Roundup of Linguistic Stories

3 October 2010

Here are a bunch of items that I’ve been meaning to post, but the semester’s workload has kept me from. (And since I awoke at 3 am, unable to get back to sleep, now seems as good a time as any.)

Jonathan Green’s three-volume Dictionary of Slang has finally been published. I’m looking forward to seeing the University of Toronto’s copy, because at $450 I’m not buying it.

This is a rather geeky posting on the use of the LaTex word processor in Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa. Also of note, thanks to Languagehat highlighting it, I stumbled across this one on transliteration and unicode.

The British Library is making images of a number of its Latin and Greek manuscripts available for viewing online. (Hat tip to Languagehat)

The blog Sentence First has a nice post on Received Pronunciation and how social pressures enforced its use.

Geoffrey Pullum over at Language Log discusses embiggen and the coining of new words and getting credit in the OED for the feat.

The Death of Comics

2 October 2010

Matt Zoller Seitz has a nice piece in Salon.com on the death of the daily comic strip. I’m not sure I quite agree with him. Daily comics are going strong, perhaps even stronger than ever. I don’t really follow the form, but with entries like xkcd and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal catching my interest nearly every day, the form is still quite alive. And there must be other contenders out there on the interwebs.

But Seitz does have a point about individual strips rising to national prominence through the medium of the daily newspaper. Never again will a strip like Peanuts be read by so many every day. And charting the progress of a strip’s importance in the national psyche as it rises through the comics page, as Seitz does with Calvin and Hobbes, is a thing of the past. But also now there is more “space” available for strips, space that is no longer ruled by editors who keep strips long past their prime, like Apartment 3G, Mary Worth, and, let’s face it, Peanuts, which was a wasteland for at least thirty years and is even now keeping some new strip out of the newspaper with its reruns. (Bill Watterson and Gary Larsen had the good sense to end Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side before they ran out of creative juice.) So I wouldn’t pronounce the death of the daily comic strip just yet.

There is also a feature in this month’s Atlantic on Doonesbury. I have yet to read it.

Surfeit of Kafka?

27 September 2010

Mr. Verb has some comments on the recent New York Times Magazine article on the saga of Franz Kafka and his works. In particular he discusses this quote from the article:

Kafka studies now proliferate at a rate inversely proportional to that of Kafka’s own production: according to a recent estimate, a new book on his work has been published every 10 days for the past 14 years.

But is this true? The New York Times does not cite a source for this figure.

A search of the MLA International Bibliography for 2009 publications with the keyword “kafka” comes up with only two scholarly books published on the writer in that year. There were twenty-five peer-reviewed journal articles. There were a total of sixty-seven publications. 2008 saw ten books and 119 total publications. 2007 had nine books and a total output of 123 items. 2006: twelve books and 160 items total. For the decade running from 1998–2008, there were total of 1,188 items, including 78 books and 405 peer-reviewed articles—and no dissertations. If the Times numbers are to be believed, the scholarly output on Kafka should be about triple what the MLA says it is. (The lower number for 2009 may reflect a delay in items entered into the bibliography. And the discrepancy between the Times and the MLA may be that the Times figure includes editions and translations of the works themselves.)

The MLA figures show a robust and active field of study. Yes, it’s a lot of material, but these things go in cycles. Literary criticism is a conversation, with scholars commenting on and building upon each others’ works. In a few years, the Kafka field will be over-cultivated out and the output will fall. Then after a few decades of lying fallow the field will blossom again. It’s probably a bad move, career-wise, for a graduate student to jump into Kafka studies at this point. (Which may be why no dissertations on Kafka are found for any of these years.) But the total output, as documented by the MLA, doesn’t seem excessive.

Mr. Verb does have a point that fields can become overcrowded and the research topics can become esoteric, arcane, and even downright silly, but high output in a particular subject is generally not a bad thing. It shows that ideas are being generated and the work is having an impact.