JAPANESE COMPANY NAMES.

TechJapan has a nice entry on corporate etymology:

In this article, we dive deep into the corporate names of seven of the world's most well-known electronics companies:

* FujiFilm
* Fujitsu
* Hitachi
* Panasonic
* Mitsubishi
* Sanyo
* Toshiba

Inside, we investigate two main areas for each company: what the characters that compose their names actually mean, and how the companies actually got their names.

One of the explanations will have a drastic effect on my pronunciation habits:

"Fujitsu" is actually short for "Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha," or "Fuji Communication Equipment Manufacturing Corporation." By simply taking the first three syllables of "Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha," Fujitsu managed to save everyone from having to write so much. The company changed its name to "Fujitsu" in 1967. "Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha" today exists as "Fujitsu Holdings Corporation."

And here I always pronounced it as if it were "Fu-jitsu," like a cousin of jiu-jitsu. All together now: FU-ji-TSUU! 富士通! FU-ji-TSUU! Thanks to Songdog for the link, and be sure to join his Oscar contest if you enjoy such things.

Addendum. Semantic Composition has an interesting entry about his time working for Sony, in the course of which he explicates the company name thus:

Sony started out as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kaisha, and was dedicated to the production of radio receivers (shades of the Walkman!) and electrical measurement equipment. Readers familiar with Sony only through their consumer electronics may not realize how huge Sony is today in the latter department. In any event, as radios and consumer electronics came to be the company's main claim to fame, they went for a name which both reflected that fact and was easier to sell to English speakers. Sony is claimed to be derived from both "sonus", Latin for sound, and "sonny", because they liked the suggestion of youth that it provided. SC's pet theory is that someone misspelled "Sonny" when silkscreening it onto a batch of parts, and the "sonus" justification was invented post hoc, to save money on having to make more.

CONFUSED.

I am often perceived as a wild-eyed descriptivist, ready to embrace any utterance by a native speaker as valid. Not so! Geoff Pullum wrote an excellent Language Log entry going into detail about what it means for a speaker to make a mistake; as he says, "Speakers will sometimes speak or write in a way that exhibits errors (errors that they themselves would agree, if asked later, were just slip-ups)." I present for your delectation a fine specimen of such an error, hot off the presses of the august New York Times. A Murray Chass story, "Marlins Don't Mind Being Rated as Underdogs in the N.L. East," begins with a rather labored riff on the similarity of the names of Jeffrey Loria, owner of the Florida Marlins (a baseball team, for those of my readers not immersed in the minutiae of American sports), and Jeffrey Lurie, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles (a football team). The third paragraph ends: "Loria and Lurie have never met, never spoken. Once, they recalled, they were confused for the other."

Now, that second sentence makes no sense whatsoever. You want to change it to "...they were confused for each other," which would be perfectly grammatical, but turns out to be misleading, implying as it does that there was one occasion on which Loria was taken for Lurie and vice versa. It turns out, as Chass goes on to explain, that there were two separate incidents: ten years ago Loria, then in minor league baseball, was called by a reporter under the impression he had just bought the Eagles; this winter, Lurie was congratulated by a waiter under the impression his team had just won the World Series. As pointless as these recollections are, if you're going to try to jam them into one sentence you have to do better than "Once, they recalled, they were confused for the other." (For one thing, you can't use "once" to mean "on two separate occasions" and "they were" to mean "each was.") Off the top of my head I'd say "Each has recalled being confused for the other," but I'm sure there are other possibilities. At any rate, what we have here is a stretch of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, but it is not a valid English sentence.

PLUMULE.

I've learned a new word, this time from that delightful (and heroic) writer Nicholson Baker. I was reading the title essay in his collection The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber when I came across this sentence: "And since a large thought seems to wish to pierce and acknowledge and even to replenish many more shoots and plumules of one's experience, some shrunken from long neglect (for every thought, even the largest, tires, winds down, and hardens into a hibernating token of chat, a placeholder for real intellection, unless it is worried into endless, pliant movement by second thoughts, and by the sense of its own provisionality, passing and repassing through the many semipermeable membranes that insulate learning, suffering, ambition, civility, and puzzlement from each other), its hum of fineness will necessarily be delayed, baffled, and drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities—one pauses, looks up from the page, waits; the eyes move in meditative polygons in their orbits; and then, somehow, more of the thought is released into the soul, the corroborating peal of some new, distant bell—until it has filled out the entirety of its form, as a thick clay slip settles into an intricate mold, or as a ladleful of batter colonizes cell after cell of the waffle iron, or as, later, the smell of that waffle will have toured the awakening rooms of the house."

(Pause to admire the waffle smell making its way up the long corridors of the meandering sentence.)

The word "plumule" struck me; it turns out it's pronounced PLOOM-yule [/"plu:myu:l/], and it means 'rudimentary shoot, bud, or bunch of undeveloped leaves in a seed' (it's from Latin plūmula, the diminutive of plūma 'small soft feather, down'), so that "shoots and plumules of one's experience" is a very tasty phrase, incorporating both the visible (as it were) and the embryonic shoots sprouting up from the depths of our lived lives and mulish memories.

And now, for my own pleasure and hopefully yours, I'm going to reproduce the opening paragraph of the essay:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one's hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

And before I go, let me repeat the definition of plūma: "small soft feather, down." Small soft feather, down—isn't that a lovely phrase?

TRAI(T).

I just discovered an important fact about the pronunciation of a common English word—something that doesn't happen very often any more. A comment in a (silly) MetaFilter thread informed me that the word trait was traditionally pronounced exactly like tray, at least in the UK; in other words, the final -t is (or was supposed to be) silent. (The OED lists both pronunciations, "tray" first; the 1998 edition of the Cassell Concise lists both, but in the reverse order.) This is not surprising for a borrowing from French, but I had never run across it, and I doubt many Americans have. So what I want to know is: are my UK readers familiar with this pronunciation? If so, is it current, a bit old-fashioned, or something they said back in grandfather's day? (And of course if any Americans are familiar with it, I want to know that as well.)

SHARAWAGGI.

A Wordorigins thread introduced me to an interesting word with a disputed etymology, sharawaggi (with g pronounced like j). The OED does not try to define it, sending the reader instead to the first citation, from 1685: SIR W. TEMPLE Gard. Epicurus Misc. II. ii. (1690) 58 "The Chineses.. have a particular Word to express it [sc. the beauty of studied irregularity]; and where they find it hit their Eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable." As you can see, Temple spoke of the word as Chinese, but the OED's etymologists, while throwing up their hands, cast doubt on that: "Of unknown origin; Chinese scholars agree that it cannot belong to that language. Temple speaks as if he had himself heard it from travellers." In the latest edition they add: "For a discussion of etymological hypotheses see 1949 Archit. Rev. CVI. 391/2." I don't have access to that number of the Architectural review (if anyone does, I'd appreciate hearing from them), but in the Wordorigins thread Douglas Wilson linked to an article, "A Borrowed Vista" by Ciaran Murray (HTML version of a pdf of issue 27 of the Kyoto International Cultural Association newsletter) that provides a very plausible theory:

There have been a number of attempts to fit Chinese characters - kanji - to this word, but none of them sounds close to sharawadgi, and none of them means what Temple meant. However, an English teacher who lived in Japan 70 years ago, a man called E.V. Gatenby, suggested that sharawadgi was a Japanese word. He thought it might be the older form of sorowanai desho - that the two halves of a design did not match. This form was sorowaji.

That’s all he said. He was tracing words of Japanese origin for the Oxford English Dictionary, and he never took the matter any further. When I tried to do so, I immediately ran into trouble. Historians of the Japanese language told me that the form sorowaji died out four hundred years ago. Temple wrote a hundred years later. So how could he have heard a word which was no longer in use?

Now I was like the character in the Arabian Nights who cannot remember the phrase ‘open, sesame’ which will disclose a door in the rock and give him access to a treasure inside. I could sense the treasure inside, but the phrase I had didn’t seem to be working. I puzzled over this for a long time, until at last a friend who taught at Tokyo University introduced me to Professor Kanai Madoka. Professor Kanai was involved in copying the documents of Dejima, which are still kept in the Netherlands, and bringing a set to Japan. And he was the one who supplied my ‘open, sesame’.

Professor Kanai told me that yes, it was true that sorowaji had died out four hundred years ago - but only in standard Japanese. It had stayed alive in the dialect of Kyushu. Now if you try to pronounce sorowaji in kyushu-ben, what do you get? Shorowaji. And if you try to pronounce shorowaji in Dutch, you get what Temple got - sharawaji. And Temple, you remember, was ambassador to Holland.

Now, I have no idea if any of the Japanese is accurate, but if it is, I'd say the etymology is pretty well nailed down (though the Dutch bit seems dubious). And the next time you see an image with a pleasing asymmetry, you can say "Ah, what shawaraggi!"

UNIVERSAL CONJUGATOR.

The Logos Universal Conjugator takes any verb you give it and conjugates it. Well, not any, of course, but a lot of common ones. I put in "go" and got a full conjugation in English; then I tried "anar" and got:

The infinitive of the verbal voice you chose is one of the following, please select the language you prefer.
* Catalan: anar
* Swedish: ana

So I clicked on the first and got a full conjugation in Catalan. And -- my goodness! -- I just discovered that if you click on one of the verbal forms, in this case anat, you get a selection of Catalan passages using it! Wonderful stuff, and I can't thank Songdog enough for alerting me to it.

FREE HIGHBEAM TRIAL.

Unfortunately, the trial period is half over, but there are still a couple of days of free access:

Free Open House - Access millions of articles from thousands of publications including journals, magazines, newspapers, images and more, For Free January 24 - 28! HighBeam Research is celebrating its first anniversary with a present to you: This week only, you get total access, totally free to all the full-text sources plus powerful members-only research tools on HighBeam Research, the most powerful research engine on the Web.

A search on the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield turned up (as the ninth hit out of 1,649) a paper from Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies by Hildegard L.C. Tristram called "Diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England, or what was spoken Old English like?" Bloomfield is only mentioned in passing, but the paper is extremely interesting; here's the abstract:

This paper suggests that diglossia in caste-like Anglo-Saxon societies consisted of O[E.sub.H] used by a very, small elite of largely Continental Germanic ancestry and O[E.sub.L] spoken by the bulk of the population. These shifted from British (Low) Latin and Late British to Old English (OE) after the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, in some areas over a period of about 300 years. It is hard to guess what the spoken language of the users of O[E.sub.H] was like and how great the gap between the spoken and written language was. The latter, through intensive networking, was kept remarkably constant over the entire OE period. Speakers of O[E.sub.L] are likely to have produced the attrition of inflections in the NP and the acquisition of aspectual distinctions in the VP. This surfaced in writing only after the whole-sale replacement of the Anglo-Saxon elite by the Normans. Cross-language contact linguistic research has shown that bottom-up language shift of large population groups is likely to produce grammatical (and phonological) contact phenomena in the target language rather than lexical ones. It is therefore claimed that Middle English started to be spoken as a low variety of English not after the Norman Conquest, but not long after the Anglo-Saxon Conquest.

(I presume O[E.sub.H] represents OE_H, ie "High Old English," and correspondingly for O[E.sub.L] = OE_L "Low OE.") And here is the end of the paper:

My conclusion then is that I do not believe in the punctuation theory concerning the sudden rise of Middle English due to a language internal development, although I agree with Dixon that punctuation is possible theoretically. But I would like to know what the purely internal conditions might have been. Nor do I believe in the internal typological restructuring of English due to the effect of the stem initial stress accent or in the deletion of merely ornamental inflections. I do believe, however, that there must have existed a very large gap between the high variety of spoken Old English (O[E.sub.H]) and the low variety (O[E.sub.L]). In terms of population numbers, we may perhaps assume that the high variety was spoken by some 4 or 5 thousand people and that the low variety was spoken by 1 to 2.5 million speakers of learner Old English. The percentage of speakers of the high variety must have been very low (0.2 to 0.4%), perhaps even lower than the percentage of today's speakers of RP as a community language (2%). The low variety of Old English would already have featured most if not all the basic grammatical characteristics of Middle English, but it never entered into the realm of writing, because of the essential caste character of Anglo-Saxon society and because of the elite's exclusive control of the technology of writing. The well-known Middle English dialect zones reflect the former ethnic contact situations which the language of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors in Britain experienced over the centuries, i.e. Anglo-Saxon with British Latin, Brittonic and Old Norse.

Thus the assumption of a substantial diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England helps to explain why, after the removal of the Anglo-Saxon elite, Middle English dialect writing appears to feature such "sudden" innovations emanating or radiating from the two focal centres in the North and in the South West.

CODA

Angelika Lutz (2002a ["When did English begin", in: Teresa Fanego--Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, words, texts and change. Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7-11 September 2000. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 145-171]) has made an interesting case against the tripartite division of the history of the English language by Henry Sweet. He divided its history into Old English, Middle English and Modern English on the basis of the degree of morphological synthesis. Lutz points out that the widely differing views held by various scholars of the beginning of Middle English suggest that the Norman Conquest and its social restructuring of England has nothing to do with the analyticization of English. Instead, she suggests a bipartite division of the history of the English language on the basis of the influx of Romance vocabulary (end of thirteenth to fifteenth century). This changed the language to such an extent that Renaissance scholars did not consider the earlier period to be "English", but "Saxon". According to Lutz, the (partial) relexification of English at the end of the Middle Ages was a more important change of the communicative system than the much earlier loss of inflections and the grammatical changes this entailed (Lutz 2002: 161).

In my opinion, Sweet's (and his followers') morphological and Lutz' lexical criteria resorted to for the sake of the periodization of the long history of the English language do not really exclude each other. They look at language change from different linguistic angles, i.e. the system internal change of morphological structure and the change of the communicative function by (partial) relexification. Because of the views advanced in this paper, I would, however, endorse Lutz's view concerning an unbroken continuation of English across the divide of the Norman Conquest. There was a political divide of ethnic rulership, but there was no linguistic divide as far as the spoken language of the bulk of the population was concerned. The attrition of the inflections and the restructuring of the syntax started with the adult learners of Old English whose native language was Late British and who shifted to O[E.sub.L]. In the Danelaw areas, attrition was reinforced by the contact of the former language shifters with the Norse speaking settlers. To put it bluntly, outside the East and the South East spoken Middle English, as far as grammar is concerned, began in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Like in France, where the result of the contact of Gaulish Latin, as a spoken substratum, with superstratum Frankish only surfaced in writing in the ninth century after the Carolingian Reform, it needed a strong external impetus to adjust the written language to the spoken practice. The Carolingian reformers attempted to restore the "proper" use of Latin in the Empire and thereby allowed the spoken languages of Old French and Old High German to appear in writing (Strassburg Oaths 842 AD, Eulalia 878 AD). Spoken low status Old English, however, could only surface in writing after the demise of Anglo-Saxon culture. Unfortunately, the historical grammars of English never gave credit to the speakers of the "real" language of Anglo-Saxon England.

I look forward to exploring this trove for the next couple of days, and I thank aldiboronti in Wordorigins for alerting me to it.

VANISHED SIMPLIFICATIONS.

A Blogchina article discusses the 1977 round of simplified Chinese characters, which was rescinded in 1986. The details of the characters won't mean much to non-readers of Chinese, but the Unicode situation might:

Scholars using Unicode will find themselves able to discuss the length and breadth of China's Glorious Five-Thousand Years of history, and yet there is one period about which they must remain silent: the vast majority of the characters in the 1977 simplification draft are simply not present. The first sixteen characters in the quiz are all present in a full Unicode font, although 13-16 are in the Extension space. The remaining sixteen I pieced together with eudcedit.

The sinograph section of Unicode has always been a hotbed of political controversy, mostly in the form of nationalism on the part of Japan and the traditional-simplified struggle among China and her outlying regions. I suspect our situation here is much the same, whether through active efforts to exclude the characters, or a simple indifference. With electronic composition and transmission, scanning and indexing integral parts of current-day research, this decade-long orthographic experiment is as if it had never even existed.

Thanks go to Nelson (whose blog, now unfortunately on hiatus, inspired a lengthy LH post on the name Vietnam) for the link.

SALITA BLOG.

Christopher Sundita's Salita Blog "is dedicated to his thoughts about the language situation and the over 160 languages in the Republic of the Philippines." His "obligatory introductory post" says:

Salita is a Tagalog word. Its meanings include word, speech, talk/speak and language. I wanted a word that not only reflects the subject of this blog, but also something that is found in a number of Philippine languages. So far, I have found six more; Ilokano (sarita), Kapampangan (salita), Pangasinan (salita), Rinconada Bikol (sarita), Botolan Sambal (halita), and Tina Sambal (salita).

(If I'm reading my Tagalog dictionary aright, it's pronounced /salitá'/, with stress on the second /a/ and a final glottal stop.) Chris is a man after my own heart; the bio at the end of his essay "Languages or Dialects?" says: "He is fluent in English, Tagalog, French, and Spanish and has a working knowledge of other languages like Japanese, Bikol, Ilocano, Korean, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Hindi and others." I wish him luck in his study of linguistics, and I hope he'll update the blog regularly—there are recent entries on Christmas and New Year greetings in various Phillippine languages and a very interesting entry on noun markers in Waray-Waray and other languages.

I found his blog via a typically meaty post at Sauvage Noble, which uses the discovery of Chris's blog as a springboard for a discussion of Sanskrit loans in Tagalog, including a transcription of a pop song (!) about such loans.

SOVIET SACRAL NAMES.

Mitrius, in his (Russian-language) blog, has a nice post on "сакральные имена в советском тексте" [sacred names in the Soviet text]. I thought the rules were interesting enough I'd provide a summary for English-speakers:
Politburo members' names were pronounced without the normal reduction of final -o: Chernenko pronounced -/ko/, not -/k@/.
Important names could not be broken between lines.
In the '40s and early '50s they could not be abbreviated as were other encyclopedia entries (after the first mention): always I.V. Stalin, never simply S.

There were similar rules for Soviet institutions; eg, Вооруженные Силы [Armed Forces] with two capital letters when referring to the military of the USSR, Вооруженные силы with one capital when referring to other socialist countries, and plain old lower-case вооруженные силы for capitalist countries. Another interesting point is that the adjective from Bolshevik is большевистский [bol'shevistskii] rather than the morphologically expected большевицкий [bol'shevitskii]; apparently the -цкий ending was felt to have a negative tinge. (Thanks go to Avva for the link.)

TARO-ROOT LANGUAGE.

Sarah Roberts, a sociolinguist studying Hawai'i Creole English, has begun a language blog, Namu Pa'i 'Ai, which

will chiefly concern itself with the linguistic situation in Hawai'i (as it is my area of expertise), but it will also cover news and research concerning other pidgin/creole varieties around the world... I will be writing mostly for a linguist and language specialist audience but I hope this blog will interest non-specialists as well -- especially Pidgin speakers and those who take an active interest in the language.

She's posted on Polari (see here for description and Bible translation) and girls being punished for speaking pidgin, among other things. A promising start!

If you're wondering about the name of the blog:

Although "Pidgin" is the usual English name for the language, in Hawaiian it is also known as 'ōlelo pa'i 'ai, which literally translates as "hard taro-root language". This term was originally used in the 19th century to refer to Pidgin Hawaiian (a Polynesian-based pidgin spoken especially on the plantations), Hawai'i Pidgin English (the direct ancestor of HCE), and a mixture of the two languages. Namu pa'i 'ai is a variant of this name and was first attested in a newspaper article in 1887. Namu is Hawaiian for "gibberish", from which the Pidgin Hawaiian word naminami "to talk, converse" was derived. The "hard-taro" metaphor latent in the name is especially obscure and is open to various unsatisfactory interpretations, which nicely evokes the state of affairs in pidgin and creole studies regarding the obscure origins of contact languages and the often unsatisfactory attempts to understand them.

(Via Semantic Compositions.)

CONRADISH.

I've just discovered a wonderful resource for readers of Russian: Conradish.net.

Conradish.net is a website designed for English-speaking people who are studying the Russian language. It began life in 1997 as The Russian-English Literatures Exchange, which was hosted at UC Berkeley's Open Computing Facility. My student account had rather limited disk space quota, however, and as a result, the original website stagnated. Now, at its new location, I'm able to include more literary works and incorporate new features, such as the collaborative translation section.

The main page has a list of over twenty authors whose works are on the site, from Karamzin and Pushkin to Sholokhov and Nabokov, and there are all sorts of special features that make it even more useful: for instance, you can search by the English definitions of Russian words. Searching on "#inquisitor" (the # is used for English definitions) brings up Nabokov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky (of course), and Gogol.

(The introduction says "When you encounter a word that you don't know, poisition your mouse pointer over it to see its English equivalent. For a more detailed description, click on the word," but this does not work for me; I presume you need to download something.)

There is also a Polska prasa section with "newspaper and magazine articles from the Polish press, covering topics ranging from politics to popular culture."

LINGUISTS AND THE WEB.

The Economist has a good article (unsigned, alas, as is the magazine's practice) on what linguists do and why the internet is such a useful resource:

Linguists must often correct lay people's misconceptions of what they do. Their job is not to be experts in “correct” grammar, ready at any moment to smack your wrist for a split infinitive. What they seek are the underlying rules of how language works in the minds and mouths of its users. In the common shorthand, linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. What actually sounds right and wrong to people, what they actually write and say, is the linguist's raw material.

But that raw material is surprisingly elusive. Getting people to speak naturally in a controlled study is hard. Eavesdropping is difficult, time-consuming and invasive of privacy. For these reasons, linguists often rely on a “corpus” of language, a body of recorded speech and writing, nowadays usually computerised. But traditional corpora have their disadvantages too. The British National Corpus contains 100m words, of which 10m are speech and 90m writing. But it represents only British English, and 100m words is not so many when linguists search for rare usages. Other corpora, such as the North American News Text Corpus, are bigger, but contain only formal writing and speech.

Linguists, however, are slowly coming to discover the joys of a free and searchable corpus of maybe 10 trillion words that is available to anyone with an internet connection: the world wide web...

The article goes on to discuss the limitations of the web (for example, meaningless spam sites filled with strings like "When some sandbank over a superslots hibernates, a directness toward a progressive jackpot earns frequent flier miles"), its immense usefulness notwithstanding the limitations, and its appearance in research papers (very recent indeed: an "early paper on the subject" was written in 2003!), and it concludes with this stirring paragraph:

The easy availability of the web also serves another purpose: to democratise the way linguists work. Allowing anyone to conduct his own impromptu linguistic research, some linguists hope, will do more to popularise their notion of studying the intricacy and charm of language as it really exists, not as killjoy prescriptivists think it should be.

Well done, Economist, and congratulations to Language Log, which is favorably cited in the article and from which (via a Mark Liberman post) I got the link. If only other popular periodicals would get that much of a clue!

LA PIZZA.

To celebrate the fact that I'm finally getting my language books back on my shelves, here's a poem in an obscure language. This is not a serious quiz à la Language Log, because the answer is easily googled (many of the words turn up a slew of pages in the language), but I thought it might be fun for people to try to guess without looking in the back of the book. Also, the title and a couple of the lines are funny (to an English-speaker), and even if you get the language, I'll bet you can't guess what they mean!

A la pizza

Pizza, pizza,
munts majestus!
Da vus, da l'otezza
ans vain agüd,
ans vain fermezza,
sustegn e salüd.
Eterna pizza,
munts majestus!

    —Jachen Luzzi

I'll give the answers tomorrow.

UNILANG WIKI.

The UniLang Wiki is "a database of language- and linguistic-related information which anyone can easily edit online." Unfortunately, you don't seem to be able to do much else but edit; if you try to go to most pages, you get "You have to login to edit pages." (Note to Unilangers: the verb is "log in," two words.) But it looks like an interesting project and they have quite a list of languages, so I thought I'd mention it.

STRATA OF SPEECH.

Before the meeting ended, which was not long after, I was set thinking of Despard-Smith’s use of the phrase ‘the men’. That habit went back to the ’90’s: most of us at this table would say ‘the young men’ or ‘the undergraduates’. But at this time, the late 1930’s, the undergraduates themselves would usually say ‘the boys’. It was interesting to hear so many strata of speech round one table. Old Gay, for example, used ‘absolutely’, not only in places where the younger of us might quite naturally still, but also in the sense of ‘actually’ or even ‘naturally’ – exactly as though he were speaking in the 1870’s. Pilbrow, always up to the times, used an idiom entirely modern, but Despard-Smith still brought out slang that was fresh at the end of the century – ‘crab’, and ‘josser’,* and ‘by Jove’. Crawford said ‘man of science’, keeping to the Edwardian usage which we had abandoned. So, with more patience it would have been possible to construct a whole geological record of idioms, simply by listening word by word to a series of college meetings.

      – C. P. Snow (The Masters, 171)

From the eudaemonist, who footnotes as follows:

* Defined by the OED thus:

A simpleton; a soft or silly fellow. So, in flippant or contemptuous use, a fellow, an (old) chap.

Date range from 1886 to 1946, but clustering around 1900 (corroborating Snow).

I wonder what the geological record of a similar gathering today would reveal?

CRISIS.

You will often see references to the alleged fact that the Chinese character for 'crisis' is made up of the word for 'danger' plus the word for 'opportunity' (or, as here, that the Japanese character is so composed). I have no idea how this claim became so popular, but Victor H. Mair at Pinyin.info has done a thorough debunking:

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages... The third, and fatal, misapprehension is the author's definition of jī as "opportunity." While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean "crisis" and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of "danger," the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify "opportunity."... The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis.

There is much more at the linked page, including some "Pertinent observations for those who are more advanced in Chinese language studies." Many thanks to Grant Barrett for alerting me to the link; I should add that Pinyin.info has all sorts of goodies, including a list of Taipei street names in Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin.

BBC VOICES.

From the BBC comes a report on how Londoners speak:

Voices is the biggest-ever survey of how we speak. From January 2005, you can take part and add your voice to the picture.

There's a page of "facts" (some of them dubious: "Women talk 'posher'. In every studied language of the world, females use more 'prestige', 'standard' forms of language"), one on Hackney, and others, but the most interesting one from my point of view is an essay by linguist Laura Wright:

The main regional dialect divide in London is between East and West, with the dividing line being on the eastern edge of the City of London.

This probably marks an ancient political boundary - possibly the boundary between the Middle Saxon kingdom (Middlesex) and the East Saxon kingdom (Essex), which in more recent times became separated further East by the River Lea.

Citizens who grew up East of the Tower of London may (only *may* - not necessarily) have an East End accent, regardless of whether they live north or south of the River Thames.

I'm often told by Londoners that they can tell the difference between a North Londoner and a South Londoner, but I suspect that they are thinking of specific kinds of speakers, that is, working-class ones...

Middle-class speakers don't have a lot of variation in their accent as compared to working-class speakers. Working-class speakers vary regionally because their speech reflects the accumulation of hundreds of years' worth of ancestors speaking on the same patch of earth.

Time-depth is reflected in accent. When you listen to an East End accent, you are listening to speakers speaking English in that neck of the woods since perhaps 500 A.D., or whenever the first speakers of what was to become Old English got out of their boats on the foreshore of what were to become the Tower Hamlets - Stepney, Blackwall, Wapping, Limehouse, Poplar, Shadwell - all the villages along the northern shore of the river.

By contrast, the middle-class London RP accent, along with its sister dialect, Standard English, first became commented upon favourably (ie, we know that it connoted a higher social register) in the seventeen-hundreds...

Thanks to Glyn for the link.

THE CLOUDS.

The hotel is humongous
as high as clouds
the clouds are not small
nor yellow with a picture of blueberries.
They are pink but they still
are not weird like blue
string wrapped around it with
people on top.
Nobody is jumping on them. There is only
a window next door in
the hotel and light pink with
yellow light on
this rainy day.

  —Julia Mayhew

THE PROVINCE OF A SCOLD.

A NY Times story by David W. Dunlap in today's Metro section, "Restoring Elegance Underfoot on a Street Long Past Its Prime" (about the restoration of the cobblestone surface of Bond Street), ends with the following admirable paragraph:

What New Yorkers call cobblestones are more accurately described as Belgian blocks — true cobblestones being rounded and irregular — but saying so is the province of a scold. And it is probably no more effective than insisting that the horse-drawn carriages on Central Park South are not hansom cabs.

That's what I try to do here on Languagehat: provide accurate information without pretending that accuracy is always to be worshiped. I'm glad to know the correct term is "Belgian blocks," but I will go on calling them cobblestones, just as I call tsunamis tidal waves. Let them scold who will!

YIDDISH WITH DICK AND JANE.

A New York Times story by Edward Wyatt reports on the belated lawsuit by Pearson Education, the publishing company that owns the copyright to the Dick and Jane primers, against a division of Time Warner in Federal District Court in Los Angeles claiming that the book Yiddish With Dick and Jane violates Pearson's copyrights and trademarks.

The brisk-selling book examines adultery, drug use and other tsuris that afflict Dick and Jane as adults. When it was published in September by Little, Brown & Company, part of the Time Warner Book Group, Pearson was farmisht and did not take any action. After an Internet video promotion of the book began attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers and the book's sales topped 100,000, however, Pearson decided that the fun was over.

The book, by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, with illustrations by Gabi Payn, states on the front and back covers, spine and copyright page that it is a parody. But the lawsuit says the book "is not a parody, but is an unprotected imitation" because it does not use the copyrighted characters "for the purpose of social criticism."...

In a statement, Little, Brown said the book was "entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment and related laws permitting expression of social commentary."

"This suit aims at the heart of creative expression," the company said, "a position no publisher should take."...

Mr. Weiner and Ms. Davilman said in an interview that they did not understand why Pearson sued. Before publication, they said, Pearson asked for, and received, a prominent disclaimer on the book saying it "has not been prepared, approved or authorized by the creators or producers of the 'Dick and Jane' reading primers for children."

Ms. Davilman said she believed that the lawsuit was "a good old shakedown for money."

A spokeswoman for Pearson said the company would not comment on the lawsuit. Earlier this month, when Pearson filed the suit, its lawyer, Stephen W. Feingold, wrote to the plaintiffs offering to discuss a settlement and saying that it had initially "decided not to sue over a title it thought would not be commercially successful."

That decision apparently changed, Mr. Weiner said. He added: "We're both fascinated and horrified at the same time. We're on shpilkes."

Me, I thought you "had" or "got" shpilkes (nervous energy, psychic pins and needles), but a little googling suggests you can be on them as well. Farmisht (and major props to Wyatt for using it straight-faced, letting the context define it) means 'mixed-up, befuddled.' At any rate, I'm on Little, Brown's side here, and I look forward to leafing through the book next time I'm in a bookstore.

(H)OPE.

Having moved to Pittsfield, I naturally made it a priority to get a library card (the library is wonderfully called the Athenaeum), and the first order of business once I had it was to check out a few local histories. I have just begun reading The History of Pittsfield, (Berkshire County,) Massachusetts, from the Year 1734 to the Year 1800, by J.E.A. Smith (1869, repr. [1990?]), and I cannot resist passing along this sentence and footnote from page 7:

On the heights where Greylock lifts the topmost summit of the State, along the valleys of the Hoosac and the Housatonic, up the rude but flower-fringed wood-roads which penetrate the narrowing opes¹ of the Green Mountains, beauty is everywhere the prevailing element.

   ¹ The reader will pardon to necessity the employment of a word of merely local authority and very infrequent use. A hope — or more descriptively, without the aspirate, an ope — is a valley, which, open at one end only, loses itself at the other, sloping upward to a point in the mass of the mountains. The word is quite indispensable in the description of scenery like that of Berkshire; and its disuse has resulted in the adoption of such vile substitutes as "hole," "hollow," or even worse. Thus we have Biggs's Hole and Bigsby's Hollow, or more probably "Holler." Surely neatly descriptive ope should not be displaced by such abominable interlopers as these.
   WEBSTER has "HOPE, n. — A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.] Ainsworth." — But English local topographical writers sometimes use the word in the sense given it in the text.

Now, that's interesting enough, but when I went to the OED (a resource not yet available to the good Mr. Smith), I found entries for both spellings—with no indication that they are related.

The second noun hope:

[OE. hop app. recorded only in combination (e.g. fenhop, mórhop: see sense 1). It is doubtful whether all the senses belong orig. to one word. With sense 3 cf. ON. hóp ‘a small land-locked bay or inlet, salt at flood tide and fresh at ebb’ (Vigf.).]

1. A piece of enclosed land, e.g. in the midst of fens or marshes or of waste land generally.

2. A small enclosed valley, esp. ‘a smaller opening branching out from the main dale, and running up to the mountain ranges; the upland part of a mountain valley’; a blind valley. Chiefly in south of Scotl. and north-east of England, where it enters largely into local nomenclature, as in Hopekirk, Hopetoun, Hope-head, Dryhope, Greenhope, Ramshope, Ridlees Hope, etc.

And the entry ope, a. and n, definition B.2.a:

2. a. Eng. regional (south-west.). An opening; spec. a narrow, usually covered, passage between houses; = OPEWAY n.

Note the 1886 citation: W. BARNES Gloss. Dorset Dial. 85 Ope, an opening in the cliffs down to the water side. Coincidence, or a misplaced unaspirated form?

Perhaps frequent commenter Eliza can provide information as to whether either of these forms is still in use.

Incidentally, the Smith book is the source of the recent fuss about Pittsfield having the first recorded reference to baseball in America; as the SportsLine story says:

The evidence comes in a 1791 bylaw that aims to protect the windows in Pittsfield's new meeting house by prohibiting anyone from playing baseball within 80 yards of the building...

Historian John Thorn was doing research on the origins of baseball when he found a reference to the bylaw in an 1869 book on Pittsfield's history.

And there it is, at the top of pate 447: "...the exterior [of the meeting-house] was protected by a by-law forbidding 'any game of wicket, cricket, base-ball, bat-ball, foot-ball, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball,' within eighty yards of the precious structure." Whatever they were playing in Pittsfield in 1791, however, it was certainly not the game of baseball as we know it, which was created (in primitive form) by Alexander Cartwright half a century later in Manhattan, true home of the game.

LOVE AND THEFT.

I plagiarize that title from Gail Armstrong, who borrowed it from Mark Ford, who stole it from Bob Dylan, who swiped it from Eric Lott, and who knows where Lott got it? Plagiarism, or more broadly the appropriation of previously written material for one's own purposes, is Ford's subject, and he starts off with the usual suspects (Sterne, De Quincey, Coleridge) before going in a surprising direction: Wallace Stevens' magnificent "Sunday Morning," with its unforgettable ending (which may or may not refer to the extinction of a species; the poem "was composed not long after the death of the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, in Cincinnati zoo on 1 September 1914. The world’s attention was fixed, of course, on other events..."). Ford used some of Stevens' imagery for a poem of his own, which is how he shoehorns it into the essay; whether it's a good idea to juxtapose your own stanzas with those of Stevens is another matter entirely. At any rate, Ford then goes on to an excellent example, and one that warms my heart:

At the other end of the scale – by far the longest work ever published to be based on the principle of the found poem – is Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative, which consists of hundreds of stories taken from law reports and organised according to region, date and category; for example, ‘Social Life’, ‘Machine Age’, ‘Property’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Children’, ‘Railroads’. Reznikoff trained as a lawyer, and worked for several years for the legal encyclopedia Corpus Juris. He became fascinated by the literary potential of witness statements, and in 1934 published the first version of Testimony, a prose anthology or collage based on summaries of court reports. The ‘recitative’ version, however, issued in two volumes in 1965 and 1968 and running to more than five hundred pages, presents its narratives taken from legal briefs in loose, free-flowing verse...

Although Reznikoff avoids revealing the legal outcomes of the cases he includes, we are always aware while reading Testimony of the legal conventions governing the way each story is told. The versification is rarely intrusive; but in a subtle, almost subliminal way, it dignifies and deepens the events that triggered the intervention of the law: the railroad accidents, the cold-blooded murders, the gross examples of corporate negligence, the thefts, the suicides, the labour disputes, the mining disasters, the racial conflicts, the crimes passionnels. The poem also might be said to cast a quizzical, even sceptical light on the titanic efforts of an American Modernist poet such as Hart Crane to impose on American history an overarching, all-comprehending myth or narrative: the sheer multiplicity of its characters and their stories defeats all impulses and attempts to generalise. Reznikoff was active in left-wing circles, and clearly thought of his project as an instrument for social justice; but like the organisers of Mass Observation in Britain in the 1930s, he wisely decided to let the evidence speak for itself.

I am very fond of Reznikoff myself and treasure my old Black Sparrow volumes of Testimony, which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in either modernist poetry or modern America. (Via Open Brackets.)

MOVING/REMOVAL.

We Yanks say the first, the Brits (if I understand correctly) use the second; in any case, that's what we're doing tomorrow. The movers are coming first thing in the morning, we close on the house we're selling in the afternoon, we close on the house we're buying the next afternoon, and Wednesday morning the movers deliver our stuff to the house in Pittsfield. After that a new life begins, and I'm going to have to devote a lot more time to trying to find clients and earn a living on my own. It's exhilarating but nervous-making; the salient point here is that any time spent on surfing and posting will be time not spent paying the mortgage, so posting frequency may fall off until I get my feet on the ground, and in any case it's unlikely I'll be back online before Wednesday. Bear with me, and try to ignore whatever spam accumulates in the crevices of old threads...

Update. Thank you all for your good wishes. I know you'll be relieved to hear that the move went smoothly; in fact, let me put in a plug for City Moves while I'm thinking of it. They did just what they said they would, were friendly and professional, and didn't break a thing. We're getting acquainted with Pittsfield (the supermarket has a good wine department!), and I just bought a do-it-yourself book that will be vital for the series of home improvements we're planning to perpetrate -- in fact, my wife is in the basement replacing a gizmo on the washer as we speak. (We have a basement! And a fireplace!) Unfortunately, something seems to have gone awry with the wireless connection to my laptop, so I'm having to borrow my wife's computer, but I'm sure that will be remedied soon, and I can get back to semi-regular posting. Meanwhile, I miss NYC but I think I'm going to like it here.

LIMERENT.

Lexicographer Erin McKean is a senior editor at OUP as well as editor of Verbatim, "the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson." Yesterday on Public Radio International's show "The Next Big Thing" she said she wanted to bring three obscure words into use (and tried to bribe John Linnell of the group "They Might Be Giants" into using all three in liner notes so she could cite them); the words were contrecoup, craniosophic, and limerent. The first means 'The effect of a blow, as an injury, fracture, produced exactly opposite, or at some distance from, the part actually struck' (OED), and there is a gap of over a century in citations, between 1882 (Syd. Soc. Lex., "Contre-coup.. is often very severe in the skull, for instance, the bone may be fractured on the opposite side to the seat of injury") and a rash of uses in 2003; the second, meaning 'learned in skulls,' has been used only once, in 1819 (in a phrenological context); and the third is the adjective from the noun limerence—the noun, meaning 'The state of being romantically infatuated or obsessed with another person,' is common enough, but Erin wants more citations for the adjective (the latest edition of the OED has three, the latest being from 1998: V. C. DE MUNCK Romantic Love & Sexual Behavior iii. 80 If limerent, she would not have been able to stop thinking about Rhett"). What's particularly interesting about limerence is its etymology, or lack thereof, as explained in this quote from Dorothy Tennov, the word's inventor:

1977 Observer 11 Sept. 3/9, I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever.

The feisty Scottish poet Liz Lochhead promptly used it in The Grimm Sisters (1981): "From limerance and venery/ She flinched as at fire," which would seem to give the word a certain literary cachet. So let's get limerent!

(Thanks to Songdog for alerting me to the show.)

Erin, by the way, is the author of this marvelous paragraph (from the anthology Verbatim, which I will obviously have to get a copy of), quoted at UJG last November:

When someone starts complaining to me about grammar, I listen intently. Not so much because I am entranced by yet another rant about the declining grammaticality of speaking and writing today, but because I am sure to hear an error in the speech of the ranter. It’s almost inevitable. English is a slippery divil; the rules are lagging far behind the caravan, and the inmates are not only running the asylum, they’re instituting managed care and turning a stupendous profit. English is messy, uninhibited, sprawling, and sloppy. That’s what I like about it. It’s a miracle when a good stylist can take the unmangeable tangle that is our language and craft a sparkling, coherent, evocative sentence out of it. In Verbatim, we believe that good writers are good writers not because of the rules of English, but in spite of them.

And Liz Lochhead, in a recent poem "Kidspoem/Bairnsang," wrote this about using Scots:

Oh saying it was one thing
but when it came to writing it
in black and white
the way it had to be said
was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead.

SUBVERSIVE WORDPLAY.

Mark Liberman has a most interesting Language Log post about two forms of encoded language, Vietnamese nói lái and French contrepets. The latter is a form of potential punning that depends on imagined malapropism; as Mark puts it:

These are exemplified by phrases like "que votre Verbe soit en joie", which literally means "may your Word be in joy", but which expresses a less spiritual message if the indicated sounds (not letters!) are swapped: "que votre verge soit en bois" = "may your staff be of wood".

The Vietnamese form is (to me, anyway) more interesting:

You can think of nói lái as subversive communication by means of implied speech errors. For example, in the period after the fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975, residents would say of the obligatory picture of Ho Chi Minh that they would like to "lộng kiếng" = "frame (it in) glass", by which they meant that they would like to "liệng cống" = "throw (it in the) sewer"...

As John Balaban says of Ho Xuan Huong,

the greater part of her poems--each a marvel in the sonnet-like lu-shih style--are double entendres: each has hidden within it another poem with sexual meaning. In these poems we may be presented with a view of three cliffs, or a limestone grotto, or scenes of weaving or swinging, or objects such as a fan, some fruit, or even a river snail--but concealed within almost all of her perfect lu-shih is a sexual design that reveals itself by pun and imagistic double-take.

See Mark's post for examples. (And here's an idiosyncratic but detailed look at how lu-shih works in its original Chinese context.)

SCANDINAVIAN INFLUENCE ON SCOTS.

Or, to be more precise, Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowland Scotch. The Project Gutenberg folks have put online this 1900 work by George Tobias Flom, a fine example of old-style philology, with plenty of examples and appendices and no attempt to appeal to the casual browser. From the Preface:

This work aims primarily at giving a list of Scandinavian loanwords found in Scottish literature. The publications of the Scottish Text Society and Scotch works published by the Early English Text Society have been examined... Norse elements in the Northern dialects of Lowland Scotch, those of Caithness and Insular Scotland, are not represented in this work. My list of loanwords is probably far from complete. A few early Scottish texts I have not been able to examine. These as well as the large number of vernacular writings of the last 150 years will have to be examined before anything like completeness can be arrived at.

I have adopted certain tests of form, meaning, and distribution. With regard to the test of the form of a word great care must be exercised. Old Norse and Old Northumbrian have a great many characteristics in common, and some of these are the very ones in which Old Northumbrian differs from West Saxon. It has, consequently, in not a few cases, been difficult to decide whether a word is a loanword or not...

And here's his admirable explanation of his use of language names:

There has been considerable confusion in the use of the terms Norse and Danish. Either has been used to include the other, or, again, in a still wider sense, as synonymous with Scandinavian; as, for instance, when we speak of the Danish kingdoms in Dublin, or Norse elements in Anglo-Saxon. Danish is the language of Denmark, Norse the language of Norway. When I use the term Old Danish I mean that dialect of Old Scandinavian, or Old Northern, that developed on Danish soil. By Old Norse I mean the old language of Norway. The one is East Scandinavian, the other West Scandinavian. The term Scandinavian, being rather political than linguistic, is not a good one, but it has the advantage of being clear, and I have used it where the better one, Northern, might lead to confusion with Northern Scotch.

An example from his long list of loan words:
Beck, sb. a rivulet, a brook. Jamieson. O. N. bekkr, O. Sw. bäkker, Norse bekk, O. Dan. bæk, Sw. bäck, a rivulet. In place-names a test of Scand. settlements.
He also has a list of Some Words that are not Scandinavian Loanwords. A very thorough job, if doubtless superseded by later works not available for free on this wonderful internet we call home. (Via wood s lot.)

GAIDAR/KHAIDAR.

Frequent commenter Map sent me a link to a Russian story she thought I'd enjoy, Р.В.С. by Arkadii Gaidar; she added that the author was the grandfather of Yegor Gaidar, briefly prime minister of Russia in 1992. I'd never heard of the author (which shocks Russians, who all read him in school), but I loved the story (about two young boys trying to save a wounded soldier during the Russian Civil War). Then I got some further background: Gaidar, whose real name was Golikov, was commander of a special unit of the Red Army, notorious for the brutal murder of deserters and civilian hostages (Russian links 1, 2). This, while distressing to learn, is not exactly LH material, but his pseudonym is. It seems Golikov's unit served in Khakassia (a small region northwest of Tuva; the Turkic Khakass are now a small minority of the population), and the locals were so terrified of their depredations they were constantly asking "Khaidar Golikov?": 'where's Golikov headed?' (khaidar meaning 'to where'). Golikov thought "Khaidar" was some sort of honorific and adopted it as his pseudonym. OK, that story sounds suspiciously like urban legend; I tried to check it out at the Introduction to the Khakas Vocabulary, but they haven't added the words beginning with x (kh). In the unlikely event someone out there can confirm or deny the Khakass meaning, be my guest; otherwise I'll regard it as not proven.

The other thing I'm wondering about is how the pseudonym became an actual family name; lots of Russian writers took pen names, but they didn't pass them on to their offspring—Maxim Gorky's son, for instance, was Maxim Peshkov.

THE NORTHERN CITIES SHIFT.

One segment of last night's PBS broadcast on American English particularly struck me: the one devoted to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, prominent in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo (surprisingly, it seems to be spreading in St. Louis). You can get a description (with chart) here (scroll down to "The Northern Cities Shift") and hear samples here; it's one thing to read about it, but you haven't lived until you've heard a recording of someone saying (what clearly sounds like) "boss" and discovered that what she was actually saying was "bus." According to the Wikipedia article:

The shift is more notable in Caucasian speakers and those who identify themselves with the region in which the vowel shift is occurring. Speakers of African American Vernacular English show little to no evidence of adopting the Northern Cities Shift. The NCS also is not being used by Canadian speakers despite the geographic proximity of speakers in the United States and Canada about the Great Lakes region.

INTERACTIVE IPA.

Paul Meier Dialect Services has a webpage with interactive charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) designed by Eric Armstrong of York University, Toronto, and voiced by Paul Meier, of the University of Kansas.

If you... want to hear one of the "signature sounds" in isolation, or in comparison with other sounds, you may do so using the charts here. Vowels, consonants, ingressives, suprasegmentals, intonation, diacritics, ejectives, implosives, diphthongs, and clicks are demonstrated. Clicking one of the charts below will link you to a Flash animation... Some of the files are quite large and may take some time to load with a dial-up connection, while others are smaller and will load more quickly.

The latest version of the IPA Alphabet was published in 1993 (updated in 1996) by the International Phonetic Association.

In addition to the official IPA charts, we have also provided a chart demonstrating the diphthongs and triphthongs of Received Pronunciation (Standard British English,) and General American (GenAm.)

Kudos for this wonderful link go to CellarFloor's MonkeyFilter post.

Update. See related MetaFilter post.

LINGUISTICS ON TV.

PBS has a program called Do You Speak American? that looks to be a well-informed investigation of issues like dialect and neologisms, with actual linguists aboard. It's being broadcast at 8 PM tonight here in New York; if you live in the US, check their local schedule page for your local time. The website is well worth investigating for its own sake; here's a snippet on Chicano English from this section by Carmen Fought (an associate professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, California):

In Los Angeles’ Mexican-American communities, the Spanish spoken is distinct from the Spanish spoken in Mexico. For example, speakers say Te llamo para trás, a literal translation of the English phrase I’ll call you back — a phrase not used by speakers in monolingual Spanish-speaking communities (in Mexico or elsewhere). The English of L.A.’s Mexican-American communities is also different. It includes a variety called Chicano English that reveals just how thoroughly social context can affect language structure. When recent groups of Mexican immigrants arrived in Los Angeles, they learned English as a second language. Most of us know someone who immigrated to this country as an adult and speaks English with a noticeable “foreign accent.” Like other adult second-language learners, the early Mexican immigrants spoke an “accented” variety of English that included phonological and other patterns from their first language, Spanish. The children of these immigrants, however, generally grew up using both Spanish and English. They used the “learner English” of the community as a basis for developing a new, native dialect of English. Of course, the kids didn’t sit down and say to themselves “We need a better dialect of English than our parents have!” So what did happen, exactly? The way that Chicano English developed tells us something about language, cognition and the human brain.

The emergence of Chicano English is similar in some ways to the development of a special set of languages called pidgins and creoles. A pidgin is a simplified language that develops when groups of adult speakers without a common language come into prolonged contact. It has no native speakers, but is spoken as a second language, varies a lot from individual to individual, and is more simplified in certain ways than other languages. When children grow up in a community where a pidgin is the predominant language, they quickly —within a generation — make it more elaborate (by putting in more complex grammatical structures), and more stable, with less individual variation. This newer variety eventually becomes a creole, which despite its unusual origins, is linguistically indistinguishable from languages that develop in other settings.

Linguists take great interest in how children elaborate and ‘strengthen’ a pidgin’s language structure in this way. How do children know what to add? How do they agree on the elements of the system? Linguists hope to be able to address these complex questions someday.

The history of Chicano English is similar. The non-native English of the early adult Mexican immigrants provided a basis for their children to develop a more stable and consistent dialect, Chicano English. Now Chicano English has rules of its own that set it apart both from Spanish and other English dialects.

By the way, you can’t tell from hearing a person speak Chicano English whether he or she also speaks Spanish. You may think you are hearing a “Spanish accent” because of the influence of Spanish on the development of Chicano English. But whatever you might think you hear, many people who speak Chicano English are monolingual, especially if they are third generation or later. You can’t tell if they are bilingual just from listening to their English. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself.

Thanks to Songdog for the link!

Update. Christ, they're interviewing that idiot John Simon. Ah well, they only waste a couple of minutes on him.... oh no, there he is again! "A society in which the uneducated lead the educated by the nose is not a good society.... Maybe change is inevitable. Maybe dying from cancer is inevitable..." I guess they could have used a subtler voice for prescriptivism; his blatant snobbery is probably a plus for my side. But it sure grates to listen to him.

THE PRIMACY OF RUSSIAN.

The very first LH post was about the "My language is the original language" phenomenon, and here we have a sterling example of it. For non-Russian-speaking readers: Valerii A. Chudinov, professor of, um, culturology and management at ГУУ (the State University of Management, founded in 1919 as Московский промышленно-экономический практический институт [Moscow Engineering-Economic Institute], in case you were thinking it was some '90s fly-by-night creation), although his graduate studies were in physics, has an abiding interest in Slavic mythology and paleography, and when he talks about Slavic paleography he doesn't mean medieval runes—he means "что славянская письменность и прежде всего русская письменность существуют, по крайней мере, несколько десятков тысяч лет" ['that Slavic writing, and above all Russian writing, has existed for at least several tens of thousands of years']. He has found Slavic runes not only on Byzantine icons of the fifth to tenth centuries, but on Greek vases from the second to sixth centuries BC—not to mention the prehistoric cave paintings of France:

And when you begin to work on them [obrabatyvat' 'treat, process; refine, polish'] skillfully, because otherwise the inscriptions are not visible, it turns out that on the mammoth is written mamont ['mammoth'], and on the horse is written dil! This is where the Russian word korkodil [apparently 16th-century Russian chronicles refer to water-dwelling beasts called "korkodily"] comes from. Because the plan of word formation is identical - korkovyi dil - horse from korka ['crust/rind'], and korka is 'scale.' So we don't have a distortion of an English or Latin word, but rather the reverse: the Latin word is a distortion of the Russian: it was korkodil, and it became krokodil ['crocodile'].

Mind you, he's not a dogmatist—he admits that Chinese may possibly be as ancient as Russian ("I haven't touched on southern Asia")—but he's quite sure that all of northern Asia, from Britain to Alaska, "in the Stone Age was entirely Russian."

I'm quoting from the amused summary at i_crust's Live Journal page; those wanting to read the full interview (or just see a couple of photographs of the impressively bearded professor) should go here. And if you're truly interested in his theories, he's got a new book out.

(Many thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana for the link, which made my day!)

ARCHIVE(S).

Iain Higgins' contribution to History and Archives: Sextet, a collective editorial in Issue 178 of Canadian Literature ("Iain, who came on board in 1995 as poetry editor, has overseen special issues on 'Poetry and Poetics' and on 'Nature/Culture.' He wrote editorials in which the creative and the scholarly were inseparable companions, and he was a proof-reader non-pareil"):

Language, said Heidegger, is the house of being, and he may be right, but whatever the case, it is certainly true to call language a house of memory, which is to say a house of oblivion, a house in which things of every sort can be called to mind or allowed to lapse into nothingness. Language is, in other words, an archive, a word as well as a concept that English borrowed from French, which borrowed it from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek, where it originally referred to the public building that housed records and documents. Words in use never stay still, and in a typical metonymic shift—reinforced by a telling grammatical drift into the plural—the word archive has come to refer also to the building’s contents. Archives, that is, are both the container and the contained; like languages, they are the houses of what we recall and what we forget, and the things themselves. What they do not hold, or cannot, is no less important than what they do or can hold. If possession is nine points of the law, then forgetting is nine points of the archive.

We cannot live except by forgetting, any more than we can sense some stimuli except by ignoring others; just imagine if you could sense every thing in its own thisness all the time, from the smallest flutter in your lungs to every single point of light entering your eyes. History—a word whose journey into English followed the same path as archive, only earlier, and which originally meant inquiry—works like our perceptual apparatus, whose seeing is enabled by our blindnesses, by focussing on one thing or set of things to the exclusion of others. That is why there can be no one history, only histories, and these can never be complete, ever.

Between getting it all in and leaving it all out, the possibilities are endless.

(Via wood s lot.)

"Bone, Beak, and Apples," a poem by Higgins with a fine rhythmic flow, is online here.

PRONUNCIATION WARS IN TEXAS.

An article by Simon Romero in today's New York Times Week in Review describes the dispute over how to pronounce Texas placenames of Spanish origin that have long since become anglicized:

JACINTO CITY, Tex. —
Forget the Alamo. It is the letter "J" that is under siege in Texas, at least to Mike Jackson, the mayor of this town near the old shipyards and oil refineries of Houston. Nearly everyday, Mr. Jackson told The Houston Chronicle, he corrects people who he thinks are mispronouncing the word "Jacinto."

To Mr. Jackson, who grew up here, it is "Juh-SIN-tuh." To others, including many newcomers who are part of the city's Hispanic population, which now constitutes nearly 80 percent of the total, it is "Ha-SEEN-to." Jacinto, after all, was originally a Spanish word, so why not pronounce it properly in the language of Cervantes?

The pronunciation of place names is one of those quiet conflicts that are played out everyday throughout the Southwest as the numbers of Hispanics in areas originally colonized by Spain and Mexico continue to grow - and in some cases nudge Anglos into the minority.

Texas is full of place names whose pronunciations confound Hispanics but sound natural to others. Palacios is pronounced "Puh-LAY-shus" instead of "Pa-LA-see-os." Manchaca is "MAN-shack" instead of "Man-CHA-ka." Pedernales is "PER-dan-al-is" instead of "Peh-der-NA-les" and so on. Even Texas should be "TEH-jas," according to some traditionalists...

Linguists studying the evolution of English and Spanish in the Southwest say that [insistence on anglicized pronunciation] is fading. Maryellen Garcia [sic; a Google search convinces me her given name is MaryEllen], a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, noted that many newscasters in Texas now pronounce Hispanic names in the Spanish manner, a habit, she said, that was growing in prestige.

"It's a bit puzzling," Dr. Garcia said. "Even as the Hispanic middle class uses less Spanish, the rest of society is not as threatened by Spanish, perhaps because of the very emergence and recognition of that middle class."

No one knows exactly where the intermingling of Spanish and English in the Southwest will lead. Some young Hispanics in Texas pronounce place names in the Spanish way among themselves, but use the Texan pronunciation when speaking with Anglos. That may be one model.

I'm sympathetic to both sides in this dispute and will be interested to see how it plays out, but I have to say I don't believe for a minute that anyone anywhere pronounces the name of the state "TEH-jas."

CLUNKY COMPOUNDS.

Sally Greene has a blog entry expressing her annoyance with the increasing prevalence of compound nouns over the traditional adjective-plus-noun combination, eg "Law Department" vs "Legal Department," "science issues," "logistics problems," and the like. I too find many of these collocations less than charming, but her final example, "desert island," happens to be wrong: desert in the OED's sense 2, 'Uninhabited, unpeopled, desolate, lonely' (1297 Robert of Gloucester: "The decyples.. Byleuede in a wyldernesse.. That me cleputh nou Glastynbury, that desert was tho") is an adjective, and considerably earlier than deserted (first citation 1629 James Maxwell, Herodian of Alexandria his History of twenty Roman Cæsars: "The deserted Villages"). To prefer "deserted island" is to make the same mistake as to insist on "go slowly" rather than the much older "go slow."