1. USan cultural assumptions in computing? Continued in computing assumptions from the US of A. [via the C2 Wiki] 2. Barely heard on NPR last week: the publisher / owner of Unità was describing Berlusconi—in English—as mediatic. I thought I heard idiotic, but then it dawned on me that it must have been mediatic a back-formation from Italian mediatico. And Google cinched it. 3. [Intentionally left blank.]
Has anybody else but me noticed that Thomas Pynchon sounds like a cartoon character? The author made a guest voice appearance, with a paper bag over his animated head, on the Simpsons last Sunday.
French minister Luc Ferry, in Le Monde, has invoked famed Indo-European philologist F. de Saussure’s first general principle of linguistics (i.e., the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign) in defense of the proposed French ban on beards (and headscarves) in school. [via Crooked Timber] I’m trying to imagine Rumsfeld citing Dwight Whitney or Leonard Bloomfield.
1. A little applied number theory. [via Vlorbik] 2. Epenthesis, anaptyxis, or polyptoton?
Just heard an MP3 of Paul Robeson singing the National Anthem of the Soviet Union. Catchy tune, surreal lyrics: “Through days dark and stormy / when great Lenin led us / our eyes saw the bright sun of Freedom above / and Stalin our leader / with faith in the people / inspired us to build the land that we love.” I wonder who wrote the lyrics? Both Russian and English.
Groovy is a new language—well, new to me—that runs on the Java virtual machine. It’s got closure support and operator overloading. Something for everygeek.
1. Nematodes in the sky. 2. The fat innkeeper, or Urechis caupo. 3. The shipworm is not a worm, but a clam: Teredo navalis.
Thanks go out to Mr Bali Hai of the Eye of the Goof blog for a comment he left on my xiuxiueig entry below. He brought up two of Catalunya’s scatological Xmas customs: el caganer (best translation I’ve found, ‘the pooping shepherd’), a traditional Nativity figurine, and caga tió (the shitting log). A quick trip to Google revealed a wealth of information online, but my favorite has to be the joco-serious Amics del Caganer (in Catalan, English, and Castillian). A caganer is most commonly a man in a red cap, smoking a cigarette or a pipe, who is squatting, pantsed, and relieving himself. A coiled turd finishes off the scene. Because the figurine must be placed out of direct line of sight of the Infant, there’s a “Where’s Waldo?” quality to the positioning of the caganer in the manger. Children often ask their parents: On és el caganer? (Where’s the shitter?). Well, Bruxelles has its manneken-pis and my adopted city of Bonn has its Bröckemännche. The caga tió, on the other hand, involves a log filled with gifts, covered with a blanket, and the children of the house whacking it with sticks until it relieves itself of its contents. Singing accompanies this activity. Finally, there’re the tifas special Xmas cakes in the shape of a little pile complete with sugar flies. Tifa is derived from pastifa which is glossed: “persona que no fa polidament la seva feina.” I have always wanted to visit Catalunya, and this just cinches it that it must be during December.
[Addendum 01/21/04: Trevor, over at Follow the Baldie dot com, has an over the top entry in response to this one, complete with vomiting eagle monographs and defecating devils woodcuts. And thanks to Margaret at Transblawg for pointing us at one another.]
1. My good friend, Erling, just got back from a short winter vacation in Paris and Barcelona. Before he left, he asked me, tongue firmly in cheek, if there was something I’d like from Catalunya like a Catalan-Latin dictionary. OK, smirk, sure. Anyway, last week I got a phone call from Erling; it seems there was more than one Catalan-Latin dictionary in the medium sized bookshop he happened upon. Which one did I want? I changed my mind and told him I’d rather have a Catalan etymological dictionary, if that were possible. Last night, I got my dictionary. It is a grand book. 2. This evening, after returning home from work, there was a belated Xmas-birthday present from Ralf & Angelika. A long, red scarf for Karneval, with the following text in Kölsch: Laach doch ens. Et weed widder wäde. Well, I’m ready; bring on the Jecke, I’ll be warm and ready. Alaaf and all that that entails. 4. There’s a new linguistics blog on the blogoblock, and its name is Semantic Compositions. Click, read, and enjoy. [via Languagehat and Language Log]
1. “White socks are neat.” Or, are they evil? 2. Saw a fun documentary over the weekend: Fellini: Je suis un grand menteur by Damian Pettigrew. It was a Scottish-French co-production that was in Italian mostly, but with some French and English. Lots of behind the scenes scenes with Fellini directing and actors counting. 3. genus dicendi quod immodico tumore turgescit, [Quintillianus XII.x.73] A new motto for UJG?
Transblawg linked to an interesting article and paper on neologisms in German, but what caught my eye was the term moose test or elk test as an English calque of the German Elchtest. I’d not heard of it before today. Originating in the automotive industry, an elk test is one where the car being tested has to swerve quickly to avoid a large obstacle (like an elk) on the road. A new compact car from Mercedes failed the test by flipping over. But the meaning has been extended into something like being tested in such a way not expected by the product’s manufacturers, who, rather than fixing the problem, as Daimler-Chrysler did, choose to ignore it. [via Carob (10.i.04) via Transblawg]
With all the todo about not learning English in Scotland lately [via Taccuino di traduzione, Transblawg, & Languagehat], I came across this Lallans site: the Scots Leid Associe:
The Scots Leid Associe wis foondit in 1972 an ettles tae fordle Scots in leeteratur, drama, the media, eddication an in ilka day uiss. Akis Scots wis ance the state langage o Scotland, it's a vailid pairt o wir heirskip an the associe taks tent tae the fact that it shoud can tak its steid as a langage o Scotland, alang wi Gaelic an Inglis.
We need more language associations, everywhere. I seem to remember that the Scottish Court was using Lallans back in the 14th century at least. Seems those pesky Anglians had conquered the British kingdom of Goddodin.
1. Latin is for breaking up. [via NerdSlut via Mad Latinist at 01/07/04 who got it from Sonjaaa the lesbian language geek] 2. Deasil is sunwards as withershins is sinistrovert. 3. All hail Gaeltacht!
Susan L. Gerhart asks Do Web search engines suppress controversy? Seems that the web and its indexing engines are not as objective as some think? Who? Jane and John Q. Public. By suppression, Professor Gerhart means the popularity of pages, in-coming links, or something like Goggle’s PageRanking. Take Albert Einstein and sub-topics like what influence his first wife, Maria Maric, had on his theories and papers. They tend to get pushed out of the top ranking by the shear volume of bland biographies and collections of his aphorisms. But, what ever happened to critical thinking? Tell me that there’s more to research than looking things up on the web. Please. If you’re a high school student, and you’ve been assigned to write a paper on Albert Einstein, then I guess you head for the web. In my day, most headed for the library and one of two or more popular encyclopedias. Not much difference, I’d say. One or two students, would get down a biography, or ask their parents, teachers, or reference librarians a few questions, but most just copied undigested prose out of tertiary sources and dumped them onto un-word-processed lined paper. [via First Monday via Hakank]
I was just thinking about Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana the other day. While I enjoy these medieval poems set to music, I have to keep wondering why the other two pieces in Orff’s amor trilogy, Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite, are not as well loved and performed as often. The former consists of a cappella versions of a series of the Lesbia poems of Catullus and the latter a mixed-language bag of lyrics. Another favorite of mine is his last piece: de Temporum Fine Comœdia.
1. Schadenfreude. f. Für libitinariorum vota (Seneca, De beneficiis 6, 38, 4) sagt Ostermann 1591 Voc. Anal. 15 Schadenfrewd. Schadenfroh schon bei Barth. Weiberspiegel (Leipz. 1565) M 8ª. K. Heisig in Zs. „Eine heilige Kirche“ I 93. [via Friedrich Kluge Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 18. Auflage, Berlin, 1960, p. 631.] 2. Die Anteilnahme der Nebenmenschen an unserem Schicksal ist Schadenfreude, Zudringlichkeit und Besserwisserei in wechselndem Gemisch. [Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken] 3. The new lexicographical buzzword was “hard words.” First used in lexicographical jargon by John Baret in his Alvearie (1573), the term was recognized as meaning the new scholarly vocabulary, usually drawn from Latin and Greek, but also from Arabic and Hebrew, which by then had been infiltrating standard English for thirty years. The “hard word” is the “inkhorn term,” now rationalized, accepted, and shorn of its pejorative meaning. “Hard words” were still largely incomprehensible outside the scholarly circles that had taken them from the classics and introduced them to the vernacular, but the difference now was that not only were such words seen as a necessary part of English, but that for all their scholarly background, there was now a mass market eager and willing to take them on. It was for this market that the dictionary makers of the [seventeenth] century, with their series of “hard word” dictionaries, most enthusiastically catered. As Sir James Murray has noted, these words were unknown to, and not to be imbibed from, mother or grandmother.” [Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, pp.171f.] 4. And speaking of Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, here’s an online abridgment.
Amongst the more silly things that folks do at any time of the year is to list their top n movies (where n is some positive, non-prime number). Well, why should Uncle Jazzbeau be any different? Except that this list of my top 23 favorites at this point in time exists only because I’ve already missed a day of blogging, yesterday, and that is bad, and lists are easy to make. So, without further ado: La Grand illusion (1937), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), All About Eve (1950), The Thing From Another World (1952), Forbidden Planet (1956), Le Mépris (1963), Casino Royale (1967), Weekend (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), La Voie lactée (1969), Performance (1970), Clockwork Orange (1971), The Godfather (1972), Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1973), La Maman et la putain (1973), La Nuit américaine (1973), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Der Amerikanische Freund (1977), All That Jazz (1979), Diva (1981), Blade Runner (1982), 37,2° le matin (1983), Sherman’s March (1986), and The Belly of an Architect (1987). That’s a fifty-year stretch, and I think I’ve mixed the high- and lowbrow well enough to upset everybody.
[Update: How could I have forgotten Duck Soup (1933): the best political musical ever? Hakank knows and has shown me. And Million Dollar Legs (1932): best Olympian flick. ]
A friend sent along a link to the Worthless Word for the Day site, and against better judgment I succumbed to the chance to brush up on inkhorn words. Imagine my shock and delight to discover epicaricacy ‘schadenfreude’. A word I’d always thought didn’t exist in English. This German word usually makes its appearance when people start discussing the number of Inuit terms for frozen rain or the impossibility of translating saudade from the Portuguese. The word is linked to an article on a food and wine site about a restaurant in County Cork, Eire. A quick googling reveals 77 pages with the food review at the top, but no origin or etymology. None of the dictionaries I consulted online or off had it, though I don’t have the second edition of the OED, so maybe there’s still hope. Even Liddell & Scott lacked a word in Greek that could possibily been Englished, though I did discover the lovely epikarpia ‘usufruct, harvest-rights’. Off the cuff and building backwards we have epi- ‘on, at, beside’ car(ic) < Latin caro ‘to care’ and -cy ‘action, rank, body, or state’. Who knows? Perhaps the Discouraging Word can find it out.
[Addendum 01/06/03: Michael Fisher sent along a nice email pointing me to the original posting which was available to me if I’d only looked further down the page. It lists Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) as a source. Looking at the form that Bailey cites is instructive: epicharikaky from epichareia ‘joy’ and kakos ‘bad, evil’. Getting from epicharikaky to epicaricacy is left to the more adventurous than me.]
The primary [task at hand for the Minimalist Program] is to show that the apparent richness and diversity of linguistic phenomena is illusory and epiphenomenal, the result of interaction of fixed principles under slightly varying conditions.
[N. Chomsky, 1995, The Minimalist Program, p.8.]
Chomsky has an irksome knack for aggravating and incensing most philologues with his pithy little aphorisms. And it is just this smug and dismissive tone of his that has usually prevented me from finishing any of his texts. I find myself agreeing more with Bach when he writes: “It used to be that linguists were enjoined to describe each language on its own terms. Now it is often presumed that all languages are basically the same.” Yes, indeed. In this paper, he writes mainly about the Sprachbund of the Pacific Northwest in all its wonderful and glorious linguistic diversity.
[via Semantics &c]
[Addendum 01/06/03: Marc Miyake over at Amaravati wrote some more (second half of the entry) about Bach and Chomsky. ]
On new year’s eve, German TV broadcasts a 40-year old, black and white, 18-minute show called Dinner for One. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing it, but I heard its catchphrase often enough: “Same procedure as every year, James.” [via Language Log via Transblawg] For some strange reason, until recently, I’d believed that it was directed by William Dieterle, one of Fassbinder’s favorite directors, who had returned to Germany after a career in Hollywood. Marvelous how the brain malfunctions.
1. K. A. Dilday has penned a provoking article on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Jackson’s movie version of the same. [via wood s lot] “I can’t lay the sole blame for the Lord of the Rings’ atavistic classicism, racism and xenophobia with either auteur or author. It was Peter Jackson, the director, who chose his alabaster cast and decided that the camera would lovingly caress their sky-bold eyes.” And while we’re on it, was anybody else disturbed that Ralph Bakshi used rotoscoped Zulus for orcs in his animated travesty? 2. McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed / There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign land. [The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn] 3. Who are these white male voters I hear tell of? Not sure I’d want to belong to any club, &c. [via Crooked Timber]
[Update 01/03/04: 4. Douglas Murray takes K. A. Dilday to task for her critique of The Lord of the Rings. Collapsing geography and race and describing how “every problem that has beset Britain has come from the East.”]
I wish a happy new year to all my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in Blogovia. May your blogging and comments be bountiful.
