"Written in Islamic"

I don't usually do current events posts, but this one was cute enough to warrant a micro-post: egregious ex-Senator Rick Santorum declares that Muslims think that “The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.” In most speeches, a sentence like that would be a major embarrassment; in this one, it's merely his only linguistics-related blooper.

(Via Angry Arab.)

Feliz Ramadan

I´ve been trying to write this little ditty for the last few years, but all I have so far is (to the tune of ´Feliz Navidad´)

Feliz Ramadan,
From the land of pork and ham...

Suggestions?

Phrasebook fiction

The bewilderingly odd and sometimes strangely evocative phrases that some phrasebook compilers apparently expect to be useful have caught the attention of many people besides me, although I do think the Andamanese one I found a year or two back takes the cake. However, until a few days ago, I had not come across phrasebook-based fiction. I can now report that there is at least one example of such a genre: Gene Wolfe's "Useful Phrases" (a short story in Strange Travellers):

Even so, many of the phrases thus translated struck me as peculiar. Who would wish to say "You no longer recognize her," "Mine is a similar address," or "I will tell the trees to be quiet"? I studied all these phrases diligently, however, so much so that I sometimes found myself murmuring in my bath, Pava pacch, tîsh ùtra. Neéve sort dufji. "How like a ghost are the fountain's waters! The flood carries away my riches." The paper is marvelously thin, and yet completely opaque; the print sharp-edged even when viewed through my best magnifying glass...

I addressed to him the phrase I had so often rehearsed: Semphonississima techsodeliphindera lafiondalindu tuk yiscav kriishhalôné! "How delightful to discover in the shrinking sea a crystal blossom of home!"

He dropped my advertisement and ran from the shop.

There would be no point in summarising the story - it's not about plot so much as mood. If it has a moral, it must be that you should keep phrase books of unknown origin for unidentifiable languages only if you want your life to become more exciting and dangerous.

TBTB Again

Ten days without a post from Keefieboy. Did you miss me?

Once again, the reason is that I have been very busy. I've been finishing off a massive e-commerce project for a company in Los Angeles that for various reasons has taken just over a year to get together. The other reason for my busyness is: Keefieboy has started writing a novel! I may be making a big mistake here by telling you about it. I'll look a right wally when I abandon it halfway through. Or when I do finish it but can't find an agent and publisher. Or it gets published and sells ten copies.

Virtually every website I've read about novel-writing says things like 'go ahead and do it if you want to, but don't expect to earn serious money from it.' But the first 10,000 words are embedded in silicon (only 90,000 to go!) and BetterArf has read it and assures me that it is as good as if not better than many other examples in its genre (comic fantasy). And I know she wouldn't lie to me!

Here's the Prologue:

This is a story about the land-locked island of Xanadu-du. Some say it is located in sub-Saharan Africa, interwoven with the nation of Mali. Others say you’re more likely to find it somewhere between the fifth and twenty-eighth dimensions, at any time between say, a week last Tuesday and five million years hence.

The people of Xanadu-du come from all over the world. Yes, this world, the one we call Earth. A few of the people were actually born in Xanadu-du, and if it was a real country they would have a Xanadu-du-ian passport. But of course, it’s not a real country, so they don’t. What they do have is a great capacity for arguing, and a hell of a lot of elephant manure. Which is odd really, because they don’t have that many actual elephants.

Visit www.xanadu-du.com to find out where this nonsense comes from.

Husband For Sale

BetterArf has been clearing out her handbag. She found this receipt. I don't know what's worse:

1) She bought a new husband rather than using her undoubted charms to acquire one for free

2) She bought it from a toy shop

3) It only cost 17 dirhams

4) She cannot remember buying it and has no idea where it is now

The mind boggles.

April Foo(g)l(e)

Two days ago I logged into my GMail account. This innocuous page normally contains nothing of interest, but on this day it carried an announcement of a new product: Google Paper. Basically it's a service whereby you forward your emails to Google, they'll print them off for you and mail them to you.

I thought this was a bit bizarre, but I do know people who really really do not understand how email works: these things are printed off by their secretaries and arrive on their desk just the same way as any other document. I thought nothing more about it until I noticed that the login page had changed again, and it includes a link to their April Fool joke. Here it is

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/index.html

Enjoy!

"An elaborate series of grunts and gestures"

More in the weird colonial-era language books series - this time "The Siwi Language", by W. Seymour Walker, F.R.G.S (Late Royal Artillery), with a foreword by His Excellency Wilson Pasha (Governor, Western Desert Province of Egypt), 1921:

There are no interjections in Siwi which are sufficiently constant to be worth committing to paper.
Their meaning is expressed by an elaborate series of grunts and gestures which can only be acquired by practice.

And:

There is only one noun-adj. in Siwi in which the masc. and fem. forms are identical:
zlèta, naked, bare
Note 30. This exception is a good example of the construction of the Siwi vocabulary, and illustrates one of the reasons for its paucity. Amongst the women a naked female is quite a possibility, but to the general Siwani mind, it is so inconceivable, and so contrary to all established customs, that no special word-form has been evolved to cope with such an obvious phenomenon.

If you want to hear what Siwi is really like, the indefatigable Madi has put a Siwi audio file up on Tawalt: the Story of Prince Sayf. With a bit of help from books like Walker's (and more usefully Laoust's), I can make out a fair bit of it. Remarkably, Siwi has borrowed Arabic's comparative form, as you can hear in the second sentence.

How to give orders in Angass

I'm researching Chadic imperatives at the moment, so I opened Angass Manual - written by H. D. Foulkes, Captain (late R. F. A.), Political Officer, Nigeria in 1915) to the appropriate section, and found it to consist solely of the following advice:

The Imperative is of the same form as the rest of the verbal forms, only uttered with the necessary tone of authority.

I suppose it's too much to expect an Edwardian captain to be able to transcribe tones, but I couldn't read that without bursting out laughing.

The book gets even better, with such cringeworthy gems as this "explanation" for phonological processes:

"The Angass, like most negroes, have a nice ear, and they endeavour to prevent harsh sounds coming together."

I particularly like how he explains that Angass grammar is really simple:

"The language is so simple in construction that I am hoping a study of it may help in elucidating the groundwork of more elaborated Negro languages."

since anything he can't get to grips with must not be part of its grammar:

"The only difficulty - but it is a very real one - in the colloquial is the apparently capricious employment of a large number of particles, the use of which, though immaterial from a grammatical point of view, is, however, necessary in practice, for without them the sentence certainly loses its flavour, and seemingly some of its sense, in that an ordinary man cannot understand a phrase unless it is enunciated exactly in the way he is accustomed to hearing it, and the omission or transposition of a word bothers him considerably."

How to find linguistic universals

I couldn't resist posting this quote:

[In this book] I examine the general conditions under which verbal complements are licensed, and provide a possible explanation for their limited distribution. The primary reference language is English, though the proposed licensing conditions for verbal complements are assumed to hold universally.

Fortunately, the author adds:

That the main proposals of this study and the analyses do indeed carry over to other languages is shown in Chapter 5, which takes a cross-linguistic perspective.

The title of Chapter 5? "Direct Perception Complements in Other European Languages". The languages considered are German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, representing a grand total of two neighboring subfamilies of Indo-European.

I don't mean to poke fun at this book specifically - it looks like a very thorough analysis of clausal complements of perception verbs in English - but this so neatly encapsulates what in practice is one of the main problems of the generative program: over-reliance on English in particular and what Sapir used to call "Standard Average European" in general.