Operation Enduring Freelance - Kathrin Passig wins Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
Those of you who do not follow LanguageLog daily might have missed this piece, titled: Operation Enduring Freelance: the CIA gets it right
Why would linguists care?
Wolfgang Behr has emailed to point out that Passig's prize-winning story, Sie befinden sich hier ("You are located here") includes this passage:
Eskimos haben, wie einfallslose Mitmenschen an dieser Stelle gern in die Konversation einwerfen, unzählige Wörter für Schnee. Vermutlich soll damit auf die abgestumpfte Naturwahrnehmung des Stadtbewohners hingewiesen werden. Ich habe keine Geduld mit den Nachbetern dieser banalen Behauptung. Die Eskimosprachen sind polysynthetisch, was bedeutet, dass selbst selten gebrauchte Wendungen wie ”Schnee, der auf ein rotes T-Shirt fällt“ in einem einzigen Wort zusammengefasst werden. Es ist so ermüdend, das immer wieder erklären zu müssen.
Vor meinen Augen entsteht gerade eine neue Art Schnee, nämlich Schnee durch-den-sich-ein-magerer-Hase-arbeitet. (...)
Eskimos have -- as unimaginative fellow humans are usually fond of interjecting into conversation at this point -- innumerable words for snow. This is probably to allude to the blunted perception of nature among citydwellers. I have no patience with the mindless repeaters of this hackneyed assertion. The Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, meaning that even rare phrases like "Snow falling on a red T-shirt" are combined into a single word. It is so tedious to have to explain this over and over again.
A new kind of snow emerges in front of my eyes, namely snow-through-which-a-skinny-hare-wades. (...)
Wolfgang observes that "this certainly confirms Passig's rank as the central agent of the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur. And it is precisely the sort of thing Aikhenvald and Pullum would have written, if they hadn't been professional linguists (cf.' Sasha Aikhenvald on Inuit snow words: a clarification', 1/30/2004)".
Language Log points out: I'd like to point out that the English-language media are falling down on the job here. Never mind Kathrin Passig's admirably wellinformed views on the Eskimo lexicon, she's just won what is perhaps the most important literary award in the German-speaking world. On June25, more than one week ago. And I can't find her name indexed at the New York Times, the Washington Post, or indeed on any of theEnglish-language media outlets indexed by Google News. Even Slashdot is silent (when was the last time that a Perl and PHP hacker won a major literary prize?), and Metafilter is down, so I can't check there.
Perhaps English-language media don't generally cover literary awards in other languages, I don't know. But Passig's story has all kinds ofnews hooks -- I mean, it's the ZIA! PHP and Perl! PowerPoint Karaoke! A prize winner accepting her award in a t-shirt with a picture of a retro computer terminal on it!
- See German language reactions (in english summary) here at sign&sight or here in Pierre Joris 'Nomadics' blog.
- Read her winning story "You Are Here" in english translation - or in the German original as "Sie befinden sich hier". (Download as PDF)