Category Archives: language

by | 4 February 2007 · 12:27 pm

Romanian Synonymy: Horse Traders and Maize

Regional synonyms constitute a “pair” of two or more words identical in sense, known and used by a group in at least one locality at a given moment in time [emphasis in original]. Thus, with regard to regional synonymy as well, the degree to which we accept words as synonyms depends on how they fit in time and place.

Sever Pop (cf. 1929) used to note that, within the territory of Romania, the following terms can be found to denote the concept of ‘horse trader’: barâşnic, craşcadău, cupeţ, factor, fleşer, geambaş, gheşeftar, ghiambabău, gârgez, făznar, hendler, herghelier, hâmbluitor, liverant, mecler, năstrăpaş, negustor, peţer, pilar, potlogar, precupeţ, precupitor, semsar, sfârnar, sfârnăroiu, şmecher, ţânzar, ţigan, tuşer. No one doubts that all the terms listed denote the same concept. The question that arises is the following: can each and every one of these words be considered synonyms? According to some definitions, still in circulation, all words that express the same notion are considered synonyms. Glancing over the list of words above, we observe that only the word negustor, which is the general term, and to a certain degree the word geambaş, are more widely known and can be considered synonyms; the rest are known only in more or less restricted areas. For the great majority of Romanians, words like barâşnic, gârgez, hendler, mecler, tuşer, and so forth do not mean anything; they are just as unintelligible as any others in a foreign language. Of course, in many places negustor can be a synonym of făznar, and geambaş with herghelier [‘herder’], and so on, but this only happens in certain places and not across the whole territory where Romanian is spoken.

These examples prove once again that for two or more words to be considered synonyms it is not sufficient that they express the same notion. And in cases of regional synonymy, the notion of synonym must be localized and made concrete.

Situations like those discussed above are very common in Romanian; they may be found on almost every linguistic map but are not mentioned except sporadically. So, for example, Marius Sala (1958), after analyzing the distribution of terms for ‘maize’, established that porumb is synonymous with păpuşoi [cf. păpuşă ‘doll, puppet’], cucuruz [usu. ‘corncob’; Russian кукурузы, South Slavic kukuruz], mălai [usu. ‘cornmeal’]. All of these words are fairly widely distributed (cf. map 900 in the Atlas of Romanian Linguistics). At present, porumb, being the general, literary term, is synonymous with păpuşoi, cucuruz, mălai in those areas where the latter are used. But the question arises whether păpuşoi, cucuruz, and mălai can be considered synonymous with each other. In the first place, at their points of intersection, they can be completely synonymous, except in cases where certain semantic differences intervene. Second, because of their wide usage, even in literature by great writers, we can admit that they form a set of synonyms at the level of literary language, if not everywhere, at least widely enough. But what do we do with the term tenchi, borrowed from Magyar and recorded at just one locale on the same map? In every other zone, tenchi is a foreign word, and therefore cannot be synonymous with the other words that denote ‘maize’. (Tenchi may eventually become synonymous with porumb or with mălai to the extent that the latter are known and used in the locality where tenchi was recorded.)

SOURCE: “Synonymy and dialects” (4.1.1.4) in Probleme de sinonimie, by Onufrie Vinţeler (Bucureşti: Editură Sţiinţifică şi Encliclopedică, 1983) [my translation].

I don’t have any problem with considering terms in different languages to be synonyms. That’s what translationese, calques, and 直訳 are all about.

UPDATE: In response to Language Hat, I need to clarify that when I accept “synonyms” across separate languages, I’m thinking of communities where nearly everyone speaks at least two languages, and where people switch between them as frequently and as easily as they or others might switch between dialects of the same language. I’ve spent some time in such communities. In fact, my first published paper in graduate school after returning from fieldwork in a New Guinea village whose unique language I had been sent to describe was not a paper just about the new , undocumented language but one on “multilingualism and language mixture” among the people of that village. People borrowed and calqued all the time, and even recreated for my benefit “pure” equivalents (rarely used by anyone else) in their own language by calquing backwards out of either the local church lingua franca, whose usage has since faded to the point that young people are no longer likely to recognize the source of those words; or else Tok Pisin, which supplies nearly every community in New Guinea an extra set of very general synonyms for specific words in their own languages. Romanians did much the same a few centuries ago when they borrowed a load of new vocabulary from French, then creating Romanianized shapes for many of the words. Those pairs became synonyms. Sometimes the synonyms carved up semantic space in complementary fashion, and sometimes one form gave way to the other.

I plan to translate several more chunks from Vinţeler’s chapter on borrowings and synonymy. He compiled a lot of good examples.

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by | 3 February 2007 · 6:02 pm

Two Chinese Views on Mongol Writing, 1237

Peng Daya:
As regards their matters of administration, they write with wooden twigs. Their writing looks like frightened snakes and writhing earthworms; it looks like the magical writing in the Books of Heaven; their characters look like the wu, fan, Gong[?] and chi of musical notation. They are closely related to the characters of the Uighurs.

Xu Ting:
I, Ting, have concerned myself with this. The Tartars originally had no writing. Today, however, they use three different kinds.

For written communication in the Tartar lands proper they always use small pieces of wood, three or four inches in length on which they make incisions in the four corners. If for instance ten horses are to be sent, they make ten notches. As a rule they only cut the required number. Their customs are pure and their thoughts honest. Hence also their language is without ambiguity. According to their laws, liars are punished by death. Thus nobody dares to betray. Even if they had no writing, they would still be capable of founding an independent state. These small pieces of wood are the same as the wooden tablets of antiquity.

For their written correspondence with the Uighurs they utilise the Uighur system of writing. Chinqai is the master of this. The Uighur system of writing has only 21 letters. The others are formed by adding something on one or the other side of the letter.

For written correspondence with the conquered Chinese states, with the Kitan and the Jurchen, they make use exclusively of Chinese writing. Chucai [Ch’u-ts’ai] is the master of this. But apart from this, before the date at the end of the letter, Chinqai in his own hand writes in Uighur letters the words: ‘To be sent to NN’. This is presumably a security measure that is directed only at Chucai. Hence every piece of writing has to be marked with such a confirmation in Uighur; without it it has no official validity. This is obviously a measure to make sure that all correspondence passes through Chinqai’s hands, in order to ensure mutual control.

In the city schools in Yanjing it is mainly the Uighur writing that is taught along with translation into the Tartar language. No sooner have the pupils learnt to translate, than they begin to function as interpreters and then in company with Tartars go on violent rampages, where without inhibitions they begin to act as masters of punishment or favour and extort bribes, goods, services, and foodstuffs.

The systems of writing that the Kitan and the Jurchen originally possessed are never used by the Tartars.

“Heida Shilüe (Brief Account of the Black Tartars),” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 109-111

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by | 26 January 2007 · 5:19 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Rengou Kantai, Ketteisen

The other old mass-market paperback that I recently bought for $1.39 was The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, by Masanori Ito (1956), translated by Andrew Y. Kuroda and Roger Pineau (1962). It offers an interesting critical retrospective on the Pacific War from the point of view of the Japanese Navy’s high command. It also offers a chance to combine book excerpts with Wordcatcher Tales.

聯合艦隊 rengou kantai – 聯合 rengou ‘combined, united’ has now been simplified to 連合. The first character also occurs in the abbreviated name of the old Soviet Union (ソ連 soren [so- is short for sobietto ‘Soviet’]) and in the translation of United Kingdom (連合王国 rengou oukoku). The second word, which can mean either ‘fleet’ (if large) or ‘squadron’ (if small) is composed of 艦 kan ‘warship’ and 隊 tai ‘squad, troop’. In Japanese, navy submarines are warships, not “boats”: 潜水艦 sensuikan ‘submerge-water-warship’. The 隊 tai can also translate ‘corps’, as in 挺身隊 teishintai ‘volunteer (lit. ‘offer-body’) corps’, which is the standard term for the military ‘comfort women‘ in Korean (chŏngshindae).

TO THE JAPANESE PEOPLE “Rengo Kantai” is a familiar and honored term meaning “Combined Fleet.” When World War II began, the Japanese Navy—the third most powerful in the world—included some of the mightiest ships in naval history and was a force worthy of the pride and trust of the Japanese people. Then, in less than four years, this great war machine fell from glory to oblivion. Of ten battleships riding in Hiroshima Bay in December, 1941, nine were sunk. The lone survivor, Nagato, died at Bikini Island as a target in an atomic bomb test.

As early as the spring of 1946, Bungei Shunju magazine urged me to write of the last days of the Combined Fleet. I refused because I did not wish to disturb the dead bodies of my friends. Even if I had forced myself to write, I would not then have been able to assemble all the material now available to me. In the years since Japan’s defeat, the war-troubled mind of the people has been calmed, but I find that there is still nostalgia for the Combined Fleet in many hearts. It was at the request of Japanese readers that my newspaper articles were assembled into this book.

Movements to romanize our language may some day succeed [!!], but the ideographs for Rengo Kantai [聯合艦隊] will always stir Japanese hearts, just as do some of Admiral Heihachiro Togo‘s famous words. His dispatch as battle was about to be joined at Tsushima Strait: “The enemy has been sighted; the Combined Fleet is moving to annihilate him. The waves are high but the day is clear.” [pp. 1-2]

決定戦 ketteisen ‘decisive battle, showdown’ – The components are 決める kimeru ‘to decide’, as in the Sino-Japanese compound 解決 kaiketsu ‘solution, settlement’; 定める sadameru ‘to decide, fix’, as in the compound 定食 teishoku ‘set meal’; and 戦う tatakau ‘to fight’, as in the compound 戦争 sensou ‘war’. The term can refer to any kind of decisive showdown, whether between sumo wrestlers, gameshow contestants, or dinosaurs.

Army leaders in Japan believed that the United States could be easily defeated. But Admirals Yamamoto and Nagano knew the temper, traits, and character of the American people, as well as the military history of the country, and they had no illusions of an easy victory for Japan.

Their hope was that Japan might quickly achieve such overwhelming successes that the United States would accept a compromise peace. There was risk involved, but Yamamoto decided in favor of decisive battle. The question then remained as to where the battle should be fought. The Naval General Staff hoped that it could be in the Solomons.

The Solomon Islands, stretching southeasterly from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, could provide valuable bases for the Japanese fleet. The General Staff figured that seizure of these islands would constitute such a threat to Allied lines of communications that the United States Navy would oppose their occupation, and could then be annihilated. This concept depended heavily on the enemy’s rising to the bait. If the enemy shied from decisive battle in the Solomons, Japan would be faced with a long war.

Admiral Yamamoto, on the other hand, advocated Midway as the battleground. He reasoned that Japanese occupation of Midway and the Aleutians (all part of the same operation plan), would guarantee a challenge from the United States Navy. He felt that Americans could accept the fall of Guam and Wake, but that they would not tolerate Japan’s advance beyond the 180th meridian. He also felt that his Midway plan had a better chance of success than the Solomons strategy.

The Midway strategy, however, involved a greater risk. The distance from Japan’s Inland Sea to Midway is more than twice the distance from Pearl Harbor to Midway. Midway’s comparative proximity to Pearl Harbor would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Japan to support an island garrison. The chance was very great that the enemy could easily recapture the atoll.

But Admiral Yamamoto argued that the opportunity for a decisive battle must be expected to entail risk. Midway should be seized. If the enemy came out to regain the island, Japan’s long-sought opportunity would be provided. A fleet-opposed action of Japan’s choosing would lead the way to another “Pearl Harbor,” in which, this time, enemy aircraft carriers could be destroyed. With the U.S. Navy’s strength divided between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Yamamoto felt that the Pacific half would fall easy victim to the concentrated Combined Fleet of Imperial Japan. [pp. 52-53]

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Filed under Japan, language, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 14 January 2007 · 8:58 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Iwo, Kakka, Kisamara

Yesterday I went to see the best Japanese movie I’ve seen in a long time: Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (硫黄島からの手紙). Although Eastwood deserves the lion’s share of the credit, and the Japanese actors were excellent (especially the leads, veteran Watanabe Ken as the commanding general and boyband star Ninomiya Kazunari as the slacker private), I appreciated above all the superb screenwriting by Iris Yamashita, who did an amazing job of bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. The wording of the Japanese dialogue and the English subtitles often diverged radically in order to make each appropriate to the context. Here are a few of the divergences.

硫黄 iou (also ryuuou, yuou) ‘sulphur, brimstone’ – Note that there is no /w/ in the current Japanese pronunciation of this most appropriate name for an island in the Volcano Archipelago (火山列島 Kazan Rettou) that was hell on earth for the men who fought there.

UPDATE: The Mandarin Chinese reading for this compound is liúhuáng. The second character, optional in many contexts, means ‘yellow’, but in this compound it is sometimes written with a ‘stone’ radical (硫磺). The regular Sino-Japanese match should be ryuukou (once written riu-kuwau), but both syllables of the island placename have suffered erosion: ryuu- > yuu- > yu- > i- and -kou > -ou.

閣下 kakka ‘(Your/His[/Her]) Excellency’ – The commanding general is both addressed and referred to as kakka, a term of great deference but not a military rank. I learned my first two Japanese military ranks while watching the Japanese-dubbed Adventures of Rin Tin Tin as a kid: 軍曹 gunsou ‘sergeant’ and 中尉 chuui ‘1st lieutenant’. In English, several of the names for the officer ranks come in pairs: 1st and 2nd lieutenant, lieutenant and lieutenant junior grade, colonel and lieutenant colonel, commander and lieutenant commander, and (my favorite) rear admiral upper half and rear admiral lower half. In Japanese (and Chinese and Korean, I believe), they come in groups of three, each coming in small, middle, and large size:

  • 少尉 shoui, 中尉 chuui, 大尉 taii for the company-grade officer ranks (USA/USN) ‘2nd lieutenant/ensign’, ‘1st lieutenant/lieutenant junior grade’, ‘captain/lieutenant’;
  • 少佐 shousa, 中佐 chuusa, 大佐 taisa for the field-grade officer ranks ‘major/lieutenant commander’, ‘lieutenant colonel/commander’, ‘colonel/captain’;
  • 少将 shoushou, 中将 chuushou, 大将 taishou (as in 将軍 shougun ‘general of an army’) for the general officer/flag officer ranks ‘major general/rear admiral (2 stars)’, ‘lieutenant general/vice admiral (3 stars)’, ‘general/admiral (4 stars)’.

The much more problematical in-between ranks of ‘brigadier/commodore‘ (with 1 star) are rendered by 准将 junshou ‘(lit.) quasi-general/semi-admiral’. In the U.S. Navy, commodores are now rear admirals (lower half).

貴様ら kisamara ‘you collective (derog.)’ – Japanese has a host of ways to translate English ‘you’. (See the useful summary at the end of the Yale Anime Society glossary.) The most common ones used in the military context of the movie were the gruff, male-bonding omae (お前, etymologically ‘honorable facing [person]’) and the familiar, superior-to-subordinate kimi (君, etymologically ‘lord’). The latter etymon is also the source of -kun, a familiar (usually male) equivalent of neutral -san ‘Mr., Ms.’ and polite -sama (様). As the derogation of 君 ‘lord’ attests, the most derogatory terms often have the most noble origins. And few terms of address have dropped farther down the scale of politeness than 貴様 ‘(lit.) exalted/sacred-sama‘, which is now best rendered in English as ‘you son-of-a-bitch, you bastard’, in other words, the ‘you’ that precedes a fight.

I had heard kisama many times, but had never heard it with its collective suffix -ra—the impolite equivalent of -tachi—until I heard abusive officers use it in the movie script to address troops about to be punished, in fact, troops about to be summarily executed in one episode. That got me thinking about the contexts appropriate for using -ra vs. -tachi. At one end of the scale, you would not combine highly derogatory kisama with a neutral collective marker: *kisama-tachi sounds socially bizarre. At the other end of the scale, you would not (except ironically) combine polite anata with impolite -ra in *anata-ra (although the less respectful anta-ra sort of works, for me anyway). However, either collective suffix seems to work on the gruff, male-bonding terms: omae-ra and omae-tachi both work for ‘you guys’, just as ore-ra and ore-tachi do for ‘us guys’.

UPDATE: Another tricky term of address I heard in the film was onore (己), which my electronic dictionary defines as either (1) ‘oneself’ (syn. jibun), (2) ‘you’ (syn. omae, anata), or (3) “Hey!; Damn it!; You son of a bitch!” [syn. kisama—J.]. In the film script, it was used by a gallant but kind-hearted commanding officer addressing his men after their situation was hopeless, telling them to do what they think is right (like Polonius: “to thine own self [onore] be true”), thus implicitly allowing them to choose surrender. The officer himself chose solitary suicide after being blinded by shrapnel.

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Filed under cinema, Japan, language, war

by | 3 January 2007 · 5:38 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Mō’ili’ili, Ishizuchi

For our first meal of the (solar) Year of the Pig, the Far Outliers pigged out on Chinese dimsum at Honolulu’s Chinese Cultural Plaza with old family friends from China who have since immigrated to Hawai‘i. Later that afternoon, I took a long walk through Honolulu’s old Japan town, Mō‘ili‘ili, with camera in hand (see Flickr for more photos). If I have time, I’d like to put together a neighborhood blogpost à la Dumneazu. In the meantime, all I can offer is a bit of etymological talk-story. It all starts with lava rock.

Mō‘ili‘ili gets its Hawaiian name from the small, round pebbles (‘ili‘ili) of lava that were washed down by Mānoa Stream, which has flooded many times, most recently during October 2004, when it destroyed basements and ground floors of several crucial buildings on the campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, including the medical school and the graduate research library. According to UH geographer Abraham Piianaia, the area had been referred to as Ka moana ‘ili‘ili ‘the pebble sea’, Ka moku ‘ili‘ili ‘the pebble district’, or Ka mo‘o (‘aina) ‘ili‘ili ‘the pebble (land) parcel’. Ka mō‘ili‘ili is a contraction of the latter two. However, the place name later came to be associated with Polynesian legends of the lizard (mo‘o), and the folk etymology for the name is ‘pebble lizard‘.

In addition to its pebbles, Mō‘ili‘ili was known for its underlying limestone karst from raised coral and its overlying ridges of volcanic Sugarloaf basalt, which provided the stone for many a building in Honolulu, most notably the New England–style sanctuaries of Central Union Church in neighboring Makiki. The Mō‘ili‘ili Quarry employed mostly Japanese workers, whose families lived nearby, turning the neighborhood into Honolulu’s Japantown during the 1920s and 1930s.

Back in those days, Japanese speakers called the quarry face Ishiyama ‘Rock Mountain’, and “the Quarry” is still how everyone refers to what’s officially known as the Lower Campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, which is now filled with a huge multistory parking lot and sprawling athletic facilities.

Ishizuchi 石鎚 ‘rock hammer’ is the name of the tiny Shinto shrine not far from the Quarry, a name I thought most fitting after I deciphered it. There are a lot of Buddhist temples of various sects in the neighborhood, and at least a couple of Christian churches with strong Japanese American membership (Church of the Crossroads and Olivet Baptist Church).

The shrine was all decked out on New Year’s Day (top photo). Unlike most Japanese shrines, but in harmony with its geographical and cultural environment, the purification trough (bottom photo) was made of lava rock and offered paper towels to dry off with.

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, language

by | 26 December 2006 · 4:55 pm

Bobkabata kabatabobbus et cetera

Scientists who name newly discovered species often name them after their mentors or colleagues, but some have more than a little bit of fun in the process. Take, for example, these two species of parasitic copepods:

Bobkabata kabatabobbus Hogans & Benz, 1990 (parasitic copepod) Named after parasitologist Bob Kabata [whose real given name is Zbigniew!].

Hoia hoi Avdeev & Kazatchenko, 1986 (parasitic copepod) Named after Ju-Shey Ho.

But sometimes they name new species after well-known figures of popular culture.

Funkotriplogynium iagobadius Seeman & Walter, 1997 (mite) from Iago, “James” and badius, “brown,” named after James Brown, the King of Funk.

Mastophora dizzydeani Eberhard, 1984 (spider) Named after a baseball player. The spider uses a sticky ball on the end of a thread to catch its prey.

Strigiphilus garylarsoni Clayton, ~1989 (owl louse) “I considered this an extreme honor. Besides, I knew no one was going to write and ask to name a new species of swan after me. You have to grab these opportunities when they come along.” – Gary Larson

Newly discovered species of dinosaurs seem to arouse extra large doses of taxonomic whimsy:

Dracorex hogwartsia Bakker et al. 2006 (pachycephalosaur dinosaur) Named for Hogwarts School of Harry Potter fame. The genus means “dragon king.” J. K. Rowling wrote, “I am absolutely thrilled to think that Hogwarts has made a small (claw?) mark upon the fascinating world of dinosaurs.” The skull is on display at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

Drinker nisti Bakker et al., 1990 (ornithopod dinosaur) after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce). “It’s the only dinosaur named after an arm of the federal government. Someday I’m going to name one after the I.R.S.” – Robert Bakker.

Qantassaurus Rich & Vickers-Rich, 1999 (Ornithopod dinosaur) Named after Qantas Airlines.

Quetzalcoatlus northropi Lawson, 1975 (Texas pterosaur) Named after an Aztec god and an aircraft designer. The pterosaur was as large as an ultra-light plane.

New strains of bacteria often seem to be discovered in labs, rather than in the field, and quite a few end up named after institutional acronyms.

Afipia (bacterium) after AFIP: Armed Force[s] Institute of Pathology.

Cedecea (bacterium) after CDC: Centers for Disease Control.

Desemzia (bacterium) after DSMZ: Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen.

These examples come to you courtesy of Mark Isaak, whose Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature is worth perusing at greater length—and multiple times.

And with that, I leave you to the fish genus Sayonara Jordan & Steele, 1906

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Filed under baseball, language, science

by | 18 December 2006 · 7:08 am

A Far Outlier Favorite Blogpost for the Year

I only recently discovered the fascinating blog Dumneazu, which follows threads of food, family, friends, and folklore wherever they lead across time and space, with plenty of photos from past and present. Its author is one of my favorite commenters on Language Hat. The Dumneazu blogpost on The Dwarf Jewish Theater of Maramures has got to be among the most far-outlying I’ve read all year. Here’s a taste.

There is an extensive wikipedia entry on the Ovitz Family. On arrival, the family members were selected by Dr. Jozef Mengele for genetic experiments. Thus it was that the Ovitz family, which in May 1944 arrived in Auschwitz together – seven dwarfs and the rest of their normal-sized family members – many of whom might have been murdered immediately had they arrived on their own, were not only spared the gas chambers, but were accorded special conditions which helped facilitate their survival. What’s more, they were able to convince the Nazis that their trusted family assistant and coachman Shimon Slomowitz, his wife and six children, as well as two additional neighbors from Rozavlea with no special connections to the family, were also relatives, and as such were allowed to join the Ovitz group. Incredibaly, the Ovitz’ were one of the only families to enter Auschwitz and survive intact, along with most of the other Maramures Jews whom they falsely claimed as relatives – thus attracting the protective umbrella of Mengele’s expermientation.

After the war, the Ovitz family settled in Haifa in the newly established state of Israel, where they called themselves the Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz and began touring. Their bittersweet cabaret was an enormous success. When they retired they had enough money to buy two cinemas, a café and a large flat where they lived together. the last surviving member of the family troupe, Perla Ovitz, died in 2001 in Haifa after revealing her amazing story to Israeli journalists Koren and Negev. “If I was a healthy Jewish girl, one meter seventy tall, I would have been gassed like the hundreds of thousands of other Jews in my country. So if I ever wondered why I was born a dwarf, my answer would have to be that my handicap, my deformity, was God’s only way to keep me alive.”

I’m a little puzzled by the blogname Dumneazu. When you google it, Google asks whether you might have meant Dumnezeu, lit. ‘Lord God’. Perhaps it’s a dialectal variant.

Whatever it may be, it provides me a good excuse to disquire a bit about Romanian deferential pronouns. The nondeferential second person singular, of course, is the familiar tu. The polite second person singular is dumneavoastră (often abbreviated d-vă), lit. ‘your (plural) lordship’. The “officious” second person singular is dumneata (d-ta), lit. ‘your (singular) lordship’. (The officious second person is the one they taught us at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey—presumably suitable for interrogating people from a position of authority.) There’s even a set of polite third person equivalents: dumnealui (d-lui) ‘his lordship’ and dumneaei (d-ei) ‘her ladyship’.

UPDATE: The blogger himself clarifies the mystery in the comments:

The name Dumneazu is a dialect variant – it is actually the nickname of a friend of mine who is the lead fiddler – the primas – of a Gypsy band in Transylvania. Everybody in the band does exactly what he tells them to do, hence the nickname. In the Transylvanian dialect that they use in Maramures, and even stronger in Moldavia, the -e sounds often get elided into -ye sounds. Pe mine becomes pe minye, etc. In the Boyash (Rudari who speak Romanian, having lost Romani) gypsy dialect of Romanian spoken in Hungary and Croatia the interesting written (mostly used for song lyrics) form – mnye – is used.

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Filed under Israel, language, Romania

by | 15 December 2006 · 5:25 pm

No-Sword on the Kanji of the Year

Matt the language blogger of No-sword offers some etymological insights into Japan’s Kanji of the Year, 命 inochi ‘life’. Here’s a snippet.

Probably the most interesting way 命 can be used is to write mikoto, which is the “highness” (as in “your”) that I mentioned above. “Highness” is, obviously, a gross translation that takes the cultural context out back and breaks its kneecaps; the word mikoto is from /mi/ (honorific) + /koto/ (“word”) and was first used to refer respectfully to what gods and emperors said, or did, or were — the distinction was not always clear-cut, as is often the case with gods and emperors*. In any case, that is why everyone who’s anyone in Japanese mythology has a name ending in -no-Mikoto.

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Filed under Japan, language

by | 22 October 2006 · 9:14 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Ha‘i, Puana

Listening the other night to the incomparable Auntie Genoa Keawe singing a Hawaiian song in a style often called female falsetto, I got curious about two things: the possible distinctive features of Hawaiian falsetto, and the exact meaning of a phrase that is ubiquitous in Hawaiian-language songs: Ha‘ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana. So I looked both of them up.

Ha‘i ‘break, snap’ – Honolulu Star-Bulletin music critic John Berger explains it in an April 2002 story headlined That LeAnn Rimes yodel translates to Hawaiian ha‘i.

First, about ha’i. The relevant translation relates to a style in which singers voice a break when moving between their lower register (“chest voice”) and upper register (“head voice”). Hawaiian falsetto singers use this technique to emphasize or add emotional intensity to a phrase or passage, whereas traditional European-American falsetto singers try to eliminate any hint of it.

“When I was studying musical theory (in college), my voice teacher and I spent five years trying to smooth that break out,” [Amy Hanaiali’i] Gilliom said.

Certain women, like LeAnn Rimes, sing ha’i, she said, singing a few bars of Rimes’ hit “Blue” to prove her point.

Keawe agreed. “I’ve heard that recording and I hear her singing, and she sings like us with the ha’i. You can sing ha’i in any language.”

Puana ‘refrain, theme, or keynote of a song’ – Puana is the key word in the phrase, Ha‘ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana. Pukui & Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary (1986) defines puana thus:

Attack or beginning of a song; in music, the tonic or keynote; to begin a song; summary refrain, as of a song, usually at or near the beginning of a song; theme of a song.

The whole phrase is rather awkwardly translated as

tell the summary refrain (this line followed by the refrain is at the end of many songs or precedes the name of the person in whose honor the song was composed).

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by | 16 October 2006 · 8:41 pm

New Favorite Nautical Term: Tumblehome

I recently scored for a pittance–I’d like to say two pieces of eight–a castaway copy of a gem of a book, The Encyclopedia of Ships, in which I’ve been browsing around during lunchtime at work. I’ve always been intrigued by ships and sea tales and nautical terminology, but this book taught me a lovely old English term not found in abbreviated dictionaries: tumblehome, a word that fairly tumbles off the tongue, as if invented by A. A. Milne or J.R.R. Tolkien. Does anyone know the French, Dutch, Portuguese, or Japanese equivalent? It describes the inward curve of a ship’s side above the waterline, at one time designed to make room for projections at deck level to clear the wharf, or to make boats easier to paddle, but also found in vessels like submarines designed to slice through the waves rather than ride over them. Its opposite is the V-shaped flare hull, like the bow of an aircraft carrier.

Another opposition of historical interest is that between clinker (or lapstrake) and carvel (or strip) planking in hulls, the former typical of northern Europe (like Viking ships), the latter spreading north from Iberia.

In the form that we would recognize it, [“carvel”] first appears in northern European languages to describe flush planking in the late 14th/early 15th century, at the same time that Iberian caravelas started visiting northern ports on a regular basis. When northern shipwrights started building ships with flush planks (c. 1430-1440) they referred to the new ships as “carvel-built” or just as “carvels” (or its equivalents). The Dutch “karviel-nagels” … are derived this way. In late medieval Dutch, “karviel” or “karveel” referred to boats built in this new way, and was the same word applied to ships coming from Portugal or Britanny with salt and wine. It may have entered English via the Dutch, but the origin is ultimately the small seagoing craft of the Iberian coast.

On the matter of clinker planking, it is almost always caulked, either with tarred animal hair or moss. In Nordic ships, the caulking (usually hair) is laid into a groove in the seam when the planks are assembled, while in cogs and other Low German craft, the caulking is driven into the interior side of the seam, above the nails (there is a relatively wide overlap).

One reason that clinker was abandoned for large vessels in favor of carvel was purely a matter of expense. Eliminating the thousands of clinker nails (rivets) reduced the expense considerably. Something like 20% of the material cost of a cog (which only had clinker sides) was in the iron for it, mostly clinker nails, according to building accounts from the Netherlands in the late 1200s. Wood could also be used more efficiently, as carvel construction did not depend on such high quality wood and it could be more efficiently sawn from the log into plank. Not to mention the savings in labor from not having to drill and drive all the clinker nails. In boatbuilding practice, fitting clinker planks is not appreciably harder or more time-consuming than it is in carvel construction – the total amount of contact surface is about the same – and most of the other tasks are about the same in terms of time and difficulty, but eliminating the rivets saves a great deal in material and labor cost. These savings were more dramatic in larger vessels, and so it is no surprise that carvel construction first took hold in big ships and then trickled down to smaller craft. In Norway, clinker continued in use in bigger vessels until the early 20th century, when it became clear that it was not compatible with diesel engine power (rivets don’t take the vibration so well).

Reader Aidan Kehoe notes that the French term for tumblehome is encabanement. Language Hat has further discussion.

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