I decided it was high time I investigated the bibliopolic delights of Northampton, just across the river and said to have more bookstores than Cambridge. My lovely and tolerant wife drove me there and dropped me off, promising to return several hours later; I went into the nearest store on my list, Half Moon Books, and stayed until my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms it was well past lunchtime. The proprietor, David Ham, is a knowledgeable and interesting fellow (and was kind enough to photocopy a map of local used bookstores for me, facilitating my further adventures), and the store is the kind of place I haven't seen since I left NYC: full of interesting books it would never have occurred to me to look for (which is why bookstores are still better than Amazon). Fortunately, I was limited by the need to carry my purchases around with me, or I might have gone hog-wild; I wound up getting a half dozen books, including Aksakov's Years of Childhood
He recommended, given my esoteric interests, I visit Troubadour Books in North Hatfield (raved about here), which I certainly will do; in the meantime, I grabbed a quick lunch at a barbecue place and headed over to Raven Books, where on an earlier (and much more fleeting) visit to Northampton I found some good stuff on the dollar rack. I spent an hour or so looking around but this time left empty-handed (only because of the fear of shoulder strain—there are a couple of things I may go back for). I crossed Main St. and found my way to the Old Book Store, where the prices were lower but the stock limited, and (fortunately for my shoulder and pocketbook) they didn't take credit cards; I wound up getting only The Uncertain Crusade: America and the Russian Revolution of 1905
Just after we moved, our real estate agent back in Pittsfield called to say that a package had been left on the doorstep by the FedEx truck. I asked her to hold it for us until the closing; when it became apparent we wouldn't make it to the closing, I didn't know what to do about it, but she said "Don't worry, I'll mail it to you" (you're a peach, Barb!), and today it showed up: an incredibly generous LH reader used the Amazon wish list to send me a copy of An Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe
The emergence of Belarusian as a fully fledged language used in all areas of human activity came to an abrupt halt with the onset of Stalinism at the beginning of the 1930s. The grammar and spelling norms of the Tarashkevich grammar were altered by decree in 1933 to bring them closer to Russian. Active use of Belarusian was likely to attract accusations of 'bourgeois nationalism' and the inevitable consequences.I had assumed that all "national" languages were officially supported in the USSR. They go on to say that Belarusian is likely to fade away: "Belarusian, unlike Slovak for example, has probably arrived too late on the scene to be promoted to the ranks of 'high-culture' languages."After 1945 the pace of Russification quickened, so that by the 1970s there were almost no schools, and certainly no higher educational establishments, in which classes were conducted in Belarusian. Parents were given the right to withdraw their children from what were supposed to be compulsory Belarusian language classes, and apparently made abundant use of that right. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was virtually the only 'national' (i.e. non-Russian) republic in the USSR in which such a situation had been allowed to arise.
The book is full of figures and maps and bibliographies; it immediately goes into a place of honor on my linguistics shelf, and I'll be consulting it frequently. Many thanks, Pamela!
Richard Parker, who runs the enjoyable new blog Notes From a Small Island from Siargao Island in the Philippines, sent me an e-mail saying "I started a few months ago on what I expected to be a simple study of Austronesian numbers, to see if I could find out anything that could reveal a little bit new about the prehistory of that intrepid group of language-speakers, who managed to spread from Madagascar to Easter Island, Hawaii to New Zealand... It has grown from a minor diversion into an unmanageable monstrosity (my original spreadsheet now has 1443 separate entry rows, and 130 analysing columns), ie that's 1443 number systems, in 1443 languages, Austronesian, 'Papuan' and anything else I could think of that might be remotely connected... In the hope that someone else may have some bright ideas on how to process this mass of information, and be able to help me get through my current attack of 'researcher's block', I've posted it, in its present unfinished state, warts and all, online at http://coconutstudio.com/Austro%20Nos%20Aug%201.xls
Warning: The file size is 2.7Mb, so it may take a while to download."
I don't have Excel on my computer, so I can't actually see the spreadsheet, but it sounds like an interesting project, and I thought I'd throw it up here for you all to see. You can read more about his numbers project here and here, and he's planning more posts on the subject. (Oh, and he knows about zompist's Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 5000 Languages—that's what got him started.)
I discovered the May Day Mystery some years ago via a MetaFilter post; now Conrad has done a typically thorough and exhilarating post on the subject.
Every year since 1981, more than once a year, and almost always on May 1, the [Arizona Daily] Wildcat has published a cryptic 'advertisement' from an unnamed source. These messages typically contain images, mathematical diagrams and formulae, quotations (literary, philosophical, religious, and commonly in the original language) and other fragments of text...I don't much care about the "solution" of the "mystery," but I sure enjoy Conrad's meta-exegesis. And I love his term "nutnut."These advertisements were noticed in 1995 by one Bryan Hance, and in 1997 he established a website to collect and analyse them. He referred to the affair as the May Day Mystery. There also exists now a MDM wiki. On Hance's site, the texts are arranged by date, with scanned images, and comments from various would-be exegetes, attempting to decode the individual piece and the overall pattern. For instance, the comments to the 1990 image provide translations and sources for the Biblical Greek and Latin, a gloss on 'Weavers Needle', a description of a circular slide rule, attempts at Biblecodesque wordcounting, references to particle physics and Lutheran theology, an identification of the musical passage, and so on and so on. These disjointed annotations remind me of nothing so much as the fragmentary insights heard around the table at a Finnegans Wake study group. One person notices that a word resembles the Irish for 'wind', another detects reference in the flow of a clause to a Victorian ballad, and another spots the letters H C E embedded in words running backwards through a line. But nobody has a damn clue why Joyce would have combined these elements (and many others) in the sentence—let alone what it all means. One thing is for sure: the comments on the MDM advertisements have become an integral part of the ongoing text as a whole...
The question, then, is what the devil is the point of these things? Who is trying to communicate what to whom, and why?
From Deutschlandradio, a story (in German) about a young student of Indo-European who likes learning languages, sometimes three or four in a year: "Pashto ist seine Lieblingssprache: Und das will wirklich was heißen, denn alles in allem spricht Sebastian Heine etwa 35 Sprachen: Altpersisch, Sogdisch, Sakisch, Aramäisch - die Liste ließe sich noch lange fortsetzen" ('Pashto is his favorite language, and that really means something, since all in all Sebastian Heine speaks some 35 languages: Old Persian, Sogdian, Saka, Aramaic—the list can be lengthened still further'). It's typical journalistic silliness to think you can "speak" Old Persian or Sogdian, but he's clearly a man after my own heart. (Thanks, Franz!)
From the Telegraph, a story about "a campaign to preserve a unique hybrid language spoken by the descendants of the Bounty mutineers":
Norfolk Island's blend of 18th-century English and Tahitian, known as Norf'k or Norfuk, will be featured by Unesco in the next edition of its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing.They give a list of phrases (All yorlye gwen? 'How are you all?'; Car do far dorg et 'Not good enough even for a dog's meal'). Thanks, Trevor!The language, one of the world's rarest, is under threat because Norfolk Islanders are increasingly marrying outsiders and because of the influence of television and radio from neighbouring Australia and New Zealand...
Its broad burr evokes West Country English, but it is peppered with Tahitian and other Polynesian words incomprehensible to English speakers.
And the always interesting Mary Beard discusses Esperanto, Welsh and the language wars: "It was through my Dad that I ventured into Esperanto a little. He, in the spirit of his times, saw Esperanto as a weapon in Moral Rearmament – as well as a blow to Welsh..."
This Wikipedia article is a lot of fun, if (like me) your idea of fun is:
* Averham, Nottinghamshire — /ɛərəm/ (“airum”)
* Avoch, Highland — /ɔx/ (“och” rhyming with loch)
and so on.
And as lagniappe, here's a story by Eleanor Arnason called "The Grammarian's Five Daughters." It's a little too faux-fairytale for me, but you may well like it, in which case you may thank Kattullus, who sent me the link.
This AP story describes a curious problem:
Residents thought changing the name of their small village in southern China would improve their fortunes.MMcM, who sent me the link, adds: "A little Googling turns up a Xinhua article with a picture and an explanation of how to draw the character," but he's not sure what the character is. Anybody know more about this?Instead, it left them in a legal limbo after police computers were unable to register a very rare Chinese character that is part of the new moniker, newspapers reported Tuesday.
"Many villagers have not been able to get marriage certificates and are facing difficulties while seeking jobs, traveling and dealing in property," the China Daily said, citing an earlier report in the Nanguo Metropolitan News.
The 50 residents of the tiny hamlet in Wenchang county on the southern island province of Hainan followed a fortune teller's advice earlier this year and changed the name "to improve the village's prosperity," the reports said.
The village's name used to be Tianmeidong, but was changed to Tianwei, plus a third character that even the Nanguo newspaper was forced to describe in its article because its computer could not write it...
Presented for your consideration:
Dark Roasted Blend. From the About page: "The 'Dark Roasted Blend' is also a part of 'Thrilling Wonder' family of sites, dedicated to the on-going quest for Wisdom and Beauty, for all things cool and wonderful in our world, and beyond"; for a taste of the kind of bean that goes into the blend, check out Unusual Books & Book Sculptures: "As for today's subject - we are covering wildly modified books (which exist mainly for the sake of art), books that are essentially impossible to read, and pieces of art made FROM books (though I have doubts about the last idea. I am one who would rather see "no books were hurt during the production..." disclaimer)" Thanks, Carol!
Ephemera: "exploring the world of old paper." Sample post: Reminiscenses of a Book Inscription Collector. I forget where I ran into this blog, but it's a gem.
One of my favorite American poets is Louis Zukofsky, and in a comment to this post I asked "Has anyone done a Zukofsky bio?" Well, now someone has, to wit Mark Scroggins; the publisher page says:
The Poem of a LifeThis I have to read. (Via wood s lot.)Zukofsky was a protégé of Ezra Pound, an artistic collaborator and close friend of William Carlos Williams, and the leader of a whole school of 1930s avant-garde poets, the Objectivists. Later in life he was close friends with such younger writers as Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, and Guy Davenport. His work spans the divide from modernism to postmodernism, and his later writings have proved an inspiration to whole new generations of innovative poets. Zukofsky’s poetry is oblique, condensed, and as fantastically detailed as the late writings of James Joyce, yet it bears at every point the marks of the poet’s life and times.
While doing some research, I ran across an interesting article, Paul K. Longmore's “Good English without Idiom or Tone”: The Colonial Origins of American Speech (pdf of Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvii:4 (Spring, 2007), 513–542; there doesn't seem to be a Google cache available):
This study offers not a linguistic analysis but a historical interpretation of Early American English that draws on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as Early American historiography and scholarship about nationalism. It examines the interplay between modes of speech and demographical, geographical, social, and political history. It explains the interaction of linguistic and historical processes in terms of the experience of these societies as settler colonies that eventually redefined themselves into an independent nation. The emergence of American varieties of English was first recognized two generations before the Revolution...Some excerpts follow:
When read in light of sociolinguistic research, historical linguistic studies suggest that in Britain’s North American colonies, the English language developed along lines characteristic of immigrant societies, particularly overseas settler colonies. The full array of British dialects mingled to form distinctly American varieties of English. Several regional koines probably evolved during the colonial era. The consensus from eighteenth-century observers to modern linguists is that whereas deep, geographically based, dialect differences marked early modern British speech, colonial English was significantly less differentiated. In Britain as a whole and even in England, dialects diverged so widely that speech from one county to another was often difficult to comprehend, but the colonies’ regional varieties were mutually intelligible. Struck by this contrast, eighteenth-century observers described colonial speech as virtually dialect-free...The author is a historian, not a linguist, but he seems to have used linguistic sources effectively. I will, of course, be interested to hear from those who know more about the subject than I.In several regions colonized during the seventeenth century—New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Chesapeake—colonial English speech appears to have been initially diffuse. Variation and diversity continued throughout the eighteenth century, particularly within isolated local speech communities, as well as within individual speech styles and style shifting. Nonetheless, several generations of American-born Anglophone colonials dwelling in the regions that would become the core of the new nation gradually selected or reallocated elements from England’s dialects as they unconsciously fashioned new North American varieties of English...
From a linguistic standpoint, it is important that the founding generation was followed by two generations of American-born colonials but relatively few additional immigrants. Those three seventeenth-century generations began to produce a new variety of English that derived but diverged from the founders’ many native dialects...
Mid-Atlantic Anglophone colonials were, from the start, more mobile, more connected to commercial networks, and more involved with a demographically diverse population across a wider area. Those factors may have accelerated dialect leveling. In contrast, seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonials achieved population stability only after several generations. Lower birth rates and higher infant and child death rates, along with skewed sex ratios and the dependency of population growth on continued immigration, kept the ratio of American-born to immigrant speakers much lower there during the seventeenth century than in the northern regions. These demographical factors may have made Chesapeake English speech diffuse and unfocused for a longer time...
Because English speech marked social station, the general absence of upper-class Britons from transatlantic migration inhibited direct transplantation of elite social dialects. As a result, individuals in every colonial region and, more to the point, all social ranks employed speech forms that Britons of higher status thought vulgar. For example, many colonials pronounced cover as kivver, engine as ingine, yesterday as yisterday, yes as yis, and Sarah as Sary. In Britain, these pronunciations marked lower social status; in America, they became stylistic variants among individuals of every rank and region, not simply indicators of class. The inability of colonial speech to replicate the full range of idioms that registered the British social hierarchy was another form of leveling...
By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, many observers were describing this leveled colonial speech as well-established and well-known. In 1759, Franklin invoked as common knowledge that, although in England individuals’ geographical origins could be pinpointed by their speech, in North America they could not. A few years later, Eddis contrasted England’s extreme dialect differences with the comparative homogeneity of colonial speech: “In England, almost every county is distinguished by a peculiar dialect . . . but in Maryland and throughout the adjacent provinces, it is worthy of observation that a striking similarity of speech universally prevails[.]” Witherspoon made the identical point: “There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.” Cresswell, a Derbyshireman who traveled through the Chesapeake and the mid-Atlantic, reported, “No County or Colonial dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.”...
Speech accommodation theory offers a social-psychological explanation for colonials’ efforts to conform to a metropolitan standard: Speakers and writers tend to accommodate their speech toward prestige dialects. In a colonial context of dialect mixing, in which speakers unconsciously select linguistic elements from a variety of dialects, psychological motivations promoting convergence toward the most prestigious metropolitan standard dialect probably operated with even greater force than in other situations of dialect contact and mixing. Members of the North American British colonial elite and middling classes assiduously copied not just British, or even English, cultural forms; they specifically targeted southeastern English fashions, ideas, institutional models, and other cultural features. This pattern is typical of colonial elites, especially in the mature phase of colonies’ development. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, elite and middling Anglophone colonials energetically schooled themselves as well as people lower down in the social hierarchy in speaking and writing “proper” English. [Footnote: Montgomery, “Was Colonial American English a Koine?” 231–232, reasonably concludes that style shifting—accommodating speech to the social situation and the rank of interlocutors—may partially account for observers’ descriptions of the correctness and purity of early American English speech. See also Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 180–184. If Montgomery is correct, such style shifting may have reflected accommodation to the trend toward standard English. Dwight might have not been able to detect his students’ regional backgrounds by their speech because they were shifting to the standard expected of them at Yale College.]
North American colonization generated more extensive dialect contact and mixing than ever occurred in early modern Britain. The necessities of migration and settlement, along with the imperatives and motivations inherent in empire-building, prompted Anglophone colonials to accommodate their various speech ways to one another. By the early eighteenth century, American varieties of English, extraterritorial immigrant koines, began to emerge in several regions. Meanwhile, the settlers’ status within the imperial system also shaped these mixed colonial varieties. In such societies, dominant groups are acutely aware of the cultural forms and standards of the imperial core. Particularly in the mature phase of social development, Anglophone colonials—most influentially those in the elite and middling ranks—consciously and unconsciously copied metropolitan Standard English. Both higher-status and upwardly mobile colonials used this “proper” and “true” English to mark their status within the colonial social hierarchy and elevate their individual and collective standing within the Empire. The regionally differentiated but comprehensible, American colonial language system helped prepare Anglophone colonials to receive the idea of American nationhood. Although British speech displayed a diversity of dialects that standardizing reformers and British nationalists had to combat, American Revolutionary nationalists did not need to impose a common “national” language. The dominant Anglophone members of the “nation” already effectively possessed one.
In reading up on the history of my new home town, I've discovered it used to be called Norwottuck. Or something like that. From the History Of Hadley: Including The Early History Of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst And Granby, Massachusetts
In Eliot's Indian Bible, the word for "the midst" of any thing, is usually noeu or noau, (sometimes nashaue,) and tuk at the end of a word generally signifies a river or brook. In our English version, the words, "the city that is in the midst of the river," are found in Joshua 13, verses 9 and 16; and in Eliot, in both verses, "the midst of the river" is rendered by noautuk. This is the Indian name of our valley. The peninsulas and projecting points of land at Hadley, Hockanum, Northampton and Hatfield, were "in the midst of the river." This Indian word was varied in different dialects, and in the records of the English. Some tribes did not pronounce l and r, and these letters are not in Eliot's Bible. The Nipmucks pronounced l, and some Indians on Connecticut River, below Massachusetts, had the sound of r. The following variations of the name of this valley, are taken from the records of Connecticut, Massachusetts, the United Colonies and Hampshire towns.Whew. Any Algonkianists able to disentangle this and suggest how I should pronounce the name? (A local has told me NORR-o-tuck is current usage; this page says "nor-WAH-tuck" but hey, it's a Wiki, anyone can put anything they want there.)Nawattocke, 1637, Nowottok and Nawottock, 1646, Nauwotak, 1648, Noatucke, 1654, Nanotuck, 1653, Nonotucke, 1653, 1655, 1658, Norwotake, 1657, Norwootuck and Norwuttuck, 1657, Northwottock, 1656, 1661, Norwottock, 1659, 1660, Norwoottucke, 1659, Norwotuck, 1661. John Pynchon has in his accounts Nalwotogg, Nolwotogg and Norwotog, and in his deeds Nolwotogg. The latter spelling was probably according to the pronunciation of the Nipmucks, who lived here. Nonotuck was used when there was no town but Northampton. The Hadley settlers introduced from Hartford, Norwottuck, and that name was more used by the English than the others.
Today was a beautiful day in the Pioneer Valley, warm and breezy, and my lovely wife and I joined Songdog (hey, he's got a picture of the new kid up!) and his first son (now three, how time flies!) on a visit to the Hadley Farm Museum. Along with a pleasing odor of old wood (you should be able to get a whiff just looking at the pictures) and a brochure on the history of West Street and the town common (twenty rods wide and almost a mile long, the longest in Massachusetts, dating back to 1659), I picked up some new vocabulary from the labels: to wit, the words froe (OED: "A wedge-shaped tool used for cleaving and riving staves, shingles, etc. It has a handle in the plane of the blade, set at right angles to the back") and pung ("A one-horse sleigh or sledge used in New England; also, a toboggan"). The former has an early form frower and a synonym fromward, suggesting that it may originally have meant 'turned away', "the reference being to the position of the handle"; the latter is "Shortened from tom-pung, or (?) tow-pung, corruptions of an Indian word akin to Chippeway odãbãn, odãbãnak, Montagnais utãpãn, Abnaki udanbangan ‘instrument for drawing’ or ‘that on which something is drawn’—and "The same word in a northern Algonkin dialect has given the Canadian tarbogin, tarbognay, whence TOBOGGAN"! Who'da thunkit?
I earn my bread as an editor, so this story not only enrages me but makes me ashamed of my profession. Helen DeWitt, one of the finest authors of our day, fought a losing battle for her own style in her own book, even after insisting on a contract that "gave me the last word on spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage and so on."
It's not a question of justifying what's in a text by appealing to precedent; you do what is right for the text.But they wouldn't listen to her, because they worship the Chicago Manual of Style. Now, I love the Chicago Manual of Style—it's an extremely useful tool for normalizing text. But—listen up, colleagues—not all text needs to be normalized. Capeesh? Sheesh.I say: Look at Frank O'Hara! Look at don marquis! This is America, where there is this idea that playing around with punctuation and usage is part of the vernacular, the AMERICAN way of doing things...
The comment thread on this post quickly mutated into a discussion of the etymology of the word shark; commenter dearieme quoted Michael D. Coe as saying "Tom Jones has recently proved that 'xoc' [in Maya] is the origin of the English word 'shark'," I asked if anyone had access to Jones's paper, and the learned and industrious MMcM picked up the ball and ran with it, leaving a series of comments marking his researches and culminating in one so meaty and informative ("I will take a stab at summarizing the case for Mayan xoc as the source of English shark...") that I can't leave it in the obscurity of that thread but have to give it its own spotlight here. Everything that follows is his; there are many links that I am not reproducing because you can easily find them in his original comment:
There are sharks all over the world. But the big ones are in the warm places. There are sharks in the Mediterranean and they were known to the Ancients. Pliny describes canīcula or canis marinus. (Latin English) Greek had a word καρχαρίας for some kind of shark, on account of its saw-like teeth. Salt water sharks are even more sensitive to salinity than other fishes and stay away from rivers, where the Europeans of the Middle Ages did most of their fishing. As a result, when the Spanish encountered new giant sharks in the New World, they borrowed the Arawak word tiburon (Spanish tiburón, Portuguese tuburão, Catalan tauró). This word passed to the English for a while. Then, suddenly, in 1569, a broadside appears in London advertising a big dead fish, “Ther is no proper name for it that I knowe but that sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses, doth call it a Sharke. And it is to bee seene in London, at the red Lyon, in Fletestreete.” (EEBO) So, it appears that the new word shark was picked up by John Hawkins' men on his disastrous last voyage. (OT, but to be clear: Hawkins was a slave trader and one of his backers was the Queen. In addition to parrots and new words, he mostly brought back Spanish gold and silver, gotten by hardly better means.) For a time, both words existed, but as general knowledge of sharks increased, it was shark that won in English.
In tracking it, the first thing to note is that there are several senses to the word, and perhaps several words. In addition to the noun shark, 'a fish', there is the obsolete noun shark, 'a cheat or parasite', and the associated verb shark, 'to swindle or sponge off of'. There is ample room for metaphors in both directions, so the two words are never fully separated. In fact, the earliest occurrence of the verb is in the 1596 play Booke of Sir Thomas Moore (part of which might have been written by Shakespeare) and involves a play on words with the fishy sense. (text)An historical survey of etymologies:
* 1668 Wilkins An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (scan): connects a specific carcharias name with shark.
* 1689 Skinner Gazophylacium Anglicanum (EEBO): person < search < chercher.
* 1721 Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (not online?): ditto verb; fish < scearan 'to cut to pieces'.
* 1783 George Lemon English Etymology (text): < carcharias 'canis marinus'.
* 1828 Webster (text): < carcharius.
* 1836 David Booth Analytical Dictionary (text): doubts the derivation from carcharias because of the nearly obsolete verb.
* 1890 A. S. Palmer Folk-Etymology (text): fish < carcharus; person < German Schurke.
* 1893 Skeat (text): supposed from carcharus, with a missing intermediate OF form; Schurke vowel unexplained.
* 1903 Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (online): intermediate OF between carcharus and shark missing; perhaps person sense came first.
* 1958 Partridge: fish < person < Schurke.
* 1989 The OED (s.v.): points out that the fish cannot come from the verb, because of the allusion in its first use (above); that shirk meant almost the same thing, as did German schurke, calling that a not unlikely source, with assimilation from the fish; and that there are likely two words involved with so many mixed notions that they are hard to distinguish.Some relevant texts:
* 1525 A partial French translation of Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage : tiburins for tiburoni. The entire Italian original was not published until the end of the 18th century. (Italian; French; English preview)
* 1526 Oviedo's Sumario de la natural historia de las indias (snippet): first use of tiburón in Spanish.
* c1530 Bartolomé de las Casas' Apologética historia de las indias (snippet): explicitly indicates the origin, “que los indios llamaron tiburones.”
* 1555 Eden's translation in Decades of the Newe World (EEBO; text): first use of tiburon in English.
* 1554 Guillaume Rondelet's Libri de piscibus marinis (scan): De Tiburone.
* 1558 His successor Laurent Joubert's translation Histoire entière des poissons (scan).
* 1585 Mendoza Historia de China (Spanish; 1588 translation: EEBO; reprint): still says, “llamado ... Tyburon” / “called tiburones,” indicating that the word is not fully assimilated.
* 1590 José de Acosta Historia natural y moral de las Indias (scan; modern translation preview).
* 1604 English translation of that (EEBO): “incredible rauening of the Tiburons, or sharkes.”
* 1589 John Hawkins in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (EEBO; text): “many sharkes or Tiburons.” (I must also shamelessly point out that there is an important quote about potatoes on the facing page.)
* 1593 Richard Hawkins' Observations (EEBO; text): “The Sharke or Tiberune, is a Fish like vnto those which wee call Dogge-fishes, but that he is farre greater.”A good deal of the space in Jones 85 is used to present epigraphic and linguistic evidence to place the word xoc in time and space. This is to be expected, since it was a conference of Mayanists. But I will just skip to the punch line: at that time, along the coast from Río Dulce to Río Grijalva, one would encounter that word to designate a shark. This is where the 86 paper would impact the English etymology, if it dramatically revised the distribution. But as I said in earlier comments, it does not.
So, this leaves open the question that is the main weakness of the whole argument. How did English slavers in 1568 pick up a Yucatec Maya word that does not ever make it into Spanish? The earliest recorded English presence in the Yucatán is William Parker's 1597 attack on Campeche. (EEBO; text; JSTOR on the history)
Here Jones presents an essentially fictionalized account of picking up a resident Spanish pilot on board the Jesus from Campeche to San Juan de Ulua. And points out that at the end of his 1569 True Declaration of the Troublesome Voyage, Hawkins declines to elaborate “all the miseries and troublesome affayres of this sorowefull voyadge.” (EEBO; preview)
Language Documentation & Conservation is "a fully refereed, open-access journal sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and published exclusively in electronic form by the University of Hawai‘i Press":
LD&C publishes papers on all topics related to language documentation and conservation, including, but not limited to, the goals of language documentation, data management, fieldwork methods, ethical issues, orthography design, reference grammar design, lexicography, methods of assessing ethnolinguistic vitality, archiving matters, language planning, areal survey reports, short field reports on endangered or underdocumented languages, reports on language maintenance, preservation, and revitalization efforts, plus software, hardware, and book reviews.Sounds like a very worthy project; you can see a list of articles from their inaugural issue at Far Outliers, where I got the link.
An article by Ros Schwartz (in Dalkey Archive's Context, reprinted from the Feb-March 2003 issue of The Linguist) discusses the importance of the translator (at one point making a comparison to the performer of a work of music); the whole piece is interesting, but I'd like to single out this example from her own work:
In Orlanda, by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, one of the characters suddenly switches from the formal “vous” to the informal “tu.” This is a crucial moment in the narrative. The speaker is a prissy, bourgeois woman of thirty-five. She is addressing a young man with whom she entertains a somewhat ambiguous relationship. For the Francophone reader, this unwitting switch from “vous” to “tu” signals an important shift in the woman’s feelings. The problem for the translator is how to convey this to the English-speaking reader with equal subtlety, when we only have the word “you” for both “tu” and “vous.” The characters are already on first-name terms, so that is not an option. I decided to have the woman put her hand on the man’s arm.I disagree, at least in terms of this example. To me, inventing a touch on the arm goes too far. What's next, changing a troika to a snowmobile because Americans aren't familiar with troikas? Sure, it's a little awkward to say "Did you notice you used tu with me?" (or "a familiar pronoun"), but I think it's the translator's responsibility to translate what the author wrote, not create some sort of "cultural equivalent." Of course, authors translating their own work frequently rewrite it in the process, but that's their right. But I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, and as always, I welcome debate. (Via wood s lot.)As-tu remarqué que depuis tout à l’heure tu me tutoies? Elle ne s’était pas rendu compte et rougit violemment.I think this works in terms of cultural equivalence. And that is what translators need to do—find cultural as well as linguistic parallels.
“Haven’t you noticed how you’ve suddenly become quite familiar with me?” She had put her hand on his arm without realising and blushed deep red.
Bill Poser has a Language Log post on the curious fact that the identical (and delicious) roast-meat product is known in the U.S. as gyro(s) and in Canada as doner or donair (from the Turkish döner). It's not a matter of respective numbers of immigrants nor of who runs most restaurants (Greeks prevailing in both, in both countries); Bill suggests that it's "an example of a founder effect, that is, that it is essentially an accident, due to the language used by the first people to introduce and popularize the dish.... In the case of Canada, if doner was used first, if Greek restaurants introduced the dish out of awareness of its popularity in other restaurants, where it was called doner, they may have used doner rather than their own name in order to attract customers already familiar with the dish under its Turkish name." That may well be the case, but an additional fact that Bill tosses in at the end may be important here: "Incidentally, the Greek term is actually derived from the Turkish. The earlier Greek term is reported to be ντονέρ [doner]. Greek γύρος 'turning' is a calque of a Turkish original that was first borrowed into Greek, then replaced after independence." I'd like to know more about the history of this; if it was indeed replaced after independence (i.e., in the early 19th century), then it's irrelevant here, but if it remained in common use (like many other Turkish-derived terms) until after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 it's possible that the early Greek restaurateurs in Canada called the dish ντονέρ [doner] and naturally used the term in their menus. Like Bill, I'd love to hear from anyone who has more information.
Another point is the pronunciation of "gyro(s)" in English; I, like virtually everyone in NYC (including Greek restaurateurs), say [dʒaiɹow] (JYE-roe), but my brother (who's spent his adult life in Southern California) uses the Grecizing pronunciation [jiɹow] (YEE-roe) and is horrified that I, a linguist and philhellene, use the "bastardized" form—so horrified that on a visit to New York (while I was still living there) he insisted I use the "correct" form when ordering. I obediently asked for two yeeroes; the counterman looked at me, puzzled, then said "Two jyeroes?" My brother gave up in disgust. It's an interesting regional split (assuming, as I do, that my brother, as he says, reflects universal SoCal usage), and for this too I would welcome further information.
1) Arnold Zwicky has an interesting Language Log post about "conflicts between faithfulness (Faith: roughly, stick to the original) and well-formedness (WF: roughly, make things fit your system)": for example, should the p in pH be capitalized if it begins a sentence? My answer: rewrite the sentence so it doesn't come at the beginning, but I'm an editor. Unfortunately, Zwicky perpetuates the persistent myth that E.E. Cummings preferred his name spelled without periods and capital letters (see here and here for refutation).
2) John Emerson, a frequent and valued commenter, is selling some of his books at very reasonable prices: "China is my specialty, but I have some books in French, some books about the Mongolian language, and a number of beautiful, well-made Heritage Club books, mostly novels and classics, in good to like new condition." See if there's something that appeals to you.
3) A story by Jen Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle describes the efforts of 16-year-old Chilean Joubert Yanten to keep his native tongue, Selk'nam, alive; it's a member of the Chon family that Wikipedia says "went extinct in 2003" (and Ethnologue doesn't seem to acknowledge at all calls Ona).
But learning a language when there is no one to speak it with is no small task. Yanten used dictionaries and audiocassettes of interviews and shamanic chants, recorded by Jesuit missionaries.Good for him. (Thanks for the link, Eve!)The teen leafs through the photocopied pages of a Selk'nam dictionary he borrowed from the library, which includes special sections on grammar and sentence structure. He explains that Selk'nam differs from Spanish in that the object comes at the beginning of a sentence, followed by the subject and the verb...
Besides Selk'nam and Spanish, he also speaks fluent Mapudungun - the language of Chile's largest indigenous group - the Mapuche. He considers himself only semi-versed in the native languages of Onikenk, Haush, Kawesqar, and Quechua - not to mention English.
He's also learning Yagan - a nearly extinct language from Chile's far south. He's been learning from its last living speaker, Christina Calderon, for three years, on the phone and by Internet messages. She has sent him recordings of songs and tribal stories. Yanten has also traveled to visit her in remote Tierra del Fuego, most recently on a trip financed by a Chilean television station.
Sorry about the hiatus; it's both unexpected and unwelcome, but it so happens that right after the move, our new grandson decided to make his appearance a week early (which is great, mother and child are fine, but it meant we spent a lot of time babysitting the first grandson, which is also great, but it kept me away from my computer), and right after that, my 91-year-old mother-in-law had chest pains and had to go to the hospital, which is not so great—even though they couldn't find anything wrong with her, it was a difficult experience—and last night she had chest pains again and was taken to a different hospital, and we were called at 4 AM, and... well, I'll spare you the details (insert rant about state of U.S. health care here), but my wife and I haven't had much sleep for the last week, and both we and the blog have suffered for it.
I'm taking a moment before we head back down to the hospital to let you know what's going on (I thank you in advance for your good wishes) and to pass on a link (courtesy of the indefatigable gourmet etymologist MMcM) that gave me a much-needed chuckle, Dnghu:
The Dnghu ('Language') Association is an international, non-profit organization located in Europe, whose main mission is to promote the Indo-European language and culture. Its primary concerns today are developing the Modern Indo-European Grammatical System, to bring the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language to its full potential, and teaching it as a second language for all European Union citizens. Our long-term objectives are the adoption of Modern Indo-European by the European Union as its main official language, as well as the use of Indo-European as the main international auxiliary language, to overcome present-day communication barriers, derived from the cultural implications that arise from the use of English as lingua franca...I don't really know what to say about this touchingly absurd project, except that if I'd known back when I was struggling with my dissertation on the Indo-European verbal system that if I finished it and got the Ph.D. I might one day be in a position to get funding from the regional Government of Extremadura, well, things might have gone very differently!The Dnghu Association is financed by a private Spanish education company, Biblos, and its work is supported by Extremadura University professors. The regional Government of Extremadura and other public economic agents have also supported the Dnghu projects' present and future implementation.
The Dnghu Association will provide organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of projects based on the Indo-European language...
I'll write more when I can; till then, as Bob and Ray used to say, hang by your thumbs.
My friends Barbara and Holt have an excellent blog, What Holt and Barbara Had for Dinner, that should appeal to anyone interested in food and/or cooking; their latest post is about gazpacho, both the many ways of making it and the etymology. With regard to the latter they say:
The etymology is wonderful. American Heritage says "Spanish, probably of Mozarabic origin; akin to Spanish caspicias, remainders, worthless things." But caspicias isn't attested until 1899.Needless to say, the first thing I did was go to the OED, where I was confronted with the extremely helpful etymology "[Sp.]" I'm afraid I don't have Mayrhofer (which lists for $995), nor do I have any useful ideas about the etymology except to suggest that the Real Academia is reaching (I'm sorry, but gazofilákion 'repository of treasure' > gazpacho 'cold soup' is quite a leap, and it doesn't seem obvious to me that the Greek word would give Mozarabic *gazpáčo, which of course is a hypothetical form anyway. So I thought I'd appeal to the varied LH readership, in particular to those interested in culinary etymology (MMcM, I'm looking at you!): any thoughts on the subject?The Real Academia Española's Diccionario de la lengua española (22d ed.) has finally tracked it down. We begin with Ancient Greek γάζα (gaza) 'treasure'; but wait, we can go even further back! Pomponius Mela (and who can doubt him) tells that it’s a Persian word, and sure enough there is a Persian ganj, Sanskrit gañja meaning 'treasure' (now before you get excited this is not to be confused with Sanskrit gañjâ meaning 'hemp'; Hindi gânjh(â)). So we have the Greek word γαζοφυλάκιον (gaza-phulakion) 'treasure-guarder', 'treasure house'. This is borrowed into Mozarabic as *gazpáčo and hence gazpacho, a little treasure house of edibles. Cool, huh, Indo-Iranian through Greek through Arabic to Spanish to our table.
If Language Hat can get me an etymology for gañja (and the other ganja, too), I'd appreciate it. Our cheap-ass university doesn't have a copy of Mayrhofer's Kurzgefasstes (!) etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen. We're all waiting for the musical.
You know what captchas are, right? Those sequences of characters you have to type in to prove you're human before you can comment on some blogs (not mine so far)? Well, English Headwear Blog has posted a collection of the weirdest examples. The Russian one (about halfway down) is particularly delightful. Thanks to Joe Clark for the tip!
In the words of the Intute: Arts and Humanities page about it:
The Glosas Croniquenses website stems from the research of an academic at the University of Arizona to trace the presence and interpret the use of Andean and Caribbean words in 16th century Spanish American chronicles. The result is a collection of glossaries, listing all the native words in seven different key texts (including Juan de Betanzos, 'Suma y narración'; Pedro de Cieza, 'Crónica del Perú: segunda parte: el Señorío de los Incas'; and Polo Ondegardo, 'Notables daños de no guardar a los indios sus fueros'. Each glossary entry is accompanied by a quotation from the text (in Spanish) and its Spanish equivalent. This allows users to understand how the particular word is being used, its interpretation by the text's author, and what this reveals about the Spanish perception of Andean culture. A detailed introduction to each text, and the metholodogy used to collate data, is provided. In short, this is a rich and valuable resource for anyone interested in indigenous languages of South America and the history of Spanish colonialism in this continent.It looks like a good idea well carried out; thanks for the link, Paul!
An interesting Martin Wainwright story in the Grauniad:
A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary.Many thanks to Kattullus and Maureen, who sent me the story simultaneously.Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters and arse-loops.
First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842...
The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect's words, has been compiled by Bill Griffiths, the country's foremost Geordie scholar, whose previous work includes the standard Dictionary of North East Dialect. His new book reveals an exceptionally rich combination of borrowings from Old Norse, Dutch and a score of other languages, with inventive usages dreamed up by the miners themselves. "There's been an urgency to the project, copying the handwritten diaries and songs stored away in family homes," said Mr Griffiths, who also collected booklets, pit newspapers and magazines and spent hours interviewing ex-miners...
Part-financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, in a three-stage dialect study of the north-east called Wor Language, the dictionary reveals the deeply practical nature of Pitmatic. The dialect was originally called Pitmatical, and its curious name was a parallel to mathematics, intended to stress the skill, precision and craft of the colliers' work.
Term after term is related to mining practices, such as stappil, a shaft with steps beside the coal seam, or corf-batters, boys who scraped out filthy baskets used for hauling coal to the pithead.
Other words are more earthy: arse-loop is a rope chair used when repairing shafts and a candyman or bum-bailiff is a despised official who evicts strikers from company-owned homes.
Every time I move, I have to physically handle every one of my thousands of books in the course of shelving it; many of them haven't been touched since the last move, and I think to myself "Do I need to hang on to this?" Now that I'm in an area with used bookstores that might take my excess inventory, I'm setting aside a growing pile of books I've decided I can dispense with. Sometimes the decision is easy (I'm never going to read Thomas Mann in German), but often I open a book at random, trying to locate whatever it was that made me buy it in the first place. I did this with Howard Nemerov's The Blue Swallows (U. Chicago, 1967, reprinted 1969, presumably bought my sophomore year in college, when I would have had no idea that Nemerov was Diane Arbus's big brother, and may not have known who Diane Arbus was); I glanced at a few tired retreads of New Criticism poetry and some japes that may have sounded more genial forty years ago, and was on the point of tossing it on the discard pile when my gaze lighted on "A Full Professor":
Surely there was, at first, some love of lettersIt's no masterpiece, but it's got good rhythm and genuine wit. And after all, the book is a nice thin paperback; it doesn't need much to justify itself. I put it on the shelf between Ogden Nash and Pablo Neruda.
To get him started on the routine climb
That brought him to this eminence in time?
But now he has become one of his betters.He has survived, and even fattened on,
The dissertation and the discipline.
The eyes are spectacled, the hair is thin,
He is a dangerous committeeman.An organism highly specialized,
He diets on, for daily bill of fare,
The blood of Keats, the mind of poor John Clare;
Within his range, he cannot be surprised.Publish or perish! What a frightful chance!
It troubled him through all his early days.
But now he has the system beat both ways;
He publishes and perishes at once.
I have for some time been interested in the development of whatever into a standalone comment (OED: "Usually as a response, suggesting the speaker's reluctance to engage or argue, and hence often implying passive acceptance or tacit acquiescence; also used more pointedly to express indifference, indecision, impatience, scepticism, etc."), and now Mark Liberman at Language Log has satisfied my curiosity with a post on the subject. It turns out to be attested as far back as the early '70s (first OED cite: "1973 To our Returned Prisoners of War (U.S. Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs) 10 Whatever, equivalent to 'that's what I meant'. Usually implies boredom with topic or lack of concern for a precise definition of meaning."), and it's now frequently reduced to "wev":
Is it boring to listen to my stream-of-consciousness? It must be, or I would have more readers! However, this blog is fun, regardless, so wev.I would have thought this was a purely graphic abbreviation, but apparently it's spoken as well. Just one more proof that I'm hopelessly out of it. Wev.(Gotta love that paranoid chipmunk...except that it's really a prairie dog, but wev.)
Just my opinion though mind you, so wev.
HAH. ok wev...moving on.
Just appropriating my wife's computer for a moment to thank everyone for their kind words yesterday on the anniversary and the move. My own computer is not yet set up, and I'm pretty beat from putting up bookshelves and shelving books (and discovering, as I do every move, that I've put the shelves at the wrong heights and have to rejigger them while keeping the books I've already put on them from sliding off and causing me to curse even more loudly), so I'll go pass out now. I hope to be back to regular posting before too long, but tomorrow we're helping my mother-in-law move to assisted living (yes, it all happens at once in the world of Languagehat!), so the rebound may not be immediate.
Oh, but before I go: be sure and read Erin McKean's guest column in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine. Why can't they just send Safire off to a hard-earned retirement and give her the gig on a permanent basis? It's a pleasure to read someone who knows what she's talking about and says such interesting things. If you thought "corpus" was a dry concept, think again. The things you can learn from a corpus!