POLITICAL SHIBAI.

Joel of Far Outliers has an interesting post called "Political Shibai or Kabuki?":

The Japanese word shibai 'performance, drama', as in Okinawa shibai or Ikari ningyo shibai 'Ikari puppet theatre', now seems well established in at least one regional dialect of English as a way to denote an empty political performance.

It has been used for a long time in Hawai‘i political talk, and someone recently (after 1999) submitted the following entry to the OED.

political shibai – (Hawaiian, from the Japanese) political shamming...

The more common synonym elsewhere seems to be kabuki...

NUER GRAMMAR.

The Pedagogical Grammar of Nuer is a product of the IU Libraries African Studies Collection in collaboration with the IU Digital Library Program (the former has a useful page of websites for Africanists); besides the lessons and exercises, there is a translation of the Book of Genesis into Nuer (one of the Nilotic languages of the southern Sudan). Via wood s lot.

COOKING TERMS.

Bill Poser at Language Log has an entry on cooking verbs, comparing the large variety available in English to the four of Japanese and the two (dry cooking versus steaming/boiling) of Carrier. This reminds me that I once tried to compare the semantic ranges of English and German cooking verbs and found they didn't match up at all well, but my dictionaries weren't as much help as they might have been, which brings up my standard complaint: bilingual dictionaries don't do food terms as well as they should. Let's change that, lexicographers!

Addendum. The Apply_heat frame is useful in this context. (Found via a blog pointed out by MM in the comments.)

NEOLOGISMS.

Neologisms - a Dictionary of Findable Words and Phrases is just what it says.

This website is being developed as a record of new and evolving words and phrases in the English language, with special reference to UK English usage. One of its prime aims is to act as a repository for new words and phrases which are not otherwise listed on the Net - or at least not found by Search Engines. Hence the working title: Dictionary of Findable Words and Phrases.

Content is intended to include etymology, definitions, derivations, origins, neologisms, coinages, usage, dialect, slang, first citations, abbreviations and acronyms.

BY NO MANNER OF MEANS.

I was not familiar with this archaic phrase until I read about it just now in Language Log (Mark Liberman division)—which surprised the heck out of me, since I've been stuffing my brain with archaic material for nigh on half a century now (I presume the first few years were taken up with more modern words and phrases, like "mommy" and "no!"). Furthermore, my wife did know the expression, a discrepancy in knowledge that gave her no little pleasure. At any rate, the short version is "by no manner of means is an archaic emphatic form of by no means, just as in no kind of way is an modern emphatic form of in no way"; if you want the details, including the many ways the phrase has been distorted, go read Mark's excellent entry with its plethora of citations.

LANGUAGE MAP.

Andrew Krug has sent me a link to this amazing census map from the MLA. Pick a language and find out where it's spoken, in the US as a whole or in any state. You can zoom, have it show the data by county or by zip code, and play with it in other ways I haven't tried yet. Enjoy!

OULIPIAN BLOG.

MadInkBeard is a blog dedicated to the idea of formal constraints in writing; as the About page says:

I've been interested in the (mostly French) group called the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) ever since I discovered the writings of Italo Calvino and (thanks to him) Raymond Queneau (both being members, the latter one of the founding-presidents). To put it as succinctly as possible the idea of the group is to create new forms of literature for the possible use of other writers. It's not about creating new literature qua literature, but about creating forms for new literature. Now using the words "form" is pretty damn open, and that is something that I need to work on thinking through. Basically, the Oulipian concept involves "formal constraint", voluntarily chosen constraints on the process of writing (such as writing a novel without the letter 'e' (Perec's La disparition a.k.a. A Void) or writing a book whose structure is based on the drawing of a sequence of tarot cards (Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destiny (sorry, the Italian escapes me)), in many cases this involves starting with a base text that is then transformed through constraints.

I have created this blog to discuss the idea of formal constraints (mostly in writing, but also in other media) as well as offer explanations and examples of various constraints. My hope is that this will help proselytize a bit for the idea of writing under constraint and also offer some practical places to start.

CONTACTING LANGUAGEHAT.

1) E-mail. One of the things I was glad of when I got my own domain was that I would be able to use it for mail; my Yahoo inbox was almost full, and the NeoMail one had a great deal more capacity. Alas, not only was it quickly aswarm with spam, but lately I've discovered that a couple of my valued correspondents have sent me messages that I did not get. I only found this out because they told me; I fear that others must have had the same experience and simply thought I hadn't cared enough to respond. Coincidentally, Yahoo (under pressure from Google's Gmail) has increased its inbox capacity from 4 MB to 100 MB, which means mine is now almost empty as opposed to almost full, and I can go back to using it. So I hereby suggest that y'all write to me at languagehat AT yahoo DOT com; I'll keep using the other for comments on other people's blogs (hoping to keep the spam there) and I'll keep checking it, so if you send mail there I should get it -- but if you've ever sent me mail and not heard back, please try again at the Yahoo address. I am very good about answering mail -- even if I'm pressed for time, I send a quick "Thanks!" -- so if I didn't respond, it's because I didn't get it. Thanks for your understanding.

2. Comments. A number of people have expressed diffidence, either in a comment or via e-mail, about commenting here: they're worried about their English, or afraid they're not expert enough to be worth hearing, or something. Please don't feel that way! This is not an Expert's Corner, it's a place for everyone with an interest in language (or poetry or any of the other things I occasionally discuss) to talk about it. I like to think of LH as your friendly corner cafe/bar, where people can wander in and stay as long as they like. You can contribute information, ask questions, or just joke around. But please don't ask me if you're Jewish -- for the last time, I don't know!

OEDILF.

OK, this is the best lexicographical development I've seen in ages. Chris J. Strolin has started a completely insane project on Wordcraft: "rewriting the highly revered OED... completely in limerick form. Possible? Yes. In one lifetime? I sincerely doubt it." (The FAQ is here.) Here are his first few entries:

BLOOMSDAY.

The action of Ulysses took place 100 years ago today. Read about it in Andrew Lewis Conn's Voice essay; follow the links in riviera's MeFi thread; listen to the Symphony Space reading hosted by Isaiah Sheffer being broadcast by WBAI at this very moment (audio here) [Note: "very moment" guarantee has expired]. Added value: Sean O'Faolain's "50 Years After Bloomsday" from the NY Times of 1954.

Update. Fionnula Flanagan read the Penelope chapter so brilliantly my wife and I were mesmerized and hated having to go to bed before "...yes I said yes I will Yes."

Also, John Banville has a disillusioned take on the whole thing in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, "Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday," which ends with this sad anecdote:

[Anthony] Cronin was the instigator of another Bloomsday event in 1982, when writers from around the world were invited to Dublin to celebrate Joyce's own centenary. Among the many notable artists who came was -- yes -- Borges, who by then was in his 80's and totally blind. He was collected from the airport by a couple of volunteer meeters-and-greeters, who deposited him in his suite at the Shelbourne Hotel and went off to do more meeting and greeting. When they returned, late in the day, Borges was still in his room, and in fact had not left during the intervening hours. What was he to have done, Borges asked, since he did not know the city or anyone in it? Ever since, when I hear talk of Bloomsday celebrations, that, I am afraid, is the image that springs immediately to mind: an old, blind writer, one of the greatest of his age, sitting alone in a hotel room overlooking an unseen St. Stephen's Green.

AKHMATOVA IN RUSSIAN.

"Ty vydumal menya..." ['You invented me...'] has Anna Andreyevna's poetry and much other material by and about her (including a Russian translation of Amanda Haight's biography). (Via wood s lot.)

SYNDONIA.

I was watching a Scientific American Frontiers episode in which a scientist named Syndonia Bret-Harte was quoted, and I was struck by her name—not so much the last name, allusive though it is, as her given name, which a Google search showed to occur every once in a while (mostly in 19th-century names) but which I could not find in any reference works (dictionaries of names, Greek, Latin, &c;). I won't bore you with the details of how I tracked it down, but I eventually discovered that it's a variant of Sidonia, whose most common English variant is Sidony. I've found two online explanations. The first is here:

INGU.

No-sword has posted another entry (earlier LH posts on this here and here) about wacky Japanese verbal forms, this time involving an English suffix:

Here are some words that would probably be understood by a Japanese speaker my age:

wakattingu
komacchingu
hashittingu

Can you spot the English? Yep, -ing. Present continuous tense. Of course Japanese has its own present continuous -- -te form + iru (or just ru) -- which if applied to those three words would make them look like this:

wakatteru (literally "[I am] understanding", generally used to mean something like "all right, all right, I get it")
komatteru ("[I am] troubled/in trouble")
hashitteru ("[I am] running")

To make the borrowed -ing form, apparently one takes the -te form (stem + -te: wakar + te = wakatte, etc.), removes the final e, and adds ingu. So, for hashiru:

hashir-u --> hashir-te --> hashitte --> hashitt --> hashittingu

Two things are worth noting about this transformation:

TRANSLATING JOYCE INTO FRENCH.

An ionarts post on the new French translation of Ulysses from Gallimard includes a tantalizing excerpt of Bruno Corty's interview with the head editor of the translation, Jacques Aubert, in Le Figaro Littéraire. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to get to the original interview (you get redirected to the Figaro home page; if you're interested, a Le Monde interview with Aubert is here), but I'll quote a couple of exchanges from the translation:

In 2000, Joyce's grandson asked Gallimard to start a new translation of Ulysses, to be placed under your leadership. Why did you choose a team instead of a single translator?

It was clear to me from the start that this new translation should be entrusted to several people. This was not only to give in to the spirit of the times, by influence, by example, for a project like a new translation of the Bible. We were ordered to publish it in 2004, and the work that had to be done made it seem difficult to me to conduct this work in a rigorous way with only one translator. Group translation is not the easy solution at all. Particularly in this case, where there are resonances, echos, and repetitions in the text that are furthermore subjected to variation throughout.

KEEPING LADINO ALIVE.

An LA Times story by Ken Ellingwood reports on belated efforts to preserve Ladino (discussed at LH here and here):

More than 500 years after Jews were expelled from Spain, an effort is afoot here to save Ladino, a medieval dialect that helped preserve the exiles' culture as they scattered across Europe and the Middle East.

Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, is slowly dying. Israel is believed to have the largest number of people — perhaps as many as 200,000 — who can speak or understand the language. But many are older than 60.

Recognizing that the oldest generation of Sephardic Jews soon will disappear, some Israelis are trying to pump life into the flickering language — collecting written works, recording Ladino love songs and teaching Ladino to young people.