Author: old_wp_importer

When people talk about languages ‘borrowing’ words, they generally mean copying.

Are there any cases of

actual borrowing

? i.e. Language B copies a word from Language B. The word evolves inside Language B, and then A copies it back with the new meaning. Bonus points if the word vanishes from Language A once B takes it, or from Language B once A takes it back.

There

must

be a lot of these French -> English -> French. Right now, all I can think of is boeuf/beef/rosbif.

Yes, I’m sure Google or Wikipedia could find me a list of thousands of the things. Asking you lot is more fun.

I spent yesterday evening walking up and down Brunnenstrasse, the street that many of Berlin’s tiny one-room art galleries have collectively settled on as home. Every Friday evening they simultaneously open their doors, bring out the booze, shove a DJ in the corner (optional), and show off their latest display for the wandering crowds. It’s a perfect example of culture being dictated by economics: none of the galleries are large enough to justify a visit in themselves – but darting between a dozen of them there’s certain to be something worthwhile.

So some Fridays I trot down there with the rest [*]. And…I spend a lot of the time trying to figure out why so much of the art leaves me cold. Partly, yes, it’s Sturgeon’s Law. But much of it is due to my own horribly narrow taste in art – and that’s something I can probably change, or at least understand. So I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what that taste is, and what scope there is to squeeze it out into other areas.

There’s one class of art that almost always appeals to me. I guess I take my art as I take my politics: gradually built up from the details, the overall interpretations multiple and provisional, rough guides to a landscape just this side of chaos. That means I’m a sucker for a certain subset of surrealism, and that among the Old Masters I go for the paintings full of convoluted, ambiguous classical and religious symbolism. Above all it means I love complex drawings, projections of multi-dimensional mental fantasies that don’t fit neatly onto paper. Better still when they’re in colourful paint. Then seeing the painting becomes something close my stereotype of an acid trip [**]: filling my mind with more fantasies and more layers of meaning than it can cope with [***]

I’ve mentioned before my love of Alexander Rodin, who is a perfect example of this: he seems to have some kind of synaesthesic SF epic trapped within his head. More mundane is Norman Sandler, whose latest work I saw yesterday: fragments of cityscapes and household objects, layered over each other, full of rubbish and cryptic text and what look like tea-stains (was this planned, or did he just knock over a cup? We may never know: the drawings are none the worse for their brown stains, but nor are they noticeably improved by them). It doesn’t have visual impact or the imaginative complexity of Rodin, but there’s enough in it to set me dreaming.


Stuff I dislike is more predictable, so deserves to go under a cut

Subscribing to the OED online costs £195/year. Does anybody actually pay that? Wouldn’t they make far more cash if they took it down to £20 or so, the price that people like me (language-obsessed, not millionaires) would pay?

The first volume of the OED was published in 1888. Surely that means it’s out of copyright by now? And if so, why hasn’t Project Gutenberg got at it?

What do those of you outside of universities use instead of the OED?

Edit

scans are online at the Internet Archive. How fantastic is that? Now, if I can just find a way of shunting them into a usable format…

*plots*

Nobody except me will like this rant by Nataša Velikonja, but I’m going to post it anyway:

Europe is boring. Boring for its self-sufficiency, among its own boundaries; Europe is a jail of virtual affluence and credit standard in which migrants without asylum, lesbians without lovers, intellectuals without mass media, and the homeless without comrades are wandering around. Europe is boring for its “white” conviction that it is better than the others, as it is supposedly the cradle of education, culture and literature. It is boring in its perpetual ecstasy with its fat kisses and broken glass on our lips. It is boring with its perpetual integration, which is being swallowed as a sacrificed young body, while images of hatred, slaughter and genocide are whirling in its eyes. Europe is boring because of its ritualized oblivion and ritualized machines of desire that never stop their craving.

Incidentally, why are there so many excellent Slovenian writers/activists/theorists these days? Is it just that when your main export is Slavoj Zizek, you at least have somebody interesting to kick against? Or that small nations have to synthesize foreign culture, not having enough local production to be tediously inward-looking? Or just the result of decades buffeted by Tito, Austrian Social Democracy, and Italian radical theorists?

Fantastic review of a Sanskrit play:

They were also believed to break the five basic prohibitions of renunciates: liquor, meat, fish, parched grain, and getting it on. Often.

So the stereotype was of creepy horny drunk carnivorous beggars covered in human ash, accompanied by hott chick acolytes, carrying around someone’s skull, asking you for money.

I think they used to squat in Tompkins Square Park.

[via the sainted Cosma Shalizi]

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…is how much translation proper nouns take. What possible reason is there to call a language ‘German’ in English, ‘Allemand’ in French, and ‘Nemetskii’ in Russian, none of them with the faintest similarity to ‘Deutsch’ (*)? And just about every name or place gets mangled by one language or another. Not to mention all the faff over everybody transliterating Cyrillic in their own special way.

At RIA Novosti there used to be a little old man whose sole function was to figure out how to transliterate names of people and places for the various foreign-language newswires. When I was there I chalked it up to the inefficiency of a former Soviet propaganda agency. But maybe they really did need Igor and his library of atlases and Who’s Who’s. Grr!

(*) I assume there is some deeply fascinating and compelling historical excuse.

I don’t care

. It’s silly.

Also: I have the strong sensation that this is a rant I’ll regret later, although I can’t for the life of me imagine why. May as well post it and find out, in any case…

One of the things I’ve been working on the past few months has just launched.

I have no idea what to say about it: my instinct is to be snarky, but actually I think the site is reasonably good. And I can’t really be proud of it, since I had no hand in the design or planning. I’ve basically just been the outsourced dogsbody, churning out a lot of the really routine, repetitive code. Still: it’s there, it works (so far), and it manages to fulfil an impressive number of Web 2.0 cliches.

Whenever you folks in the UK post about the weather, we seem to be having something similar in Berlin. I don’t understand it; I thought I was distant enough to get different weather.

Yes, it’s snowing here too.