more on flora and fauna and question about Multitran

[Will Ryan]

I am highly flattered to have a such a fan as Natalie Kononenko, and 
reciprocate the sentiment. I also envy her opportunity to have been able 
to do such fieldwork and clearly hers is the ideal way to research 
terminology of this kind, although even in this case one would have to 
establish how widely an informant's term is used. But alas it doesn't 
help translators or writers at their desks far from the village scene. 
There is, of course, a considerable number of recorded Russian and 
Ukrainian folk terms for plants and animals but they tend to be 
scattered in research articles, small dialect dictionaries and 
catchpenny 'folk wisdom' publications of the kind sold on bookstalls in 
the Metro, and are not gathered into a corpus. Dal's dictionary contains 
a vast number of such terms, but they are not always localized and Dal' 
does not give sources, and is not always reliable.
I absolutely agree on the usefulness of the vast and admirable "A Modern 
Herbal" for English terms and their Latin equivalents (it includes their 
history and folklore in many cases).
Liubistok/lovage is a happy find and a curiosity for etymologists; the 
Russian word is apparently derived from Polish lubistek, via MHG 
luebestecke, from late Latin levisticum. The English is from the same 
Latin source but via French - and  the popular etymology involving the 
notion of love in both Russian and English seems to be a quite 
fortuitous parallel development. The further jump in Russian and 
Ukrainian from the popular etymology to attributing magical love potion 
qualities to the plant seems not to have happened in English.
 
Will Ryan


nataliek at UALBERTA.CA wrote:
> I am a fan of Will Ryan's work and I agree with him that things can 
> get quite complex.  When writing about folk medicine, I had the 
> advantage of having talked to village herbalists.  Thus, I knew what 
> the various plants looked like, what their various uses were, how 
> their medicinal properties were activated, so to speak, etc.  This 
> made it much easier to find English equivalents.  In this regard, I 
> very much recommend the 2 volume "A Modern Herbal," which is actually 
> not modern at all but an old English source book republished by Dover. 
>  I think this book is wonderful and I was able to find the English 
> equivalents of the various plants I was writing about in it.  I was 
> pleased and charmed, for example, to discover that liubiistok is 
> called lovage in English.
>
> Now about translating flora and fauna - I was quite excited when 
> someone suggested Multitran.  But, when I tried it, I was quite 
> disappointed.  Translations for the most obvious items came up, but 
> the more esoteric terms were just not part of the database.  Has 
> anyone else tried Multitran and have others had better results?
>
> Natalie Kononenko
> Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography
> University of Alberta
> Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
> 200 Arts Building
> Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E6
> Phone: 780-492-6810
> Web: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
>  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
>                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------