ARABIC ETYMOLOGY.

Frequent commenter Tatyana sent me a link to a Russian blog where there was a discussion of the Arabic word SiraaT 'path' (famously used in the first sura of the Qur'an, the Fatiha: Ihdina al-sirata al-mustaqima 'Show us the straight path'), mentioning that it was from Latin stratum 'path.' Not having any way to determine whether this was true, I wrote to an Arabic scholar about it, asking also where one could go to look such things up. He confirmed the derivation and added "There is no Arabic etymological dictionary." I found this shocking, and am hard put to explain it. I can understand why the cultural emphasis on the Arabic of the Qur'an as the perfected form of the language might have made native speakers less likely to look beyond it and work on its Semitic connections, but how could the avid European Orientalists of the Victorian era have omitted to produce such a thing? In an age obsessed with philology, when Edward William Lane was producing his monumental Arabic-English Lexicon and men like Theodor Nöldeke and Carl Brockelmann were doing groundbreaking work on Semitic, how could no one have done an etymological dictionary? And how could no one have done one since? Get cracking, people!

OF OF.

In the course of reading Elizabeth Fernea's Guests of the Sheik (a lively account of a year in Iraq which anyone interested in life in the Shiite south should read), I came across the following sentence: "Probably it was a combination of particular circumstances, many of which I remained unaware, plus the fact that people were just becoming used to our presence." I instantly noticed that there was one "of" too few in the clause beginning "many of which...," but I wonder how many readers pass right over it? I suspect that my job as an editor may make me hypersensitive to the inner workings of syntax.

GOOGLING FROM ALL OVER.

Avva says that Evan says that half of all Google searches are conducted in languages other than English, and Evan works for Google, so he should know. Avva says he would have thought the non-English searches only amounted to 20%; I would have guessed it was higher than that, but I'm surprised and pleased to discover it's half and half. Let the world search!

THE MOST UNTRANSLATABLE WORD.

Faithful correspondent Andrew Krug sent me a link to a BBC story by Oliver Conway claiming that:

The world's most difficult word to translate has been identified as "ilunga" from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.

It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".

It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate.

GREENLANDIC FOR SILLY PERSONS.

Or for persons with a great fondness for seal meat. Desbladet has a tasty report on a couple of books on Greenlandic. My favorite bit:

Now, Janssen's phrasebook was prepared for Europeans in Greenland, hardly doctors. So it was probably also handy that when all these sicknesses were treated, there a consoling word to close with: "Have no fear, God and his help are always with you and will make you hale again."

A section on groceries starts with Greenlandic food: "Are you in the habit of eating seal-meat?", to which there are two (2) answers: "Yes, I often eat seal-meat" or "Since I've just eaten, no thanks".

DICO DU NET.

The Dico du Net is a collaborative French dictionary of words having some relation to the internet; its ambit includes:

des domaines aussi variés que : le référencement, la mesure d'audience, l'hébergement de sites, la création de sites web, le développement de logiciels, le moteur Google, DMOZ, les weblogs, les noms de domaine, les normes d'Internet, l'e-Marketing et l'e-Commerce...

HOT-TYPE MEMORIES.

"Minding my p’s & q’s" by Denny Johnson is a loving account of his career in typesetting, starting out as a printer’s devil back in the days when "upper case" meant a literal case:

The Job Case in our shop resembled a huge dark green wood bedroom dresser, built at that time, I supposed, certainly somewhere in California, maybe just after the Gold Rush. It stood five feet high, about a foot over my head. It was almost six feet wide, and stained with years of printer’s ink and chewing tobacco; it was sturdy and unmovable. Ever at its side on the floor -- a mucky red Hills Brothers coffee can was the compositors’ constant companion -- his spittoon.

Instead of three or four deep drawers for underwear, t-shirts and socks, there were sixteen drawers, eight down per side. All the drawers were labeled but their identification tags had long since been obliterated by ink smudged fingerprints. Each drawer was three inches deep by three-feet square and separated by small individual wood fences or dividers that allotted the drawer into special custom cubicles. Every drawer was designed to hold a different, complete font of hand-type from six to twelve point. This is twelve point; this is eight point; so it’s clear that not only did the compositor have to separate and put away each letter in their appropriate letter home, he needed to put the correct letters with their identical sized brethren in the proper drawer as well. If not, sentences would unquestionably suffer and the reader be put upon to wade through dissimilar sized letters and misspelled words, in a sort of alphabet soup that the proofreader would routinely mark: W/F (Wrong Font).

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!