FREE OED.

For a month, anyway. They're having a free trial of OED Online through February 5; login with "trynewoed"/"trynewoed." Hat tip to Ben Zimmer.

THE RULES FOR LONG S.

I'll bet you thought (if you ever gave it any thought) that short s (the s we know today) was used at the ends of words and long s (the one that looks like an f to us: ſ) everywhere else. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not nearly that simple, and I know because Andrew West of BabelStone wrote a long, long post about it back in 2006 (now updated with n-grams!) providing all the information you could possibly want about usage not only in English but in French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages, with many images. Enjoy (if, of course, this is the sort of thing you enjoy)!

DIKOZABR.

Anatoly has a hilarious post describing his desperate attempts to figure out what was amiss with his incorrectly remembered Russian word дикозабр [dikozabr]. He saw a picture of one, wanted to know how to say it in English, looked it up, and quickly realized he must be mangling the true word... but he couldn't for the life of him figure out what that was. He tried changing some of the sounds around in his head, but got nowhere. Googling only got four results, but one of them was very promising; a woman wrote: "Сказала слово 'дикозабр' и долго не могла понять, что же в нем не так...." ("I said the word 'dikozabr' and for a long time couldn't figure out what was wrong with it..."). However, when he visited the site, he discovered that the end was "...and only by looking through an alphabetical encyclopedia of animals was I able to find it"! He objurgates her for not writing down the word, adding "How are we to build a brighter future with such people?" Then he asks his wife, and she tells him the answer. He ends his post:

In a minute I'll click on the Publish button, this entry will appear in the journal, and soon it will appear in search results on the word "dikozabr." I know, I believe—there will be someone tomorrow, or next month or next year, who will be as I am today, rushing around the net to find the correct name of the dikozabr. I can see him opening this post, impatiently scanning the text, getting a sneaking suspicion that I will spite him the way devushka.ru did me and I won't say the secret, coveted word here... Fear not, future reader! To describe the whole story only to maliciously stand you up in the end—I couldn't do that. The word you're craving is дикобраз [dikobraz, 'porcupine'].

NORTH AMERICAN DIALECTS.

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns, created by Rick Aschmann, is, as Nick Heer says at MetaFilter (where there's considerable discussion of it), "ugly but intriguing." There's an immense amount of information packed in there.

PRONOUN.

I never thought there would be an African music theme on LH, but for the second day in a row I've run across something in that line that I felt I had to share. John Beadle of Milwaukee used to host the "African Beat" program on WYMS; now he maintains a superb audioblog, Likembe (the name "refers to the Congolese version of the thumb-piano, an instrument that can be found across Africa, that in various versions is called the mbira, sanza, kalimba, ubo, etc."). He's been featuring Somali music (with the help of a well-informed Somali commenter named Sanaag), and today's post presents songs from Famous Songs: Hits of the New Era (Radio Mogadishu SBSLP-102, 1973), Volume Three, "issued under the aegis of the Somali Ministry of Information and National Guidance to rally support for the military government of Mohammad Siad Barre... For all their propagandistic aspects, it would be a mistake to dismiss their musical qualities. Waaberi, the Somali super-group featured on Somalia Sings and Famous Songs, pre-dated the 1969 military coup and was a training ground for many great singers..." The music is striking, but what drove me to post was reaching the song called "Magac U Yaal" (mp3), which was translated as "Pronoun." There must be some mistake, thought I, but no:

The composer is Abwan Maxamud Cabdullahi Ciise ("Sangub"...) .... The track is dealing with the widespread joy that came with the official standardization of the Somali language in 1972. Somali is an agglutinative language with a rather complex grammar. This song introduces a number of ingenious and dexterous tricks to the trade of remembering and applying the new grammatical rules correctly.

Prior to the formalization, a score of scripts existed for the language - some for centuries. The discussions, overheated debates and tug-of-wars around this issue started in the late 19th century but couldn't materialize because of differences in interest and allegiance. For practical convenience, an 'independent' advisory committee set up right after the independence finally chose one of the Latin-based alphabets. That decree didn't go down well with some of the supporters of the original Somali scripts or Arabic-based alphabets. The ensuing conflict had eventually led to the imprisonment of some cacophonous antagonists, who were supposedly offered to set an example for any prospective dissonance.

OK/KO.

I love Congolese rumba, or soukous as it is properly called, one of the founding fathers of which was Fran�ois Luambo Makiadi, known as Franco. Franco founded the great OK Jazz band, and their signature tune was "On Entre O.K. on Sort K.O." (YouTube)—"You enter OK, you leave knocked out [KO'd, kayoed]." Both abbreviations are, of course, borrowed from English, where the pronunciations of the letters are identical, but in the song they are pronounced /oke/ and /kao/ respectively, showing that the first was borrowed in spoken form ("OK" being the prototypical bit of Yankee speech) and the second via writing, so that the letters have their French values, with /ka/ for K. I just thought that was interesting, and it's a good excuse to expose people to this wonderful music if you don't know it already. It will KO you!

Update. Much more on Franco and Congolese music here.

HEPBURN'S LEGACIES.

Joel of Far Outliers has been reading American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan 1859�73, by Hamish Ion, and as usual he shares with the rest of us particularly appetizing snippets; I was particularly interested in Legacies of Hepburn�s First Dictionary of Japanese, 1867:

Although Hepburn was discounting the early work of his friend Brown in claiming his was the first dictionary, it was an immense achievement, far surpassing any nineteenth-century rival. ... Even though Hepburn�s dictionary might have been more suited for those using colloquial speech than wanting to acquire the written language, it remains Hepburn�s greatest contribution to opening Japan, not only to missionaries but also to the English-speaking world. ... In September 1872, the Japan Weekly Mail noted that the second edition of the dictionary �is a fresh encouragement to foreigners in this country to pursue the study of the Japanese language, and to the Japanese it will afford invaluable assistance in the study of ours.� The newspaper predicted that its print run of three thousand would be quickly sold out. It was close to a century later � in the early 1960s with the publication of the Nelson dictionary � before another American missionary produced a dictionary that would have a similar profound impact on those learning Japanese. The Hepburn system of romanization of Japanese, which the earlier dictionary first introduced and the Nelson dictionary used, remains the standard system of romanization.

TRANSLITERATION TRANSMISSION III.

Over eight years ago, in the very earliest days of LH, I posted a bitter complaint about the habits of the translator of the novel Ali and Nino: "She kept all the Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Russian terms from the novel in their German guises (the book was written in German), which produces an effect in English that is at best barbarous and at worst incomprehensible." A year later I had a similar complaint about a translation from Hungarian. Now here I am, back to kvetch about the same damn thing. I happen to have both the English translation (The Case of Comrade Tulayev, 1951) and the French original (L'Affaire Toulaev, 1949) of the best-known novel by Victor Serge (a Russian revolutionary who was born in Brussels, wrote in French, and passed from anarchism to Bolshevism to a disillusioned sort-of-Trotskyism, and who will always have a place in my heart for his wonderful remark to the Leninists he turned away from: "All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours?"), so I decided to read them simultaneously. The translator, Willard R. Trask, practiced a slavish fidelity to French orthography that produces extremely annoying results.

I first realized the problem on page 3, when Serge's Romachkine was rendered "Romachkin" instead of the appropriate Romashkin. On page 7, Macha was kept intact instead of being changed to Masha. (On page 8, a salacious sentence was omitted, but that's another issue.) On page 15 Kouznetsoff (i.e., Kuznetsov) shows up as "Kutzetsov," whether through translatorial incompetence or typographical sabotage being impossible to determine, but on the very next line Guépéou has its accents stripped to appear as the absurd "Guepeou" rather than, as it should be, GPU (the secret police, successor to the Cheka and precursor of the NKVD). On page 29 there's a mysterious "Vorogen district"; this should be Voronezh, but here the error is Serge's (the French text has "Vorogène"). On page 36 the name of one of the protagonists is given as "Erchov"; it should be Ershov or Yershov (the character is an analogue of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov). It's not just Russian names that are bollixed up, either; on p. 41 Serge's Sinkiang, which should have been kept intact, is transmogrified into "Tsingkiang" for reasons known only to Trask. (Oddly, a few pages later he manages to correctly turn "Mao-Tse-Dzioun" into Mao Tse-tung.) What on earth did he think he was doing? Even if he didn't know the first thing about Russian, he knew that no English-speaker was likely to pronounce "ch" as "sh"—"Macha" can only be read as a female equivalent of "macho," unless it's given an equally inappropriate Germanic "kh" sound (as in Mucha). And what is an English-speaker supposed to make of "Guepeou"? Shame on Willard Trask, who failed in the most basic task of a translator, that of producing an intelligible text in the target language.