The Death of Imagination

A stem vocabulary of the Navajo language. Haile, Berard. (St. Michaels, Arizona : The Franciscan Fathers, 1950-1 ; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975)

I'm hard-pressed to think of any other language that has kicked my ass as thoroughly as Navajo. This should come as no surprise to y'all, given its legendary difficulty, but with time I'd learned how overblown some of these reputations can be. Basque, for instance, has its challenges, but it's nowhere near as impossible as it's made out to be. So when I bought these volumes at a book fair (at Alumni Gymnasium on the Loyola Campus, IIRC), I was not expecting the pasting I got.

Ask me for a simple translation in a foreign language, and I can probably eke one out given some time and good resources. With Navajo, I didn't even know where to start. Every stem in Haile's dictionary comes in several extremely divergent forms whose uses I didn't understand even after reading through the entire attached grammar twice. In my excitement, I'd rashly offered to create some compounds for a game my brother was running, but I soon realised that I was nowhere near to being up to the challenge.

So when I saw Faltz' The Navajo verb in the basement of Powell's during that epic buying binge I told you about last week, I thought I'd found my godsend. I still think that, but it's hard to tell, since every time I read more than five pages of it at a sitting, I need to have a little lie-down, and then I somehow forget to pick the book up for another nine months.

The verbal system really is a marvel of complexity, where ablaut effects and metathesis rub up next to object classifiers and obviative pronominal prefixes. All told, there are ten slots to be filled in the Navajo verb template and the form of almost every element can vary depending on what comes before or after it. You really get the feeling that the mad genius who came up with it was simply having too much fun.

At leasts it's a comfort to know I'll never be bored in my old age.

Llyfr dysgu Lladin Jones, Evan J. (Caerdydd : Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1933)

In many ways, this is the quintessential language book in my collection: No one I know can imagine anyone else owning it. Moreover, it came to me cheap and by accident. It's not the sort of thing even I would go out of my way to acquire, yet it's the only title I own on a subject that interests me.

At my old place of work, there was a colleague who reminded everyone of me: He was a lanky, long-haired guy who lived alone, collected books, and learned obscure languages for fun. His chef œuvre was a bibliography of books on Mongolian in the Slavic languages and his small flat in Pilsen was crammed with volumes he had salvaged from one place or another. I have no idea any more where he picked up this work, but when trying to find a good home for it, his thoughts naturally settled on me. I would've paid him the same few dollars I would've forked over to a second-hand bookseller, but he wouldn't accept them.

As for content, this is exactly what the title says it is: A book for learning Latin. It just so happens that the people doing the learning are Welsh speakers. I've never been strongly interested in Latin, but when you're Linguoboy, it's one of those languages that people simply expect you to do, so I figured I could make use of it. And I have, but--I confess--mostly for the tables. Not just the tables of Latin declensions and conjugations either, but more than anything for the tables on pp. 264-267 which show the chief phonological developments of Latin borrowings into Welsh. The heading of the section, Yr elfen Ladin yn y Gymraeg, has two examples: LATINE > Lladin and ELEMENTUM > elfen.

It's the only book I've ever owned in full-on literary Welsh. This is nowhere more apparent than in the simplest examples, such as where Me non amat is translated with the laughably synthetic form Ni'm câr. Even the alternative version, Nid yw yn fy ngaru i, isn't close to anything you'd ever hear someone say. (If I had to express this--even in writing--it would come out Dydy e ddim yn 'ngharu fi.) Now I guess you can see why the textual explanations aren't much use to me.

One of the most charming features of this rara avis is the bookplate, which is neither in Latin nor Welsh nor English. What else would you expect on a Welsh grammar of Latin but Irish Gaelic? Yes, boys and girls, this venerable volume was once the proud possession of:

An t-Ath. Liam Mac Gabhann,
7112 Sr. Foster Thiar
Siocago, Illinois

For those of you scratching your head at the abbreviations, they are athair "father" and sráid "street"; thiar means "west(ern)". You can't imagine how tickled I am to own something that once belonged to an Irish priest living in Norwood Park. (Or perhaps I should say Páirc Coillthuaidh?)

The pratical guide to Japanese signs : 1st pt., Especially for newcomers Moriyama, Tae ; translated by Jeffrey Cohen. Tokyo ; New York : Kodansha, 1997)

I know, total surprise, right? Sure, if there's anyone on your Friends list you'd expect to have a phrase book for Jakaltek or a Javanese grammar, it'd be me. I'd kill to have either and I'd dedicate a loving article to either if I did, but all I have instead is a half-dozen books on Japanese. Not because I'm particularly interested in the language, mind you, but because (a) such books are relatively easy to find and (b) I get asked a lot about it. Also, it's a "half-free" language: I already know most of the characters from studying Chinese and much of the grammar from learning Korean, so why not learn the vocab and pick it up?

In truth, I'm rather mortified that I've never even been motivated enough to memorise all the kana. Today at Toguri's in Lakeview, I saw a box of kana flash cards and mused that perhaps this is what it would take for me to learn them. Then I noticed the $29.95 price sticker and said, "Doubtless there are other items." (I left with an $11 book of short stories in translation.)

monshu and I have talked for years about visiting Japan. If we do, we may be thankful I picked up this little gem late last year. It teaches you how to read several dozen common signs from "first-class ticket counter" to "nigiri-zushi" by progressively building a repertoire of kanji. It even has little pictographic equivalents as aide-mémoires (e.g. a fruit on a table next to a sprouting plant for 社).

Unfortunately, according to our current timetable, such a vacation is at least two or three years off. What we could really use now would be a book that would do the same thing for Chinese. Sure, there is some overlap, but it's not easy to predict what it will be in advance. The Sinitic vocabulary of Japanese is somewhat "fossilised" vis-à-vis that of modern Standard Chinese. For instance, whereas the Japanese (and Koreans) still use 食堂 (lit. "eating hall") to mean "restaurant", to the Chinese this means a dining hall in an institution, i.e. a "canteen" and they prefer expressions like the florid 餐廳 (lit. "meal pavillion") or the more prosaic 飯店 ("cooked.rice shop").

So this well-organised, sensibly-written, pocket-sized book is more likely than most to gather dust on the shelf waiting for a day to be useful.

White Hmong-English dictionary Heimbach, Ernest E. (comp.) Rev. ed. Ithaca : Cornell University Southeast Asian Progam, 1979.

I actually blogged a bit about the acquisition and format of this work back in January, so perhaps in this entry I should delve a little deeper into the content.

I'll start with the standard Hmong orthography, which strikes most English speakers as insanely unintuitive. And it is--for them. It was designed by missionaries with ease of use for native speakers in mind, not for backwards compatibility with the idiosyncratically etymological spelling of English. Or, as Heimback explains in the introduction:

Still other peculiarities resulted from practical considerations in seeking for an orthography which could be easily typed, printed, and taught. The use of consonant symbols in syllable final position to represent tones is not as unconventional in the area as it is outside of the area, and works well with Hmong because of the syllable structure which has no phonemic final consonants.

Lets take the example of the Hmong self-designation, Hmoob. The doubling of the vowel indicates that it is nasalised. (To speakers of languages without phonemic nasalised vowels, they are often mistaken for vowel plus [ŋ], thus the English respelling Hmoong. Compare Swedish balkong for French balcon [balkɔ̃].) The final <b> a high level tone, such as that of Chinese 空 kōng. Given that White Hmong has eight distinctive tones, one should be thankful they didn't opt for the crazy diacritics of the Chữ Quốc Ngữ used for Vietnamese, which has two less.

I actually find these spellings ingenious, though I had a completely different reaction when I first encountred Gwoyeu Romatzyh, a system for transcribing Standard Chinese designed along similar principles. Looking back, I wonder if learning this wouldn't have saved me a lot of trouble down the line. After all, as English speakers, we are used to silent letters. If Hmong used, say, <h>, <gh>, <e>, and <w> for various tones rather than <b>, <j>, <v>, and <m>, we might not consider it remarkable in the least. And if I had learned to spell the Chinese words for "learn", "snow", and "blood" as shyue, sheue, and shiue rather than xué, xuě, and xuè, then I might not be having to look them up all the damn time when I forget which has which tone. Diacritics simply aren't part of my native alphabet, and they don't have the same salience in my memory as different sequences of basic letters.

So what is Hmong like? Typologically, like most of the languages spoken in the same area: Highly analytic and isolating. For example, take the simple phrase, Koj lub npe hu li cas? you CLASSIFIER name call as how "What is your name?" (Note also the use of classifiers, another areal feature.) However, personal pronouns are not analytical as in Chinese, e.g. koj "you", neb "you two", nej "y'all". The interrogative occurs before the verb rather than after, e.g. Koj puas txawj hais lus Hmoob? you INTERROGATIVE can speak speech Hmong "Can you speak Hmong?"

As the term lus Hmoob reveals, compounds are generally left-headed, as in Thai or Vietnamese, e.g. quav muag "eye boogers" (lit. "excrement [of] eye"). However--also as in those languages--there are exceptions in borrowed vocabulary, e.g. khoob xeeb "hollow heart" (from Chinese 空心 kōngxīn "idem."). And noun phrases follow suit (e.g. hnub no day this "today") except that classifiers precede head nouns (e.g. lub tsev no CLASSIFIER house this "this house") and pronouns precede those (e.g. kuv tus txiv I CLASSIFIER male "my husband"; cf. kuv txiv "my father").

If you know anything about the Hmong people, you know just how little their lives have been a bed of roses. This comes to the fore in Appendix 5 of the book, "Useful terse expressions". These include the following:

Kev quaj keb nyiav Sorrow, weeping, mourning
Kev tshaib kev nqhis Hunger and thirst
Kev txhaum ke txim Sin and guilt
Khub khub dub dub Dirty and mud encrusted
Ntuj dub nciab teb tsaus nti Sky and land all dark
Ntuj txias teb tsaus A place of cold and darkness
Ntuj yuav fav teb yuav lam Calamity is coming
Ntshai ntshai ib ce tsaug tas So afraid (he was) weak all over

Cajun French I. Faulk, James Donald. Crowley, La. : Cajun Press, c1977.

Long ago it occurred to me that the truly ironic thing about my dislike of French is if it were some freakish marginalised Romance variety instead of an elabourated literary language with 100 million or so native-speakers, I'd be all over it. I mean, what's not to love about a phonology that turns [akwa] into [o] or [insula] into [il] or verb complex that's got more in common with Swahili or Basque than anything Romance? But, unfortunately, French is associated with France and--even worse--pretentious American Francophiles. I've had to spend my whole life hearing people babble on about how "beautiful" it is while they condemn American English for its "nasality" and German for its "gutteralness", even though French is more nasal and gutteral than the two of them put together.

What I needed, I realised, was a freakish marginalised variety of French, one without any snob appeal or fawning devotees. I thought Québécois would fit the bill but the Québécois are, if anything, more annoying about their language than the French. I got excited when I found out that there were vestiges of colonial French in Missouri, but finding anything on this dialect turned out to be harder than impossible. So when e. and bunj asked me what I wanted from New Orleans, I told them, "Find me a book on Cajun French."

And they did--but not this one. All they could find was a recent reprint of a turn-of-the-century French work that failed to turn my crank much. Cajun French I (AFAICT, Cajun French II never saw the light of day) came from a fellow language geek at my previous job. (It's to him I'm also grateful for the only grammar of Latin I've ever owned. It's in Welsh.) In its own way, it's leaves as much to be desired as the aforementioned reprint, but it's got more charm.

How much more? Bumloads more. For one thing, it looks exactly like what you'd expect something cobbled together in a teacher's spare time to look; browsing the typescript pages, you can almost smell the mimeograph ink. For another, the concerns are unabashedly parochial. Don't expect to come away from it able to discuss the latest Caro and Jeunet film, but you'll be able to talk about fence-mending, critter-hunting, and going down to the Lucky Seven for milk with practiced ease.

The transcription system used is the kind of "phonetic English" that would normally have me pulling my hair out by the roots, but somehow it works here. And I love the long lists of vocabulary terms; makes up for the lack of a glossary. Besides, if I want some prettified documents, there's always the slick pages on the Tulane University site that I've discovered in the meanwhile. (Plus it's nice to have collaboration for some of the more unusual grammatical features identified by Mr Faulk, like the loss of the subject pronoun elles or the pronunciation of elle as [al].)

I just can't wait to use some of it on a snooty poseur francophone and have him tell me how atrocious my French is.

Nederlands-Engels woordenboek Visser, G.J. Utrecht/Antwerpen : Het Spectrum, 1970

Can't say where I got this, but--judging from the pencilled price on the half-title page, I only paid $7 for it together with the English-Dutch companion volume. I don't even know how long I've had it, though I think it's at least five years.

When I was abroad, I was delighted to discover that my knowledge of German included as a free bonus a basic ability to read Dutch. (Note, though, that the ability to speak Dutch--or understand it spoken--is another matter entirely.) I remember in particular picking up a copy of De Telegraaf in Florence and making it through a feature article on the Pink Tank of Prague with few problems. (Knowing what a pack rat I am, I probably still have that article somewhere.)

But, there hasn't been much call for me to read Dutch since then--Afrikaans would be more useful where I work--and so the dictionary has lain largely untouched in the Germanic section of my bookcase. It joined an equally decrepit edition of Teach yourself Dutch (or perhaps was joined by it; as I admit, the chronology is hazy in my mind) and sat patiently watching the German reference works jumping on and off the shelves as I worked my way through one Teutonic author after another.

Probably just as well, since when a friend of mine from the Netherlands came for a visit some years back, he had a look at it, remarked with incredulity on the equivalents given for some words, and pronounced it "old-fashioned". Still, it's better than nothing and has the advantage of being scarcely larger and more bulky than my newly-bought copy of the De voeten van Abdullah, so when I go a-commuting, I can slip both into my bag and easily balance the one on my lap while consulting the other.

Time hasn't been kind to the cheap binding, however, which has split into three unconnected sections. As long as each text block remains intact and individual pages don't begin coming loose, it will still serve its purpose, but I'm already on the lookout for a replacement. Does Dutch mean enough for me to actually buy new? We shall simply have to wait and see.

Basque-English dictionary Aulestia, Gorka. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1989.

Few acquisitions do I recall as vividly as the purchase of this huge hardcover Basque dictionary. Europa Books, a place of pilgrimage on Clark Street just north of Belmont, was having a gigantic half-off closeout sale in the early 90s. I made it to the counter with a stack of books a least two feet high, but this 672-page monster was easily the biggest among them. I think it retailed for something like $50-70 dollars, but that's assuming you could find a place to buy it. When the owner reached it, he said, "Do you know how hard it was for me to get this?" "I do," I replied. "Why do you think I'm buying it?" (In retaliation, he went on to drop the entire godblessed stack in an attempt to fit it into my bag in the most weak-minded manner imaginable.)

Even though it was a prize possession, I made little use of it until recently. I'd browse it occasionally, but I wasn't trying actively to learn Basque. The most useful feature for many years was the fact that it lists virtually ever Basque place or personal name I've ever heard anywhere (provided one can figure out how it should be spelled in normalised Basque orthography). But, as y'all may know, a couple months ago I dusted off my copy of Colloquial Basque which had likewise spent years neglected on the shelf and worked my way through the first couple lessons. As a result, I discovered just how comprehensive and useful the conjugational tables in the prefatory material could be.

The genius of Basque is that almost none of the verbs are conjugated. The madness of it is that the few auxiliaries which are have a confusing array of forms. They vary based not only according to the number and person of the subject, but also of all objects. That's not so crazy--Osage does this, too, as I've explained at length--except that the suffixes and prefixes are almost completely different in the past tense from what they are in the present. Other than that and the fact that few of the words bear any resemblance to the vocabulary of any other language (despite a seemingly endless number of attempts to show a relationship between Basque and literally any other language in the world), it's really not as impossible as it's cracked up to be. The Basques like to brag, for instance, that the Devil spent ten years in the Basque Country trying to tempt souls and left knowing only the words for "Yes" and "No". (You'll find an excellent introduction to Basque grammar penned by the late great Larry Trask on Martin Buber's website.)