Verbochromia

Translations are often cited because they are simply so poor they are funny. Alphadictionary.com provides many examples to smirk at like the sign over an information booth in a Chinese railway station which was marked ‘QUESTION AUTHORITY’. Some of these mistranslations acquire almost mythic status. I’m sure this one quoted on the site said to be from a hotel in Yugoslavia has been floating around for a while: THE FLATTENING OF UNDERWEAR WITH PLEASURE IS THE JOB OF THE CHAMBERMAID. For my own part I think it something of a shame to mock these efforts at communication in a second language. Sometimes what seems to be a mistranslation is actually an adoption from a regional dialect. In the manner that someone only too steeped in language learning can, I laughed a bit too heartily at Germans talking about ‘wellness’ before realising that it was an actual Anglo-American industry. Then again, at the bottom of a skyscraper in Shanghai you can find a couple of people waiting to check your credentials before you ascend the lift. They are standing at the:

Yes, the ticket wicket. Funnily ‘ticket wicket’ does not seem to be entirely the idiosyncratic invention of a translator driven mad. At the Standard Portable website you can find ‘ski ticket wickets’ , which can be used for holding a ski pass. It also seems to be used on various other websites in English referring to Japan and Asia for a similar kind of thing as above. There is even a Canadian travel company called ‘Ticket Wicket Travel’. My curiosity is now verily piqued. Is this simply a case of being divided by a common language? If any Canadian, American or maybe Australian can confirm that this term exists in more than Chinglish, that would be greatly appreciated – it is a word that Hiberno-English and British English seems to be sorely lacking. Tickets at the ready. Ticket wicket coming up…

Cheap Carabiners - Hang your Keys off These, but Climb at Your Peril!

Or names for things you did not know had names.  Recently, a friend of mine lost their keys. I asked if it was the set with the silver carabiner. My friend was surprised to learn that the silver hook carried around all these years had a name. If I am honest, I had similarly been searching all these years for an excuse to use the word carabiner. Writing it here in this post I did not even know how to spell it, because I had only ever heard it said once, on a school holiday learning to climb and abseil. I just associated it in my mind with the Caribbean and thought it was a funny word to use for something so functional that could potentially save your life.  I am disappointed now to see that it is spelt nothing like Caribbean, or caribeena, carrebeena, or whatever else might come to mind. Of course, having written all those down, I have now successfully ensured that I will never be able to spell it correctly again either. My Collins dictionary informs me that the word can also in fact be spelt ‘karabiner’. It comes from a German word ‘Karabinerhaken’ or carbine hook, which is a type of hook used to attach a carbine to a belt – a carbine being a type of light rifle. Strangely, the word ‘carbine’ comes from Old French ‘carabin’ which may be a variant form of ‘escarrabin’ or one who prepares corpses for burial. That in turn comes from Latin ’scarabaeus’, a kind of beetle, it seems. From beetles, to corpses to rifles and life-saving hooks…

However, the interesting thing is not so much the spelling or etymology as the delight my friend had in discovering that an object they had been innocently carrying around nameless and blameless in their pocket for years, had a name. The name makes it functional, socially useful and somehow different from the intriguing clippy piece of metal. I am still pondering the effects of naming something. It obviously tidies something up mentally, but is this at the risk of making it more banal? I thought it might be interesting to explore this empirically, so I have gone on a quest to find names for other things that often go nameless.

It seems that there are quite a number of websites which introduce all the ‘names of things you didn’t know had names’, like this one. Reading the lists I experience a mixture of surprise and indignation that anyone would bother to give such a thing a name or attempt to force me to learn it. On the other hand, some of the names are so enchanting that you wonder why they have been so long neglected. Here are a couple more to ponder:

Aglet

The small sheath at the end of a shoelace from Old French aiguillette meaning ‘little needle’. Now that makes sense and is also quite endearing methinks. How useful it could be: ‘This lace has no aglet!’ ‘My aglet is broken!’ ‘The lace poking out of the end of the aglet has frayed’.

Wamble

This is a good one. It means to move unsteadily, feel nausea or to have one’s stomach growl. Particularly useful on a ship if you are going hungry from sea sickness. According to the Collins English Dictionary it’s from the C14 wamelen ‘to feel ill’, which appears to be related to Norwegian vamla meaning ‘to stagger’. It makes me think of the wombles in a new light. Wambling free.  Oh boundless borborygmus! In fact, it seems there is no direct connection between wombles and wambling (wombling aside).  So legend has it, the author of the series of Womble books was walking with her children on Wimbledon Common when one of them referred to it as Wombledon Common. There you have it.

And finally…there is a lovely list of unusual words here and a page of humorous attempts to make use of them here.  But for now, I must leave further inaniloquence to another day.

Dogs and culture apparently. I thought it was language and culture. This image comes from the Wordle web page and links through to the bigger picture. Here you can create beautiful word clouds. They cannot be saved as files or downloaded, but they can be added to the public forum or linked to from another website, as here. It’s an interesting way of checking if you are writing about what you thought you were, because it weights the size of the letters for each word according to how many times it is cited in the text.

But then again is a text necessarily about the word that is cited in it most often? The most common word in the English language is ‘the’. Mr Eigo Sensei can tell you all about it if you are having any trouble with your ‘thes’. Wordle does not seem to take ‘the’ into account or every cloud would be a big THE. A big Joycean “the i said the i will the“…

I think there’s a reason Joyce said ‘no’ to ‘the’ and ‘yes’ to ‘yes’.  the the the the the the the the….an indecisive stammering, not a joyceful eruption.

Here at the Paperback Writer’s blog are some nice ways to use wordle to unleash your wordsmithery. Happy wordling!

Aagh, superfluous ludic language. So punny it’s painful. My apologies. But it captures the point. There has been a horrendous hiatus and now we begin again, a small beginning, a subtle shift of the left big toe, but there it is. A friend pointed out this interesting article on the New York Times’ collection of data on the words that their online readers most frequently check on their online dictionary. I could engage now in a solipsistic reverie on the abstruse polysyllables, but you would probably find such feckless perorations decidedly enervating and descend into apoplectic paroxysms. Such a contretemps between us would be far from my intent. Rather than continue with this soporific hubris, thereby inviting your opprobrium,  I will therefore practice greater linguistic austerity and avoid such egregious and incendiary, not to say, obstreperous word mountains. You get the idea. Right, I’ll shut me gob now. Please enjoy the article.

The UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger provides a list of nearly 2,500 dead or dying languages. Support for dying languages is often controversial in situations of scarce resource where the preservation of a language might mean the extinction of a people, but often when a language dies, a wealth of cultural knowledge, alternative perspectives and information about the natural world die with it. I cannot possibly give room to a discussion of all of the dying languages and the myriad political reasons for their demise, but I thought it might be interesting to highlight 26 of them – one for each letter of the alphabet, as a way of indirectly considering what is being lost, where it is being lost and why it might be worth preserving.  The choice of languages will not be particularly systematic, but more a case of randomly selecting from those I can find information on, those we never hear about but which are linked to national cultures which are quite familiar and those which are so remote from general awareness as to be interesting just for that very reason. It is in this spirit of bringing to consciousness and perhaps prompting further exploration – rather than attempting a comprehensive overview and detailed history – that this “Alphabet of Dying Languages” begins with a look at the Ainu language of Japan, also spoken in parts of Russia.

Suzuko Tamura is a leading expert on this language and published her book ‘The Ainu Language’ in 1988 with an English translation produced in 2000.

The Ainu are indigenous to Japan, but have often had a rocky relationship with the Japanese, who took over influence in Southern Hokkaido, resulting in battles in 1457, 1669 and 1789 which the Ainu lost. This video provides some interesting old footage and facts about the Ainu peoples, accompanied by traditional Ainu music and singing. The website of the Ainu Museum also gives a well-structured overview of Ainu history and culture, including eating habits, agriculture, language and literature among other things.

Within Japanese culture, the Ainu traditions have at times been subject to what Richard Siddle (1996) describes as ‘the master narrative of seamless national homogeneity that dominates Japan’s discursive space’. This underplaying of difference has persisted in negative attitudes towards the Ainu and in the Ainu’s consequent own sense of shame about their Ainu heritage and use of the language. The sense of being ‘alien’ is heightened by differences in appearance from other Japanese, such as more prominent cheekbones and beard growth.  In recent times some have attempted to rectify this victimization by the self/the other and to celebrate Ainu culture instead. The band “the Ainu Rebels” tries to reinvigorate Ainu tradition by blending old-style songs with rap, hip hop and rock.  I find it quite fascinating that aspects of American culture functioning as ‘global’ can act as a crutch for a minority group in another part of the world to stand up for itself faced with dominance by a local national culture.  Is it a redefinition of the culture, a true bringing up-to-date or is the culture simply being shackled to another hegemony?

Given ambiguous feelings towards Ainu culture, the language is also threatened with demise, with numbers of native speakers in the double digits. In line with attempts to revive the culture, second-language speakers are, however, on the rise. The culture has no alphabet of its own, but makes use either of Japanese Katakana or a Latin-based alphabet. It was originally an oral culture with stories passed on word-of-mouth from generation to generation, including “Yukar” or tales of heroes, “Yaysama” which women perform as impromptu songs of their emotions and “Upopo” which is a festival song.

Traditional Ainu Music Demonstration

Ainu means ‘human’ and the Ainu believe that there is a god for everything which is not human e.g. a god of fire, a god of windows, a lake god, a river god etc.  This designation of themselves as ‘humans’ is one common to many peoples around the globe, who contrast themselves with what is ‘other’ or not-human. This ‘othering’ can include other human beings, perceived as unworthy of respect. An often cited example is the term ‘barbarian’ meaning primitive or uncivilized. This term derives from Latin via the Greek word barbarous meaning non-Greek, originally an onomatopoeic rendering of babble. The Sanskrit word barbara means stammering or non-Aryan.

This brief introduction to the Ainu situation is not specifically a plädoyer for Ainu culture, nor necessarily a patronising plea for everyone to be ‘nice’ to each other, but it highlights how easy it is to unjustly define a model of human existence according to our own image, whether Ainu or Japanese. The Japanese have been fortunate in having the political and material resources, as well as the population, to present their image more strongly and to make the Ainu feel ashamed of their own humanity.

or ‘Curious ways in which the English Language may be made to convey Ideas or obscure them’. This is the title of a humorous American book from 1883 which is a companion to ‘English as She is Spoke’ and brings us back to the topic of ambiguity in language. There are some wonderful clangers in this one, so I thought I’d share a few here. The whole text can be found on the Gutenberg website here. I hope these bring a wry smile to your face for the day and not too much of a groan!

I’ve taken a couple of examples from each of the sections presented in the book, so here goes with English as she is wrote…

By the Inaccurate:

“I saw a man digging a well with a Roman nose.”

‘A gushing but ungrammatical editor says: “We have received a basket of fine grapes from our friend ——, for which he will please accept our compliments, some of which are nearly one inch in diameter.”‘

Here’s to heartily sized compliments!

By Advertisers and on Sign-Boards

‘”Babies taken and finished in ten minutes by a country photographer.”‘  Is he not wanted by the police?

‘”A large Spanish blue gentleman’s cloak lost in the neighborhood of the market.”‘ Perhaps he’s a smurf.

For Epitaphs:

Of a fate we are often warned about when procrastinating about life:

‘”Killed by an omnibus why not?

So quick a death a boon is

Let not his friends lament his lot

For mors omnibus communis.”‘

‘”Here lies, cut down like unripe fruit

The wife of Deacon Amos Shute;

She died of drinking too much coffee,

Anny dominy eighteen forty.”‘

By Correspondents:

‘The following specimens from scholars’ examinations in making sentences to illustrate the definitions of words, found in their small dictionaries, will have a familiar sound to some of our readers:

A great warning for over-zealous use of the dictionary without awareness of context and collocation! When I was first learning German I remember a friend reading out a piece of work in which she talked about going to a ‘Fussballstreichholz’ or a football So, there you have it: ‘English as She is Wrote’ or was wrote in 1883. I am sure times have not changed so much when it comes to the absurdities of language…