more on flora and fauna and question about Multitran
Olga Meerson
meersono at GEORGETOWN.EDU
Thu Sep 20 21:48:20 UTC 2007
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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