William Shakespeare used the word dotage to capture reduced mental ability (as in being blindly in love) rather than as a quaint term for old age, successeswere really outcomes – one could talk of a ‘bad success’ – and, it turns out, the word bastard back then most often referred to a flower that was genetically hybrid.
A new dictionary, a verbal treasure trove of the nuances and uses of Shakespeare’s words, is published this week.
While dinner was preferred by Shakespeare for what we might think of as lunch (although his contemporaries used it to refer to an evening meal), beef, as today, was strongly associated with the English, but particularly the lower ranks (it was thought to reduce intelligence).
And while fish was not only considered inferior to red meat, it was also considered to be ‘decidedly dodgy’, being associated with Catholicism or sex.
This new research by Lancaster University sheds light on the times with the publication of The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, to be published by Bloomsbury.
Its publication comes after 25 years of preparation, a £1 million Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, a team of up to 25 researchers, and seven years of hard work.
The project, conceived and led by Jonathan Culpeper, a Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, will result in a unique 5 volume reference work, detailing and illuminating Shakespeare’s rich language.
A key feature of the project is that is uses corpus linguistics, the computer-aided analysis of massive datasets of language, to provide evidence-based accounts of Shakespeare’s language.
And not just of Shakespeare’s words.
The volumes of the Encyclopedia will also reveal the linguistic thumbprints of plays and characters plays, the articulation of themes such as love and death, and the networks of character interaction.
This month sees the publication of the first two volumes, which together constitute a dictionary.
Professor Culpeper, who worked together with Dr Andrew Hardie and Dr Jane Demmen, also from Lancaster University, on these volumes, said: “This is the first fully corpus-based dictionary of Shakespeare’s language and most comprehensive since Alexander Schmidt’s in the early 1870s.”
Volumes 1 and 2 comprise 20,000 word-entries gleaned from a million-word corpus of Shakespeare’s plays and compared with a matching million-word corpus of contemporary plays, along with huge corpus of 320 million words of various writings of the period.
Professor Culpeper said: “So why the comparisons?
“Other dictionaries define Shakespeare by looking just at Shakespeare. The result is a bit circular – Shakespeare’s words had lives amongst his contemporaries, and we pay attention to that, along with what they are doing in Shakespeare’s plays.”
It is obvious perhaps that wicked occurs densely in religious texts of the time, but who would have guessed that of the highly frequent word ourselves?
Frequent words such as alas or ah are revealed to be heavily used by female characters, doing the emotional work of lamentation in the plays (especially histories).
“Frequent words,” Professor Culpeper comments, “often excluded from previous Shakespearean dictionaries, have a wood for the trees problem.”
The dictionary also surveys the infrequent, flagging words that occur but once in Shakespeare, such as bone-ache (syphilis) or ear-kissing (whispering, though other writers used it for flattering), and words that seem to have their earliest occurrence in Shakespeare (including, the decidedly modern sounding self-harming).
The Encyclopedia is written for a general audience. The remaining volumes will be published over the next three years.
From Italy: A Sister’s Story, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
It’s the darkest time of night. Adriana, a baby in her arms, hammers on her sister’s door. Who is she running from? What uncomfortable truth is she carrying with her? Like a whirlwind, Adriana upends her sister’s life bringing chaos and cataclysmic revelations.
Years later, the narrator gets an unexpected, urgent summons back to Pescara, her hometown. She embarks on a long journey through the night, and through the folds and twists of her memory, from her and her sister’s youth, their loves and losses, secrets and regrets. Back in Borgo Sud, the town’s fishermen’s quarter, in that impenetrable yet welcoming microcosm, she will discover what really happened, and attempt to make peace with the past.
From Indonesia: The Birdwoman’s Palate, Laksmi Pamuntjak, translated from the Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao
Aruna is an epidemiologist dedicated to food and avian politics. One is heaven, the other earth. The two passions blend in unexpected ways when Aruna is asked to research a handful of isolated bird flu cases reported across Indonesia. While it’s put a crimp in her aunt’s West Java farm, and made her own confit de canard highly questionable, the investigation does provide an irresistible opportunity.
It’s the perfect excuse to get away from corrupt and corrosive Jakarta and explore the spices of the far-flung regions of the islands with her three friends: a celebrity chef, a globe-trotting “foodist,” and her coworker Farish.
From Medan to Surabaya, Palembang to Pontianak, Aruna and her friends have their fill of local cuisine. With every delicious dish, she discovers there’s so much more to food, politics, and friendship. Now, this liberating new perspective on her country – and on her life – will push her to pursue the things she’s only dreamed of doing.
From Slovakia: Vanity Unfair, Zuzana Cigánová, translated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek
An accidental pregnancy, a good-looking man who cares about no one but himself, marriage because the man “had a bit of a Christian upbringing”, and divorce – that is the trajectory of Pipina’s life, leading to single motherhood and a thousand cruelties of everyday life because she is an ugly woman in a world where ugliness is worse than a death sentence. At every turn, she is reminded of her inferiority. She can’t wait for the end of each day when she can sit in the stairwell outside of her dilapidated apartment and retreat into her thoughts. Her drab life full of indignities dissolves only in her beautiful, cinematic dreams. In them, she experiences whatever she can’t do or have in real life.
From Morocco: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
34-year-old prostitute Jmiaa reflects on the bustling world around her with a brutal honesty, but also a quick wit that cuts through the drudgery. Like many of the women in her working-class Casablanca neighbourhood, Jmiaa struggles to earn enough money to support herself and her family – often including the deadbeat husband who walked out on her and their young daughter. While she doesn’t despair about her profession like her roommate, Halima, who reads the Quran between clients, she still has to maintain a delicate balance between her reality and the “respectable” one she paints for her own more conservative mother.
This daily grind is interrupted by the arrival of an aspiring young director, Chadlia, whom Jmiaa takes to calling “Horse Mouth.” Chadlia enlists Jmiaa’s help on a film project, initially just to make sure the plot and dialogue are authentic. But when she’s unable to find an actress who’s right for the starring role, she turns again to Jmiaa, giving the latter an incredible opportunity for a better life.
From Argentina: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
Welcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions and morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances and urban madness spill over with women and girls whose dark inclinations will lead them over the edge.
From Cameroon: Dark Heart of the Night, Léonora Miano, translated from the French by Tamsin Black
What is Africa’s own “heart of darkness”? It is what confronts Ayané when, after three years abroad, she returns to the Central African village of her birth. Now an “outsider” with foreign ways distrusted by her fellow villagers, she must face alone the customs and superstitions that bind this clan of men and women. When invading militia organise a horrific ceremony that they claim will help reunite Africa, Ayané is forced to confront the monstrosity of the act that follows, as well as the responsibility that all the villagers must bear for silently accepting evil done in their name.
From Palestine: Minor Detail, Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this “minor detail” of history.
From South Korea: Concerning My Daughter, Kim Hye-jin, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang
When a mother allows her 30-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Her daughter’s involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her. And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family, who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, who chose not to have children, Green’s mother cannot accept it. Why should not choosing a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all?
From Germany: Identitti, Mithu Sanyal, translated from the German by Alta L Price
Nivedita (aka Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student is in awe of her supervisor – superstar postcolonial and race studies South-Asian professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Nivedita’s praise of her professor during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks – and before she learns the truth – calls into question her own reputation as a young activist.
Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world. As debates on the scandal rage on social media, blogs, and among her closest friends, Nivedita’s assumptions are called into question as she reconsiders the lessons she learned from her adored professor.
From India: Bhairavi, The Runaway, Shivani, translated from the Hindi by Priyanka Sarkar
A still, dense, ancient forest. A dark cave deep within. And in it a woman-child whose beauty can move the most pious to sin. Who is she and why did she jump from a moving train to land in the biggest cremation ground teeming with Aghori Sadhus?
In this story spanning generations and redolent with Gothic imagery, Shivani aka Gaura Pant tells the story of a woman’s life, her moral and mental strength and her resilience. She also examines the choices women have in her beautiful, descriptive prose.
From Japan: Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerising scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.
From Ukraine: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, Oksana Zabuzhko, translated from the Ukranian Nina Shevchuk-Murray
Spanning 60 tumultuous years of Ukrainian history, this multigenerational saga weaves a dramatic and intricate web of love, sex, friendship, and death. At its centre: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past – secrets that refuse to remain hidden. While researching a story, journalist Daryna unearths a worn photograph of Olena Dovgan, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed in 1947 by Stalin’s secret police. Intrigued, Daryna sets out to make a documentary about the extraordinary woman – and unwittingly opens a door to the past that will change the course of the future. For even as she delves into the secrets of Olena’s life, Daryna grapples with the suspicious death of a painter who just may be the latest victim of a corrupt political power play. From the dim days of the Second World War to the eve of the Orange Revolution, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets explores the enduring power of the dead over the living.
Mexico: Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters – inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable – forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Cuba: I Was Never the First Lady, Wendy Guerra, translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas
Nadia Guerra’s mother, Albis Torres, left when Nadia was just ten years old. Growing up, the proponents of revolution promised a better future. Now that she’s an adult, Nadia finds that life in Havana hasn’t quite matched its promise; instead, it has stifled her rebellious and artistic desires. Each night she DJs a radio show government censors block from broadcasting. Frustrated, Nadia finds hope and a way out when she wins a scholarship to study in Russia.
Leaving Cuba offers her the chance to find her long-lost mother and her real father. But as she embarks on a journey east, Nadia soon begins to question everything she thought she knew and understood about her past.
As Nadia discovers more about her family, her fate becomes entwined with that of Celia Sanchez, an icon of the Cuban Revolution – a resistance fighter, ingenious spy, and the rumoured lover of Fidel Castro. A tale of revolutionary ideals and promise, Celia’s story interweaves with Nadia’s search for meaning and eventually reveals secrets Nadia could never have dreamed of.
Venezuela: It Would Be Night in Caracas, Karina Sainz Borgo, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer
In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcón stands over an open grave. Alone, she buries her mother – the only family she has ever known – and worries that when night falls thieves will rob the grave. Even the dead cannot find peace here.
Adelaida had a stable childhood in a prosperous Venezuela that accepted immigrants in search of a better life, where she lived with her single mother in a humble apartment. But now? Every day she lines up for bread that will inevitably be sold out by the time she reaches the registers. Every night she tapes her windows to shut out the tear gas raining down on protesters.
When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida must make a series of gruesome choices in order to survive in a country disintegrating into anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But just how far is she willing to go?
Colombia: Fish Soup, Margarita García Robayo, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Coombe
Fish Soup is a collection comprising two novellas plus the book of short stories Worse Things.
Set on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Waiting for a Hurricane follows a girl obsessed with escaping both her life and her country. Emotionally detached from her family, and disillusioned with what the future holds if she remains, she takes ever more drastic steps in order to achieve her goal, seemingly oblivious to the damage she is causing both to herself and to those around her.
The tales of Worse Things provide snapshots of lives in turmoil, frayed relationships, dreams of escape, family taboos, and rejection both of and by society. Sexual Education examines the attempts of a student to tally the strict doctrine of abstinence taught at her school with the very different moral norms that prevail in her social circles.
Brazil: The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Paulo Gurgel Valente
Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal jungle: stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually, he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival but are affected by his radical mystery. A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is one of Lispector’s best works.
Peru: Little Bird, Claudia Ulloa Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Lily Meyer
A stranger keeps coming into the narrator’s apartment and staring at her plant. A woman rescues a bird her cat attacked but accidentally carries it into her job interview. A woman ends up accidentally married due to a misunderstanding. Donoso stories carry with them the haze and fatigue of every day life.
Uruguay: The Naked Woman, Armonía Somers, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude
A groundbreaking feminist classic from 1950s Uruguay, The Naked Woman was met with scandal and outrage due to its erotic content, cynicism, and stylistic ingenuity. The novel follows Rebeca Linke’s ardent, ultimately tragic, attempt to free herself from a hostile society. Juxtaposing fantastic imagery and brutal depictions of violence, it is one of the most original works of Latin American fiction.
Chile: Seeing Red, Lina Meruane, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
Lucina, a young Chilean writer, has moved to New York to pursue an academic career. While at a party one night, something that her doctors had long warned might happen finally occurs her eyes haemorrhage. Within minutes, blood floods her vision, reducing her sight to sketched outlines and tones of grey, rendering her all but blind. As she begins to adjust to a very different life, those who love her begin to adjust to a very different woman – one who is angry, raw, funny, sinister, sexual, and dizzyingly alive.
Argentina: Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses
Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways – often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,” a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbour jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” and in “Candy Pink,” a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.
Ecuador: Jawbone, Mónica Ojeda, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker
Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?
When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break from reality.
The world we live in has never been more interconnected, giving people access to more multilingual content than ever before. This also makes the ability to communicate and understand information in any language increasingly important.
Today, we’re introducing SeamlessM4T, the first all-in-one multimodal and multilingual AI translation model that allows people to communicate effortlessly through speech and text across different languages. SeamlessM4T supports:
Speech recognition for nearly 100 languages
Speech-to-text translation for nearly 100 input and output languages
Speech-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 36 (including English) output languages
Text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages
Text-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 35 (including English) output languages
In keeping with our approach to open science, we’re publicly releasing SeamlessM4T under a research license to allow researchers and developers to build on this work. We’re also releasing the metadata of SeamlessAlign, the biggest open multimodal translation dataset to date, totaling 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments.
Building a universal language translator, like the fictional Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is challenging because existing speech-to-speech and speech-to-text systems only cover a small fraction of the world’s languages. But we believe the work we’re announcing today is a significant step forward in this journey. Compared to approaches using separate models, SeamlessM4T’s single system approach reduces errors and delays, increasing the efficiency and quality of the translation process. This enables people who speak different languages to communicate with each other more effectively.
SeamlessM4T builds on advancements we and others have made over the years in the quest to create a universal translator. Last year, we released No Language Left Behind (NLLB), a text-to-text machine translation model that supports 200 languages, and has since been integrated into Wikipedia as one of the translation providers. We also shared a demo of our Universal Speech Translator, which was the first direct speech-to-speech translation system for Hokkien, a language without a widely used writing system. And earlier this year, we revealed Massively Multilingual Speech, which provides speech recognition, language identification and speech synthesis technology across more than 1,100 languages.
SeamlessM4T draws on findings from all of these projects to enable a multilingual and multimodal translation experience stemming from a single model, built across a wide range of spoken data sources with state-of-the-art results.
This is only the latest step in our ongoing effort to build AI-powered technology that helps connect people across languages. In the future, we want to explore how this foundational model can enable new communication capabilities — ultimately bringing us closer to a world where everyone can be understood.
The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, published this week, aims to be the ‘first fully corpus-based dictionary of Shakespeare’s language and most comprehensive since Alexander Schmidt’s in the early 1870s.’
William Shakespeare used the word dotage to capture reduced mental ability (as in being blindly in love) rather than as a quaint term for old age, successes were really outcomes – one could talk of a ‘bad success’ – and, it turns out, the word bastard back then most often referred to a flower that was genetically hybrid.
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While dinner was preferred by Shakespeare for what we might think of as lunch (although his contemporaries used it to refer to an evening meal), beef, as today, was strongly associated with the English, but particularly the lower ranks (it was thought to reduce intelligence). And while fish was not only considered inferior to red meat, it was also considered to be ‘decidedly dodgy’, being associated with Catholicism or sex.
'To Kate' (v.) #cl2023
Quick peek inside the new @Ardenpublisher Encyclopedia of #Shakespeare Language
Every single word of his plays is included (minus proper nouns and numbers)! pic.twitter.com/cO46TeWzu4
— Katharine Kavanagh (@BustingFree) July 6, 2023
This new research by Lancaster University sheds light on the times with the publication of The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, published by Bloomsbury earlier this week. Its publication comes after 25 years of preparation, a £1 million Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, a team of up to 25 researchers, and seven years of hard work.
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The project, conceived and led by Jonathan Culpeper, a Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, will result in a unique 5 volume reference work, detailing and illuminating Shakespeare’s rich language. A key feature of the project is that is uses corpus linguistics, the computer-aided analysis of massive datasets of language, to provide evidence-based accounts of Shakespeare’s language.
And not just of Shakespeare’s words. The volumes of the Encyclopedia will also reveal the linguistic thumbprints of plays and characters plays, the articulation of themes such as love and death, and the networks of character interaction. Professor Culpeper, who worked together with Dr Andrew Hardie and Dr Jane Demmen, also from Lancaster University, on these volumes, explains “This is the first fully corpus-based dictionary of Shakespeare’s language and most comprehensive since Alexander Schmidt’s in the early 1870s.”
This month sees the publication of the first two volumes, which together constitute a dictionary. Volumes 1 and 2 comprise 20,000 word-entries gleaned from a million-word corpus of Shakespeare’s plays and compared with a matching million-word corpus of contemporary plays, along with huge corpus of 320 million words of various writings of the period.
“So why the comparisons?” asks Professor Culpeper. “Other dictionaries define Shakespeare by looking just at Shakespeare. The result is a bit circular – Shakespeare’s words had lives amongst his contemporaries, and we pay attention to that, along with what they are doing in Shakespeare’s plays.”
Advertisement
It is obvious perhaps that wicked occurs densely in religious texts of the time, but who would have guessed that of the highly frequent word ourselves? Frequent words such as alas or ah are revealed to be heavily used by female characters, doing the emotional work of lamentation in the plays (especially histories).
“Frequent words,” Professor Culpeper comments, “often excluded from previous Shakespearean dictionaries, have a wood for the trees problem.”
The dictionary also surveys the infrequent, flagging words that occur but once in Shakespeare, such as bone-ache (syphilis) or ear-kissing (whispering, though other writers used it for flattering), and words that seem to have their earliest occurrence in Shakespeare (including, the decidedly modern-sounding self-harming).
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The Encyclopedia is written for a general audience. The remaining volumes will be published over the next three years. To learn more, please visit the publisher’s website or buy this set on Amazon.com.
Being a small part of the @ShakespeareLang project was one of the highlights of my time at @LAEL_LU. Holding the encyclopedia for the first time earlier this week was really special. Congratulations to @j_culpeper, @HardieResearch and @JJDemmen on these first two volumes!! pic.twitter.com/3aoAtfych7
— Mathew Gillings (@mathewgillings) July 6, 2023
Top Image: Work on a new ‘verbal treasure trove’ captures nuances and uses of Shakespeare’s words. Phot courtesy Lancaster University, UK
