LITERAL-MINDED.

A new (since June) linguistics blog, by Neal Whitman: Literal-minded. He has an interesting series of posts about his son's early difficulties with the l sound. (He also guest-posts at The Volokh Conspiracy.) Via Tenser, said the Tensor.

EARLY SOVIET CHILDREN'S BOOKS.

The Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries maintains a website for their exhibition on Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era:

The present exhibition in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries draws on an important collection of more than 350 Soviet children's books published in the 1920s and 30s and which are remarkable for their original aesthetic quality, linguistic variety and thematic diversity. Dynamic constructivist typography utilized the expressive quality of the stocky, 'architectural' azbuka, the Russian alphabet. Diagonal layouts introduced a simultaneous representation of contents and often used photomontage as a succinct expression of the narrative text. The emblematic use of red and black as dominant colours linked the children's material closely to the publishing output at large. Since more than 100 nationalities live within the fifteen former republics of the USSR, the variety of languages in which children's books were published is nothing short of astonishing. While Russian was the official language of the Union, children's books published in Ukrainian, Uzbek, Tartar, Kazakh, Azerbaidzhani, Armenian, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, lakutian, Nanaian and other languages are well represented in the McGill collection.

SAUNTER.

The word saunter, like many others, can't be traced back very far (AHD: Probably from Middle English santren, to muse), but of course that doesn't stop people from trying, and this word has a particularly enjoyable pseudo-etymology, discussed in the following typically piquant passage from one of the stories in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Martians (a book I recommend to anyone who likes thoughtful, human-oriented science fiction):

Long walks around Odessa at the end of the day. Aimless, without destination, except perhaps for an evening rendezvous with Maya, down on the corniche. Sauntering through the streets and alleyways. Sax liked Thoreau's explanation for the word saunter: from à la Saint[e] Terre, describing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. There goes a Saint[e] Terrer, a saunterer, a Holy Lander. But it was a false etymology, apparently spread from a book called Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691. Although since the origins of the word were obscure, it might in fact be the true story.

Sax would have liked to be sure about that, one way or the other. It made the word itself a problem to mull over. But as he sauntered Odessa thinking about it, he did not see how the matter could be investigated any further, the etymologists having been thorough. The past was resistant to research.

JAPANESE LINKS.

In response to a commenter's query on this thread, I googled my way to this page of Japanese learning resources (part of the Zozenawayone site); there are all sorts of goodies there, but the one that first struck me was this:

Into this void comes the Japanese-English Dictionary Server, an online database with kanji, kana, slang, names, technical jargon, and about eighty different ways to show the results. (This is important if your computer isn't set up to display Japanese.) The dictionary even includes idiomatic phrases, though they're run together with no spaces between the words (so hotoke no kao mo sando, "to try the patience of a saint," appears as "hotokenokaomosando"). And to gild the lily, the site loads quickly and is rarely down.

CARRUTH ON HIS LANGUAGE.

Hayden Carruth, as I've said before (hi, Moira!), is one of my favorite American poets; tonight I was reading my wife a poem of his called "Vermont" (1975, available in Collected Longer Poems) and came across these lines (towards the end), which I thought I'd share with y'all:

What is the difference, now at last, between
the contemporary and the archaic? I
say "drawed" for "drew" and "deef" for "deaf" and still
use "shall" and "shan't" in ordinary conversation
like any good Vermonter, and sometimes too
I write "thou" for "you." So am I therefore
dead? That will come soon enough. Meanwhile
my language is mine, I insist on it,
a living language as long as it is spoken
by living men and women naturally,
as long as it is used.

PUNCTUATION HELL.

A story by Peter Landesman in the July 11 NY Times Magazine begins:

On Dec. 14 of last year, just hours after being hauled out of a hole in the ground by American forces, Saddam Hussein received his first visitors as a prisoner of war: two Americans, L. Paul Bremer III, at the time the top United States administrator in Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the commander of American-led forces in Iraq; and four prominent Iraqis—Mowaffak al-Rubaie, then a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and now Iraq's national security adviser; Adnan Pachachi, the foreign minister of Iraq before Hussein's reign; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite representative; and Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.

SPOONER'S DAY.

It’s Spooner’s Day! Grab your binoculars and let's go word botching! (Via wood s lot.)

THE AMPERSAND.

To quote aldiboronti, from whose Wordorigins thread I swiped this link:

Lovely page from Adobe on the historical development of the ampersand, from the ligature of ET or et to the & of today, with illustrations of various stages, the earliest being a ligature from Pompeian graffiti dated 79AD.

EVERY WAY BUT ONE.

I've just discovered another language blog, Every Way but One, authored by Russell: "Student of linguistics. Student in Japan." There's a lot of good material about Japan and the Japanese language; I was particularly taken with the post English Readings for (Japanese) Chinese Characters, which describes a truly weird onomastic development:

The original name for [an army base in Miyazaki Prefecture] was pronounced shin-den-baru (new-paddy-field). But the current pronunciation is nyuu-ta-baru. That is, the first character, which means new, is now being pronounced with the (Japanese rendition of the) English word. (Oh, and for some other reason the second character now has a native Japanese reading instead of a Chinese reading...not sure why that is - generally the S[ino-]J[apanese] readings go just as fine with foreign words as they do with other SJ morphemes).

ONLINE SANSKRIT DICTIONARY.

The Online Sanskrit Dictionary "cannot be a substitute for a good printed Sanskrit-English dictionary. However, we anticipate this to aid a student of Sanskrit in the on-line world." I can't vouch for its accuracy (and the quality of the English in the introduction doesn't inspire confidence), but it's a handy quick reference. (Via Incoming Signals.)

HOW TO READ A TRANSLATION.

Lawrence Venuti has a good essay, "How to Read a Translation," in the July Words Without Borders.

The foreign language is the first thing to go, the very sound and order of the words, and along with them all the resonance and allusiveness that they carry for the native reader. Simultaneously, merely by choosing words from another language, the translator adds an entirely new set of resonances and allusions designed to imitate the foreign text while making it comprehensible to a culturally different reader. These additional meanings may occasionally result from an actual insertion for clarity. But they in fact inhere in every choice that the translator makes, even when the translation sticks closely to the foreign words and conforms to current dictionary definitions. The translator must somehow control the unavoidable release of meanings that work only in the translating language. Apart from threatening to derail the project of imitation, these meanings always risk transforming what is foreign into something too familiar or simply irrelevant. The loss in translation remains invisible to any reader who doesn’t undertake a careful comparison to the foreign text—i.e., most of us. The gain is everywhere apparent, although only if the reader looks.

But usually we don’t look. Publishers, copy editors, reviewers have trained us, in effect, to value translations with the utmost fluency, an easy readability that makes them appear untranslated, giving the illusory impression that we are reading the original. We typically become aware of the translation only when we run across a bump on its surface, an unfamiliar word, an error in usage, a confused meaning that may seem unintentionally comical...

ETYMOLOGIC.

The creators of Etymologic! call it "the toughest word game on the web," and for all I know they may be right.

In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve; in each case the word or phrase is highlighted in bold, and a number of possible answers will be presented. You need to choose the correct answer to score a point for that question. Beware! The false answers will often also seem quite plausible, and some of the true answers are hard to believe, but we have documentation!

PHIN.

PhiN. Philologie im Netz "is a journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies."

It publishes articles and reviews within an interdisciplinary framework. The PhiN "Forum" is open to shorter statements, discussions, dialogues, and interviews. Contributions are welcome from all areas of the field. PhiN is published on the internet four times a year, in January, April, July, and October. Viewing, downloading, or printing material from PhiN issues is free... Contributions are accepted generally in English, French, German, and Spanish. All articles should be preceeded by a short (10 lines) abstract in English.

WORDS AT THE CBC.

The CBC website has a section called Words: Woe & Wonder that contains lively and sensible essays on all sorts of language-related issues, for instance an excellent discussion of why many news organizations prefer to refer to the ex-dictator of Iraq as "Saddam" rather than "Hussein" (short answer: "Hussein" is the first name of the man's father, not a family name, and virtually everyone in Iraq knows him as "Saddam" and not "Hussein"). The most recent is Quibbling over Quotes, which begins by defending the shorter noun "quote" (just as good as "quotation," but used in different contexts) and continues with various related matters; I especially liked their catching the NY Times (my favorite whipping boy) in an incorrect correction:

When Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, everyone back on Earth heard the following crackle over their televisions and radios:

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

...When Armstrong got back home and saw the mission transcript (as well as some newspaper and magazine coverage of his adventure), he told reporters that he had been misquoted.

NASA concluded the "a" got lost in atmospheric static, the official record was changed and many news organizations ran a correction, including the New York Times on page 20 of its July 31, 1969, edition. After pointing out that Armstrong had requested the revision, the paper embraced the extra word without qualification: "Inserting the omitted article makes a slight but significant change in the meaning of Mr. Armstrong's words, which should read: 'That's one small step for a man, one giant step for mankind.'"

Wait a minute. Small step, giant step? Is this right? Nope. It turns out that while publishing a five-paragraph correction outlining why an "a" was being added to a line that will be cited for generations, the Times turned "giant leap" into "giant step" by mistake. A slight stumble, to some. An astronomical bungle, to others.

GREEKING HARRY POTTER.

I wouldn't normally bother to note the translation of the first Harry Potter book into Greek, but the translator has written an interesting essay describing how he did it.

My intention was to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process (such as would only be taught only to very advanced students at Hogwarts!) to reach the 21st century. Objects and ideas would be unfamiliar - but once he'd got used to his new surroundings, the book would make complete sense. So I thought it was very important to have this time-travelling Greek in mind at all times, and continually ask myself "would that have any meaning for him? what would he make of that?" In other words a cultural transposition is involved, not just finding the words.