Diacritiques

You’d think the CIA were presenting ironclad evidence after receiving reports of interviews with an English-speaking Iraqi defector who claimed to be able to provide first-hand information on mobile biological weapons labs? You’d be wrong. Not if the interviews were conducted in English and Arabic by German intelligence officers, translated into German, and finally “translated back” into English. Here’s the original article from HustonChronicle.com.

Via Blogalization, who neglect to tell us which kind of Arabic, though.

The linguists at Language Log have coined the word eggcorn, which refers to a particular kind of lapsus. An eggcorn is created by speakers (or writers) who, when searching for a word the meaning and pronunciation of which they know but the etymology and the spelling of which they have forgotten or never learnt, come up with a form they contrieve based on recongizable lexical items that provide the meaning they are after. Eggcorn itself is an eggcorn: Someone, somewhere didn’t quite know how to spell acorn and thought that an egg-shaped seed would most likely be called an egg corn.

Identical eggcorns can (and for the known ones, turn out to) be forged many times over independently. Some may appear so sensible that people learn them from each other. But an eggcorn isn’t quite universally accepted (yet), which makes it different from folk etymology.

The Language Log linguists like eggcorns; they have fallen for their irresistible charm. Not everyone agrees, though. Mark Liberman points out that a recent article in the Guardian prefers the term “word crime”. I briefly mentioned the same article in a previous post written in French that talked about how the publication of a new edition of a well-known dictionary was heralded in the French paper Libération and in the Guardian, respectively: In the former, with a sweet interview with a lexicographer who has interesting strories to tell about the evolution of meanings and dictionary entries; in the latter, with a whingeing diatribe about the illiterate populace.

What’s the point of all this?  read the post »

Updated version following up a comment. Scroll down!

Open the Iliad and you find that the Greeks referred to their goddess Hera as βοῶπις (bo-ôpis), i.e. cow-eyed. A 19th century scholar must have translated this as “ox-eyed” – the term is still around – but I frankly doubt he was on-target.

Homer and his contemporaries weren’t poking fun at Hera at all: it was considered high praise if you could be sayed to have eyes as beautiful as a cow’s. Nor was she the only one adorned with an epithet (“epitheton ornans” is the scholarly term) that extols her graces by comparing her eyes to those of an animal. Athena, whose beauty was either that of deep wisdom or formidable bellicosity, comes with the epithet γλαυκῶπις (glauk-ôpis), meaning owl-eyed. The owl, Athena’s animal, being a predator after all, this makes a lot of sense. (There are some divergent voices saying that the etymology might be wrong and the translation ought to read “sparkle-eyed”; but those two versions of her epithet wouldn’t really be incompatible.)

I was reminded of this while browsing the photos of fellow WordPress user speakbold, and in particular this one. Can we find a use for “giraffe-eyed”, maybe to express that remarkable serenity we see in the attitude of this animal (who, after all, lives in a zoo, for goddess’s sake)? Or should it rather be giraffe-lipped?

Update: Kareen, in her comment written in French, points out that the goddess Aphrodite, or Venus, also goes by the epithet “callipyge” or “kallipygos”  read the post »

A l’occasion du centième anniversaire du Petit Larousse, Libé pubile un entretien charmant avec le lexicographe Jean Pruvost, auteur du livre « La dent-de-lion, la Semeuse et le Petit Larousse: la biographie du Petit Larousse » qui paraît aujourd’hui même. (Tiens, je ne savais pas que dandelion, pissenlit, venait du français. L’accès à l’article devrait d’ailleurs devenir […]