Just the facts

I've been reading, for my linguistics/semantics class, about concepts that are ingrained in American (or English, Australian, Russian, Japanese...) culture, which we suppose are universal. Concepts like "freedom" are rooted in American culture and history, and though dictionaries may offer direct translations of the word, the chance that the words completely correspond is slim. American "freedom" implies non-interference, while Russian "svoboda" has a somewhat different emphasis--you cannot speak of svoboda from something, the way you can speak of, for example, "freedom from interruption." Svoboda has a spacial connotation, and it can be given, whereas you cannot give someone freedom. Clearly, translating these involves adding certain connotations and removing others. Understanding that these two words do not mean the same thing, even when they are translated into one another, is crucial to understanding what is meant. There are many similar examples, some of which affect communication between cultures in a way that leads to misunderstanding.

Applying this to literature (as you do), one wonders about reading books in translation. Something I read for class about diminutive name suffixes used several examples from Tolstoy. In Russian, there are lots and lots of possible diminutive forms of names, all with different connotations. In English, of course, diminutives are usually used mostly for children. Timmy eventually grows up and becomes Tim. Russian diminutives don't imply childishness. They are also generally untranslatable. So when we read War and Peace in English, we are missing the shades of meaning implied by diminutive names. There are no doubt many other nuances we miss, and many of our own cultural associations we add. I'd argue that a vast amount of what we love about books is the nuance.

Have you ever noticed some meaning missed when reading translations? I don't know that I've read enough translations, or any recently enough. And it's more in what we don't realize we're missing, I suppose. But what cultural assumptions do we bring to reading that make what we read seem more or less realistic?

If you want your illusions about universal truths completely blown to shreds, read something by Anna Wierzbicka. You know all those English expressions like "as a matter of fact", "hard facts", "just the facts," "in fact"...? We love facts. Yeah, all these expressions don't translate prettily. Nobody else talks about fact like we do.

Anniversary and some links

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I know this because by virtue of taking a German class I acquired a luridly pink t-shirt that says so. I had yet to be born in 1989, but the fact that it was twenty years ago is a bit odd nonetheless.

Irrelevant to this anniversary, I have some links for you.

Libraries of C.E.O.s, a 2007 article just alerted to me by Cornflower's book blog.

Apparently, babies start learning language in the womb.

Colonial Williamsburg has started putting their collection of historic artefacts online. This is mainly interesting to me as a resource for costume research, but it'd be fun to browse through all of it.

Look! It's not related to Tam Lin!

I finally finished The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson. I'd been putting it off to read other things, but then I started The Worm Ouroboros and so had to read something to put that off, and there you have it. I always have to be procrastinating on something.

The Mother Tongue is hilarious; it's subtitle rather says it all: "English and how it got that way," the story of the English language, its history, its place in the world. It's a funny story to begin with, but Bill Bryson makes it funnier because you know he's always amused. The book outlines the development of language in general and the history of English in particular, including its vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling, has chapters on dialects, proper English usage, dictionaries, American vs. British English, swearing, word games, and the future of the language. The funniest chapters, which were what really got me through to the end and which I couldn't help but read aloud (my mother finally told me to stop so I had to just stop reading), were those on English's effect on other languages and English names. Some of the funniest examples of English words being borrowed into other languages are things like Japanese for a suit, being "sebiro," which comes from "Savile Row," and then of course the French, when they want to get a bit tan, go to the beach for "le bronzing" and a German book that doesn't quite make the best-seller lists is "ein steadyseller." The chapter on names is fascinating; it goes through the odd tendency of British place and family names to be pronounced nothing like they're spelled (and, if there are two places with the same name, for these to be pronounced differently in each place and neither like it's spelled), hilarious place names in general, unusual British pub names, surnames. The British place names, of course, are mostly hilarious just because they sound funny, but imagine living in Fertile, Minnesota; Humptulips, Washington; or Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming.

In short, The Mother Tongue is a very well-written (one always hopes so in a book on language), informative, and concise book, which you can't possibly read without bursting to tell someone some of the things you've learned.

Language about language

Somehow or other, I seem to have come by a small collection of books about language. All have been sitting on my shelves unread for quite some time, but I feel it's time for a bit of nonfiction and so I have decided to read one of them.

I love historical linguistics. I would be seriously considering studying linguistics in college, except that I hate the bits of it that sound like science. Mostly language interests me on a historical and societal level. Three of these books are about historical linguistics, though for the most part treated in a less academic-sounding way. Two are about English, one about French.

The Story of French, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, I bought last year on sale in the bookstore of Reed College in Portland. I started reading it, though I didn't get very far and stopped, but it was certainly interesting. The authors are Canadian, one of them French Canadian and the other having learned French in college in Montreal. The book begins with the origins of French in Latin, and will no doubt be fascinating to me when I get around to it.

The next two books in this collection have amusingly similar titles, though from what I can tell, slightly different topics. They are Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling, by David Wolman and The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, by Bill Bryson. The first of these I have in uncorrected proof form, which suggests that my mother brought it home from work, but I have no idea where the other one came from. Righting the Mother Tongue seems to focus mostly on the various quirks of English spelling (which admittedly form rather a large topic, being very quirky). The Mother Tongue looks more comprehensive (and has frighteningly tiny print), but similarly fun.

The last book of this collection (though I have a suspicion I have more floating around which could be added) is The Ode Less Travelled, by, interestingly, Stephen Fry. This is a bit different from the other books, as it is not about linguistics, but poetry. It is a guide to understanding poetry and its various forms and terms, though given the author I suspect it's rather funny. I like poetry and read it somewhat regularly, but I do confess myself fairly unfamiliar with the names for things.

You are reading this, so evidently you like reading about reading, but do you read about language? I find it fascinating, and have read several books on the subject. Simon Winchester's Oxford English Dictionary-related books come to mind, and I once read a thick textbook-like thing all about historical linguistics. One often doesn't stop to thing of the individual parts of a word, or what it means more literally than its accepted meaning, so I like being reminded of this, and learning new facts about it. And I'd definitely be on the lookout for new books on linguistics, if anyone has any to recommend.

I need a new bus book (requirements: smallish paperback, need not keep itself open as the house book must to be read at meals), and one of these is destined to be it. I'm afraid The Story of French and The Ode Less Travelled are both ruled out as being too large and heavy, so it's between the mother tongue duo. I'm thinking it'll be Bill Bryson's take on the matter.

I get way too excited about school sometimes, huh....

I registered for my first quarter of classes at UW today! I can still go back and change them if I want to, and who knows what bright idea I'll suddenly have about something I want to take, but for the moment I think I know what I'm doing.

I'm taking Sex, Gender, and Representation in Greek and Roman Literature; German 101; and Writing in Comparative Literature. Every semester/quarter, I do this thing where I angst about my schedule and what classes I should take, and then once I pick them I get ridiculously pleased over it. I'm looking forward to all of these classes enormously. The first two most of all. The first one is an Honors class, and discussion-based, I believe, and involves Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Odyssey, and some Euripides, among other things, if the textbook list is to be believed. I'm terribly excited to have that excuse to read Greek literature that I've been wanting, and I think it'll be a really interesting class in general.

German I'm looking forward to just because I always look forward to taking new languages. I chose German largely because I know I'm going to like it (some languages I find boring and/or aesthetically displeasing, and it would be annoying to realize this once I was already committed to finishing out the class). Also, I have a disproportionate number of German friends. I would be taking French 201 (either in place of German or in addition to it), but the class was full.

Writing in Comparative Literature mostly just fulfills an English Composition requirement, but it sounds interesting because the readings one is comparing are in translation and there's an option to read them in the original, if possible.

No doubt I'll be doing much less random fun reading this fall, what with all this, but it's sure to be interesting.

Mr et Mrst Dursley, qui habitaient au 4, Privet Drive...

I was sitting around at school today waiting for a teacher, and having nothing else to do I picked a book off a shelf. It was A Book of Surrealist Games. It was full of word games (things like Exquisite Corpse and Telephone, and variations on these plus a lot of others), drawing games, and various brain games. A lot of the word games were really interesting, and I kind of want to borrow the book and do a lot of them, but there was one in particular that I liked. Here's how it goes:

One person writes a short story (a paragraph or two), or finds one. They send it on to someone else, and this person translates it into another language. That person then sends their translation on to someone else, who translates it into another language and sends it on again. You keep sending it on and translating it into different languages, until eventually someone translates it back into English (or whatever the original language was), and you see how much it's changed.

I've done this sort of thing just using Google Translator and a random paragraph, but I think it would be more interesting if you're really translating it properly. The whole thing is especially interesting to me as I have vague career plans of becoming a translator, and translation in general is rather interesting. Word play doesn't translate, but maybe in translation new word play will appear. Cultural things don't translate well--like the Russian word for the main meal of the day, which would probably be translated as lunch but which is more important than lunch, or Finnish "sisu," or German "fremdsprachenfeinheitseifersucht" which as I understand it means basically "envy of a language that has a word as cool and completely nebulous as this word" (that last one totally convinced me I should learn German).

I've read three things in translation this year. The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame), translated from Finnish, and two Greek plays--Lysistrata and The Bacchae. I suppose technically I've also read part of another book in translation--Harry Potter, only in French. That was by far the most interesting experience with this. I know Philosopher's Stone pretty much back to front nearly by heart, to the point where I anticipate words really accurately, so despite the fact that my vocabulary in French is iffy I hardly ever had to stop and look things up. There were some interesting translations though. Snape is called Rogue, which struck me as rather too obvious, Draco Malfoy has become Drago Malefoy, Filch is Rusard and his cat Mrs. Norris is Miss Teigne (why did she stop being married, I wonder)--it's interesting how titles aren't always translated. Nearly-Headless-Nick is Nick-Quasi-Sans-Tete, which I like. The four Hogwarts (Poudlard) houses are Choixpeau (Ravenclaw), Gryffondor, Poufsouffle (Hufflepuff), and Serpentard.

I would love it if someone would tell me why French lemon drops are lemon Eskimos.

I am back from California. It was very sunny, and frankly I'm glad to get back to the cloudy Seattle weather.

I discovered in the course of the trip, much to my delight, that reading in cars no longer makes me ill. Accordingly, I finished Le Ballon Rouge and The Pursuit of Love. The Pursuit of Love was excellent travel reading, as it didn't require too much work but was invariably fun, wonderfully anecdotal, and besides, rather interesting characterwise. Now I've got to read Love in a Cold Climate, as I have them both compiled in one book. I've started it, and so far I'm not sure I like it quite so well, but it may simply take a while to get into it.

Incredibly, I only bought one book in the course of the trip, and it wasn't even in a used bookstore, and it was on the very last day. The Story of French, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. I started reading it in the car on the last stretch home, and it looks like it'll be really very interesting. I love historical linguistics, and that's a lot of what this is, so I'm sure I'll enjoy it.