan דדי.
- QL uses אַלְכַּל "everything" substantively, but - like QM - גְ'מִיע as a determiner.
- QM occasionally uses the Neo-Arabic רא for "to see" (e.g. 2:12) while QL sticks with the Classical נְצַֹר throughout.
- QL translates the Hebrew כִּי "because" as לָאייַן.

The rest is forthcoming in the form of a paper, hopefully soon. Ah well, at least I don't have to go far for my new year's resolutions. Boldog új évet, everybody!

References:
[1] Sumikazu Yoda, "'Sifflant' and 'chuintant' in the Arabic dialect of the Jews of Gabes (south Tunisia)", Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik 46 (2006): 7-25

bl

2010-11-19T21:55:00.010+01:00

I just returned from London where I spent most of the last four days at the British Library. In between the usual hectic mix of manuscripts, manuscript catalogues and journal articles, I considered it my duty to squeeze in a tour through BL's exhibition Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. It truly is what it's advertised to be - a tour through the whole length and breadth of English with everything from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and medieval English-French phrasebooks through audio recordings of legendary speeches and outlier dialects to recipes in Tok Pisin ("Katim tamato liklik, putim long sosipan..."), all of it right there at your fingertips.
But the absolute highlight of the whole exhibition were the short video vignettes starring David Crystal reading from various historical documents in their original language. With enthusiasm, passion and delivery worthy of a Shakespearean actor, Crystal really made the texts come alive. I was especially delighted to hear him recount the egges/eyren anecdote from Caxton's Eneydos: "...certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / by cause of dyuersite & chauge of langage". Try this video for a taste, or better yet, go see for yourself, it's definitely worth it.
And while your in the building, be sure to check out the British Library bookshop for all things exhibition-related, other cool stuff including most of David Crystal's recent books and, considering recent history (see here and here for background), this wonderful piece of irony:

things

2010-09-24T23:29:00.028+02:00

... that make me go 'OH FUCK YOU':
I'm sure by now all of you have heard about eggcorn being added to the OED (and hurray for the LanguageLoggers!), but have you also seen the new words they added to the New Oxford American Dictionary? This is a list of the some of the more interesting ones and to be quite frank, some of the definitions are a little fishy. For example, I'd always thought BFF is an abbreviation of "best friends forever" (often written over yearbook pictures), hockey mom refers to a mother who devotes a great deal of time and effort to supporting her children’s participation in any type of extra-curricular activity, not just hockey and to be a hater, you have to be at least a little obssessive or very consistent in your hate for the person or thing in question. But the one that pissed me off to no end is this:

waterboarding n. an interrogation technique simulating the experience of drowning, in which a person is strapped, face up, to a board that slopes downward at the head, while large quantities of water are poured over the face into the breathing passages.

Lovely. First, 'interrogation technique' is a bullshit definition on its own - isn't an 'interrogation technique' technically what we used to call a 'question'? Second, waterboarding something that causes pain for the purpose of extracting information and is thus undeniably TORTURE and only a real evil fuck would deny that. Always was, always will be, no matter who does it to whom in the name of what, end of story - unless you want to describe racking (vbl. n. 3 b) as an 'interrogation technique', too, you fucking cunts. And third, thanks so much for giving ammunition to all the right-wing bedwetting fucktard evil pieces of shit who can now say (and you bet they will): "But it's not torture, see, even the New Oxford American Dictionary says so!"
For all of this, I award you, the formerly good people of OUP USA, a heartfelt FUCK YOU!

... that make me go 'WHAT THE FUCK?':
So you may have heard that we here in Slovakia now have a new government. First time ever led by a woman, which is a good thing and what's even better is that noone seems to care. But other than that, they're even bigger assholes than anyone could have expected (and I voted for them). Defense Secretary who doesn't speak English, hard-core free-market activists who see nothing wrong with conspiring with leftists to defraud the public, PMs who ran on the platform of 'restoring transparency to government' and then refuse to disclose the names of those who tried to bribe them ... You know what, scratch that - it's pretty much business as usual. Unfortunately, this also applies to one of the more notorious achievements of the previous government, the Official Language Act 357/2009. Now you know that my position is that while it's not as bad as some have described it (in fact, several investigations have been launched, but noone has yet paid any fines), it must go. Like with the previous incarnation (OLA 270/1995), one would expect that the new right-wing coalition government (which includes a Hungarian party) will immediately repeal if not the whole damn thing, then at least those provisions mandating fines. Right? Wrong. It took the fuckers almost three months to move on this and when they finally came to an agreement earlier today, nearly all they did was introduce a few cosmetic changes. For example:

- In section 3, which covers the use of the official language by state agencies, they merely moved the requirement for all state employees to speak and use the official language from subsection 2 to subsection 1.

- In section 3, subsection 3 (formerly subsection 4), they replaced "Orgány a právnické osoby podľa odseku 1 sú povinné používať štátny jazyk..." ("All agencies and legal persons as set forth in subsection 1 are obliged to use the official language...") by "Orgány a právnické osoby podľa odseku 1 používajú štátny jazyk..." which not only doesn't change squat because the same verb (používajú = use-3PL.PRES) is used in subsection 1, but also introduces a dilemma for any poor schmuck who would endeavor to translate this piece of shit into English. Normally, the aforesaid poor schmuck would go with "shall use", but this introduces an element of obligation which the legislators apparently tried to remove. Or so one would think, because while the present tense is used in Slovak legislation to mandate, prescribe or proscribe, any distinction between "sú povinné používať" and "používajú" is then lost. One would then guess that the present tense is used here descriptively, but then again, this type of usage in Slovak legislation usually includes an adverb, like "obyčajne" ("usually"). Color me perplexed, especially since the same thing was done to section 6 which covers the use of the official language by members of armed forces, police, intelligence services and fire brigades: "... sa v služobnom styku povinne používa štátny jazyk" ("the use of the official language is mandatory during the execution of their duties") is replace by simple "... sa v služobnom styku používa štátny jazyk" ("... the official language shall be used ..."). So what does the change mean? Are the police officers and firefighters no longer required to only use Slovak? If so, why the fuck do we need a law for that if we have a constitution which says that all that is not prohibited is allowed?

- In section 5, which governs the use of the official language in media and such, only two provisions were changed: One concerns readings from literary works in their original language and the other now mandates that any printed materials, catalogs and programmes accompanying artistic performances and alike issued in a language other than the official one now no longer have to contain the exact translation of the original text, but only have to provide the basic information in Slovak. This is undoubtedly due to a well-publicised incident with the Hungarian amateur theater troupe Új Hajtás and their four-page programme where three pages were written in Hungarian and only the last one in Slovak. Thanks to the change, the good people of Új Hajtás can now probably return to rehearsals without fear of government sanctions, but boy if this doesn't have the stink of a lazy bureaucrat. Spirit vs. letter and all that, but I also doubt that those who protested these particular provisions were concerned with the volume of the content rather than the stupid requirement.

- And the final example, the contentious and oft misinterpreted subsection 5.7 which governs inscriptions on memorials, monuments and memorial tablets and mandates that all those (like many in my hometown Košice) which are written in a language other than the official one must also include an exact translation into the official language. Well guess what? They still do. Only now the order of the texts doesn't matter, so while the previous OLA mandated that the Slovak text come first, now it doesn't have to. Gee, thanks so much, guys.

Now true, next to these cosmetic changes, there has also been one really important one: According to section 9a.1, self-employed natural persons and legal persons can no longer be fined for violating the provisions of OLA. Only government agencies can be fined and only if the information in question is intended for public use and concerns threats to life, limb, safety or property.

Yay, hooray, etc., state agencies will now fine themselves, but nevermind. So now instead of a really bad and fucking stupid piece of legislation we're stuck with a bad and still pretty fucking stupid piece of legislation. How fucking stupid, you ask? Well, this is what they left in:

§ 2
(4) Akýkoľvek zásah do kodifikovanej podoby štátneho
jazyka v rozpore s jeho zákonitosťami je neprípustný.

§ 2
(4) Any interference with the codified form of the official
language contrary to its principles is unacceptable.

WHAT THE FUCK? Let's ignore the legislative aspect, namely that this provision is not mentioned in sections 9 and 9a in the context of sanctions and what use is a provision like this without sanctions, and just concentrate on the words. Does this mean that non-standard Slovak is now outlawed? Does everyone who uses slang words, non-standard conjugation or even - oh the horror! - wrong spelling violate the law? If so, some people are in deep trouble. Like a ľudák asshole by the name of Pavol Dinka. The fucker wrote a book titled Zápasy o slovenčinu. Novela jazykového zákona: pravda a lži (The Struggle for Slovak: The new Language Act - Truth and Lies). While the title may sound like something that would describe my last post on the subject, the whole volume is nothing but a long litany of perceived wrongs and a detailed description of extinction campaigns waged against our poor opressed language by the Czechs, the Hungarians, the EU and God knows who else. You get the picture. What persuaded me to buy the book, however, is the monumental ironic awesomeness of the cover. Take a good look:

The pensive dude is naturally Ľudovít Štúr, but notice the big writing underneath. With Štúr's picture, you would expect the next most visible thing to be the cover or the title page of his Nárečja slovenskuo (which is actually right there above Ľudovít), but by God, someone fucked up big time. What you got here displayed so prominently is the title page of Hlasz pobosnoho spéványa, a psalter in one of the Eastern Slovak dialects printed in Debrecen in 1752 (note the date). This is the full title page taken from Péter Király's magnificent A keletszlovák nyelvjárás nyomtatott emlékei:

Now it's bad enough that the cover of Mr. Dinka's screed contains text in a variety that doesn't even come close to standard Slovak (which the language of Nárečja slovenskuo would have been, despite its quirky orthography). Even enlightened Slovak linguists are very uncomfortable with the idea of non-Central Slovak being used in writing - if you're lucky, I will come back to that some time in the future. But the real shocking thing about this particular book is that the language of the Eastern Slovak protestants who translated this and other religious works well before Anton Bernolák was even born is written in HUNGARIAN ORTHOGRAPHY. That's right folks - hlasz for hlas, pésnye for pešňe, kresztzanszke for krescanske and so on and so forth. Oh how I wish I, a faithful son of the East and a true hater of all Slovak nationalists and fascists who worship their own dialect as the Golden Calf, could describe to you the splendid irony and the sheer awesomeness of this cover. But alas, no time. I gotta go rat the dipshit and the publishing house out while the old OLA is still in force. The fuckers are so busted...

... that make me go 'YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING':
My buddy E is a fucking idiot. He's also a brilliant historian of the Israel-Palestine kerfuffle, especially the largely ignored early years, and, incidentally, a perfect definition of the word 'vyčuranec' (cf). But mostly he's a fucking idiot. You see, he is actually interested in the opinion of the august institutions that are tasked with regulating the Slovak language and has even sought their advice on a number of issues. Chief among them is the proper way to spell the terms "západný breh" (The West Bank, الضفة الغربية) and "pásmo Gazy" (The Gaza Strip, قطاع غزة). Currently, the usage is as above, i.e. non-capitalized. Now since these two terms refer to unique geographical areas, one would think that the rules of Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu 3rd edition (section VI, subsection 1.1, item 1.) would apply, namely that all proper names, which includes any general term (consisting of one or more words) used to designate a specific object, are to be capitalized. This unquestionably includes names of geographical areas and - and this is important for political as well as linguistic reasons - it doesn't matter whether the area in question is a recognized political or administrative entity. It is also of note that it does not matter if the adjective(s) name in question are derived from proper names or not. One thus writes "Blízky východ" for "Near East" or "Svätá zem" for "Holy Land" - both geographical areas with a murky definition and no administrative or legal status whatsoever. So E naturally assumed that the proper way to refer to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be "Západný breh (Jordánu)" and "Pásmo Gazy", respectively. But being the fucking idiot he is, he wanted to consult the proper authorities and confirm. And so he wrote to the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences who, after some back and forth, referred him to Dr. K, the head of - and I am not making this shit up - the Department of Geographic Nomenclature of the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography. Yesterday, Dr. K replied:

Dobrý deň,
názvoslovná komisia rokovala o vašich návrhoch a na objasnenie si
vyžiadala stanovisko palestínskeho veľvyslanectva k týmto názvom.
Podľa ich stanoviska názvy západný breh a pásmo Gazy nie sú názvami
administratívnych celkov, ale len ľudovými názvami. Preto komisia
tieto názvy zatiaľ neodporučila štandardizovať.

s pozdravom

Dr. K
----

Dear Sir,

the Naming Committee has discussed your proposal and requested a clarification from the Palestinian embassy regarding these names. Their position is that west bank and Gaza strip are not names of administrative units, but only folk names. For this reason, the Committee has recommended not to standardize these names.

Best regards,

Dr. K

Behold, my friends, standardization in action. I don't even have to whip out the George Carlin scale of stupid for this one, although for 'folk names', I think I could. But let's just consider the momunental cluelessness of Dr. K and the august Committee who probably don't realize that "Blízky východ" or "Ďaleký východ" ("Far East") are not names of administrative units and thus spit at PSP and the Institute of Linguistics. Against that sort of cluelessness, the colossal stupidity of the idea of consulting the embassy of another nation while deciding how to spell their shit in our language and then actually taking it into account is a mere afterthought. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING. Thank God these people weren't around when we decided to call the capital of France "Paríž" or Germany "Nemecko".

Goddam there's a lot of stupid bastards walking around. And some of y'all wonder why I walk around cussing all the time. This is why. Fuck this shit, I'm gonna go kill me some zergs. Anybody wants to join me, add me - bulbul[at]chello.sk

unsuck

2010-08-13T13:25:00.007+02:00

As it usually happens with these hip cool geeky things, I got a bunch of emails from different people telling me to check out Unsuck It. And so I did and being the corporate drone I am, I quite liked it the idea of a business-speak (or - in their words - "terrible business jargon") to English translator. Having tried a few terms randomly culled from my Outlook inbox, I found the tool not only informative (action item = Goal or to do), but also funny (rock star = adequate programmer) and I literally lolled at the idea of e-mailing the douchebag who used it (too bad they're all on holiday this month). But then I tried the "I'm feeling douchey" button and got this:

Drink the Kool-Aid
Unsucked: Follow blindly.

Really? 'Drink the kool-aid' is a standard US English idiom and is used by all kinds of people, not just pointy-haired bosses. Same applies to 'dog and pony show', 'in spades', 'low-hanging fruit' or 'on the same page' and even phrasal verbs like 'drill down'. I'm all for desucking managerialese, but painting everyday idioms like 'win-win' (which, in case you didn't know, means 'good for everyone') with the same brush as buzzwords like 'holistic' or 'synergy' smells a lot like something you would find in Strunk and White: "Don't use adjectives, adverbs and idioms." Well, they would probably called them 'clichés', but it would be just as stupid.

ca****

2010-08-03T21:49:00.014+02:00

Last night's episode of NBC's Last Comic Standing (a reality show where aspiring stand-up comedians compete for a money prize and the eponymous title) featured the following bit by a contestant by the name of Felipe Esparza (UPDATED: added video below):

My brother came out of the closet, he told everyone he was gay. My dad thought he'd (1) choke on a turkey - "Que dijó <grunts> oy Dios (1) <grunts> que dijóóóó...!" I ran behind him on a Heimlich maneuver (2). He said: "Not you too, [ka]<bleep>!"

(1) Doubtful.
(2) Accompanied by thrusting motions of the pelvic region.

Before the bleep, only a [k] can be clearly heard, perhaps followed by a short [a] thus combining in the syllable [ka]. Now try as I might, I can't think of an English curse word starting in [ka]. The vowel in cunt is different ([ɐ], perhaps, though it would be difficult to tell with Mr. Esparza's accent), plus the beep was longer than would be required for [nt] and in any case, this particular word is a heavy caliber and not very likely to appear on network tv. So after careful consideration and taking into account Mr. Esparza's ethnic background and his use of Spanish in the very same routine, I'm inclined to believe that the good people at NBC actually bleeped out the Spanish word cabrón [kaˈβɾon] (n. m.) = 1. goat; 2. asshole, motherfucker. I have no way to confirm that (if you do, please speak up), but if it is indeed so, then this is a great stride forward for the Latino community in the United States. Having FCC (and all the TV executives who shit their pants at the mere mention of this august institution's name) cater to the sensibilities of uptight speakers of Spanish is surely a sign of recognition that Spanish is here to stay. I can't wait to hear the "English only" crowd's take on that.

hašek

2010-07-02T01:46:00.004+02:00

As I have mentioned elsewhere, some time ago, John Emerson and I were engaged in a little project. It was the aim of this noble endeavor to translate into English one of the best, yet sadly neglected, works of Jaroslav Hašek, his "Political and Social History of the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of Law". We didn't get very far - of the 80 chapters, we only managed to translate 5 and review 3 before, well, life happened and I suddenly had neither the time, nor the frame of mind to continue. Which is a crying shame, because the "Political and Social History of the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of Law" is funny as hell and as poignant a satire on politics, literature, arts and people who engage in those pursuits now as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Don't let yourself be fooled by the bombastic title - the "History" would be best described as a collection of short stories with Hašek's drinking buddies and other crème de la crème of contemporary Czech society in starring roles, their various faults and misadventures the main target of Hašek's wit and settling scores the chief purpose of the whole enterprise. Written in Hašek's disorganized and rambling style in sometimes colloquial and then suddenly formal Czech, the "History" is a true challenge for any translator and I'll leave it to you to judge how well we did. If by chance you find the translation, well, good, I'm quite certain it should be ascribed to Mr. Emerson's editorial efforts. Any and all errors of whatever type are purely my fault. Enjoy and let me know if we should continue.

latino-punic

2010-06-02T14:10:00.004+02:00

Remember this post from about three years back on Sabaean minuscule script and Robert Kerr's (Universiteit Leiden) dissertation on Latino-Punic inscriptions? Well some moments ago, a kind blogger user named RMK (perhaps even Robert M. Kerr himself) dropped by to let us know that the dissertation has been published by Mohr Siebeck under the title Latino-Punic Epigraphy (full bibliographic record below). Thanks for sharing and congratulations!

KERR, Robert M.: Latino-Punic Epigraphy. A Descriptive Study of the Inscriptions - Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010, xvi + 253 p. (ISBN 978-3-16-150271-2, €64)

theatre

2010-05-24T23:26:00.004+02:00

Via pocitace.sme.sk: The Bratislava Theatre Institute has launched a website titled Slovak Drama in Translation which aims to introduce those few unfortunate souls who haven't managed to learn Slovak yet to, you guessed it, Slovak playwrights and their work. To be quite honest, most of the names included don't ring a bell, but I'm happy to report that it includes the true greats, such as Milan Lasica. To be precise, he and his long-time partner in crime Július Satinský (collectively known as Lasica a Satinský or L&S) fall somewhere between cabaret, stand up (Dialogues) and theatre - absurd - proper (Deň radosti, in French), but whatever the genre, their work undoubtedly belongs to the best our small literary scene has to offer. My only worry is that in addition to what is lost in the transfer from one medium to another, a lot of the punch the original packs (including the best wordplay ever) cannot be adequately translated.
All of the above is true, even more so, of Stanislav Štepka and his more or less amateur troupe "Radošinské naivné divadlo" (aka Radošinci). While Štepka's later work may be somewhat formulaic, his two most famous plays Jááánošíííík (1970, a drop dead funny and spot on deconstruction of a popular myth rivalled only by a 1976 movie Pacho hybský zbojník where, as chance would have it, Lasica a Satinský served as screenwriters) and Človečina (1973, roughly: "Human Condition", equally funny, but even more tragic and hard hitting look an average Slovak family) have become a firm part of Slovak popular culture to such extent that some (including yours truly) are able to recite large portions by heart. Neither play is, however, currently available in translation and I am not surprised. In most his plays, Štepka mixes his own Western Slovak dialect with standard Slovak and does so many wonderful things to both that I feel truly sorry for all of you who will never hear or see it the way we do. So enjoy the rest, such as it is. And learn Slovak.

literalese

2010-04-18T10:03:00.018+02:00

Memiyawanzi (with some help from Thomas Lambdin) makes an excellent point about Bible translations and its usefulness for comparative syntactic analysis which boils down to this: in many instances, Bible translators, regardless of language, quite often slavishly imitate the syntax of the original.

This is true of nearly all translations of sacred texts made before the rise of linguistics in general and translation studies in particular, but even here, there are more extreme cases. One of those is šarḥ, the translation of sacred texts of Judaism into Judeo-Arabic. Ironically enough, the original meaning of the root šrḥ is "to explain, to interpret", but the šarḥ translations are anything but that. Quite the contrary - their language emulates the syntax of the original as closely as possible. In order to do so, the translators - šarḥanim - have gone so far as to introduce new grammatical features to their target language.

One example of such feature is the use of the preposition الي [ilā] to translate the Hebrew direct object marker את or the Aramaic direct object marker ית. Old Arabic (including Quranic Arabic and Classical Arabic) marks the direct object by means of the suffix -a, while Neo-Arabic (which includes the modern colloquial varieties, but also varieties employed by the Arabic-speaking Jewish population of Middle East and North Africa) normally marks the direct object by position. There are exceptions to this, such as Maltese, Cypriot Maronite Arabic and some Syro-Palestinian dialects [1], which use some variant of the preposition l-. In šarḥ Arabic, however, the direct object is marked using the preposition אלא [ilā], which is identical in function to Hebrew את or Aramaic ית. Consider the following example from the Targum to Canticles 3:5:

Targumic Aramaic:

כד שמעו שבעת עממיא דבני ישראל עתידין למחסן ית ארעהון קמו כחדא וקציצו ית אילניא וסתימו ית מבועי מיא וצדיאו קרויהון וערקו

English translation by Jay C. Treat:

When the seven nations heard that the Children of Israel were about to take possession of their land, they rose at once and cut the trees, stopped up the water springs, laid waste their towns and fled.

Judeo-Arabic translation (Iraq, 19th century):

לָמִּן סַמְעוּ סַבִע אֶל אוּמָם אַן בִנִין יִסְרָאִיל מִתְּוּובִדִין ליִוּורְתֹוֹן אֶלָא בִלַדְהוֹם קָאמוּ גִֹמִיעָא וּקַצוּ אֶלא אֶל סִגַֹר וּסַדּוּ אֶלָא מִנָאבִע אֶל מָאיי וכַֹרִבוּ אֶלָא קִרְיָיאתְּהוֹם ואִנְהַזְמוּ

Or to highlight the phrases in question:

Targumic Aramaic	Judeo-Arabic	English
למחסן ית ארעהו	ליִוּורְתֹוֹן אֶלָא בִלַדְהוֹם	take possession of their land
וקציצו ית אילניא	וּקַצוּ אֶלא אֶל סִגַֹר	cut the trees
וסתימו ית מבועי מיא	וּסַדּוּ אֶלָא מִנָאבִע אֶל	stopped up the water springs
וצדיאו קרויהון	וכַֹרִבוּ אֶלָא קִרְיָיאתְּהוֹם	laid waste their towns

And so while in most varieties of colloquial Iraqi Arabic, one would normally render these structures - V + OBJ.M + N - as Verb + Noun, in šarḥ Arabic, the translator feels compelled to produce a verbatim translation and thus translates the semantically empty direct object marker by repurposing the directional preposition אֶלָא [elā].

There are many examples of this in translations from Hebrew and Aramaic, not only in Judeo-Arabic, but also in other Jewish languages, such as Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Judeo-Spanish [2] or Judeo-Persian:

Ruth 4:11 Hebrew:

... יתן יהוה את־האשה הבאה אל־ביתך כרחל ׀ וכלאה אשר בנו שתיהם את־בית ישראל ...

Ruth 4:11 English (NASB):

... May the LORD make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, both of whom built the house of Israel; ...

Ruth 4:11 Judeo-Persian [3]:

... בי דהד כודא מר אן זן אנקי אייא בכאנה תו קון רחל וקון לאה אנקי אודאן כרדנד הר דואן אישאן מר כאנדאן ישראל ...

But unlike in those languages, where the new direct object marker either expanded previous usage (as in Judeo-Spanish אה [a]) or redefined its role both historically and sociolinguistically (as in Judeo-Persian מר [mar] which is normally only found in classical Persian poetry), the Judeo-Arabic repurposing of אלא is a completely different game. Not only did the šarḥanim take a completely innocent preposition and turned it into something completely different, but consider the fourth example from Targum Canticles 3:5:

Targumic Aramaic	Judeo-Arabic	English
וצדיאו קרויהון	וכַֹרִבוּ אֶלָא קִרְיָיאתְּהוֹם	laid waste their towns

So while the Aramaic original does not require the direct object marker, its use has become obligatory in written Judeo-Arabic. As Benjamin Hary notes in his Translating Religion: "... šarḥ created its own Judeo-Arabic grammar and structure" [4].

And I'm thinking: isn't that true, at least in terms of syntax, for every Bible translation and, by extension, of all languages that have been fundamentally influenced by translations of sacred scriptures? How different, I wonder, were real spoken Syriac or Coptic from their varieties recorded in Christian translations and writings?

Notes:
[1] Borg 2004:46
[2] Hary 1991:605-606
[3] Mainz 1976:21
[4] Hary 2009:165

Bibliography:
BORG, Alexander: A Comparative Glossary of Cypriot Maronite Arabic (Arabic-English). With an Introductory Essay. - Ledein: Brill, 2004, xxviii + 486 p.
HARY, Benjamin: On the use of 'ila and li in Judeo-Arabic texts. Pages 595-608 in: KAYE, Alan S.: Semitic studies in honor of Wolf LESLAU on the ocassion of his 85th birthday, November 14th, 1991. Volume I. - Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1991, lxviii + 889 p.
HARY, Benjamin: Translating Religion. Linguistic Analysis of Judeo-Arabic Sacred Texts from Egypt. - Leiden: Brill, 2009, 360 p.
MAINZ, Ernest: Ruth et le Cantique des Cantiques en judéo-persan. Journal Asiatique, 264/1-2, 1976, pp. 9-34
Sefer šir ha-širim ʿim targum ve-šarḥ arvi. Baġdād, 1936/37

tds

2010-03-19T20:03:00.008+01:00

Comedy Central's The Daily Show March 17th edition, in a report on what seem to be the last stages of the US health care reform broohaha, offered a video of Republican representative Steve King. In this video, the gentleman from Iowa compares the opposition to the current version of the HCR bill to the crowds on the squares of Prague during the Velvet (or as we call it here in Slovakia, the Tender) Revolution. As ridiculous as this comparison is, it wasn't the most prominent whiskey-tango-foxtrot moment in that particular segment. Take a look below, see if you can spot what caught my attention:

The screengrab shows that the video credit goes to ThinkProgress.org or their Youtube channel (UPDATE: and ultimately, CNN), but the font is unmistakeably that used by the editors at TDS and so it is to them I direct this question:
Seriously? Checkoslovakia. Seriously?

slowár

2010-02-18T23:18:00.010+01:00

Jazykovedný ústav Ľudovíta Štúra Slovenskej Akadémie Vied, the main body in charge of studying and regulating the Slovak language, has recently gone through the trouble of digitizing Anton Bernolák's post-humously published magnum opus, the six-volume Slowár Slowenskí Češko-Laťinsko-Ňemecko-Uherskí (Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-Latino-Germanico-Ungaricum), and putting it online. Get it while it's hot / still there. In what I think is a lovely touch, the text on this particular part of the JÚĽŠ website is in Bernolák's Slovak (essentially Western Slovak koine, as opposed to Štúr and Hodža's Central-dialect-based standard which eventually prevailed) and Bernolák's orthography. You will notice the German-like capitalization of nouns, 'g' for the glide [j] (ge = copula.3SG) and 'ǧ' for the voiced velar plosive [g] (Pluǧin = 'plugin'). And just in case you want a break from looking for the naughty words (like the one above), here's two more of Bernolák's linguistic writings from my personal collection: Orthographia (which is just what the title suggests) and Etymologia (which is actually an awesome treatise on derivational morphology and compounding followed by a Latin-Slovak glossary of linguistic terms, a list of Slovak proverbs with translations in Latin and a brief Slovak-Latin-Hungarian-German dictionary organized by semantic fields). Enjoy.

trend

2010-02-15T20:50:00.015+01:00

... let's start one:

hurkil (ḫurkil) (n.), nom.-acc. sg. hur-ki-el (KUB XIII 30, 3 and 7), hu-u-ur-ki-el, hu-ur-ki-il, hu-u-ur-ki-il in Code 2:87-91, 95-96, denoting severe sexual offences such as bestiality and incest... (1)

And while we're at it, I'm sure the following bit from KUB 17.27 iii (2) will come in handy, too:

(12) ... ANŠE-aš še^!-ḫur-ri-eš-ke-ed-du
(13) [n=a-at]=kán GU4-uš kam-mar-ši-eš-ke-ed-du

"... Let the donkey piss on it, let the cow shit [on it]!"

1. PUUHVEL, Jan: Hittite Etymological Dictionary. Volume 3. Words beginning with H. Berlin; New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1991, p. 401
2. KLOEKHORST, Alwin: Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon. Leiden: Brill, 2008, p. 403. One more cite on p. 743 with slightly different transcription.

357/2009

2009-10-12T15:29:00.027+02:00

To be quite honest, I did not want to address the global snafu that is the new Slovak "Official Language Act" ("Zákon o štátnom jazyku" 357/2009). First, Slovak politics disgusts me. There is no left - the main ruling party may talk the talk, but their populist/nationalist agenda sure ain't fooling me; the nationalists are just what the name says and the occasional comic relief they provide isn't worth the trouble; the party of pater patriae is almost out of the races and not a moment too soon and don't you get me started about the right - the choice is either Christian Democrats who are neither with a post-fascist touch, or three teeny-tiny parties with way too much media presence who worship the Golden Calf of the Invisible Hand, hate Muslims, gays and the EU and bow to the White House - unless, of course, its current occupant is a Democrat. (To my readers in the US - imagine you have three Republican parties led by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan.) And so I, a devout western-civilization-hating muslim-appeasing gay-abortionist-leftie-peacenik-hippie, always end up voting for the wishy-washy center right party and don't want to have anything to do with the whole circus for the next four years.
Second reason I didn't really want to weigh in on the language law because this involves playing Hungarians and Slovaks against each other. I never know on which side of the battlefield to park my bilingual bicultural doesn't-really-belong-anywhere fat ass, especially when I see that it's not just the Slovak nationalists stoking the fires of fear and hatred. Standing on the sidelines and cussing both teams out just doesn't strike me as constructive, nor is it good for my health.
But as you might expect, I did watch the whole thing unfold and I kept record of the important developments as well as the many reactions to them, especially on LG Policy List. And so when this morning I read first John Cowan's email and then languagehat's latest post (Gmail opens a lot faster than my RSS reader), I thought what the hell, let's do this. So here are my comments on István Deák's blogpost and the Official Language Act 357/2009 with special regard to the six nightmare scenarios outlined by Mr. Deák's friends at HHRF. Please remember all I said above and know that in the following, I do not take anybody's side but my own.
To employ my favorite metric (the George Carlin Scale of Stupid), Mr. Deák is either stupid or full of shit. If the fact that he doesn't even cite the law isn't enough to make your BS indicators glow red, then consider that, as his commentors have pointed out, he doesn't even understand the political landscape of Slovakia. It's the (at least nominally) left-wing and nationalist/populist parties that are behind this piece of legislation. Some right-wing parties - like the aforementioned Christian Democrats - may have nationalist/fascist skeletons in their own closets, but in general, the right as a whole cooperates with the Hungarian parties and has included them in their last two coalition governments (Dzurinda’s cabinets of 1998-2002 and 2002-2006).
So back to facts and keep in mind, IANAL: we are talking about Act no. 357/2009, the "Official Language Act" (henceforth: OLA 357/2009). Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the first such act to be passed by the parliament, nor is it the first one to mandate fines. I even put together a historical overview, but alas, it's at home and I'm at work. All I can tell you now is that OLA 357/2009 is an updated and amended version of the original OLA 270/1995. That one also included a section on fines, but that particular section was abolished with the adoption of the "Use of Minority Languages Act" (UMLA) 184/1999 on September 1st, 1999.
The currenct Act consists of 15 sections, but the last four are parliamentary legal mumbo-jumbo, so that leaves us with 11. Section one informs us that Slovak is the official language in Slovakia (1.1), mandates that it be given preference over other languages spoken in Slovakia (1.2), notes that this act does not have anything to say about liturgical languages (1.3), and most importantly, reminds everybody that there's still the "Use of Minority Languages Act" 184/1999 which governs the use of those languages and protects their speakers' rights to use them. Which is another reason I feel justified describing Mr. Deák as either stupid of full of shit. Nothing else can explain the monumental stupidity of his introductory statement:

On September 1, the Slovak parliament made it largely illegal for its citizens to use any language other than Slovak.

Moving along to Section 2, we find that it's full of your standard horseshit about how the official language needs to be protected and codified with some added blah-blah about language culture (the holy grail of all Slovak prescriptivists) and the need to improve it. 2.4 explicitly forbids any interference with the codified form of the Slovak language that is in violation of its rules. Buggered if I know what that means, more on that perhaps later.
Section 3 covers the use of Slovak in official interactions (the original term is "úradný styk", the translation is that used by the EU). To sum up: all government business, including that of local and regional government, is to be conducted in Slovak, all laws, regulations, government records and local records are to be kept in Slovak. 3.1, however, once again points out that nothing in this section limits the use of minority languages which is governed by the aforementioned UMLA 184/1999. This brings us to HHRF’s nightmare scenario no. 2: „a civil servant discussing job opportunities with an unemployed Roma in Romany”. Well, that situation is governed by OLA 357/2009, which in turn insists that UMLA 184/1999 applies. Section 7 of UMLA permits civil servants to use the minority language under conditions laid out by UMLA and other legislation. And as far as I can tell – IANAL times infinity – nothing in OLA 357/2009 expressly forbids a civil servant from using a minority language when speaking to a client – in fact, such a provision would violate a number of laws and EU accords. So I call bullshit. Same goes for nightmare scenario no. 4 – “a conductor addressing a passenger in Hungarian on a train from Slovakia to Hungary”. Since a train conductor is not a government representative in any sense of the word, nor is his job official government business, provisions of subsection 3.1 simply do not apply to him or her.
3.2 governs the use of Slovak by employees of state postal and telecommunication bodies, members of armed forces and firemen, all of whom must only use Slovak in official interactions. Note that 3.2 speaks of "official interactions" ("úradný styk"), while section 6, which specifically governs the use of Slovak in the armed forces and fire brigades and mandates the use of Slovak, speaks of communication during “execution of their duties” (“služobný styk“). While the former is generally taken to mean predominantly written communication, the latter is taken to mean what the English translation says. So yes, the law mandates that firemen only speak Slovak when executing their duties (nightmare scenario no. 1), which might involve rescuing a speaker of Hungarian from a burning building. But as for the fines for answering their calls for help in a language other than Slovak, we’ll get to that later.
Somewhat OT, but it’s funny: section 3, subsection 5 introduces a hilarious term “jazyk spĺňajúci požiadavku základnej zrozumiteľnosti z hľadiska štátneho jazyka“ = „a language fulfilling the requirement of basic intelligibility with regard to the official language”. Guess what they mean.
Section 3a addresses the old question of geographical names by referring to specific legislation on the subject.
Section 4 governs the use of Slovak in education. Once again it notes that there is a separate set of laws governing schools where languages other than Slovak are the main medium of instruction and the schoolbooks they use. Chief among them is the “Education Act” (EA) 245/2008, especially section 12 which governs not only schools where minority languages are the main medium of instruction, but also the so-called bilingual education, i.e. schools where the majority of subjects is taught in English, German, Spanish or French (I think that’s it). Here’s probably where HHRF’s nightmare scenario no. 3 – “a German book club discussing a book in German without first introducing it in Slovak” – comes in. A book club set up by private citizens is naturally off limits, so school is the only other scenario where provisions of OLA would apply I can think of. Pursuant to EA section 12.6, classes can be conducted in any minority language or a foreign language. So once again, bullshit.
As for minority languages, not much of a change here except, if I remember correctly, under the new Act, school administrations have to keep two sets of records – one in Slovak, the other one in the minority language.
Section 5 governs miscellaneous aspects of the law. 1.1 covers the mandatory use of Slovak in the broadcast media and lists exceptions. 5.1 e), for example, specifically exempts all types of music pieces and performances with original lyrics, 5.1 f) exempts radio productions in minority languages broadcast by Slovak state radio, 5.6 exempts various cultural events (although fliers and such must still include a Slovak version of the text). As for HHRF's nightmare scenario no. 5 – "a radio station broadcasting in English without Slovak translation" – that only counts as one half of one piece of bullshit. Technically it is possible to fine that, but I cannot imagine a situation where this would be necessary. First of all, this provision only applies to radio stations licensed in Slovakia - or does anybody think that it is the intent of the Parliament to go around and fine every Austrian, Hungarian, Polish and Ukrainian radio stations that can be picked up here, not to mention all the short wave stations? And secondly, the Act provides exceptions for all reasonably thinkable instances of radio broadcasting in languages other than Slovak, including - but not limited to - broadcasting in minority languages, international broadcasting and language courses. As far as anything else is concerned, I don't really see why anyone would put on a broadcast in English and not provide a translation.
Subsection 5.7 governs inscriptions on memorials, monuments and memorial tablets ("... pamätníkoch, pomníkoch a pamätných tabuliach ...") – all of which refers to objects which are a part of the public sphere and which are in the care of the state or local authorities. Contrary to HHRF’s nightmare scenario no. 6, it doesn't say anything whatsoever about private tombstones or grave markers (“náhrobný kameň“ in Slovak). I hate to repeat myself, but – bullshit.
We’ve covered section 6, so on to section 7 which covers the use of Slovak in legal proceedings. Not much to report, except that subsection 7.2 confirms that the rights of speakers of minority languages in this respect shall not be infringed. How that stacks up against Mr. Deák's introductory remark, you can judge that for yourself.
Section 8 is another miscellanea section (which goes to show how much thought our MPs put into this). Subsection 8.1 mandates that all consumer information be in Slovak, subsection 8.2 allows for the parallel use of languages other than Slovak in written documentation relating to labor relations and alike, subsection 8.3 covers technical documentation and specifications as well as statutes and charters of political parties and other associations, subsection 8.4 deals with healthcare providers who are allowed to, but not obligated to, speak any language to their patients and clients and 8.5 mandates that only contracts in Slovak will be considered valid for the purposes of legal proceedings. Subsection 8.6 is the one that has attracted the most attention so far. It mandates that all public notices, signs, announcements, inscriptions and alike must be written in Slovak. Any text in a second language must be identical in meaning to the Slovak one and follow it. As you can imagine, these provisions have caused a lot of outrage among business owners, largely due to the fact that this is where they expect the fines to come in.
Which brings us to to sections 9 and 9a - enforcement of the provisions of the Act and fines. As with the previous version of this Act, two types of authorities are charged with enforcing these rules: authorities regulating advertising and the Broadcasting Comission for all advertising and all broadcast media and the Ministry of Culture for everything else. Contrary to popular belief, there will be no language police going around fining people for speaking anything else than Slovak, just like there was none back before September 1st, 1999 when UMLA abolished the fines. Mind you, the asshole authors of OLA 357/2009 make no qualms about the fact that this is precisely what they're trying to undo. But just like back then, this mind bogglingly stupid provision is not meant to penalize private and public use of languages other than Slovak. Section 9a, subsection 1 which governs the application of fines explicitly states that only government bodies, legal persons and self-employed natural persons (whom the unofficial translation calls "natural persons entrepreneurs", ugh) can be fined.
In other words, I, bulbul teh private person, cannot be fined for writing this in English or any other language of my choosing, nor can I be fined for cussing in Finnish, wearing one of those Thinkgeek "I'm in ur X Y-ing ur Z" t-shirts with Chinese characters in the blank spaces or writing بلبل on my mailbox (true story, all of that). I, bulbul teh self-employed natural person, IČO 37643967/DIČ likehellImtellingyou, could be fined for, say, writing بلبل on the sign of my office building, especially if I placed it above the Slovak equivalent of my nom de plume or even ignored to provided the translation. So there goes the nightmare scenario no. 1.
Mind you, I still think sections 9 and 9a are fucking stupid, just like the whole Act and the whole fucking government and especially that dumbfuck Minister of Culture (I might get to that later). But that doesn't excuse Mr. Deák from bullshitting the good readers of the NYR blog nor HHRF from bullshitting everybody else.

UPDATE: As chance would have it, George Pataki visited Slovakia today and weighed in on the controversy. Check out the video.

snowclone

2009-10-06T21:03:00.003+02:00

X is the new Y as seen in the vanity card of Monday's episode of "The Big Bang Theory":

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #260

FASHION TRENDS

Dead is the new unambiguous. Bipolar is the new undecided. Heavily armed is the new born again. Bald is the new head... and the new crotch. Hairy is the new face. Sheepishly admitting to having an STD is the new flirting. Purell is the new face of fear. Finding the time that's right for you is the new impotence. The smiley-face emoticon is the new "sincerely yours." Smoking is the new outdoorsy lifestyle. Looking forward to insanely expensive private schooling, thousand dollar a week nannies and soccer is the new yuppie birth control. Misinformed is the new patriotic. Veganism is the new "tastes like chicken." Serotonin uptake inhibiting is the new crowd control. Texting is the new talking. Talking is the new singing. Singing is the new hubris. Gay marriage is the new "be careful what you wish for." And finally, and only because I really need this to catch on, fifty-seven years old is the new forty-five.

I, for one, hope thirty is the new twenty.

cossacks

2009-09-29T22:30:00.006+02:00

Most of you probably know this painting by Ilya Repin and the (most likely apocryphal) story behind it: the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV wrote a letter to the Zaporozhian Cossacks in which he commanded them to cease and desist any and all attacks on his army and territory and furthermore to submit to his rule. Uncharacteristically, the cossacks responded with a letter of their own. Quite characteristically, the letter is filled with profanities and denigrating comments on the Sultan, his character, combat abilities and personal hygiene and the only thing missing is an obligatory reference to his mother.
Some time ago, I stumbled upon a paper (archived PDF) by Victor Friedman of University of Chicago where he analyzes the textual history of the legend and the linguistic peculiarities of its most popular recension. Now that it's cited on Wikipedia, it's too late for me to brag about the discovery, so just go and read the whole thing. And after you do, you might want to know this: it turns out that the incident was recreated for the 2009 Russian movie "Тарас Бульба". Watching the YouTube clip of the scene in question, you will note that while the imagery is quite faithful to Repin's painting, the language is not what you would expect from a bunch of Ukrainian cossacks. For one, the movie version replaces the Arabic/Turkish loan шайтан by чёрт and omits the reference to Devil's excrements the Sultan's army is allegedly in the habit of consuming ("... чорт сере/викидае, а твое військо пожирае..."). But most importantly, the language is - with some exceptions - quite obviously Modern Russian: Russian такой instead of Ukrainian такий, чёртово [t͡ʃortava] instead of чорта [t͡ʃorta], самого pronounced as [samova] instead of [samoho], ёжа (hedgehog-ACC) instead of їжака and so on. Even though, as Friedman notes, the language of the letter is not exactly pure Ukrainian, but rather a "Late ~~East South~~ South East Slavic" dialect heavily influenced by Russian, it still somewhat grinds my ears to hear sons of the steppe speak Russian. Ah well, it's still a pretty cool scene.

german

2009-09-11T01:16:00.010+02:00

On Monday at Steiner's, I picked up a biography of Ján Stanislav, one of the greatest Slovak linguists of the 20th century. When I finally got to reading it earlier today, I stumbled across an anecdote from Stanislav's student years. It perfectly illustrates languagehat's observations on the influence of German learning on Russian intelectual history and shows that's it's not just the Russians who owe German scholars a great deal:

Keď raz študent povedal Milošovi Weingartovi, že nevie dobre po nemecky - dostal nemeckú knihu do referátu - profesor povedal: "Němčina jest najdůležitejší [sic] slovanský jazyk" a boli sme odzbrojení ...

When on one occasion, one of the students told Miloš Weingart that his German wasn't so good - he had just been assigned a book in German - the professor said: "German is the most important Slavic language" and there was no more excuse for us ...

glagolitic

2009-08-18T21:25:00.005+02:00

(Via SME via TASR) The August 12th edition of Népszabadság reports an incredible find: a shard of pottery (most likely a fragment of a bottle or a jug) with Glagolitic letters was found near Zalavár (aka Blatnohrad). According to Miklós Béla Szöke who is charge of the excavations, the letters iže and onъ (plus a cross) can clearly be read on the shard - but don't take his word for it, see for yourselves (source).
Even considering the history of the place (Pribina's and Koceľ's stronghold, reportedly one of the stops on Cyril and Method's way to Moravia and the site of one of the schools founded by the brothers), I'm filing this one under 'too good to be true.' Watch this space for more.

Rome

2009-06-29T00:30:00.004+02:00

Unless I crumble from all the work dropped on me this morning, I'll be flying to Rome later this afternoon to attend the 2009 SBL International Meeting. I'll be presenting a paper which has very little to do with linguistics, so, um, you know, here it is (UPDATED) and here's the handout (UPDATED), just in case anybody is interested. It's all very beta, so comments are welcome.

shm-

2009-06-02T19:52:00.008+02:00

Damned if I know how, but earlier today, I ended up at the Wikipedia entry dedicated to the shm-reduplication and I was glad to see that it had been expanded considerably since the last time I checked it out. Among other things, the section on origin now cites a paper by Ghil'ad Zuckermann who points out a similar phenomenon in Turkish, the prefix m-, which conveys the meaning of "x and similar things". And that's when it hit me: "ketáb-metáb"! Jiří Osvald's Teheránská hovorová perština (Colloquial Persian of Tehran), one of the thin yet excellent language textbooks published in the 1960s through 1980s by Nový Orient, also briefly mentions this very phenomenon. I'm reproducing the chapter in question in full (note the typically tehruni "nīss" instead of "nīst"):

§ 106 - Ketáb metáb
Opakováním slova se změnou počáteční souhlásky na m se vyjadřuje "něco takového, podobného."
Ketáb metáb nadárín? - Nemáte něco na čtení? (knížku nebo něco takového)
Púl múl mohem níss. - Nejedná se o peníze.

§ 106 - Ketāb metāb
Repeating a word while changing the initial consonant to m expresses the notion of "something like that, something similar."
Ketāb metāb nadārīn? - Wouldn't you happen to have something to read? (a book or something like that)
Pūl mūl mohem nīss. - It's not about money.

So there. Any guess as to which was first, Persian or Turkish?

UPDATE: In the comments below, Etienne provides some more examples from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages (thx m8!). I'll just add two Google books hits, the first of which addresses the Dravidian part and the second one provides an extensive treatment of the shm- reduplication in Yiddish and English and similar echo phenomena in languages from Slavic through Turkic all the way to South Asia. Looks like someone has already written that thesis and it's a pretty cool one.

reduplication

2009-02-25T04:00:00.019+01:00

I don't know how well your average US movie trailer represents spoken North American English, but I found it rather striking that this particular trailer contained not one, but two examples of contrastive focus reduplication in the space of 40 seconds. The first one is a classic:

00:43-00:46
- You like her?
- Yes.
- You LIKE-HER-like-her?

It's the second one, spoken by the lovely and talented Zooey Deschanel, that stands out:

01:20-01:22
- I got the baby.
- THE-BABY-the-baby?

According to Ghomeshi et al. referenced in the LanguageLog post above (preprint, section 3.4, p. 27), one of the constraints on contrastive reduplication (CR) is

(57) a. The scope of CR is either X⁰ or XP^min.

So if I got this right, in case of noun phrases, only minimal noun phrases (i.e. bare noun/pronoun) can be reduplicated and thus reduplication of a NP -> D N such as the one above should be impossible. And indeed, as Ghomeshi et al. elaborate:

Condition (57a) is violated in *A-LINGUIST-a linguist (cf. (47)): although the determiner is a grammatical morpheme, it is outside of NP^min, so it cannot be within the scope of CR.

The examples they refer to are

(47) a. Do you want [tu:] or WANT [tu:]-want [tu:]?
b. ? Do you wanna or WANNA-wanna?

(48) a. I wouldn’t DATE–date a linguist.
b. * I wouldn’t DATE-A–date-a linguist

and

(49) * I wouldn't date [CG A-LINGUIST]-[a linguist]

all from section 3.3 which deals with the optionality of some types of complements with some types of heads (e.g. pronouns or prepositions for verbs, PPs for adjectives). In comments to (47), they wonder if this optionality can be explained phonologically, i.e. those complements are considered clitics and they can, but don't have to be, included in CR. Long story short, citing Hayes' "clitic group" (CG in (49) - "a prosodic word plus the clitics to its right or left"), Ghomeshi et al. dismiss the idea of clitics being involved in CR, noting that (emphasis mine)

So in (48), date and a do not form a copyable clitic group, since a must belong to the same clitic group as linguist. However, Hayes’ definition of clitic group includes clitics on the left as well as the right, and these never reduplicate¹¹.

Hence the asterisk preceding (49) - whatever the phonological considerations in CR, clitics to the left of the prosodic word (such as determiners in NPs) are never a part of the duplicated phrase. Footnote 11 explains that the only exception to that rule are lexicalized proper names (The Hague) and gives the following example:

The casino isn't in THE-PAS-The-Pas, but in Opaskwayak.
(The reserve of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation includes land that is in the northern Manitoba town of The Pas, but not legally part of it.)

This example, however, does not appear in Kevin Russell's corpus and, more importantly, it doesn't explain Ms. Deschanel's reduplication.

Now I'm way in over my head here, so my first stupid question is whether the fact that "THE-BABY-the-baby" doesn't appear in a complete sentence is to any extent relevant. Judging by the examples of same type given by Ghomeshi et al. (e.g. 7, 8, 10, 11, 17), I don't think so, but what do I know. The bottom line seems to be that we have a real-life example of reduplication of a NP -> D N, something Ghomeshi et al. claim is not possible. Would you agree or did I miss something?

€

2009-01-12T01:00:00.011+01:00

Now that the first working week of the new year is over, I think it is safe to say that Slovakia's transition to the new currency is going very well. I was a little late on board, making my first official euro purchase on Thursday (shoelaces, € 0.83) and making the first ATM withdrawal on Friday (€ 40), but even though I am arithmetically challenged, so far so good.

Unlike other nations - such as Malta - we were fortunate enough to avoid major linguistic issues associated with the adoption of the euro, but there are still some minor changes to consider. I, for one, rejoice at the thought of never having to decide again whether I should translate "slovenská koruna" as "Slovak crown" (which seems to have been the preferred form) or "Slovak koruna" (which sounds better to me). But that's just a minor point. As some, including this report in Pravda and this one in SME (originally by the Czech press agency ČTK), have pointed out, the real story is the changes which euro will mean for the slang terms for amounts, coins and banknotes:

desiatka/desík/desina = 10 (note the typical Bratislava suffix -ina normally used in standard Slovak to form fractions)
dvacka = 20 (but not dvacina)
pajdík = 50 (another typical Bratislava / Western Slovak formation)
kilo = 100
pětikilo = 500
liter = 1000
melón = 1 000 000 (melón also meaning, of course, "melon", especially "water melon")

But just what kind of changes should we expect? According to the Pravda editorial,

Slangové označenia peňazí ako desík, kilo, liter či melón odídu s korunou do zabudnutia. ... Liter stratí s eurom zmysel úplne. Tisíceurová bankovka totiž neexistuje, najvyššie papierové euro má hodnotu 500.

Slang terms designating money like desík, kilo, liter or melón will become obsolete. With the adoption of the euro, liter will vanish completely. There is no € 1000 note, the highest demonination is € 500.

Really? Does that mean that we will no longer count money in tens, hundreds, thousands or millions? I guess it would be absolutely futile to try to explain to a journalist that one single word can be used for an object, like a banknote, as well as a concept, like an amount. Martin Považaj, a linguist with the Slovak Academy of Sciences, did try to do so when talking to ČTK with questionable results:

"Je však možné, že niektoré z týchto slov zostanú, ale nadobudnú novú významovú náplň, to znamená, že číselná hodnota skrývajúca sa za týmito slovami zostane, ale bude sa už vzťahovať na eurá[.]"

"It is possible that some of these words will stay with us, but will acquire a new meaning, that is the numerical value behind the words will remain, but will refer to amounts in euro."

So according to Dr. Považaj, it is merely possible that with a change in extralinguistic reality, the language will follow suit. Whereas according to anybody else with a bit of understanding of language, it is, how should I put it, pretty fucking certain.
And then the author of the report helpfully adds:

Znamenalo by to, že tieto výrazy by vyjadrovali 30-krát väčšiu hodnotu, kilo by tak už napríklad nebolo 100 Sk (3,32 eura), ale sto eur (3013 Sk).

This would mean that these terms would be used for amounts 30 times higher that before, thus kilo would not mean 100 Sk (3.32 euro), but hundred euro (3013 Sk).

The fact that this needs to be spelled out astonishes me. I'm quite certain that this - together with Dr. Považaj's explanation above - is a statement to the view of Slovak as something rigid and immutable so prevalent in our society. If you want another example, just try the very next paragraph:

Slová ako päťeurovka alebo stoeurovka sa doteraz do slovníkov slovenského jazyka nedostali, podľa jazykovedcov sú však spisovné a využívajú sa v hovorovej neoficiálnej komunikácii.

Words like päťeurovka (5 € note) or stoeurovka (100 € note) have not yet been included in dictionaries of Slovak, but according to the linguists, these are standard terms which are used in spoken unofficial communication.

Two perfectly legit compounds made from two perfectly normal (and standard) words based on a long-used and perfectly standard terms (päťkorunáčka and stokorunáčka) and yet people still feel the need to ask the official body to please please pretty please validate their own words. This makes me glad we haven't had to deal with any serious linguistic issues. Although the following clusterfuck could have been pretty funny to watch...

And finally, there is the issue of the new slang term for euro. According to Mira Nábělková, a Czech linguist quoted by the SME/ČTK piece, terms like jurko, jurášky, juráše and juroše have been recorded on the internet, obviously combining the English pronunciation with Slovak suffixes. I can see why jurko (note the diminutive suffix -ko) would work, but since it happens to be the diminutive form of the name Juraj, I don't think it's very likely. As for jurášky, I only found one single occurrence, and that one insists it's a pronunciation used by speakers of English. There were a few ghits on juráše, but all of those were from websites in Czech and as for juroše, that one only appears in variations of this ČTK report. And to add one final insult, Dr. Nábělková immediately connects these imaginary slang terms for euro with Juraj Jánošík, i.e. the most stereotypical stereotype in the history of Slovak stereotypes. Even her other examples, the diminutives eurko (neuter), eurík (masculine) and eurka (feminine) seem fishy. A brief Google search quickly revealed that the feminine form is nothing of the kind, but rather Nominative plural of the neuter form (UPDATE: but only when written without diacritics, the proper plural form is eurká). Examples (the first three ghits):

1. ... na ktore mimochodom sa eurka uz vyfasovali ... (which, by the way, they already got euros for)
2. ... a nosi eurka za kazdy mliecny zubok ... (who brings euros for every milk tooth)
3. ... a ked majitelom Slovanu dojdu eurka ... (and when the proprietors of Slovan run out of euros)

From the final list of terms collected on the internet, eurčeky is another nonce formation, but euráče, euráky, euráčiky (another diminutive) and - much less common - euroše are in actual use with euráče being the most common, at least according to raw ghits (2460 vs. 116, 224 and 109). I guess only time will tell which one(s) will be left standing. But if you want to come back in a few months and find out, be sure not to rely on Pravda, SME or ČTK.

door

2008-10-21T22:59:00.005+02:00

In what is just another episode of a long-running series, today I was once again forced to deal with medical professionals. That's usually bad enough - doctors routinely make the top of my shit list with nurses right behind. What made it worse is that instead of going to my usual place, a rather friendly clinic in a convenient location situated next to a lovely park especially beautiful this time of year, I had to drag myself over to this butt-ugly God-forsaken communist-era hospital complex on the outskirts of town. Long story short, I wasted about three hours, didn't even get to see the doctor and most likely caught something along the way. Not a good day, if you catch my drift. All would have been lost, had I not stumbled across this while I wandered the halls:

Bilingual (Slovak-English) and trilingual (Slovak-English-German) signs are not unusual in Bratislava - in fact, the aforementioned rather friendly clinic employs them routinely, considering the large number of foreign residents and Austrians who either live here or come here to get high-quality medical care (especially dental) at a very low cost. But this is the first time I've seen the ubiquitous (in hospitals and clinics, that is) "Don't knock" sign translated into Chinese. Why did this particular immunology clinic put up this sign, I don't know. Bratislava does have a relatively large Chinese community, yet somehow I doubt its members are particularly susceptible to alergies and autoimmune diseases, considering that this was the only door with a sign in Chinese.

Be that as it may, I naturally had to check if the Chinese was legit. Of the five characters 请不要敲门, I only recognized the negative particle 不 bù. The rest was supplied by various dictionaries:

请 [qǐng] = to ask, to invite, please
不 [bù] = (negative prefix), not, no
要 [yào] = important, to want, FUT AUX, may, must, OR
要 [yāo] = demand, ask, request, coerce
敲 [qiāo] = knock, to strike, to knock (at a door), to hit
门 [mén] = gate, door

Seeing as I get about 4000 hits when googling the phrase in quotes and Google Translate provides this very phrase as the translation of "Please don't knock", I suspect it's indeed proper Chinese. Please don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong. That would certainly be interesting, just consider Engrish. With China playing an ever increasing economic and political role on the global stage, Chinese is bound to increase in importance and stature and will inevitably be used by people as clueless about it as the authors of the many Engrish texts are about English. Is it possible that I have just witnessed the birth of Hanyish or perhaps Zhongwenish?

google

2008-09-28T23:54:00.010+02:00

As you probably already know, Google Translate has added 11 more languages, including Slovak, to its already impressive portfolio. While testing the English-Slovak service, I was pleasantly surprised at the MT engine's ability to handle syntax like noun phrases containing adjectives, although I noted a number of problems associated with translating English idiomatic structures, such as those involving verbs "give" and "take" or multiword expressions. Overall, about 60% of translations of work related documents I put in did produce comprehensible and usable texts, so color me impressed. More testing will be required to see if Slovak translators who work for me should start to worry about their jobs (and trust me, I do have a shit list), but I'm pleased to inform you that we already have a candidate for the mistranslation of the year. Consider the headline of this report on the first US presidential debate from CNN.com and then have a look at the translation, especially the items in red:

English: Analysis: A few jabs, but no knockout in first debate
Slovak: Analýza: Za pár popíchnutí, ale žiadna kokot nedved v prvom diskusie

OK, my praise of syntax handling now sounds premature, since in "v prvom diskusie", neither the noun nor the ordinal numeral are declined properly (it should be "v prvej diskusii"), but that's not the interesting bit. That rests with the translation of the word "knockout": "kokot nedved". "Kokot" = "dick, prick" is of course the basic Slovak insult for a man, for more information see here. It is also a very vulgar term, rarely seen in print or heard on the airwaves, so its appearance here will not only ellicit a chuckle for its own sake, but also the question of just what corpus was Google using in training the MT engine. The web, sure, but I can't think of any sufficiently large bilingual corpus where that word would crop up. And that question is even more justified with the second part of the translation: what the hell is a "nedved"? The only word that even comes close is the Czech surname Nedvěd which is a form of "medvěd" = "bear". There are a few people with that name with a significance presence on the web to be included in a web corpus, like the football player Pavel Nedvěd, the hockey player Petr Nedvěd and the folk singers Jan (Honza) and František Nedvěd. But how did their name get into the translation for "knockout"? "Knockout" ("knokaut" in Slovak) is a sports term, but I know of no boxer by the name of Nedvěd. Then again, football and hockey players as fellow athletes could probably fit the bill. That still leaves the question of how did this Czech word get into a translation into Slovak. And it's not the only one - if you look at the screenshot, you will see at least three more words clearly identifiable as Czech (highlighted in green):

- "štípnout" for "tweak" - Slovak: "upraviť, vyladiť"; "štípnout" = "pinch, sting", slang: "steal", although one of my dictionaries gives "štípnout" for tweak" without any further context or explanation.
- "slíbený" for "vowed" - Slovak: "sľúbený". Note that this is a past participle while the original has "vowed" as a past tense verb.
- "poldové" for "cops" - Slovak: "policajti", slang: "fízli". Note the context mismatch: both "poldové" and "fízli" is stylistically marked and not very likely to appear in a newspaper save perhaps for direct quotes.

Once again, I assume that web corpora were to some extent used to train the MT engine. As my own feeble attempts at corpus research have shown, the country code cz or sk in the domain name does in no way guarantee that you will find only Czech or Slovak text there. The actual ratio is hard to determine, but it is definitely nice to see that one of the better aspects of Czechoslovakia - its almost fully bilingual citizens - survives to this day.

And one last interesting bit from this small test: Barack Obama's full name is translated as it should be. But whenever his last name shows up on its own, Google translates it as "osobách" = "person-LOC.PL" (highlighted in light blue). Buggered if I know why...

(h/t: filer)

awwissu

2008-08-04T03:00:00.010+02:00

In an effort to promote and protect the Maltese language and establish an unified linguistic policy, in 2005, the government and parliament of Malta have adopted the Att dwar l-Ilsien Malti (Maltese Language Act, Chapter 470). The Act establishes Il-Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Malti (National Council for the Maltese Language) as the main body charged with "adopting and promoting a suitable language policy and strategy" (Part II, 4(1)). Aside from the general task of promoting Maltese Language both in Malta and abroad (Part II, 5(1)), the Council has also been specifically charged with updating "the orthography of the Maltese Language as necessary" and establishing "the correct manner of writing words and phrases which enter the Maltese Language from other tongues" (Part II, 5(2)). Having been formed in 2005, the Council, headed by prof. Manwel Mifsud, immediately began working on an orthography reform and three years of research, public debate and expert discussion resulted in the publication of Government notice no. 642 in the Government Gazette of July 25th which amends the official orthography of Maltese. This amendment, also known as Deċiżjonijiet 1, is the third official update of Maltese orthography established by the Tagħrif fuq il-Kitba Maltija written by Ninu Cremona and Ġanni Vassallo and published in 1924 by Akkademja tal-Malti. Unlike the previous ones, Żieda mat-Tagħrif of 1984 and Aġġornament tat-Tagħrif fuq il-Kitba Maltija of 1992, this reform will consist of three parts.

As outlined by the guide to the decision-making process published by the Council under the title "It-Triq lejn id-Deċiżjonijiet 1" (8 MB PowerPoint presentation), the Council identified three problematic areas:

1. Orthographic variants
2. English loans
3. Phonetic variants

A decision was made to deal with these issues one by one in this particular order. In the first phase, over 300 orthographic variants were collected, after which the Council issued a general call for opinions to the public and a specific one to a selected group of professionals (authors, translators, teachers and journalists). It is interesting to note that the latter call was answered by only 35 people, fortunately including some of the biggest names in Maltese literature. The reactions were published in a separate volume of 195 pages titled Innaqqsu l-inċertezzi. The public debate was concluded by a workshop on orthographic variants with over 180 participants and Innaqqsu l-inċertezzi as the main subject of discussion. The final decision was entrusted to a committee chaired by Albert Borg consisting of 11 experts. After 30 meetings, the committee issued a final recommendation which was unanimously approved by the Council and finally published as Government notice no. 642, a document with the legal force of a law entering into effect on July 25th, 2008.

Government notice no. 642 / Deċiżjonijiet 1 consists of five main sections:

1. Grave accent and circumflex
Only grave accent is now used in Maltese (e.g. kafè, però), circumflex is abolished.

2. Capitalization
Deċiżjonijiet 1 establishes comprehensive rules for capitalization and lack thereof. Most notably, names of religions, religious orders, sects, art movements, styles and epochs as well as adjectives derived from them and names of their members are now capitalized throughout, e.g. l-Iżlam, ir-Rinaxximent, l-Impresijonisti, stil Sikulo-Normann, id-Dumnikani and in-Nazzjonalisti.

3. Word combinations
This section deals with various phrases, fixed expressions and idioms where there's been significant confusion. Subsection 3.1 covers expresions and idioms where the constituent parts are written separately, such as the reduplicative constructions of the type ftit ftit (little by little, gradually), numerals except 11-19, adverb nett and preposition a la and għala.
Subsection 3.2 contains rules for writing phrases and expressions written together, separately or hyphenated. 3.2.1 covers (mostly prepositional) phrases which can be written together or joined by a hyphen, such as fil-waqt (at the time of) as opposed to filwaqt (while). Appendix A provides a comprehensive list of such multiword expressions that are now written as one word, appendix B contains those that are still written separately or hyphenated.
3.2.2. deals with prefixes such as awto-, ko-, anti- and post- which are now written without a hyphen except where the stem is capitalized, e.g. antiinflammatorju (or antiflammatorju, both are acceptable), but anti-Iżlamiku.
The rest of subsection 3.2 covers prepositions ġo, ma', sa' and ta' (actually the Genitive exponent), the negative particle ma and the preposition kontra. New rules provide a choice between writing ma, ma', sa' and ta' in both full and short form (sa issa / s'issa "until now") when followed by a vowel, għ or ħ. Subsection 3.2 also significantly simplifies the spelling of ġo, ma', sa' and ta' + definite article il-. Forms ġol, mal, sal and tal are now used regardless of what follows (consonant, vowel, għ or ħ), removing one major headache for all speakers of Maltese.

4. Roots and stems
This short section establishes different rules for writing words of Semitic origin and Romance words. For Semitic roots, the rules confirm the practice of using the same set of letters for one root even though the pronunciation may differ (e.g. ktibna "we wrote" is pronounced [ktibna], but kitbu "they wrote" is pronounced [kidbu]). The obvious exceptions with some roots, such as verbae tertiae għ, still apply (e.g. the verb sema' with the root smgħ and first person singular perfect smajt). Non-Semitic stems are written the way they occur in words adopted into Maltese and no effort is made to establish a single correct spelling.

5. Other
This final section attempts to simplify and unify the orthography of a small number of words. Subsection 5.1 deals with consonants with the same pronunciation, but non-phonetic spelling or two different spellings, where in both cases the phonetic spelling is chosen as the preferred variant. Examples include dvalja which replaces tvalja "tablecloth", risq instead of riżq "profit, benefit" and skont instead of skond "according to" which was even before the reform written with t before enclictic pronouns. Subsection 5.2 also adapts the spelling of some words to match their most common current pronunciation, such as the title of this post Awwissu instead of Awissu "August", dettall instead of dettal, Iżlam instead of Islam and prefers karozza over of karrozza "car". The rest of the section covers a number of words designed to bring their spelling in line with their etymology (Magreb instead of Maghreb, since the word was borrowed from Italian or English) and three spelling changes based on reinterpretation of roots.

Having been published in the Government Gazette, the new rules of Maltese Orthography are now binding for all government institutions including schools, textbooks and examinations. The Government notice no. 642, however, provides for a three-year transitional period during which both variants will be acceptable. On July 25th, 2011, the new forms will finally become the only correct and acceptable ones. It will remain to be seen how speakers of Maltese will get used to it. We'll see if the first reactions were an indicator and if, what will that mean for the second phase which deals with borrowings from English and which is well underway. Should be interesting to watch.

UPDATE: Albert Borg comments on the process and the motivations in an interview for Times of Malta published today.

may

2008-05-31T21:30:00.022+02:00

The bulk of the various advertisements, billboards and promotional signs which adorn our lovely city consists of the usual fare of telecommunication products, financial services and real estate done in the usual bland unremarkable style of the two or three ad agencies which control our small advertising market. But once in a while, an ad comes along - or, rather, is put up - which truly boggles the mind. Like this one, from last October:

When I first noticed it, I actually stopped dead in my tracks and stared at it for about a minute. I was stunned at the fact that I immediately understood what the ad was all about. Once I got over that and back to work, I found myself once confounded once again, this time by the question of just who the makers of the ad had in mind as their target group. Why? Let's break it down:

The text says "To the Winter Palace!" and then "New Fall/Winter Collections 2007", the latter part we can ignore. As for semantic content of the rest of the ad and its context:

- we're in Slovakia;
- it's October;
- the ad is for a Winter sale taking place at a shopping mall called Shopping Palace Zlaté Piesky ("Zlaté Piesky" is the name of the neighborhood and the word "Palace" is, naturally, English, the Slovak equivalent would be "palác"); combined with
- the preposition "na" which is used in wishes ("Na zdravie!"), exhortations ("Poďme na to!") and for other similar purposes, such as a call to attack (readers of Hašek will recall his famous "Na Bělehrad!")
- the young man's raised fist is a well known gesture of defiance, a symbol of resistance etc.; and finally (and most interestingly);
- the couple's faces.

October. Winter Palace. Defiance, resistance, revolution. A call to arms. Son of a bitch - the advertisers in '00s Slovakia are using the Great October Socialist Revolution to hawk their products. When the girls and me discussed this at the office, we all agreed that the semiotic content of the ad was immediately clear to anyone of from our generation and older. All of us at the office are Husák's kids, i.e. we were born in the baby boom of late 70's and early 80's Czechoslovakia. All of us also spent at least a few years in communist-era elementary schools where the teachers were addressed "súdruh učiteľ/súdružka učiteľka" (lit. "comrade teacher"), the official form of greeting was - I shit you not - "Česť práci!" (lit. "Honor to work!"), the October Revolution was the biggest thing in history evah, especially in October and November (it was officially celebrated on November 7th with compulsory parades and stuff), and pictures of people looking exactly like the couple in this ad lined the walls of every school's hallways. Those pictures and the whole art movement which was to referred to as "socialist realism" is the main reason I was stunned upon seeing the ad for the first time. You see, when I think of iconic images representing communism and the communist era in Central European history, I think of potraits of Lenin, Stalin, perhaps even Marx (but, oddly enough, not Che Guevara). Or I think of Kremlin, hammer and sickle, red flag, red stars, May Day parades. But all of those would have too obvious. And so the creators of the ad dug a little deeper into our public subconscious and came up with this very subtle, yet unambiguous reference to the former era and it's icons. ~~Kudoz~~ Kudos to them for hitting a nerve most of us probably didn't even know they had, which is - after all - the purpose of every advertisement. I, for one, am still shocked at how firmly entrenched the indoctrination I received in my early years still is in my mind. And I wonder if I'll ever be able to get rid of it and if not, what would that mean...

And this brings me to my original question: just who is the target group for this ad? Is it people who still remember the previous era, like my generation, people in their mid-twenties to early thirties, or even people older than that? Most of us do have the disposable income, but are we really likely to be persuaded by a billboard to visit a shopping mall located at the outskirts of the city (like this one is) in the notoriously bad traffic? And are we really the group of people who is most likely to spend any amount of time in malls? Not so much. Here just like anywhere else, it's teenagers who hang out in malls. But will they get the ad? Based on a number of surveys in regard to history the Ministry of Education conducted, I doubt that very much. The kids today are barely aware of the pre-1989 period in our history and - thankfully - know little of its mythology. So the ad probably missed its target by a lot. But still, it is a great piece of advertising art.

Another interesting ad came along a few weeks ago. I don't have a good action shot, so a picture taken from the advertiser's website must suffice:

Translation: "May is all about ..." and then there's the L-word. Even those inhabitants of Bratislava (and, I imagine, all other cities, towns and villages) with minimal command of English recognize the word "love" and nod in agreement. After all, in our culture, May is commonly - if somewhat clichedly - referred to as the month of love or the time for love ("máj - lásky čas"). Come to think of it, back in the day (see the trip down the memory lane above), every month was a month of something. March, for example, was the month of books. April was the month of forrests. And four weeks between late October and early November were officially designated the month of Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship - in fact, there are couple of good jokes about that one, but you kind of had to be there to get them. As for the ad, it's all pretty straightforward until now - the connection between May and love is a transparent one for every Slovak, even if the word for love is English. But that can't be all, can it?

Of course it's not. And that's where the second layer of meaning comes in. First, this is an ad for a bank, more specifically a particular investment product. Then there's the pile of silver coins and the gold coins which make out the L-word. And finally, there is that one more word that is spelt "love". It's a Romani word pronounced ['lɔvɛ] or ['lɔːvɛ] which means - "money". So what we have here is a trilingual pun. Pretty neat, wouldn't you say?

And once again I have to ask myself, just who the target group for this ad is? It is true that Romani borrowings are quite common in some dialects of Slovak, especially in those regions with large Roma population, but they are hardly ubiquitous. My native dialect (which is more or less the dialect of Košice) is probably the best example of Romani influence. The Romani word čaja and the interjection dig are widely recognized as shibbolets of our dialect and, needless to say, routinely feature in parodies thereof. What's more, with the growth of the Roma community, their (admittedly very slow) integration into the mainstream society and various government programs designed to promote Romani language and culture, the number of these borrowings may even increase.

I came across one just the other day, when my baby sister described something as "totally mište". "Totally what?" I said, perplexed. "Mište," she said. "What?" she went on noticing my blank look, "Mr. Big-shot Linguist just heard a word he doesn't understand?" I said "Well, yeah." and then the little brat proceeded to laugh her butt off. Only when I threatened to revoke her access to my bank account did she stop mocking my ignorance (at least outwardly) and explained that mište means "great, cool, awesome". When I asked where she got the word from, she gave me a "well duh!" look and said that her and her friends got the word from a Roma classmate and liked it so much that for some time, it even replaced the ubiquitous Hungarian derived "fasa". Somewhat surprised, I checked the authoritative Romani-Czech dictionary and sure enough, there it was: "mištes = right, correct, proper." The variant mište (though neither in my dictionary, nor any of the others) is even commonly used in Slovak Romani meaning "good, well":

O dad but mište bašavelas pre cimbalma, bašavelas andre banda mire papuha, no le pandže čhavendar ča jekh phral bašavel.

My father played ~~cymbal~~ cimbalom very well, he played in a band with my grandfather, but of the five children, only one brother plays [an instrument].

A few more questions and one brief Google search revealed that this word is far from the local (read: our village) phenomenon my sister made it out to be and has in fact made it into most Eastern dialects. My favorite example is one from a chat room where while discussing music sharing someone asked "Nemáte dakto nejaké mište bootlegy?". Mište, ain't it?

With my sister's help, I then compiled the following list of Romani words in Eastern Slovak, words/meanings marked with an asterisk are the ones that appear to be new:

čávo [noun, masculine] = 1. boy, young man; 2. boyfriend; 3. a flashy macho-type young man (see chav); 4. *douchebag (cf.) (o čhavo)
čaja [noun, feminine] = 1. girl; 2. a good looking girl; 3. girlfriend (e čhaj)
dig (alt.: dik, dyk) [interjection] = 1. lo!, behold! (originally dikh, the imperative of dikhel = to see)
gádžo [noun, masculine] = 1. a Gentile (non-Roma); 2. a person of low intelligence and/or education, a person with no manners (see redneck) (origin unknown, the Sanskrit word gṛhastha is sometimes cited as one possible etymology)
love [noun, masculine, plural] = money (o love, e love)
*mište [adjective] = great, cool, awesome (mištes = right, correct).
more [interjection] = 1. a familiar way to address a man (see "dude!"); 2. a general-purpose interjection, often preceded by ci.
*mulo [noun, masculine] = dumbass (o mulo = revenant)
*piraňa = 1.a good-looking girl; 2. a female equivalent of čávo 3 (e piraňi = a young woman)
*temerav = an oath: "May I die!" (te merav)

That last one is particularly interesting. My sister was only able to identify it as "some sort of a curse". I figured out that it's a first person singular present tense form of "merel" = "to die" and "te" is a conjunctive particle, but it's pragmatic properties eluded me. It wasn't until a buddy of mine visited a casino where he found himself at a table with some Vlax Roma (or, as he put it, "a bunch of Klingons") who kept using the phrase. Once he got back, he inquired about it in a forum I'm a member of and other participants were quick to point out that the term is also used by a fellow who calls himself Rytmus and is apparently a rapper. His music isn't exactly my cup of tea, but he seems pretty successful and very controversial, both by virtue of his language and as a result of a number of (most likely manufactured) feuds with other rappers and mainstream pop musicians. And, most importantly, he is a Roma and very proud of his Roma heritage. He has made it his trademark and he claims it is the inspiration for his anger and his music. Here is a video of track 3 "Temerav" (also spelt "Temeraf") from his album Bengoro ("The Devil" in Romani) which is also a very good sample of his style. Judging by the views on YouTube, the amount of Google hits he gets and my sister's iPod, Rytmus is quite popular among the young generation and it is thus not inconceivable that "temerav" is not the only Romani word his fans learned from him. A case in point is the second Google search hit on "mište" I quoted, which is, as the address bar of your browser immediately reveals, from a hip-hop forum. And more to the point, consider one of his most popular bits, the uncharacteristically sentimental "Mama" ("mother" in Slovak) which features a chorus in Romani and the phrase "potrebujem lóve" = "I need money" between 00:42 and 00:44.

So perhaps I'm wrong and the distribution of the Romani word "love" is much wider than I thought. The Slovak National Corpus isn't of much help here and there is not much other research on the subject, so I'll leave it at that. And perhaps I'm wrong entirely and it's not dialect distribution the makers of the L-word ad rely on to deliver their message. Instead, they are using popular culture to sell their products. And if popular culture takes Romani to the national level, even if it's in tiny bits and pieces, I certainly won't complain. Especially with a trilingual pun like this one.

karshuni

2008-05-09T03:00:00.025+02:00

In every field of research, there is a number of terms which are often misunderstood and/or used incorrectly not just by laymen (the people call the staff of Language Log and languagehat as expert witnesses), but quite often by knowledgeable experts as well. Karšūnī is one of the terms which just beg for such treatment and often receive it. Having recently waded through a number of documents looking for texts in karšūnī, the whole thing gives me a real a headache. Here is why.

First, there's the many ways of spelling it. Karshuni, carshuni, carchouni, carschouni, karschuni, karšūnī, karshūnī, karschūnī, garshuni, garschuni, garšūnī, gerschuni, gershuni, geršūnī or even akaršūnī and akarschūnī - you name it, it's somewhere out there. Which is the correct one is anybody's guess. According to Julius Assfalg's brief yet exhaustive and even after 26 years unsurpassed overview of the subject (3:297-298), this is a much debated question among eastern Christians. Eminent scholars like G.S. Assemani and Alphonse Mingana believed it should be garshuni/garšūnī and considered the form karšūnī a Maronite corruption. On the other hand, many believe the correct form is gershuni, as it derives from Geršūn, the Syriac form of the name Gershon / Gershom, Moses' firstborn son, who is supposed to have invented this practice. The form with initial k- is firmly established in French and German traditions, while the English-speaking scholars seem to prefer garshuni and its derivations. To each his own, I would normally say, but in this digital age, a line has to be drawn somewhere. Searching for the same term with small variations over and over again just isn't fun. I'm taking this up with the European Commission, they should be able to settle the matter in no time at all.

Then there's the many meanings of the term - especially when it comes to manuscript catalogues. In the strictest sense, karšūnī is a term for manuscripts or printed works in Arabic language in Syriac script. Simple enough: language - Arabic; script - Syriac. Makes sense, right? Well, no, not really. It does not refer to a different variety of Arabic language the way the term Judeo-Arabic does - moreover, Arabic-speaking Christians used both Arabic script and Syriac script when writing Arabic. Nor does it describe a variety of the Syriac script adapted for writing Arabic (as is the case with the term bosančica, Cyrillic and Bosnian/Croatian) or a ductus used more or less exclusively for writing Arabic (as with nastaʿlīq and Persian/Urdu). The best way of defining karšūnī would be saying it's a practice of writing Arabic texts in Syriac script. This practice did not require any modification of the script (the way Cyrillic used for Turkic or Uralic languages did) nor did a separate ductus develop for writing Arabic. And thus in many manuscript volumes written in Syriac script, a text in Syriac is often followed by a karšūnī text written by the same hand in the exactly same serṭō. Add to that the formerly standard practice of Western libraries to catalogue manuscripts by script and not by language and it's 'Hello, Mr. Aspirin' every time you consult one of the older ones.

The Judas apocryphon mentioned recently at the Apocryphicity blog and the respective entry in the Cambridge Syriac collection catalogue is a classic example of the mess this can create. The physical description of the volume in question (Add. 2881) includes the following:

The writing is usually an unsightly cursive Karshuni, but some pages are written in a better Egyptian Arabic hand (e.g. ff. 175 b, 176 a, 245 a, 247 b —249 a, 258 b, 281 b, 282 a, 290 b, 291 a, 299 a— 301 a).

First off, "unsightly cursive" is definitely out of place here. "Unsightly cursive serṭō / jacobite " would be fine and so would "unsightly cursive madnḥāyā / nestorian". Even "unsightly cursive esṭrangelā" would be perfectly OK, though somewhat remarkable, since karšūnī texts were very rarely written in esṭrangelā. But "unsightly cursive Karshuni" just isn't right - "cursive" is an adjective used almost exclusively of writing and as I pointed out earlier, karšūnī is not a type of script. But never mind, I can live with that. The author of this particular entry apparently thought Karshuni was a designation of a type of Syriac script, which is why they also included the bit about "better Egyptian Arabic hand". We can thus assume that ff. 175b, 176a, 245a etc. are written in Arabic language in Arabic script while the rest is written in Arabic language in Syriac script, right? Well, no. According to the catalogue, folios 2b through 298b are written in Arabic language and Syriac script. This also includes ff. 175b, 176a, 245a, 247b —249a, 258b, 281b, 282a, 290b, 291a - all of which are supposed to be written in that "better Egyptian Arabic hand". Only ff. 299a — 301a are, as expected, written in the Arabic script, as are some notes on f. 307b. The rest seems to employ serṭō. At this point I'd like a glass of water with my medication, please. And I can consider myself lucky not dealing with texts in languages other than Syriac or Arabic written in Syriac script, such as Turkish, Armenian, Persian or even Malayalam (although to be fair, writing in Malayalam required some adapting and the script itself is legitimately referred to as "gerisoni"). Once we include those, karšūnī takes on a new meaning very similar to ajami.

And finally, there is the issue of the original meaning and the etymology of the term - though unlike the previous ones, this one is more theoretical than practical. We've already seen one attempt at an explanation (derived from Gershon / Gershom) and if you did not find it very convincing, I can't blame you. Other alternative etymologies proposed do not fare any better with regard to credibility:

- karḵūnē (a diminutive plural of ܟܰܪܟܐ [karḵā] = "rolled", also "codex") meaning "small round (i.e. letters)" - which, again, refers to a type of script or a ductus
- Syriac verb ܓܪܰܫ [graš] meaning "to draw away", hence "foreign, imported writing"
- Persian kār + Šūnī, i.e. "the work of Šūnī" (why Persian?)
- a diminutive form of Syriac ܟܰܪܣܐ [karsā] = "belly", i.e. "(letters) with small bellies" (again with the type of script)
- and finally, the trusted option of a derivation from a personal name.

As you can see, we're drawing a blank so far. It would help a lot if we knew where the practice was started and who first used the term, but we don't. All that can be said for certain is that the Wikipedia entry is quite wrong: there is no evidence that Eastern Christians wrote in Arabic before the end of the 8th century AD when (according to Graf) Maronites took the point and Nestorians and Copts followed suit. Nor is there evidence that Syriac script was used to write Arabic when "Arabic script was not yet fully developed and widely read". Such use of Syriac script cannot be ruled out, of course, but it simply doesn't matter: when Eastern Christians adopted Arabic language, they also adopted Arabic script. Up until the 13th century, karšūnī was reserved for titles, chapter names, notes and such, while most of what was written was written in Arabic script (such as the production of the Palestinian Melkites analyzed by Joshua Blau [1]). Karšūnī manuscripts grew in number in the 14th century and the next century marked the beginning of karšūnī's golden era which lasted well until the 19th century and survived even the introduction of printing machines. This is what we know for a fact. The rest, like the origin of the practice and the meaning and the origin of the term - not so much.

And so we are left with Assfalg's (3:298) observation to that effect and his brief remark that the earliest recorded usage of the term in European sources is the preface to Gabriel Sionita's and Faustus Naironius' edition of Novum Testamentum Syriace et Latine printed in Rome in 1703. Well, we were, until 1991. This was when Hartmut Bobzin published a brief yet fascinating article [2] antedating the term by at least 146 years. It was found in a manuscript by Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter who prepared the first European printed edition of the Syriac New Testament. The manuscript in question contains, among other things, a fragment of a Latin translation of Kitāb al-ādžurrūmīja, a famous compendium of Arabic grammar (original here). A translation of one of the first lines of Kitāb al-ādžurrūmīja ("Partes orationis sunt tres...") is followed by a brief excursus into comparative Semitology which includes these comments on the Aramaic language (pardon my very bad translation):

... Aliter syros scribere, babilonios aliter, et differentes ab utrisque hebreos qui e babilone in patriam redierunt. Deinde aliam esse scribendi rationem Jonathe, Onkelo, aliam Danielj et Jobis historie authori Mosj, aliam postremo Christianis quos Maronitas vocant, qui Chaldaico sermone in sacris utuntur, arabico vulgo passim, hunc ipsi vocant קרשוני illum chaldaicum quem Syrum adpellant.

... The Syrians use a different writing, so do the Babylonians, and the Hebrews who returned from Babylonia to their homeland use a writing different from both those. And thus one should mention first [targum of] Jonathan and [targum of] Onkelos, then the story of Daniel and Job written by Moses and finally the Christians who are called Maronites who use the Chaldaic language in their services and colloquial Arabic elsewhere, and this they themselves call קרשוני in that Chaldaic which they term Syriac.

As Bobzin points out, it is interesting to note that Widmanstetter speaks of language and not writing. It is also interesting to note that his version of karšūnī (I lost count, sorry) begins with a qoph and not a gimel, which may rehabilitate the form with initial k-. Or not, as it depends on where the form originated. Unfortunately, Widmanstetter's notes are not helpful in this regard and so the etymology and the origin of the term karšūnī are still lost in the mists of time. Ah well, maybe I'll find something. And while I search, remember: Arabic language, Syriac script. Like this:

References:
[1] BLAU, Joshua: A Grammar Of Christian Arabic (Fasc. I-III). - Louvain : Secretariat du CorpusSCO, 1966-1968
[2] BOBZIN, Hartmut: Über eine bisher unbekannte Europäische Bezeichnung des Terminus 'Karšūnī' . - Journal of Semitic Studies, 1991, XXXVI/2, pp. 259-261
[3] FISCHER, Wolfdietrich (Hrsg.): Grundriss der Arabischen Philologie. Band 1: Sprachwissenschaft. - Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 1982, xiii., 362 p.

IMP

2008-04-25T01:56:00.021+02:00

Zmjezhd over at epea pteroenta has identified and brought to our attention the true cause of the decline and eventual destruction of the Roman Empire: txting. We all knew that this vile disregard for ortographic rules and conventions would eventually bring down our civilization and now thanks to zmjezhd we have a proof that it has already done so once, infecting the very heart of the Roman Empire at its finest time and spreading like cancer all over the civilized world. And to fully appreciate the threat of txting, let us consider the rate at which it spread from the center of the Empire to its periphery. Zmjezhd's example dates to the early 2nd century AD, which indicates that by then, the disease had already infected Rome and Italy. Yet at that very time, the outer provinces still held on to their heritage. This is evidenced by this late 2nd century AD inscription in stone (a simple, honest and down-to-earth material which is - very unlike the liberal elitist marble - resistant to moral and cultural corruption) in Lavgaricio, today's Trenčín:

VICTORIAE
AVGVSTORV
EXERCITVS QVI LAV
GARICIONE SEDIT MIL
L II DCCCLV
[M VAL MAXIMI]ANS LEG LEG II AD CVR

Victoriae
Avgvstorvm
exercitvs qvi Lav-
garicione sedit milites
legionis II DCCCLV
[Marcus Valerius Maximi]anvs legatvs legionis II adivtricis cvravit

To the victory of the venerable,
the troops stationed in Laugaricio,
855 soldiers of the 2nd legion
Dedicated by M. V. Maximianus, the legate of the auxiliary to the 2nd legion.

Note how everything but the signature is spelled out in full (save for that one -m of the Genitive plural suffix). The abbreviations in the legate's name and title are to be seen as symbols of modesty so typical of Roman warrior class and not signs of moral decay which had by then overrun Rome. As many times before and many times since, here the periphery still holds to the traditional values like proper grammar, even though the center has long abandoned them.

But only a few decades later, all is lost. In Rome, the position of the emperor weakens, the Imperial Crisis looms and troops of Alexander Severus (or possibly the Emperor himself) leave this message in a stone somewhere in the vicinity of today's village of Semerovo:

IMP M AVR SEVE
RVS A[L]E PI[US] F
LIX AVG PONT M[AX TRIB]
POT VIII [C]ON III [P P]....

Imperator Marcvs Avrelius Seve
rvs Alexander Pivs Fe
lix Avgvstus Pontifex Maximvs tribvnicia
potestate VIII consvl III pater patriae....

Emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus
Alexander Pius (The Pious) Felix (The Lucky)
Augustus (The Venerable), chief priest, holder of the office
of tribune 8 times, consul 3 times, father of the country....

The cancer of the language has spread from Rome to the land of the Quadi and from marble to stone. And thus the Roman world ends, not with a bang, but 4 w1MP3r and a warning to the future generations who would not take the proper steps to guard against this horrible disease: ur nxt, d00dz.

Reference:
ŠKOVIERA, Daniel: Antiqua Slovaciae Memoria. - Bratislava : Tatran, 1977, 36 p.

gramatika

2008-04-17T03:00:00.007+02:00

Remember my multi-part review of the new dictionary of Slovak? Yeah, well, it's been a year and I'm still stuck at installment no. 4 and the part of the entry with information on stylistic and pragmatic properties of the headword. The only thing I can say in my defence is that I've been sidetracked when I started looking into the history of Czecho-Slovak lexicography to understand the whys and hows of lexeme classification based on these rather loosely defined "functional criteria". In the course of that research I came across a lot if interesting stuff (with three full bookshelves to prove it). The most fascinating result of that small detour was a paper on the brewer slang of Southern Bohemia [2] published by Alena Jaklová of the University of South Bohemia. In that paper, professor Jaklová compiled from various sources a dictionary of terms related to beer brewing. It is interesting to note that those sources included not only native informants, but also various professional publications, including a (ministry of education approved) textbook for trade schools. Why so? Because of the standard/non-standard ("spisovný/nespisovný") dichotomy so firmly entrenched in Czecho-Slovak linguistic thinking. There slang terms traditionally fall on the non-standard side of the divide and thus become linguistic outcasts, shunned in polite society and even barely worthy of recording. The inclusion of slang terms in an officially sanctioned publication is therefore a major concession on the part of the prescriptivists and purists and, to some extent, an admission of defeat: what do you do when you need a word for a concept only a handful of people are familiar with? Do you stick to your guns and try invent a new word that will follow your rules (and, invariably, fail) or do you grudgingly accept the words of those few well versed in the subject even though it turns your refined stomach? The authors of those textbooks took the latter approach and prof. Jaklová agrees. She argues that in considering the status of professional slang/professional jargon, the standard/non-standard dichotomy should be disregarded altogether and the terms used by the professionals should be accepted into the standard fold. After all, who knows best what word to use for that thingamajig over there than the person who knows every single thing there is to know about it?

Aside from being a voice of reason, the paper is a veritable lexical banquet where through the professional jargon of brewers you can find out just about anything you ever could want to know about various types barley and yeast, the different stages of preparation of malt, all the apparatus involved in beer brewing and even a thing or two about the social structure of the Czech brewery and different customs associated with the production and consumption of beer. And so you can learn that in breweries of Southern Bohemia, a drak ("dragon" = boilerman) keeps a fire burning in the kiln using a osel ("donkey" = a special shovel) while checking the temperature on a pánbíček (a diminutive form of pámbú = "Pán Bůh" = "Lord", a thermometer), that the head cooper goes by the rather unflattering title vrchní Jidáš ("the head Judas") and that they don't steal beer in Budějovice, they střílí pivo ("shoot beer") - though the end effect for the brewer remains the same. Were you inclined to engage in some linguisticking, you could even argue that the Czech have at least 18 different words for beer and offer the following list as a proof:

abcajch
abcúk
stažky
bok
samec
březňák
chmelovina
chmelka
mladina
mutr
nadkvasné
pivo
pozdravenské
převarek
přivítanské
řízek
skapky
šmízo

But there is one word in this list that not only takes the ~~cake~~ malt, but also grabs the keg, the table and all the beer in the storage rooms:

gramatika - pivní polévka s rozvařeným řežným chlebem, údajne lehká a lehce stravitelná

gramatika - beer soup with overcooked rye bread, reportedly light and easily digestible

Let me see if I can find a recipe somewhere...

Oh and one more bit: the section on etymology claims that the term šalanda ("a large room where brewery staff changed and/or slept") is a borrowing from Arabic - "šalandí" (شلندي). Hm, perhaps. But wouldn't a French source (chaland) be much more likely? And assuming that I'm correct and the word ultimately derives from χελάνδιον (a Byzantine warship), how does a ship become a room?

References:
[1] HUBÁČEK, Jaroslav: Malý slovník českých slangů. - Ostrava : Profil, 1988, 190 p.
[2] JAKLOVÁ, Alena: Pivovarský slang v Jižních Čechách. In: Jazyk a řeč jihočeského regiónu II. - České Budějovice : Katedra českého jazyka Pedagogické fakulty JU, 1993, p. 50-68

tukhes

2008-04-08T01:00:00.010+02:00

*chung-chung*

One of the many reasons why I love all of Law and Order is how the writers and producers get stuff right, especially when it comes to the many facets of the multicultural, multireligious and multilingual New York City. This is a special forte of Criminal Intent where such excurses into the everyday lives of various - often self-contained - communities serve to demonstrate the astounding abilities of detective Goren, such as his familiarity with Aramaic or his knowledge of modern-day nomadic peoples. But this dedication to accuracy - hardly a distinguishing feature of network television - can be observed in other parts of the franchise, too, especially in linguistic matters. And so on Law and Order, Arabic is real Arabic, Syriac is written in real honest-to-God serṭō and even though one of the five boroughs stands in for Prague and the accent is so thick you couldn't cut through it with a damn blowtorch, the Prague police officers speak real Czech.
The latest example I've seen is episode 9x13 of Law and Order: SVU. The investigation of another grisly sex crime brings Stabler and Munch to Kehilat Moshe, a Hasidic community in upstate New York. In a brief voiceover narrated by the victim's mother, we are told that people in Kehilat Moshe (a fictionalized version of the real-life Satmar Hasidic town Kiryas Joel) are "extremely orthodox" and that "Many barely speak English." This is where I crossed my finders and muttered "Yiddish, Yiddish, Yiddish, please let me hear some Yiddish!"
And sure enough, just a minute or two later, the detectives make contact with the local law enforcement and the following conversation takes place:

Yep, that's Yiddish all right. But if you listen closely, you may notice there's something off here. What follows is my clumsy attempt at transcription:

A: Der politsi ...
A: The police ...
B: Farshtey. ... ze mus gayn bayn der rebbe, [bʌt] nemt den lange veg un nisht baym shil.
B: Understood. [Tell them] they must see the Rabi, but take the long way, not the way around the temple.

Now I'm by no means an expert, as is evident by the blank I drew on the first part of the conversation. But to my knowledge, "the police" and "the temple" should both be feminine, i.e. "di politsye" and "di shil/shul". "By the temple" should therefore be "bay der shil" (בײַ דער שיל), not "baym (bay dem) shil". I'm also not quite certain about the "bayn der rebbe" part. Hearing "bayn" (בײַן) instead of the expected "baym" (בײַם) wouldn't be that strange, I do sometimes confuse my nasals. But "bayn/baym der rebe" definitely doesn't sound right - "baym rebe" (בײַם רבי) or "bay dem rebe" (בײַ דעם רבי) is what I would expect here. Same goes for "nemt den lange veg" and the absence of case suffix. If I'm not mistaken, "der langer veg" (which is what the Nominative is) should be here in the Accusative, i.e. "den langn veg" (דען לאַנגן וועג). And one more thing: notice how the name of the real Hasidic community reflects the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew - "Kiryas Joel", as opposed to "Kiryat Joel" in the Modern Hebrew/Sephardic pronunciation. Shouldn't the name of the fictional town (presumably קהלת משה in Hebrew) also be pronounced the Yiddish way and thus written "Kehilas Moshe" or even "Kehilas Moyshe" in English?
Of course I wouldn't expect a living language - which, thank God, Yiddish still is - to be exactly the same now as it was when it was recorded and described by Uriel Weinreich, Shlomo Birnbaum, Joshua Fishman and other great scholars of Yiddish. Doubly so in the light of the fact that standard Yiddish based on Lithuanian Yiddish is far from the only dialect there is and definitely not the one with most native speakers - Satmar Hasidim speak a Galician (Polish-Hungarian) dialect of Yiddish. Some change, especially due to language contact, would be expected even in case of close-knit communities such as the Hasidim - which is what I believe happened when instead of אָבער "but" we get [bʌt]. But as for the rest of the deviations from the Yiddish I know, if there indeed are any, I am at the end of my ken. So here is where I turn to you, my esteemed readership, to help me fill out the blanks in my transcription, especially that first line. And of course, I'd be immensely grateful if anybody could explain to me what is going on in that conversation. Who knows, we may even find out that my praise for the writers of Law and Order was a bit premature...

trunk

2008-04-03T01:54:00.022+02:00

You know what, I've had it with this shit. My inner critic is an asshole and I just have to stop listening to him. It's because of him that I missed a lot of the great linguistic stuff that happened in the last couple of months and that just sucks.

So without further ado, let me:
1. Make a brief announcement: I'm back.
2. Thank every one who kept checking this space, especially Mr. Languagehat and my other fellow linguabloggers who are and always will be an inspiration.

And since I should probably start by picking up my own slack, here is - with many apologies to RAF, Abraham Lincoln and Bob Newhart - my modest and belated contribution to the celebration of National Grammar Day. Now if I could only remember how I found this one...

OK, so here's how it probably went down: I was catching up on Paleojudaica from whence a link lead me to On the Main Line, a very cool blog on the Cairo Genizah, Hebrew and other things fascinating, and somehow from there I got to Baltic Polyglottic, a new blog from Latvia (now sadly no longer updated). Hey, if the blogosphere needs anything, it's the general adoption of Lameen's "references with every blog post" policy and more people from the new EU Countries, so yay! It was there, in a charming post entitled "The most useful phrase I learned last year", that I learned about the career advice blog Brazen Careerist by one Penelope Trunk.

Now I'm not someone who needs career advice, nor would I listen to it should it be offered, but my recent job-hunting experiences made me curious. And so I clicked the link to find out how to turn an interview into a job. I learned that I should lose weight because fat (and therefore) unattractive people have a much lower chance to get hired, that I should prepare stock answers to standard interview questions and that I should practice being interviewed a lot. Now I admit that as a fat dude, I found the equation overweight = unattractive a bit insulting. But hey, that's no reason to stop being fair and balanced, so I decided to dig around a bit more to form a qualified opinion of Ms. Trunk and her writing. After two hours of reading brilliant advice like "being promoted has nothing to do with your skills and competence, it's all about being liked", "if you want to have a successful career start in college by geting out of the library" and having learned that Ms. Trunk is a former professional voleyball player (insert-jock-joke-here) and that she went through several stages of personal rebranding (... I got nothing), my mind was made up. The only question left to be answered was where does Ms. Trunk place on the George Carlin scale of stupid?

Fortunately, right about that time I got to a post, an excerpt from her book, which contains several tips on how to write "so people pay attention". The book costs $25, but Ms. Trunk was kind enough to provide us with one tip for free. It's #25 and it goes "Don't use adverbs". I'm guessing some of you can sense where this is going, so just grab your favorite snack and let's enjoy the ride.

By way of introduction, Ms. Trunk gives us her opinion on what constitutes good writing. First and foremost, you have to be brief. In Ms. Trunk's view and according to her understanding of the people she quotes, short equals elegant. Take Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address - 270 words, yet undoubtedly one of the most powerful speeches ever written. So how do we write short and elegant texts that make people pay attention? Here are her seven tips:

1. Write lists.
... They are faster and easier to read than unformatted writing, and they are more fun. If you can’t list your ideas then you aren’t organized enough to send them to someone else.

OK, I can get behind that one, at least partially. I'm glad that an expert like Ms. Trunk approves of this strategy that was also employed by many great writers. Consider Winston Churchill, a Nobel Prize in Literature winner, and his famous "We shall fight on the beaches" speach which featured this list:

We shall fight:
on the beaches;
on the landing grounds;
in the fields;
in the streets, and
in the hills.

Truly, this is the most powerful example of list as a literary device (with the possible exception of the Metterling list no. 5). It not only gave strength to the British people, but also outlined the Allied strategy for victory in WWII and even won the Battle of England. And I'm sure it provided people in London with endless mirth.

2. Think on your own time
....people don’t want to read your thinking process; they want to see the final result.

Indeed. Who cares about arguments and evidence, let alone what you read and where you read it? Results, that's what counts!

3. Keep paragraphs short.
Two lines is the best length if you really need your reader to digest each word.

Unless, of course, you are Penelope Trunk.

4. Write like you talk.

What a splendid advice! For example, if like me you use the words "fuck" and "goddamn bullshit" a lot when you talk, you might want to start inserting these words into your work correspondence. I'm sure your boss will be impressed and people you deal with will appreciate the colorful character that you are. Especially if you work in customer care.

For example, you would never say “in conclusion” when you are speaking to someone so don’t use it when you write.

Very true. I mean think of all the pretentious nonsense people write to sound smart and educated and whatnot, shit they would never actually let pass through their lips. Like doctors, for instance, with their pseudolatin mumbo-jumbo. It's 'skull', not 'cranium', you asshole. Speak English! Or consider lawyers. Wouldn't all our contracts be much more clear and readable without all that "hereafter" and "aforementioned" and "compensation" and "shall" crap? Maybe when the revolution comes, we don't have to kill them. Let's just teach them to write properly.

5. Delete
When you’re finished, you’re not finished: cut 10% of the words.

Say, Abe, what's with that "The world will little note, nor long remember" shit? Cut it down. "The world won't remember" is good enough. And same goes for "we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow". Geez, keep it simple, will ya? Most of these folks don't even know what "hallow" means. Honestly, would you say that speaking to someone?

6. Passive voice. Almost no one ever speaks this way.

Ah, this is a familiar one. But the new twist Ms. Trunk puts on it is worth your last penny:

If you have a noun directly following “by” then it’s probably passive voice.

So when earlier today I wrote an email asking someone to "deliver the files by end of business", I was probably using the passive voice without even knowing it. Moreover, as Ms. Trunk points out,

... when you write it [passive voice] you give away that you are unclear about who is doing what because the nature of the passive voice is to obscure the person taking the action.

To pick an example: "When we write, authenticity gets buried under poor word choice". So who was it that buried authenticity? We really need to know!

And last, but by Jove, definitely not least:

7. Avoid adjectives and adverbs.

'Scuse me, ma'am, but why?

Adjectives and adverbs are your interpretation of the facts. If you present the right facts, you won’t need to throw in your interpretation.

Ah, I see. So when I say that the traffic light in an intersection is red, that's just my interpretation of the light spectrum and safe in that knowledge, I can just drive through. And when I tell someone that they are late because we agreed to meet at 1100 and they arrive at 1130, that's just my interpretation of the situation. For all I know, they are actually on time!

To recap, let's see these principles in action. For that, we can use the Gettysburg Address, which according to Ms. Trunk is a paragon of short and therefore elegant writing. Unfortunately, Abraham Lincoln didn't have the opportunity to profit from Ms. Trunk's expertise, what with the tragic visit to the theater. But fear not, for I, a faithful acolyte of hers, am here to correct that. Behold, the new and improved version of The Gettysburg Address:

~~Four score and seven~~ 87 years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a ~~new~~ nation, ~~conceived~~ in Liberty, and ~~dedicated~~ to the proposition that all men are created ~~equal~~.
Now we are ~~engaged~~ in a ~~great civil~~ war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so ~~conceived~~ and so ~~dedicated~~, can ~~long~~ endure.
We ~~are~~ met on a ~~great~~ battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a ~~final resting~~ place for those who ~~here~~ gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is ~~altogether~~ ~~fitting and proper~~ that we should do this.
But, in a ~~larger~~ sense, we can not dedicate~~—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—~~this ground. The ~~brave~~ men, ~~living and dead~~, who struggled ~~here~~, have consecrated it, far above our ~~poor~~ power to ~~add or detract~~ modify.
The world ~~will little note, nor~~ ~~long~~ won't remember what we say ~~here~~, but it cannot ~~never~~ forget what they did ~~here~~.
It is for us ~~the living, rather, to be dedicated here~~ to the ~~unfinished~~ work which they who fought ~~here~~ have ~~thus far so nobly~~ advanced.
Our ~~It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great~~ task is ~~remaining before us — that from these~~ ~~honored dead we~~ to take ~~increased~~ devotion to that cause for which they gave the ~~last full~~ measure of devotion.
That we ~~here highly~~ resolve that these dead ~~shall~~ will not have died ~~in vain~~ — that this nation, under God, shall have a ~~new~~ birth of freedom.
And that people's government ~~of the people, by the people, for the people,~~ shall not perish from the earth.

That's of course the version we get if we only follow rules 1- 3 and 6-7.
If we just follow rules No. 4 and 5, then we get this:

A lot of people died fighting in this war. Let's make sure they did not die in vain and that democracy will survive.

And honestly, folks, isn't that just better than the original?

Yeah, right.

As history has shown, the world has noted and to this day remembers what was said on that day in Gettysburg. That is because Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest orators of all time. He might not have been familiar with linguistics, but he sure knew about chosing the right words, about rhythm, about aliteration, about gradation and repetition. In short, he knew about all those things that make a speech great and of which Ms. Trunk hasn't got a fucking clue.

And finally, how does Ms. Trunk fare with regard to the George Carlin scale of stupid?

… I just checked to see if I have modifiers in this section. I do. But I think I use them well. You will think this, too, about your own modifiers, when you go back over your writing. But I have an editor, and you don’t, and I usually use a modifier to be funny, and you do not need to be funny in professional emails. So get rid of your adverbs and adjectives, really.

I report. You decide.

monkey

2007-12-18T21:53:00.000+01:00

We briefly interrupt our regularly scheduled radio silence to bring you the following message:
If you haven't read languagehat's latest post yet, go do it, like, now. And then contact your local bookstore / Amazon knock-off to get your own copy of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit.

Mr. Hat was kind enough to ask me to comment on the Czech / Slovak section and perhaps even to add a few entries. Happy to oblige, I produced a 2000-word essay on the subject of Slovak insults and curses. Needless to say, only some of it got into the book. As for the rest, while you wait for your copy of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit (or, if you're in the US, while you wait for your copies to be printed), here's my original essay as just a little something to whet your appetite.

To be honest, I'm somewhat miffed that they left out "Pojebali kone voz". After all, it doesn't get much more untranslatable - let alone much more Slovak - than this. Perhaps if I had mentioned that it can also be sung...? The tune is Nebola som veselá and the full lyrics go like this:

/: Pojebali kone voz, pojebali kone voz :/
/: A teraz, má milá, na piči si drevo [seno] nos :/

Ah well, maybe there'll be more room in the sequel.

In any case, congratulations to Mr. Hat and let us all hope this is just the first of many!

update

2007-08-12T22:44:00.000+02:00

So far, this new job thing isn't working out as well as I hoped it would. I do like the fact that working 25 hours a week gets me the same amount of money as my previous 60-hours-a-week job with 100% less stress, but I don't feel the benefit of more free time and energy yet. I assume it's just the rather abrupt transition combined with the fact that I haven't had a real holiday in almost four years that leave me feeling like a drained toilet at the end of every day. Long story short, I know I've been neglecting my blogging duties. I'm aware of the fact that I still need to finish the review of the Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka, share with you some of the fascinating stuff on Ármin Vámbéry I've learned, write a brief analysis of an emerging Slovak conditional structure, continue with the work on the two Judeo-Arabic translations of Targum to the Canticles and publish at least some of the other 100-odd drafts I've saved over the past few months. And I will, as soon as all of this gets better (which should be any day now). Just hang in there please.
In the mean time, you could check out the new online course of Slovak called E-Slovak my alma mater has put together. The demo (klick on the "Prihlásiť sa ako hosť" button) looks quite good, let's see what you think of it.

Č

2007-07-22T17:38:00.000+02:00

As long as I can remember, my name has always been a source of misunderstandings, mishaps and embarassing incidents. It all started when my mother decided to defy an ancient tradition (the firstborn son always receives his father's first name and both my grandfather and my father are named Imre/Imrich) and talked my father into giving me a different name. My father backed down insisting on the tradition being continued at least in some way and so two years later when my brother was born, they named him Imrich. Since people believed the tradition was honored the first time, for most of our lives, everyone always confused the two of us.
To make matters worse, instead of an honest-to-God Hungarian first name to go with my Hungarian last name, my mother picked out a name which couldn't have been more Slavic without sounding too 1836*. So here I am, stuck with the politically suspect combination of a Slavic first name and a Hungarian last name which has raised many a brow and lead to many a dumbass question of the "So what ethnicity are you then?" type. It's Hittite, by the way. I even gave that as my ethnicity at the last census and you can kiss my fat Neshite ass, Slovak National Party.
Then there's the way my last name should be correctly pronounced: the Hungarian "é" which is a long close-mid/near-close front unrounded vowel without a counterpart in Slovak** is usually heard as [i:] and the combination of "pl" with the final "ö" (i.e. [ø]) is simply too much to handle for most people. As you can imagine, calling a service hotline or introducing myself at the front desk of an office building is always a fun experience - "I'm sorry, did you say [tʃible]?" As long as I live, I will never forget the look on the face of the doctor in the ER in an English town (where I came in after a small accident of the 'pedestrian vs. motor vehicle' type) as he looked at my sign-in sheet and went "Um... Mr, er, [kɛpləʊ]?". The only non-speaker of Hungarian outside our family who has ever pronounced our last name correctly was the Vice-Dean of our Faculty (a professor at the Department of Slovak Language and Literature, of all people) at my graduation ceremony. Needless to say, this feat earned him the undying respect of the entire Hungarian branch of our family, especially my grandparents.
And finally, there's the whole written thing. Never in my life have I had an official document issued with my last name spelled properly the first try. My first passport was a particularly embarassing disaster: the accute accent on "e" was missing. As a result, I was not allowed to board a flight on one occasion because the name on the ticket (copied from my ID card) did differ in this rather insignificant aspect from the name on my passport.
At one point, my father - who has had to go through the same ordeal - started collecting various instances of misspellings of our name from things like official letters, ballots, participant IDs and such most which he came across during his politically active years. For a long time, my favorite item from that collection was Czőploi, taken from a wedding invitation. Every time I look at it I can just hear the person responsible thinking "OK, I'm pretty sure 'p' and 'l' were there somewhere and there was a digraph and one of them Hungarian letters, now if I could only remember which one and in what order..."
Long story short, I thought I'd seen it all. That was until Friday when I went to the post office to pick up my latest order from abebooks. Having opened the package and checked its contents, I was thinking of throwing the envelope into the next trashbin when my eyes fell on the address box:

Yes, you are indeed seeing what you are seeing: & # 2 6 8 , é p l ö. Someone wrote an HTML entity on an envelope.
I totally understand where this began: the webform on the abebooks page did not process the character "Č" - Latin capital letter c with a háček U+010C, HTML entity & # 2 6 8 ; - correctly (happens a lot) and thus this was printed on the order and the invoice. But how could someone actually write this as a part of a person's name, is simply beyond me. Do the good people in France really think our names contain ampersands and numbers? I hope not. Even if this was just a case of not paying enough attention, someone actually had to grab the envelope, pick up a pen, look at the invoice and wonder for a second or two just what the heck were those weird characters and numbers doing in a person's name. I am inclined to believe that that someone was not very IT-savvy and simply too puzzled to figure it out. So they just copied the name line over from the order. But still...
Be that as it may, I shall be proud to present this to my father to include in his collection. I hope it will have the same effect on him as it did on me, because when I looked at that envelope, I broke into a laughter the like of which hadn't been heard from me in years. That alone - and stories like this one - is compensation enough for all the trouble with my name.

* On April 24t, 1836, a bunch of Slovak patriots led by Ľudovít Štúr took a trip to the Devín castle to pledge their lives to the national cause. As a symbol of their dedication, each took a purely Slavic name. Some of those would still be quite OK today (Hurban's Miloslav, Maier's Jaromír etc.) , some of them... Let's just say that if you decided to name your newborn son Velislav, Zvestoň or Slavoľub, you might as well start saving up for therapy sessions right now.

** No matter what the Wikipedia says, there ain't no way in hell the Hungarian "é" in "hét" is the same vowel as "ee" in German "Seele" or the long variant of the Polish "e" in "dzień". No fracking way. Hungarian "é" is both more close and more front than either of those.

super-grammaticam

2007-07-20T16:55:00.000+02:00

It's not every day that I learn something new about my neck of the woods on Wikipedia, but every such occasion is a joyous one and this particular bit of information is certainly worth sharing.
It concerns Sigismund of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia etc. etc. (1368-1437), better known around here as Žigmund Luxemburský/Zikmund Lucemburský. A colorful figure, this one: known to his enemies as "That double-crossing sly red fox" and famous for his lavish lifestyle and constant financial problems, he is said to have once exclaimed "This whole kingdom is bankrupt, you can't squeeze more than 40.000 gold pieces out of it!". He even pawned 13 cities of Spiš to Poland to finance his war against Venice (and/or his expensive tastes, depending on whom you chose to believe). These cities were only returned to the Kingdom of Hungary (and thus Slovak territory) in 1772, which is how come Henryk Sienkiewicz's Potop (The Deluge) has the Polish king John II Casimir (Jan Kazimierz) travel to the Polish city of Lubowla (today's Slovak Stará Ľubovňa) to receive a hero's welcome and to plan the resistance against the Swedish invasion.
But what Sigismund is most (in)famous for is his part in the Hus affair and the resulting Hussite wars. He was the one who guaranteed Jan Hus a safe passage to and from the Council of Constance. The ~~lying cheating bastard~~ politician that he was, Sigismund broke his promise and the rest is history. Which brings us to our amusing anecdote.
It was at the opening session of the Council that the following transpired:

"Right Reverend Fathers, date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur," exclaims Sigismund, intent on having the Bohemian Schism well dealt with,--which he reckons to be of the feminine gender. To which a Cardinal mildly remarking, "Domine, schisma est generis neutrius (Schisma is neuter, your Majesty)," --Sigismund loftily replies, "Ego sum Rex Romanus et super grammaticam (I am King of the Romans, and above grammar)!"

Well, at least he did not say "Ego deciderator sum"... Anyway, it is quite interesting that in my study of the Hussite wars I have never stumbled upon this bit of trivia. One would have thought that the Czechs with their hate for Sigismund would particularly enjoy this bit, but neither the history books I consulted, nor the historians I spoke to had ever heard of this incident.
By the way, the quote above is not from the Wikipedia, but it's a description of that incident from Thomas Carlyle's History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (Volume II) who quotes from Wolfgang Mentzel's Geschichte der Deutschen. It would seem that Carlyle is the main source for this anecdote, at least in the English-speaking world, though it crops up in Italian, too. I haven't been able to find Mentzel's work to check his sources. Anyone out there has a copy?
The Wikipedia article, referring to The Nutall Encyclopedia, adds that "this reply caused him to receive the nickname "Super-Grammaticam". Again, I scouted the vast plains of the Internet and consulted my library only to arrive at the conclusion that "Super-Grammaticam" probably wasn't a nickname given to Sigismund by his contemporaries, but rather an invention of Carlyle's, as he himself admits in the very same passage I quoted from above:

For which reason I call him in my Note-books Sigismund SUPER GRAMMATICAM, to distinguish him in the imbroglio of Kaisers.

It would appear that the nickname comment is a slight oversight on the part of the Wikipedia users. Someone should correct it immediately.

And on an unrelated note: this record temperatures shit has got to stop. I don't mind the heat that much, it's quite manageable with proper hydration and the right choice of underwear (don't ask). But Bratislava being what it is* and the ladies summer attire being what it is... Let's just say I almost got slapped twice yesterday for, well, staring. Enough, I say.

* The city with the highest proportion of gorgeous women per capita in the world, that's what!

two

2007-07-04T01:30:00.000+02:00

Two things I didn't know about:

1. Sabean inscriptions in minuscule script written on pieces of wood and palm leaves

I stumbled across this one in the programme to the 30. Deutscher Orientalistentag in the Semitic Studies section where it was announced that Dr. Peter Stein of Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena will present a preliminary report on a research project.
I rushed to my bookshelves to consult first A.F.L. Beeston's A Descriptive Grammar of Epigraphic South Arabian (1962) and then G.M. Bauer's Язык южноаравийской письменности (1966). A lot on the monumental script, but zip on the minuscule script on both counts. Fortunately, the incredibly useful Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (p. 455-456) was a little more forthcoming (not surprisingly, since the article on Old South Arabian was co-authored by the very same Peter Stein):

At the beginning of the 1970s, the first instances of writing on wooden sticks, in a hitherto unknown minuscule script, were discovered in Yemen. The understanding of these sticks, which come from the Yemenite Ǧawf and of which several thousand have come to light in the mean time, is made especially difficult because of the script and the unknown vocabulary. Concerning the contents of the roughly thirty examples published thus far, probably dating to the second/third centuries AD, it can be said that they are documents partly written in the form of letter that have to do with legal and economic matters.

That would explain the lack of any mention of the minuscule script in the aforementioned works on South Arabian both of which predate the discovery of inscriptions in minuscule (cursive) script. Furthermore, according to the website (DE) of the project, only a few more than 40 of these have been published so far (e.g.). The Bavarian State Library in Munich is in posession of several hundred of inscriptions in Sabaean minuscule script which represent the focus of the research currently underway in Jena. In the first phase of the project (pardon my poor translation),

...wurden sämtliche Inschriften der mittel- bis spätsabäischen Periode (ca. 3. Jh. v. Chr.-6. Jh. n. Chr.) analysiert. Dieses Textkorpus umfaßt 205 Nummern, worunter sich 85 juristische und Wirtschaftstexte (Abrechnungen, Quittungen, Schuldscheine u. dgl.), 74 Briefe, 26 Schreibübungen und 7 Inschriften aus der Kultpraxis (vornehmlich Orakelanfragen und -bescheide) befinden. Diese Inschriften werden in einem ersten Band der Publikation veröffentlicht, dessen Drucklegung z. Z. vorbereitet wird.

... all inscriptions from the Middle to the Late Sabaean period (ca. 3rd century BC - 6th century AD) have been analyzed. This corpus contains 205 items consisting of 85 texts of legal and economic nature (bills, receipts, IOUs etc.), 74 letters, 26 scribal exercises and 7 inscriptions of religious nature (mostly questions to oracles and responses). These inscriptions will be published in the first volume of the publication which is currently being prepared for printing.

Now there is something to look forward to. While we wait for both the report and the book, check out this sample of the minuscule script.

2. Latino-Punic inscriptions in Libya

A thesis on the subject was recently defended by Robert Kerr of Universiteit Leiden (summary in pdf). Punic written in Latin script is of course nothing new: act V, scene 1 of Plautus' Poenulus, for example, contains an entire monologue in Punic (look here for an analysis taken from Rosenberg's Phönikische Sprachlehre und Epigraphik). Yet I had no idea that the Latino-Punic corpus was so extensive (Dr. Kerr mentions 69 inscriptions, "mostly epitaphs"), nor that Punic apparently remained a living "functioning North-West Semitic language" for much longer than previously thought. Dr. Kerr believes Punic was spoken as late as the 7th century AD and offers the following insight (NL) into the Punic-Roman relations after the Third Punic War (again, please excuse the poor translation):

Er is lang gedacht dat het afgelopen was met de Punische cultuur toen Carthago was verwoest, en ‘Africa’ een provincie werd van het Romeinse Rijk. Maar in Tripolitanie kwam die cultuur toen eigenlijk pas tot bloei. Het gebied ging zijn eigen gang. Rome bemoeide zich er niet intensief mee, en met de Carthaagse invloed was het al afgelopen sinds de Tweede Punische Oorlog, toen de regio zich aan het gezag van Carthago had onttrokken. We zijn snel geneigd om te denken in een dichotomie Romeins-Carthaags. Maar echt niet iedereen in Noord-Afrika die Punisch sprak had posters aan de muur had hangen van Hannibal als bevrijdingsheld.

It was long believed that the Punic culture was done for once Carthage was destroyed and "Africa" became a province of the Roman Empire. But the culture in Tripolitania actually only came to bloom. The region went its own way. Rome didn't really bother itself with it and the Carthagian influence was already diminished after the Second Punic War when the region broke away from the Carthagian sphere of influence. We are inclined to think of that period in terms of Roman-Carthagian dichotomy. But not every Punic speaker in North Africa had posters on their wall celebrating Hannibal as a liberator.

The earliest inscriptions in the Latino-Punic corpus are from 1st and 2nd centuries AD and were found in Leptis Magna. Later specimens were found deeper inland at the edge of the desert and date back to the 3rd and 4th and perhaps even 5th century AD. According to Dr. Kerr,

...in het pre-desert gebied van Tripolitanië waren de Punische inscripties juist veruit in de meerderheid. Daar zijn bijna geen Latijnse inscripties gevonden.

... in the pre-desert part of Tripolitania, Punic inscriptions far outnumbered the Latin ones. In fact, almost no Latin inscriptions were found there.

No surprise there since apparently Punic was spoken by the mixed population which came about when Punic men married Libyan women. Punic men

... waren in het grensgebied neergezet door de Romeinen. Ze hadden in het leger gezeten, en werden nu ingezet om tegen een goede betaling de verdedigbare grensboerderijen te bemannen. Ze hadden een grote vrijheid. In Romeinse bronnen stonden Punischtalige mensen erom bekend dat ze in droge gebieden succesvol landbouw konden bedrijven.

... were settled in the border areas by the Romans. They had been in the army and were now employed to man defendable border outposts for a good pay. They were afforded a lot of freedom. In Roman sources, speakers of Punic were famous for being able to succesfully cultivate the land in dry areas.

Unfortunately,

Het systeem van de verdedigbare boerderijen en het opslaan van water was fragiel en onderhoudsintensief, en heeft de invallen van Berberstammen vanaf de zesde, en de islamitische veroveringen in de zevende eeuw niet overleefd.

The system of defendable outposts and water retrieval was fragile and maintenance intensive and did not survive Berber raids beginning in the 6th century and the Islamic conquest in the 7th century.

As for the actual language of the inscriptions, there is still some controversy as to what it actually is:

Sommige Berberologen en Afrikanisten wilden nog wel geloven dat arme pachters Punisch waren blijven spreken, maar de elite niet, die sprak Latijn. Maar de inscripties zijn bewijs uit de eerste hand dat het Punisch ook door de upper class aan de kust nog in de derde eeuw na Christus werd gesproken, zoals ook al blijkt uit de overlevering rond keizer Septimius Severus (rond 200 AD, red.), die uit Lepcis Magna kwam.

Some berberologists and africanists still wanted to believe that while poor leaseholders still spoke Punic, the elite did not and switched completely to Latin. But the inscriptions are a first-hand proof that Punic was still spoken by the upper class on the coast as late as the 3rd century AD, as is also evident from the tradition surrounding the Emperor Septimius Severus who was born in Leptis Magna.

I found Dr. Kerr's findings concerning the phonology of the inscriptions utterly fascinating. He compared the writing conventions used in both Latin and Punic inscriptions of North Africa and found that the latter must be derived from the former. This lead him to the conclusion that the pronunciation of North African vulgar Latin must have strongly resembled that of Punic. In both languages, for example, ellision of unstressed vowels is a rule. Dr. Kerr believes that the phonology of both vulgar Latin and Punic in North Africa must have been influenced by a substrate language which he terms Berbero-Libyan. In his own words:

Vergelijk het met de overeenkomst in uitspraak tussen het Afrikaans en het Zuid-Afrikaanse Engels, of tussen het Iers en het Engels dat in Ierland wordt gesproken. De taal is anders, maar de tongval is herkenbaar.

Compare that with the similarities in pronunciation of Afrikaans and South African English, or Irish and Irish English. The language is different, but the accent is immediately recognizable.

And finally, even the good old St. Augustine (who was born in Roman North Africa) comes into play here:

Vaak wordt aangenomen dat Augustinus eigenlijk ‘Berbers’ bedoelde als hij het over Punisch had. Maar hij wist heel goed dat er verschil was tussen het Punisch en het Libico-Berber. Van het laatste wist hij dat het bestond, maar hij kende het niet. Augustinus herkende bijvoorbeeld ook Hebraïsmen in de oud-Latijnse Bijbelvertaling, doordat hij Punisch kende. Hij kende geen Hebreeuws.

It is often assumed that Augustine actually meant "Berber" when he spoke of Punic. But he was very well aware of the difference between Punic and Libyco-Berber. Of the latter he only knew that it existed, but he did not speak it. Augustine for example recognized Hebraisms in the Old Latin translation of the Bible because he spoke Punic. He did not speak any Hebrew.

Unfortunately, Robert Kerr's dissertation is not available on the website of the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics. Bummer, certainly, but it will hurt less once you look around and notice the tons and tons of great stuff there. My favorites so far are Matthias Hüning's Woordensmederij (pdf) on the history of the Dutch suffix "-erij" and J.A.M Vermaas'
Veranderingen in de Nederlandse aanspreekvormen van de dertiende t/m de twintigste eeuw (pdf) on the history and development of Dutch forms of address. But there is also Johnny Tjia's A Grammar of Mualang (pdf, Ethnologue report here) and František Kratochvíl's (go Czech boys!) A Grammar of Abui (pdf) which was recently announced on linguistlist. So go and get it before they wise up :o)

UPDATE: The always brilliant Lameen follows up with a post linking to a comprehensive database of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic texts kept by Dr. Jongeling of Leiden and quoting al-Bakri who suggests Punic (or a variation thereof) might have survived well into the 11th century. Do go and check it all out. And if you speak Dutch, Dr. Jongeling's page has a lot more goodies for ya, like this introductory grammar of Hebrew and an introduction to Welsh with exercises.

l33t

2007-06-22T02:30:00.000+02:00

Jangari over at matjjin-nehen has raised an interesting question: aside from the usual English-based acronyms like omg and lol, are there any acronyms based on other languages used in their respective variations of 133t5p34k?

My answer: sure there are. Here are just some of those Slovak ones I found in my ICQ logs.
(Warning, foul language ahead!)

d = ďakujem = thank you.
p = prosím = you're welcome.
nzc = nemáš za čo / niet za čo = you're welcome (cf. German "keine Ursache" or French "de rien").
mfp = mám f piči (correct spelling: mám v piči) "I have it in my cunt" = I don't give a fuck.
ppf = po piči front = totally cool. Or totally fucked up, depending on the context.
jj = jo jo (Czech: jo = "yes") = yup; sure.
njn = no jo no (no = "well") = yeah, well; what can you do.

The first three are pretty self-explanatory, although it should be noted that they are used alongside their English equivalents (ty, yw and also np).
As for mfp and ppf, they further illustrate the popularity and varied usage of the term "piča" (discussed in brief here). Please don't ask me what "po piči front" is all about. All I can tell you right now is that "po piči" (lit. "alongside a cunt"?) means something along the lines of "cool, great, awesome" and can be used both as an adverbial as well as an adjective (both predicatively and attributively). Just who added "front" ("front" as in military front or weather front) and what it's supposed to mean is still a mystery to me.
mfp also provides additional material for the comparative study of abuse language: as michael farris pointed out in the comments to the aforementioned thread, in Polish,

There's also 'mieć X w dupie' (have X in (one's) ass) which means (IMO rather counter-intuitively) 'don't give a shit about'.

The Slovak version is not only counter-intuitive, but also anatomically inappropriate, since it is used prevalently by male speakers (no surprise there, since a statement like that made by a woman would probably invite a response of the "Oh really? So what else..." kind). Considering the number of such anatomically impossible insults and terms of abuse, I'm starting to think there is a pattern to it: the more outrageous, the more unlikely, the more unreal the connection, the stronger the insult is. Time to look closely at the semantics, wouldn't you agree?

UPDATE

Dang my stupid head, how could I have forgotten this gem?

c2 (courtesy of enzo)

Doesn't ring a bell, does it? One tiny hint: try prounouncing it as if it were an English acronym (and it helps if you're not a native speaker of English). You get something like [sɪ tu] which, by sheer coincidence, sounds almost exactly like Slovak "Si tu?" meaning "Are you here?"
Pretty cool, heh?

lol

2007-06-18T02:03:00.000+02:00

What so special about cats anyway?

White-eared bulbul, Pycnonotus leucotis.
Image source: Wikipedia user AshLin.
This image is published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Taiwan bulbul / Styan's bulbul, Pycnonotus taivanus
Image source: Wikipedia user FrankyBoy5.

White-spectacled bulbul, Pycnonotus xanthopygos
Image source: Nir Ofir.
This image is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

bandwagon

2007-06-15T02:10:00.000+02:00

I hope it's not too late to jump on it...

Ľudovít Štúr speaking before the Hungarian Assembly. In a speech held on January 15th, 1848, he advocated the use of vernaculars (other than Hungarian, naturally) in education and proposed to amend the legislation under debate accordingly.
Image source: www.stur.sk

Michal Hodža, one of the authors of the 1852 ortography reform which established the so-called "etymological principle". This included the introduction of the letter "y" (absent in Štúr's codification), a move widely criticized, especially by Slovak schoolchildren.
Image source: www.stur.sk

Now let's see if anybody gets this one... :o)
Image sources:
Original image: hethitologie.de
The cuneiform character: John Heise's Akkadian page.

And finally, a big lolthanks to lolpresident for the inspiration. The one with Bush and Topolánek - priceless. And the bukkit category is a masterpiece of the lolart.

solution

2007-05-23T23:41:00.000+02:00

WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE AHEAD!

And the correct answer to last week's puzzle is [drumroll]

büdös = IPA: [bydøʃ].

Of a total of 25 participants (both online and off-line), the correct answer was provided by [drumroll]

No one.

Which certainly does not surprise me, because there ain't no way in hell the first consonant is a voiced bilabial stop (and, accordingly, no participant identified it as such) and neither vowel is rounded (almost everybody heard [i] and [ɛ] / [e] respectively). Now I am familiar with the word büdös, but this particular phrase is one I had never heard before and had it not been for my buddy smiki who explained it to me, I would never have guessed. I wonder why. My initial suspicion, i.e. the 'cartoonish' voice quality which makes it sometimes hard to watch South Park even in English, was invalidated by the fact that I didn't have any comprehension problems with the rest of the episode. So what is it? Regional accent? Some sort of (suprasegmental) devoicing and derounding doesn't sound very likely...

But hey, everybody's a winner here and here is your prize. Let's start with the full transcript and the translation:

Cartman: Kis türelem [kiʃ tyrɛlɛm]
Teacher: Gyerünk, Eric! [ɟɛryn̪k ɛrik̪]
Cartman: Büdös picsába! [bydøʃ pitʃaːbɒ]
Kyle: Ha ha!
Cartman: Kus, Macesz! [kuʃ mats̻ɛs]

Cartman: Just a minute! (lit. A little patience!)
Teacher: Let's go, Eric!
Cartman: Aw fuck! (lit. Into the stinky cunt!)
Kyle: Ha ha!
Cartman: Shut up, dude!

The most interesting thing about this exchange - and the reason it attracted my attention - is the translator's choice. In the original English version, when prompted to step up, Cartman replied with his trademark "Goddammit". (A) picsába! is a common enough way of expressing dissatisfaction or disappointment in Hungarian, but it is also several degrees above "Goddammit" in strength and lack of social appropriateness. Knowing the Hungarian dubbing industry, I would expect A francba! "Dang it!" or something along those harmless lines.

Speaking of translation strategies, check out an excerpt from the episode 5x11, which also features the term picsa. This time as a translation of English "What the fuck was that?", i.e.

Mi a picsa volt ez? [mi ɒ pitʃɒ volt ɛz]
what DEF cunt was this

While not necessarily a bad translation, there is a slight difference in meaning here. In English, the "the fuck" part of WH- interrogative expressions acts as a modifier or intensifier (also see here). That would be best translated using the all-purpose expletive a picsába (see below). Asking Mi a picsa volt ez? in Hungarian amounts to inquiring as to the type of the thing or phenomenon encountered. Mi a picsa volt ez therefore means something like "What kind of a cunt was this?".

Another interesting thing is the use of the Illative (-ba/-be) indicating direction into an enclosed space. Both picsa "cunt" and fasz "dick, prick" often appear in Hungarian abuse language in the Illative. On their own or preceded by the definite article a they function as interjections and can be translated as "Fuck!" or "Fuck that!". Often, however, they appear preceded by verbs in the imperative, such as in the time tried recommendation Menj a picsába! "Go fuck yourself! (lit. Go into the cunt!)" and its anatomically impossible variety Menj a faszba "lit. Go into a prick!". This usage closely mirrors that of Czech and Slovak. In Slovak, the same structure (albeit expressed analytically by means of a preposition) and the same word are used: Do piči! or Do piče! as interjections, Choď do piči! or the more intensive Bež do piče! lit. "Run (in)to a cunt!" as full imperatives. Taboo words connected with reproduction are not that common in Czech. Instead, Czech relies on terms and expressions associated with excretion. A Czech would therefore say Do prdele! "lit. Into an ass!" or Do řiti! and Jdi do prdele! or (much less commonly) Jdi do řiti!

Growing up, I never heard the phrase büdös picsába, nor did I ever hear someone mutter or yell a faszba. It's not that my folks and neighbors are especially polite, far from it. They just opted for a different approach: the third member of the unholy trinity, the ancient verb bászni "fuck" (1st. pers. sg. ind. baszom) and a noun in the Accusative. Baszom az istenét (lit. "I fuck God") is, together with Baszom a Krisztus-Máriát / a Krisztusát, still my father's favorite. Baszom az anyád(at) ("... your mother"), baszom az apád(at) ("... your father") and baszom a világot ("... the world") are just a few other options for those not willing to sin against the Second Commandment. Softer versions can be obtained by omitting the verb - az anyád, az apád, a Krisztusát etc. Such forms have even been borrowed into Slovak as azapát, azaňát and kristušát. Readers of Jaroslav Hašek will surely find all of this familiar, though the author of Good Soldier Švejk might have gotten his case or possessive suffixes wrong. Even the Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian version Jebem ti majku! "I fuck your mother!" can be found mentioned in Švejk.

The similarities mentioned above raise many fascinating questions concerning linguistic contact, common inovations and area linguistics. The etymology of the word piča (SK)/picsa (HU) /pička (HR/BiH/SRB), for example, is a big unanswered question. Similarities such as the Illative structures mentioned are striking and even the differences, such as the aforementioned difference between reproduction based taboo vocabulary and excretion based taboo vocabulary, are truly fascinating. Someone ought to do a real study.

Speaking of comparative scatology and scatological language contact: even the ever popular imperative baszd meg "fuck you" was borrowed into Slovak and Czech as both an interjection bazmek! and a masculine noun bazmek meaning "thingie, device, gizmo". Just to give you an idea of the currency this borrowing from Hungarian enjoys all over the former Czechoslovakia: my hometown Košice is still jokingly referred to as Bazmek city. And check out and ctrl+f this Czech forum on overclocking and this hardware discussion board. Oranžovej bazmek, now that's a typical one.

And finally, here is a little gem smiki found while researching büdös picsába on the internet for me: a rézfaszú bagoly. This one deserves a full treatment:

réz = copper
fasz = dick, prick
-ú = an adjective-forming suffix
bagoly = owl

Thus:
A rézfaszú bagoly = A copper-dicked owl.

Dunno about you, but I laughed all day. And that was before I found out there is a t-shirt you can order with the full version, i.e. Vigyen el a rézfaszú bagoly = "May a copper-dicked owl take it". 2600 forints equals aproximately $14. Pity they only deliver to Hungary...

Now excuse me, I have to get back to the kibaszott work. Vigyen el a rézfaszú bagoly, indeed.

cartman

2007-05-16T23:52:00.000+02:00

Hey folks, anyone up for a little game?
Excellent! So here is the board and the pieces:

A - a brief excerpt from an episode of South Park dubbed into Hungarian.
B - a transcript in both standard Hungarian ortography and IPA:

Cartman: Kis türelem [kiʃ tyrɛlɛm]
Teacher: Gyerünk, Eric! [ɟɛryn̪k ɛrik̪]
Cartman: (X) picsába! [(X) pitʃaːbɒ]
Kyle: Ha ha!
Cartman: Kus, Macesz! [kuʃ mats̻es]

Now (X) marks the spot with the treasure we're after. It's a single word consisting of two syllables spoken between 00:00:03 and 00:00:04 and what I want from you, boys and girls, is to provide a transcription below in the comments using any transcription method you like. Everyone who provides the correct transcription, wins.
Warning: speakers of Hungarian need not apply and are asked not to spoil it for everybody else.
The lucky winner(s) will receive my eternal gratitude, a brief lesson in Hungarian and the knowledge that they succeeded where others (such as myself :o) had failed.

Good luck!

easter

2007-04-08T10:50:00.000+02:00

Mark 16:6:

Онъ жє глагола имъ: нє ѹжасайтєсѧ: ˀɪ҃иса ищєтє назарѧнина распѧтаго: воста, нѣсть здѣ: сє, мѣсто, идѣжє положиша єго:

Христос воскрес, everyone!

islamic

2007-04-02T15:51:00.000+02:00

I have been worshipping at the altar of Language Log for quite some time now. Normally, all I can do is stand aside, marvel and try to learn. But today, reading Bill Poser's post "Political Correctness, Linguistic Incorrectness", I just had to pause, think hard and finally respond. Since Lameen took the first step and published his reaction, I decided to throw in my €0.02 and republish parts of the email I sent to Bill Poser earlier today. But first, a brief recap:

Bill Poser's post is a passionate reaction to an article in the Telegraph which reports that

Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook which offers "non-offensive" phrases to use when announcing anti-terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks.
Banned terms are said to include "jihad", "Islamic" or "fundamentalist".

The article also specifies the phrase "Islamic terrorism" as one of those to be replaced by more PC alternatives. Bill Poser draws the rather incomprehensible conclusion that

The EU really thinks that there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism.

and, in Lameen's words

seeks to justify the term "Islamic terrorism" by saying that "Dozens of terrorists have explicitly said that they are Muslims and that their motivation was Islam. Moreover, there is clearly widespread support among Muslims for terrorism."

Bill Poser supports this by quoting two polls centered around support for suicide attacks against civilians and specifically Americans which purport to show that Muslims support such actions. Lameen retorts by quoting another statistic which shows that a large number of Americans support bombing of civilian targets and wonders whether

Americans' killings of Muslim or Muslim-looking civilians ought to be termed "patriotic terrorism"

Well, ought it?

Lameen also makes one very important point:

The likes of Al-Qaeda wrongly describe their own terrorist acts as jihad in order to make them appear legitimate to other Muslims; for Western governments to publicly accept this characterisation is about as sensible as it would be for Muslim critics of Bush to start losing no opportunity to call him a true American patriot...

Needless to say, I absolutely agree. I am also very sorry to see that Bill Poser has fallen into the same trap many pundits and pseudoexperts cannot seem to avoid: he appears to be taking the "terrorist" rhetoric at face value. To parody a Slovak "expert" on Middle Eastern affairs (may his arse itch and his hands be so short he could not scratch it!): "They say they kill for Islam. Well golly gee gosh aw shucks, they say it, then it must be true! Anyone who says otherwise is an apologist!" Please. We are scientists. No matter how emotionally affected we are, we must always question the first impression, always dig deeper, never believe we know it all and understand everything. If we do, what do we become? Pundits, I fear. And I don't know how about you, but I'd be better off in a pine box on a slow train back to ~~Georgia~~ Košice.

And now for my original comments: first of all, I cannot help but notice that Bill Poser has failed to define "terrorism". I can only conclude from his statistical examples that by that he means actions like suicide bombings against civilians. If I'm correct, then I must confess that I find the comparison he uses rather puzzling. He is in fact equating a group people whose distinguishing characteristic is a fight for/against something (Roman Catholics/Evangelicals - abortion) with a group of people whose distinguishing characteristic is the use of certain tactics (Muslims - suicide attacks). Please forgive me if the phrase "apples and oranges" sounds more than appropriate.

My second objection to Bill Poser's conclusions is based on his attempt to take the logic behind the alleged EU guidelines ad absurdum:

By the same token, "Christian opposition to gay marriage" does not imply that all Christians are opposed to gay marriage or that Christians are particularly associated with opposition to gay marriage.

That is true. But isn't it also true it's the Christians who are particularly associated with opposition to gay marriage and abortion? Consequently, there are two ways to understand the phrase "Christian anti-abortionists":

(1) people who oppose abortion who are (happen to be) Christians.

and

(2) people who oppose abortion because they are Christians.

In other words, (1) provides a description, while (2) indicates a causal relationship. In this case, both interpretations would be correct, as the majority of Christians are bound by the tenets of their belief and the teachings of their churches to oppose abortion.

Similarly in case of "Islamic terrorism", when I hear this phrase, I understand it to mean

(3) people who comitted terrorist acts and who are (happen to be) Muslims

whereas a faithful Fox News viewer or LGF reader might actually hear

(4) people who comitted terrorist acts because they are Muslims.

While (3) certainly is correct in any sense of the word, (4) is probably not. There are two reasons why this may be so - the first one (all major authorities of Islam have denounced terrorism and terrorists) is still rather controversial and will be best left for experts to pronounce final judgement on. The other reason is far more interesting and hinges on the answer to the following question: do Muslims commit terrorist acts because the commandments of their faith order them to? Does a Hamas suicide bomber blow himself up because the Qur'an tells him so or does he actually hope to contribute to a bigger cause? Do the "insurgents" in Iraq drive trucks full of explosives into US Army checkpoints just because the Imam said so or do they see it as another step in achieving a goal? It seems they do. Hamas is - at least nominally - fighting for an independent Palestine state. Various factions in Iraq are either trying to get the US troops out or to wipe out each other. Even Bin Ladin's final goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family.

That being so, doesn't it mean that there is a small but significant difference between the semantic content of the word "Christian" in "Christian anti-abortionists" and "Islamic" in "Islamic terrorist"? My answer would be yes. In fact, my observations indicate that the adjective "Islamic" in "Islamic terrorism" is not a purely descriptive one, but is very often used to point out the causal relationship between Islam and terrorism. Needless to say, this a) distorts reality (to believe that, say, a Hamas suicide bombing and an attack on US troops by the Badr Corps share the same cause is sheer lunacy) and b) is designed provoke an emotional response. That's just not helpful and only desirable to those with their own dark motives.

Here I would like to point out that it is by no means certain that the EU Commission and/or Parliament are in fact banning the term "Islamic terrorism". I'm a cynical SOB and I hate journalists, I will therefore not believe a word The Telegraph prints until I get independent confirmation. Especially not if their description of the terms prohibited by the "secret handbook" (my, my, my, what an interesting choice of words...) sounds too recycled. But even if the EU did adopt such a policy, the use of terms like "ostrich-like approach" and "stupid and dangerous" to describe such steps would still be rather unfortunate. In these times of empty rhetoric, rejecting meaningless terms and nonsense phrases like "Islamic terrorism" in favor of more accurate descriptions would be most welcome. Holding on to them is irresponsible.

maltese

2007-03-26T09:57:00.000+02:00

Via kelmet mailing list (grazzi, Olvin :o):

Department of Maltese, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta
and
il-Kunsill Nazzjonali ta' l-Ilsien Malti

have great pleasure in inviting you to

a series of talks by prof. Thomas Stolz (Universität Bremen)

Monday, March 26th,7.00 pm – L-Università, Ċentru Vassalli (Gateway), Sala E
1. PIDGIN AND CREOLE LANGUAGES: Is the Maltese case different?

Tuesday, March 27th, 7.00 pm – L-Università, Sala Erin Serracino Inglott
2. "L-GĦAQDA INTERNAZZJONALI TAL-LINGWISTIKA MALTIJA": Towards an international Maltese linguistics

Wendesday, March 29th, 7.00 pm – L-Università, Ċentru Vassalli (Gateway), Sala E
3. LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY - Where does Maltese belong?

I know it's a bit short notice, but any of you language freaks currently in Malta, please go.
Great things are afoot for the Maltese language, the chief among them is the founding of the aforementioned "Għaqda Internazzjonali tal-Lingwistika Maltija" (International Society for Maltese Linguistics), which will (so the cover letter by prof. Manwel Mifsud) take place in a few months in Bremen and which will be brought about by valiant efforts of prof. Stolz.
So please go and take notes. Especially at the first talk, the subject of which sounds very much like the title of my dissertation proposal.

sibboleth

2007-03-26T08:42:00.000+02:00

Two not-so recent and well-known examples I've recently encountered in works of fiction, found quite amusing and thought I could share:

1. Dutch - from Paul Verhoeven's Soldaat van Oranje:
Time: May 1940
Setting: Erik and Guus (dressed in tuxedos and arriving on motorcycles) have just reached an army checkpoint in front of a burning barracks hell bent on enlisting and fighting the Germans who had just invaded the Netherlands. The soldiers at the checkpoint are understandibly confused and thus suspicious as to their identity and motives:

SOLDIER 1: Zij zijn Moffen, verklede Moffen!
ERIK: Wij zijn toch Hollanders!
SOLDIER 1: Allemaal op!
SOLDIER 2: "sch" wat zeggen! Moffen kunnen geen "sch" zeggen! Zeggen, Scheveningen!
GUUS: Scheveningen, Scheveningen!
SOLDIER: Scheveningen!
ERIK: Scheveningen!
GUUS: Schele, schoonmoeder, scheveningen!
ERIK: Scheveningen, sch, sch, sch, nul (I think...)!
SOLDIER 3: Ha, ja, laat maar door.

SOLDIER 1: They're Jerries, Jerries in disguise!
ERIK: Come on, we're Dutch!
SOLDIER 1: Stick 'em up!
SOLDIER 2: Let them say something with [sx] in it! Jerries can't pronounce [sx]! [zexxə], [sxeːvənɪŋə]!
GUUS: [sxeːvənɪŋə], [sxeːvənɪŋə]!
SOLDIER: [sxeːvənɪŋə]!
ERIK: [sxeːvənɪŋə]!
GUUS: [sxeːlə], [sxoːnmudər], [sxeːvənɪŋə]!
ERIK: [sxeːvənɪŋə], [sx], [sx], [sx], zero!
SOLDIER 3: Yeah, OK, let 'em through.

It seems that "Scheveningen" was a popular choice for a shibboleth in WWII Netherlands. Tim McNamara in his fascinating article on shibboleths and language tests mentions that according to witnesses, "the Scheveningen shibboleth was 'common knowledge' " at that time and adds this testimony:

The story of the ‘shibboleth test’ to distinguish German speakers from Dutch ones is well known (at least among people of my age). [The expression involved was] Scheveningen, often combined with an even more difficult word for Germans, ‘beschuit’ (Dutch rusk). Germans pronounce ‘sch’ as ‘sj’ and the diphthong ‘ui’ (sounds a bit like in the French fauteuil) as ‘oi’.... Scheveningen is a village at the coast near The Hague. The place was well known during the war because it was the place where people from the resistance were held in prison. ... Moreover a lot of illegal transport by boat from and to England was via Scheveningen. (p. 356)

In the light of this, I'm wondering if the use of the name "Scheveningen" as portrayed in the movie and in fact the whole scene isn't a bit anachronistic. There wasn't that much reason to look for German spies that early in the war and the town hasn't quite achieved its war time prominence yet. Still, it's quite funny, especially thanks to Rutger Hauer's delivery.

The article also includes other examples of shibboleths, like the one from civil war torn Lebanon where (so McNamara's informant), "right wing militia" (Phalangists?) would require people to pronounce the Arabic word for 'tomato' to identify Palestinians. In Lebanese Arabic, it is pronounced [banaduːra], while in Palestinian Arabic, it's [bandoːra] (p. 353).

2. Polish - from Andrzej Sapkowski's Narrenturm:
Time: 1420
Setting: Reynevan, the main protagonist, is trying to hitch a boat ride with what is described as a bunch of Wasserpolaks (nevermind the anachronism, it's a deliberate one and the book is full of them). Note that Reynevan is a Silesian.

- Koń mi okulał. A trzeba mi do Wrocławia.
Polak żachnął się, charknął, splunął znowu.
- No - nie rezygnował Reynevan. - Jakże tedy będzie?
- Nie wożę Niemców.
- Nie jestem Niemcem. Jestem Ślązakiem.
- Aha?
- Aha.
- To powiedz: soczewica, koło, miele, młyn.
- Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn. A ty powiedz: stół z powyłamywanymi nogami.
- Stół z powy... myła... wały... Wsiadaj.

- My horse got lame. And I need to get to Wrocław.
The Polish guy waved his hand, cleared his throat and spit again.
- Well? - Reynevan insisted. - What do you say?
- I don't ferry Germans.
- I'm not German. I'm Silesian.
- Oh?
- Oh.
- Well then say [sot͡ʂeviʦa], [kowo], [miele], [mwɨn].
- [sot͡ʂeviʦa], [kowo], [miele], [mwɨn]. Now your turn: [stuw s povɨwamɨvanɨmi nogami].
- [stuw s povɨ]... [mɨwa]... [vawɨ]... Get on board.

"Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn" is also an old one: it was used in 1312 in Cracow by the armies of Władysław Łokietek to identify Germans most of whom had participated in a rebellion against Łokietek. As for stół s przewył... powyław... poławy... that other one, it is a noted Polish tongue twister. I might pass that test. But if someone ever whips out "Cześć Czesiek! Czeszesz się częściej często, czy częściej czasem" on me, forget it. Just shoot me. Please.

References:
MCNAMARA, Tim: 21st Century Shibboleth: Language Tests, Identity and Intergroup Conflict. Language Policy, 2005/4, p. 351-370

bogcha

2007-03-23T22:31:00.000+01:00

When some time ago I discussed Mór Jókai and wondered about the exact meaning of the term "boktsatütün", languagehat and an anonymous reader were kind enough to provide the answer: "small bale of fine tobacco, tobacco wrapped in small bundles".
As much as I trust their expertise, it is always nice to get independent confirmation. This time, I found it on p. 114 of Scenes from the East. Through the Eyes of a European Traveller in the 1860s by the Hungarian orientalist Ármin Vámbéry (a.k.a. Hermann Bamberger, 1832 - 1913) . Though usually ranked among his many travelogues, this book is more of a sociological study of the peoples of Orient. As such, it offers many fascinating insights into the everyday lives of people of the Ottoman Empire. Just consider the titles of some of the chapters - "Women", "Food", "The Bath", "Festivals", "Schools" and "Tobacco and Drugs". It is in the latter that we find the following passage:

There is an old Hungarian proverb which refers to "smoking a pipe like a Turk", whose antiquity I would question, for those Turks who invited themselves so regularly to South-eastern Europe had not at the time been introduced to nicotine. It was only during the reign of Sultan Ahmad III that an edict was issued to curb the consumption of tobacco. Ironically, it is today precisely in the Ottoman Empire that tobacco is almost a cult. The king of tobaccos grows in Rumelia, native soil of the great Macedonian, mainly at a small place north-east of Thessaloniki called Yenije Vardar. The small yellow-brown plant is dried for weeks, even months, on its stem, then packed into small bundles (bogcha), and only after maturing for years in the merchant's warehouse do the connoisseurs of Stambul give it the name of ala gabek. The leaves are sliced into strips as fine as strands of silk, and are much valued in the Imperial Palace, the Sultan's harem, and not the least at the Porte, where the Privy Council carries out its important state duties in dense clouds of aromatic smoke.

Interestingly enough, in Slovak we still say that someone who smokes a lot "fajčí ako Turek" (smokes as a Turk) and same goes, as far as I know, for Czech and Serbian. Also of interest is the fact that the original text only says "a proverb; a folk saying" ("a közmondás"), nothing about just "Hungarian"...
Be that as it may, rest assured I will return to Ármin Vámbéry in the future. A fascinating fella, this one - linguist, ~~tinker~~, sociologist, ~~tailor~~, diplomat, ~~soldier~~, spy. He advised Sultan Abdul Hamid II, was (so my buddy Emík tells me) best pals with Theodore Herzl and apparently knew Mór Jókai and Bram Stoker, too. And he's from the hood - born in Svätý Jur, raised in Dunajská Streda, studied here in Bratislava.

References:
VÁMBERY, Ármin: Scenes from the East. Through the Eyes of a European Traveller in the 1860s. - Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1979 (an English translation of: Keleti életképek. - Budapest: Atheneum, 1876; available online here)
KHALIDI, Walid: The Jewish-Ottoman Lands Company: Herzl's Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies, XXII, no. 2 (Winter 1993), p. 30-47

SSSJ part 3

2007-03-14T03:47:00.004+01:00

Previously on ~~Lost~~ SSSJ: ~~Kate and Sawyer have~~ we covered the following parts of a standard entry in SSSJ:

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

and now ~~the conclusion~~ we're proceeding to:

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

The abbreviation following the note of origin (here in italics) is used to classify individual lexemes according to what the introduction to SSSJ calls "functional criteria". Essentially, this part of the entry is equivalent to OED's label. It provides information on stylistic and pragmatic properties of the lexeme in question and other information concerning its eventual obsoleteness, frequency, limited regional occurrence or correctness. Remember my question about which side of the prescriptive/descriptive fence will SSSJ fall on? Here's where you find the answer to that. But first, a brief rant.

There are three things most people never knew about standard Slovak and definitely should. Here we go:

1. From its conception, Standard Slovak has been first and foremost a political tool. (a.k.a. "We are NOT Hungarians. No, we're not Czech either!")
No one in their right mind will dispute the validity of this statement. It is, after all, so glaringly obvious. Even Bernolák's first attempt to codify a standard Slovak language based on Western dialects was a direct result of a political decision made by Emperor Joseph II. In 1784, the enlightened despot established a general seminary in Bratislava with the purpose of educating priests of all nationalities from all corners of the Empire. Although most of its Slovak students were drawn from Western and Southern Slovakia, the dialectal fragmentation so typical of the mountainous territory of Slovakia was a serious impediment in the educational efforts of the seminary. Bernolák's attempt at codification of a single standard Slovak language ultimately failed, just like Joseph II's policies - for political reasons. But it showed the way.
Štúr's project which eventually led to standard Slovak as we know it today was one of the major materials in the nation-building efforts of the fateful 1840s and arguably its most successful product. Ever since, standard Slovak has been a rallying point for patriots and nationalists alike and one of the most important (if not the most important) symbols of Slovak indentity. It is therefore not surprising that protectionism and purism have always been the main tenets of Slovak language policy and kept our language alive through Hungarian nationalism of late 19th century, the ideology of Czechoslovakism of the first Czechoslovak Republic and other trials our nation faced in the troubled 20th century.

2. Standard Slovak is an artificial language. ("Standard Slovak? That's those two guys over there.")
Now that may not be the best way of putting it. It would be more fitting to say that standard Slovak was an artificial language and is still treated as such by some. As for the first part of the statement, one just needs to look at the first fifty or so years in the history of standard Slovak. First, any act of codification is basically creating a new language. Secondly, until 1914, standard Slovak was pretty much confined to a few people and/or groups. The resulting infighting among linguists (Hattala, Viktorín, Mráz and later Czambel and Škultéty) and writers would put any conlang community to shame and yet, all that time most Slovaks still spoke their respective dialects. It was only the quasi-independence under the Czechoslovak flag and possibly the mass media revolution of the 20th century that made standard Slovak the actual mother tongue of most Slovak children.
The question of whether standard Slovak still is an artificial tongue and therefore whether there exists a state of diglossia in the whole of Slovakia (and not just certain parts of it like the East) is one that would require a substantial amount of research (wink-wink nudge-nudge all you Slovak majors). Various indicators point in that direction. Even the occasional article becrying the decline of "language culture" (like Genzor 1997) usually includes more than a few examples of hypocorrections and hypercorrections so typical of diglossia.

3. To some people, especially certain linguists, "standard Slovak" means "high style". ( a.k.a. "Ľudovo povedané...")
Let's back up a bit. First of all, what I call "standard Slovak" here is termed "spisovná slovenčina" in Slovak. The adjective "spisovný" is a curious one. First, it is only used referring to language. Secondly, it is rarely used when speaking of languages other than Czech, Slovak or German - a phrase like "spisovná angličtina" earns 8 points on a 1-10 weirdness scale. And finally, it appears to be derived from the root "pís-" i.e. "to write" and evokes associations with "spis" = "writing" (as in "zobrané spisy" = "collected writings"). As such, JÚĽŠ seems to prefer the English translation "literary Slovak", as do Russian scholars ( e.g. K. V. Lifanov in his Генезис словацкого литературного языка). But to find out what that term really means, we must go to those who use it. Having spent some time doing so (hence the hiatus), I can report that "spisovná slovenčina" appears to be used in the following meanings:

a) codified Slovak (in historical terms)
This is especially true of the works on the history of Slovak, such as those by Eugen Pauliny ( Dejiny spisovnej slovenčiny I 1966) or the more recent ones like Dejiny spisovnej slovenčiny by Pavol Žigo and Rudolf Krajčovič (2002). In accordance with what appears to be accepted terminology, Žigo and Krajčovič refer to "predspisovné obdobie" ("pre-codification period") and "spisovné obdobie" ("codification period" or rather "post-codification period") in the history of Slovak.

b) a language common to the entire territory of Slovakia (as opposed to regional varieties and local dialects)
So dialectologists (e.g. Štolc 1994 or Bosák 1996) and, it would appear, Pauliny ( e.g. 1966:87-89) together with other linguists who commonly refer to pre-codification regional varieties of Slovak used in writing as "cultural languages", e.g. "cultural Western Slovak" or "cultural Eastern Slovak". In his Krátka gramatika slovenská (Short Grammar of Slovak 1997), Pauliny also notes that the Slovak language is not uniform and explicitly defines "slovenský spisovný jazyk" i.e. "spisovná slovenčina" as a variety of Slovak which is the same for the whole of Slovakia (Pauliny 1997:7).
This is also the most common popular meaning of the term in areas with diglossia (most notably Eastern Slovakia), where one either speaks a dialect or "spisovne". And it's in this sense that the term "spisovná slovenčina" is used in most instances of criticism of media personalities or politicians whose speech shows regional varieties ( e.g. non-palatalized lateral [l] instead of palatalized lateral [ľ] or dialectal "neni" instead of standard "nie je").
And finally, I am assuming that this is what is meant by people who speak of "národný jazyk" ("national language"). Mind you, I am by no means certain: in the last few years, the adjective "národný" has undergone a slight but significant shift of meaning (from "ethnic" to "of state or country"). And it was a fishy term even before that.

c) High variety (as opposed to the vernacular varities or slang)
For this one, we have to look no further than that sorry excuse for a dictionary and the eternal shame of Slovak lexicography, Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka (available online here). It defines "spisovný jazyk" ("standard language") thusly (emphasis in the original, translation mine):

spisovný príd.
1. s. jazyk, s-á slovenčina kultivovaná a kodifikovaná celospoločenská forma národného jazyka
(the cultivated / refined / cultured and codified cross-societal variety of the national language)

I can hear some of you protest: "But dude, 'kultivovaný' doesn't just mean 'cultured', it also means 'cared for', 'nurtured' etc., like, ya know, plants and living things and stuff!"
OK, fair enough. Let's hear it from the KSSJ, shall we?

kultivovaný príd.
1. kultiváciou upravený: k. pozemok, les (improved by cultivation: c. land, forrest)
2. vycibrený, zošľachtený, uhladený: k. jazyk, verš; (refined, cultured: c. language, verse, c. audience = educated)
k-é obecenstvo vzdelané;

As seen above, 1. refers only to agricultural concepts. 2., on the other hand, has exactly the same meaning as, say, OED's " cultivated 2". QED.
One might object that this is only the opinion of the editors of KSSJ. But one would be wrong. There are many examples of this and I will only mention my favorite one. I have previously spoken of the waiver "ľudovo povedané", i.e. "as (simple) people would say", which speakers of Slovak often attach to words and phrases they feel are not exactly "spisovné". In nearly all such cases, however, not even the most fanatic purists would object to what they are saying. In fact, these perceived non-standard lexical items are not even slang expressions or dialectal words, but merely idioms, perfectly legit derivations and various colorful expressions of all sorts. Going through just a few examples, one would quickly notice that what we are witnessing every time someone uses the phrase "ľudovo povedané" is not a speaker of variety A trying to find the right expression in variety B (which would be the case if b) above applied), but rather a choice between two different registers or styles. A simple Google search reveals the full extent of this phenomenon: one speaker prefixes this phrase to such perfectly normal and standard Slovak verb as " zruinuje" ("will ruin"). A journalist includes this waiver when using the idiom "byť za vodou" (lit.: "to have crossed the waters", meaning to be set for life financially), another (from my favorite daily) will prefix it to a perfectly standard word "predať" ("to sell") when meaning "to advertise" and yet another one will even add it to a beautiful and purely native noun "zosúkromnenie" the standard equivalent of which he probably feels is "privatizácia" ("privatization"). Over 12.000 examples of this on the internets and countless others in the conventional media and elsewhere in the public sphere clearly show that something is going on here: all of these people apparently identify a dry stilted way of speaking in public with standard Slovak. And if what these speakers of Slovak say they consider "simple" or "uneducated", what would be the opposite? Refined. Educated. Applied to language, isn't that the very definition of "High variety"?
And finally, I feel tempted to include here a rather curious remark by Juraj Dolník (on whom more below and even more later). In one of his articles (Dolník 2000), he wrote that in order to pronounce qualified judgements on the standard language, one must come to know the "full-blooded" language (quotes in the original). Buggered if I know what he really meant. I guess it just goes to show that even the great linguistic minds of our time are not quite clear about what they mean when they speak of "standard Slovak".

Trivial as the observations above may seem, without knowing what you know now it is nigh impossible to properly understand the nature of Slovak linguistics and language policy. Especially when it comes to the Slovak lexicon and lexicography and the eternal fight between the prescriptivist and the descriptivist faction. You see, although the long war is finally over and we are finally independent (whatever that's worth), some linguists still fight for the purity of Slovak not so much for linguistic reasons, but for political ones: borrowings from Czech are therefore shunned altogether, because /insert_history_lesson_here/. Latin roots and words, on the other hand, are OK even if we have perfectly good native words to use in their stead, because Latin does not carry any negative political connotations and is generally considered cool (see Geoffrey Pullum's "Classicism"). Those same linguists fail to understand that, to use a metaphor, Slovak is no longer a proprietary project. It's been open-sourced for at least 60 years. It's a child that has grown up long ago and no longer needs protection. And yet, some still insist it wear a coat when going outside even in May and some others even try to forbid it to stay out after 10pm and date that cute tall kid that just moved in next door. People like that suffer from a dangerous delusion: they believe they can actually control a living thing like a language (and, for that matter, its speakers). To them, codification is not a completed process, but something they can repeat over and over again. Moreover, they detest any behavior they do not approve of and either try to pretend it does not exist, or, worse, claim that any action (words or phrases or usage) not conforming to their expectations is an aberration and should be swiftly and decidedly suppressed. And what's worse, some people actually buy all of that crap.

Just to illustrate my observations above, let me give you a small taste of the intellectual climate in Slovak linguistics: In 2000, Slovenská reč (one of the major journals for the study of Slovak) served as a forum for a fascinating debate between two major authorities on Slovak, the aforementioned professor Juraj Dolník (the head of the Department of Slovak Language and Literature at my alma mater) and professor Ábel Kráľ (a phonetician and phonologist, currently of the Constantine Philosopher University in Nitra). Did I say "a debate"? Well, it was more like a flamewar, complete with strawmen, Eternally Refined Analogies (TM Fred Clark), Sudden Changes of Subject (TM pending), Infinite Explanations of What I Really Meant (TM pending), Unbelievably Stupid Arguments (copyright expired 6000 BC), Silly Metaphors (licensed under Unfair Use Doctrine) and other staples of flamewars everywhere.
Inspired by an article by professor Dolník with the title Standard Slovak and Czech (and probably his book Spisovná slovenčina a jej používatelia (2000), too), the flamewar proper was initiated by professor Kráľ's response entitled Where did the Slovaks get their standard language from? (Slovenská reč 65 2000/2). Dolník's original thesis - borrowings from Czech (traditionally considered a big no-no, see above) are under certain conditions quite acceptable - sent Kráľ on a tangent and his article reveals the ugly face of Slovak prescriptivism in all its hideousness.
First of all, Kráľ speaks of people's reluctance to "osvojovať" i.e. acquire standard Slovak (p. 72). This would support points 2 and 3 above. Surely people haven't stopped speaking Slovak, so he must be referring to a particular variety of Slovak. And if they need to exert themselves ("brať na seba námahu") to acquire standard Slovak, aren't they in fact, just like say Arabic children, learning a foreign tongue?
Kráľ's reference to the role Czech has played in our history further supports my point 3 above. The so-called Biblical Czech was, so Kráľ, a language used to fulfill

"higher" social needs

i.e. the High variety. But when Biblical Czech was finally supplanted by the newly-created standard Slovak, doesn't that mean that what basically happened was that one High variety replaced another? Certainly so, especially considering how for the first 50 or so years the use of standard Slovak was limited to a few scholars and a relatively small number of journals.
Secondly, you don't need a statistical analysis to show what professor Kráľ considers the central pivot, the pinnacle, the summit and the Holy Grail of linguistics and language policy: the system and its purity. Kráľ views the system as something immutable, something that, once fixed, cannot and should not be changed. There can be no variation in a system. None. The only case of systemic differences ( e.g. non-standard forms in declension or pronunciation) Kráľ can imagine is a hypothetical "different standard Slovak", i.e. what would have happened had Štúr not succeeded or someone else had beaten him to the punch (p. 79). Once in place, Kráľ argues, the system is set in stone. He believes that any variation in speech is first and foremost a mistake or a persistent error. Being a phonetician, Kráľ even goes so far as to suggest that any failure to correctly (orthophonetically) pronounce a phoneme has psychological causes and refers to Piaget to prove his point (p. 80). God forbid there should be regional or dialectal variations. May the Lord keep us from the evil Easterners and their short vowels and penultimate accent or those devils of Záhorie or Myjava and their lack of palatalization. You people are SICK!
After a few pages of this grade-A prime-cut class-1 quality bullshit, Kráľ delivers the coup de grace in a response to Dolník's revision of the criteria for inclusion of a lexeme into the standard lexicon (standards-usage-system integrity being the holy trinity). Kráľ's reaction to propositions which sensibly favor the criterion of usage ("functional adequacy") leaves no illusion about his views on the nature of standard Slovak and the role of speakers of standard Slovak (p. 81):

Nie mi je známy logicky a lingvisticky prijateľný dôvod na odporúčanie, aby sa termínu funkčnosť (funkčná adekvátnosť) prisúdila vyššia rozhodovacia sila než termínu norma alebo systémovosť.

I am aware of no logically and linguistically acceptable reason to recommend assigning a higher importance to "functionality"/"functional adequacy" than to "standard" or "system integrity" [when determining the acceptability of a lexeme].

In other words, to hell with the speakers and their silly ideas of communication effectiveness and intelligibility! Who the hell do they think they are? Who died and made them the custodians of Slovak? Screw them, we have a system to maintain! They will eat what we cook and serve them and they will LIKE IT!
My friends, seldom have I heard a more fitting description of prescriptivism and no one has ever summed up the attitude of certain Slovak linguists to their language and her speakers better than this. Don't be mistaken, this is not a lonely voice speaking. This is the position of many linguists and language professionals. Only a few of them will voice their concerns in terms of preserving the system, but to each and every one of them (and a large number of your average Slovak Joes and Janes), standard Slovak is exactly how I described it a few months ago in my last rant on the subject: a half-dead monster everyone is scared of and does their best not to upset it. However silly one looks doing so.
It is no accident that although professor Kráľ is a phonetician and professor Dolník is known for his works on general linguistics and sociolinguistics, the main points of the flamewar revolved around Bohemisms and in particular around two controversial words - "prádlo" ("laundry") and "hranolka" ("a french fry"). It is a symptom of our prescriptivism-infested linguistics that caring for and about standard Slovak basically consists of a) bitching about spelling and b) bitching about (the choice of) words. You don't get to hear much about morphology or syntax, like the English-influenced 3rd person singular possessive pronoun ( e.g. "váš" instead of "svoj") or the prevalence of passive constructions over the native reflexive-passive phrase (e.g. "návrh bude pripravený" versus "návrh sa pripraví"). As for a), this is particularly evidenced by Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (PSP). PSP is the authoritative publication on Slovak spelling and, to a very small extent, usage. It's THE book people will throw at you if they suspect you of violating the rules of standard Slovak. Moreover, it is the only such publication that is regularly updated and thus the only guide on "proper Slovak" that is available to the general public. Take this and the emphasis on spelling in elementary and secondary education and you shouldn't be surprised that for many, even those with college education, proper spelling = proper grammar (yes, tbc, I'm looking at you :o). That's pretty much how far caring about language goes in these parts. Except for b), naturally.
And thus although the flamewar mentioned above occasionally briefly delves into phonetics and morphology, its central points are the aforementioned borrowings from Czech and other issues of lexicology. As such, it offers further insights into the perpetual process of creating and enriching Slovak lexicon and the role of linguistics therein. Most notably, when it comes to letting the speakers decide what words to use for new concepts and things, Kráľ has the following to say (p. 81; note that my translation is not very literal - Kráľ's writing is a reader's and translator's nightmare):

Nepokladám za optimálny ani taký postup, v ktorom by kodifikátor iba čakal, kym používatelia jazyka rozhodnú o „osude" určitého javu.

I am not willing to condone an approach where the codifier only waits for the speakers to determine the "fate" of a particular phenomenon.

What a crock of shit. There are cca. 5 million native speakers of Slovak. There are maybe 200 linguists actively working in our universities and the Academy. Guess who is faster in inventing new words? And exactly how many times in the past 20 years were the linguists forced to wait for the public to come up with new words for new things and concepts? My entire tax bill (and this year, that's a lot of money) says never.
Folks, by now you probably know on which side of the P-D divide I pitched my tent and set up my sheesha. But let me just say this: if every time we needed a new Slovak word our mavens got together and came up with one, I'd be the first spreading it all across the land. I can't help but like what the Académie Francaise did in a similar case, the official French word for "email" - "courriel". Hell, I need such an intervention right now: my horse for a native word for "implementation"! Unfortunately, there are two problems here:

1. Like their French colleagues, our linguists are slooooow to move. 2003 is pretty late to pick a word for "email", isn't it? By that time, other terms have firmly established themselves. It goes to Académie's credit that they chose a word which was already sort-of in use (in Canada, that is). But that ain't how it works round here. To pick a very similar example and to entertain you with a personal anecdote: back in 2001, I worked on the localization of Windows XP and Office XP. I really enjoyed the work and the experience it provided me has proven invaluable, but it was also where I had my first run-in with Slovak prescriptivism. The companies involved in the project consulted a prominent Slovak linguist (who shall remain unnamed) on matters of style and usage. Style was fine with me. I really liked the guidelines on using leading words ( i.e. writing "spoločnosť Microsoft" instead of just "Microsoft") and I continue to follow most of what I learned there to this very day. But when it came to chosing a new word for a new concept, only the fact that I was a bit wet behind the ears kept me from voicing my disapproval in the strongest terms possible. Based on the decision of that linguist, Microsoft products and information sources translate "download" as "prevziať". "Prevziať", also meaning "to accept, to take over, to assume, to take on, to adopt." "Prevziať". We were supposed to translate "download" as "prevziať" when none of us, or indeed anyone, has ever used any other Slovak word than "stiahnuť". A beautiful purely native word originally meaning "to pull down" which had by that time gained wide acceptance not just among the geeks and the nerds, but also among wide population. And the effing lingoes throw it away and tell us we should use something else they just made up, something that no one has ever heard of, something artificial. Does it surprise anyone that Slovak linguists and their ideas of what is correct and proper are rarely taken seriously?
2. Unlike the illustrious members of Académie Francaise, our linguists have no legal means to implement their decisions and virtually no support from the government. Once AF picked courriel, the French Culture Ministry banned the use of any other term meaning "email" in official government documents and communication. Fat chance of that happening here. The government, bless their corrupt hearts, have other things on their mind. And even though the nationalists and the fascists (most of whom call themselves Christian Democrats these days) occasionally come up with some silly ideas on how to protect standard Slovak (usually by attempting to punish incorrect usage), the bill either dies in comittee or is thoroughly ignored by everybody. Again, does it surprise anyone that Slovak linguists and their ideas of what is correct and proper are rarely taken seriously?

All of that ran through my mind as I saw the first volume of SSSJ on that shelf in the bookstore a few weeks ago. I wondered whether strict purism would compel the editors to come down hard on many Bohemisms and the growing number of borrowings from English. I was also curious to see whether they would recognize the many changes our language and our society went through in the last 17 years and accept them for what they are: the proof that Slovak is alive and doing better than ever. And I was anxious to find out whether they would finally see that no language can only include a refined and cultured variety and reject everything else and whether they would finally see that what is spoken on the streets, in the classrooms and yes, even in reality shows, is the true Slovak. And that culture means more than Monday night adaptations and the occasional poem no one reads.

Having spent the last few weeks thinking about all of that, I also realize that although Kráľ and Dolník and many others claim to only speak about science when discussing these linguistic matters, the question of including certain words and rejecting others is anything but a theoretical issue. In the Slovak linguistic milieu (of which I hope I you have a much better idea now, though I certainly do not claim to be an unbiased observer), a dictionary is much more than a long-needed tool for language professionals and the general public. Since Slovak is a political tool, the question of the role of purism addresses not only issues of language, but also those of identity. As long as some fight to preserve the artificial nature of standard Slovak claiming to be the ones who own it while rejecting any changes or variations, standard Slovak will further divide rather than unite. And to accept the notion that only the High variety is acceptable for the use in the public arena and thus to renegade all other varieties to the periphery of society is an upfront not only to all language lovers, but also to all language users and indeed all people everywhere. Not to mention the fact that arbitrary decisions by prescriptivist assholes have cost me a lot of money in bills not honored because my translations have violated some silly rules. And arrogant stupid-ass prescriptivism just pisses me off.

In Part 4 of our series, we will finally return to the pages of SSSJ and observe how what we've discussed here plays out there. Please join us then.

References :
BOSÁK, Ján: Nárečia sa menia, postoje ostávajú? In: Sociolinguistica Slovaca 2 (1996), p. 25-36
DOLNÍK, Juraj: O prístupoch k spisovnej slovenčine. In: Slovenská reč 65 (2000/3), p. 149-155
GENZOR, Jozef: Zamyslenie nad normou a štandardizáciou. In: Sociolinguistica Slovaca 3 (1997), p. 134-147
KRÁĽ, Ábel: Odkiaľ vzali Slováci spisovnú slovenčinu? In: Slovenská reč 65 (2000/2), p. 71-85
PAULINY, Eugen: Krátka gramatika slovenská. - Bratislava: Národné literárne centrum, 1997 (a revised reprint of 4th edition, 1971)
PAULINY, Eugen: Dejiny spisovnej slovenčiny I. Od počiatkov až po Ľudovíta Štúra. - Bratislava: SPN, 1966.
PULLUM, Geoffrey K.: Ideology, power, and linguistic theory. Presented in a special session at the 2004 Convention of the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 2004. (online here)
ŠTOLC, Jozef: Slovenská dialektológia. - Bratislava: Veda, 1994.
ŽIGO Pavol; KRAJČOVIČ, Rudolf: Dejiny spisovnej slovenčiny . - Bratislava: Stimul, 2002.
Лифанов К.В.: Генезис словацкого литературного языка. - München: LINCOM, 2001.

SME

2007-03-03T22:28:00.000+01:00

For those of you who didn't already know: SME is without a doubt the most influential daily in Slovakia. That being said, it sucks big time. The last editor-in-chief was well known for his visceral hate of the former Prime Minister and it really showed. The current editor-in-chief fiels the same way about the current PM and it really shows. I usually don't read anything beyond national and local news and the occasional interview, especially since they stopped publishing Calvin and Hobbes regularly. The international news page is simply apalling: it's written by a bunch of ignorant half-educated slobs who wouldn't know the meaning of the word "bias" if it bit them in the ass. Just today, SME published an article by its Israeli correspondent on the upcoming holiday of Purim. The central point of the article is the usual hatemongering concerning Iran, this time in form of popular music, a song entitled "Push the Button" reported to refer to Ahmadinejad. How was the article introduced? By explaining the origin of Purim and thereby referring to a Persian king who wanted to exterminate all the Jews and equating that king with the current president of Iran all the while insinuating that there are ancient feelings of hatred held by the Persians for the Jews.
Needless to say, wrong, wrong and wrong. Haman was the first minister, not the king (Esther 3:6). Achašveroš (probably Xerxes, though some insist it's Artaxerxes) protected the Jews and in the end punished Haman for what he attempted to do (Esther 8:7). And just in case anyone would choose to believe that bit about how Persians hate the Jews and vice-versa, just remember Cyrus the Great and the fact that Isaiah 45:1 refers to him as "God's annointed", מְשִׁיחַ.

So you understand the nervous twitch I get everytime I spot a language or linguistics-related article in SME. And oh boy, it's two-for-one day at SME Plaza! Just look at the title of this report on a petition put forward by Slovak Rusyns:

"Rusíni chcú návrat staroslovienčiny do liturgií"

"Rusyns Demand Return of Old Church Slavonic Liturgy"

I don't even need to read the article to spot two examples of grade-A BS:

1. Old Church Slavonic hasn't been in use as a language of liturgy in Slavic countries for several hundred years. Some time in the 12th century (possibly much later), it was replaced by Church Slavic.

2. Rusyns cannot even demand the return of Church Slavic since it was never abolished. To my knowledge, Slovak Greek-Catholic (Uniat) Church still gives the priests and the congregations the choice of using either Church Slavic or Slovak in liturgy. True, the use of Church Slavic is in decline (and it's my fault, too), but it is by no means uncommon, let alone something that the worshippers must demand.

It gets better after that. Contrary to the impression given by the title, the first paragraph claims that the focus of the petition is not the return of Church Slavic, but that the undersigned request the return of the use of the newly codified Rusyn language in liturgy. Confused? You ain't seen nothin' yet. To my knowledge, Rusyn has never been officially used as a liturgical language. And indeed if you read the actual text of the petition, you will find that the undersigned voice their dissatisfaction with the fact that most Greek-Catholic priest were trained in Slovak, not Rusyn, that there are no translations of Gospels, prayer books and textbooks into Rusyn and that neither priests nor bishops are willing to deliver sermons and read from the Gospels in (codified) Rusyn. In other words, the petition requests that the Rusyn faithful be given the same rights as every other ethnic group recognizing the authority of the Pope which is to worship in their own native language. But you wouldn't learn that from the article. And that's a pity, because neither the text of the petition nor the article and those interviewed for the article make it clear what the relationship between Church Slavic and Rusyn should be according to the Rusyn Academy. Now there is a question I'd love to see answered.

Did I mention how much I hate journalists?

Oh and if you can read this, it means that the technical problems plaguing me have been at least partly resolved and we will resume our regularly scheduled programming shortly.

grammys

2007-02-12T22:18:00.000+01:00

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

2007-02-12T04:47:00.000+01:00

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

2007-02-12T04:35:00.000+01:00

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

2007-02-12T04:20:00.000+01:00

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...)

crap

2007-01-30T00:05:00.000+01:00

I seem to be having problems posting. Whether it's just blogger goofing on me, or my ISP doing something weird or the combination of all of the above aided by the newly-installed Firefox 2, I don't know, but I'm working to sort it out. Please stand by.

UPDATE: test test

UPDATE: eeeeexcellent!

it's here!

2007-01-26T23:00:00.000+01:00

By God, they did it. They actually did it. I ... I ... Wow.

I don't know how they managed to keep it a secret for so long. Sure, there have been rumors, mostly having to do with the Slovak National Corpus and there's been talk of CD/DVD-ROMs. But as I walked into the bookstore of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV) this afternoon, I could not believe what I saw. There it was, fresh off the presses, seeing the inside of a bookstore for the first time - the long-awaited first comprehensive dictionary of the Slovak language ever and the first real dictionary of the Slovak language since 1959.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first glimpse of Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka (Dictionary of Current Slovak).

Now I've been giving the good folks over at the SAV Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics hard time over the lack of a decent current grammar and/or dictionary. Today, I'm taking it back. And that's all the taking I'm doing today. You see, I got to the bookstore at four in the afternoon, by which time they only had two copies of the Dictionary left, both of them already reserved and paid for. But first thing Monday, I'm getting my own copy and once I have examined it, I shall be certain to share my thoughts with you. I'm sure that there many questions on your mind. Does it include etymology? Which side of the prescriptivist-descriptivist divide will it fall on? Are we perhaps witnessing the birth of a new era in Slovak linguistics and maybe even language policy? Dammit, I can't wait for it to be Monday!

*Buzássyová, K.; Jarošová, A.: Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka. - Bratislava: Veda, 2006.
Picture courtesy of the official website of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

librivox

2007-01-25T20:26:00.000+01:00

Busy busy busy. Real busy. So here's some good stuff I came across somewhere in between Dutch mining laws and Finnish road signs:

Librivox is a site which "provides free audiobooks from the public domain" recorded by volunteers. The catalog lists several hundred works in 15 languages, including Hebrew, Latin and Old English. I came for Juhanni Aho's "Helsinkiin" (which pleasantly surprised me by its quality matching that of commercial audiobooks. Well done, Tuija!), but stayed for "Three Short Stories in the Maastricht Dialect" (plus the text). I just love wacky dialects!

The Digital Archive (via PaleoJudaica.com) contains many free e-books of older date on all matters Oriental and Near Neastern. Thatcher's/Harder's "Arabic Grammar of the Written Language", "Syriac Grammar" by George Philips and "Higher Persian Grammar" by D.C. Phillott should be enough to capture most of y'all's attention. And if it's not, there's also all kinds of stuff on Ottoman and Persian literature, early Church and general history to keep a guy/gal busy for months. Internet, you gotta love it.

Sahidica is a by-product of my decision to delve into the secrets of the Coptic language (inspired by viewing "The Lost Gospels" and "Stargate: The Director's Cut"*). It includes the New Testament in parallel Sahidic Coptic and Greek with a lexicon of Sahidic and a Bohairic version of NT as a bonus. And the editor seems to have done a great job comparing and editing various published editions of NT in Sahidic. Hooray for good old fashioned philology!

* Yeah, I know, it was Egyptian. But hieroglyphs scare the willies out of me. Next best thing 'n' all.

szerelemnyelv

2007-01-11T20:26:00.000+01:00

...which is Hungarian for 'the language of love'. Which can only mean French, right?
Well, no.

Earlier today, I was rereading "A cigánybáró" ("The Gypsy Baron"), my favorite novel by the Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai. Set in 18th century Banát, it is a charming story of a young nobleman returning home from exile in Turkey to reclaim his title and his inheritance. The multilingual world of medieval and early modern Hungary meeting the multilingual world of the Ottoman Empire described in Jókai's playful prose is a linguistic feast. I'm still trying to find out what "kurugja" is and who is meant by "Ali Kurd". And does anyone have any idea what kind of tobacco "boktsatütün" ("bokçatütün"?) is?

In chapter 5 ("The Sevenfold Trials of Baronhood"), our protagonist is spending some time at the estate of baron Feuerstein where he is subjected not only to the trials, but - as a poor expatriate - also to the general ridicule of the assembled nobility. Describing how, as a part of the trials, the protagonist has just learned French in one afternoon (How indeed, you ask? Read the novel, I answer.), the narrator offers this insight into the linguistic milieu of 18th century Austro-Hungarian empire:

Most már aztán nem lehetett vele mókázni a háta mögött, mert megértette, amit franciául beszéltek; németül konversálni pedig úri társaságban nem volt szokás: ez csak a szerelem nyelve, négyszemközötti társalgásra való.

From now on, they could no longer mock him behind his back speaking French. And German was not commonly spoken in the high society: it is solely a language of love, more suitable for an intimate conversation.

How things change...

umberto

2007-01-05T19:28:00.000+01:00

In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of straight way, which remains even when the path is tortous.

The Name of the Rose (Random House Vintage 1998), p. 15

Happy birthday, professor.

arrrrrrrgh

2007-01-03T20:00:00.000+01:00

Why didn't I think of that? Why did it only occur to me today while reading languagehat's first post of the year where he slams William Safire for getting it totally wrong again - this time concerning the Persian suffix "-stan" - and adds:

..."home of" isn't exact, but it gives the general idea. ("Place of" would be better; it's from the Indo-European root *stā- 'stand,' and in Persian it's also used in words like registan 'place of sand, desert' and gulistan 'place of roses, rose garden.')

That's when it hit me: Bulbulistan. An 18th century poetic composition in Persian by a Bosnian poet Fawzī al-Mostarī (Bosnian: Fevzi Mostarac, i.e. Fevzi of Mostar, some sources give the name Fevzi Blagajac) modeled after Saʿdī's "Gulistān". One of the manuscripts of Kitāb-i bulbulistān is preserved in the Bašagić Collection of Bosnian islamic manuscripts in Bratislava's University Library.

Now if only I had thought of bulbulistan back in August ... But I didn't and so I went for the same concept ("place of"), but with the Slavic suffix -ovo, like in the names of Bulgarian cities Veliko Tǎrnovo and Gabrovo (whose inhabitants have - undeservedly, no doubt - a reputation for being skinflints). As for Slovak municipalities with names featuring this suffix, it would appear that they have been named after a historical personality:

Bernolákovo - Anton Bernolák
Gabčíkovo - Jozef Gabčík
Golianovo - general Ján Golian (one of the commanders of Slovak National Uprising)
Hurbanovo - Jozef Miloslav Hurban (an ally of Štúr, one of the creators of modern Slovak)
Štúrovo - Ľudovít Štúr

Or the founder:

Trebostovo - a 13th-century nobleman by the name of Treboš.

The only exception is Námestovo, probably derived from námestie = town square, market square, most likely referring to its status as a market town.

Seriously, bulbulistan, what a great name that could have been. Ah well, too late now. At least I'll update the picture.

best

2006-12-31T08:00:00.000+01:00

This is my humble contribution to the third annual Ralphies.

BOOK - FICTION:
Andrzej Sapkowski: "Lux Perpetua", the final volume in his Hussite trilogy. In the interest of full disclosure I'd like to add that I have not read it yet and that's because I'm an idiot who decided to wait for the translation. Well not anymore. The first thing I'm doing come January 2nd is ordering it from Poland.

BOOK - SCHOLARLY:
Come to think of it, the only scholarly book published in 2006 I've read was Jonathan Owens' "Linguistic History of Arabic". But still, even if it were the only scholarly book published this year, it would certainly have to be mentioned as the most significant contribution to Arabistik in 2006. Now as for being 'the best'...

MOVIE:
I haven't seen many movies this year, but of those that I have, the biggest surprise was "Devil Wears Prada". I loved it. I also liked "Casino Royale", though I don't think it deserves a place on any Best of 2006 list. "The Queen" does.
Worst of 2006: "Superman Returns". I paid 160 Sk for the ticket. To think that this is the price of a Romeo y Julieta No. 3...

BEST TV:
Sky One's adaptation of Terry Pratchett's "The Hogfather". Though I still have my doubts about Noby Nobbs and the Tower of Art (is it really that high?), it was everything a Pratchett fan could have hoped for. I'd love to see them do "Thief of Time" and not just because I want to see Michelle Dockery as Susan again.
I understand many of you would expect to see "Doctor Who" here. I'm sorry, I can't. Although I enjoyed it immensely and I firmly believe that David Tennant is the best doctah evah, I just can't overlook the silliness so typical of season 28. I could swallow the alternate Earth storyline, though it strongly reminded me of the alternative reality in later seasons of ST:DS9. But "Love and Monsters" virtually reeked of shark and the ending of "Fear Her" was simply cheesy. The olympic dream is dead just because someone dropped the torch? Give me a lovin' break. And don't get me started on the season finale.
And yes, Ma'am, the theme is Torchwood, we get it!

Honorable mentions:
"How I Met Your Mother", episode 2x09 "Slap Bet". The best laugh I had all year. Not to mention that the writer single-handedly rehabilitated slapstick comedy in my eyes.
And the best TV moment: Stephen Colbert and the Hungarian ambassador.

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

And finally, best wishes for 2007 to everyone, especially you, David and cjmr :o)

cnn

2006-12-30T22:09:00.000+01:00

40+ tv channels and nothing good on, what do you do? You turn to CNN or N24 hoping for a documentary. I was not disapointed, since CNN was showing a documentary on early Christianity called "After Jesus". I tuned in just before 21:00 CET (about halfway through) as the narrator (Liam Neeson, apparently, though minus his gorgeous accent in "Love, Actually") got to the Simon bar Kochba revolt and anounced that in the next part (after the commercial), we will be hearing more about the conflicts in the early Church, especially gnosticism. And that's where my ~~bullshit~~ Dan Brown radar went off.

Regrettably, I was right. One would think one had nothing to worry about seeing that CNN decided to consult authorities such as Richard A. Freund or Bart Ehrman who were, naturally, great. Yet the narration framing the entire documentary was all wrong. There are things one could just let go, like equating gnosticism with mysticism. But no matter how impressive Liam Neeson's Aslan voice is, a large number of the statements made in the narration (which accounts for cca. 70% of the entire program) were either misleading or plain false. Just a few examples:

- The narration states that the texts in the Nag Hammadi library were authored by the monks of the nearby St. Panochius monastery. Not only is this not true (the general opinion is that the monks were only hiding the texts from the orthodox church), but also it implies that these works are a product of a small fringe sect and not a popular movement or movements within the early Christian church.

- The narration states that the apocryphal gospels offer a different biography of Jesus than the canonical ones. The chief example it gives is the Gospel of Thomas - which does not contain any biographical information on Jesus at all.

- Once the narration got to explaining what is so important about the gnostic gospels, the first on the list was - you guessed it - the role of women and especially Mary Magdalene in the early Church, accompanied by the now famous saying 114 from the Gospel of Thomas:

Simon Peter said to them, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life."
Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

- The narration described the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library as "perhaps the greatest threat" to Christianity in the last 2000 years. I'm sure many a theologian would strongly disagree. Moreover, the writers seem to believe - mistakingly, as many have repeatedly pointed out - that people's faith would be shattered with the discovery of documents which post-date Jesus by at least two centuries.

Besides sensationalism so typical of the media (et tu, CNN?), the last two clearly show the effects the gospel according to Dan has had on the perception of the history of Christianity. One cannot help but wonder why the creators of the documentary bothered to talk to actual scholars if they were not ready to provide them with enough space. A skilled director could have let the experts speak and used the narration to introduce their comments and tie them together. Instead, the writers of "After Jesus" resigned themselves to repeating the currently popular wisdom and used the scholars they interviewed (and the names of their institutions) to give the program an air of seriousness. The result was another opportunity missed.

I had my doubts about BBC's "The Lost Gospels", too. They might have as well named it "The Bart Ehrman Show", since it was apparently based on Bart Ehrman's "Lost Christianities" and featured a lot of Bart Ehrman. But for all of its deficiencies and the difference in scope and subject, it made a much better job of explaining the actual issues and the historical context. Not to mention the lovely cinematography. And we got to see the original text of the Gospel of Thomas.

Here's a more comprehensive review of "After Jesus", this time from an evangelical perspective and with a lot of actual quotes from the program.

es-sams?

2006-12-29T22:45:00.000+01:00

Let us consider the following passages from a North-African šarḥ of the targum to Song of Songs*:

ווּקְפוּ לוֹ אֵסַמְס וּלְקַמַר
u-waqfū lo es-sams u-l-qamar (ŠM 1:1)

כִּיף אוּלַאַד לַחְבָּאַסָא
kīf awlād la-ḥbāsa (ŠM 1:5)

כַמָא אֲלְדִי זֵין וּמַשְכּוּר אֵתְרֻנְגְ בֵין אַסְזַ'ר
kamā aldī zēn u-maškūr etrung (et-trung?) bēn asžar (ŠM 2:3)

The use of term la-ḥbāsa is interesting in itself. The Aramaic text reads כִּבְנוֹי דְכּוּש, i.e. "like children of Kūš". כּוּש is a well-known Old Testament name of (so Strong 03568):

a Benjamite mentioned only in the title of Ps 7,2
the son of Ham and grandson of Noah and the progenitor of the southernmost peoples located in Africa
the peoples descended from Cush
the land occupied by the descendants of Cush located around the southern parts of the Nile (Ethiopia)

Apparently, כּוּש is used in targum to Canticles either referring to the descendants of Cush or as the name of the country we know now as Ethiopia. Should the latter be the case, it wouldn't be surprising that the translator chose to use the equivalent in his target language, i.e. الحبشة. After all, many before and after him did so, like St. Jerome in the Vulgate or the translators of the KJV. Die Lutherbibel, on the other hand, has "Kusch" and even "Nile" (Esther 1:1 "...der König war vom Indus bis zum Nil..."). So far so good, yet there is one mystery: why the voiceless alveolar fricative [s] instead of the voiceless post-alveolar fricative [š]? And it's not just la-ḥbāsa, but also es-sams (الشمس) and asžar (اشجار). What up with that?

As expected, Handbuch** has a few words to say on the subject. According to the chapter on the dialects of Maghrib (p. 253), in the Jewish dialects of Tunis and Susa, the [s] and [š] sounds have merged. Furthermore, [š] and [ž] are the only phonemes which can occur in a non-emphatic environment, while [s] and [z] only appear when followed by a non-emphatic [r]. Hmmm... Where have I heard this before? Ah yes, David Cohen's Le parler arabe des juifs de Tunis: Textes et documents linguistiques et ethnographiques (Mouton & Co, 1964; henceforth: Parler I). It would appear that Parler I was the source of this particular passage in Handbuch, so let us check the original. In addition to the observations above (which seem to have been taken over word by word), Cohen notes that [š] and [ž] appear to be both the non-emphatic counterparts of [ṣ] and [ẓ] and their allophones in a non-emphatic environment. He illustrates the phenomen with the following example (p. 13):

ẓāṛ = "neighbor" (<<< ǧwr; note the emphatic [ṛ])
x
žirǟn = "neighbors"

So instead of the typical sets [s] - [š] - [ṣ] and [z] - [ž] - [ẓ], we have [š] - [ṣ] and [ž] - [ẓ] with [s] and [z] as positional allophones only appearing before non-emphatic [r]. Sounds pretty straightforward and there are plenty of examples in Parler I texts:

tūnǝš ("Tunis")
ǝnnǟš ("people")
ḫämš ("five")
šǝ́mʿū ("they heard")
lǟžǝm ("must")
žǟdä ("moreover, in addition")

and, as expected (note the [r]),

yǝsǝryu ("they buy", p.38)
yǟsǝr ("very", p. 153)
yǝzri ("he/it runs", p. 116)

and so on and so forth. Nice and neat, ain't it?

Well, no. You see, there are more than a few words in Parler I which directly contradict Cohen's observations. Examples:

sisǟn (Cohen: "choses fundamentales", p. 57)
zǟd ("more", p. 60)
ḥwǟyǝz ("clothes", p. 153)
zǝ́mäʿtäyn ("two weeks", p. 81)
ʿlǟs ("why", p. 92)

Note the absence of [r] in the words above. And just in case Cohen got it wrong and the influence of [r] stretches across word boundaries, note that none of the words above appear anywhere near [r] - ʿlǟs even occurs in a one-word sentence. Since they appear in a close proximity to an emphatic consonant (suprasegmentally or not), one might - just might - expect tafḫīm-induced variants like *ʿlǟṣ or *ḥwǟyǝẓ. But based on Cohen's description, the only possible option is žǟd (see the list above), and ḥwǟyǝž.

And finally, if you look closely at the list above, you will spot at least two words in which one would expect [ž] and [š] in any modern dialect of Arabic:

zǝ́mäʿtäyn ("two weeks", p. 81)
ʿlǟs ("why", p. 92)

Which brings us back to the original question: why ʿlǟs in Parler I if ʿlǟš makes perfect sense (see e.g. Maltese għaliex), why es-sams instead of eš-šams/eš-šamš in ŠM?
The possible explanations I have been able to come up with so far are as follows:

1. Hypercorrections.
Cohen himself notes in Parler I that in literary texts, "the typical opposition of š - s and ṣ - s is restored throughout (with the expected number of errors and confusions)" (p. 16, translation mine).
PRO: Some of Cohen's other observations concerning the language of literary texts (e.g. ǝldi or variations thereof instead of ǝlli as the relative pronoun) do seem to correspond with what I've seen so far in ŠM. And hypercorrections are a staple of any Judeo-Arabic text.
CONTRA: Some of Cohen's other observations concerning the language of literary texts do not apply to ŠM - for example, I have yet to notice a high number of Hebrew words and phrases and the tendency to restore [h].
As for confusions, the anonymous author of ŠM appears to be not only a skilled translator, but also very well versed in grammar and phonology (more on that later). People's 2 (note the sorta-apostrophe following the second zayin):

עָלָא זוז' לְוּוַּאַח
ʿalā zōž lwāḥ (ŠM 1:2)

Examples like these indicate that the translator was very well aware of the difference between [z] and [ž] (and, conversely, [s] and [š]). Confusion - at least in this case - is thus very improbable.

2. Change in progress
The exceptions to the rules of the merger of [s]/[š] and [z]/[ž] postulated by Cohen himself noted in Parler I as well as the even higher ocurrence of such exceptions in ŠM may indicate that the merger described by Cohen was far from completed at the time Cohen spoke to his informants and had only recently begun at the time ŠM was composed.
PRO: this phenomenon is - as far as I know - unattested in other pre-Hilalian varieties of Arabic (Maltese, Siculo-Arabic).
CONTRA: such a late phonetic development, though not at all impossible, is quite unlikely.

3. Other
I've been working under one particular assumption here, assuming that ŠM is from Tunisia. I have no doubt it was written in Maghrib (more on that later), but aside from historical considerations (large Jewish population of Tunisia, a large number of Judeo-Arabic works published by Belforte & Co. are of Tunisian provenance etc.) and the [s]/[š] - [z]/[ž] alternation, I have no other proof of its Tunisian origin. It could very well have been composed in Morocco, Algeria or even Libya by a speaker of another dialect with different phonetic rules and pecularities.
That still would not explain the contradictions observed in Parler I, though.

To be continued...

*Sefer šir ha-širimʿim pitron targum ve-arvi. Leghorn: Solomon Belforte & Co, 1854-55. Henceforth: ŠM (šarḥ maġribī).
** Fischer & Jastrow: Handbuch der arabischen Dialekte. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1980.

hackenporsche

2006-12-22T21:04:00.000+01:00

I.e. "heel Porsche". That was the correct answer to the question "Womit düsen vornehmlich die Senioren zum Supermarkt" (roughly: "What do the senior citizens drive to the supermarket?") in today's edition of "Wer wird Millionär?" ("Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?").
The contestant admitted that he had not heard any of the four options before and had to ask the audience. Luckily, the good people there were more than confident and 80% of them picked the word above. Other options were similarly structured compounds noun1+noun2, where

noun1 = a body part (besides "Hacken" = heels, I only remember "Sohlen" = soles), and
noun2 = a sports car (Ferrari, Maserati).

As Günther Jauch revealed to the contestant, the 20% of the audience and to me, a "Hackenporsche" is a shopping bag (usually tartan, so some sources) with steel frame and wheels, like these. Needless to say, ROFLMAO. Compounding, especially the German kind, you gotta love it.
And while the official term is apparently "Einkaufsroller", I have absolutely no idea what the English word is (if, indeed, there is one). Any ideas?

bellum

2006-12-14T04:15:00.000+01:00

So there I was, in my infinite arrogance, thinking nothing in this world will ever surprise me. Then one day (this Monday, to be specific), as I was sitting at my computer searching the vast virtual planes of the internet for the best translation for one thing or another, my eyes spotted something I had not considered possible.
The place: YLE Colloquia Latina, the Latin-language chat of the Finnish Public Broadcasting Company.
The marvel of all marvels: a flamewar in Latin.
Lingua mortua? Minime*!

* That's how the French "Non!" is translated in the Latin editions of Asterix.

vato

2006-12-08T09:00:00.000+01:00

Thanks to gastan, I learned a new word just the other day. When he asked me what the title of a Snoop Dogg (feat. B-Real and Pharrell) song "Vato" meant, I had to (yet again) admit my ignorance and put my Google skillz to use. And lo, behold, check this out yo!

vato = Mexican Spanish. 1. man; 2. dude; 3. homeboy

According to the wikipedia article,

the word originated in Pachuco slang of the 1940s, and is derived from "the once-common friendly insult chivato, or goat. It had a slightly unacceptable air to it, which the Locos and Weesas of the Chuco world enjoyed. They were able to take the sting out of racism by calling themselves a bunch of names assimilated 'good Mexicans' didn't like."

It would appear that this is one of those situations where a minority community took a word commonly used to insult them and accepted it as a symbol of their distinctiveness, thus changing its meaning and even turning it to a symbol of defiance. Other examples may include the N-word or even the words cigán/cikán/cigány, normally a pejorative name, yet one used with pride by the Roma of Eastern Europe (before the post-1989 Roma revival) to emphasize and embrace their status as a minority and their distinctive culture.

The urbandictionary entry seems to agree on the original social context of the term, as it lists vato as a part of the gangsta slang and the equivalent of American English homeboy, which is also a word with strong gangsta culture connotation. On the other hand, there are more than a few examples which show the word in non-gangsta environment. One of them is item no. 4 in the above mentioned urbandictionary entry. Also, George Lopez uses the word vato in a plain, non-gangsta sense in one of his routines where he discusses the inability of Chicano men to express their emotions:

Vatos never wanna tell 'em ... that we love 'em.

("Team Leader", Track 13 - 'Love You-Sober')

Interestingly enough, Snoop Dogg's "Vato" may complete the circle: his popularity and his association with the gangsta culture could very well help supress the neutral meaning vato has acquired and reestablish it as a firm part of the cholo culture. Watch this space for further developments.

avestan

2006-11-30T06:43:00.000+01:00

As my current research (what little of it I have time for these days) leads me further and further into the realms of Old Testament studies et alia, I find myself enjoying James R. Davila's PaleoJudaica more and more. Aside from being the best online resource for pseudepigrapha, PaleoJudaica is THE place to get your info on Dead Sea Scrolls and various other things Judaic and ancient Near Eastern. And if that's not enough for all you language freaks, go check out yesterday's post where professor Davila links to the home page of Iranian studies at Harvard, which contains introductory textbooks for Avestan, Old Persian and Sogdian by P. O. Skjaervø and reference grammars of both Sorani and Kurmanji Kurdish by W. M. Thackston.

And on a personal note: how would you feel if you had just spent three days busting your behind arranging a last-minute trip to Mauritius (no small feat, since the holiday season is about the start and most of the good hotels are booked solid) only to find out that contrary to previous plans you're not going? Because I'm a little miffed.

gurnisht

2006-11-21T04:33:00.000+01:00

If I were, as the Germans say, poetisch veranlagt, I'd sing to you of the joys of being self-employed - the idiot boss, the long hours, the lousy pay (couple of weeks late, again), very little time for anything else etc. etc. But I am not and besides, I can't, I've got to make the deadline.
As a result, I got nothing for you. Absolutely nothing. Nada. Ничего. גורנישט*.

*Courtesy of the Yiddish Radio Project. Needs Real Player. Trust me, it's worth it.