Here are the slides from my presentation at the 2016 Editors Canada conference. I didn’t have a separate script, and I neglected to record myself presenting, so this is what there is to give you, but it covers the points; my speaking was generally expansion on the points.
Here is the whole show, downloadable: harbeck_who_EAC_201606
Here are the slides, one by one.
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged communication, dialect, eac, editing, editors, Editors Canada, Editors' Association of Canada, genre, jargon, linguistics, register, roles, slang, sociolects, writers, writing
Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, the national blog of Editors Canada
As editors, we pay attention to the written form of our language. Its relation to the spoken form is a whole other thing.
The spelling is odd, we know. But even our hyphenation doesn’t really break according to pronunciation. Consider the word breaking. Where do you hyphenate it? Break-ing. But where does the syllable break happen in pronunciation? Before the k. Don’t believe me? Shout it, emphasizing each syllable equally. You’ll shout “Bray! King!” rather than “Break! Ing!” In speech, we automatically shift a consonant at the end of one syllable to the beginning of the next if there isn’t a consonant there already, regardless of how the word is formed. But in writing we reflect the bits the word is made of, because that’s how we think of it.
Except when we don’t. And then it’s a whole nother thing.
Take a word like another. It’s made of two pieces: an and other. Put them together, and the n is automatically said at the beginning of the second syllable, so it sounds like a nother. You’d think we’d still keep it in mind that it’s really an other. You would not inevitably be right.
A whole nother isn’t the only place we’ve done this redivision. Centuries ago, a newt was an ewt and a nickname was an ekename. And speaking of nicknames, Ned and Nan come from mine Edward and mine Ann (we used to alternate my and mine as we still alternate a and an), and in Shakespeare you’ll see nuncle in place of uncle.
It also goes the other way. A poisonous snake, in English, was næddre, which would normally have become nadder, but instead of a nadder we have an adder. Likewise, a naperon gave us an apron. We pronounce them no differently, unless we put another word in between, but we think of them differently. We hear the n said at the start of the next syllable, but since the n in an always does that, we reanalyze it in a way that seems – for one reason or another – more appropriate.
Do you wish you could have someone to make rulings on these kinds of resplittings (also known as rebracketing and false splitting)? Try calling an umpire – as long as you don’t mind that your umpire would once have been a noumpere.
This doesn’t mean that we have to accept a whole nother, of course. A whole other is considered formally correct, although that implies a two-word an other. Since we’ve glued the two parts together, putting whole in the middle is arguably more like what we do in abso-bloody-lutely… except we wouldn’t write a-whole-nother.
Perhaps we should reconsider what we do and don’t think of as inviolable word boundaries. We may dislike alot quite a lot, for instance, but if we can make a word like another, can you think of a truly defensible reason for it not to be another one such? Or is that a… completely different issue?
This article first appeared in Active Voice, the national newsletter of Editors Canada.
What’s English for Schadenfreude? Schadenfreude, of course.
Words are like Barbie dolls or trading cards or Hummel figurines or camera lenses or kitchen gadgets: if we see one that fills a spot that we don’t already have filled, we want it. Even if we didn’t know we needed to fill that spot until we saw the word.
This is surely one reason listicles about “untranslatable words” are currently popular. Perhaps you never thought before about wanting a word that means “the look on a person’s face as they watch the person ahead of them at a bakery take the last one of the pastry they wanted,” but once you see a word for it, goshdarn it, you have to have it.*
The funny thing about those articles on untranslatable words is that they always give translations for the words. And not just “Schadenfreude (n.): Schadenfreude,” either, but “Enjoyment of someone else’s suffering.” So, really, the words aren’t untranslatable, are they? Not any more than anything else is. There just isn’t a single word for them.
Actually, if you want a really untranslatable word, try a preposition. How about French à? Does that mean “to”? Hmm. In C’est à moi? In J’habite à Montréal? In poulet à la crème? You can’t come up with a single equivalent word for any preposition, because different languages always use them in different ways. And yet within the sentence you can always translate them, as much as you can translate anything else.
But the dirty secret of translation is that you can’t really translate anything else either.
You can only come sufficiently close in the context of the text and your culture. And sometimes barely even sufficiently. Every word has different overtones and associations and references for different cultures – and for different sets of people (and even for each different individual) within a culture. It has different phrases it typically shows up with, different places it’s been heard, different rhymes, different sets of things it has been used to refer to commonly. And there are different attitudes towards what it refers to.
The idea of a purely accurate translation is like the idea of a truly authentic culinary experience from another culture. Say you want an authentic Thai curry. You go to a Thai restaurant. But they’re using Canadian-grown ingredients. So you go where they have imported Thai ingredients. But you’re still in a Canadian restaurant. So you go to Thailand. Ah. But you’re still… a Canadian in Thailand. You didn’t grow up eating Thai food. Look, imagine a person from another country (maybe Namibia or Vanuatu) eating fruitcake or roast turkey or tuna casserole for the first time. There is no way their experience of it is going to be like yours. You just have to accept that. Cultural experiences are not truly fully translatable. And language is a cultural experience.
Of course, there are many things that are purely functional, and the cultural accretions are quite incidental. “Push to open.” “Tear here.” No problem there; cultural attitudes towards pushing and tearing can be treated as separate issues. That lulls us into thinking that accurate translation is possible.
But even there, we’re taking tone and connotation for granted. Why doesn’t the packet say “Rip here”? Why doesn’t the door say “Shove to open”? And once we get even a little farther from the purely mechanical, judgment calls are a regular thing. Send the same document, even on a technical subject, to two different translators and you will get two different renditions, each with its merits and detractions. And if you get into fiction or plays or – the worst – poetry, you’re really just getting a sort of harmonic resonance of the original, on a different instrument.
Consider this:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
The famous first stanza of Dante’s Divina Commedia. Lovely, flavourful Italian. Here’s Robert Pinsky’s version:
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.
Here’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Here’s Courtney Langdon’s:
When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
because the path which led aright was lost.
Right road? Straightforward pathway? Path which led aright? Wood, woods, forest? Dark, gloomy? Midway, half way?
This is why Italians say traduttore traditore. Which has been translated “to translate is to betray.” But really I think it’s better rendered as “Translator? Traitor.”
*Oh, you want a word for that? How about discrescent? Or pain-déçu? I know: bedrøvet. That’s the Danish version of “sad.”
This weekend is the annual conference of the Editors’ Association of Canada. It’s happening right up the street from me; I can almost see the venue from where I’m sitting writing this. There will be much convening and learning, and eac mickle fun.
Did you think I had that eac wrong? Well, yes, arguably. Oh, you think it should be EAC in caps for the Editors’ etc.? No, no. It’s just that the current spelling of the word I have written as eac is eke. But since we don’t use eke anymore, really, I don’t see much harm in using the Old English version here for a lark.
There’s another reason to use the eac form. As you read here yesterday, Iva Cheung sought an archaic adverb and found swoopstake, which is suitable for what she wanted, but unlike off it’s not also a preposition. Eke is likewise not also a preposition – it’s just an adverb meaning ‘also, as well’. But eac as it was used in Old English was also (if less often) a preposition, translatable as ‘besides, in addition to’ (and, for those who know and care about such things, taking a dative object): hæfst þu oþre eac him? (hast thou others eac him?). So I should say that eac an adverb it was a preposition.
A little point on pronunciation, by the way. Eke is pronounced like “eek,” but eac was not. The diphthong written as ea (and in this instance it was a long one, literally said for a longer time) was pronounced [æa] or [æə], where [æ] is as in back, [a] is as in bark (North American version, not including the r), and [ə] is as in buck. In other words, eac was pronounced about the same as the way a person from Mississippi pronounces back, minus the b.
If you know German, you’ll know the word auch ‘also’; if you know Dutch, you’ll know the cognate ook. These two words are eac descended from the same old Germanic word as eac. But they survived into modern times. English now prefers to use also (and as well, besides, in addition to, etc.) for historical reasons that are probably worth a master’s thesis for someone.
So be it. We still have this word, gathering dust but not altogether lost. It’s like one of those bottles of liquor pulled out of the back of the cabinet, where it has been languishing for many years. “Are you really going to drink that? What is it?” “Dunno, but it could be fun.” “Ugh. Don’t put any in my martini, please.”
Well, de gustibus non est disputandum. I will be romping with the words and the word people this weekend, and eac having much fun. Nunc est bibendum; join me if you wish.
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged eac, Editors' Association of Canada, eke, word tasting notes
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