Whatever happened to the Persian Gulf?

It appears that the thought-provoking non-fiction smasharoo Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? is read in all the best radio production offices, and when they think geographical name-changes, they think Campbell. It seems I am going to be on the BBC World Service discussion programme World Have Your Say between about 6 and7pm tonight. Which is to say in less than an hour. Sorry you missed it!

Dictionary fail

There are certain nationalities we don’t really have a proper word for in English, or at least feel pretty uncertain about. I’m talking demonyms, or gentilics if you prefer. What’s the name for someone from Afghanistan? An Afghan surely, but we often hear Afghani, presumably on the model of Pakistani. There is also of course the afghani, the unit of currency of Afghanistan, but dictionaries do not tend to recognise it as an adjective or a nationality.

Especially problematic are Francophone ex-colonies where English just uses the French word; there’s a pattern of sorts with Senegalese, Congolese, Togolese,¹ but there are many other possibilities. Seychellois, but Chadian and Burundian. Benin — Beninese or Beninois? Comoros? — Comorian, but I had to look it up; I could have believed Comorese, and there’s some evidence for that idea on Google if not in dictionaries.² Madagascar? — Malagasy (not to be confused with Monegasque which means from Monaco). Burkina Faso? “Burkina Fasan” gets over 1000 Google hits, but looks ridiculous; Burkinabé seems to be the word even in English. Côte d’Ivoire? — Ivorian, but how do you pronounce it, “eye-VORE-ian” or “ee-VWAR-ian”?

Zaire/Zaïre no longer exists (read all about it in that seminal work of “nostalgic geography”, Whatever Happened to Tanganyika?, if you can still find a copy), and perhaps linguistically speaking we should be glad of that, but what was the adjective: Zairean? Zairian? Zairese? Zairois? All with or without dots above the i, of course. The Central African Republic, perhaps the world’s most soulless and inconvenient country name, is a puzzle. Surely not “Central African Republican”; Wikipedia says it’s just “Central African” but that’s hopelessly ambiguous. We can only hope they revert one day to Oubangui-Chari/Ubangi-Shari, or perhaps Ubangi, or even just Bangui after the capital — presumably that works for Mexico and Panama and Guatemala. And/or Andorra.

But I digress, as ever. It’s often when a country is thrust from obscurity, and seemingly always for bad reasons, into the spotlight of the news that we become aware of these uncertainties. Niger has always been an odd one. The river is the Niger (“NIE-dger”) but the country is Niger (“nee-ZHAIR”, à la française). But what on earth do you call an inhabitant of the place? Not a Nigerian, that’s someone from Nigeria. The word is Nigerien, or even Nigérien “nee-ZHAIR-ian”, a strange mixture of French and English sounds. Again, with no disrespect to either nation, it’s an inconvenient confusion. You’d certainly want to double-check your travel doocuments; I once saw a travel agent confess on national television to booking someone onto a flight to Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, when they wanted to go to the Caucasian republic of Azerbaijan.

In the light of recent news events, Collins Dictionaries might want to think about revising the entry in their online French dictionary (right). The French for Nigerian is not nigérien, that means from Niger. As the French-to-English entry shows. In this electronic age, it’s all too easy to catch dictionaries out like this.

¹ Oddly perhaps, we also have cases like Marshallese, though the Marshall Islands have no French influence that I know of. There’s also Ceylonese, presumably connected with Sinhalese, and OED records various oddities and archaisms such as Tyrolese and Bengalese, and even Swahilese for Swahili.
² In Dictionarese?

London, or was it Liverpool? Somewhere round there

Here’s one I missed at the time, from the Guardian of 2 November 2009:

These are uncertain times for The Chambers Dictionary and for The Observer.¹ I have been told that the publishers Chambers Harrap will be wound up, its Glasgow staff made redundant, and its reference list transferred to Hodder Educational in London.

Of course, redundancies among Chambers’ Glasgow staff would have been a small price to pay, considering, er, there weren’t any, what with the company being based in Edinburgh, and all that. But hey, it’s all the same, it’s just Scotland, or is it Ireland, whatever, I dunno, somewhere a long way off on the Celtic fringe anyway.

¹This being the Guardian² (or as they would say The Guardian), italics in the titles of books and newspapers are taboo — can anyone explain this perverse and obscurantist aspect of their house style?
² OK, I know you’re supposed to write “The Guardian” not “the Guardian”, but I just don’t like that for some reason and I feel at liberty to define my own quirky house style for my own blog. Even if I don’t see why a famous national newspaper should be allowed to.³
³ I say “national” but of course it used to be the Manchester Guardian. Or was it the Newcastle Guardian, I dunno. Somewhere round there.

State for hire

One of the first places I knew I wanted to write about in my smash-hit non-fiction sensation Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? (now storming the charts in paperback) was the Republic of Nauru, once known as Pleasant Island. With phosphate reserves more or less exhausted and (forgive me Nauru) a tradition of government more hapless and inept than anything our own dear PM could be accused of, it has had to turn to more and more wacky ways to raise income. Nowadays it seems have resorted to (forgive me again) prostituting its sovereign status to the highest — or just the latest — bidder, becoming a pawn in superpower propaganda battles by conferring its official recognition on disputed nations like Kosovo, South Ossetia and Abkhasia. According to the Guardian, and indeed the Telegraph (or rather some anonymous stringer whose words were presumably copied and pasted by both papers), “In July 2002, Nauru accepted $130m from China to de-recognise Taiwan only to re-recognise it in 2005 after apparently receiving another, better offer.” Forgive me one last time, Nauru, but does “obscure microstate agrees to recognise obscure disputed territory, for money” really bring any kudos to either party? Then again who cares, it’s among the more harmless ways they’ve found of raising some much-needed cash.

(On the more mysterious question of how Nauru could remind even the most desperate and deadline-addled journalist of “a small dinner plate dropped into the gleaming South Pacific”, I have nothing to offer.)

Polyphony

This evening I was at a strange but rather entertaining event, an attempt to break the record for the number of languages in which the well-known Scots song Auld Lang Syne has simultaneously been sung. I think the organisers of this wacky happening at Glasgow University were hoping for 100 languages. They got nowhere near that number, but given that the standing record is apparently nine, success never seemed in doubt.

The BBC, true to its preference for speed over accuracy, and for reporting as news things that haven’t actually happened yet, was quick off the mark. Three minutes before the event even began, their website was reporting that languages sung had included “Persian, Arabic, Malay, Vietnamese, Frisian, Hindi, Urdu, Irish Gaelic, Romanian, Scots, Welsh, Ukrainian, Yoruba, Swahili, Catalan, Bangla, Maori, Chichewa, Georgian, and Igbo”. Given that the words of the song are in Scots, it would be surprising if that had not been on the list, but I can personally vouch for the regrettable fact that Yoruba and Welsh were not involved.

In the end the total was apparently 41 languages, sung by perhaps 200 people. An easy victory, but surely, in a university and city as large as Glasgow, there could have been more? Leaving aside the issue of putting the word about effectively, the limiting factor may well be the availability of translations. I had been hoping to sing in Welsh, and apparently several other Welsh speakers had volunteered themselves, but I for one had been unable to find a translation on the Web, and there wasn’t nearly enough time to write a serviceable one (even if I didn’t have other things to do). So I ended up being recruited to sing in Latin and felt very academical.

I had naively expected to find an Auld Lang Syne website somewhere with translations in dozens of languages, but no luck. My theory, for what it’s worth (and I think this was confirmed by tonight’s event), is that while in the world at large, especially perhaps Eastern Europe and the Far East it is felt to be as international as Happy Birthday To You, in the UK it is seen as an emblem of Scottish culture. Hence to translate it into Welsh would be rather like putting Gaelic words to Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner. Only one person showed up to sing in Hungarian, but she had two versions of the text to choose between. However, several admirable people had brought along their own specially-crafted translations, and perhaps these will find their way onto the web for future occasions.

So what do 41 languages sound like, sung together? I would have loved the chance to move around the hall between different groups of singers, actively experiencing the effect, but the main impression from the midst of it (just between the Japanese and the Lithuanians — wot no Kurdish?) was of rhythmic sibilants. Presumably with that many languages going on someone or other will be singing an s sound on almost every syllable, and that’s what really penetrates the general wash of sound.

There was something very fine about seeing languages bravely represented by a single individual. I was delighted to be singing near to a native speaker of Sami (the language of what we used to call the Lapps), and later to chat to the only Georgian speaker. But my heart went out even more to a small contingent singing a language of which no-one (probably) is a genuine native speaker: Esperanto. The Latin of the twentieth century? One of them, a splendidly geeky-looking girl, told me as she left that next time she would do it in binary.

Expert advice

There’s been much talk recently of governments disregarding expert advice. What a shame the police didn’t listen to their expert adviser, the distinguished and much-admired phonetician Stanley Ellis when he told them the infamous Yorkshire Ripper tape was a hoax. At least, he pinned down the hoaxer’s accent to the very village he came from, over 100 miles from where the crimes were committed, and was proved right when the hoaxer was finally arrested in 2005. But this failed to dissuade the police from diverting the enquiry to completely the wrong part of the country, even ruling out the real murderer because he did not fit the profile of the hoaxer.

“Minister to meet publishers in bid to save dictionary jobs”

Today’s Scotsman reports that “Enterprise minister Jim Mather is set to call publishing companies to a round-table meeting in a bid to save Edinburgh dictionary firm Chambers.”

“The hegemony of the south”

At last, the chattering classes of South Britain have woken up to the incipient Scottish tragedy looming over Chambers Dictionaries in Edinburgh. Good on Robert McCrum of the Observer for breaking the silence with a blazing indictment of “cultural vandalism” that, as he notes, “has not troubled the cultural conscience of the south”.

However, it seems “the south” is still a little hazy about what comes from where. Those of us who have spent years writing dictionaries in Scotland for the old Glasgow firm of Collins, which became part of HarperCollins in 1990 or so, might be a little miffed to see it lumped together with the likes of OUP and Penguin as part of the “hegemony of the south”. William Collins, a Glasgow mill-worker-turned-schoolmaster, founded the company in 1819 (the very year Chambers brothers published their first title, The Songs of Robert Burns), and like Chambers, Collins was a family firm until quite recently. HarperCollins’s British HQ may be in London, just as the parent company of Chambers is based in Paris, but their dictionaries are still Clyde-built, by the way.

The feelgood factor

Hostage to fortune, these bullish statements on corporate websites.

“The gold standard for dictionaries”

glimmer n. some small gleam or flicker, as in hope or intelligence
[Campbell, in the style of The Chambers Dictionary]

Fingers are still crossed for Chambers Harrap, the embattled dictionary firm in Edinburgh. An emergency works committee has been held at the level of the parent company Lagardère and the consultation period extended. A online petition to keep Chambers in Edinburgh is available to sign at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/chambers-in-edinburgh/. Tell your friends.

David Crystal considers the proposed closure “especially ironic, in the case of Chambers, when we think that Edinburgh has been made the first UNESCO City of Literature.” Robert McCrum, blogging in the Guardian, considers that “Chambers sets the gold standard for dictionaries” (see the response of McDrudge in the comments) but it’s revealing that when he wrote those words neither he nor Crystal had yet heard of the closure announced two weeks earlier — and not surprising given the disgraceful lack of interest in the story shown by the “national” press south of the border. My friend Caroline of the Publishing Cupboard points out that what we need is to get the King of Twitter, Stephen Fry, on board. An article in one of the English broadsheets from one of these luminaries would surely do no harm at all.

And in an unorthodox but thought-provoking move, MEP David Martin has even launched a campaign to give the Chambers brand protected geographical status, like Scotch whisky or Stilton cheese. Can it be true that a product’s unique qualities are sometimes due not just to the soil or water or climate of its place of origin but to the accumulated intellectual expertise of its makers, who can only be found in that place? It might seem a stretch in this case, given the relative geographical mobility of such workers and the publishing industry’s dependence on “outsourcing” to freelances all over Europe, but it’s certainly an interesting idea. Terroir intellectuel?

Days I’ll remember all my life

In the light of the regrettable tradition that seems to be establishing itself on this blog whereby “Days” are acknowledged only after they have passed, I would like the following to be taken into consideration.
26 September: European Day of Languages
13 October: English Language Day
16 October: National Dictionary Day, also known as Noah Webster’s Birthday — how about a British equivalent to celebrate James Murray? Sam Johnson has had enough commemorating recently.Another American institution, National Grammar Day, is not till 4 March. It is the creation of the rather scary-sounding “SPOGG” or Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. If this blog is still going I may take a quick look to see how the American SPOGGers compare with our own dear British nutters.

The curse of the 140-character limit

If it’s true that the appalling Berlusconi has immunity from prose, then the political role of the poet has surely never been more important.

Happy National Poetry Day.

The Town Hotel

It was reported last month that an unidentified British tourist in a small French town got locked in when she assumed the sign outside the Hôtel de Ville (town hall, at least in some places, Mairie in others) meant it was a hotel. Probably not such a stupid mistake as all that, it must happen from time to time. She wrote the following message asking for help:

Je suis fermer ici
( Toilettes).
Est ce possible
moi la porte en ouvrir ?

You have to be cautious about tall tales and urban myths retailed with a straight face in our careless and credulous media, but here’s one for which there seems to be some tantalising photographic evidence. The BBC still managed to misquote the tourist’s message, but hey what’s new.

The story has even spawned its own little website, whence I lift this intriguing pic (right), perhaps a screenshot from television news?? It comes complete with an amusing piece of machine “translation” (“The tourist for its continuous, but think of other clients of the institution ... Time passes and people seem to sulk the square in front of City Hall ... A shot of fear for some poor woman who has certainly enriched his vocabulary” etc).

I’m still not 100% convinced though. There’s something about the handwriting that just isn’t quite what you’d expect from a Brit in her early thirties. And I wonder why an English speaker whose French was not great would think to chuck in that en (presumably “to open the door of it”). And what on earth is the verb doing at the end like that? Was this tourist actually German or Dutch, by any chance?

Ya dubber!

In a now familiar pattern, as they say, a young northern bottlenosed whale has spent the week hanging around the Clyde after losing its way while migrating, and is not long for this world.

The quality of newspaper wordplay has been as desperate as the puir wee beastie’s chances of survival: “Some-fin fishy doon the watter” (Evening Times) would require the animal to be way out in the Clyde estuary rather than in the heart of Glasgow, which was rather the point of the story — but you can’t not have a pun in a headline, can you? Also there’s complete disagreement about when the critter was first spotted or identified, the Herald and BBC reports contradicting themseves within a few lines. Situation normal basically.

A sort of tradition has grown up of giving names to these forlorn creatures, a symptom of the massive public sympathy they evoke. When the whale that came up the Thames in 2006 died, it was like the Blessed Diana of Harrods all over again. It had been variously named, sorry “dubbed” (which does make you wonder how the Queen got close enough with her sword, but it’s probably better than “christened” in the circumstances), Willy (Daily Mail), Wally (Sun), Whaley (Daily Mirror, or was it someone’s three-year-old?) and Gonzo “because it was a Bottle Nosed Whale and Gonzo is a Muppet with a large nose”.

It would be interesting to know the process behind this, especially when nothing particularly obvious or witty springs to anyone’s mind. Who does the dubbing? Do the newspapers each invent their own nickname and may the best one win?

A Risso’s dolphin that wandered into the Clyde last year was nicknamed Disco Dave “after a discarded packet of Discos crisps got caught on his fin”. There is indeed a certain tragic pathos to that image, the noble beast robbed of its dignity by a piece of squalid detritus (presumably an empty crisp packet rather than a packet of crisps as the Daily Record has it). Note: “his fin”, not “its fin”. I wonder what they would have said if it had been a shark.

In the case of the current Glasgow whale, the Evening Times and the Glaswegian agree on Bobby (why?), but I prefer, although I can’t remember where I saw it, Bucky the Bottlenose. It may be slightly Glaswegianist stereotyping but at least it makes sense — bottle, Buckfast, geddit? The Zeitgeist, in the form of Twitter, adds Whally (which seems like a blend of Whaley and the almost generic Wally), Bubba and (go figure) Timothy. Mind you it also contributes the following gem: “so sad a baby strayed from it’s parents, they say, or is it because we are overfishing ??”

I prefer the following comment on the Scotsman website, a brutal summary of Glasgow’s riverine socio-topography. “If it carries on upriver it’s kebab meat, if it hangs a left up the Kelvin it’s sushi.”

Update on Chambers Harrap

The Financial Times seems to be the first non-Scottish newspaper to get round to reporting the Chambers closure announced last week. The BBC website reports on the NUJ’s fight to save the company’s Edinburgh HQ. Messages of support can be sent to the Chambers Harrap NUJ chapel [union branch] care of the NUJ Scottish Office at nujscotland@nuj.org.uk; messages of protest to Chambers Harrap can be directed to admin@chambersharrap.co.uk.

ANOTHER UPDATE
From the Scotsman, 24 September 2009:
Dictionary staff spell out case for keeping Capital base open

Everyone’s an expert

The Herald and the Scotsman have their say on the ChambersHarrap closure today. Surprise surprise, not one news source anywhere seems to have quoted a real live lexicographer on the subject, or indeed anyone that works in dictionaries.

The culture minister, Michael Russell, a former television producer and author, feels that “it does, to a certain extent, reflect the changing patterns of how research and reference are now undertaken.” No doubt he’s right, but why couldn’t we hear from someone who actually knows about how all that affects dictionary sales?

Philip Jones of the Bookseller magazine claims that “so much is available faster and for free online. It doesn’t have the credibility that a print book has, but mostly people would tend to look online rather than buy a book for £10 that might go out of date in six months.” Again, no doubt true, though a tenner doesn’t go far these days, it’s the price of a round of drinks or couple of glossy magazines at an airport, and less than the tourist guide to the place you’re flying to, and those things date a fair sight faster than dictionaries. In my experience people see a dictionary as about as ephemeral as a bible, and buy a new one about as often.

Marion Sinclair of Publishing Scotland (formerly the Scottish Publishers Association) says “dictionaries have migrated online and a lot of people have the attitude that it doesn’t matter about the brand name. But often it doesn’t have the wealth of lexicography behind it. That is a real specialist skill and that is what we are in danger of losing.” Very good point, but one that would perhaps have been better made by a lexicographer. And, pace Ms Sinclair, actually it doesn’t matter much about the brand name. What matters is that the thing is properly written by someone who knows what they’re doing and then regularly updated, something that is indeed under threat.

Oh and by the way, assuming Google News is to be trusted, not one lousy English newspaper has even mentioned the story yet.

Chambers Harrap to close

Appalling news today of the closure of Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh, my first dictionary employers. As BBC news points out, this “marks the end of a 200 year association with Scotland for the dictionary”; of course they mean the Chambers Dictionary/ies, rather than The Dictionary — there are still dictionaries published north of the border — but it shows just how bad things are in reference publishing. I was going to entitle this “Hachette job” after the parent company, but it doesn’t really seem like a laughing matter, least of all for the 27 people who are apparently going to lose their jobs.

Classy picture there from the BBC (right). I love the way that, in order to illustrate the piece, someone has just heaved their office copy of Chambers off the shelf, plonked it down on a clean area of carpet and pointed their cameraphone at it. Is this the photographic equivalent of what’s happening to reference works? It’s become so easy to lay your hands on some recycled content you nicked from somewhere (just as I do right), or knock up something yourself which can then propagate itself all over the internet. In one way that’s liberating and democratic, but surely it must be accompanied by an awareness of when something, like that excuse for a photo, is so embarrassingly rubbish as to be unprofessional. Is this casual lack of discrimination, amid a plethora of unmediated information, actually part of the disaster that’s happening to dictionaries?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, and “The Black Guy with the Funny Name”

Not to trivialise a serious and tragic subject (honest), but al-Megrahi sounds surprisingly unforeign in a Scottish context. I keep hearing it as Al McGrachy. A kind of reverse of Barak Obama, the Westerner with the Islamic-sounding moniker.

Strange name for a ship

How odd for someone to be “aboard the Arctic Sea”, as opposed to abroad, or adrift, or whatever, on it.

Milking the gravy train

Two more bloated trough-snufflers are herded into the spotlight. Their names are, wait for it, Bill Cash and Sir John Butterfill.

“Tory grandee Sir John Butterfill is the latest to come under scrutiny after avoiding capital gains tax on £600,000 profit from selling a taxpayer-funded property. He claimed nearly £17,000 just for servants’ quarters, where his housekeeper and odd-job man lived.” (ITN)

The greedy grandee (left), who actually bears a certain physical resemblance to a pig, was knighted (or as he puts it “appointed a Knight Batchelor” [sic]) for, ironically enough, “services to Parliament”. Perhaps in the light of how he’s served the reputation of that institution it would serve him right if they took his K back.

But seriously (by which of course I mean but frivolously), what names! What names for people embroiled in an expenses scandal. You couldn’t make it up. Not even if your creative instincts had been honed by years of making up reasons for helping yourself from the public purse. Sheridan himself couldn’t do better. You know the kind of thing:

Dramatis Personae:
Lord Fillmeboots, an Embezzler from the Public Purse
Mr Cheapwords, his Spokesman to the Press
Whingemore, a troublesome Journalist
Divers scrutineers and petty officials of the House, accused of Complicity
The common people of England, outraged
Sundry Commentators upon the parlous state of Democracy, self-appointed

And of course:
Dame Esther Rantsman, an upstart Opportunist

I mean come on, we might as well get some amusement for our money. No-one can say they’re cheap laughs.

This entry has been sponsored by “Wadges” O’Moolah, your friendly and informal supplier of building and gardening services, tree inspections, duck islands etc. No tedious paperwork, cash welcome, no questions asked in Parliament. Top prices charged — you can't get a good job done for nothing! (Well you can obviously sir, you’re an MP.)