Recycled Knowledge

Schleicher's Fable in Lojban

2012-01-18T21:28:00.000-05:00

Here's a version of Schleicher's Fable in Lojban with word-by-word glosses (note the use of letters as pronouns). You can see Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit versions at Memiyawanzi.

pa lanme .e ci xirma
one sheep and three horse

pa lanme poi claxu loi sunla cu viska ci xirma
one sheep such:that lack a:mass:of wool (-) see three horse

.i pa ri cu lacpu pa tilju carce
(-) one:of the:latter (-) pull one heavy cart

.i pa ra bevri loi barda
(-) one:of the:previous carry a:mass:of heavy-thing

.i pa ra sutra bevri pa nanmu
(-) one:of the:previous quick carry one man

.i ly. cusku fi ci xy. fe lu
(-) S. say to three H. (-) quote

le risna cu se cortu ri'a lo nu viska pa nanmu poi sazri xy. li'u
the heart (-) PASV hurt because:of a/some event:of see one man such:that operate H. unquote

.i ci xy. cusku lu
(-) three H. say quote

doi lanme ko jundi
O sheep you-IMPV pay:attention

.i le risna cu se cortu ri'a lo nu viska la'e di'e
(-) the heart (-) PASV hurt because:of event:of see referent:of following:utterance

.i tu'a pa turni nanmu cu zbasu lo sunla be ly. binxo lo se dasni be ny.
(-) (-) one govern man (-) make a/some wool of S. become a/some PASV wear [i.e. worn thing] of M.

.i je ly. claxu sy. li'u
(-) and S. lack W. unquote

.i ly. jimpe la'e di'u
(-) S. comprehend referent:of preceding:utterance

.i je ba bo rivbi klama le pintu'a
(-) and then (-) escape go:to the plain [lit. flat=parcel:of:land]

The Lojbanists I checked this with don't understand why the sheep flees, since he has already been shorn. Does anyone have any idea?

John McCarthy's theorem prover

2011-11-29T12:47:00.001-05:00

John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, died last month. The new R7RS Scheme standard will be dedicated to his memory. As another dedication, I thought I'd resurrect his theorem prover, which was published in the Lisp 1.5 manual, and translate it into Scheme. Comments in square brackets are mine; everything else is McCarthy's.

When this code was written, I was in still diapers and a lot of you probably didn't even exist — and yet it only needed indentation, a few changes from cond to if (which helped with the indentation), and a sprinkling of question marks. It's interesting that this Lisp is so old that () is not identical to #f. The procedure names suck and should be replaced with better names (ending in question marks).

;;; We define a function "(theorem s)" whose value is truth
;;; or falsity according to whether the sequent "s" is a theorem.
;;; A sequent is represented by the following S-expression:
;;;     (arrow (term term ...) (term term ...))
;;; Atomic propositional formulae are represented as symbols.
;;; Other propositional formulae are represented as lists whose
;;; first symbols are "not", "and", "or", "implies", or "equiv".
;;; Example: (arrow (and (not p) (not q))) (equiv p q) (or r s))).

;;; The procedure "theorem" is given in terms of auxiliary
;;; functions as follows:

(define (theorem s) (th1 '() '() (cadr s) (caddr s)))

(define (th1 a1 a2 a c)
  (if (null? a)
      (th2 a1 a2 '() '() c)
      (or (member? (car a) c)
          (if (atom? (car a)
                     (th1 (if (member? (car a) a1) a1
                              (cons (car a) a1)) a2 (cdr a) c))
              (th1 a1 (if (member? (car a) a2) a2
                          (cons (car a) a2)) (cdr a) c)))))

(define (th2 a1 a2 c1 c2 c)
  (cond
   ((null? c) (th a1 a2 c1 c2))
   ((atom? (car c)) (th2 a1 a2 (if (member? (car c) c1)
                                   c1
                                   (cons (car c) c1))) c2 (cdr c))
   (else (th2 a1 a2 c1
              (if (member?
                   (car c) c2) c2 (cons (car c) c2))
              (cdr c)))))

(define (th a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (if
   (null? a2) (and (not (null? c2))
                   (thr (car c2) a1 a2 c1 (cdr c2)))
   (thl (car a2) c1 (cdr a2) c1 c2)))

;;; "th" is the main predicate through which all the recursions
;;; take place.  "theorem", "th1", and "th2" break up and sort
;;; the information in the sequent for the benefit of "th".
;;; The fourarguments of "th" are:
;;;     a1: atomic formulae on left side of arrow
;;;     a2: other formulae on left side of arrow
;;;     c1: atomic formulae on right side of arrow
;;;     c1: other formulae on right side of arrow

;;; The atomic formulae are kept separate from the others in
;;; order to make faster the detection of the occurrence of
;;;  formulae on both sides of the arrow and the finding of
;;; the next formulato reduce.  Each use of "th" represents
;;; one reduction according to one of the 10 rules.
;;; The formula to be reduced is chosen from the left side
;;; of the arrow if possible.  According to whether the
;;; formula to be reduced is on the left or the right we use
;;; "thl" or "thr".  We have:

(define (thl u a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (case (car u)
    ((not) (th1r (cadr u) a1 a2 c1 c2))
    ((and) (th2l (cdr u) a1 a2 c1 c2))
    ((or) (and (th1l (cadr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)
               (th1l (caddr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)))
    ((implies) (and (th1l (caddr u) a1 a2 c1
                          c2) (th1r (cadr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)))
    ((equiv) (and (th2l (cdr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)
                  (th2r (cdr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)))
    (else (error "thl: unknown operator" u a1 a2 c1 c2))))

(define (thr u a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (case (car u)
    ((not) (th1l (cadr u) a1 a2 c1 c2))
    ((and) (and (th1r (cadr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)
                (th1r (caddr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)))
    ((or) (th2r (cdr u) a1 a2 c1 c2))
    ((equiv) (and (th11 (cadr u) (caddr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)
                  (th11 (caddr u) (cadr u) a1 a2 c1 c2)))
    (else (error "thr: unknown operator" u a1 a2 c1 c2))))

;;; The functions "th1l", "th1r", "th2l", "th2r", "th11"
;;; distribute the parts of the reduced formula to the
;;; appropriate places in the reduced sequent.
;;; These functions are:

(define (th1l v a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (if
   (atom? v) (or (member? v c1)
                 (th (cons v a1) a2 c1 c2))
   (or (member? v c2) (th a1 (cons v a2) c1 c2))))

(define (th1r v a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (if
   (atom? v) (or (member? v a1)
                 (th a1 a2 (cons v c1) c2))
   (or (member? v c2) (th a1 (cons v a2) c1 c2))))

(define (th2l v a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (cond
   ((atom? (car v)) (or (member? (car v) c1)
                        (th1l (cadr v) (cons (car v) a1) a2 c1 c2)))
   (else (or (member? (car v) c2) (th1l (cadr v) a1 (cons (car v)
                                                          a2) c1 c2)))))

(define (th2r v a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (if
   (atom? (car v)) (or (member? (car v) a1)
                       (th1r (cadr v) a1 a2 (cons (car v) c1) c2))
   (or (member? (car v) a2) (th1r (cadr v) a1 a2 c1
                                       (cons (car v) c2)))))

(define (th11 v1 v2 a1 a2 c1 c2)
  (cond
   ((atom? v1) (or (member? v1 c1) (th1r v2 (cons v1 a1) a2 c1 c2)))
   (else (or (member? v1 c2) (th1r v2 a1 (cons v1 a2) c1 c2)))))

;;; Finally, the function "member?" is defined by

(define (member? x u)
  (or (and (not (null? u))
           (equal? x (car u))) (member? x (cdr u))))

;;; [Note: This function is not the same as "member", because
;;; it returns #t rather than a tail of the list on success.
;;; The "atom?" function is defined as in Lisp 1.5.]

(define (atom? x) (not (pair? x)))

;;; Example:  (theorem '(arrow (p) (or p q))) => #t
;;; because given p, we can infer p v q.

Samuel Beckett's mathematical nightmare

2011-09-30T16:27:00.001-04:00

From Beckett's early novel Molloy, later reprinted separately under the title of "Sucking-Stones". I have introduced paragraphing for readability, though in Beckett's text this is just part of a huge 80-page paragraph, one of only two in Molloy's monologue. Reprinted without permission.

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat.

Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on.

But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else.

And the first thing I hit upon was that I might do better to transfer the stones four by four, instead of one by one, that is to say, during the sucking, to take the three stones remaining in the right pocket of my greatcoat and replace them by the four in the right pocket of my trousers , and these by the four in the left pocket of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my greatcoat, and finally these by the three from the right pocket of my greatcoat, plus the one, as soon as I had finished sucking it, which was in my mouth. Yes, it seemed to me at first that by so doing I would arrive at a better result.

But on further reflection I had to change my mind and confess that the circulation of the stones four by four came to exactly the same thing as their circulation one by one. For if I was certain of finding each time, in the right pocket of my greatcoat, four stones totally different from their immediate predecessors, the possibility nevertheless remained of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished, but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about. So I had to seek elswhere than in the mode of circulation. For no matter how I caused the stones to circulate, I always ran the same risk.

It was obvious that by increasing the number of my pockets I was bound to increase my chances of enjoying my stones in the way I planned, that is to say one after the other until their number was exhausted. Had I had eight pockets, for example, instead of the four I did have, then even the most diabolical hazard could not have prevented me from sucking at least eight of my sixteen stones, turn and turn about. The truth is I should have needed sixteen pockets in order to be quite easy in my mind. And for a long time I could see no other conclusion than this, that short of having sixteen pockets, each with its stone, I could never reach the goal I had set myself, short of an extraordinary hazard. And if at a pinch I could double the number of my pockets, were it only by dividing each pocket in two, with the help of a few safety-pins let us say, to quadruple them seemed to be more than I could manage. And I did not feel inclined to take all that trouble for a half-measure.

For I was beginning to lose all sense of measure, after all this wrestling and wrangling, and to say, All or nothing. And if I was tempted for an instant to establish a more equitable proportion between my stones and my pockets , by reducing the former to the number of the latter, it was only for an instant. For it would have been an admission of defeat. And sitting on the shore, before the sea, the sixteen stones spread out before my eyes, I gazed at them in anger and perplexity. For just as I had difficulty in sitting in a chair, or in an arm-chair, because of my stiff leg, you understand, so I had none in sitting on the ground, because of my stiff leg and my stiffening leg, for it was about this time that my good leg, good in the sense that it was not stiff, began to stiffen. I needed a prop under the ham you understand, and even under the whole length of the leg, the prop of the earth. And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on me, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim.

The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure. Finally I seemed to grasp that this word trim could not here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and that it was my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally insoluble. And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether right or wrong, that I finally reached a solution, inelegant assuredly, but sound, sound.

Now I am willing to believe, indeed I firmly believe, that other solutions to this problem might have been found and indeed may still be found, no less sound, but much more elegant than the one I shall now describe, if I can. And I believe too that had I been a little more insistent, a little more resistant, I could have found them myself. But I was tired, but I was tired, and I contented myself ingloriously with the first solution that was a solution, to this problem. But not to go over the heartbreaking stages through which I passed before I came to it here it is, in all its hideousness.

All (all!) that was necessary was to put, for example, six stones in the right pocket of my greatcoat, or supply pocket, five in the right pocket of my trousers, and five in the left pocket of my trousers, that makes the lot, twice five ten plus six sixteen, and none, for none remained, in the left pocket of my greatcoat, which for the time being remained empty, empty of stones that is, for its usual contents remained, as well as occasional objects. For where do you think I hid my vegetable knife, my silver, my horn and the other things that I have not yet named, perhaps shall never name. Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat , suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat.

Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the vright way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others.

And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? No, for it is clear that after the next series, of sucks and transfers, I shall be back where I started, that is with the first six stones back in the supply pocket, the next five in the right pocket of my stinking old trousers and finally the last five in left pocket of same, and my sixteen stones will have been sucked once at least in impeccable succession, not one sucked twice, not one left unsucked.

It is true that next time I could scarcely hope to suck my stones in the same order as the first time and that the first, seventh and twelfth for example of the first cycle might very well be the sixth, eleventh, and sixteenth respectively of the second, if the worst came to the worst. But this was a drawback I could not avoid. And if in the cycles taken together utter confusion was bound to reign, at least within each cycle taken separately I could be easy in my mind, at least as easy as one can be, in a proceeding of this kind. For in order for each cycle to be identical, as to the succession of stones in my mouth, and God knows I had set my heart on it, the only means were numbered stones or sixteen pockets. And rather than make twelve more pockets or number my stones, I preferred to make the best of the comparative peace of mind I enjoyed within each cycle taken separately.

For it was not enough to number the stones, but I would have had to remember, every time I put a stone in my mouth, the number I needed and look for it in my pocket. Which would have put me off stone for ever, in a very short time. For I would never have been sure of not making a mistake, unless of course I had kept a kind of register, in which to tick off the stones one by one, as I sucked them. And of this I believed myself incapable. No, the only perfect solution would have been the sixteen pockets, symmetrically disposed, each one with its stone. Then I would have needed neither to number nor to think, but merely, as I sucked a given stone, to move on the fifteen others, a delicate business admittedly, but within my power, and to call always on the same pocket when I felt like a suck. This would have freed me from all anxiety, not only within each cycle taken separately, but also for the sum of all cycles, though they went on forever.

But however imperfect my own solution was, I was pleased at having found it all alone, yes, quite pleased. And if it was perhaps less sound than I had thought in the first flush of discovery, its inelegance never diminished. And it was above all inelegant in this, to my mind, that the uneven distribution was painful to me, bodily. It is true that a kind of equilibrium was reached, at a given moment, in the early stages of each cycle, namely after the third suck and before the fourth, but it did not last long, and the rest of the time I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other. There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen.

But deep down I didn't give a tinker's curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn't give a fiddler's curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn't be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.

[It seems to me that Molloy underestimates the utility of numbering his stones. He could simply note the number n of the stone in his mouth when he removes it, and then search his pockets for stone n+1 (modulo 16). With four stones per pocket and no stone-shifting, he will have on average to remove two before finding it.]

Publication dates for the parts of the OED

2011-09-29T03:05:00.000-04:00

The Oxford English Dictionary has had three editions:

the original edition, published in twelve volumes from 1888 to 1928, and known retrospectively as OED1
the OED2, consisting of a supplement published in four volumes from 1972 to 1986 (there was a 1933 supplement to OED1 too, but it was superseded by the four-volume supplement so I'm ignoring it here) and merged with the text of OED1 in 1989, after which two volumes of new words and senses were published in 1993 and one more in 1997
the OED3, currently in progress and being published online only.

When you look at the online version, each page is marked OED2 or OED3, but since the supplement only included new words and meanings of words since OED1, many of the so-called OED2 pages are really unmodified OED1. What is more, the OED1 volumes were published in installments called fascicles, and very little revision was done before the fascicles were merged into volumes.

So here's a table of when the various fascicles, volumes, and editions were published, so that you can find out, at least probably if not definitively, the true age of an OED definition. Unless otherwise noted, all the entries are OED1. Note that the fascicles weren't necessarily published exactly in alphabetical order, because several editors worked on the project simultaneously.

Words included	Date (YYYY-MM-DD format)
A-Ant	1884-01
Ant-Batten	1885-11
Batter-Boz	1887-03
Bra-Byz	1888-06
A-B volume	1888
C-Cass	1888-06
Cast-Clivy	1889-11
Clo-Consigner	1891-10
Consignant-Crouching	1893-05
Crouchmas-Czech	1893-11
C volume	1893
D-Deceit	1894-11
Deceit-Deject	1894-12
Deject-Depravation	1895-06
Depravative-Development	1895-12
Development-Diffluency	1895-12
Diffluent-Disburden	1896-06
Disburdened-Disobservant	1896-09
Disobstetricate-Distrustful	1896-12
Distrustfully-Doom	1897-03
Doom-Dziggetai	1897-06
E-Every	1891-07
Everybody-Ezod	1894-03
D-E volume	1897
F-Fang	1894-11
Fanged-Fee	1895-04
Fee-Field	1895-09
Field-Fish	1896-03
Fish-Flexuose	1896-09
Flexuosity-Foister	1897-03
Foisty-Frankish	1897-10
Frank-law-Gain-coming	1898-01
Gain-cope-Germanizing	1898-01
Germano-Glass-cloth	1899-03
Glass-coach-Graded	1900-01
Gradeley-Greement	1900-07
Green-Gyzzarn	1900-12
F-G volume	1900
H-Haversian	1898-03
Haversine-Heel	1898-06
Heel-Hod	1898-12
Hod-Horizontal	1899-03
Horizontality-Hywe	1899-06
I-In	1899-10
In-Inferred	1900-03
Inferring-Inpushing	1900-07
Input-Invalid	1900-10
Invalid-Jew	1900-12
Jew-Kairine	1901-06
Kaiser-Kyx	1901-10
H-K volume	1901
L-Lap	1901-03
Lap-Leisurely	1902-01
Leisureness-Lief	1902-03
Leif-Lock	1903-01
Lock-Lyyn	1903-10
M-Mandragon	1904-10
Mandragora-Matter	1905-07
Matter-Mesnalty	1906-03
Mesne-Misbirth	1906-12
Misbode-Monopoly	1907-06
Monopoly-Movement	1908-03
Movement-Myz	1908-09
N-Niche	1906-09
Niche-Nywe	1907-09
L-N volume	1908
O-Onomastic	1902-07
Onomastical-Outing	1903-03
Outjet-Ozyat	1904-01
P-Pargeted	1904-03
Pargeter-Pennached	1904-12
Pennage-Pfennig	1905-09
Ph-Piper	1906-06
Piper-Polygenistic	1907-03
Polygenous-Premious	1907-12
Premisal-Prophesier	1908-12
Prophesy-Pyxis	1909-09
O-P volume	1909
Q	1902-10
R-Reactive	1903-07
Reactively-Ree	1904-07
Ree-Reign	1905-03
Reign-Reserve	1906-01
Reserve-Ribaldously	1908-06
Ribaldric-Romanite	1909-03
Romanity-Roundness	1909-12
Round-nose-Ryze	1910-03
S-Sauce	1909-06
Sauce-alone-Scouring	1910-06
Scouring-Sedum	1911-03
See-Senatory	1911-12
Senatory-Several	1912-09-30
Several-Shaster	1913-06-13
Shastri-Shyster	1914-03-26
Q-Sh volume	1914
Si-Simple	1910-12
Simple-Sleep	1911-09
Sleep-Sniggle	1912-06-27
Sniggle-Sorrow	1913-03-27
Sorrow-Speech	1914-09-28
Speech-Spring	1915-03-25
Spring-Standard	1915-09-30
Standard-Stead	1915-06-29
Stead-Stillatim	1916-06-29
Stillation-Stratum	1917-12-06
Stratus-Styx	1919-09-04
Si-St volume	1919
Su-Subterraneous	1914-12-22
Subterraneously-Sullen	1915-12-21
Sullen-Supple	1917-01-18
Supple-Sweep	1913-03-21
Sweep-Szmikite	1919-09-04
T-Tealt	1910-09
Team-Tezkere	1911-06
Th-Thyzle	1912-03-29
Su-Th volume	1919
Ti-Tombac	1912-12-23
Tombal-Trahysh	1913-09-25
Traik-Trinity	1914-06-24
Trink-Turn-down	1915-06-24
Turndun-Tzirid	1916-03-27
U-Unforeseeable	1921-10-06
Unforeseeing-Unright	1924-07-31
Unright-Uzzle	1926-07-29
Ti-U volume	1926
V-Verificative	1916-10-26
Verificatory-Visor	1917-08-30
Visor-Vywer	1920-04-01
W-Wash	1921-10-06
Wash-Wavy	1923-05-24
Wavy-Wezzon	1926-08-12
Wh-Whisking	1923-05-17
Whisky-Wilfullness	1924-11-27
Wilga-Wise	1926-08-12
Wise-Wyzen	1928-04-19
XYZ	1921-10-06
V-Z volume	1928
OED1 in full (12 vols.)	1928
Supplement A-G	1972
Supplement H-N	1976
Supplement O-Sd	1982
Supplement Sea-Z	1986
OED2 in full (20 vols.)	1989
OED2 Supplement vols. 1-2	1993
OED2 supplement vol. 3	1997
OED3	in progress

Groups of names

2011-07-24T14:42:00.000-04:00

RFC 1178, a wise and funny set of rules on how to name computers (and how not to), recommends that groups of computers that have something in common be given names that have something in common. The principle isn't limited to computers, to be sure.

Here's a list of 255 groups of names ranging in size from two names on upward. I can't tell you where they come from, though I very much doubt anyone will sue you for reusing them. Feel free to figure out and post what the common factors are, the more specific the better, though I don't have any more authoritative information than you do. Obviously, answers of the form "These are the names of the xxxx's at yyyy" are not helpful.

Challenge: A few of the groups are fakes (don't come from the original source). Which ones?

1) Canteen, Cosy Room, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Vermeer

2) De Dam, Leidseplein, Museumplein, Nieuwmarkt, Rembrandtplein, Zeedijk

3) Ann Arbor, Chelsea, Dearborn, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Grosse Pointe, Hell MI, Holland, Kalamazoo, Plymouth, Portage, St. Joseph, Three Rivers

4) Bad Axe, Cadillac, Frankenmuth, Lansing, Ludington, Midland, Mt. Pleasant, Pinconning, Port Huron

5) Marquette, Oscoda, Petoskey

6) Battle Creek, Charlevoix, Houghton, Mackinac Island, Munising, Ontonagon, Paradise, Sault St. Marie, Traverse City

7) Boars Nest, Bo Duke, Daisy Duke, General Lee, Luke Duke, Uncle Jesse

8) Astrud Gilberto, Cootie Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, Folsom, Jimmy Scott, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Montreux, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughn, Sun Ra, Thelonius Monk

9) Brookhaven, Buckhead, Candler Park, Decatur, Druid Hills, East Atlanta, East Lake, Grant Park, Inman Park, Little 5 Points, Midtown, Morningside, Oakhurst, Ormewood Park, OTP, Reynoldstown, Sandy Springs, Virginia Highlands

10) Alamo, Armadillo, Iron Man, Longhorn

11) Bar, Barton Springs, Baz, Bull Creek, Deep Eddy, Devil's Cove, Foo, Hamilton Pool, Hippie Hollow, House Park, Ladybird Lake, Windy Point

12) Bulette, Icke, Kitt, Rincewind, Tresor

13) Moeda, Ouro Branco

14) Akwan, Caparao, Mantiqueira

15) Cipo, Curral

16) Canastra, Espinhaco

17) 8 Mile Rd, Gratiot Ave, Maple Rd, Michigan Ave, Reuther Fwy, Southfield Fwy, Telegraph Rd, The Lodge Fwy, The Palace, Woodward Ave

18) Aspen, Crested Butte, Manitou Springs, Red Rocks, Rotunda, South Park, Tiny Town

19) Dinosaur, Estes Park, Flatirons, Garden of the Gods, Independence Pass, Longs Peak, Mesa Verde, Sand Dunes, SuperMax

20) Anca, Avanti, Chedi, Chola, Dravida, Kalinga, Kanchi, Kashi, Kekaya, Kunti, Magadha, Panchala, Pandya, Sindhu, Sinhala, Videha

21) Ben Hur, Bon Appetit, Casino Royale, Cyborg, Deja Vu, Dune, Gladiator, Golden Eye, Hercules, Jumanji, Moonraker, Predator, Radio lab, Robocop, Sparta, Thunderball, Zardos

22) Enigma, Hawaiian Shack, Poison

23) Smurf, Tintin

24) Condorito, Gaturro, Hijitus, Mafalda, Miguelito, Susanita

25) Beacon Hill, Faneuil Hall, North End, Waterfront

26) Boondock Saints, Cheers, Dead Poets Society, Glory, Good Will Hunting, Mystic River, The Departed, The Perfect Storm

27) Big Dig, Mayflower, Tea Party, Walden Pond

28) Harpoon, Magic Hat, Sam Adams

29) etc, proc, var

30) Aragon Ballroom, Cheap Trick, Kingston Mines, Metro Chicago, Ravinia Festival, Schubas Tavern, Smashing Pumpkins, Styx, The Vic Theater, Wilco

31) Blues Brothers, Bob's Country Bunker, Championship Vinyl, Chez Quiz, Ferris Bueller, High Fidelity, Hubbards Cave, Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Wayne's World

32) Gold Coast, Hyde Park, Lakeview, Old Town, Ravenswood, Wrigleyville

33) Asti, Pad Thai

34) Armadillo, Big Tex, Bluebonnet, Buddy Holly, Longhorn, The Alamo, Willie Nelson, Yellow Rose

35) Bakken, Legoland, Tivoli

36) Broken Top, Chicken Charlie Island, Klamath

37) Mt Hood, Mt Mazama, Wizard Island

38) Bosco, Longmile Sprawl, Podge, Rodge, Zag, Zig

39) Boyne, Kells, Tara

40) Curie, Edison, Freud, Socrates, van Gogh

41) Circle N, Dodo, El Paso, Mars, Moonquake

42) Bordeaux, Chianti, Douro, La Rioja

43) Ballroom, Library, Study, The Carriage House, The Conservatory, The Dining Room, The Studio, The Trophy Room

44) Ashford, Carrickfergus, Kilkenny, Malahide, Slane

45) Boiler Room, Dashboard, Dude, Fear, Glengarry, Jerry Maguire, ManBearPig, Nice Red Uniforms, Office Space, Ruthless Efficiency, Surprise, The Closer, Wall Street

46) Argon, Helium, Krypton, Lithium, Neon, Potassium, Radon, Rubidium, Sodium, Xenon

47) Lord Vetinari, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, Sam Vimes

48) Beckett, Behan, Binchy, Fusion, Doyle, Joyce, Kinsella, O'Casey, Pearse, Swift, Wilde, Yeats

49) Alhambra, Camelot, Colosseo, Den Lille Havfrue, In Den Alpen, Leidseplein, Lorelei, Montmartre, Mont Saint Michel, Muumilaakso, Newgrange, Nidarosdomen, Ponte Vecchio, Torre de Belem, Vasaskeppet

50) Brady, Brennan, Gallagher, Geldof, Hewson, Lynott, McEvoy, Morrison, O'Connor, O'Riordan

51) Aponoia, Epithumia, Hedone, Olethros, Oneiros, Potmos, Teleute

52) Diamond, Emerald, Onyx, Pearl, Platinum

53) Koe Allee, Rheinblick

54) Aladdin, Sinbad

55) Bembel, Eppler, Worscht

56) Duvel, Westvleteren

57) Akiaki, Aldabra, Baltra, Barduda, Cedros, Dolgoi, Formosa, Gomera

58) Gurgaon, Inhaca, Jemo, Koro

59) Nassu, Obi, Orango, Paros, Piazzi, Qamea, Quinchao, Roxa

60) Ekero, Jawa, Kaggo, Mela, Saibai, Samso, Sangir, Savu, Serrano, Temoe, Tenerife, Tiburon, Tobago, Tristan da Cunha, Ulithi, Uman, Unimak, Urup, Vega, Vieques, Wakaya, Wokam, Wotho, Yakobi, Yunaska, Zembra, Zufaf

61) Backbord, Fehmarn, Ruegen, Steuerbord, Sylt, Usedom

62) Alster, Davidstrasse, Elbe, Gaensemarkt, Grossneumarkt, Hans Albers Platz, Kombuese, Neuer Pferdemarkt, Reeperbahn, Silbersackstrasse

63) Fiete, Hinnerk, Kloenschnack

64) Avital, Carmel, Gilboa, Hermon, Megiddo, Meron, Tavor

65) Chun Guen, Daan Tart, Har Gau, Siu Mai, Wun Ton

66) Pune, Trivendrum

67) Amritsar, Calicut, Cogra, Jalandhar, Panaji, Patna, Raipur, Ranchi, Shimla, Srinagar, Udaipur

68) Daman Diu, Darjeeling, Dehradun, Delhi, Durgapur, Dwarka, Ellora, Ernakulam

69) Faridabad, Faridkot, Ferozepur, Gangtok, Gurgaon, Hampi, Haridwar, Hastinapur, Hubli

70) Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jammu, Jhansi, Kochi, Mumbai

71) Aradhana, Aristotle, Bambam, Challenge, Chirutha, Confucius, Darwin, Flintstones, Indra, Jetsons, Johnny Bravo, Jwala, Kabir, Kanad, Khaidi, Master, Nietzsche, Noddy, Panini, Pebbles, Plato, Popeye, Powerpuff Girls, Richie Rich, Saussure, Scooby Doo, Socrates, Sponge Bob, Teletubbies, Top Cat, Veta, Vijetha

72) Aerosmith, Beatles, Bee Gees, Coldplay, Deep Purple, Dire Straits, Eagles, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Matchbox Twenty, Metallica, Mufasa, Nemo, Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd, Pocahontas, Princess Fiona, Pumbaa, Queen, Rolling Stones, Scorpions, Shrek, Simba, Timon, U2, Van Halen

73) American Beauty, Archie Andrews, Armageddon, Asterix, Betty Cooper, Braveheart, Calvin and Hobbes, Casablanca, Forrest Gump, Frankenstein, Grease, Homer Simpson, Jughead Jones, Jurassic Park, King Kong, Marge Simpson, Obelix, Peter Griffin, Pulp Fiction, Ray, Reggie Mantle, Rocky, Rush Hour, Serendipity, Star Wars, Stewie Griffin, Terminator, The Departed, The Exorcist, The Godfather, The Matrix, Tintin, Titanic, Veronica Lodge

74) American Idol, Bewitched, Bugs Bunny, Charmed, Chip 'N Dale, Daffy Duck, Daisy Duck, Desperate Housewives, Donald Duck, ER, Friends, Goofy, Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, Jerry, Lost, Magica De Spell, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Mr. Bean, Oprah, Pluto, Prison Break, Roswell, Scrooge McDuck, Scrubs, Silver Spoons, Smallville, Small Wonder, That '70s Show, The Apprentice, The Brady Bunch, The Crystal Maze, The Scholar, Tom, Tweety Bird

75) Batman, Cinderella, Cyclops, Electra, Hawk Girl, Krypton, Phoenix, Rapunzel, Robin, Snow White, Spider Man, Superman, Wolverine, Wonder Woman

76) Akbar & Birbal, Auntie Shanti, Cafe d'art, Chacha Chowdhry, da Vinci, Frida, Kalia the Crow, Mary Cassatt, Michelangelo, Monet, Pollock, Ramu & Shamu, Rembrandt, Renoir, Shikari Shambu, Suppandi, Toulouse Lautrec, van Gogh

77) Ajanta, Charminar, Fatehpur Sikri, Goa, Hyderabad, Mysore Palace, Taj Mahal

78) Caddyshack, Casablanca, Columbia, Disney, Footloose, Fox, Ghostbusters, Goodfellas, Gremlins, Lionsgate, Matrix, MGM, Paramount, Pixar, Rocky, Universal, Warner Bros.

79) Burning Man, City Limits, Coachella, Glastonbury, Lilith Fair, Lollapalooza, Montreux Jazz, Ozzfest, Summerfest, Sunsplash, Woodstock

80) Americano, Cougars, Espresso, Huskies, Mariners, Olympic, Seahawks, Sonics, Sounders, Storm

81) Adams, Cascade/Event Area, Crater Lake, Hood, Jefferson, Lassen, McLoughlin, Mt. St. Helens, Newberry, Rainier, Thielsen, Three Sisters

82) Fistful, Infamous, Sloppy, Walking

83) Acropolis, Angkor, Chichen Itza, Corcovado Statue

84) Easter Island, Eiffel Tower, Giza Pyramids, Great Wall, Kiyomizu Temple, Machu Picchu, Neuschwanstein Castle, Petra, Statue of Liberty, Stonehenge, Sydney Opera House, Taj Mahal, Timbuktu

85) Everest, Lhotse

86) Access Denied, Broken Pipe, Segmentation Fault

87) Abisko, Akka

88) Brickyard, Bristol, Darlington, Lowes, The Garage, Vegas

89) Barbican, Brixton, Camden Town, Cannon Street, Ealing Broadway, Gloucester Road, Goodge Street, Kew Gardens, Leicester Square, Liverpool Street, Mile End, Moorgate, Mornington Crescent, Nicolle, Oval, Sloane Square, South Kensington, St. James Park, Tottenham Court Road, Victoria, Waterloo, Wimbledon

90) Amundsen, Atrium, Barents, Berners Lee, Brunel, Columbus, Cook, Da Gama, Drake, Faraday, Hawking, Livingstone, Magellan, Maxwell, Mobile Hubble, Newton, Turing, VC Booth 1, VC Booth 2, VC Booth 3, Vespucci

91) Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Dumas, Orwell, Pasternak, Stevenson, Tolkien, Tolstoy

92) Bristol, Piper, Track, Trig, Willow

93) Barcelona, Bilbao, Chueca, Granada, Huertas, Oviedo, Salamanca, Santander

94) Botticelli, Giotto, Leonardo

95) Carducci, Dante, Leopardi, Montale, Pascoli, Petrarca, Ungaretti

96) Edward Teach, Henry Avery, Jack Rackham, Jean Thomas Dulien, Stede Bonnett, Thomas Tew

97) case, const, default, goto, mutable, switch, try

98) Moscow, Plyuk, Prostokvashino, Shelezyaka

99) Kalina, Malina, Ryabina

100) Kegonsa, Mendota, Monona, Waubesa, Wingra, Yahara

101) Amanu, Arutua, Beka, Bora Bora, Buratu, Chormah, Eiao, Fetuna, Futi, Hiti, Hua

102) Adventure Sound, Carysfort, Dunnose, Eagle Passage, Fitzroy, Foam Creek, Fox Bay, Grantham Sound, Hornby, Keppel

103) Caroline Point, Malvinas, Port Harriet, Port Howard, Port Louis, Port Stephens, Rookery Bay, Sappers, Saunders, Seal Bay, Speedwell, Stanley, Surf Bay, Volunteer Point, Weddell, Yorke Bay

104) Babuyan Claro, Cabalian, Iraya, Iriga, Isarog

105) Antipolo, Bago, Balanga, Bohol, Cadiz, Cavite, Cebu, Davao, Digos, Escalante

106) Beppu, Itami, Kawasaki, Kobe, Kyoto

107) Nara, Okayama, Osaka, Otaru, Sapporo, Sendai, Tokushima, Yamagata, Yoichi

108) Cape Meares, Champoeg, Dabney, Deschutes

109) La Pine, Memaloose, Minam, Molalla, Mongold, Owyhee, Pilot Butte, Prineville, Prospect, Rooster Rock, Seneca, Silver Falls, Succor Creek, Sumpter, Tumalo, Unity Forest, Viento, Vinzenz, Washburne

110) Arapaho, Castlewood, Chatfield, Cherry Creek, Comanche Grassland, Curecanti, Eleven Mile, Florissant, Grand Mesa, Great Sand, Gunnison, Harvey Gap, Highline Lake, Hovenweep, Jackson Lake, Lake Pueblo, Lathrop, Lone Mesa, Lory, War

111) Diamond Head, Hanauma Bay, Hapuna Beach, Iao Valley, Kaena Point, Kahana Valley, Kewalo Basin, Kona Coast

112) Lava Tree, Makapuu Point, Makena Park, Mauna Kea, Na Pali Coast, Polipoli Spring, Umikoa, Waahila Ridge, Wailoa River, Wailua Valley, Waimea Canyon

113) Alamitos, Arroyo Mocho, Arroyo Valle, Bodega Bay, Bolinas Lagoon

114) Calaveras Creek, Calera, Cherry Canyon, Coyote Creek, Easton, Feather River, Garrity, Gold Creek, Green Valley, Guadalupe, Happy Valley, Islais, Koopman

115) Laguna Salada, Leyden, Lion Creek, Lobos Creek, Milagra, Mowry Slough, Novato Creek, Oyster Bay, Permanente Creek, Petaluma River, Peyton Creek, Pinole Creek, Pirate Creek, Rheem, Stevens Creek, Sulphur Springs, Sycamore

116) Tassajara, Tehan, Temescal, Tolay, Tomales Bay, Uvas Creek, Vallecitos, Walker Creek, Walnut Creek, Ward Creek, Welch Creek, Wildcat Creek, Yosemite Creek

117) Aiea, Eleele, Ewa, Halawa, Honolulu, Kahului, Kailua, Kapaa, Kihei

118) Lahaina, Nanakuli, Nanawale, Napili, Pearl City, Waimalu, Waimea, Waipahu, Waipiu

119) Aldebaran, Andoria, Drema

120) Bruneau, Cascade Lake, Castle Rocks, City of Rocks, Coeur D'Alene, Dworshak, Eagle Island, Farragut, Heyburn

121) Lake Walcott, Lucky Peak, McCroskey, Old Mission, Ponderosa, Priest Lake, Thousand Springs, Winchester

122) Chelan, Dash Point, Dosewallips, Ebeys, Fields Spring, Goldendale, Grayland

123) Larrabee, Moran, Mystery Bay, Nolte, Olallie, Osoyoos, Palouse, Potlatch, Rainbow Falls, Rasar, Rockport, Sacajawea, Seaquest, Yakima

124) Antalya, Atlas, Beirut, Bucharest, Burgas, Damascus, Haifa, Kaluga, Kazan, Kazan Lounge, Kiev, Perl, PHP, Pike, PL/I, PL/SQL, Postscript, Prolog, Python

125) Ada, Algol, APL, AppleScript, Assembly, Awk, Basic, C, C#, C++, Cobol, Eiffel, Erlang, Forth, Fortran, Haskell, HTML, Icon, Java, Javascript, Lisbon, Lisp, Logo, Lourdes, Madrid, Matlab, Mersin, ML, Modula, Nice, Ocaml, Pascal, Perugia, Rouen, Setubal, Seville, Siena, Sofia, Tehran, Toledo, Turin, University Theatre, Vezelay, Vienna, Zaragoza

126) Abilene, Albuquerque, Ardmore, Aurora, Chesapeake, Dalhart, Etna, Gainesville

127) Miami, Olympia, Portland, Richmond, Saskatoon, Seaside

128) Tucson, Verbena, Vernal, Vidalia, Waverly, Weatherford, Weyburn, Wichita, Winnipeg, Wynne, Yarnell, Yellow Bluff, Yoder, Zephyr Cove

129) Apoera, Arica, Belem, Brasilia, Buenaventura, Capanema, Cayenne, Charana, Coro, Cuiaba, Esquel, Fortaleza, Georgetown

130) La Paz, Lima, Manaus, Manizales, Matoury, Montevideo, Natal, Niteroi, Palmas, Paramaribo 42, Quito, Santiago, Sao Paulo

131) Adsense, Tepu, Valencia, Witagron, Yacuiba, Yopal

132) Abidjan, Abuja, Accra, Addis Ababa, Aksum, Algiers, Atar, Banfora, Bangui, Benghazi, Berbera, Casablanca, Dapaong, Delgo, Dire Dawa, Douala, El Golea, Faya, Fes, Gambela, Gaoua, Gardo, Guipe, Khartoum, Kotsi

133) Marrakesh, Mogadishu, Mongo, Monrovia, Nairobi, Navrongo, Nyala, Ouagadougou, Rabat, Segou, Shebha, Siguiri, Tarfaya, Terna, Timbuktu, Tripoli, Tummu, Tunis, Wau, Yaounde

134) Arusha, Bangula, Binga, Blantyre, Caprivi, Chipata, Cuamba, Durban, Gokwe, Gweru, Harare

135) Maseru, Matobo, Maun, Mossel, Mutare, Nata, Pretoria, Ubundu, Werda, Zambezi, Zanzibar, Zavala

136) Amnat, Ang Tong, Ayutthaya, Bangkok, Ban Mi, Ban Pong, Betong, Bua Yai, Chai Nat, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chon Buri, Hat Yai, Hua Hin, Kalasin

137) Lampang, Lop Buri, Nan, Na San, Pattani, Phuket, Prachin, Rayong, Saraburi, Satun, Sena, Sing Buri, Surin, Tak, Tha Kham, Trang, Ubon, Warin, Yala

138) Anare, Athena, Green Gorge

139) Jubany, McMurdo, Neumayer, O Higgins, Palmer, Prat, Rothera, South Pole, Syowa, Vostok

140) Attopeu, Bac Can, Ca Mau, Con Son, Da Lat, Da Nang, Hai Phong, Ha Noi, Ha Tinh

141) Nam Dinh, Napheng, Napiat, Naxa, Paklay, Pakse, Paksong, Phnom Penh, Seno, Sonla, Tuy Hoa, Vangsim, Vang Vieng, Vapi, Vientiane, Vinh

142) Amancio, Banes, Baracoa, Bauta, Bayamo, Biran, Camaguey, Florencia, Guines, Havana, Holguin

143) Las Tunas, Manzanillo, Mariel, Matanzas, Mayari, Moa, Nueva Gerona, Palma Soriano, Pinar, Placetas, Puerto Padre, Ranchuelo, Remedios, Sagua, Sancti, San Luis, Union, Yaguajay

144) Amorsolo, Bae, Boonma, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Hongdo, Huay, Luna

145) Kuramata, Lajmi, Mali, Noda, Noguchi, Padamsee, Qureshi, Rathore, Raza, Rosanjin, Sokhwan, Varma, Wasim, Xiaodong, Zobel

146) Abu Nuwas, Africanus, Ahmad Baba, Alencas, Amru, Balzac, Basho, Bronte, Byron, Caloris Montes, Camoes, Chekov, Couperin, Dario, Donne

147) Eitoku, Equiano, Fram, Ghiberti, Gluck, Goya, Handel, Harunobu, Haydn, Hesiod, Hitomaro, Horace, Imhotep, Kalidasa, Kenko, Khansa, Kuan, Leopardi

148) Mahler, Marti, Mena, Mistral, Mofolo, Myron, Nampeyo, Nervo, Nezami, Odin, Ovid, Petrarch, Proust, Pushkin, Rabelais, Rilke, Sadi, Sayat, Snorri, Surdas

149) Tansen, Thakur, Theophanes, Tolstoy, Tsai, Turgenev, Unkei, Valmiki, Velazquez, Vyasa, Wagner, Wergeland, Wren, Yeats, Yun Sondo, Zarya, Zeami, Zeehaen, Zola

150) Abalos, Acidalia, Aeolis, Albor, Anseris Mons, Apollinaris, Arsia Mons, Ascraeus Mons, Olympus Mons

151) Cydonia, Dejnev, Elysium, Eos, Fontana, Geryon, Gonnus, Hibes, Hipparchus, Huygens, Isil, Izendy, Jovis, Kuiper

152) Lowell, Lyot, Malea, Meroe, Nansen, Niesten, Nili, Octantis, Orcus, Oxia, Pavonis, Perepelkin, Phlegra, Pindus, Roddenberry

153) Samara, Sepik, Terby, Teviot, Tinia, Trebia, Tyras, Uzboi, Vedra, Vogel, Voo, Voza, Warrego, Woomera, Xanthe, Xui, Yaonis, Yebra, Zephyria

154) Adal, Asgard, Aziren, Bavorr, Bragi, Bran, Buri, Dia, Durinn, Erlik

155) Gandalfr, Ginandi, Gisl, Gloi, Gunnr, Hepti, Ilma, Jumo, Keelut, Lempo, Lodurr, Loni, Losy, Lycaon, Mimir, Mitsina

156) Nakki, Nama, Nar, Nerrivik, Nidi, Numi, Omol, Pakane, Randver, Saga, Saraka, Skeggold, Sudri, Sumbur

157) Tapio, Toll, Tontu, Uksakka, Vanapagan, Veralden, Vestri, Vidarr, Vitr, Vutash, Ymir, Yuryung

158) DL Bliss, Emerald Bay, Folsom Lake, Hatton

159) Pacheco, Palomar, Pigeon Point, Pio Pico, Placerita, Plumas, Point Lobos, Portola, Salton Sea, San Simeon, Silverwood, Tolowa, Topanga, Tule Elk, Washoe, Wassama, Wildwood

160) Annadel, Benbow, Bidwell, Calaveras, Candlestick, Caspar, Castaic, Castle Crags, Castle Rock

161) La Purisima, Leo Carillo, Limekiln, Los Encinos, Mono Lake, Morro Bay, Oceano, Ocotillo, Olompali

162) Ames Monument, Bear River, Bighorn, Boysen, Buffalo Bill, Curt Gowdy, Devils Tower, Edness, Fetterman, Fossil Butte, Grand Teton

163) Independence Rock, Medicine Lodge, Names Hill, Ottley, Platte River, Pony Express, Register Cliff, Shoshone, Trail End, Wagon Box, Yellowstone, Yesness

164) Bannack, Bolin, Calf Creek, Elkhorn, Finley Point, Flathead Lake, Greycliff, Kootenai

165) Madison River, Rattlesnake Creek, Rosebud, Roundhorn, Sluice Boxes, Spring Meadow, Thompson Falls, Tower Rock

166) Englischer Garten, Hofbraeuhaus, Isartorplatz, Marienplatz, Odeonsplatz, Olympiapark, Schloss Nymphenburg, Stachus, Viktualienmarkt

167) Flushing Meadows, Fort Wadsworth, Prospect Park

168) Breezy Point, Fort Greene, Marine Park, Sunset Park, The Highline

169) Steeplechase Park, Washington Square Park

170) Peninsula, Plaza, Ritz Carlton

171) Gansevoort, SoHo Grand

172) CBGB, McSorley's, Milk and Honey

173) Brass Monkey, Burp Castle, Flight 151, Spuyten Duyvil, Zum Schneider

174) 86th St. Starbucks, Apollo, Baker Field, Cloisters, Cotton Club, Inwood, Washington Heights

175) Belvedere Castle, Bethesda Fountain

176) Delacorte Theatre, Great Lawn, Harlem Meer, Riverside Park

177) Alice Tully Hall, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, Metropolitan Opera, NY Philharmonic, Sheep Meadow, Strawberry Fields, Tavern on the Green

178) Empire State, Radio City, Rockefeller Center

179) Battery Park, City Hall, Geo NY, Shake Shack, South Street Seaport, Wall Street

180) Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Coney Island, D.U.M.B.O., Williamsburg

181) Asbury Park, Atlantic City, Avalon, Cape May

182) Hoboken, Hohokus, Long Beach Island, Manasquan, The Meadowlands

183) Pine Barrens, Point Pleasant, Princeton

184) Ridgefield, Spring Lake, Wawa, Wildwood

185) Sakura, Valentine, Warhol

186) Bastille, Braille, Einstein, Hitchcock, Opera, Ray Charles

187) Huo, Mu, Shui, Tu

188) Rabbit, Goat, Ox, Tiger

189) Gong, Shang

190) Ba Jiao, Chen Si, Kai Xin, Qi Xiang, Tan Shou, Tuo Ta, Zuo Lu

191) Bai Lu, Chun Fen, Dong Zhi, Li Chun, Li Qiu, Li Xia, Mang Zhong, Qiu Fen, Xiao Shu, Xia Zhi

192) Han, Jin, Ming, Qin, Sui, Tang, Xia, Zhou

193) Li Ji, Shang Shu, Zhou Yi

194) Chang Ban Po, Ding Jun Shan, Long Zhong Dui, Qun Ying Hui, Tong Que Tai, Wo Long Gang

195) Hai Wang Xing, Huo Xing, Jin Xing, Shui Xing, Tian Wang Xing, Tu Xing

196) Diagon Alley, Gringotts, Hogwarts, Platform 9 3/4

197) Area 51, Batcave, Black Widow, Centipede, Chupacabra, Coyote, Gila Monster, Killer Bee, Ocelot, Rattlesnake, Road Runner, Ruby, Scorpion, Snowbird, Summer Picnic, Tarantula

198) Bob Dog, Chef Edgar Cooke, Daniel Striped Tiger, Donkey Hodie, Dr Duckbill Platypus, Harriet Elizabeth Cow, Henrietta Pussycat, King Friday XIII, Lady Elaine Fairchilde, Mister Rogers, Neighborhood of Make Believe, Prince Tuesday, Purple Panda, Queen Sara Saturday, X the Owl

199) Bob, Bobek

200) Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Arthur Ashe, Booker T. Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, George C. Scott, Kate Smith, Lewis And Clark, Patsy Cline, Pearl Bailey

201) Autorama, Bambole, Domino, Falcon, Forte Apache, Genius, Pense Bem, Peteca, Piao, Playmobil, Pogoball

202) Abrolhos, Ipanema, Iracema, Itaunas, Maresias, Ponta d'Areia

203) Asteroids, Castlevania, Centipede, Contra, Donkey Kong, DOOM, Double Dragon, Dragon's Lair, Excitebike, Final Fantasy, Frogger, Galaga, Gauntlet, Golden Tee, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Halo, Joust, Madden, Metroid, Mortal Kombat, Ms. Pac Man, Pac Man, Paperboy, Pong, Punch Out!, Qbert, Rampage, Resident Evil, Sonic, Space Invaders, Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros., Tecmo Bowl, Tetris, The Horseshoe, Tron

204) ABC, Zelda

205) Center of the Universe, Dubliner, Matador, Prost, Red Door, War Room

206) Cirrus, Cumulus, Hail, Monsoon, Purple Haze, Showers, Snow, Sprinkle, Squall, Stratus, Thunderstorm, Umbrella

207) Alki, Bumbershoot, Burke Gilman, Canal, Chinook, Fish Market, Floating Bridges, Gasworks, Hammering Man, Houseboat, Interurban, Kingdome, Locks, Mighty O, Monorail, Pike, Pioneer, Red Hook, Seafair, Shilshole, Solstice, Space Needle

208) Abba, Acasia, Baekje, Balhae, Beethoven, Chosun, Daisy, Fresia, Gaudi, Gaya, Goguryeo, Goryo, Hwangjiny, Isadora Duncan, Jiphyunjoun, Lily, Picasso, Shakespeare, Silla

209) Charmed, Dharma & Greg, Doris Day Show, Falcon Crest, First Years, Full House, Girls Club, Half & Half, Hooperman, Ironside, Journey Man, Life and Times of Juniper Lee, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, McMillan and Wife, Midnight Caller, Monk, My Sister Sam, MythBusters, Nash Bridges, Party of Five, Phyllis, Sliders, Streets of SF, Suddenly Susan, That's So Raven, The Lineup, The Real World, Too Close for Comfort, Top Chef, Trapper John M.D., Twins, Wolf

210) American Graffiti, Barbary Coast, Basic Instinct, Birdman of Alcatraz, Bullitt, Days of Wine and Roses, Dirty Harry, Flower Drum Song, Harold and Maude, Innerspace, Magnum Force, Maltese Falcon, Matrix Revolutions, Metro, Mrs. Doubtfire, Murder In The First, Sister Act, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Star Trek 4, The Birds, The Fan, The Rock, Vertigo, X Men

211) Balboa Terrace, Bret Harte, Buena Vista, Castro, Cayuga, Cole Valley, Diamond Heights, Dogpatch, Duboce Triangle, Eureka Valley, Excelsior, Fairmount, Financial District, Forest Hill, Forest Knolls, Glen Park, Haight Ashbury, Hayes Valley, Holly Park, Hunters Point, Lakeshore, Laurel Heights, Lincoln Park, Lone Mountain, Marina, Mission, Nob Hill, Noe Valley, Portola, Presidio, Soma, St. Francis Wood, Sunset, Sutro Heights, Tenderloin

212) Chen Huang Miao, Da Guang Ming, Da Shi Jie, Dian Shan Hu, Lu Zhi, Nan Xun, Paramount, Shi Ku Men, Shi Liu Pu, The Bund, Tong Li, Wu Zhen, Xi Tang, Zhou Zhuang

213) Aiyoyo, Apa Kabar, Bo Chup, Chao, Kiasu, Kumusta, Nihao, Paiseh, Sawaddee, Selamat

214) Hermosa, Huntington, Jaws, Laguna, Manhattan, Newport, Redondo

215) Baywatch, Cast Away, Malibu, Paradise Cove, Sunset, Ventura, Zuma

216) Brown Derby, Coconut Grove, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Pig and Whistle

217) La Monica Ballroom, Pacific Plunge, Pier Aquarium, Rusty's Surf Ranch, Uncomfortable Triangle, Whack A Mole

218) Bait & Tackle, Hippodrome, Mini Golf, Sea Dragon, Skee Ball, Spill the Milk

219) Alfred, Katthult, Vimmerby

220) Benois, Montferrand, Rastrelli, Rossi, St. Petersburg

221) Atlant, Fontanka, Moika, Sphinx, Strelka

222) Hulk Hogan, Wrestlemania

223) Lychee, Mango

224) Melbourne, Sydney

225) Appropriately, Between, Jest, Denial, Hale, Mates, Sane, Side, Spired, Stead, Tense, Venting, Voice, Voluntarily

226) Beachley, McGrath, Webb

227) Bradbury, Bradman, Brock, Campese, Camplin, Cuthbert, Doohan, Fraser, Freeman, Gaze, Goolagong, Gould, Kewell, Lewis Sydney, Lillee, Perkins, Rafter, Strickland

228) Bison, Black Bear, Elk, Mountain Lion, Pika, Pronghorn, Red Tail Hawk

229) Bee Hive, Big Horn Sheep, Chipmunk, Critters, Marmot, Owl, Prairie Dog, Trout

230) Agam, Alterman, Ben Yehuda, Kadishman, Levin

231) Bialik, Einstein, Geva, Kishon, Shemer, Spinoza

232) Ayame, Hagi, Renge, Sakura, Tsubaki, Ume

233) Africa, Bali, Blue, Green, Hawaii, Jamaica, Red, Tatami, Yellow

234) Akashi, Eawase, Hanano en, Kagaribi, Kashiwagi, Kiritsubo, Kobai, Matsukaze, Niono miya, UX Lab

235) Fumizuki, Hazuki, Kannazuki, Kisaragi, Minazuki, Mutsuki, Nagatsuki, Satsuki, Yayoi

236) Canadian Club, Center Ice, Lake Louise, Peggy's Cove, The Lighthouse, The Stampede, Tremblant

237) Alishan, Chitou, Dabajianshan, Eluanbi, Sun Moon Lake, Taroko, Yehliu, Yushan

238) Bianca, Cordelia, Cressida, Ophelia

239) The Cabinet Room, The Cloakroom, The Oval, The Rose Garden, The Secret Undisclosed Location, The Situation Room, The Smoke Filled Room, The South Lawn, The Treaty Room

240) Asungaq, Chu, Deniigi, Kanut, Mequssuk, Nannuraluk, Nini, Ookpik, Qigiq, Tarralikitak

241) Korniszon, Sledzik

242) Atomek, Bolek, Filemon, Gucio, Koralgol, Krecik, Lolek, Maja, Muchomorek, Plastus, Reksio, Romek, Rumcajs, Tola, Tytus, Uszatek

243) And, Enjoy, Share

244) Bandura, Bleeding Gums Murphy, ENIAC, Patty, Santa's Little Helper, Selma, Sideshow Bob

245) Chief Wiggum, Itchy, Mayor Quimby, Milhouse, Scratchy, Shelbyville, Snowball 1, Snowball 2

246) Acapulco, Bondi, Cancun, Copacabana, Rimini, Tenerife, Waikiki

247) Agadir, Blackpool, Cardinal, Hirnibraeu, Ipanema, Ittinger, Turbinenbraeu

248) Calanda, Eichhof, Feldschloesschen, Hubertus, Huerlimann, Loewenbraeu, Schuetzengarten, Waedibraeu, Warteck

249) Alaris Prime, Alderaan, Corellia, Han Solo, Kaja Sinis, Kamino, Kethor, Senali, Tilnes, Tritus, Uffel, Yoda

250) Ando Prime, Boz Pity, Naboo, Taris, Tatooine

251) Blueberry, Blue Chip, Blue Jeans, Blue Penguin, Blue Sky, Bluetooth, Curacao, Deep Blue, Smurf, The Blues

252) Forest, Granny Smith, Greenfield, Greenstone, Greenwood, Greeny, Kiwi, Peas

253) Green Card, Greenhouse, Green Keeper, Green Pepper, Green Tea, Greenwich, Grinch, Ireland, Leprechaun, Shamrock

254) Chagall, Dali, Duerer, Kelly, Klimt, Luongo, Nikita

255) Dodgeball, Five Ball, Oranje

Cognitive milestones

2011-07-11T15:30:00.003-04:00

My grandson Dorian is now just past three, and he has very recently achieved two major cognitive milestones.

On the one hand, he now can say that the person he sees in the mirror or the looped-back video camera is himself. I saw him just yesterday standing in front of a full-length mirror on the floor and saying "A picture of Dorian!" On the other hand, he now will come up to an adult and say "You need to change my diaper!" when he has pooped in it. Both of these are very significant advances over just a month ago.

Until now, Dorian could pass the mirror test (like humans and other great apes, dolphins, killer whales, and magpies) in the sense that he showed recognition of himself in a mirror. But he did not verbally acknowledge it, though he liked seeing such images and would laugh when shown one. I should think that the second milestone is also available to apes, who don't have language as we do (even the ones trained in sign language never ask questions, or tell us what they think, for example) but are capable of manipulating complex symbols to make demands.

The Final, Complete, Authoritative List of Self-Describing Linguistic Expressions

2011-05-17T17:15:00.005-04:00

Note: I did not make up any of these wonderful terms.

ablout, adjectival, adverbially, affrichation, agglutinatinglanguagetype, analogician, anapityxis, ancicipation, anology, apfricate, apfrication, aphas..., apocop, apocop, aprothesis, assimilassion, assimination, asssibilation, atticipatory assimilation, breakieng, compēsatory lengthening, condamination, conjunction and/or disjunction, cpoatricpulated stocp, daigraeph, debuccalihation, derivationalizationalize, devoicink, diephthoungiezaitioun, digræph, diminutivito, dithsimilation, diäeresis, duplication, díäçrîtič, e grede, ebleut, epenethesis, epentthesis, execrescence, extcrescentce, final devoicink, finix, fixsuf, folk at-a-mall-oh-gee, folk ate-a-mology, folk-entomology, foneme,frapped r, frixathiv, frönting, fəˈnɛtʰɪk, gemminnattion, genitive’s, Ghrassman's Lhaw, gloʔʔalization, græ:t vu:l shift, haplogy, haspʰiration, infuckingfixation, Krimm's Law, lharyngeal, lenizhion, loan mot, lubualuvatium, metasethis, methatesis, metophony, monophtong, morph-eme-s, mprenasalization, nansal infinx, noun, noun phrase, NP[ADJ[labeled]ADJ N[bracketing]N]NP nãsąlĩzątĩǫn, o grod, paragogee, perreveratory addimilation, pheresis, positionpost, ppoggessive addimilation, pre-fixed, pro clitic, pyalatyalizyation, reduced grud, redup-reduplication, relick form, rerressive assimilation, rfrikhathive, rhotarism, rules of redundancy rules, schwə, sfirathization, sibboleth, spelling pronounciation, stigmartize' fohm, suffix-ed, superlativissimus, svarabhakati, sync'pe, teefoicink, t-fuckin'-mesis, the firsth Germanih sount shifth, the sekont Germanich sount shiftz, thetamesis, to back formate, triephthouong, ttlvwl rdctn, ümlaut, voizing, vowol harmono, weagening, zr grd.

My personal favorite is "vowol harmono".

Stories in related languages

2011-05-07T15:31:00.000-04:00

The Fisherman and His Wife

Here are multiple versions of the familiar (or if isn't familiar, read it!) Grimm's fairy tale in different closely related languages. You can probably find more if you try.

There's also a Russian version of the story by Pushkin (search for "СКАЗКА О РЫБАКЕ И РЫБКЕ")

Between all of those one ought to be able to make out what's going on. For extra thrills, try reading one of the languages you don't know.

"Kannitverstan"

Johann Peter Hebel's classic 1809 tale "Kannitverstan" is about the moral reflections that mutual incomprehension can arouse in a young German from Württemberg who is in Amsterdam for the first time (based on a true story dating from 1757) :

Update: Links refreshed, Dutch and Russian added.

Language Hat, or Topic Drift

2011-04-10T18:36:00.000-04:00

Language Hat is one of my favorite blogs. The host, also known as Language Hat, has created a complex community of extremely interesting people, and he downright encourages topic drift provided the topic stays interesting and non-hostile, which it almost always does. So just to show off how drifty the topics can be, I grabbed most of last year's postings and reduced them to just the first and last sentences (where "last" means "last sentence on the last comment"), and presented them here in chronological order from January to December. Occasionally there's a bit more than two sentences in order to provide context. If one of the posts interests you, click on the ➤ to read it.

➤ My wife asked me why "refrain" means such different things as a noun and as a verb, and the answer turns out to be interesting: the two have completely different histories. [...] Your spam style, on the other hand ...

➤ Of course I wanted to find the original Russian of the diary online, and I was pleased to turn up this site: it's full of scanning errors and only goes up to the end of 1929, but it will be a welcome companion up to that point. [...] Shklovsky is also the author of one of the best biographies of Tolstoy and a master of bon mots. Here is one:

➤ Orin Hargraves has a good post in the Language Lounge section of Visual Thesaurus on the decay of that good old modal shall, using Fowler's entry on it as a jumping-off point ("There is never a reason not to consult Fowler about usage: whether you find what you were looking for or not, you'll walk away from his text amused and edified in a way that you weren't when you went to it"). [...] I do have a life so I think I'll just get on with it.

➤ I wrote about the death of poet and publisher Jonathan Williams here; now Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens have put together a wonderful tribute at Jacket Magazine, with contributions from the quick and the dead. [...] [I'm leaving this because it's rare to see a spammer so incompetent they can't even link the site they're spamming for. -LH]

➤ A nice little paragraph from the Nov. 12, 1918 entry featuring an argument with Nikolai Gumilyov (who would be shot by the Bolsheviks less than three years later) about translation; Gumilyov was a fine poet, but I'm on Chukovsky's side here: [...] When Sashura gave up, I thought it was hopeless.

➤ There's a long and fascinating entry (April 18, 1919) featuring Gorky talking about Tolstoy; with any luck you'll be able to read it, or at least part of it, at Google Books. [...] Not something I possess either.

➤ Chukovsky talks about Maxim Gorky so much I thought it would be a good time to finally read Gorky's famous autobiography. [...] 'изведут' I think could be better rendered into English as 'do her in'

➤ Anatoly has a thought-provoking post today that I thought I'd translate and bring to the attention of those who don't read Russian:It sometimes happens that a field of study arises and organizes itself around some big problem, standing before it unignorable and demanding to be solved. [...] Personally I would love to attend, but it's a bit far from Beijing....

➤ One of the things I love about investigating obscure references in my reading is that it sometimes leads me into nearly forgotten byways of history that I can then bring to light. [...] If you think of it as a dialect of English, it's appropriate to translate into or out of it into the dialect forms of other languages.

➤ This isn't a movie review site, but since I posted about the new must-see movie, I thought I'd briefly record my reaction to seeing it last night (in 3D). [...] The Bennetts are very middle class.

➤ I know this is petty and I should rise above it, but I can't help sharing a couple more examples of malfeasance from the Gorky translation discussed here. [...] a very funny read, the article telling off the Patriarch Alexiy (!) for not knowing the correct usage of dovlet'

➤ The latest post at Slawkenbergius' Tales is a thoughtful take on John Cheever that sent me back to his 1962 story "A Vision of the World"; I'll let slawk handle Cheever's worldview while I focus on a linguistically interesting element of the story he doesn't mention. [...] Well, "fiemnie" suggests it's Polish sound changes and spelling imposed on a Romance base.

➤ The farther I read in Chukovsky's diary, the more at a loss I am to understand on what basis they abridged the English version. [...] My mother has been working in a Russian Academy journal for 40 years - she has seen ideological pressures replaced by financial, and these are worse, because only what sells goes.

➤ Christopher Culver has a post exploring the relationship between the words for 'kopek' and 'squirrel' in languages of the Volga region: "As hmtjnovs etymological dictionary explains, борынгы заманнарда тиен тиресе вак акча функциясен үтәгән [in ancient times squirrel hides functioned as a low-value monetary unit]." [...] This makes me wonder about the origin of the term "buck" for a dollar.

➤ A section of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is called "Colon" (pages 91 to 103 of my Ballantine paperback); here is a small segment from near the end: [...] Not that this has anything to do with colons, or story-telling, but, you know, fyi..

➤ I knew the symbol properly used for a foot (measurement of length), as in 5′, was called a "prime," and I occasionally vaguely wondered why, but it's one of those things I never got around to investigating. [...] Also there's a quirk in London where you can just use 3/7/8 instead of the full 020n area codes if you're dialling from within the city.

➤ The Czech Literature Portal "is intended mainly for the promotion of Czech literature abroad." [...] I've done a small amount of work out of Slovak (my brother lives and works in Bratislava) and gotten paid before, so it's possible.

➤ In the southern part of Moscow, in a district known as Tsaritsyno, "the tsarina's," after its centerpiece, Tsaritsino park (formerly owned by Catherine the Great), there is a former resort settlement in the form of two concentric circular streets with a dozen or so "spokes." [...] No, putting the family name first is a common (official) way of referring to everyone in Russia; it just happens that in this case his name was given the other way round.

➤ I'm always interested in finding words that can't be succinctly translated, and I ran across one such today. [...] I use the word in a judgement-neutral way -- not to mean 'dispiriting or bloody-minded violence'.

➤ Another in the "live and learn" series: I ran across the phase sola topee today and vaguely thought "Shouldn't that be solar topee?" After all, it's a pith helmet worn for protection from the sun. [...] The ţ above indicates a retroflex - it's t with dot-under in the original.

➤ I know I blog about Russian stuff a lot, doubtless too much for some readers, and I apologize in advance for the nature of this post, since unless you actually know Russian it won't be of interest, but it's such a surprising and satisfying etymology to me I can't resist passing it on. [...] It appears to be out of print, but there are used copies for sale via Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

➤ Such is a typographers' term for the symbol : according to Nick Martens in his hilarious The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary: [...] If you ask me, that's bollocks.

➤ John McWhorter is a favorite here at LH and has come up repeatedly in my posts (most recently here); I was happy just now to run across an online course guide (pdf) of his lectures on "The Story of Human Language" for the Teaching Company (you can access the three parts separately here). [...] As more and more "dots" get connected in a way that people can follow the design (and even add to it, or improve on the connections), more and more people will come to recognize the design as probable or even valid.

➤ Matt Treyvaud of No-sword regularly writes for Nojaponisme, where he has a new translation of Mori Ōgai's 1914 essay Honyaku ni tsuite 「翻譯に就いて」 ("On translation"), a lively response to his detractors ("The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind"). [...] I don't use gateau in English myself -- it's a BrE term -- but I bet it is semantically narrowed with respect to French.

➤ Ofer Aderet has an interview in Haaretz with pianist Alice Herz- [...] Rabelais - not so much: too many footnotes.

➤ Frequent commenter Sashura sent me a link to this episode of the BBC's Open Book program, which features Mariella Frostrup talking to the Swedish thriller writer Henning Mankell, Alex Clark on "the most compelling private diaries of the last two 200 years" (finishing up with a discussion of the struggle over Kafka's papers now winding its way through the Israeli courts), and German scholar Michael Maar on Nabokov (whose name, irritatingly, the presenter insists on pronouncing with the stress on the first syllable). [...] It looks like the last Wikipedia editor has some odd ideas about how it's pronounced or how IPA marks stress or both.

➤ I've finished reading Bely's Peterburg (see here and here), and I'm even more willing than before to join Nabokov in calling it one of the great novels of its century. [...] Ouch! 2 new from $275.48; 8 used from $40.94! WTF??

➤ A remarkable report (by Mark Liberman at the Log) on the appearance in a New South Wales court of a soi-disant "plenipotentiary judge" on behalf of an applicant; after much dispute over his right to appear, he provides his "pertinent information," which follows: [...] "Idle-wild" was just an adolescent nickname. I believe he was christened Cape.

➤ It's time for another extract from The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century, by Comrie et al. (see here and here). [...] It's too tedious deleting all those spam comments.

➤ The inimitable Poemas del ro Wang continues to astonish: the latest post rescues from the dustbin of history a person—nay, a phenomenon—ubiquitous a century ago, the Hungaro-Moravian Queen of Hirsutism, Anna Csillag (pronounced CHILL-log; csillag is the Hungarian word for 'star' and is derived from csillog 'shine,' from Finno-Ugric *ćɜlk-). [...] I forgot to mention that the brushing was 100 strokes.

➤ Anatoly sent me to this post from Shkrobius, and the story told there was striking enough I thought I'd translate it here: [...] Yes, "chasing" is probably a better translation.

➤ One of my heroes, Howard Zinn, died recently, and this moving reminiscence by Alice Walker gives me a hook to post about him here: [...] I'll admit to having read, and enjoyed, his earliest edition of the History... way back in the misguided glory days of my youth, but I got older, wider read, and smarter. ;-D

➤ I'm afraid this doesn't even have any Estonian in it, so it's kind of hard to justify its presence here, except that I figure we can all use a laugh; as Robert Mackey says in his NY Times "Lede" post, which embeds it, "this note-perfect Estonian television ad for an evening news show, which reimagines the opening of 'The Simpsons' set in rural Estonia, is a cult hit on YouTube." [...] Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

➤ I'm still reading the Gorky translation discussed here and here (I'm now on the second volume, V lyudyakh [Among people, tr. as In the World]), and in Chapter 8 there's a nice anecdote about how the young narrator, forced to read dull books to the captain of the Volga steamer in whose galley he was working, was struck by the phrase собственно говоря 'strictly speaking,' which occurred in the context "Собственно говоря, никто не изобрел пороха..." ('Strictly speaking, no one invented gunpowder...'), and back in Nizhny Novgorod with his family, asked to tell more of his shipboard experiences, he responded: "http://www.languagehat.com/archives/Мне уж нечего рассказывать, собственно говоря..." ('I really don't have anything to tell, strictly speaking...'), causing general laughter and leading him to be nicknamed "Strictly speaking." [...] Only the most cynical will see something ominous in the fact that most IG's report to the head of the agency they oversee.

➤ Richard Ishida, of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has created what he calls "small web-page utilities" to aid in language use online: [...] fileformat.info already houses a unicode look-up database, its been useful for years!

➤ People keep sending me this BBC story, "Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India," so I guess I'd better post it. [...] He sounded a bit nervous in the interview.

➤ Nick (aka opoudjis) over at Illinistefkondos took such a long break from posting I stopped visiting, and now when I finally get around to checking in I find all manner of goodies, which we can divide into two categories: [...] There are so few blogs I want to read these days, the best way of finding one is to get someone else to start it.

➤ A Russian correspondent wrote me to say: "as a reader of your blog I see that you are interested in Russian formalistic prose. Here are two novels by Iliazd available for free download." [...] You could live here a hundred years and end up concluding that you'd gotten the place about right the very first day you stepped off the plane."

➤ The World Loanword Database (WOLD) is the most amazing thing I've seen in a while, linguistically speaking. [...] Some of the other bits are rather good, though, but I think I will wait until the library gets it.

➤ Having finished Alexander Grin's delightful Алые паруса (Scarlet sails), I've moved on to Olga Forsh's 1931 novella à clef Сумасшедший корабль (The crazy ship), about life in the early 1920s in the Saint Petersburg House of Arts, a refuge during those hungry years for writers like Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Grin (who wrote Scarlet Sails there), Korney Chukovsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Forsh herself. [...] The word is also used for a note of 1000 monetary units (eg dinars, deutschmarks...)

➤ My grandson is in a mainly Chinese-speaking preschool, which of course thrills me, and there are more and more such schools springing up what with the growing prominence of China. [...] No two people have exactly the same brain, any more than they have exactly the same body (fortunately!).

➤ I was scanning wood s lot (one of the reliable pleasures of the LH morning) when I was stopped in my tracks by a brief excerpt from a longish poem, "Nine," by Anne Tardos (home page, Wikipedia). [...] I like the theory, because she spent time in Budapest and learned Hungarian; "a bit of a long shot but not entirely unlikely" is about right, pending further ID.

➤ A very bad "poem" has apparently been making the rounds for decades now, attributed to Jorge Luis Borges. [...] There's no ASCII like US-ASCII,

➤ Today wood s lot features Bertolt Brecht's "An die Nachgeborenen" (1939), which along with Auden's "September 1, 1939" ("I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid...") is one of the great poetic distillations of the mood just before World War II broke out. [...] Haiku are poems which strive

➤ The Telegraph has a good obituary for Bruce Mitchell, whose Guide to Old English I own and consult with pleasure. [...] For a minute I thought that the new author would turn out to be Dan Brown.

➤ I'm reading a lousy Iraqi novel called Papa Sartre (a 2009 translation of the 2001 original); it's only 178 pages long but feels like War and Peace, and I'm skimming more and more as I zip through its repetitive and heavy-handed mockery of schemers, ne'er-do-wells, and fake philosophers. [...] Here's OpenStreetmap.

➤ My wife and I have been watching a bit of the Olympics, and I noticed one of the Russian figure skaters was named Yuko Kavaguti. [...] Gilbert also inserts some footnotes criticizing the characters for their "bad grammar" and other flubs.

➤ From Richard Hamblyn's LRB review of To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon, by Richard Shelton: [...] Once preserved (originally by drying and/or smoking), the surplus generated by the abundance of the resource makes it available for trading, either for its own sake or as currency.

➤ John Emerson sent me a link to a NY Times article by Ellen Barry about the complex relationships among the peoples of Dagestan, one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. [...] How many times can a male cow be castrated?

➤ Kim Fischer, a PR person at Temple University, has a puff piece on Lawrence Venuti, a translator and translation theorist and (not coincidentally) a Temple English professor, which irritates me with its breathless treatment of him as the Hot New Thing in translation: [...] I'll try to remember to reopen it in a couple of days in the hope they will have wandered off elsewhere, but if anyone has a comment they have to get off their chests, drop me a line and I'll reopen it.

➤ Daniel Kalder in the Guardian has a good interview with Robert Chandler, who has translated Andrei Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit [Russian Kotlovan] twice because "No other work of literature means so much to me" and "Platonov is hard to translate: in the early 1990s we were working in the dark." [...] And mab, I strongly second what you say about Robert.

➤ This thread developed into a discussion of the parallel between the development of evolution theory and historical linguistics. [...] Too bad I hate spam, but it's nice to be loved sometimes. ;-)

➤ Anatoly posts a YouTube clip from the 10th anniversary performance of Les Miserables, with a bunch of international singers taking turns at the mike for Valjean's aria "Do You Hear the People Sing?" [...] Interesting in any case. I will keep it in mind.

➤ The idea of the indeterminate text is associated with postmodernism (e.g.: "the modernism of Eliot has been identified with the autonomy of the text [...] and the determinacy of its meaning, the postmodern text is 'open' and its meaning is indeterminate"), but there's nothing new about it. [...] Oh, well then. Not amazing.

➤ There is a meme running around the internet that takes the form "I'm gonna love him and pet him and squeeze him and call him George" (many variations in wording, but all ending with "...and call him George"). [...] Oprah Winfrey got her name from the book of Ruth, too, I believe.

➤ I've been on something of a spending spree at Amazon lately,* and the latest goodie to arrive is a copy of The History of the Russian Literary Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth, Lawrence L. Thomas's abridged 1969 translation of V. V. Vinogradov's classic Очерки по истории русского литературного языка XVIIXIX вв. (2nd ed. 1938). [...] Or will I need to resort to the Maltese voiceless pharyngeal fricative? :-S ħ

➤ A couple of days ago Anatoly asked his readers for poems they loved by living poets, and as of now at that link there are almost a thousand responses. [...] Two other things are exciting too: the number of ex-Russia russophonic poets and that most poems ARE in verse - and very good rhymes too.

➤ The company is Toyota, but the family name of the founder is Toyoda. [...] Strokes may be answer, but my 'tort' As they were advertizing in Saxon, it would be so symmetrical to say " A Toyota " in your drive way, so when looking in thy rear view mirror you read "atoyot a

➤ I had never heard of poet and translator Emery George (and there's essentially nothing about him online except that "He is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor"), but he did a terrific translation (judging by the English—I don't read Hungarian) of "A la recherche," one of Mikls Radnti's last few poems before he was shot by the SS in 1944. [...] I wonder if this view is supported by critics.

➤ An AskMetaFilter question says "My grandmother's first language [Ladino] is nearly extinct. I'd like to record an interview with her for archival purposes; how should I go about it? ... I'm linguistically literate, but far from an expert, so advice from anyone with linguistics experience (particularly field lingustics) is especially appreciated." [...] Maybe their fieldwork was in anthropology or even something completely different (geology?), not linguistics, so for their own purposes they did not think it was important to record the language.

➤ 1) John Emerson sent me Interesting Schtoff from Google Books, a section of Steven K. Baum's virtual cave. [...] I expect you know PT Barnum's mermaid.

➤ Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Basil Bunting, one of my favorite poets; I've devoted three posts to quoting him (1, 2, 3) and several others to discussing him. [...] I don't think I've ever heard a more English name: Basil Cheesman Bunting

➤ Copyediting dictionaries is tedious work but I always learn things. [...] A very late addition, but I just came across St. John Cassian commenting favorably on lack of cross-linguistic communication (in the context of exegeting the 11th chapter of Genesis): "a happy and valuable discord had recalled to salvation those whom a ruinous union had driven to destruction."

➤ I just discovered that Open Library ("One web page for every book.") has a blog, and it has an entry that will upset any bibliophile, The Enemies of Books by George Oates: [...] There'll always be an England.

➤ The answer requires both an ability to read Arabic script and a knowledge of West African languages, so I'm not especially hopeful that even my Varied Readers will be able to provide it, but it's such an interesting puzzle I can't resist passing it on. [...] On the other hand, in addition to Indiana HB #246 (also here previously), there is US HR #224, making 3.14 National Pi Day.

➤ I've left the topic of my book unaddressed for too long, preoccupied as I have been with more highfalutin' topics, but thanks to the indefatigable John Emerson I hereby bring you Русский Мат.net! [...] Doesn't the pass simple sound as if the human race was once on the verge of extinction but managed to avoid it by a single sex act?

➤ More fun from my dictionary editing! [...] I've just realised that Norwegian Blue must have been some kind of play on Danish blue, which was a popular cheese in the sixties (Cleese's father having changed his name from Cheese).

➤ John McIntyre, a truly old-school copy editor (the man wears a bow tie, for God's sake), has a delightful hard-boiled detective story celebrating National Grammar Day, Pulp Diction. [...] The triteness is so heartwarming, it's almost enough to inspire me to go hang out at Grand Central Station in the hope that I too might meet someone who can spell that I can rescue from a life without proper bookshelves.

➤ Nick at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος has an informative and amusing post answering a question a reader asked in the comment thread to an earlier post, Generalised use of να in Early Modern Greek (which itself is well worth your while if you're interested in the development of Greek syntax): [...] (The commentary at slang.gr has missed the apprentice etymology, and refutes the putative wife abuse of the expressionwhich is not implausible unfortunatelywith "no, no, no, we fuck women, we bash men".)

➤ Silje Bekeng is a young Norwegian writer/journalist/critic who gives (or once gave) her location as "Brooklyn/Oslo"; she has a funny essay at N1BR ("the book review supplement to n+1 magazine") called Into the Woods, about the peculiar obsessions of Norwegian literature going back to Hamsun. [...] I haven't read Sandemose (either), but I've also heard that the 'Jante Law' has a richer and more interesting use in his book than in the common use of it afterwards.

➤ Back in 2003, Songdog alerted me to a pair of synonyms, gennel and snicket (and the resulting post sparked off almost three years' worth of enjoyable discussion); now he draws my attention to an interesting column by lexicographer Erin McKean (discussed many times on LH, e.g. here and here) about synonyms: [...] It depends of which language you are using around those words.

➤ Do you know why someone who regularly spends a certain amount of time traveling back and forth between home and work is called a "commuter"? [...] Yeah, in Berlin, we usually call them "Monatskarten", but if you "subscribe" to a year's worth of "Monatskarten", it's called an "Abonnement".

➤ Excellent news from the NY Times: they've settled on a replacement for the late William Safire as their language columnist, and it's linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer! [...] Thank you, Bathrobe, I had never thought of the derivation of redondant from a verb, let alone from onde.

➤ It's rare for me to discover that I've been completely wrong about the meaning of a reasonably common word or phrase, so I was shell-shocked just now when I read this definition of the verb compound: "Law forbear from prosecuting (a felony) in exchange for money or other consideration." [...] He forbears to prosecute the felony (well, as much as he can, considering he isn't an official authority) in return for other considerations, although in neither case does he benefit from it himself.

➤ Last month I posted a link to a review of Elif Batuman's The Possessed; here's her list of "four Russian modern classics that youve probably missed," and it makes me even more interested in her. [...] and another one: here

➤ Over the years I've had occasion to investigate various of the Russian writers known collectively as the Serapion Brothers (the most prominent of whom were Mikhail Zoshchenko and Victor Shklovsky), and I kept coming across the name Hongor Oulanoff, which always gave me a smile—there was something so incongruous about the combination of the Russian-sounding Oulanoff (Ulanov) and the very un-Russian Hongor. [...] It was a surprise to me, I didn't know it was the custom, and I felt hurt, but I just complied.

➤ This week's NYT "On Language" column is by Ammon Shea, an enjoyable but scattershot writer who takes on the issue of vocabulary size: not, this time, "what language has the most words?" but another perennial favorite, "does a bigger vocabulary make you a better person?" [...] And in 1974 or so, even in English "macho" wasn't always negative, but in Spanish it was entirely positive.

➤ I always liked counterpane, an old word for a bedspread, but I never knew its etymology, which is quite unexpected: it's an alteration of earlier counterpoint (due to an association with obsolete pane 'cloth'), but that counterpoint is an entirely different word from the one you're thinking of—it's from Old French contrepointe, which is an alteration of coultepointe, from Medieval Latin culcit(r)a puncta 'pricked (i.e., quilted) mattress.' [...] And I suppose Worcestershire is pronounced "uncle".

➤ Another interesting etymology (this is the kind of thing that catches my attention when I'm copyediting a dictionary): crew originally meant 'reinforcement(s)' in the military sense, as can be seen from the first citation in the OED, "1455 Rolls of Parl. 34 Hen. VI, c. 46 The wages of ccc men ordeigned to be with him for a Crue over the ordinary charge abovesaid." I [...] Of course, various kinds of syncope have always been common, and examples abound; I mention it here only to call attention to the fact that abbreviation sometimes makes an etymology very difficult to discover; for we always want to know exactly how a word begins, and how it began in early times.

➤ The March/April 2010 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine is particularly rich in LH-related items. [...] Thanks; it could be useful inside my daughter's school, perhaps.

➤ I was recently looking at an old post and ran across a link to Laudator Temporis Acti, and when I clicked it I was very pleased to see that Michael Gilleland is still at the same old stand, posting on Greek scholarship, portraits of readers, word histories, and all manner of other things likely to appeal to LH readers. [...] Reba was played by the country singer Reba McEntire, who's from Oklahoma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reba_McEntire

➤ A clever ad from Dorling Kindersley Books. [...] First the palindromic goat porn and now this, the world turn'd upside down.

➤ Anne O. Fisher has done a translation of Ilf and Petrov's Zolotoi telyonok called The Little Golden Calf, and she was kind enough to send me a copy (even though I tried to dissuade her, telling her I was too busy reading other things!). [...] I don't think that late 60s thing with no article really worked. Later there was a group called The The, but I never knew how to pronounce it, and that can't be good.

➤ Spoiler: the answer is "No." [...] Funny, for a purist, he writes in simplified characters.... that's a major bit of language change.

➤ Sashura sent me a link to today's program, on apologies, of Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth. [...] Goodness, I hope not.

➤ This is a tangled tale that will teach you nothing useful, but I have to share it because it took me so much time to untangle; its moral (like that of many of my posts) is that the internet is a good thing, which you already knew. [...] There are pictures of both the object and the heraldic charge right on Wikipedia.

➤ The wonderful Arika Okrent (see this LH post) has an article in Slate about the craze to learn Na'vi, the alien language used in Avatar (which I briefly reviewed here). [...] Ulaan Baator looks like a wild and crazy place. I see the Stupa Cafe has a lending library and free Wifi.

➤ One of my regular diversions is checking the "Random books from my library" list on the lower right and visiting any author pages that I think might be obscure enough to have information missing (which, given my collection, is a lot of author pages). [...] El Teatro Coln sigue siendo estatal (del Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires) espero que no lleguemos tan lejos en nuestra locura como para permitir que sea comprado por ninguna empresa.

➤ The website Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (a project of the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies of the Higher Education Academy) is a treasure trove of information; the Essentials section "provides a series of short overviews of the political and intellectual contexts of the letters, queries, and reports," Cuneiform Revealed is "an introduction to cuneiform script and the Akkadian language," and the Highlights section presents a small selection of the many texts on the site (given in transcription and translation, with enticing names like "Give Straw or Die!"). [...] 𒁖 𒆪 𒅖 𒇻 𒀸 𒃰 𒋫 𒉿 𒀸 𒋫 𒄿 𒄷 𒌋 𒌨 𒆠 𒅋 𒀀 𒆠 𒀸

➤ I had never heard of the London Library, but an article by Nancy Mattoon makes it sound like a very attractive place: [...] Nij, looks like you've been nailed.

➤ There are two nouns morion; the first, meaning a kind of helmet, does not concern us here (it is probably from Spanish morrin), but the second, a variety of smoky quartz, has an interesting etymology: it is from a Latin word morion that is a misreading of Pliny's mormorion. [...] ajay, I did but jest, poison in jest, no offense in the world.

➤ As I wrote here, I'm reading Platonov's novel Chevengur (written in 1927-28 but not published until 1988 in the USSR; the English translation is long out of print, but apparently Robert Chandler is working on a new one). [...] Thanks, that's extremely helpful!

➤ Victor Mair has an interesting post at the Log about an article (in this 2008 book) by Tibetanist Nicholas Tournadre in which Tournadre says that there are 220 "Tibetan dialects" derived from Old Tibetan: [...] If you want to comment, please e-mail me and I'll be delighted to reopen it.

➤ Betty Kirkpatrick, "the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Rogets Thesaurus," is doing a nice series of "Useful Scots words" for the Caledonian Mercury; they don't seem to have a convenient group URL, but you can do pretty well with a site search on her name. [...] But I hope that Russian had a good time in Aberdeen.

➤ Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the very popular "No1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series, and he has a new book coming out... in Scots. [...] Thanks, MMcM, I read this a long time ago and am probably fuzzy about all the details.

➤ From Scotland we move to Ireland, where Colm  Caomhnaigh from Dublin is compiling a Dictionary of Bird Names in Irish. [...] Yes! Thanks, m-l.

➤ So I'm flipping through the NY Times 2010 Baseball Preview and trying to ignore the terrible things they're saying about my team ("For Mets, Gloom and Doom..."), and I start reading a story by Billy Witz about a "recently formed 14-member committee of managers, general managers, owners and others who are exploring ways in which the game may be improved," and I hit the following sentence: [...] However, if editors and others are occasionally not seeing this as a mistake then perhaps the thin edge of the wedge may have made its first tiny thrust, only time will tell.

➤ Not really. [...] I'm told that teaching nuns carried these usages to Minneapolis/St. Paul.

➤ Just now I called our cat Pushkin a gubbins, and my wife said "That's a good word, what does it mean?" [...] I don't think I've heard it applied to living creatures before.

➤ Some years ago Edith Grossman translated Don Quixote, and she has an interesting essay about the process in the latest issue of Guernica. [...] But saying that "Cervantistas have always loved to disagree and argue, often with venom and vehemence" is such a lie!! We love each other. Tenderly ;-)

➤ Helen's Steakhouse—sorry, I mean Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος—is one of those blogs whose irregular schedule of publication always throws me for a loop. [...] Solidarity with communists in Greece would have been a compelling factor.

➤ When I copyedit dictionaries, I find lots of material for LH. [...] krugman is a good guy visavis George W. Bush, but not necessarily otherwise.

➤ I'm slowly making my way through Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, and I'm now on Ronald LeBlanc's "A la recherche du genre perdu: Fielding, Gogol, and Bakhtin's Genre Memory." [...] Which is probably why the French translator of Fielding mentioned above did not see fit to translate the lengthy and painstaking description of the heroine's features and qualities, but to leave it to the reader to imagine her.

➤ I have more than once had occasion to use the online Encyclopdia Iranica; I have been grateful for its amazing compilation of information, but frustrated by the user interface and the problems with scanning and character reproduction. [...] The epic of adaḵa and sīmorḡ reminds my of the Syriac Hymn of the Pearl, which I read a couple of years ago: a pared down Persian epic given a Christian Gnostic twist.

➤ Victor Mair has a Log post going into great detail about the many uses of the symbol Q in Chinese. [...] On air, the NBA is now to be called meiguo zhiye lanqiu sai (美国职业篮球赛), F1 is to be called yiji fangchenshi saiche jinbiao sai (一级方程式赛车锦标赛) , and the G8 is to be called baguo fenghui (八国峰会)."

➤ One of the best books of the last decade is in danger of going out of print, which, aside from being a crying shame in its own right, would make it harder for its author, Helen DeWitt, to get another book into the marketplace. [...] Elif Batuman considers herself a C-list author, she doesn't say whether she thinks that's good or bad.

➤ Admit it, you have no idea how to say Eyjafjallajkull. [...] Al-Jazeera shows how to pronounce Eyjafjajokull, complete with bouncing ball.

➤ The Language Portal of Canada "is a Web site that showcases Canadian expertise in the area of language." [...] Thanks, Kim. I'll follow your lead when I have some time -- and a full moon is upon us!

➤ I've read a fair amount about the Google Book settlement, but I haven't seen a more helpful explanation than Annalee Newitz's "5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading." [...] I suspect it's more the reputation hit than the money.

➤ The New York Times recently had a symposium headlined "Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words?" [...] Yes. Thank you. I thought it was a myth.

➤ I gave my impressions of the first half of Andrei Platonov's Chevengur here, and I'm glad I did, because the novel takes a sharp turn when it settles into the titular village at that point, and my feelings about it changed accordingly. [...] By the same token, couch potatoes may have invented potato chips.

➤ A New York Times piece by Michael Kimmelman is about the French language, which, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, among others, is "under siege." [...] If Anglo-Saxon didn't use this, what form did it use in its place? Just curious.

➤ Jon Lackman has a very interesting discussion at Slate of the history of the word kabuki in English; I did not know this background:...the word didn't appear in print in English until the late 19th-century, and then only rather infrequently. [...] Now I suspect 'kabuki' will crop up everywhere in the next few days.

➤ Cathi Szulinski did a lot of research and wrote up her findings: [...] ... immovable library steps

➤ "The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (henceforth SDBH) project is carried out under the auspices of the United Bible Societies. [...] I was known as "um shai" mother of tea, since I preferred (boiled) tea over the local water.

➤ Fedor Gladkov's Cement was on the reading list in my college days, forty years ago, and my memory was that it was nearly unreadable, a dreary mass of Socialist Realist rhetoric and cardboard characters. [...] I'm surprised we haven't heard from the goats' lawyers, after the libellous insinuatons that they would allow themselves to be involved in dodgy money laundering.

➤ Venkat Ramdass sent me a link to his site linguos with the following explanation:Linguos is unique in its function as phonetic search engine. [...] And they don't seem to have any similar support for romanized Arabic, Korean, Japanese etc.

➤ An article by Sam Roberts in today's NY Times describes some of the many obscure languages spoken in New York City, and the efforts to document them before they disappear. [...] He peers morosely into his cocktail glass and says "Cuba Libre", (rum, Coke, and lime juice), literally "free Cuba".

➤ I've loved libraries as long as I can remember (they were homes away from home during my peripatetic childhood), and I'm particularly fond of college libraries, so I'm very glad that Leslie Fields, Records Service Archivist at Smith College, has put online the excellent exhibit she created on the history of the Neilson Library at Smith that I saw in person a few months ago. [...] The added advantage was that they could just look it when they went out, so I couldn't watch the late-night Krimi in their absence.

➤ A few years ago I had a post about this annoying expression (annoying both because it's strangely worded for its normal use—"invites the question" would be much better—and because it brings all the petitio principii pedants out of the woodwork); there I linked to a comic strip for amusement, now I link to Mark Liberman's definitive explication of the history and uses of the phrase, from Aristotle's τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι (not, as the Log has it, αἰτεσθαι—it's from the start of Prior Analytics ii:16) to the present. [...] I suspect that the original meaning of "begs the question" is current in law and philosophy.

➤ I'm reading Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" in the latest New Yorker (abstract here), about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova for murder (she allegedly paid Mikhail Mallayev to kill her husband), and this passage struck me for obvious reasons: [...] The adult mother should have been able to take care of herself.

➤ The first letter I've ever written to the NY Times Book Review was published today, exactly as I wrote it (except that they added a paragraph break and a hyperlink); the link goes to the published version, and here's what I sent them: [...] Yup. See here.

➤ I've been reluctantly impressed with the results Google Translate (Wikipedia) gives me (reluctantly because my default assumption has long been that automatic translation is No Damn Good), and I was interested to read a couple of pieces about it online. [...] Commercially processed, machine-translated scraps of intelligibility disagree with me and are probably oncogenic.

➤ I confess that my inner twelve-year-old never gets tired of stories about Chinglish that mention "such delectables as 'fried enema,' 'monolithic tree mushroom stem squid' and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as 'The Jews Ear Juice," but I probably wouldn't post the Andrew Jacobs story "Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish" in the NY Times if it were just the usual superficial collection of laugh lines. [...] It seems to have more to do with how the Chinese think about grass.

➤ Sven Birkerts has an article in The American Scholar that's long but well worth reading. [...] I have not read Endless Night, but apparently she used the same plot formula in both novels.

➤ A few years ago, in the course of a post on how to sort books, I said, "There are in fact people who arrange books by color" (alas, the link is now dead); I discover from a comment by Doctor Science in this Log thread (for a post in which Pullum answers the eternal question "What does Kreisoppa Tebberley mean?") that the New England Law Library has a search function called "Well, Its Red" that actually allows you to look for a book based on its color. [...] synthete 97,800 ghits

➤ I had occasion a while back to consult the Wikipedia article for Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), a system of orthography used to write Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien, and was disappointed: it was sloppy and incomplete. [...] That really is an excellent article.

➤ I'm reading an excellent history of Soviet culture in (primarily) the 1920s, Katerina Clark's Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, and I just got to this discussion of a feature of mid-'20s Soviet life hitherto unknown to me: [...] There was also a feature-length parody of the Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad -- The Thief, But Not From Baghdad (1926) -- which is unfortunately lost.

➤ I know, I get tired of the "saving dying languages" trope too, it's a worthy activity but the stories all run together after a while. [...] Thanks for the references and samples!

➤ I was going to post about Yury Olesha's great novel Envy, which I just finished reading in Russian, but I got distracted by creating a long Wikipedia article about an unjustly forgotten Russian writer and didn't finish that either, so I'm just going to refer you to Mark Liberman's Log post about a site where you can search 43 different stylebooks at once, OnlineStylebooks.com, and totter off to bed. [...] Yes, this web page quotes the poem, adding "The trite poetic image 'sticky little leaves' was still fresh in 1828" when Pushkin coined it (Давно стершийся поэтический образ  клейкие листочки  в 1828 году был свежим).

➤ Having spent the better part of two days creating this Wikipedia article, and having worked harder on it than on most of my college papers, I'm damn well going to post it here. [...] Screwing up French genders has been one of the special privileges of anglophones since Le Mort Darthur at least.

➤ For the last couple of weeks I've been reading Yuri Olesha's masterpiece Zavist' (Russian text), translated into English as Envy (Wikipedia, plot summary), and I understand why Nabokov called it the greatest novel produced in the Soviet Union—not only because it is in fact great, but because it's Nabokovian in a way hardly any Soviet writing is, with a focus on language and imagery that is sometimes amazingly reminiscent of Olesha's coeval (both men were born in 1899, less than two months apart). [...] It's a funny old world.

➤ Nothing earthshaking in this Economist column by Robert Lane Greene, but it's nice to see Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage getting some love in such a respected venue. [...] Maybe that means more to some of you than it does to me.

➤ Several years ago Mark Liberman had a Log post investigating the contraction I'ma for I'm going to; today he has an update in which he reproduces a snippet of Art Blakey introducing his musicians from the famous "Night at Birdland" recording of February 1954 with a quintet that was a forerunner of the Jazz Messengers he was to lead for over three decades, one of the most influential groups in the history of American music. [...] I agree about Nat King Cole.

➤ This Ask MetaFilter thread has made me grumpy, and I trust you'll forgive me if I vent a bit here. [...] In the English translations, Je dirais mme plus is rendered as To be precise.

➤ I wrote briefly about Konstantin Vaginov here, and since I'm currently engaged in reading Soviet works from 1927, I've finally gotten around to his magnum opus, the novel Goat Song (Козлиная песнь). [...] what a great find, his poetry, thanks for the pointer!

➤ The Macmillan Dictionary Blog has a guest post by Yuliya Melnyk called "The influence of English on the Russian language"; it's short and pretty superficial, but this struck me: "Many words are produced in Russian slang every day; they have English roots and Russian affixes, e.g.: mastdait, which means criticize, comes from English must die..." I'm sure glad she told me, because I don't think I'd ever have figured that out if I saw мастдаить in the wild. [...] I don't know why I said Gould, who would be quite irrelevant to it, except that I like both their writing very much.

➤ Those of you who spend any time on sites where technology is discussed will doubtless be familiar with the term fanboy, meaning 'someone so emotionally attached to a tech product or company that any perceived attack will send them into a defensive frenzy.' [...] Sorry LH and everybody - my previous comment was actually for the previous article, under the title "MASDAIT".

➤ I'm now reading Mandelstam's dense 1927 novella "Egipetskaya marka" ("The Egyptian stamp"), and in trying to look up the odd word финолинка [finolinka], evidently a sort of night light (which turns out to occur only here in all of Russian literature), I ran across this LJ site, dedicated to a line-by-line analysis of the story. [...] Mongolianness isn't important, except that it helps distance him from both literatures -- not being ethnic Chinese, he feels no obligation to keep face or defend his "native culture".

➤ I'm still reading Chukovsky's Diary, 1901-1969 (see this post), and I've come across a couple of short, striking passages I wanted to share. [...] AJP, I am not sure, but I am not an architect.

➤ That odd phrase is the title of a new novel by Evgeny Klyuev (Russian Wikipedia) mentioned in Lisa Hayden Espenschade's latest post at Lizok's Bookshelf, a typically informative list of the 2010 Big Book award finalists, with commentary. [...] Have German (and Dutch) changed considerably since the 18th century?

➤ Ethan Shen has done a research project comparing the three major free translation engines available online; here are his results to date: [...] Until Google Translate can figure out a way to parse sentences properly in the old unrevolutionary way, I suspect it will continue to do a poor job with languages outside the Western European mould.

➤ Via the latest entry at Pepys' Diary ("then home to my wife, who is not well with her cold, and sat and read a piece of Grand Cyrus in English by her") I learned about what is alleged to be the longest novel ever written ("with the possible exception of Henry Darger's unpublished The Story of the Vivian Girls"), Artamne, or Cyrus the Great, and from the Wikipedia article I got to Artamne.org, which has put the entire novel online. [...] Maybe that's where Engles got the idea for "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State."

➤ Ive just finished Mandelstam's novella "Egipetskaya marka" (see this post), and it probably took me longer than any other thirty pages of Russian prose Ive read—not because the vocabulary was especially difficult (though some of it was) but because its very much a poet's prose, and a particularly knotty poet's at that, and it has to be nibbled at rather than gulped, and thought about in between bites. [...] I'm glad you liked it!

➤ The time for his autobiography to be published, that is. [...] I see from the marktwainproject that it was used at the end of some of his telegrams, and in one letter he received. Which is OK, I suppose.

➤ I ran across the odd Russian word мадаполам, looked it up, and found it defined by the equally odd English word madapollam. [...] Yeucch. I can't imagine how anyone can think it lacks flavor -- I can see how some people like that flavor (though with difficulty).

➤ Anatoly has two recent posts about Russian words that have somehow eluded the dictionaries, one a couple of centuries old and the other... newish, but it's impossible to know how new because, well, the dictionaries ignore it. [...] I try to refrain from taking the bait (assuming I see it coming).

➤ eXchanges, "the University of Iowas online literary magazine devoted to translation," has a new issue called "Hackwork," featuring Mmoires of Translation by Lawrence Venuti as well as translations from Latin (the Aeneid), Romanian (Dan Sociu), Chamorro (translating Chamorro translations of the Psalms!), and Spanish. [...] No, they're usually named, and the more famous ones are mentioned fairly prominently.

➤ I wrote about Shanghainese here; alas, the site I built that post around seems to have bit the dust long ago (it was truly excellent—I wonder what happened?), but you can get a start on learning the language with a charming set of little video lessons available from China Daily here. [...] You always have to keep an eye out for the bad ones.

➤ Over at the Log, Mark Liberman has an interesting post about a performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters he saw; as linguistic notes, he mentions Kulygin's ut consecutivum and brings up the issue of accents, saying "a provincial town in the Russia of 1900  especially one far enough away from the capital that the three sisters would not have gone back for a visit in eleven years  would have had a distinctive regional accent, I think, one that everyone involved would have been quite aware of." [...] I've seen it claimed that log cabins were brought to the US by the Swedish colony in Delaware, which was quickly absorbed by the Dutch.

➤ I'm progressing through Chukovsky's Diary, 1901-1969 pari passu with my reading of Russian fiction, and on October 11, 1927 he had some interesting things to say about Tynyanov (see my Kije gripe): [...] Yes, he knew absolutely everybody and was sympathetic to most (though sternly honest about his opinions of what they wrote).

➤ I'm fine with the normal use of "begging the question" (see this recent post), and I regularly mock those who insist on the petitio principii sense. [...] ... And where it ends, knows God.

➤ I was shocked to look at the NY Times this morning and learn that Andrei Voznesensky has died. [...] oh, thanks, as usual I'm too lazy and too busy to remember about links.

➤ I knew little about Clarence Barnhart beyond his name (and that primarily as part of the collocation Thorndike-Barnhart), so I was considerably enlightened by Rulon-Miller Books' sales catalog page for the Barnhart Dictionary Archive, with its full biography and history of his lexicographical work. [...] Here's the direct link to the touching story.

➤ The other day my wife asked me about the history of brook in phrases like "brook no opposition." [...] Not so much nowadays (in spite of hours spent waiting in airports, etc), but most travelling was no picnic in earlier centuries, when you might be set upon by bandits, or find yourself in the middle of a war, and even if such events did not happen, carriages (assuming you could afford the luxury of one) were usually very uncomfortable, especially since roads were unpaved.

➤ The historian Keith Thomas has an essay in the LRB that exemplifies the working method an "anonymous reader" describes as involving "a great many references to and citations of a generous selection of (mostly printed) texts and documents, which account for a high percentage of the text." [...] I'm afraid that's above my pay grade, but perhaps a commenter with more expertise in German will be along to answer.

➤ Anatoly quoted my post from yesterday, singling out the quote beginning "It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton..."; he finished his post by linking to this poem (in Russian), which the story reminded him of. [...] Especially because of the r (West Turkic, like Chuvash  Hungarian has lots of loans from such a language) as opposed to z (East Turkic, including the Oğuz family itself).

➤ Charles King, in his TLS review, "Among the Circassians" (April 23, 2010, p. 11), of a couple of books about the Caucasus, writes that the North Caucasus is a region "that many Russians would just as well forget they owned." [...] But maybe "apprehension of accident" parses more smoothly for someone with a different idiolect.

➤ The NY Times has introduced a promising new feature at Schotts Vocab, their vocabulary blog: Schotts Daily Lexeme. [...] Trying to smell the sea would be a good way to pass the time if you're ever trapped in an elevator.

➤ I've always vaguely wondered about the phrase past master—was there or wasn't there also a passed master, and did the one come from the other?—and I've finally looked it up in the OED. [...] We were roundly trounced, in play if not in punning, by the Bad News Barristers, who came, naturally, from the Law School.

➤ I was thunderstruck (well, surprised anyway, but I'm feeling a little weak-brained this morning, so it hit me strongly) to discover from this post of Anatoly's that the Russian words "меч" and "шпага" are felt by Russians to be completely different things. [...] It was a one-of-a-kind weapon.

➤ I'm off to Rhode Island, the home of the cabinet, for the weekend. [...] unfortunate - und-fortunate

➤ I'm back in body (after a more or less sleepless night and a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride), but my spirit is weak, so for the moment I'll just pass along this enjoyable word dug out of the recesses of the OED by aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org: [...] A special thread is used for suit and coat buttons and buttonholes, which get more wear and tear than regular seams.

➤ Lane Greene of The Economist writes to tell me about their new language blog, Johnson. [...] Now there's a clause that I might prefer to have put in loglan.

➤ I ran across the participle stymieing, and it looked wrong, so I looked it up (for that matter, it still does—I just looked it up again to make sure). [...] IIRC, one of the Little Rascals was named Stymie.

➤ This Slate article by Rosecrans Baldwin is both the funniest and the most intriguing thing I've read in a while. [...] It's nice to come back to a new comment on an old post and it isn't some spam.

➤ I wrote about the issue of cannot versus can not way back in 2003; as I said there, "The only context in which can not, two words, occurs is as an emphatic alternative: 'You can do it, or you can not do it.'" Today ESPN provided a perfect illustration of why the negative must always (except in that rare circumstance) be spelled as one word, cannot. [...] My daughter makes telephone calls with her camera, though she prefers to use it as a typewriter.

➤ I have added to my blogroll the wonderful Sentence first ("An Irishman's blog about the English language"). [...] Oh, and as for the "sox" spelling, the Boston Red Sox article says: "Sox had been previously adopted for the Chicago White Sox by newspapers needing a headline-friendly form of Stockings, as 'Stockings Win!' in large type would not fit on a page."

➤ Months ago, I was following a Google path I no longer remember and Google Books showed me a book that had the "Hail Mary" in Russian. [...] I was asking for it (drops a tear in his cup of tea).

➤ Movie subtitles have been a perennial topic of discussion here at LH (e.g., 1, 2, 3), and Nate Barksdale provides another interesting link with his essay Subtleties. [...] Here's the direct link; the movie is Bienvenue chez les Chti!

➤ Claire Bowern of Anggarrgoon (and a frequent LH commenter when she isn't as busy as she apparently is these days) has joined Quentin Atkinson and Russell Gray in creating the North American English Dialect Survey: [...] As linked here: "Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri..."

➤ There is a condition (terrifying to the bibliophiles among us) called alexia, "an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. [...] But I don't remember any more if they said my class was "interesting" or "boring".

➤ The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is online in full: [...] Shortly after the encyclopedia's publication I was at a presentation by Dr. Hundert, at which he mentioned that the entire thing would be available for free online by June - I had completely forgotten about it!

➤ "Gabby" Street was an old-time catcher, manager, coach, and broadcaster who died the year I was born. [...] I used to use it but by dint of sheer guts, grit, and can-do spirit, have largely vanquished the addiction.

➤ I keep forgetting to mention this, but it's not too late to join The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly in their summer-long reading of The Tale of Genji. [...] Unfortunately, his maximum life expectancy only seems to be 5 years, and as he was hatched in 2008, it's unlikely he'll be around for the next World Cup.

➤ Some years ago I posted about Nicaraguan sign language; now a story in Discover magazine discusses "a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College": [...] Similarly, when telling a story in two different locations, Anglo deictic space will be relative to the speaker's position at the time when the story occurred, whereas Aboriginal space will be absolute: the story will be accompanied with (from the Anglo perspective) entirely different gestures depending on the orientation of the speaker.

➤ Kyoto Journal is "a non-profit volunteer-based quarterly magazine established in 1986" that "offers interviews, essays, translations, humor, fiction, poetry and reviews." [...] Sure would love to see that review!

➤ The Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has an online interview (French) with translator Andr Markowicz: [...] Similarly, the primacy of usage (bottom-up language evolution) in English is in direct contrast with the prescriptive and proscriptive approach of the Acadmie franaise (top-down), which has never been particularly fruitful for a living language.

➤ My wife and I were doing an acrostic puzzle in which one of the clues was "penny farthing" and the answer they wanted was "bicycle." [...] I'm not sure if I knew the meaning of the word before I lived there or not, but I think I did. Anyway, it's a great word.

➤ As I enter my sixtieth year, I take pleasure in all the people life has put in my path (which of course includes you LH readers); on a less elevated plane, I take pleasure in the chicken curry and homemade peach ice cream I'm now digesting and in the presents generous kith and kin have showered me with, the more LH-relevant of which I will now mention, so you will know what I am experiencing in the weeks to come. [...] I have never liked any of the Twain impersonators, not nimble enough, and too much of the cutesy old codger cliche.

➤ Robert McCrums new book Globish, about how English is becoming the world language because it's so "unique" and "direct" and "universal" and what have you, has gotten a well-deserved thrashing from linguist John McWhorter in The New Republic. [...] It clearly shows the language's career has nothing to do whatsoever with its complexity.

➤ Plato's Protagoras, a translation is "an attempt at a collaborative translation of Platos Protagoras, a beautiful and challenging dialogue. [...] Here's David Crystal, briefly, speaking in his Liverpool-Welsh accent on the British usage.

➤ I presume we all know about the first appearance of the word America on the Waldseemller map of 1507; what I, at any rate, didn't know was that the text of the map and accompanying book, and hence the coining of the word, is thought to be the work of Waldseemller's friend Matthias Ringmann. [...] Now he's fallen to #79 as businesses have wised up to the commercial potential of the net. It was nice while it lasted.

➤ Anatoly recently posted about the Acapela Text to Speech Demo, saying he was struck by how well the Russian voice (Алена) rendered the text he entered. [...] If you try to con it with "Beagles, beagles, bagels!", it sticks to its guns.

➤ Victor Mair has a post at the Log featuring "Brian Holton's ongoing translation of Shuǐhǔ zhun 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots, part of which is available online." Holton calls his version "The Mossflow," a wonderful term which the DSL defines as "a wet peat bog, a quagmire, swamp." [...] Occitan has exactly the same problem, and probably any language without a written standard that is heavily overshadowed by a standardized relative does too.

➤ In a recent post, Anatoly discusses his occasional reluctance to look up English words he doesn't know, preferring to deduce their meaning from context, a habit which occasionally leads him astray. [...] It makes some sense, no one would want hairy pasta from other sources.

➤ As I wrote here, I've been reading Tynyanov's Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [Smert' Vazir-mukhtara], "The death of the vazir-mukhtar [ambassador plenipotentiary]," and now that I've finished it, I'm trying to figure out why I didn't like it more than I did. [...] But still, it's rather startling to see these familiar Arabic words written in Russian practically unchanged (although "wazir" has been used enough in English fiction).

➤ I've been trying to investigate Schlegel's use of Arabesk 'arabesque' as a literary term (Nicholas Saul says in the "arabesque or hieroglyph" the "material is to be ordered into complex symbolic forms which allude ironically to the inexpressible absolute rather than attempt prosaically to embody it": The Cambridge History of German Literature, p. 230), because it influenced Gogol in his Arabeski (1835; Proffer writes: "There are two works of Gogol which nobody reads: The Arabesques is one and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends the other"). [...] Though I'm sure somebody's already written a home-run dissertation based on the contrary claim.

➤ Formerly (and hopefully future) frequent commenter Xiaolongnu sent me a link to the Periodic Table of Swearing (click image for large version). [...] Shouldn't this "Periodic Table of Swearing" have at least one catamenial expression containing the word "period"?

➤ Lord knows I get frustrated with the general level of ignorance concerning language and linguistics out there in the world; lashing out at it has been a feature of LH from the beginning. [...] Though mine is, in fact, bigger than yours.

➤ Stan of Sentence First has a most enjoyable post about an excellent word: [...] Whaddayaknow, I'm a knawvshawler.

➤ A NY Times story by Simon Romero describes the unusually promising situation of the Caribbean language Papiamento: [...] I've seen reports that Dutch proficiency has increased and reports that English proficiency has increased, but none that Sranan Tongo proficiency has decreased.

➤ Long-time readers of LH will know my negative feelings toward the much-lauded translating duo of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (see, for instance, here); imagine, therefore, my pleasure on being sent a link to "The Pevearsion of Russian Literature" by Gary Saul Morson, and my disappointment on learning it was only an abstract. [...] It's humid here too. Technically, it's rain, I suppose. By The Beatles.

➤ The good people at Oxford UP sent me a copy of Ruth H. Sander's German: Biography of a Language, which I recently finished reading. [...] And bake, boke, bickered.

➤ Felipe Martinez, an independent researcher from San Diego, California, is "investigating the absence of Brazilian author Joo Guimares Rosa (1908-1967) in the English-speaking world." [...] U of Chicago Press published an English translation of Os Sertes under the title Rebellion in the Backlands.

➤ Ljiljana Progovac and John L. Locke have published an intriguing paper, "The Urge to Merge: Ritual Insult and the Evolution of Syntax" (you can download the pdf from that page; the article is, admirably, published under a Creative Commons license). [...] Poor editing of the Wikipedia makes it less than clear that it was an affinity for Harris's politics that steered Chomsky in the direction of formal linguistics.

➤ Toward the end of this long thread from February, we got onto the subject of the symbol # being used for pounds; I had never seen it, but was presented with enough convincing evidence that I threw up my hands and accepted it ("Huh, you learn something every day. I wonder how I managed to miss the # = lb. thing?"). [...] We can tell you more about the coffee gifts including coffee machines and coffee pods.

➤ Kyoto University of Foreign Studies has an exhibition on "Crepe-Paper Books and Woodblock Prints"; there's lots of interesting stuff there, but I'll call your attention to the Preface, which discusses the phenomenon of "crepe-paper books," called chirimen-bon in Japanese (縮緬紙 chirimen is 'crepe paper'): [...] These are very lovely. Here's another collection.

➤ John Wells, at his phonetic blog, has a post offering a professional analysis of just how an American voice teacher went wrong in a video clip in which she tries to teach the British "short o" vowel. [...] I been a bludy foreigner looking for his china all these decades, tally ho.

➤ I recently got Brief Lives: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, by Andrew Piper, as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I thought I'd add my review here in case anyone wants to talk about Goethe, Felicia Hemans (pronounced HEMM-unz), or anything else. [...] "The Chinese Messiah?"

➤ In a discussion of French chapeau 'hat' that developed in the meandering course of this thread, our caprine constituent AJP asked "m-l, is there a connection between chapeau and chapel (its current English meaning) based on physical resemblance?" [...] That's wise. With Google translate you could be saying "plastic bag".

➤ I learned about Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them back in February (see this post, whose thread devolved into the usual inexplicable mix of topics, this time including skis, Jenny Lind, and hunting bears), and having gotten it for my birthday (thanks, Brooke & Elias!) I'm finally reading it, and enjoying it thoroughly. [...] Turkic etymology for DUCK

➤ I've quoted John Derbyshire a number of times; here's a nice piece he wrote about his experience having one of his books translated by Alexei Semikhatov, an unusually scrupulous, thoughtful, and literate man. [...] You could put this on SurveyMonkey to get more data ;-)

➤ As I wrote here, I've been reading Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, and now that I've finished I thought I'd try to sum up my feelings. [...] (Ladefoged denied this, but what did he know — he was a Dane who couldn't even pronounce his own name properly.)

➤ Stan Carey of Sentence first has an occasional feature he calls "Link love" in which he presents his readers with a bouquet of intriguing links; I hereby pass on to you Link love: language (20), which starts with "Emailing while sleeping" and concludes with a couple of rude bits from the Log. [...] Poor old Duke of Buckingham.

➤ I linked to an interview with the excellent translator Robert Chandler here; now I'd like to present a short essay he wrote on translating Pushkin's The Captains Daughter. [...] And for what it's worth, Eric Knight is a wonderful writer, and I greatly recommend his story collection, The Flying Yorkshireman, which consists of modern tales of Sam Small, the Yorkshire version of Pecos Bill.

➤ Copy Editing at The New Yorker with Mary Norris. [...] I remember a working group co-chair who signed some of his e-mails as "John the Cockhare". Apparently, that's how his text-to-speech software pronounced "cochair" (without a hyphen).

➤ Dave of Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective (which I welcomed here and have since linked to less often than I should), has done a post—the last in a series on the five grains of the Land of Israel—on the Hebrew word כוסמת kusemet, which now means 'buckwheat' but once meant... well, that's not clear, but I urge you to read his thoughts on the subject. [...] The place made me nervous for some reason - I think I won't go there again any time soon.

➤ Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org presents this video with the words "This is a great little story about the expectations people have about language," and I won't add anything to that except that it choked me up a little. [...] LH, how strange to find that there are language blog trolls.

➤ How time flies! As always, I thank my commenters, without whom I wouldn't bother blogging; this time around, I thought I'd link to a selection of posts, one from each year, that I remembered with fondness as I skimmed through the archives: [...] Happy Birthday, Hat!

➤ An author might start a novel this way: "On his thirtieth birthday, Voshchev was laid off from his factory job for weakness and woolgathering." [...] But Platonov didn't do X or Y or Z. He did something else. Why? Why does it sound so strange? There was a reason for that; what is it?

➤ Another video, this one hilarious: English Swear Words. [...] Thanks, MMcM!

➤ Mark Liberman has a post at the Log in which he waxes wroth about what he calls a "bizarre meme" by which "every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to 'universal grammar'." [...] Hi, Grumbly. The competition has arrived. Grmpf.

➤ I'm digging into The Russian Context: The Culture Behind the Language by Eloise M. Boyle and Genevra Gerhart (which I wrote about here), and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it, but right now I just want to quote this paragraph from the introduction to the Literature section (which "contains those quotations from literature that the educated Russian carries in his head, and that a student of Russian will encounter not only in everyday conversations with Russians, but when he picks up a newspaper or turns on the television"); it provides a concise explanation of a well-known phenomenon: [...] Indeed, from Kennedy to Bush II all Presidents were descended chiefly or entirely from immigrants from the British Isles.

➤ A recent post by Geoff Nunberg at the Log discusses the dudgeon people get into over verbal blunders by politicians (and inevitably the comment thread descends rapidly into tedious political bickering); however, he links to this fascinating post from 2008 (which I apparently missed at the time) in which he provides a new etymology for verbiage: apparently it has nothing to do with the other verb- words (from Latin verbum)! [...] I hadn't been familiar with the Dictionnaire Historique, but now (of course) I wish I had a copy.

➤ Last year I wrote about the mysteriously limited availability of the wonderful Sergei Dovlatov in English; I am happy to learn from this PEN America post that "when we were putting together PEN America 12, we decided we would re-publish one of Dovlatovs stories. [...] I don't understand why he's not as available as, say, Pelevin and Akunin.

➤ A fascinating factoid: Nazi is obviously a short form of National socialist, or Nationalsozialist to be precise, just as Sozi is a short form of Sozialist. [...] Jeongseong: Right you are: I posted in haste and may now repent at leisure.

➤ Checking my referrer log, I just discovered a blog I wish I'd known about earlier, dormir debout. [...] I'm coming round to Grumbly Stu's supposition that there could be a missing link.

➤ Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist at Wayne State University who once ran also runs the site Forthright's Phrontistery (which I wrote about here), now also has a blog Glossographia ("Anthropology, linguistics, and prehistory"), whose latest post is a very interesting examination of the history of the word chairperson. [...] Ha ! I had my fingers crossed !

➤ Ben Zimmer has a wonderful takedown of the Telegraph story you may have seen: "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered." [...] Ben's description  'Dan Brown lexicography'  is spot on.

➤ I wanted to quote a particularly good example of the way quotations are used in Russia from the Boyle/Gerhart book I wrote about here; I was googling for an English translation of the Pushkin poem cited when I discovered that this section happens to be included in a webpage of sample passages from the book (scroll down, it's the second one). [...] Oh, snap!

➤ As I have noted before, I am a fan of Raymond Queneau, and I am pleased to discover that his Cent mille milliards de pomes (Wikipedia) are cleverly generated at this site: every time you visit or refresh, you get a new combination of lines (in both French and English unless you specify a preference). [...] So, are certain languages better suited for certain artforms than others? Would "Beowulf" be just as good in Latin?

➤ Having finished my rereading of Platonov's Kotlovan (see this post), I find myself more moved than ever by the ending, but I don't really have anything more to say about the novel as a whole, so I'll quote this section from A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, by Thomas Seifrid: [...] Thanks!

➤ The Bodleian Library announces a new publication, The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699: [...] Yes, LH, that must've been it.

➤ MetaFilter user lapsangsouchong posted an interesting AskMetaFilter question: "Which of the thousands of neologisms coined in the Turkish language reforms of the 1920s and 30s stuck, which ones didn't—and why?" [...] (From Nişanyan, obviously. Also cf. discussion of a couple  when I say it, it's exactly two; but it's any small number from my wife, so I make no assumptions.)

➤ I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and it's already clear to me that this is one of those basic works of scholarship that everyone dealing with the field has to come to terms with. [...] The extension to 'administrative unit' in Russian is understandable in this larger context.

➤ I'm still reading Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (see the previous post), and I want to quote some material from the start of Chapter 3, "Linguistic Ukrainization, 19231932." [...] And I've never seen roman capitalized in this context.

➤ Mark Brown has a story at The Guardian about Stephen Pax Leonard, a Cambridge University researcher who's off to Greenland to document the language and traditions of an Inuit community: [...] @aqilluqqaaq: ᐃᓛᓕ/illillu!

➤ One of the few literary critics I both respected and always enjoyed reading has died at 90: Frank Kermode, for whom John Mullan wrote a good obituary in The Guardian. [...] Yes, we did Bishkek back in 2004.

➤ Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 has astonished me yet again. [...] I think this falls under "original research" or something.

➤ I am deeply grateful to the blogger at Particularly in Burma for first reposting the wonderful anecdote recounted by slawkenbergius in this contentious thread ("my uncle, who lives in Israel, sent me this great story...") and then, in today's post, translating it from Russian, saving me the trouble. [...] That "Wunderbar! Wunderbar!", is actually another typo: it should have been "Wunder! Wunderbar!", which scans. But that doesn't make it any the less WTF to me.

➤ I recently learned of the death of the Slavist Horace Lunt, a student of Roman Jakobson who taught at Harvard; I still consult my first edition (1955) of his compact Old Church Slavonic Grammar, admirably sensible and structuralist. [...] Werner Winter happened to pass on only a few days earlier: http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-3229.html

➤ Lisa Hayden Espenschade has provided a very useful resource at her blog Lizok's Bookshelf: a list of a couple of dozen Russian-language sources of book reviews, including both individual bloggers and institutional sites. [...] The setting of my work couldn't be further from Russia, but I had never thought before of the idea of Russian criticism of, say, Karamazov. That's a mind-blower.

➤ Angus Trumble has a nice post at Paris Review Daily about the ombrellai (umbrella makers) of Piedmont, who spoke a jargon called Tarsc: [...] Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

➤ James Somers has a good analysis of "it turns out," beginning by saying that Paul Graham knows how to use the phrase: "He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers dont. That probably sounds like a compliment. [...] Of course, some people will still believe it to be true but ultimately they will realize their error.

➤ I have mentioned Marat Akchurin's wonderful Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics before, and I thought I'd quote this passage from his visit to Tajikistan in 1990, as the whole Soviet mess was in the process of falling apart; it resonates with the material I've been posting from Terry Martin's book: [...] Yes, sorry for my laziness.

➤ Schott's Vocab has a post today linking to this OED entry (draft revision Mar. 2009):pig's whisper, n. [...] Semantically related, though unidentical, to the dog's breakfast, is the curate's eggderived from the famous old cartoon.

➤ An interesting piece by Olivier Razemon in Le Monde about the correct/local ways to pronounce various French place names (it's Luberon avec e comme dans "beurrer," pas comme dans "bb," and Wissant (Pas-de-Calais) is "Uissant", et non "Vissant", encore moins "Ouissant"). [...] I don't even know what the correct symbols are for the pronunciations I hear or use myself.

➤ I can't really make use of it myself, since my Dutch is nonexistent, but I can't resist passing it along for those who can: the Oud Nederlandsch Scheldwoorden Archief (Old Dutch profanity archive). [...] But yes, the German connection is much more likely.

➤ I'm in the middle of E. E. Cummings's EIMI, a sometimes too poetickal and occasionally wellnigh incomprehensible but withal lively (or Alive with Is, as Comrade Kem-min-kz might say) and well worth reading account of the author's month (May-June 1931) in the still relatively new Soviet Union, newly admired by the Depression-struck West. [...] No, not in this case.

➤ A post on Wordorigins.org asks a reasonable question that had never occurred to me: why is hemophilia called by a name that means 'blood-loving'? [...] Incidentally, it has to be "Sir Arthur", not "Sir Crown".

➤ I've been slowly reading the January 14, 2010 issue of NYRB (very slowly—I keep it in my shoulder bag for emergency reading), and I've just gotten to a review that angered me enough to vent publicly. [...] That must be an Eric Gill typeface.

➤ Occasionally in my reading I come across mentions of people who seem significant beyond the sparse traces they've left in the historical record, and when they have a connection with literature I sometimes try to memorialize them here. [...] Gee, thanks for your charitable assumption.

➤ On page 167 of Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 there's a table headed "Official List of 'Culturally Backward' Nationalities"; these were nationalities considered "eligible for preferential assistance, and enjoying appropriate awards and privileges" in what Martin calls the Affirmative Action Empire of the USSR in the early 1930s; the criteria were an extremely low level of literacy, an insignificant percentage of children in school, lack of "a written script with a single developed literary language," presence of "everyday social vestiges" (oppression of women, racial hostility, etc.), and a lack of national cadres. [...] It is obvious that the higher echelons of French administration never identified themselves with the communist "cadres", nor did they find the word "contaminated" by its use in that context.

➤ Mark Liberman at the Log has a post about a (re)coinage found in this Candace Buckner sports story for the Kansas City Star in a quote from high school lineman Shane Ray: "As a team, we dont like that feeling of being underlooked..." [...] These shoes (or overshoes) were popular in Europe in earlier centuries (see Wikipedia) for crossing muddy streets. Not for walking very far though.

➤ An Ask MetaFilter question led to an amazing result. [...] Yes, one of my dearest childhood discoveries (I was studying Latin at St. Mary's International and loved puns); I was devastated to discover, years, later, that it was apocryphal.

➤ I've been having an exchange elsewhere about the word gyp 'cheat, swindle,' and I am (with some trepidation) bringing it here in the hopes of having a productive discussion and perhaps learning a few things. [...] Does anyone remember it?

➤ I keep waiting for Language Log to debunk this BBC News story by Katie Alcock—I mean, BBC News is notorious for bad science reporting, and the Loggers take delight in bashing them for it (see here and here for two of many examples)—but so far nothing, so I'll just toss it out here and see what people have to say. [...] My source didn't answer and either doesn't know or isn't interested.

➤ But I wound up taking a later bus than expected and will have to defer a real post until tomorrow. [...] (Or stayed up drinking and talking till 1 and 2 in the morning for several days in a row, but that's another story.)

➤ The fearsomely learned Conrad has sent me an excellent OED find, the long-forgotten word bridelope:[late OE. brdlp, either:*brdhlap, or ad. ON. brhlaup, brullaup (Sw. brllopp, Da. bryllup) wedding; cf. OHG. brthlauft, -louft, MHG. brtlouf, Ger. (arch.) brautlauf; f. OTeut. brđi- BRIDE + hlaup- run, LEAP.] [...] I'm no expert in the history and evolution of food, but I'd have thought that once a baking idea has been invented (egg bread, for instance), then the recipe's going to be adjusted a little bit by everyone who tries it and pretty soon you've got more than one product.

➤ "The Rohonc Codex (pronounced [ˈrohont͡s] in Hungarian) is a set of writings in an unknown writing system." [...] [Note for future readers: a gentleman by the name of Microsoft Office 2007 was leaving identical genial-but-irrelevant comments in a number of threads, including this one.]

➤ I quoted a brief poem by Charles Reznikoff back in 2003; I thought I'd provide a larger sampling, a couple of sections from his 1969 poem "Jews in Babylonia": [...] (Alm/Alpe applies to artificial pastures in the mountains.)

➤ I am absolutely delighted to learn that Geoff Pullum's coinage eggcorn (which I wrote about back in 2004) has made it to the official word-hoard of the English language. [...] "to the manor born"

➤ A couple of minor word issues: [...] The only other source of the sound h would have been Arabic, but most if not all Arabic words borrowed into Spanish were nouns borrowed with the article al attached, and so structurally distinct from the inherited Spanish nouns.

➤ The Russian word белок [belók] means a number of things, including 'egg white' and 'white of the eye' (it's based on the adjective белый [bélyi] 'white'), but the sense that concerns us here is 'albumen; protein.' [...] Now I'm thinking that the verk of grverk might be a folk etymology for vair.

➤ Fred R. Shapiro's regular "You Can Quote Them" feature for the Yale Alumni Magazine is always a pleasure, and this month's column has a spectacularly unexpected explanation for a familiar phrase: [...] Next time I'm searching for the flashlight that used to be right on that shelf over there, I'll give him a call.

➤ Via a John Cowan comment to this post at Stfcrft & Vyākaraṇa, I found this essay, "Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!" by Nick Nicholas, aka opoudjis (of Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος). [...] The /x/ pronunciation is of very early date, yet affected sources are still transliterated with kh, by well-established convention.

➤ I was taught in school, half a century or so ago, that you had to use a possessive with a gerund (or "verbal noun"): I resented his saying that, not I resented him saying that. [...] Extra fun is that the Russian word 'ерунда' 'erund' 'nonsense' is reckoned to be based on some form, perhaps the nom.-voc.-acc. pl. (as a sort of collective), of Latin 'gerundium'.

➤ I'm reading a long story by Andrei Platonov (see my post on his novel Kotlovan); the story is called "Впрок" (Vprok, 'for future use/benefit'), and as far as I know has never been translated into English. [...] "Chutka?" Does this mean that when my Ukrainian grandmother referred to her sister as "chutka" she was calling her a little devil?

➤ Oxford UP has published Jonathon Green's magnum opus: [...] But there will be cheap, not-very-used copies available -- and I do hope you use bookfinder to find the cheapest source, Doctor.

➤ The name of Tokyo until 1868 was Edo (江戸), pronounced /edo/. [...] I distinctly remember the first U.S. commercials for Hyundae saying "It's [ˈhʌndɛi], like Monday!"

➤ August von Haxthausen's Studien ber die innern Zustnde, das Volksleben und insbesondere die lndlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (1847-1852; Google Books), an account of his 1843 journey to Russia from the point of view of agricultural economics, is famous for its impact on the Russian intelligentsia—it jump-started the debate on the origin of the mir (commune), which so obsessed late-nineteenth-century Russia—so when I saw a used copy of an abridged English translation, Studies on the Interior of Russia, for a few dollars, I bought it, despite my suspicion that it would prove too dry for extended reading. [...] The edition I have is pretty heavily abridged, and I'm too lazy to work through the German original to find out what more he had to say.

➤ My pal Ken Robbins wrote to say he was "looking for a word to describe the psychological (semantic?) process whereby a word is drained of its meaning by mere repetition. Everyone (I think) knows the phenomenon. [...] (Oh, all right, then - London, early 1950s)

➤ According to an AP story, the British Library is making more than a quarter of its collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge: [...] I read this title in my reader as "Greek Miss Online" and thought you were just being cheeky, haha.

➤ Lameen Souag, of Jabal al-Lughat, doesn't post often, but when he does it's always worth reading. [...] a diminutive

➤ Jessie Little Doe Fermino Baird, whom I mentioned here five years ago and is the subject of the article linked here, has been working for almost twenty years to revive the Wampanoag (or, more correctly, Wpanak) language, and I am pleased to learn from a Boston Globe story by Laura Collins-Hughes that she has won a MacArthur Fellows "genius grant" of $500,000: [...] I second LH's comment.

➤ Stan Carey has another fine post at Sentence first ("An Irishman's blog about the English language") discussing John Honey's 1989 book Does Accent Matter? The Pygmalion Factor. [...] Cf. Tom Wolfe's entertaining discussion in "The Right Stuff" about how airline pilots all tended to talk with a West Virginia accent, because they were ex-military, and in the military the fighter pilots were the elite, and the fighter pilots emulated and looked up to the test pilots, and the best of the test pilots was Chuck Yeager, who came from a valley so far up in the backwoods that they had to pipe in the daylight.

➤ I wanted to like this book. [...] thanks, I see what you mean.

➤ Anatoly passes on this delightful snatch of conversation overheard in the Moscow radical/intellectual bookstore Falanster (i.e., Phalanstre); the Russian is below the cut: [...] His brother, William, who wrote The Reluctant Debutante, and who had been jailed near the end of the War for acquiring pacifist tendencies about flame throwers and French civilians, wrote an autobiography, Mr. Home Pronounced Hume.

➤ Elif Batuman has an amazing story in last week's New York Times Magazine on the tangled history of Franz Kafka's diaries and other papers. [...] Are there any reviews of the book mentioned in bibliography at the end: How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton University, 2003)

➤ Via Jamie Olson's The Flaxen Wave I learned about an excellent journal, Cardinal Points; I'll let Jamie introduce it: [...] It would be silly to deny it. Thank you!

➤ John Tagliabue has a New York Times story about the attempt to revive Romansh: [...] Is there a map or list of languages replaced/not replaced by Arabic?

➤ Today's post at wood s lot features, among other fine things, the great Irish writer Flann O'Brien aka Brian O'Nolan aka Myles Na Gopaleen (Myles na gCopaleen), who is still too little appreciated. [...] Yes. Wikipedia says: "The novel's title derives from Snmh d n (Middle Ir.: 'Swim-Two-Birds'), a possibly apocryphal place on the River Shannon, reportedly visited by the legendary King Sweeney, a character in the novel."

➤ I am in awe of Mark Woods, who's been putting out wood s lot for ten years now. [...] Thanks, guys. Alles klar!

➤ As longtime readers know, I read novels to my wife at night, and having just finished Lucky Jim (hilarious, and perfect bedtime reading), we've moved on to Humboldt's Gift. [...] Last night I began reading The Adventures of Augie March to my spouse. Thank you for the inspiration.

➤ Well, it's not new to its speakers, obviously, but it's new to the rest of us. [...] The bare fact of the discovery is of extremely limited interest without the research, which, whether as The Last Speakers, or in the journal Indian Linguistics is now (or soon to be) available. Hence, news.

➤ I'll be spending the day in Amherst, at the Center for Russian Culture, where they're having a symposium to celebrate what would have been Joseph Brodsky's seventieth birthday. [...] And here I'm in the early stages of writing an article about Brodsky and Venclova.

➤ Today Hanoi celebrates its thousandth anniversary, and when I went to Wikipedia to find out what happened in 1010, I discovered an astounding array of historical names: [...] "gangsta"

➤ Martin Worthington of SOAS has put online an archive of recordings of "modern Assyriologists reading ancient Babylonian and Assyrian poetry and literature aloud in the original language." [...] "Luna" is just the personification of "luna", the ordinary Latin word for 'moon'.

➤ This Gossypiboma post is a year old, but I missed it then and you probably did too; it links to "Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (The Salad-Salad Paper)," by Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell, whose abstract reads: [...] (This reanalysis implies that the word did not evolve at the same speed everywhere, so that many people were aware of the original meaning of the word).

➤ I was recently flipping through a New Yorker when I was stopped in my tracks by an ad in Russian for a magazine called Snob, with a teaser in English: "Ask your Russian friends to read it to you." [...] penguin in Serbian is pingvin or пингвин.

➤ Seven and a half years ago I posted about a remarkable literary magazine called Two Lines: "they present everything bilinguallycompletely in the case of poetry, usually only the first page in the original for prose." I'm happy to say they're still around, and the latest issue, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, which the Center for the Art of Translation kindly sent me, is full of good things. [...] Zapotec, now that's the kind of language you don't see every day.

➤ A couple of years ago I posted about Edward Vajda's discovery of the link between Ket (spoken in Siberia) and the Na-Dene languages of America. [...] How much did Marx/Engels know about Navajo or Hopi culture,

➤ My daughter-in-law very kindly told me about the sale held this week at the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown, a dozen or so miles southeast of here. [...] Milovan Djilas.

➤ Victor Mair has a fascinating post at the Log about the Chinese character 和 h ("harmony, peace"). [...] I was hoping to be able to find the actual page and word, but Google Books has "No preview."

➤ Simon Garfield has a nice piece in the Guardian Observer (extracted from his Just My Type: A Book about Fonts) on the history of typefaces and how they're used; it starts with an appalling anecdote about a woman in New Zealand who was fired for sending an e-mail in ALL CAPS. [...] It has been stated that harder the type face to read , more students remember what was written versus an easy readable type face, study versus glance, better retention factor.

➤ The fascinating and appalling Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman, by Michael Savitz, tells what it's like to "spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner": [...] You have to admire the skill of the librarian in choosing the exact optimum moment to discard the book and extract that final 50 cents' value.

➤ In this post I described the Brodsky symposium I attended earlier this month, and in a comment I particularly praised the contribution by Mikhail Gronas, an assistant professor in the Department of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. [...] I think this is the link you intended.

➤ Stephen Crowe's Wake In Progress is an ongoing project of illustrating Finnegans Wake. [...] Usually the old song "Whale, kipper, whelk, come in the eel-side."

➤ Alan Shaw sent me a link to this interview by Rebecca Gould with descendants of Titsian Tabidze, the great Georgian poet who fell victim to Stalin's purges when he was only 42. [...] Thanks very much, Christopher!

➤ I don't link to Poemas del ro Wang as often as I probably should, because I figure everyone goes there as regularly as I do. [...] After he returned to Budapest, he composed his fundamental Byzantinoturcica: Sprachreste der Trkvlker in den Byzantinischen Quellen.

➤ The excellent Bathrobe (aka Bademantel and various other variants) has sent me a couple of enjoyable BBC News links on typefaces, which I hereby share with you. [...] To be sure, Romanian is an exception, but that is because Romanian was not written in Latin letters until about 1830, and not universally so until about 1920. In any case, written "h" is a weakened form of /x/, and was written "x" in Cyrillic.

➤ Sashura sent me a link to this NYT obituary by Margalit Fox of Sol Steinmetz, "a lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom (n., abbrev., < On Languages Board of Octogenarian Mentors)"; Ms. Fox lards the obit with as many word histories ("his surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason") as she can, and I'm sure its subject would have loved it. [...] Apparently he was bitten by that wonderful bug that makes scholars and poets go to extremes to find the [right] word.

➤ Eve Lonard, of the lovely city of Montral, wrote me to ask about a verb she had just encountered, "to intricate." As she says, the Urban Dictionary defines it as follows: "to bring people on board or to get them onside with an idea or a proposal or an initiative of some type by getting them intricated into the process bit by bit, almost without their noticing that they are making a commitment." They quote this example of usage: "First we'll get the Leagues Board of Governors intricated then we'll get the franchise!" She suggests that it might be a backformation from "extricate," and this seems like it must be correct. [...] There is more to analyse in the uses to which Nunberg at al. put their "indicatorcharacter" distinction, but not right now. And perhaps not here.

➤ Great news, via Dwight Garner at the New York Times: the new editor of the Paris Review, Lorin Stein, has "made the entire run of The Paris Reviews storied interview series, previously almost impossible to find in electronic form, available there, free for the browsing." Just go here and splash around to your heart's content. [...] It usually means no more than lack of a certain kind of training.

➤ There was much talk, a couple of months ago, about a NYT Times Magazine article called "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" by Guy Deutscher (whose earlier book I discussed here and here). [...] Come on. A little bit.

➤ Jan Freeman is another consistently excellent writer I should link to more often; her column on "could(n't) care less" is so compendious that I will never have to address the issue myself. [...] I wouldn't agree, no.

➤ The basic tool of a copyeditor in the U.S. is Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. [...] The fruits of both the "true" and wild service trees need to be "bletted" (lovely word, derived from the French blet, "sleepy", and introduced into English by the 19th century botanist John Lindley), or allowed to over-ripen, like medlars, before they are properly edible.

➤ A reader in an e-mail wonders "whether any of those translator pens really work": [...] "The couple were divorced last year".

➤ Kt Sheng has a post at Poemas del ro Wang that discusses the propensity of some Renaissance writers to proclaim the stylistic similarity of their own languages to Hebrew (which of course was considered the original language of the Garden of Eden), ending as follows: [...] In turn, the new preposition became prefixed to the complex pronoun, the "suffix" deriving from the original -cum having lost its identify.

➤ I wanted to bring jamessal's mom a house gift when I arrived for the wedding, and I knew she loved Mandelstam, so I asked which poem she'd like me to translate for her. [...] What was it about these early 20th century poets?

➤ Venetia Ansell (who "read Classics and Sanskrit at Oxford and is currently working in Bangalore, India") has a blog, Sanskrit Literature ("Bringing Sanskrit literature to a wider global audience"), that aims to "revisit Sanskrit classics through novel media and interpretations," to "reinvigorate an interest in and love for Sanskrit and its authors," and to "serve as a hub where like-minded people can share ideas." The About page says:Sanskrit has a tradition of literature richer and more diverse than anything produced by its sister languages in Greece and Rome. [...] It isn't even clear whether it's the whole act or maybe just the insomnia speech.

➤ This Typefoundry post on the history and current state of the number that appears on the door of 10 Downing Street is pretty far afield from the usual concerns of Languagehat, but I happen to know that I have among my commentariat architects and other persons with an interest in this sort of thing, and besides, it's a fascinating (and infuriating) piece, so here it is. [...] That is why Unicode has entirely different representations for the Arabic and "Arabic-Indic" digit sets, even though only a few of them actually look different; they have quite different bidirectionality properties.

➤ Anatoly Vorobei writes: Many years ago, my mind was blown by reading Otto Jespersen's Modern English Grammar On Historical Principles. I read/skimmed mainly Part I: Phonetics, where Jespersen slowly, fascinatingly and painstakingly goes over the phonetical changes that occurred in English [...], including the Great Vowel Shift as well as changes that came after it. [...] There is a lot more to the history of English than the Great Vowel Shift, although that is a "defining moment" (spread over a few centuries).

➤ From Dalkey Archive Press, Translation in Practice: A Symposium, edited by Gill Paul: [...] Love the Dalkey Archive; they're definitely one of the good guys.

➤ A question from dearieme in this thread sent me to the OED's new draft revision (Sept. 2010) of the etymology of posh, a perennial favorite of folk etymologists (no, it's not from "port outward, starboard home," and I'm surprised the OED dignifies that old wheeze with an entire paragraph): Origin unknown. [...] Words by the less informed or educated GNU and not members of the literary set were usually totaly ignored, unless picked up by society but with common folk speaking in flickers and on the goggle box and other mass communicating devices have made slang have come into the main stream of the upper percentile of literature.

➤ From The Observer, Tom Lubbock: a memoir of living with a brain tumour: [...] It hadn't been a nice, neat learning experience after all.

➤ I just finished reading an excellent collection of essays, The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (edited by Wayne Vucinich and based on papers from a conference held in December 1966); the amazingly detailed entry by Mary Matossian on the peasant's way of life introduced me to plenty of new vocabulary, and Donald Fanger's "The Peasant in Literature" made sense of the development of literary representations of peasants (as well as emphasizing that they are only that, and cannot be taken as reflecting the actual lives of peasants). [...] There's probably some Greek name for the figure of speech. Thanks, G.

➤ I continue to love serendipity. [...] Sad. Thanks for the clarification!

➤ Oxford University Press has been sending me review copies of its language-related books, and they're starting to pile up, and the gift-giving season is approaching, so I figured it was a good time to start letting y'all know about them. [...] Thanks, everybody.

➤ Back in 1994 I photocopied a couple of pages from John B. Bremner's Words on Words to have a copy of the entry BUCKLEYISM, which begins: [...] But when he dictionary dives, he does so with an unpopped ear: the legalize of "commorant" strikes me soundly not only as a nod to the sacred bonds of alimony but also a beak flick to the predatory seabird.

➤ If you're in London, or plan to be there in the next few months, you might want to visit the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library: "In this ground-breaking exhibition, the roots of Old English, slang dictionaries, medieval manuscripts, advertisements and newspapers from around the world come together - alongside everyday texts and dialect sound recordings. Follow the social, cultural and historical influences on the English language... and see how its still evolving today." [...] Worth checking out if you're in London, though it appears to be sold out.

➤ Julian Barnes has a wonderful review of Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary in the LRB (hat-tip to Kri for the link). [...] They act as though they believe that although a source text may have multiple translations into a target language, it has only one "best" translation, and they have arrived at the formula to determine this "best" translation in all cases, rendering all other approaches to translation irrelevant.

➤ Following up this post: [...] A household with cats but no dogs is called "all meow and no schnauzers".

➤ Voice Recognition Elevator is a hilarious three-and-a-half minutes of YouTube (from Burnistoun, a BBC show set in a fictional Scottish town). [...] A good point. I'll play them the Liszt when they come inside for Goats' Christmas.

➤ You'd think I'd be familiar with the etymologies of the basic English vocabulary words, but I keep running into surprises. [...] Look at all the plagiarism in his autobiography, some of which describes his fictitious experience of events he didn't see.

➤ I am delighted to discover, via that unfailing source of goodness wood s lot, a blog called Idiotic Hat (run by Mike, a university librarian in Southampton, U.K.), and via this IdioHat post to learn that... well, I'll let Mike tell it: [...] That makes sense. Sexual activity is rather exhausting, so it should be avoided when energy must be conserved.

➤ I've been rolling my eyes over the nonsense that's been making the rounds lately about Jane Austen and her alleged editor (example: "How Jane Austen failed at spelling: Study shows author wrote in a 'regional accent' and used poor punctuation") but have been too lazy to write about it; fortunately, Language Log and Fresh Air stalwart Geoff Nunberg has saved me the trouble. [...] Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

➤ One of the things (besides poetic genius) that has always made Pushkin stand out from the Russian literary crowd is his African ancestry; his mother's grandfather Abram Gannibal was taken as a boy from somewhere in Africa to the court of the Ottoman Sultan as a hostage, from whence he was ransomed by the deputy of the Russian ambassador, baptized in Vilna (now Vilnius), sent to Paris for an education (while there he fought with the French army, rose to the rank of captain, and adopted his surname in honor of Hannibal), and brought to Russia, where he became prominent at Elizabeth's court and retired in 1762 a major-general and a rich man. [...] Perhaps, but the future Gannibal was a hostage, not a slave.

➤ Mark Liberman at the Log writes about a Kyiv Post article by Paul Goble that begins: "A statement by a Kazakhstan minister that his country will eventually shift from a Cyrillic-based alphabet to a Latin-based script and reports that some scholars in Dushanbe are considering dropping another four Russian letters from the Tajik alphabet suggest that a new battle of the alphabets may again be shaping up in Central Asia." [...] Thanks for the information on .no and .se.

➤ An opinion piece by Jane Gardam in today's NY Times is pretty badly written, in my view (one paragraph begins "A single glove. The glove of a king. A 14th-century king. Chaucers king"), but that (sadly) is not particularly surprising. [...] Man goes into cage. Cage goes into salsa. Shark's in the salsa. Our shark.

➤ I just discovered that this Edward Lear limerick: [...] I also dropped an allusion to you over at Another Place.

➤ Uto-Aztecan, "A website for Uto-Aztecan Studies," is a welcome new addition to the internet, and just the sort of thing that the internet is ideal for. [...] He Of The Chinesian Cityworld of Aojou Nanbien: Sidney J. Baker wrote a book in homage to Mencken called The Australian Language; alas, I have not read it.

➤ I'm tearing through last week's New Yorker (trying to get as much of it read as I can before this week's descends upon me), and I just finished Lauren Collins's "Burger Queen: April Bloomfields gastropub revolution." Well, I say "finished," but in fact I skimmed the last couple of pages impatiently; there's some interesting stuff in there (I had no idea carrots were purple until the Dutch discovered how to make them orange in the seventeenth century—until then, people didn't like to cook with them because they turned everything they were cooked with purple), but it's basically an overlong puff piece full of chummy references to celebrities and annoying statements like "What Friedman really wants is a tongue-in-cheek red-sauce Italian place." [...] Yes, congrats, David! Science does not suck.

➤ Back in April, Douglas Mangum at Biblia Hebraica et Graeca had a tantalizing post briefly discussing The Invention of Hebrew, by Seth L. Sanders (2009), which Mangum calls the book that "best deals with the question of how, why, and when the Israelites started writing Hebrew and how that impacts our theories of biblical composition." [...] Some of these systems are described in the book Les fous du langage (translated as Lunatic lovers of language), by the French-Russian linguist Marina Yaguello, and in a few other works on the same topic.

➤ From the oldest Hebrew to the newest: the Forward had Judith Shulevitz, "a cultural critic and magazine editor who helped to start both Slate and Lingua Franca," guest-edit a special section on Parsing Israeli Slang. [...] (I meant to add it as an afterthought, but moved it when I added 'apparently' to the last sentence. Another bad editing choice.)

➤ I wrote briefly about Mikhail Gronas in my account of the Brodsky symposium last month, and at greater length in this post about his article "Why Did Free Verse Catch on in the West, but not in Russia?" [...] I got my Ong! (What kind of name is that, anyway?)

➤ The Economist's "Johnson" language blog has an interview with linguist K. David Harrison (see this LH post from last year), in which he has interesting things to say about languages and their preservation; here's one snippet: [...] I am interested (from a distance) in the Chukotka languages (Chukchi, Koryak, etc).

➤ I just ran across a reference to the historian Robert Muchembled, and of course wondered about the origin of that odd family name, which didn't look especially French. [...] And for the "muchosa", Picard bagpipes, there's a Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4S1cQ5aYqk

➤ I was shocked to learn from the NY Times obituary (by William Grimes) that Bella Akhmadulina died yesterday at what now seems to me (as I approach 60) the absurdly early age of 73. [...] That's the way I understood it. I agree with your evaluation.

➤ In the longest LH thread ever, AJP asked about the meaning of "literals" in "However, there are a number of literals in here, which is a shame. What has become of editing within publishing houses?" [...] More familiar, but I'll file that too.

➤ C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they've read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has once again begun the series with my contribution; here it is, featuring my wise words on Marshall Berman, Andrey Platonov, and Vladislav Zubok, all of whom will be familiar to regular readers of LH. [...] And I should be writing my "What I read in 2010" post soon for READIN.

➤ The Theoretical Linguistics program at Etvs Lornd University in Budapest celebrated its twentieth anniversary with this delightful video. [...] Then the computational linguist will lie down with the philologist.

➤ I recently finished the copy of John L. Locke's recent Eavesdropping: An Intimate History that the publisher was good enough to send me, and I feel that it has given me a new keyhole through which to peep at the world. [...] There are other instances of the -ea-/-au- correspondence, such as leap (and leave) related to G laufen 'to run', and cheap to G kaufen 'to buy' (Cheapside was the merchant district).

➤ Let's go for a walk at sunset. [...] This is like the Marshal McLuhan scene in Annie Hall.

➤ I have on more than one occasion had harsh things to say about the translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (e.g., here), but I recommend the half-hour Lapham's Quarterly podcast available at this page (it's currently at the top of the left column: "December 1, 2010 Pevear and Volokhonsky Podcast: Episode #6"). [...] It's not a very "good" pentameter, but the "filling out" produces a characteristic (Beckettian rather than Baudelarian) irony: You wanted it, well here it is.

➤ Don't miss Matt's post at No-sword today on "the first Oriental branch of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Baritsu Chapter," and how the name comes from a mysterious Conan Doyle reference to "baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling," which turns out to be a mangled allusion to a long-forgotten martial art called bartitsu, invented in 1898 by Edward William Barton-Wright, a British engineer who had spent the previous three years living in Japan. [...] baruchitsu is how you transliterate in romaji (Latin script) the kana transliteration of the original English Bartitsu into Japanese.

➤ I've posted about Jesse Sheidlower, Ben Zimmer, and Erin McKean before (and have links to projects by all three in the sidebar), but I didn't realize they were all graduates of the University of Chicago, which has a nice online piece by Debra Kamin about them: [...] I wish I had invented that, or at least taught my fingers to do it when I was young.

➤ Words without Borders has an interesting interview with Roberto Bui, aka Wu Ming 1, a member of the Wu Ming writing collective, on translating Stephen King into Italian. [...] I don't think he expected his readers to sit in the library with dictionaries.

➤ I have been asked about the history of the construction "X much?" as a rhetorical response (e.g., "Bitter much? Overanalzye much? Ad hominem much?"). [...] [Spam URL deleted but comment left for amusement value —LH.]

➤ A Financial Times story by Christian Oliver and Kang Buseong describes the problems of linguistic integration in Korea: [...] I wasn't really suggesting 客体 Object(ive) as a term of (North) Korean opprobrium in contrast to 主体 Juche, but rather 事大主義 Sadaejuui 'flunkyism (servility)', a term of abuse widely employed by Korean nationalists for much of the 20th century.

➤ Erin McKean recently pointed out a wonderful entry in her Wordnik site: queez-madam, listed only in the Century Dictionary and defined as "The cuisse-madam, a French jargonelle pear." [...] John, the no purple rhinoceroses,did they wear bowties?

➤ Nicholas Ostler is one of LH's favorite authors of language books; I enthused about his Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World in this post and about his Ad Infinitum in this one. [...] And they probably don't treat prisoners from Queensland very well in Victoria.

➤ Researchers at the World Oral Literature Project have compiled a database of language endangerment, described in a Cambridge press release: [...] But this database might lead you to think there was nothing out there.

➤ This is not a food blog, but how can I resist Rishidev Chaudhuri's post "Some notes on the grammar of the curry" at 3 Quarks Daily when it includes rhetoric like this? [...] I think they're a wonderful breed.

➤ No, that's not a typo, it's a convention: [...] Not a new file card, but a little yellow Postit sticker with an "!" on it.

➤ The internet helps fulfill a medieval will at HARAMBAM: [...] Where would we be without Al Globe?

➤ Mark Liberman's latest Log post sent me back to my 2008 post about the vexed issue of why Southern Californians use the definite article when referring to freeways (e.g., "the 405"), and the remark there that U.S. 101 used to be known as Ventura Boulevard made me wonder about the name Ventura—I've driven through there a million times and never thought to ask why it was called that (ventura is Spanish for 'fortune, chance, happiness'). [...] But in Rancho Mission Viejo, Viejo 'old' can be interpreted as referring to the masculine noun Rancho."

➤ An n-gram is "a subsequence of n items from a given sequence." Google has come up with what it calls an Ngram Viewer that allows you to compare the frequencies of words in printed books over any span of time since the invention of printing. [...] Most of the time there are too many variables.

➤ I'm about halfway through Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, a must-read for anyone interested in what life was like for Russians during the thirties, with informative asides on everything from party secrecy (a Communist who violated the secrecy rules in a speech to a factory meeting could be accused of "betraying the party to the working class") to the campaign for kulturnost' (a Krokodil cartoon was captioned "How cultured Ivan Stepanovich has become! Now when he curses people out he uses only the polite form [vy]"). [...] While, I think, stylistically Helen Dunmore is stronger than Slovo, psychologically characters in Ice Road are treated deeper than in The Siege.

➤ A longish Observer story by Tim Adams about Google Translate has some interesting discussion and quotes, but in my current befuddled state (brought about by excessive copyediting), what I most enjoyed was this (probably apocryphal) anecdote: [...] As a child I learned Hebrew at school, but only after a decade of living in Israel was I able to say that I was highly fluent in the language.

➤ In this thread, Sili kindly shared this BBC Radio 3 link which has (six minutes in, after the end of a new oboe concerto by Marc-Andr Dalbavie) a twenty-minute talk by translator Robert Chandler on the life and work of Platonov (see this post and this post for background). [...] I really appreciate learning about Platonov (and the Chandlers' translation work). Thanks for mentioning him.

➤ A Wordorigins post quoted the online OED's etymology of monkey-business:[n. + BUSINESS n., probably after Bengali bā̃drāmi. Compare modern Sanskrit vānara-karman (vānara monkey + karman action, work, employment), Hindi vānara-karma.] [...] If I survive the intense research that I have launched, Ill let you know.

➤ I was looking up something else in Brewer's ("devil's delight," which is how one of my dictionaries quaintly translates Russian столпотворение—it wasn't there, oddly, but Farmer and Henley have it: "Devil's-Delight. To kick up the devil's delight, verbal phr. (common).  To make a disturbance") and ran across the phrase "the devil to pay and no pitch hot," defined as "There will be serious trouble arising from this," with the explanation: "The 'devil' was the seam between the outboard plank and the waterways of a ship and very awkward of access. It also needed more pitch when caulking and paying, hence 'the devil'." [...] Thanks for explaining, John!

➤ Enrico Brignano is a comedian from Rome whose ten-minute Dialetti italiani is a tour de force of mimicry. [...] Licia currently has a post up about l'itanglese

➤ Mark Liberman has a post at the Log about the U.K. term jobsworth (OED: "Brit. colloq. (depreciative). A person in authority (esp. a minor official) who insists on adhering to rules and regulations or bureaucratic procedures even at the expense of common sense"), which was as new to him as it is to me; it comes from the U.K. expression "it's more than me job's worth", meaning "I'd lose my job if I let you do that." [...] Given its demographic's history of somewhat increased bureaucratic attention, I feel that Yiddish must have a veritable wealth of nouns for your uberzwerg and your jobsworth; I lament that I cannot think of a single one right now.

➤ I'll be opening most of my presents tomorrow, but I already have a couple of LH interest: Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Jeff Parker. [...] Got it, so not that they wouldn't have before by convention or on principle, but now they kind of had to, consistent with expectations in other modern languages.

➤ A quick rundown of the LH-related presents unwrapped today: [...] Sorry -- I'll try that link again: volume 33, p. 115

➤ Phil Gyford (who runs the indispensable Pepys' Diary site, one of the few I visit every day no matter how busy I am) has a lament for what's happening to the printed book. [...] To be honest, I was quite surprised by the high quality of books from Germany when I started buying them through Amazon the other year - it seems almost standard for a hardback to come with a ribbon to mark your place - do they just value quality more there or is it the famed book-price laws keeping publishers who do care in business?

➤ It's very hard to translate Joseph Brodsky into English. [...] ʤizesus?

➤ I just learned that Denis Dutton has died at only 66. [...] The quality of its diverse selections was consistently high, and it introduced me to many writers, websites and ideas I might otherwise not have encountered.

➤ Over eight years ago, in the very earliest days of LH, I posted a bitter complaint about the habits of the translator of the novel Ali and Nino: "She kept all the Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Russian terms from the novel in their German guises (the book was written in German), which produces an effect in English that is at best barbarous and at worst incomprehensible." A year later I had a similar complaint about a translation from Hungarian. [...] The other half of the class went for Khrushchev, which made rather more sense.

➤ Joel of Far Outliers has been reading American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan 185973, by Hamish Ion, and as usual he shares with the rest of us particularly appetizing snippets; I was particularly interested in Legacies of Hepburns First Dictionary of Japanese, 1867: [...] Croon: In an earlier stage still preserved in some families, it's pronounced "Freestonhugh".

Typing a letter into my browser's location bar...

2011-03-14T13:22:00.000-04:00

The browser in question is Chrome.

amazon.com
bankofamerica.com
ccny.cuny.edu
dsl.ac.uk
etymonline.com
facebook.com (my daughter's; I have an account but don't use it)
google.com
hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com
imdb.com
json.org
kmart.com
languagehat.com
m-w.com
norman.walsh.name
oed.com (plus a sekrit proxy that gives me access to it)
peoplehub.reedelsevier.com (work site)
q - nothing
rottentomatoes.com
scholar.google.com
translate.google.com
unicode.org
v - nothing
w3.org/TR
xn--orn-ooa.info (better known as þorn.info)
yahoomail.com (my daughter's)
zagat.com

MicroXML Editor's Draft

2011-01-25T17:38:00.001-05:00

I have assembled a very preliminary Editor's Draft for MicroXML. It is about 20 pages long, and covers for MicroXML what is covered by XML 1.0 (Fifth Edition), Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Third Edition), XML Infoset (Second Edition), Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Third Edition), xml:id 1.0, and XML Base (Second Edition), which total about 82 pages.

It still needs formal normative references, and there are a few open issues listed in section 10. Comments and corrections are earnestly solicited either in comments here or in email.

The Hoose at Pooh's Neuk / Kidnappit

2011-01-23T00:33:00.000-05:00

Well, I've finished the second Pooh book in Scots, and it seems to me just a hair less good than the original. I have no idea if that's the translator, the author, or just me. Definitely it's harder to understand, perhaps more Scots and less English, though not so much you'd notice it right off. I do, however, want to present one of Pooh's hums in three versions: Robertson's translation, a literal back-translation by me, and Milne's original. It comes from Chapter VIII, "Where-intil Wee Grumphie does a Gey Graund Thing":

I lay on ma chist
   I lay on my chest
      I lay on my chest
And thocht I wid jist
   And thought I would just
      And I thought it best
Pit on I was haein a sleep I had missed;
   Put on I was having a sleep I had missed;
      To pretend I was having an evening rest;
I lay on ma wame
   I lay on my belly
      I lay on my tum
Some verse tae declaim
   Some verse to declaim
      And I tried to hum
But naethin particular seemed to strike hame.
   But nothing particular seemed to strike home.
      But nothing particular seemed to come.
Ma face was flat
   My face was flat
      My face was flat
On the flair, and that
   On the floor, and that
      On the floor, and that
Is aw guid and weel for an acrobat;
   Is all good and well for an acrobat;
      Is all very well for an acrobat;
But it doesna seem fair
   But it does not seem fair
      But it doesn't seem fair
Tae a Freendly Bear
   To a Friendly Bear
      To a Friendly Bear
Tae streek him oot unner an auld creel-chair.
   To stretch him out under an old wicker-chair.
      To stiffen him out with a basket-chair.
And a kind o squoot
   And a kind of squoot
      And a sort of sqoze
He could dae wioot
   He could do without
      Which grows and grows
Is no that braw for his puir auld snoot;
   Is not that pleasant for his poor old snoot;
      Is not too nice for his poor old nose,
And a kind o squeed
   And a kind of squeed
      And a sort of squch
Is sair indeed
   Is grievous indeed
      Is much too much
On his mooth and his lugs and the back o his heid.
   On his mouth and his ears and the back of his head.
      For his neck and his mouth and his ears and such.

Plainly some of the changes are enforced by the rhyme, but I do think "I lay on ma wame / Some verse tae declaim / But naethin particular seemed to strike hame" is better, and better poetry, than "I lay on my tum / And I tried to hum / But nothing particular seemed to come."

I'll also mention here Kidnappit, a graphic novel based on Robert Louis Stevenson's classic romance Kidnapped, which is available both in English and in Scots. In the original book, much of the dialogue is Scots-and-water, whereas all the narration, though in first person by a Scotsman, is in standard English or nearly so. I don't know how the characters speak in the English comic, but some lines of dialogue can be usefully contrasted between the two versions that I have read: when our hero David Balfour confronts the Red Fox in Stevenson's original (chapter 17), he says: "I am neither of his people [the Stewarts] nor yours [the Campbells], but an honest subject of King George, owing no man and fearing no man." But in the Scots comic, what David says to the Reid Tod is "I am nae aucht of James's folk or o yours. I am a leal subject o King George, aucht a nae man and feart o nane." Somehow I think that's more likely to be what the real David Balfour (so to speak) actually said.

The MicroLark parser

2011-01-21T14:58:00.002-05:00

I've been developing a parser for MicroXML which I have dubbed MicroLark, in honor of Tim Bray's original 1998 XML parser Lark. I didn't take any code from Lark, but we ended up converging on similar ideas: it provides both push and tree parsers (as well as a pull parser), it is written in Java, and I intend to evolve it as MicroXML evolves. However, as MicroXML is much smaller than XML, so MicroLark is about a third the size of Lark.

If you want to cut to the chase now, you can get the jar file, the source code of version 0.8, the Javadoc, and the test cases (which are based on the W3C's XML Conformance Test Suites). If you run the jar file, pass it one argument which is the file you want to parse, and you'll get the parsed output in Pyx format, a simple line-oriented format similar to SGML ESIS format. If you specify @ as the file, MicroLark will read the names of files from the standard input, and write its output to files with the same names but with .pyx added.

MicroLark 0.8 supports MicroXML according to James's most recent definition, with the addition of prefixed attribute names. MicroLark allows, but does not require, namespace definitions for these prefixes. Element names do not allow prefixes. This version provides the parser proper, the Element class, and a MicroXML writer. I'll be adding more MicroXML-specific test cases in a later release. Future versions will supply a package of iterators to allow XPath-style operations, and a validator based on MicroRNG.

The core of MicroLark is a pull parser implemented as a state machine, which is just a big switch of switches. The outer switch is controlled by the current state, and the inner switches by the current character. The parser returns when a start-tag, end-tag, character data, end of document, or error is found, making sure that parsing can be resumed smoothly afterwards. Consequently, it is not draconian, though its error recovery strategy mostly consists of resetting the current state to "character data". When the parser returns, the caller can call accessors to get the current element stack or character data, or the location and text of an error. The push parser (SAX-style) and the tree parser (DOM-style) are thin layers over the pull parser; the tree parser is draconian.

The Element class is the incarnation of the MicroXML data model, so it provides access to the name, attributes, and children of an element. Element objects are provided by all three parsers, though only the tree parser populates the children. There are the usual collection methods for fetching, searching, and mutating the attributes and children; text children are represented as Strings, and when an attempt is made to insert a text child next to an existing text child, the two are coalesced. You can create your own Element objects, and the class ensures that they always represent well-formed MicroXML (for example, the names of elements and attributes must be well-formed). There are convenience methods for retrieving the current value of an inherited attribute, and for obtaining the current values of xml:lang/lang, xml:id/id, xml:base, and the namespace of a prefixed attribute.

Users can create subclasses of Element and instruct the parser to use them by creating a factory object. Factory objects get the current element stack from the parser as well as the name of the new element, and return an instance based on them. This allows tree nodes to have their own fields and methods suitable for their use in the application, as well as the creation of tree nodes that enforce restrictions on their children such as "no text children" or "element children must belong to class X".

MicroLark is open source, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Check it out, play with it, report bugs and suggestions for improvement in the comments here or to cowan@ccil.org

Winnie-the-Pooh in Scots

2011-01-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

I have just read, and with great enjoyment, Winnie-the-Pooh in Scots, translated by James Robertson and with the original E. H. Shepard illustrations.

Lang lang syne, a lang while syne noo, aboot Friday past, Winnie-the-Pooh steyed in a forest aw by himsel unner the name o Sanders.
('Whit does "unner the name" mean?' spiers Christopher Robin.
'It means he had the name in gowd letters ower the door and he steyed unner it.'
'Winnie-the-Pooh wisna jist shair,' says Christopher Robin.
'I am noo,' says a gurly [growly] voice.
'Then I'll cairry on," says I.)

The other characters, I should mention, are Wee Grumphie (Piglet), Heehaw (Eeyore, and a much more sensible spelling than "Eeyore" to an American like me), Rabbit, Hoolet (Owl, cf. English howlet, a mixture of howl and owlet, or their French originals), Kanga, and the Bairn Roo. Teeger doesn't come in until The Hoose at Pooh's Neuk, which has just arrived but I haven't read yet.

The book is a delight overall, especially to one as steeped in Pooh as I have always been, and who had Scott, RLS, and Ian Maclaren mixed in with his English reading from a very early age. I suppose there were half-a-dozen or so words that I didn't know the meanings of, as I unfortunately read the book without the marvelous Dictionar o the Scots Leid, the OED for Scots, at hand. I must particularly praise the verse translations, such as this one from Chapter 1, "Where-intil we are introduced tae Winnie-the-Pooh and a wheen Bees, and the Stories stert":

It's a thocht, is it no, that if Bears were Bees,
They'd bigg their bykes at the bottom o trees.
And if that wis the wey o it (if Bees were Bears)
We widna hae tae speel up aw thir stairs.

My favorite moment, however, was at this line in Chapter 4: "These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST." In Robertson's translation, this becomes: "Thae notices had been written oot by Christopher Robin, the ainly yin in the Forest that could spell; for, lang-heidit though Hoolet wis in mony weys, able tae read and write and spell his ain name HOOTEL, for some reason he gaed aw through-ither when it cam to kittle words like MEASLES and BUTTERYBREID."

The next time I'm writing some software that needs a fanciful name, perhaps I'll call it Hootel.

MicroXML and JSON

2011-01-01T21:52:00.001-05:00

Warning: You don't know about MicroXML without you have read a blog post by the name of "More on MicroXML"; but that ain't no matter, because you can click on the link and read all about it.

Warning Too: Carefully note the word "and" in the title. There's a reason why it's not "versus".

The whole point of MicroXML is to provide an XML spec (and associated data model) which is small and simple enough, and easy enough to implement, that it can go where no XML has gone before. Of course, JSON is already filling part of that niche, and it's even simpler than MicroXML. So MicroXMLers have two choices: think up reasons why JSON is bad, or figure out ways to coexist with it. My personality being what it is, I choose the second.

The goals of this posting are a) to specify a way to losslessly and uniquely transform JSON documents into MicroXML documents and back, and b) to specify a way to add markup to an arbitrary MicroXML document to explain how to transform it to JSON, which probably involves some amount of loss, because if MicroXML weren't more expressive than JSON, it wouldn't have a reason to exist. Consequently, a non-goal is to specify a way to losslessly and uniquely transform MicroXML to JSON and back.

JSON values have six possible types: objects (key-value mappings), arrays (ordered lists of values), strings, numbers, booleans, and null. The simplest approach to the first goal that could possibly work is to define a MicroXML vocabulary with six elements in it, named object, array, string, number, boolean, and null, and that's what I'm going to specify. So JSON converted to MicroXML looks pretty much like JSON itself, only more verbose. Why do this at all? So that the converted JSON can be fed into a MicroXML-based or XML-based pipeline and possibly converted back to JSON at the other end. Of course, if you don't need to do that, no problem: just don't convert to MicroXML in the first place.

Five of the six types are easy to represent: an array element represents the elements of the array using its child elements; a string, number, or boolean element contains the string, number or boolean value as character content, and a null element is always empty.

Next we must choose how to represent the key-value pairs within an object. They can't be represented as attributes (that is, with the key as the attribute name and the value as the attribute value), because the JSON RFC only says that keys SHOULD be unique, not that they MUST be unique, and attribute names in XML elements MUST be unique. So we'll represent each key-value pair as a child element, and represent the value of the pair using the content of the element.

But what about the key? There are two plausible choices: use an element with the fixed name pair and specify the key (which must be a string) using a key attribute, or use the name of the element directly as the key. The first solution is general but verbose; the second solution is not general, because only a subset of strings can appear as a MicroXML (or XML) element name. We'll require MicroXML-to-JSON converters to accept both (be liberal in what you accept), but require JSON-to-MicroXML converters to use the second solution unless the key contains a character that's not valid in XML names (be conservative in what you send). So pair becomes a seventh name in the MicroXML vocabulary for JSON.

(The characters U+FFFE and U+FFFF can appear literally in a JSON string, key, or value, but can't appear in XML character content, not even using character references. These aren't likely to actually occur in JSON documents, but just for completeness we'll say that they must be escaped with JSON escaping as \uFFFE and \uFFFF. This constitutes a minor violation of the rule of verbatim round-tripping, since JSON->MicroXML->JSON will always produce escape sequences for these characters even if the original document had them appear literally, but no realistic JSON application will notice the difference.)

So much for the first goal. What about the second? We'll require JSON->MicroXML translators to adopt the rules above to begin with. What about elements and attributes present in the MicroXML that have other names? We'll say that if an element has the attribute json-type, then the value of that attribute tells us how to process it. Thus an element named list with a json-type attribute of array will be converted to a JSON array. In this process, the actual name of the element and any inappropriate content is discarded, including any character content in an element with a json-type of object or array and any content at all of an element with a json-type of null. We don't discard child elements in elements with a json-type of string, number, or boolean: instead we use the XPath value of the element, which is the same as the content of the element with any tags ignored.

What about MicroXML attributes? We discard them for all elements except those with a json-type of object, where we treat them as additional key-value pairs (excepting of course any json-key attribute).

As usual, comments are solicited.

MicroRNG

2010-12-23T18:00:00.011-05:00

This is a contribution to the MicroXML conversation. It's a stripped-down version of RELAX NG suitable for validating MicroXML documents. It excludes namespaces, since MicroXML doesn't have them either. Somewhat reluctantly, I have also jettisoned all simple types but a few and all value types except the default, since I figure that MicroXML will mostly be used by applications that need to validate string values in more complicated ways anyhow.

Generalized interleave has a high implementation cost, so I've removed it as well, except for mixed content, which I consider essential. Finally, I've ditched lists, datatype libraries other than stripped-down XSD, foreign markup, name classes, nested grammars, external file inclusion, the notAllowed pattern, divs (which are just for documentation), and definition combining methods.

Here's what's left, in the form of a compact RELAX NG grammar. When translated to XML format, this is also a MicroRNG grammar (modulo namespace issues).

start = elementElem | grammarElem

grammarElem = element grammar {startElem, defineElem*}

startElem = element start {elementElem | refElem | element choice {(startElem | refElem)+ } }

defineElem = element define {attribute name {text}, pattern+}

pattern = elementElem | textElem | mixedElem | attributeElem | valueElem | groupElem | choiceElem | optionalElem | z zeroOrMoreElem | oneOrMoreElem | refElem | dataElem

elementElem = element element {attribute name {text}, (emptyElem | pattern+)}

emptyElem = element empty {empty}

textElem = element text {empty}

mixedElem = element mixed {pattern+}

attributeElem = element attribute {attribute name {text}, (valueElem|textElem)?}

valueElem = element value {text}<

groupElem = element group {pattern+}

choiceElem = element choice {pattern+}

optionalElem = element optional {pattern+}

oneOrMoreElem = element oneOrMore {pattern+}

zeroOrMoreElem = element zeroOrMore {pattern+}

refElem = element ref {attribute name {text}}

dataElem = element data {"string" | "decimal" | "double"| "integer" | "date" | "dateTime" | "boolean" | "base64Binary"}

In addition, MicroRNG just allows a single unique element element in a definition (that is, no more than one definition of an element), even though that would reduce the convenience of RNG definitions to their DTD equivalents.  There are other possible simplifications, like getting rid of element elements as the root, or removing zeroOrMore elements in favor of optional elements wrapped around oneOrMore elements, but I judge them to be more annoying to schema authors than helpful to implementers.


Comments are gratefully solicited either here or at James Clark's blog.

Somewhere A Duck Quacked

2010-08-02T18:33:00.001-04:00

Here's a totally unauthorized reprint of Peter De Vries's story "The Irony Of It All", a satire of pulp writing, and Randall Garrett's "Look Out! Duck!", a science-fiction satire of De Vries's story, now with 50% more jokes as a result of being able to read the De Vries story first. Eventually I'll gussy this up with mutual hyperlinks connecting the two Dumbrowskis and the two Constanzas, but not today.

Employed again, finally

2010-06-14T11:42:00.002-04:00

I'm going to start work at LexisNexis on June 28 with the title of "Content Architect". I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about the job, but I will be dealing with UML (about which I know little as yet) and RELAX NG (about which I know plenty). This will be my first official non-programmer job ever, but I will still be writing one-off code for various purposes, so I'm not handing in my geek license just yet.

The rumors that I've left Google are true

2010-04-21T10:50:00.000-04:00

My last working day there was April 13, and I'm actively looking for work now. If you know of anyone in the NYC area who wants a high-powered generalist who can work with both people and computers, please let me know.

Thanks, and thanks to everyone who's been sending me good wishes and job postings.

Noun-noun Compounds

2009-12-18T16:08:00.005-05:00

Here's a list of different types of noun-noun compounds. The original research was done by Ivan Derzhanski and then adapted by me for use in my Lojban reference grammar. Unfortunately, the formatting of the on-line version is unreadable, and it's full of Lojban technical terms. I've salvaged the content here. All of these languages put the modifier first and the modified term (the "head") second.

After the English gloss of each compound, there's a list of non-English languages that use it. If the compound is not used in English, there is a definition as well. The abbreviations are explained below. If you don't care about the Lojban, you can ignore it.

1. The head represents an action, and the modifier then represents the object of that action.

pinsi kilbra = pencil sharpener (Hun)
zgike nunctu = music instruction (Hun)
mirli nunkalte = deer hunting (Hun)
finpe nunkalte = fish hunting (Tur, Kor, Udm, Aba 'fishing')
smacu terkavbu = mousetrap (Tur, Kor, Hun, Udm, Aba)
zdani turni = house ruler (Kar 'host')
zerle'a nunte'a = thief fear (Skt 'fear of thieves')
cevni zekri = god crime (Skt 'offense against the gods')

2. The head represents a set, and the modifier the type of the elements contained in that set.

zdani lijgri = house row
selci lamgri = cell block
karda mulgri = card pack (Swe)
rokci derxi = stone heap (Swe)
tadni girzu = student group (Hun)
remna girzu = human-being group (Qab 'group of people')
cpumi'i lijgri = tractor column (Qab)
cevni jenmi = god army (Skt)
cevni prenu = god folk (Skt)

3. Conversely: the head is an element, and the modifier represents a set in which that element is contained. Implicitly, the meaning of the head is restricted from its usual general meaning to the specific meaning appropriate for elements in the given set. Note the opposition between "zdani linji" in the previous group, and "linji zdani" in this one, which shows why this kind of compound is called "asymmetrical".

carvi dirgo = raindrop (Tur, Kor, Hun, Udm, Aba)
linji zdani = row house

4. The modifier specifies an object and the head a component or detail of that object; the compound as a whole refers to the detail, specifying that it is a detail of that whole and not some other.

junla dadysli = clock pendulum (Hun)
purdi vorme = garden door (Qab)
purdi bitmu = garden wall (Que)
moklu skapi = mouth skin (Imb 'lips')
nazbi kevna = nose hole (Imb 'nostril')
karce xislu = automobile wheel (Chi)
jipci pimlu = chicken feather (Chi)
inji rebla = airplane tail (Chi)

5. Conversely: the modifier specifies a characteristic or important detail of the object described by the head; objects described by the compound as a whole are differentiated from other similar objects by this detail.

pixra cukta = picture book
kerfa silka = hair silk (Kar 'velvet')
plise tapla = apple cake (Tur)
dadysli junla = pendulum clock (Hun)

6. The head specifies a general class of object (a genus), and the modifier specifies a sub-class of that class (a species).,

ckunu tricu = pine tree (Hun, Tur, Hop)

7. The head specifies an object of possession, and the modifier may specify the possessor (the possession may be intrinsic or otherwise). In English, these compounds have an explicit possessive element in them: "lion's mane", "child's foot", "noble's cow".

cinfo kerfa = lion mane (Kor, Tur, Hun, Udm, Qab)
verba jamfu = child foot (Swe)
nixli tuple = girl leg (Swe)
cinfo jamfu = lion foot (Que)
danlu skapi = animal skin (Ewe)
ralju zdani = chief house (Ewe)
jmive munje = living world (Skt)
nobli bakni = noble cow (Skt)
nolraitru ralju = king chief (Skt 'emperor')

8. The head specifies a habitat, and the modifier specifies the inhabitant.

lanzu tumla = family land

9. The head specifies a causative agent, and the modifier specifies the effect of that cause.

kalselvi'i gapci = tear gas (Hun)
terbi'a jurme = disease germ (Tur)
fenki litki = crazy liquid (Hop 'whisky')
pinca litki = urine liquid (Hop 'beer')

10. Conversely: the head specifies an effect, and the modifier specifies its cause.

djacu barna = water mark (Chi)

11. The head specifies an instrument, and the modifier specifies the purpose of that instrument.

taxfu dadgreku = garment rack (Chi)
tergu'i ti'otci = lamp shade (Chi)
xirma zdani horse = house (Chi 'stall')
nuzba tanbo = news board (Chi 'bulletin board')

12. More vaguely: the head specifies an instrument, and the modifier specifies the object of the purpose for which that instrument is used.

cpina rokci = pepper stone (Que 'stone for grinding pepper')
jamfu djacu = foot water (Skt 'water for washing the feet')
grana mudri = post wood (Skt 'wood for making a post')
moklu djacu = mouth water (Hun 'water for washing the mouth')
lanme gerku = sheep dog (dog for working sheep)

13. The head specifies a product from some source, and the modifier specifies the source of the product.

moklu djacu = mouth water (Aba, Qab 'saliva')
ractu mapku = rabbit hat (Rus)
jipci sovda = chicken egg (Chi)
sikcurnu silka = silkworm silk (Chi)
mlatu kalci = cat feces (Chi)
bifce lakse = bee wax (Chi 'beeswax')
cribe rectu = bear meat (Tur, Kor, Hun, Udm, Aba)
solxrula grasu = sunflower oil (Tur, Kor, Hun, Udm, Aba)
bifce jisra = bee juice (Hop 'honey')
tatru litki = breast liquid (Hop 'milk')
kanla djacu = eye water (Kor 'tear')

14. Conversely: the head specifies the source of a product, and the modifier specifies the product.

silna jinto = salt well (Chi)
kolme terkakpa = coal mine (Chi)
ctile jinto = oil well (Chi)

15. The head specifies an object, and the modifier specifies the material from which the object is made. This case is especially interesting, because the referent of the head may normally be made from just one kind of material, which is then overridden in the compound.

rokci cinfo = stone lion
snime nanmu = snow man (Hun)
kliti cipni = clay bird
blaci kanla = glass eye (Hun)
blaci kanla = glass eye (Que 'spectacles')
solji sicni = gold coin (Tur)
solji junla = gold watch (Tur, Kor, Hun)
solji djine = gold ring (Udm, Aba, Que)
rokci zdani = stone house (Imb)
mudri zdani = wood house (Ewe 'wooden house')
rokci bitmu = stone wall (Ewe)
solji carce = gold chariot (Skt)
mudri xarci = wood weapon (Skt 'wooden weapon')
cmaro'i dargu = pebble road (Chi)
sudysrasu = cutci straw shoe (Chi)

16. The head specifies a typical object used to measure a quantity and the modifier specifies something measured. The compound as a whole refers to a given quantity of the thing being measured. English does not have compounds of this form, as a rule.

tumla spisa = land piece (Tur 'piece of land')
tcati kabri = tea cup (Kor, Aba 'cup of tea')
nanba spisa = bread piece (Kor 'piece of bread')
bukpu spisa = cloth piece (Udm, Aba 'piece of cloth')
djacu calkyguzme = water calabash (Ewe 'calabash of water')

17. The head specifies an object with certain implicit properties, and the modifier overrides one of those implicit properties.

kensa bloti = spaceship
bakni verba = cattle child (Ewe 'calf')

18. The modifier specifies a whole, and the head specifies a part which normally is associated with a different whole. The compound then refers to a part of the modifier which stands in the same relationship to the whole modifier as the head stands to its typical whole.

kosta degji coat finger (Hun = coat sleeve)
denci genja tooth root (Imb)
tricu stedu tree head (Imb = treetop)

19. The head specifies the producer of a certain product, and the modifier specifies the product. In this way, the compound as a whole distinguishes its referents from other referents of the head which do not produce the product.

silka curnu silkworm (Tur, Hun, Aba)

20. The head specifies an object, and the modifier specifies another object which has a characteristic property. The compound as a whole refers to those referents of the head which possess the property.

sonci manti = soldier ant
ninmu bakni = woman cattle (Imb 'cow')
mamta degji = mother finger (Imb 'thumb')
cifnu degji = baby finger (Imb 'pinky')
pacraistu zdani = hell house (Skt)
fagri dapma = fire curse (Skt 'curse destructive as fire')

21. As a particular case (when the property is that of resemblance): the modifier specifies an object which the referent of the compound resembles.

grutrceraso jbama = cherry bomb
solji kerfa = gold hair (Hun 'golden hair')
kanla djacu e= ye water (Kar 'spring')
bakni rokci = bull stone (Mon 'boulder')

22. The modifier specifies a place, and the head an object characteristically located in or at that place.

ckana boxfo = bed sheet (Chi)
mrostu mojysu'a = tomb monument (Chi 'tombstone')
jubme tergusni = table lamp (Chi)
foldi smacu = field mouse (Chi)
briju ci'ajbu = office desk (Chi)
rirxe xirma = river horse (Chi 'hippopotamus')
xamsi gerku = sea dog (Chi 'seal')
cagyce'u zdani = village house (Skt)

23. Specifically: the head is a place where the modifier is sold or made available to the public.

cidja barja = food bar (Chi 'restaurant')
cukta barja = book bar (Chi 'library')

24. The modifier specifies the locus of application of the head.

kanla velmikce = eye medicine (Chi)
jgalu grasu = nail oil (Chi 'nail polish')
denci pesxu = tooth paste (Chi)

25. The head specifies an implement used in the activity denoted by the modifier.

me.la.pinpan. bolci = Ping-Pong ball (Chi)

26. The head specifies a protective device against the undesirable features of the referent of the modifier.

carvi mapku = rain cap (Chi)
carvi taxfu = rain garment (Chi 'raincoat')
vindu firgai = poison mask (Chi 'gas mask')

27. The head specifies a container characteristically used to hold the referent of the modifier.

cukta vasru = book vessel (Chi 'satchel')
vanju kabri = wine cup (Chi)
spatrkoka lanka = coca basket (Que)
djacu calkyzme = water calabash (Ewe)
rismi dakli = rice bag (Ewe, Chi)
tcati kabri = tea cup (Chi)
ladru botpi = milk bottle (Chi)
rismi patxu = rice pot (Chi)
festi lante = trash can (Chi)
bifce zdani = bee house (Kor 'beehive')
cladakyxa'i = zdani sword house (Kor 'sheath')
manti zdani = ant nest (Gua 'anthill')

28. The modifier specifies the characteristic time of the event specified by the head.

vensa djedi = spring day (Chi)
crisa citsi = summer season (Chi)
cerni bumru = morning fog (Chi)
critu lunra = autumn moon (Chi)
dunra nicte = winter night (Chi)
nicte ckule = night school (Chi)

29. The modifier specifies a source of energy for the referent of the head.

dikca tergusni = electric lamp (Chi)
ratni nejni = atom energy (Chi)
brife molki = windmill (Tur, Kor, Hun, Udm, Aba)

There are some compounds which don't fall into any of the above categories.

ladru denci = milk tooth (Tur, Hun, Udm, Qab)
kanla denci = eye tooth

It is clear that "tooth" is being specified, and that "milk" and "eye" act as modifiers. However, the relationship between "ladru" and "denci" is something like "tooth which one has when one is drinking milk from one's mother", a relationship certainly present nowhere except in this particular concept. As for "kanla denci", the relationship is not only not present on the surface, it is hardly possible to formulate it at all.

Here are some types of compounds where there is no effective difference between the modifier and the head. In some languages, it is common for these compounds to occur in the opposite order as well.

30. The compound may refer to things which are correctly specified by both components. Some of these instances may also be seen as asymmetrical compounds where the modifier specifies a material.

cipnrstrigi pacru'i = owl demon (Skt)
nolraitru prije = royal sage (Skt)
remna nakni = human-being male (Qab 'man')
remna fetsi = human-being female (Qab 'woman')
sonci tolvri = soldier coward (Que)
panzi nanmu = offspring man (Ewe 'son')
panzi ninmu = offspring woman (Ewe 'daughter')
solji sicni = gold coin (Tur)
solji junla = gold watch (Tur, Kor, Hun)
solji djine = gold ring (Udm, Aba, Que)
rokci zdani = stone house (Imb)
mudri zdani = wooden house (Ewe)
rokci bitmu = stone wall (Ewe)
solji carce = gold chariot (Skt)
mudri xarci = wooden weapon (Skt)
zdani tcadu = home town (Chi)

31. The compound may refer to all things which are specified by either of the compound components. English does not have compounds of this form, as a rule.

nunji'a nunterji'a = victory defeat (Skt 'victory or defeat')
donri nicte = day night (Skt 'day and night')
lunra tarci = moon stars (Skt 'moon and stars')
patfu mamta = father mother (Imb, Kaz, Chi 'parents')
tuple birka = leg arm (Kaz 'extremity')
nuncti nunpinxe = eating drinking (Udm 'cuisine')
bersa tixnu = son daughter (Chi 'children')

32. Alternatively, the compound may refer to things which are specified by either of the compound components or by some more inclusive class of things which the components typify.

curnu jalra = worm beetle (Mon 'insect')
jalra curnu = beetle worm (Mon 'insect')
kabri palta = cup plate (Kaz 'crockery')
jipci gunse = hen goose (Qab 'housefowl')
xrula tricu = flower tree (Chi 'vegetation')

33. The compound components specify crucial or typical parts of the referent of the compound as a whole. English does not have compounds of this form, as a rule.

tumla vacri = land air (Fin 'world')
moklu stedu = mouth head (Aba 'face')
sudysrasu cunmi = hay millet (Qab 'agriculture')
gugde ciste = state system (Mon 'politics')
prenu so'imei = people multitude (Mon 'masses')
djacu dertu = water earth (Chi 'climate')

Here are the explanations of the three-letter language-name abbreviations:

Aba = Abazin
Chi = Chinese
Eng = English
Ewe = Ewe
Fin = Finnish
Geo = Georgian
Gua = Guarani
Hop = Hopi
Hun = Hungarian
Imb = Imbabura Quechua
Kar = Karaitic Hebrew
Kaz = Kazakh
Kor = Korean
Mon = Mongolian
Qab = Qabardian
Que = Quechua
Rus = Russian
Skt = Sanskrit
Swe = Swedish
Tur = Turkish
Udm = Udmurt

More of my blather

2009-11-06T04:14:00.002-05:00

If, Ghu help you, you want to see a lot the stuff I'm posting as blog comments rather than saving for my own blog, then this amazing search engine is your friend. If you, too, post a lot of comments, go to their home page and set up your own profile, giving them the "web address" you use to post, and everyone can see many of the places you are posting to as well. Very, very nice.

Update: Alas, this service is dead.

More female programmers

2009-10-24T22:39:00.000-04:00

I tried to post this comment to a public site, but failed repeatedly. The topic of the original post isn't relevant to my comment, which was in response to a comment that read, in its entirety:

Why would we would want more female programmers?

My answer:

The world needs more effectively mobilized brains. We can't afford to constrain ourselves on what size or shape or color the bodies are that house those brains. Also, diversity is good in itself: it improves flexible response, and it's silly to throw away a cheap source of diversity.

A major U.S. university with a strong CS program (I am contractually prevented from naming it) that had female CS undergraduate admissions in the single digits year after year was able to raise their admission to the same rate as other engineering programs by changing just one thing: they no longer gave people who already had programming experience preferential admission. There have been no changes in the overall performance of the student body in the years since.

"Omnilingual"

2009-10-22T19:19:00.000-04:00

This is to announce my edited version of H. Beam Piper's classic story of linguistic archaeology on Mars, "Omnilingual". Why edit a classic? Here's my Editor's Introduction:

H. Beam Piper's 1956 story "Omnilingual" is one of the few, and still one of the best, science fiction stories in which the science is linguistic archaeology. While the meat of the story holds up marvelously fifty years later, the particulars are firmly rooted in the 1950s. Everyone smokes like a chimney — on Mars! The women are called girls, and their gender is mentioned at every conceivable opportunity. All the work is still done with pencil and paper and sketching boards and looseleaf notebooks.

My edits, then, are intended to modernize the work, to help the 2009 reader not stumble over the details. Notebooks are computerized; sketchbooks have been replaced by tablets. Gender equality and the metric system are taken for granted. Smoking isn't even mentioned. I wedged in a mention of the Classic Maya decipherment of the 1980s (a counterexample to the story's thesis!), but let one of the characters dismiss it as irrelevant. I set the story, as Piper did, forty years in the future, but that is now 2049 rather than 1996. There are fewer This Is Science Fiction flags, so "Earth" instead of "Terra", "U.N." instead of "Federation Government".

Piper's Mars and his Martians are completely impossible based on what we know of Mars today. Rather than trying to change all that, which would have involved wholesale destruction and re-invention, I have changed the planet's name to Ares after the Greek rather than the Roman god of war. The intention is to suggest someplace analogous to Mars as we know it in 2009, but different in detail. The atmosphere on Ares is thin, but breathable with supplementary oxygen; the humidity, while low, supports plenty of life forms. As for the too-human Martians (or Areans), I have made them an offshoot of Homo sapiens whose presence on the fourth planet from the sun remains a mystery.

However, the characters, the plot, the underlying logic remain the same. Hopefully I haven't damaged the story too much in trying to adjust it to modern taste. Those who prefer the original form can easily find it at Project Gutenberg, who provided the public-domain base text from which this revision was made. They also have the original Frank Kelly Freas drawings, which I didn't feel right about using -- they were made in the 1950s, too, and no longer seemed to fit the revised text.

Read and enjoy!

Fragments

2009-10-16T16:03:00.000-04:00

David Moser's relentlessly self-referential story "This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself" begins simply enough with the fairly ordinary sentence "This is the first sentence of this story."

But by the fourth paragraph, a harbinger of what is to come: "Introduces, in this paragraph, the device of sentence fragments. A sentence fragment. Another. Good device. Will be used more later."

True enough. "Incest. The unspeakable taboo. The universal prohibition. Incest. And notice the sentence fragments? Good literary device. Will be used more later."

A later passage from the same increasingly disconnected tale: "Bizarre. A sentence fragment. Another fragment. Twelve years old. This is a sentence that. Fragmented. And strangling his mother. Sorry, sorry. Bizarre. This. More fragments. This is it. Fragments. The title of this story, which. Blond. Sorry, sorry. Fragment after fragment. Harder. This is a sentence that. Fragments. Damn good device."

Still further down: "The purpose. Of this paragraph. Is to apologize. For its gratuitous use. Of. Sentence fragments. Sorry. "

And then: "Or this sentence fragment? Or three words? Two words? One?"

Getting near the end: "By the throat. Harder. Harder, harder."

Lastly: "This is."

Read. The whole thing. Worthwhile. NSFW, technically.

Why Are PHBs Stupid?

2009-10-01T11:16:00.002-04:00

Mark Liberman on Language Log asks:

However we decide to define "manager", this group is certainly now the object of a complex of negative stereotypes. When and how did this start? I don't know, and I welcome suggestions. These attitudes may be connected to the antique European aristocratic disdain for those who are "in trade", and to the (I think related) modern intellectual disdain for the world of business. These attitudes seem to have been imported from the intelligentsia into industry through the medium of engineers and especially programmers, who (at least at lower levels) maintain a very different culture from the "suits" in finance, marketing, product planning, and so on.

I think Mark's right to speak of "engineers and especially programmers", and I think the key phrase is "maintain a very different culture". Historically, the boss that most people dealt with was the foreman, which the OED defines in the relevant sense as "the principal workman; specifically, one who has charge of a department of work." You began by doing the work, and if you got good at it, you ended up telling other people with less experience or less competence how to do it instead. This could go right up to the top: Thomas Edison began as an inventor, and wound up running a huge "invention factory", the first modern industrial research lab.

Two factors undermined this, though: the sense that promoting high-quality workmen instead of continuing to take advantage of their work made no sense, and the idea that management was or could be a profession abstracted from the particular work being managed. The first factor appeared particularly strongly in computer programming because of the huge disparity in productivity: the best programmers are literally two orders of magnitude more productive than the average. Losing a top steelworker to foremanship might cost the company the labor of 2-3 standard steelworkers, but losing the productivity of 100 merely competent programmers seemed insane. And of course geeks tend to like their jobs, and to be uninterested in (and incompetent at) people-managing. Companies had to deal with the widespread appearance of workers who did not want to be promoted, ever.

At the same time, the rise of the MBA spread the meme among the suits that managing people was a learned profession like law or medicine or engineering, where you primarily apply what you have learned from books, courses, etc. to the requirements of the job. Before that, management had always been seen as a job, like digging ditches or being President of the United States: you can prepare for it to some extent, but mostly you do a job by applying whatever you have to whatever you need to do.

Making management a profession was arguable; the associated notion that you could manage workers with no understanding of what they did was a disaster. Computer programmers were in the forefront of knowing what had happened: they quickly saw that their bosses had no idea of how the work was done, the necessary conditions for doing it, or the difference between what could be done, what could be done with extraordinary effort, and what could not be done at all. The boss had always been seen as a mean fellow (after all, he tells you what to do and can fire you), but now he also appeared clueless and even stupid, someone who could not be made to understand no matter what.

None of the early citations in the OED, nor the quotes that I find in LION, seem to reflect the modern Dilbertian managerial stereotype. That stereotype clearly predates Dilbert — but when did it arise? and where did it come from?

In this context, we have to return to Andrew's question: What is a manager, anyhow? By now, I suppose that the Dilbert empire employs a certain number of people, whom Scott Adams in some sense manages — does he thereby consider himself a "manager" in the relevant sense?

Scott Adams is not only a manager now, he has always been one by training: he was an economics major, not any kind of scientist or engineer, and he got an MBA before he worked with his first geek. He is extraordinarily observant (especially for an MBA, I add snarkily) and he actually does grasp how geeks think, but despite appearances he basically sees them from the outside. When I discovered this, the shock was so great that I started to see him as an outsider mocking my culture rather than an insider mocking its excesses (though to be sure Dilbert is harder on suits than on nerds), and I lost interest in the strip completely.

(Note: Even though Mark says he's been a manager since 1980, I think that industrial research and academia still basically run on the old model, and therefore their managers, including him, are mostly exempt from the trend I am reporting here.)

Common Lisp symbols bound in more than one namespace

2009-09-21T15:41:00.000-04:00

These are the Common Lisp symbols which are bound in more than one namespace: for example, + is both a function (addition) and a variable (the most recent form evaluated by the REPL). The links point into the Common Lisp Hyperspec.

Two Kinds

2009-05-24T15:18:00.000-04:00

There's two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't.

There's three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can't.

There's 10 kinds of people on the world, those who can do binary and those who can't.

There's 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand trinary, those who don't understand trinary, and those who mistake it for binary.

And, of course, there's two kinds of people in the world, those who can tell a joke, and those who can't.

Or perhaps there are really three kinds, those who can tell a joke, those who can't, and those who can but run it into the ground.

But Little Anthony and the Imperials said it best.

No more anonymous comments; sorry.

2009-05-09T03:37:00.003-04:00

I just had to clear out about 100 anonymous spam comments, and Blogger doesn't make that easy. So no more anonymous comments. Sorry. But you can still comment on any posting, no matter how old.

Recycled Nursery Rhymes and Songs for Secular Babies

2008-12-26T18:26:00.001-05:00

Here are a few things I sing to Dorian (who is now six months old) along with more conventional fare like "Guten Abend, gute' Nacht" (the Brahms Lullaby), "You Are My Sunshine", and "Veni, veni Emmanuel":

Air: Three Blind Mice
Dor-i-an, Dor-i-an
See who I am, see who I am,
I am the Drool- and the Burpinator,
I am the Fart- and the Poopinator,
I am the Squeal- and the Howlinator,
I'll be baaaack, I'll be baaaack.

Air: Puttin' on the Ritz
Who's that baby, what is he doin'
He's my grandson, he is a-chewin'
Dor-i-an . . . Chewin' on his bib.

Who's that baby, where is he goin'
I don't know and there is no knowin'
Dor-i-an . . . Chewin' on his bib.

Air: Jesus Loves Me
Grandpa loves me, this I know,
'Cause his caring tells me so,
Little me with him belongs,
Till I'm bold and brave and strong.

Yes, Grandpa loves me (3x)
His caring tells me so.

(This gets changed to Grandma or Mommy or even Grownups on occasion.)

Air: Deck the Halls
Fast away the bottle's draining,
  Do-do-do-do-do, do-do-ri-an.
On the bib the drips are raining,
  Do-do-do-do-do, do-do-ri-an.
Soon the back we will be pounding,
  Do-do-do, do-do-do, Do-ri-an.
And the burps will be resounding,
  Do-do-do-do-do, do-do-ri-an.

Air: Tell Me Why
Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky's so blue,
Tell me, oh tell me, just why I love you.

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropism makes the ivy twine,
Scattering makes the sky so blue,
Gonadal hormones are why I love you.

(This is the only one I didn't make up myself.)

Converting Restricted XML to Good-Quality JSON

2008-10-14T00:27:00.007-04:00

Here's some ideas for converting restricted forms of XML to good-quality JSON. The restrictions are as follows:

The XML can't contain mixed content (elements with both children/attributes and text).
The XML cannot depend on the order of child elements with distinct names (order dependence in children with the same name is okay).
There can't be any attributes with the same name as child elements.
There can't be any elements or attributes that differ only in their namespace names.

You also need to know the following things for each child element:

Whether it MUST appear at most once (a singleton element) or MAY appear more than once (a multiplex element).
Whether it only contains text (an element with simple type) or child elements and/or attributes (an element with complex-type).

Now, to convert the XML to JSON, apply these rules recursively:

A singleton element of simple type, and likewise an attribute, is converted to a JSON simple value: a number or boolean if syntactically possible, otherwise a string.
A multiplex object of simple type is converted to a JSON array of simple values.
A singleton element of complex type is converted to a JSON object that maps the local names of child elements and attributes to their content. Namespace names are discarded.
A multiplex element of complex type is mapped to a JSON array of JSON objects that map the local names of child elements and attributes to their content. Namespace names are discarded.

Comments are very welcome.

I before E except after C

2008-09-17T18:42:00.004-04:00

Here's a better version of the little poem. I don't know who wrote it; I touched it up a bit for better rhythm:

When IE and EI both say EE,
Who can tell which it should be?
After C, use E then I;
Otherwise IE will apply.
Some exceptions we may note
Which one needs to learn by rote:
Protein, caffeine, weird, and seize,
And in the U.S., leisure, please.

Dorian pictures

2008-07-01T23:57:00.001-04:00

See the tagged Flickr photostream. I will add to this.

Dorian Sion Cowan

2008-06-18T23:16:00.003-04:00

My grandson Dorian was born at 9:08 PM yesterday, June 17, 2008 (New York time). He weighed 9 lb 0.9 oz (4110 g) at birth, and was 22 inches (56 cm) long. And he is the Best Baby In The World.

(Well, when I say that, I make a mental reservation in favor of Irene, Dorian's mommy, who is now almost 21 but was certainly the Best Baby in her day.)

Baby and mother are doing wonderfully well -- Dorian is starting to breastfeed very nicely, and already knows a great many Proto-Indo-European roots. Irene's Caesarean incision is still very sore, and the IV is in her hand, not her arm, which makes handling him a little awkward for her. Her best friends have been hovering around the two of them, and so have Gale and I as far as we have been able. They will be coming home Friday morning.

Anyhow, I sang him a lullaby the night he was born, not that he needed it -- he was pretty well drifting off anyhow. But even though my voice was cracking, I needed to sing it to him. It's by Fred Small, and is called "Everything Possible". This is the slightly altered version of the chorus that Dorian actually got:

You can be anybody you want to be,
You can love whomever you will.
You can travel any country where your heart leads,
And know I will love you still.
You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around,
Or find one special one,
And the only measure of your words and your deeds
Is the love you leave behind you when you're gone.

And this is the second song he heard from me, this morning when I stopped by to see him:

Rockabye Dorian, on the tree-top
When you are fed, your poop will go plop
When you have plopped, your diaper we'll change
And then you'll be cleaned up and happy again.

Okay, it doesn't quite rhyme, but it's his.

Dorian, if you are reading this, you already know your grandfather is a crazy old man who embarrasses the hell out of people. You'll live this one down too.

Essentialist Explanations, 14th edition

2008-05-04T15:04:00.002-04:00

As always, posted here. We are getting close to 1000 entries -- keep them coming in!

Eulogy

2008-04-25T02:11:00.002-04:00

The following was said of David Ricardo by Maria Edgeworth:

I never argued or discussed a question with any person who argues more fairly, or less for victory and more for truth. He gives full weight to every argument brought against him, and seems not to be on any side of the question for one instant longer than the conviction of his mind is on that side. It seems quite indifferent to him whether you find the truth or whether he finds it, provided it be found.

Or more concisely: He wanted to be right, whether or not he had been right.

Ricardo died at fifty-one. I myself am almost fifty, and if I were to die next year, I hope as much could truthfully be said of me.

On the word "bumblebee"

2008-03-19T10:30:00.002-04:00

The story of the word bumblebee is curious, but (contra Mr. Burns of the Simpsons) certainly doesn't lead back to a form like bumbled bee, in the way that ice cream leads back to iced cream, or the American form skim milk descends from the form skimmed milk still current elsewhere. The bee part is transparent, and there is a Middle English verb bomb(e)len, meaning to make a humming sound, presumably of imitative origin. So there you are.

However, it's clear that the older form was humble-bee, where hum(b)le is an intensive of hum, which is also presumably of imitative origin. Whether bumblebee is a new coinage based on bombelen, or whether it is an alteration of humble-bee by dissimilation, or a mixture of both, it's impossible to say.

But when we look in Pokorny's etymological dictionary of Indo-European for hum, we see it under the root kem²-, as expected by Grimm's Law, and with Lithuanian reflexes in k- and Slavic ones in ch- that also refer to humming noises and bees. That certainly does not sound imitative to me -- the sharp sound of [k] is nothing like a bee hum, which has no beginning and no end. So in the end the obvious imitative nature of bumblebee leads to a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

And there remains at least one dangling oddity: Pokorny also lists an Old Persian -- at least I think that's what "Ai." means -- reflex meaning "yak". Yaks grunt (as the Linnaean name Bos grunniens indicates), they don't hum, and what is Old Persian doing with an inherited word for "yak" anyhow? English, like most modern languages, has borrowed its word from Tibetan.

Elements or attributes?

2008-03-03T14:22:00.004-05:00

Here's my contribution to the "elements vs. attributes" debate:

General points:

Attributes are more restrictive than elements, and all designs have some elements, so an all-element design is simplest -- which is not the same as best.
In a tree-style data model, elements are typically represented internally as nodes, which use more memory than the strings used to represent attributes. Sometimes the nodes are of different application-specific classes, which in many languages also takes up memory to represent the classes.
When streaming, elements are processed one at a time (possibly even piece by piece, depending on the XML parser you are using), whereas all the attributes of an element and their values are reported at once, which costs memory, particularly if some attribute values are very long.
Both element content and attribute values need to be escaped, so escaping should not be a consideration in the design.
In some programming languages and libraries, processing elements is easier; in others, processing attributes is easier. Beware of using ease of processing as a criterion. In particular, XSLT can handle either with equal facility.
If a piece of data should usually be shown to the user, use an element; if not, use an attribute. (This rule is often violated for one reason or another.)
If you are extending an existing schema, do things by analogy to how things are done in that schema.
Sensible schema languages, meaning RELAX NG, treat elements and attributes symmetrically. Older and cruder schema languages tend to have better support for elements.

Using elements:

If something might appear more than once in a data model, use an element rather than introducing attributes with names like part1, part2, part3 ....
If order matters between two pieces of data, use elements for them: attributes are inherently unordered.
If a piece of data has, or might have, its own substructure, use it in an element: getting substructure into an attribute is always messy. Similarly, if the data is a constituent part of some larger piece of data, put it in an element.
An exception to the previous rule: multiple whitespace-separated tokens can safely be put in an attribute. In principle, the separator can be anything, but schema-language validators are currently only able to handle whitespace, so it's best to stick with that.
If a piece of data extends across multiple lines, use an element: XML parsers will change newlines in attribute values into spaces.
If a piece of data is in a natural language, put it in an element so you can use the xml:lang attribute to label the language being used. Some kinds of natural-language text, like Japanese, also require annotations that are conventionally represented using child elements; right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic may similarly require child elements to manage bidirectionality properly.

Using attributes:

If the data is a code from an enumeration, code list, or controlled vocabulary, put it in an attribute if possible. For example, language tags, currency codes, medical diagnostic codes, etc. are best handled as attributes.
If a piece of data is really metadata on some other piece of data (for example, representing a class or role that the main data serves, or specifying a method of processing it), put it in an attribute if possible.
In particular, if a piece of data is an ID (either a label or a reference to a label elsewhere in the document) for some other piece of data, put the identifying piece in an attribute. When it's a label, use the name xml:id for the attribute.
Hypertext references (hrefs) are conventionally put in attributes.
If a piece of data is applicable to an element and any descendant elements unless it is overridden in some of them, it is conventional to put it in an attribute. Well-known examples are xml:lang, xml:space, xml:base, and namespace declarations.
If terseness is really the most important thing, use attributes, but consider gzip compression instead -- it works very well on documents with highly repetitive structures.

Michael Kay says:

Beginners always ask this question.
Those with a little experience express their opinions passionately.
Experts tell you there is no right answer.

I say:

Newbies always ask:
     "Elements or attributes?
Which will serve me best?"
     Those who know roar like lions;
     Wise hackers smile like tigers.
          --a tanka, or extended haiku

Final words:

Break any or all of these rules rather than create a crude, arbitrary, disgusting mess of a design if that's what following them slavishly would give you. In particular, random mixtures of attributes and child elements are hard to follow and hard to use, though it often makes good sense to use both when the data clearly fall into two different groups such as simple/complex or metadata/data.

Which characters are excluded in XML 5th Edition names?

2008-02-07T15:44:00.001-05:00

The list of allowed name characters in the XML 1.0 Fifth Edition looks pretty miscellaneous. The clue to what's really going on is that unlike the rule of earlier XML 1.0 versions, where everything not permitted was forbidden, now everything that is not forbidden is permitted. (I emphasize that this is only about name characters: every character is and always has been permitted in running text and attribute values except the ASCII controls.)

So what's forbidden, and why?

The ASCII control characters and their 8-bit counterparts. Obviously.
The ASCII and Latin-1 symbolic characters, with the exceptions of hyphen, period, colon, underscore, and middle dot, which have always been permitted in XML names. These characters are commonly used as syntax delimiters either in XML itself or in other languages, and so are excluded.
The Greek question mark, which looks like a semicolon and is canonically equivalent to a regular semicolon.
The General Punctuation block of Unicode, with the exceptions of the zero-width joiner, zero-width non-joiner, undertie, and character-tie characters, which are required in certain languages to spell words correctly. Various kinds of blank spaces and assorted punctuation don't make sense in names.
The various Unicode symbols blocks reserved for "pattern syntax", from U+2190 to U+2BFF. These characters should never appear in identifiers of any sort, as they are reserved for use as syntactic delimiters in future languages that exploit non-ASCII syntax. Many are assigned, some are not.
The Ideographic Description Characters block, which is used to describe (not create) uncoded Chinese characters.
The surrogate code units (which don't correspond to Unicode characters anyhow) and private-use characters. Using the latter, in names or otherwise, is very bad for interoperability.
The Plane 0 non-characters at U+FDD0 to U+FDEF, U+FFFE, and U+FFFF. The non-characters on the other planes are allowed, not because they are a good idea, but to simplify implementation.

Note that the undertie and character tie, the European digits 0-9, and the diacritics in the Combining Characters block are not permitted at the start of a name. Other characters could have sensibly been excluded, particularly combining characters that don't happen to be in the Combining Characters block, but it simplifies implementation to permit them.

This list is intentionally sparse. The new Appendix J gives a simplified set of non-binding suggestions for choosing names that are actually sensible.

Who do I work for?

2008-02-06T16:56:00.000-05:00

Well, a company that provides an email service with about 10⁷ users, and a calendar service with about 10⁶ users, and a news syndicate with about 10⁴ sources, and a video sharing facility that displays about 10⁸ video views a day, and an image index with about 10⁹ images. And it connects about 10⁵ advertisers with about 10⁵ online publishers and 10³ offline ones, and provides online wallets for about 10⁶ buyers and 10⁵ sellers, and is localized in about 10² interface languages, and employs about 10⁴ people, and is rated 10⁰ in the list of best companies to work for. And it is not best known for any of these things.

Who are they?

10¹⁰⁰.

Justice at last, part two

2008-02-06T11:07:00.000-05:00

The Fifth Edition of XML 1.0 is now a Proposed Edited Recommendation.

So what, you say. Ho hum, you say. A bunch of errata folded in to a new edition, you say. No real change here, you say.

But no, not at all, but quite otherwise. There's a big change here, assuming this PER gets past the W3C membership vote and becomes a full W3C Recommendation. There's something happening here, and what it is is eminently clear.

Justice is coming at last to XML 1.0.

For a long time, the characters used in the markup of an XML document -- element names, attribute names, processing instruction targets, and so on -- have been limited to those that were allowed in Unicode 2.0, which was issued in July 1996. If you wanted your element names in English, or French, or Arabic, or Hindi, or Mandarin Chinese, all was good. But if you wanted them in the national languages of Sri Lanka, or Eritrea, or Cambodia, or in Cantonese Chinese, to say nothing of lots and lots of minority languages, you were simply out of luck -- forever.

Not fair, people.

I tried fixing this the right way, by pushing the XML Core WG of the W3C to issue XML 1.1. It acquired some additional cruft along the way, some good, some in hindsight bad. It was roundly booed and even more roundly ignored. In particular, at least one 800-pound gorilla voted against it at W3C and refused to implement it.

Now it's being done the wrong way. We are simply extending the set of legal name characters to almost every Unicode character, relying on document authors and schema authors not to be idiots about it. Is that an incompatible change to XML 1.0 well-formedness? Hell yes. Is any existing XML 1.0 document going to become not well-formed? Hell no. We learned our lesson on that one.

Who supports this? I won't name names, but XML parser authors and distributors from gorillas to gibbons have been consulted in advance this time, and there are no screaming objections. Some will probably provide an option to turn Fifth Edition support on, others will turn it on by default. Unlike XML 1.1 support, this is actually a simplification: the big table of legal characters in Appendix B just isn't needed any more.

"Hot diggity (or however you say that in Amharic). When can I start using this?" Not so fast. First the W3C has to vote it in -- if they don't, all bets are off. Then implementations have to spread through the XML ecosystem, including not only development but deployment. It'll take years. But it only has to be done once, for all the writing systems that aren't in Unicode yet will all Just Work when they do get implemented.

Ask not what you can do for XML, but what XML can do for you.

It's morning in the world.

(Oh yes: Send comments before 16 May 2008 to xml-editor@w3.org.)

Justice at last

2008-02-06T10:50:00.001-05:00

There was an old man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter Nan
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

The pair of them went to Manhasset,
The man and his Nan with the asset.
Pa followed them there
But they left in a tear
And as for the asset, Manhasset.

He followed them next to Pawtucket,
Nan and her man and the bucket.
Pa said to the man,
"You can keep my sweet Nan",
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.

(This works best if you pronounce "Pa" as "paw", assuming you make any difference between the two -- in New England, there definitely is. If your "aw" sounds like "ah", you can hear the "aw" sound the rest of us use by saying "Awwwwwwwwww!")

Here's the trio's route:
note the doubling back
to avoid pursuit.

View Larger Map

Taggle, a TagSoup in C++, available now

2008-01-31T00:57:00.000-05:00

A company called JezUK has released Taggle, which is a straight port of TagSoup 1.2 to C++. It's a part of Arabica, a C++ XML toolkit providing SAX, DOM, XPath, and partial XSLT. I have no connection with JezUK (except apparently as source of inspiration).

The author says the code is alpha-quality now, so he'd appreciate lots of testers to shake out bugs. C++ users, go to it! Having a C++ port will be a real enhancement for TagSoup.

The code is currently in public Subversion: you can fetch it with svn co svn://jezuk.dnsalias.net/jezuk/arabica/branches/tagsoup-port.

Revised home page

2008-01-10T02:53:00.000-05:00

I've rewritten my home page at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan. Some interesting old things that were on my site but had no pointers from there now have little writeups, and I've reorganized it a bit -- but it's still the ultimate minimalist home page, no pictures or graphics.

TagSoup 1.2 released at long last

2008-01-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

There are a great many changes, most of them fixes for long-standing bugs, in this release. Only the most important are listed here; for the rest, see the CHANGES file in the source distribution. Very special thanks to Jojo Dijamco, whose intensive efforts at debugging made this release a usable upgrade rather than a useless mass of undetected bugs.

As noted above, I have changed the license to Apache 2.0.
The default content model for bogons (unknown elements) is now ANY rather than EMPTY. This is a breaking change, which I have done only because there was so much demand for it. It can be undone on the command line with the --emptybogons switch, or programmatically with parser.setFeature(Parser.emptyBogonsFeature, true).
The processing of entity references in attribute values has finally been fixed to do what browsers do. That is, a reference is only recognized if it is properly terminated by a semicolon; otherwise it is treated as plain text. This means that URIs like foo?cdown=32&cup=42 are no longer seen as containing an instance of the ∪ character (whose name happens to be cup).
Several new switches have been added:
- --doctype-system and --doctype-public force a DOCTYPE declaration to be output and allow setting the system and public identifiers.
- --standalone and --version allow control of the XML declaration that is output. (Note that TagSoup's XML output is always version 1.0, even if you use --version=1.1.)
- --norootbogons causes unknown elements not to be allowed as the document root element. Instead, they are made children of the default root element (the html element for HTML).
The TagSoup core now supports character entities with values above U+FFFF. As a consequence, the HTML schema now supports all 2,210 standard character entities from the 2007-12-14 draft of XML Entity Definitions for Characters, except the 94 which require more than one Unicode character to represent.
The SAX events startPrefixMapping and endPrefixMapping are now being reported for all cases of foreign elements and attributes.
All bugs around newline processing on Windows should now be gone.
A number of content models have been loosened to allow elements to appear in new and non-standard (but commonly found) places. In particular, tables are now allowed inside paragraphs, against the letter of the W3C specification.
Since the span element is intended for fine control of appearance using CSS, it should never have been a restartable element. This very long-standing bug has now been fixed.
The following non-standard elements are now at least partly supported: bgsound, blink, canvas, comment, listing, marquee, nobr, rbc, rb, rp, rtc, rt, ruby, wbr, xmp.
In HTML output mode, boolean attributes like checked are now output as such, rather than in XML style as checked="checked".
Runs of < characters such as << and <<< are now handled correctly in text rather than being transformed into extremely bogus start-tags.

Download the TagSoup 1.2 jar file here. It's about 87K long.
Download the full TagSoup 1.2 source here. If you don't have zip, you can use jar to unpack it.
Download the current CHANGES file here.

Down vs. across

2007-08-19T10:17:00.000-04:00

This turn-of-the-eighteenth-century poem reads one way down, another way across. The "down" version was politically orthodox back in the reign of George I, whereas the "across" version represented treasonous Jacobite sympathies.

I love with all my heart	The Tory party here
The Hanoverian part	Most hateful doth appear
And for their settlement	I ever have denied
My conscience gives consent	To be on James's side
Most glorious is the cause	To be with such a king
To fight for George's laws	Will Britain's ruin bring
This is my mind and heart	In this opinion I
Though none should take my part	Resolve to live and die

Third normal form for classes

2007-08-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

It's been wisely and wittily said, though I don't know who by, that a relation is in third normal form (3NF) when all its fields depend on "the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key". This is generally considered to be a Good Thing, though people do deviate from it for the sake of performance (or what they think performance will be -- but that's a whole different rant).

I'd like to introduce an analogous notion of 3NF for classes in object-oriented programming. A class is in 3NF when its public methods depend on the state, the whole state, and nothing but the state. By state here I mean all the private instance variables of the class, without regard to whether they are mutable or not. A public method depends on the state if it either directly refers to an instance variable, or else invokes a private method that depends on the state.

So what do I mean, "the state, the whole state, and nothing but the state"? Three things:

If a method doesn't depend on the state at all, it shouldn't be a method of the class. It should be placed in a utility class, or (in C++) outside the class altogether, or at the very least marked as a utility method. It's really a customer of the class, and leaving it out of the class improves encapsulation. (Scott Meyers makes this point in Item 23 of Effective C++, Third Edition.)
Furthermore, if the state can be partitioned into two non-overlapping sub-states such that no methods depend on both of them, then the class should be refactored into two classes with separate states. This also improves encapsulation, as the methods in one class can now be changed without regard to the internals of the other class.
Finally, if the behavior of a method depends on something outside the state, encapsulation is once again broken — from the other direction this time. Such a method is difficult to test, since you cannot know what parts of what classes it depends on except by close examination.

At any rate, this is my current understanding. My Celebes Kalossi model grew out of considering how methods and state belong together, and this is the practical fruit of it.

Update: I didn't talk about protected methods, protected instance variables, or subclassing. The subclasses of a class are different from its customers, and need to be considered separately if any protected methods or state exist. I am a firm believer in "design for subclassing or forbid it": if you follow the rules above, then instead of subclassing a class, you can simply replace it with a work-alike that has different state while taking no risks of breaking it. (You probably need to make the original class implement some interface.)

Furthermore, the static methods of a class have static state, and the same analysis needs to be performed with respect to them.

Comments?

Extreme Markup 2007: Friday

2007-08-14T14:29:00.000-04:00

This is a report on Extreme Markup 2007 for Friday.

Friday was a half-day, but Extreme 2007 saved the best of all its many excellent papers for almost the last. Why is it that we repeat the "content over presentation" mantra so incessantly, but throw up our hands when it comes to tables? All the standard table models -- HTML, TEI, CALS -- are entirely presentational: a table is a sequence of rows, each of which is a sequence of cells. There are ways to give each column a label, but row labels are just the leftmost cell, perhaps identified presentationally but certainly not in a semantic way. If have a table of sales by region in various years, pulling out North American sales for 2005 with XPath is no trivial matter. Why must this be? Inquiring minds (notably David Birnbaum's) want to know.

David's proposal, really more of a meta-proposal, is to use semantic markup throughout. Mark up the table using an element expressing the sort of data, perhaps salesdata. Provide child elements naming the regions and years, and grandchildren showing the legal values of each. Then each cell in the table is simply a sales element whose value is the sales data, and whose attributes signify the region and year that it is data for. That's easy to query, and not particularly hard to XSLT into HTML either. (First use of the verb to XSLT? Probably not.)

Of course, there is no reason to stop at two categories. You can have a cube, or a hypercube, or as many dimensions as you want. The OLAP community knows all about the n-cubes you get from data mining, and the Lotus Improv tradition, now proundly carried on at quantrix.com (insert plug from highly satisfied customer here) has always been about presenting such n-cubes cleverly as spreadsheets.

The conference proper ended in plenary session with work by Henry Thompson of W3C that extends my own TagSoup project, which provides a stream of SAX events based on nasty, ugly HTML, to have a different back end. TagSoup is divided into a lexical scanner for HTML, which uses a state machine driven by a private markup language, and a rectifier, which is responsible for outputting the right SAX events in the right order. It's a constraint on TagSoup that although it can retain tags, it always pushes character content through right away, so it is streaming (modulo the possibility of a very large start-tag).

Henry's PyXup replaces the TagSoup rectifier, which uses another small markup language specifying the characteristics of elements, with his own rectifier using a pattern-action language. In TagSoup, you can say what kind of element an element is and something about its content model, but you can't specify the actions to be taken without modifying the code. (The same is technically true of the lexical scanner, but the list of existing actions is pretty generic.) In PyXup, you can specify actions to take, some of which take arguments which can be either constants or parts of the input stream matched by the associated pattern. This is a huge win, and I wish I'd thought of it when designing TagSoup. The question period involved both Henry and I giving answers to lots of the questions.

To wrap up we had, as we always have (it's a tradition) a talk by Michael Sperberg-McQueen. These talks are not recorded, nor are any notes or slides published, still less a full paper. You just hafta be there to appreciate the full (comedic and serious) impact. The title of this one was "Topic maps, RDF, and mushroom lasagne"; the relevance of the last item was that if you provide two lasagnas labeled "Meat" and "Vegetarian", most people avoid the latter, but if it's labeled "Mushroom" (or some other non-privative word) instead, it tends to get eaten about as much as the meat item). The talk was, if I have to nutshell it, about the importance of doing things rather than fighting about how to do them. At least that was my take-away; probably everyone in the room had a different view of the real meaning.

That's all, folks. Hope to see you in Montreal next August at Extreme Markup 2008.

Extreme Markup 2007: Thursday

2007-08-13T15:03:00.000-04:00

This is a report on Extreme Markup 2007 for Thursday.

My first talk of the day was on a fast XSLT processor written in C++ and designed for large documents (more than 2 gigs) and high performance. Documents are loaded into memory using event records, which are essentially just reifications of SAX events, with parent and next-sibling links. Because internal links are record numbers rather than raw pointers, the internal limit is 2 GB of events rather than bytes (I think that's the reason). The authors did an interesting experiment with compiling multiple XPaths into a single DFA and executing them in parallel, but found that overall performance was not really improved by this additional complexity.

The next presentation was by Eric Freese, about chatbots and RDF. The chatbot here uses AIML, a language for representing chat scripts, and enhances it by allowing RDF triples (notably Dublin Core and FOAF information) to be stuffed into the bot so it knows a lot more about a lot more. The bot, called ALICE, follows the classical Eliza/Doctor tradition; it applies rewrite rules to the input to produce its output. (Oddly, Eric had believed that Eliza was hardcoded rather than script-driven until I pointed out otherwise during the comment period; to watch the Doctor script in action, fire up emacs and type "Alt-x doctor", or type "Alt-x psychoanalyze-pinhead" and hit Ctrl-G after a few seconds.)

James David Mason told us all about the application of topic maps to very complex systems, in this case pipe organs. Organs are even more complicated than they appear to be from the outside. (The reviewers, we were told, tended to say things like "I wouldn't attend this talk because I'm not interested in organs"; I think they missed the point. There were, however, wonderful multimedia interruptions of the talk in the form of excerpts from music being played on the organs under discussion. Usually James tells us censored versions of stories from Y-12, the secret national laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (They're starting to make things with FOGBANK again after many years of not using it, and it's a big concern.) This time he talked about his non-work instead of non-talking about his work; it was great.

Next I heard some folks from Portugal talking about digital preservation of the Portuguese national and local archives. They use PDF/A to preserve documents of all sorts, but they also need to preserve the contents of relational databases, with tables, views, triggers, stored procedures, and all. Dumping them as SQL has serious portability problems, so they decided to carefully define a database markup language to handle all the metadata as well as the data itself. That way, information can be authentically transferred from one database engine to another without loss.

The last (and plenary) presentation of the day had not a speaker but "listeners" from W3C, OASIS, and ISO, asking what things should be standardized in addition to what we already have. Audience members concentrated on processes for stabilizing and withdrawing standards (ISO has this, the other two don't), the desire for more and earlier feedback processes and fewer faits accomplis, and other meta-issues. There were a few requests for additional concrete standards; unfortunately, I don't have notes. The session ended without too many real fights.

On Wednesday I talked about the nocturne on naming, but it was actually held on Thursday. Much of it was spent discussing the FRBR model of works, expressions, manifestations, and items. For computer-document purposes, a work is the abstract work, e.g. Hamlet; an expression is a particular kind realization, like a particular edition of the text or recording of a performance; a manifestation is the expression in a particular format such as .txt, .html, .doc, or .avi; and an item is a particular copy residing on a particular server, disk, or tape. Ideally, there should be separate URIs for each of these things.

A commenter asked what about topic maps I was defending: primarily the clear topic-map distinction between a URI used to name a document (a subject locator in topic maps jargon) and the same URI used to refer to the subject matter of the document (a subject indicator). Theoretically, RDF uses different URIs for these separate purposes, but that leads to paradoxes -- the document you get when you GET a subject indicator, what's the URI that identifies that? Furthermore, how do you tell which is which? In the topic-maps data model, a topic simply has some URIs which are locators and others which are indicators.

Extreme Markup 2007: Wednesday

2007-08-13T12:38:00.000-04:00

This is a report on Extreme Markup 2007 for Wednesday.

The first talk of the morning was by David Dubin, and was about an alternative approach to reifying RDF statements so that one can make RDF claims about existing RDF statements (such as who made them, and where and when, and whether and how much you should believe them). The classical approach is to model the statement as a node, and then assert Subject, Predicate, and Object properties about this node. David's approach involves using the XML/RDF for the claim itself as the object of RDF claims. I can't say I understood what he was driving at very well: it seems to me that the main deficiency with RDF that makes reification necessary is that you can't state an RDF sentence without also claiming that it is true. This is convenient in simple cases, but annoying when you want to do meta-RDF.

Paolo Marinelli analyzed alternative approaches to streaming validation. W3C XML Schema provides what he calls a STEVE streaming discipline: at the Start tag, you know the Type of an element, and at the End tag, you can make a Validity Evaluation. XML Schema 1.1 proposes to provide various kinds of conditional validation using a subset of XPath 1.0, but does not (in the current draft) provide the full power of what is actually streamable in XPath.

The core of this paper is the classification of XPath expressions into various axes and operations, specifying when you can determine the value of the expression and at what memory cost ("constant" and "linear-depth" mean streamable, "linear-size" means not streamable). See Table 1 in the paper for the details.

Finally, Paolo proposes an extended streamability model called LATVIA, in which there are no restrictions on such XPaths, and schemas are marked streamable or non-streamable by their authors (or their authors' tools, more likely). The difficulty here is that implementors' tools that depend on knowing element types early will wind up being unable to process certain schemas, which will result in a process of negotiation: "Can't you make this streamable?" "Well, no, because ..." "That will cost you one billion stars."

Moody Altamimi gave a superb talk on normalizing mathematical formulae. There are two flavors of MathML, Presentation and Content; the former is about layout (it's close to LaTeX conceptually), the latter is meant to express meaning, and is closer to Lisp. Even in Content MathML, there will be lots of false negatives because of non-significant differences in the way authors express things: it's all one whether you say an integration is from m to n, or whether it's over the interval [m,n], but Content MathML uses two different notations for this. Similarly, we can presume that + represents an associative operation, and do some transforms to unify (+ a b c), (+ (+ a b) c), and (+ a (+ b c)). On the other hand, we don't want to go overboard and unify (+ a 0) with a; if the author wrote "a + 0", presumably there was a good reason.

The next talk I attended was about hierarchical processing in SQL database engines, and was the worst presentation of the conference: it was a marketing presentation rather than a technical one ("their products bad, our product good"), and furthermore it was a marketing presentation that was all technical details, and as such exceedingly boring. Furthermore, it assumed a detailed ANSI SQL background rather than an XML one. I'll read the paper, because I'm interested in the subject, but I'm not very hopeful.

Liam Quin of the W3C told us all about XQuery implementations, and which ones support what and how well, and what kinds of reasons you'd have for choosing one over the other, all without making any specific recommendations himself. He said that in general conformance was good across the major implementations, and performance depended too heavily on the specifics of the query to generalize.

At this point I got pretty burned out and skipped all the remaining regular talks for the day, except for Ann Wrightson's excellent overview of model-driven XML, why the instance documents are practically unreadable (too high a level of meta-ness, basically), and what can be done (not much, short of defining local views that map into the fully general modeled versions). I spent a fair amount of time in the poster room, though I didn't take notes. I also attended the nocturne that evening on URIs and names, where I defended the Topic Maps view of things with vim, vigor, and vitality.

Extreme Markup 2007: Tuesday

2007-08-13T11:24:00.001-04:00

This is a report on Extreme Markup 2007 for Tuesday.

Tuesday started, as is traditional, with a welcome from James David Mason, Steve Newcomb, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, all luminaries of the XML community, followed by a brief practical introduction by Debby LaPeyre (where are the bathrooms? where is the coffee? who can help you?) and the keynote speech by Tommie Usdin. Debbie and Tommie have been running this conference for years, and are now doing so directly through their company, Mulberry Technologies, rather than via IDEAlliance -- a parting of the ways with clear benefits for both sides, I believe.

Tommie's talk, "Riding the wave, riding for a fall, or just along for the ride" was about a lot of things, but what drew my attention was the question of edge cases. 95% of all XML, we are told, is not written by human beings but generated as part of Web Services calls. And then again, depending on who you ask, 95% of XML is RSS feeds. We can expect the list of 95%s to grow in future. Or perhaps 95% is really human-authored content after all. Who knows?

Next, still in plenary session, Tom Passin presented on the practical use of RDF for system modeling. The interesting feature here for me was an indented-plain-text representation of RDF that can be rewritten by a simple Python program as RDF/XML. It takes advantage of the fact that people naturally write lists, naturally indent the subpoints (which can be modeled as RDF properties), and can easily extend the indentation to add values. Here's an example from his paper:

Organization::
   rdf:about::OFS
   rdfs:label::Office for Federated Systems
   member-of::
      rdf:resource::Federated-Umbrella-Organization

The final plenary session was Michael Kay, the author of the excellent XSLT processor Saxon, on optimizing XSLT using an XSLT transformation XSLT is written as a tree, and it's also an excellent language for transforming trees, and optimization is mostly about transforming one tree into another. For example, an expression of the form count(X) = 0 in XQuery can be rewritten as empty(X); it's a lot faster if you don't have to count thousands of Xs just to determine whether there are any. (Saxon treats XQuery as just another syntax for XSLT 2.0.)

Michael's approach involves having lots of simple rewrite rules of this type, and then iterating over the list until no more changes are being made. That's important, because one optimization may expose the possibility of another optimization being made. Sometimes it pays to recognize a general XSLT expression as a special case, and provide a processor-specific extension that provides that special case efficiently. For this reason, the rewrites are as a whole processor-specific. Michael talked in particular about the case of having lots of boolean-valued attributes on an element whose content model is known. Rewriting can cleverly pack those attributes into a single integer-valued attribute with special functions to test bit combinations.

Update: Michael also pointed out that XSLT optimizers don't know anything about the data, unlike the built-in SQL query optimizers that databases use, and so have to make guesses about how much of what you're going to find in any input document. Someone asked if he had made any explorations in that direction: he said not as yet.

In the question period, Michael said that Saxon is moving more and more to generating JVM/CLR bytecodes rather than interpreting the decorated tree at runtime. Some cases are still difficult to make fast in generated code: for example, given the path $x/a/b/c/d/e, if $x is known to be a singleton, the results will already be in document order, but if not, a sort must be performed. This could obviously be compiled into conditional code, but it's messy and can lead to a combinatorial explosion as it interacts with other features. Deciding at run time is just easier.

Most of the remaining papers were given two at a time, although recognizable tracks don't really exist at Extreme. I went to see David Lee of Epocrates on getting content authored in MS Word into appropriate XML. The core of this talk was an extended lament on how authors insist on using Word; even if you provide specialized authoring tools, they compose in Word and then cut and paste, more or less incorrectly, into the specialized tool. Epocrates has tried a variety of strategies: Word styles (authors won't use them), tagged sections (authors screw them up), form fields (plaintext only, so authors delete them and type in rich text instead). In the end, they adopted Word tables as the safest and least corruptible approach. A few Word macros provide useful validations, and when the document is complete, a Word 2003 macro rewrites it using Word 2003 XML (unless it is already in that format). I pointed out that the approach of having authors use Word and saving in plain text was also viable, leaving all markup to be added by automated downstream procssing; David said that design was too simple for the complex documents his authors were creating.

Next I heard Michael Sperberg-McQueen on his particular flavor of overlap; I have nothing in particular to add to his paper, which is extremely accessible.

As a RELAX NG geek, I was interested to hear about Relaxed, a completely new implementation of RELAX NG and Schematron validation. Update: I forgot to mention that it also provides NVDL (which accounts for the name), a meta-schema language which dissects a document by namespace, local root element, or both, and passes different fragments of the document to different validators using different schemas. JNVDL uses the Sun Multi-Schema Validator to translate any other schema language you can think of into RELAX NG. You can try the validator online.

I should mention that this conference deliberately provides long breaks, a long lunch, and encourages in-the-halls discussion, one of the most important parts (some say the only important part) of any conference. So if I didn't attend the maximum possible number of talks, there were reasons for that. (Sometimes you just need to catch up on your email, too.)

Extreme Markup 2007: Monday

2007-08-13T10:34:00.001-04:00

This is a report on Extreme Markup 2007 for Monday.

Monday was not technically part of Extreme at all; it was a separate workshop called "International Workshop on Markup of Overlapping Structures 2007". Overlap is a special interest of mine: how to deal with marking up things like books, where you may want to preserve both the chapter/paragraph/sentence structure and chapter/page structure (or even just page structure, in books where the chapter boundary doesn't mean the beginning of a page). Bibles can add chapter/verse structure, and indeed one of the presenters was formerly with the Society of Biblical Literature.

I won't give details of the presentations: you will eventually be able to see them on the Extreme Markup site, and googling for LMNL, Trojan Horse markup, TexMecs, Goddag structures, and rabbit/duck grammars should provide more than enough information. I will, however, say a bit about how overlap is typically represented in XML, and then about the two different kinds of (or use cases for) overlap that this workshop identified.

A variety of techniques have been used to represent overlap, but work in the field is generally converging on using XML augmented with milestone elements. A milestone is an empty element that represents the start-tag or end-tag of a virtual element that can overlap with other virtual elements or the actual elements of the document. A milestone is tagged with an attribute to show whether it is meant to be seen as a start-tag or an end-tag, and how the start- and end-tags match up. So <foo sID="xyz"/> would indicate the beginning of a logical element, and <foo eID="xyz"/> would indicate the end. The xyz has no particular significance, but must be present in exactly one start milestone and one end milestone. This technique has the advantage that the virtual element's name is an element name, potentially belonging to a namespace. Clever XSLT processing can be used to convert real elements into virtual ones or (provided no overlap of real elements results) vice versa.

Overlap of the first kind descends from the old SGML CONCUR feature, and is basically about having multiple hierarchies over a single document, like the examples I gave above. Typically you want to be able to pull out each individual hierarchy as a well-formed XML expression without milestones, and then look at it or validate it or process it however you like. Often this is all that's needed for overlapping documents, and it's then a matter of deciding whether all the elements are to be milestones in the base form of the document, or whether some virtual elements (the most important ones) are left as real XML elements rather than milestones.

Overlap of the second kind cares about ranges rather than elements, interval arithmetic (and computational geometry) rather than trees and DAGs, inclusion rather than dominance. It's the kind that most interests me, and LMNL is in my highly biased opinion the state of the art here. If you want dominance information, you can mark it up using annotations (LMNL's broadened version of attributes), or just infer it from what ranges include what, but you aren't assumed to care about it: basic LMNL just has a simple list of ranges over text.

From 2:00 PM onward there was a kind of Quaker meeting, with people going to the mike and talking for 5 minutes. Originally there were speakers and audience members asking questions, but very quickly the discussion became general, as signaled by the audience mike being moved to the front of the room. (When you are in this situation, always use the mike: people with hearing aids can't hear you no matter how loud you yell.) Nothing new emerged here, but participants got to understand one another's viewpoints and systems pretty well. Extreme probably will do this workshop again in a few years, and some other kind of workshop (XML data binding was suggested) next year.

At the end of the day ...

2007-08-01T08:43:00.001-04:00

... it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Noogler

2007-07-31T14:44:00.000-04:00

I am one.

This is a personal blog. Nothing I say here represents the views of anyone else.

Lawrence of Arabia tells a tale

2007-06-26T14:23:00.000-04:00

Sunset came down, delightfully red, and after the feast the whole party lay round the outside coffee-hearth lingering under the stars, while Auda and others told us stories. In a pause I remarked casually that I had looked for Mohammed el Dheilan in his tent that afternoon, to thank him for the milch camel he had given me, but had not found him. Auda shouted for joy, till everybody looked at him; and then, in the silence which fell that they might learn the joke, he pointed to Mohammed sitting dismally beside the coffee mortar, and said in his huge voice:--

'Ho! Shall I tell why Mohammed for fifteen days has not slept in his tent?' Everybody chuckled with delight, and conversation stopped; all the crowd stretched out on the ground, chins in hands, prepared to take the good points of the story which they had heard perhaps twenty times. The women, Auda's three wives, Zaal's wife, and some of Mohammed's, who had been cooking, came across, straddling their bellies in the billowy walk which came of carrying burdens on their heads, till they were near the partition-curtain; and there they listened like the rest while Auda told at length how Mohammed had bought publicly in the bazaar at Wejh a costly string of pearls, and had not given it to any of his wives, and so they were all at odds, except in their common rejection of him.

The story was, of course, a pure invention -- Auda's elvish humour heightened by the stimulus of Revolt -- and the luckless Mohammed, who had dragged through the fortnight guesting casually with one or other of the tribesmen, called upon God for mercy, and upon me for witness that Auda lied. I cleared my throat solemnly. Auda asked for silence, and begged me to confirm his words.

I began with the introducing phrase of a formal tale: In the name of God the merciful, the loving-kind. We were six in Wejh. There were Auda, and Mohammed, and Zaal, Gasim el Shimt, Mufaddhi and the poor man (myself); and one night just before dawn, Auda said, 'Let us make a raid against the market'. And we said, 'in the name of God'. And we went; Auda in a white robe and a red head-cloth, and Kasim sandals of pieced leather; Mohammed in a silken tunic of 'seven kings' and barefoot; Zaal ... I forget Zaal. Gasim wore cotton, and Mufaddhi was in silk of blue stripes with an embroidered head-cloth. Your servant was as your servant.'

My pause was still with astonishment. This was a close parody of Auda's epic style; and I mimicked also his wave of the hand, his round voice, and the rising and dropping tone which emphasized the points, or what he thought were points, of his pointless stories. The Howeitat [tribe] sat silent as death, twisting their full bodies inside their sweat-stiffened shirts for joy, and staring hungrily at Auda; for they all recognized the original, and parody was a new art to them and to him. The coffee man, Mufaddhi, a Shammar refugee from the guilt of blood, himself a character, forgot to pile fresh thorns on his fire for fixity of listening to the tale.

I told how we left the tents, with a list of the tents, and how we walked down towards the village, describing every camel and horse we saw, and all the passers-by, and the ridges, 'all bare of grazing, for by God that country was barren. And we marched: and after we had marched the time of a smoked cigarette, we heard something, and Auda stopped and said, 'Lads, I hear something'. And Mohammed stopped and said, 'Lads, I hear something'. And Zaal, 'By God, you are right'. And we stopped to listen, and there was nothing, and the poor man said, 'By God, I hear nothing'. And Zaal said, 'By God, I hear nothing'. And Mohammed said, 'By God, I hear nothing'. And Auda said, 'By God, you are right'.

'And we marched and we marched, and the land was barren, and we heard nothing. And on our right hand came a man, a negro, on a donkey. The donkey was grey, with black ears, and one black foot, and on its shoulder was a brand like this' (a scrabble in the air), 'and its tail moved and its legs: Auda saw it, and said, 'By God, a donkey'. And Mohammed said, 'By the very God, a donkey and a slave'. And we marched. And there was a ridge, not a great ridge, but a ridge as great as from the here to the what-do-you-call-it (hi biliyeh el hok) that is yonder: and we marched to the ridge and it was barren. That land is barren: barren: barren.

'And we marched: and beyond the what-do-you-call-it there was a what-there-is as far as hereby from thence, and thereafter a ridge: and we came to that ridge, and went up that ridge: it was barren, all that land was barren: and as we came up that ridge, and were by the head of that ridge, and came to the end of the head of that ridge, by God, by my God, by very God, the sun rose upon us.'

It ended the session. Everyone had heard that sunrise twenty times, in its immense bathos; an agony piled up of linked phrases, repeated and repeated with breathless excitement by Auda to carry over for hours the thrill of a raiding story in which nothing happened; and the trivial rest of it was exaggerated the degree which made it like one of Auda's tales; and yet, also, the history of the walk to market at Wejh which many of us had taken. The tribe was in waves of laughter on the ground.

Auda laughed the loudest and longest, for he loved a jest upon himself; and the fatuousness of my epic had shown him his own sure mastery of descriptive action. He embraced Mohammed, and confessed the invention of the necklace. In gratitude Mohammed invited the camp to breakfast with him in his regained tent on the morrow, an hour before we started for the swoop on Akaba. We should have a sucking camel-calf boiled in sour milk by his wives: famous cooks, and a legendary dish!

Essentialist Explanations, 13th edition

2007-06-25T23:45:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the good folks at Metafilter, I have just updated my Essentialist Explanations page to its 13th edition, including (naturally) a new section entitled "Meta".

Summer haiku

2007-06-23T13:03:00.000-04:00

How gracefully she
inhaling the red roses
goes down on her knees.

Family felines

2007-05-24T14:50:00.000-04:00

(I know, it's Thursday, not Friday. So what.)

Katie sleeping

And what do you want?

Okay, I'm awake now. Can I help you?

It was not my catnip. I'm innocent, innocent I tell you....

A shell script mini-clinic

2007-04-26T12:04:00.001-04:00

On one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, someone posted the following Unix shell script as a wrapper for a program which unfortunately littered the current directory with temporary files which it did not remove. (Because this post is not about the faults of that program, I've replaced the reference to it in the fourth line of the script).

#!/bin/bash
pushd . > /dev/null
cd /tmp
some-program $@
popd > /dev/null

The author added, "I'm sure there's a better way to write the script, but this would do the trick." So it does. However, the code exhibits a number of misunderstandings of how shell scripts work that I think are worth clarifying.

The first and fifth lines are used to preserve and restore the current working directory. However, a script (or any Unix process) always has its own working directory; changing the working directory in a script does not affect the caller of the script in any way. This is not true for shell startup scripts like .login, .profile, and .bashrc, or for Windows .bat and .cmd files, all of which should be careful not to permanently change the current working directory.

So the first improvement is to remove the first and fifth lines entirely. Since these are the only parts dependent on the particular shell being run, namely bash, it is now possible to change the first line to read #!/bin/sh. On Linux and Cygwin, this is a distinction without a difference, but on Solaris and BSD Unixes, sh is a different shell from bash, and less of a resource hog; on older operating system versions, bash may not even be present. Therefore, it's always best practice to write simple shell scripts like this one as portably as possible, running them with sh whenever you can. (Of course, there is no reason to avoid bash-specific features in full-fledged bash programs, where you are using bash as a programming language like Perl or Python.)

Lastly, using $@ to mean "all the arguments" is unsafe if any of the arguments might contain a space character. Instead, use "$@". For the same reason, $* should be avoided entirely, unless you want to reparse the arguments according to whatever whitespace they contain. The distinction doesn't happen to matter in this script, but it's a very good habit to get into in general, because some day you will have to process a file (possibly coming from Windows or the Mac) with a space in its name, and then your script will break embarrassingly.

"Who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?"

2007-04-24T10:25:00.000-04:00

--attr. Adolf Hitler, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa

We do.

Ava Cowan Foxy

2007-04-23T17:00:00.000-04:00

Here is a condensed version of my web site, found in the Google cache of a server which is apparently down. I've neutered the links and forms, most of which referred to equally nonexistent resources.

Essentialist Explanations, 12th edition

2007-04-14T17:48:00.000-04:00

I've finally caught up with the incoming entries, and published the 12th edition of my page Essentialist Explanations, a list of "simplistic and often humorous" (Langmaker) explanations of the form "Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z." There are now 876 of them; new entries are always solicited, though it takes time for me to post them.

Read and enjoy.

Comments policy for Recycled Knowledge

2007-04-09T14:39:00.000-04:00

I reserve the right to remove comments from this blog for any reason or no reason. I will do so primarily in the attempt to maintain a civil tone here. So far this hasn't been necessary, and I hope it never will be. Of course, I will also remove anything that might get me in legal trouble or that I think is spam: so far I've done the latter but not the former.

TagSoup 1.1 released

2007-03-22T16:12:00.000-04:00

TagSoup 1.1 is now released at http://tagsoup.info. This release includes JAXP classes for those who want them. HTML comments have been completely revamped (the implementation has been broken for many releases), and a few other small bugs fixed. Do upgrade, if only for the comment handling.

Regularized Inglish: wordlists

2007-02-24T13:31:00.000-05:00

Here are some Regularized Inglish wordlists from Wijk.

The following words (from a list of the 1000 most frequent words) have the stressed vowel changed:

abuv, afternoone, agen, agenst, aul, aulmoste, aulreddy, aulso, aultho, aulways, amung, anuther, anser, eny, enything, ask, baul, bair (verb), bayr (noun), beutiful, beuty, becoz, becum, beloe, blud, bloe, branch, breik, bruther, braught, bild, bilding, bilt, bisness, bisy, bye (for "buy"), caul, can't, chance, chainge, Shicago, class, cullour/cullor, cum, cumming, command, cumpany, controel, cood, coodn't, cuntry, corse, cort, cuver, dance, dainger, ded, deth, demand, discuver, doo, duz, duzn't, dun, doen't, dor, dubble, erly, erth, yther/eether, Ingland, Inglish, enuff, example, ie (for "eye"), faul, flor, floe (for "flow"), foar (for "four"), frend, frunt, fooll (for "full"), guvernment, grant, grass, greit, groope, groe, haf, haul, hed, helth, herd (for "heard"), hart (for "heart"), heven, hevy, hight, insted, iorn, jurnal, knoe, knoen, knolledge, laf, lern, Lundon, looze, luv, loe, loer, mashien, meny, mesure, munney, munth, muther, moove(ment), nyther/neether, nun (for "none"), nuthing, wunce, wun, oenly, uther, aught (for "ought"), oen, peeple, plesant, plesure, pritty, proove, pooll (for "pull"), poot (for "put"), quorter, red (for "read"), reddy, receev, remoove, roel, sault, sed, ses, shoo, shood (for "should"), shoelder, shoe (for "show"), smaul, snoe, sum(thing,times), sun (for "son"), soel, spred, strainge, tauk, taul, tair, thare, tharefore, tho, thaught, thru, tuch, tord (for "toward"), trubble, too (for "two"), waul, wont (for "want"), wor (for "war"), worm (for "warm"), wos, wosn't, wosh, Woshington, wotch, wauter, wair, wether, whot(ever), whare, hoo, hoel, hoome (for "whom"), hooze, wooman, wimmen, wunder(ful), woen't, wurd, wurk, wurld, wood (for "would"), woodn't, yoo, yung, yoor(self), yoo'r, yoothe.

And here are the words that have an unstressed vowel changed. Most unstressed vowel spellings are left alone in Regularized Inglish, but these are changed to avoid confusion.

capten, certen, certenly, mounten, forren, felloe, folloe, folloeing, narroe, tomorroe, windoe, yelloe.

From the same list, changes involving adding or removing a final e:

afternoone, childe, wilde, behinde, finde, kinde, minde, winde (verb), sine (for "sign"), moste, poaste, bothe, truthe, coole, foode, foole, moone, roofe, roome, scoole, soone, gon, Europ, ar, wer, figur, promis, purpos, minut, hav, giv, liv, nativ, believ, leav, serv, twelv, themselvs.

And finally, words with changes in consonants:

caracter, dout, gard, onnour/onnor, our (for "hour"), iland, lissen, ov, offen, scoole, shugar, shure, studdy, sugest, sunn, winn.

Here are the analogous lists for the next most frequent 1000 words:

accumpany, ahed, aincient, eny(body,wun,way), arrainge, baught, boe, boel, bred, brekfast, brest, breth, braud, bery, boosh, cam (for "calm"), cassle, chaimber, clark/clerk, curnel, cumfort(able), cupple, currage, cuzin, daingerous, discuvery, disese, duzen, ern, everywhare, exchainge, faulen, faulse, flud, foek, faught, foarth, frend(ly,ship), foolly (for "fully"), glance, gloe, guvernor, greitly, groen, groth, hunney, improove, jurney, kee, lether, luvly, luver, mashienery, magazien, ment, utherwise, oe, oener, poliece, poar, prayr, poosh, quolity, quontity, quorrel, rainge, recaul, recuver, ruff, rute, roe, scaircely, serch, seeze, shoen, sloe (for "slow"), sloely, sum(wum,whot,where), saught, sorce, suthern, steddy, strainger, thare'z, thred, thretten, thruout, throe (for "throw"), throen, tung, tresure, unknoen, wonder (for "wander"), worn (for "warn"), welth, woolf, wunn (for "won"), wurker, wurry, wurse, wurship, wurst, wurthy, woonde, yoo'd, yoo'll, yoo'v.

automobiel, curten, equol, welcum, holloe, shaddoe, sorroe.

blinde, kindely, desine, worne, noone, shoote, smoothe, trooope, handsom, determin, engin, examin, imagin, purchase, favourit/favorit, immediat(ly), opposit, privat, senat, separat (adj.), havn't, activ, representativ, observ, ourselvs, preserv, reserv.

ashure, clime, Crist(ian,mas), det, onnest, leag, Lincon, sacrifise, summ, shurely, sord, Tomas, whissle.

These lists probably contain minor errors of transcription.

Regularized Inglish: theory

2007-02-24T13:11:00.000-05:00

I see I promised to post on Regularized Inglish (RI) back in 2005, but never got around to it. Here's a brief explanation.

Axel Wijk's Regularized Inglish is a massive multi-decade job (completed in the 1950s, so there's nothing available online about it) of analyzing practically every word in the language, figuring out what the complicated rules behind the spelling system really are, and identifying all the truly irregular words and proposing properly rule-governed spellings for them. English, e.g. is truly irregular in its first vowel only, and so it becomes Inglish.

The underlying principle of RI is that every spelling shall correspond to at most a few sounds, preferably only one; multiple spellings for a single sound, however, are tolerated. Thus -ough is kept for bough, but not for rough, through, plough, hiccough, hough, or borough. Why choose bough? In order to consistently apply the RI rule that says "gh has no effect on the pronunciation of any word".

In my opinion, Wijk goes a bit far in a few places: for example, he introduces dh for the sound of th in father in other than initial positions (the, not dhe) for very little gain; he sorts out long "a" into a as in fat and "aa" as in father; he changes s to z when pronounced that way, except in the plural of nouns (not nounz)and the third-person singular ending of verbs. I wouldn't bother with any of these changes, which have little impact on being able to pronounce words at sight.

But as reformed (not revolutionized) spellings go, RI is a Great Thing.

A haiku

2007-02-19T03:53:00.000-05:00

Quantum mechanics:
Which moves through the springtime pond?
Frog or a ripple?

This is post 200.

Tagsoup 1.0.4 released!

2007-02-19T03:47:00.000-05:00

Just a bug-fix release. See tagsoup.info.

The heart of Celebes Kalossi

2007-02-18T15:17:00.000-05:00

I'm finally ready to explain the central ideas of my object-oriented programming model Celebes Kalossi (read the linked post first for the terminology). I've been hanging fire on it for a long time over a terminological issue, which I've decided to just punt on.

In CK, there are two kinds of relationships between classes: subtyping and incorporation. Subtyping is like the relationship between a Java interface and its superinterface; incorporation is something like C++ private inheritance. These two concepts are intertwingled in various ways in various programming languages, but CK completely separates them. Every class subtypes one or more classes except for the root of the class hierarchy (if there is one); classes can incorporate zero or more other classes.

When you declare that class A subtypes class B, you mean that A (the subclass) has all the methods that are declared or defined public in B (the superclass) and all of B's superclasses, plus those declared or defined public in A itself. You are not saying that any of the definitions provided in B or its superclasses are or are not available in A, so there is no problem if a given method is public in more than one superclass. You are also suggesting that an instance of A is Liskov substitutable for an instance of B, although it is impossible to check this property mechanically. We call the public methods of A and its superclasses the interface of A.

When you declare that class C incorporates class D, on the other hand, you mean that the non-private methods defined in class D (the incorporated class) are effectively given the same definition in class C (the incorporating class). Provided that the methods in D have been properly declared in class C, they can be invoked on objects of class C just as if they had been defined as standard or public methods of class C. It does not matter if a method is defined in class D and declared in class C (which is C++ private inheritance) or vice versa. However, the fact that a method is public in class D does not make it public in class C unless it is declared public in class C or one of its superclasses: incorporation affects behavior but not interface.

For convenience, we say that a class subtypes itself and incorporates itself. Both incorporation and subtyping are transitive: class A subtypes class B's superclasses as well as class B itself, and classes incorporated by class D are implicitly incorporated by class C as well. All the methods in the incorporated classes of C are placed on an equal footing: it does not matter how they were incorporated. A loop in the subtype hierarchy specifies that all the types in the loop have the same interface; a loop in the incorporation hierarchy is ignored, so even if C incorporates D, D can also incorporate C. Note that an implementation may provided types which are outside the model: typical examples would be numeric types, strings, and exception objects.

If a method is declared in a class X or in any of the classes incorporated (directly or indirectly) by class X, it must also be defined exactly once in one of those classes. (If there are no definitions of some method, the class is abstract and must be declared as such.) If incorporating class Z would cause conflicts, CK provides for renaming or hiding unwanted methods when incorporating a class: class L can incorporate class M including specified methods (in which case all others are hidden), excluding specified methods, or renaming a method as a new name. Classes that incorporate L see the changed view.

There are no inheritance rules in CK, because there is no inheritance as such: if you want X to use the same implementation of method m as its superclass Y, then incorporate whichever class Z from which Y gets its implementation of method m. You can do the same thing for classes that are not related to you in the superclass hierarchy, or even for your subclasses if you really want to -- the model is nothing if not flexible.

I'll have another post, hopefully soon, about how CK might be implemented on the JVM or CLR.

TagSoup 1.0.3 released!

2007-02-03T22:54:00.000-05:00

For TagSoup users among my readers, there's a new release at http://tagsoup.info, providing control of the output encoding and fixing a few bugs.

If you aren't a user but think you might like to be, TagSoup is a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: poor, nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short. TagSoup is designed for people who have to process this stuff using some semblance of a rational application design. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML. TagSoup also includes a command-line processor that reads HTML files and can generate either clean HTML or well-formed XML that is a close approximation to XHTML.

Update: TagSoup 1.0.2 had some brown-paper-bag bugs, so I've released 1.0.3 as a replacement.

The old farts have it

2007-01-11T17:20:00.000-05:00

Age and treachery, it is said, beat youth and X every time. But what is X?

Googling suggests that this part of the proverb isn't very stable. I find: enthusiasm, skill, idealism, enthusiasm, innocence, inexperience and experience, endurance, exuberance, ability, virility, skills, reflexes, speed, talent, baggy pants, and a bad haircut.

Being a HAXEor

2006-11-28T17:39:00.000-05:00

(thanks to d8uv for the title)

I usually describe myself as an "'ex' troglodyte", because I prefer the Unix line editor ex(1) to all other text editors. This makes people look at me like I'm something they found by turning over a rock, but what do I care?

(I know that ed(1) is the standard text editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little minimalism for a little convenience.)

Anyhow, in the tradition of Tim Bray's MARS, I will now say that I make my web site with HAXE, standing for HTML, Apache, and ex (reversed for euphony and cuteness).

Update: Though I don't like cokebottle editors, much of what's said in The Case For Emacs is relevant to me. I don't use ex(1), it is part of me.

"Irrumabo vos et pedicabo"

2006-11-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

In my first year of college, long ago,
I took a class on Ovid and Catullus.
One of the sexual poems I found confusing,
and the book we were using
was quite devoid of commentary on it,
grammatical or otherwise.

So at the next class, I asked my professor
what the poet meant by such-and-such.
He was hesitating, doubtful, maybe-yes-maybe-no.
Yet at the following meeting of the class,
he was entirely changed:
he explained forthrightly just how the poem worked.

I could not understand the sudden change
until I looked about the studentry
and saw the only female student
absent that day.
I was shocked and outraged --
naïve nerd from a feminist family that I was --
to think that a professor! of the liberal arts!
and of Latin of all things! could be so sexist,
so crude, so utterly indifferent to his duties
to all his students.

Many years later, it occurred to me to wonder
if he had sunk so low as to ask her
to be absent that day so that he could answer my questions.
All the worse, I thought.
All the worse.

Looking back today, I think:
perhaps he was, poor man, in a cleft stick,
caught between the fear of being accused of harassment
by the woman for openly discussing sex in class,
and the fear of having his dean (who happened to be my mother)
coming down on him for neglecting the questions
of her precious darling (little did he know
that while she might have disapproved,
she would never have punished him for that --
my mother believed in justice).

It's a hell of a thing
when students can't learn
for fear or for shame
what the poets sing.

An annoying ambiguity about which nothing can be done now

2006-11-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

The phrase "COMBINING DOUBLE" in a Unicode character can mean either of two things. Sometimes the diacritical mark is doubled with respect to some other mark:

U+030B COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT ̋
U+030E COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE ABOVE ̎
U+030F COMBINING DOUBLE GRAVE ACCENT ̏
U+0333 COMBINING DOUBLE LOW LINE ̳
U+033F COMBINING DOUBLE OVERLINE ̿
U+0348 COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE BELOW ͈
U+035A COMBINING DOUBLE RING BELOW ͚
U+20E6 COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE OVERLAY ⃦

But sometimes it means that the mark extends over two characters, the one it applies to and the following one:

U+035D COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE ͝
U+035C COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW ͜
U+035E COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON ͞
U+035F COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON BELOW ͟
U+0360 COMBINING DOUBLE TILDE ͠
U+0361 COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE ͡
U+0362 COMBINING DOUBLE RIGHTWARDS ARROW BELOW ͢

Of course U+1D18A MUSICAL SYMBOL COMBINING DOUBLE TONGUE 𝆊 is something else again.

Thank you. I feel much better now.

The lackmus test

2006-11-12T01:56:00.000-05:00

In a post to one of the innumerable technical mailing lists I belong to, a native speaker of German used the phrase lackmus test, meaning a simple method for detecting differences. In English, the phrase is litmus test; why the difference?

Middle English had both the native English word lykemose and the Scandinavian borrowing litemose; only the latter has survived. The second morpheme in each case is that of English moss, but the first morphemes are different, meaning 'drip' and 'dye, color' respectively.

Litmus is made by drying and powdering certain lichens; it was originally used as a water-soluble dye, but is now generally used as a quick-and-dirty test for acidity, hence the metaphorical use of the term (it turns red in acids, blue in bases).

East is west and west is east

2006-11-12T01:45:00.000-05:00

Little Diomede Island (U.S.) in the Bering Strait (not the Aleutians, as I mistakenly wrote earlier) is reckoned to be some tens of thousands of kilometers west of Big Diomede Island (Russia), despite the obvious fact that Little Diomede is about four kilometers east of Big Diomede.

The reason for that is that in the state of nature, Europe is east of North America, which is east of Asia, which is east of Europe. So it makes no sense to ask "Is X east or west of Y?" unless we have instituted a convention of some sort.

One possible convention is: "X is east of Y if and only if the easterly great-circle course between them is shorter than the westerly one." That's the rule we apply in ordinary life, and by that rule, the Russian island is west of the U.S. one.

But the navigator's convention unwraps the globe at the 180 degree meridian, and says that the entire Eastern Hemisphere is east of the entire Western Hemisphere. Using this convention, the Russian island is east of the U.S. one.

And by the same token, Alaska, since it sticks into the Eastern Hemisphere, is the easternmost U.S. state as well as the westernmost and the northernmost. The southernmost state is Hawaii. Of the 48 contiguous states, the westernmost is Washington, the easternmost Maine, the southernmost Florida (thanks to Key West), and the northernmost Minnesota, due to a surveying error.

Say who?

2006-11-12T01:39:00.000-05:00

I got four stupid financial spams with interesting From: lines the other day. These are the ones that pick dictionary words for first and last names: what is that supposed to be about, anyhow? Anyhow, here they are:

The peculiar Queueing M. Secretively,
The paradoxical Tough D. Frailty,
The malapropos Foolhardiness T. Phoneticians,
And the Marxist (tendance Chico) Spumoni P. Brickbat.

I guess it was the last one that put me over the top.