Posts tagged with “language”
The last thing I wanted this to turn into was anything but a headache.
— My Boss, Continuing Adventures in Over-Negation
Language is funny.
Someone on Hacker News, while discussing languages, said, ‘I suspect “human language” has a very specific meaning among linguists.’ I responded, “‘human language’ actually means very little among linguists. If he were being very precise he’d say “natural language”,’ which I think is true. after all, if your professional context is almost always natural language—and you are not a xenolinguist—you probably wouldn’t have any semantically-invested terminology to distinguish among species.
But now I’m thinking about the analogous case, which would be asking a programmer, ‘So, what language are you thinking of using for your next project?’ and receiving the answer, ‘Uh, English. duh.’
Which is making me giggle.
Learn about syllepsis, then refuse to stop employing it
The quickly-growing-essential How to Write Badly Well had a particularly linguistically rich entry today. I will only give you a choice quote so as not to spoil it:
As he ran a red light, the conversation back in his mind and away from his troubles, he couldn’t help but feel…
Di Geviksn-Velt in Yiddish, oyf English, umzist.
There was not nearly as much hubbub as I though there should be when, just a little while ago, The YIVO Institute For Jewish Research (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, for the true believers), released for free, immaculate download the entirety of Mordkhe Schaechter’s awe-inspiring work, Di Geviksn-Velt In Yidish or, in somewhat less monumental English, Plant Names in Yiddish. The somewhat-uninspiring English title belies the amazing nature of the work.
To an encyclopedia junkie like myself it’s amazing: you can imagine the book as starting off by demolishing the sketchy, vaguely-held notion that Yiddish is impoverished in its terms for flora and fauna, because it is a ghetto language. But it quickly moves on from that point to demonstrate the astounding breadth and depth of Schaechter’s scholarship. In addition to many scholarly pages on the overall nature of Yiddish plant terminology, he simply goes on to catalogue the name of every single plant you could think of, in Yiddish. The simplicity of this undertaking is amazing. It can be expressed in one sentence; but the fact that a single sentence can stand in front of such comprehensive, unassuming scholarship renders them both that more impressive. That YIVO has seen fit to digitize and put online, for free perusal and download, the entirety of the work is, at least for me, just the last wholly unexpected joy and surprise.
As a reference work it’s indispensable. But as a simple joy—as an impossibly rich and dense body to dive into at immediately satisying random—it is even dearer. At a random page turn I can tell you that the Yiddish name for Artillery Clearweed, Pilea microphylla, is הארמאטניק.. Harmatnik, that is, ‘cannoneer’—I have never heard of Artillery Clearweed but apparently its offensive associations are not unique to English. Sweetflag, the genus Acorus, goes by the name שאװער, or shaver. Its obvious false-friendship with the English verb aside, I am not nearly well enough versed in any of Yiddish’s many substrates to tell you offhand where the name shaver comes from. But I think it’s funny: indeed, far from being some wasteland of natural terminology, where the urban, mercantile Yid is happy to lump all ferns with ferns, trees with trees, birds with birds, and so on, stemming from a general lack of engagement with nature, Yiddish natural terminology is a happy and well-churned melange of influences, Polish, Hebrew, German, Russian, French, Ukrainian and original coinages, where the language’s syncretic, cosmopolitan nature joyously shines through.
It is rare that such a wide body of lexicography is combined with such keen linguistic analysis, and rarer still that such work is made freely available to all. I urge you to read this book, online or to download it.
