Jan Hits The Fan

Another year, another group of my delightful ninth graders trying to spell the word "tragedy" for their Romeo and Juliet assignment.

Last year's collection

in a way this is beautiful because this is how language worked in the elizabethean era

official linguistics post

I think English is more efficient than French in a lot of ways but if you guys would just let us donate a few diacritics, I swear it would change your life. Imagine having an accent to indicate which syllable in a word is stressed. You look at it and you immediately know. It’s more efficient than guessing or remembering, you have to admit. Spanish does it because Spanish loves you, while English revels in confusion and fear. What about an accent that tells you if the ‘read’ you’re looking at is the one that’s pronounced read instead of read, or one that lets you know if the letter i in a particular word is pronounced ai or ee. I’m still not over that time I had to talk about Pride & Prejudice in English class and couldn’t remember which one was pronounced which way. Just add a little circumflex. Prîde and Prejudice. The word even looks more prîdeful now that it’s got a hat!

French is such a nanny state of a language in comparison, “a is a verb and à is a preposition and cote is pronounced with the mouth slightly more open compared to côte, we MUST dispatch our best accents to provide assistance and prevent panic.” We’ve got 15 accented letters and special characters (é, è, ê, ë, à, â, ô, ù, û, î, ï, ç, æ and œ) and many of them are just here wringing their hands hoping that thanks to them you won’t be confused re: pronunciation or meaning, or even slight nuances in verbal mood. French is gently guiding you by the hand around potential pitfalls of meaning like “it’s vital for the past tense of ‘have’ to be spelt eut in the indicative mood and eût in the subjunctive else you might be confused as to whether the verb carries a connotation of conjecture or doubt <3”, English is driving you home in reverse down the highway with broken headlights at night like “had had, who cares! I guess homonyms and syllable stress might trip people up once in a while? thoughts & prayers”

Then again not all of our accents are terrifically useful, some of them are more like people doggedly holding on to a job that modern life has rendered obsolete, like the circumflexes that are just here to tell you that an s used to live here (forest -> forêt, haste -> hâte). We keep them around because they make the word more interesting (bonus etymology!) and nicer to look at but I wouldn’t mind giving them away for a good cause. French is lying down next to a pond fascinated by its own reflection while English is racing by with such efficiency it sometimes trips on its own feet and faceplants but together we could be normal. Ish.

It's actually only recently that I discovered what "the exception that proves the rule" actually means, and the more I think about it, the weirder it is that for so long, I just accepted the way most people (incorrectly) (including me before now) use that phrase.

People tend to use it to basically mean, "I have a freebie to reject one (1) example that would otherwise weaken my point, and act like it actually strengthens my point." If I say, "X is always Y," and someone gives an example of a case where X is not Y, I can just nod sagely and say, "Ah, but that's the exception that proves the rule," and everyone just accepts that that's A Thing.

That... makes no sense! Being proven wrong about something being universal doesn't somehow make you more right.

And the REASON it doesn't make sense is: *That's not what 'exception that proves the rule' means.*

"The exception that proves the rule" means that if someone has gone out of their way to make an official exception to a rule, it indicates that the rule exists in the first place, even if we don't have direct evidence of the rule. This can be particularly useful in, for example, the study of history. If you unearth some ancient tablets that say, "Let it be here decreed that on festival days, men shall be permitted to approach the Temple of the Goddess without covering their heads," that's evidence that a man going to that particular temple without covering his head wouldn't normally be allowed. Maybe we haven't found the tablet yet that says that. Maybe this civilisation never even bothered to write down that you can't go to the Temple of the Goddess bare-headed, because it was so obvious to them. But the fact that the exception exists means the rule must have existed.

English: Grammar Nazi - Kinda extreme - Trivializes fascism  - Limited usage

Finnish: Comma fucker - Funny, light-hearted yet still clearly derogatory - Trivializes nothing - Usage not limited only to grammar, but works for any nitpickers

I think about this a lot.

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there’s no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that’s used to fill the empty spaces between languages

Ok English is my native language and unfortunatly the only one I know yet, but this reminds me so much of that passage in Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

From the Wikipedia page on loons

no punctuation we read like romans

NOPUNCTUATIONORLOWERCASEORSPACESWEREADLIKEROMANS

INTER·PVNCTVATION·WE·INSCRIBE·LIKE·ROMANS

words doesn’t classical matter order in greek;

we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.

The fact that this has yet to devolve into boustrophedon is a miracle… or a challenge. I’m looking at you @terpsikeraunos @macdicilla @labellamordens

I’m up to it

Not many jnſtances of Punctuation - but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly - ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie - and the long S - ſ - vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes - & the short “s” vſed only at the end - as with the U and V, and the I and J - but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” - Y may be vſed in the place of TH - but only ſparingly - and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences - ſeeminglie without end - a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.

And furthermore, Carthage is to be destroyed.

Or we could just

I know German likes to take English words but when will yall realise shit like “gegoogelt” and “gechillt” sounds genuinely awful

Ich wurde outgecalled:(

:(

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place // Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities // Warsan Shire, Conversations About Home // Fatimah Asghar, Partition // Aysha, Diaspora Defiance // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous // Kaveh Akbar, Do You Speak Persian? // Safia Elhillo, Date Night With Abdelhalim Hafez // Gustavo Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues // Scherezade Siobhan, How to Welcome the Dead

Greek is the only language they have in common when they meet. Neither of them has a huge vocabulary to work with; it’s ordering-at-the-taverna Greek, but it’s better than nothing. Having a way to communicate that isn’t stabbing each other is useful.

Once they decide they’re no longer enemies and may in fact be something like soulmates, they start learning to speak each other’s languages. Slowly, the way children learn, walking around the markets in Damascus and naming food, clothing, parts of buildings. So Yusuf learns to speak Genoese Ligurian (a language called Italian won’t exist for hundreds of years yet, and they’ll learn it together) and Nicolò learns in fits and starts to speak both the derja that Yusuf uses at home in Tunis and the Damascene Arabic around them. He mixes them up all the time but he does well enough to be understood.

Nicolò had never had much need or desire for reading and writing at home. His time as a priest means he can struggle his way through reading and copying out a little Latin but he can’t say he enjoys it. But Yusuf is educated and well-traveled, from a prosperous merchant family in a part of the world where literacy is much more common than in medieval Europe. He can read Arabic, Persian and Greek; he does calligraphy and composes poetry. He is the first person Nicolò has met who is literate in that way, for whom reading and writing is not just functional but pleasurable. And the Arab world is full of books–science, medicine, philosophy, literature–and full of writing, the name of God written out over and over and made into art. So, he says to Yusuf, teach me.

It’s slow going. Learning to hold the pen with enough control while not smearing the ink writing right to left is at least five lessons on its own. Learning the fusha vocabulary needed to read and write is like learning yet another new language. (“You realize I’ve learned Arabic three times for you now,” he says in a moment of frustration when Yusuf is literally moving his hand for him to show him how to connect the letters. “Hmm. I must be something special then,” Yusuf mutters without losing concentration on the word he’s writing. It’s a wasted effort because the line is totally smudged when Nicolò drops the pen to turn around and kiss him.)

It’s frustrating and it makes him feel stupid more often than he’d like to admit, and 800 years later he still has the penmanship of a 10-year-old madrassa student, but eventually he can write well enough that he feels confident actually saying something. He’ll never be a poet, but he starts writing little notes and hiding them places Yusuf will find them–in his coat pocket when he isn’t looking, in his saddle bag next to the waterskin, between the pages of his sketchbook. They’re simple, practical things. “Good morning, love.” “Stay safe.” (He’s just going out to get bread but finding that one in his greatcoat pocket on a frigid London morning still makes him smile.) Sometimes they just say “I love you.”

Eventually Nicolò learns to read and write other languages (turns out Romance languages are much easier for him, who knew?) and even to enjoy reading for pleasure. But Arabic is the first language he wanted to write, and he still always writes his love notes to Yusuf that way. He isn’t always around when Yusuf finds them but sometimes he is, and the way his entire face will light up when he unfolds the little scraps of paper makes it all worth it.

Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?

Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?

die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …

This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING

Dalla padella alla brace “From the pan to the embers” (Italian)

salir del fuego para caer en las brasas

“to leave the fire only to fall on the coals/embers”

Or my personal favorite for Spanish…

de Guatemala a Guatepeor

“to go from Guatemala [Guate-bad] to Guate-worse”

a cădea din lac în puț

To fall from a lake down a well

(Romanian)

Throughout her translation of the “Odyssey,” Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented — “radical” in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.

The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by…

Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldn’t be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they’re translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus’s nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (“of many a turn”) and Cook (“of many turns”) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them — poly(“many”), tropos (“turn”) — answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does “a man of many turns” suggest the doubleness of the original word — a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the “Odyssey,” one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?

“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”

Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:

When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered … wrecked … where … worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about …” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.

Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.

“It feels,” I told Wilson, “with your choice of ‘complicated,’ that you planted a flag.”

“It is a flag,” she said.

“It says, ‘Guess what?’ — ”

“ ‘ — this is different.’ ”

The First Woman to Translate the Odyssey Into English, Wyatt Mason