A NY Times article by Craig S. Smith, "Académie Solemnly Mans the Barricades Against Impure French," describes the sedate, not to say molasseslike, activities of the Académie Française, which "has been toiling for 70 years on the dictionary's ninth edition and has reached only the letter P." (The new edition is online up through the word NÉGATON 'Particule élémentaire chargée d'électricité négative.')
The eighth edition, published in 1935, has 35,000 words, but the current edition is already up to 50,000 and will probably reach 70,000 before the academy reaches the end of the letter Z. The pace is so slow that by the time the edition is done, the early letters of the lexicon will be largely out of date.The academy, founded in 1635 under the sponsorship of Louis XIII's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, has been quietly engulfed by the slow collision of tradition and modernity that remains one of the central dynamics animating Western Europe today...
[Maurice] Druon defends the academy's tempo largo. "We need 50 years to know that a word is really in use and won't disappear," he said. But even he finds progress on the dictionary as slow as ripening Camembert in January.The Dictionnaire, of course, is not merely a repository of vocabulary but a source of admonition as to correct usage; thus when an immortel is moved to address another as "espèce de con!" he will bear in mind that "Le mot Espèce est féminin, quel que soit le genre de son complément" and will treat the expression, if not his interlocutor, as feminine.He says that the academy has fallen off its pace in turning out a new edition roughly every half century, in part recently because of the interruption of World War II. By the 1980's, he realized that with the academicians' sluggish speed and the plethora of fast-appearing new words, the academy would not complete the dictionary before the end of the 21st century.
To restore credibility to the project, he accelerated the process and started publishing the academy's progress in periodic installments that are eventually grouped into volumes. Two volumes have been published so far, taking the ninth edition through the word "mappemonde," or a map of the earth presented in two side-by-side circles. Of the 11,500 words in the second volume, 4,000 are new....
The academy does not use freelancers, as many lexicographers do. Its staff of 10 scholars work through the academy's eighth edition and consult commercial dictionaries, specialized glossaries and the computerized Treasury of the French Language database, which is a nearly complete catalog of the 180,000 French words ever used, including obsolete words.
They prepare words, both old and new, for consideration by the Dictionary Commission, which consists of 15 academicians who meet at the academy for three hours every Thursday morning around an oval table behind a red-stained wooden door... After a civilized lunch, the commission members join the rest of the academicians for an hour and a half in the academy's vaulted meeting room, a hushed temple of maroon suede upholstery and blue-gray silk walls...
Few mortals have ever witnessed the academy at work. The privilege is reserved for monarchs and heads of state, and "no more than 19" have been so honored in the academy's nearly 400-year history, Mr. Druon said.
When asked if a journalist might attend one of the working sessions, he threw his head back and bellowed, "Never!"
(Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)
It's no fun going to one's site and seeing the "bandwidth exceeded" message; I wouldn't feel as bad about it if it were due entirely to actual visitors, but knowing that the bandwidth eaten by both spammers and the blacklist needed to control them is pushing the site over the limit fills me with rage and I want to kick the bandicoot. (No, we don't have a bandicoot, I just like the sound of the word: bandicoot! It's from Telugu bantikokku: banti 'ball' + kokku 'long beak,' just to get some linguistics into this entry.) The good folks at Insider Hosting have been wonderful about these problems, but yesterday was Labor Day, so nobody was manning the defibrillators. Anyway, we're back—resume normal banter, and a curse on all who abuse the internet for filthy lucre.
(It's Tuesday morning, but I'm publishing it as a Memorial Day post to maintain daily continuity. I won't let the pill-peddlers and poker-pushers take that away from me!)
Anybody who loves the writing of Thomas Pynchon should hie them here and read what Gerald Howard has to say about Gravity's Rainbow: the experience of falling on it with anticipation in 1973 ("clearly someone at that publishing house understood the impecunious nature of the Pynchon audience, I noted gratefully"—I felt the same way!) and finding it even better than expected, then the discoveries made on going to work as an assistant editor at Viking Penguin:
One Friday in summer 2004, I spent a memorable afternoon in the half-deserted offices of Viking Penguin going through the thick editorial file for Gravity's Rainbow. There was in this experience the poignance of office technologies past (carbons, telegrams, memos typed on manual typewriters) and the names of the distinguished departed—from Malcolm Cowley, Viking's longtime literary adviser, to other colleagues, mentors, and friends. But there was also the sheer fascination of peering behind the curtain like Dorothy to discover how the levers had been pulled to launch one of the most consequential novels of the twentieth century.I envy the man, and I thank him for sharing his knowledge with us. I also thank the estimable Matt for bringing the piece to my attention. Now I know what I'm going to (re)read after Mason & Dixon...
I knew that the word magnet was ultimately from Greek Magnētis (lithos) 'Magnesian (stone),' which the AHD says is "from Magnēsiā Magnesia, an ancient city of Asia Minor." Merriam-Webster's concurs: "stone of Magnesia, ancient city in Asia Minor." But my problem, as I looked at my map of Asia Minor, was that there were two Magnesias: Magnesia ad Maeandrum ('on the Meander River'), now in ruins, and Magnesia ad Sipylum ('at the foot of Mt. Sipylus') or ad Hermum ('on the Hermus River'), now buried beneath the Turkish city of Manisa (whose name obviously derives from it). So I did some googling to try to find out which Magnesia we were talking about, and what did I find but my old friend, the Elementymology & Elements Multidict by Peter van der Krogt, whose magnesium entry says:
The names magnesia alba and magnesia nigra are derived from Magnesia, Μαγνησια, a prefecture in Thessaly (Greece)... Manganese and Magnesium were abundant in oxide and carbonate ores in this region, and they therefore became referred as Μαγνητις λιθος, or stones from Magnesia. The region also contained large amounts of iron oxides (magnetite, or lodestone, for example) so that the ores were magnetized. That explains why magnesium as well as magnet (and magnetism) are derived from Magnesia, while magnesium is not magnetic.(Emphasis added.) He certainly sounds like he knows what he's talking about... but could my two favorite American dictionaries both get it wrong? The OED records an ancient dispute and takes no sides:
The origin of the Greek terms is uncertain, and was disputed in antiquity. They may refer to an origin in the district of Magnesia in the east of Thessaly (cf. MAGNESIAN n. and a.1), or in the territory of the city Magnesia ad Sipylum in Lydia; on the other hand, Pliny (Nat. Hist. 20. 2; 36. 126-7) cites Nicander as his authority for the derivation from the name of a shepherd, Magnes, who found that the ground on Mount Ida attracted the iron nails in his shoes and the ferrule of his staff.Does anybody know if this can be pinned down once and for all?
Jim Tyson, guest-blogging at Naked Translations, has an interesting discussion of the usefulness of linguistics for translators:
Most linguistic theories involve several levels of analysis of text (I use text here to include transcriptions of speech). For example texts can be analysed from the point of view of phonology – the organised system of sounds in a language. They can be analysed from the point of view of morphology – the way that words in a language can be analysed into meaningful units (or not, as the case may be). Then there's syntax: the analysis of words organised into sentences; semantics – the analysis of the meaning of words and sentences; pragmatics – what people achieve by the use of sentences; and there's discourse – the analysis of sentences organised into larger texts. One popular conception of the task of translation is the transfer of a structure in a source language to a structure in a target language. What are these structures that are transferred?Lots of good examples (even though I wish he hadn't mentioned Chomsky as the linguist par excellence).
This entry was sparked by a sentence in an excellent New Yorker piece by Thomas A. Bass called "The Spy Who Loved Us" (unfortunately not online, but you can get a summary here). It's about Pham Xuan An, who served simultaneously as a Time correspondent in Saigon and a high-ranking North Vietnamese spy, and the sentence in question is this: "Dominating the far end of the room is an altar covered with flowers, bowls of fruit, and four hand-tinted photographs of Mai Chi Tho's parents and his two famous brothers: Dinh Duc Thien, the two-star general who helped build the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and Le Duc Tho, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who snookered Henry Kissinger at the Paris Peace Accords."
Before I continue, I have to explain how Vietnamese names work. Fortunately, this site has done it for me, so all I have to do is quote:
Vietnamese names put the family name first followed by the middle and given names. Take Pham Van Duc, for example, Pham is the family name or what we call the last name. Van is the individual's middle name, and Duc is the given or first name.The only notable exception to the last rule is Ho Chi Minh, known as President (or Uncle) Ho. (On the other hand, Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, was General Minh, or "Big Minh.") Of course, Ho was not his original family name (it was Nguyen), which brings up the other important issue, that of noms de guerre. No self-respecting revolutionary (aside from Mao) uses his or her birth name, so the family relationships among Communists are often not apparent on the surface. The sentence I quoted from the New Yorker article is a sterling example; it turns out (after much digging) that their family name is not Mai, Dinh, or Le, but rather Phan: Le Duc Tho was originally Phan Dinh Khai, Dinh Duc Thien was Phan Dinh Dinh (found here), and Mai Chi Tho was apparently Phan Dinh Dong (only here, in the not very clear entry "Mai Chi Tho Phan Ðinh Ðông, Hôi ky, tomes 1 et 2, nhà xuât-ban Tre 2001"—but it's gotta be him, right?). I wonder whether the legendary New Yorker fact-checkers went to all that trouble? Nah, they probably have a book that lists all Vietnamese public figures with birth names and pseudonyms. I'm jealous.Vietnam has about 300 family or clan names. The most common are Le, Pham, Tran, Ngo, Vu, Do, Dao, Duong, Dang, Dinh, Hoang and Nguyen—the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith. About 50 percent of Vietnamese have the family name Nguyen.
The given name, which appears last, is the name used to address someone, preceded by the appropriate title. Nguyen Van Lu, for example, would be called Mr. Lu.
(Oh, one other thing: Vietnamese has two d's, one plain and one with a bar through it; the latter is like an English d, but the former is pronounced y in the south and z in the north, so that Ngo Dinh Diem, really Ngô Đình Diệm, is /ŋo din yiəm/ in the south and /ŋo din ziəm/ in the north. It's a truly annoying bit of alphabet creation; thanks a lot, 17th-century missionaries!)
According to a story from the Sofia News Agency of Bulgaria (so, um, take it for what it's worth), Europe's Oldest Script Found in Bulgaria:
Ancient tablets found in South Bulgaria are written in the oldest European script found ever, German scientists say.The story goes on to quote a Bulgarian archeologist as saying the discovery "throws a completely different light on Bulgaria's history." Me, I'll wait to hear it from more scientific sources, but it's certainly intriguing if true. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau.)The tablets, unearthed near the Southern town of Kardzhali, are over 35-centuries old, and bear the ancient script of the Cretan (Minoan) civilization, according to scientists from the University of Heidelberg, who examined the foundings. This is the Cretan writing, also known as Linear A script, which dates back to XV-XIV century B.C.
Songs of the Russian People, by W. R. S. Ralston (1872):
This book, despite its title, is a treasure-trove of Slavic mythology, tradition, folklore and ethnography. There are plenty of songs, not only from Russia but every part of the Slavic region from Serbia to Siberia. The songs are used as a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of pre-industrial Slavic peasant life, including weddings, funerals, witchcraft, demonology, games, riddles, and seasonal traditions. Also covered are the details of Russian pagan religion and mythology, with comparisons to related topics such as Vedic and Germanic mythology.(Via Plep.)Lacking are samples or analysis of the songs in the original language (except for a very brief treatment in appendix B), and there are no musical transcriptions or descriptions of dance. However, the massive, well documented, and very entertaining collection of Slavic traditions in this book more than makes up for this deficiency.
Once again, the vigilant wood s lot informs us of the anniversary of Joseph Brodsky's birth and quotes a fine poem, which I will pass on to you:
Letter to an ArchaeologistCitizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it's gentler than what we've been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.1983
(I've corrected the online version from my copy of To Urania, adding italics and changing an errant "that" to "than"; also, I'm pretty sure this is a poem Brodsky wrote in English and thus was not "translated by the author." Incidentally, according to Google, "refujew" occurs only in this poem, so it's presumably Brodsky's portmanteau invention. Verrucht is a German word meaning 'despicable, loathsome.')
I've recently begun reading Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (I suspect this won't be the last post to emerge therefrom), and I have a question about the word lengkua in the following passage from page 82:
Tis then Mason and Dixon are most likely to be out rambling among all the Spices armies us'd to kill for, up in the Malay quarter, a protruded tongue of little streets askew to the Dutch grid, reaching to the base of Table Mountain. The abrupt evening descends, the charcoal fires come glowing one by one to life, dotting the hill-side, night slowly fills with cooking aromas,— shrimp paste, tamarinds, coriander and cumin, hot chilies, fish sauces, and fennel and fœnugreek, ginger and lengkua.By dint of googling (only 9 hits for the word as printed) and my amazing linguistic truffle-hunting skills (I combined the "Malay" in the quoted passage with what appeared to be Malay text in some of the Google results and took out my Malay dictionary), I discovered that the word should be lengkuas, a Malay word for the spice whose Linnean name is Alpinia galanga.
Now, this site has a slew of names for it: siamese ginger, siamese galanga, java galangal, greater galangal, el galangal, el adkham, hang dou kou, stor kalanga, galanga, galanga de l'inde, laos, galgant, kulanjan, naukyo, lenkuas, galanga maior, kha, ka, riêng, großer galgant, herbe indienne, da liang jiang, grand galanga, galanga majeur. But the form galangal seems to be the current English name, used alongside galanga.
So my question is this: is Pynchon's lengkua a simple mistake or typo for lengkuas, or could it be a legitimate (though rare) alternate form? I have too much respect for Pynchon and his love of variant forms to assume the former, but I don't see much evidence for the latter. Persons with knowledge of Malay or other relevant subjects are invited to reply at length, but random comments and jokes are, as always, welcome as well.
Incidentally, the OED has the entry form galingale (used by Chaucer in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: "A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones/ To boille the chiknes with the Marybones/ And poudre Marchant tart and galyngale") and gives the following impressive variety of forms:
(1 gallengar), 4-5 galyngal(e, 5 ganyngale, 6 gallyngale, galigal, 6-9 galingal, 7 gallingale, galingame, galingall, 6-9 galangal(e, 7 galangall, calangall, 6, 8 galengal, 8 galengale, 4- galingale
But that appears to be a different plant. Still, it seems to be historically the same word; here's the OED's etymology:
ad. OF. galingal (garingal), a. Arab. khalanjān or khaulinjān, said to be a. (through Pers.) Chinese Ko-liang-kiang, lit. ‘mild ginger from Ko,’ a prefecture in the province of Canton. The word appears also as med.L. galanga, galinga (F. galangue), MDu. galigaen (Du. galigaan, galgant), MHG. galgan (mod.Ger. galgant).Oh, and if anyone can direct my attention to an online map of Cape Town in its Dutch days (18th century), I will be most grateful. I've found nice history sites but no maps.
The University of Pennsylvania Press is having a book sale; unfortunately, the prices are not slashed so dramatically that they fall into the can't-resist category (at least in my current state of incomelessness), but they have such a rich catalog that I linger wistfully over any number of the titles—Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past, by Brian Stock, for instance ("The essays in this volume are about a segment of the past that runs roughly from the end of antiquity to the thirteenth century. More generally, they are about recollecting the past by putting words into writings. They are equally about the past that is written about and the writing that brings it to life. In other words, they deal with the creation of the past as text."), or much of the Anthropology, Folklore, Linguistics section, for example Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue, by Sascha L. Goluboff ("Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation--headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia--she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue's congregation") and Marshall G. S. Hodgson's classic The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Ismailis Against the Islamic World (Hodgson, who died at 46 in 1968, produced what is still one of the best places to start learning about the history of the Islamic world in his three-volume magnum opus The Venture of Islam).
I learned about the sale via the new anthropology group blog Savage Minds, which bids fair to be the Language Log of anthropology, entertaining and informative. Drop by and check it out.
In today's NY Times there is a travel piece on Le Marche by Christopher Solomon that opens with the sentence "'I bring you a taste of my verdicchio,' says our host as my friend Laurie and I sit down to dinner beside a murmuring fire." The rest of the sentence (like the rest of the article: "He also loves the people, saying ,'They're kind and they're gentle and they're modest and they're slow'") is standard travel-section cliché, but the word murmuring stands out: have you ever heard a fire murmur? Is this a shiny piece of freshly observed reality, or a simple misuse? We report, you decide. (And my thanks once again to Bonnie for the heads-up.)
John August is a young screenwriter (NY Times article) who has such an enlightened attitude toward language I strongly suspect he was exposed to a good linguistics course at some point, and he occasionally lets fly at shibboleths in his blog. This is a good thing, because his blog is dedicated to providing useful information to would-be screenwriters, and since everybody wants to be a screenwriter these days, I presume he has a substantial readership who will benefit from his strictures. See, for example, English is not Latin:
In an email a few weeks ago, my former assistant (and alarmingly successful writer/director) Rawson Thurber apologized for ending a sentence with a preposition. I insisted that he was well within his rights to dangle a preposition, split an infinitive, or break pretty much any rule he’d been taught about English – especially the seemingly-arbitrary ones.Now, that's a bit more forceful than I usually am, but the guy writes movie dialogue, so being forceful comes natural to him, and people who might be bored by a nuanced explanation of the pluses and minuses of each point of view will snap to attention and perhaps be shocked into listening and even thinking.Grammarians come in two flavors. A descriptivist studies the way people use a language, while a prescriptivist tries to lay down the rules of a language.
Prescriptivists are assholes. Ignore them.
Another good rant announces that ‘Data’ is singular with a ferocity that frightens even me! Go get 'em, JA. (And thanks, Bonnie!)
I discovered E-Julie's blog The Language Legend ("Keeping you posted on cool stuff happening in the world of words"), via Naked Translations, which highlights (as will I) a post on Geordie (the dialect of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its surrounding area), which in its turn links to two good sites: Newcastle English ("Geordie"), by Geoff Smith, and the BBC's Geordie Dialect page ("modern times mean that some Geordie words are dying out and North Easterners are changing how they speak"). Now you too can talk like Andy Capp!
Plep links to a useful Wikipedia page on family names around the world. It's a little sketchy, and some of the sections could use a lot of filling in (Russian springs to mind), but that's the great thing about Wikipedia: you can fix it yourself!
John Emerson of Idiocentrism has posted on Buying Books on the Internet, a subject of interest to many of us. He has some useful recommendations and solicits others:
Over the years I’ve developed my own lore, which I'm sharing here, but I’m also trying to find out a few things from my vast readership. I’m especially interested in finding better sources for books in Spanish and in Chinese, and in finding out why shipping from Europe seems to be both slower and more expensive than shipping from other equally-distant parts of the world, such as India and Australia. (Or is it just my imagination?)...One of his commenters has mentioned FetchBook, which looks very useful and has been added to my bookmarks.Please feel free to add comments on any information you have about good book-buying resources of all kinds, including sources for books in exotic languages which almost no one reads.
Kyle E. Chambers, whose "research focuses on the mechanisms, structure, and representations that underlie lexical-phonological development and adaptation across the lifespan," has begun a new blog, tarising, that reflects his interests. As someone closely following the development of a very bright one-year-old, I will look forward to any posts that help me understand what comes out of his mouth!
Language Log has been investigating a very interesting situation. It seems people very often say and write "unpacked" when logically they should be using "packed"; the example Geoff Nunberg brought up in the first post is from the New Yorker: "They had only just moved in; their boxes lay on the kitchen floor, still unpacked." As Geoff says, "it can be hard to spot, even when you've been tipped off in advance to look for it." (Dan Menaker noticed it after three other editors at the magazine had missed it.) Mark Liberman then discovered that it was an extremely common error, and Jesse Sheidlower of the OED pointed out (in Geoff's latest post) that it may not be an error at all; in his words, "unpacked doesn't mean what you think it means." Geoff suggested that the "decisive question... would be whether the writers of these passages would defend the usage if the apparently anomalous use of unpacked were pointed out to them." To which Jesse responded:
I did try to contact the authors of the quotes I provided. The only one I managed to reach was John Derbyshire, who wrote the line I quoted from National Review, so he's conservative, and spoke with a very plummy RP British accent. When I first asked him he didn't see a problem, but when I pointed out unpacked he paused for a very long time, then said, "It's a mistake," and, in a manner typical of linguistic conservatives, he said, "I wouldn't have noticed it, but it's wrong, I won't do it again, I've learned something, it's my editor's fault," etc.Geoff's response is that this shows the usage is a performance error; he doesn't want to call it a part of English unless its users acknowledge it as such. I disagree; to me, it's reminiscent of the alleged "which/that" distinction, of which Arnold Zwicky says "authors who recommend it routinely violate it and... the facts of usage are squarely against it." People who think language should be a certain way even though it's not, even in their own usage, are perfectly willing to condemn their own usage and say "it's wrong, I won't do it again..." You can't depend on users' judgments in these matters, you have to look at the facts of usage, and based on what I've seen at the Log, one meaning of unpacked is '(still) packed.' The fact that it contradicts the older meaning is irrelevant; context will disambiguate, just as it does with other self-contradictory words like sanction.I've asked several more people with my constructed sentence, who continued the trend of not having a problem with it. One was a fact-checker at The New Yorker, who thought it was fine, still thought it was fine when I asked about unpacked, and only when I said, "the issue is that unpacked is here being used to mean 'packed'" did he say, "Oh, yes, that doesn't make any sense at all."
But I'd like to know what others think, and since there's no comment function at the Log, feel free to express yourself below.
Addendum. On the which/that distinction, see Arnold Zwicky's long and interesting followup.
Update. Jan Freeman writes about the controversy and links to a page where you can vote on a sample sentence; Geoff Pullum admits "that we have a lexical phenomenon here, not a sporadic error heard occasionally here and there." Progress!
I had always assumed that press in the sense 'force someone to become a sailor' (as in the phrase press gang) was simply a transferred use of the ordinary verb, but a lively book I've just stumbled on, The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore by J. R. Hutchinson (1914), provided a surprising explanation which I (having verified it with more scholarly sources of lexicographical information) hereby pass on to you:
The origin of the term “pressing,” with its cognates “to press” and “pressed,” is not less remarkable than the genesis of the violence it so aptly describes. Originally the man who was required for the king’s service at sea, like his twin brother the soldier, was not “pressed” in the sense in which we now use the term. He was merely subjected to a process called “presting.” To “prest” a man meant to enlist him by means of what was technically known as “prest” money—“prest” being the English equivalent of the obsolete French prest, now prêt, meaning “ready.” In the recruiter’s vocabulary, therefore, “prest” money stood for what is nowadays, in both services, commonly termed the “king’s shilling,” and the man who, either voluntarily or under duress, accepted or received that shilling at the recruiter’s hands, was said to be “prested” or “prest.” In other words, having taken the king’s ready money, he was thenceforth, during the king’s pleasure, “ready” for the king’s service.
By the transfer of the prest shilling from the hand of the recruiter to the pouch of the seaman a subtle contract, as between the latter and his sovereign, was supposed to be set up, than which no more solemn or binding pact could exist save between a man and his Maker. One of the parties to the contract was more often than not, it is true, a strongly dissenting party; but although under the common law of the land this circumstance would have rendered any similar contract null and void, in this amazing transaction between the king and his “prest” subject it was held to be of no vitiating force. From the moment the king’s shilling, by whatever means, found its way into the sailor’s possession, from that moment he was the king’s man, bound in heavy penalties to toe the line of duty, and, should circumstances demand it, to fight the king’s enemies to the death, be that fate either theirs or his.Yet another example of the remarkable workings of coincidence, that resented but ubiquitous factor in human affairs.By some strange irony of circumstance there happened to be in the English language a word—“pressed”—which tallied almost exactly in pronunciation with the old French word prest, so long employed, as we have seen, to differentiate from his fellows the man who, by the devious means we have here described, was made “ready” for the sea service. “Press” means to constrain, to urge with force—definitions precisely connoting the development and manner of violent enlistment. Hence, as the change from covert to overt violence grew in strength, “pressing,” in the mouths of the people at large, came to be synonymous with that most obnoxious, oppressive and fear-inspiring system of recruiting which, in the course of time, took the place of its milder and more humane antecedent, “presting.” The “prest” man disappeared, and in his stead there came upon the scene his later substitute the “pressed” man, “forced,” as Pepys so graphically describes his condition, “against all law to be gone.” An odder coincidence than this gradual substitution of “pressed” for prest, or one more grimly appropriate in its application, it would surely be impossible to discover in the whose history of nomenclature.
While looking for something else entirely (the phrase "suit yourself," which (as it turns out) is first recorded in Kipling) my eye caught on the OED entry Suiogothic, which is not (as I had supposed) an adjective for some obscure relative of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths but an archaic word for 'Swedish':
[ad. mod.L. Suio-, Sueogothicus, serving as adj. to Suiones (Sueones) Gothique, which was used to denote the Sviar, Svear Swedes, and Götar (Göthar), older Gautar, the inhabitants of Götland (the southern portion of Sweden).]I'm writing about it not only because it's an interesting, if dusty, word but because if you google it you find that the poor thing turns up only in jumbled word sequences that I believe are spam-catching sites, and I wanted to give it a good home.Swedish; the (Old and Middle) Swedish language.
1759 B. STILLINGFL. tr. Linnæus' Orat. Trav. in Misc. Tracts (1762) 16 Its name, still used among the Suegothic vulgar. 1797 Encycl. Brit. (ed. 3) VIII. 23/1 Of this Woden many wonderful things are related in the Sueo-gothic chronicles. 1814 JAMIESON Hermes Scythicus I. 12 Alemannic ostar, Suio-Gothic öster, Islandic austr, oriens. Ibid. II. 4 To the Islandic, the Suio-Gothic, including the ancient language of Sweden, is very nearly allied.
(Note, by the way, the primitive, chant-like rhythm of the first Jamieson quote; I can imagine Carl Orff setting it in a hypothetical Carmina Etymologica: A-le-man-nic OS-tar! SUI-o-goth-ic ÖS-ter! IS-LAND-ic AUS-tr! O-RI-ENS!! Or, now that I think of it, it would make a nice cheerleading chant for the football team of Miskatonic U.)
As a followup to my earlier post on words for 'butterfly,' I offer you the funny and erudite reflections of Q. Pheevr on the English word:
Still, butterfly is a funny thing to call a butterfly, isn't it? It's also not obvious exactly what the compound means—okay, so it's probably right-headed, and therefore refers to some sort of flying insect. But what, exactly, is the relation between the 'butter' part and the 'fly' part? (OED sez: "The reason of the name is unknown," but offers some speculation, to which I return below.) There are several possibilities. I hope that the Language Loggers will forgive me for saying this, but Sanskrit has at least four words for 'compound', and I intend to use them here to illustrate the multiplicity of possible meanings of butterfly.And so he does; I'll quote here my favorite:
Butterfly could be a tatpurusha compound, in which the relation is one of interaction rather than resemblance. For example, a butterfly could be an insect that eats butter, in which case one would have to wonder, as Alice did of the bread-and-butter fly, how it could possibly survive without human intervention. Or it could be quite the reverse—an insect that shits butter, as suggested by the OED: "Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in Kilian, which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement." Trouble is, as A World for Butterflies points out, butterflies don't shit. (Caterpillars do, though, and apparently there is one species that, thanks to a diet of yellow flowers, does emit appropriately coloured frass. (Yes, caterpillar shit is called frass, and yes, it's derived from fressen. The OED defines frass as "the excrement of larvæ; also, the refuse left behind by boring insects," and although I'm sure Nabokov (whose birthday was Earth Day) would have insisted that there are no boring insects, I will not.))Now, there's a man who knows how to parenthesize (and yes, that is a word; Southey wrote (in his "unfinished and, indeed, unfinishable" The Doctor, which sounds quite intriguing from this description and which includes the first published version of "The Story of the Three Bears"): "Sir Kenelm Digby observes... that ‘it is a common speech (but’, he parenthesizes, ‘only amongst the unlearned sort) ubi tres medici duo athei’.").
(Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)
Cristi Laquer and Scott Kolp have started a language blog called Invented Usage that looks like a lot of fun, with discussions of language, the distinction or lack thereof between poetry and prose, and a funny exchange between the bloggers about possible names for their prospective blog. Welcome to Blogovia, Scott and Cristi!
The National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution are collaborating on Documenting Endangered Languages, "a new, multi-year effort to preserve records of key languages before they become extinct" as the NEH's press release says. Here's the Program Solicitation with details of the project, and here's a news report by Carl Hartman (thanks, Laurent!).
In the words of The Penguin Companion to Literature 4: Classical and Byzantine, Oriental and African (1969):
The Thai version of the Rāmāyana exhibits marked differences from the Sanskrit epic. Episodes known from Sinhalese, southern Indian and Bengali versions are included, while Khmer and Javanese versions have also influenced its development in Thailand... Early in the formation of the local tradition ancient Buddhist versions probably played an important part.At this site you will find "a line by line translation of King Rama I's version of Hanuman's journey to Lanka, each paragraph of translation following its Thai text," and you can hear it read in Thai by clicking on the RealAudio links. An excellent find by Plep.The only complete Thai version is the Ramakian of Rama I (1782-1809). Invocations and texts of episodes, some intended for performance as dance-drama, are known from the 18th century. Despite the relatively late date of such manuscripts, the epic has a long history in Thailand. [Edwin Gerow]
Adam Langer, journalist, author, playwright, and filmmaker, has a series of articles in The Book Standard under the general rubric "Enough About Me"; #8, "In Which the Author Hands in His Copyedited Manuscript and Pays Tribute to the Most Unheralded Job in Publishing," contains a number of exchanges with six copy editors, members of a profession Mr. Langer rightly admires:
That’s the way it goes with copyeditors. They perform one of the most important jobs on manuscripts, saving authors from their misspellings, their grammatical errors, their logical and stylistic flaws, and yet, their efforts remain largely anonymous. As for me, I was always a terrible copyeditor. An attention-span problem, I guess. I’m still not sure if “copyeditor” is one word or two... [It's two in Merriam-Webster—LH]The five are Judit Z. Bodnar, Courtney Denney, Dorian Hastings, Steve Lamont, and Betsy Uhrig, and in a postscript he asks the same questions of Jude Grant. Some of the questions are a little silly ("What if you have to copyedit a book that you hate? Can you distance yourself?"), but the answers are usually enjoyable, and I loved the descriptions of each editor's "weapons"—Ms. Bodnar's for example, are:At any rate, I will take this opportunity to pay tribute to one of the most unheralded jobs in publishing by providing this conversation with five highly reputed copyeditors. Their remarks have been edited for continuity; hopefully, somebody else has copyedited them.
Style manuals: Chicago, ALA, Words into Type, Recipes into Type. Dictionaries: Webster’s Unabridged, Biographical, and Geographical. Synonyms and Antonyms (not all that useful, sad to say). Several foreign dictionaries. Dorland’s Medical. Bartlett’s and other quotation sources, including biblical. Several editions of Roget’s. Several world atlases and a few road atlases. Complete Shakespeare and Milton, the King James Bible and Pruden’s Concordance, plots of the great operas, Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. A number of books each on when and how things were invented. A branch of NYC Public Library a couple of blocks away.
Ilan Stavans, subject of an earlier LH post, is interviewed by Christine Lagorio for the Village Voice; his new book sounds like fun:
In his new Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (Graywolf), Stavans pushes the limits of how reference books can be read. He does so by pointing out their necessary imperfections, such as trying to lock a language in its time and place, à la Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. To Stavans, a dictionary takes on many other roles: sharp consultant, witty comrade, flip arm candy, live-in partner. In an ode to the rigid orthographic volumes, he even titles a chapter "Sleeping With My OED."Unfortunately, there are a number of pointless swipes at lexicographers other than the hip, "radical" Stavans. Claiming that "many common curses" aren't to be found in dictionaries is a moldy complaint that a glance at anything published in the last couple of decades should have forestalled, and talking about "the growing dialects that lexicographers fear" is dumb and insulting—the words are the interviewer's, but they seem to represent Stavans' chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, at least as reflected here. On the other hand, we know better than to trust how reporters represent linguists.The book is a brave feat not only because it shows he's got academic boxing gloves on, but also for the intimate vantage point it affords readers. By opening up his personal life, Stavans seems to enhance his linguistic argument, recognizing that this intimacy—e.g., the hyper-detailed description of Stavans's personal library bookshelves and his eight-year-old son's talk of heaven—is part of why people read.
A useful 1982 reference book, Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, by Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington. From the Foreword:
The text of the present book is not a history of bookbinding—although there is a great deal of history about the craft contained herein, and it also discusses the materials used, the notable binders whose names illuminate it, and other useful information. It is rather an up-to-date dictionary.Courtesy of ElizaD at Wordorigins.The succinct definitions and explanations, as well as the biographical vignettes, contained in this dictionary will be a boon to those who seek this kind of information. Those concerned, whether they are practicing binders, technicians, rare book librarians, collectors, or simply laymen, will find this a welcome source of answers to their questions. Not the least of these is the one frequently asked of me during my long service in the Library of Congress as Chief of the Rare Book Division. How can I best treat the leather bindings in my personal library ? But this is only one of the thousands of questions to which this dictionary provides the ready answers. The text speaks accurately and helpfully to all those who will seek it out and profit from the immense amount of information it presents in a lucid and comprehensible form.
FREDERICK R. GOFF Honorary Consultant in Early Printed Books Library of Congress
My wife and I were discussing the delightful character Marvin the Robot when she said "Marvin... what an odd name. Where is it from?" I didn't know, so I looked it up, and it turns out it's from the Welsh name Merfyn (pronounced MEHR-vyn), the name of an early king. The Welsh name was borrowed into English as Mervin, which turned into Marvin by the same process that turned person into parson and (uni)versity into varsity. More fun with etymology! Oh yeah, the Welsh name probably means 'eminent marrow': mer 'marrow' + myn 'eminent.' (M becomes v, which is written f, for complicated Celtic reasons I won't go into here; take my word for it.)
This paper by Quang Phuc Dong* of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology** begins "There is an extensive literature dealing with English imperative sentences. As is well known, these sentences have no overt grammatical subject..." and ends "... it is clearly no accident that many quasi-verbs are homophonous with normal morphemes." However, it is no ordinary linguistics paper, and if you don't at least skim it you'll be missing out on some great example sentences. And if you actually read it, you'll learn interesting facts about some very common words.
*There is no such person.
** There is no such institution.
If you scroll all the way down past the paper itself, you will find the following among other elucidations:
"Quang Phuc Dong" is a nom de guerre (linguistique)... of James D. McCawley, who "created the interdisciplinary field of pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics virtually on his own."
Every time I decide to cut William Safire some slack or just let him be, he does something so egregious I have to drag him once again before the bar of justice. His latest "On Language" column is called "Go To!" and is mostly an unobjectionable discussion of the spread of two terms that originated in sports jargon: go-to (as in "go-to guy") and walk-off (as in "walk-off home run"); he wonders if the latter will undergo the same kind of metaphoric extension as the former. But, being Safire, he's unable to broach the subject he wants to talk about without a cutesy historical lead-in, and since he knows essentially nothing about the history of language and apparently is not subjected to the humiliation of having his column fact-checked, he regularly perpetrates howlers in his tossed-off intros. This time he begins:
The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, obsessively trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood, is observed by a Doctor of Physic and a horrified Waiting-Gentle-Woman. As Shakespeare's most famous villainess cries, ''Out, damned spot!'' the doctor whispers a warning to his fellow witness: ''Go to, go to; you have known what you should not.''Did he even glance at the scene he's quoting? The Doctor and the Gentlewoman, secretly observing Lady Macbeth, are overcome by horrified compassion and exchange murmured comments to each other after each of her outbursts. When she says "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with this starting," the Doctor says, clearly to Lady Macbeth though of course not for her ears, "Go to, go to; you have known what you should not," and the Gentlewoman agrees: "She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known." And regardless of the addressee, the phrase simply does not mean what Safire thinks it means, as a glance at the OED would have told him: definition 91b under go is:The meaning of the imperative go to, four centuries ago, was ''beat it,'' now ''geddoutahere'' or, as those who cherish archaisms still say, ''get thee hence.'' In our time, those two short words have fused into a compound adjective with a wholly different meaning, and that modifier is sweeping the language...
I beg you, Times, exercise some quality control!
Aldiboronti at Wordorigins has been posting so many fine links lately I thought I'd do a roundup of a few of them. English Slang in the Nineteenth Century "aims to provide a conspectus, if not comprehensive then at least covering a wide range, of nineteenth-century English slang"; as aldi says: "It includes general works such as Hotten's The Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words by a London Antiquary, 1859, as well as more specialized books." Dictionaries Published in the United States, 1703-1832 (pdf; here's an HTML cache) is just what the name implies; aldi cites "a few of the more intriguing entries." You can read Chapter 1 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, here ("From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity—that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident—is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word's eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century—chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences..."); towards the end of the chapter are two "examples of the use of a kind of private language":
The first is "Glynnese," created by William E. Gladstone's in-laws, the Glynnes. Writing of Glynnese, Gladstone's biographer Philip Magnus says:Finally, there's the Festus Lexicon Project:The Lytteltons and the Gladstones [Lord Lyttelton and Gladstone married the Glynne sisters] were so numerous and devoted, so quick, eager and vital, that for many purposes they felt themselves to be self-sufficient. They invented a kind of language for themselves, which was formally embodied by Lord Lyttelton in 1857 in a glossary which was privately printed. It was entitled Contributions Toward a Glossary of the Glynne Language by a Student (George William, Lord Lyttelton) . . . Gladstone, who loved to hear Glynnese spoken, did not often use the language himself. But Mrs. Gladstone used it on every possible occasion.[...]The other family with a language of its own creation was the Barings, and they too were well established as members of the social elite. Sir Edward Marsh, a great friend of Maurice Baring, describes the language in his autobiography: "I have mentioned the Baring language, or to speak more idiomatically, 'The Expressions.' It was started, I believe by Maurice's mother and her sister, Lady Ponsonby, when they were little girls, and in the course of two generations it had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety, putting everyday things in a new light, conveying in nutshells complex situations or states of feeling, cutting at the roots of circumlocution. Those who had mastered the idiom found it almost indispensable." Among those who had mastered it were high officials in the Foreign Office, members of the literary elite such as Desmond MacCarthy, and many others. In this circle, the "Expressions," far from being frowned upon, were used as a symbol of unquestioned membership and helped mark off the boundaries of the group.
The Lexicon of Festus (de uerborum significatu) is a Latin dictionary compiled in the Roman imperial period which preserves a great deal of priceless information about the history, society, religion and topography of Rome and Italy in earlier centuries... The objectives of this project are:Well done, aldi, and keep 'em coming!* to make this mass of information available to researchers in a usable form;
* to stimulate debate on Festus' own work, on the antiquarian tradition from which he was drawing and on the subsequent history of the text in the Renaissance and thereafter; and
* to enrich and renew studies on the many particular areas of Roman life on which Festus provides such essential information.
This has been niggling at me for years, and now that the guy is back in Lebanon I'm inspired to ask my readers who know Arabic: is General Aoun's name, which I gather is عون in Arabic, pronounced the same as the identically spelled word 'aun 'help, aid; helper, aide, assistant'? This is one of those times when I know just enough to know that I don't know enough.
The other night I watched a deeply moving documentary on PBS, "Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness," about a heroic Japanese consul who saved thousands of Jewish lives during WWII:
As Japan's consul to Lithuania, Sugihara risked career, disgrace, his life, and the lives of his family defying Tokyo by writing transit visas for refugees desperate to escape persecution. In August 1940, Sugihara spent upwards of sixteen hours a day issuing visas, until Soviet-occupied Lithuania forced the final shutdown of the country's last remaining consulates. In the end, more than 2,000 Sugihara-stamped passports allowed hundreds of families to flee Europe through Russia to safe havens abroad. Today it is estimated that more than 40,000 people owe their very existence to Sugihara's heroic acts of humanitarianism.(You can find many more details, as well as video clips, at the website.)
His full name was Chiune Sugihara, but after the war, when the Japanese government fired him and he was forced to take any job he could get, he wound up working in Moscow under the name Sempo Sugiwara. I wondered about the relationship between the names, and now Bill Poser of Language Log explains what's going on in a detailed post (hint: the pairs of given names and family names are identical, but in different ways). I'm glad he posted about it, both because it informed me and because it gave me a chance to post on this topic and urge everyone to read about a nearly forgotten man.
Anggarrgoon quotes the following news report by Abantika Ghosh:
NEW DELHI, MAY 2 Four months ago, his tribe’s near-miraculous escape from the devastating tsunami catapulted King Jirake to fame. His interviews describing the disaster, and how his tribe was adjusting in their new quarters in Port Blair, made headlines across the world.(The rest of the article is here.) I thought at first that the "10 variants" were those listed in the Ethnologue family tree for Great Andamanese, but all except A-Pucikwar are said to be extinct.
But all that was in stark contrast to the 65-year-old’s quiet and painful death in a Chennai Hospital on April 17—the tribal chief died of brain haemorrhage and consequent paralysis.And apart from the 49 remaining members of his tribe, including Jirake’s grandson Berebe, who was born days before he died, the only other people mourning his demise were a group of researchers from the School of Languages in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
For, Jirake was the last member of his tribe who knew all the 10 variants of the Great Andamanese language. With his death, the trilingual Great Andamanese-English-Hindi dictionary that Professor Anvita Abbi’s team from JNU is working on, has suffered a setback that it will probably never be able to fully recover from...
I had always vaguely wondered about the place name Bikini (after which the famous swimwear was named); now, thanks to an exhaustive investigation by piloklok (Bob Kennedy's linguistics blog, which has been promoted to the blogroll for this service to etymology), I know that the Marshallese form is Pikinni and that this "is composed of pik 'surface' and ni 'coconut'." Now I have only two questions: 1) Is the stress, as my Webster's Geographical Dictionary and the Wikipedia article say, on the first syllable? and 2) What does "piloklok" mean?
(Via Literal-Minded.)
Update. See now Jory Dayne's extremely informative comment in this Wordorigins thread:
Pik and Ni are glossed as ‘plane surface’ and ‘coconut’ in The Marshallese-English Dictionary—and according to Abo, Bender, Cappele & DeBrum, Pik,Ni is the origin of the place name Pikinni. I guess the real mystery, however, is why the Marshallese opted to single that particular islet out for that specific feature, when nearly all the other islets in the whole of the group share almost identical features: namely, a flat surface where coconuts are growing.There is another gloss for Pik, and that is to fly, as in the flight of birds, or flapping. Given the tendency to name places for an apparently arbitrary, isolated event, this seems like it could also be a possibility—perhaps in a storm or what have you; that’s pure speculation on on my part, however.
As for stress, I would offer that PIK(ih)NI was probably the original pronunciation—for a couple reasons.
1. I’m willing to bet that the second ‘i’ in Pikinni/bikini is actually just an excrescent vowel... For instance, the Marshallese word for ‘doctor’ is taktõ (dahkduh)—borrowed from English. It is pronounced, however, as DAHK(ih)Duh. A non-loan word, jerbal follows the same pattern. It is pronounced JEHR(ih)bahl.
So you’re probably looking at the name actually being Pikni, with the excrescent vowel inserted between the two parts to help it conform to custom. Other place names also follow this pattern...
2. The ‘N’ in Ni, is a heavier ‘n’—the doubling in the current spelling (Pikinni) is probably to reflect that (although they have recently switched to using a cedilla beneath the heavy consonants to indicate this). So while the stress would be placed on Pik, the weight of the ‘n’ would give that syllable a stress of its own.
It's worth mentioning, though, that the current pronunciation of Pikinni seems like it has changed to match the one common to English speakers (biKIni). I offer that with the caveat that I have only been in contact with Marshallese who have relocated to the U.S. (although most very, very recently)—so it may just be that group, while native Marshallese are “keepin it real.”
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Also, for languagehat, I had to do a doubletake when I saw that the blog that prompted your query was called Piloklok, because in Marshallese, loklok is a “vulgar term,” technically meaning to wash one’s (female) genitals, but in current usage essentially means ‘to fuck;’ and Pi is the Marshallese transliteration for English word Bee. So I was scratching my head there for a minute. But apparently Kennedy just made it up, so chalk it up to crazy coincidence.
According to a Guardian story by John Ezard:
The Man Booker prize organisation yesterday unveiled a £15,000 special translation award as part of its international fiction prize, whose first winner is due to be announced early next month.About time, say I. But which translator's picture did they use to illustrate the story? Why, none of them, of course; they ran a photo of Gabriel García Márquez! In fact, they didn't even name any of the translators. Calling Rodney Dangerfield...The move has been inspired partly by the judges arriving at a final shortlist in which 10 of the 17 authors wrote in other languages. The winning author would have got £60,000, with nothing, until now, for the translator.
"The judges became increasingly aware of the huge role translators play," said their chairman, John Carey.
Among those in line for the inaugural prize are the translators of Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Naguib Mahfouz, Tomas Eloy Martínez and Kenzaburo Oe. The winning author decides which translator gets the prize, with discretion to split it among several translators.
(Via Naked Translations.)
Reading Fred Anderson's superb Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, with its penetrating insights into every side's point of view and what really mattered in the end (the Battle of Quebec, in which Wolfe and Montcalm so famously fell, was less important to the fate of Canada than the Battle of Quiberon Bay two months later, which put the French navy out of commission and prevented the resupply and reinforcement of Canada), I noticed a particularly telling misspelling in the following quote from the journal of Captain Samuel Jenks, a Massachusetts blacksmith, in an entry written after the fall of Montreal on September 9, 1760: "I fear we shall be kept [at Crown Point] until ye last of November, for ye command is left to Haverland, & I know he delights to fatigue ye provincials." (I should point out that ye is a purely graphic alternative for the, due to the similarity of handwritten y and Þ; he would have read it "...until the last of November..." and so on. I will also point out that he was quite correct, and the commander, so solicitous of his regular troops from Britain, kept the provincials "working on the fort and its barracks despite a terrifying outbreak of smallpox, severe weather, and the utter lack of an enemy threat"; Anderson adds that "there was no love to be lost between the provincials and regulars who together had added Canada to the British empire.")
Now, the commander's name was Haviland, and Jenks's spelling Haverland tells me that his dialect was non-rhotic (did not pronounce postvocalic r). I had somehow got it into my head that the loss of the r sound began later, but as this site says:
In the seventeenth century, most of England was rhotic, but non-rhotic speech was common in the southeast, near London. By the eighteenth century this became a prestige variety. In America, areas colonized by higher-class immigrants from southeastern England, such as Tidewater Virginia and the Eastern New England area, maintained non-rhotic speech, which is why the stereotyped Boston accent is r-less--"I pahked my cah by Hahvahd yahd" being a prime example. The r-lessness resulted partly from these speakers being (or being descended from) speakers of r-less dialects in England, and partly from the contact that wealthier speakers from these regions maintained with London at a time when r-lessness was prestigious.The site also has this nice bit: "a classic joke in the New York area has a student writing 'A tragic hero is one who falls through the floor in his character.'"Other regions, such as the mid-Atlantic states, Western New England, and upland areas around Virginia, were chiefly colonized by Scots-Irish or Western English immigrants who spoke r-ful dialects, and did not maintain much contact with upper-class British speech. (New York City, traditionally r-less, is a slightly differerent story; the area was originally r-ful, but r-lessness grew in the mid-nineteenth century through immigration from New England.)
The High Icelandic language centre (Miðstöð háfrónska tungumálsins) is... well, it's pretty strange. In the words of their manifesto:
But you needn't be Icelandic to be High Icelandic:
The High Icelandic Language movement has its origin in the Icelandic hyperpuristic circles of the nineties. Its members were inspired by the puristic extremities of the nineteenth-century Fjölnismen and the fanatic translation of Goethe’s Faust by Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi. Towards the end of the millennium the movement was nothing more than a few individuals who were unsatisfied with the ‘in their opinion’ moderately puristic endeavours of the Icelandic word-commissions. These men went further where the Fjölnismen had stopped. Lists of purely Icelandic geographical names, Icelandicized proper names and names of chemicals were collected. All these efforts culminated in the foundation of the ‘Language Laundry’ (Nýyrðasmiðja Málþvottahús), which brought hyperpurism into the spotlight...Languages free of foreignisms don’t exist. From a linguistic point of view, there is no such thing as a ”pure” language. All languages (even High Icelandic) have borrowings. But there is a difference between purity and originality. A word like ‘sinkbróðir’ for ‘cadmium’ contains a loan-word, but the compound as a whole is unique in the world. In a way, this kind of genuineness could be interpreted as a form of purity. Still the High Icelandics aim at reducing as much as possible the foreign words in Icelandic that were borrowed after the first written texts. The exclusion of many words won’t necessarily lead to language impoverishment. In order to avoid that, a large part of obsolete Old Norse vocabulary will be resurrected. The result will be a hyperpure variant of modern Icelandic...
The future speakers of hypericelandic won’t necessarily be Icelandic. Every speaker of a Scandinavian language and last but not least every human being on this planet who is interested in Old Scandinavian culture is a potential student of Háfrónska. Geographical dispersion is no obstacle anymore in this era of mass media. It is uncertain whether we will equal the popularity of Nynorsk, but the phenomenon will be noticed.I can't quite shake the suspicion that this is a put-on ("Hyperpurists were presented as a bunch of clowns..."; the Language Laundry?), but I guess it's real, and I guess it's harmless, though the worship of "purity" gives me the hives—there's just not a great likelihood of these people taking to the seas in reconstructed Viking ships and pillaging the world in the name of Icelandic purity. And they do have nice images of animals with High Icelandic labels. But a word of warning: "If one doesn’t master the cases, one simply can’t speak High Icelandic."
Thanks to John Emerson for the link.
Addendum. See the discussion of the kenning factory (and of "the oddly unscientific and antiquated definition of 'Viking' in the Oxford English Dictionary") at Acephalous.
OK, first go read Gary Shteyngart's The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye (from the Spring 2004 Threepenny Review). It's very funny.
When I return to Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days. The Russian language swaddles me. The trilling r's tickle the underside of my feet. Every old woman cooing to her grandson is my dead grandmother. Every glum and purposeful man picking up his wife from work in a dusty Volga sedan is my father. Every young man cursing the West with his friends over a late morning beer in the Summer Garden is me. I have fallen off the edges of the known universe, with its Palm Pilots, obnoxious vintage shops, and sleek French-Caribbean Brooklyn bistros, and have returned into a kind of elemental Shteyngart-land, a nightmare where every consonant resonates like a punch against the liver, every rare vowel makes my flanks quiver as if I'm in love...That was great, right? The man can tell a story. I
Ann Mason's Bungalow Colony sits on the slope of a hill, beneath which lies a small but very prodigious brook, from which my father and I extract enormous catfish and an even larger fish whose English name I have never learned (in Russian it's called a sig; the Oxford-Russian dictionary tells me, rather obliquely, that it is a "freshwater fish of the salmon family").
He's being disingenuous here, since the Oxford definition is actually "white fish (freshwater fish of salmon family)," but I can understand his ignoring the "white fish" part—written as two words like that, it looks like a description rather than a name. Now, it turns out the English equivalent of сиг (sig) is indeed whitefish, but it took me a while to realize that. First I checked my Russian-French dictionary, which defined it as "lavaret." Then I found lavaret in my Collins Robert dictionary (something of a miracle, as the much larger Larousse French-English doesn't have it), where it was defined as "pollan." This word is not in any of my medium-sized dictionaries, but it is of course in the OED: "A species of fresh-water fish, Coregonus pollan, found in the inland loughs of Ireland." What on earth is a lexicographer doing using an obscure word almost guaranteed to be unknown to the reader, and moreover referring to an entirely different species, to define the French word? Then I determined that the species was Coregonus lavaretus and googled that, and the first hit confirmed that this was indeed the "common whitefish." So why did the Oxford Russian-English choose to confuse everyone by separating "white" and "fish"? Ah well, the question was answered. But fish names are confusing. The OED has the following terms whose definitions include the genus Coregonus: ferra, gizzard fish, gwyniad, freshwater herring, lake herring, mountain herring (described in a quote as Coregonus williamsoni but in the OED's definition as Prosopium williamsoni), houting (Coregonus oxyrhynchus, a name redolent of papyrus), kilch, lavaret ("The houting, Coregonus lavaretus, as it occurs in some European lakes"—now wait a minute, you just said the houting was Coregonus oxyrhynchus!), moon-eye ("a whitefish of the genus Coregonus; a cisco"—but "cisco is "The popular name of several species of North American whitefish belonging to the genus Leucichthys"), omul ("The Arctic cisco, Coregonus autumnalis"), Otsego bass ("The lake whitefish, Coregonus clupeaformis"), pilot-fish, pollan, powan ("It belongs to the same genus as the Vendace and the Pollan, with which it was formerly identified, and is still often confused, under the name Freshwater Herring"), round-fish, shad-salmon ("the whitefish or freshwater herring, Coregonus clupeiformis of Lakes Erie and Ontario"), shad-waiter ("the Menomonee whitefish, Coregonus quadrilateralis"), skelly ("The gwyniad, the fresh-water herring, Coregonus clupeoides"), tittymeg ("A whitefish of Canadian and North American lakes, Coregonus clupeiformis"), tullibee, vendace ("a. A species of small freshwater fish, Coregonus vandesius, belonging to the same genus as the pollan and powan or gwyniad, found in the lake of Lochmaben in Scotland. b. A closely-allied species, Coregonus gracilior, found in Derwentwater, formerly identified with the preceding"), and of course whitefish: "A common name for the fishes of the genus Coregonus, of the family Salmonidæ, found in the lakes of North America, and valued as food." The combined effect of a plethora of local names, changing standards of Linnean nomenclature, and probably a certain disconnect between lexicography and biology produces a mess that makes me pity anyone who tries to match names from one language to another. But I do very much like the word "tittymeg."
Getting back to the Shteyngart piece, for those who are interested, here's the original of the "old Soviet anthem from my youth" (I can't find an audio file, but here's the scanned sheet music—change the 24 in the URL to 25 and 26 for the rest):
Чайка крыльями машет,
За собой нас зовет.
Пионеры, друзья и товарищи наши
Собираются в новый поход.Припев:
Плывут, плывут, плывут
Над нами облака.
Зовут, зовут, зовут
Привольные просторы:
Зеленые луга,
Широкая река,
Родимые,
Любимые
Леса, поля и горы.
And the "old Russian childhood ditty" (mp3):
Пусть всегда будет солнце,(Via wood s lot.)
Пусть всегда будет небо,
Пусть всегда будет мама,
Пусть всегда буду я.
Addendum. My wife thought she remembered hearing the "old Russian childhood ditty" in English, so I did some googling and discovered that it's not so old—by Arkady Ostrovsky, it won a song festival in Poland in 1963. And finding that page enables me to share with you a fine resource for Russian music, the Russian Musical Highlights of the 20th Century, with year-by-year accounts of musical events.
I also disovered that Shteyngart had used the "childhood ditty" in his 2002 story Shylock on the Neva. Time to move on, Gary!
Mark Liberman of Language Log is posting a great series of entries on the function of the well-known Canadian tag "eh": The meaning of eh (describing the findings of a 2004 paper [pdf] by Elaine Gold, "Canadian Eh?: A Survey of Contemporary Use"), Open access eh (the results of a search of Canadian Hansards), Um, em, uh, ah, aah, er, eh (other "filled pauses"), and most recently Canadian "eh" and Japanese "ne" (comparison with a similar Japanese particle). An interesting quote from the last:
Robin Lakoff's 1975 account of English tag questions, based on her introspective judgments, was that such tags "are associated with a desire for confirmation or approval which signals a lack of self-confidence in the speaker." But when Cameron et al. 1988 looked at the distribution of tag questions in nine hours of unscripted broadcast talk, they found that such tags were used only by the participants that they characterized as "powerful" -- in other words, those "institutionally responsible for the conduct of the talk". These were doctors as opposed to patients, teachers as opposed to students, talk show hosts as opposed to guests.This is why it's important to do research rather than depending on introspection and theorizing.
Update. There's further interesting discussion at piloklok, Bob Kennedy's new linguistics blog, which I discovered via HeiDeas.
Natalia Dmytruk, a sign-language interpreter for Ukraine's state-run television, has received the Fern Holland Award at the Vital Voices Global Partnership's fifth annual ceremony honoring women from around the world who have made a difference. According to Nora Boustany's Washington Post story:
During the tense days of Ukraine's presidential elections last year, Dmytruk staged a silent but bold protest, informing deaf Ukrainians that official results from the Nov. 21 runoff were fraudulent...Election monitors had reported widespread vote rigging immediately after the runoff between Yushchenko and the Russian-backed prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych. With Yanukovych leading by a slim margin, the opposition urged Ukrainians to gather in Independence Square in front of the parliament building to protest the results...
The opposition had no access to the state-run media, but Dmytruk was in a special position as a television interpreter to get their message out.
On Nov. 25, she walked into her studio for the 11 a.m. broadcast. "I was sure I would tell people the truth that day," she said. "I just felt this was the moment to do it."And she is. (Via meredithea at MonkeyFilter.)The newscaster read the officially scripted text about the results of the election, and Dmytruk signed along. But then, "I was not listening anymore," she said.
In her own daring protest, she signed: "I am addressing everybody who is deaf in the Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies. ... And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again," she concluded, hinting at what fate might await her. She then continued signing the rest of officially scripted news.
Dmytruk's live silent signal helped spread the news, and more people began spilling into the streets to contest the vote. She returned to work to give the 3 p.m. news, but was not admonished by her superiors. When she finished, she went into the technicians' studio and told them what she had done. They hugged her all at once. "You are terrific, Natalia," she said they told her.
The National Library Service has a very useful page called The ABC Book, A Pronunciation Guide; the symbols used are idiosyncratic (á = able, rate, é = evil, reel, ð = schwa), but the pronunciations I happen to know are spot-on, even the obscure ones:
Hippocrene (hip-ð-KRÉN-é) Publishers, foreign reference works
Rao's (RÁ-óz) N.Y. restaurant
So I'm willing to trust them on ones I didn't know, like:
Boni & Liveright (BÓ-ní and LIV-rít) Publishers (I said BOH-nee, not -nigh)
Brearley (BRÂR-lé) NYC East side private school
CMEA (SMÉ-ð) Council on Economic Assistance
Djer Kiss (DÉR KIS) Cosmetics mfr. (how'd they make Djer = deer?)
As always happens, there are typos, but the ones I've found so far are easily remedied by the pronunciations:
Mujiheddin (moo-JÄ-he-DÉN) Afghan resistance [s/b Mujaheddin]
Pichaco Plaza (pð-KÄCH-ó) Hotel [s/b Picacho]
If anybody finds other mistakes, please put them in the comments, and hopefully someone at the NLS will see them and correct the list. (Via Semantic Compositions, where I learned that Rokeach is ROH-keech, not—as anyone who knows any Hebrew is tempted to say—roh-KAY-akh.)
The Discouraging Word is only updated once a month or so these days, but it's worth visiting, because it provides some real lexicographical entertainment. The latest entry (Sommer prowde with Daffadillies dight, Posted Saturday, April 30, 2005—there are no permalinks) focuses on the word "dight," which I knew as an archaic word for 'adorn'; I probably once knew, but had forgotten, that it was from Latin dictāre 'to dictate, order.' What I did not know was how it had once flourished; the OED says "From the senses of literary dictation and composition in which it was originally used, this verb received in ME. an extraordinary sense-development, so as to be one of the most widely used words in the language." As TDW says, there are 16 primary definitions, but I feel obliged to point out that that the last one shouldn't be there (it's "an erroneous use by Spenser," F.Q. I. viii. 18 "With which his hideous club aloft he dights"—one of the odd Victorian features of the OED is its deferential inclusion of hapax mistakes by Great Writers, which have no more linguistic significance than similar errors made by the man on the Clapham omnibus); I also want to point out definition 4.b.:
To have to do with sexually. Obs.It never ceases to amaze me how many improbable words have been pressed into service by the insatiable Anglophone appetite for sexual vocabulary.
c1386 CHAUCER Wife's Prol. 398 Al my walkynge out by nyghte Was for tespye wenches Þat he dighte. Ibid. 767 Lete hir lecchour dighte hire al the nyght. c1386 __ Manciple's T. 208. 1393 LANGL. P. Pl. C. II. 27 In hus dronke~nesse a day hus douhtres he [Lot] dighte And lay by hem boÞe.
