WASABI.

Wasabi (stress on the first syllable: WAH-sah-bee) is not horseradish. For an explanation of why it's not even close, as well as of why people think it is (not to mention a description of the word's bizarre relationship to the characters used to write it in Japanese), see Bill Poser's post at Language Log.

MAY HAVE.

I believe I've mentioned before that one of the changes going on in English that distresses me the most (I say "going on" out of a combination of nostalgia and wilful blindness—the fact is that it's already happened) is the obsolescence of the contrary-to-fact past "might have." I can't remember the last time I heard it used, and I'm slowly beginning to wince less ferociously when I hear "if he'd run faster he may have caught the ball"; I suppose before I die I'll become more or less accustomed to it, though I don't imagine I'll actually take it up myself. I seem to have made the unconscious assumption, however, that it was an American phenomenon, so I was shocked anew just now, listening to an interview with a British author named Caryl Phillips, to hear him say "If I lived there [England], it may not be as easy for me to see the changes." Now, as is apparent from the quote itself, he has not actually lived in England for years; an online biography says "Born in St. Kitts on March 13, 1958, he moved to England after just one year. There he took an honors B.A. at Oxford and began his blossoming writing career. He has since taken up a home in Amherst as well, where he serves as writer in residence." It is possible, therefore, that he picked up this distressing verbal remodeling here in the US, and that in the mother country they still say "it might not be as easy." Can anyone enlighten me on usage in the UK (or, for that matter, elsewhere in the Anglophone world)?

A side note: the interviewer pronounced the writer's given name as if it were spelled "Carl," whereas I've always said it as if it were "Carroll." Does anyone know whether the first pronunciation is correct (ie, the one the writer uses) or whether the interviewer was simply trying to avoid sounding as if he were talking about a woman named Carol?

DEAF THINKING.

Dave Furstenau (MetaFilter's RavinDave) sent me a link to an interesting Straight Dope column. A reader named Cathy asked:

In what language do deaf people think? I think in English, because that's what I speak. But since deaf people cannot hear, they can't learn how to speak a language. Nevertheless, they must think in some language. Would they think in English if they use sign language and read English? How would they do that if they've never heard the words they are signing or reading pronounced? Or maybe they just see words in their head, instead of hearing themselves?

Excerpts from Cecil's reply:

The language of the deaf is a vast topic that has filled lots of books—one of the best is Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf by Oliver Sacks (1989). All I can do in this venue is sketch out a few basic propositions:

The folks at issue here are both (a) profoundly and (b) prelingually deaf. If you don't become totally deaf until after you've acquired language, your problems are . . . well, not minor, but manageable. You think in whatever spoken language you've learned. Given some commonsense accommodation during schooling, you'll progress normally intellectually. Depending on circumstances you may be able to speak and lip-read.

About one child in a thousand, however, is born with no ability to hear whatsoever... The profoundly, prelingually deaf can and do acquire language; it's just gestural rather than verbal. The sign language most commonly used in the U.S. is American Sign Language, sometimes called Ameslan or just Sign. Those not conversant in Sign may suppose that it's an invented form of communication like Esperanto or Morse code. It's not. It's an independent natural language, evolved by ordinary people and transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. It bears no relationship to English and in some ways is more similar to Chinese—a single highly inflected gesture can convey an entire word or phrase. (Signed English, in which you'll sometimes see words spelled out one letter at a time, is a completely different animal.) Sign can be acquired effortlessly in early childhood—and by anyone, not just the deaf (e.g., hearing children of deaf parents). Those who do so use it as fluently as most Americans speak English. Sign equips native users with the ability to manipulate symbols, grasp abstractions, and actively acquire and process knowledge—in short, to think, in the full human sense of the term...

The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like—the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian. Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized differently from that of a hearing person. Still, sometimes we can get a glimpse. Sacks writes of a visit to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. "Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane," Sacks writes. "She was dreaming in Sign."

I find that a fascinating idea, for some reason: dreaming in Sign.

LANGUAGE IN MOVIES.

Eve has a list of movies where languages and accents are done well and badly; she solicits suggestions for others. (I entirely agree with her complaint about the use of a British accent to signify "foreign.")

LINGUA FRANCHISE.

An interesting article by Charles Foran (from the promising new Canadian magazine Walrus) on world varieties of English; nothing particularly new, but written with panache:

In a restaurant in Singapore's Little India district I chatted recently with a man doling out bowls of fish-head curry. He called me a "mat saleh," Malay for 'white foreigner.' He dubbed a woman who walked past us an "S.P.G." a 'Sarong Party Girl.' Upper-crust Singaporians who put on posh accents were "chiak kantang." "Chiak" is Hokkien for 'eating,' "kantang" a mangling of the Malay for 'potatoes.' 'Eating potatoes': affecting Western mannerisms. Singapore has four official tongues Mandarin, English, Malay, and Tamil. At street level, though, none of these takes precedence. Neither does the Hokkien dialect, spoken by many older Chinese. The city-state's functioning language is actually Singlish, a much-loved, much-frowned-upon hodge-podge of dialects and slang. When the man asked if I could pay for the meal with a smaller bill, he expressed it this way: "Got, lah?" I recognized that bit of language cobbling. In Hong Kong, where I was then living, Cantonese speakers sprinkle their English with similar punctuation. 'Lah' often denotes a question, like 'eh' for Canadians. 'Wah' infers astonishment. Once, when I was walking through that city's nightclub district with a Chinese friend, we nearly knocked into a Canto-pop star, a young man of smouldering Elvis looks. "Wah, now can die!" my friend said, only half-jokingly.

LIVING WITH CAUCASIANS.

LivingWithCaucasians is a blog describing the life of an American family in Caucasian Georgia, and it's a great read if you happen to be interested in that part of the world. Some bits involving language (no permalinks—it's Blogger):

Saturday, December 13, 2003
Consumer Culture in Georgia: Maybe You Should Rethink That Product Name

The desire to adopt Western consumer culture, as misguided as you and I might think that is, proceeds at a fair clip here in the former Soviet Union. Here in Georgia, there is a triple barrier: language. And not just language, alphabet, too. There are three distinct written languages here: mkhedruli (kartuli/Georgian), Cyrillic (Russian), and Latin (English). There are several other written languages that are around on a regular basis, depending on which consumer product you are dealing with: Armenian and Farsi, as well as the other languages that use Cyrillic—Ukrainian, Uzbek, Kazakh, etc.

Everyone (except the Armenians and Azeris and members of various isolated mountain tribes who live inside the borders of Georgia) speaks kartuli. Most everyone speaks at least some Russian; the younger folks are mostly learning English rather than Russian in school. TV is about half and half kartuli/Russian, so even if they aren’t taking it in school, the kids learn a bit of Russian by watching. The population is only about 4 million, so there’s clearly not a huge indigenous consumer product manufacturing industry. Russia is a LOT closer than the U.S., so as a trading partner, it’s obviously first in line. BUT English is cooler than Russian.

What all this means is that many products have to be labeled in at least two languages. Most of the imported food products we buy in the supermarket have a photocopied label in kartuli strategically scotch-taped over the only area where there might be any product information we might like to read. But hey, it’s their country...

And just as I feared, I am having to buy food in open air markets, with no prices posted, speaking none of the local languages. But many of the food names are cognates for something I’ve heard before: puri is bread, chai is tea, kave is coffee, rhvino is wine. And I have learned lots of the names of things that have cognates only on other planets: milk is rdze, butter is karaki, beer is ludi. And people in the markets are kind.

(Via No-sword.)

YINKA DENE.

The Yinka Déné Language Institute, founded in 1988, is devoted to the preservation and promotion of Yinka Déné language and culture. The link was sent me by Bill Poser, Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, who says: "It contains information both specifically about the Carrier language [mentioned in an earlier LH post] and the activities of the organization and more generally about the native languages of British Columbia."

THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING.

One of my Christmas gifts was Simon Winchester's book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I am very much looking forward to reading. How can I resist a book whose acknowledgments include the line "Philip Durkin, an expert on etymology and a philologist at the OED, was most helpful in navigating the minefields of Chapter 1, and worked with Elizabeth on such vexing matters as the supposed origins of words like periwinkle, skirt, and ketchup"? There was a time when the job description I most wanted was that of "philologist."

Those of you who live in snowy climes will be amused to learn that another of my presents was a set of cross-country skis, with the associated poles, boots, gloves, &c. I've never been on skis in my life, but clearly it's time to start learning.

ORIGINS OF CHRISTMAS WORDS.

Here's a nice little page explaining the origins of Christmas, reindeer, mistletoe, Christmas carol, St. Nicholas, poinsettia, and wassail. I should point out that in the Christmas entry they have "moesse" for mæsse. (Via Circadian Shift.)

Merry Christmas to all LH readers that celebrate it, and waes haeil to all!

MODOC.

This excellent word ("Origin unknown") is best explained by quoting the OED's citations:

1936 Allen & Lyman Wonder Bk. Air 312 A modoc, the derivation of which is obscure, is a flashy chap who goes around wearing helmet and goggles, and more than likely, leather boots and riding breeches, too, and talking about the big things he is going to do for aviation. 1942 Berrey & Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §756/2 Modock, one who has taken up aviation for publicity, social, or similar reasons. 1960 Wentworth & Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang 341/2 Modoc, one who becomes an Air Force flier for publicity, social prestige, or similar reasons.

As far as I can tell by googling, the word is dead as a mackerel, which is a pity—it has a fine slangy ring to it. (Found at The Sensible Ass, a blog which makes a habit of listing odd and interesting words.)

Update. According to Mike (in the comments), modock (as he spells it) "is currently used by a large group of U.S. pilots"; I am happy to retract my statement that it was dead as a mackerel. Mike is interested in the early history of the word, so if you know anything about it, please e-mail him (click on his name in the comments for the address).

HOW MANY NEW WORDS?

A recent Language Log post by Geoff Pullum takes issue with this putative statistic: "The genius of English is the way it updates itself every day, with 20,000 new words a year, Watson read somewhere." Leaving aside the issue of the annoying lack of attribution for the claim, Pullum wonders whether it's even possible that English is adding 20,000 words a year. "That's really a lot. It's 55 a day. That means two or three new words becoming established every hour, day and night." He basically leaves it there, but Mark Liberman takes up the question, coming at it from several angles: additions to dictionaries (around 2,500 per year), new trademarks (>100,000 added per year), and terms in science and technology ("probably many more than 20,000... new names coined every year"). Liberman rightly (in my opinion) discounts the trademarks, but I think he's too quick to dismiss the scientific terms. As rebarbative as "GDP-L-fucose synthase" may be, I don't see any principled way to distinguish it from the long line of terms that have preceded it, from atmosphere through phlogiston and quark. The OED has from the beginning tried to include scientific terminology, and although it's probably impossible by now to keep up with the details of every specialty, if they're used in the normal course of events by the specialists concerned, they're bona fide English words and deserve to be counted. Whether it's possible to do an accurate count, of course, is another matter altogether.

Update. Mark Liberman has added further thoughts in response to this entry, and a gentle [sic] therein prompted me to eliminate a stray -e- that had somehow crept into a mention of his name.

TRADEMARKS.

Transblawg links to a trademark checklist of immediate use to those with a professional need to check for trademark status and of interest to the merely curious, like me; as Margaret says, although it is a creation of the International Trademark Association ("of more than 4,300 trademark owners and professionals, from more than 170 countries"), it appears to include only trademarks from English-language countries—it includes, for example, Dual herbicide but not the Dual turntables everybody wanted when I was in college.

KAUDERWELSCH.

An entry at Desbladet quotes someone named Diana as follows:

Could I just say here how very very wonderful Kauderwelsch phrasebooks are? They have grammar explanations and morphological glosses as well as long lists of colloquial expressions and obscenities. They are the O'Reilly books of phrasebooks. Anyone who is serious about languages should make sure to learn German just in order to be able to take advantage of the series. I have about 20 of them, including Mongolian, Armenian, Irish Gaelic, Yiddish, and "Hochchinesisch." The Finnish one was the single most useful Finnish learning aid in my first year here.

This is absolutely true, and reminds me that I should be telling my faithful readers about these marvelous books. When I was in Vienna I picked up Wolof, Kurdish, and Georgian, and I wish I'd gotten more. They are attractively laid out, use colloquial (not to mention vulgar) speech, give morpheme-by-morpheme versions as well as overall translations of sentences, have cultural explanations, and in general are as good as tiny little books that fit in your shirt pocket could possibly be. If you know German, get hold of any that strike your fancy; you won't regret it. (And like the lady said, you might consider learning German just for this purpose. They're that good.)

MULTILINGUAL SANTA.

There's a nice story by Patricia Leigh Brown in today's NY Times about Michael Cox, a Santa who talks to kids in their own languages:

This evening, amid frilly tulle snow and Muzak carols, Santa alighted at the Hilltop Mall with a melting pot in his sleigh.

"Maligayang Pasko," said Michael Cox, 46, the multilingual Santa Claus, to 3-month-old Ghenne Delfin, speaking Tagalog, the language of the Philippines. "Merry Christmas."

The North Pole may not be known for its diversity — if holiday television specials are to be trusted there are just elves, reindeer and the Clauses. But as the Santa fluent in eight languages took his seat at the center of the mall on a green wing chair in a wooden castle, the North Pole was transformed into California, with Christmas greetings in Spanish, Italian and Arabic:

"Feliz Navidad."

"Buon Natale."

"Idah Saidan wa Sanah Jadidah."

Here in Richmond, across the Bay from San Francisco, it can be easy to disbelieve. This is a place that, when it attracts notice, it is usually because of its high crime rate or industrial pollution. But Richmond and surrounding communities like Hercules and Pinole have long been a portal for Filipinos, Mexicans, Chinese, East Indians and other newcomers who bring their languages, traditions and expectations of a better life.

"Namaste," Santa said, greeting 7-year-old Chandi Kaushari and her two younger sisters in Hindi. Chandi confided a wish in a universal language. "Barbie," she said...

In Tagalog, Punjabi, Hindi and Arabic, in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin, girls in velveteen dresses and boys teetering on their fathers' shoulders knew Santa Claus was speaking especially to them.

"They seem to spark up more," Mr. Cox said. "He cares about them. He speaks their language."

To parents like Jai Kaushari, a 28-year-old salesman whose daughters, Chani, Roshni and Kajal, speak Punjabi and Hindi at home, Santa's linguistic gifts mean a lot.

"They understand him," he said, standing beside the crackling video-screen fire. "So they trust in Santa."

"Habla español?" Santa asked Danielle Sanchez, 3, as she climbed into his lap with a look of trepidation. "Cinco for Santa!" he said. And she gamely gave him five.

"Ilang taon na sya?" he said in Tagalog to Nancy Delfin, a 29-year-old sales manager, asking her the age of her daughter Ghenne.

Ms. Delfin said she appreciated hearing the language of her parents and grandparents in this public place. "Especially for little kids who aren't able to visit their homeland, this is like speaking to a Santa in their hometown," she said.

Yeah, yeah, Tagalog isn't "the language of the Philippines" (it's the official "national language," but there are lots of others, and Cebuano has more native speakers), and being able to say a few phrases in a language doesn't make you fluent, but I'm going to cut the Times some slack on this one, since they're not trying to give us a linguistics lesson, just a feel-good story. Maligayang Pasko!

EFFLE.

From Margaret Marks's Transblawg I learned of the term effle, meaning "grammatical English which could never be uttered because it has little meaning and could never be put into a sensible context" (and derived from the abbreviation EFL 'English as a Foreign Language'). Now Margaret has added an entry providing some hilarious examples from a book called I am Learning Armenian, "prepared by Krikor Afarian (Teacher and Journalist), second edition 1978, Shirak Press, Beirut," beginning with "Yezneeg likes very much the meat of the hen" and ending with the very final-sounding "It's Dr. Kevorkian."

THE VOCABULARY OF MENACE.

A tendentious but thought-provoking mini-review of The New Penguin English Dictionary from the Telegraph (via Puerta del Sol):

"Spotting new words can be slightly depressing. It's only three years since the excellent Penguin dictionary first appeared, but it has acquired "hundreds of new words, jargon and buzzwords" - which might be good news except that "every aspect of technological progress", as its editor says, "seems to entail the vocabulary of menace", and he instances cyberstalking, identity theft and shoulder surfing (sneaking behind someone as they punch in their PIN number). All this and bioterrorism too."

A more substantive review can be found at Michael Quinion's World Wide Words, pointing out that the Penguin is "based on the skeleton of the older Longman Dictionary" and giving this caveat:

There are dangers, though, with creating an image of the moment: one entry is for quantoid, "a person who is enthusiastic about statistics and quantitative methods of analysis". That would be fine, except that in ten years of active research, I’ve never seen an example, and online I found just seven instances. Surely, this hardly makes it a widely used term suitable for inclusion in a concise dictionary? Mr Wilcockson disagrees, arguing that it’s a playful and quirky use of language that deserves inclusion.

I have to go with Quinion on this.

GLOSSPOST.

GlossPost, a searchable database of glossary URLs, looks like an excellent resource. Just the top few items include nautical dictionaries, economic glossaries, law, forestry... Check it out; there's something for everyone. (Via Enigmatic Mermaid.)

FRANCOPHONIE.

A new blog that focuses on the history of French-speaking (en français, bien entendu). So far, very promising, with an entry (with a nice map) on Nouvelle-France in the 18th century preceded by a Le Figaro article on the Cajuns finally getting an apology from the Canadian government for their deportation (only two and a half centuries late) and a Les Echos piece on the Louisiana Purchase. (Via La Grande Rousse.)

APACHE IN "THE MISSING."

Andrew Krug has referred me to an AP story by Richard Benke about the excellent Chiricahua Apache spoken in the film The missing:

Word swept through the Mescalero reservation like an early winter wind that characters in the film "The Missing" spoke a dialect of Apache.

Most adult Apaches in the audiences have said they could understand every word of the Chiricahua dialect — and the children suddenly wished they could, too.

That's what Mescalero councilman Berle Kanseah and Chiricahua linguist Elbys Hugar intended as technical advisers for the Ron Howard (news) film, a tough tale of 19th century frontier life starring Tommy Lee Jones (news) and Cate Blanchett (news) that has been in theaters for about three weeks.

Television and popular culture are killing minority cultures, starting with language, Kanseah said.

"There's a generation gap that's growing," he said, suggesting Apaches aren't the only ones facing it. "We need to enforce the home and not lose our way of life, which is our language."

It was the first film that any of them could remember in which Apache was spoken well enough on screen to be understood. Usually, Westerns were dubbed in Navajo, a related language, said supporting actor Steve Reevis, a Montana Blackfoot who has worked several films but never spoke Apache before "The Missing."

A rare example of Hollywood doing right by a little-known language. Kudos all around (and thanks, Andrew!).

OHWEJAGEHKA: HA`DEGAENAGE:

As a follow-up to yesterday's Languagegeek post, here's Ohwejagehka: Ha`degaenage:, the site of "a nonprofit organization based on Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario Canada that was established to help preserve and nurture the Iroquoian languages and songs." There's a Language page with sound samples, fonts, and statistics. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey.)

DAGUERREOTYPE.

OK, all you prescriptivists, here's something for you to obsess about: the word daguerreotype should have an acute accent on the second e and be pronounced "dagairraioteep"; don't take my word for it, take Edgar Allan Poe's:

This word is properly spelt Daguerréotype, and pronounced as if written Dagairraioteep. The inventor's name is Daguerre, but the French usage requires an accent on the second e, in the formation of the compound term.

In the same Alexander's Weekly Messenger essay of Jan. 15, 1840, we find an interesting precursor of the word photography:

We have not now space to touch upon the history of the invention, the earliest idea of which is derived from the camera obscure, and even the minute details of the process of photogeny (from Greek words signifying sun-painting) are too long for our present purpose. [Emphasis added.]

Thanks to Laputan Logic for reproducing the Poe piece.

LANGUAGEGEEK

T. Carter, in a comment to an earlier post, has pointed me to Languagegeek, a site "dedicated to the promotion of Native North American languages, especially in providing a means by which these languages can be used on the internet."

I have included a font, "Aboriginal Serif Unicode" which tries to cover all of the glyphs (alphabetical letters/Syllabics) necessary for writing the Native languages. Also, there are pages which show what symbols are required for each language, and a keyboard that can be used for typing each language.

The font is based on the Unicode encoding, so that users on any computer can use the font to read Native language texts composed by anyone else, using this font or otherwise. Also, by typing in the Aboriginal Serif Unicode font, other users can read your Syllabics text without downloading and installing the exact same font that you have...

For the names of the languages themselves, I have attempted to use on at least some pages the Native language ethnonym (the name of the nation used by its people) in those cases where I have found such a name. Usually, I give the English/French name in parentheses. Occasionally, I have found numerous different names for the same Nation, so I may not always be completely consistent on this site, using one version in one place, a different version elsewhere. I would appreciate any feedback on correct usage in each language. Where I have yet to find an ethnonym, I have employed a standard English/French word. In a few instances, there seems to be no one word for the nation, like Blackfoot or North Slave, instead each sub-group in the nation has its own name. Here, I have used the English word when referring to the nation as a whole, and the Native names to label the individual dialects. Language families are called by their English-linguistics name.

A few caveats: the site focuses mainly on languages spoken in Canada, although that is not stated explicitly (cf. "Native North American languages" above); many of the links on the pull-down menus at the top go nowhere or to 404s; and the "What's New" link is a pdf file (for no apparent reason), which some people like to be warned about. At any rate, many thanks, T.!

ELIZABETH BATES.

Elizabeth Bates, a psycholinguist and developmental psychologist who focused on the way infants develop language and (in the words of the NY Times obituary) "an outspoken critic of the theory that humans are endowed at birth with a language module," died Sunday at the age of 56. Language development is one of the areas of linguistic study that I have interest in but no competence to judge; that notwithstanding, anyone who kept up a steady attack on Chomsky & Co. is a friend of mine:

Dr. Bates thought all development, including the acquisition of language, rested on a foundation of general mental abilities. For example, humans drive cars not because their brains contain car-driving modules but by using various visual, motor and focusing skills, which are parts of the brain's wider repertoire.

Language is special and unique, Dr. Bates said, but its specialness is derived from the interaction of bits and pieces in the brain that are recruited for many purposes. Defining language as "a new machine built out of old parts," Dr. Bates spent her career working out the details of that concept.

In putting forth her ideas, Dr. Bates criticized the theories of the linguist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleague Dr. Steven Pinker, the psychology professor, now at Harvard. They contend that infants have a high degree of early knowledge and that development is more a matter of unfolding inborn traits.

Frequent sparring between the two sides, one based in California, the other in Massachusetts, led to the aphorism that much of cognitive neuroscience lay within the dynamic pull of a west pole and an east pole. Dr. Bates was "queen of the west pole," Dr. Elman said.

Dr. Pinker said in an interview: "As much as we locked horns, I had a huge amount of respect for her intellect and for keeping people like me honest. In anticipating her criticisms, she forced me to do better work."

Dr. Bates conducted studies on more than 20 languages on four continents, showing how so-called universals of language like noun-verb agreement vary significantly in specific languages.

She studied infants born with extensive damage to the brain's language areas and found that their language abilities developed normally. In recent work, she found that there was a significant overlap in areas of the brain involved in processing language and areas involved in processing environmental sounds like trains whistling, cows mooing and doors slamming. She concluded that all these areas were specialized for meaningful sounds, not just language.

THE LOVER'S TONGUE.

Via Nick J. comes a Vancouver Sun story by Nick Miliokas about a new book, The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex, by Mark Morton. I don't know how qualified Morton is to judge etymologies (he's an assistant professor of English at the University of Winnipeg), but at least he recognizes that the fact that there are hundreds of words in the English language that first appeared in Shakespeare "doesn't mean that he invented them." And this seems like a fair statement: "Whenever Shakespeare could make a dirty pun, he would. He loved bawdy language, that's for sure." Plus there's an informative bit about everybody's favorite weird bawdy word, merkin:

...To set the stage: cast your mind back to the 1700's. Syphilis is running rampant; indeed, there is no cure for, or reliable treatment of, veneral disease in general. Females embarrassed by hair loss in the vicinity of a certain private body part find comfort in the merkin—a "genital toupee, a pubic wig," as Morton puts it.

"You would think they'd have more important things to worry about, under the circumstances," he says. "But it's funny the sort of things people worry about. I think it parallels cosmetic surgery in this day and age."

MOVING.

Or, as the Brits say, moving house. That's what I'm doing this weekend (having closed on the new house this afternoon), so posting will be sparse to nonexistent until Monday. I've never owned a house before; let's all hope it goes well.

Update. Well, the immediate agony is over (and believe me, moving in a blizzard is agony; it took 14 hours and the movers barely made it... but they got everything there in one piece, bless their hard-working Russian hearts); now the protracted agony of unpacking begins. But it's all worth it: from our front windows we can see the hills across the Hudson in the distance (instead of a brick wall across the street), and outside the kitchen window is an apple tree (instead of another brick wall a few feet away), and deer come right up to it and munch apples while you watch, and the house, though small, is full of light and has an upstairs and a downstairs and a balcony and skylights, and I think we're going to be happy there.

WORDS.

A couple of interesting words encountered while perusing the OED, the first remarkable for its etymology (lapwing has nothing to do with lap or wing) and the second because I hadn't realized (though it made sense once I thought about it) Ring Lardner's family name was once an occupation.

lapwing [OE. hléapewince, str. fem., f. hleápan to leap + *winc- to totter, waver (so OHG. winkan, MHG. winken, also to wink; cf. OE. wincian to wink. The bird was named from the manner of its flight. The current form is in part due to popular etymology, which connected the word with lap v.2 and wing sb.] A well-known bird of the plover family, Vanellus vulgaris or cristatus, common in the temperate parts of the Old World. Called also pewit, from its peculiar cry. Its eggs were the 'plovers' eggs' of the London markets. Allusions are frequent to its crested head, to its wily method of drawing away a visitor from its nest, and to the notion that the newly hatched lapwing runs about with its head in the shell.

lardner [a. AFr. lardiner, an altered form (? after gardiner gardener; for the form cf. vintner) of larder, OFr. lardier, f. lard: see lard sb.]
1 = larder 1. north. and Sc. Obs.
2 An official who has charge of a larder. Obs. exc. as the title of an honorary office.

AMBIGUOUS SIC.

Geoff Pullum gnaws at an Edmund Morgan quote from Gore Vidal discussing Lincoln, trying to puzzle out the meaning of an interpolated sic; he finds several possible layers in this quote, and by reproducing it here I'm adding another:

With his centralizing of all power at Washington this "reborn" (sic) union was ready for a world empire that has done us as little good as it has done the world we have made so many messes in.

Geoff may have dashed off his entry a tad hastily, by the way; the sentence "Or was it in the original by Vidal, a sign put there by Vidal to say that Washington really did use the word 'reborn'?" indicates he's mistaken Vidal's reference to the country's capital for one to its Father.

THE EMLIT PROJECT.

The EmLit Project (European Minority Literatures in Translation) is a book (online as a series of pdf and mp3 files) of original European writings in Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Sinhala, Picard, Walloon, Lingala, Sorbian, Greek, Turkish, Sicilian, Albanian, Galician, Arabic, "Amazic" (ie, Berber in general rather than the specific language properly called Tamazight; the text included is apparently in Tarifit), Gun, and Catalan; the first section of the book contains the originals, which are followed by translations into English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (accompanied by boxed descriptions of the history and European context of each language). There are also audiofiles of ten writers reading their work. I know pdf files are a nuisance, but this kind of material is surely worth it. (Via Open Brackets.)

From the introduction to the Picard section:

The days are long gone when, in Lille, an oath had to be taken in Picard. Who now remembers the fables of Gauthier le Leu? Who could complete The Journey to Sicily which death prevented Adam de la Halle from finishing?... Like all the place-names which have disappeared off the map, Picardy dreams of a resurrection. Bu tthe picard language is no longer used in public life... My four grandparents were already bilingual, educated in French. My father knew by heart some of the poetry of Henri Tournelle and some saucy fables by Bosquètia—to our great delight at family reunions...

KENNERS WAKE.

Jeet Heer writes about the late Hugh Kenner's discovery of modernity in a determinedly anti-modern Canada, his relationships with Pound and McLuhan (the latter, once a close friend, "quite unfairly... accused Kenner of stealing his ideas"), and other things, along the way quoting an excellent sentence of Kenner's:

Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett are their own greatest inventions, and the books they contrived, or had their contrivances contrive, record a century of intellectual history with intricate and moving fidelity: suffering our partner the machine to mechanize all that the hand can do yet remaining obstinately, gaily, living; courting a dead end but discovering how not to die.

(Via wood s lot.)

LEARNING RUSSIAN.

A funny and perceptive piece by Robert Skidelsky (or "Lord Skidelsky," in the quaint terminology of the British Isles) about his eight-year struggle, under varying conditions, to learn Russian, starting at the age of 56.

Short periods of immersion are no good, continual reinforcement is needed. The late 1990s were linguistically disastrous. I was finishing the third volume of my biography of Keynes, being an opposition front bench spokesman in the Lords and trying to salvage the Social Market Foundation from bankruptcy. By 2001 I was free of all these commitments and the road to Russian was open again.

It started that spring with my renting a flat in Moscow for two months. My new teacher Masha, inherited from Edward, spoke no English and so I was forced to speak Russian with her. It was my first big breakthrough. But it was hard work, and I spent much of my time in despair.

In retrospect I realise that my method was not really efficient. I should have lived with a Russian family, and let more of the language sink in by osmosis, but I was too jealous of my privacy...

(Via Ultima Thule.)

Update. There is a fascinating discussion going on in the comments about how people learn languages; I commend it to the attention of anyone interested in the subject. A particularly thought-provoking paragraph from joe tomei:

The research question of applied lingustics is fundamentally 'why do we have different learner outcomes from what appears to be the same learning circumstances?' How that question is phrased can twist the answer, so if I ask the question as 'why does virtually everyone learn a first language, but not a second?', you are in generative grammar territory, postulating a Language Acquistion Device in someone's head. However, if you ask the question as 'Why can't everyone be like the guy you mentioned, 'picking up' languages?' you are where I call home, which is functional linguistics. If we view language learning as something that almost everyone can do, so long as they are in an environment where it is valued, then we see that the fluency that Krashen argues for is partly due to the anonymity that he creates by presenting the judges with a tape recording. I am certain that if the listeners were told that this was a test to join Mossad and they needed to determine whether the speaker [a 29-year-old immigrant from Mexico who works in an Israeli restaurant in Los Angeles and speaks fluent Hebrew] was an agent who was trying to pass as a Hebrew speaker, their judgement might be quite different.

ORIGINS OF CHINESE.

In the comments to a previous entry whose thread had turned into a discussion of whether the Chinese language developed in the north (where history places it) or in the south (as its affiliation with the Tibeto-Burman languages would seem to suggest), xiaolongnu wrote:

I am going to a conference in Philly this weekend where someone is giving a paper called "Origins of Sino-Tibetan and Prehistoric Linguistic Exchanges in Eurasia." The speaker is a Chinese scholar called Xu Wenkan, so I expect it's pretty current Chinese scholarship on the subject. If there is sufficient interest I will report on this when I return, probably Monday or Tuesday. Or should this maybe be a new thread?

So here's the new thread, and I eagerly await new information!

A FIGURE FOR LIFE ITSELF.

J.M. Coetzee's Nobel lecture, He and his man, must surely be the most remarkable such speech ever heard in Stockholm. There are no thankings of the Academy, no references to honored predecessors, no musings on the state of literature. There is only a tale of a man in Bristol, retired, living with his memories and a dead parrot and the tales sent him by his man.

Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.

The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys.

Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over the world, but they are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not migrate...

I did not realize there were fens in the original Boston as well as its New World namesake; I knew "duckoy" was an occasional early variant of decoy (which according to the OED "was preceded by a simple form coy sb. (known in 1621), a. Dutch kooi of the same meaning... but the origin of the de- is undetermined") but was enthralled by the tale Coetzee (or "his man") spins of Dutch and German ducks lured to Lincolnshire by crafty decoy-men; I did not know about the Halifax gibbet with its cruel hope-against-hope of escape, which I rather wish Coetzee had invented. Read it. Will you see language better used on a public occasion? I trow not.

Addendum. Caterina, in her enthusiasm for the speech, has put online Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Crusoe in England," which makes an interesting companion piece.

RATING THE DICTIONARIES.

YiLing Chen-Josephson gives a spin around the block to "seven of the relatively affordable and frequently updated college dictionaries" and rates them on a point system (for stock, definitions, usage guidance, etymologies, and enjoyment) in a Slate article. It's an enjoyable read for anyone who loves dictionaries (and, as it happens, I agree with her 1-2 picks), even if (as Mark Liberman, from whom I got the link, says) the "methodology is simultaneously quantitative and arbitrary" and someone else might come up with different results. Mark complains that she doesn't evaluate online versions, but as a diehard print man I'm happy to stick with the paper versions.

NAKED TRANSLATIONS.

Nothing racy here; that's the name of a new translation blog owned and operated by Céline Graciet:

I am French (born in Bayonne, in the South-West) and live in Brighton, in the UK... Living and working in the UK for nine years has allowed me to develop an intimate understanding of this country, its language and funny ways. This makes me particularly well-equipped to translate English texts into French, my mother tongue. I keep constantly in touch with French by listening to the radio (I especially like Europe 1 and France infos), reading Le nouvel observateur every week as well as novels in French and of course, talking regularly to my family and friends.

Her latest post is on the expression "spin doctor" ("'Spin Doctor', what a great expression in English and how difficult it is to translate. A literal translation would mean absolutely nothing in French and I’ve often wondered how to render it...") Welcome, Céline!

GLOSSIKA.

The Glossika site has an amazing amount of material about Chinese languages and dialects (and related forms like Sino-Vietnamese). From the Introduction:

This website has hyperlinked cross-references and information on hundreds of dialects. Many researchers will find this information useful as it is all in one location.

On the main page are listed the main Chinese languages. Choose a language for a more detailed list of dialects. Most dialects have tone data, which is listed in master tone lists by language. There is also some tone sandhi data available. Some major dialects have complete phonological data available provided with IPA characters in charts that Chinese dialectologists commonly use. A tutorial is given how to read these charts.

Many thanks to jobson, who linked to the site (specifically to the Taiwanese page) in the comments to the katakana entry.

MAYAN IN THE NEWS.

Via mirabilis.ca comes a link to a story from The Independent, "'Lost' sacred language of the Maya is rediscovered" by David Keys:

Linguists have discovered a still-surviving version of the sacred religious language of the ancient Maya—the great pyramid-building civilisation that once dominated Central America.

For years some Maya hieroglyphic texts have defied interpretation—but now archaeologists and linguists have identified a little-known native Indian language as the descendant of the elite tongue spoken by rulers and religious leaders of the ancient Maya.

The language, Ch'orti—spoken today by just a few thousand Guatemalan Indians—will become a living "Rosetta Stone", a key to unravelling those aspects of Maya hieroglyphic writings which have so far not been properly understood. Over the next few years dozens of linguists and anthropologists are expected to start "mining" Ch'orti language and culture for words and expressions relating to everything from blood-letting to fasting.

Sounds exciting, no? Hot new discovery has linguists and anthropologists all atwitter! But when I googled "John Robertson, Ch'orti" I got a page on The Classification of Mayan Languages, by Peter Mathews, where we find:

Generally it is agreed that there are eight major sub-groupings of the Mayan languages... A more recent proposed classification of the Ch’olan languages has been put forward by John Robertson (1992:3; 1998:10-11; see also Stuart, Houston, and Robertson 1999:II-39), who has argued that the language of the hieroglyphs (for which Robertson, David Stuart, and Stephen Houston have since proposed the label "Classic Mayan") is the direct ancestor of Ch’olti’, which in turn is the ancestor of Ch’orti’..."

This would seem to imply that Robertson's classification of Ch'orti as the descendant of Classic Mayan (aka "the sacred religious language of the ancient Maya") is more than a decade old, which leads me to wonder why it is suddenly a news story. At any rate, the investigation was worth it, because the classification page turns out to be part of a site whose main feature is an online Dictionary of Maya Hieroglyphs (introduction here, search box here).

NONVERBAL DICTIONARY.

The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & Body Language Cues, from Adam's-Apple-Jump to Zygomatic Smile, by David B. Givens (Spokane, Washington: Center for Nonverbal Studies Press), is a detailed examination of the ways we communicate without words. Take "zygomatic smile," for instance:

Usage: Though we may show a polite grin or camera smile at will, the zygomatic or heartfelt smile is hard to produce on demand. While the former cue may be consciously manipulated (and is subject to deception), the latter is controlled by emotion. Thus, the zygomatic smile is a more accurate reflection of mood.

Anatomy. Lip corners curl upward through contraction of zygomaticus muscles; crow's-feet show when the zygomaticus muscles are strongly contracted, and/or when orbicularis oculi muscles contract. In the polite (i.e., intentional, weak, or "false") smile, lip corners stretch sideward through contraction of risorius muscles, with little upward curl and no visible crow's-feet.

Evolution. The smile-face may be traced to the primate's grimace or fear grin. The submissive grin, used to show "I am afraid," came to suggest that "I am harmless—and therefore friendly—as well" (Morris 1994). The link between smiling and humor, love, and joy has yet to be explained.

Feedback smile. Smiling itself produces a weak feeling of happiness. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that "...involuntary facial movements provide sufficient peripheral information to drive emotional experience" (Bernstein et al. 2000). According to Davis and Palladino (2000), "...feedback from facial expression [e.g., smiling or frowning] affects emotional expression and behavior." In one study, e.g., participants were instructed to hold a pencil in their mouths, either between their lips or between their teeth. The latter, who were able to smile, rated cartoons funnier than did the former, who could not smile (Davis and Palladino 2000).

That's less than half the entry, which goes on to discuss Peter Jennings, Dr. Irving Smigel (a New York dentist who created the Supersmile product line), the "supermarket mandatory smile," salesmanship, and the smiley face, as well as providing a list of "research reports." And there's much, much more; the book is a real treasure trove. (Via dublog.)

SNOIGWHOS.

That (or rather *snoigwh-o-s, from the root *sneigwh-) is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for snow, large quantities of which have been falling in NYC and will supposedly continue doing so until there are 12 to 16 inches on the ground; we went into Manhattan to enjoy it to the full in Central Park, checked out the snowball fight (not very impressive in extent, but full of enthusiasm), and watched a bunch of happy dogs. Winter is definitely here.

Lest you think the PIE form was simply a cheap excuse to tell you about my day, here are some other descendents of the PIE root (cf. Pokorny's entry and the The Pali Text Society's Pali-English dictionary):

Vedic snihyate, Av. snazaiti it snows = Lat. ninguit, Gr. neiphei; OIr. snigid it rains; Lat. nix snow = Gr. nipha = Goth. snaiws, OHG. sneo = Eng. snow; OIr. snige rain = W. nyf; Lith. snie~gas = Latv. sniegs = OPr. snaygis 'snow,' Lith. snie~ga it's snowing (inf. snigti); OCS snyegu, Russ. sneg 'snow'

NAMES IN KATAKANA.

This enlightening bit of trivia comes from The Japan SAQ (Seldom Asked Questions):

Q.  If there is a waiting list in a restaurant, Japanese people write their names on it not in kanji or hiragana (how they would usually write their name if you asked them to), but in katakana.  Why is this?  I've heard that it is considered less personal to use katakana, but I do not understand why.  (I can understand that kana is less personal than kanji, but why katakana not hiragana?)--Question submitted by Tim Gershon

A.  Actually, it's all about legibility.  Katakana, being stark and angular, is easier to read than hiragana.  Hiragana, being curvy and loopy is easily distorted and a lot of people have idiosyncratic ways of writing it.  When they write characters using straight lines, it makes word much more legible. It's the same reason that people are asked to print rather than write when filling out forms using English.

(Via MetaFilter.)

Addendum. Joe Tomei in the comments has provided an excellent Hiragana & Katakana site that has tables showing more features and forms of both systems than I ever knew existed. Check it out.

E-MAIL OR EMAIL?

I go along with Merriam-Webster's in preferring the hyphenated version, but this isn't about preference, it's about priority. I would have assumed that the hyphen came first and then (as happens in the course of events, cf. "base-ball") people began writing it as one word. Not so, according to the investigation undertaken by Avva, who's irritated by the whole question but can't resist looking into it, in the same way (he says) that you can't help probing the toothache with your tongue. He has investigated the Google Groups Usenet archives and found that from the very early '80s, when there was barely such a thing, both forms were in use, and both grew in popularity throughout the decade, so that the evolutionary hypothesis fails. His suggestion is that CompuServe's 1979 introduction of what they called EMAIL (so called, he wonders, because program names couldn't contain a hyphen?) established that form in the awareness of computer users, so that it was available alongside the more natural "e-mail" as both began to supplant the term "mail" (which was originally used for the electronic variety as well). He is continuing his researches and welcomes any corrections and commentaries; I too welcome comments from anyone knowledgeable about the history of usage in those dark ages of the internet.

BEAVERS.

Beavers are overrunning Language Log today. First there was Bill Poser's impressive post on Carrier beaver words (which describe not only beavers of various sizes but 'newly mated beaver couple,' 'beaver channel under the ice,' and 'pair of beaver lodges built close together behind one dam,' inter alia); then Mark Liberman followed up with Beaver vocabulary from another culture, describing the arcane castorcentric terms of MIT (given "as they would be pronounced in the archaic Building 20 dialect"). My only quarrel with the latter is the final element, billed as "the informative and inspiring ritual chant of the MIT Women's Track and Field and Cross Country squad":

E to the u du dx,
E to the x, dx.
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine,
3 point 1 4 1 5 9.
Integral, radical, mu, dv
Slipstick, sliderule, MIT!

(I have omitted the introit and final, since they are not relevant here.) Now, in the first place, I am pretty sure that the proper formulation is "e to the x dy dx," and I was a math major before switching to linguistics, so I'll bow to my own authority. In the second place, I object to the labeling of this as an MIT chant. I'm sure it has been so used, but I heard it many years ago (minus the MIT reference, of course) as the unforgettable chant of the Caltech cheerleading squad, with which I am familiar as a graduate of an institution whose football team was so execrable Caltech was the only team it could regularly beat. And I have evidence that it is of ancient lineage, to wit the primitive version quoted (probably misquoted) in this International Slide Rule Yahoo! Group message (emphasis added):

Steven,

Here are two that Gene Shoemaker used at Caltech in the mid forties. These
are both listed on pages 22 & 23 in David Levy's biography "Shoemaker by
Levy, The Man Who Made an Impact"

e to the x the x the x
e to the x the x the x
e to the x the x the x
e to the x dx [delta x]
Sliiii . . . de rule! Tech tech tech tech tech tech tech!!!

Cotan, tangent, cosine, sine
3.14159!
Sliiii . . . de rule! Tech tech tech tech tech tech tech!!!

Enjoy!

Dave

West Coast representing, yo.

REFRIED ONOMASTICS.

I shudder along with Dorothea:

You start with the perfectly normal Spanish name Pablo. If you’re greatly daring, you make it into a feminine: Pabla. (Attested in current PR census data, though very rare.) Then you import Paula, I daresay from Portuguese. (Also rare.)

Then you squish them together to make Paubla, which to my eyes is an ugly abomination, but one doesn’t expect parents to be reasonable when naming their offspring. This name inexplicably becomes popular.

But no, wait, it gets worse. From Paubla one derives Paublina. And then—get this—the name migrates back to the masculine side of the ledger, ending up as Paublino and even Paublo. Gah! At least Paublo doesn’t come anywhere near supplanting Pablo.

I do hope there’s a better explanation for all this than the one I just advanced. I mean, I can live with Margarita to Margara to Margaro (that’s actually morphologically clever), but this is just plain cruelty to innocent phonemes, that’s all there is to it.

And on a similarly onomastic note: Transblawg features spammers' names.

I regularly empty the trash in my Eudora. These are all the names I can offer at the moment: Zaida Coxum, Young Alford, Jernigan Fletcher, Yesenia Hopkins, Kermit Clinton, Genaro Lovett, Barton Kilgore, Roman Guy, Laverne Sosa, Godiva Stanley and the monosyllabic Butts.

My all-time favorite, though, is one she quotes from Rogue Semiotics: "the titanically monickered Inflorescence B. Afghan." I think that's better than anything W.C. Fields came up with. (I just found Backlogged L. Barents in my own inbox; once I would have been impressed, but no longer.)

EZRA POUND AGAIN.

Brian Stefans at free space comix has a review of two new Pound editions, The Pisan Cantos (New Directions) and Poems and Translations (Library of America); they both sound like attractive, well-annotated books, and I look forward to giving them a spin around the block. I particularly like Stefans's peroration:

Compare this variety, optimism and excitement to the expressions of cultural exhaustion prevalent now in the United States, in which you would think -- after a century of the most manic and ambitious explorations into the most divergent writing styles, from Derek Walcott to Barrett Watten, going back to Emily Dickinson and coming up to now with Christian Bök -- that there are only two flavors of writing: “post avant” and “official verse.” What Pound asked of poets was that they peek out of the hole, partake in some intellectual “dissociation” -- certainly beyond any tedious question of “lineage” and beyond the borders of our own self-centered country -- to set the stage for this “renaissance.” Our lack of concern with metrics beyond occasional lip service paid to the repetition of vowel sounds and like matter (here on Silliman’s Island) regardless of a phrasing’s cultural base or an examination of the larger corpus from which a cadence arose, has been detrimental to our present culture of poetry, in which the line is often equated with some statement of cultural allegiance, rather than the bow and viola that Pound would have us believe.

Give me metrics or give me prose! (Via wood s lot.)

ANGLO-SAXON POETRY.

The Internet Sacred Text Archive has put online the Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. One caveat: the thorns and eths look weird in my browser, small and separated from the rest of their words. (Via Plep, who adds "Including the fabulously ribald riddles from the Exeter Book.")

COLOR TERMS.

For once, the NY Times has a language-related piece that doesn't make me turn red and sputter like a retired colonel. The Sunday Magazine has an article, "Color Cognition" by Dirk Olin, that actually presents interesting facts in a meaningful way. It's the old chestnut of how different languages divide up the spectrum, but for a short magazine piece Olin does a pretty good job of laying out the theories.

The world clearly has many shades of color meaning. Literary Welsh has no words that correspond with green, blue, gray or brown in English, but it uses others that English speakers don't (including one that covers part of green, part of gray and the whole of our blue). Hungarian has two words for what we call red; Navajo, a single word for blue and green but two words for black. Ancient Greek's emphases on variables like luminosity (as opposed to just hue) led some scholars to wonder seriously whether the culture at large was colorblind.

In a series of classic studies conducted during the late 1960's, Eleanor Rosch, now with the University of California at Berkeley, compared color discrimination by Americans with that of the Dani people of Indonesia. English speakers typically use 11 separate ''elemental'' color words (including black, white and gray), whereas the Dani use only two. Rosch tested the color memory of the two groups' members—first showing them a color, then (after a short delay) asking them to find it in a separate group of similar colors. Despite the groups' big difference in nomenclature, she found that they were perceiving colors in the same way. Rosch's findings were seized upon by advocates of universality, who said terminology doesn't affect cognition: color transcends culture.

But recent studies conducted by Debi Roberson, Ian Davies and Jules Davidoff (at the universities of Essex, Surrey and London) suggest otherwise. They examined the hunter-gatherer Berinmo tribe of Papua, New Guinea, a people with five basic color terms who don't distinguish blue from green. (They do, however, have a distinction for shades of green—called nol and wor—that are not shared by Westerners.) In essence, they found that the Berinmo handled their nol-wor differences better than their blue v. green (while it was vice versa for English speakers). After practice, both groups were able to improve their discernment of the distinction that they previously hadn't shared with their counterparts. ''These results,'' Davidoff and his colleagues contended, ''indicate that categorical perception occurs, but only for speakers of the language that marks the categorical distinction, which is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis.'' (The relativity of color naming is just one manifestation of this broader concept, for which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a formula: ''large differences in language lead to large differences in thought.'')

There are other interesting quotes as well. A tip of the hat to the Paper of Record.

ENGLISH FROM TURKEY?

I suppose I should have posted about this on Thanksgiving (turkey, get it?), but I didn't have the heart. But people seem to expect me to write about it (the e-mails and comments keep pouring in), so I've been rolling up my sleeves and preparing a volley of sarcasm. Fortunately, the ever-dependable Des of Desbladet has saved me the trouble:

A lesser journal than Nature might have invited some historical linguists to review the submitted article, but why let being utter bollocks get in the way of announcing newly-broken ground in a shiny new interdiscipline? "Turkish farmers" means "farmers in what is now Turkey," of course, and we can put that one down to the journalistes, but we will note with not inconsiderable hilarity that:

Gray was encouraged that his research had been supported in the United States by Stanford University's eminent geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

When evolutionary psychologists and prominent geneticists agree, what business could historical linguists possibly have objecting?

Why are people so obsessed with trying to prove unprovable things about the prehistory of Indo-European using nonlinguistic methods (necessarily, since linguistic methods have gone about as fur as they can go)? Until we dig up a six-thousand-year-old account of "Our Journey to the West" in PIE, we're not going to know. Get used to it and start doing something useful with your scholarly apparatus, Varied Nonlinguists.

Addendum. MM, in the comments, has directed me to an invigorating rant on the subject over at Phluzein, which I happily commend to your attention.

SAMARRA.

Mark Liberman asks a question that has often occurred to me as well: what is the proper (Iraqi) way to pronounce the name of the city Samarra? I've always said [s@m'ar@] (except in the name of the John O'Hara novel Appointment in Samarra, where for some reason I say [s@m'ær@], probably because that's how I heard it spoken of when I was a kid), and my usually reliable Webster's Geographical Dictionar concurs, but Mark says:

I asked Tim Buckwalter how this word is pronounced in Arabic, and he responded:

The word sAmar~A' has two long vowels (/sa:mar:a:?/) so the stress should fall on the last long vowel and all preceding ones get shortened. However, names that end in /a:?/ tend to drop the glottal stop, and stress shifts to the nearest preceeding long vowel. A good example of this is "Sinai": /si:na:?/ in MSA, but /si:na/ in colloquial (and sloppy MSA). So, I suspect that this is how he got /sa:mar:a/. But since I don't know Iraqi, maybe I got it all wrong.

[Note: for the interpretation of Tim's transliteration sAmar~A', see this table]. According to Tim's answer, the correct formal pronunciation in Modern Standard Arabic would have final-syllable stress (which neither NPR announcer used), whereas the colloquial pronunciation (at least in the Levantine Arabic that Tim knows best) would have initial-syllable stress, as in Carl Kasell's pronunciation. If I understand the transliteration right, the vowel quality would also be closer to American English cat than cot .

So my question is, does anybody out there know how the word is said in Iraqi Arabic? No educated guesses, please; we have one of those from an actual Arabist above.

While we're on the subject of Iraqi place names, I find it strange that all European languages have /o/ in the first syllable of Mosul when the Arabic name has /u/—or so I thought, but a Google search suggests that it has /i/ ("MEE-sul"). Anybody know what they say in Iraq?

Update. I just heard Mishal Husain, who grew up in the Middle East and generally seems to pronounce Arabic names authentically, say [s@m'ar@]. She's not Iraqi, so I'm not accepting it as definitive, but it's certainly suggestive.

Further update. Mark has contacted an actual Iraqi and posted the results; apparently the stress is on the last syllable. Furthermore, it seems the traditional etymology from /sarra man ra?a:/ 'delights/cheers (he/she) who sees [it]' is wrong; the short form Samarra is based on the pre-Arabic toponym represented by Latin Sumere and Syriac Sumra, and "Surra Man Ra'a, a verbal form of name unusual in Arabic which recalls earlier Akkadian and Sumerian practices, is a word-play invented at the Caliph's court," which fits better with how I understand these things to work. (I'm still hoping to hear about Mosul, though.)

LOSING INFLECTIONS.

John McWhorter has an interesting discussion of why some languages lose their inflections and begin depending on word order and function words, from a global perspective an unusual development:

I ask these questions [why Native American, Australian, and Bantu languages have kept their "bristling paradigms of prefixes and suffixes"] because my research increasingly suggests to me that for a language to shed its inflections, rather than consistently replace or even retain them, is less business as usual than the unexpected case. From a global perspective, languages appear to usually do this as the result of widespread acquisition by adults, whose ossified language organs tend to clear away languages' "junk."

Thus the inflection-shy nature of Romance compared to Latin—and Romanian's remnants of case-marking are dishwater compared to Polish, Greek or Lithuanian—was due to imperfect renditions of that language being passed on in the context of invasion and imposition from the outside. English is the only Indo-European language in Europe with no gender marking on articles or nouns—ever notice that?—because of Vikings' approximation of Old English starting in the eighth century. It is presumably no accident that Persian, with its low inflection and gender-neutral third person pronoun, has been lingua franca par excellence throughout much of its history.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this argument before, but McWhorter puts it well, and it's one of the few supposed historical explanations for language change that makes sense to me.