SCAPEGOAT.

I looked up scape 'plant stalk' (a word my wife and I learned at the Food Bank Farm, where they had garlic scapes), thinking it might have an interesting etymology; it didn't particularly (it's from Latin scapus 'shaft, stalk'), but right below it there was a word with a really great etymology, scapegoat. I'll quote the OED:

App[arently] invented by Tindale (1530) to express what he believed to be the literal meaning of Heb. 'azāzel, occurring only in Lev. xvi. 8, 10, 26. (In verse 10 he renders: ‘The goote on which the lotte fell to scape’.) The same interpretation is expressed by the Vulgate caper emissarius (whence the Fr. bouc émissaire), and by Coverdale's (1535) rendering ‘the fre goate’, but is now regarded as untenable. The word does not appear in the Revised Version of 1884, which has ‘Azazel’ (as a proper name) in the text, and ‘dismissal’ in the margin as an alternative rendering.

Merriam-Webster provides the useful information "as if ʽēz 'ōzēl goat that departs."

I must have known that at some point, but my memory has jettisoned enough material over the years that it came as a fresh surprise. (I occasionally "learn" things by reading over my old LH posts, sad to say.)

FUTILITY CLOSET.

Via MetaFilter, I discovered Greg Ross's excellent website, Futility Closet, self-described as "An idler's miscellany of compendious amusements." It has a language category full of such gems as Roll Call:

A pangrammatic anagrammatic verse composed by Edwin Fitzpatrick — each line contains each of the 20 consonants once and each of the six vowels twice:

Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp,
Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice?
Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp –
Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice.

And it rhymes!

Enjoy rummaging through the closet.

HOW WINTLE BECAME WINKLE.

A great story of dialect pronunciation at Linguism:

My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Winkle. Don’t laugh - this is a relatively common name in the Potteries, and presumably originates in the place name Wincle, which is a village in Cheshire. ...

When I started researching this part of my family history, I spent a cold afternoon in a church vestry copying out all the relevant birth marriage and death entries in the Registers, and noted that some of the entries had the spelling “Wintle”. I was interested, but not surprised, because a feature of the Potteries dialect is the merging of the consonant clusters /tl/ and /kl/ as /tl/. (It is common, for instance, to hear people talking about “pittled onions”.) I assumed, therefore, that the vicar, not being a native of the Potteries, was hearing “Wintle” and spelling the name accordingly, despite the regular local spelling being “Winkle”. I continued to collect references to the Winkle families of the district for some years, including all the entries in the censuses from 1841 to 1881. I noticed, however, that ‘my’ family appeared not to be listed before 1881, even though my great grandfather was already 45 at that time. The light began to dawn with the discovery in the 1881 census that my great grandfather was born in the Forest of Dean. Down in Gloucestershire, the name that is common is Wintle, and I now found that he had moved to the Potteries some time after 1851, when he was 15. He married, as Wintle, in 1859. He and his growing family are all listed in the censuses of 1861 and 1871 as Wintle.

My assumption about the dialectal confusion had been correct, but the wrong way round: by the time of my grandmother’s birth in 1877, the registrar had heard my great grandfather say “Wintle”, but had assumed that this was his dialectal way of saying “Winkle”, and registered my grandmother under that spelling. The whole family became “Winkle” by 1881, and when my great grandparents died, within two weeks of each other in 1924 - after 65 years of marriage, made even more remarkable by the fact that my great grandfather had been a coalminer - they were both buried as “Winkle”.

A fascinating discovery, admirably explained.

A ROSE IS A ROSE.

Except when it's a piece of metal. We had a minor household crisis recently that involved breaking into our own house in broad daylight through a window and the replacement of a doorknob, and in the course of the latter process we found that the instruction sheet referred to "the rose." Rose? Why yes, as the OED says (s.v. rose 14.):
f. Building. A circular, sometimes ornamental mounting through which the shaft of a door-handle may pass.

The next definition, equally surprising to me, was:
g. A circular mounting on a ceiling through which the wiring of an electric light passes; = ceiling rose s.v.

So now I know what to call two common household items of whose names I was heretofore, all unknowing, unaware.

IT BURNS ME UP.

Dear Abby ventures into the realm of language today, something that rarely goes well:

DEAR ABBY: Does a house "burn up" or "burn down"?
— HOT TOPIC IN ASHEBORO, N.C.

DEAR "HOT": It does both, depending upon where the fire starts. According to the Beverly Hills Fire Department, if a fire starts in the attic, it burns down — and if it starts on the first floor, it burns up.

Who do you turn to when you need linguistic information? Why, a fireman, of course! I have no idea whether whoever picked up the phone at the Beverly Hills Fire Department made that up on the spot because it sounded plausible or actually differentiates the phrases in that way, and if the latter whether it's personal, institutional, or professional use (do other firemen make the distinction?), but I do know that it's not general usage. In current English, burn up and burn down are essentially synonymous when used literally (though of course burn up has a metaphorical sense of 'irritate, annoy'). Back in 1888, when the Bra-Byzen fascicle of the OED saw the light of publication, things were different; to burn down was "to burn until it becomes feeble from want of fuel," whereas to burn up was "to take strong hold of the combustible material, get fairly alight." I can't find such a distinction in my modern dictionaries, however, and I'm pretty sure it has long passed out of use. I'm not saying the two phrases are used identically, mind you—that's always a perilous assumption to make—just that the distinction claimed by Dear Abby is incorrect.

And now, with the thin excuse that my late mother loved reading Dear Abby, I present a song she used to sing, which she doubtless got from her mother (in 1920s Iowa); since I can't find any trace of it on the internet, I want to put it out there so it won't vanish from human memory:

Washing dishes, washing dishes,
That is all I do, it seems;
Washing dishes, making wishes,
And my head is full of dreams...
Light the fire, and scrub the floor;
Put the ashes out the door,
And after all my other chores,
Then I go back to washing dishes!

(Needless to say, if you're familiar with this or a variant, I'd love to hear about it.)

PHAISTOS DISC A FORGERY?

An e-mail from Jerome M. Eisenberg, Editor-in-Chief of Minerva, The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology, alerts me to his article in the July/August issue claiming that the Phaistos Disc is "a clever forgery." His press release says:

Dr Jerome M. Eisenberg, Editor-in-Chief and founder of the magazine in 1990, presents his spectacular findings based on scrupulous and painstaking research initiated nearly four decades ago. His aesthetic and technical analyses convincingly demonstrate that the disk was created by a master forger shortly before its ‘discovery’. He also suggests that the disk was created specifically to boost the reputation of Dr Pernier who was anxious to match the successful finds of his colleagues Federico Halbherr at Gortyna and Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos... A conference on the Phaistos Disk sponsored by Minerva will be held at the Society of Antiquaries in London on Friday 31 October and Saturday 1 November.

I'm not competent to judge, but I'm curious to see the reaction of those who are.

INDIAN NONSENSE.

A new book called The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense sounds like a lot of fun; amardeep of Sepia Mutiny says in his post "The book is a collection of nonsensical poems and short stories from all over India, most of them translated into English. It’s one of those rare Penguin India titles that ended up getting distributed in the U.S." and quotes some samples, of which my favorite is:

Idli lost its fiddli
Dosa lost its crown
Wada lost its violin
And let the whole band down.

The primary editor, Michael Heyman, has a very enjoyable blog to promote the book ("Like the phoenix from the ashes, like the peanuts from Natchez; like paneer from the curd, like Subir the Goatherd (whose fear of paneer is absurd), The Tenth Rasa rises again! The official (really, official, this time) launch of The Tenth Rasa in the USA will take place in the new year!") as well as an essay at oxfordbookstore.com about the creation of the book. Thanks for the link, Matt!

A MIDDLEMARCH EPIGRAPH.

As I mentioned last month, my wife and I are reading Middlemarch, which has epigraphs for each chapter, and the one for Chapter 30 defeated me. It's in French, a language I allegedly speak, but I couldn't make head nor tail of it:
Qui veut délasser hors de propos, lasse. —PASCAL.
I think I was mixing up délasser and lasser with délaisser and laisser. At any rate, the internet came to my rescue, I found a translation of the pensée in question, and as a public service for others (like Roger Sutton) who have stumbled over this fragment, I present a translation: "whoever tries to divert us at the wrong time tires us out," a thought extremely relevant to poor mythology-obsessed Mr. Casaubon being told by his doctor "to be satisfied with moderate work, and to seek variety of relaxation."

I include below the entire pensée in the original and in a musty online translation:

Dans le discours, il ne faut point détourner l'esprit d'une chose à une autre, si ce n'est pour le délasser, mais dans le temps où cela est à propos, et non autrement ; car qui veut délasser hors de propos, lasse. On se rebute, et on quitte tout là : tant il est difficile de rient obtenir de l'homme que par le plaisir, qui est la monnaie pour laquelle nous donnons tout ce qu'on veut.

24. Language.- We should not turn the mind from one thing to another, except for relaxation, and that when it is necessary and the time suitable, and not otherwise. For he that relaxes out of season wearies, and he who wearies us out of season makes us languid, since we turn quite away. So much does our perverse lust like to do the contrary of what those wish to obtain from us without giving us pleasure, the coin for which we will do whatever is wanted.

ELEGY FOR COPY EDITORS.

From Lawrence Downes at the NY Times, a lament for the passing of the newspaper copy editor. Downes visits the Newseum and discovers it has "nothing about the lowly yet exalted copy editor":

Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses...

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

Webby doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy, of course, and online news operations will shine with all the brilliance that the journalists who create them can bring. But in that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.

He ends by saying "if newspaper copy editors vanish from the earth, no one is going to notice." Maybe no one else will, but I will, dammit. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

GABION.

I've completely succumbed to the Troyat biography discussed in this post (and Yana Weinstein convinced me I was wrong to make fun of the word "sibilant"), and today it taught me a fairly useless but interesting word, gabion. Young Lieutenant Tolstoy, having gotten bored with swanning around the general staff HQ well behind the front lines near the Danube during the Crimean War, asks to be sent to where the action is, in the Crimea, and winds up in Sebastopol: "Assigned to the 3rd light battery of the 14th Artillery Brigade, he found to his annoyance that he was quartered in the city itself, far from the fortifications and outworks." Troyat describes the "strange mixture of 'camp life' and 'town life'" in the city, then says:

Closer to the fortifications, the town assumed a more tragic aspect. Houses in ruins, roadways transformed into pitted dumps, bombs half-buried in the mud, the smell of carrion and cannon powder. Stooping over, soldiers crept along the maze of trenches. At the back of a casemate non-commissioned officers played cards by candlelight; sailors picked lice off each other on an esplanade surrounded by gabions; near a cannon a lieutenant rolled a cigarette in yellow paper. Balls whistled. Bombs crashed. The sentinels called out, "Ca-a-non!" or "Mortar!" to give warning.

I was, of course, struck by the word "gabion," and the context gave no clue as to what it might be, so I went to the OED and found:

gabion [a. F. gabion, ad. It. gabbione augmentative of gabbia cage:—L. cavea. Cf. It. gaggia = F. cage:—cavea: see CAGE.] 1. A wicker basket, of cylindrical form, usually open at both ends, intended to be filled with earth, for use in fortification and engineering.

(You can see a picture of some medieval gabions here.) But it was the second definition that impelled me to post:

2. Used fig. (with allusion to quots. 1638) by Scott.
1638 ADAMSON Muses Threnodie (note), The ornaments of his Cabin, which by a Catachrestic name, he usually calleth Gabions. Ibid. (title of piece), Inventarie of the Gabions, in M. George his Cabinet. a1832 SCOTT in Harper's Mag. LXXVIII. (1889) 779 [Gabions are] curiosities of small intrinsic value, whether rare books, antiquities, or small articles of the fine or of the useful arts. 1837 LOCKHART Scott (1838) VII. 218 Sir Walter.. began.. to dictate of Laidlaw what he designed to publish in the usual novel shape, under the title of ‘Reliquiæ Trottcosienses, or the Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck’.

Well, that was intriguing! But my attempts to investigate this Muses Threnodie were foiled; the only texts available online are brief excerpts, like the one linked in the Wikipedia article on the author. If you do a Google Books search, you find that all copies of this book—published in 1638!—are "No preview available." What the devil, Google?

A LANGUID SIBILANT THRONG.

I'm following up my Caucasus books by reading Henri Troyat's biography Tolstoy; normally I'm suspicious of biographies that "read like novels," but this one works for me so far, and it's now brought me to the Caucasus with the eager but hopelessly unfocused twentysomething Lev Nikolaevich, who's escaping the social whirl and gambling debts of his Moscow life by hanging out with his beloved older brother Nicholas, serving with a regiment stationed in Chechnya. The future passionate antiwar activist (who helped inspire me to become a conscientious objector almost forty years ago) decided he wanted to be a soldier too and "set off with his brother for Tiflis, where he could take the induction examination." But when he got to the capital of Georgia (now Tbilisi), he discovered he was missing a necessary certificate and would have to wait for it to arrive from far-off Tula. There follows a description of the town:

Disappointed, he decided to wait for the document there and, letting his brother return to Starogladkovskaya alone, he rented a room in a modest house in the suburbs—the favorite haunt of the German colony, among the vineyards and gardens on the left bank of the Kura.

South of the German settlement, on the same side of the river, the native quarter spread along the mountainside: steep narrow streets, houses with overhanging balconies, a languid sibilant throng in which veiled Moslem women brushed against Persians with scarlet-painted fingernails and high hairdresses, Tatar mollahs in loose gowns and green or white turbans, hillsmen from the conquered tribes wearing Cherkesska belted at the waist. The hieratic camels' heads swayed above the crowd. It was hot, even in November. The air smelled of dirt, honey, incense and leather. On the right bank of the Kura lay the Russian town, clean, neat and administrative, exhaling the tedium of a provincial capital beneath the sun.

Your basic local color, but what struck me was that odd adjective "sibilant." It's not clear what language he's trying to describe, if indeed he had a particular one in mind—Armenian, Georgian, Persian, Russian, and German, among others, were all heard, and it's true that they all have sibilants, but how many languages don't? I imagine if you'd asked Troyat (born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov in Moscow), he'd have given a languid Armeno-Russian-French shrug and waved the question off, but I'll tell you what I think: I think writers who want to describe the people of some exotic locale and their language throw a dart at a board with labels like "guttural," "sibilant," "nasal," and the like, and use whichever the dart finds its way to. (There's an amusing discussion of guttural at Language Log, where Ben Zimmer says "it's one of those words that gets thrown around whenever a speaker finds an alien speech pattern somehow displeasing. ... A quick Web search turns up such examples as 'a guttural English/Chinese mishmash,' 'a guttural Yorkshire accent,' 'a guttural Southern drawl,' 'guttural Ebonics, and countless others.")

Update. I have decided, based on the comments, that "sibilant" isn't actually an attempt to describe a language after all, which strictly speaking renders this post superfluous. Good thing I'm lax about staying on topic!

If you're curious about Tbilisi/Tiflis, there's a map of the prerevolutionary city (based on the 1914 Baedeker, which I've been unable to find except as a small-scale teaser) here, and you can see some old photographs here.

LH: TOP 20.

Jon of eduFire just wrote to let me know that LH has been selected as one of their Top 20 Language Bloggers on the Web:

Language Hat is definitely one of the smartest language-related blogs you’ll find. There’s a great community of people reading and commenting on the blog as you can see evidence of here. Highly recommended if you’re looking for something a bit more academic.

I particularly like the citation because it rightly focuses on the "great community," which is what makes LH what it is. So take a bow, folks!

(Jon says "we're looking to give away some free language tutoring sessions in the coming weeks and if this is something you'd like to offer to your readers I'd be happy to set that up." If you're interested, their e-mail is contact at edurev dot com.)

Also, don't tell anybody, but it looks like my book is going to be published in the U.S. next year. More details when the deal is final, but I wanted to give hope to those who have been clamoring!

IE LOANWORDS IN FINNISH.

The creator of Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish has done a splendid job. Mind you, I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of the etymologies, but they're very well presented, and the approach inspires confidence:

The data on the site is based on etymologies published in scientific sources for the scrutiny of the research community. This is not one of those sites where anything goes, whatever the author feels is plausible. Of course it is still part of this discipline that a certain percentage of the etymologies would be uncertain, and occasionally I use a question mark to show this. The way of presenting the etymologies is one of my own design and despite the strict selection of etymologies I would discourage you from using this site as a primary source for scientific works. ... I also have no place to record the author of each etymology separately (special recognition is due to the Finnish scholar Jorma Koivulehto, due to whom the number of irreproachable loan etymologies has been greatly increased in the last decades). For a more precise presentation I encourage you to consult the literature below. Any possible etymology which has not been published in a scientific context will be marked accordingly.

The lexicon is far from complete. The number of possible etymologies is far greater, especially with respect to the last millennium BC, corresponding to Early Proto-Germanic as well as Proto-Baltic. For the purpose of economy a time-line has been drawn (see below on this page) to exclude more recent etymologies. This lexicon also, for the purpose of popular legibility, generally excludes words, which do not have any cognates in English and Finnish. Many words have become obsolete in Finnish despite their existence in Saami, Estonian, Mordvinic, Cheremis (=Mari), Votyak (=Udmurt) or Zyryan (=Komi). Others are not represented at all in English. For those with an interest in these words I refer to the literature below. Without this criterion the number of etymologies would be considerably larger.

Jouppe (which apparently is the creator's name) says "One target group might be foreigners learning Finnish or Estonian that wonders where a lot of Finnish vocabulary comes from. Another target group is indeed Indo-Europeanists who lack access to the literature on Finnic etymology, largely published in German, Finnish and other less accessible languages." I fall into the latter category (well, I do read German, but am too lazy to), and I much appreciate the effort lavished on the site. Thanks for the link, Kári!

MBUWWA.

A remarkable case of survival, from Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat:

Most languages probably have a few words used especially for addressing babies. However, Siwi seems to have a lot more than I know from English or Arabic (I've recorded something like 40). One of these (already noted in Laoust 1931) is mbuwwa "water" (the normal Siwi word is aman). mbuwwa, meaning "water" or "drink", turns out to be rather widespread: they use it in baby talk in Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Malta, Sicily, and probably a few other places for which I haven't found sources. The remarkable part is that Ferguson managed to track down a historical source for this word. Varro, a Roman grammarian of the first century BC, gives bua as the nursery word for "drink" (presumably to be related to bibere, the adult verb for "drink".) (Unfortunately, I haven't managed to find the relevant work online.) If the connection is correct, then this word (possibly along with some others, like pappa for "bread" or "food") has persisted in Mediterranean baby talk for at least 2000 years, apparently without ever passing into adult speech.

As several commenters point out, 40 isn't a lot of baby-talk words (SnowLeopard says the Hopi Dictionary Project's Hopiikwa Lavaytutuveni "lists 80 words of baby-talk Hopi"); SillyBahrainiGirl got excited ("mbuwwa! I am from Bahrain and haven't heard this word for years!"), giving Lameen his own moment of excitement ("Wow, I didn't realise mbuwwa went all the way from Morocco to Bahrain. I wonder if it's used even further east?"); and the estimable bulbul got even more excited: "You have got to be kidding. Papať is the Slovak BT word for 'to eat', papa (feminine) means food and now you're telling me it's found in the Mediterranean as well? Awesome." Yet another area of language that deserves more attention than it's gotten to date.

LEXICOGRAPHIE ONLINE.

That is to say, French lexicographic materials. A correspondent writes:

The Dictionnaire Littré de la langue francaise in now available on-line, free, at www.littre.com. It contains more than 80,000 definitions, 200,000 citations of authors and reference works, and synonyms, conjugations of verbs, etc.

The Robert is planning to go on line, but it will not be free.

On the encyclopedia front, www.Larousse.fr has been revamped to allow contributions from readers, a la Wikipedia,but these are clearly identified by a different colour from the official contents of 150,000 articles and 10,000 illustrations or animations, which are verified and updated regularly

The venerable Quid will not come out in printed form this year, and its on-line site is being revamped to make the content relevant to different age groups, particularly school children.

A very useful roundup. Thanks, Paul!

RE.

Hey, remember that discussion of how to pronounce pace 'with due deference to' or 'despite'? It was fun and educational, right? Well, I've got another poll for those who occasionally say Latin words and phrases out loud: how do you say re 'in the matter of, referring to'? And do you say it the same way in the phrase in re (same meaning)? I do, but apparently quite a few people don't. (Sparked by this AskMetaFilter thread, which is actually about whether one should use a colon after re. Answer: yes in headings, otherwise no, as in Verbatim Summer 1979 "G. Bocca's observations re public signs.")

SACRED GAMES GLOSSARY.

Kári Tulinius writes me to say:

I just finished reading Vikram Chandra's novel Sacred Games... It is mostly set in Mumbai and a large part of it takes place in the city's underworld. Therefore it is filled with lots of slang. There's a helpful glossary provided in the back of the book, but it also exists online, here.

You can also download it in pdf, rtf, or xls format here. The "a" section alone has material ranging from arthi "Funeral byre on which a person is carried to the burning grounds" to aaiyejhavnaya, aaiyejhavnayi "motherfucker," with some fairly substantial entries like:

Arre chetti kar, dooty par jaana hai

This is a Punjabi phrase that would translate roughly into something like, “Hey, hurry up, I have to go to my duty.” The “duty” in question is the speaker’s police shift. In India, putting in a day of work is often referred to as “doing duty.”

It's lots of fun, and definitely gets me interested in the novel!

INTERVIEWS WITH BRODSKY.

Words Without Borders presents Thirteen Ways of Looking at Joseph Brodsky, an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Valentina Polukhina:

Between 2003 and 2004, Valentina Polukhina conducted a series of interviews about Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Joseph Brodsky. She spoke with former Brodsky student and executive director of The Academy of American Poets (from 1989 to 2001) William Wadsworth; respected American essayist Susan Sontag; and prolific poet, playwright, essayist and fellow Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

Brodsky is a fascinating and contradictory figure even on the page; in life he was obviously both inspiring and infuriating, and these exchanges frequently make for gripping reading. Wadsworth says "Joseph was tremendously charismatic, but he also came across in many ways as an absolutist, and was frequently given to outrageous statements, even insults. If you couldn't roll with the punches, if you disagreed with him and your skin was thin, Joseph's manner could seem overbearing," and there are several examples of this. Walcott says:

Joseph was somebody who lived poetry. He proclaimed it every time I met him. That's why I admired him. He didn't do the English or American thing, you know, of being shy and saying, “I am not really a poet” or, “I don’t like to be called a poet”—any of that nonsense. He was very proud of being called that. He was Brodsky. He was the best example I know of someone who proclaimed that he was a poet; that's what he did. ... He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling.

I continued to be mystified by people who admire his terrible self-translations, but in Russian he is one of the all-time greats, and I hope this book keeps his memory fresh in America.

MY EYE AND BETTY.

I don't know how many people are still familiar with the old expression of incredulity "All my eye and Betty Martin" (e.g., from Walter De la Mare's 1930 On Edge: "You might be suggesting that both shape and scarecrow too were all my eye and Betty Martin"), but there's a good discussion of it by Mark Liberman over at the Log. The eighteenth century (when it appears to have originated) was at least as fond of folk etymologies as we are today, and there are a couple involving implausible snippets of alleged Church Latin overheard by simple British sailors in foreign parts (or ports): "Ah! mihi, beate Martine" or "Mihi beata mater," neither of which actually occurs in Catholic ritual (I might add that the mistaking of mihi for "my eye" could only occur with the traditional English pronunciation of Latin, unlikely to have been in use abroad). The truth is that nobody knows or is likely to know how it originated, but it's an enjoyable phrase and one that I hope will somehow make its way back into the vernacular.

LOVES WIFE, BUT.

Today's Dear Abby nicely complements yesterday's snooty deplorer:

DEAR ABBY: I am happily married to the most wonderful woman in the world. I feel blessed to have her in my life and to be a part of hers.

I am not an elitist; I like to think I am a humble person. But I do believe in correct grammar, proper pronunciation and the eloquent employment of words in conversation. My wife did not have the benefit of an upbringing in which these were practiced. She comes from the "ain't got no" school of speaking.

I can accept this at home, but in business as a corporate executive, I am embarrassed by her low verbal skills.

I would never hurt or shame my wife by correcting her in front of anyone. The obvious answer is to bring it up in private. I did that, but she is not inclined to improve her word skills. She has mentioned a friend who tried to help her in this endeavor, but it went nowhere. I wish I could do something. Any ideas on how I can help? -- WORDSMITH IN ILLINOIS

Abby (Jeanne Phillips) is nicer than I would be about it, but she has the right idea:

You say you have a happy marriage and your wife is the most wonderful woman in the world. Nobody has everything. Love her for who she is and stop worrying about how others perceive her.

Again, I am mystified that people care so much about this stuff that this fellow, who thinks his wife is the most wonderful woman in the world, nevertheless gives her grief because her English doesn't meet his high standards. Personal to WORDSMITH: yes, you are an elitist. Get over it.

DESCRIPTIVISM AS SLAVE MORALITY.

Mark Liberman at the Log quotes a message from a correspondent who, after some high-minded insults ("disingenuous … smug … misrepresentations …"), gets down to brass tacks:

At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of Nietzsche's concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day. Emily Bender's remarks, as quoted in your post of 10/28/06, offer a typically tedious, humorless, and self-righteous example of this type of morality. Descriptivism, like most such ideologies, merely reflects the values and tendencies of the society it serves. In this case, those tendencies are a frantic race to the intellectual bottom, where language and the Humanities are concerned; a perversion of the concept of democracy; a mutation of the virus neophilia; and a telling instance of that great logical fallacy of modern times: Post hoc, ergo hoc melius.

I continue to be fascinated and baffled by this particular form of mental derangement. It's harmless, I suppose, but the irrational conflation of grammar and morality is common enough it must serve some basic need (and I note with amusement the accompanying delusion that tossing around italicized Greek and Latin shows one's own superior nature). At any rate, read Mark's post for a nice demolishing of both "Kevin"'s misapplication of Nietzsche's ideas and Nietzsche's own mistaken etymologies.

Personal to "Kevin": if neophilia were a virus name, it would not be italicized according to AMA style, and "Humanities" should not be capitalized and your Latin is ungrammatical and says the opposite of what you want it to say.

JSTOR.

If you've been frustrated by finding at Google a tantalizing snippet of what looks like an invaluable article on exactly the topic you're interested in, only to discover that it's behind the JSTOR wall, you'll want to read this conversation between Tom Matrullo of IMproPRieTies and Bruce Heterick, Director of Library Relations at JSTOR. Here's the basic point:

In fact, and here's the maybe-if-and-when good news, the presiding lights behind JSTOR are now looking at various ways and means to open its treasurehouse to all, because they understand that that makes all sorts of sense. They simply have to ensure that by doing so, they don't remove the parts of their economic model that have enabled them to build a self-sufficient, independent 501(c)3 organization in a relatively short time.

There's much more in the post and comments; I don't understand all the economic issues involved, but I'm glad they're being discussed, and hopefully they'll be solved before long. (Via Tom's comment on this post at This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.)

Update. A followup post clarifies the situation, all too depressingly. Heterick wrote Tom:

It isn’t really the case that JSTOR is thinking about “open access” as much as I was carrying forward the notion that JSTOR is always trying to “open access” more broadly to other communities (e.g. secondary schools, public libraries, developing nations). That is an important part of JSTOR’s mission (to extend access as broadly as possible), so perhaps I should have used the phrase “broaden access” instead of “open access” to avoid the confusion with much more highly-publicized “open access movement”(OA).

Tom says, "Apparently JSTOR doesn't believe that knowledge, the scholarly intelligence of the humanities, belongs to us all. I believe JSTOR is wrong."

REVIVING PENOBSCOT.

A couple of newspaper articles on the revival of Penobscot, an Algonquian language barely hanging on in Maine (Ethnologue prematurely pronounces it extinct): the Boston Globe's "Last Words," by Stacey Chase, and DownEast Magazine's "Lost in Translation," by Abby Zimet. Both have good quotes and samples of Penobscot words. From the Globe piece:

Maine's Native American tribes speak closely related languages that derive from the Eastern Algonquian family of languages once widely used from Maine to Virginia. But a common misperception is that tribal languages are relics linguistically frozen in the 1600s, when they were first heard by missionaries and explorers, and they are missing words critical to communicating in today's culture. "It's entirely possible to talk about the stock market or auto racing in Penobscot if you want to," MIT's Richards says. "There's nothing inherent in the language that makes it unsuitable for modern use."

And from DownEast:

According to many experts, Penobscot is among [the disappearing languages] — though debate continues as to whether it is “dead” or merely “dormant.” Either way, outsiders paint a grim picture. Dr. Ives Goddard, curator and senior linguist at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, has been quoted as declaring: “The Penobscot language is extinct. There are no native speakers.”

Of course this is news — alternately amusing and infuriating — to tribal members who exchange daily pleasantries in their native tongue. In reality, almost anyone of a certain age on Indian Island will say they can still hear echoes of a native-speaking grandmother or aunt, and many repeat the native phrases of daily life to their children: “scowi mits” (come eat!) “koli keseht” (good job!) “ciksrta” (be quiet!) “krselrmzl” (I love you).

The disconnect between white and native perceptions is centuries old, a fragment of what one Penobscot activist calls “our twistory.”

The latter has a sidebar on the white linguists who "have played a key role in the revival effort, a fact that prompts mixed feelings among Penobscots":

Dr. Frank Siebert was an eccentric, curmudgeonly, nationally recognized expert on Native American languages who spent years deciphering the Penobscot language and compiling a dictionary. Over time, he also assembled two volumes of Penobscot legends
and stories.

Much of that material made its way to the Penobscot via Conor Quinn, a young, white, gifted linguistics student at Harvard University who grew up in Portland. Quinn spent several summers in the 1990s working with Siebert, transcribing his lengthy notebooks and learning Penobscot in the process.

And here you can listen to an interview with Priscilla Attian of the Penobscot Nation in which she talks about learning the Penobscot language and how doing so was once forbidden and is now encouraged. Thanks for the links, Martin!

(I must say, krselrmzl is quite a mouthful for 'I love you'—reminds me of the languages of the Caucasus.)

ILLI.

I've gotten interested in Chechnya and the Chechens, and after reading two superb books by reporters that came out after the First Chechen War, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power by Anatol Lieven (excellent historical and cultural background, on both Russians and Chechens) and Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus by Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (great reporting—Gall in particular must have an amazing ability to convince hard-bitten and secretive rebels to let her accompany them to hideouts), I have moved on to Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory by Yo'av Karny, an odd but gripping book by an Israeli who became fascinated with the "mountain peoples" of the Caucasus. He mentions the Narts, the mythical race of giants whose tales are told throughout the North Caucasus (I wrote about them here and here), and in the process of investigating the Chechen versions of the Nart saga I discovered the later illi epics, comparable to Homer or the Serbian epics (JonArno Lawson says "This ancient rhyming form of the heroic ballad, which has been passed down until recently as oral literature, is peculiar to the Chechens. It is their oldest form of self-expression as a people"); an online book (pdf), The Culture of Chechnya: History and Modern Problems, contains an essay, "The Inception of Chechen Artistic Writing: Ethni-historical and Aesthetic Prerequisites" by Kh. R. Abdulayeva, that describes them as follows:

Deserving special attention are the illi, dramatized epico-heroic long poems—a form prominent in Chechen folklore... [N.b.: The plural is actually illesh—LH.]

The epic quality is graphically manifest in detailed descriptions, which are justified from the ideational point, and compositionally. Direct speech—dialogues and, more seldom, monologues—occupies a greater part of the illi. That is one of its specifics. Whatever the hero wants to tell or ask, he necessarily makes a long speech. Even when a particular situation does not demand any details, they will be provided by the epic song. Its hero speaks in picturesque words with all kinds of epithets, similes and metaphors—occasionally unexpected and paradoxical—as he describes the situation in detail.

The narrator gives much time to descriptions of the hero’s attire, his horse’s harness, his social status in the native village, etc. The bard bestows heroic traits on his characters not through merely relating what they do (unlike the Nart epic, the illi usually does not ascribe any fantastic traits and properties to its characters) but through an extolling manner of their depiction, which imparts significance to the hero’s every movement and word. That is why all illis (“The Song of Bibolat Son of Taima”, “The Song of Surkho Son of Ada”, “The Song of the Black Nogai” and others) concentrate on meticulous and emphatic description of the hero’s every movement. They emphasize a slow and dignified rhythm in elevated words....

The illi are tremendously popular, their heroes are household names. A Chechen knows no better compliment than comparison with such a hero....

The names of those gifted folk poets and singers have not come down to us. Unlike other genres, open to all for recording and recital, the illi demanded special gifts. Naturally, the best of illanchis were improviser poets. Many might have taken part in military campaigns they extolled.

Illi recitals demanded vast audiences, which were to be active. Sung by men along, the illi was open to all ears. The recital was solemn and ceremonial.

N. Semyonov described a typical illi recital: “The Chechen did not sing but spoke to the tune of his balalaika, not unlike in an operatic recitation. Every stanza finished with a long and quick lilting passage as he ran his fingers along the strings. The narrator felt one with the hero in his plight, and there was an impression that he was improvising. There was genuine inspiration in his wistful voice as he described the dead abrek. True, he was really improvising—or the impression of the song would not have its remarkable integrity”.

Importantly, the illi started a trend toward the one language of Nakh folklore. “Among the spoken Nakh dialects, we already have a certain interdialectal form common to the whole people. That is the idiom of folk poetry, used by speakers of all dialects <…> Formally, it almost fully coincides with Chechen,” wrote Z. Malsagov.

The illi are now recited only seldom, but interest in them survives. The songs are recorded, and stay popular with researchers and the reader-at-large. The heroic songs had a tremendous impact on Chechen written poetry, and to this day win admiration with the perfection of poetic form and profound content.

I was particularly struck by the part about the unifying epic dialect; it would be interesting to see a comparative study of the dialect used in epics of different peoples.

PRONOUNCED BURMA.

This is truly wonderful: Mac OS X's Dictionary program (featuring the New Oxford American Dictionary) lists the pronunciation of "Myanmar" as "Burma." Go to Eric Bakovic's LL post to see the image. Hey, that's how I say it, anyway!

While you're at the Log, you might check out a couple of posts by Arnold Zwicky: one about an absurd lie by the Toronto Star about a language test for immigrants that supposedly claimed that the sentence "The standard of living has increased" is ungrammatical, and a touching one about his long-time partner, whom dementia had robbed of the ability to recognize the word California... unless he needed to recognize it.

BOOKS DEVOURED HIS LIFE.

Luc Sante has an essay, "The Book Collection That Devoured My Life," on a problem many of my readers will probably empathize with as much as I do: "Seemingly I've arranged my life in order to acquire as many books as possible.... I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton's Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway's True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don't actually read...." Needless to say, I have books in even more languages I don't actually read (though I think I may have disposed of the Albanian booklet on the wonders of socialism). Anyway, it's as enjoyable as Sante's writing always is (the name, by the way, is monosyllabic). Thanks, Jill!

HOPEFULLY.

I'm sure you're all aware of the alleged incorrectness of sentence-adverbial (or "speaker-oriented") hopefully (for a discussion of why apparently pointless decisions to chastise one sentence adverb and not another get made, see this LH post from last year). Well, Mark Liberman over at the Log has run some numbers, and it turns out that while "subject-oriented" hopefully (i.e., meaning "in a hopeful manner") is fairly common in fiction (almost always modifying descriptions of speaking, looking, and going: "Doug looked up at him hopefully"), elsewhere (in newspapers, magazines, academic writing, and speech) it occurs, on average, just 5% of the time, and if you restrict the search to spoken usage, the percentage is zero. That's right, people essentially never use hopefully to mean "in a hopeful manner" when they're speaking their native language. So the word clearly means "it is to be hoped," although in certain restricted environments it can be used to mean "in a hopeful manner." Hopefully, we can now put this "incorrect" nonsense to rest.

RARAE AVES.

Some of my favorite blogs are updated so rarely I can go weeks without checking them; recently three such have turned up with excellent posts I want to share.

1) Over at bulbulovo, the post may starts with a photo of an ad that plays on nostalgia for Socialist Realist images and goes on to one that says (in Slovak) "May is all about LOVE" with the last word in English... except that it's spelled out in gold coins, and it so happens that love is also the Romanes word for 'money.' From there he segues into a discussion of Romanes loan words in Slovak. (One thing that puzzled me was his transcription of the Romanes word as "['lɔvɛ] or ['lɔːvɛ]"; in most dialects, the stress would be on the final syllable, and I'm not sure whether his stress is for the Slovak loan word or whether Slovak dialects of Romanes have taken on initial stress under the influence of Slovak.)

2) Dick & Garlick had been quiescent since November, but I've learned not to give up on it, and more posts started appearing in April (though I just noticed them yesterday). The latest is my favorite: Automatic Hinglish, which points out that "Google Translate now offers translation from English to Hindi and vice versa. ... What's surprising is that if you translate from English to Hindi and convert the results back to English, some of the original text is restored."

Here's a portion of Hamlet's soliloquy in Google Hindi:

' Tis एक consummation
श्रद्धापूर्वक को wish'd. करने के लिए मौत की नींद के लिए.
नींद के स्वप्न को perchance करने के लिए: सॉफ्टवेयर, यही तो कठिनाई है!

That's completely meaningless, of course. But feed this drivel to the Google translator, and it becomes Shakespeare again - with a few improvements.

'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to wish'd. To death for sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream: software, there's the rub!

Software, there's the rub: truer words have never been spoken.

3) I'm particularly embarrassed not to have noticed this for so long, because it starts with a plug for my book: Polyglot Vegetarian had a post back on April 27 called Sowing Cumin and Basil that began "The American edition of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, co-authored by Steve at LanguageHat, still isn't available, as far as I know. [Too damn true—LH] But being impatient, I went ahead and got the UK edition..." MMcM, the blogger, is inspired to write about curses, some involving cumin and basil, with the usual multilingual quotes (Greek, Latin, Persian, Old Norse, Hebrew, and Spanish, inter alia); his erudition is always worth diving into and splashing around in, with the warning that it may make you hungry.

(The title of this entry is of course the plural of rara avis 'rare bird'; the odd thing is that Merriam-Webster gives both /rer-ǝ-'ā-vǝs/ and /rär-ǝ-'ä-wǝs/ for the singular, but only /rär-ī-'ä-wās/ for the plural. If you use the traditional anglicized /rer-ǝ-'ā-vǝs/ for the singular, aren't you going to use /rer-ē-'ā-vēz/ for the plural? I do, anyway.)

CHECHENS DON'T LIGHTLY CURSE.

I'm always fascinated by the differentiated use of languages in multilingual situations (see this post for a great example from Madagascar), and I've run across one in my current reading, Anatol Lieven's superb examination of the reasons for Russia's disastrous loss in the First Chechen War, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. Lieven is discussing dedovshchina (literally 'granddadism'), the brutal hazing endemic to the Russian army at least since WWII, and he quotes a Chechen who as a young conscript spent time in the Soviet army in East Germany in the early '80s:

The 'granddads' forced the younger soldiers to buy useless things from them, hand over all their pay—and 20 marks a month was all we got. One young soldier in my squad had had to give most of his pay for a broken clock. I took it to the 'granddad', asked him, 'Why did you sell him this?' He cursed me. Now we Chechens don't lightly curse each other—for us, this is a serious business. I broke the clock over his head. I got another three days in the cooler for that...

The footnote on this passage includes this illuminating remark:

Incidentally, it is not quite true that Chechens do not use the Russian expression, 'xxxx your mother!' when speaking to each other; but they only do so when speaking in Russian—in which language, among Russian men (thanks partly to generations of military service), it has become so common under Soviet rule as to lose all meaning. Spoken in Chechen, I was told, this would indeed be a killing matter.