languagehat.comLanguages, hats, and more.A MIDDLEMARCH EPIGRAPH.- June 24, 2008 As I mentioned last month, my wife and I are reading Middlemarch, which has epigraphs for each chapter, and the one for Chapter 30 defeated me. It's in French, a language I allegedly speak, but I couldn't make head nor tail of it: Qui veut délasser hors de propos, lasse. —PASCAL. I think I was mixing up délasser and lasser with délaisser and laisser. At any rate, the internet came to my rescue, I found a translation of the pensée in question, and as a public..http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003163.php ELEGY FOR COPY EDITORS.- June 24, 2008 From Lawrence Downes at the NY Times, a lament for the passing of the newspaper copy editor. Downes visits the Newseum and discovers it has "nothing about the lowly yet exalted copy editor":Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the days work of a newspaper staff becomes an...http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003162.php GABION.- June 23, 2008 I've completely succumbed to the Troyat biography discussed in this post (and Yana Weinstein convinced me I was wrong to make fun of the word "sibilant"), and today it taught me a fairly useless but interesting word, gabion. Young Lieutenant Tolstoy, having gotten bored with swanning around the general staff HQ well behind the front lines near the Danube during the Crimean War, asks to be sent to where the action is, in the Crimea, and winds up in Sebastopol: "Assigned to the 3rd light battery.http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003161.php A LANGUID SIBILANT THRONG.- June 21, 2008 I'm following up my Caucasus books by reading Henri Troyat's biography Tolstoy; normally I'm suspicious of biographies that "read like novels," but this one works for me so far, and it's now brought me to the Caucasus with the eager but hopelessly unfocused twentysomething Lev Nikolaevich, who's escaping the social whirl and gambling debts of his Moscow life by hanging out with his beloved older brother Nicholas, serving with a regiment stationed in Chechnya. The future passionate antiwar...http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003160.php LH: TOP 20.- June 19, 2008 Jon of eduFire just wrote to let me know that LH has been selected as one of their Top 20 Language Bloggers on the Web:Language Hat is definitely one of the smartest language-related blogs youll find. Theres a great community of people reading and commenting on the blog as you can see evidence of here. Highly recommended if youre looking for something a bit more academic.I particularly like the citation because it rightly focuses on the "great community," which is what makes LH what it is. So..http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003159.php IE LOANWORDS IN FINNISH.- June 19, 2008 The creator of Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish has done a splendid job. Mind you, I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of the etymologies, but they're very well presented, and the approach inspires confidence:The data on the site is based on etymologies published in scientific sources for the scrutiny of the research community. This is not one of those sites where anything goes, whatever the author feels is plausible. Of course it is still part of this...http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003158.php MBUWWA.- June 17, 2008 A remarkable case of survival, from Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat:Most languages probably have a few words used especially for addressing babies. However, Siwi seems to have a lot more than I know from English or Arabic (I've recorded something like 40). One of these (already noted in Laoust 1931) is mbuwwa "water" (the normal Siwi word is aman). mbuwwa, meaning "water" or "drink", turns out to be rather widespread: they use it in baby talk in Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Malta,...http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003157.php LEXICOGRAPHIE ONLINE.- June 17, 2008 That is to say, French lexicographic materials. A correspondent writes:The Dictionnaire Littr de la langue francaise in now available on-line, free, at www.littre.com. It contains more than 80,000 definitions, 200,000 citations of authors and reference works, and synonyms, conjugations of verbs, etc. The Robert is planning to go on line, but it will not be free. On the encyclopedia front, www.Larousse.fr has been revamped to allow contributions from readers, a la Wikipedia,but these are...http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003156.php RE.- June 16, 2008 Hey, remember that discussion of how to pronounce pace 'with due deference to' or 'despite' It was fun and educational, right Well, I've got another poll for those who occasionally say Latin words and phrases out loud: how do you say re 'in the matter of, referring to' And do you say it the same way in the phrase in re (same meaning) I do, but apparently quite a few people don't. (Sparked by this AskMetaFilter thread, which is actually about whether one should use a colon after re. ...http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003155.php SACRED GAMES GLOSSARY.- June 15, 2008 Kri Tulinius writes me to say:I just finished reading Vikram Chandra's novel Sacred Games... It is mostly set in Mumbai and a large part of it takes place in the city's underworld. Therefore it is filled with lots of slang. There's a helpful glossary provided in the back of the book, but it also exists online, here.You can also download it in pdf, rtf, or xls format here. The "a" section alone has material ranging from arthi "Funeral byre on which a person is carried to the burning grounds" to.http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003154.php |