The heart of things has been silent since the end of last year and Glosses.net has been hibernating since October, but I'm pleased to report that both Jonathon and Renee have chosen the bissextile day to return to the fray. Renee has not one but two new entries, 29th Feb ("I am planning to enjoy Spring while it lasts") and Komi and Mansi links (just what it says, with special focus on alphabets):
When I lived in Komi ASSR (in Vorkuta) as a child, the only Komi that I heard came from the local Komi radio station. The station and its broadcasts were much ridiculed by the non-Komi population. These broadcasts had about 30% of recently borrowed Russian lexicon, perhaps much more. This was in the late eighties. It's a pity they didn't teach Komi in schools, I would love to know it. My mother, too, wanted to learn the language when she moved to Vorkuta; she was told by some embarassed Komi nationals that nobody spoke it in the city.And Jonathon has a meditation on blogging, drinking, stavrosthewonderchicken's much-commented-on recent blogrant, and his finally managing to escape the trap of kankei ga nai ('that’s nothing to do with me') and reconnect with "this thing we were all in love with."
Addendum. PF points out in the comments that Cinderella Bloggerfeller has returned as well, under the guise of February 30. Good things come in threes.
Welcome back, both all of you; you've been missed!
I recently had occasion (in a Wordorigins thread) to make the point that virus has no Latin plural, whereupon the excellent aldiboronti linked to a page that has an exhaustive discussion of that very matter. For practical purposes, all you need is the first line: "The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context." But the rest is lots of fun.
Incidentally, in investigating the origins of the username "aldiboronti" (short for Aldiborontiphoscophornio, a character in The Tragedy of Chrononhotonthologos: being the most tragical tragedy that ever was tragediz'd by any company of tragedians), I ran across Elizabeth Archibald's delightful essay on the mad variety of books to be found at Yale:
Nor is Chrononhotonthologos a lone oddity by any means. Another eighteenth-century gem that seems to exemplify the same aesthetic is Xsmwpdribvnwlxy: or, The sauce-pan, tucked away in the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library. And Yale's collection would be dubiously diminished without Benefit of farting farther explain'd, vindicated, and maintain'd, against those blunderbusses who will not allow it to be concordant to the cannon law, an explosive endeavor of the 1720s. But the astounding breadth of Yale's collection is hardly limited to its books. Yale's library offers its devotees a vast collection of periodicals: among the online periodicals alone, there are 157 whose titles begin with the letter X. In such an extensive collection, there is bound to be something for everyone—whether it be the American Poultry Journal or the ominous-sounding Pain Weekly. And naturally, Yale's reference section is as extensive as its periodicals collection, featuring items like The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings, The Encyclopedia of Amazons, and the Iceland Telephone Directory.Ah, for the days when I roamed the low-ceilinged aisles of Sterling!
Like Mark Liberman, I am a fan of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, so I was intrigued by his Language Log post investigating the term marthambles, an unspecified illness "known as the marthambles at sea and griping of the guts by land." O'Brian claimed to have taken the word from "a quack's pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century," but it turns out he may instead have taken it from Dorothy Dunnett's historical novel The Ringed Castle (1971). Not only do I appreciate the wordsleuthing involved, I am glad to be told about Dunnett's "exciting, literate, carefully-researched works, full of accurate historical detail and historically accurate specialized terminology," set in 16th-century Muscovy; I will check the Mid-Manhattan Branch's catalog for them next time I'm there.
Update. Mark Liberman has gotten a note from Lisa Grossman, co-author of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, indicating that there actually was such a quack's pamphlet, written by a Dr. Tufts circa 1675, and it seems likely that Dunnett and O'Brian read The Quacks of Old London independently. Grossman also mentions the wonderful term Hockogrockle, another alleged disease which O'Brian inexplicably failed to use.
Gentium — a typeface for the nations:
Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.
The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both ancient and modern Greek, including a number of alternate forms. These fonts were originally the product of two years of research and study by the designer at the University of Reading, England, as part of an MA program in Typeface Design.Via wood s lot.SIL International has now embraced the Gentium project, and plans to continue development. Expansion of the glyph set to include more extended Latin glyphs, archaic Greek symbols, and full Cyrillic script support is the next step. Work on this has already begun, but the results will not be available for a few months. Addition of bold and bold italic faces will follow.
Languagehat doesn't normally concern itself with the news pages (except as sources of linguistic tidbits), but two recent stories should be troubling to anyone who cares about the free flow of information.
1) Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya or Cuba:
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes which include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba.Commentary at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light; a bold countermove at Shanna Compton's Rebel Edit, whose first post says:Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and the treasury department says it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations. It can be punishable by fines of up to a half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years.
So welcome to Rebel Edit. Edit a poem or short piece by a writer from one of these countries and send to rebel edit at shannacompton dot com. I will post it on this blog, which in effect will become both an act of protest and a petition.Addendum. Bill Poser at Language Log has gone into more detail about both why the Treasury Department's interpretation of the law is wrong and why it's counterproductive.
2) Charges have been dropped against translator Katharine Gun—not in itself bad news, but Gail Armstrong has some extremely cogent remarks about the implications of the case for translators:
I expect that in the UK at least, this episode will lead to more careful screening of potential in-house translators in government offices, and perhaps even to recruits being questioned on their political stance (and an unspoken policy of hiring only those who toe the incumbent party line).Translators have traditionally been viewed with some suspicion by those unable to grasp a divided devotion to two or more cultures, and by those baffled by such dedication to words.
A fascinating story by Edward Cody about nüshu (sample with Chinese equivalent here), a form of writing developed by women in the southwestern corner of Hunan province:
It was a delicate, graceful script handed down from grandmother to granddaughter, from elderly aunt to adolescent niece, from girlfriend to girlfriend—and never, ever shared with the men and boys.Read the article for more details about the murky history of nüshu and its discovery by outsiders and the regional custom of "sworn sisterhood" it reflects, and go to Adam Morris's Brainysmurf entry for further links and a gorgeous image of the writing. (Thanks to Adam and to Pascale Soleil for alerting me to this story.)So was born nushu, or women's script, a single-sex writing system that Chinese scholars believe is the only one of its kind.
"The girls used to get together and sing and talk, and that's when we learned from one another," said Yang Huanyi, 98, a wrinkled farmer's widow who learned as a girl and whom scholars consider the most accomplished reader and writer among a fast-dwindling number of nushu practitioners. "It made our lives better, because we could express ourselves that way."
Addendum. Laura Miller has written a stern critique of Cody's article over at Kerim Friedman's Keywords.
Almost a year and a half ago I posted a teaser about Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, which is now causing such a brouhaha; my interest, of course, was and is in the use of Aramaic and Latin—particularly the former, since now that I know the Latin is spoken in modern Italian church pronunciation I can't say I have much interest in it (and it should, of course, be Greek anyway). Now the NY Times has an article by Clyde Haberman on that very subject, leading off with a modern Aramaic speaker:
George A. Kiraz can hardly wait [to see the movie]...I hope there will be further quotes when he's seen the movie."I want mainly to see if I understand any of the Aramaic, and what form of Aramaic it is," said Dr. Kiraz, director of the Syriac Institute in Piscataway, N.J. His organization promotes the study of Syriac, an Aramaic dialect that is the liturgical language of the Syrian Orthodox Church and some other churches with Middle Eastern roots.
"I call it BBC Aramaic—the standard form that continues to be used today," said Dr. Kiraz, 39. He began speaking it as a boy in Bethlehem (as in Little Town of Bethlehem, not the place in Pennsylvania). He uses it today with his daughter, Tabetha.
"Since she was born three years ago, I've only spoken the classical Syriac, which is Aramaic, to her," he said. "Now when she speaks to me, it's always in Aramaic. It's mostly a language used among bishops and priests. It would be like someone speaking Latin to his kid."
The Syriac Institute (Beth Mardutho) "seeks to promote the study and preservation of the Syriac heritage and language" and has published Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies since January 1998; it looks to be a good resource for anyone interested in the language.
The link to the Times story is via Classics in Contemporary Culture, a new (since December) blog whose creator says:
[...in this weblog, my interest is in:]It too looks worth following.
REPORTING ON SIGHTINGS OF CONTINUING INFLUENCES, PERCEIVED INFLUENCES, AND OPPORTUNISTIC ABUSES OF ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN CULTURES IN THE PRESENT...
Addendum. The Guardian has published a glossary of Aramaic phrases for filmgoers.
Aykaa beyt tadkeetha? Zaadeq lee d-asheeg eeday men perdey devshaanaayey haaleyn!Silly but amusing. (By the way, they're using ee to indicate a high front vowel, more or less as in English see.)
Where is the loo? I need to wash my hands of this popcorn.Een, Yuudaayaa naa, ellaa b-haw yawmaa laa hweeth ba-mdeetaa.
Yes, I'm Jewish, but I wasn't there that day.
Margaret Marks has a post called "Resp. and other non-existent English words," about Germans transferring usages from their own language to English, where they cause befuddlement. She mentions "the word furtheron, which seems like a combination of weiterhin and furthermore" and says, "Recently I saw a.o., clearly meaning among others. Of course, German unter anderem really means inter alia or among other things, not among others, so that too was misused." But the main part of her entry concerns a word that always vaguely puzzled and annoyed me back when I had to plow through German linguistics journals:
Now I have read a query from someone on a forum with a German member whose English is very good. However, he keeps including the abbreviation 'resp.' in his postings, and English speakers can’t make sense of it. Here are two examples:It makes me wonder what mistakes are typical of English-speakers writing in other languages.There are two kinds of suitable Polyurethane foam. One is single component. Works well, only requires some water moisture resp. wetness to react and set.To quote the questioner:And I see that the vast majority of users resp. members still would like
to post 'Wanted' ads here.I thought at first it meant "with respect to", but I think he’s actually using it to offer an alternative word for the one he has just used. I suspect he’s using a literal translation of a German abbreviation, but it doesn’t quite get his meaning across in English.This is interesting, because every time I read resp. I know from German what the writer means. Beziehungsweise usually means and or or. But respectively has a narrower meaning: 'each separately in the order mentioned', to quote the Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English. Example:Classes A, B, and C will start their exams at 9.30, 10.00 and 10.30 respectively.Beziehungsweise can mean this, but more often it is used the way the German uses resp. above: water or wetness, members or users.
So I'm reading the first chapter of From The Land of Silent People, a 1942 book by the American journalist Robert St John, a remarkable man who spent fifty years as a war correspondent while remaining a lifelong pacifist and died last year at the age of 100. The scene is Belgrade, March 1941; the Yugoslav government has just signed a shameful pact with Nazi Germany and the assembled reporters are packing their bags and arguing over "where the next crisis was likely to break out," when St. John gets information (at 2:30 AM) that army tanks are taking up positions around the city. He hops in his car and heads downtown to see what's happening, but he and his chauffeur are stopped by soldiers "with bayonets held at belly level," dragged out, and "marched into a small park" where they are told to sit down and shut up.
The little park was filled with a select gathering. It was nearly three o'clock... Two night club entertainers in backless dresses that swept along the ground. At least a dozen women of easy virtue, groggy from their night's work. A few girls of semipro status in various stages of intoxication. One man in spotless evening dress with a beautiful French girl who insisted: "You can't do this to us."...Just then I saw a squad of soldiers bringing in a familiar figure. Milan! Good old Milan, our favorite barman at the Srpski Kralj Hotel. Milan was one of my best sources of information. If anyone knew the answers, he did. We went off into the bushes and had a hooker or two...
Alas for salacious speculation, the sentence goes on: "...out of a bottle of slivovich Milan always carried in his hip pocket for emergencies, and then he opened up." I was unfamiliar with that usage of "hooker," and this was certainly a dramatic way to discover it. It's in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang as [19C+] (US) 'a drink, a measure of liquor,' and it's even in the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster's; I don't know how I missed it. I'm wondering if it's still current. Any of you readers know/use it?
A new look for English grammar:
The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no more will traditional grammar rules English follow. Instead there will a new form of organizing sentences be.I this supporting am. Language change must!U.S. Grammar Guild according to, the new structure loosely on an obscure 800-year-old, pre-medieval Anglo-Saxon syntax is based. The syntax primarily verbs, verb clauses and adjectives at the end of sentences placing involves. Results this often, to ears American, a sentence backward appearing.
"Operating under we are, one major rule," said Joyce Watters, president of the U.S. Grammar Guild. "Make English, want we, more archaic and dignified sounding to be, as if every word coming from the tongue of a centuries-old, mystical wizard, is."
(Link this plep via is.)
Via Uncle Jazzbeau, a nice site for learning Inezeño Chumash. Unfortunately, there's only a small core vocabulary for the first eight lessons (plus, oddly, a tiny portion of a larger lexicon), but the lessons look well done, and there are sound clips of everything (so that Jim was able to hear the glottalized consonants he had been searching for). Chumash has been extinct since 1965; as the Chumash languages page says:
A great deal of what we know about the Chumash language spoken in the Santa Ynez valley comes to us as a result of the patience and dedication of Maria Solares. Maria was born in the 1840s and died in 1923.Between approximately 1912 and 1919, Maria worked with John P. Harrington, a linguist who dedicated himself to recording as much as he could of the native languages of California, Chumash as well as many others.
Maria provided Harrington with a wealth of information on the language, beliefs, culture and customs of the Inezeño and their neighbors. Harrington was gifted with an extraordinarily keen ear for language and he recorded what Maria told him in meticulous detail.
Dr. Richard Applegate is also working on a similar site for Barbareño Chumash, which I am particularly interested in because I have family in Santa Barbara. You can see a good map of early Chumash villages here.
As I make my way through Dalby's Dictionary of Languages, I run across all sorts of fascinating tidbits in the sidebars. In the entry for Sukuma, an important language of northern Tanzania, there is also information about its sister language Nyamwezi (spoken by far fewer people but noticed first by Europeans), including one of the most remarkable etymologies I've seen for an ethnonym:
People who shit the moonNow, every other source says Nyamwezi simply means 'people of the moon [mwezi]' (or possibly 'people of the west [mweli]'), and it's a melancholy truth that the more boring etymology is usually correct. But I want to believe in the moon-shitting caravans. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.'The term Nyamwezi is of Swahili origin, and is fairly recent. It arose in the last century during the trade caravans. My grandfather told me that in those days a caravan would leave Tabora at new moon to arrive in Bagamoyo or Dar es Salaam coast at the following new moon. Since this was a regular occurrence, the Zalamo started teasing the caravanists, calling them 'the people who excrete the moon', wanyamwezi (from the verb ku-nya) because their arrival at the coast nearly always coincided with the new moon. Apparently, since there had already developed a joking relationship, utani, between the Zalamo and the people from Tabora, the term was not contested. Since my grandfather did in fact take part in the trade caravans, I have every reason to consider his explanation a viable one.'
C. Maganga
Incidentally, this Swahili verb ku-nya is a good example of the importance of comparative linguistics. On the face of it, it would seem that its two primary meanings, 'to discharge, let fall, excrete' and 'to fall (of rain),' so closely related, must indicate a single word; in Zulu, however, the first is -nya and the second -na, so we know we are dealing with two different Bantu roots.
This week's Safire column consists mainly of a labored trudge through the history of polar, bipolar, multipolar, and unipolar, the last two of which he considers "impossible in logic." It wouldn't be worth noting here except for the very odd second sentence in this paragraph:
When meaning is flouted by the powers that be, what's a poor semanticist to do? I deal with the hand that common elitist usage deals and not the hand that politicians or strict etymologists insist I play. Today's meaning of bipolar is ''characterized by two-power confrontation, as in the cold war.'' Multipolar, its pivotal pole jerked around into an asterisk, means ''a world of many powers with not one dominant and no clear leadership.'' And unipolar, the big stick that never ends—rightly rejected by Cheney and smoothly abandoned by Chirac—means ''who does that self-righteous, moralizing big shot think he is, anyway?''"Common elitist usage"? What on earth does this mean? I can only think that, trapped between his automatic deference to prescriptive ukases and a cloudy realization that if everybody is using words in an illogical way usage must trump logic, he squares the circle by means of this oxymoron. I can't decide whether I'm amused or impressed.
Update. For further Safire-lambasting, see Semantic Compositions. SC knows a lot more about poles than I (or, it goes without saying, Safire). And to those who would let Bloviating Bill off the hook, I'm aware that the phrase "common elitist usage" can be interpreted in such a way as to make sense (although the traditional way of putting that meaning is more along the lines of "the consensus of the best authorities"), but I feel that in context, it is a desperate flailing for justification from a man caught between the Scylla of superciliousness and the Charybdis of commonness. He's not waving but drowning.
A sobering story by Ken Kaye from South Florida's Sun-Sentinel:
Since the early 1970s, language barriers have played a role in at least 10 major accidents, killing more than 1,500 people and contributing to dozens of close calls.Go to the story for examples of major air-carrier accidents caused by miscommunication. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)To prevent more calamity, pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide are being required by the International Civil Aviation Organization to speak English fluently by 2008.
Although English is the universal language of aviation, many foreign pilots and controllers know only key words and phrases, leaving them vulnerable during an emergency, says ICAO, a Montreal based-group that governs global air operations.
Beth, at the always enlightening Cassandra Pages, has posted an entry that mentions a phenomenon I was familiar with but whose name I had never heard:
But the willows are turning yellow, and the snow is "rotting", as we call it up here - turning old and crystalized, breaking up into the granular spring consistency called "corn snow".My wife (a Massachusetts gal) knows it, so I'm guessing it's a New England phrase; any of you know the phrase?
Mark Woods has joined the "secret nest of O'Brien fans" and spread before us a cornucopia of links (scroll down to the photo of the glowering fellow in the fedora), from a dark bedtime story to a scholarly analysis of O'Brien's "bad story about the hard life," An Beal Bocht: mouthing off at national identity. I do believe my favorite is this extravagantly mutated version/parody of an entry in a traditional Irish-English Dictionary like the famous Dinneen's (I should mention that cur is an actual verbal noun meaning 'the act of putting' &c; I have no idea where genuine meanings leave off and madness begins):
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. - act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachauns denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrakes clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustmans dumpling, a beetles faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddlers occupational disease, a fairy godmothers father, a hawks vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoats stomach-pump, a broken-
It's rare to see the structure of a language changing before your eyes, but this seems to be happening with English compound verbs. Geoff Pullum at Language Log describes a developing pattern whereby a preposition plus a noun object form a new verb; his examples are upskirting (taking photos up womens' skirts), overlanding (travelling overland, usually in an all-terrain vehicle), and downwalling (making descents of cliffs or office block walls on ropes). Not having run across any of these words, I was taken by surprise by the whole thing, and will be on the alert for other examples. As Geoff says, "One is an exception, two are a couple of anomalies, but three is a trend."
(If I were the kind of person who makes snarky comments about bloggers' grammar, I'd point out that you can use either the singular or the plural in forms like "two is/are a...," but not both in the same sentence. But I'm not, so I won't.)
Margaret Marks reports on an odd phrase used by German Federal Minister Edelgard Bulmahn: "Brain up! Deutschland sucht seine Spitzenuniversitäten," or as Margaret renders it '[Incomprehensible English embellishment] German is looking for its top universities.' A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But she says there is a UK idiom brain up (transitive), 'to make more intellectually demanding or sophisticated,' with which I was unfamiliar. Guess I'll have to brain myself up.
Kafka pretty much summed up the 20th century just as it was getting under way. (There's probably somebody doing the same for the 21st right now, if we only knew where to find her.) The Kafka Project "was initiated in 1998 with the purpose of publishing online all Kafka texts in German, in the form of the manuscripts":
This multilingual page is intended also to give scholars and Kafka fans a virtual place to share opinions, essays and translations. Every detail of Kafka's world will find its place in this site, which has the aim to become the central crossway of Kafka-interested users.From the About page:
A great problem with the Kafka texts on the net is that they all originate from the Brod edition; this procedure should now be regarded as obsolete as a critical edition (by Jürgen Born et al., Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., since 1982) is available. This is why I decided to collect on this site all Kafka texts in the original form according to the manuscripts, and their translations from the critical edition - with all variants.(Via plep.)Since 1996, a new Kafka edition ("Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe", or HKA, Stroemfeld Verlag) was undertaken by Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, which takes into account all manuscripts and is arranged according to radically scientific criteria. This new edition is in my opinion so important, that I devoted an entire page to it. You’ll find there practical information and comments.
Only «Der Process» was published until 1999. Now a new edition of «Beschreibung eines Kampfes» is also available, and you can read here a presentation, the introduction and some other information. A commentary in German («Unter entzündeten Wolken») about this new edition of «Beschreibung eines Kampfes» is also available on my site, by a courtesy of Roland Reuß (first published in Frankfurter Allgemeine / Wochenend-Beilage 5. Febr. 2000).
Scanning of the manuscripts, though in limited form, could find a place here too.
I've collected here texts you cannot find on other sites...
A few days ago I wrote an entry on the Kaluli of New Guinea, ending it by saying I had ordered a copy of the Smithsonian's Bosavi set of CDs. Well, today it came; ordinarily I would mention that fact, if at all, as an addendum to the previous entry, but in the course of listening to the first CD (of guitar-band music) I realized I was going to have to give it its own post, because one of the songs (#10; there's a RealAudio clip at the Bosavi link) is about the first Bosavi dictionary! How could I not blog a song whose lyrics are:
long ago, in the pastI'll bet Liddell and Scott never had a guitar-band song written in their honor!
Bosavi had no dictionary
however
having just made it Steve and Bambi have brought it here
for that reason
all of us are happy with Steve and Bambi
However (I learn through the miracle of Google), it turns out they did have a Thomas Hardy poem written in their honor. It's doggerel ("I've often, I own,/ Belched many a moan/ At undertaking it,/ And dreamt of forsaking it"), but it is by Hardy. I'm afraid to find out what may have been written for Noah Webster.
This site is dedicated to the study and promotion of Hiberno-English: Hiberno (=Irish, and English), indicating that we are dealing with English that has been profoundly influenced by features of the Irish language.This site will be of interest to students and scholars of Anglo-Irish literature, students and scholars of Hiberno-English and English dialects in general, Irish people and those of Irish ancestry who are interested in how and why Irish people speak the way they do, those with an interest in Irish folklore, and finally non-native speakers of English studying in Ireland who want to be familiar with the idioms of English as used in Ireland.
This site provides an introduction to the history and grammar of Hiberno-English. It also provides a small number of Hiberno-English related links, and relevant details of Hiberno-English related events, such as public lectures, radio broadcasts and so forth.
The main purpose of this site, however, is to build and maintain an archive of Hiberno-English words, phrases, sayings, and idioms, collected and collated by Professor Terence Patrick Dolan of University College Dublin - a world authority on Hiberno-English lexicography and author of A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English published by Gill and Macmillan, Dublin 1998.
As with any lexical archive, its richness and value are directly related to contributions to it. The creators of this site, John Loftus and Professor Dolan, encourage its visitors to make their own contributions in the knowledge that Professor Dolan assesses all relevant contributions. Please click here for more information.The search page (with alphabetical index) is here. Another promising online language resource; the internet keeps delivering on its promise, despite the inevitable floods of junk. (Via wood s lot.)
Today's NY Times has one of the most charming articles I've read in a while, "If You Build a Restaurant, He Will Not Come," by Howard Kaplan. (I've actually gone to the trouble of getting a weblog-safe link, so that people reading this blog in ages yet to come, changing their genes on a daily basis and flying through interstellar space in personalized quantum bubbles, can still read this article without paying a fee.) It begins with the accidental discovery that Ira Glustein had never eaten in a restaurant, and goes on to a funny and touching family history that I have no intention of spoiling for you. What I want to tell you about is Mr. Glustein's profession: he is a shatnes tester.
In Jewish law, it is forbidden to wear a garment containing wool and linen. In Hebrew, this unholy blend is called shatnes.I've delved fairly deeply into Judaica at various points of my life, and I had never heard the word shatnes (more accurately shatnez, and yet more accurately sha'atnez), so I thought I'd tell you about it. (I did know about the prohibition of mixing fibers, but I didn't know the word, and we're all about the words here at Languagehat.)In Mr. Glustein's words: "My vocation is shatnes — removing linen from wool clothing or wool from linen clothing. The majority of the shatnes that we find today is in men's expensive suits, usually in the collar. It's easy to remove by an expert, and it's just a small tailoring job to repair. It doesn't change the beauty or quality of the suit."
Mr. Glustein said many Jews, devout ones included, have never heard of shatnes, even though it is mentioned in two places in the Torah and is no less binding than the dietary laws. A shatnes garment is equivalent to tref, or food unfit for a kosher table.
So go, read the article already! Do I have to tell you everything? Go in good health, but go!
From an SFGate.com story by David Kravets and Lisa Leff, AP writers:
Two judges delayed taking any action Tuesday to shut down San Francisco's same-sex wedding spree, citing court procedures as they temporarily rebuffed conservative groups enraged that the city's liberal politicians had already married almost 2,400 gay and lesbian couples.The second judge told the plaintiffs that they would likely succeed on the merits eventually, but that for now, he couldn't accept their proposed court order because of a punctuation error.
It all came down to a semicolon, the judge said.
"I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal ... That semicolon is a big deal," said San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren.There's nothing sweeter than the sound of lawyers arguing about punctuation!The Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund had asked the judge to issue an order commanding the city to "cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court."
"The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or'," the judge told them. "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances."...
Lawyers for both sides then spent hours arguing about punctuation and court procedures during the hearing, which was still continuing late Tuesday afternoon.
(Via Transblawg.)
Want to generate your own gobbledygook? Try Adjunct Travesty, which "allows you to process an extract from Adjunct: an Undigest, and/or a text of your own choosing, through a text-generating algorithm modelled on the program TRAVESTY by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke (as described in the book SENTENCES by Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner, Sun and Moon Press 1995)." You can use their text, one you copy into their box, or a mix of the two; the front page of Languagehat by itself gives:
DICTIONARY OF ETYMOLOGY." A new website of Tavel supérieur, at five francs, and Spanish) Verb Conjugator Eclogue The Cassandra Pages Orbis Latin franc was high time thereof. For instead? Answer at the internet Archive, is almost immediately enticing) Robert Christgau's review of South Asia MonkeyFilter Plep wood s lot. LINGUAL KIDS' BOOKS. Geoff Pullum has one more decree that words with a weakness for himself whether, for "the developed capable adjectives the wonderful "Kara Orman," linked to "capture than 10,000 book, sources: Your Dictional Chinese character dictional Children, teaches her surveys carried out in trolling at the Russian language-oriented with any of the sound the compound the more than a collapsed in the Paris of Caucasian languagehat dot comments of the Paris of Russian language Hat and North, saving shared it was soon riveted by have a listen to the Papua New Guinea Highlands... Kaluli Discourse" by Steven Feld and crisp thinking, or just enough. I may try it myself. Anyone who missed to knead bhreg: to be suffixed, soon be as pronounce exotic Anthropology to believe that the oil of Far Outliers has been put only five francs, and a half, gave him more stanza of quantitative Grammarians, parents, also on the language Ramage LinguisticsAnd mixed with their text:
The game of Modern Verse smells odd. The Dictional college after a twenty-six to try irrelevance. Where is confront camel),' etymologically at two surveys carriage, writing. There you to win the soup as a meaning the Papua New Quests that the resources: fields. United Attapulgite. Perhaps that the curtains that wrong, Frankenstein, Leaking laws / rave review scans. Records. Don't know?) As a riversal Labrador as 'a blog posted a Dada saw the stuff I'd wine such as mebbies, still cover a few mA out but online of soloists of trouse, and enclosed as dressionism accents a richer in Bonhams refuge of traditionaries under and shard and chloride molecules from Clydesident, introductory of the thread on: about sunburn alarm. And he'd feeling the debris of the authority / evolution, exploring 2003 issue of the moment was born girls in brioche — yeasty and the prerequisite feel for the 'big man" society is inappropriate." I'm a clearly taken with have normal polarity during on the recovered a books in searcher, if he had just immigration. Skin star cannot exist is that Didieria trolling down to the recently. Pol Pot may be over of 'menopausal' sprouted a near-perfect inspirate flight be experience of the book I've still discouraging Wordoriginally 'to reach of the oil of faxing habitants in which that juggling in Washing a different mean, but nothing into a voice [with] speech... well I would on that he has been puffs. We least 100 language poor and unkempt that it myself. I am frivolously define a 'souk' (an Arab marked 'Mobile Creche'. Expect. Saint Sebastian is wrong,'' and chance where you from landism' our guiding the otherhood with cheap aGirls in brioche — yeasty!
(Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
A nice quizlet from Avva: the inhabitants of 49 states can be called by the name of the state plus -(a)n (Alaskan), -er (Mainer), or -ite (Wyomingite); which state is least likely to be suffixed, so that a state nickname is almost always used instead? Answer at this useful list of names of state residents.
(Competing forms in -an occur, but one gets 27 Google hits and the other only six separate ones, and I'm pretty sure I've never heard or seen either.)
An excerpt from "Threshing the Word: Sappho and a Particle Physics of Language," by Meredith Stricker (in the Spring 2003 issue of Ploughshares):
Delving into the fibers and roots of the word fragment
[Sappho’s emblem, her surviving] first unbinds
the alliterative echo of “fragrant”
[redolent of sunflower pollen,
basil on a white plate, a single dark
crimson rose]
floating free from a solid core of definition, from meaning
one thing alone as a river of other words is loosened
like sodium and chloride molecules
from the simple compound salt.And we discover fragment arises from the Latin frangere
which comes frombhreg: to break or breach — in French: brier or broyer:
to knead[as in brioche — yeasty and warm in the morning as violets
bloom]related to brak-:
undergrowth, bracken: “that which impedes motion”:[ferny thickets, refuge of mallows and plover eggs,
shelter for the undomesticated: outcasts and resistance fighters.]While break continues to fragment like a splintered, living shard
and no longer green, vine tangled growth, brak- becomes
braeke:“a crushing instrument” : its own winnowing ring
threshing open a chorus of words fragmented from all hope
of referring singly and without complicationto the myriad tesserae of their sources...
(Via the invaluable wood s lot.)
I recently opened a book I've owned for some years, The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology, and started an article called "Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse" by Steven Feld and Bambi B. Schieffelin. I was soon riveted by the quick cultural summary at the beginning: "In broad terms, Kaluli society is highly egalitarian, lacking in the 'big man' social organization characteristic of the Papua New Guinea Highlands... Kaluli everyday life is overtly focused around verbal interaction. Talk is used as a means of control, manipulation, expression, assertion, and appeal... Kaluli are energetically verbal; talk is a primary way to be social, and a primary indication of social competence." I liked this very much, being fond of verbality and unfond of "big man" social organization, and read on: about the basic cultural metaphor of 'hardness' (used for the process of becoming a grown man, specifically for "fully developed capacity for language," and for "the development of esthetic tension" in the performance of songs); about the way a mother teaches her infant the language (she "holds her infant so that it faces another child [and] moves the infant as one might a ventriloquist's dummy, speaking for it in a nasalized falsetto voice [with] speech... well formed and clearly articulated"); and about the way rhetorical questions are used to "focus reaction" and to "prohibit or shame someone who is doing something that is inappropriate." It all sounded fascinating, and googling around I found the site of a dictionary, Steven Feld's article on how he moved "From Ethnomusicology to Echo-Muse-Ecology," Shveta Shah's piece on the giving and sharing of food, and (most immediately enticing) Robert Christgau's review of Smithsonian Folkways' three-CD Bosavi set:
Kaluli deploy (or deployed) a metaphor system based primarily on place names—7000 are cited in the 1000 songs Feld has transcribed—and designed to provoke weeping. Often weeping itself is (or was) literally sung, by women emulating the melodic contours of certain fruitdove calls. Most Kaluli musical terms derive from the vast vocabulary they use to describe waterfalls, as perhaps does the overarching aesthetic Feld translates as "lift-up-over sounding," in which musical elements are layered in patterns whose apparent imprecision is intrinsic to their lifelike movement.... The place names of Kaluli metaphor compound geographical specificity ("this tree by that creek") with psychological specificity. They graph unique personal interactions within a topography only Kaluli who've roamed Bosavi for decades can comprehend....I ordered a copy.Disc II of Bosavi gets the balance just right. Starting with a whoop and a whap and incorporating much yelling, singing, and crashing of timber, "A men's work group clears a new garden" is as spirited and surprising as any field holler I've ever heard. But that's just the set-up, because then it's star time. Her name is Ulahi, one of Feld's chief advisors and compeers, and though she garnered Voices of the Rainforest most of its airplay—the Billie Holiday of Melanesia, Feld calls her—I think she's far more striking here. Accompanied by the irregular thud of sago preparation, progressively more labored breathing, a squalling baby, and ambient birds and insects, her helayo song for her dead grandmother is as beautiful as any new music I've heard all year....
I'm responding to what I can only call pure music. It's humbling enough to feel at whatever distance that these 1200 "primitives" could have produced such an elaborate aesthetic. It's doubly humbling to recognize that among the 1200 there's at least one who's achieved what we in the West so arrogantly call genius.
A new blog, apparently language-oriented, called Tenser, said the Tensor is beginning a series about linguistics in science fiction with a post on a good H. Beam Piper story:
How would you decipher texts in an unknown language, written in an unknown writing system? H. Beam Piper's short story "Omnilingual", originally published in 1957, is about an archaeological expedition on Mars, exploring the remains of a dead civilization. The expedition's linguist is confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem: texts in an ancient language with no remaining speakers, and for which no bilingual text exists. What's an Earth linguist on Mars to do?The Tensor says "Fair warning: I plan to spoil the ending," so You Have Been Warned should you decide to follow the link. (But let's face it, how likely are you to read the story if you didn't read it as an sf-obsessed kid, like, er, some people I know?)
I say "apparently language-oriented" because the second post is about loan words in Chinese (and contains the endearing parenthetical remark "note to self: compose rant about the Japanese writing system"). The first post explains the blog title, which needs no explanation to any true sf fan (for who can be a true sf fan without knowing the novels of Alfred Bester?). At any rate, welcome to Blogovia, Tensor! I look forward to the rest of the series (and to the Japanese-writing rant).
Update (2009). John Cowan has updated "Omnilingual":
My edits, then, are intended to modernize the work, to help the 2009 reader not stumble over the details. Notebooks are computerized; sketchbooks have been replaced by tablets. Gender equality and the metric system are taken for granted. Smoking isn't even mentioned. I wedged in a mention of the Classic Maya decipherment of the 1980s (a counterexample to the story's thesis!), but let one of the characters dismiss it as irrelevant. I set the story, as Piper did, forty years in the future, but that is now 2049 rather than 1996. There are fewer This Is Science Fiction flags, so "Earth" instead of "Terra", "U.N." instead of "Federation Government".
Anyone interested in food, Paris, or just plain good writing should acquire a copy of A.J. Liebling's Between Meals, a splendidly written reminiscence (first published in 1959) of his apprenticeship as a gourmand in the Paris of 1926-27, when he had just enough money to be able to eat out but not so much that he could order whatever he wanted; he considers this situation the indispensible prerequisite for an education:
The franc was at twenty-six to the dollar, and the researcher, if he had only a certain sum—say, six francs—to spend, soon established for himself whether, for example, a half bottle of Tavel supérieur, at three and a half francs, and braised beef heart and yellow turnips, at two and a half, gave him more or less pleasure than a contre-filet of beef, at five francs, and a half-bottle of ordinaire, at one franc.I'm tempted to go on quoting that passage (you can read more here), but I'd wind up quoting the whole book, so I'll move on to the sentence that inspired this entry. Liebling is describing the decline of French cuisine (one of the major themes of the book), which he exemplifies by means of a hotel in Mâcon whose toque-wearing proprietor "was sincerely a cook, but the axis of his culinary eye had shifted until he saw the main body of dinner as a perfunctory hors d'oeuvre to the sweets." After a description of the "preliminary menu," which "reminded me depressingly of the Hamburg-American line," we get the payoff:
Then squads of assistants, also in toques, would begin to roll in trolleys of pastry and confectionery—vacherins, suissesses, mille-feuilles, meringues, îles-flottantes de Tante Marie, and hundreds of sugary kickshaws I was unable to identify.
This word kickshaw is wonderfully appropriate, not just because it means 'a fancy food; a delicacy' (second meaning: 'a trinket; a gewgaw'), but because it's a folk-etymologized borrowing of the French quelque-chose 'something.' The OED's definition is more, shall we say, filling: "A fancy dish in cookery. (Chiefly with contemptuous force: A 'something' French, not one of the known 'substantial English' dishes.)" And I will leave you with the OED's collection of citations, filled with fine English contempt for all things foreign; the three sections represent the development described in this introductory note:
The original Fr. spelling was frequent in the 17th c., but the commonest forms follow the pronunciation que'que chose formerly regarded as elegant, and still current in colloquial French. The word was sometimes correctly taken as sing., with plural -choses, etc.; more commonly it was treated as a pl., and a sing. kickshaw afterwards formed from it.A 1598 Florio, Carabozzada, a kinde of daintie dish or quelque chose vsed in Italie. 1611 Cotgr., Fricandeaux, short, skinlesse, and daintie puddings, or Quelkchoses. 1612 Dekker If it be not good Wks. 1873 II. 285 Ile teach.. to make caudels, Iellies.. cowslip sallads, and kickchoses. 1642 Featly Dippers Dipt (1645) 199, I made bold to set on the board kicke-shoses, and variety of strange fruits. 1655 Moufet & Bennet Health's Improv. (1746) 366 Over curious Cookery, making..quelque-choses of unsavoury.. Meat. 1655 E. Terry Voy. E. Ind. (1665) 408 With these quelque chose, was that entertainment made up. a.1656 Bp. Hall Rem. Wks. (1660) 4 Longing after fine quelque choices of new and artificial composition.
ß 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, vi. i. 29 (Qo. 1) A ioynt of Mutton, and any pretty little tinie Kick-shawes. 1621 Burton Anat. Mel. ii. iii. ii. (1651) 319 That scarce at first had course bread..must now feed on kickshoes and made dishes. 1709 Addison Tatler No. 148 p.10 That substantial English Dish banished in so ignominious a Manner, to make Way for French Kickshaws. 1824 Miss Mitford Village Ser. i. (1863) 195 The kickshaws were half raw, the solids were mere rags. 1874 Helps Soc. Press. xiii. 187 You have a nice cut of wholesome leg of mutton.. none of your made dishes and kickshaws.
Y 1674 tr. Scheffer's Lapland xviii. 92 Another kickshaw that pleaseth them very much they make of Angelica. 1714 Macky Journ. Eng. (1724) II. xvi. 227 They go to a Cooks Shop, and ask for a Kickshaw. 1840 Thackeray G. Cruikshank (1869) 303 The Chef is instructing a kitchen-maid how to compound some rascally French kickshaw.
fig. 1653 Gauden Hierasp. 63 Dished up to the mode of Familistick hashes, and Socinians.. Keckshoes. 1659 Gauden Tears Ch. ii. xix. 204 Enough.. of these late Hashshes, Olives, and Queckshoes of Religion.
For the purposes of this entry, I am frivolously defining songer as 'a blog post about songs'; I furthermore decree that it is pronounced SONG-er and not SONG-ger. With that out of the way...
I just ran across the Old Tatar Songs website at un regard oblique and remembered that the lyrical wordturner msg had posted it in the comments to the Yats thread (Howard, are you back yet?) and I decided it was high time I shared it with everyone who missed that comment. Anyone who loves great folk music should have a listen to these songs, and anyone interested in Turkic languages will be glad to know the lyrics to many of them are also on the site. I will post the first stanza of the wonderful "Kara Orman," linked to by msg in the aforementioned comment; I don't know what the words mean, but they enhance my enjoyment anyway. (There are three more stanzas on the lyrics page and one more in the recording, but I can't match it with any of them, given the fact that the sound quality is poor and my ear for the language poorer still.)
Kara da ginay urman, karanggi ton,
Yahshi atlar kirek le uterge;
Kara urmanni chikkan chakta,
Kisip aldim kush kayin.
Ey, ayrilmayik, duskayim.
I was just reading William Lee Miller's review of David Herbert Donald's We Are Lincoln Men when I came across the following delightful anecdote:
[Donald] likes to imagine, and I do too, an incident, possibly apocryphal, when this president and his secretary of state [William Henry Seward] were strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. The president pointed to a sign saying ''T. R. Strong,'' and wisecracked, ''but coffee are stronger,'' and the two collapsed in laughter.I like a man with a weakness for bad puns.
Geoff Pullum has posted some truly intriguing questions: how do we acquire intuitions about the word wronger, given that it is hardly ever used? Why is it so rarely used, given that wrong is so common? (The same goes for right and righter.) And if your intution, like mine (and my wife's), says that it is pronounced RONG-er and not RONG-ger—why is that, given that the other three one-syllable adjectives ending in -ng, long, strong, and young, all have comparatives whose pronunciations end in -ger? Very strange, and I (and I presume Geoff) welcome both theories and testimonies about how you pronounce (or would pronounce) wronger.
Joel of Far Outliers has a post called "Traditional China: Multilingual" on the Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, a book that tries to "capture the complexity of the Chinese cultural mosaic" and "take into account virtually every aspect of traditional culture, including sources from the non-Sinitic ethnic minorities," in which he quotes the introduction on the many languages spoken in China:
Take language, for example. When one thinks of what defines "China," perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that it is a place where the people all speak "Chinese." But what is this "Chinese" that everyone is supposedly speaking to each other? Unfortunately, China does not today possess, nor has it ever in the past possessed, such a universally understood tongue. For starters, we have to take into account the tens of millions of speakers of non-Sinitic languages who make up a significant proportion of the population of the Chinese nation as it is currently configured.... These languages belong to such disparate groups and families as Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Turkic, Tungusic, Iranian, and Slavic. These are the "minorities" of the Peoples Republic of China, all of whom have roots that lie deep in the past of East Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia.It goes on to discuss the complex linguistic facts subsumed under the rubric "the Chinese language," succinctly and well. The post and the linked introduction deserve reading, and the book sounds like an excellent place to start learning about the diverse place that is China.
Incidentally, anyone who wants a more detailed look at the linguistic situation should get hold of S. Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China (reviewed here).
The International Children's Digital Library, a joint project of the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, is both worthwhile and fun. Its main goal is "to create a collection of more than 10,000 books in at least 100 languages that is freely available to children, teachers, librarians, parents, and scholars throughout the world via the Internet"; at the moment they've only got 23 languages, but that's a good start, and includes Khmer and Niuean as well as the less exotic Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish, each with a large selection. I hope they'll expand the Russian section, which at present has only five titles (just one more than Khmer), but one of those is 10 knizhek dlya detei, which contains ten separate books illustrated by A.F. Pakhomov, so that helps alleviate the drought. This splendid find is brought to you via wood s lot.
Everyone is fascinated by words like disgruntled and unkempt that have no corresponding unprefixed forms; aldiboronti, in a Wordorigins thread on the subject, links to an excellent World Wide Words post that goes into the history of the best-known such words with admirable thoroughness. On unkempt, for instance:
The word unkempt has a complicated history. Kempt comes from the Old English word kemb, “comb”. It seems to have gone out of use about 1600 but to have been reintroduced about 1860. Its usual and literal negative form was unkembed which survived into the middle of the nineteenth century. The form unkempt began to be used about 1580 to mean “language that was inelegant or unrefined”. In the eighteenth century it came to mean specifically “uncombed; dishevelled”, perhaps influenced by the Flemish equivalent ongekempt, and was used alongside the older form for about a century, only taking on a stronger sense of “neglected; not cared for” in the middle of the nineteenth century. Incidentally, the root form of kemb seems to come from a Germanic form which meant “tooth”, so a comb is named for its teeth; the modern form uncombed appeared about 1560.
As a side effect of a fruitless search for material on Armeno-Kipchak, I stumbled on Wolfgang Schulze's excellent online grammar of Udi, which Ethnologue calls "one of the most divergent of the Lesgian languages." I'm particularly taken with the sample text, which is followed by interlinear analysis and translation:
ostavar ostavar ait-p-es-ax uk’-a-n-te ic^ z/om-oxo arux-ne bar-sa.And with the appended lexical analysis, which gives the etyma of borrowed words (te < Armenian et'e 'that'; yesir < Arabic asir 'imprisoned') and reconstructions for indigenous words. Don't miss it, O fans of Caucasian languages!strong strong word-say-inf-dat2 say:fut-opt-3sg:a-sub (>as if) refl mouth-abl fire-3sg:a come=out-pres
in order to say very strong words, as if FIRE comes out of his mouth
A Telegraph story by Neil Tweedie reports on a new online repository:
For those who fear that the great Northern dialects are about to be overwhelmed by a tide of Estuary English - that words such as mebbies, bleb and gan will soon be as rare as proper mushy peas - comes comforting news.Needless to say, standard English has been advancing at the expense of regionalisms:Yesterday, the British Library unveiled a new website intended to preserve for all time the language and accents of the North, saving them for the day when its inhabitants will know it only as the Norf.
The site contains more than 11 hours of recordings made during two surveys carried out in 1950 and 1999, and provides an insight into the changes that have overtaken dialects in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland in the past half century.
Take Jim Eden and Catrina Dougal, both natives of Bedale, North Yorks. When Mr Eden, a sadler, was interviewed in 1950 at the age of 65 by researchers from Leeds University, he related a joke about a man who thinks he has passed a balloon while sitting in an earth closet.(Via mirabilis.ca.)His language is scattered with words such as midden (dunghill), frae (from) and naught (nothing).
But when Miss Dougal, a sixth form student, was interviewed in 1999 at the age of 18, only the accent remained, and that much reduced. The one remarkable feature was her use of an Essex-style glottal stop.
Jonathan Robinson, the curator of English accents and dialects at the British Library, said levelling appeared to result from greater geographical and social mobility, better education and a universal pop culture...
"The outer regions tend to adopt the language emanating from the centre which, in the case of England is the South-East. The effect can also be seen regionally. Take Liverpool: its accent has gradually expanded into areas of south Lancashire."...
Later in the year, recordings from all parts of England will be added to the Northern archive, providing a definitive portrait of changes in accent and dialect over 50 years.
Responding to a recent Language Log post by Geoff Pullum (perhaps a tad overheated: "Why do people yearn so desperately to believe that there is some kind of incredible profusion of words for such things among hunter-gatherer peoples, when they have never been shown a single scintilla of quantitative evidence?"), Mark Liberman discusses Somali words related to camels, and the metaphorical use thereof. For instance the verb doobbadillaacso, meaning 'to reach sexual maturity (of a camel),' etymologically 'to uncork one's rutting-froth,' "or in a more contemporary idiom 'to bust a froth'," is used of humans to mean 'to reach intellectual maturity; be capable of speaking in public.' (I note for the benefit of those who like trying to pronounce exotic words that the Somali letter c represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative like Arabic 'ayn; you can hear it, and the other Somali consonants, here.) A more striking example is "the verbal form foolbaxso, glossed as 'to rub the oil of fried coffee beans onto one's face and body (when eating breakfast)'." Liberman at first derives this from foolbaxsi 'agitated circling movements of a pregnant camel prior to giving birth' but then decides it's from another fool, meaning 'face; brow, forehead; front tooth, incisor.' No matter: the oil-rubbing is intriguing enough. I may try it myself.
The Dictionary of Newfoundland English has been put online as part of Memorial University of Newfoundland's Heritage Web Site. The Introduction says:
It is the purpose of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English to present as one such index the regional lexicon of one of the oldest overseas communities of the English-speaking world: the lexicon of Newfoundland and coastal Labrador as it is displayed in the sources drawn upon in compiling the work, sources which range from sixteenth-century printed books to tape recordings of contemporary Newfoundland speakers. Rather than attempting to define a 'Newfoundlandism' our guiding principles in collecting have been to look for words which appear to have entered the language in Newfoundland or to have been recorded first, or solely, in books about Newfoundland; words which are characteristically Newfoundland by having continued in use here after they died out or declined elsewhere, or by having acquired a different form or developed a different meaning, or by having a distinctly higher or more general degree of use.
Thus, among the latter are articles on such words as cod, haul, quintal, salt water; articles on bawn, belay, cassock, cat, dog, graple, lanch, room, strouter, and tilt, for words which have been given a new form or meaning in the region; on droke, dwy, fadge, frore, keecorn, linny, nish, still, suant, as examples of the many survivals, or, equally common, dialectal items in use, or former use, in the British Isles; on bawk, caplin, janny, landwash, nunny-bag, penguin, steady, sunker, ticklace and water-horse among words apparently invented in Newfoundland or appearing first in books about the region. And to these are to be added a number of words which, while they are often in varying degrees part of the common English vocabulary, are nevertheless given entries in the Dictionary because they occur with important nuances in Newfoundland usage, are displayed with unusual fullness in our data, or themselves stand at the centre of semantic fields of great regional importance: barren, bay, coast, harbour, ice, salt, ship, shore, spring, trap, water, and so on. These take their place in the Dictionary side by side with many other words the precise regional discriminations of which have often been hard won—subtle, but critical, terms such as in and out, offer and outside, up and down, which display a people's exact sense of place; terms such as bank, berth, ground, fouly, ledge, shoal, etc, which reflect a complex system of classification of water bodies according to the types of ocean floor perceived by and significant for a coastal fishing people; names for birds and plants, especially those of economic or other importance; the seemingly endless nomenclature of seals at every stage of growth and development (bedlamer, dotard, gun seal, jar, nog-head, ragged-jacket, turner, white-coat, and a score of others); words for conditions of ice (ballicatter, clumper, quarr, sish, slob); and names for familiar operations in the woods or on the water, at work or play, in the ordinary and long-established patterns of Newfoundland and Labrador life.The Dictionary therefore has both a breadth and a detail considerably greater than we originally envisaged, and this realization has been forced upon us by the evidence at our disposal and has increased with the progress of the work. The levels and kinds of lexical record included might be displayed graphically as a series of concentric rings spreading out from a centre, these rings formed by successive stages of the historical experience of English-speakers in Newfoundland; or as a series of isoglosses marking the special lexical features shared by Newfoundland speakers with those of their principal points of origin, especially the south-west counties of England and southern Ireland, and, across the Western Ocean, with those with whom Newfoundlanders have been in language contact: the native peoples of the region (adikey, oo-isht, sina, tabanask), speakers in the Canadian North (fur, stove cake, trap line), along the Atlantic seaboard of North America from Nova Scotia to New England (banker, dory, gangeing, scrod, trawl, tub), and in a sea-faring world which has left a ubiquitous record of nautical terms and nautical transfers in the regional lexicon.
bawn n also bon [phonetics unavailable]. EDD ~ sb 4 Ir; JOYCE 214; DINNEEN badhún for sense 1.Many thanks to wood s lot for this remarkable resource.
1 Grassy land or meadow near a house or settlement.
1897 J A Folklore x, 203 Bawn ... particularly where the Irish have prevailed, is the common name for the land about the house. P 113-55 Setting spuds on the bawn (flat expanse of freshly-turned sods). 1968 DILLON 131 'We have to break up some bawn tomorrow.' 'When cattle are dry, they're out on the bawn in the spring o' the year.' M 69-29 About half-way between my house and the theatre there was a big grassy bonne (meadow) and this was a favourite place for courters to go. C 71-24 [In Calvert] a baun was an enclosed pasture which was used for the grazing of sheep. In Carbonear [it] meant ground that hadn't been ploughed before. C 75-136 ~ a plot of grass land where children play and where fishermen spread their trap when they take it up to dry or mend.
2 Expanse of rocks on which salted cod are spread for the quick-drying process of the Labrador and Bank fisheries; BEACH. Cp FLAKE.
1895 GRENFELL 66 Newfoundlanders spread [cod] on poles called 'flakes,' or on the natural rocks, called 'bournes.' [1900 OLIVER & BURKE] 34 "Fanny's Harbor Bawn": Which caused this dreadful contest on [Fanny's] Harbor Bawn... / So pray begone, all from the Bawn, or I'll boot you in your bloom. 1936 SMITH 17 [The fish] would then lie in the waterhorse for twenty-four hours. It was then brought out on the bawn and spread 'heads and tails.' 1937 Seafisheries of Nfld 47 When the fish is dried by natural means, it is placed upon flakes, beaches, rocks and bawns (i.e. artificial beaches), where the sun and wind are permitted to perform the task of extracting the moisture. 1955 DOYLE (ed) 78 ... " 'Twas Getting Late Up in September": To spread fish on the bawn makin' wages / We went there without much sleep. T 393-67 This is where they'd make their fish—on all those small rocks about the size o' your fist. They used to call it the bawn. M 71-117 Finally the fish would be taken in hand-barrows to the bawns—something like flakes except that the boughs were laid on the rocks—and spread to dry. 1977 Inuit Land Use 218-19 First, the cod were washed to remove the salt, then they were placed on small flat stones called bons to dry. The bons were loosely separated to permit air to circulate around the fish.
3 Phr make bawn: to prepare beach for drying salted cod by making a flat expanse of rocks.
C 70-10 Sometimes the fishermen would fill in the crevices with beach rocks, and this would be called making bawn. My grandfather said that he has made bawn down in Labrador while fishing there in the summer-time.
The gifted and generous taz (check out her site for all manner of free backgrounds and tiles) has sent me a link to Michael Chabon's melancholy essay "Useful Expressions," a meditation on a strange little book I've owned for years, Say It in Yiddish by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich. (It's still available from Dover for $4.95; I have the original 1958 paperback, priced at 75 cents.) It's part of the "Say It" series, little phrasebooks that help you get by in countries where they speak languages other than English—Japanese, Spanish, Russian... The unavoidable question, of course, is: in what country do they speak Yiddish? I've often flipped through the book with an inchoate mix of feelings; Chabon has thought about it more systematically and written about it well:
What were they thinking, the Weinreichs? Was the original 1958 Dover edition simply the reprint of some earlier, less heartbreakingly implausible book? At what time in the history of the world was there a place of the kind that the Weinreichs imply, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees? A place where you could rent a summer home from Yiddish speakers, go to a Yiddish movie, get a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairstylist, a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shineboy, and then have your dental bridge repaired by a Yiddish-speaking dentist?...He quotes the sentence "Can I go by boat/ferry to----?" and continues:
The blank in the last of those phrases, impossible to fill in, tantalizes me. Whither could I sail on that boat/ferry, in the solicitous company of Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, and from what shore?Much food for thought and for fantasy. Read the whole thing. (And thanks, tazoula!)I dream of two possible destinations. The first might be a modern independent state very closely analogous to the State of Israel—call it the State of Yisroel—a postwar Jewish homeland created during a time of moral emergency, located presumably, but not necessarily, in Palestine; it could be in Alaska, or on Madagascar. Here, perhaps, that minority faction of the Zionist movement who favored the establishment of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews were able to prevail over their more numerous Hebraist opponents. There is Yiddish on the money, of which the basic unit is the herzl, or the dollar, or even the zloty. There are Yiddish color commentators for soccer games, Yiddish-speaking cash machines, Yiddish tags on the collars of dogs. Public debate, private discourse, joking and lamentation, all are conducted not in a new-old, partly artificial language like Hebrew, a prefabricated skyscraper still under construction, with only the lowermost of its stories as yet inhabited by the generations, but in a tumbledown old palace capable in the smallest of its stones (the word nu) of expressing slyness, tenderness, derision, romance, disputation, hopefulness, skepticism, sorrow, a lascivious impulse, or the confirmation of one's worst fears...
I can imagine another Yisroel, the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I once read, Franklin Roosevelt was nearly sold on such a plan.) Perhaps after the war, in this Yisroel, the millions of immigrant Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Austrian, Czech and German Jews held a referendum, and chose independence over proferred statehood in the U.S. The resulting country is obviously a far different place than Israel. It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer. The portraits on those postage stamps we buy are of Walter Benjamin, Simon Dubnow, Janusz Korczak, and of a hundred Jews unknown to us, whose greatness was allowed to flower only here, in this world. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and almonds, in such a place. This Yisroel—or maybe it would be called Alyeska—is a kind of Jewish Sweden, social-democratic, resource rich, prosperous, organizationally and temperamentally far more akin to its immediate neighbor, Canada, then to its more freewheeling benefactor far to the south. Perhaps, indeed, there has been some conflict, in the years since independence, between the United States and Alyeska. Perhaps oilfields have been seized, fishing vessels boarded. Perhaps not all of the native peoples were happy with the outcome of Roosevelt's humanitarian policies and the treaty of 1948." Lately there may have been a few problems assimilating the Jews of Quebec, in flight from the ongoing separatist battles there.
This country of the Weinreichs is in the nature of a wistful fantasyland, a toy theater with miniature sets and furnishings to arrange and rearrange, painted backdrops on which the gleaming lineaments of a snowy Jewish Onhava can be glimpsed, all its grief concealed behind the scrim, hidden in the machinery of the loft, sealed up beneath trap doors in the floorboards. But grief haunts every mile of that other destination to which the Weinreichs beckon, unwittingly perhaps but in all the awful detail that Dover's "Say It" series requires. Grief hand-colors all the postcards, stamps the passports, sours the cooking, fills the luggage. It keens all night in the pipes of old hotels. The Weinreichs are taking us home, to the "old country." To Europe...
I know legal terminology tends to the arcane, but this is ridiculous. Apparently in the heading of affidavits there is a line that simply says "ss" between the names of state and county, thus:
STATE OF ARIZONA )And nobody knows what it means. There are, of course, several theories. One is that it means "subsections"; this seems to me shot down by the fact that there are no subsection numbers next to it. Another is that it means scilicet 'namely'; aside from the fact that the normal abbreviation is sc, 'namely' makes no sense here. The explanation that Margaret Marks, from whom I take this item, tentatively prefers (and I'm glad to hear it, because I, a legal ignoramus, like it too) is
)ss.
COUNTY OF MARICOPA )
what Bryan Garner says in Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage: that it was entered once in error and then copied again and again over the centuries. Garner... says it comes from a flourish in the Year Books (unofficial law reports from 1282 to 1537).The law is not only a ass, it is a sloppy and forgetful ass.
A new comment on an old post says:
I have run across the occupation "pail turner" I can't find this on any lists of obsolete occupations so I'm hoping you might either know the answer or have an idea where I might look.Sure enough, if you google the phrase you get a number of old census records resembling "Newcomb Lewis 23 M Pail Turner NH" and lists of occupations like "151 Packer 2. 152 Pail turner 1. 153 Paint store 2," but no explanation of what a pail turner does (or rather did). Anybody know?
Anyone who's ever tried to sell their writing should visit this educational thread at Making Light. Teresa, who has had to wade through many a slush pile, provides a "rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics" (from "1. Author is functionally illiterate" to "14. Buy this book"); wry agreement, humor, outrage, and all manner of psychodrama ensue (including at least one disemvowelled comment). Warning: Teresa's initial post is very long, and there are (at this moment) 362 comments, so allow yourself some time.
Feòrag, way way down the thread, quotes this typically magisterial warning from Dr. Johnson:
Perhaps no class of the human species requires more to be cautioned against this anticipation of happiness, than those that aspire to the name of authors. A man of lively fancy no sooner finds a hint moving in his mind, than he makes momentaneous excursions to the press, and to the world, and, with a little encouragement from flattery, pushes forward into future ages, and prognosticates the honours to be paid him, when envy is extinct, and faction forgotten, and those, whom partiality now suffers to obscure him, shall have given way to the triflers of as short duration as themselves.
Valerie Bloom's poem "Language Barrier" begins:
Jamaica language sweet yuh know bwoy,and continues with marvelous examples of Jamaican idiom ("A ready yuh ready aready?"), finishing up with an expansion of the linguistic dissonance felt by "po' likkle foreign Hugh":
An yuh know mi nebba notice i',
Till tarra day one foreign frien'
Come spen some time wid mi.An dem im call mi attention to
Some tings im sey soun' queer,
Like de way wi always sey 'koo yah'
When we really mean 'look here'.
Mi advise im no fe fret imself,(If you need a crash course in patois, there's a word list here.) The poem is just one element in the syllabus for the Caribbean Literature course (Winter 2002) of the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara; they obviously have to have good course materials to keep students focused on anything but the gorgeous surroundings of the beachfront campus. (Via wood s lot.)
For de Spaniards do it to,
For when dem mean fe sey 'jackass',
Dem always say 'burro'.De French, Italian, Greek an Dutch,
Dem all guilty o' de crime
None a dem no chat im language,
Soh Hugh betta larn fe mime.But sayin' dis and dat yuh know,
Some o' wi cyan eben undastan one anodda,
Eben doah wi all lib yah
An chat de same patois.
A useful table of plurals, collective nouns, sounds, and names for females, males, and offspring (I add the necessary caveat that many alleged collective nouns for animals are more fanciful than real); a second page lists animal adjectives (anserine : goose) and tosses in a few herpetological riddles and jokes. Via wood s lot (via morfablog).
Dan of Swanno sends me a link to a heartfelt description of the agonies of trying to learn how to pronounce Tibetan while looking at the apparently sensible writing system. For a more orderly description of said system, try the Learn Tibetan page, and you can hear Tibetan read aloud here.
I hope all of you are familiar with the amazing linkhound plep, who routinely ferrets out informative and/or gorgeous stuff from around the world. If not, go there at once; if you know him already, go there anyway, because he's entirely revamped his site, with a clean new layout and striking flower-shaped insignia, courtesy of taz, whose design skills are eminently clear from the Languagehat banner above this post. Bravissimi tutti i due.
A comment by the proprietor of BARISTA in a previous post brought to my mind this wonderful passage from Pound's Canto 80:
" forloyn " said Mr Bridges (Robert)Robert Bridges was a poet who became laureate in 1913; Pound said: "Anecdote: years ago when I was just trying to find and use modern speech, old Bridges carefully went through Personae and Exultations and commended every archaism (to my horror), exclaiming 'We'll git em all back; we'll git em all back'." Frederick Furnivall was instrumental in the creation of the OED and one of the dramatis personae of The Meaning of Everything (a Christmas present I am very much looking forward to reading); S. Weir Mitchell was a Philadelphia neurologist and writer (known especially for his historical novels, perhaps the reason he appears here); and forloyn (normatively spelled forloin) is an old hunting term meaning 'To leave (the pack) far behind' or (as a noun) 'The action of forloining' (according to—what else?—the OED): "When a Hound meeteth a Chase, and goeth away with it far before the rest, then say, he Foreloyneth." Alas, despite Bridges' antiquarian hopes, "the Cantos is very likely the one modern work in which the word forloyn can be found" (Kenner, The Pound Era, 94).
" we'll get 'em all back "
meaning archaic words and there had been a fine old fellow
named Furnivall and Dr Weir Mitchell collected
Weir Mitchell was quite a character; this medical-eponym site has an extensive biography and bibliography (and even quotes a couple of his poems), and includes this striking passage:
Weir Mitchell was a legendary character whose portraits show him as a handsome man. His rather gaunt features and bearded face make one readily understand why he was likened by many people at the time to «Uncle Sam». He was a superb conversationalist and his personality and humour gave him a wide range of friends. He actively promoted young people who he thought were outstanding, most notably John Shaw Billings (1838-1913) and Hydeio Noguchi (1876-1928).Mitchell was famous for his sometimes eccentric approach to patients with functional illnesses. He was asked to see a patient who was thought to be dying, and soon sent all the attendants and assistants from the room, emerging a little later. Asked whether she had any chance of recovery, he said «Yes she will be coming out in a few minutes, I have set her sheets on fire. A clear-cut case of hysteria!»
Another story is that he was confronted with a lady who had a similar problem and having tried all the tricks he knew to induce her to leave her bed, threatened her with rape and commenced to undress. He got to his undergarments when the woman fled the room screaming! These stories may have grown with the years since in many ways he was rather prim, and Freud’s writing shocked him. He is said to have thrown a book on psychoanalysis into his fire, exclaiming, «Where did this filthy thing come from?»
Courtesy of the ever-jocular Des, sole proprietor of the multifaceted webpublication Desbladet ("på nätet sedan 2001"):
What's that, Tezza?(I for one am inordinately fond of the British nickname formation employed here, exemplified most notoriously by Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne, "the Geordie comedian and occasional footballer.")Homo sum; nihil humanum a me alienum puto.
I am human, and I for one welcome our new alien overlords.
Terentius ("Terence")
Incidentally, should you for some inexplicable reason wish to see this joke in its original context, you will have to go to the 'bladet and scroll down to 2004-02-05 10:28, Smörgåspost. I won't say that permalinks are bloggered, because the good Herr Von Bladet doesn't use Blogger but rather an even more antiquated and creaky blogpostmanufacturesystem called Diaryland, but I will say that when I attempted to access the alleged permalink for this entry I got a page that began cheerfully "Hi! You've hit the error page for Diaryland. Lucky you!" I can't begin to tell you how lucky I feel.
A sentence in today's NY Times story about the Massachusetts Supreme Court caught my eye: "Several legal experts said all seven justices were highly qualified, and that Justice Sosman and Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, in particular, were known for their sharp and probative intelligence." How do people feel about this use of probative (where I would use probing)? Merriam-Webster's gives as a first definition "serving to test or try: exploratory," and I presume they take this from the OED's "Having the quality or function of testing; serving or designed for trial or probation; probationary. Now rare." But the OED's last citation is from a couple of centuries ago, and I've never seen the word used in any other way than Webster's second definition (chronologically, not in order of frequency of use): "serving to prove: substantiating." This is the only meaning given, for instance, in Cassell's, which does not bother with obsolete uses. So: is the Times wrong, or simply behind the times?
From Nancy Gandhi's under the fire star:
In the Urdu alphabet, the short vowels are not written. So, if you read chaat you will see an 'a'; but the letters 'cht' could be pronounced chat, chit or chut. Chat means 'roof,' but chut is a part of the female body. Once a friend of mine who was an Urdu teacher told me that in the school where he taught foreigners, one of the early reading tests always included the sentence, "When it is hot, I sleep on the roof." Invariably, some poor sucker would read, "When it is hot, I sleep on the (female body part)," and all the teachers would snicker like little boys. I guess it shows that embarrassment is an excellent way to imprint something in one's memory.
My friend Nick Jainschigg has sent me a link to a Finnish site, coloria.net, that appears to contain investigations of all sorts of color-related phenomena. I say "appears" because my Finnish is, sadly, nil; of course I have dictionaries (though poor ones), and when I get the chance I'll play with them a little, but basically it's going to remain a closed book to me... with the important exception of the color pages themselves. If you click on the color boxes under the heading VÄRIT on the left, you are taken to pages featuring the color you clicked, and each one has a section labeled etymologiaa... that begins (for reasons that escape me) with an etymology of the English word, black for example:
Englannin black (tullut käyttöön ennen 1100-lukua) juontuu vanhan englannin sanoista blac, blæc, blak - ja on sukua esim. vanhan yläsaksan blah, blach; ehkä peräisin latinan polttamista tarkoittavasta sanasta flagrare (kreikk. phlegein). Sana tarkoittaa kirjaimellisesti 'kaiken valon imevä'.It continues with an amazing collection of words for that color in as many languages as they could find:
engl. black; keskienglanti blak; vanha englanti blæc · ranska noir · italia nero · espanja negro · lombardia negher · portugali negro, preto · romania negru · esperanto nigra, nigro; nigreco (mustuus); nigrega (sysimusta) · papiamento preto, pretu · sranan blaka · saksa schwarz; vanha saksa blach, blah; baijerin murre schwoarz · hollanti zwart · friisi swart · afrikaans swart · gootit swarts · ruotsi svart; bläck ('muste') · islanti svartur, blakkr (tumma, mustahko) · tanska blæk, sort · norja svart · gaeli dubh · vanha iiri dub · iiri dub, dubh · anglosaksit blæc · bretoni du · walesin kieli du · baski beltz · kreikka kelainós; melas, melan (tumma) · heprea shahor · latina ater, niger (tarkoitti myös pahaa) · sanskriitti krsna (musta, tumma), niilotpalashyaama (sinertävänmusta) · malta iswed · unkari fekete · eesti must · karjala musta · vepsä must · vatja mussa · venäjä tsornyi, (chërnyy) · bulgaria (cerno) · puola czarny · tsekki cverny´, èerná · slovakki cierny · egypti semeti, km · turkki kara, siyah · sorani (kurdimurre) resh, siya · gorani (kurdimurre) siyaw · albania zi japani kuro, makkuro (sysimusta) ; kunne (ainut) · kiina hey suh; mandariinikiina hêisè, (hei) ; kantonikiina hak, haak · korea kamansayk, kemceng, kkamahta, kkamang, huksayk ('lainasana' kiinasta), pullyak ('lainasana' englannista) · thai (dam) · vietnamThe principles of arrangement are sometimes unclear (what are Ancient Egyptian, Turkish, two varieties of Kurdish, and Albanian doing on the same line?), but the total effect is irresistible.en · tiibet nagpo ·
(Uusi-Guinea) dugum dani mili; mui ; hitigima muli; golegole (Murrayn saarella) · pukapuka uli · tonga uliuli · maori mangu, pango · aboriginaalit? arunta urapulla · guru (Queensland), unma (Queensland), manara (Queensland) · (Filippiinit) hanunóo biru · samal ?etom · tagalog itím, maitím · bisayan maitum · malaiji itam · jaava (irang) · batak birong, (agong) · hawaiji `ele`ele, uliuli · tonga, samoa uliuli · indonesia hitam · malayalam (Intia) (kadúpe) · tamili (Intia) karuppu · urdu (Intia) kálá · tada (Intia) (kârthiti) · kanadan eskimot krernertok · (cheyennet) émo'ôhtávo ('se on musta') · chinook li?el · (navajot) lizhin · (shoshonit) duhubite · (komanssit) tuhani · lakota sapa (likainen) · maidu (P-A intiaanit) sísiw omaha-ponca (sioux) s^a'be (musta, tumma); sa'be ('olla musta') · chiricahua (athapaskan) dilxil · meskalero (athapaskan) liz^i · arawak o-ri · tarascan turí- (Meksiko) · mazatee hma (Meksiko) · ixcatec tiye (Meksiko) · yik (Sierra Popoluca) · mayat (Jukatan) box · (mayat) tzeltal ?ihk, ?ik' · aymara (inkat) cchaara, chara, chaara, ch'iara, llanco, saani, sanni · ketsua (inkat) yana (myös sininen) · uru-chipaya tsoq · yibiri humáksan (Tsad) · somali mado · tiv (ii) (Nigeria) · ibo oji (Nigeria) · hausa baki (Nigeria) · urhobo obyibi (Nigeria) · nupe zìkò (Nigeria) · ibibio ebúbít (etelä-Nigeria) · daza (yasko) (itä-Nigeria) · shona nema, (citema) (Rhodesia) · ila shia · masait (erok) · bagirmi ili (Tsad) · suahili -eusi (Tansania) · nandi tui (Etiopia) · bullom të (Sierra Leone) · songhai bibi, bi (Mali) · dinka macar, car (Sudan) · mende teli (Länsi-Afrikka) · ndempu wuyila (Kongo) · dahomey (wiwi) (Benin)
By the way, many of the Finnish names for languages are odd-looking but decipherable if you squint (ranska, tanska, norja, and iiri are French, Danish, Norwegian, and Irish respectively); a couple of the weirder ones are ruotsi 'Swedish' and venäjä 'Russian.'
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the faq begins:
Can I find your Coloria Website in an English version?
Sorry - you can't and you propably won't. Unless somebody wants to translate the text for free of charge. I have received several requests about translating the site to English. Actually, I originally planned to publish the site in English too but then I realized that my resources are limited. I had to choose between English and Finnish - and since Finnish is my native language and no such site was online in Finnish... Luckily, there are lots of good sites about colours in English already.
A correspondent has kindly pointed me to William Drenttel's explanation (in his blog Design Observer) of the temporary names of newly discovered elements, based on the Latin names of the numbers (so that 111 is "unununium" until it is confirmed and permanently named). If you've been wondering about stories like "Uut, Uup add atomic mass to periodic table," this will tell you all about it. As he says, "Oh, that our cereal aisle had brands named Uuu, Uub, Uut, Uuq, Uup, Uuh, Uus and Uuo."
Watching a documentary on Shakespeare, I learned two new words. John Shakespeare, William's father, was described as a brogger: in the OED's definition, "An agent; a jobber, esp. a corrupt jobber of offices; a broker." What he dealt in was wool, and wool, it turns out, was measured in tods, a tod being "a weight used in the wool trade, usually 28 pounds or 2 stone, but varying locally." He got in trouble for (as I recall) evading duties on a large number of tods. I don't know if this had any influence on the Bard's development, but I like the words.
I am a Dove that represents
the opposite of a raven. I stand
for peace, my skin is so white,
girls admire me. What's the big
fuss about how I look? I always
wonder about that question.
I fly up high, I always
worry someone will shoot me.
I have a lucky life. I am
harmless as can be, because I am
full of peace.
This poem reminds me of the ancient Greek "cicada poem" beginning "makarizomen se tettix" ('we bless you, cicada'), but I can't find it online, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Incidentally, Julia has had her first acceptance, from Spoon River. Congratulations, Julia, and I look forward to reading it!
[Update. USA Today has published a story on Chulym, by Joann Loviglio of Associated Press, that wins David Harrison's seal of approval. (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)]
K. David Harrison, of the Swarthmore Linguistics Department, claims to have discovered is working on a new previously undescribed language in Siberia. The Swarthmore press release quotes him as saying:
"We went looking for a language we weren't sure even existed... It had been misidentified and falsely lumped together with other languages in Russia for convenience and political reasons, and we didn't know if any speakers were left. No scientists had visited them in 30 years, and no one had ever recorded a single word of the language."It continues:
Harrison says the Chulym people continue to practice their ancestral lifeways of hunting, gathering, and fishing, but because of a variety of social, political, and demographic factors are now clearly losing their ancestral language. "They live in six small, isolated villages, often intermixed with a majority Russian population," he says. "Only 35 people out of a community of 426 still speak it fluently, and we didn't find any fluent speakers under age 52. The remainder of the Chulym have switched to speaking only Russian. It's now considered a moribund language."(News story based on the press release here.)Harrison says the unique Chulym number systems, grammatical structures, and classification systems may be lost with the language. Their highly specialized knowledge of medicinal plants, animal behavior, weather signs, and hunting and gathering technologies is also threatened. "Not least of all," he says, "their rich pre-literate oral tradition, including religious beliefs, stories, and songs, will soon be completely lost, both to themselves and to science." Harrison hopes to preserve some of that tradition by returning in 2005 to produce a grammar of the language and a children's storybook.
Now, I'm a little confused, because the only references I can find to a Chulym people (Chulym is the name of a couple of Siberian rivers) are to the Chulym Tatars, who speak a Turkic language. Ethnologue's entry calls it a Western Turkic language and says "Closely related to Shor; some consider them one language." But their entry for Shor has it as a Northern Turkic language, but goes on to say "Some sources combine Shor and Chulym." Either way, if it's Turkic, it's not some amazing new language with a unique worldview, so presumably these aren't the Chulym Tatars but some other group. I look forward to reading more about it.
(Thanks to Bonnie for alerting me to this story.)
This week's "On Language" column by the jovial and often clueless William Safire focuses mainly on the word bogeyman, alias boogeyman. Safire claims there's a transition from the latter to the former in progress; I think the latter is a colloquial/childish version of the former, which has always predominated in formal contexts. A section of the tax code (cited by Safire) is a bogeyman; the thing that's gonna getcha if you don't watch out is a boogeyman. Furthermore, I seriously doubt his hypothesis that political correctness is involved; I certainly never associated the word with the rather obscure racial slur boogie, and I doubt many people do, though (as always) I'm willing to be corrected.
But what really surprised me was his use of the word scarifying in this context:
It's apparent that the boogieman, bogeyman and (in the U.S. South) boogerman or buggabear is a monster, evil spirit, hobgoblin or chimera racing through our language, used by nefarious alarmists to frighten small children and innocent voters. He is known to Germans as Boggelmann, to the Irish as bocan, to the Scottish as boggart and to Icelanders as the linguistically related puki. Earliest citation I can find is in Old French, around 1200, as Bugibu, and in the Middle Ages the dark figure's name became synonymous with the Devil, one of whose names was Old Bogey. There could be a connection with the scarifying ''Boo!''While the verb scarify as a synonym for scare is in most dictionaries, it is usually rejected by exactly Safire's sort of change-resistant language "maven," since the older verb scarify means 'to make shallow cuts in (the skin); to break up the surface of (topsoil or pavement); to distress deeply, as with severe criticism; lacerate,' and hidebound prescriptivists are fond of announcing that there's no scare in scarify. Dollars to doughnuts he writes a shamefaced correction in a week or two, saying the Gotcha Gang has caught him out in his "misuse" and he'll never do it again.
One odd thing is that the piece ends (after a brief history of the outdated slang word broad) with a stray close quote:
No matter how you shuffle this deck, the slang etymology of broad has to do with a piece of paper that gets into mischief. In today's slang, a broad—as Frank Sinatra liked to characterize the fair sex, now treated more fairly—is nicer than a slut but is not as trustworthy as a dame or as companionable as a babe.''You'd think it would have been caught and omitted from the online version, but no, there it is. Another sample of Bad Proofreading in Our Time(s).
Avva has been reading Chandler and has posted about what he finds a strange use of like, postposed rather than preposed (the current use, as in "It was, like, weird"):
"She thought I ought to be willing to throw a scare into the roommate just on the telephone like, not mentioning any names." (from The Long Goodbye)
"Only that half is folded back like, so I guess maybe you can't see it." (from The Little Sister)
This is a quite distinct usage from the currently fashionable one, and much older. The Cassell Dictionary of Slang says:
1 [late 18C+] used to express 'approximately', 'just about' or poss. to draw attention to the subject matter when used prenominally, as in he ran down the road like, and ... 2 [1940s+] (orig. US Black/beatnik) to express 'kind of', 'in a way' or 'so to speak' when used postpositively, as in it takes like ten minutes; I feel, like, sick 3 [1950s+] (orig. US jazz/beatnik/hippie/teen) usu. used as an interjection or to draw attention to what follows, or to indicate uncertainty, or simply as a meaningless filler as in Like man, it's out of sight, Like he drove so fast...The OED, unfortunately and uncharacteristically, jumbles up these uses, but it's easy to disentangle them from the citations (and it's quite something to see the Noctes, Henry Green, and Black Panther all cited in the same entry!):
7 dial. and vulgar. Used parenthetically to qualify a preceding statement: = 'as it were', 'so to speak'. Also, colloq. (orig. U.S.), as a meaningless interjection or expletive.There is a large bibliography of works on the more modern use; I wonder if anyone (say, one of the Language Log crew) knows of good studies of the earlier one?1778 F. Burney Evelina II. xxiii. 222 Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship's taking offence. 1801 tr. Gabrielli's Myst. Husb. III. 252 Of a sudden like. 1815 Scott Guy M. vi, The leddy, on ilka Christmas night.. gae twelve siller pennies to ilka puir body about, in honour of the twelve apostles like. 1826 J. Wilson Noct. Ambr. Wks. 1855 I. 179 In an ordinar way like. 1838 Lytton Alice ii. iii, If your honour were more amongst us, there might be more discipline like. 1840-41 De Quincey Style ii. Wks. 1862 X. 224 'Why like, it's gaily nigh like to four mile like'. 1870 E. Peacock Ralf Skirl. I. 112 Might I be so bold as just to ax, by way of talk like, if [etc.].1911 A. Bennett Hilda Lessways i. vi. 49 He hasn't passed his examinations like... He has that Mr. Karkeek to cover him like. 1929 'H. Green' Living vi. 57 'E went to the side like and looked. 1950 Neurotica Autumn 45 Like how much can you lay on [i.e. give] me? 1961 New Statesman 22 Sept. 382/2 'You're a chauvinist,' Danny said. 'Oh, yeah. Is that bad like?' 1966 Lancet 17 Sept. 635/2 As we say pragmatically in Huddersfield, 'C'est la vie, like!' 1971 'H. Calvin' Poison Chasers xiii. 170 To concoct some fiendish scheme that might like give youse a fightin' chance. 1971 Black Scholar Apr.-May 26/1 Man like the dude really flashed his hole card. 1973 Black Panther 17 Nov. 9/4 What will be the contradictions that produce further change? Like, it seems to me that it would be virtually impossible to avoid some contradictions.
The great Arabic writer Abdelrahman Munif (more here) died in Damascus on January 24 at the untimely age of 71. Had he lived, he might well have gotten the Nobel. I highly recommend Cities of Salt to anyone who wants to understand how Saudi Arabia got where it is today.
Update. Abdul-Rahman Mounif: the Guardian obit, by Abdul-Hadi Jiad. (Via MoorishGirl.)
The NY Times has a regular weekly feature consisting of humorous squibs about life in the Big City. Today's had two of linguistic interest:
DEAR DIARY:I was at a hip New York bar recently celebrating my boyfriend's birthday.
At the table next to us were a group of out-of-towners discussing their plans to visit the Empire State Building the following day.
Needing help with transportation, one of the women turned to our party and said, "Do y'all ride the subway?"
Before we could answer, she asked a follow-up question: "Oh, wait, are y'all from here?"Our group replied in unison, "Yes."
The thoughtful tourist paused for a moment and then quickly rephrased her question: "Excuse me, do youse guys ride the subway?"
Jamie L. Rubin
Dear Diary:Being a teacher and writer of Irish Gaelic—a minority language even in Ireland—and new to the New York area, I was eager to find out if there were other Irish speakers in the city. I found, to my delight, that a group met regularly in a Midtown bar.
Having first arranged by e-mail to meet them, I arrived at the bar and scanned the clientele. Indeed, around a table was a group deep in conversation, and I asked them in Irish if I could join them. "Why not?" came the reply in Irish, and I sat down with them and ordered a drink. It seemed strange to me that none of their names were familiar, but they seemed more than happy to talk to me, if a little puzzled.
After five minutes of inconclusive stop-start conversation, however, one of them finally asked me why I, a total stranger, had joined their group.
Beginning to realize my error, and somewhat embarrassed, I looked around the bar again. This time, behind a screen in the restaurant at the end of the bar, I found my Internet colleagues on their second bottle of wine and amazed to learn that I had, quite by accident, blundered into another group of Irish speakers.
The first group, no less astonished, came up to us before they left the bar and, amid much laughter, we wondered how many more of us were lurking around the city's corners.
Brian Ó Broin
Update. I am happy to report that pf is basically OK (though banged up around the face, minus his Rabelais, and plus a—presumably temporary—stutter) and on his way to Chita; fortunately, he had bought the ticket before his misadventure, and the muggers tossed his passport back to him upon request. You can read my original post in the extended entry below, and get a fuller story on his blog. I must say, he's dealing with all this a hell of a lot better than I would in his place.
I recently wrote about the Siberian wanderings of pf. Well, he's in Khabarovsk and things haven't been going too well:
And just when I was thinking my entries were getting boring. My technique of striking up conversations with all and sundry has a dark side. I'm sitting in the hospital now, with a swollen face and no wallet. And they seemed such nice young men. This makes the second time I've been beaten in Russia, though the good stuff still outweighs the rest. Only thing is without money, things are a little more difficult.If anybody has contacts in Khabarovsk, or knows of any good ways of getting him some assistance, this might be a good chance to increase your karmic level, perform a mitzvah, or just help out a guy in a jam far from home.And no hat. And no glasses. And a concussion, which is a new word for me in Russian, but I've forgotten it. I seem to be having trouble getting things in general in my head straight, but you expect that. On the neat side, one of my pupils is now elliptical, and its long axis is not parallel to the pull of gravity. Nor the short axis, naturally.
Always wanted to see the Russian health system from the inside. I've had a few friends who've worked in it and who've said it's better to die at home than in the hospital, since you're more comfortable there and you die slower. See you soon, I hope.
07:04:18 AM, Sunday 1 February 2004
[Entry edited to replace the no-longer-applicable "Vladivostok" with "Khabarovsk," thanks to the more careful reading of Tim in the comments.]
A column by Stephen Henighan about a subject I've always wondered about: how do Canadians spell? Inconsistently, it would seem:
Standard Canadian spelling follows British spelling in many, though not all, cases. (The British drive on “tyres,” use “aluminium” siding and “realise” that they can be sent to “gaol.”) Like other aspects of Canadian culture, our spelling, in spite of its second-hand appearance, is unique. Part of our inheritance is a system for distinguishing between related nouns and verbs. The laminated card that authorizes you to get behind the wheel of a car is a “licence,” but the bar from which you take a cab home is “licensed.” Your son “practises” a sport, but you drive him to “practice.”My students at the University of Guelph—and even some of my colleagues—are unable to master this system. Many of them write “colour” and “favour” and sometimes “centre,” as a basic declaration of identity, but after that they throw up their hands. Their confusions mirror the inconsistencies of the signs we see around us, where dissonant spellings mingle. Our newspapers offer little guidance. For years Canadian newspapers used U.S. spelling. In the early 1990s the Globe and Mail, in theory, changed to Canadian spelling. Major Southam papers such as the Montreal Gazette switched to an impoverished version of Canadian spelling, adopting “centre” but not “colour”; under Conrad Black’s ownership of Southam, the “-our” forms came into use, though some American spellings (“traveler,” “two-story house”) were retained. Quill & Quire, another editing anomaly, brandishes a house style that juxtaposes the Canadian “offence” with the U.S. “defense.”...
Most younger Canadian writers, even the best ones, spell inconsistently. Michael Redhill, in Fidelity, shuffles between “moulded” and “molded”; Ann-Marie MacDonald, in The Way the Crow Flies, alternates the U.S. “crenelated” with the Canadian “panelled.” While these writers’ lapses are rare, the inconsistencies run rampant in many who are less accomplished. Almost no Canadian writer—not even Leo McKay, Jr., who is a high school teacher in Truro, Nova Scotia, and one of the few Canadian authors who continues to write “snowplough” rather than “snowplow”—can resist the insidious spread of “license” as a noun. Any spelling adopted by high school teachers in Truro, Nova Scotia has become the Canadian standard.(Via wood s lot.)The case of “licence/license” and “practice/practise” shows how inconsistency (also exemplified by hyper-corrections such as a “licenced” bar or an “honourary” consul) is the hallmark of cultural erosion. In the Ottawa Valley village where I grew up, grade four girls from families with modest formal schooling would chant, “‘Ice’ is a noun so when ‘practice’ is a noun you write it with ‘ice.’” This dictum enabled them to disentangle “licence” from “license” and spell “defence” correctly. Such seemingly trivial ditties are the bricks and mortar of a culture...
To state the spelling question in terms of British versus American is to misunderstand it. Canadian writers long ago forged distinctive spelling conventions. The question is why—without any of the passion that swirls around spelling wars in countries like Germany or Romania—these conventions are fraying even as they have been consolidated by the publication of volumes such as the Oxford Canadian Dictionary (1998). My summer reading turned up a “theatre” here, an “odour” there, with other spellings intermittently Americanized; where the authors stumbled, the editors were incapable of picking up the slack. This is not a conscious decision, nor is it trivial: it is evidence in microcosm of a culture that is being forgotten.
Be sure to chase Henighan's essay down with this little rant by Ronald de Sousa; remember:
HYPOURCANADIAN SPELLING is a CANCEROUS TUMOUR!