02.28.05
Do Websites Dream of Hyperlinked Sheep?
A gallery of covers from Philip K. Dick’s books, including a large number of foreign editions. They range from the derivative to the pseudo-classical to the iconic to the really, really … disturbing.
02.27.05
Cajun, I Guarantee
I just bought A Great and Noble Scheme, “the story of how the hapless French Acadians were run out of their Nova Scotia homes,” so I’ll offer a few Cajun links (and one for Creole):
- Cajun French-English Glossary at LSU
- Action Cadienne, a volunteer organization dedicated to preserving Cajun culture and Louisiana French
- Some phrases on a page with a really … interesting … design scheme
- Several links at Clarence’s Guide to the Cajun French Language
- Useful books are Father Daigle’s A Dictionary of the Cajun Language and Cajun Self-Taught
- Kreyol Lwiziyen
On an unrelated note, I also purchased Madame De Pompadour, by Nancy Mitford, a biography of Louis XV’s mistress. It really doesn’t have anything to do with languages, at least as far as I’ve read, but it does mention le Comte de Saint Germain, a very … interesting … man from the eighteenth century. Among his other accomplishments, he was reputed to speak all the languages of Europe, though I haven’t tracked down the original evidence for that assertion. Some people think he’s still around. What’s two centuires if you were old when you met Jesus?
02.25.05
Gallery of Unicode Fonts
An extensive Gallery of Unicode Fonts, at a site that purports to provide four basic travel phrases in many languages. Is the Hittite accurate?
02.24.05
Coptic Manuscript Trove
Al-Ahram (The Pyramid) reports the find of several early Christian manuscripts written in Coptic (via Cronaca):
“It is a very important discovery, equal to the Naga Hammadi scrolls” found in 1945 in an Ancient Egyptian cave inhabited by Copts during the Roman era, said Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Hawass said the scrolls were originally found in a large sealed stone jar by a murderer while hiding from the police. But when the renowned writer Taha Hussein was the minister of education, he bought the scrolls in a marketplace and offered them to the Coptic Museum.
Hawass added that the scrolls include 13 religious and philosophic codices translated into Coptic by fourth-century Gnostic Christians and translated into English by dozens of highly reputable experts.
This English-Coptic dictionary at My Coptic Church might help your Coptic studies; they also provide a Coptic font (necessary for viewing dictionary results). I’m looking for another Coptic dictionary, but I seem to have lost the link. I’ll post it if I track it down.
On a related note, the Oriental Institute of Chicago has an online version of their book Thus Wrote ‘Onchsheshonqy, an introductory grammar of Demotic Egyptian first published in the mid-1980’s.
Update: The other dictionary, a PDF facsimile of Walter Crum’s A Coptic Dictionary, has been taken down at the request of Oxford University Press.
02.23.05
Afghan Assortment
- Send e-mail in Dari
- Dari Poetry
- Australian seasonal worker documents, available in Dari, Pashto, and a wide variety of other languages
- Afghan Children’s Books in Dari and Pashto
- Classic works in Dari, in PDF format
02.22.05
Save a Bunny
I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t know February was “Adopt A Rescued Rabbit Month”. Adoptable bunnies can be found at Petfinder. Just remember NOT to give real rabbits for gifts at Easter - only chocolate ones.
02.21.05
Hello Fada
Language Hat left a comment to this post of Irish links asking why he couldn’t see the fada’s (accute accent marks) on the letters on some pages; in Firefox, they are replaced with question marks in black diamonds (in IE, I think, they are replaced by various symbols, including Chinese characters). There are two issues here. The first, over which the viewer has no control, is how the web page in question is encoded. Specifically, the issue is whether it is Unicode compliant. The second is the encoding setting of your browser; this should match the encoding of the web page to see everything properly. In the case of this page of Irish stories, the encoding is not Unicode-compliant, and so the question marks appear. The default encoding in Firefox is UTF-8 (Unicode). Switch this by going to the View menu, highlighting Character Encoding, and selecting Western (ISO 8859-1). The steps are similar in IE. The characters should appear correctly now. Both IE and Firefox have an option for auto-detecting the encoding; this is turned off by default in Firefox.
Languages Beginning with M
Continuing the tradition started with Mi’kmaq and Menorquí, links for various languages that start with the letter M:
- Mapuche (also known as Mapudungu and Araucano)
- A brief description of Mapuche
- Information about the Mapuche and their culture
- A Spanish-Mapuche glossary
- Mohawk
- Daniel Claus published a Mohawk primer in 1786 (link is part of a Penn Library online exhibition of colonial printing)
- The above primer in facsimile (via Canadiana)
- Some words in Mohawk (though the sound files don’t seem to be working). Other Six Nations languages are available as well.
- Mongolian
- The Mongolia Society offers a number of linguitic and cultural publications about Mongolia in various languages
- The Yeti in old documents (stretching the Mongolian language connection, I know)
- A brief description of the Bodleian Mongolian collection
- Tracking down treasure books
02.20.05
Hieroglyphic Marxism
A purely graphical translation, by Hugo Gellert, of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. I like the octopus. Would you ever guess that this picture represents “The Mystery of the Fetishistic Character of Commodities Exchange”? (via Incoming Signals)
02.19.05
Menorquí
The variety of Catalan spoken on the island of Minorca is called Menorquí; unsurprisingly, the dialect spoken on Mallorca is known as Mallorquí. Here are some short prayers in Mallorquí, and here are some phrases. Menorquí still shows the influence of English from the eighteenth century, when England owned the island. Some easily interpreted examples are grevi, bifi, and plumqueque - all foodstuffs, belying the reputation of English cuisine. There are other differences as well; for example, Spanish el, which in Catalan is els, is es.
The capital, Mahon (Sp. Mahón Men. Maó), gave its name to mayonnaise, supposedly created in honor of the Duc de Richelieu’s capture of the city in 1756 during the Seven Years War. The name of the island itself, meaning “little one” dates from Roman times and contrasts with Mallorca, “big one.” The Phoenicians had referred to it as Nura, the island of Fire, and the Greeks as Meloussa, the island of Cattle.
02.18.05
What’s Dug Up, Doc?
Gomphos elkema, a 55 million year old rabbit-like animal, was discovered recently in Mongolia.
“Gomphos had a true ‘rabbit’s foot’; that is, a foot more than twice as long as the hand that could be used for hopping.”
But the ancient creature did have some traits that were unlike its modern relative. For example, Gomphos had quite a big tail and some of its teeth were more squirrel-like than rabbit-like.
When Irish Links Are Clicking
Last night I was reading about the Battle of the Boyne, at which William III defeated the deposed James II in 1690 in Ireland. Accordingly, I thought I would offer an assortment of Irish links. Because of the numerous occurrences of the fada, these sites can be difficult to read in Firefox.
- Sgéilíní na Finne, a booklet of short tales for those learning Irish, published in 1928 and now updated with sound files
- Ainmneacha sráide Bhaile Átha Cliath (Dublin street names) in Irish. Bhaile Átha Cliath, the native name for Dublin, is pronounced something like blaa-clee-uh. It means something like “Town by the hurdle that is a ford” but I’m having trouble with the meaning of cliath. Via this page explaining Irish placenames.
- Irish sounds - for example “Lenition (or Why Written Irish has all those Bloody Hs)”. Additional info by clicking the Language tab
02.17.05
Mi’kmaq Resources
Some Mi’kmaq (Micmac) links:
- Mi’kmaq hieroglyphic prayers
- Religious literature printed in Mi’kmaq
- Mi’kmaq talking dictionary project
Morning Miscellany
- An online facsimile of A First Reading Book in the Micmac Language by Silas Tertius Rand (at Canadiana)
- A pamphlet called the Relação da Entrada was the first book printed in Brazil, published in 1747 by Antonio Isidoro da Fonseca
- A bisel Yiddish
- The Chinese characters for goldfish (inspired by this post at Cronaca).
- Polish medals from the Russo-Polish War
02.16.05
Etymology of “Rabbit”
According to the OED, the word rabbit has a northern French origin, as can be seen in the Walloon robett, showing up in Middle English as rabet. It might be related to Fr. rabouillère, the burrow in which kits are raised. Its first documented appearance English is in John de Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum:
Conynges..bringeþ forþe many rabettes & multiplieþ ful swiþe.
Interestingly, this sentence contains an early appearance another word for rabbit, cony (first documented a century earlier than rabbit), which comes from Latin cuniculus, rabbit or underground passage. In this case, the quotation shows how older rabbits were called coneys, while rabbit referred to younger animals.
An alternate spelling, coney, shows that Coney Island was once overrun by rabbits. The Dutch originally called it Konijn Eiland, which became Conyne Island, and then the modern Coney Island. There are some sparse references to it as Congu, which suggests the possibility of an alternate derivation.
Lastly, a coney is a conman’s gull. Thus, this picture shows a cony getting ready to fleece a coney.
Lionhead Rabbits
Lionhead rabbits are a new breed of rabbit that have manes. I’d like to get one, but the ones I see are still somewhat expensive.
02.15.05
Vondel’s Lucifer
Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), the Dutch poet, was an advocate of religious freedom, based on his experiences as a Catholic convert facing a Calvinist society. It has been suggested that his masterpiece, Lucifer (1654), influenced John Milton, but Biblical inspiration is probably sufficient to explain the similarity of their works. Other works of Vondel’s are also available at this site.
Cyrillic Transcriptions
Transcriptions of English words into the Cyrillic alphabet for Russians learning English, complete with some interesting spellings of the original words. Via Russkiblog, a site documenting an English speaker’s progress learning Russian.
02.14.05
Hunting Hippos Near Nebraska
I recently purchased a few sheets from the May, 1881 issue of Iapi Oaye, the Word Carrier, a Dakota-language newspaper published at the Yankton (Dakota) and Santee (Nakota) reservations. The Riggs brothers, Stephen and Alfred, both served as editors. There is a short article about hippopotamus hunting in Africa, accompanied by a large illustration that looks like it came from Harper’s. I have typed up the article (I’m not sure which dialect it is in) and am trying to translate it; however, my study of Dakota is just beginning so it’s not going very quickly. Please let me know if anyone has any suggestions (in the comments or blog at mithridates dot com). In the meanwhile, some resources I’m using that others might find helpful:
- The new edition of Fr. Buechel’s Lakota Dictionary
- Reading and Writing the Lakota Language by Albert White Hat
- Waiting for the release of 550 Dakota Verbs (looks like April)
- Dakota Dictionary Online, maintained by the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota
02.13.05
Cataloging, Shmataloging
In this post, LanguageHat discusses the problems of keeping track of one’s books. I have always found this method to be simple, if not terribly efficient.