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Some have suggested that we translate our stories into multiple languages to expand our market.  This is a fantastic idea and we’d love to try, but we are wary of the perils of mistranslation.

As an opera singer, I do a lot of translation of song texts, and I know very well how easy it is to make a mistake.  Sometimes one letter is all the difference between what you mean to say, and a dirty word.  Other times, a colloquial phrase that is popular in the States might transform into a hideous insult in another culture.

Just for fun, we plugged a few of our books’ phrases into Translation Party, a fun site that will translate any given English phrase into Japanese, then back to English, then back to Japanese, etc. until the phrase reaches “Equilibrium” (meaning the software is finally able to accurately reproduce the exact same phrase in both languages).  The results are fun and exactly what we don’t want to happen when we finally do translate our books.

First, a line from “What Animal Are You?”:

Roar, you great lizard and stomp through the floor.

轟音は、大トカゲや床まで踏みつける。

Roar, to the floor and trample lizards.

轟音を踏みにじるトカゲは床としています。

Trample lizards are rumbling and the floor.

踏みにじるのトカゲと鳴る床があります。

Final: There are sound and floor-stomping lizards.

The next phrase from “If I Were Big” took a little longer to reach equilibrium:

She’d have long legs and go anywhere

彼女は長い足があるんだけど、どこにでも行く

She has long legs I have, go anywhere

彼女は、私の長い脚をしているどこにでも行く

She will go anywhere to have my long legs

彼女は私の長い脚をしている任意の場所に移動します

She will move to any location on my long legs and a

彼女は私の長い脚を任意の場所に移動すると

She moved to any location of my long legs

彼女が私の長い脚の任意の場所に移動

Her to move anywhere in my long legs

彼女のどこにでも私の長い脚に移動する

I long to move the legs of her everywhere

私は長い脚を動かすには彼女のどこ

I have to move to where her legs are long

私が彼女の足の長さを移動する必要があります

You must move the length of her legs I

あなたが彼女の足の長さを移動する必要があります私は

Final: I need to move the length of her legs

Ours were fun, but my favorite came from the lyrics to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”:

Start – Hey where did we go, days when the rains came, down in the hollow, playing a new game.

Final: Or here is a small hole in the rain, I, or, if necessary, you must create a new game.

…

By Anatoly Liberman

Spelling reform and genitals will keep the rubric “gleanings” afloat forever. In connection with my series of posts on the oddest English spellings (which will be continued), I received several questions about dyslexia and orthography. Since I am unacquainted with the neural aspects of dyslexia, I cannot have a professional opinion on this subject, but the main divide seems to be between alphabetic languages and those using hieroglyphs (such as Chinese) rather than between languages like Finnish, in which the word’s aural Gestalt and visual image correspond remarkably well, and languages like English, in which the spelling of numerous words is unpredictable (bury, build, bosom, choir, till ~ until, and so forth), for different parts of the brain control our mastery of letters versus symbols (in this case, pictures).

Now to the genitals. Thanks to the correspondent who provided a quotation of dildoes from John Donne’s “Elegy 2: The Anagram” (1599). Those lines confirm the fact that the word was well-known in Shakespeare’s days. While our British correspondent was watching “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” an idea occurred to her that the opprobrious sense of knob had existed for centuries. My information on this subject is sparse. Knob “penis” was indeed known in the second half of the 17th century, but neither Shakespeare nor his younger contemporaries, whose language is often coarser than his, seem to have used it, even in puns, while reproducing the speech of their time. Nor do I find it in the old classical dictionaries of slang. Apparently, it reemerged after a long period of underworld existence only in the 20th century.

By way of compensation, I will add a note to my old post on the origin of Engl. brain. I suggested in it that brain is akin to bran and that the earliest meaning of the word was approximately “refuse,” not too different from “gray matter.” At that time I did not remember that 400 years ago the brain was supposed to produce semen, because both substances look rather similar. Hence the allusion to “brains between legs.” As regards Italian fiasco, I am sure that, contrary to a guess of our correspondent, far’ fico and far’ fiasco are unrelated. Some discussion of the Italian word (in connection with Engl. fig) can be found in my An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction; fig is mentioned in the entry on the F-word. To the best of my knowledge, far’ fiasco had no scurrilous overtones when it was coined. Fiasco (this is an answer to a different question) can, of course, have entered English directly from Italian, but if an Italian word (except for art terms and those pertaining to Italian realities) is also current in French and if the chronology does not militate against such a conclusion, it is safer to suggest that English took it over from French rather than Italian. I will return to fiasco in a different context.

In my etymological database, only one citation on poontang turned up. G. Legman wrote in the journal American Speech 25, 1950, p.234: “The Southern term poontang, for sexual intercourse ‘especially between Negro & white’ (Wentworth), is popularly and mistakenly believed to be a Negro word, perhaps of African origin. Actually, as pointed out by the well-known translator Keene Wallis, poontang is merely a heavily nasalized Creole pronunciation of the French word putain, whore, and undoubtedly spread through the South from French-speaking Louisiana. Wallis reports it as current in Missouri about ‘1915’.” This is followed by twelve quotations (but not from Wallis), three of them from Look Homeward, Angel (1929; Poon Tang). Few words are more detrimental to an etymology than undoubtedly and doubtlessly, but the derivation from putain is not bad, and the southern provenance of poontang seems to be correct.

A question was asked about the adverb yet. It concerns usage, but the development of yet also has a historical dimension. Our correspondent finds the sentence “Has Lucy come yet?” strange. It sounds perfectly idiomatic to me. In Modern English, yet has numerous meanings, and in two situations it alternates with “substitutes.” One is still: he is still here ~ he is not here yet. The other is already: he has already come ~ has he come yet? Apparently, the latter alternation is not universal; otherwise, there would have been no query. A few things about past usage may be of interest. Still is an adjective (“quiet, motionless”) and an adverb, as above. In Shakespeare’s language still meant “always” (“Thou still hast been the father of good news”). In some British dialects, yet occurs as still was in the 16th and 17th century. Consequently, it may be that in Wordsworth’s sonnet addressed to Milton: “So didst thou travel on life’s common way / In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay,” yet is misunderstood by modern readers, for Wordsworth may have meant “and always (ever) thy heart.”

Extinction of Languages. The disappearance of every language, like the disappearance of every species, is an irreparable loss, and it is a good thing that in the 20th century many languages have been saved from extinction and in a few cases even revived (Hebrew is an anthologized example). But it is also a fact that languages, and not necessarily endangered ones, those with few speakers left, have been dying throughout history. Take Hittite, Hunnish, and Gothic. They were spoken by tens of thousands of people forming powerful tribal unions. What is left are a heap of clay tablets, a few biblical fragments, and the like, while from preliterate societies (to which the Huns belonged) almost nothing has remained. Vandals have a bad press, though at one time they were not worse than, say, the Goths. The Vandals are gone, and, but for a few names and words recorded by the Romans, we would have had no idea of their language. History is cruel; however, it is also unpredictable: it sometimes spares the weak and destroys the strong.

Etymologies. How are Engl. bold and Old Icelandic ballr related, considering that the Icelandic word meant “frightful, dangerous, fatal?” Adjectives often refer to a quality possessed by an individual and the effect this quality has on others. Here we deal with courage and its results: a stout-hearted person is “bold,” whereas his boldness is “dangerous” to others. Can Engl. evil be related to Latin evilescere “to become vile, worthless, despicable,” and, if such a possibility exists, can certain conclusions be drawn with relation to the writings of early English saints? Our correspondent is correct in isolating the root of vilis “vile” in the Latin verb (e- is a prefix). This structure excludes its affinity to evil, but any influence of this relatively rare Latin verb on the Old English adjective should also be ruled out, because the original form of evil was yfil (the modern pronunciation of the stressed vowel is a “Kentism”) and because its cognates, beginning with Gothic, already had the meaning it has today. A medieval scholar would have been delighted to catch at the similarity between evil and evilescere, but by the time umlaut changed u in ubil- (the reconstructed but secure protoform of evil) to y, let alone by the Middle English period (when Old Engl. long y yielded e), all the works cited in the letter had been written and become canon. Ubil-, though pronounced with -v-, did not sound like Latin evil- and would not have inspired even the most ingenious thinker of the Middle Ages. The literature on counting-out rhymes is vast. As always, I am grateful for every tip, but, while writing about eena-meena, I included among my references only those works that deal with the origin of the relevant words, and such works are not many

Pronunciation and grammar. (I won’t repeat the questions, for they can be guessed from the answers.) Unless the norm has changed in recent years, the first vowel in Coventry has the value of o in on. It is true that the o in womb is not identical with its counterpart in woman. But since I do not use phonetic symbols in this blog, I disregarded the vowels’ respective duration. Food and foot are distinguished in the same way (the first oo designates a longer sound). I doubt that anyone acquainted with Emily Bronte’s novel pronounces wuthering, as in Wuthering Heights, with the vowel of strut, though the name Wuthering does have such a vowel. It was good to hear that the OED allows shrank, my past tense of shrink, to exist. I am aware of the fact that in American English the common past form of shrink is shrunk but feel quite comfortable with my slightly idiosyncratic grammar. There is no way I can keep abreast of the times. Most people around me say shined where I say shone (my shone used to rhyme gone, and when I finally made it rhyme with lone, it was too late: shined replaced both). Likewise, I refuse to say plead-pled and stick to pleaded. Little restaurants in my area post the coy apology: “Excuse us: we are slightly old-fashioned.” I am afraid I should carry a board on my breast with a similar message.

Antedatings and contested etymologies. Thanks to Stephen Goranson for his information about the first occurrences of fiasco and snob. Snob remains a word that reached London around the 1770’s. The story connecting the introduction of fiasco with a bad performance by Biancolelli, the harlequin, has been repeated many times, and I knew it. I cannot disprove it, but long experience has taught me to treat such tales with great distrust. When it comes to etymology, they usually turn out to be wrong. One can imagine that far’ fiasco had existed before the actor’s poor performance and that he deliberately carried a bottle around his neck, a good precautionary measure for all of us, whether comedians or etymologists.

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By Anatoly Liberman

The word fiasco reached the European languages in the 19th century: in Germany Heine introduced it from French (1837); in Sweden it appeared ten years later; in England in 1854, and so on. Although an Italian word meaning “bottle,” fiasco, along with its cognates in the other Romance languages, is, most probably, of Germanic origin, so that Engl. flask and German Flasche may be native (by contrast, flagon, from flacon, from some form like flascon, originated in France and went to England from there). The reasons fiasco keeps baffling etymologists need not cause surprise: it emerged as slang, and the sources of slang are usually hard to trace.

Three moments complicate the search. First, despite the fact that fiasco is, undoubtedly, Italian, the phrase far fiasco spread to other languages from French. (In texts, the phrase far fiasco turned up before the bare noun fiasco “mistake.”) Second, if far fiasco means “to make a bottle,” with a later change to “make a mistake and fail,” it is unclear why fiasco “bottle” has no article. Third, as far as we can judge, the phrase was first used only with reference to actors’ bad performance, a fact that leaves us wondering where bottles come in: bad eggs and rotten tomatoes would be more in place.

Far fiasco has no medieval roots. Therefore, occasional mentions of Roman customs, failed conspiracies (the hero of one of them was Count Giovanni L. Fiesco, 1547), and the like need not bother us. Only one of the more reasonable guesses, from Stainer and Barrett’s Dictionary of Musical Terms, may be quoted for completeness’ sake: “The fistula pastoricia was blown by the Romans to signify their dissatisfaction and it is possible that the present term arose from the similarity between the shape of a flageolet (flaschinet), and a flask.”

The literature on the origin of fiasco is not vast, but not negligible either: entries in the explanatory and etymological dictionaries of most European languages and about a dozen notes and articles. Some conjectures are copied from book to book, but all authors hasten to say that no definitive solution exists. Fiasco aligns itself with the words I have discussed in the recent past: their meaning is so discouraging (the posts were devoted to charade and charlatan) that etymological frustration should be taken for granted: these words “have a reputation to live up to.” As a rule, fiasco is referred to the production of Venetian glass. Allegedly, when a glassblower spoiled some beautiful object, it was made into a common bottle. Or when an apprentice ruined his assignment and ended up with a pitiful bottle instead of what he had hoped to produce, the outcome was a fiasco. Or a stupid tourist would witness the work of professional glassblowers and decide that the process was easy. He would be allowed to use the tube, but the result would be only nondescript pear-shaped bottles, much to the merriment of the bystanders, who would shout fiasco! at every new attempt. No evidence supports the idea that the phrase far fiasco originated in Venice. Unlike sports and art, glass blowing is a field whose professional secrets mainly interests only those involved, and a technical phrase known to insiders would be unlikely to travel far and wide. Nor has it been documented that workers ever turned spoiled objects into primitive bottles or destroyed them.

Another line of inquiry emphasizes the fact that the verb far does not have to mean “do, make”: it can be a substitute for some more concrete verb. This is true enough. To make one’s bed does not mean to produce it. To make head against something “resist an obstacle successfully” does not involve the manufacturing of a head. Make can even be a kind of link verb (for example, I made bold to mention this fact). The phrase appiccare un fiasco “to hang a bottle round someone’s neck” (appiccare “attach, fasten”) was a legal formula, and a substantial body of material has been produced to show that in the Middle Ages and later various objects—including bottles—were hung around miscreants’ necks. However, “to inflict a penalty” and “impose a punishment” are hardly synonyms for “fail as the result of a mistake.” At first sight, more promising seems to be the consideration that the names of hollow objects are often used as metaphors for “an empty head” and “fool.” Both German Flasche and French bouteille can mean “dummy,” but Italian fiasco cannot, so that this path also leads nowhere.

As pointed out above, fiasco became known in Italy and other lands as slang current in theaters. It may have originated elsewhere, but the stage was the center from which it spread through the languages of Europe. An ingenious reconstruction refers to the period in the 18th century when Italian comedians performed in France and became bitter rivals of native actors. This approach purports to explain how the now obsolete French expression faire une bouteille “make a mistake” became far fiasco and why the Italian phrase appeared in France before the Italians began to use it. Even if this is how the events developed, the problem of the indefinite article remains unsolved. Although far un fiasco and far il fiasco have been recorded, they have never been the main variants of the idiom and look like later rationalizations of far fiasco. Bottle is a countable noun, and it remains a puzzle why, in translating faire une bouteille, une was left out. Similar cases, with articles missing after faire ~ make, exist, but they are not many. The French idiom faire face a, roughly synonymous with make head against, had some currency in English guise (make face to); for example, Washington Irving used it. Here neither language needs the indefinite article before face, which is typical: compare save face. One can understand how face acquired an abstract meaning or how the same process affected way (make way), sail (make sail = hoist sail), and penny (at one time, the phrases make penny of something or make a penny of something enjoyed some popularity). But bottle? To us fiasco is abstract (“failure; disaster),” but nothing can be more concrete than Italian fiasco “bottle.” And this circumstance brings me to a last (surely, not the last) hypothesis on the origin of this intractable word.

Perhaps fiasco is connected with bottles less directly than is usually believed. In southern French dialects, the phrase faire flist “to lose courage” occurs. Flist, flast, and so forth are sound imitative words, and the phrase in question means approximately “to go flop.” One can imagine that for fun actors reshaped some French word like flast into Italian fiasco. This hypothesis is not unknown, but etymologists, in the rare cases they touch on it, do so in passing and with great diffidence, for too many missing links invite caution. In the world of words, old age (and flask has been around “forever”) is no proof against an onomatopoeic origin; the opposite is true. Since Germanic f- goes back to earlier p-, the protoform of flask must have begun with plas- or plos-, a typical sound imitative complex: compare Engl. plash ~ splash-. Perhaps the type of bottle called “flask” got its name for the sound the liquid it contained went plas-plas or plos-plos. Bottle (originally a wine sack or a leather flask?) is a Romance word and may be related to Engl. body and other nouns denoting “swelling.” B-d and b-t words are also sound imitative. Latin ampulla “bottle” was frequently used to designate inflated and noisy objects. If flask arose as an onomatopoeic word in antiquity, it could cross the path of another onomatopoeia centuries later. All this is interesting but rather fruitless guesswork.

However slippery our ground may be, research has shed some light on the derivation of fiasco. Contrary to what popular books keep telling us, the word did not arise in the lingo of Venetian glassblowers. It probably owes nothing to the barbarous punishments of the Middle Ages and beyond. Despite the obvious Italian connection, it has French roots (not to be confused with a French root). Other than that, the bottle refuses to be cracked.

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When a new edition of a dictionary is published, you never know what people are going to pick up on as noteworthy. Last week, when the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was officially launched, much of the surrounding publicity had to do with the all the brand-new material: the 2,500 new words and phrases and 1,300 new illustrative quotes. But what’s gotten just as much attention is something that’s missing. The hyphen, that humble piece of connective punctuation, has been removed from about 16,000 compound words appearing in the text of the Shorter. The news has been making the rounds everywhere from the BBC to the Wall Street Journal. “Hyphens are the latest casualty of the internet age,” writes the Sydney Morning Herald. “Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on,” a Reuters headline bleakly reads. A satirical paper even warns of a “hyphen-thief” on the loose. But don’t worry, hyphenophiles: the punctuation lives on, even if it’s entering uncertain terrain in the electronic era. (more…)

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