SCRAPIE.

This all started because while editing an article in MS Word for a veterinary journal, I noticed that the spellchecker did not recognize the word scrapie. That's odd, I thought—it's a reasonably common word that I (who am not given to browsing books about the diseases of livestock) have run across any number of times in my reading career. Why wouldn't it be in the spellchecker's dictionary? As is my wont, I went directly to the OED, where it was defined as "A subacute, invariably fatal, disease of sheep and goats, characterized by degeneration of the central nervous system, leading to uncoordinated gait and itching." So far, so good. But the first citation was from 1910! Surely such a homely word referring to such a common rural phenomenon must have been around for centuries, and in fact the 1910 citation (from Vet. Jrnl. LXVI. 711) implies it's not an innovation: "Shepherds and farmers.. class more than one disease with totally different symptoms under the head of Scrapy." How can it not be attested before that?

So I thought I'd check to see how far back the comparable French word was attested, only to discover it wasn't in any of my bilingual dictionaries. It's not in my Russian ones either, but the Yandex online dictionary has it, and the translation they give is скрепи [skrepi], clearly borrowed from English. Do sheep not get this disease outside Merrie England? And did sheep there not develop it until the nineteenth century?

COETZEE ON TRANSLATION.

This is my favorite kind of discussion of translation—not a theoretical treatise filled with jargon, but a nuts-and-bolts analysis of particular issues that come up in the course of particular translations. And it's by the wonderful J.M. Coetzee, so it's well written as well as meaty. I'll just quote a couple of tidbits to whet your appetite:

Dialogue comes with its own set of problems, particularly when it is very informal and incorporates regional usages, contemporary fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is rarely of this kind. For the most part its character is formal, even if its rhythms are more abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose. So hitting the right register ought not to be a problem for the translator.

Where my dialogue is aberrant is when it comes from the mouths of children or of characters for whom English is not a first language. In general, it is best for such speech to be translated not word for word but by speech typical of children in the language translated into (hereafter called the target language), or by the speech of a foreigner making typical foreign slips...

When Professor Curren's mind wanders to the West's classical past, should the translator treat these moments as allusions and footnote them? Since such allusions are often glancing and casual, how can he be sure he has picked them all up? Is a passing reference to a photograph of Sophie Schliemann worth a long footnote on Troy, Homer's Iliad, and the excavation of what he thought was Agamemnon's tomb by Heinrich Schliemann?

The phrase amor matris ['love of (one's) mother/mother's love'] crosses the professor's mind. For the benefit of a reader without Latin, the famous ambiguity of the phrase can be explained in a quick footnote; but how does one evoke the atmosphere of rote learning in classrooms going back six centuries in the West?

In Boyhood, the young hero is obsessed with cricket. The ball-throwing machine that he constructs for batting practice in the backyard is easy enough to picture as long as one has an idea of the relation of batsman to bowler in cricket. For the Korean reader, is cricket worth a long elucidatory note, or should the machine be left unexplained as a cultural puzzle?...

Would mastery of the theory of translation make one a better translator? There is a legitimate branch of aesthetics called the theory of literature. But I doubt very much that there is or can be such a thing as a theory of translation—not one, at any rate, from which practitioners of translation will have much to learn.

Translation seems to me a craft in a way that cabinet-making is a craft. There is no substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of being a good cabinet-maker, plus a handful of precepts relating to tools and to types of wood...

There's a wonderful examination of "the atemporal tendency of the present participle" and the problems it causes in the translation of a passage from Waiting for the Barbarians. If you enjoy such things, you'll want to read the whole essay. (Via wood s lot.)

DIXON: MOTHER-IN-LAW LANGUAGE III.

A follow-up to this post: the exciting conclusion (pp. 190ff.) to Dixon's discussion of Jalnguy ("mother-in-law language").

I had intended that my Jalnguy questioning should fall into two parts. The first was now as complete as I could get it that trip—going through everyday language words and asking their Jalnguy equivalents. I took a day off to go down to the motel at Mission Beach to prepare for the second stage.

A six-by-four-inch card was made out for each Jalnguy verb, and on it were listed all the everyday-style verbs for which it had been given as correspondent. Since there was a many-to-one relation between everyday and mother-in-law vocabularies, I expected to finish up with a fair number of Guwal forms on each Jalnguy card. A couple had just one—Jalnguy yirrgunjinyu had only occurred as equivalent of Guwal miyandanyu "laugh"—but most had four, five or six Guwal verbs for the one Jalnguy item.

The jubumban card was fairly typical. This Jalnguy verb had been given by Chloe, and by George and Ginnie, as the equivalent of bijin "hit with a rounded object", jilwan "kick with the foot or shove with the knee", dudan "mash food with a stone", dalinyu "deliver a blow to something on the ground, for example, fall on". One Jalnguy verb and four Guwal equivalents...

Then into stage two. "Jubumban", I asked Chloe, Minya guwara? What would that be in Guwal? I had four Guwal words on the card for this Jalnguy item, verbs for which jubumban had been given as equivalent in stage one, the Guwal to Jalnguy elicitation. I wondered if she'd give them all, or just a selection, and which would be named first. The answer was simpler than that. "Bijin," Chloe said, "that's what you'd say for jubumban." That was all. I enquired if there were any more Guwal words that would translate jubumban, but she said "No, just bijin." After trying everything else, I finally just read out the other words on the card. What of dudan? Oh yes, that was jubumban too. Same for the other two. These were all correct, but bijin was the only Guwal word that had occurred to Chloe when I said jubumban.

The same thing happened with every other card. Chloe gave just one of the list of Guwal words, ignoring all the others that had been given as equivalents of the Jalnguy word, in stage one. And then, when I went up to put the same questions to George, he gave exactly the same responses... For every card, Chloe and George picked out just one verb. And they selected the same one.

The next thing I did was to focus attention on bijin "hit with a rounded object" and jilwan "kick with the foot or shove with the knee", two words from the jubumban card. How would this distinction... be rendered in mother-in-law, if it were needed? Bijin would be just jubumban, but jilwan would be winarra-gu jubumban or wangabay-ju jubumban—adding winarra "foot" or wangabay "knee" in instrumental inflection to the basic verb jubumban. Bijin is, like jubumban, just "hit with a rounded object" but jilwan is "hit with a specified type of rounded object, namely a foot or a knee".

The same thing happened when I contrasted other pairs from the cards. Nothing was added to the central correspondent... but for each of the other words something could be added to jubumban as a further specification...

These results in stage two took me totally by surprise. I'd had no idea this was what could happen, no working hypothesis that these facts could confirm. But they did suggest an idea about the semantic structure of a language. Maybe the verbs of any language fall into two types—let's call them "nuclear" and "non-nuclear". The nuclear verbs are the most frequently occurring items and have wide, general meaning—like "give" and "tell" and "look". Nuclear verbs could not generally be defined in terms of other verbs. Non-nuclear verbs, on the other hand, are more specialised and could be defined in terms of a nuclear item. So stare would be non-nuclear in English, and it could be defined as look hard.

Dyirbal Jalnguy has the minimum number of words necessary to say in Jalnguy anything that can be said in the everyday style. Guwal has both nuclear and non-nuclear verbs, as have all other everyday-language styles. But Jalnguy has just nuclear verbs...

This seemed a real breakthrough. The relation between the two speech styles of Dyirbal revealed something about the underlying structure of the language—and perhaps of all languages.

I'm always deeply suspicious of enthusiastic leaps to "all languages," but this is fascinating stuff, and if they'd teach it to kids instead of those deadly "grammar rules" people might have a better idea of how language works.

AMNESIAC.

I'm catching up with teju cole, whom I recommended earlier and who I belatedly remembered is going to pull down the pillars of his blog at the end of the month, and I've just hit a remarkable (they're all remarkable) entry called "amnesiac." It begins with a quote from Tomas Tranströmer:

One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: 'Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.'

It goes on to describe the "fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" and the bustling slave market they created, which thrived "in spite of a British ban on the trade (in 1808) and a British naval presence in Nigerian waters," and tells us that "This history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound. There is no day of remembrance, no museums." And then he describes a visit to "the famous CMS bookshop on Lagos Island":

The interior of the shop is vaguely familiar, from my visits here as a schoolboy, when this was the leading bookseller in the city. We came here when there was something we couldn't find at the University Bookshop in Akoka or at the Abiola Bookshop in Yaba. But today it is a depressing sight. The books available for sale are few in number and restricted to few categories. Many volumes are dusty or curled at the edges. There are primary and secondary school textbooks and there are assorted volumes on computer programming, on accounting and on law. The largest section of all is devoted to “inspirational” and Christian books. A woman walks in and brusquely asks the attendant where she can find bibles. She is directed to a well-stocked section, the only section of the shop in which there is more than one customer. The titles of the books are reiterations: how to make money quickly by adopting certain simple principles, how to discover God's plan for your life, how to live a healthy, wealthy and victorious life according to the precepts of the pentecostal church.

The shelf given to general fiction is pitiful. Other than a few tattered copies of plays by Shakespeare and Soyinka (and why are they tattered?), all that is available is a handful of recently published novels: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. Both of these are first novels by young Nigerian women based in the US and they are here because they have an energetic young Nigerian publisher behind them. There is also a single copy of Dan Brown’s ubiquitous book. And I see a stack of books by James Hadley Chase, a minor imitator of Ian Fleming's, who was inexplicably popular in Nigeria when I was growing up and apparently still is. But where are the Nigeria-based Nigerian writers? Where is the selection of international literary fiction? The reader I had seen on the danfo had surely not bought her book here. Poets, too, are notable by their absence.

The listless air of the bookshop is tiring. There is an information desk at the back of the shop. I go there with the idea that I might ask some questions. But the woman standing behind the high desk is slumped over, like a large mammal felled by a single shot. But she's not dead, only sleeping, same as the other woman I saw at the museum. A standing fan slowly shakes its large head from left to right to left. It covers her in breezes. What I am looking for, what Tranströmer described as a moving spot of sun, is somewhere in this city. But it is not here. Here, one must forget about yesterday: it never happened.

Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work but I imagine they’ll soon break for lunch. The past is not even past.

I don't want to end on that depressing note, so I'll quote from a later entry, jazz:

But the following week, a friend took me to a relatively new shop on Awolowo Road in Ikoyi. And there I finally found myself at home, joyous, inspired. The shop is called the Jazzhole/Glendora. The owner is Kunle Tejuosho, and he is one of a small but tenacious breed of Nigerian cultural innovators. It is a combination music and book shop. The presentation is outstanding, as well done as any Waterstones or Borders. There was a broad selection of jazz, pan-African and other international music near the capacious entrance, and rows and rows of books for the general reader towards the back. The shop was tastefully lit, with a cool and quiet interior. Here, I thought to myself, was that “moving spot of sun” I had so hungrily sought. I saw music by Ali Farka Toure, by Salif Keita. There were books by Ian McEwan, Philip Roth and, yes, Michael Ondaatje. The prices were high. Not higher than they would be in an American or British shop, but certainly beyond the reach of most Nigerians. And yet, the Jazzhole is vital. Knowing that there is such a place, in the absence of good libraries or other vendors, makes all the difference to those who must have such sustenance. And better at those high prices than not at all.

And whatever you do, don't miss dust. A whole novel in a blog entry.

DIXON: MOTHER-IN-LAW LANGUAGE II.

This is a follow-up to this post, with further excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon's Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker:

I'd only begun to work systematically on Jalnguy in the last few weeks in the field, and didn't realize the full significance of it until I came to mull over the data back in London.

The many-to-one correspondence between Guwal [everyday language] and Jalnguy ["mother-in-law" language] vocabularies was a key to the semantic structure of Dyirbal. If one Jalnguy word was given as the equivalent for a number of distinct Guwal terms, it meant that the Guwal words were seen, by speakers of the language, to be related. For nouns, it revealed the botanical and zoological classifications which the Aborigines perceived. For instance, bayi marbu "louse", bayi nunggan "larger louse", bayi daynyjar "tick", and bayi mindiliny "larger tick" were all grouped together under a single Jalnguy term, bayi dimaniny.

It could be even more revealing with verbs. The everyday style has four different words for kinds of spearing, and also such verbs as nyuban "poke a stick into the ground (testing for the presence of yams or snails, say)", nyirran "poke something sharp into something (for example, poke a fork into meat to see if it is cooked)", gidan "poke a stick into a hollow log, to dislodge a bandicoot". All seven of these Guwal verbs are rendered by just one word in Jalnguy: nyirrindan "pierce".

Sometimes Jalnguy grouped together verbs in a most surprising fashion. For instance, gundumman was given as Jalnguy equivalent of julman "squeeze, for example, squeeze a boil, knead flour", and also of bugaman "chase, run down, as in catch a runaway steer". What did these two verbs have in common? It was only when I had a chance to discuss it with Chloe that she explained gundumman means "bring together". Hands come together in julman, while bugaman describes a pursuer coming into contact with what he is chasing...

[Dixon returns to North Queensland to do further work with Chloe.] I started going through all the nouns, verbs and adjectives in my accumulated vocabulary lists, asking how to say each one in the mother-in-law style. Bayi midin "ring-tail possum" was bayi jibuny in Jalnguy. Balan mawa "shrimp" came out as balan dunguy. The information given by Chloe, and later George, correlated well with what they had told me three years earlier. Jalnguy had not been actively used since about 1930, but it was clear that it was being remembered quite accurately...

Now it was time to get back to the serious business of gathering the Jalnguy words... Chloe decided she wanted some mates to help her think through some of the hardest words, so one day we went up to Murray Upper and assembled a sort of committee on Jalnguy, outside Jimmy Murray's hut at Warrami... All sorts of things fell into place that day. For many verbs I'd originally been given a one-word English gloss. Nudin was "cut", and so was gunban—and so was banyin—I was told. But they didn't all have the same Jalnguy equivalent. Nudin and gunban were both jalnggan, but banyin was bubaman in Jalnguy; all the committee agreed on that.

Now bubaman I already knew as the correspondent of the everyday style verb baygun "shake or wave something, or bash something on something else, for example, pick up a goanna by its tail and bash its head on a tree to stun it." The concept seemed to be "put something in motion, holding on to it" (and it might or might not impact on something else).

Further detail was needed. Nudin, I discovered, means "cut deeply, sever", while gunban is "cut to medium depth, cut a piece out". Fine, both are further specifications of the general Jalnguy verb jalnggan "cut". Now for banyin. Every language has a few words like this, which describe an important everyday activity but which seem a bit bizarre to people from a different cultural background. Banyin means "get a stone tomahawk and bring it down on a rotten log so that the blade is embedded in the log, then pick up both tomahawk and log by the handle of the tomahawk and bash the log against a tree so that the log splits open and the ripe grubs inside it can be extracted and eaten". It involves a tomahawk, which is the major implement for cutting or chopping. But the criterial action is seen to be the bashing of the log against a tree to split it; this can be inferred from the fact that the Jalnguy correspondent is bubaman "shake, wave or bash" rather than jalnggan "cut".

The definition of banyin is the longest string of words expressing a single meaning I can remember ever seeing.

TWO LEMMAS.

Looking up something else, I happened to notice that English has two words lemma: lemma 'auxiliary proposition; glossed word or phrase' and lemma 'the lower of the two bracts enclosing the flower in the spikelet of grasses.' Not particularly noteworthy in itself; what struck me was the etymologies: the former is from Greek lēmma (with long e) 'thing taken, assumption,' from lambanein 'to take' (compare the perfect passive eilēmmai), the latter from Greek lemma 'husk,' from lepein 'to peel.' Etymologically, they're completely unrelated. Kind of neat.

SORRENTINO.

It's Gilbert Sorrentino day at wood s lot; I haven't read much Sorrentino (Aberration of Starlight and, I think, Mulligan Stew), but I like his style. I very much like this interview by Alexander Laurence (from 1994). Asked about what's happened since the glory days of Black Mountain, he says:

Hard to answer this question. I was on a panel a little while ago with Robert Creeley, and we were both being asked versions of your question. Apparently, young people are enormously interested in "how things were" in the Fifties. Creeley said something much to the point, to the effect that we all took art very seriously in those days, we were absolutely committed. He's right, of course, there was a sense then among young artists that we were writing for our lives—but maybe more importantly, there was a really drab "establishment" in place at that time—artistic and social and political—and young artists felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were destroying it, "deforming the ideogram," as Jakobson says.

And his response to a question about commercial publishing is a wonderful rant:

Joyce, Pound, and Williams commanded the smallest of audiences and were shunned by what we now think of as "major" publishing houses. Publishers have always been craven when the odds are not in their favor, it's just enhanced nowadays because there is so much money to be made if the publisher can hit the shit machine. What is most surprising to me is the number of—what can I call them?—"absent" books published. These are books that have no literary merit, no spirit of aesthetic adventure, no rough but interesting formal design, and—this is most important—no chance of commercial success! That's what is so amazing to me—not the number of Judith Krantz-like novels published, nor the Calvin Trillin-Garrison Keillor warm and wise and witty and wonderful malarkey, but the novels that just lie there: life and love in a small town in Northern California, sexual awakening in a Baptist family in Pennsylvania—daughter flees to Greenwich Village, meets bum who makes her pregnant, discovers feminism—and on and on. Were I running these houses, I'd can all these editors in a minute. If they can't make millions, would be my thinking, I'll be God damned if they're going to put out excrement that will only break even, i.e., if we want to break even, I'd say, let's publish BOOKS. But, of course, the chances are that the people who own these houses would not know a book if it buggered them.

And don't miss his rave for my man Flann O'Brien.

DIXON: MOTHER-IN-LAW LANGUAGE I.

This is another in a series of posts (1, 2) presenting excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon's Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker; this one deals with one of Dixon's major interests, the avoidance forms common among Australian languages (you can see samples of so-called "mother-in-law language" here: scroll down to "2.3 Taboo and avoidance"). He introduces it on pp. 91ff:

Now that the rains had begun, we were keen to get back to Cairns before bad floods came; we had been warned that roads were often out for weeks at the height of the wet season. But Chloe insisted that before we left, we must go through one other type of language: Jalnguy. A special language that a man had to use when talking to—or even when talking in the presence of—his mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law would use it back. Jalnguy was also used between a woman and her father-in-law, and between certain types of cousins. Every member of the Jirrbalngan and Girramaygan tribes would know Jalnguy, and had to use it with relatives from these particular kin categories. They were people who should be kept at arm's length in social dealings—one would not normally look them in the eye or be left alone with them without a chaperon—and the use of a special language, Jalnguy, was an overt index of this avoidance behavior.

There was never any choice involved, Chloe said. A man would talk with his wife in Guwal, the everyday language style, but if a mother-in-law was within hearing, he had immediately to switch to Jalnguy. All the texts and vocabulary I'd collected so far were Guwal. Some of the old people had warned Chloe that it wasn't wise to divulge anything about Jalnguy, but she had decided to ignore them...

Everything, it appeared, had a different name in Jalnguy. "Water" was bana in the everyday style, Guwal, but jujama in Jirrbal Jalnguy. "Fire" was buni in straight-out Jirrbal but yibay in Jirrbal Jalnguy. "Man" was yara in Guwal and bayabay in Jalnguy, while "woman" was jugumbil and jayanmi respectively.

It appeared, though, that the grammar was the same—only the nouns, verbs, and adjectives differed...

We went through a few score words, getting Jalnguy equivalents... Then Chloe said that we needed some conversation in Jalnguy. It was always easier if she had a mate to talk to. We should go down to the mission, and once more enlist the aid of old Rosie Runaway.

It appeared that Jalnguy had not been actively used since about 1930. The gradual loosening of tribal bonds and the pressure of learning English as a second language may have been partly responsible. Since then Guwal had been used for everything, even when an avoidance relation was around. The traditional taboo relationships were still respected—a son-in-law would never look his mother-in-law in the eye, and he would talk softly in her presence, avoiding risqué subjects. But Jalnguy was no longer employed as a linguistic marker of these social attitudes.

In fact, only a few of the older people remembered much of the Jalnguy vocabulary. Rosie did, and although she and Chloe were not in a taboo relationship they were soon rattling on in a conversation that reconstructed old times. Walking in the bush, getting hot and sweaty and going for a bathe in the cool water of a nearby creek. Plaiting split lawyer vine into a dilly-bag. Then both ladies bewailed, in Jalnguy, the fact that they were the last ones who could speak it—children nowadays go to school and all they learn is how to speak English.

Every single vocabulary word was from Jalnguy—not once did either Chloe or Jarrmay [Rosie's real name] lapse into Guwal. Later on we went back to Chloe's and she translated the text, phrase-by-phrase, into Jirrbal Guwal and also into Girramay Guwal.

Jalnguy was a revelation. I'd never heard of anything like this before, in Australia or anywhere else. Every member of the tribe had to know two distinct languages—or at least, two distinct vocabularies, for the phonetics and grammar were the same. Two names for every animal, two forms for every verb, two varieties of each adjective. But it was also something of an embarrassment. I felt I had quite enough to do, over the coming wet season, trying to work out the structure of Guwal. I decided to concentrate on the everyday style first, try to learn to speak it and fully understand it. Further study of Jalnguy should be postponed until that object had been achieved.

SAFIRE 1, COPYEDITORS 0.

We here at Casa Languagehat believe in fairness to the point of gritted teeth, yea, unto the uttering of small yips of pain. Having twice this month (1, 2) spifflicated William Safire, the oft-erring language columnist of the New York Times, I now find myself in the acutely uncomfortable position of defending him against his own copyeditors, who, according to Sunday's column, not only exist but challenge him on mistaken grounds:

These thoughts are triggered by the copy desk's (two words) objection to the spelling of a word in last week's column, which dealt with irregardless as a jocular redundancy and therefore, in my judgment, "arrant nonsense." Last year, I chose that very phrase as an example of "wedded words," like unmitigated gall, congenital liar and blithering idiot.[...]

As a language columnist, I have a license to use almost any taboo word or misspelling as an object of study, but not as part of my own prose. The objection was not to its being a word-wedding, cliché or fixed phrase, but because the desk held that arrant should be spelled errant. You could look it up, it (the desk) said, in the Dodger and Yankee manager Casey Stengel's classic phrase.

I looked it up, in Webster's New World, and in Merriam-Webster's, and in American Heritage, and cannot fault the desk: there it was in all three of the best sellers: "arrant, adjective, variant of errant." That was the lexicographers' way of saying that although some spelling deviants insisted on arrant with a beginning a, most sensible people agreed with the establishment and spelled errant with an e. The Times's copy desk was going by the book.

Safire is unquestionably right; as he says, "We are not dealing here with one word with one meaning spelled two different ways, one preferred and one variant; in my view, we are dealing with a word whose meaning has split, and the resulting 'variation' in spelling signifies the difference in the two meanings." If indeed the copyeditors wanted him to make the change (and I can't suppress a small voice that suggests he might be making the whole exchange up as an excuse to discuss the two words), they were not only wrong but a disgrace to their (and my) profession.

But I'm not letting Bloviating Bill off the hook quite so easily. What's this about "all three of the best sellers"? I can't speak for Webster's New World, which I don't own, but M-W says arrant means "being notoriously without moderation : EXTREME (we are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us —Shakespeare)" and AHD says "Completely such; thoroughgoing: an arrant fool; the arrant luxury of the ocean liner." So what's Safire talking about? Presumably the etymologies, for which M-W has "alteration of errant" and AHD "Variant of errant." Now, the man may be cheerfully amateurish in matters linguistic, but he knows the difference between a definition and an etymology; why he's obscuring it in this instance is obscure to me, but it gives me a chance to get a bit of revenge for my gritted teeth. His final remark, "Let the dictionaries catch up with the living language," is not just disingenuous, it's downright mendacious. Bad Language Maven, bad!

Hmm, let me check the New Oxford American Dictionary... aha:

arrant adj. [attrib.] dated complete, utter: What arrant nonsense! [Middle English: variant of ERRANT, originally in phrases such as arrant thief ('outlawed, roving thief').]

Not only is there a nice detailed etymology showing the transition in meaning, they actually give "arrant nonsense" as an example. Come on, Times, spring for a copy for the copy desk and save them from themselves!

IN SILICO.

In the course of editing a medical article I came across the phrase in silico, which at first mystified me; fortunately, Wikipedia has an admirably thorough entry that not only defines it—"performed on computer or via computer simulation"—but discusses the propriety of the word-formation:

Contrary to widespread belief, in silico does not mean anything in Latin... "In silico" was briefly challenged by "in silicio", which is correct Latin for in silicon (the Latin term for silicon, silicium, was created at the beginning of the 19th century by Berzelius). "In silico" was perceived as catchier, possibly through similarity to the word silicate. "In silico" is now almost universal; it even occurs in a journal title (In Silico Biology: http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/)

The Wikipedia article also provides a citation for the first use: "Using the data available in libraries [...] two sets of experiments were performed on computers (experiments in silico) using the consistency of the data extracted." (Danchin A, Medigue C, Gascuel O, Soldano H, Henaut A. From data banks to data bases. Res Microbiol. 1991 Sep-Oct;142(7-8):913-6.) I trust it will show up in the OED in due time. (Although generally I prefer that words be properly formed, I have to agree that in silico is preferable to the longer form, and hell, silicium isn't classical anyway.)

SHANGHAINESE.

Mark Liberman has a Language Log post about an oddly formed adjective that's always pleased and puzzled me, Shanghainese. Where does that intrusive -n- come from? I assumed it had something to do with Chinese, but Mark provides more parallels:

But my guess is that this starts with the analogical shadow cast by the place names ending in 'n'—Japan, Taiwan, Canton, Bhutan—whose adjectival forms (and the corresponding language names and/or ethnonyms) add '-ese'—Japanese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Bhutanese. Then there are the cases where a final syllable is elided in the place names to get adjectival forms that happen to end up ending in '-nese': Chinese, Lebanese.

Finally—and most relevantly—there are some long-established cases where there is an intrusive 'n': Java → Javanese, Sunda → Sundanese, Bali → Balinese, etc. The oldest of these seems to be Javanese, which the OED traces back to 1704[...] and which may derive from an earlier Javan...

The preference for -ese as the adjectival ending for places in the "East Indies" presumably reflects the influence of Dutch, which also (I think) regularly has intrusive -n- in such words: Javanees, Sundanees, Balinees, etc. I don't have access to a historical dictionary of Dutch—is there one?—but I assume that these words date back at least to the early 17th century, if not the 16th. I also don't know whether the use of intrusive -n- to repair hiatus is the general pattern in Dutch, or whether (as in English) it's just one of many quasi-regular local options.

He expressed surprise that the OED's earliest citation for the word Vietnamese is from 1947; I reminded him (via e-mail, LL having no comments) that "until WWII and Ho's independence movement, there was no such thing as Vietnam—what we think of as Vietnam was three provinces of French Indochina, and you'd use Tonkinese, Annamese/Annamite (interesting that there was no settled form), or Cochin-Chinese as called for." And I added the following observation, which I repeat here as perhaps of interest to such of my readers as are interested in recondite geographical terminology:

Interesting also that the OED has no entry for Cochin-Chinese; they do have one for Cochin-China, which is defined as "Name of a country in the Eastern Peninsula"! I had never heard or seen that phrase used in that way, but a little googling turned up Geography of the Eastern Peninsula: comprising a descriptive outline of the whole territory, and a geographical, commercial, social and political account of each of its divisions, with a full and connective history of Burmah, Siam, Anam, Cambodia, French Cochin-China, Yunan, and Malaya, by Henry Croley (1878). Forgotten geography...

Amazingly, Amazon has a listing for the book! I have no idea what they'd do if you ordered a copy.

PROUST ON LANGUAGE CHANGE.

From Sturrock's translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe:

I addressed these words to Francoise: "You're an excellent person," I said smarmily, "you're kind, you've a thousand good qualities, but you're no further on than the day you arrived in Paris, either in knowing about women's clothes or in how to pronounce words properly and not commit howlers." This was a particularly stupid criticism, because the French words we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only "howlers" made by Gallic mouths in mispronouncing Latin or Saxon, our language being simply the defective pronunciation of a few others. The genius of the language in its living state, the future and past of French, that is what should have interested me in Francoise's mistakes. Was her "amender" for "mender" not equally curious as those animals surviving from remote epochs, such as the whale or the giraffe, which demonstrate to ust the stages through which animal life has passed.

The original:

...j'adressai à Françoise ces paroles cruelles: «Vous êtes excellente, lui dis-je mielleusement, vous êtes gentille, vous avez mille qualités, mais vous en êtes au même point que le jour où vous êtes arrivée à Paris, aussi bien pour vous connaître en choses de toilette que pour bien prononcer les mots et ne pas faire de cuirs.» Et ce reproche était particulièrement stupide, car ces mots français que nous sommes si fiers de prononcer exactement ne sont eux-mêmes que des «cuirs» faits par des bouches gauloises qui prononçaient de travers le latin ou le saxon, notre langue n'étant que la prononciation défectueuse de quelques autres. Le génie linguistique à l'état vivant, l'avenir et le passé du français, voilà ce qui eût dû m'intéresser dans les fautes de Françoise. L'«estoppeuse» pour la «stoppeuse» n'était-il pas aussi curieux que ces animaux survivants des époques lointaines, comme la baleine ou la girafe, et qui nous montrent les états que la vie animale a traversés?

Thanks for the quote, Andrew!

[In case anyone notices that the translation suddenly changed around 8:20 PM EST, I was alerted to the fact that Amazon claims to show the pages of the Sturrock translation but it's actually linking to the earlier Enright translation, so I had to change to the Sturrock that Andrew kindly sent me. Stupid Amazon!]

SPIFFLICATE.

I just ran across a fine old slang word, spifflicate or spiflicate—the former spelling is preferred by the New Oxford American Dictionary, which defines it as 'treat roughly or severely; destroy,' the latter by the OED, which defines it more elaborately: "To deal with in such a way as to confound or overcome completely; to treat or handle roughly or severely; to crush, destroy." Some OED citations:

1796 New Brighton Guide 39 Come, spiflicate that scoundrel Care, Gruel him, bruise him, never fear.
1818 MOORE Fudge Fam. Paris ix. 223 Alas, alas, our ruin's fated; All done up, and spiflicated!
1842 BARHAM Ingol. Leg. Ser. II. Babes in Wood xi, So out with your whinger at once, and scrag Jane, while I spiflicate Johnny!
1873 Brit. Q. Rev. LVII. 276 The way in which the learned, racy old Hector smashes and spiflicates scientific idiots.. is delicious.

The participle occurs in this bit of dialogue, which I shall have to remember for future use:
1891 MEREDITH One of our Conquerors x, You've got a spiflicating style of talk about you.

The etymology? It's a "fanciful formation."

BISHOPS AND BERBERS.

Lameen Souag at Jabal al-Lughat posts infrequently, but it's always worth reading. Last month I meant to blog his post comparing the traditional (but probably erroneous) etymology of Istanbul < Greek εις την Πόλιν, pronounced /istimbóli(n)/ and meaning 'to the City,' with

'usquuf, "bishop" in Arabic, which apparently derives from a Coptic reinterpretation of Greek episkopos "bishop" as e-pi-skopos "to the skopos", due to which skopos was reanalyzed as meaning "bishop".

I am unqualified to judge the validity of the latter etymology, but it's certainly interesting.

And this month he has a post about one of the easternmost outposts of Berber, El-Fogaha (الفقهة) in central Libya, where some archaic Berber words are retained and there are some interesting phonological developments.

On Istanbul, the more commonly accepted explanation these days is that it's derived directly from the Greek name Konstantinopolis, but as Pospelov says, there's no actual evidence, and the forms are too divergent to allow us to simply assume the change. (The artificial Turkish form Islambol 'filled with Islam' is simply a folk etymology.)

WINTER.

Winter is good - his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World -

Generic as a Quarry
And hearty - as a Rose -
Invited with Asperity
But welcome when he goes.

   Emily Dickinson

Via wood s lot.

I'm constantly taken aback by how great a poet Emily Dickinson is. There's so much going on in these eight lines I could spend the rest of the day mulling them over as I look out the window at the snow being eroded by January rain.

"...welcome when he goes."

TARO.

After my long post on eggplant words, I was delighted to come across a similar post on taro over at qB's Frizzy Logic. It starts with some linguistic discussion:

"What is this delicious vegetable?" I remember asking Dr B's parents many years ago. I was sure I'd had it before, somewhere else. "Gollogassy" they chorused. Bappou (grandpa, aka Dr B's father) told me how to grow it and warned of the care that has to be taken in preparation. Nobody knew an English translation. It was, I was told, a speciality of Cyprus.

I was pretty sure that whatever it was (sweet potato? no, not orange; yam? not quite; cassava? no, not the same) must also be an African and/or Caribbean staple since it was, apparently, freely available in Bristol which is not noted for its enormous Cypriot community.

The mystery remained unsolved until our trip to Cyprus. There I discovered that Cypriot Greek pronunciation differs from mainland or "standard" Greek (and also from the ancient Greek I endured for the minimum time possible at school). The letter kappa, for instance, sounds not like a k as in "kite" but roughly like the g in "gone". So "gollogassy" is in fact "kolokasi"...

There's plenty about Cypriot food and culture, as well as qB's marvelous photographs.

THE MULTIFARIOUS AUBERGINE.

By popular demand (in this thread), I am discussing the various words for 'eggplant' (Solanum melongena, a comestible with a far wider variety of shapes and colors than most of us are aware of—there's a very nice photograph of "a smorgasboard of eggplants" here). The word eggplant itself is the odd man out here (and odd it is, too, until you see the variety it must originally have referred to: scroll most of the way down this page for a dramatic photograph of what do indeed look exactly like eggs with green stems); the English word that will start us on our voyage is aubergine. This is, as you might guess, borrowed from French; the French word is from Catalan albergínia, which is from Arabic al-bādinjān (with the definite article al-), itself borrowed from Persian bādingān, which is probably from Middle Indo-Aryan *vātiñjana-, vātingana-; most sources attribute the latter form to Sanskrit, but I don't find it in my dictionaries.

The Arabic word is the source also of Spanish berenjena, which the Italians (assimilating it to mela 'apple') borrowed as melanzana, which they then folk-etymologized as mela insana 'mad apple'; Hobson-Jobson, in its usual discursive fashion, says:

The Ital. mela insana is the most curious of these corruptions, framed by the usual effort after meaning, and connecting itself with the somewhat indigestible reputation of the vegetable as it is eaten in Italy, which is a fact. When cholera is abroad it is considered (e.g. in Sicily) to be an act of folly to eat the melanzana. There is, however, behind this, some notion (exemplified in the quotation from Lane's Mod. Egypt. below) connecting the badinjān with madness. [Burton, Ar. Nights, iii. 417.] And it would seem that the old Arab medical writers give it a bad character as an article of diet. Thus Avicenna says the badinjān generates melancholy and obstructions. To the N. O. Solanaceae many poisonous plants belong.

This is under the heading brinjaul, a form now spelled brinjal, of which the OED (which classifies it as "Anglo-Indian") says: "Few names even of plants exemplify so fully the changes to which a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology and form-association... The Malay berinjalā, prob. from Pg., illustrates the Anglo-Indian form... In the West Indies brinjalle has been further corrupted to brown-jolly." The Portuguese form referred to is spelled beringela in Portugal and berinjela in Brazil; Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) has both berengena and merengena (the former used among the Istanbul Sephardic community according to my dictionary); and the Neapolitans, idiosyncratic as usual, borrowed the Arabic as mulignana.

Greek μελιτζάνα [melitzána] and Slovene melancána are borrowed from Italian, but most other Eastern European words come from Turkish patlıcan (itself an eccentric borrowing from Arabic): Greek Romany patlidžáno (plural patlidzéa), Albanian patëllxhan, Serbo-Croatian patlidžan, Hungarian padlizsán, Polish bakłażan (there's also oberżyna, presumably from German Aubergine, which is obviously from French), Russian баклажан [baklazhán]. The Yiddish word is patlezhán; perhaps one of my Yiddish-scholar readers can tell me what the immediate source is, but it's clearly in this group.

Other forms: Swahili bilingani, Malagasy baranjely, Somali birinjal (according to this page) or bidingal (according to my dictionary)... oh, and a local descendent of the Middle Indic forms, Hindi/Urdu bai(n)gan, is the source of the West Indian form baigan (current in Guyana and Trinidad).

You can see still more eggplant words (of all origins) here.

Whew. Let the additions and corrections begin!

MORE NONSENSE FROM SAFIRE.

I'm sorry, I know we just did this last week, but dammit, I can't let this stuff go uncorrected. In today's column he discusses a certain negative prefix:

That got me wondering about ir- words, from irresponsible to irreverent, and irrespective to irrational. There's no doubt about the meaning of the prefix ir-; it means "not." Why, then, don't we use the standard prefixes that turn around a word's meaning, like in- or un-?

The reason is that language is created to fit the mouth. It is easier to pronounce irresolute than inresolute or unresolute, which is why those clunkier forms never got off the ground. Somewhere in the mist of early mouthings, English speakers found the n uncomfortable before words beginning with r. So - why not scrap the "inr," with its two separate sounds, and go with a simple "ir-"? In most cases we dropped the n of in-, leaving only the i, pronounced "ih." Then, because spelling is the handmaiden of pronunciation, when it came to writing down the way the word sounded, we decided to double the r.

I think I've already used the phrase "mindbogglingly stupid" to describe a Safire column, and I hate repeating myself, so let me ask him one simple question: if it's a question of English phonology, how come we say inroads instead of irroads and unresolved instead of urresolved? Answer: because it's not a question of English phonology, as he could have found out by looking at a dictionary, any dictionary. Let's try irrational. What does Merriam-Webster's Collegiate say? Why, it says "Middle English, from Latin irrationalis, from in- + rationalis rational." So we're talking about Latin phonology. Yes, Virginia, Latin did have an assimilation rule that changed n+r to rr (and n+l to ll, which is why we say illiberal and illiterate); that's why only words derived from Latin show this assimilation. Now, was that so hard? Again I ask: does nobody at the Times dare question the man?

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPLES.

A comment by Ran in this thread was so interesting I thought I'd give it its own post. He quotes from Bescherelle: La Conjugaison pour tous, a comprehensive description of French verbal conjugation (I'll give his translation, slightly emended by me, since the original French is available in his comment):

131 Some remarks on past participle agreement

The subject of past participle agreement involves significant developments that could suggest that it's one of the most important aspects of the language. To take an accurate measure of the import of the problem, the following remarks should be kept in mind.

- A matter of spelling
Past participle agreement is almost exclusively a matter of spelling. Gender agreement makes itself heard in speech in only a small number of participles: for example, offert. By far the greater number of past participles have masculine forms ending in -é, -i, or -u, and only mark their feminine forms in spelling: -ée, -ie, -ue. As for agreement in number, it never manifests itself in speech, except in the case of liaison, itself rather rare.

- Little-respected rules
Even in those cases where gender agreement is apparent in speech, we often find, in today's language, that the rules aren't observed, notably for the agreement of a past participle with a preceding direct object. We very often hear *les règles que nous avons enfreint or *les fautes que nous avons commis instead of the regular enfreintes and commises.

- An artificial rule
The rule of agreement of a past participle with a preceding object is one of the most artificial in the French language. Its introduction can be dated with precision: the poet Clément Marot formulated it in 1538. Marot took as his example Italian, which has since partially abandoned this rule.

- A political matter?
Marot's rule was nearly abolished politically. In 1900, a courageous minister of public education, Georges Leygues, published an order that "allowed" [tolérait] non-agreement. But the French Academy brought so much pressure to bear that the Minister was forced to replace his order in 1901 with a text that did away with the acceptance of non-agreement except when the participle is followed by an infinitive or a past or present participle: les cochons sauvages que l'on a trouvé or trouvés errant dans les bois.

This little story is a perfect illustration of the idiocy both of imposing artificial rules on a living language and of allowing academies to keep the language from throwing them off. Georges Leygues, je vous salue!

DIXON: CHLOE, THE IDEAL INFORMANT.

One of the main "characters" in Dixon's book is Chloe Grant, his main informant for the first language he studies, Dyirbal. She is introduced in Chapter 2 (pp. 24 ff.):

We asked about Chloe Grant. "Oh yes, Chloe'd know a good bit too. Been with the whites a fair amount, but she was brought up by the tribe[...]

...And there was Yabbon: a white-painted wooden house set on blocks about two feet off the ground, with a water-tank and windmill off to the right. The yard was fenced and bare, except for a few clumps of grass and weed among which the dogs—and a goat—ran.

Chloe invited us up to sit on a wooden bench and chairs on the front verandah. We said what a nice house it was.

"Yes," she agreed, "used to be white people live here until two months ago. But I'm a poor widow since my husband pass away, and I've got these three girl to bring up.[...] So old Ormy Butler he let me live here. But now he say he want me to move. I'm not going." Chloe's voice moved up an octave as she almost sang the last word. "I've got nowhere to go." Then without any pause and in a matter-of-fact tone: "Yes, what can I do for you?"

I explained, stammered, that I'd come from England to learn something about the original language of Murray Upper and that Les had said Chloe might help us. What I really wanted was stories, just telling a traditional tale, or something about her early life, talking into the microphone for five or ten minutes.

"I don't think I can help you there." There was a pause, while Chloe fiddled with her cigarette. "There were two languages on the Murray, not just one."

"No, I didn't know that."

"Oh yes. The other side of the river that was Jirrbal and this side was Girramay."

"Were they very different?" I asked.

"Oh, long way. Jirrbal call 'water' bana but Girramay say gamu. And 'fire', that's buni over there but this side they call yugu."

It's the start of a long and productive relationship. Dixon says "Black-haired, bespectacled, of medium height, Chloe exuded a vivacity and intelligence that made it hard for me to keep up." She reminds me of my late, beloved Aunt Bettie, to whom I was a surrogate son; she even looks like her (there are pictures of many of the informants in this well-designed book). Later on, describing another visit (the year is 1963), he says (pp. 73 ff.):

Although Chloe had had a Girramay mother and an Irish father, she had been brought up in the Jirrbalngan camp at Bellenden. She'd been born about the turn of the century, and tribal life had continued pretty well intact until 1913, when the government had stepped in and taken many of the people away to settlements. After that, aspects of traditional life had continued in secret.

Chloe had a quick and active mind, and had taken note of everything that went on around her, absorbing all that was recounted around the camp-fire of traditional legends and beliefs.[...]

Chloe had the energy of someone half her age. She would be up at six in the morning, get Ernie off to work and the girls to school, clean and tidy the house, and be ready and waiting for us by nine o'clock. At first, when she yielded to our persuasion to tell traditional stories, Chloe apologized for each one, saying it was not true, just silly. This was the legacy from a century of psychological brainwashing by the whites—telling the Aborigines that they had no proper language, and reviling their customs. We assured Chloe that Jirrbal and Girramay myths were similar to many European stories and legends (including much of the Old Testament) which no one took as literally true.

At the beginning, whenever Chloe translated a sentence into Jirrbal she'd apologize that it was "back-to-front". I had to stress that each language had a distinctive word order, and that there was nothing sacred about the order of English. Jirrbal grammar and means of expression were every bit as valid and proper as those of every other language. Every language is a bit different from every other one, that's all.

We found the same sentiments all over North Queensland. Because of what white people had said to them, Aborigines were ashamed of their languages and legends, and they were at first wary of talking to us simply because they thought we would laugh at them.[...] It is good to be able to report that things have changed a lot since then. In the late sixties, Aborigines all over Australia had a resurgence of pride in their own heritage, and in their Aboriginality. By and large, they have now stopped trying to become dark-skinned whites.

In a better world, this book would be required reading in all English-language high schools. I can't think of another book that simultaneously teaches so much about language and basic humanity.

DIXON: THE WORD FOR DOG.

In a previous entry I promised a series of posts with excerpts from Dixon's Memoirs of a Field Worker, and since three commenters in that thread mentioned the story of the Mbabaram word for 'dog,' I think I'll start with that. Here's the setup:

When Ken Hale had sent the Jabugay tape, he'd urged me to find a speaker of Barbaram, the apparently aberrant language that Lizzie Simmons ["eighty years old, toothless, and cranky"–p. 54] had declined to speak to us. Certainly Dyirbal and Jabugay had very normal Australian grammar and vocabulary, not radically different from the Western Desert language, almost two thousand miles away. But from the few words that Norman Tindale had published of Barbaram, that language looked really different.

People at Mareeba had mentioned Albert Bennett, at Petford, and early one Sunday morning I set out to try to locate him... Albert was an oldish, square-framed man with curly grey hair. He was sitting stolidly on a bench just outside his open front door. I introduced myself, but he really wasn't very interested. He didn't remember any Barbaram language, but who'd want it anyway? What good was it?... Finally he volunteered a word.

"You know what we call 'dog'?" he asked. I waited anxiously. "We call it dog." My heart sank... [pp. 105-107]

And here's the payoff, from his visit the following year:

Barbaram was still a major priority... I met the third and last living member of the Barbaram tribe, Jimmy Taylor, who had walked down from his barracks near the store... We had a good session, getting another seventy-five words and—even more important—bits of grammar... Most exciting of all, I could see a relationship between Barbaram and the other languages I'd studied. "Stomach" is bamba in Dyirbal but mba in Barbaram; "we two" is ngali in Dyirbal and Wagaman but li in Barbaram... Barbaram had simply dropped off the initial vowel and consonant... So Barbaram did seem to be a language of the Australian family, only it had undergone a quite regular change that had produced odd-looking words. Stress probably shifted from first syllable (as in Dyirbal) to second syllable—bámba to bambá. Then the first syllable was gradually dropped off in pronunciation, yielding modern mbá... [Dixon discovers at this point that the name of the language is actually Mbabaram and not Tindale's "Barbaram."]

Four years later, when I was spending a year at Harvard and first met Ken Hale, he pointed out that the e and o had developed in Mbabaram in the same sort of way as in some languages he had worked on from further up the Cape York Peninsula. An a in the second syllable of a word had become o if the word had originally begun with g. So from guwa "west", Mbabaram had derived wo. We were sitting on a bench near Gloucester, Massachusetts one Sunday in September when Ken suddenly saw the etymology for dog "dog". It came from an original gudaga, which is still the word for dog in Yidin (Dyirbal has shortened it to guda). The initial g would have raised the a in the second syllable to o, the initial gu dropped and so did the final a (another common change in the development of Mbabaram). Ergo, gudaga became dog—a one in a million accidental similarity of form and meaning in two unrelated languages. It was because this was such an interesting coincidence, that Albert Bennett had thought of it as the first word to give me. [pp. 125-129]

For a linguist, that kind of insight is as thrilling and beautiful as a really nice proof for a mathematician (which is what I once intended to be, and I still remember my excitement on understanding Gödel's proof when I read this excellent book). And now I have another instance to set beside my standard Persian bad 'bad' when explaining to people that similar words are not necessarily related.

LEONARD, TWAIN, AND CORSICAN SPELLING.

Mark Liberman has a very interesting Language Log post that takes off from an LSA paper by Alexandra Jaffe about "Transcription in Sociolinguistics: Nonstandard Orthography, Variation and Discourse":

She started with her own work on the "polynomic" orthography of Corsican, where "variation in spelling is understood to be a systematic representation of coherent linguistic systems (regional dialects of Corsican)". In contrast, she observed, we Americans most often use respelling to index stigmatized dialects. This effect is especially striking when the respelling represents ubiquitous, pan-dialectal pronunciations, like "wuz" for was, "hist'ry" for history, or "subjecks" for subjects.

Mark then repeats a quote from her handout, which I liked so much I will pass it on in my turn; it's by the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard (see this post for more by him):

Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that's no thi way a say it. Nif yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wit hi page covered in letters stuck thigither, nwee dots above hof thi letters, in fact yi end up wi wanna they thingz yi needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be able ti read. But that's no thi way a think, as if ad took a course in phonetics. A doan't mean that emdy that's done phonetics canny think right—it's no a questiona right or wrong. But ifyi write down "doon" wan minute, nwrite doon "down" thi nixt, people say yir beein inconsistent. But ifyi sayti sumdy, "Whaira yi afti?" nthey say, "Whut?" nyou say "Where are you off to?" they don't say, "That's no whutyi said thi furst time." They'll probably say sumhm like, "Doon thi road!" anif you say, "What?" they usually say "Down the road!" the second time—though no always. Course, they never really say, "Doon thi road" or "Down the road!" at all. Least, they never say it the way it's spelt. Coz it izny spelt, when they say it, is it?

Perhaps if I reframe the first sentence as "normal" English, it will help those unfamiliar with the dialect: "You write down a word, and you say to yourself, that's not the way I say it." Let's see, nwee is "and wee" and emdy is "anybody"; let me know if there's something you can't figure out.

He then discusses Mark Twain's famous use of carefully rendered dialects in Huckleberry Finn, and in an update quotes an intriguing suggestion by Ben Zimmer:

I've often wondered whether Twain's "wuz" is properly understood as eye-dialect (i.e., a mere respelling indexical of the quoted speaker's low status, education, etc.) or as a pronunciation spelling indicating a real dialectal difference. It's possible it could have been the latter when used by Twain or other keen-eared 19th c. writers if, for instance, "was" had a standard pronunciation with an open back rounded vowel (IPA turned script-a, as in the British pronunciation given by the OED), while "wuz" represented a once-nonstandard (now standard) Amer. pronunciation with an open mid back unrounded vowel (IPA wedge). I don't have any evidence for this shift in the pronunciation of "was", but it's something to consider.

Makes sense to me; I hope someone will investigate it.

PRISONERS LOST IN TRANSLATION.

A new comment by MAB in the Pevear-Volokhonsky thread from a few months ago brings up Dead Souls, which I am reading in Russian, and reminds me of a gaffe I recently came across in Andrew MacAndrew's translation, which I keep around as a backup for difficult passages. I'm on Chapter Seven, perhaps my favorite (it starts with a wonderful passage comparing a writer to a voyager, continues with Chichikov's speculations on the lives of the dead serfs he's buying up, and ends with a drunken feast and, in a final flourish, a boot-fetishist lieutenant from Ryazan who can't make himself pull off his boots and go to bed), and in the course of describing the much-loved police chief who gives the feast, Gogol says: Даже все сидельцы обыкновенно в это время, снявши шапки, с удовольствием посматривали друг на друга и как будто бы хотели сказать: «Алексей Иванович хороший человек!» Which is to say, 'Even the prisoners shop assistants would usually, in those days, taking off their caps, all look at one another with pleasure as if to say "Alexei Ivanovich is a good man!"' But MacAndrew has: "And all those around, their heads uncovered, would exchange glances which meant, 'Yes, our police chief is a good man.'" He evidently mistook сидельцы sidel'tsy, which is on its face a derivative of сидеть sidet' 'to sit,' for a deverbative meaning 'the guys sitting around' or the like. He forgot that 'to sit' is a long-standing Russian equivalent for 'to be in prison'; in Russian, the normal way to say someone served a ten-year sentence is "He sat for ten years." It's true that sidel'tsy is not much used in that sense any more, but if you're translating Gogol, it behooves you to seek out historical meanings. Anyway, if anyone has the P-V translation, could you let me know how they render this? It's in a long paragraph not far from the end of the chapter.

Addendum. Tatyana has convinced me that sidel'tsy in fact means 'shop assistants' here; this does not change the fact that MacAndrews blew it, and I'd still be curious how P&V rendered it.

MEMOIRS OF A FIELD WORKER.

I've been reading, with increasing pleasure, R.M.W. Dixon's Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, and I find myself unable to wait until I've finished it before sharing it with you all. It's by far the best book I've read on what it's like to be a field linguist, which is what I think of as a "real" linguist—it's all very well to sit in an office and pore through monographs, but to me (and this is, or used to be in pre-Chomsky days, a typically American point of view) a linguist should be out there engaging with living languages, preferably ones that can use his services for purposes of education or salvage. His mix of linguistic description (carefully explained so that amateurs should be able to follow it) and reportage (he's properly outraged by the appalling conditions under which Aborigines lived in Queensland in the early '60s, when he first went to Australia, and he draws vivid word-pictures of his informants and other friends) is exhilarating, and if this book had been available when I was in college I'm pretty sure it would have inspired me to drop Indo-European and head to Australia myself (and I'd probably still be a linguist today).

Rather than trying to select a few paragraphs, an impossible task, I'm going to follow the lead of Joel at Far Outliers, one of my favorite blogs; while he's reading a book, he posts nice fat chunks of it over the course of a week or so, giving a good idea of what it's like. So you'll be seeing a series of Dixon posts here; I'll start small, with a little anecdote that reminds me of a scene from An American Werewolf in London. Dixon and his wife Alison are driving through North Queensland on his first field trip:

The heat was overwhelming as we parked our caravan on the only available plot... We went across to Lucey's pub. Alison sat in the lounge while I went through to the bar—into which women were not allowed, by Queensland law—to ask for a coke and a gin and tonic. The weatherbeaten, red faces of the cattlemen sitting on stools around the bar all slowly swivelled and surveyed me. "Pommy!" ejaculated one of them. I was made to feel that no one had ever asked for a gin and tonic in that pub before.

I should point out that Dixon is not, in fact, a Pommy but a Scot who had been doing graduate work at Edinburgh, but it was clearly a distinction without a difference as far as the cattlemen were concerned. Or are Scots in fact Poms? I welcome clarification from Australian readers.

Addendum. I am informed by Claire in the comments that Dixon is in fact a Pom by any definition, being from Gloucester originally. He sure doesn't advertise it in the book; I guess those surly cattlemen made a deep impression!

THE RISE OF PRESCRIPTIVISM.

An essay (pdf, HTML cache) by Dr Shadyah A.N. Cole in the Umm Al-Qura University Journal, "The Rise of Prescriptivism in English," is a 23-page investigation of its subject. The abstract says:

The social milieu of eighteenth-century England gave rise to the middle classes. As their numbers, wealth, and influence grew, they felt the need for an authority on language to settle disputes of usage and variation. An English Language Academy was proposed but came to naught. Instead, dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson’s, and grammars, such as Robert Lowth’s, took the place of a language academy. Together, dictionaries and grammars were felt to have accomplished the three goals that were deemed necessary: to ascertain, refine, and fix the English language once and for all.

And the introduction gives a summary of her approach:

Where do these rules and exceptions to the rule come from? This paper traces the beginnings of the phenomenon of prescriptive grammars in English. Part Two describes the milieu which led to the writing of prescriptive grammars. Part Three details the attitudes toward language itself that prevailed at this time. Part Four discusses the call for an English Language Academy and why it failed. Part Five shows that an English dictionary and an English grammar were found to be adequate substitutes for an English Academy. In Part Six prescriptive grammars are discussed in detail, and Part Seven shows what the results of this prescriptivist movement are today.

Her conclusion is admirably even-handed:

Whatever the grounds on which the decisions were reached about the correct standards, however arbitrary the choice, however faulty the reasoning behind the choice, the work of prescriptivist grammarians has indeed led to the fixing of an amazing number of points of disputed usage.

You can see some further quotes in aldiboronti's Wordorigin.com post, from which I shamelessly stole the link. I swear, aldi, I'd split the profits from this site with you if there were any.

THE HISTORY OF HEBREW.

In the course of investigating Joel Hoffman's book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, I ran across David Steinberg's useful web page "History of the Hebrew Language" (which cites Hoffman in the bibliography). It's got tables of phonetic correspondences and brief descriptions of each phase of the language, with some interesting insights:

It is in semantics that Israeli Hebrew can be said to break radically with the past and semantically and hence culturally become a European language...

The process worked as follows. When reviving Hebrew, the revivers asked the “fatal question” i.e. “what is the Hebrew word for X” with X being a Yiddish, Russian or German (and more recently English) word. He would... select a Hebrew word (verb, adjective, noun etc.) with a historical semantic range that overlapped the particular meaning of the foreign word he was trying to translate. Then, the Hebrew word would come to mirror the semantic range of word X. I.e. it would take the range of meanings of X and lose all of its original meanings not included in the semantic range of X. This is a development with huge cultural implications...

[For example,] Biblical Hebrew taḥana (Israeli Hebrew takhana) was originally a fairly rare word, from a root meaning “bending down” used meaning a stop for camping. It was used for describing the Israelites camping places in the wilderness. The root being similar in meaning to se station[n]er in French, takhana was chosen as the Hebrew calque... of the word “station”. It is now used to translate any English use of station without any connection, any longer, with the root meaning. In fact, since “station” is not used in European languages to denote a camping place, it can no longer be used in its original meaning! Arabic used a more “authentic” approach i.e. the Arabic word for bus stop is related to the word “to stop”; for police station Arabic uses a word meaning center of diffusion. What this means is that Hebrew has accepted an idiosyncratic development of this vocabulary item which stems from internal developments in another, historically unrelated, language.

Similar developments have taken place for sherut to translate all senses of service and tenu’a... for all senses of movement e.g. scout movement!

However, I'm still trying to get a handle on the Hoffman book, which apparently has some controversial theories about how ancient Hebrew sounded (he discounts the entire Masoretic tradition). Anybody have an informed opinion they'd like to share?

GOOD GRIEF.

I've been trying to lay off William Safire—we all know his limitations and he's frequently amusing and occasionally even informative, so why keep thumping him?—but sometimes he says something so mind-bogglingly ridiculous I can't be satisfied simply muttering at my copy of the newspaper, I have to go public. In today's On Language column, he begins by quoting an allegedly new usage of the word good (in the reply "I'm good"), then calls it "one of the basic words of the English language - originally used in the place of God to avoid irreverence." Wha? He seems to be claiming the word good was first ("originally") used as a substitute for the word God (what, they stuck in the extra -o- to avoid blasphemy?), but surely even he can't believe that. The OED knows of only one such use ("The Good, that guides And blessed makes this realm which thou dost mount"), and that's from Cary's 1814 translation of Dante. The original meaning of good was, not surprisingly, 'good'—or, to be more specific, "Of things: Having in adequate degree those properties which a thing of the kind ought to have... Of persons, as a term of indefinite commendation." It's from a different Indo-European root, *ghedh- 'to unite, join, fit' (god is from *gheuH- 'to call, invoke'); the similarity of sound is rhetorically useful but otherwise irrelevant.

He follows this historical blunder with a religio-semantic one: "Early on, I'm good meant 'I am without sin,' but that is now seldom the meaning." I search the OED entry in vain for any hint of sinlessness; I search my memory of Sunday school for any suggestion that it was possible for human beings (with an exception or two, who didn't speak English) to be without sin. I can only conclude that our boy William dashed the column off before his first cup of coffee and (as usual) nobody at the Times bothered to even read it over before sending it to the printer.

Incidentally, the last half of the column is devoted to dedication pages in books. Don't ask me why.

CANTONESE LOSING OUT IN L.A.

People keep sending me the L.A. Times article "Cantonese Is Losing Its Voice" by David Pierson, so I might as well post it. As John Emerson put it in his e-mail, it's "a mix of classic stupidities and interesting information." Among the former: Cantonese is "a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions"; it "is said to be closer than Mandarin to ancient Chinese" and "is also more complicated" (because it has more tones, you see); and (a particular favorite) "it is far more difficult to learn Cantonese than Mandarin because the former does not always adhere to rules and formulas." But there's a lot of the latter too:

Popular phrases include the slang for getting a parking ticket, which in Cantonese is "I ate beef jerky," probably because Chinese beef jerky is thin and rectangular, like a parking ticket. And teo bao (literally "too full") describes someone who is uber-trendy, so hip he or she is going to explode.

Many sayings are coined by movie stars on screen. Telling someone to chill out, comedian Stephen Chow says: "Drink a cup of tea and eat a bun."

Then there are the curse words, and what an abundance there is.

A four-syllable obscenity well known in the Cantonese community punctuates the end of many a sentence. [...]

Even quintessential Hong Kong-style restaurants, including wonton noodle shops, now have waitresses who speak Mandarin, albeit badly, so they can take orders. Elected officials in Los Angeles County, even native Cantonese, are holding news conferences in Mandarin.

Some Cantonese speakers feel besieged.

Cheryl Li, a 19-year-old Pasadena City College student whose parents are from Hong Kong, is studying to become an occupational therapist and volunteers at the Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, where most of the patients are Chinese.

Recently, she was asking patients, in Mandarin, what they wanted to eat. When one man thought her accent was off, he said, "Stupid second-generation Chinese American doesn't speak Mandarin."

Li responded angrily, "No! I was born here. But I understand enough."

"We're in the minority," she added, reflecting on the incident. "I'm scared Cantonese is going to be a lost language."

Still, Li is studying Mandarin.

I suspect the "four-syllable obscenity" mentioned in the article is diu nei lo mo, cited by the esteemed Jimmy Ho in an enjoyable LH obscenity thread.

Addendum. See also Amida's irritated response to the article.

LAGOS PIDGIN.

I have come across yet another of the internet's little-known lexicographical resources, Babawilly's Dictionary of Pidgin English Words and Phrases:

Pidgin English is spoken widely across Nigeria. It is a language made up of elements of the Queen's English and the local dialects. With Nigeria having about 250 tribes in all, one finds a lot of variation in the type of Pidgin English spoken by the different ethnic groups. In this compilation I have limited myself to what I would call 'Lagos Pidgin' as this is what I am familiar with. The three major Nigerian languages namely Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa feature prominently in Pidgin English in general, however with Lagos being historically a Yoruba city 'Lagos Pidgin' consists of a disproportionately high number of Yoruba words.

A couple of entries will suggest the flavor:

Dey: 1. Is e.g. wetin dey happun 2. Location e.g. where you dey 3. Stance in the matter e.g. which one you dey sef. 4. In existence 5. Spectacular e.g. dat car dey well-well.

Dey laik Dele: (Dele is a Yoruba name) 1. I am barely surviving e.g Man juss Dey laik Dele. 2. Being idle e.g You juss dey there laik Dele . Also - Standing like Standard Bank, Looking like Lucozade and Dey like you no dey.

I was led to this site by investigating a Lagos term used in teju cole, a temporary blog reporting on a visit home by a Nigerian long resident in the U.S.; it's full of beauty, sadness, and keen observations on life in Nigeria and in general, and I recommend it to your attention before it vanishes away at the end of the month.

BEGGING THE QUESTION.

When the occasion arises to discuss the English phrase that once meant what is unambiguously termed petitio principii but is now universally (except by pedants) used to mean "raise the question," I used to reflexively link to my earlier discussion of the issue (scroll down to final paragraph). Now I have another choice: the latest episode of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics. Many thanks to John Emerson for the prompt heads-up!

FREE OED!

Can't afford a subscription to the online OED? No problem, sort of, for the next few weeks—to promote the new BBC TV series Balderdash and Piffle, they're providing free access at certain times, as this page explains:

Until 13 February, you can use the OED to look up any word starting with the letters featured in the programmes—or pick a quick link to see one of the words highlighted this week.

Any time until 13 February you can look up any words beginning with this week's letter, or with any of the previous letters of the week.

PLUS!
For 48 hours after each programme (from 22:00 GMT on Mondays to 22:00 GMT on Wednesdays) you can look up any words, beginning with any letter, in the whole of the OED.

(Emphasis theirs.) Thanks go to Grant Barrett for the tip; be sure to take full advantage of this generous offer!

JEWISH LANGUAGES.

The indefatigable aldiboronti (in a thread at his usual haunt, Wordorigins.org) has turned up another great resource, the Jewish Language Research Website:

Throughout the world, wherever Jews have lived, they have spoken and/or written differently from the non-Jews around them. Their languages have differed by as little as a few embedded Hebrew words or by as much as a highly variant grammar. A good deal of research has been devoted to a number of Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Italian, Jewish English, and Jewish Neo-Aramaic. This website displays information about several Jewish languages, as well as about some of the researchers who have written about them.

The list of languages for which they provide contacts, descriptions, and basic bibliographies includes Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, Jewish English, Jewish Malayalam, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Iranian, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Portuguese, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo/Ladino, and Yiddish; other languages for which they provide only Ethnologue links are Israeli Sign Language, Judeo-Alsatian, Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Crimean Tatar/Krimchak, Judeo-Georgian, Judeo-Slavic/Canaanic, Judeo-Tadjik/Bukharan, Judeo-Tat/Juhuric, and Karaim—a tantalizing list!

Here's a bit from the Jewish Malayalam page:

One of the most notable features of Jewish Malayalam is the presence of fossilized elements from the pre-Malayalam layer. These archaisms exist at several levels, including lexicon, morphology, phonology, and semantics. A semantic example can be found in one of the wedding songs: the bride is described as covering her head with three types of flowers that have NaRRam. The word NaRRam exists in contemporary Tamil, Malayalam, and other local languages with the meaning 'bad smell'. However, in this case the word is used with its old Tamil sense: 'good smell'. This is just one example of the many elements of Jewish Malayalam that may seem like contemporary Tamil borrowings but are actually archaic remnants from before Malayalam split off from Tamil.

XMAS LOOT.

What with one thing and another, I never reported on LH-related goodies I got for Xmas. On the hat front, my sister-in-law gave me a much-needed beret. I got a couple of novels I've been wanting to read, Doctorow's The March and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, as well as the magnificent Sailor's Word-Book by Admiral W.H. Smyth (originally published in 1867). A few entries from pages 36-37 will give an idea of the range of items:

AMICABLE NUMBERS are such as are mutually equal to the sum of each other's aliquot parts.

AMLAGH. A Manx or Gaelic term denoting to manure with sea-weed.

AMNESTY. An act of oblivion, by which, in a professional view, pardon is granted to those who have rebelled or deserted their colours; also to deserters who return to their ships.

AMOK. A term signifying slaughter, but denoting the practice of the Malays, when infuriated to madness with bang (a preparation from a species of hemp), of sallying into the streets, or decks, to murder any whom they may chance to meet, until they are either slain or fall from exhaustion... As in the case of mad dogs, certain death awaited them, for if not killed in being taken, torture and impalement followed.

AMPOTIS. The recess or ebb of the tide.

AMRELL. An archaic orthography for admiral.

AMUSETTE. A kind of gun on a stock, like that of a musket, but mounted as a swivel, carrying a ball from half a pound to two pounds weight.

AMY. A foreigner serving on board, subject to some prince in friendship with us.

Should be a great help in reading Patrick O'Brian.

LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION.

An interesting story on a study involving the much-discussed influence of language on perception:

University of California researchers tested the hypothesis that language plays a role in perception by carrying out a series of colour tests.

They found that people were able to identify colours faster in their right visual field than in their left.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study said it was because the right field is processed in the brain area responsible for language...

They asked 13 people to identify a colour on a square among a group of other squares all of which were the same colour.

In one test the squares were all shades of blue, with one square being a different shade.

In the second test there was two colours used, blue and green. The participants were quicker in the second test at identifying the different colour square when it was in their right field of vision - to the right of their head.

There was no difference in speed in the first test, suggesting because the colours had a different name in the second test the mind was able to identify the colour more quickly when it was seen in a certain field of vision.

I finally found the abstract of the actual PNAS article, "Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left" (the full article requires a subscription). It'll be a long time before we know how all this stuff works, but I'm always glad to see experiments that shed a little light. (Thanks for the tip, Anatoly!)

Update. See now Mark Lieberman's detailed discussion (with illustrations) in Language Log.

A GREETING FOR THE NEW YEAR.

Best wishes to all for a good 2006 (surely it has to improve on 2005); here are a couple of goodies I'd like to share:

1) For the Russophones, О космополитической сущности зонненблюменфоллькорнброта: Gusi-Lebedev takes the nonce word zonnenblyumenfoll'kornbrot, used by Pushkin in a charming little ditty he wrote for Anna Kern's album in 1823 (Мне изюм нейдет на ум, Цукерброт не лезет в рот, Шоколат, рахатлукум, Зонненблюменфоллькорнброт, Пастила не хороша Без тебя, моя душа: basically, 'nothing tastes good to me without you, my dear, not even chocolate, Turkish delight, or Sonnenblumenvollkornbrot,' the last-named being a German word for coarse whole wheat bread with sunflower seeds), and writes a learned critical essay treating it as an ancient, if latterly forgotten, element of the Russian vocabulary, rejecting Stalin's efforts to present it as a Bolshevik innovation and tracing it through history, from ancient Babylon through Omar Khayyam and medieval German student songs to the great Russian poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. Very funny stuff. (Thanks, Tatyana!)

2) For the rest of you, I bring the happy news that Jordan MacVay has gotten Macvaysia its own domain and kicked off the new year with a post on the Gaelic word for 'curry' and other matters solved by the new Gaelic Orthographic Conventions 2005; he ends: "Now I know how to say I ate curry in Gaelic: Dh’ith mi coiridh. I haven’t yet had any opportunities (nor reasons) to write about lesbians or giraffes in Gaelic, but surely there’s a first time for everything. You just never know."