The Last Jabberwocky Translation, I Promise

Geek Stuff | Linguistics

Here it is in Ancient Greek! Unfortunately, I can’t really understand it. Turns out I’m not as l337 as I thought. From this comment thread.

ΙΑΜΒΡΩΞ ΙΑΜΒΙΚΩΣ

καυσπροῦντος ἤδη, γλοῖσχρα διὰ περισκιᾶς
στρυβλοῦντα καὶ στρομφοῦντ’ ἂν εὑρίσκοις τόφα,
δεινὴ δ’ ἐπέσχε σωθρία βορυγρόφας,
ῥάθαισι δ’ ἀντιποικὸν[1] ὕμνησαν ῥάθαι
ἔκγριμμα· τὸν δὲ πρέσβυν ἐξαυδᾶν κλύω·
‘παῖ, παῖ, φύγοις ἄν ἐμπέδως Ἰάμβροχα,
ἔιτ’ ὄνυχι μάρπτων εἴτε δὴ δάκνων τύχοι
γνάθοισιν, ἀπρόσοιστον· ὣς δ’ αὔτως φυγεῖν
ὄρνιθα δεινὸν Γυπογῦπ’· οὐδ’ ἂν φθάνοις
ἐλθὼν δαφλοισβῷ πρὸς λόγους Βανδράρπαγι.’
ὁ δ’ ἐν χεροῖν εὔκοπνον ἐξάρας ξίφος
θήρας ὅμως μετ’ ἴχνος ὀλγώδους ἔβη·
τέλος δ’ ἀπειπών, πολλὰ συννοούμενος,
πλείστην ὅπου παρέσχε φλαττόθρατ σκιάν,
ἔστη δι’ ὀλίγου· χὠς ἔβοσκεν ἀργίλας
θυμῷ μερίμνας, ἐμπύροισιν ὄμμασιν
σμύζων Ἰάμβρωξ ἔπτετ’ ἐκ ψυδνῆς νάπης,
δῆλος δὲ βορβολισμὸς ἦν ποτωμένου·
ταύτην δὲ καὶ δίχ’, ὡς ἐσεῖδε, καὶ τρίχα,
ἔνθεν τε κἄνθεν διάτορον πληγὴν νέηων,
ἔσνιξεν, ἐξέσναξεν εὐκόπνῳ ξίφει,
εῖθ’ οὗπερ ἔκτα κειμένης τεμὼν κάρα
γαυχούμενος κατῆλθεν· ἀσπαστὸν δ’ ἰδὼν
ἐλθόνθ’ ὁ πρέσβυς, τοιάδ’ ἐξεφρίγκασεν·
‘ὦ χαῖρε λάμπωψ· ὡς Ἰαμβροχοκτόνον
τόδ’ ἀγκάλισμα παιδὸς ἀσμένως ἔχω.
ὦ τρισβακαρτὸν ἦμαρ· ὦ καλοῦ καλά.’
ἤδη δ’ ἐκαύσπρει, γλοῖσχρά τ’ ἐν περισκιᾷ
στρυβλοῦντα καὶ στρομφοῦντ’[2] ἂν εὑρίσκοις τόφα,
δεινὴ δ’ ἐπέσχε σωθρία βορυγρόφας,
ἔκγριμμα δ’ ἀντιποικὸν ὕμνησαν ῥάθαι.

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Three Hierarchies

Theology | Geek Stuff

I’m finally blogrolling Three Hierarchies. I’ve always like his writing, but he’s very Lutheran, which somehow made me resistant. (I don’t know why this doesn’t apply to Josh, but somehow in my mind, it doesn’t.) Anyway, what finally pushed me over the top was this post on biology and creation and this post on the doctrine of creation in the Silmarillion.

I mean, he posted on the doctrine of creation in the Silmarillion! It just doesn’t get any better than that.

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Egoslavia

Geek Stuff

The true story of how an obscure New Wave band got its name, from a former band member who now writes about internet economy. The thing is, I actually like the name “Egoslavia” better than “REM”.

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The Great War

Geek Stuff | Quotations

Umberto Eco has laid down the law. Let the reader be atent:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

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Math Geek Jokes

Geek Stuff

aminorex: K just invented a new card game: Mathematics, the proving.
aminorex: I play “Fermat’s Last Theorem”! Ha!
aminorex: O RLY, well, I play Andrew Wile, with special +5 elliptic curve theory!
aminorex: Arrrrrrrgh!

Apologies to those of you who don’t get it, because it’s way too hard to explain.

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Conlang Relay Text

Geek Stuff | Linguistics

If you happen to be taking part in the Conlang relay, look away now. This reveals my text, and the relay is not over, so it’s cheating if you peek!

I’m currently participating in the 13th Conlang Relay. “What’s a Conlang relay?” you ask. The link explains it all, but in short: a game of Conlang telephone, in which a text is translated repeatedly from language to language, each translator aided only by a vocab and a rudimentary grammar that explains only what’s necessary to understand the text.

Since some of my readers (or at least one of them) may be interested in the text, I’m posting my Yivrian translation together with the grammar and vocab exactly as I sent them on to the ring. You may try your hand at translating it, if you’d like. I’ll post the “answer” in the comments in a few days.

Niul eyi pelíra ela lastam kathona nasakavva osro a’ilo:

Loraon anarvessa osro’il pirsedam onyal osind keth noyaa el. Nyel senyala da yarono so raun na lavus.Po tapílona kírith lassimil ta ikil ta dakil dosavvala. Nokepyal em seyya nakírith na tapun da kénessonor té kírith fal sotayyala tarsayéos osind fainen apirsan. Naosind ku fainyaa tabohyol pirsedam. Kéhaila kéhoyal ren, té voethrayala. Pirsedam pudahyol ta kírith nayal no ditoilona ela gevi. Até nasaron afainyé osind apirsan, pirsedam daroyal da badomon na kanda.

Hear me read the text.

VOCAB
a- (prefix) — of, genitive
até — despite, nonetheless, however
badom — rest, remainder
da — in
dakil — fat
daroya — to be happy, to make merry
dito — sack, bag
dosya — to stand, to sit
el — he (3sg masc)
ela — with; about, concerning; full of
em — subordinating conjunction; introduces a subordinate clause expressing intent or desire
ethraya — to be cold
eyi — to be
fainya — to come here, to approach, to draw near
fal — there (adverb)
gev — book (u-declension)
ikil — black
ilo — sadness
kanda — day
katha — which (see note)
keth — which/that (relative; see note)
ku — when, while
ké- (prefix) — all, every
kéha — hand
kéhoya — to touch
kírith — raven
lassimil — small
lastam — young person, youth
lavus — snow
loran — middle
na- (prefix) — that one
na — from; made of; out of, (part) of
narvessa — month
nasakya — to cast aside, to throw away, to discard
nasaron — afterwards, following (nasaron a+infinitive)
naya — to crawl, to slither
nesso — power
niul — this (thing)
no — to, towards; into
nokepya — to attempt, to try
noya — to go to, to approach
nyel — this one (3sg masc)
onya — to see
osind — sleigh, sledge; any unwheeled transport dragged after a horse, esp. in winter
osro — winter
pelíra — story, tale
pirsan — teacher
pirsedam — student
po — upon, on
pudya — to be still, to be quiet
ren — wall (u-declension)
senya — to stand, to stay, to remain
seyya — to put
so — near, next to
sotayya — to cling, to be attached
ta — and
taboya — to be worried
tarsaya — to look in the face; to examine, to look at closely; to confront
top — shoulder (u-declension)
té — but
té — raven
yaro — garden

GRAMMAR

NOUN MORPHOLOGY

There are five cases in Yivrian, of which four occur in the text. They are expressed with the following affixes:

NOMINATIVE — (citation form): used for subject of verbs and object of prepositions when the prepositional phrase modifies a noun

GENITIVE a-: used for direct possession and in some constructions

DATIVE -os: meaning “for, for the sake of, to”

ABLATIVE -on: meaning “by means of, with, at such a time, in that place”, and used for the object of prepositions when the prepositional phrase modifies a verb

The genitive affix is always prefixed and is invariable. The dative and ablative affixes are infixed before a final vowel if there is any, e.g. NOM kenda “king” => ABL kendona “by the king”. In other cases it is simply attached to the end of the noun.

U-DECLENSION

There is a large class of nouns that have a change in the stem vowel in every form except the nominative. Rather than go into the details, I’ll simply list the alternate stems of all of the u-declension nouns in this text:

Primary stem/Secondary stem:
ren/ran-
gev/gav-
top/tap-

U-declension nouns also take the dative ending -us and ablative ending -un. (The fact that these nouns have -u- instead of -o- in these endings is what gives them their name.)

POSSESSION

Possession in Yivrian is indicated by infixing -i- into the final syllable (after the nuclear vowel), then adding one of several suffixes. The only suffix that occurs in this text is -la, the 3sg possessive suffix. E.g. kenda “king” => kendaila “his king”.

U-declension nouns form the possessive from the secondary stem given above, inserting the vowel -í- between the stem and the possessive suffix.

PLURAL

Plurals are formed by adding -r to the end of the word following a vowel, and -i following a consonant.

VERB MORPHOLOGY

ASPECT

All verbs in their citation form end in -ya. This indicates the “base” form of the verb. Other aspects of the verb are formed by changing this base ending:

-ya — base
-hya — causative
-vva — habitual

There are others (and there are subtleties even within these three), but they don’t concern the text so I’ve left them out.

The ending -ya is attached directly to the stem of the verb, while before -hya and -vva an epenthetic -a- is added.

VOICE

The first vowel of the verbal ending alternates to indicate voice.

-ya — active
-yo — passive
-yu — reflexive (not used, I think)

TENSE AND PHASE

After the first vowel of the verbal ending follows a consonant which indicates tense:

- (null) — present
-l — past
-n — future

Following this consonant, additional suffixes may occur to indicate “phase” (which is really another kind of aspect). In this text, only the suffix -a occurs, indicating progressive aspect.

Thus:

-ya — present simple active
-yaa — present progressive active
-yal — past simple
-yala — past progressive

VERBAL INFINITIVES

Verbs may form an infinitive by replacing the first vowel of the verbal ending with -é.

Infinitives are treated as nouns, and so may take nominal prefixes and suffixes. In particular, an infinitive with the dative ending -os indicates “in order to + INF”.

PARTICIPLES

Participles are formed by adding a special set of adjectival endings to a verbal stem which has had its final -ya (if any) removed. The participial endings are:

-en — active
-es — passive

MODAL PREFIXES

A verb may be prefixed with any of a set of seven prefixes to indicate mood, along with some other categories. The only modal prefix in this text is vo-, which is a general intensifier indicating “very” or “much so”.

MISCELLANEOUS

Adjectives can be derived from nouns by simple addition of the suffix -il. (Those words that only occur as adjectives in this text are simply listed in their adjectival form as such.)

Sequences of -nVn- are often reduced to -Vn- (i.e. the first /n/ is dropped. This also happens with other consonants, though I believe only with /n/ in this relay).

SYNTAX

WORD ORDER AND CASES

Yivrian syntax is SVO. Adjectives follow nouns, and prepositions precede their object. Generally both the subject and the object of a sentence are expressed in the “nominative” case above, as are objects of prepositions. However, following prepositions that are adverbal (i.e. modifying a sentence, not an NP) nouns must be in the ablative case.

Word order is somewhat flexible, so SOV and intransitive VS patterns also exist.

RELATIVE CLAUSES

Within a relative clause, the relative pronoun is NOT necessarily fronted. Rather, it retains whatever position it would normally have in the clause.

Furthermore, Yivrian distinguishes between “adjectival relative clauses”, which modify some other noun in the phrase, and “nominal relative clauses”, which occupy by themselves the place of some noun in the clause. This is an English example of an “adjectival relative”: “The person *who sings* is here.” And this is an example of a nominal relative: “*Whosoever might sing* is welcome.” Hopefully you know what I’m talking about.

The relative pronoun in adjectival relative clauses is *keth*, while the relative pronoun in nominal relative clauses is *katha*.

TENSE IN SUBORDINATE CLAUSES

Tense in subordinate clauses is relative to the tense of the main clause, i.e., if the main clause is in the past tense and the subordinate clause is simultaneous with the main clause, the verb of the subordinate clause must be expressed in the *present* tense. This applies to all subordinate clauses, included relative clauses.

I *hope* that’s all. Happy translating!

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Lewis, Curiously

Theology | Geek Stuff

I have read, finally, a rather curious discussion of C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and the meaning of myth currently to be found on the New Yorker website. It’s a fascinating essay and I recommend it to everyone who has the twenty minutes or so it takes to read the thing. There are some missteps, like the author’s frivolous foray into others’ speculations about the young Lewis’s sex life and repressions, but overall it’s an interesting read.

The most interesting aspect for me is the fact that the author rejects Aslan as un-Christian:

At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God…. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

For me and for most of the other Christians who have ever read the Narnia books, Aslan is in fact one of the most Christian elements of the books. This is not because of the sacrifice scene–which I’ve never like all that much personally–but because of the wonderful description of Aslan as “not a tame lion”, and the juxtaposition of power and humility that he embodies. The fact that Aslan, the beautiful, powerful King, goes to the Stone Table embodies the humility of God in submitting to the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. It shows us the divine side of the King of Kings and the Lion of Judah, and disabuses us of the idea that He is a plaything or a pet.

At the same time, I also appreciate the author’s alternate Narnian incarnation story:

If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory.

This would be a Christian allegory. But what this proves is not that Lewis got it wrong, but that the Christian story can be enmythed in multiple ways. The vision of the King of Beasts as the King of Kings is just as valid as the vision of a Beast of Burden as the Suffering Servant. But now that the question has been put, I have to say that there are some things that I like better about this version, namely that it’s the story of an incarnation. Aslan never seemed very incarnational. He has been around in the same form since the very beginning of the story, and his appearance in LWW is simply a return, not the shocking and scandalous emergence of something unexpected. There is no Narnian Nativity, and Narnia’s the worse for it.

UPDATE: Confessing Evangelical feels the same way.

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Wrathful Dispersion Theory

Geek Stuff | Linguistics

The Canadians give their take on “Wrathful Dispersion Theory“:

The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity’s hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: “Let us go down,” God says to Himself, “and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues.

In the early days of evolutionary linguistics, Babelists used to taunt French-speaking evolutionists with cries of “Your father was a Roman!” WD, by contrast, acknowledges that languages can indeed change over time, and some Wrathful Dispersionists even concede that modern French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and so on may actually have developed from Latin after all. The existence of Latin itself, however, and its mutual unintelligibility with, say, Old Church Slavonic or Proto-Bantu, could only have arisen through the wrath of the disperser.

Wrathful Dispersionists are also fond of pointing out gaps in the written record, noting that there is no physical evidence of different languages dating back any earlier than five thousand years ago, a date which is suggestively close to the one commonly attributed to the Tower of Babel by biblical literalists. The bulk of their case against evolutionism, though, is based on the notion of irreducible perversity. For example, they argue that the sheer alienness of Basque—its apparent lack of any resemblance to any other living language—could only have come about by deliberate, wrathful (and, the Babelists would add, divine) intervention. Similarly, they claim that the notorious “ruki rule” in Sanskrit (/s/ becomes retroflex in the environment of /r/, /u/, /k/, or /i/—a “calculatedly chaotic conglomeration comprising two vowels, a rhotic, and a surd”) is so arbitrary and so confusing that it must have been the conscious invention of someone who was absolutely determined that Sanskrit should be thoroughly incomprehensible to native speakers of any other language, such as Finnish.

Brilliant. Where do I sign up?

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Festive Garb

Life | Geek Stuff

I redid Larisa’s site for her in festive holiday decor. It’s very cute.

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My Pointy-Haired Boss

Life | Geek Stuff

Before I get too far I should actually point out that my boss is not that bad. As bosses go, he’s actually quite good: understanding, flexible, good-natured, generous, etc. He bears no resemblance to the Dilbertian pointy-haired boss in terms of disposition of psychopathy. For the most part, I’m totally satisfied with him and the way we work together.

There is, however, one source of amusement and frustration in our relationship, and that’s the area of communication. To begin with, he seems to want an awful lot of it. He calls me at least twice a day, sometimes three or four times times a day. This is almost never warranted, since most of the time I’m simply making forward progress. So we have lots of conversations like this:

(11:00 am)
Boss: How are things going?
Me: Great. I’m working on feature X, and I should be done around 3:00. I’ll call you then.

(1:00 pm)
Boss: So, any news yet?
Me: Um, no. I’m still working, and it still looks like I’ll be done around 3:00.

(2:59 pm)
Boss: So, what do you have to show me?
Me: I’m almost there. Give me 15-20 more minutes

(3:18 pm)
Me: So, now that we actually have something to talk about…

However, to fully appreciate this you have to imagine each of these conversations padded to absurdity. My boss has a circituous way of speaking and always has urgent or interesting questions, which means that I rarely get away with less than 10-15 minutes of phone time. Heaven forbid that we need to do a conference call with the other developers: that means 20 minutes of useful information made to fill up an hour and a half. I once literally fell asleep while on the phone with my boss and the lead developer.

Aside from my boss’s loquacity, it can also be difficult to get him to understand what I’m talking about or realize what he’s asking. For example, we’re currently building an online messaging system, and in demoing it he was shocked to find out that every conversation opened in a new window. Why wouldn’t they all open in the same window? “You mean in a tabbed window?” I asked. Actually, it turns out that he was imagining each conversation occupying a tile within a larger window, an interface that would be not only ugly, but difficult to program and just utterly bizarre. Then he expressed concern that we hadn’t implemented multi-user chat yet, despite the fact that we had agreed to omit that feature in extensive earlier discussions. And other things of this type–it can be very difficult to get on the same page as him, especially since he isn’t especially technical, and tends to latch onto certain ideas or catchphrases with vague meanings and then insist on them over and over again.

In other words, it’s all the pitfalls of being a programmer and having to work for someone who’s not.

But I point out again that it could be many, many times worse. He is still patient and generous, and he is willing to hang onto a conversation until he actually understands why we can’t do X or must do Y. I want to gripe, but not too much, especially on the off-chance that he someday reads this post.

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