RUSSIAN CURSIVE VIDEOS.

Natalia at A Spoonful of Russian ("learning Russian one bite at a time") has been making videos of how to write Russian cursive letters, and Language Geek has conveniently gathered the links in one post. When you're learning a language, it's important (as far as I'm concerned) not only to master the pronunciation and grammar but to learn to write as the native speakers do; it's a painful experience to see (for example) a foreign student of Chinese painstakingly writing horrible boxy characters that would make any Chinese cringe. So if you're studying Russian, this is a good way to make sure you know how to write cursives properly. (Mind you, there's more than one way to write some letters, and for т I prefer the form that looks more like the printed version but with the vertical extending below the line, because that's the way Mandelshtam wrote it.)

NEW YORK STYLE.

I enjoyed Deborah Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation—it's so nice to see a real linguist connect with a wide public, instead of the likes of Lynne Truss!—so I was glad to encounter her account of "New York Style" in PBS's Do You Speak American? series. Sure, it's anecdotal, but it comes with a bibliography, and the anecdotes are great:

New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk. Silence is okay when you’re watching a movie (though it might be better punctuated by clever asides), or when you’re asleep (collecting dreams to tell when you awake), but when two or more people find themselves together, it’s better to talk. That’s how we show we’re being friendly. And that’s why we like to talk to strangers—especially if we won’t be with them long, such as in an elevator or on a bank line. This often makes non-New Yorkers think we’re trying to start something more than a conversation.

Once, when I was visiting San Francisco, my friend and I stopped in the street to look something up in her guidebook, and she complained that the book wasn’t very clear. A man who was walking by turned to us and said “Oh, that book’s no good. The one you should get is this,” pulling a guidebook out of his bag to show us. I couldn’t resist checking out my hypothesis, so I asked where he was from. He had just flown in from New York.

After we talked about New York-California differences for a few minutes, the visiting New Yorker suggested that we exchange our guidebook for the one he recommended, so we all went back to the store where my friend had bought her book a few hours before. In the bookstore, our new friend called over his shoulder, “Have you read Garp?” I answered, “No should I?” “Yes,” he said, animatedly. “It’s great!” Then I heard a voice behind us saying, “Oh, is it?” I’ve been thinking of reading that.” I looked around and saw a woman no longer paying attention to us. I asked her where she was from: another New Yorker.

(Thanks for the link, Amelia!)

KHOSH.

There's an extremely interesting discussion going on over at Jabal al-Lughat. Lameen starts by pointing out that "in all dialects of Arabic, adjectives normally follow the noun" but quotes T. M. Johnstone (Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, Oxford UP 1967):

The (Persian) adjective kooš precedes the noun it qualifies. It does not occur in association with defined nouns. It is not inflected for gender or number. Thus:
  kooš walad, bint  a good boy, girl

and asks about the situation of the word in Persian (where it is now pronounced khoš and its meaning is 'pleasant, happy' rather than 'good'). Much interesting discussion follows; MMcM (a frequent commenter in these parts) gives a useful link to Paul Horn's Grundriss der neupersischen Etymologie, where you can see related words in the Iranian languages, and bulbul (ditto) quotes Haim Blanc's Communal dialects in Baghdad. The most recent comment at the moment is by Eli (I don't know whether he's the Eli Timan mentioned by Peter Austin in this thread), who says:

1- khOsh is used in all Iraqi dialects. it is common to both noun-adjective and adjective-noun sentence structre positions, although it is normally placed before the noun it qualifies. It is of common gender and number. Examples خوش ولد خوش بنت
2- It behaves almost like an adverb, and denotes more than just 'Good'. It is like aHsan walad (best boy). It emphasises the quality of the noun it qualifies...

(He gives more information on the word's use and connotations.) I find all this fascinating, and I look forward to whatever else may turn up on the word's origins, spread, and syntactical oddities.

IRAQI ARABIC.

In the course of reading The Last Jews in Baghdad (see this LH post), I encountered references to "the Arabic spoken by Jews" and wondered what that was all about: was there really a separate dialect, not just regular Iraqi Arabic with a few Hebrew words tossed in? A little googling turned up a thread at WordReference Forums on this very topic, started by Nun-Translator's question:

I am reading an autobiographical novel written in Hebrew by Eli Amir that takes place in Baghdad in the 1940s. He frequently refers to "Jewish Arabic" and "Muslim Arabic". I'm not clear if he is talking about accents or dialects... Are you aware of "Jewish Arabic"? Is it an accent or a dialect? (The way Amir uses the term, it sounds more like a dialect.) Does it still exist? And one more question: Is there a distinctive "Christian Arabic" in Iraq or elsewhere?

The answer turns out to be that there are two major dialects in Iraq, a northern and a southern, conventionally distinguished by their pronunciation of the letter qaf as /q/ (hence "qeltu" for قلت) and /g/ ("gilit") respectively, and the distinction accidentally became a religious one in Baghdad, as explained by a commenter who goes by the handle smooha:

This happens to be a subject of great interest to me. I had the privilege of having read several books on the subject, most notably Haim Blanc's Communal Dialects of Baghdad.

As clevermizo noted, the Mesopotamian (Iraq and eastern Syria) varieties of Arabic can be divided into qeltu and gilit types. The gilit type is overwhelmingly of Bedouin origin, from the tribes to the south and west of the rivers. If my memory serves me correctly, virtually all Baghdadis (Muslims, Christians, and Jews) spoke in a qeltu variety, from the Abassid era until the late 19th c (?), which saw an unprecedented process of urbanization, with a vast number of Bedouin tribesmen (previously nomadic) became the majority. The original urban Baghdadi Muslims assimilated with the new majority, while the Christian and Jewish communities maintained their respective dialects (which, though to a significant extent mutually intelligible, contained numerous differences in lexicon).

The dialects were maintained as the language of the home/family, while the Muslim variety was used as a sort of lingua franca in the public sphere. As far as I know, Christian Baghdadis still speak their dialect in their homes, though it seems to me that Christians have tended to assimilate a bit more, because of political and social considerations (anti-Christian sentiment as well as inter-marriage between Christians of different regions)...

An interesting note: the Jewish dialect was 100% mutually intelligible and virtually identical in every non-Kurdish town in Iraq (i.e. a Jew from the northern city of Mosul could communicate fluently with a Jew from Basra, Baghdad, etc.).

It is quite easy to find samples of Muslim Baghdadi speech. If you're interested in hearing the difference, go to this site.

It's a comprehensive resource for samples of the (mostly minority) dialects of Arabic... Also, be aware that since most of the Jewish speakers now live in Israel, there are some Hebrew words here and there that are not a part of the original Jewish Baghdadi dialect.

A search for more information on the qaf divide led me to A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East by Yasir Suleiman, which discusses it on pp. 99-100:

The function of (Q) as a group boundary-setter is exhibited in various speech communities in the modern period. This is attested in a large number of studies... Blanc (1964) reports that the communal dialects of Baghdad are marked by the prestigious variant [g] in the speech of the Muslims and by the stigmatized [q] in that of the Christians and Jews... This pattern of communally based linguistic variation is found in Bahrain. Holes (1983) reports that the prestigious variant [g] is a marker of the speech of the Sunnis in Bahrain, while the stigmatized variant [q] characterizes the speech of the Shi'ites. In Tunis, the prestigious variant [q] is a marker of urban speech, while the stigmatized variant [g] is a marker of the rural or semi-nomadic communities... These, and the other studies listed above, generate four observations:
(1) The variable (Q) serves as a marker of group membership. These groups may be communally defined, as in Baghdad and Bahrain, or ecologically designated, as in Tunisia and in Ibn Khaldun's study.
(2) The prestige or stigma associated with a variable is contextually defined. Thus while [g] is the prestige variant in Baghdad and Bahrain, it is not in Tunis.
(3) The prestige of a particular variant may change in time. Ibn Khaldun's observation about the variant [g] exemplifies this phenomenon.
(4) Whenever dialect shift takes place it tends to move in the direction of the prestigious variant in a speech community.

I was going to discuss a recent Jabal al-Lughat thread that involved Iraqi Arabic, but this is quite long enough already, so I'll save it for its own post!

SONGHAY AND DOGON.

Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat has a post on the Songhay languages, which he's studying for his dissertation; I hadn't realized that the group's membership in the Nilo-Saharan family was so shaky. (Lameen says "if it were spoken in the Americas, it would undoubtedly be classed as having no relatives whatsoever.") He links to a number of resources he's finding useful, including Jeffrey Heath's webpage, a treasure trove of material about not only Songhay but Dogon. Dogon, it turns out, is not a single language (despite the claims of French colonialists and the Malian government) but a group of related languages; as Heath says in his 730-page Jamsay Grammar (pdf, to be withdrawn once the book is published):

Using the test of mutual unintelligibility as diagnostic, on the other hand, there are clearly many distinct Dogon languages in Mali. We do not yet have Dogon-wide data in a form that would permit accurate identification of language boundaries and of genetic subgrouping. However, having surveyed the varieties spoken in the northern and northeastern parts of Dogon country, I can report the following as distinct languages...: 1. Jamsay (aka Diamsay)...; 2. Beni-Walo, spoken in three separated microzones...; 3. Nanga (naŋa)...; 4. Tabi-Sarinyere, spoken by the people sometimes called Tandam...; 5. Najamba (= Bondu)...

The grammar has a substantial bibliography of material on the Dogon (not just language-related). My thanks to Lameen for pointing me to this great site!

FRISBEE.

A story by Judith Ann Schiff in the Yale Alumi Magazine (May/June issue) explains the origin of the word frisbee; I had heard it was named for a pie tin, but Schiff gives plenty of details:

It was 50 years ago this spring that a novelty company called Wham-O started mass production of the famous plastic disc that was called, at first, the "Pluto Platter." But by the time the discs arrived at the Ivy League, the students already had a game called "Frisbie," named after a pie tin, and theirs was the name that stuck.

Exactly when Yale students started tossing around tin pans made by the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, isn't clear. Most histories of the Frisbee, as well as lists of "Connecticut Firsts," put the date at about 1920. Students would fling the empty pie tins to each other as they crossed the campus and shout "Frisbie!" as a warning, like golfers shouting "Fore!"...

In 1948, a Los Angeles inventor named Walter "Fred" Morrison, hoping to cash in on the rash of UFO sightings, came up with a disc he called the Flyin' Saucer. In 1955 he and his wife, Lucile, improved the design and renamed it the Pluto Platter. It caught the eye of the Wham-O toy company owners, who took out a patent on behalf of Morrison and began mass production in 1957...

In August 1957, Gay Talese, in a New York Times article on fad toys, wrote, "The Frisbee . . . is now marketed by half a dozen manufacturers under various names, including Flying Saucers, Scalos, Space Saucers or Wham-O Pluto-Platters. Frisbee is strictly the nom de Ivy League."

The paper version of the article has a photo of an actual pie tin not reproduced online, but you can see one here.

ANGELS OR AGES?

Regular readers will know I'm a sucker for the writing of Adam Gopnik, who has a feature article in this week's New Yorker called "Angels and Ages: Lincoln’s language and its legacy." He starts off talking about reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, and how moved he was by the famous moment at Lincoln's deathbed when "Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, 'Now he belongs to the ages.'" He decided to "start reading the new Lincoln literature":

For the flight home, I picked up James L. Swanson’s “Manhunt,” a vivid account of the assassination and the twelve-day search for John Wilkes Booth that followed. Once again, I came to the deathbed scene, the vigil, the gathering. The Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family minister, said, “ ‘Let us pray.’ He summoned up . . . a stirring prayer. . . . Gurley finished and everyone murmured ‘Amen.’ Then, no one dared to speak. Again Stanton broke the silence. ‘Now he belongs to the angels.’ ”

Now he belongs to the angels? Where had that come from? There was a Monty Python element here (“What was that? I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers,’ ” the annoyed listeners too far from the Mount say to each other in “Life of Brian”), but was there something more going on?

The rest of the piece is an attempt to answer that question (I don't think it will spoil anyone's reading experience to say that yes, there was something more going on), but I want to select one casual pun as an example of why I love Gopnik so much. Talking about the young Lincoln's law practice, he says:

In the old hagiography, Lincoln the lawyer was a fiery, folksy fighter against injustice; to more recent, disillusioned revisionists, he was a corporate lawyer, a “railroad” lawyer doing the work of the new industrialists. Dirck shows that both accounts are overdrawn.

If you don't like that bit of clever wordplay, well, tastes differ, but you're missing a lot of fun.

WHEN BILINGUALS SWITCH.

Christian Jarrett's BPS Research Digest Blog has an intriguing post called "Tongue-tied: When bilinguals switch languages involuntarily" that reports on a study on "the case of two bilingual patients who, during the course of brain surgery for epilepsy, appear to have had their 'switches' involuntarily flipped"; the conclusion is "These case studies support the notion that, in bilinguals, specific regions at the front of the left hemisphere act as a language switch." Fascinating stuff. (Thanks, Trevor!)

THERE'LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND.

From Michael Specter's recent New Yorker profile of British entrepreneur/adventurer Richard Branson, creator of the Virgin empire (Virgin Megastores, Airlines, Limousines, Games, Brides...), which began in 1970 with Virgin Records:

His next indictment, under the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act, was in 1977, when the Sex Pistols released their only album, "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols," on the Virgin Records label. " 'Bollocks' was considered an unforgivably rude word," Branson said. The playwright and lawyer John Mortimer successfully defended him by producing an expert witness to demonstrate that the word "bollocks" was derived from an Anglo-Saxon term and could be used to refer to a priest. The witness even turned up in court wearing clerical garb. The judge, to his dismay, was forced to dismiss the charges, saying, "Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of commercial profits by both you and your company, we must reluctantly find you not guilty."

I love everything about this except the magazine's insistence on putting album titles in quotation marks.

I was wondering about the "priest" business, which the OED says nothing about, but fortunately I found Gavin Corder's Blog, which last September had a detailed post on this very subject:

...old Mortimer was no slouch and he called upon the Reverend Professor James Kingsley to give evidence, (due to him being an expert).

He said it was used in records from the year 1000 and in Anglo Saxon times it meant a small ball. The term was also used to describe an orchid. He said that in the 1961 publication of Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang, he had not taken into account the use of the word bollocks in the Middle Ages. He said it appears in Medieval bibles and veterinary books. In the bible it was used to describe small things of an appropriate shape. For instance bollocks could also be traced to a pulley-block at the head of a sailing topmast, otherwise known as a bullock block.

He said that the word also appears in place names without stirring any sensual desires in the local communities. Mortimer said that this would be similar to a city being called Maidenhead - that didn't seem to cause the locals in the vicinity any problems.

Mr. Kingsley said that Partridge in his books wrote that bollocks remained in colloquial use down through the centuries and was also used to denote a clergyman in the last century. ''The word has been used as a nickname for clergymen. Clergymen are known to talk a good deal of rubbish and so the word later developed the meaning of nonsense,'' he said. ''They became known for talking a great deal of bollocks, just as old balls or baloney also come to mean testicles, so it has twin uses in the dictionary''.

Mr. Ritchie asked him if he was just an expert on the word bollocks to which Kingsley replied that he was an expert on the English language who felt he could speak with authority on the derivation of a word such as bollocks. Mr. Ritchie asked Kingsley if the words fuck, cunt and shit also appeared in the Dictionary of Slang from which he had quoted. Kingsley replied ''if the word fuck does not appear in the dictionary it should.''

I had no idea, by the way, that the word bollocks caused such a stir at the time. As an American, I considered it just one of those quaint mother-country expressions like bonnet for 'hood' and toad-in-the-hole; I probably had the vague idea that well-bred Brits went around saying jovially "Oh, bollocks, old chap!" I assumed that the album was sold in brown paper bags because it was, you know, punk rock. Three decades later, my eyes are opened.

OÏL.

In the continuing adventure of reading Proust to my wife at bedtime, we've gotten well into The Guermantes Way and are comfortably ensconced in Mme de Villeparisis's godawful party, where everyone is busily engaged either in sucking up or in putting down. The Duchesse de Guermantes (with whom the young narrator is hopelessly in love for no reason except that she is the Duchesse de Guermantes) is being catty about Robert de Saint-Loup's mistress, an actress named Rachel, and says (in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation we're reading) "And then, if you'd heard the things she recited! I only remember one scene, but I'm sure nobody could imagine anything like it: it was called The Seven Princesses." Another guest, the Comte d'Argencourt (the Belgian chargé d'affaires), responds, "Seven Princesses! Dear, dear, what a snob she must be!" Even though we're reading the novel in English, I often check the original (which I keep on the night table by the bed), and here I found that Argencourt actually says "Les sept princesses, oh! Oïl, oïl, quel snobisme!" On the next page, the Duchess mocks Rachel for "uttering a sentence, no, not so much, not a quarter of a sentence" and then stopping "for a good five minutes," to which Argencourt again responds "Oïl, oïl, oïl!" (the translation has "Oh, I say").

Now, I was familiar with oïl only as an Old French word for 'yes' (descended from Latin hoc ille and developing into modern oui), and I had seen it only in the phrase langue d'oïl (which distinguishes French dialects that use descendents of hoc ille from langue d'oc, which uses descendents of hoc); I was completely baffled to see it turn up in a modern novel, and I have absolutely no clue what its connotations are. I've checked all my dictionaries, and even the largest only give it as a medieval affirmative (Trésor de la langue française informatisé: "Au Moyen Âge, mot exprimant l'affirmation dans les régions de France approximativement situées au Nord de la Loire et qui est devenu la particule oui en français"). At least I've learned that it's now pronounced /ojl/, pretty much like the English word oil; I've always given it two syllables, oh-EEL, as it presumably sounded in Old French. But can any of my Francophone readers enlighten me as to what is conveyed by this archaic word on the lips of Argencourt?

Update. In the comments, D Filippi has the answer: it's Proust's respelling (mocking Belgian pronunciation?) of what is usually written ouille or ouïe—it can mean 'ouch!' (in response to physical pain) but also seems a close equivalent to Yiddish oy! (in response to more existential pain). The TLF says (after giving the 'ouch' definition):

[Souvent répété dans un discours pour évoquer une douleur ou un désagrément hypothétiques] Synon. aïe!, aïe, aïe, aïe! Tondre la pelouse, désherber le jardin, ouille, ouille, les courbatures... alors, pour bien récupérer, les nouveaux matelas Epéda Multispire (Télérama, 17 avr. 1983, no 1737, p.143). Ouillouillouille. Rascasse: Je vais chercher les épées. Il sort. Crockson, pleurant: ouyouyouye! ouyouyouye! (ACHARD, Voulez-vous jouer, 1924, I, 3, p.61). Prononc. et Orth.: [uj]. Homon. houille. ROB. Suppl. 1970: ouille! „On écrit aussi ouïe. V. aïe. (Souvent répété, sous la forme ouillouillouille, écrit ouyouyouye chez Achard)”. Pt ROB. 1980: ouïe! ou ouille; Hachette 1980: ouille! ou ouïe! Étymol. et Hist. 1914 houille! (A. MARCHAND, Souris l'arpète, p.169 ds QUEM. DDL t.7). Onomatopée.

For what it's worth, Mark Treharne's recent (2002) translation has "Seven of them! Dear me, what a snob she must be!" and "Oh dear, oh dear!" for the two remarks quoted above.

And apropos of nothing, I can't resist quoting this passage from a few pages earlier:

“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the floor,” Mme. de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can never get used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always leaves his in the hall. I tell him when I see him come in that he looks just like a clock-maker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind the clocks.”

“You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of M. Molé’s hat; we shall soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a chapter on hats,” said the historian of the Fronde, somewhat reassured by Mme. de Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a voice that no one but myself overheard him.

In the original:

—Non, c'est une nouvelle habitude qu'ont ces messieurs de poser leurs chapeaux à terre, expliqua Mme de Villeparisis, je suis comme vous, je ne m'y habitue pas. Mais j'aime mieux cela que mon neveu Robert qui laisse toujours le sien dans l'antichambre. Je lui dis, quand je le vois entrer ainsi, qu'il a l'air de l'horloger et je lui demande s'il vient remonter les pendules.

—Vous parliez tout à l'heure, madame la marquise, du chapeau de M. Molé, nous allons bientôt arriver à faire, comme Aristote, un chapitre des chapeaux, dit l'historien de la Fronde, un peu rassuré par l'intervention de Mme de Villeparisis, mais pourtant d'une voix encore si faible que, sauf moi, personne ne l'entendit.

BURUSHASKI.

There's something romantic about language isolates. The most famous is Basque (subject of much crackpottery); others are Ainu and the Siberian languages Ket and Nivkh (also known as Gilyak). In and around the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, almost 90,000 people speak a language called Burushaski; I've known about it for over 30 years, ever since I read W.B. Lockwood's A Panorama of Indo-European Languages in grad school and found a paragraph on it full of wonderfully exotic names:

In the western part of the Karakorum an isolated language, Burushaski, survives in two enclaves: an eastern form found in Hunza and Nagar, a western form in Yasin, where it is termed Werchikwar. To the north there is contact with Wakhi, in Yasin also with Khowar, otherwise with Shina, a language which has advanced in the Gilgit area at the expense of Burushaski... Dumaki forms a diminutive Indo-European enclave within the Burushaski of Hunza and Nagar. To all intents and purposes, Burushaski is a purely oral medium.

Well, in a comment to this post, David Marjanović linked to an online version of a book containing a compact grammatical description of the language, Dick Grune's Burushaski − An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram Mountains (pdf, HTML cache), whose very first words told me I'd been pronouncing the name wrong all these years: "Burúshaski (stress on the second syllable)..." The book is very clearly and enjoyably written, an unusual pleasure in this kind of text ("The bad news is that Burushaski has perhaps as many paradigms as Latin, but the good news is that they are much more regular"). Grune discusses the possible relationships of the language:

Although Burushaski has been compared to almost any language on earth, no fully convincing relationships have yet been established. Modern taxonomic methods are, however, beginning to yield results. Ruhlen (1989) [lit.ref. 7] still classified Burushaski as a language isolate: ‘its genetic affiliation remains a complete mystery’ (p. 126), but Ruhlen (1992) [lit.ref. 7] reports on a possible classification of Burushaski as a separate branch of a newly proposed Dené-Caucasian superstock. More recently, Blažek and Bengtson (1995) [lit.ref. 8] list tens of etymologies relating Burushaski to the Yeniseian languages, spoken by a hundred people along the Yenisei river in Siberia. Where appropriate, we have included these etymolgies in this survey.

(I'm not sure what the "lit.ref." numbers refer to; the list of references at the end is not numbered and has only one entry for Ruhlen, his Guide to the World’s Languages: Volume 1 [1987; 1991].) He begins his description of the language with this summary:

For all its romantic and exotic associations, Burushaski is not much weirder than Latin, Turkish or Finnish; of these three it is most reminiscent of Turkish in its structure. It has two or three cases for the nouns (see below) and a small number of locative suffixes; it has essentially one conjugation for the verb, plus a number of composite conjugations; and its sentence structure is similar to that of Turkish but much simpler. Its most remarkable features are that it has four genders for the nouns and that the indications of the object of the verb are the same as those for possession on the noun: ‘I hit him’ is expressed roughly as ‘I do his hitting’, as in many Amerind languages.

The four genders (I know you're wondering) are human males (which he abbreviates hm), human females (hf), animals and countable objects (x), and materials and abstracta (y). Another interesting feature is the consecutive, "which has no counterpart in English. It has the meaning of ‘after having done so and so’ or ‘when such and such state had arisen’; it is a kind of adverbial past participle and it is used very, very frequently in Burushaski." The higher numbers are vigesimal: 20 is áltar, 30 áltar tórum 'twenty ten,' 40 altó-áltar 'two-twenty,' 50 altó-áltar tórum, and so on. I greatly enjoy this kind of compendious description; it gives me the sense of getting a handle on a language without having to do any real work. Thanks, David!

CHICKENSHIT.

Mark Liberman has a typically incisive Language Log post about that satisfying expletive chickenshit, sparked off by this quote from a Washington Post story: "McCain... used a curse word associated with chickens and accused Cornyn of raising the issue just to torpedo a deal." (Mark says "Amazingly, Andrew Sullivan was... baffled by this bit of bowdlerization," but I confess when I read the story earlier I myself was baffled. I associate chickenshit with bosses, not chickens, and wondered vaguely if McCain had squawked in outrage.) After a thorough lexicographical examination, he says "It seems to me that there is some philosophical work to be done here, along the lines of Harry Frankfurt's pathbreaking exegesis of bullshit," and I couldn't agree more. I disagree, however, with Mark's suggestion that "the essence of chickenshit — or at least a critical factor in chickenshit — is misrepresentation of motives"; that seems to me an ancillary, not a defining, factor. In an update he quotes an excellent analysis by Paul Fussell, whose book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War contains an entire chapter "Chickenshit, An Anatomy":

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige... insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called — instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit — because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

Gallus gallus may vanish from the face of the earth, but chickenshit will always be with us.

COMMON PRAYER AROUND THE WORLD.

I posted earlier about a site that has the Anglican Book of Common Prayer online in various versions (including Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and Hawaiian); now I offer you a comprehensive history and discussion of translations of the BCP—well, comprehensive as of 1913, when William Muss-Arnolt, was a linguist at the Boston Public Library, published The Book of Common Prayer among the Nations of the World, online thanks to the Society of Archbishop Justus. Muss-Arnolt begins, as is only proper, with Latin and Greek (meaning, of course, Ancient Greek), continues with Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Near East (beginning with Modern Greek and ending with Pashtu), The British Empire in India and the Far East (beginning with Hindi and ending with Ainu), Australia and the Pacific Ocean ("The Aborigines of Australia Sadly Neglected"), Africa ("The Land of Good Hope"), and The Amerinds or American Indians in North and South America (beginning with Mohawk—"The Mohawk were the most easterly tribe of the Iroquois confederation, the “Romans of the New World,” and hereditary foes of the Algonquians"—and ending with Yahgan, a language familiar to regular readers of LH). The book is very well presented:

The complete text of the book is presented here, as it was in the original, to the extent that HTML will allow. Additionally, the individual BCP's discussed are identified by their reference number from Griffiths’ Bibliography of the BCP. Also, scans are included of a number of title pages of the BCP translations. Nearly all of these are from the web author’s collection.

The discussions of the men who produced the various versions are interesting and often touching ("A memorable figure under Magellan’s clouds was this solitary possessor of a language, who held, as it were, the spiritual life of a people in the scored and ruffled leaves of his version"), and the accounts of the peoples and languages, though sometimes inaccurate and condescending from our enlightened point of view, make lively reading. Who can resist a sentence like this? "The Right Rev. Alexander Charles Garrett, bishop of Dallas, Northern Texas, translated in 1862, while missionary at Victoria (1861-67), on Vancouver’s Island, portions of the Prayer Book into the Chinook jargon; but the jargon was so hopeless that he never printed a line."

(My thanks to The Growler for alerting me to this via e-mail.)

ONEIDA ONLINE.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has found several good sites for learning Oneida (Ethnologue, Wikipedia): the Oneida Language Revitalisation Program, Oneida Language Tools (including a grammar section that links to pdf files of "a 165 page document that describes the basic sound, word, and sentence structures of Oneida"), and Tracy Williams' site (warning: automatically launches video clip). As Lameen says, "It's great to see this much material online for a language with less than two hundred speakers; this should make it a lot easier for would-be speakers to make a good start at learning it."

THE BOOKSHELF, II.

Occasionally publishers send me copies of their recent or imminent publications, obviously in the hope that I'll mention them; sometimes I don't, either because the books are too far from the LH beat or because they irritate me. The latter was the case with Ben Yagoda's When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It; I opened it with anticipation because I've enjoyed Yagoda's writing, but a few pages into the introduction I hit this:

I'm with the prescriptivists on enthuse. The "descriptivists," by contrast, would go to their deaths defending the use of hopefully to mean "it is to be hoped that" simply because people use it that way. These are the linguists and academic grammarians whose motto, borrowed from Alexander Pope, is "Whatever is, is right."

And a few pages later comes this:

The main flaw of the descriptivists shows up in their own inconsistency. People such as Harvard linguist Steven Pinker, whose book The Language Instinct contains a chapter roundly ripping the "language mavens," and the editors of the jaw-droppingly comprehensive Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage put forth an it's-all-good philosophy, yet in their own writing follow all the traditional rules.

Now, I don't like ignorant assaults on straw-man "descriptivists" when David Foster Wallace perpetrates them, and I don't like them coming from Yagoda either. Yes, descriptivists (better known as "linguists") describe language as it is, not as they might like it to be, just the way astronomers describe the universe as it is and physicists describe subatomic particles as they are. What would be the point of an astronomer condemning a planet for not being the kind of planet he prefers? And the point about descriptivists following all the traditional rules is just silly—nobody's saying it's bad to write according to traditional rules of style or that anything can and should be said anywhere. Obviously, with language as with clothing, there's a time and a place for everything; most of us wouldn't go to a fancy restaurant in ripped jeans and t-shirts, and when we're carrying on an erudite conversation or writing a scholarly book we don't say "ain't." The point is that there's nothing wrong with ripped jeans or ain't; in the right context they can be far more appropriate than "proper" alternatives. Context is all. And Ben, there's nothing at all wrong with hopefully except that you personally don't like it. Try not to confuse your preferences with the English language.

Now that I've got that off my chest... I reopened the book recently and discovered that it's actually a lot of fun. Yagoda loves words and good writing and has spent years saving up good quotes, which he lavishes on his book; it's worth flipping through just for the lists of quotes like this one in the chapter on adjectives (titled "Adj."; all his chapter titles are dictionary-style abbreviations):

"In those trusses I saw a reminder of a country-fairgrounds grandstand, or perhaps the penumbrous bones of the Polo Grounds roof." —Roger Angell on the gridwork at the new baseball stadium in Baltimore

"She shook her head, and a smell of alembicated summer touched his nostrils." —Sylvia Townsend Warner.

"The Sunday's events repeated themselves in his mind, bending like nacreous flakes around a central infrangible irritant." —John Updike.

"He had the surface involvement — style — while I had the deep-structural, immobilizing synovial ballooning of a superior mind." —Nicholson Baker on Updike.

And there are four more almost as enjoyable (though cartilaginous and chordal aren't really that obscure). Alas, this parade of his favorite adjectives is preceded by a long rant about "NOAs (needlessly obscure adjectives)":

There is no reason to use rebarbative instead of "unpleasant," "annoying," or some other familiar negative epithet, other than to be fancy... T.S. Eliot made a fetish of using long-dormant adjectives like defunctive, anfractuous, and polyphiloprogenitive... Senator Robert Byrd is justly snickered at for saying things like "maledicent language" and "contumelious lip." Gore Vidal has been accused of excessive fondness for words like mephitic and riparian. In just one essay, James Fenton writes, "the element of the aleatoric may well be genuinely present," and refers to "proleptic writers such as Ibsen and Strindberg" and to a "hieratic figure somewhat reminiscent of Ernst." That's too proleptic for me.

I'm sorry, but you don't get to be both the Plain Man for whom Plain Words are Good Enough and the literary lepidopterist luxuriating in rare specimens like alembicated and infrangible. Can he really not see that all that separates his Bad Adjectives from his Good ones is that for unexamined personal reasons he happens to like the latter and dislike the former? I'll even bet that if you dropped all the adjectives in a hat and presented them to him randomly a year later, he'd divide them entirely differently.

But it's easy enough to ignore the over-the-top egocentrism once you get the hang of it, and the important thing is that he does know where to find real answers if he decides he needs them; in the second paragraph of the chapter on conjunctions he defers, quite properly, to "Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar"—that is to say, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney D. Huddleston and Language Log's own Geoffrey K. Pullum.

And I learned stuff from it. In the noun chapter, Yagoda discusses productive suffixes, including -ster, tracing its evolution through "such words as huckster (first use—1300), trickster (1711), gangster (1896), roadster (1908), and hipster (1941)." When he gets to the 1990s, he says "a Massachusetts kid named Shawn Fanning was dubbed 'the Napster' by his high school buddies because of his curly hair. Fanning went on to invent the world's first file-sharing software, called, naturally, Napster." Even Wikipedia does not have that bit of origin information (as of this date), and I'm glad to know it. (I googled around and found it in enough sources to convince me it's probably not an urban legend.) So if you can sift through the unexamined prejudices and writerly riffs to find and savor the good stuff, it's a book well worth your while.

KANJI CURIOSITY.

Freelance writer Eve Kushner has been "fascinated by kanji ever since I started learning the characters in fall 2002," and she's started posting weekly essays about them at Kanji Curiosity. Her first is called "Neck and Neck," and begins:

Do Japanese people regard the nose of an airplane as its neck?!
I initially thought so when I examined the kanji for 機首 (kishu: nose of plane):

機 = machine
首 = neck

I imagined a plane as a long, headless neck with wings! Then I realized that 首 (SHU, kubi) means not only "neck" but also "head," "beginning," and "first." Associated meanings include "forepart of a vessel" and "occupying a head position" or "main."

Ah, now the kishu compound makes more sense. But still I was tickled, because I have a deep affection for 首, which shows up in fascinating places:

手首 (tekubi: wrist)   hand + neck
足首 (ashikubi: ankle)   leg + neck

The wrist is the "neck" of the arm, and the ankle is the "neck" of the leg. Similar thinking applies to flowers:

花首 (hanakubi: the place where a flower joins its stem)    flower + neck

We have a comparable concept in English, with terms such as "bottleneck" describing narrowed areas. But somehow compounds involving 首 feel more fanciful or fun. Take, for instance, these imaginative words, in which 首 truly means "neck" in the anatomical sense:

首っ引き (kubippiki: tug of war using necks; constantly referring to a dictionary)   neck + pull
猪首 (ikubi: short, thick neck)   boar + neck

I don't know about you, but that kind of comparison helps characters stick in my head.

CHICKEN CHICKEN.

Chicken chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken (chicken chicken chicken); chicken chicken chicken chicken: chicken! (Chicken chicken.)

HAKKA ONLINE.

Siu-Leung Lee's Hakka site has a section on the language: "This section is a collection of notes of my own experience and thoughts about the Hakka dialect and other language/dialects. Except where cited, many of my non-linguist viewpoints are unproven hypotheses. Discussions holding similar or contrary views, as well as supplementations are cordially welcome." The modesty is welcome; for a more organized take on the subject one can check the Wikipedia article and its links, but this is one Hakka's take on his own culture and language and interesting as such. Dr. Lee's biography can be read here; on his own site he says "I was born in a Hakka family, but I knew little about Hakka. Brought up in Hong Kong, I had little use of the Hakka dialect except to understand the conversation of my father's friends and employees. My parents spoke to me in Cantonese.... In the early 1990s, I spent 4 years back in Hong Kong. Browsing in a bookstore, I picked up a book about Hakka. Only then did I start to learn more about what Hakka meant to me..." Thanks for the link, Paul!

BE-SIGH-CLE.

I'm still reading The Last Jews in Baghdad, and I just came across this paragraph on page 59, which combines an interesting fact about Iraqi dialects with a highly amusing anecdote, a sort of reductio ad absurdum of linguistic prescriptivism:

Of the Jewish teachers at Madrasat Ras el-Qarya I remember Salih Afandi, who taught arithmetic and used to insist on addressing us in the colloquial Arabic Muslims spoke, unlike his colleagues who managed to make do with a strange combination of classical Arabic and the Arabic spoken by Jews. Especially pompous was a young teacher by the name of Nyazi—an uncommon name among the Jews of Iraq—who taught us English in the fourth form. I remember him telling us that the correct pronunciation of the word bicycle was to rhyme with “behind” and “besides,” the accepted pronunciation being completely wrong. He insisted on our doing it correctly and it was only some years later that I found out how nonsensical the correction was.

THE BOOKSHELF, I.

I've been accumulating books I want to write about, and I might as well start with two that helped me with this curses-and-insults book I've been working on.

The first is In Other Words, by Christopher J. Moore. I was unfairly disparaging to the book in a post a couple of years ago making fun of the non-word "razbliuto" (which Moore had taken from another source and which, as he pointed out in the comment thread, had been removed in the next edition of his book); being now in the position of working on a similar book, I fully realize how impossible it is, given less than infinite time, to verify every entry, and having actually used Moore's book I find it immensely enjoyable. One can quibble about particular definitions, and there's too much emphasis on "untranslatability," but it's a nice selection of foreign terms; alongside the more obvious Arabic baksheesh and hajj, for example, is hilm il-utaat kullu firaan 'the dream of cats is all about mice,' meaning "to have a one-track mind." And in the introduction to the Eastern European section Moore gave me great pleasure by quoting the final section of this essay about Budapest by the Serbian writer Dragan Velikić, with its riff on the name of Pillangó utca:

I translated that name to myself as Pillangó Street, in other words, I did not translate it at all, convinced that it was a name, a street bearing somebody's name. I walked through Budapest as if I had just arrived in Babylon where, by the grace of a god who had yet to become angry or disappointed, everything had a personal name, untranslatable, and thus immediately understandable... Nothing about that feeling changed even when my friend explained to me smilingly that pillangó means — butterfly. You are talking about the Street of Butterflies, she said, about Butterfly Street. But the word pillangó was ever after engraved in my mind as the name of a butterfly. There was a "Pillangó butterfly" and it lived in Budapest.

The second book is Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge. The authors are academics (at Monash University), which means the book has a fair amount of jargon (of course, in Chapter 3 they insist that "although some [jargon] is vacuous pretentiousness, and therefore dysphemistic, its proper use is both necessary and unobjectionable"), but they are also linguists, which means the discussion of "bad language" is well informed and should enlighten readers who turn to the book to understand what linguistic taboo is all about. For the curse/insult book I naturally leaned on the chapter on "Jargon, slang, swearing and insult," but directly relevant to a prime mission of Languagehat is Chapter 5, "Linguistic purism and verbal hygiene," which in its opening paragraph says "We focus not on formal acts of censorship... but on the attitudes and activities of ordinary people, in letters to newspapers or comments on talkback radio. In these contexts, ordinary language users act as self-appointed censors and take it upon themselves to condemn language that they feel does not measure up to the standards they perceive should hold sway." The authors discuss Australian resentment of "ugly Americanisms," how standard languages come about (noting that "prescriptive grammarians seeking to establish the Standard often failed to conform to their own prescriptions"), the attempts of the "self-appointed protectors" of English to hold back language change, and Mary Douglas's theory of pollution and taboo in relation to language. They conclude the chapter by saying:

Standard language is an ideal that speakers have, and which everyday usage never quite matches up to — not even in the performances of 'good' speakers and writers... For as long as records go back, people have complained about the degeneration of the language used in their own time. Feelings about what is 'clean' and what is 'dirty' in language are universal, and humankind would have to change beyond all recognition before these urges to control and clean up the language disappeared. An integral part of the language behaviour of every human group is the desire to constrain and manage language, and to purge it of unwanted elements: bad grammar, sloppy pronunciation, newfangled words, vulgar colloquialisms, unwanted jargon and, of course, foreign items. Next to the shamans are the self-appointed arbiters of linguistic goodness: ordinary language users who follow the ritual, and taboo those words and constructions they see as 'unorderly' and outside the boundaries of what is good and proper.

A thoughtful and sensible analysis; I hope the book is widely read.

CIRCUMCELLION.

I'm pretty sure this is the most entertaining description of a religious sect I've ever read. I hadn't heard of the Circumcellions, and I'm guessing most of you haven't either; the OED decorously limits itself to "A name given to the Donatist fanatics in Africa during the 4th c., from their habit of roving from house to house" (hence the name: Latin circum 'around' + cella 'cell'), but the linked article says:

The Circumcellions were a Christian suicide cult of the fourth and fifth centuries. Their religious practice consisted of delivering random beatings to strangers along the road, with the purpose of goading the strangers into killing them. If that didn't work, they just threw themselves off a cliff instead[...]

Sociologically, the Circumcellions were the Roman equivalent of trailer trash — rural, uneducated and less-than-notable in terms of contribution to the gross national product. The only job of a Circumcellion was simply "being a Circumcellion." Despite this, members of the sect didn't starve to death... because that would take too long.

Although they considered themselves breakaway Christians, one would be hard-pressed to develop a theological justification for the Circumcellions. Its parent cult, the Donatists, was founded on the basis of an extremely complex stand that generally extolled the virtues of Martyrdom.

The Circumcellions took the premise to lemming-like proportions (literally) and decided that martyrdom was the ultimate Christian value. They set out to accomplish it... by any means necessary.

According to the gospels, Jesus told Peter to put away his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, shortly before the Crucifixion. Many Christians have taken this command as an injunction to nonviolence and evidence of Christ's pacifism.

The Circumcellions, on the other hand, took this passage to mean that they shouldn't use bladed weapons. Instead, they favored large clubs, which they inexplicably called "Israelites."

Using their "Israelites," the Circumcellions whacked their victims around in the hopes of provoking their own martyrdom, all the while shouting "Praise the Lord!" in Latin[...]

There's more where that came from, including an argument (I don't know if accurate) that it was the Circumcellions who were responsible for the doctrine of the "just war": "it was in response to the wacky shenanigans of the Circumcellions that St. Augustine wrote the first major theological justification for the use of violence by Christians — so that they could defend themselves against the club-wielding morons." (Via Kattullus's MetaFilter post on a podcast lecture series about the Byzantine Empire by Lars Brownworth.)

SAMPHIRE.

A friend wrote me to ask about the word samphire, and once I'd copied out enough material to give her an answer I thought I might as well share my research with all and sundry. So:

First off, in case anyone had (like me) the vague idea that "samphire" was an alternate spelling of "sapphire," it's not; according to the OED, the latter word has never had a variant in -m-. The forms given are saphyr, saphir, safir(e, (zaphire), safer(e, saffer(e, safyr(e, sapher, saphyre, saphire, saffyr, saffre, safewr, (safour, safur), Sc. sapheir, saphere, saphier, (safure, saffure, -oure, Sc. saufir), sappheir, Sc. saiffer, sapphyr, sapphire. With that out of the way...

The OED's definitions are:

1. a. The plant Crithmum maritimum (growing on rocks
by the sea), the aromatic saline fleshy leaves of
which are used in pickles. Also called rock samphire.
1545 ELYOT Dict., Crethmos uel Cretamus, an herbe
growing on the sea rockes, whiche we call Sampere.
[...] 1605 SHAKES. Lear IV. vi. 15 Halfe way downe
Hangs one that gathers Sampire: dreadfull Trade. [...]
1863 BARING-GOULD Iceland 176 The water has to be
given a flavor by the squeezed berries of the
Samphire.

b. As a name for various other maritime plants, esp.
the glasswort (Salicornia). For GOLDEN, MARSH1,
PRICKLY samphire, see those words.
1703 W. DAMPIER Voy. III. I. 121 The Mould is Sand by
the Sea-side, producing a large sort of Sampier, which
bears a white Flower. [...] 1907 Westm. Gaz. 7 Feb.
12/1 The glasswort is still called ‘samphire’ in
Suffolk, and is gathered for purposes of pickling.

2. Cookery. The leaves of samphire, used chiefly as a
pickle.
1624 BOYLE in Lismore Papers (1886) II. 138 A smale
Barricke of Sampier. [...] 1747-96 H. GLASSE Cookery
xix. 306 Take the samphire that is green, lay it in a
clean pan.

Waverly Root says in his wonderful Food:

samphire, an English plant known also as sea fennel,
described long ago as "of a spicie taste with a
certaine saltnesse," not to mention the samphire which
is the seaside purslane, the prickly samphire which is
the sea parsnip, the Jamaica samphire which is
saltwort, or the marsh samphire which is saltwort too,
but a different kind, known also as chicken claws or
glasswort, since it was once used to make glass, a
safer use perhaps than eating it, for John Gerard
wrote that "a great quantitie taken is mischievous and
deadly," but it did have the advantage that "the smel
and smoke . . . of this herb being burnt drives away
serpents."

The Diner's Dictionary, by John Ayto, says:

Samphire is a confusing term, for it refers to two
completely unrelated plants. The original samphire, a
member of the carrot family, grows on coastal rocks —
whence its name, which is a garbling of French (herbe
de) St Pierre, 'St Peter's herb', an allusion to its
rocky habitat (Peter comes from a Greek word for
'rock'). Its aromatic leaves have long been used in
pickles, and people ran considerable risks to gather
it (Edgar in King Lear, staring over the imaginary
cliff edge, conjured up the vertiginousness of their
situation: 'Halfway down hangs one that gathers
samphire, dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger
than his head'). Much more familiar under the name
samphire nowadays, however, is an altogether different
plant, genus Salicornia, which first had the term (in
full marsh samphire) applied to it in the eighteenth
century. It grows in saltmarshes, and has fleshy
succulent leaves that can be eaten as a vegetable,
lightly boiled or steamed (no need to add salt). Its
alternative name, glasswort, refers to the former use
of ash from its burnt leaves in making glass.

And Alan Davidson's magisterial Penguin Companion to Food
has an entry too long to type in; fortunately, Amazon has
"Search inside" for it. Just search on "samphire" and
click on the second result, "on Page 827," and then on
the arrow at the right margin to read the rest of the entry.
(Too bad you can't see the delicate line drawing at the lower
right of the first page.)

SARDINIAN AND OTHER STUFF.

Thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins, I have the pleasure of presenting to you the online Sardinian dictionary (I linked the English version, but you can get it in Italian, French, German, and Spanish as well—just click on the appropriate flag). They say:

The “Ditzionàriu Online” has a simple structure and it is easy to use. It is basically made up of two parts: one is the dictionary itself, which contains the words and their description (main database); the other is dedicated to the collection of new words or extra information on existing ones (temporary database). The dictionary may be freely consulted while the insertion of information may be done only after having registered oneself.

In other news, the Chabon serial I raved about here has finally ended (apparently it will be released as a book later this year); I guess I'll have to assuage my grief by reading some of his other work. But I have a question. In the last couple of episodes, one of the characters is a jashivgar: "He turned to the jashivgar who stood by his side, a captain of archers in a scale-mail coat." I've scoured the internet (where it occurs only here) and my reference works in vain. Anybody have any idea where this word comes from?

Also, don't miss the Daily Growler's latest post, a lament for the New York City he knew a few decades ago: "hell, I went to Carnegie Hall regularly in those days—Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony—Leopold Stokowski conducting his American Symphony Orchestra—... I was there when Bruno Maderno conducted Saint-Saens Organ Symphony and Stokowski in the balcony box across from mine put his fingers in his ears right at the moment the organ entered the orchestral picture with a punctuation heard 'round the world... There were jazz clubs all over town, uptown, Mikell's up on Columbus, downtown, Slugs in the East Village, the Village Gate, the Vanguard, the Knickerbocker down near Washington Square had jazz—there was Sweet Basil over on Seventh Avenue South and up the street... the club owned by the Brecker Brothers, and on down on Hudson and Spring was the Half Note—even the Metropole was still a jazz club when I first walked through Times Square." Wish I'd been there.

THE LAST JEWS IN BAGHDAD.

It seems I just can't get enough of Levantine Jewish memoirs; after polishing off Aciman and Sciaky, I've embarked on The Last Jews in Baghdad by Nissim Rejwan, about his family's life in Iraq before the mass exodus of the Jews in 1951. (I came to Rejwan via a recommendation by my man Ammiel Alcalay, who quotes him enticingly in his wonderful After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture.) You can read the first chapter here; I'll quote this illuminating description of the hib, or terracotta water filter:

Whether drawn from taps or brought by the saqqa directly from the banks of the bountiful River Tigris, which ran right in the middle of the city dividing it into its two parts—Al-Risafa to the east of the river and Al-Karkh to its west—there remained the problem of where to keep the water clean and relatively cool. This was the easier part. On its arrival, the precious liquid was poured directly into a huge earthenware container usually standing in a prominent place in the inner courtyard. The hib—that is how it was called in colloquial Iraqi Arabic—was a center of attention and of a significance second only to that of the kitchen. Placed strategically in the shade, it was always carefully covered with a wooden top to keep away flies, mosquitoes, and other natural intruders from the air.

The hib was a many-faceted device. Apart from keeping the water clean and fit for drinking it also served as a kind of primitive refrigerator. The water was always cool thanks to the breeze which, no matter how burning hot it was itself, always managed to cool the outside of the hib by contact with its damp walls. Moreover the hib, which was rounded and with a very narrow base, was placed on a sturdy wooden "cage" with small holes that, while permitting the draught to circulate inside and out, kept the place out of reach of scorpions, cockroaches, snakes, and certain other intruders from land. It was in this "cage," qafas, that some of the most valuable necessities were tucked away. Besides the special jug that was placed right under the hib's base to gather the water dripping therefrom, there was ample space in it to accommodate pots, bottles, and plates containing cooked meals, milk, yogurt, liquid medications, and fruit and vegetables, which were preserved in reasonable coolness through the sweltering heat of summer and kept out of harm's reach. The qafas also prevented the cats from reaching the meats and the milk products. Ice and ice boxes were introduced only in the 1930s and were used in the better-off households to preserve meats, vegetables, and fruits.

This segues into a description of how people dealt with snakes, which they were forbidden by custom to harm ("In certain households, again, the mistress of the house left a plate of milk around so that a snake drinking it would become pacified and friendly to members of the household. In such cases the mother chants, 'O snake of the house, do not do us harm and we won't harm you!'") I'm thoroughly enjoying it, even though the haphazardly transliterated Arabic sometimes gives me a hard time (in the book he calls his native neighborhood "Abu Shibil"; in this essay he uses the more accurate Abu Shibl).

And as lagniappe, in the course of investigating his "tcharkhatchi" ('night watchman'), I discovered WikIraqi, which has an Expressions page that includes an entry "جرخجي Pronounced [CHARKHACHI] A night guard. Also the name of a well-known Iraqi family. The word is of Turkish origin." The coverage is spotty and some of the explanations dubious, but it's a valuable resource.

Oh, and if anyone can tell me more about the word hib or the Turkish origin of charkhachi (I presume it includes the -ji suffix), I'll be grateful.

CUNJEVOI.

While trying to find the solution to the "congat" puzzle at Anggarrgoon, I happened on the word(s) cunjevoi in my Australian Oxford:

cunjevoi¹ n. an Australian sea-squirt found on intertidal rocks and used as bait. (Probably from a NSW Aboriginal language.)

cunjevoi² n. a rainforest plant of NSW and Qld, having extremely large leaves and arum-lily-like flowers, the stem-tissue providing a staple food for Aborigines after it had been carefully treated to rid it of its very high toxicity. (Probably from Bandjalang.)

Naturally, I turned to the OED, which lumps them together into a single entry:

cunjevoi
Austral.
[Native name.]
1. The popular name for the green arum or spoon lily, Alocasia macrorrhiza.
1889 J. H. MAIDEN Useful Native Plants Austral. 165 Colocasia macrorrhiza.. Alocasia macrorrhiza.. ‘Pitchu’ of the aboriginals of the Burnett River, Queensland; ‘Cunjevoi’ of those of South Queensland. [...] 1965 Austral. Encycl. I. 221/1 One of the commonest Australian species is the cunjevoi,.. whose large fleshy rhizomes extend for several feet over the surface of the ground.

2. (Also -boi, -boy.) A common ascidian, the sea-squirt (see quots.). Abbrev. cunjie.
[1821 S. LEIGH in W. S. Ramson Austral. Eng. (1966) 121 Conguwa, a kind of living fungus, which at certain Seasons they detach from the Rocks on the Sea Shore.] 1911 A. E. MACK Bush Days 109 Down at the sea's edge grew the cunje-boy, brown and red, upon the rocks. [...] 1966 BAKER Austral. Lang. (ed. 2) xiv. 302 Cunjie, a cunjevoi, used for bait.

I'm hoping one of my Australianist readers will tell me whether this is two different Aboriginal words that happen to fall together in borrowed form, or whether the OED is correct in taking them as two meanings for one word. (It would also be great if someone can answer Claire's "congat" question.)

NEW LINGUISTIC SURVEY OF INDIA.

Steven Bird has a Language Log post about an exciting new project:

Later this month, linguists from across India will convene to begin work on a 10-year, US$100M project to survey 400+ Indian languages. The New Linguistic Survey of India will involve 44 academic institutions and some 10,000 linguists and language experts, making it the largest national language documentation effort to date. The project will describe each language and speech variety, compiling lexicons, grammar sketches, audiovisual documentation, and language maps, and will disseminate these materials over the web...

You can read a story by Sharath S. Srivatsa in The Hindu that discusses the survey's century-old precursor:

The first and only LSI so far was that initiated by Sir George Abraham Grierson, which began in 1898 and was completed in 1927...

Though Grierson's survey inspired a large number of studies on language, it also had some drawbacks.

Data was collected by untrained field workers and, further, the survey excluded the former province of Madras and the then princely States of Hyderabad and Mysore from its purview.

No reasons were assigned for this omission and the result was that South India was under-represented in the LSI.

And here is an enthusiastic story (originally from OutlookIndia.com, March 11, 2007) by Sugata Srinivasaraju that ends by discussing the place of English:

What happens to English in the NLSI? How will it deal with a foreign tongue that has had such a pervasive influence in the last couple of decades? That's where tracking bilingualism becomes important. "In the West, bilingualism is the exception; in India it is the rule... Recognising convergence in India's history is not so much an ironing out of differences of identity as the emergence of a fresh all-India linguistic identity," says the report.

LOST LANGUAGES.

I was startled to find an unexpected Amazon.com package in my mailbox today—it turns out a LH fan made use of the wish list linked in the right sidebar to send me a copy of Andrew Robinson's Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts! I've lusted after this beautifully produced book, with its gorgeous illustrations of eleven ancient scripts (three deciphered, the rest still awaiting their Champollion or Ventris) ever since I saw it in St. Mark's Bookshop several years ago, and I've already plunged in. You can read a detailed description at ill-advised; I'll just offer my heartfelt thanks to whatever kind soul did this generous deed.

Actually, though, I will quote ill-advised's mention of an odd aspect of the book that struck me as well:

This particular copy that I bought has another curious aspect: it isn't the McGraw-Hill edition; it's “A Peter N. Nevraumont Book” published by “BCA” (whatever that means) “by arrangement with McGraw-Hill [. . .] Created and produced by Nevraumont Publishing Company” and it doesn't even have an ISBN, only a “CN” (I guess that would be some sort of catalog number internal to the publisher) of 106839. However, it is listed on amazon as having the ISBN 064169959X.

I thought all books had ISBNs these days!

TRANSLATOR FIRED FOR RAILLERY.

A story by Grégory Onillon at Libé describes how an American translator got fired for subtitling a Sarkozy appeal to the French to "s’unir à moi" as "to rally my inflated ego." An amusing sidelight is that the story mistranslates the mistranslation as «unissez-vous à mon ego surdimensionné» (rally here should be rendered ranimer or the like; s'unir à would be rally to). Via the Enigmatic (and always delightful) Mermaid, who attaches the post to the labels "Oopsie, Traduttore_Traditore" and suggests "Translator thinks, I will just make a little joke here, surely the editor will spot it and we'll have a laugh at the drinking fountain later on. Editor doesn't spot it..."

IN DEFENSE OF CUSSING.

On another Chinese-related topic, hopefully less contentious than romanization, herewith Danwei presenting a translation of Massage Milk's In defence of Beijing's dirty words:

Recently, some media have been worrying about jing ma [Beijing style swearing and the constant sound of profanities you hear if you walk around Beijing], saying that if spectators at the Olympic Games constantly hear Beijingers cursing, it will be very embarrasing. Therefore, there are people calling for an elimination to Beijing swearing before 2008....

Chinese has two slang expressions that I think are profound: one is "fuck! (wo cao, literally 'I fuck', sometimes closer in meaning to 'fuck me!'), one is "stupid cunt" (sha bi).

There's an old story about a world story-telling competition. The winner is the one who can use the fewest words to tell the most complicated story. In the end, the winner was a Chinese guy. This guy told a story about riding a bicycle up a mountain to look at the scenery, and then having an accident. The whole story only had two words "Fuck me!" (wo cao)...

Very funny stuff. (Thanks to Rupert Goodwins for the link.)

THE BIBLE IN KRIOL.

The Religion Report, from Australia's ABC radio, features "the first complete translation of the Bible into an Australian indigenous language - Kriol - spoken by around 30,000 indigenous Australians." Read the transcript or listen to the show (and hear Psalm 23, "God im det stakmen blanga wi"). And thanks to frequent commenter noetica for the tip!

ILLITERACY IN CHINA.

I would urge everyone to read Victor Mair's guest post at Language Log. Its conclusion seems to me indisputable:

The people of China — now, as they have been for the past three millennia — are constantly challenged by an enormously complicated script suitable only for an elite consisting of a tiny proportion of the population...

If only China would adopt a policy of true digraphia (PINYIN plus HANZI) and actively promote it, the problems of illiteracy would vanish within a decade or two.

I've said that before myself, but people seem unwilling to accept it; the romance and storied history of the characters blinds people to the obvious.

LOUTISH NON-WICKER CHAIRS.

Matt of No-sword has posted a nice quotation from Soetsu Yanagi's 1933 essay "Whither folk crafts?":

Folk crafts, by definition, do not bear signatures. ... Consider: Japanese people who don't even know what grammar is can use complicated Japanese without difficulty. How different this is from speaking a foreign language, when we must awkwardly consider each point of grammar as we speak! When the words begin to come with ease, our use of the language is at its most unremarkable. Put another way, we can only use a language freely if we can use it in an unremarkable fashion. Folk arts must share this quality of being easily accessible to anyone. The "remarkable way" of the inspired genius is not the way of folk crafts.

As Matt says, "The main difference between folk crafts and language, then, is that there are fewer people going around insisting that cups without handles are ugly, or writing op-eds about the kids today and their loutish, insolent non-wicker chairs."