I can’t remember how I came across it, but it probably was during my conlang noodling for the Red Dwarf Esperanto entry earlier. Blissymbolics is a pictoral artifical language that was created by Charles Kasiel Bliss [1897-1985] in 1949. He was imprisoned in 1938 in Dachau and later in Buchenwald for being Jewish. In 1939, he was deported from Germany. After passing through England, he ended up in Shanghai, and after the war he settled in Australia. He left his papers to the national Library there. I’d like to find a copy of his book: Semantography (Blissymbolics): A Simple System of 100 Logical Pictorial Symbols, Which Can Be Operated and Read Like 1 + 2 = 3 in All Languages.
I love when a name comes out of nowhere and hits you smack in the face. Just like that. I was talking with Erling on the phone, and he mentioned that a director friend of his in Austria wanted to use a Daniil Kharms text for a libretto. Kharms? Never heard of him, but the web is indeed a wondrous place and Google is its handmaiden. First, I read his Plummeting Old Women, and then I moved on to Zdagger Upper Story. He starved in a Leningrad prison hospital in 1942. Some think his nom de plume was a play on English charms and harms, but some have noted that Kholms was an early transliteration of Sherlock Holmes in Russian.
Петр Павлович: (входя в комнату)
Здыгр аппр устр устр
я несу чужую руку
здыгр аппр устр устр
где профессор Тартарелин?
здыгр аппр устр устр
где приемные часы?
если эти побрякушки
с двумя гирями до полу
эти часики старушки
пролетели параболу[Даниил Хармс. Адам и Ева.]
Pyotr Pavlovich (entering the room):
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
I am carrying someone’s elbow
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
Where’s Professor De Dispenchin?
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
Where on Earth are office hours?
If this little clockie dangling
Its two weights a-reaching down
Oldish clockie while still pending
Flew an arc without a frown[Daniil Kharms. Zdagger Upper Story. Translation by Serge Winitski.]
I’m not quite sure how old Daniil suceeding in avoiding me all these years, but I’m glad now that we’ve found each other..
I watched the second season of Red Dwarf on DVD yesterday. I noticed, while watching the first season last week, that the signs on board the ship are bilingual: English and Esperanto. In the first episode, Rimmer is trying to learn Esperanto from an instructional video and doing badly at it, but what I find exceptionally hard to believe is that there are no accurate transcriptions of the sentences on the web. One sentence is: Bonvolu direkti min al kvinstela hotelo? Yet, google red dwarf kvinstela hotelo, and what do you get? Bupkes. All the sites have the ‘five-star hotel’ mistranscribed as kvinsela hotelo. Rimmer is clueless to its meaning anyway. He does hazard a guess to the next sentence which he thinks means: ‘I would like to purchase that orange inflatable beach ball, and that small bucket and spade’. (Transcribed as: La mango estis bonega! Dlej korajn gratulojn al la kuiristo.; it should be: La manĝo estis bonega! Plej korajn gratulojn al la kuiristo. ‘The meal was excellent! Many hearty congratulations to the cook.’) You’d think that the intersection of skiffy nerds and auxlang aficionados would be greater than zero, but you’d be wrong.
Well, this explains a lot: “Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda”.
One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree.
[via rc3 dot org]
I haven’t been blogging too much about politics here in the States. Mainly because it’s just too damned depressing to think that Bush might actually win another four years (I’ve always been a pessimist) and finish off the job of destroying this republic. Long-time readers (“Hi, Steve!”) have been chastizing me about my dereliction of duties. Today, I ran across this interesting article by John Eisenhower, Ike’s son, on why he is voting for Kerry. [via Pedantry]
Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, “If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both.” I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today.
Well, it took me donkey ears, but I finally saw my first Ozu movie Tokyo Story (東京物語 tokyo monogatari). A long time ago, after being taken to see the fresh-from-Cannes Taxi Driver in a København cinema, I ran across Paul Schrader’s The Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. I read it, but not having seen any of the films of any of the three filmmmakers made for an abstract exercise. A decade or so later, I saw Bresson’s Au Hazard, Balthazar, and some things clicked. Now, after watching Tokyo Story on an overcast Sunday afternoon, I finally see what Schrader was on about. Back when I first started to get serious about motion pictures, I went through a longish phase of distaining the merely entertaining product that Hollywood spewed forth. Later, like so many, I began to develop a taste in guilty pleasures. But these days, I’ve become less tolerant of big budget flicks with lots of explosions and CGI-driven plots, instead of the character-driven subtler ones I cut my æsthetic eyeteeth on.
Yesterday afternoon a book arrived in the mail: Robert A. Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone! in its first, hard-cover, vanity press (Linguistica—Ithaca, NY) edition. Sadly, the tepidly retitled second edition (Linguistics and Your Language), is out of print, though it’s rather easy to find. It’s in good condition, except for some red pencilled underlining and marginalia. Its dust jacket is chipped, but the picture (which I must scan soon and post) of Professor Hall is priceless.
We have two main points to make [in Part IV]: 1) that a science of language exists; and 2) that we can learn something from it which will ease our troubles and help towards solving some of our problems connected with language.
Our basic technique will be much like that of “shock treatment” that psychiatrists often use. When a person has built up a way of life based on harmless attitudes or beliefs, the psychiatrist has to sweap this false basis away before he can replace it by new, more realistic and therefore sounder ideas. Often enough, a temporary confusion or disorientation may result, because of bewilderment and loss of cherished illusions. But this is really a favorable sign, since it represents the beginning of a healthy attitude and true udnerstanding of the problems involved. In the same way, our discussion will intentionally aim first at showing how little real foundation there is for many of the ideas we have about language, in order to replace them with a better understanding of its nature and function. Of necessity, therefore, our first part will be primarily negative in its approach, clearing the ground, as it were, for the more realistic and more helpful positive conclusions to be presented in the rest of the book.
[Robert A. Hall Jr. 1950. Leave Your Language Alone!, pp7f.]
Synchronistically, I also just came across this entry in a new (to me) blog.
I was on a roll. Ticking off the entries day by day, and then it happened: life, work, what-have-you interposed itself. But I recently got three URLs sent to me amongst the spicy ham product. They’re both funny, but in a nervous kind of way: partially due to cultural dissonance, no doubt.
When it comes to dictionaries, I’ve always wanted to have a copy of the Greek Lexicon (of 51,000 difficult words) compiled by Hesychius of Alexandria in the fifth century CE. (If I look up a word in Scott & Liddell, it seems I’m always being waylaid by one of Hesychius’ nearby inkhorn terms.) The last complete edition was published by Marcus Musurus in 1514 (at the press of Aldus Manutius). There’s just one MS and a modern edition, under the auspices of the Danish Academy, has been in the works since 1953. So far, they’ve made it to omicron. There’s more information here as well as a digitized page from the sole MS (Venice, Marc. Gr. 622).
Jacques Derrida died last Friday. Although it’s trendy these days to knock the man and his writings, I always found something of interest in his texts, and I was particularly fond of Glas.
L’essence de la rose, c’est sa non-essence: son odeur en tant qu’elle s’évapore. D’où son affinité d’effluve avec le pet ou avec le rotl ces excréments ne se gardent, ne se forment même pas. Le reste ne reste pas. D’où son intérêt, son absence d’intérêt. Comment l’ontologie pourrait-elle s’emparer d’un pet? Elle peut toujours mettre la main sur ce qui reste aux chiottes, jamais sur les flouses lâchés par les roses. Il fait donc lire l’anthropie d’un texte qui fait péter les roses. Et pourtant le texte, lui, ne disparaît pas tout à fait, pas tout à fait aussi vite que les pets qui le soufflent.
[J. Derrida. Glas pp69b–70b.]
Translation:
The essence of the rose is its nonessence: its odor insofar as it evaporates. Whence its effluvial affinity with the fart or the blech: these excrements do no stay, do not even take form. The remains remain not. Whence its interest, its lack of interest. How can ontology lay hold of a fart? It can always put its hand on whatever remains in the john, but never on the whiffs let out by roses. So the anthropy of the text does not itself altogether disappear, not altogether as quickly as the farts that blast, prompt, spirit off the text.
[J. Derrida. Glas pp58b–59b; translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., & Richard Rand.]
by jim at 08:14 AM | permalink | Comments (5)
Had a chance to look around and found some information on the arigatou (有鞏ぅ) < obrigado etymology. According to an old FAQ (for sci.lang.japan) that I found online, the use of arigatou predates contact with the Portuguese. I’ve tidied up the non-native English in the quotation below:
The word derivations are different too. Arigatou is related to arigatai ‘kind, welcome’ and arigatagaru ‘be thankful’, which conveys a grateful feeling for something that was done in favor of the one using the word. The first kanji is aru (有 Unicode 6709) ‘exist, happen’ and the second one, gatou < katai (鞏 Unicode 978F) means ‘hard, difficult’.
Makes sense to me. There’s some more information in this newsgroup discussion.
Well, I finished my first full week of teaching at USF, and I made a couple of fun discoveries yesterday in between classes: the Ricci Institute and the Fromm Institute. I was searching online for books on Japanese etymology, because I was trying to determine if Japanese arigatou was a loanword from Portuguese obrigado as somebody had suggested in a forum. (For the record and off the cuff, I didn’t think so.) Anyway, the library catalog showed a result that said the book was in the Chinese Library. I asked my TA, who’s from Shanghai, if there was a Chinese library on campus, but she didn’t think so. Hmm, looked around on the USF website, and bingo!, came up with the Ricci Institute. Haven’t had a chance to walk up to the Lonely Mountain Campus to see it yet, but am looking forward to it. Matteo Ricci was an interesting fellow who tried to teach the Chinese to use the European ars memorativa to help in learning their characters. The Fromm Institute discovery came about more slowly: I had noticed since day one last week, that mixed in with the usual undergraduates was a whole passel of retired folks roaming around the campus in hoardes. They all seemed to know one another and were just as happy and rambunctious as the younger students. But why? Finally, in the cafeteria, I sat at a table and heard three older guys talking about Nabokov’s Lolita (as well as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) in a way that said to me that they’d just come from a lecture they’d rather enjoyed. Talked to one of them and discovered that their was a whole ’nother college on campus for and by retired folks. Nice.
Just got email from my good friend Ches Themann-Urich, the European director who gave my opera Sub Pontio Pilato its world premiere. Looks like he's landed a gig in Rijeka, Croatia, (aka Fiume of former times). He he’d directed there before and caused some kind of a Skandälchen to shock the burghers. Way to go, Czeslaw! More later.
The folks at Canoo have published an online German grammar in both German and English. I discovered them a while back because they provide morphological help for the LEO (link everything online) German-English-German dictionary in the form of morphological paradigms. Here’s the search results for sein. Though they did miss a chance at an Easter Egg in the form of searching on canoo. All it offers is: Meinten Sie: Kanu.
Professor Weiss of Cornell has the outline for an historical Latin grammar online:
My main research interests focus on Indo-European linguistics. In particular I have been interested in the historical phonology and morphology of Greek, Latin and the Sabellic languages. I am currently working on a book about the Iguvine tables, the most important surviving texts in the Umbrian language. I am also interested in the theoretical aspects of historical linguistics.
Pretty neat. [via Sauvage Noble]
It’s great to see that Laputan Logic is back online after a lengthy hiatus. He has a great sidebar entry with a set of links to high-quality scans of the Tabula Peutingeriana which is an early Roman roadmap. See if you can find your favorite European cities.
Well, I’ve been reading my Lowth’s Grammar (see yesterday’s entry), and I’ve only found one prescriptivist shibboleth so far. The old not ending a sentence with a preposition chestnut.
Prepositions have a Government of Cases; and in English they always require the Objective Case | after them; as, “with him; from her; to me.”
The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs, and joined to the Verb at the end of the Sentence, or of some member of it: as, “Horace is an author, whom I am delighted with.” “The world is too well bred to shock authors with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them of.” This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in | writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.
[Robert Lowth. 1762. A Short Introduction to English Grammar, pp.126ff.]
That’s it? Compared to Lynne Truss et al., the good bishop is pleasantly genteel. In fact, he admits that the construction is common enough in the 18th century, and he even ends a sentence with a preposition, leaving me to believe his heart really wasn’t into this fiat. I’m still looking for the infamous split infinitive, but haven’t found it yet.
Found this interesting blog [via pf] written by an American who’s working in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Well, I starting teaching three classes yesterday at a local Jesuit university. Though I’m lecturing for the CS department, the classes are lower division and for non-majors, and we’ll see if any other teaching gigs ensue. I had fun wandering around the campus and into St Ignatius: the huge campus chapel that’s now been converted into a parish church. Crazy neo-baroque architecture, but there was a noon mass going on so I didn’t get to see much. Later, I ate some tasty pakoras and samosas that a Indian student organization was selling in the quad. The library was nice, once I got my picture ID and could get past the turnstyles. Checked out a Scolar reprint of Bishop Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar from 1762 which is the book in which split infinitives were first deprecated. Should provide some fun later on in the blogging.