Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

I was reading this on the train up to Providence, and back. I figure that in about eight pretty solid hours of reading I managed to get almost all the way through…two chapters. And I used to pride myself on being a fast reader. I was never bored, but man is that a dense book. And at over 1700 pages, I suspect that Huddleston and Pullum are quite correct in supposing that not many people are going to sit down and read it cover to cover. Maybe if we ever actually launch a manned voyage to Mars…
I’m not sure that I can summarize it. In fact, I’m sure that I can’t. But I can relate one or two things that were new to me, and struck me as highly interesting:

I’m quite impressed with the simplification of lexical verbs into six inflectional forms: preterite, present 3d singular, present plain, plain form, gerund-participle, and past participle.
What syncretism has joined, let no fossilized paradigm put asunder!

Also, the classification of former contractions as negative forms of auxiliary verbs was novel to me, but makes sense. When I described this to some of my friends they were skeptical (except about “won’t” because of the obvious shift), but came around when presented with the non-expandable examples such as “Don’t you think that it’s true?” or “Can’t you see her?”

In general, I really liked the approach that they take, explaining in detail exactly what considerations led them to the decisions that they made, and giving copious examples. The writing, while dense, and often technical, is quite clear and I appreciate the flashes of humor. If only it weren’t such a workout to lug it around, I probably would make the attempt to read it cover to cover.

Old English in the OED - June 2002 Newsletter - Oxford English Dictionary

The revision of Old English material in the Third Edition will be thoroughgoing. Every single Old English quotation, whether already in OED or newly added, is being checked against the most recent reliable edition of the text, with new bibliographical details and additional context being given where appropriate. Dating of quotations has been radically revised, with NED’s assumed composition dates replaced by a simple threefold division of all pre-1150 quotations into ‘early OE’ (up to 950), ‘OE’ (950-1100), and ‘late OE’ (1100-1150), based firmly on manuscript dates as agreed by the most recent scholarship.

I’m thinking of ponying up for an individual subscription to the online edition as my holiday present to me this year. It’s spendy ($295), but oh-so-tempting.

Since reading the Professor and the Madman got me interested, I’ve been perusing the OED Newsletter. One interesting item:

J. R. R. Tolkien & the OED - June 2002 Newsletter - Oxford English Dictionary

Amid all the publicity surrounding this year’s release of the film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, it has occasionally been mentioned that Tolkien was an English professor. What is rather less well known is that in 1919 and 1920, at the very start of his career, Tolkien worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary; he later said of this time that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’.

The Professor and the Madman was certainly an interesting story. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about one of the most valuable (prolific and thorough) volunteer contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, who happened to have been an inmate at an insane asylum where he had been committed for murder. While I enjoyed it thoroughly, I thought it was marred a bit by punching up the story with pointless armchair psychoanalysis of poor C.W. Minor. An example was the passage that I quoted in the “Guess the Source” post, which was part of an entirely lame attempt to set a background for Minor’s later sexual obsessions. So while I actually wish the book were dryer, the stuff that irritated me about it may well have been what made it into a national bestseller.

I love songs that playfully quote other languages. “Plus Je T’Embrasse“, as performed by Blossom Dearie is one such, containing the lovely line that’s the headline of this post and the only English in the song. Short phrases are what tickle me the most. Something like the Beatles’s “Michelle, Ma Belle” are somehow too earnest to really strike my fancy. Or maybe it’s just overexposure to the Beatles.
Anime theme-songs are a fruitful source of this sort of thing. Probably J-Pop songs in general are, and I’m just not familiar enough to say for sure. But there definitely seems to be an unwritten law of Anime lyrics that the song contain at least one phrase of English—not counting loan words like gaarufurendo or purezento. Or I think not counting them; modern Japanese is such a avid borrower from English that it’s hard for me to tell what’s been adopted and what’s just quoted for hipness. In general, I tend to assume that words that have been adapted to the Japanese phonetic system are mostly assimilated, and words where an effort is made to preserve the English pronunciation are intended to sound exotic, but I’m sure it’s not as straightforward as that for native speakers—particularly the younger generations. For instance, the original Japanese theme for Sailor Moon “Moonlight Densetsu”[1.- something like Moonlight Legend, or Legendary Moonlight] includes moonlight, midnight, weekend, happy-end, all with (pretty much) English pronunciation–as opposed to “miracle romance”, which is adapted to the more native sounding mirakuru romansu.

Websnark asks what do you even call the opposite of selling out. The obvious answer is “buying in”, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite right.

And there are the girls—young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears—who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.

answer down below, ’cause I can’t seem to do extended entries in wordpress…

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Casey and Andy

’cause everybody likes a good cartoon about grammar

See what happens when I stop blogging for a couple of months? All sorts of interesting discussions come and go…in this case It’s Ablaut Time weighs in on spelling reform. And come the revolution “weighs” is going to be one of the first words up against the wall…

Wordgumbo Main Index

Wordgumbo is a site with quite a number of lexicons for various languages:

* Albanian
* Baltic
* Latvian
* Lithuanian

* Celtic
* Breton
* Irish Gaelic
* Scottish Gaelic
* Welsh

* Afrikaans
* Danish
* Dutch
* Frisian
* Old English
* Modern English
* German
* Icelandic
* Norwegian
* Swedish
* Greek

* Kurdish
* Romany
* Sanskrit
* Romance
* Catalan
* French
* Italian
* Latin
* Lombard
* Portuguese
* Rumanian
* Spanish

* Czech
* Russian
* Polish
* Slovak
* Serbo-Croatian

* Ancient Egyptian
* Hebrew
* Maltese
* Altaic
* Japanese
* Turkish
* Hawaiian
* Indonesian
* Maori
* Tahitian
* Tagalog
* Dravdian
* Brahui
* Eskimo-Aleut
* Canadian Inuit

* Basque
* Penutian
* Mayan

* Papiamento
* Sranen

* Swahili
* Tswana
* Yoruba
* Zulu

* Chinese

* Estonian
* Finnish
* Hungarian

* Esperanto