One of the great things about Wikipedia is that it can be a sort of informal translation and transliteration service. I've been spending some happy if slightly pointless time looking at the ways in which different languages write John McCain's name, taken from the sidebar of his Wikipedia entry. ( Con Makkeyn, Джон Маккейн, Џон Макејн, Жон МакКэйн, ג'ון מקיין, דזשאן מעקעין, جون ماكي, جان مک‌کی, ჯონ მაკ-კეინი, Τζον Μακέιν, 約翰·麥凱恩, 马凱恩, 존 매케인, জন ম্যাককেইন, ジョン・マケイン, จอห์น แมคเคน, जॉन मॅककेन, ஜான் மெக்கெய்ன )

Because Obama's name is much more easy to spell in any language, the transliteration questions are not as interesting (assuming you found them at all interesting in the first place). It is striking that while there are 66 Wikipedia articles on McCain there are 91 on Obama. This inevitably means a few new alphabets:

(  ባራክ ኦባማ, ބަރާކް އޮބާމާ, बराक ओबामा, ಬರಾಕ್ ಒಬಾಮ, ബറാക്ക് ഒബാമ )

There now, aren't you glad you know that!

The carton of apple juice I got from our local supermarket the other day comes from Poland. It's obviously made for export, as the contents are described thus on the side:

• Apple drink
• Яблочный напиток
• Obuoulių gėrimas
• Ābolu dzēriens
• Ябълкоба напитка
• Suc de mere

What struck me (apart from the sheer mind-boggling fact that these languages, firmly behind the Iron Curtain twenty years ago, are now on display in Tesco's) was that the root for "apple" (and Dutch appel, German Apfel; plus, I am told, Irish abhal and úll and Welsh afal) clearly also lies behind Russian яблоко, Lithuanian obuolys, Latvian ābols and Bulgarian ябълка. A bit of googling reveals that this is an ancient root, but one found only in the northern European languages, which makes me suspect it may not be quite as ancient. Though the Finnish and Estonian words, omena and õun, look quite different and perhaps closer to Hungarian alma, Turkish elma, Mongolian alim. But perhaps not.

(The Romanian word măr is presumably from Latin malus/malum, badly corrupted I admit but no worse than Spanish manzana or Portuguese maçã.)

Rather surprisingly, the root of Romanian "suc" meaning "juice" is thought to be completely different from the root of Slavic "sok"/"сок" also meaning "juice". Which seems a bit improbable to me; one almost imagines Slavicists bending over backwards to prove the relationship of sok/сок with the Albanian word for blood and the Latvian and Lithuanian words for tar rather than accept the possibility of an early derivation from Latin sucus.

Only the Romanian translator was bold enough to call the liquid in the carton "juice", everyone else going for "drink". The Slavic verb пить/пити is related to Latin bibere and its descendants (French boire, Italian bere) and more obviously to Greek ποτο. Meanwhile the Latvian and Lithuanian words dzēriens and gėrimas come from an Indo-European stem meaning "devour" or "consume", which appears indeed in the second syllable of "devour" and in Russian "жрать" meaning the same.

So that's what I learnt from my breakfast drink.

Chinese: 異世奇人
Korean: 닥터 후
Japanese: ドクター・フー
Hindi: डॉक्टर हू
Hebrew: דוקטור הו
Farsi: دکتر هو
and
Russian: Доктор Кто
Bulgarian: Доктор Кой

Apart from the last two, I have no idea about the pronunciation - open to being enlightened!

My Thursday quiz was indeed about alphabets, as several of you, including feorag and in particular burkesworks said. It is interesting, and perhaps a little surprising, how few alphabets or scripts give their letters actual names that mean something rather than just call them roughly something like the sound they stand for. It's also interesting just how rapidly the meanings of the letters get lost in the historical murk, hence the uncertainty in some of the clues given. The answers are as follows:

First list - ( Phoenician / Hebrew )
Second list - ( Futhark )
Third list - ( Ogham )
Thanks for playing, those of you who did!

Well, thanks to everyone who ticked boxes in yesterday's poll. I found the results interesting.

First off, if you can read this, you probably also have Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew characters installed. Probably also Arabic, but I somehow screwed up the poll between Arabic and Armenian. I ought to have also tested for more exotic Cyrillic characters: the Macedonian/Serbian њ, the Altai ҥ, the Kazakh/Kyrgyz ң, the Siberian ӈ and the Sami ӊ. Next time.

Next in order are a clutch of South Asian scripts. I was surprised that both Thai and Tamil were a nose ahead of Devanāgarī, which is surely used by a lot more people than either of the former two. After Devanāgarī, Gurmukhī and Gujarātī are level pegging (as is, from a slightly different part of the world, the much less widely used Georgian), followed by Kannada and then Telugu (which is level with two scripts related to Arabic - Syriac and Thaana), and then Malayalam.

After that the four big East Asian scripts - the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana, and phonetic and standard Chinese - if you have one of these you probably have all four.

( more )

For the funny n's, it's not very surprising that everyone can see ñ, ń, ɲ, ɳ and ŋ. I am slightly surprised that not quite everyone could see the perfectly respectable Czech/Slovak letter ň and the Latvian ņ, and that equally many can see the pretty bogus ṅ, ṇ and ṉ (OK this last is used by two actual languages but one is spoken by only 4000 people and the other apparently by only 20). Likewise, just behind, the perfectly genuine Lakota ƞ is level pegging with the bogus ṋ. Almost 90% of you can see ǹ as well, even though I haven't found a language that uses it.

It is a shame that the glorious n̈ (as in Spın̈al Tap) has not been more popular among typesetters. But I'm surprised that as many as a third of you could see ᶇ, n with a hook, and that a quarter of you could see ᵰ, n with a niddle tilde. It shows that people who work on fonts find it easier to grapple with the more bizarre and less used Latin-based letters than with real scripts used by millions of people.

How international is your font library?
( click here for font porn! )

I met someone yesterday whose business card had her name and phone number embossed on it in Braille. Apart from my own general fascination with alphabets, my grandmother used to do some work with Braille, though I was never quite clear what - her eyesight was better than mine is. I spotted immediately that the Braille spelling on this person's business card was wrong - her surname has six letters, but the Braille version had only five and was missing the one Braille letter I can actually recognise. ('a')

She works for an organisation involved with equality issues, though herself is not on the disability dossier, which explains both why they made the effort and why nobody had yet spotted the mistake. But I wonder how many people, in general, have their names in Braille on their business cards (and indeed how many of them have got it right), and I also wonder if this is actually much use for people with visual disabilities, who possibly on the whole aren't in the same habit as I am of collecting small bits of card with very small writing on them.

11) Latin Palaeography: Antiquity & the Middle Ages, by Bernhard Bischoff, translated by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín & David Ganz

My Christmas present from my wife (I got her the lives of early saints). I dabbled in this subject during my medieval astrology phase, and had some dealings with co-translator Ó Cróinín at one point; this book is not a popular introduction, but a scholarly overview of the subject, and so it's a surprisingly good read, especially when you consider it was originally written in German.

The book starts with an overview of what was written and how - the shift from scroll to codex (a codex being what we normally refer to as a "book"); the shift from papyrus to parchment/vellum to paper; different inks; other things that were written on, like the ubiquitous but ephemeral wax tablets. Fascinating stuff about what has survived and what hasn't; a personal letter from the bishop of London to the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, written in about 704.

Then the middle section, which is the must substantial and technical, on the spread of different styles of Latin handwriting, staring in Ireland and Britain and then concentrating on Germany, France and Italy, with excursions to Scandinavia, and the Czechs get a look-in too, as do the Mozarabs, a group one doesn't often hear much about. Not a lot of concentration on individual letters, more on general style issues and how they tie in with politics - Charlemagne is of course a very big figure here, the only person whose name is commemorated in a style of writing. But he also looks at the evolution of shorthand, and the abbreviations which are the biggest headache in palaeography (explaining why there is no real standard), and briefly looks at the evolution of the numbers.

For me, that last point was always the weirdest. Although in the documents I used to look at, the numbers 0,1,2,3,6,8 and 9 were normally tolerably recognisable, the others were not:
4 was written
5 was written
7 was written

Easy to mistake an early "5" for a modern "4" if reading quickly. Apparently the man we have to thank for this is Gerbert of Aurillac, whose contribution to Western culture and the history of science deserves to be much better known.

The final section looks rather briefly at the manuscript as a cultural artifact, and while interesting enough could have done with a bit of contextualisation with other cultural artifacts. In fact, that is my biggest complaint about the book generally, that as a monograph on a pretty technical topic, admittedly written for the specialist, knowledge of a lot of the context is assumed. Most seriously, lots of places are mentioned, but there are no maps; I would have appreciated some sense of the geographical as well as intellectual connections between Corbie and Luxeuil, for instance.

Anyway, the business end of this is only 220 pages, so despite the density of the subject matter it is a quick read, and often intriguing for the glimpses we get of individual scribes and patrons who helped to shape the letters we read today. My favourite sentence:

"Nevertheless, in the ninth century, Danila, the scribe of the three-columned bible of La Cava, mastered capitalis, uncial, half-uncial, a slanting half-uncial with uncial admixture, and minuscule, all with equal elegance." (p. 99)

I noted some time ago that the Serbian letter ћ is different from the Maltese letter ħ. The Serbian ћ is Cyrillic, and its upper case equivalent is Ћ, whereas the Maltese letter ħ is based on the Latin h, and its upper case equivalent is Ħ. Also they are pronounced completely differently, the Serbian Ћ/ћ is phonetically /ʨ/, a bit like English "tch", and the Maltese Ħ/ħ much more like a heavy English "h" (the Maltese H/h without the cross stroke is much softer).

Indeed, the IPA symbol for the Maltese sound is simply /ħ/, using the Maltese letter; it's found in several other Semitic languages - Arabic ḥa (isolated ح, initial حـ, medial ـحـ, final ـح) and traditional Hebrew ח (though apparently that tends to be pronounced more like /x/ by modern Israelis). I'm glad to see that some of the more obscure Caucasian languages have it too: ҳ in Abkhaz, xI in Avar, xъ in Chechen, хь in Kabardian. And a couple of African languages as well, according to Wikipedia: ḥ in Kabyle, one of the Berber languages of Algeria; and simply x in Somali. And finally a couple of Romance languages/dialects: g/gh in Galician, and j in Cuban Spanish.

This is all completely different of course from ℏ, which is Planck's constant divided by 2π.

I hope that is clear.

I was amused by the other suggestions, but as liberaliser and vnp worked out, the EUBAMчики are the EU customs officers operating on the frontier between Ukraine and Moldova, in a set-up known officially as the EU Border Assistance Mission, EUBAM for short.

vnp points out that if it is a Russian slang word, it is more likely to be EUBAMшники than EUBAMчики. I confess that the subject came up over a dinner table in a crowded restaurant, so it is possible that I misheard; it's also possible, as liberaliser suggests, that it is Ukrainian rather than Russian slang, which I suppose might make a difference.

Hat-tip to pickwick, from pue:



Obsessed as I am with alphabets, I have had to identify the 26 flipped letters:


zʎxʍʌnʇsɹbdouɯ1ʞظıɥbɟǝpɔqɐ

Most are from the International Phonetic Alphabet - which you can search on WikiPedia.


( 26 letters )

If I have made any mistakes I'm sure some one reading this will tell me...

Those of you who are professional editors, or who speak Arabic, or who just like laughing at extremist rigt-wingers when they do something stupid, will appreciate this:

In order to forge closer ties with its political friends in the Middle Eastern Islamic countries, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) printed the September issue of its party organ, Velika Srbija, in the Arabic language, but the writing was printed left to right, defying the Arabic right-to-left rule, the sensationalist Kurir tabloid writes on Wednesday.

In an effort to find out how the Radicals came to make such a major blunder, the tabloid contacted SRS Vice-Chairman Dragan Todorovic, who said he could not explain the omission “because he does not speak Arabic.”

Todorovic said that the Arabic-language edition of Velika Srbija is edited by Anjad Migati, himself an Arab, advisor to the SRS chairman and member of the party’s innermost leadership. Todorovic added that Migati is a highly educated and literate man and was surprised at the omission.

Migati, too, was surprised when informed of the error, pleading “a mistake made by the printing shop.”

“The mistake is obvious, but have no concern, the target readership is clever and will find their way about it,” he said.

I just love that last line.

According to Wikipedia, these are abjads:

أبجدية عربية
אלפבית עברי

These are abugidas:
देवनागरी
อักษรไทย
বাংলা লিপি
ಕನ್ನಡ ಅಕ್ಷರಮಾಲೆ
മലയാളം അക്ഷരമാല
தமிழ் அரிச்சுவடி

And these are alphabets:
кириллический алфавит
ქართული ანბანი
Ελληνικό αλφάβητο

All have their own entry in Wikipedia in their own script. Interestingly only the two abjads are written right-to-left.

3) The Economist Style Guide

Mandatory reading for those of us doing editing for a living, of course. Full of useful snippets and helpful hints, though I dare to disagree on a few points:

Dominicans Take care. Do they come from Dominica? Or the Dominican Republic? Or are they friars?

*Snerk!*

federalist in Britain, someone who believes in centralising the powers of associated states; in the United States and Europe, someone who believes in decentralising them.

Perhaps that one was a bit more tongue-in-cheek.

Abbreviations that can be pronounced and are composed of bits of words rather than just initials should be spelt out in upper and lower case

Agreed, but their examples include "Kfor" and "Sfor" which I would always spell KFOR and SFOR, since that is and was the capitalisation preferred by the peacekeepers themselves.

Put the accents and cedillas on French names and words, umlauts on German ones, accents and tildes on Spanish ones, and accents, cedillas and tildes on Portuguese ones: Françoise de Panafieu, Wolfgang Schäuble, Federico Peña. Leave the accents off other foreign names.

C'mon, in this day and age I think we should be able to go a long way in spelling names correctly even if the version of the Latin alphabet used in unfamiliar. Though I accept that Đà Nẵng, for instance, has an English spelling of Da Nang.


Capitalisation rules - much tougher than I would be inclined to be, with odd lapses from that toughness - why, for instance, "the queen" but "the Queen's Speech"?

community is a useful word in the context of religious or ethnic groups. But in many other others [sic] it jars. Not only is it often unnecessary, it also purports to convey a sense of togetherness that may not exist.
The intelligence community means spies.
The online community means geeks and nerds.

*Hmph!*

It is sometimes useful to talk of human-rights abuses but often the sentence can be rephrased more pithily and accurately. The army is accused of committing numerous human-rights abuses probably means The army is accused of torture and murder.

Fair point. Though Anne wonders if the latter phrase is not in fact more precise, while being equally accurate.

haver means to talk nonsense, not dither, swither or waver.

Really?


There is an insanely complex set of rules for the correct spelling in English of Russian names, almost all of which I agree with, apart from the idea that you should always transliterate "дж" as "j"; giving as an example Stalin's real surname, Jugashvili. I would always write Dzhugashvili. (Though of course in his native Georgian it was ჯუღაშვილი which I would transliterate as Jugashvili, as "ჯ" is normally transcribed "j"; but we know him through translation from the Russian.) They then go on to add, absurdly, that his first name should be spelt "Josef" not "Iosif". I would have said that the man know to us as "Joseph Stalin" was born "Iosif Dzhugashvili". (Accepting Иосиф Джугашвили ratehr than იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი as the more official version of his original name.)


Placenames: I'm glad that they are with me on Transdniestria, rather than "Transnistria" which is gaining ground. But there's no way I'm using "Leghorn" for Livorno.


More places: The list of administrative divisions of Belgium, bafflingly, lists only nine provinces, omitting Brussels (and Flanders and Wallonia), though there is a hint that Brabant can be Flemish or Walloon. And the list of Swiss cantons, while including without explanation the splits of Appenzell and Unterwalden, does not mention that Basel is similarly split.


Will keep it by my desk though.

I have to admit that I simply cut and pasted from Wikipedia's article on the USSR State Motto, so you can find more there. The quick guide is as follows:

( languages )

Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!
Пролетарі всіх країн, єднайтеся!
Пралетарыі ўсіх краін, яднайцеся!
Бутун дунё пролетарлари, бирлашингиз!
Барлық елдердің пролетарлары, бірігіңдер!
პროლეტარ ყველა ქვეყნისა, შეერთდით!
Бүтүн өлкәләрин пролетарлары, бирләшин!
Visų šalių proletarai, vienykitės!
Пролетарь дин тоате цэриле, униць-вэ!
Visu zemju proletārieši, savienojieties!
Бардык өлкөлордүн пролетарлары, бириккиле!
Пролетарҳои ҳамаи мамлакатҳо, як шавед!
Պրոլետարներ բոլոր երկրների, միացե'ք!
Әхли юртларың пролетарлары, бирлешиң!
Kõigi maade proletaarlased, ühinege!

So, how many of those can you identify? (or even read?)
And a bonus two:

Kaikkien maiden proletaarit, liittykää yhteen!
Барлык илләрнең пролетарийлары, берләшегез!

Let's be quite clear: the letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ) is completely different from the letter ezh (Ʒ ʒ). See?

I hereby resolve to write about Sir Menȝies Campbell in future, to avoid confusion.

Edited to add: Rather to my surprise, in my journal's default view, they actually are completely different!
( picture )

Do NOT put non-Latin characters into your signature file.

Hat-tip to nancylebov:

http://janpeters.net/pics/stuff/alphabet.gif

Much more digestible than the Robert Sacks book!

rfmcdpei has posted on the Ruthenians.

jacobsmills has succumbed to the lure of the alphabets.

I have (briefly) seduced lamentables to the Curse of Sudoku.

And as for wiselamb - no further comment is necessary!

5) The Alphabet, by David Sacks

I put this on my Amazon wish list ages ago, and can't remember why; but anyway I decided I might as well buy it and read it a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The book can't quite decide whether it's a serious investigation of the history of orthography or a collection of fun trivia snippets. I did learn a lot about the first Semitic alphabet, from which most others are descended, and its descent to us through the Phoenicians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans and French. But I was disappointed not to learn more about other alphabets than ours - especially the Georgian script which as most of you will know fascinates me. (Does the Georgian თ have any relation to our "t"? Does their ო have a common lineage with our "o"? Or უ with "u"?)

Also the fact that the book is essentially an assemblage of 26 newspaper columns, one for each letter, meant that several topics came up again and again without ever being fully explored. One topic that I already know a bit about, but where I'd hoped to learn more, was the Great Vowel Shift. One topic that I know almost nothing about and where I found the information provided infuriatingly minimal and repetitive was the evolution of minuscule letters, and indeed why we have upper and lower case now - Georgian doesn't, for instance, and Arabic takes a whole different approach to letter shapes.

I particularly hated the practice of inserting explanatory boxes for sub-topics within the main text. Apart from the fact that it makes the main argument (such as it is) difficult to follow, I found (ironically) the fonts used for some of the boxes difficult to read. And the structure became confusing rather than ordered. The only person who has really done these vignettes well is Norman Davies in his Europe: A History, and others shouldn't try to copy him unless they really know what they are doing.

So, in summary, an unsatisfying book on a fascinating subject.

9) The Knight in the Tiger Skin / ვეფხისტყაოსანი (more usally translated as "The Knight in the Panther's Skin"), by Shot'ha Rust'hveli / შოთა რუსთაველი (more usually transliterated Shota Rustaveli), translated by Marjory Scott Wardrop with an introduction by Irakly Abashidze.

The is the grand epic poem of Georgian literature, written by a senior official of the court of Queen Tamar, in the late twelfth / early thirteenth century. I bought my copy of the 1966 edition of the 1912 translation from a street stall in Tbilisi last week, but have found the same edition transcribed on the Georgian Parliamentary Library site here. (The original Georgian, if you want to try it, is here.)

Rather grand claims are made by Georgians and their fans on behalf of this poem (vide Abashidze's introduction, "its life-affirming passion, shining humanity and heroic spirit, the ideas of patriotism and internationalism that it embodies and the elevated human feelings and moral ideals it expresses link this great literary monument of the distant past with the spiritual world of all freedom-loving peoples") and since I can't read the original to appreciate its intricate metrical structure (including rhyming words to the fourth syllable) much of it is lost on me. I did wonder if the limitations of the metrical structure of the four-line stanza are in some ways reminiscent of comics - you have the box, you have to fill it with narrative, so sometimes it needs to be padded out a bit, and occasionally it feels a little cramped.

The plot doesn't matter much - there are knights, one of whom wraps himself in a tiger skin and mourns his lost love, they go on long voyages by sea and land, fight battles in many different countries, and rescue the lost love, and all ends happily. However it is absolutely fascinating to read a work written at the far end of Europe from Eleanor's Aquitaine and her sponsorship of the ideals of courtly love, and find exactly the same values of chivalry extolled - and explicitly sourced not in Europe but in Arabia, Persia, Africa and India. I have always tended to think of this sort of thing as linked to the Norman French of the later Middle Ages, but of course it all happened because of the Crusades and the massive injection of new material into Western European from the Islamic world.

Especially in times like these, it's important to be reminded that there was a time when the centre of our civilisation was located in what are now Iraq and Iran (with significant overspill to Egypt and Pakistan).

Ӕ and ӕ are unique to Ossetian. They look just like Æ and æ, but are in Cyrillic.

My pictures are here.

For the first time ever, my name badge is in Cyrillic. But I can't reproduce it here, as this is an SMS post.

[Edited to add:] Николас Уайт.

A good day today. I made it into Leuven to do some shopping for my field trip next week - one of our staff has just got married, and another needed cuff-links, so some browsing in unexpected quarters of Leuven; thanks to leila_azziza for her tip about the cuff-links. And managed to get and read the new Daniel Clowes book.

Tomorrow I'm off to the country that calls itself საკართველო, leaving by a mid-afternoon flight to Gatwick, followed by the usual soul-destroying bus transfer to Heathrow, finally arriving in the capital city, თბილისი, at stupid o'clock on Monday morning. Later on Monday, once I wake up, I'll make a field trip to Цхинвал (aka ცხინვალი), capital of the rebel-held territory of Хуссар Ирыстон (aka სამხრეთი ოსეთია) and then from Tuesday to Thursday I'll be in intense discussions of the disputed region known to most of its current inhabitants as Լեռնային Ղարաբա (or just Արցախ for short) though the other side of the dispute prefer to call it Dağlıq Qarabağ. (If your computer chokes on some of those alphabets, I wouldn't worry too much about it.) Then on Thursday I'm flying to the UK as my cousin is getting married in Hampshire on Friday. And then I get home on Saturday.

I'll get my cousin a wedding present in Georgia. (Not britzkrieg's Georgia, which does not refer to itself as საკართველო, no matter how much Belgian beer is consumed.)

Not a political poll, but another orthographic one, now that I've worked out how to write it. I myself can see the first five of these but not the second five.

Poll #488100 More scripts
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48

Can you see these letters?

Interesting that the developers of all this sorted out the obsolete Deseret script developed by the Mormons in the early nineteenth century long before they got around to the breathing symbols in Ancient Greek!

(Darn, misspelt Tibetan. And can't change it now.)