October 17, 2011 by Angela Tung - 1 Comment

Vampire Vords (And Accents)

What comes to mind when you imagine a vampire accent (as we’re sure you often do)? Bela Lugosi perhaps, or Count von Count. We’ve found that the ways to “speak vampire” are about as varied as the ways to say the word.

Vampire has Slavic origins, and may come from the Kazan Tatar ubyr, “witch.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first appearance of the word in English in 1734, while there have been “scattered English accounts of night-walking, blood-gorged, plague-spreading undead corpses from as far back as 1196.”

Non-English accounts are even older. From Greek mythology we have lamia, “an enticing witch who charmed children and youths for the purpose of feeding on their blood and flesh.” The word probably comes from lemures, “the spirits of the departed considered as evil-disposed specters or ghosts.” Lemures also gives us lemur, named for its eerie appearance and nocturnal habits.

Also from Greek folklore we get vrykolakas, “generally equated with the vampire of the folklore of the neighbouring Slavic countries.” The word is derived from the Bulgarian word vǎrkolak, which is derived from another term that means werewolf. The dhampir is “a half-human half-vampire mythical hybrid creature” in Balkan folklore, and comes from the Arabian dham, “teeth,” and pire, “to drink.” In gypsy or Roma folklore is the mulo, literally “one who is dead.”

The soucouyant is “a night witch who sucks people’s blood, sheds her skin, and can turn herself into a ball of fire and fly,” and comes from West Indies Creole. In Caribbean folklore, the soucouyant is known as the loogaroo, which possibly comes from loup-garou, which you may remember from our werewolf post.

Now how about that vampire accent? The titular vampire in Bram Stoker’s quintessential bloodsucker novel lives in the “the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Transylvania, Bukovina and Moldavia,” basically in and around Romania. Aruguably the most famous film adaptation of the book is Dracula with Bela Lugosi. (The unofficial first film adaption of the book, Noseferatu, is silent, so we don’t get to hear Max Schreck’s vampire accent, or how he managed to speak around those pointy teeth.) Lugosi was Hungarian, not Romanian, and it’s Lugosi’s accent the vampire accent trope is based on.

The accents of film vampires after Lugosi are varied. In the Son of Dracula, Lon Chaney, Jr. sticks with his American accent (and morphs into an incredibly slow-moving bat). Christopher Lee keeps his British accent.

In the blaxploitation film Blacula, William Marshall, an American actor “trained in Grand Opera, Broadway and Shakespeare,” sounds rather Shakespearean as the African prince-turned-human leech.

New Jersey born and bred Frank Langella has a vaguely European accent in his Dracula rendition.

Count von Count of Sesame Street is modeled after Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (“Ah! Ah! Ah!“) and like many vampires has a bad case of arithmomania (this is based on the superstition that fishing nets and poppy seeds can keep vampires away because the vampires would be compelled to count the knots in the nets and the individual seeds).

In the vampire comedy, Love at First Bite, George Hamilton also seems to imitate Bela Lugosi and, even more disturbingly, discos.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Stoker’s novel stays true to form with a Hungarian accent from Gary Oldman (and a couple of bad British accents, courtesy of Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves).

In Interview with the Vampire, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst play American vampires so they speak with American accents while Tom Cruise speaks with a Tom Cruise-accent.

In the television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampires don’t have any particular accent, or rather they have the regional accents of wherever they’re from (Drusilla’s is Cockney, Spike’s is north London, while Angel‘s was Irish). The real interest is around the inventive slang of the Scooby gang.

Michael Adams (who teaches a course simply and awesomely titled, “Vampires”) has written extensively on “slayer slang” for VERBATIM magazine and in his subsequent book, Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (both edited by Wordnik’s own Erin McKean), for example, X-free (“I’m destiny-free”), proper names as verb (“I cannot believe that you of all people are trying Scully me”), and adding the suffix –age to traditionally non-age words (saveage, sliceage, slayage). For even more on slayer slang, check out these posts from Language Hat (“Much?”) and Language Log (“X much”).

As for True Blood, some would argue the only accents are badly executed Southern.

For even more things vampire, check out Word Spy’s entries on vampire state, vampire time, and Twilight mom; go to Fritinancy’s blog and have some vampire wine; or get your degree from Transylvania University.

Next week, the devil made us do it.

October 14, 2011 by Angela Tung

This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

Welcome to the Language Blog Roundup, in which we give you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.

First up, in Occupy Wall Street (OWS) news, The Millions compared OWS to Bartleby the scrivener. At Language Log, Victor Mair pointed out an OWS Chinese protest sign that doesn’t quite translate, while Mark Liberman discussed a left-wing “altar ego.”

Mr. Liberman also lucked out – twice – over an incorrectly used American English idiom. Arnold Zwicky put Strunk & White in cultural context; Geoff Pullum untangled some tangled idioms; and Ben Zimmer discussed so what if/that. In more translation problems, Victor Mair wondered about the dictionary “dick” section and the use of pinyin over Chinese characters, as well as the genius of cursive tattoo writing. Mr. Zwicky offered his own thoughts on cursive writing on his blog.

This week in words, Erin McKean spotted, among others, gelehallon, “Swedish raspberry gelatin bits dusted with sugar,” and co-working, shared workspaces “emphasizing open space and the ability to rent a single desk.” At Johnson, Robert Lane Greene explored Rick Perryisms, while at Macmillan Dictionary blog, Natalie Hunter asserted that Noah Webster would have loved LOLspeak, and Stan Carey discussed pragmatics, and on his own blog, an absoposilutely awesome infix.

Fritinancy’s word of the week was humble, as in Siri, Apple’s voice-control system for the new iPhone 4S, the “‘humble’ female personal secretary.’” At Lingua Franca, Allan Metcalf compared velcro and teflon writers (“Teflon writing is smooth, polished, gemlike” while Velcro writing “isn’t necessarily pretty to look at, but it gets hold of you and shakes you up”). Motivated Grammar wondered if simply speaking a language makes one an expert.

The Virtual Linguist considered salami slicing, “the practice of making relatively small cuts here and there”; the cowardly poltroon; the big bazooka approach; word uses and abuses in Stephen Fry’s Planet Word. Word Spy spotted the Ikea effect, “increased feelings of pride and appreciation for an object because it has been self-made or self-assembled.”

Dialect Blog explored the pronunciation aunt in a New England accent; why Americans don’t get dialect; and the vowel sound in yeah. K International posted about a new Iliad translation, and translation fail with Apple’s Siri, which apparently sounds a lot like the Japanese word for buttocks and “in Georgian. . .is a rather vulgar way of referring to one’s penis.”

In language news, the Académie Française website is seeking to ban certain English words and phrases, while The New York Times assured us that bilingual babies can sort out language just fine, and in fact are “more cognitively flexible.” Meanwhile playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) has a new play, Chinglish, which “explores the language barriers that a U.S. businessman tries to overcome as he looks to secure a lucrative contract in China for his sign-making firm”; and Margaret Atwood has a new book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, of which a limited edition is being printed “made entirely of wheat straw, flax straw and recycled content.” Ms. Atwood talks to The Atlantic about science fiction, religion, and her love of Blade Runner.

Brain Pickings showed us an awesomely illustrated edition of Moby Dick, while Buzz Feed showed us awesome stacks of books found in offices. Art Info gave us a peek into the surprisingly smutty love letters of Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, and Flavorwire did some literary matchmaking between fictional characters (Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood, emo couple of the year). Big Think gave us the Halloween portmanteau of the week, lycanthropography.

Finally, we were saddened to hear of the passing of Dennis Ritchie, often called the father of the C programming language. “In addition to being the creator of C,” says CNET, “Ritchie co-authored ‘The C Programming Language,’ commonly referred to as K&R (after the authors, Brian Kernighan and Ritchie) and widely considered the definitive work on C.” Condolences to his family and loved ones.

October 10, 2011 by Angela Tung - 4 Comments

Zombie Words Attack!

Continuing our month-long Halloween theme (last week we posted about werewolf words) this week we take a word walk with the undead: zombies.

The word zombie originally referred to “a snake god or fetish in religions of West Africa and elsewhere,” and later came to mean “a person, usually undead, animated by unnatural forces (such as magic), with no soul or will of his/her own.” Its origins are either African – from the Kikongo zumbi, meaning “fetish,” or the Mbundu nzambi, meaning “god” – or, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it may come from a “Louisiana creole word meaning “phantom, ghost,’” which stems from the Spanish sombra, “shade, ghost.” Sombra also gives us somber and sombrero.

There are a number of different ways to refer to the living corpse. One is undead, an old word attested to the 1400s. (Bram Stoker apparently had considered naming his most famous novel The Un-Dead.) Other words include lich, a “southern dialectal survival” of the Old English lic, “body, dead body, corpse,” and revenant, a more general term for “one who returns; especially, one who returns after a long period of absence or after death; a ghost; a specter,” or a zombie. Revenant comes from the French revenir, “to return,” and is related to revenue.

The draugr is “an undead creature from Norse mythology,” and possesses superhuman strength, the ability to increase its size at will, and the “unmistakable stench of decay.” Other “zombienyms” include the living dead, as popularized by the iconic horror flick, Night of the Living Dead, and the walking dead, perhaps made popular by the television show, and the graphic novel series the show is based on.

Zombie! by danhollisterduck, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by danhollisterduck]

The Walking Dead is an example of the zombie apocalypse genre, in which “a widespread rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization,” and is often caused by a plague or pandemic. Other examples include The Living Dead series, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, I Am Legend, and many more.

Think a zombie apocalypse could never happen? Think again. Cracked gives five scientific reasons why a zombie apocalypse is possible, such as the existence of brain parasites; a real life “rage virus,” also known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or mad cow disease; and neurogenesis. Better be prepared and study your CDC zombie apocalypse preparedness guide (that’s right, I said: C – D – C). If you want to make peace with the zombies, you’ll want to check out How to Speak Zombie: A Guide for the Living, the Zombie Lexicon, or this primer on zombie in American Sign Language for the zombie-hearing impaired.

To calm down from zombie attacks, have a zombie cocktail, made of “rum and fruit juices.” But don’t have too many for you may want to attend a zombie walk, “an organized public gathering of people who dress up in zombie costumes,” one of which occurred last week during Occupy Wall Street, a protest against “financial greed and corruption,” including perhaps zombie banks, banks that are insolvent but propped up by government intervention. For more on zombie banks, read William Safire’s 2009 piece in The New York Times.

Fremont Zombie Walk 2007 by KellBailey, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by KellBailey]

Beware the zombie lie, which according to Word Spy is “a false statement that keeps getting repeated no matter how often it has been refuted,” as well as the zombie computer, “a computer containing a hidden software program that enables the machine to be controlled remotely, usually to perform an attack on another computer,” and the zombie clause, not to be confused with the Zombie Claus, which you should probably beware of too.

In terms of grammar, you may want to ignore zombie rules, “a long list of peeves on the part of single individuals that somehow made it into grammar books and teaching materials.” The term was coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky, who writes about zombie rules here, here, and here. Mark Liberman at Language Log writes about teaching zombie rules here.

A zombie language, according to Urban Dictionary, is a constructed language made up of dead languages, such as Latin, that have been revived by enthusiasts who might wear this T-shirt. A dead language is opposed to a living language, “which is still spoken in the contemporary period.” A dead metaphor is “a former metaphor which has in effect lost its metaphorical status and become literal,” such as world wide web and mouse.

Finally, for the best engagement photos ever, look here.

Next week we’ll be sinking our teeth into vampires, though not the sparkly kind.

October 7, 2011 by Angela Tung

WotD Perfect Tweets Roundup

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from this week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.

This week’s theme – werewolves! Here are our favorites.

Thanks to everyone for playing! Next week you’ll have another chance to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, just follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

October 7, 2011 by Angela Tung - 2 Comments

Happy Hangul Day!

Hangul by Andrew 鐘, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Andrew 鐘]

This Sunday, October 9, is Hangul Day, the yearly commemoration of “the invention and proclamation of [the] native alphabet of the Korean language.”

Prior to the establishment of Hangul (which translates as “great writing”) in 1446 by King Sejong the Great, according to this Language Log post:

the Korean language was rarely written at all. The written language used in Korea was Classical Chinese. The combination of the use of a foreign language with the large amount of memorization required to learn thousands of Chinese characters meant that only a small elite were literate, overwhelmingly men from aristocratic families. The great majority of people were illiterate.

Written Chinese (or hanzi) is semanto-phonetic, says Omniglot, an excellent source on writing systems, and uses pictograms, logograms, and ideograms. Other examples of semanto-phonetic writing systems are ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan.

Detail of heiroglyphics by dustinpsmith, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by dustinpsmith]

Hangul, however, is alphabetic, using each letter to represent a consonant or vowel. Other alphabetic writing systems are Latin, Roman, and Cyrillic, “which have been adapted to write numerous languages,” including modern English, and futhork, “the Old English runic alphabet.” Runes are letters or characters “used by the peoples of northern Europe from an early period to the eleventh century. . .believed to be derived from a Greek source.” Greek is the first alphabetic system to use vowels.

Cyrillic McDonalds by david.orban, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by david.orban]

Ogham is an alphabetic writing system made up “of 20 letters used by the ancient Irish and some other Celts in the British islands.” Tifinagh is “an alphabetic script used by some Berber peoples, notably the Tuareg,” and is “thought to have derived from ancient Berber script.” Avestan is “the script in which the ancient Persian language of the Avesta is written,” while Glagolitic is “the oldest known Slavonic alphabet, designed around 862–863 CE by Saint Cyril in order to translate the Bible and other texts into Old Church Slavonic.”

DSCF0041 by VicWJ, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by VicWJ]

More examples of ogham.

Hangul is sometimes wrongly considered a syllabary or phonetic writing system with “symbols representing sounds,” but it’s not, says Language Log, because it’s “completely analyzable at the segmental level” and “the groups into which the letters are formed do not correspond exactly to syllables.” Some syllabaries include kana, Japanese syllabic writing (literally “false name”), which is made up of two types: hiragana, “the cursive form of Japanese writing,” with hira meaning “plain, ordinary,” and katakana, an “angular kana used for writing foreign words or official documents, such as telegrams,” with kata meaning “one.” Chinese characters as used in Japanese are referred to as kanji, “Chinese characters.”

A Chinese semi-syllabary writing system is bopomofo or zhuyin fuhao:

a phonetic script used in dictionaries, children’s books, text books for people learning Chinese and in some newspapers and magazines to show the pronunciation of the characters. It is also used to show the Taiwanese pronunciation of characters and to write Taiwanese words for which no characters exist.

Zhuyin fuhao translates as “phonetic symbol,” while bopomofo are the first four letters of the system.

TC Keyboard by sanbeiji, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 by sanbeiji]

More examples of bopomofo.

Nüshu, which translates from Chinese as “women’s writing,” is “a syllabic script created and used exclusively by women in Jiangyong Prefecture, Hunan Province, China.” Omniglot goes on:

The women were forbidden formal education for many centuries and developed the Nüshu script in order to communicate with one another. They embroidered the script into cloth and wrote it in books and on paper fans.

Nüshu may have regained popularity recently due to the novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

Abugidas or syllabic alphabets “consist of symbols for consonants and vowels,” with consonants each having “an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or muted by means of diacritics.” In addition, “vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning of a word or on their own.” Abugidas include Devanagari, “used to write several Indian languages, mainly Sanskrit and Hindi,” and which was descended from the ancient brahmi; Gurmukhi, “designed for writing the Punjabi language”; and Ge’ez or Ethiopic, used to write several Ethiopian languages.

R0018642 by nozomiiqel, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by nozomiiqel]

More examples of Devanagari.

Abjads or consonant alphabets “represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels.” Abjads still in use are Arabic and Hebrew. Extinct abjads include Aramaic, Phoenician, and Samaritan.

Some writing systems still have yet to be deciphered, such as rongorongo, “an early glyphic writing system of Easter Island, written in reverse boustrophedon.” Boustrophedon is “a method of writing shown in early Greek inscriptions, in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right, as the furrows made in plowing a field, the plow passing alternately backward and forward,” which you may remember from our post on writing.

Rongorongo tablet by christopherhu, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by christopherhu]

Alternative spelling systems are “designed to make it easier to learn how to write English.” These include the phonetic alphabet developed by Benjamin Franklin, and Shavian, “named after George Bernard Shaw” and devised as a result of a competition “to create a new writing system for English.”

Fictional alphabets are “writing systems used in books, films and computer games.” JRR Tolkien invented several for his Lord of the Rings books, including Cirth, Sarati, and Tengwar. Atlantean is “the language supposedly spoken by the inhabitants of Atlantis,” while Klingon is “an artificial language created by Marc Okrand, first appearing in a Star Trek episode in 1967.” Other notation systems include braille and shorthand, while some language-based communication systems include Morse code and semaphore.

Language Log suggests you celebrate Hangul Day with a drink such as “makkeolli, a kind of rice wine also known as 농주 nong-ju ‘farmer’s wine.'” May we also suggest this beautiful Hagul Day bento.

hangul day bento by gamene, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by gamene]

Happy 한글 Day!

October 7, 2011 by Angela Tung

This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

Welcome to our weekly language blog roundup, in which we give the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.

We were saddened this week by the passing of Steve Jobs. The Onion paid tribute in their own way, while xkcd suggested this subtle memorial.

Back in language news, Ben Zimmer discussed the new language of Facebook, while Erin McKean explored when words leave the dictionary. This week in words at The Wall Street Journal, Erin spotted stingray, a cell phone tracking device, and stall speed, “the speed below which an airplane can’t create enough lift to stay aloft,” among others. Humanities Magazine profiled the Dictionary of Regional American English (DARE), the fifth and final edition of which will be published in March 2012. [Disclosure: Erin is on the Board of Advisors for DARE.]

There was controversy in politics this week over the name of a certain hunting camp. Robert Lane Greene at Johnson wrote about The New York Times’ handling of it while The Daily Show tackled “the amazing racism” and other troubling geographical names.

At Language Log, Mark Liberman took a look at others’ takes on Rick Perry’s “talking Texan.” Mr. Liberman also posted about elephants’ alarm call for bees; putting the X in the AXB; and someone and me versus me and someone. Victor Mair learned about fake foreigners in Chinese.

Over at Lingua Franca, Geoffrey Pullum assured us that using the passive voice is perfectly fine in some circumstances, and even preferred, with which John McIntyre at You Don’t Say wholeheartedly agrees. This week Mr. McIntyre also wrote about the language assertionist, who goes beyond prescriptivism and “will not be persuaded by evidence; neither will he be persuaded by the arguments of authorities who contradict what he asserts.”

At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan Carey dissected why people hate the word blog. At Separated By a Common Language, Lynneguist offered up an untranslatable British English word, punter. Fritinancy’s Prohibition-esque word of the week was scofflaw, “a person who habitually violates or flouts the law”; asked if the phrase reach out made us retch (it does); and critiqued a New Yorker piece on brand names.

The Virtual Linguist mused on the origins of Indian summer and Greenwich Mean Time. Sesquiotica had a quick dip with a dabchick, a kind of grebe and also “a nickname for residents of Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England.” The Word Spy spotted underdecided, “unenthusiastic or unsure about a decision, particularly when choosing a candidate in an election”; dejab, “to stop wearing a hijab”; and quiet car, “a train or subway car where riders cannot have cellphone conversations or use noisy devices” (someone should have informed this lady of the definition).

Also from the Word Spy, aka Paul McFedries, is a piece on the language of online life. Are you a pancake person, someone who reads broadly but without depth? Ever encounter a nontroversy, “a false or nonexistent controversy”? And what would you if met your Googleganger, “the online equivalent of your doppelgänger”?

Motivated Grammar considered David Foster Wallace and misplaced modifiers. The Dialect Blog explored the use of son in African American English; American ash; and the rise of be like.” K International took a look at a man who dealt with his dyslexia by learning Klingon.

Down at Occupy Wall Street, protesters have set up a library. Flavorwire offered up this literary baby name dictionary; 10 children’s books that are also great for adults; and South Korean photographer Chan-Hyo Bae’s amazing fairy tale photos. The Poetry Foundation ranked poets by beard weight, and the Rumpus let us know that martial arts star Bruce Lee also wrote poetry. Biblioklept gave us this fictional map of L.A., and Arnold Zwicky made us laugh with this comma, comma, comma, comma chameleon.

That’s it for this week!

October 3, 2011 by Angela Tung - 3 Comments

Dictionary Day – Contest

Dictionary by crdotx, on Flickr

Dictionary Day is just a couple of weeks away! To help celebrate this day honoring the “Father of the American Dictionary,” Noah Webster, we’re holding a contest: now that you’re using Wordnik as your go-to word source, show us how you’re putting your print dictionary to use. Perhaps you’re using it as a door stop, or to flatten some flowers, or as a booster seat for a toddler. Whatever non-lexicographical use you’re putting your dictionary to, we want to see it.

Spanish dictionary pages up into the air by Horia Varlan, on Flickr

By midnight Pacific Time on October 15, send your photos to us via Twitter or email, or post them on our Facebook wall. You can enter as many times as you want. The winners will receive a Wordnik T-shirt and some other swag, and appear on our blog.

Definition of love by Billy Rowlinson, on Flickr

Interested in learning more about Noah Webster? Check out this new biography, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, by Joshua Kendall (here’s the review from the The New York Times). If you’re on the east coast, you may want to visit the Noah Webster House in West Hartford, Connecticut, the lexicographer’s birthplace. If you like corn mazes and lexicographers, you’re in luck, while for Halloween you may want to consider going as the Dictionary Fairy. Finally, for some inspiration for your dictionary photos, browse through this Flickr group, Lexicography and Dictionaries.

We look forward to seeing your dictionary photos!