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I finally watched a movie I’d been wanting to see for years, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城市 Bēiqíng chéngshì). It’s famous as the first Taiwanese movie to deal openly with the Kuomintang government’s brutal takeover of Taiwan, in particular the February 28 Incident (about which I was told in whispers when I was teaching college in Taiwan in the ’70s), but that’s unimportant compared to the fact that it’s a great film — to my mind, up there with Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day at the peak of Taiwanese cinema. What brings it here, however, is something that struck me forcibly while watching it, the linguistic complexity. To quote Bérénice Reynaud’s A City of Sadness (British Film Institute Publishing, 2002; review):

From the beginning (Hirohito’s speech) to the end (Tachikawa’s music), A City is permeated through and through by Japanese sounds. Not only is the moody, emotional theme music heard at key moments, creating an aural scansion that contributed to the aesthetic success of the film, but a number of diegetic songs, in addition to Aka Tonbo, are Japanese. When Wen-ching is in jail, in a distant background, unseen prisoners break into a Japanese song, mourning the fate of young men going to war. That, at the moment of dying, victims of the Kuomintang repression turn to Japanese culture to express their feelings, is no accident. Like all film-makers forced by censorship to use subtle forms of expression, Hou resorts to discreet, apparently ‘non-political’ elements to make a point. The ‘official history’ the Nationalist Party sought to carve, in blood if necessary, onto the ‘recovered’ island was that Taiwan was an integral part of mainland China: the rupture in historical continuity created by 50 years of Japanese occupation had to be denied. Consequently, Japanese language and culture became the signifiers of the specificity of the Taiwanese experience. Which Kuomintang official could guess, by listening to an apparently innocuous nursery rhyme, that its hidden meaning was ‘We are Taiwanese, not mainlanders’?

Taiwanese from all walks of life were deeply marked by Japanese culture. The ‘Taiwanese dialect’ itself, as it is spoken by the ‘native’ characters in the film, is laced with Japanese words and phrases. Moreover, among intellectuals and politically active people – like the ones most likely to be in the same jail as Wen-ching – turning back to Japanese culture meant taking a certain stance in relation to their own agency. As expressed many times in the film, by Hinoe’s bookish friends as well as by the grass-roots ‘Big Brother’ Wen-heung, Taiwan kept being ‘handed over’ without being consulted, first by the Qing Dynasty to the Japanese and then by the Allies to the Nationalist Party. Kept in a state of submission by the Japanese, the Taiwanese had hopes of becoming full citizens once they were reunited with the motherland. Instead, mainlanders were behaving in Taiwan as if in occupied territory. Reverting to Japanese mores and culture, to the language of the previous occupying forces, now defeated, was an understated way of making a choice, of rejecting the present occupation, of defiantly asserting that the gap between Taiwan and the mainland was unbridgeable.
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As a fan of both Jean-Luc Godard and typography, how could I resist Paule Palacios-Dalens’ 2019 article Jean-Luc Godard, the Typographer with a Movie Camera (originally Jean-Luc Godard,le typographe à la caméra)? Here’s the introduction:

If Jean-Luc Godard is the cinema itself, he is also heir to the printed page. Layout design, and in particular typography, is for him the privileged means of experiencing at every opportunity the paradoxical relationships of text and image. A particular facet of his graphic work concerns the use he makes of type fonts. Three stages emerge through his filmography, marked by the use of a unique typography, whose subtle choice indicates significant aesthetic and political stakes.

For the first two phases it is about the very French Antique Olive, designed by Roger Excoffon between 1965 and 1967, which was followed by the symbol of Swiss typography, Helvetica, from the 1980s to 2010. The third phase is distinguished by the use of so-called screen fonts (Tahoma or Verdana) designed by Matthew Carter. Godard uses them in his last two works to date, Adieu au langage (“Farewell to Language”, 2014) and Le Livre d’image (“The Picture Book”, 2018). If the primary function of typography is to show the text, Godard’s underlying question, whatever the medium (video, paper or film), is a painter’s preoccupation: How to represent thought and what colour (political and pictorial) to give it. How to print a thought in movement and free oneself from the fixation of the text on the page? How to make a book while making a film? Typography is the privileged visual mediation through which Godard tries to put an end to the competition between text and image in the production of thought.

She goes into detail about the history and nature of the typefaces and the use Godard made of them; here’s a bit from her discussion of Antique Olive:
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I was describing someone (OK, a chipmunk I’d been feeding) as “cosseted” when it occurred to me to wonder where that word came from. The answer is simple, interesting, and (to me) unexpected: a cosset is ‘a pet, usually a pet lamb’ (first in 1579: “I shall thee give yond Cosset for thy payne,” Spenser, Shepheardes Calender). That explains that, but where does the noun come from? That’s unclear; Wiktionary repeats Skeat’s suggestion that it’s from Old English cotsǣta ‘cottager,’ but I find that highly unconvincing. Somebody should look into it.

Not worth making a separate post of, but I have a complaint about the OED’s entry (entry revised 2016) for filmstrip, defined as “A length of film bearing a sequence of still frames.” Here are the three citations:

1896 The camera is provided with a continuous strip of sensitive film, and..a negative is made of it upon the sensitive film strip.
Weekly Irish Times 9 May 3/9Citation details for Weekly Irish Times

1962 Three new filmstrips, intended for training student electronic engineers.
Engineering 16 November 649Citation details for Engineering

2004 Each page is a ‘time slice’—like a still frame in a filmstrip.
B. Greene, Fabric of Cosmos (2005) i. iii. 53

Now, technically of course any strip of film is “a length of film bearing a sequence of still frames,” but in fact the word filmstrip has a more specific sense, well described in this NY Times piece by Christian Kriticos (archived) about collector Mark O’Brien:

Originating in the 1920s, filmstrips were a low-budget cousin to the movies. “You can think of them like slide shows,” O’Brien said. They contained 30 to 150 still images on a single roll of film, which was advanced manually frame by frame. The content was often educational, covering subjects as varied as teenage acne and the metric system. Teachers would project the pictures on classroom walls, while vinyl or cassette soundtracks provided narration, music and regular beeps to prompt the move to the next frame.

Obviously the 1896 citation does not refer to this but to a plain old strip of moving-picture film; to lump them together is like including a quote about a very warm canine in an entry for hot dog ‘frankfurter.’ Come on, OED, you can do better.

A paper by Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35 1-4 [2017-2018]: 31-42) begins by quoting Roman Szporluk on the origins of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity and asks “If the imagined community began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when did the Ukrainian vernacular begin to delimit itself vis-à-vis its neighbors?” Flier goes on to quote George Shevelov to the effect that “a continuum has existed from the earliest local changes within Common Slavic to the present,” then gets to the meat of his paper:

It is one thing to worry about labels, but it is quite another to examine the typology of the linguistic systems on East Slavic territory and uncover the relationship among specific changes. The goal is to establish not simply a list of distinctive characteristics, as Shevelov would have it, but to reveal a hierarchy of change and therefore a more accurate evaluation of linguistic data.[6] Thus, we are not as interested in registering Change A and Change B as we are in the assertion that Change B implies Change A and if B is in place it is no longer possible to return to the status quo ante, that is pre-A. My intent here is to make use of advances in Slavic historical linguistics since the publication of Shevelov’s encyclopedic Ukrainian historical phonology three and a half decades ago, knowledge that sheds new light on the chronological layering of East Slavic and thus provides a relative time frame for marking such fundamental typological shifts.

I will focus here on internally motivated sound change precisely because it is based on linguistic data least subject to conscious alteration on the part of speakers. We want to consider the language of speakers throughout Ukrainian territory, especially those at a far remove from the scriptoria and bureaucratic offices of urban elites. Members of this latter group are much more likely to be affected by the need for new abstract vocabulary or socially prestigious speech, desiderata that often lead to calques or direct borrowings, particularly from neighboring languages of power such as Polish or Russian. En passant we might note that both of these prestigious and influential languages have had a heavy steady stream of borrowing and calquing of their own. For now we will forget the self-reflective elites: we will be interested in when and how the non-elite speech communities of East Slavic began to diverge phonologically, never to proceed along the same trajectory again.

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I’m almost finished with Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (1, 2, 3), and I was brought up short by this passage in the concluding chapter: “some particularly important manuscripts – including the Codex Venetus A of Homer – can be studied in greater detail in digitized form than by any other means, including autopsy.” Of course I was aware that autopsy is from Greek αὐτοψία ‘act of seeing with one’s own eyes’ (which is why Stan Brakhage called his disturbing 1971 film about forensic pathologists The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes), but I hadn’t known that that sense was used in English. A trip to the OED (entry revised 2011) proved enlightening:

1. The action or process of seeing with one’s own eyes; personal observation, inspection, or experience. Now rare.

1607 It is apparently knowne, especially to them which are skild in the autopsie of Anatomie, the seat or fountaine head of it, is..a great hollow veine.
T. Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors. Or The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or The Philosophers Stone to Make a Golden Temper f. 59

1647 For we question whether..a man by the bare light and instruction of the Book could attaine to a dextrous practice of a trade, whereunto hath been required seven yeares Autopsia.
W. Petty, Advice to Hartlib 19

1651 Or by autopsie [Latin per autopsiam], when by our observation, wee get a certaine knowledge of things.
R. Wittie, translation of J. Primrose, Popular Errours i. xiv. 53
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1722 The extreme Capillaries of these Vessels are not to be prov’d by Autopsy, no more than those of the Veins and Arteries are.
J. Wainewright, Anat. Treat. Liver 60
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1818 It is also this kind of evidence which places beyond dispute the autopsy of a traveller; and distinguishes him from the mere writer of Travels, who never himself saw what he relates.
E. D. Clarke, Trav. Europe, Asia & Afr. Part III (1824) vol. IX. p. viii

1839 The defect of autopsy may be compensated by sufficient testimony of a multitude.
T. De Quincey, On Hume’s Argument in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine July 95/2

1901 The evidence..that he is describing from personal autopsy the scenes of the great events which he narrates is overwhelming.
G. B. Grundy, Great Persian War & Preliminaries vi. 223

1988 [He] has collated (usually from photographs or facsimiles, only rarely by autopsy) all the manuscripts cited except for [etc.].
Classical Philology vol. 83 151

2003 Pliny was procurator of Hispania Tarraconensis, and the Natural History contains information about the area which Pliny seems to have derived from autopsy.
J. N. Adams, Bilingualism & Latin Language iv. 450

Sense 2.a., “Examination of the organs of a dead body in order to determine the cause of death, nature and extent of disease, result of treatment, etc.; post-mortem examination; an instance of this,” only goes back to 1805 (“The distinguishing signs of peripneumony and pleurisy are so uncertain that they have been doubted by some celebrated physicians; they have been so often belied by cadaverous autopsia,” Philosophical Magazine vol. 21 240). I note, more in anger than in sorrow, that they once again show their indifference to authorship; the 1988 citation under 1 is by Donald J. Mastronarde, and the 2.a. citation is from “An Essay on Medical Entomology” by François-Pierre Chaumeton.

The etymology goes into commendable detail on the sense development:
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Joel has another great excerpt from Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (see this post); after a passage on religion, it continues:

Elsewhere, too, the adoption of Indian ideas was selective rather than wholesale. While writing systems were borrowed and Indian languages used for the earliest local writing, the languages both of the court and the common people remained the local Austronesian or Khmer ones. Sanskrit for a while may have served the same priestly and official role as Latin in medieval Europe. But in time Indian Pallawa script was used to write local languages, the oldest found so far being in old Malay dating to the seventh century in Sumatra. The following century saw the development of Kawi script, derived from Pallawa but used to write old Javanese.

This script became the basis for other scripts including later Javanese and Balinese, which are still in use today. The first writing in Khmer also dates to the seventh century and uses an adaptation of Pallawa script. Six hundred years later this became the basis of Thai writing. The origin of Indian language influence also varied. Only Sanskrit words, those of religious and classical texts, not Prakrit or other common Indian speech, entered early writing in Java, but Tamil ones appeared in Sumatra. Despite the import of Indian religions, social structures appear to have remained indigenous. The maritime cultures borrowed Indian ideas in art and architecture but then adapted them so that they have distinctive aspects which are readily recognizable.

Apart from religion and script, the biggest influence was on legal and governance issues. The Indian text on statecraft, Arthashastra, and the ancient Brahman legal code, Manusmriti, were widely studied by ruling elites and had a major influence on the development of state systems. The Arthashastra, written in the fourth century BCE during the north India-based Maurya empire, which supposedly followed the peace-loving Jain religion, required rulers to be ruthless in protecting the interests of the state but disciplined, hardworking and learned. It was a secular recipe for enlightened despotism applicable to rulers of any faith. The Hindu notion of divine kingship was especially attractive to rulers, seeming to make the exercise of power something higher than mere personal leadership: a mandate from above. Buddhism on the other hand (and also Jainism) was more sympathetic to merchant interests and the accumulation of wealth. Its practitioners were also less constrained by caste issues and religious rituals, which for the devout were an obstacle to long sea journeys.

What a fascinating part of the world! For more on its complexity, see my 2005 post It’s Never That Simple.

This is pretty silly, but it amused me, and it will perhaps amuse the Persons of Welshness among us. From Frances Wilson’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis:

Lewis finds Burton in his voice, which Burton himself described as “the deep, dark answer” to the Welsh valleys. “I think our voices were born with coal-dust and rain and some sort of authentic mystery from those dark and tortured valleys,” he told an interviewer in 1974. For Lewis, Burton’s voice is “one of the twentieth century’s great noises,”

roaring, swelling, delicate and bombastic by turns, the articulation and diction very precise—and it’s what I hold most dear, what I find most engaging, about him, too, the inflections, nuances, elaborations and grain of his voice, the fire and the flint of things spoken. Everything one would want to know with Burton is present in the voice, which was rich and artificial, carrying a sense of fracture, of mournfulness.

Welsh was Burton’s first language, and it took years of elocution to iron out his vowels. “Unless you are Welsh,” he said of his friend Stanley Baker, “you couldn’t possibly understand him,” and the same is true of Burton. “He suffers from this intoxication with words,” Taylor said. “It’s Welsh verbal diarrhea.” “The Welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses,” explains Lewis, “because flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.”

I’d never heard of Lewis, and I can’t say I’m pleased to have made his acquaintance; from the review:
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Songdog and I are making some changes that we hope will improve reliability so the site doesn’t keep being unreachable. There may be bumps along the way; be patient!

Another deep dive into an obscure region of typography, With hollow feet and harlequin hats: Tuscan letters, a prank of lapidary origin? (Second part):

Tere Schultz delivers a new literary and typographic divertimento for passionate readers. This time she follows one of her personal fixations: the Tuscan letters. Those ornamental objects, delicate or extravagant, that inhabit streets and typographic catalogs of all times, without losing an iota of expressive force. The product of decorative ingenuity, Tuscan vernaculars dress the street signs of Mexico as much as the stained glass windows of Paris, the ‘fileteado porteño’ of Buenos Aires signs or the hulls of fishing boats in the Amazon waters. However, this decorative ubiquity, notorious and implausible, alarms many. Fortunately, like a healing balm, Schultz will deploy here her original hypothesis, suspiciously unexplored, of how the Tuscan style would have been born from a mischievous interpretation of the stone inscriptions (wrongly) called lapidary. Although perhaps here the term ‘lapidary’ is appropriate, since the idea caught the author strolling through a cemetery. (Warning: sensitive material. Agnostic typographers and designers of little faith, please refrain).

Here’s a definition:

Basically, a typeface is considered Tuscan when its serifs are bi- or tri-furcated (sometimes with a greater number of extensions) to achieve a certain degree of fantasy or ornamentation. The examples are infinite since, apart from the terminals, all the other elements of the anatomy of a letter can vary: the strokes contrast, the ratio of proportions, the absence / presence of diamonds and other elements within the strokes, shadows, textures and other external additions.

And here’s a discussion of the name:
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Just a quick post — we had people over, and it’s late — but I wanted to mention a phrase I was unfamiliar with that turned up in an episode from season 2 of Endeavour (which my wife and I are rewatching after many years). One of the characters is explaining to Morse the nature of a classified ad placed in the Oxford Mail: his group of friends had agreed to use such an ad as an emergency signal to call the group together, and he compared it to a “twilight bark.” I looked it up and it turns out to be from The Hundred and One Dalmatians — it’s an alarm system the dogs use to pass the word about missing puppies. I’m not sure if in the book (1956) or only the movie (1961); the episode is set in late 1966. For those who were as unaware as I was, now you know.