more on flora and fauna and question about Multitran

[Olga Meerson]

In my graduate-school youth, working on Xlebnikov helped finding these equivalents. Consequently, one of the best authorities was, and perhaps remains, Ronald Vroon.
Olga

----- Original Message -----
From: Will Ryan <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>
Date: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 4:03 pm
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] more on flora and fauna and question about Multitran

> 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/
> >
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