I spent the weekend working with Apache Cocoon, TEI and Docbook, and eXist. An alphabet stew of XML, XSL/XSLT, DTD/Schema, etc. It was oodles of fun! My grand plan is to cobble together a semantic webbish blogging and wiki cum CMS tool that I can use ... We’ll see.
Well, this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, William Saffire says:
Many foreign languages are difficult for the Japanese to learn because their language is written vertically. They have come up with the phrase yoko (“horizontal”) meshi (“boiled rice”), meaning “a meal eaten sideways.” Yoko meshi evokes the stress that comes from trying to make oneself understood in a foreign language.
WTF! It seems that the Japanese are not the only ones who have strange opinions on their language. Rather it seems that Mr Saffire is a-join’ in with those who traffic in the most untranslatable words trade. And this is caused by the directionality of their writing system. Indeed!
And, while we’re at it, why are the English glosses for the individual words yoko (横) and meshi (飯) parenthetical and in scare quotes while the phrasal meaning is not?
[Addendum 04/18/05: Languagehat, as always, has a much funnier entry on Saffire’s musings]
Oxyrhynchus is in the news again. [Last mentioned by UJG here.]
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
The prose is a tad bit sensationalistic, but it is an important development in paleography and classical philology. Some of the newly deciphered texts will be published next month by the owners of the papyri, the Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the collection’s discovery. Some of the academics involved, professors Obbink, Pelling, and Janko, are mentioned by name in the article.
It’s even been slashdotted already.
You gotta love the Web! There always something for somebody. An aside in my last entry immediately drew a response from reader, Greg Kendall, who is the proprietor of the Seven Roads Gallery of Bookseller’s Plates, Binder’s Tickets, etc., etc. I almost didn’t mention the Munksgaard bookseller’s plate, but I did, and then spent some pleasant time looking at Greg’s collection. Immediately thereafter, I went into the Bibliotheca Byssina and started rummaging around taking down older books at random from the shelves, opening them and looking for any plates which weren’t in his collection. Finding some, it also forced me to finally get the scanner out of storage, download new drivers, and scan the plates. (I’ve been meaning to scan and post pictures on this blog.)
A package of books came in the mail yesterday, all the way from København: Geldner’s translation of the Rigveda. (There’s a small bookseller’s plate on the inside front cover: Ejnar Munksgaard, Nørregade 6, København.) I know I could have bought it cheaper in paperback from Harvard Press, but I’ve always liked the heft and feel of the hard cover, four volume edition. Any way you look at it, it’s going to be fun comparing the original Sanskrit (Indian reprint of the Max Müller-edited edition) and that funny English version (Griffith).
Also, yesterday when I was making a shingle to hang outside my office (so people wouldn’t mistake me for my ever-absent officemate), I needed a quick and free devanagari word processor to do my various Hindu names. I didn’t want to take the time to download TeX, get it installed and running on a Windoze machine, and then search out the fonts and transliteration programs. So, intead I went to this website and decided to download the Baraha program. It does Sanskrit and Hindi devanagari, as well as Tamil, Kannada, and Telegu.
Fließe, um Labsal, Stärkung, Roß, Rind (zu gewinnen); schaffe weites Licht, berausche die Götter! Denn all das ist für dich leicht zu erzwingen; o Pavamāna Soma, du verdrängst die Feinde.
[Karl Friedrich Geldner. Der Rig-veda, dritter Teil, hymn ix.94.5]
Prince Rainier III of Monaco has died. In keeping with Uncle Jazzbeau’s recent surfeit of obituaries, I blog this.
John Paul II has died, and I was reminded of the insane popularity of The Da Vinci Code. [via Chicken or Beef?] For a trashy fun and paranoid read on the pope before last, get the, to me, far better novel (under the guise of non-fiction), Yallop’s In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I. Calvi, Gelli, and P2 (Propaganda Due). The funnier parts of Godfather, Part III are based on similar material. I first read about Il Crack Sindona in a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal.
Alan Dundes, professor of folklore at UC Berkeley, died Wednesday, March 30th, after collapsing from a heart attack while teaching a graduate seminar in Giannini Hall. I took Introduction to Folklore and a mythology class from him in the late ’70s. He had a fantastic sense of humor and was a tireless and excellent lecturer and researcher. [via Languagehat]
The American poet, Robert Creeley, died last week. Ron Silliman has three entries (one and two and three). I never got to hear Creeley read live, but I’ll always remember David Bromige doing his impression of Creeley declaiming the contents of a bottle of ketchup in the student union pub at Sonoma State.
The Conspiracy
You send me your poems,
I’ll send you mine.
Things tend to awaken
even through random communication
Let us suddenly
proclaim spring. And jeer
at the others,
all the others.
I will send a picture too
if you will send me one of you.
[Robert Creeley. Poems 1950-1965. Coldar and Boyars, London: 1966