The Most Dangerous Letter

The other day I was asking a friend who's living in Port-au-Prince if she knew anything about how Haiti same to have so many k's. The inspiration was the mountain village of Kenscoff, just south of the capital, that figures in Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. We're still trying to track down the origin of that name, but Kreyol (aka Haitian Creole) has lots of k's, whereas French, the country's other national language, has, more or less none.

A few searches turned up a great long answer, a chapter in the book Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

My take-away from the article (most of which you can, and should, read) that Kreyol orthographies are various and contested, and that the first major promoted one (McConnell-Laubach) seems to have been introduced by American protestant missionaries (hey, we do love translating into local dialects!). The Wikipidia entry on Haitian Creole points out that most Kreyol spellings are very similar to the words' renditions in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Meanwhile, I'll type for you my favorite sentence from the Language Ideologies chapter...

Among the most contested letters is k, which not only represents the danger of U.S. imperialism but has even been claimed to represent the threat of communism.

As for k's in French, they're all from other, non-romance languages. Here's the entire k section from the admittedly pocket-sized 1968 Dennison French Dictionary ("All Important Words"):

kangaurou, kayak, képi, kilogramme, kilometre, kiosque

What's really fun is imagining using all six of those words in a single sentence!

--

The whole idea of dangerous letters leads us, of course, to Costa-Garvas's 1969 film Z, a very slight fictionalization ("Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.") of a political murder in 1960s Greece.

The film (quite good and gripping, by the way), explains its title in a bit of screen text tacked at the end of the epilogue, just after we hear of the subsequent terrible things that happened to all the characters:

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"

Gua Gua Gua!

A friend, after some longstanding scrutiny of her map-of-the-world shower curtain, emailed to ask, basically, whence cometh all the gua/gui/guays in various country names. I'll paste in my response right ... now:

OK, here be etymologies:

For each I've started from my shelf copy of Place-Names of the World (Adrian Room, 1974), and then added bits from wikipedia etc.


Guadalquivir River (southern Spain) - From Arabic Wadi-al-kebir = 'river of great water' (Guada- is common 1st element of many Spanish names, from Arabic wadi = 'river, ravine').

Guadeloupe - named after monestary on Guadelupe R. in Spain ... same 'wadi' as above.

Guam - sighted by Magellan's men on St. John's day 1521. Present name native verison of 'Juan/John'. [currently Guáhán in chimorro, Guaján in Spanish).

Guatemala - Spanish version of Indian (probably Tuendal) uhazmala = 'mountain that gushes out water', though earlier explanation of origin had been from Aztec [nahautl?] quauhtemellan = 'land of the eagle' [spanish wikipedia has it meaning "place of many trees"]

Guyana, French Guiana (la Guyane; in French, Guyana is le Guyane), Guayana Esequiba (Venezuelan territorial ciaim) - explored in 1499 by Vespucci and Hojeda, latter naming territory after people, the Guaizas, whose own name = 'respected' (ie 'we who must be respected').
But en.wikipedia: Guyana is an Amerindian word meaning "Land of many waters".
And fr.wilipedia: The term "guyane" is of indigenous origin. In the guanao language, which is spoken by the indians of the Orinoco delta, GUAI means 'name', or 'denomination', UANA is a negation. ... thus Guyane means 'that which can't be named' or 'sacred ground ' or 'the house of the supreme being' (referring to the "italien" [indian?] name for the guyana massif)

Guinea, Equitorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, New Guinea - probably from Berber aguinau = 'black (-skinned people)'.
Guinea hen = fowl from Guinea. Guinea pig - 1664, native to South America and is so called either because it was first brought back to Britain aboard Guinea-men, ships that plied the triangle trade between England, Guinea, and South America; or from confusion of Guinea (q.v.) with the South American region of Guyana.

[N.B. I always found it interesting that when you jigsaw Africa and S. America back together, guinea and guiana match up!]

Nicaragua - discovered 1522 by explorer Gil Gonzalez, named territory after Indian chief who owned it. Chief's name of uncertain meaning. [es.wikipdia has the Nicarao tribe emigrating south from Teotihuacan (the classical civilization near present Mexico City). The Nicaraguan government cites unnamed etymologists to say that the name has Nahuatl [ie Aztec-lang-family] origins -- some say it can be divided ni-can-atl-hua, 'the lords of water are here' or 'place where there are great deposits of water'. Others suggest that nic-atl-nahuac' means 'here together on the water'. es.wikipedia quites that, but also suggests that the -agua is from the Spanish 'water'.

Paraguay - country after river, after native tribe, Paragua, with name derived from Indian [sic] para = 'water' en.wikipedia has this: The literal translation from Guaraní is Para=great river or sea; Gua=from or belonging to or place; Y=water or river or lake. This could lead to:
* "Water or river belonging to the sea" (the Atlantic Ocean).
* "Water or river that belongs to a great river" (the Paraná River).
* "Water or river that comes from a sea" or "water or river from the place where the sea is" (the Pantanal wetland).
The fourth version states that it could be a corruption from Pajaguay, "river of the Pajaguás", a tribe that inhabited the right bank, opposite from the Guaranís.

Uruguay - country after river, origin perhaps in Indian [sic] guay = 'tail' + uru = 'bird', referring to species of bird w/remarkable tail living in forests here. Or perhaps connected with guay = 'river', common element in South American names.
both wikipedias have: The name "Uruguay" comes from Guaraní. It has many possible meanings. Some of the proposed meanings are:
* "River of the uru" or "River of the country of the uru": a version attributed to Felix de Azara, which suggests that the name of the country comes from a small bird, called the urú, native to the banks of the Uruguay river (from uru, idem, gua, "place of", and y, "water")[4]
* "River of colorful or 'painted' chinchillas (birds) [sic? I can't find any refernces, Spanish or English, to chinchillas that aren't the soft-furred Andean rodents, apart from a city called Chinchilla in Spain]": poetic interpretation attributed to Juan Zorrilla de San Martín.
* "Rivers that have dead people of snails": an interpretation attributed to a collaborator of Félix de Azara (from arugua, "snail", and y, "water")[4]
* "River of those who bring food": an anonymous version which has been popularized since the discovery of an old document written by Jesuit Lucas Marton.

Speaking in Tongues

From today's Folha de S. Paolo, a photo from this weekend's World Club Championship match: English shirt on a Brazilian footballer playing in Japan for an Italian team against Argentinean opposition.


Today, Kaká was named World Footballer of the Year. His acceptance speech, also in English:

Tonight is really special for me. When I was young, I dreamed of playing for Sao Paulo and playing just one game for the national team. That was it, but the Bible says God gives us more than we ask for and that is what has happened in my life.

For some reason I get a lot more excited (or is it I cringe less?) about players' for-the-camera professions of faith when they aren't American. Also, oddly, when you're wearing the on your shirt you by definition carry it close to you whether you win or lose — which is a pretty strong (if invisible) answer to the protest that, hey, wait a minute, Jesus isn't just (or even firstly) for Winners.

Mixing French and Arabic(s)

I'm fascinated by on-the-fly language hybrids: Spanglish, Sheng (Kiswahili-English), the "HUGME" (Hindu-Urdu-Gujarati-Marathi-English) of Salman Rushdie's many-tongued Bombay. The other day I was emailing a friend about mixing French and Arabic in Tunisia, and hours later came across (via Language Log via Langauge Hat) some anecdotes on the real-world usefulness of Fusha (aka standard written Arabic) vs. French vs. local dialects.

From the Language Log post:

This situation makes the task of foreign learners more difficult, since they need to learn to deal appropriately with a very broad range of mixtures of "high" and "low" languages. This is true to some extent in any language, but the range of diglossia in "Arabic" appears to be significantly greater than in most other modern situations. You need to imagine a situation in which "Latin" is used to refer not only to classical and patristic Latin, but also to the spoken versions French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (with none of them having any standard written form).

And the longer usage anecdotes, quoted in Language Log but from a World Bank-hosted pdf:

Hela is a sixth-grade primary school student living in Tunis. She spends her summers in Nabeul with her grandmother. Her two best friends there are Hiba and Meriem. Hiba lives in Nabeul all year round and is the same age as Hela. Meriem is a year older and lives in La Marsa during the school year. Hela goes to a private school where she started French and Arabic at the same time. She has more than 20 hours of classes in Arabic and about 10 hours in French a week. All the subjects other than French, such as Math and Biology, are taught in Fusha. Sometimes the teacher explains things in Arbi, but the students often have to speak in Fusha. Hela does not like Fusha as much as Arbi, it feels too alien to her. She even likes French better than Fusha. Meriem’s classes are a lot like Hela’s. She prefers French and often uses French words when she’s speaking Arbi. She thinks it makes her sound cool, like an adult. Hiba, on the other hand, didn’t start French until the third grade. Even though she now has the same number of hours of each language as Hela does, she prefers Arabic (both fusha and Arbi) to French and reads more Arabic books.

The three girls play together and watch television. Their favorite shows are Saoussen, which is in Fusha, and Les Schtroumfs, which is in French. Sometimes, when they play, they pretend to be the cartoon characters and try to sound like them. Hiba likes playing Saoussen best, because she doesn’t play well when they speak in French. Meriem prefers Les Schtroumfs because her Fusha is poor. They usually just speak Arbi together. After the summers over, Hela and Meriem go back to their homes. They decide to write each other letters over the school year. After the first day of school, Hela runs home to write letters to her friends. She starts to write a letter to Hiba, in Fusha, but feels that this is not a friendly letter. It feels more like homework. She thinks in Arbi, but cannot write what she means, and has to translate. Frustrated, she decides to write to Meriem first. She quickly realizes that her best bet is to write in French, but still struggles with finding the right words to say what she means. Finally, she settles on using Arbi words that she approximates phonetically and finishes one letter. For Hibas letter, though, its harder for her to do this with Fusha, so she just writes a very short letter and writes some words in French. These solutions work, but leave her feeling unsatisfied. She feels closer to Meriem because she can communicate with her better. She rapidly loses interest in writing to Hiba, though.

Hela's cousin, Farah, grew up in Saudi Arabia. She is the same age as Hela and is in the fourth grade. Farah only speaks Saudi Arabic, Fusha, and English, which she studies at school. She feels that Fusha is strange and silly. Nobody really speaks it there either. When Farah and Hela get together, they can only speak a mixture of their dialect with Fusha. It is very strange for both of them. They hardly ever write each other letters, because they’d have to do it in Fusha, which neither feels comfortable with. Farah feels resentment towards Fusha and reads even less. She doesn’t like music in Arabic as much as English or French music and only reads in Arabic if it is mandatory. Her French continues to improve and her Fusha remains poor. This does not bother her though, because she knows that once she gets to secondary school, Fusha would be much less important and if she wants to be a doctor when she grows up, she will only need French.

Urdu Desktop Publishing

The ever-stellar Language Hat linked to this refutation of a recently circulated story about the last hand-lettered newspaper in the world, an Urdu paper published in Chennai, India. Not so, says Iqag Notes:

The vast majority of “printed” Urdu works are hand written. That includes books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and so on. It’s true that there is at the moment an incredibly fast pace of change towards computerization amongst the major newspapers, and a slower pace for books, but this has been only over the last five years. In fact, one of the only things which are almost always computer composed are wedding invitations, because it’s cost effective for these small batches, and because the consumer bears the higher labor costs of DTP vs. caligraphy.

After which follows a fascinating history of efforts to render Urdu script in printed form - old-school typography, lithography (making a facsimile of a hand-lettered page), and desktop publishing.

Lithography was easier and cheaper than block type, and there was no particular reason to look back. That is, until the invention of computers and the various stages of mechanical and computerized typesetting. Still, developing the algorithm for proper rendering of nasta`liq was just not attracting the necessary investment. One factor may have been the fact that those kids from Urdu speaking families who went into computers in India - and even, to some extent Pakistan - were those least likely to be able to read Urdu. Even now, if you are Muslim and go to an English medium school, you take Arabic as your second language, and if you go to an Urdu medium school, the chances of you pursuing engineering are slim.

There's also a fascinating digression about printing the Qur'an:

As for the Qur’an, a trained Urdu calligrapher would be completely unqualified for that. Qur’an’s are written by teams of huffaz (people who’ve memorized the Qur’an) trained in Qur’anic calligraphy. They are repeatedly checked and certified by government bodies in multiple countries. Generally speaking, a publisher who prints a Qur’an with an error of a single diacritical mark can expect to be held responsible for recall and destruction of the entire issue. 95% of the Qur’ans you’ll run across in South Asia are reprints (mostly unauthorized) of the Taj Company edition of the 1930s. These are resized and recut to fit different editions. I watched someone spend two years cutting and pasting by hand to produce a new, large print multi-lingual interlinear edition which he hoped would become a marketplace sensation. Essentially, there are two visual styles in Qur’ans today, the Taj version, and that handed out by the Saudis. Everything else is a rarity. Many South Asians have trouble reading the Saudi version as it lacks visual cues they grew up with.

And this intriguing parenthetical:

(You must realize that most of the non-English publishing in India is done at the expense of the author or the author’s friends or students or disciples. This actually leads to very vibrant literary scenes about which people actually care quite a bit.)

Now let's see if I can do some script-comparisons—admittedly risky for scripts I can't read. Here's a headline from The Siasat Daily, rendered as a jpg with InPage's DTP software:


And here's an Urdu headline from BBC Urdu, which uses a Unicode font—it doesn't mimic the calligraphy as well—it's flatter, like standard Arabic type, but it's searchable:

سفر فیصل آباد، چیف جسٹس کا بھرپور استقبال

I'd like to find an image of a contemprary handwritten Urdu news article, but haven't figured out how to locate one yet.