Here's the state of language legislation in France at the moment.
It seems a bit extreme to me, because I really don't think that French is in any danger of being replaced by English, now or in the foreseeable future. I wouldn't want my government telling me how to speak and write, which is why I don't care for the English as the official language legislation that is afoot here in the States either. (Here's a good set of links for those curious about US language politics.) It's ironic that a Canadian-Japanese immigrant linguist turned senator was involved.
Notre définition de la langue suppose que nous en écartons tout ce qui est étranger à son organisme, à son système, en un mot tout ce qu'on désigne par le terme de linguistique externe Cette linguistique-là s'occupe pourtant de choses importantes, et c'est surtout à elles que l'on pense quand on aborde l'étude du langage.
Ce sont d'abord tous les points par lesquels la linguistique touche à ethnologie …
En second lieu, il faut mentionner les raltions existant entre la langue et l'histoire politique …
Ceci nous amène à un troisième point: les rapportes de la langue avec des institutions de toute sorte, l'Église, l'école, etc. Celles-ci, á leur tour, son intimement liées avec le développement littéraire d'une langue, phénoméne d'autant plus général qu'il est lui-même inséperable de l'histoire politique. La langue littéraire dépasse de toutes parts les limites que semble lui tracer la littérature; qu'on pense à l'influence des salons, de la cour, des académies. D'autre part elle pose la grosse question du conflit qui s'élève entre elle et les dialectes locaux; le linguiste doit aussi examiner les rapports réciproques de la langue littéraire, produit de la culture, arrive à détacher sa sphère d'existence de la sphère naturelle, celle de la langue parlée.
[Ferdinand de Saussure. 1915. Cours de linguistique générale, introduction, chapitre 5]
Translation [Wade Baskin]:
My definition of language pressuposes the exclusion of everything that is outside its organism or system — in a word, of everthing known as "external linguistics." But external linguistics deals with many important things — the very ones that we think of when we begin the study of speech.
First and foremost come all the points where linguistics borders on ethnology …
Second come the relations between language and political history …
Here we come to a third point: the relations between languages and all sorts of institutions (the Church, the school, etc.). All these institutions in turn are closely tied to the literary development of a language, a general phenomenon that is all the more inseparable from political history. At every point the literary language oversteps the boundaries that literature apparently marks off; we need only consider the influence of salons, the court, and national academies. Moreover, the literary language raises the important questions of conflicts between it and the local dialects; the linguist must also examine the reciprical relations of book language and the vernacular; for every literary language, being the product of the culture, finally breaks away from its natural sphere, the spoken language.
I'd like to thank Miladus ad usum Delphinorum for drawing my attention to an interesting quotation, which he posted on his blog. It's from the Jesuit grammarian and rhetor, Dominique Bouhours [1634-1702].
Comme la parole est le lien de la société, et que la langue qu'une nation parle est commune à toute la nation; le public seul peut déterminer ce qui regarde la parole.
Il faut qu'un mot, pour estre receu, ait les suffrages du peuple qui doit s'en servir. Et de mesme que dans les Royaumes électifs, l'élection d'un Prince n'est point légitime, si les Estats assemblez ne le choisissent d'un commun accord; dans les Langues une diction nouvelle n'est point autorisée, si toute la société, ou du moins la plus saine partie de la société ne se déclare en sa faveur.
Dominique Bouhours. 1674, 1682 (2nd ed.). Doutes sur la langue françoise proposez a messieurs de l'Académie Françoise par un gentilhomme de province.]
So, does the French Academy represent French speakers in the same way that National Assembly represents French citizens? I don't know. My problem with academies in general is that they tend towards conservatism rather than innovation. If a majority of francophones used the term le software, how has the Academy served them by replacing this anglicism with le logiciel? Let the record show that I think the IT industry here in California should borrow the latter to replace the former. I guess a devil's advocate would compare the Academy to the W3C organization. After all it's just trying to standardize French. So why don't standards bodies upset me as much as language academies? I'm not sure, but I suppose it's because I'm not a native speaker of C++ or XML. Natural languages are also capable of taking care of themselves, but not so our brittle artificial ones.
My provisional translation:
As speech binds society, and the language that a nation speaks is common to all the nation; the public alone can determine what speech is.
It is necessary that a word, to be received, has the votes of the people who must make use of it. And likewise in elective kingdoms, the election of a prince is not legitimate, if the assembly does not choose him by mutual agreement; in languages a new usage is not authorized, if all the company, or at least the healthiest part of the company is not declared in its favor.
Seggi zeneise a riso ræ, bûzzanchitene da tutti e pârlighe ciæo.
"Sii genovese a riso rado, fottitene di tutti e parlagli chiaro". Questo motto, ancora così vivo e usato, è "un biglietto da visita" che i genovesi, e per estensione tutti i liguri, esibiscono con molto piacere. Insomma se fosse possible, tutti i nati su questa striscia di terra, inserirebbero il: "Sii genovese di sorriso rado, fregatene di tutti e parla chiaro", nel cartiglio del proprio stemma nobilare. Certo, non tutti i liguri sono così, ce n'è qualcuno che sorride o ride con facilità, ma ciò non toglie che al "parlighe ciæo" ci presta tengono tutti, proprio tutti. Il proverbio, come è immaginablile, si presta a una infinità di varianti. Una delle più gustose è quella che usano i bambini, e non solo loro, quando vogliono dimostrare di essere genovesi al cento per cento. Questa versione fa: "Son zeneise a riso ræ, strenzo i denti e parlo ciæo", e i denti, dicendolo, li tengono stretti veramente.
[Ennio Celant. Proverbi liguri: curiosità, origini, storia, p. 107]
Bûzancâ v. a. Rovinare, Guastare, Conquasare, Conciar male, Mandar a male.
Andâse fâ bûzancâ; Andar in rovia, Andar a gambe alzate, Rimaner brullo, povero, ecc.
Bûzancâse n. p. Rovinarsi: Ridursi in cattivo stato di salute, mezzi o altro.
— d'ûnn-a cosa o personn-a; Ridersi, Infischiarsi, Non sapersi che fare di checchessia.
Vatt'a fâ bûzancâ; Va al diavolo, Va in mallora, Va al boja, alle forchee simili. Modo di imprecazione.
[Giovanni Casaccia. 1876 [1984]. Dizionario genovese-italiano.]
I just don't know. There's was something about an entry over at Bellona Times, juxtaposing a John C. Wright interview and one with David Bromige, that got me into a nostaglic funk about the late '80s and my introduction to Usenet [via work]. Two names, Tom Maddox and Tim Maroney, or as I came to think of them while picking my way through their flameworn spat on alt.postmodern and rec.arts.sf-lovers Mad Dogs and Maroon.
Those were the days, though they seem so long ago, as those two would daily do battle. You could feel the heat, and I made up my mind then and there never to post to any group on Usenet. Maddox, I last heard of, when he and his friend William Gibson wrote a couple of teleplays for The X Files, First Person Shooter (2000) and Kill Switch (1998). If you nose around the Usenet archives you can still find some traces of what they wrought.
But back to Mr Wright, a guy I don't know — as my dear old, departed dad would say — from a load of hay. His first book, a sample chapter of which lies here, reminds me of two other books, Cross-Time Engineer by Leo Frankowski and The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phœnician by Edward Lester Arnold. Funny thing how the mind works. I read Phra all the way through and had a fun sort of time, but the Conrad Stargard adventure just had too little reward for me. I should've known by its lurid cover, but some age-old adage snuck into my brainpan. Now that I think of it, both Bellamy's utopian SF novel Looking Backward and Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court use the same unstuck-in-time theme to get on with their polemic yarning and proselytizing, but they wrote less deadeningly.
I was saddened to learn that David Bromige had suffered a stroke. I had taken some classes from him back in the early '80s. He'd introduced me to language poets and poetry, Oulipo, and much, much more. I was last in touch with him in the mid-'90s while working in the belly of the beast. I still have a great photo of him somewhere holding his new-born daughter, Margaret, at a death-of-summer party I threw one strange October out on the family ranch in Schellville.
Read, view, and weep. [via Tom Tomorrow]
Thanks to la Grande Rousse across the border in Canada, I've been reading up on how the francophone world views les mots moches 'ugly words.' There's a whole site, Dicomoche, dedicated to them or at least to their eradication, and whose motto is: "Ce que l'on conçoit mal s'ènonce obscurèment et les mots pour le dire arrivent pèniblement." ("Concepts one doesn't think through cannot be articulated clearly and the words only come with difficulty.") Speaking ugly can include the use of anglicisms, neologisms, solecisms, buzzwords (mots-bourdons). While I'm no friend of howlers or words blanched of meaning by thoughtless repetition, it seems to me that loanwords and metaphor are just a couple of ways that a language has of renewing itself or enriching its vocabulary. Of course, many francophones see French as their rightful, cultural patrimony, and unlike anglophones and their German cousins, they have formally organized their own guilds to protect the linguistic purity of la belle langue. To a certain degree, I agree with them, but it's awfully hard to legislate language.
[Addendum 06/26/03: Language Hat has made me, rightfully, reconsider my last sentence. It is hard to legislate language, though nations will try. Orthographies are probably the most successful tip of this iceberg, but speakers will often talk in new and interesting ways, and in matters of diachrony, I agree with Sapir that there's a drift, or a certain tendency, in language change. It was a slip — I plead heatstroke. I was trying to be nice, but it came out that I support bureaucratic language control in some way, which I don't. At most these academies only really control the upper registers of language, and the real change come from below.]
Another article concerning phonaesthetics, [from the Word Ways site via The Discouraging Word; no permalinks look for the 06/24/03 entry]. Both the Scribe and Mr Eckler are doubtful about ugly words in principle, as am I. For example, what about clotted cream? A beautiful collocation and a delightful substance, it brings back lovely memories of lecturing to a group of German teenagers on the begatting of Arthur by Uther while standing on top of a windswept Tintagel on a glorious summer day and the cream tea we had afterwards.
There's an enjoyable article in the Forward [via graywyvern's blog permalinks are on the fritz, so look at last Friday's entry (06/20/03)] that lead me to Matthue Roth's website.
I think one of the things that makes Judaism right for me is, it's sex-positive. I don't talk about sex lewdly or dirtily. And I'm definitely not out to demystify sex. When I talk about it, I'm talking about sex as mystery, as something that I don't know about yet, and especially as something that can exist in a different form than it does in today's world.
I stumbled across graywyvern's blog because of an entry that mentions the poet, Ron Silliman.
There I sat, staring at this strange cartoon at the end of the New York Times Review of Books, wondering for the the umpteenth time how this rag (or any other major newspaper) could be considered by anyone, anywhere, to be part of some liberal media conspiracy. After mentioning it to Ms Viki, she pointed me towards an article on coporate blogging. It was less than news, it was less than edutainment, but it was some kind of typing, I'll have to admit that, though. Then this morning I sit down at the old CRT and start rummaging through my blogroll. There was an entry in Commonplaces Improprieties today pointing me at entry on another blog I hadn't visited before. Jeanne Sessum reads that same article about corporate blogging and slays self by leaping to a firey death.
Well, yes, it seems that the corporate media have discovered blogs and blessed them in their benign corporate way. Look! over here! some CEO blogs, and it's really just some kind of new-fangled, geekified marketing. It's all right, Mr and Mrs America, you can go back to your pool parties — I'd seen Goodbye Columbus over the weekend — and such. As Tom at Commonplaces points out in his entry, it's all part of a dreary cycle that big journalism churns through whenever exposed to something new and truly newsworthy. Then it came back to me. Something I'd read over at Adam Curry's site [via a big link on Marc Canter's blog:
I've been interviewed hundreds of times. By broadcasters, publications, newspapers, magazines, school papers. You name it, they've interviewed me.
Not once, ever, has the result been factually correct.
So, my big story this morning à la New York Times is that newspapers lie, dammit!
Sam Ruby has started up a wiki to discuss what makes a (b)log entry well formed. [via Tim Bray's Ongoing] Rather interesting, though some have their doubts (see the comments to the original call entry). Sam hopes to keep the discussion on an abstract, non-implementation level. So far, it seems that author, content, permalink, and date are the minimal required features (or attributes) for the proposed data model, with some skirmishing on whether to use URIs or GUIDs to identify an entry.
I wrote a while back on organzing ones blog entries, and I'm still interested in how the whole version control / addenda, categorization / cataloging / semantic web nexus will sort out. The shift from MSS to incunabula to books was a tough one. HTML started out as a proposed structure markup language, but quickly became a desktop / web publishing page layout language (in the hands of some web monkeys). At least that's the story the XML alphabet soup folks are sticking with, and I include myself here when I'm not too pessimistic about the web in general. The whole comment thing is still rather ad hoc and unstructured. Think about how footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, glosses, annotations, et al. have developed over the past three centuries. We bloggers have taken over some visual cues from print periodicals (e.g., callouts, headlines, catchwords), but we're still in the early days of blogging.
[Addendum 06/24/03: Tim Bray has a nice followup entry on "why clarifying what a blog entry is" is good and necessary.]
Laputan Logic has a nice entry summing up the evidence against the recently dismissed James son of Joseph brother of Jesus ossuary (and the Jehoash inscription, too). The previous entry is a good one on Mithras. I remember reading some historian's opinion that the reason Christianity won out over Mithraism was that the former had wider appeal because it accepted non-soldiers and women.
Miladus ad usum Delphinorum has posted a quotation from Scipion Dupleix [1569-1661] on language. Knowing better, yet I'll hazard a translation. (See his entry for the original text.)
Admittedly, some opinions, or rather conceits, if mad, make me think that to these wits, language is like eating. For just as there are some foods that worry delicate stomachs, yet are ordinary fare for others, likewise there are some recent terms in common usage that are nevertheless unpleasant to these critics.
"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer," or so wrote Voltaire. So, it seems that some memes are just too tasty and choice to be eradicated, (e.g., the great Eskimo snow hoax, or the hundredth monkey), but the one that caught my eye today was the boiling frogs metaphor. [via the original Wiki] Whit Gibbons chased down a zoologist, Dr. Victor Hutchison at the University of Oklahoma, to answer a German reporter's question about the boiling frogs meme.
Vic's answer was as follows: "The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so." Naturally, if the frog were not allowed to escape it would eventually begin to show signs of heat stress, muscular spasms, heat rigor, and death.
As with many things in this world, I posit a literary origin, in this case Dante:
E come a l'orlo de l'acqua d'un fosso
stanno i ranocchi pur col muso fuori,
sì che celano i piedi e l'altro grosso,sì stavan d'ogne parte i peccatori;
ma come s'appressava Barbariccia,
così si ritraén sotto i bollori.[Dante. Inferno, xxii, 25-30]
I started with a French author, and I must end with one.
Il ne suffit pas à un sage d'étudier la Nature et la Vérité, il doit oser la dire en faveur du petit nombre de ceux qui veulent et peuvent penser; car pour les autres, qui sont volontairement esclaves des préjugés, il ne leur est pas plus possible d'atteindre la Vérité qu'aux grenouilles de voler.
[Julian Offray de la Mettrie. 1748. L'Homme machine]
Godard's Le Mépris is one of my favorite meta-movies (films about the making of films), and one of my favorite blogs is languagehat. So imagine my pleasure and surpise when I ran across this entry [via Google] in a previous incarnation of languagehat. Compounded with this is the fact that I'd been holding off writing my own entry about Hanns Johst's quotation, "Wenn ich Kultur höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning!" which is usually credited to Goering. Hélas! The Alberto Moravia novel, Il Disprezzo, on which the movie is based is called in English Ghost at Noon. It's a good read, but the movie is better. I remember seeing Jack Palance interviewed on TV, and how he become speechless in a rage about how Godard had directed him (badly). A funny thing about this polyglot movie is how the dubbed version had to invent lines for the translator who repeats substantial amounts of dialog in Italian, German, English, and French for the other characters. Godard allegedly punched Carlo Ponti, one of the producers, at the premiere.
[Addendum, 06/20/03: Here's the newer, MT link straight from LH.]
Rummaging around the web, looking for something else, I stumbled across this opening line in an essay on Italian dialects: "Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish master of the magic of local things." [Alice Meynell. 1914. Essays, "Little Language"] I've been thinking about Liguria lately, that tight, cramped little province — whence my father's family came — jammed up between the sea and the mountains, stretched out between France and Pisa. The Italian Riviera is divided into two parts: di Ponente and di Levante (West and East, setting and rising). Byron and Shelley lived there. Dickens mentions in passing during his visit, the local dialect, Zeneise (genovese, Genoese).
The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist. I believe there is a legend that Saint John's bones were received there, with various solemnities, when they were first brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses them to this day. When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they are brought out and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never fail to calm. In consequence of this connection of Saint John with the city, great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni Baptista, which latter name is pronounced in the Genoese patois `Batcheetcha,' like a sneeze. To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a Sunday, or festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a little singular and amusing to a stranger.
[Charles Dickens. 1846. Pictures from Italy, chapter 4]
I occasionally monitor a news group about and written in the dialect, and there are some good websites dedicated to it.
[Addendum, 06/19/02: Entry in Hugo Plomteux. 1975. I dialetti della Ligure orientale odierna. Baciccia. "nome proprio (di battesimo) comunissimo in Liguria ... Benchè sia conosciuto anche in piemontese (bacicia 'uomo scemo'), in milanese (stesso senso), e nei dialetti italiani della Svizzera (nel senso di 'sempliciotto'; anche un nome di gatto), è una forma tipicamente ligure. In Italia settentrionale bacicia vuol dire ormai 'genovese'. In Argentina, dove sono numerossimi i Genovesi, bachicha ha preso il significato di sempliciotto', o anche 'italiano in generale'. Nel Messico existe inoltre il gergale embachichar 'rubare'.]
[Addendum, 09/05/04: Translation of the Plomteux excerpt. Baciccia. "Proper baptismal name, very common in Liguria. Although, it's also known in Piedmontese (bacicia 'foolish man'), in Milanese (in the same sense), and in the Italian dialects of Switzerland (in the sense of 'simpleton' [sempliciotto 'a man lacking in all malice, rather stupid or foolish'], also the name of a cat), and a typically Ligurian form. In Southern Italy bacicia is now used for 'Genoese'. In Argentina, where Genoese are quite numerous, bachicha has taken on the meaning of 'simpleton', or also 'Italian in general'. In Mexico, moreover, there exists the slang term embachichar 'to steal, rob'.]
"Ma tanti, tanti di più sono coloro che, senza saperne il nome, le hanno scoperte a guizzi, a spicchi, a frammenti fulminei e abbaglianti, dai pochi oblò che si aprono nel tunnel che porta da Levanto fin quasi alla Spezia." [Eugenio Montale, 1896-1981, Nobel Prize 1975]
While an MP3 of "Azi ai voie" by the Romanian band Voltaj [in its turn a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction"] played in the background, I wondered if anybody had thought of throwing a fantasy blog block party. Using something like GeoURL or the London Bloggers Tube Map. It's strange mapping points in cyberspace to meatspace. Connecting blogs by interconnectivity (à la Technorati's link cosmos) is, of course, easier and somehow makes more sense, but what about categorizing blogs by IP address or by the amount of money in a blogger's coin purse at entry creation? I don't know, maybe it'd make more sense to just sit down and read a book. Here's Sartre's La Nausée (actually the New Directions paperback translation by Lloyd Alexander) and there's Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. Which one? Will do. Antoine Roquentin or Geoffrey Braithwaite? Go ahead, you decide, make a choice. Stuck in Bouville, a veritable utopia, researching a fictional Marquis de Rollebon, or visiting a slightly less fictional city called Rouen, tracking down an author named Flaubert, or a parrot of his acquaintance thereto. Hmm.
Jean-Paul writes: "The statue seemed to me unpleasant and stupid and I felt terribly, deeply bored." And, Julian types: "Let me start with the statue: the one above, the permanent, unstylish one, the one crying cupreous tears, the floppy-tied, square-waistcoated, baggy-trousered, straggle-moustached, wary, aloof bequeathed image of the man." Of course, the second statue (that is the statue in the second, more modern quotation) isn't the real one, but another casting made years after the Germans had carted off the first one in a war scrap drive, and the first statue (that is Roquentin's little Khmer statuette "on a green carpet, next to a telephone") is something else entirely.
Shucks, just brought on by the Invisible Library, or perhaps just a bout of spring fever.
You are on a twisty turny road that leads nowhere in particular. Then you notice a large Englishman lensing one of his best movies in your neighborhood. Wait a minute! Where have I seen that profile before? Alfred Hitchcock came to San Francisco and shot Vertigo with Kim Novak and James Stewart. I stumbled across this site which compares location shots from the movie in 1958 and today in 2003. [via Monkeys vs Robots] Based on a virtual tour by Lawrence French that has lots of fun-filled information of Vertigo.
Whilst contemplating the lumps in "my stirabout on the hob" and lofting a pint of "your only man," I reminded myself today, à propos de rien, of the works of Mr de Selby, that great Irish physicist-philosopher, best read about in the footnotes of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman and who may or may not be the same person of the same name in The Dalkey Archive. O'Brien [né Brian O'Nolan AKA Myles na Gopaleen] also once wrote a book, An Béal Bocht 'the poor mouth,' in Gaelic that was a cruel satire of Irish romanticism yet beyond reproach since most of his conservative critics had not the Gaelic to read it. His de Selby is an absurd Hibernian Lucretius.
This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of 'black air', i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain 'regrettable' industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so called 'prosecanto' in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby's equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman's Atlas where he inveighs savagely against 'the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after six o'clock' and makes the famous gaffe that death is merely 'the collapse of the heart from the strain of a lifetime of fits and fainting'.
[Nolan O'Brien. 1939/1966. The Third Policeman. Chapter 8, footnote 1]
I was lead to O'Brien through the secondary literature on Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Curtius' remarks on the Hisperica Flamina and Teofilo Folengo's macaronic epic Il Baldus. And, then, somehow, de Selby made me ponder again Des Esseintes' musings on Late Latinity in Huysmans' incomparable Against the Grain.
L'auteur qu'il aimait vraiment et qui lui faisait reléguer pour jamais hors de ses lectures les retentissantes adresses de Lucain, c'était Pétrone.
...
Ici, c'est l'inspecteur des garnis qui vient demander le nom des voyageurs récemment entrés; là, ce sont des lupanars où des gens rôdent autour de femmes nues, debout entre des écriteaux, tandis que par les portes mal fermées des chambres, l'on entrevoit les ébats des couples; là, encore, au travers des villas d'un luxe insolent, d'une démence de richesses et de faste, comme au travers des pauvres auberges qui se succèdent dans le livre, avec leurs lits de sangle défaits, pleins de punaises, la société du temps s'agite: impurs filous, tels qu'Ascylte et qu'Eumolpe, à la recherche d'une bonne aubaine; vieux incubes aux robes retroussées, aux joues plâtrées de blanc de plomb et de rouge acacia; gitons de seize ans, dodus et frisés; femmes en proie aux attaques de l'hystérie; coureurs d'héritages offrant leurs garçons et leurs filles aux débauches des testateurs; tous courent le long des pages, discutent dans les rues, s'attouchent dans les bains, se rouent de coups ainsi que dans une pantomime.
Et cela raconté dans un style d'une verdeur étrange, d'une couleur précise, dans un style puisant à tous les dialectes, empruntant des expressions à toutes les langues charriées dans Rome, reculant toutes les limites, toutes les entraves du soi-disant grand siècle, faisant parler à chacun son idiome: aux affranchis, sans éducation, le latin populacier, l'argot de la rue; aux étrangers leur patois barbare, mâtiné d'africain, de syrien et de grec; aux pédants imbéciles, comme l'Agamemnon du livre, une rhétorique de mots postiches. Ces gens sont dessinés d'un trait, vautrés autour d'une table, échangeant d'insipides propos d'ivrognes, débitant de séniles maximes, d'ineptes dictons, le mufle tourné vers le Trimalchio qui se cure les dents, offre des pots de chambre à la société, l'entretient de la santé de ses entrailles et vente, en invitant ses convives à se mettre à l'aise.
[J.-K. Huysmans. 1884. À rebours. Chapter 3]
Huysmans' "breviary of décadence" (secundum Arthur Symons) surfaced for me in a footnote to the transcripts of the Oscar Wilde-Marquis of Queensbury libel trial because it figures in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's a crooky labyrinth we plod through in the reading of literature.
Translations.
The writer he really loved and who made him reject for good and all from among the books he read, Lucan and his sounding periods, was Petronius.
...
Here, we have the Inspector of Lodgings coming to inquire the names of the travellers lately arrived; there, it is a brothel where men are prowling round naked women standing beside placards giving name and price, while through the half-open doors of the rooms the couples can be seen at work; elsewhere again, now in country houses full of insolent luxury, amid a mad display of wealth and ostentation, now in poverty-stricken taverns with their brokendown pallet-beds swarming with fleas, the society of the period runs its race,-- debauched cut-purses like Ascyltos and Eumolpus on the look-out for a piece of luck; old wantons of the male sex with their tucked-up gowns and cheeks plastered with ceruse and acacia red; minions of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women frantic with hysteria; legacy hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lustful caprices of rich men; all these and more gallop across the pages, quarrel in the streets, finger each other at the baths, belabour each other with fisticuffs like the characters in a pantomime.
All this told with an extraordinary vigour and precision of colouring, in a style that borrows from every dialect, that cribs words from every language imported into Rome, that rejects all the limitations, breaks . all the fetters of the so-called "Golden Age," that makes each man speak in his own peculiar idiom — freemen, without education, the vernacular Latin, the argot of the streets; foreigners, their barbarian lingo, saturated with African, Syrian, Greek expressions; idiotic pedants, like the Agamemnon of the Satyricon, a rhetoric of invented words. All these people are drawn with a free pencil, squatted round a dining-table, exchanging the imbecile conversation of tipsy revellers, mouthing dotards' wise saws and pointless proverbs, all eyes turned upon Trimalchio, the giver of the feast, who sits picking his teeth, offers the company chamber-pots, discourses of his insides, begging his guests to make themselves at home.
[J.-K. Huysmans. 1884. Translatred by John Howard. Against the Grain. Chapter 3]
Allan Miller sent me this great link for DIY posters to protest a Bush visit in Berlin on 22. and 23. May 2002. My favorite poster has a picture of Walter Brennan and says (in translation) Cowboys instead of War-mongers (it rhymes in German). It's worthwhile visiting just to download the international circle slash Bush sign. Reminds me how Reagan spoiled my exile in Bonn in 1985 by flying up and down the Rhine in a black helicopter. Oh, well.
If you were confused by Befunge with its 2D programmer counter, then get ready for Unlambda [via Irrefragable] which has no variables and only manipulates functions. It claims to be Turing complete and most probably is. Consider the following Unlambda program:
```s``s``sii`ki `k.*``s``s`ks ``s`k`s`ks``s``s`ks``s`k`s`kr``s`k`sikk `k``s`ksk
It "prints the Fibonacci numbers (as lines of asterisks)." There's something both healthy and unhealthy about obfuscated programming languages, and I must admit I like them as a sort of conceptual art.
Well, the past two days I've been sitting on a jury. The case (a DUI) was settled halfway through the witness' testimony for the plaintiff. The defendant pleaded to a lesser charge, and the jury was dismissed. I had a chance to speak with the court reporter and ask some questions about her job as I was waiting for my paperwork. The stenographic machines are now hooked up to laptops and some software (generically called CAT for computer-aided transcription) is used to do realtime transcriptions from the stenographic tapes. The machines themselves are ineresting, having 22 keys, and the letters associated with each key are printed to a fixed location on the tape. The notes are recorded phonemically with lots of special abbreviations and phrases stored in the CAT software's dictionary. Basically, each court reporter comes up with his or her personal system after working at it a while. Some phonemes are represented by chords of letters, e.g., the first two "letters" of my first name "Jim" comes out on the tape as SKWR and EU for "J" and "I." Another interesting bit of information is that court reporters are used for close captioning. Makes sense.
Thomas L. Friedman has written a curious piece on why the US sent troops into Iraq, and it has little to do with WMD [via istori/blog]. According to the op-ed piece in the New York Times, there were four types of reason: real, right, moral, and stated. WMD was the stated reason, and it doesn't matter one way or another. The chilling "right" reason was the US needed to make a demonstration to the "Arab-Muslim" world that 9/11 was unacceptable. Who knows? He may be right, but I doubt that having a sitting president lie about the reason(s) for going to war, helps either here or abroad. Sure Saddam's a monster, but there's a bunch more where that came from. Sure it's about oil, as even Mr Friedman admitted grudgingly in a previous piece. So, who does Mr Bush think he's fooling? I think that there were more than four reasons for invading Iraq, and very few of them had neat and tidy categories to fall into like real, right, moral, and stated. Those are all just so many ethical weasel words, and whatever the reasons, ethics had little to do with it.
Weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. [Stewart Chaplin]
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called weasel words. When a weasel sucks eggs, the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a weasel word after another, there is nothing left of the other. [Theodore Roosevelt]
And, in fact, a weasel word has become more than just an evasion or retreat. We've trained our weasels. They can do anything. They can make you hear things that aren't being said, accept as truths things that have only been implied, and believe things that have only been suggested. Come to think of it, not only do we have our weasels trained, but they, in turn, have got you trained. When you hear a weasel word, you automatically hear the implication. Not the real meaning, but the meaning it wants you to hear. [Carl Wrighter]
[via Virtual Salt: Critical Thinking Course]
And our appy-polly-loggies to Mr Benjamin Disraeli for the title munging.
Not much to report today, but I did get in touch with Scott Larsen, who was a friend way back in junior high school. The web works wonders and you can find anybody if you put your mind or Google to it.
The Engimatic Mermaid has posted an entry about how the government of Brazil is trying to legislate its citizens' language. The problem with language is that everybody speaks one (at least), and we all have opinions on ours. What's right? What's wrong? How the plebes are slaughtering our noble tongue. This relieves most people of their reason and allows them to discourse on matters better left undiscussed. This linguistic sickness is the goad that urges otherwise sane people to lobby for English First or English as the Official Language of the USA. I thought all those huddled masses yearning to be free of their ancestral languages and strange ways need only to be shown the blinding, political power of American English for them to come to their senses and assimilate. Why can't these pesky foreigners learn English like the rest of the world?
I've just started reading Geoffrey Nunberg's The Way We Talk and came across this:
Some people try to give you what they think are beautiful-sounding words, like pearl, or willow, or autumn. But that's always a tricky business, because you're never sure how much your impression of the sound is colored by the meaning. Max Beerbohm once asked a friend, "Do you think that ermine is among the most beautiful-sounding words in the language?" "Oh, to be sure," his friend replied. And Beerbohm said, "Well, what about vermin? On the other hand, there are some absolutely gorgeous-sounding words that we tend to overlook because their meanings are repellent. Take melanoma. A beautiful word; you want it to be the name of a tropical wind instead of a tumor. You think of something out of a Carmen Miranda song: "Smell the tropical aroma / Carried on the melanoma." Actually a lot of medical words have that feeling — like diarrhea. What a waste of fine syllables that is.
Yup, some of us feel the same way about the word blog. Sounds perfectly okay for what it is.
As a result of reading this entry at Kerim's News Weblog [via Language Hat], I took a moment to bow my head and remember the Anatolian language Ebykh. According to the Ethnologue language database: "The last fully competent speaker, Tevfik Esen, of Haci Osman, died in Istanbul 10/92. A century ago there were 50,000 speakers in the Caucasus valleys east of the Black Sea. Most migrated to Turkey in 1894. The ethnic group now speaks a distinct dialect of Adyghe."
Surfing a blogroll [at Zizka] lead me to Orcinus and this article by David Neiwert on Eric Rudolph and the Face of Terror. Mr Neiwert ponders the differences and similarities between Islamic and Christian fundamentalist terrorism. Makes for a good, frightening read.
The Financial Times: "Jürgen Möllemann, former deputy leader of Germany's liberal Free Democrats, died on Thursday after his parachute failed to open during a parachute jump. Police indicated they suspect Mr Möllemann committed suicide. Mr Möllemann was an experienced hobby parachutist." [via a BBC radio news report]
Well, it turns out that the Second Gulf War was about oil after all and not about weapons of mass destruction or any of the other expediencies which the current regimementioned. Ipse dixit Wolfowitz.
Update: (Well, the link above is broken.) I, too, was fooled by reports in the press that quoted Wolfowitz as saying that Iraq was "swimming in oil." [via This Modern World] What Wolfowitz actually said:
Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.
The Swedish Minister of Migration, Jan O. Karlsson, was practising his idiomatic English the other day, and it's getting pretty good. Mr Karlsson joins a short list of foreign politicos (e.g., Canadian Françoise Ducros) who've been exercising their freedom of speech. Too bad the Prime Minister is not amused. [via Buttersquash Ranch]
There’s a good article by somebody over on Kiro5hin site about infinity. Not just any layperson’s infinity though, but the real thing ™ as in mathematics. It’s a nice example of the kind of semantic dodgery one can expect from natural languages. The great thing about language is you can say (or type) “infinity is a number” or “infinity is a cat” and get away with it, but not so in mathmagicland.
Given that:
QED: “Infinity is a number.” Anonymous
Update: The quotation “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” is cited by Joshua Shikel Fishman in the Mendele Yiddish Literature and Language list (6.087). [It appeared first in print in Uriel Max Weinreich, 1945, der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt. (“YIVO and the problems of our time”) in yivo-bleter 25.1.13.] There’s more information and a translation here. 2. Also, it’s not Uriel but his father Max who wrote the article. Sorry about that. Another link.
[Addendum 07/20/05: I’ve finally got around to posting a scan of the passage in question.]
Erling mentioned this Linux supercomputer based on 70 Sony PlayStation 2s to me last night, and a quick google gave me the link at the NCSA, the folks who brought us the original Mosaic browser [via ZDNet]. The cluster cost about US$50K.
A discussion of the origin of the phrases black Mariah and paddy wagon over on the Discouraging Word [the 04/23/03 entry, via Language Hat] got me to wondering about the origins of the similar German phrase die grüne Minna. From the German police color, green, (though I see now [via Google] that that is changing to blue, in line with some EU regulations), and the nickname for Wilhelmina (I assume). It also got me to thinking about the first movie studio that Edison built which his workers named the Black Mariah.
Looking for something else entirely, I came across the SignWriting Linguistics Forum. When working on my thesis back in the early '90s, I worked at a local high school running their English department's computer lab. On occasion I had two or more deaf kids* in a class along with their signing interpreters. Watching them translate my ad hoc lectures into ASL was usually more fun that what I was lecturing about, and I tended sometimes to grind to a halt, as I watched the translators signing and finger-spelling away. I also enjoyed discussing the different dialects of ASL with both the students and their assistants. The SignWriting dot org site has an article on transcription systems for sign languages. Such a lot of pretty glyphs demands closer scrutiny. The SignWriting system was invented by Valerie Sutton who also developed the Sutton method of dance notation. (I am only familiar with Labanotation.)
* Their term for themselves and the one they preferred to "the hearing impaired."
"For bureaucratic reasons [the Bush administration] settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair. Does anybody care anymore? [via You Live Your Life As If It's Real via Wood S Lot] Sheesh!
I've been looking at what various linguists have had to say about phonaesthetics or sound symbolism. It makes for a fun way to pass a Sunday morning before diving into the paper.
First, Otto Jespersen: "Shorter and more abrupt forms are more appropriate to certain states of mind, longer ones to others." He then goes on to talk about the imperative form (mainly in Latin). But, the opposite is true too: "In the same way [as the previous Danish example from Ibsen] the effect of splendid is strengthened in slang: splendiferous, splendidous, splendidious, splendacious." not too often, but at times, I tend to forget the playfulness of speakers: the plasticity of our linguistic material. These two quotations are from the twentieth chapter on sound symbolism. There's also a splendiferous section on popular terms in various languages for speakers of other languages based on terms taken from the language in question: e.g., "in Hungary German visitors are called vigéc (from wie geht's?), and customs officers vartapiszli (from wart' a bissl)." [Otto Jespersen. 1922. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin.]
Next, a longer quotation from a master of linguistics:
Sound symbolism constitutes yet another autonomous category, of slightly controversial status. To the extent that sounds, in symbolic context (and nowhere else), are credited with conveying messages of their own, this marginal category represents a tenuous bridge to semantic change, ordinarily removed from the realms of articulation, acoustics, and auditory perception. Sound symbolism may be absolute or relative. The former category prevails if the analyst attaches, cross-linguistically, an unvarying evocative value to, say, a high front vowel or to a hissing prepalatal consonant; the problem then is to ascertain whether speakers will allow words endowed with major connotative force, through such ingredients, to participate in normal sound shifts, at the cost of heavy loss in suggestiveness. The effects of relative sound symbolism are conditioned by the given phonological system; thus, in a language generally adverse to long consonants an occasional geminate may boast "expressive" value (which it would otherwise lack). Again, the language historian is curious to learn how speakers maintain a word enhanced by such a feature in this privileged status amid the welter of pervasive transformations. At this juncture one notes a welcome contact with information theory. [Yakov Malkiel. 1968. "Historical Linguistics" in International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, vol IX, pp. 371-380. Reprinted in Malkiel, 1968, Essays on Linguistics Themes.]
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