The Linguist

@CIOL_Linguists AUTUMN 2023 The Linguist 29 SECTION HEADER REVIEWS The first Germanic people on our shores may have been mercenaries under Roman command fighting the Iceni, Picts and other troublesome, Brittonic-speaking tribes. After the Roman withdrawal in 410 CE, waves of Angles, Frisians, Jutes, Saxons and others landed and settled in East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. Place names are their calling cards – Swaffham, for example, means 'home of the Swabians'. PG differed from PIE in terms of syllable stress: the latter had randomly placed accents, whereas the former had trochaic stress. This became a characteristic of English pronunciation, e.g. hárvest, séven, wínter. The new language was spread partly by native Brittonic speakers learning the new tongue through trial and error. Mistakes were made, repeated, and eventually newer forms created and accepted. By the mid-9th century, Old English (OE) was spoken throughout the land. Cornish, Cumbric, Manx and Gaelic clung on in the peripheries, as did Early Scots and Welsh. Overlapping with this, Vikings introduced Norse to the north and east, from which a thousand or so words are still current (e.g. 'get', 'skin', 'weak'). The Norman Conquest had little long-term effect on the evolution of English. In contacts between competing languages, demography eventually supersedes prestige. By 1400 Norman French had had its day in England and Ireland. Only a few fossilised forms survive (one being 'court martial'). This same phenomenon had led to the Norse invaders abandoning Danish by the 10th century in favour of French. Modern English is approached through the prism of the colonial era. Settlers in the New World needed new words, anglicised versions of native flora and fauna: 'racoon', 'terrapin', 'persimmon' (all from Virginia Algonquian). Pidgin languages took root to facilitate trade. The author refers to how dispossessed North American cultures were killed off "sometimes deliberately, sometimes through carelessness and indifference". Although not as appetisingly conjectural as neurolinguistics, nor as eye-bogglingly de pointe as machine translation and deep learning, historical linguistics, in the right writer's hands, can narrate something of great importance. That is, how men and women take their language abroad, and how it can True to its title, The Translator's Little Book of Poetry is a brief compendium of poems devised with translators in mind. It comprises 16 carefully selected works in varying styles, ranging from Shakespeare to the present day, each of which serves as a doorway into a topic of particular significance in the translator's daily work. These topics are discussed in insightful commentaries by translation professionals, which accompany the poetic texts. Lewis Carroll's mostly incomprehensible poem Jabberwocky introduces us, quite aptly, to the issue of understanding your subject matter. Many translators will recall that feeling of being faced by a text that looks grammatically correct but is completely impenetrable. The advice offered in this case is that to be successful in their profession, translators have to specialise and learn how to deal with highly technical material. Similarly, Christina Rossetti's poem In the Bleak Midwinter serves to focus the reader's mind on the subject of how best we should (or should not) translate taboo words, while Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee brings up the matter of poetic musicality and how it can be conveyed between languages. As well as reflecting on the challenges and choices commonly faced by translators, this approach allows readers to enjoy verses they might not otherwise have delved into, and encourages close reading of the texts in order to identify the translation issues concerned. The new companion volume, The Translator's Little Book of Art, takes a similar approach using pictorial art rather than poetry as a starting point for illustrating some of the complexities typically encountered by translators. The inspired selection of works spans the ages from ancient Egypt to modern Pop Art, addressing such matters as the formal restrictions and boundaries (grammatical, cultural, etc) imposed on the translation process, instances in which these boundaries become hazy, and whether it might be licit to transgress them sometimes. It is worth noting that both of the books reviewed here have a short bibliography and glossary at the end. These brief volumes are a delight to read, or just to browse. Moreover, in a world currently obsessed by the linguistic achievements of artificial intelligence tools, they are a timely reminder of the very human intelligence, sensitivity and discernment needed to produce a successful translation. Ross Smith MCIL CL Available from bltcreations2020@gmail.com. CIOL member discount for both books (while stocks last): £19.95 + p&p. Quote CIOL2. The Translator's Little Book of Art/ Poetry Elizabeth De Zoysa, Caroline Durant, Felicity Pearce et al The Translator's Little Book of Art, BLT Creations, 2023, 50 pp; ISBN 9780957393158 Paperback £15.95 + p&p lead them to travel, settle, inter-marry and set off again. In The Long Journey of English: A geographical history of the language, Professor Peter Trudgill has crafted a well- grounded exposition of language development, with insights from archaeology and anthropology. The epochs and strands and threads of language evolution, as well as its geography, are navigated with a deft hand. Graham Elliott MCIL The Translator's Little Book of Poetry, BLT Creations, 2020, 58 pp; ISBN 9781715896799 Paperback £8.95 + p&p

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