Diacritiques

… et une d’aujourd’hui.

Les journalistes qui bloguent, ne serait-ce que dans un coin du site officiel de l’organe de presse auxuels ils sont rattachés, apportent un je-ne-sais-quoi de parole à la première personne qui change du baratin des journaux.

Voici la description de Pascal Riché, correspondant de Libération à Washington, du spectacle qu’il s’est offert à ses yeux et à ceux de son compagnon de route, Julian Borger (du Guardian), hier à La Nouvelle Orléans :

Des milliers de gens étaient agglutinés autour du Convention Center, abandonnés à eux-même. Ils attendaient des bus qui ne venaient pas. Plusieurs sont morts, et les autorités n’ont même pas emporté les cadavres qui restent là, posés à même le trottoir. On leur jette des rations alimentaires et des bouteilles d’eau du haut d’un hélicoptère, ou du haut du pont voisin. Comme à des pestiférés. Ils vivent dans la peur, surtout la nuit, à cause des gangs, des armes. Ils ont soif et faim. Les toilettes du centre débordent d’excréments. Vous pouvez imaginer l’état d’exaspération et de colère de ces gens. “Ecrivez que si les bus ne viennent pas, on va mettre le feu à la ville” m’a juré un type.

Car l’autoroute est juste à côté est parfaitement sèche. Les aider, les tirer de là, serait facile. Pourquoi a-t-il fallu attendre quatre jours pour commencer à leur promettre des bus ?

Au début, en débarquant dans cette foule en colère, nous avions un peu peur. Aucun n’a été agressif, tous ont été amicaux, clamant simplement leur indignation, leur souffrance, et leur sentiment profond d’être traités comme des animaux parce qu’ils sont noirs et pauvres.

[« Thousands of people were crowded around the Convention Center, left to their own devices. They were waiting for buses that didn’t come. Several have died, and the authorities haven’t even taken away the dead bodies that are laid out on the sidewalk. Food rations and bottles of water are being thrown down to them from a hovering helicopter, or from a neighboring bridge. As if they had the plague. They are frightened, especially at night, because of the gangs, the arms. They are hungry and thirsty. The toilets of the center are overflowing with excrement. You can imagine how exasperated and angry these people are. ‘Write that if the buses don’t come, we will burn down the city,’ a guy promised me.

Because the highway is very close and perfectly dry. To help them, to get them out of there would be easy. Why was it necessary to wait four days to start promising them busses?

In the beginning, when we entered this angry crowd, we were a bit scared. None of them has been aggressive, all have been friendly, and were simply venting their indignation, their suffering and their deep-seated feeling that they are being treated like animals because they are black and poor. »]

Les notes de Adam Brookes sur le Reporters’ Log de la BBC (également d’hier) sonnent sensiblement pareil :

[16:00 GMT] There’s a very aggressive police presence. They don’t stop and talk to the refugees at all and they don’t communicate with them. They just speed by in their pick up trucks and their cars pointing shotguns out of the window as they go. It’s quite extraordinary behaviour. And these desperate people are waiting for evacuation. The police behaviour makes them all feel like suspects.

Every now and again a military helicopter comes in, it hovers over a car park and soldiers throw out big boxes of bottled water and food ration packs and then a great tide of young men come running in and start fighting for the food. This means that the most vulnerable people, the sick and elderly, many families don’t get a shot of the food coming down. There are five corpses there, at least from what we’ve seen today, it could be a serious development.

[17:24 GMT] One army veteran, sick with diabetes, with no medications, asked me why if the United States is capable of invading a country half a world away, wasn’t it capable of driving him 10 miles across the river.

It was as if in his mind the very idea of Americanness and citizenship was being betrayed.

Donc, pourquoi la Croix Rouge n’était-elle pas présente à côté de ces réfugiés ? Simple: ils ont reçu des ordres. La Garde Nationale contrôlait l’accès à la ville, et le département de la « Homeland Security » ne voulait pas créer des conditions trop « favorables » au maintien de quiconque dans la ville sinistrée :

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

• Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
• The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Quelqu’un a fait exprès de laisser des êtres humains souffrir et mourir dans une ville transformée en enfer. Merci à tous ceux et celles qui ont gueulé, pour que finisse ce spectacle indigne et meurtrier.

(La dernière citation via Rivka, chez Respectful of Otters ; remerciements à Magpie.)

Debi Jones Joan Touzet, who blogs at An Atypical Life, has put up an uncensored recording (mp3 file, 3.2 MB) of the interview that the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, gave to the radio station WWL-AM yesterday. I am locally mirroring the file here; another mirror is here.

Via Debi Jones, who links to more mirrors. You can also listen to the WWL-AM live feed .

I understand that a “bleeped” version has been or is being aired on CNN International here in Europe. This is a remarkable document that I think is worth listening to to the end.

Quote (added later — I wasn’t sure about the “doggone” part):

And they don’t have a clue what’s going on down here. They flew down here, one time, two days after the doggone event was over, with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn — excuse my French, everybody in America, but I am pissed.

Regular blogging will resume shortly. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: I have given Anna Stevenson’s excellent transcript a once-over (a small number of corrections and additions of disfluencies, mostly).

There’s another quiz up at Language Log, this time set by Geoffrey Pullum.

The task is to rewrite the USA motto E pluribus unum (”out of many, one”, representing the union of the original 13 states) to signify the converse “out of one, many” — in Latin.

I’m a bit hesitant to offer my solution. The idea to be presented with Dan Brown novels as a prize is just too scary. But still, let’s not chicken out!

First step, e or ex? Well, ex is always fine, e only before consonants, I think, and the next word is a form of unus so it’s ex. And ex takes the ablative case, so it’s ex uno.

Now, how to transform pluribus? It could be in the accusative case here, the object of an elided verb (”Let’s make one[many] out of many[one]”). On the other hand, the nominative case would fit as well (”From the multitude[unity] springs unity[multitude]”). Not that it helps much, as for both the masculine/feminine form plures and the neuter plura, the nominative form is the same as the accusative.

So what gender do we choose? It depends on whether, in the original, unum is the attribute of something (a state, a nation), or if it refers to the abstract, unity, the condition of being one. I’d go for the latter, but we’re not finished, because I’m not sure that Latin would use the neuter plural plura to refer to the corresponding several-ness. In other words, I’d be asking plura/several what, and we are back to the missing noun. If that noun’s gender is neuter — or if the abstract can be used in the plural –, the solution is plura, otherwise it’s plures.

For the elided noun (if there is one), I come up with natio (feminine) or populus (masculine), or civitas (feminine). Neither fits with the neuter unum in the original motto.

Final submission:

1. Ex uno plura (with the original neuter adjective)
2. Ex uno plures [nationes]

P.S.: I’m surprised Geoffrey Pullum doesn’t mention the origin of the motto. It probably came from a sort of 18th century Reader’s Digest called Gentlemen’s Magazine, which was widely read by the elites. This is not a lofty classical quote.

P.P.S.: The title of this post refers to a mnemotechnic aid (Eselsbrücke in German, i.e. a bridge for donkeys) used by German learners of Latin to remember which adjectives/quantifiers take the ending -ius in the genitive case and ī in the dative case. It goes like this:

Unus, solus, totus, ullus,
uter, alter, neuter, nullus,
alius erfordern alle
ius in dem zweiten Falle,
und im dritten setze sie
stets mit einem langen i.

P.P.P.S.: I wonder if I should tell the amusing story about how I got my copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language…

From the Guardian Unlimited front page, today, 19:35 Western European Daylight Saving Time.

Shouldn’t we be glad that an influential bunch of religious leaders who otherwise don’t agree about much anything for once display unity when it’s about keeping “those” “dirty” people from committing “spiritual rape” of the holy city of Jerusalem? I’m getting more and more cynical about organised religion, mine included.

US elections provide us with our four-yearly dose of US geography. Some sites have published maps that are more interesting and illuminating than the standard state-by-state red-and-blue ones. Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber has posted a county-by-county map that comes from (Associated Press via) USA Today . His post is a bit terse because the […]

Language Log brings it to our attention that a hoax might be giving millions of web users the wrong idea about the history and etymology of NYC’s nickname The Big Apple. The term didn’t in fact originate with an early 19th-century immigrant from France named Eve, who (supposedly) ran a brothel and called the women […]