Blog spam attack

Well, comments will be monitored for a while. Under spam comment attack. Happens pretty often, but usually just a couple at a time. In this case, it's a couple a minute over an extended period of time. And if the URL is really what the site is about, it's the most useless commercial crap you could put on this blog.

Old school translation humor?

The recent passing of Eugene Nida has gone more or less unremarked on in linguistics blogs, at least those that I follow. It has been huge news among missionary types, judging from a quick Google search. This reflects his career, I suppose, but he actually did do real work in linguistics — the image is the cover of a book he published with the University of Michigan Press.

While there's a lot of importance to be said about missionary linguistics and probably about his role in it, I'm not going to deal with that now. I have far less significant stuff in mind.

The NYT did a long obit on Nida (here). They  laid out his contribution to translation as being in his “dynamic equivalence” or “functional equivalence” approach, that is, the effort to provide idiomatic translations rather than literal, word-by-word ones. I don't know the history of translation at all, but he certainly wasn't the first to do this by any stretch. But again, my purpose is a lower one.

The obit ends with this note:

Translated back into English, some of the Bible passages produced using Mr. Nida’s method yield a resonant poetry. As The New York Times reported in a 1955 article about his work, “‘I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa: ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’” 

Is this a print instance of what some now call 'BabelFish humor'? Or a sophisticated statement about metaphor and language change (since it's within a small region)? I'm going with colonialist-era exoticization of languages/cultures readers don't have any clue about.

Add these to your trolley

One of my students forwarded to me this link to an interesting BBC Magazine article on Americanisms that some Brits find annoying. Just as interesting are the 1295 comments.

Frank & Ernest rule the world

Somebody gave me this last night ...

(Here's the link to the real version … in color, even!)

A lot of American English speakers don't produce an actual 'n' in a word like can't. We instead nasalize the vowel, [kæ̃t], sometimes also with a final glottal stop instead of the 't'. The story is that this happens when the nasal is followed in the same syllable by another consonant, so that you have an 'n' in can but not can't. But in Atlantis, some of us can flap the 't' and so don't have a full nasal here either. (We don't lose the contrast, just the 'n': nasalization on the vowel keeps antic versus attic clear.)

In other words, some of us DO have a lost consonant of Atlantis. Kinda.

New linguablog: The Diacritics

Just found out about another language blog: The Diacritics. Former ling undergrads, now law students.

Read it.

another awesome blend

FOOTBALLMAGEDDON!!!
(For those of you poor souls who don't live in Madison, WI, some explanation is called for. We're having a "rare weekday football game" tonight - some 80,000 people will attend - and our inboxes have been filled with dire warnings about what it's going to do to traffic, given that classes start tomorrow and students are still moving in and everything is generally chaos on campus.)
HT to a friend of a friend on Facebook.