la madelaine de saussure

Thanks to the blog, Bradshaw of the Future (link), I’ve come across the wonderfully named Memiyawanzi, also a blog, which is named after a Hittite word. (The stem of this word is memija ‘word; deed’ which is cognate with some other IE words meaning either ‘to speak’ (Old Russian měniti ‘speak’) or ‘to think, remember’ (Sanskrit manyate ‘s/he thinks’); see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans p.394.) Anyway, the blogger therein has a wonderfully moody piece about bibliomania and having bought online a copy of Johannes Schweighæuser’s 1825 Lexicon Herodoteum. This reminded me in one powerful Proustian moment of my having bought a second edition of F. de Saussure’s Système primitif de voyelles. I got it from a marvelous used book store (link) nearby in the next town over from where I live, nestled as it is behind an abandoned Target store. I am one of Michael’s few walk-in customers. My standard question whenever I visit is “Have any linguists died?” I bought the Saussure from the as-yet-unpriced library of an ex-Africanist, Charleton Hodge. He had acquired the book in 1961, as he duly noted on the front page. But, what really caught my eye was the bookplate on the front endpaper. The book had been in the library at Johns Hopkins University at one time as part of the Stratton Memorial Library. Who was Alfred William Stratton [1866–1902], who had received his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1902 and had been the Principal of the Oriental College and the Registrar of the Punjab University, at Lehore? The book had been donated to the library, but as was penciled in above the bookplate it had been “replaced by Collitz 1879 copy”. That would have to be Professor Hermann Collitz, Indo-Europeanist, first president of the LSA in 1924, and who had retired from Johns Hopkins in 1927. Collitz had died in 1935, and, so I wondered, when had my copy been replaced, and where had it been before Hodge bought it. Better yet, who was A W Stratton? Turns out he was a student of Professor Maurice Bloomfield [1855–1928], philologist and Sanskrit scholar. I found out that Stratton’s widow had published his Letters From India in 1908, and about which more in a subsequent post.

erzjan' kel'

The Russian Orthodox Church has its 16th patriarch, Kiril I (né Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev; Wikipedia; Novinite). According to the Wikipedia article he is of Erzya-Mordvin ethnic origin. Erzya (Эрзянь кель) is a Finno-Ugric language with about half a million speakers. Reading up on Erzya led me to the Finno-Ugric Electronic Library (link). (The English interface has some problems, but for those who read Russian it’s a good resource.)

mapping bad habits

Cartocacoethes :- a mania, uncontrollable urge, compulsion or itch to see maps everywhere. John Krygier discusses the world’s allegedly oldest map from Çatalhöyük (link).

The Çatalhöyük “map” provides a great case study of the perils of prehistoric map hunting.

The Çatalhöyük map was first brought to attention in a 1964 article entitled “Excavations at Çatal Höyük, 1963, Third Preliminary Report” by James Mellaart Anatolian Studies 14 (1964, pp. 39–119).

Image by John Swogger via Flickr.

[Via Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary (link) via Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words Newsletter (link).]

ick bin ein lexikon

Languagehat recently posted about reading Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (link), and that got me to started wondering about the Berlin dialect. Long post short, I found a Berlinisch Lexikon online (link).

ad annum per gerras

Happy New Year one and all! And for our German friends, Dinner For One, a Silvester treat (link and link).

be all like

Two things about seeing Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York in a Berkeley multiplex cinema yesterday: (1) the small theater in which we saw the movie was furnished with a small number of comfy chairs and couches, and (2) I found myself drawn into the conversation of a couple of strangers sitting behind me. It started with one fellow’s lament about the abuse of like as a discourse marker, a quotative, and a linguistic hedge or filler (link, link, and link). I held my silence, but when they were all like: “And then there’s go for said!” Still I ignored them. Mainly because I could not remember the linguistics term quotative go for this grammatical feature of the informal register in my own ideolect. But, they did not stop there, and finally they wondered, just a bit too loudly, about using the present tense to report something that had happened in the past. “It’s called the historic present,” I said (link). And then after a awkward pause, I added: “It’s good to finally get some use out of my linguistic degree.” We all of us laughed nervously and then lapsed into silence and waited for the movie to begin. It was wonderful.

tycho magnetic anomaly one

It’s not like somebody tagged me with the Alphabet Movie Meme (link), except maybe myself. So here comes the list: Aguirre der Zorn Gottes, Berlin Chamissoplatz, A Cock and Bull Story, The Draughtsman's Contract, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, Falsche Bewegung, The Great Gabbo, Helsinki Napoli All Night Long, India Song, Johnny Stecchino, Kamikaze 1989, Ladri di saponette, La Maman et la putain, Nuit et brouillard, Ossessione, Pasqualino Settebellezze, Q, Roma, Stalker, Teorema, Unforgiven, Vivement dimanche!, Le Week-end, X, Yojimbo, and Z.