JAMAICAN PATOIS BIBLE.

A couple of readers have sent me links to this BBC News story about a new translation of the Bible into Jamaican patois (apparently the usual name for what linguists call Jamaican Creole); it provides the usual warring sound bites ("Mr Stewart says the project is largely designed to bring scripture alive, but it also has another important function - to rescue patois from its second-class status in Jamaica and to enshrine it as a national language" vs. "Bishop Alvin Bailey, at the Portmore Holiness Church of God near Kingston, argues that Patois is too limited a language to represent the nuances of Biblical text, and has to resort to coarse expressions to makes its meaning clear") but is an interesting read and of course quotes the text, though not as much as one would like. (Jamaican Creole previously on LH: Language Barrier, Pullum on Jamaican Creole.)

DOCTORS' SLANG.

As an astringent palate-cleanser after the overindulgence of holiday dinners, may I present (courtesy of Marc Adler) a page of Doctors' Slang, Medical Slang and Medical Acronyms, Veterinary Acronyms & Vet Slang. People with delicate sensibilities should probably not click, but if you have a dark and robust sense of humor, you should find much to enjoy. A few mild examples: Acute Pneumoencephalopathy - airhead; AHF - Acute Hissy Fit; Albatross - chronically ill patient who will remain with a doctor until one or other of them expire; ALC - a la casa (send the patient home). Thanks, Marc!

XMAS LOOT 2011.

I'm still recovering from midday Christmas dinner, but I've regained enough energy to post about those of my gifts that might interest LH readers. Pride of place goes to a couple of brand-new reference works, The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 13th Edition and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. I own earlier editions of both, which have long been among my very favorite books; these updates are unbelievably gorgeous, superb products of the bookmaker's art, and I will be spending a great deal of time poring over both of them. There is an overblown controversy over the atlas because a map apparently incorrectly shows the amount of loss of Greenland's permanent ice cover since 1999, and what with all the uproar over global warming it got a lot of publicity. I'm not saying that's insignificant, and the publisher should definitely be embarrassed, but some Amazon customers are saying idiotic things like "Sounds like a pretty big mistake. Wonder how many others have crept into this edition?" News flash: every reference book has errors, but the people at the Times Atlas have been doing this for a long time (my copy came with a gorgeous reproduction of the world map from the first, 1922, edition) and they know what they're doing. Anyone who needs a high level of detail and can afford this magnificent atlas would be foolish to settle for a lesser one—unless, of course, they're obsessed with Greenland's ice cover, in which case they should probably get a more specialized work anyway.

This is my third AHD; I bought the first edition as soon as it came out (during my sophomore year of college), and I remember how thrilled I was with the smell (yes, I'm a book-sniffer), the illustrations, the etymologies, and above all the appendix of Indo-European roots with its introduction by Calvert Watkins, one of the two leading American specialists in the field (I studied with the other, Warren Cowgill). I read it to pieces, quite literally; by the time I reluctantly discarded it (during one of the four moves we've made in the last decade), the boards had long since separated from the pages, many of which had been reduced to scraps. I got the fourth edition at the Strand in NYC, and was delighted with the addition of an appendix of Semitic roots; ten years have passed since then, and the dictionary has added 10,000 new words and senses. In the Introduction they mention a number of them, including ghrelin, a hormone that promotes hunger and growth, notable because its discoverers named it after the Proto-Indo-European reconstructed root *ghrē 'to grow'; it's surely the only English word in part borrowed, rather than descended, from PIE. Some other words new in this edition I noticed flipping through are kalbi (also galbi), "A Korean dish consisting of marinated, grilled short ribs, often served wrapped in a lettuce leaf with rice and red bean paste" [Korean, rib, ribs < Middle Korean kari-spjə: kari, rib + spjə, bone]; khimar, "A long headscarf worn by Muslim women, typically gathered or fastened under the chin and covering the body to a variable length" [Arabic ḫimār, covering < ḫamara to cover, conceal; see ḫmr in App. II] (this is accompanied by a typically beautiful and informative photo); and Khitan, "A member of a Mongol people who established the Khitan Liao dynasty in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the 10th century" [Akin to Persian Khutan and Mandarin Q�dā (< Middle Chinese, khit tan), ultimately < the Khitan ethnic self-designation of unknown meaning]—this is also the source of Russian Китай 'China.'

HOW MANY AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES?

How many languages were spoken in Australia at the time of European settlement? Claire of Anggarrgoon says 363 or 364, not counting Tasmania, and she should know. Her list is here (an xlsx file, which you can open in Excel or Google Docs [thanks, Sven!]); she says "this is, if I say so myself, a far better list to use than the Ethnologue�s," and I'm perfectly happy to take her word for it.

I hope all LH readers are having a good holiday season; tomorrow I'll provide my traditional Xmas Loot Report.

BAD COMPANY.

A correspondent sent me a link to this touching essay by Anne Fadiman (who knows what it is to be overshadowed by a famous father) about the ill-fated Hartley Coleridge, who wrote well (but not as well as STC) and drank too much and disappointed pretty much everyone, including himself. The e-mail called attention to the impressive words epistolophobia and scribblelation, both of which occur in letters (the first by STC, the second by Hartley) about halfway down the linked page, but I was particularly struck by the unpredictable definition of the phrase I have used as my post title, a little farther down, in the passage about Hartley's losing his position as a Probationer Fellow at Oriel College: "Hartley failed to attend chapel regularly, stank of tobacco, and associated with 'bad company,' a term redolent of bums and barmaids but that in fact referred to undergraduates from colleges other than Oriel."

THE BOOKSHELF: FROM ELVISH TO KLINGON.

A while back, OUP sent me a reviewer's copy of From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, by Michael Adams. I set it aside, thinking it was probably some marginally interesting attempt to cash in on the popularity of all things Star Trek and Tolkien. When I finally took a good look at it, however, it turned out to be a collection of papers edited by Michael Adams, and a fascinating one. The table of contents is after the cut; as you can see, it covers a much wider range of topics than one might think—not only the titular languages and a chapter covering Volapük, Esperanto, et al., but Orwell and Burgess, Hebrew and Hawaiian, even Joyce and Beckett. I was as pleasantly surprised by this book as I was by Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages a couple of years ago (see this post). Rather than try to summarize all the chapters, I'll just quote some bits from the Tolkien one, which is worth the price of admission all by itself. It starts with this wonderful epigraph:

You can�t be a Tolkien fan without liking the look of these fake languages, and I still find them aesthetically pleasing, even now. There is something wonderful about looking at a new language, noticing something of its structure, sensing its power to communicate and hold things. [...] And I remember feeling the ground had opened up in front of me when I got to Appendix F.

Jenny Turner 'Reasons for Liking Tolkien'

The piecemeal revelation [of the languages in The Lord of the Rings] preserves a sense of distance, ancientness, and mystery, just as does the gradual and partial revealing of the history of the Elder Days. Instructive comparison my be made with 'The Notion Club Papers' [...], an unfinished draft in which the legend of the ancient downfall of N�menor is received preternaturally by 20th-century recipients. In a kind of linguistic thriller, the tale emerges as the characters gradually decipher fragments of two languages in which it is described, Elvish and Ad�naic. For the language enthusiast, the phonology and declension system are fascinating, but Tolkien's instinct in abandoning a story so wholly dependent on linguistic investigation was very sound.

Because Tolkien constructed his Elvish language family using the pattern of real-world language change, it is possible for the investigation of Elvish to create the same intellectual and aesthetic pleasure that can be found in real-world philology, delighting in the relations and histories of words.[...] The apprehension of these complex relationships—discovering the relation of an obscure word to another element in the same or another language, or uncovering the transformative effect of a series of sound changes—is a source of fascination whether the context is Elvish or English etymology.[...]

Since few people study classical or even modern languages in depth nowadays, very few have had the chance to discover such philological pleasure; but of those who have, many were introduced to it through Tolkien's languages.

I'm tempted to quote some of the detailed linguistic discussions, but I think I'll just say if you like the sound of the contents and the excerpts, you'll like this (amazingly inexpensive) book a lot. And you can still run out and get it if you need a last-minute gift!

THE POETRY OF PLACE NAMES.

Yesterday wood s lot featured the poetry of Helen Mort, hitherto unknown to me, and I liked it a lot; just from the line "the small, white knuckle of a distant farm" you can tell she's a real poet. (Great name, too.) The first excerpt was "Hermaness," the start of her sequence "North of Everywhere":

Last night, my body was a compass needle
drawing me past every place I�d once called North:
past Sheffield�s border lands, the sleeping giant
of Manchester, grey towns en route to Aberdeen
then silently across the waterway to Lerwick
where my bearings ferried me past Baltasound,
the sloughed down moors, past Norwick bay
where waves worry at rock all day.
By nightfall, I�d approached the edge of Unst,
the land curtseying to meet the sea,
a lighthouse with no keeper but a resting gull,
the tide, dragged from a North
I couldn�t even dream. I stopped
and let my heart go on ahead of me.

HARMLESS DRUDGERY.

Via Sentence First comes news of a brand-new blog by lexicographer Kory Stamper, harm�less drudg�ery. So far there's only one post, An Introduction to Harmless Drudgery, but it's lively enough I'm looking forward to future ones:

I almost literally fell into lexicography: I tripped over a book and landed on the newspaper which held the �Editorial Assistant� want-ad I eventually answered. I had a (fun and tremendously useless) degree in Medieval Studies and worked a menial job that was slowly and steadily killing my will to live. Publishing was a field that held some appeal�not because it was high-paying, glamorous, or easy to get into. It is none of those things.

You see, I love words. I love all of them, even the nasty bastardized ones�yes, I even have a love/hate thing for �irregardless.� Their histories, who they�ve been with, where they came from, where they are going. Reading is not just an escape or a hobby; it is a compulsion. I am that person you see on the subway who, upon finishing her newspaper or magazine, begins carefully reading all the ads and graffiti on the train and then moves on to the receipts in her pockets. If I run out of reading material, I start fidgeting like a coke fiend needing a line or ten. Do not come between me and my words.