Language Log

Email from D.D.:

After reading an article in The Economist about Nigeria's Boko Haram terrorists on my subway to work today, I asked an Oxford-educated Nigerian co-worker a question: if people from Nigeria are call Nigerians, what are people from the nation of Niger, to the north, called? The guy was stumped! Wow. (I have since done enough googling to learn that they are called Nigeriens — all French-like.)

But anyway, before I learned that, my co-worker and I discussed the issue. He suggested that the common origin of the two nations’ names was due to the Niger River that flows thru them both (according to him; I didn't consult maps).

My question of my co-worker—me being a guy who grew up near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers—was whether it was the French (as it was in early Missouri) who originally transcribed the name of the Niger river (and then some Anglicized the pronunciation), or was it the English.

The answer is "neither one" — it was the Berber/Arab/Andalusian etc. civilization of North Africa and Spain, transmitted via Italian, Latin and other European languages by al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, later known as Leo Africanus.

Over the last couple of days, I read Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem The Triumph of Life, and Paul de Man's essay "Shelley Disfigured", which is presented as a close reading of that poem. The essay quotes extensively from the poem, but its analysis struck me as telling us more about de Man than about Shelley:

Forgetting is a highly erotic experience: it is like glimmering light because it cannot be decided whether it reveals or hides; it is like desire because, like the wolf pursuing the deer, it does violence to what sustains it; it is like a trance or a dream because it is asleep to the very extent that it is conscious and awake, and dead to the extent that it is alive. 

Whether Shelly's or de Man's, these are ideas evoked by highly inferential connections among aspects of the poem's content. Which is fine, except that I was looking for "an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces".

The first British envoy to China was George Macartney; his mission is referred to in the historical literature as the Macartney Embassy.  The basic purpose of the embassy was to open up trade between Great Britain and China, which theretofore has been greatly restricted in various ways by the Chinese authorities.

Naturally, Macartney would have needed translation assistance to communicate with Chinese officials.  However, due to some peculiar circumstances that will be related below, translators were not easy to come by, as is detailed in this passage from the Wikipedia article on the Macartney Embassy:

From the University Chicago Library News:

Calling all historians of cryptography and stenography, Sherlockians (see “The Dancing Men”), and other amateur detectives!  The collection of Homer editions in the Special Collections Research Center – the  Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana(BHL) – includes a copy of the rare 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey that contains, in Book 11 (narrating Odysseus’s journey into Hades) handwritten annotations in a strange and as-yet unidentified script.  This marginalia appears only in the pages of Book 11 of the Odyssey; nowhere else in the volume.  Although the donor of the BHL is suspicious that this odd script is a form of 19th-century shorthand (likely French), he acknowledges that this hypothesis remains unsupported by any evidence offered to date.  

The donor of the BHL is offering a prize of $1,000 to the first person who identifies the script, provides evidence to support the conclusion, and executes a translation of selected portions of the mysterious marginalia.

I was not able to find high-resolution images for remote use — Can it really be true that aspirants need to travel to Chicago and inspect the material IRL?

Update: High-resolution images are now available here.

In response to "What would a "return to philology" be a return to?", Omri Ceren proposes a simple explanation for Paul de Man's assertion that literary "theory" was just a return to philology:

You might be overthinking the de Man thing.

Jon Kabat-Zinn's estimable (2013) Full Catastrophe Living (Revised edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness has an odd "Chinese character for X" blooper: "Maybe there is something to be learned from the fact that the Chinese character for 'breakthrough' is written as 'turning'" (e-book loc 8495, last sentence in chap 12).

Will Spence has an article on "Why 'gentleman' matters" in Caixin Online, part of a Mainland media group, with the following lede:  "The Chinese government often says it wants to build up its soft power, but for this to happen it may have to embrace its heritage and adopt a gentler approach".

A key passage is the following:

It is interesting to note that the the word itself is rarely translated – it is much more common to hear "gentleman" than to hear shenshi or junzi – suggesting that there is something uniquely British about the notion, in a similar vein to English adopting the words of Chinese concepts like taichi and yin yang.

Analytics is all the rage. Thus Keith Pompey, "Sixers aide immerses Brown in analytics", Philadelphia Inquirer 4/7/2014

Brett Brown is inherently curious.  

The first-year 76ers coach was eager to learn as much as possible about the data that tell us where every player is during every possession of an NBA game. It's called analytics, and the Sixers are among the NBA franchises that are shifting toward basing major decisions on data and model-driven analysis.  

"There's always the thing that they call unintended consequences," said Brown, who was introduced to analytics this season. "That's where my curiosity combined with, yeah, you know, there's a bit of defiance in me that I don't believe it. Prove it. And what about this? What about that?  

"And if you can get through all those type of layers, I say, 'Wow.' And I feel like I've improved."  

So much so that the 53-year-old is fond of Lance Pearson, who deals with advanced analytics and statistical scouting for the Sixers. Pearson was hired away from Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Ky., where he was an assistant coach and special assistant in analytics.  He has a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Boston University. Pearson also has bachelor's degrees in computer science, mathematics and philosophy from Kentucky.

Lǎowài 老外 (lit., "old foreign") is a ubiquitous term for a certain type of person from abroad in China, and dictionaries almost invariably gloss it as "foreigner".  Yet the subtleties and nuances of the term seem almost endless, and they can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings.  To try to get a handle on this colloquial expression, I asked a number of laowai who have had long experience in China what they thought of this appellation that they had doubtless been called hundreds of times and some Chinese friends who most likely had had occasion to employ that designation themselves.

Under the heading Freedom 2014, "Whether it’s freedom from surveillance or freedom to be single, this spring the BBC is investigating what freedom means in the modern world". One of the BBC's own contributions to #Freedom2014 is a lovely addition to our No Word For X archive:

The Inuit language doesn't have a word for freedom, the closest is "annakpok" which means "not caught". #Freedom2014 pic.twitter.com/11vwveA9Ks

— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) April 1, 2014

I'll leave it to better-informed commenters to tell us how to express various concepts of freedom in Inuit — but my guess is that "not caught" is one of a number of perfectly reasonable Inuit phrases for various senses of English free. Certainly as hunter-gatherers in marginal terrain the Inuit must have experienced many kinds of freedom in their history — though perhaps they would echo what Matthew Arnold said about philistinism: "We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing."

From Pat Robertson's 700 Club, 3/31/2014:

In a 2010 NYT “On Language” column, Grant Barrett traced the claim that “cellar door” is the most beautiful phrase in English back as far as 1905 1903. I posted on the phrase a few years ago ("The Romantic Side of Familiar Words"), suggesting that there was a reason why linguistic folklore fixed  on that particular phrase, when you could make the same point with other pedestrian expressions like linoleum or oleomargarine:

…The undeniable charm of the story — the source of the enchantment that C. S. Lewis reported when he saw cellar door rendered as Selladore — lies the sudden falling away of the repressions imposed by orthography … to reveal what Dickens called "the romantic side of familiar things." … In the world of fantasy, that role is suggested literally in the form of a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, a brick wall at platform 9¾. Cellar door is the same kind of thing, the expression people use to illustrate how civilization and literacy put the primitive sensory experience of language at a remove from conscious experience.

But that doesn't explain why the story emerged when it did. Could it have had to do with the song "Playmates," with its line "Shout down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door"? There's no way to know for sure, but the dates correspond, and in fact those lines had an interesting life of their own…

Natasha Heller called to my attention the fact that there are several Chinese covers of the Oscar-winning song "Let It Go", from the blockbuster Disney computer-animated film "Frozen".