Trying to find something about when non-rhotacism developed in Barbara M. H. Strang's A History of English
The sound /ŋ/ now appears medially and finally in stressed and unstressed syllables, as in singing; it has never been accepted in initial position. Its extension to unstressed syllables is quite recent, and has spread from middle class into general usage under the influence of spelling (or so the expression 'dropping the g', for the older pronunciation, indicates). As recently as 1936 Wyld retained his 1920 comment that the older pronunciation (/ɪn/, /ən/) was 'still widespread among large classes of the best speakers, no less than among the worst' (op. cit, 283). He describes these forms as 'of considerable antiquity' and 'at one time apparently almost universal in every type of English speech', he notes that Swift had objected to them in the early 18c, and in 1801 Walker ambiguously remarks that the best speakers use 'g-less' forms, but yet these forms savour of vulgarity (ib., 289). During the same period unease about the pronunciation was shown by hyper-correct 'reverse forms' in -ing where it had no place historically - as in lupin, chicken, children. The movement towards -ing gained momentum in the 19c:Let me just repeat the money quote: "the more 'correct' pronunciation, as it was considered, ... was in reality an innovation, based upon the spelling." Those people who say "I'm goin"? They're historically correct. The people who laugh at them for "dropping the g"? They're historically wrong, wrong, wrong, and should be pointing the finger at themselves for abetting the degeneration of our precious mother tongue.Apparently in the twenties of the last century a strong reaction which set in in favour of the more 'correct' pronunciation, as it was considered, and was in reality an innovation, based upon the spelling, was so far successful that the [ŋ] pronunciation . . . has now a vogue among the educated at least as wide as the more conservative one with -n (Wyld, loc. cit.)
This has been #3514 in the series "For Pete's sake, stop worryin' so much about what you think your neighbor is saying 'wrong.'"
The NY Times has another language story, A Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks, and if you're an aficionado of these things you will have guessed that 1) the story is by the muddled but ever plucky Nicholas Wade, and 2) the gene is FOXP2, the "language gene." Now, I am an ignoramus about genetics, but Geoff Pullum did a convincing demolition job on the excessive claims made about this gene several years ago, and I have had no reason to revise my opinion since. I note that this time Wade has outdone himself by not consulting a single linguist. So I will confine myself to the approach I took on an earlier occasion:
People have a deep desire to communicate with animals... dogs... myths... chimpanzees... delicate, if tiny, step... mouse... gene for language... FOXP2... subtle speech defect... grammar... gene... evolutionary biologists... gene... mice and chimpanzees... gene... natural selection... language... the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology... genetically engineered... mice... mouse... “We will speak to the mouse.”
Wolfgang Enard... humanized mice. FOXP2, a gene... genes... brain... mice... FOXP2 genes... FOXP2... brain... brain... involved in language... humanized mice... Baby mice... ultrasonic whistles... humanized baby mice... Dr. Enard says. Dr. Enard argues... human genes... chimps... DNA... genes... chimps... mouse... Joseph Buxbaum, an expert... Dr. Enard... FOXP2... mice... Dr. Gary Marcus... human FOXP2... FOXP2 plays a vital role in language... other genes... language gene... cascade of genes... “It would have been truly spectacular if they had wound up with a talking mouse.”
Conrad sent me this pleasing rant by M. LeBlanc in response to a piece by Mark Krikorian at the National Review complaining that people are pronouncing Sonia Sotomayor's name correctly.
The idea that your name is somehow the property or the business of others, and that not only should they not be required to pronounce it correctly, they should purposely pronounce it incorrectly is one of the more brow-furrowing and staggering assertions I've heard come out of a conservative in months. It would be one thing if Krikorian was complaining about people getting lambasted for pronouncing it incorrectly, but he's not. What he's saying is that, despite knowing how to pronounce it correctly, people should nevertheless say it in a way that sounds wrong to the bearer of the name because to pronounce it correctly would be displaying too much "adapting to the newcomer."I do like to see stupidity flayed with gusto. Thanks, Conrad!
My 21-month-old grandson and I like to play a game we call "Ada" (because the first book he selects, by tradition, is a handsome if somewhat beat-up hardcover edition of that Nabokov novel): he points to, or pulls off the shelf, a book from my poetry and literature collection and I read a few lines. (He has his favorites—Jonathan Williams, Yeats, Flann O'Brien, Richard Powers—and sometimes pretends to read aloud from his very favorite, a garish paperback Bustan of Sadi.) Today he pulled out The English Patient
Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle.I begin my work at the time when Servius Galba was Consul.... The histories of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, while they were a power, were falsified through terror and after their death were written under a fresh hatred.So Tacitus began his Annals.But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat.
My wife and I finished Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone
There are a lot of fish in this novel (one passage on page 79 begins "Starry ray, rainbow smelt, sturgeon, herring, sardine, sea trout, eel, cod, hake, threebearded rockling, John Dory, mullet, red goatfish, thicklip grey mullet, Atlantic bonito, swordfish, ocean perch, Norway redfish, American plaice, lumpsucker, dab, rock sole, Atlantic saury..."), and it taught me a nice piscine adjective a few pages before that: "A police car glides ahead of her with the quiet slowness of a shark. The driver turns his head in her direction, sunglasses covering his selachian gaze." Merriam-Webster explains that the adjective refers to "any of a variously classified group (Selachii) of cartilaginous fishes that includes the existing sharks and typically most related elasmobranchs (as rays)" and is "ultimately from Greek selachos cartilaginous phosphorescent fish; akin to Greek selas brightness." Don't know when I'll next get the chance to use it, but it's now in my arsenal, ready for deployment.
Incidentally, I foolishly assumed that one of the locales, Tête-à-la-Baleine ("Whale's Head"), was invented, but no, it and its companion, Providence Island, are real, and you can see pictures here. And if you're curious, you can read the first chapter in French here (pdf; here's a Google cache).
Nick Nicholas, an Australian who describes himself as a business analyst and linguist, commented on a recent post, and I made the mistake of clicking on the URL his name linked to, which turned out to be opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr ("opoudjis his blog / τὸ τοῦ ὁπουτζοῦ ἱστολόγιον"), and I've spent the entire morning investigating his writings rather than working. The latest post, on the computer used to compile the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, was interesting, but when I scrolled down to "Nick Nicholas", I was really hooked. He starts out talking about surnames ("Crete switched to a new patronymic suffix en masse, -akis, in the mid-19th century.... But there's not many -akis's before 1800. The Who's Who of Cretan Renaissance Literature ... reads: Sachlikis, Della Porta, Choumnos, Falier, Picatorio, Bregadin, Sklavos, Achelis, Cornaro, Chortatzis, Troglio, Foscolo, Bugnali"), then focuses in on Cyprus, where his family is from:
The dominant pattern in Cyprus is for surnames to be archaic genitives of proper names—making them straight patronymics. And people would switch their patronymics to surnames... my grandfather went by ο Νικολής του Πούτρου in the village. "Boutros's Nick"... But Boutros's Nick was not written down as Boutros's Nick. He was written down as Nicholas of Mark-the-Pilgrim, Νικόλαος Χατζημάρκου (or Χ″μάρκου, because Χατζη- was a damnably frequent surname prefix, and people would save themselves the penstrokes when they could). And when he was Englished, he was Englished as Nicolaos Hadjimarcou.From there he moves on to the next generation's switch to "Nicholas" on arrival in Australia (a translation of the patronymic Nikolaou), and the way Greeks in Greece have dealt with it. And the post before that was on the "reminiscences from 1964 of an Egyptian colleague of Cavafy at his desk job in the Irrigation Dept, Alexandria, who was his underling and succeeded him when Cavafy retired": apparently the great poet would "sneak in late, pretend to be massively busy by strategic placement of papers, occasionally shut the door and gesticulate writing poetry" and "only knew enough Arabic to tell his servant to buy him chickens for dinner": "The commenters to the blog post are floored, not that Cavafy barely spoke Arabic mid-colonialism, but that neither did the Greeks of Alexandria in 1964. (It was only the second time the interviewer had ever set foot in an Egyptian's house.)" And his post Death of the Library as I knew it linked to Pape-Benseler, Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen, 3rd ed. 1911 (warning: 96 MB download from the linked page, but if you're into Greek proper names, how can you resist?).As an Englishing, "Hadjimarcou" tells you stuff, which is why I took the <dj> across in opoudjis. It tells you that he was a Cypriot, so he pronounced the prefix as /xadʒi/, the way it came across from Arabic hajji via Turkish haci, and not as the alveolar Hatzi- of the mainland.
And then I discovered his language blog! The most recent posts constitute a fascinating discussion of the validity of using monotonic type for Early Modern Greek texts (he acknowledges that the arguments against it are more emotional/traditional than rational, but he still doesn't like it; from one of the posts, I learned about Ioannis Kakridis, who in 1941 "was denounced by the faculty of the University of Athens for republishing a lecture in the monotonic system, which led to the so-called 'Trial of Accents' and his suspension and later dismissal from the university"); before that there's a post Placenames of Kievan Rus' that caught my attention for obvious reasons. It starts off with this bravura paragraph:
A culture confident in itself (or arrogant, same thing) will assimilate foreign place names and personal names, bending them to its language. Thus did Kshayarsha become Xerxes, and Shoshenq, Sesonchosis. Thus did Svyatoslav become Sphentísthlavos, and Dagobert Takoúpertos, and Saint-Gilles Isangéles. Thus did Hujr become Ógaros, and Ma'di Karib Badichárimos, and Kormisosh Kormésios. Thus, in late reassertion of confidence, did the clerks call Newton Néfton, and Darwin Dharvínos and Descartes (via Latin) Kartésios (and France Ghallía instead of Frántza, and England Anglía instead of Ingiltéra); while Makriyannis, no less confident on behalf of the people, call Armansberg Armaspéris, de Rigny Dernýs, and Washington Vásikhton.A discussion of Byzantine versions of foreign names leads to "my fun and games decoding Russian placenames last night":
I was hoovering up by inspection the proper names of the registry of documents of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, an edition of various legal texts held by the patriarchate. Lots of these documents involve property and jurisdiction issues close to home; but a few documents involve setting up shop for the Orthodox Church in Russia in the 14th century....The most mysterious one was Novogradopoulion, and no, it's not any of the various Novgorods; read his post for the exciting answer. And in the comment thread, Νίκος Σαραντάκος provides this great anecdote:What complicates things even further is that many of the old bishoprics are in the borderlands of modern Poland and the former Soviet Union, regions with a complicated history. The history of the towns once covered by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has been written in Lithuanian, and Polish, and German, and Russian, and Ukrainian, and Byelorussian, and Yiddish. ... And those cities have changed names many a time—including 1945, and 1990. As if it wasn't bad enough that the words are Grecified Russian to start with, their current names are Byelorussian or Polish that look different again.
I think I've worked out the lot, but some of them took some chasing, a lot of blank staring at the Wikipedia map of Kievan Rus', and some inventive Googling...
Another bit of toponymic mess in the same book. Somewhere, Rhoides mentions the extra-thin (αραχνοΰφαντα) garments of Ceos. When Kalokyris translated the book in modern Greek, he rendered this as Cos, which is not the same island, obviously. But there's a twist: Rhoides had copied Gibbon, and it seems that Gibbon (according to the footnotes in my edition) had misread Cos for Ceos, so two wrongs made one right after all!In short, this sucker's going on the sidebar.
I have apparently never devoted a post to the wonderful Omniglot site before, although it's been in my "Language resources" list pretty much since LH started. Just as well, because before I would have said it was a great place to go forwriting systems, and now I learn from a MetaFilter post that Simon Ager has added all sorts of things, including Useful foreign phrases, Language learning tips, and Assorted foreign phrases ("These phrases come mainly from phrasebooks and language courses. Some of them are intended to illustrate particular grammatical points, others I just found amusing"—I am particularly fond of Portuguese Entrou na casa e viu os chapéus no benguleiro 'He entered the house and saw the hats in the hat stand'). Oh, and there's a blog, a regular feature of which is a language quiz; the latest has "a recording of part of a story in a mystery language... Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?" Needless to say, I love that kind of thing. (Don't scroll down that page if you don't want to see other people's guesses.)
Suspicious of Lane Fox after the Bytyllion incident, I checked up on his mention of "the island of Oricos in the Bay of Valona"; at first I thought I'd caught him out, because Oricum (now Albanian Orikum) is not an island, but a little research convinced me that it had been at the time under discussion, though it soon became connected to the mainland. (This leaves the question of why he calls it "Oricos," with a Latin c married to a Greek -os, and refers to the "Bay of Valona," using its Italian name rather than the modern Albanian Vlorë or the ancient Aulon, but let that go.) At any rate, I was so annoyed by the minimal and ridiculously outdated Wikipedia article (in its entirety: "Oricum was an Ancient Greek city in Epirus, modern Albania. It gained great importance during Roman rule. It was founded by colonists from Colchis according to Pliny," with footnotes referencing books from 1841 and 1779) that I spent far too much time completely revamping it, enjoying the ability the internet affords to splash around among recondite references like Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, and Keith G. Walker, Archaic Eretria: A Political and Social History from the Earliest Times to 490 BC. Anyone who wants to admire the results of my labors can investigate the article in its present state, and if they have anything to add, so much the better.
To provide a linguistic hook, I will note that we would not know the quantity of the middle vowel, since neither Greek nor Latin distinguishes long and short /i/ in writing, except that the word happens to occur in poetry; Horace, for instance, in Odes III.7, writes the Lesser Asclepiad line "Gygen? ille Notis actus ad Oricum," from which we learn that the i is short.
I'm over a quarter of the way through Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer
In chapter 6, "Up to Unqi" (Unqi being an Aramaic name for the north Syrian plain around the Orontes), Lane Fox describes the sea route up the coast and the evidence for Greek contact with the locals, and on page 91, in a discussion of the ancient port at Ras Ibn Hani, he writes:
What, then, did the Greeks call the settlement which they found by this harbour? At [nearby] Ras Shamra, texts and statues show the honours accorded to El, father of the gods. Ras Shamra's later small settlement and the nearby Ras Ibn Hani were surely the site which Greeks later knew as "Betyllion" (their version of the Semitic phrase "bait-El" or "House of El"). They noted Betyllion for its natural harbour, namely the "White Harbour" which we can still admire and which had been the port since Ugarit's Bronze Age. We can therefore understand why Betyllion's "natural" harbour is described as the first staging-post for the Roman emperor Trajan when he set out from Rome to join his troops in Syria for their fateful campaign into Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in AD 114-17.24 He had landed at ancient Ugarit. The correct location of Betyllion is important for different reasons, not because it was a Greek settlement but because it has become involved in a major topographical puzzle about Greek contact further north and also because the name ("house of El") confirms that Canaanite-Phoenician culture never entirely died at the site.Now, the first warning bell was that word "surely," which tends to mean "I can't document this so I'll wave my hand and hope you don't look into it too closely." I was also curious about that odd name Betyllion. So I went to his footnote 24 and found: "Jo. Malalas, Chron. 11.3 (ed. J. Thurn, 2000, 205); Frost (2001), 61-74." Malalas! Another warning bell: the guy wrote in the sixth century A.D., which is certainly "later," but 1,400 years is quite a lot later when you're trying to retrieve a place name. Well, thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can actually see that passage of Book XI in the 1831 Dindorf edition, and what do we find? Not "Betyllion" but Bytyllion—or, to be more exact, Βυτυλλίου in the Greek text and Bytyllii in the Latin translation at the bottom of the page (both are in the genitive case). But perhaps this is corrected in Thurn's modern edition? No, thanks to "Search inside the book" at the Amazon listing
, we can see that Thurn too has Bytyllion. (I checked with other sources, too, like the Barrington Atlas, and they all had Bytyllion.) The only conclusion I can come to is that Lane Fox changed the form to fit his thesis and neglected to mention the fact.
This is not good. I presume he intends "Betyllion" to represent a Greek Βητύλλιον (with eta), and it's true eta and iota were pronounced identically by Malalas's day, but that doesn't mean you can just substitute one for the other. So his sentence "Ras Shamra's later small settlement and the nearby Ras Ibn Hani were surely the site which Greeks later knew as 'Betyllion' (their version of the Semitic phrase 'bait-El' or 'House of El')" can be deconstructed as "Ras Shamra's later small settlement and the nearby Ras Ibn Hani might have been the site which Greeks fourteen hundred years later knew as Bytyllion, but which I prefer to think of as 'Betyllion' because then I can better make it fit the Semitic phrase 'bait-El' or 'House of El', which I need for my theory." Sure, all this stuff is speculative anyway, but I prefer the speculation up front rather than swept under the rug.
Incidentally, that other reference in the footnote, Frost (2001), is Honor Frost, "Two Cypriot Anchors," in Larissa Bonfante and Vassos Karageorghis (eds.), Italy and Cyprus in Antiquity: 1500-450 BC (Nicosia, 2001); I can't access the book, but this review says it "uses the similarity between seventh century anchor-stocks from Cyprus and Italy as a device for entering into a discussion of Bronze and Iron Age anchors, their use in sanctuaries, and the relationship between cult space, towers, and sea-travel," which doesn't sound like it relates to the things that bother me—but if you have read the article and are aware of something that bears on this stuff, please share.
Dick & Garlick ("Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, slang & pop culture") is always an interesting read, and R Devraj's latest post discusses the north Indian use of convent as "a generic term for an English-medium school. Hence, convented, adj., someone who has studied at an English-medium school." Checking the OED to see if this surprising sense was there (it wasn't), I was reminded that the Middle English form was covent (from Anglo-French covent, cuvent, couvent), the Latinizing form convent (after Latin conventum 'assembly') being introduced in the mid-16th century, and Covent Garden was originally the kitchen garden of the Abbey or Convent of St. Peter, Westminster, something I doubtless once knew but had long forgotten.
A couple of years ago I posted about an antedating of "the whole nine yards" to April 25, 1964. Now Fred R. Shapiro, in a Yale Alumni Magazine column, after summarizing the history of what he calls "the most prominent etymological riddle of our time," reports on two further antedatings:
Your staff of testers cannot fairly and equitably appraise the Chevrolet Impala sedan, with all nine yards of goodies, against the Plymouth Savoy which has straight shift and none of the mechanical conveniences which are quite common now.Shapiro's conclusion: "Their context does not relate to the military, nor to the realms of cloth, concrete, or football. They are sufficiently removed from World War II to raise serious doubts about how a term from that war could have attained currency in the 1960s yet left no trace of prior usage. We don't yet have answers, but the questions are moving in new directions as the fog of speculation gives way to the light of fact." The first reader response is from a guy who thinks the military explanation is correct because he read it in a Len Deighton book. As Shapiro begins by saying, "Etymology is the -ology that gets no respect."
— Car Life, December 1962Then the dog would catch on and go ki-yi-yi-ing from one to the other of the shouting pyjama clad participants mad, mad, mad, the consequence of house, home, kids, respectability, status as a college professor and the whole nine yards, as a brush salesman who came by the house was fond of saying, the whole damn nine yards.
— Robert E. Wegner, "Man on the Thresh-Hold," Michigan's Voices: A Literary Quarterly Magazine, Fall 1962
Addendum. Ben Zimmer has a fuller report, with actual images of the cited texts, here.
Having finished Beckwith, I was in the mood for another fresh look at early history, so I'm reading Robin Lane Fox's new book about the Mediterranean in the eighth century B.C., Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer
It occurs to me that we are living in a golden age of language books. It took a while for me to realize this, because plenty of dumb and silly language books get published each year, just as they always have. But now, more and more, there are good books aimed at the general public and written by real linguists, something that used to be almost nonexistent. When I was growing up, the only such author was Robert A. Hall, Jr., whose Linguistics and Your Language
What brought this so strongly to my mind was reading In the Land of Invented Languages
But don't get me wrong: her expertise isn't why you should read the book—it's just the reason you can trust what you read. You should read the book because it's a gripping account of some amazing people and some fascinating changes in the European cultural environment (artificial languages being primarily a European thing, though she mentions Balaibalan, an Arabic-Persian-Turkish mix "designed sometime between 1400 and 1700 (the documents can't be reliably dated)"). She starts with the early attempts to create languages that would "directly represent concepts," the poster boy being Wilkins, who lost the first (600-page) draft of his manuscript in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and had to rewrite it from scratch. The second section is on the late-19th-century craze for languages intended to bring peace to all mankind (the idea, a very silly one, being that war is caused because people can't understand each other's languages); the first to catch on was Volapük (in 1889 "the third international Volapük conference was held in Paris, and the proceedings were entirely in Volapük"), but after excessive squabbling among its partisans, resulting in schisms and a bewildering variety of "improved" versions (Nal Bino, Bopal, Spelin...), L. L. Zamenhof picked up the disaffected customers with his invention, Esperanto, still the only true success story among artificial language—not only does it have far more users than any other, it actually has native speakers (including Danish rocker Kim Henriksen). The final section is on the efflorescence of invented languages in recent decades (the most successful of which, of course, is Klingon, which Okrent learned in the course of working on the book), created in the main not for reasons of scientific or social benefit but for fun, for the joy of playing with the possibilities; this paragraph beautifully summarizes the attitude:
For these language inventors, language was not an enemy to be tamed or reformed but a muse. And they bowed down before her. Jeff Burke, a tall man who seemed nervous and shy at the podium, explained how he had been inspired to build his own family of "Central Mountain" languages by the incredible beauty he found in Mohawk when he took a course on it in college. He said the language "did something to me," and he began to dig into the history of the language, becoming a self-taught expert in the development of the language from Proto-Algonquian. His talk didn't focus so much on his own creation as on the real languages that inspired it. He wanted us to understand where his artistic vision had come from. As he went over the complicated details of the Mohawk pronominal system, he spoke softly, but with such love and wonder in his voice that I thought he might burst into tears.As you can see from that passage, she cares about the people involved, not just their ideas and inventions, and that's what makes the book not just a stimulating read but a powerfully moving experience. In between the Esperanto and final sections, she discusses two language creators whose successes were inextricably intertwined with their disasters. One is Charles Bliss and his symbols, mentioned above, and the other is James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan, a language originally developed in the late 1950s to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Bliss, born Karl Kasiel Blitz in 1897 in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi), having gotten his inspiration from those Chinese characters in Shanghai, devoted himself to devising a logical system of universal symbols that would make it impossible for Hitler-style propaganda to succeed—"inconsistencies and falsehoods would be instantly exposed." After the war he and his wife Claire emigrated to Australia and lived off their savings while he wrote his book; he finished it in 1949, and "Claire sent six thousand letters to universities and government institutions all over the world announcing the publication of his fantastic new invention. They waited for the orders to start rolling in." Alas, there was no response, and it looked like his life's work was a failure. Then in the late 1960s Shirley McNaughton, a teacher at the Ontario Crippled Children's Center who despaired of reaching the children who couldn't speak, ran across a copy of Bliss's book and gave it a try: "Once McNaughton had taught the kids the meaning of a few symbols and showed them examples of how the symbols could be put together, she witnessed an explosion of self-expression. Kids whose communicative worlds had been defined by the options of pointing to a picture of a toilet, or waiting for someone to ask the right question, started talking about a car trip with a father, a brother's new bicycle, a pet cat's habit of hiding under the bed. Kids who were assumed to be severly retarded showed remarkable ingenuity in getting their messages across." McNaughton wrote to Bliss, who "immediately mortgaged his house in order to make the long trip to Toronto. Everyone was excited. When he arrived, there were meetings and talks and parties." I won't detail how it all fell apart, and he wound up alternately threatening to sue McNaughton and the Center and proposing marriage to her, but the whole thing is worthy of Dostoevsky, and it's worth getting the book just for that section.
The James Cooke Brown story is similar in that he won devotees and helpers and drove them away with his need for absolute control (they went on to create the far better known Lojban), but I won't go into it here. Instead, I'll refer you to the book's website, which has a section listing all 500 languages in her appendix and linking to passages in many of them, and close with a touching passage from one of the creators she profiles, Elias Molee, a Norwegian-American who spent his long life (he was born in 1845 and killed himself in 1928) creating one Germanic-based language after another: American Language (1888), Pure Saxon English (1890), Tutonish (1902), Niu Teutonish (1906)... His book Pure Saxon English is online thanks to Google Books (as are a number of the others she mentions), and the "Plea for Visionaries" (pp. 78-79) is an exemplary statement of the attitude Okrent, with her finely judged mix of empathy and objectivity, tries to convey throughout her wonderful book:
Let me, before closing the first part of this work, put in a plea for a milder consideration of visionaries, as distinguished from "cranks." A crank is a sickly, one-sided person who has gone crazy over an idea. The word comes from the Anglo-Saxon, cranc; German, krank; Icelandic, kankr, and means sick. Cranks are, as a rule, narrow-minded and uncultivated. The visionaries, on the other hand, are characterized by ideas not necessarily in opposition to their neighbors, but ideas so selected, and so highly colored as to appear like mere visions in the sky, a fine midsummer-night's dream. It is a great thing to be able to quietly bear the evils of life, and to rate its transient delights at their true value; but he whose visions can create for him a flower-garden, who can inhabit his air-castles with the same pleasure as if they were solid stone, is a happier man than a philosopher. He who can shape out of the air a paradise of his own, believe in it and live in it, is more to be envied than a man with mere hard common sense. Life is not bread only. It is possible to be too practical — too matter-of-fact. Reason can tell us that the rainbow is mere sunshine and water, but the grand destiny of nations can not be solved without the aid of inspiration and poetic visions. Imagination alone can understand inspirations — pictures of institutions to come. We are all, more or less, visionaries. What are we in the world for, except to improve it? Visions of future improvements and future enjoyments lure us onward. This imaginative faculty is conspicuous in youth, and the longer any man or woman, the longer a people, is able to retain it, the more will they do and the more lasting will be their enjoyment while upon the stage of life. O that we could always be like children, and find beauty and pleasure in scenes that imagination paints for us in the clouds! ... Whenever a people ceases to be moved by anything except hard common sense, it is getting to be too old, and too timid for future progress. Like most men of three-score and ten years, it is satisfied with what it has already accomplished. Imagination and love of mankind can alone preserve the youthfulness of the soul."We are all, more or less, visionaries": exactly so, and I find myself no longer able to look down on those whose visions, even if unrealizable, are full of such inspiration and creativity. May their tribe increase!
Two readers have sent me reports of the death on April 24 of Margaret Gelling, doyenne of English toponymists. The Economist's obituary does a splendid job of conveying what she did:
Mrs Gelling worked for the English Place-Name Society, formally and informally, from 1946. From 1986 to 1998 she was its president. She never held an academic post, but lectured widely, wrote a dozen books and produced three of the county surveys of place names. She was devoted to the proposition that names drawn from the landscape were not trivial or accidental, but original and important. All her passion for argument was employed to prove that hamm, a piece of land almost enclosed by water, was as vital a suffix as ham, a man-made enclosure; that an ending in -den might come from denu, a long and sinuous valley, rather than denn, a woodland pig-pasture; and that the hall in Coggeshall came from halh, a nook or a hollow, not some grand building. Cogg’s nook, a little recess tucked into the 150-foot contour line, was perhaps the best place where he could put his hut. With Mrs Gelling, topography always came first.Now I want to read her book Signposts to the Past: English Place NamesNo subtlety escaped her. The suffix fyrhth was not simply wood, but “scrubland at the edge of the forest”. The word wæss was not just swamp, but—she was particularly proud of this—“land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly”. She had observed this herself at Buildwas, on the winding Severn in Shropshire, where between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon the flooding river drained from the land “as if a plug had been pulled out”. A feld was not necessarily ground broken for arable, but any open country in the almost all-covering fifth-century forest. And an ærn was not merely a house, but a place where something was stored in bulk and worked on: so that Brewerne, in Cambridgeshire, acquired a smell of beer, and Colerne, in Wiltshire, a dusting of charcoal.
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Geoff Pullum made a post over at the Log based on a mistaken idea that the new Star Trek movie (which I just saw last night—tremendous fun!) had a "chemistry blooper." Turns out it didn't, but the thread turned into a discussion of the movie's positive view of linguists, the realism or otherwise of a reference to "all three dialects of Romulan," and particularly "Chekov's inability to say Victor with a V instead of a W," which inspired an astonishing amount of nitpicking; as I said there:
I find it hard to believe all this discussion over the v/w thing. As Pavel Iosad said in the sixth comment, it's an homage to the original; the actor himself (who was born in Leningrad) said: "With Chekhov, it was fun to capture the comedic aspects. Naturally, he’s kind of funny sometimes. I adjusted it, but I wanted to be close to the [original version]. Certain things I took: the v’s to the w’s. [Walter Koenig] says wessels. He doesn’t say the v, which is an odd choice. It’s the kind of choice that they made 40 years ago when he was this Cold War stereotype. But it’s fine. It’s great.” Yes, it's a linguistic element, but it has nothing to do with how real Russians actually speak. Otherwise, his accent was spot-on (not surprisingly), and at one point he lets loose with a perfect "ё-моё" (closer to "Fuck me!" than "Holy moly," pace the linked webpage).(Thanks for the interview link, Eric!)
I'm trying to understand the phrase va banque, which the OED defines as "In baccarat and chemin-de-fer, a bet against the whole of the banker's stake." (Their first cite is 1946 A. J. P. TAYLOR Course of German Hist. ii. 38: "Both dynasties desired the defeat of Napoleon; but the Hohenzollerns, having nothing more to lose, were ready to bid va banque—the Habsburgs were not.") An apparently synonymous exclamation is "Banco," which goes back considerably farther (1789 J. MOORE Zeluco I. viii. 38: "As he shook the box, being about to throw, the Hussar officer cried, Banco; and the others took up what they had staked.") I gather it's an all-or-nothing bet, but I don't grasp how it works in the card game. Can anyone explain in simple terms, suitable to someone who has never played baccarat, what goes on when you make such a bet?
Maximilian Voloshin (the stress is on the second syllable: vah-LOSH-in) may not have been as great a poet as the famous "Silver Age" Russians (Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak & Co.), but he was a very fine one, and his famous house at Koktebel in the Crimea served as a refuge for both Reds and Whites during the Civil War (and how, with his integrity and refusal to take sides, he not only survived the war but lived in peace until his death in 1932 is a mystery). At any rate, Greg Afinogenov (aka slawkenbergius) has translated his long and moving poem Дом Поэта as "The Poet's House" (with the original Russian en face, a much-appreciated courtesy), and I commend it to your attention. You may be puzzled, as I was, by the reference to "Queen Taiakh"; I asked Greg about it, and he pointed me in the direction of this piece by Boris Grigoriev suggesting that the name Taiakh, which Voloshin gave to a reproduction of an Egyptian statue he acquired in Germany and installed in Koktebel, is the Arabic word حياة ḥaya(t) 'life' spelled backward. Se non è vero, è ben trovato!
Oxford UP was kind enough to send me a copy of Slang: The People's Poetry
But the social circumstances that provoke jargon are different from those that provoke slang: in jargon, there's something at stake beyond positioning oneself in the social circumstance. Jargon may be stylish, but it is not, as Eble suggests of slang, analogous to fashion: jargon has to roll up its sleeves and do real work. There is nothing playful about on a wait, triple-sat, or four-top; these are all shorthand for things that folks working in restaurants don't have time to say at length. For instance, when a server returns from a break, another says, in passing, "We're on a wait," not "We have more patrons than we can serve at one time." The second server is passing because she has just been triple-sat and she doesn't have time to explain, or she'll be weeded. Note that "I'm weeded" takes less time to say than "I am in the weeds."Later he makes the point that jargon tends to be homogeneous: "servers in California use terms familiar in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey." And he discusses edge cases: "At Winchester, one of England's great public schools, students have spoken a peculiar slang over so many centuries that it looks surprisingly like jargon. An item of Winchester slang is called a Notion, a term that is itself a Notion."In slang, clipping's cazh [casual], but in jargon it's efficient. When a server behind you quietly says Backs, there's nothing casual in the message: it's a warning that said server is carrying a full tray and that no one within distance of a stage whisper should move. ... In this situation, if you don't understand restaurant jargon, if you don't respond to it as a member of the guild, the results will be catastrophic. ...
So jargon is practical: it's brisk and unambiguous, and it helps busy people do their jobs efficiently. But its use is also social: social relations within the restaurant depend on it, and efficient work for the common goal depends on cerain social relations. When restaurant jargon is slangy—full of fun, invention, and irreverence—it reinforces the restaurant in-group's camaraderie and alleviates the tedium of its shared labor.
After the initial section on definitions, he has chapters on the social, aesthetic, and cognitive aspects of slang, ending with a section titled "Toward a Poetics of Slang," which begins, charmingly, "It should be clear by now that I'm more inclined to complicate matters than to get to the bottom of things" and ends by saying slang "cannot be understood without considering its relation to every relevant aspect of language, the slight but irreducible area of a spandrel amid the lines and arcs and space of the grand design of language..." And each chapter ends with a full bibliography. A fine job.
Christian Bök has a rather odd project, The Xenotext Experiment:
I have conceived of The Xenotext Experiment, a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu, doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S Burroughs, who declared “the word is now a virus.” In this experiment, I propose to address some of the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing a “xenotext” – a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form....While I appreciate the intellectual panache of the idea, I'm not sure it's actually a good one to put into practice. (Thanks, Trevor)I propose to encode a short verse into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium, after which I plan to document the progress of this experiment for publication. I also plan to make related artwork for subsequent exhibition.
I plan to compose my own text in such a way that, when translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets “expressed” by the organism, which, in response to this grafted, genetic sequence, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein – a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text. I hope, in effect, to engineer a primitive bacterium so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also a useable machine for writing a poem.
One of the forgotten byways of history is brought to our attention by Leah Price in the LRB:
By the time David Copperfield appeared in 1849, the days and nights that Dickens spent studying an 1824 reprint of a 1750 manual must have felt doubly galling thanks to the publication, in 1837, of Isaac Pitman’s new method, Stenographic Soundhand. Like Esperanto a generation later, shorthand spread through a counter-culture of early adopters – spirit-rappers, teetotallers, vegetarians, pacifists, anti-vivisectionists, anti-tobacconists. Pitman himself associated shorthand with ‘the dawn of religious freedom’ and ‘the dawn of political freedom’ (verbatim transcription, he claimed, prevented parliamentary reporters from privileging favourites). His empire grew with the British postal system. In 1840, he condensed his method into a ‘Penny Plate’ the right size for sending through the new penny post. A network of ‘gratuitous correctors’ (Pitman’s language veered between pedantry and hucksterism) encouraged autodidacts in the provinces to send one another their shorthand exercises to be marked; later, chain letters called ‘ever-circulators’, composed in shorthand, were sent through the imperial mail. ...Fascinating stuff, and "gratuitous correctors" is a good name for those of us who work on Wikipedia articles today. (Thanks, Paul!)Pen pals in Africa and Australia found one another through the classified pages of shorthand magazines that juxtaposed new material with reprints of published fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Around the World in Eighty Days, all the Sherlock Holmes stories and even an unabridged run of the Strand Magazine. The depositories of copyright libraries are littered with Victorian shorthand editions of A Christmas Carol, Aesop’s fables, English-Welsh and English-Hindi dictionaries, the Old and New Testaments, and biographies of Calvin and Galileo. Pitman’s Shorthand Weekly (later called the Phonetic Journal) featured ‘serials and short stories by well-known authors; miscellaneous articles; illustrated jokes and anecdotes; and prize competitions’. On 17 August 1901, it offered a prize for the best biography of Isaac Pitman by a colonial subscriber. Submissions, naturally, were accepted only in shorthand. You can still read every syllable from the first International Shorthand Congress and Jubilee of Phonography, thanks to transcripts produced by ‘an army of phonographers . . . not at all concerned with the economic rewards of shorthand, important as these are, but only with the service – personal, social – even professional – which one Pitmanite can render another in any part of the world.’ One delegate described shorthand as a ‘bond of brotherhood’. Like the open-source movement a century and a half later, Pitmanism was idealistic, distributed and male.
And then everything changed....
In my capacity as hatter, I bring you today's NY Times story "When He Talks Hats, Basic Black Is Only the Beginning," by Ralph Blumenthal, about Bruno Lacorazza and his Brooklyn store Feltly Hats, which caters to Orthodox Jews. I have always admired the magnificent headgear of the various Orthodox communities (my late friend Allan Herman used to enjoy pointing out the styles of dress and payess to me as we wandered the streets of New York: "See that guy who looks like a seventeenth-century Polish tax collector? That's a Satmar"), and I particularly love the opulent shtreimel (from Middle High German streimel 'stripe, strip') and its taller cousin the spodik (which I presume is Polish spodek 'saucer,' related to spod 'from under').
I conclude with the conclusion of the story: "'People always use hats,' [Rotter] said. 'It’s a necessity, like food.'" Fun zayn moyl in gots oyern!
I've finished Beckwith
Furthermore, the epilogue, "The Barbarians," would make a superb little booklet on its own, and sums up the essence of what he's trying to convey throughout the book. He thoroughly demolishes "the widely held theory of the 'needy nomads,' according to which steppe-zone Central Eurasians did not themselves produce enough of the necessities of life and depended on the agricultural products, textiles, and other goods of their peripheral neighbors, whose wealth they coveted. When the Central Eurasians could not obtain what they needed or desired by trading their animals and other goods with the 'advanced' peripheral empires... the Central Eurasians invaded to take them by force." He demonstrates that the Central Eurasians were no more violent than the "civilized" states with whom they sometimes fought, that what they desired above all else was trade (which requires peace), and that it was generally the peripheral states that attacked the Central Eurasians in an effort to expand their own territory and impose their own power, which they believed should be universal. He provides this powerful quote from Sophia-Karin Psarras ("Han and Xiongnu: A Reexamination of Cultural and Political Relations"): "I have found that the Xiongnu merit the attention paid them since the Han, not because of any threat they posed to China, but because they were China's equal. It is this equality which constituted the supposed menace to China." Everyone who wants to discuss world history should read and assimilate what he has to say, and hopefully the entire concept of "barbarian" will eventually make its way to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
Alas, I must report on the last two chapters, which are devoted almost entirely to a denunciation of "Modernism," by which he means pretty much everything bad that's happened since the nineteenth century. (For him, postmodernism is a subset of Modernism, a sort of rebranding.) This passage will give an idea of the depth of analysis involved: "Modern poets stripped poetry of its elite status in relation to prose: free verse, a thinly disguised form of prose that anyone could write and was therefore accessible to anyone, replaced poetry. Painting called for little training or aesthetic taste (and, indeed, Modernism explicitly demanded its suppression); it required only the ability to splash paint on a canvas. In painting, poetry, and music, among other high arts, traditional forms were rejected and there was unrelenting pressure to abandon any new forms that arose to replace the old ones. The result was literally the loss of the meaning of Art and even Beauty..." Yes, he capitalizes Art and Beauty, and yes, he sounds exactly like the clichéd guy complaining that his six-year-old daughter can paint better than that.
Now, I don't begrudge anyone their prejudices, and there's no reason a specialist in medieval Eurasian history should have any expertise in, or sophisticated response to, modern poetry, music, and art. He's welcome to bend the ear of the patrons of his neighborhood bar about such things, and he'd doubtless find sympathetic listeners. But it boggles my mind that he considers it relevant, let alone vital, to a history of Eurasia (which he claims "suffered the most of any region of the world from the devastation of Modernism"), and it further astonishes me that his publishers didn't make him cut all that stuff (and replace it with the further details he could surely supply about the topics and periods in which he is genuinely expert). As it is, I can only suggest that readers skip chapters 11 and 12 and head straight to the brilliant Epilogue.
One minor complaint I can't resist making: he has a cavalier attitude about nomenclature that occasionally creates real problems. It's quirky that he insists on calling the Battle of Talas "the battle of Atlakh, near Talas" (saying in a footnote that "It is popularly known as the Battle of Talas"—well, then, that's its name, no?) and a bit odd that he chooses to use "czar" rather than "tsar," but what the heck; it's extremely puzzling that he calls the Battle of Manzikert the Battle of Mantzikert (the accepted quirky nomenclature is to use Malazgirt, the Armenian name; what good is that extra -t-?); and it's truly bizarre that he insists on calling the country south of Russia "Ukraina" (adding in a footnote "Also Ukraine"). But using Salmanasar (a French form) on page 41 and Shalmaneser (the normal English form) on page 61 for the same Assyrian name is pretty unforgiveable.
Today wood s lot quotes a well-known poem by Gary Snyder, and I'm going to quote it too, partly because I like it and partly because I have something to say about the chain of quotes within the poem:
Axe HandlesIt's a wonderful image, and the chain of transmission back to the fourth century is impressive, but it actually goes back much further than that. Lu Ji was probably quoting the neo-Confucian Doctrine of the Mean, which Pound translated as The Unwobbling Pivot; Pound says of it: "It is divided into three parts: the axis; the process; and sincerity, the perfect word, or the precise word; into Metaphysics: 'Only the most absolute sincerity under heaven can effect any change'; Politics: 'In cutting an axe-handle the model is not far off, in this sense: one holds one axe-handle while chopping the other. Thus one uses men in governing men'; Ethics: 'The archer, when he misses the bull's-eye, turns and seeks the cause of the error in himself.'"One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattem is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"—in the
Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.-
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
But the actual quote from The Doctrine of the Mean (I.XIII.2) is: "In the Book of Poetry, it is said, 'In hewing an ax-handle, in hewing an ax-handle, the pattern is not far off.' We grasp one ax handle to hew the other; and yet, if we look askance from the one to the other, we may consider them as apart. Therefore, the superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops." So we see that it actually goes way, way back to the Shih Ching, I:15; Legge translates the relevant lines as "In hewing an axe-handle, in hewing an axe-handle,/ The pattern is not far off," and Pound himself, in his vigorous version, has "To hack an axe-haft/ an axe/ hacks;/ the pattern 's near." And the pattern continues.
Incidentally, note in the Snyder poem the unusual phrase "And go gets it" (an extension from the normal imperative "Go get it!"); if you google it, you get almost entirely references to this poem, but there are a few others—in a comment on this blog, for instance, we find "To me, he is a smart man, black or white, he see's the money and go gets it."
The World Digital Library "makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." The materials are mostly photographs and maps, but you can browse by type of item; here are the books, which include, for instance, a 1907 history of the First Nerchinsk Cossack Regiment; the second Augsburg edition of the Fables of Aesop, "translated from Latin into German by Heinrich Steinhöwel" and "illustrated with 208 woodcuts"; and Blake's Book of Urizen. Quite a treasure trove already, and presumably it will continue expanding. (Thanks, Paul!)
Conrad alerted me to the strikingly discursive OED etymology of the word they list as "grey, gray, a. and n." After a brief and boring account of its origin (it's from Old English grǣᵹ, and has only Germanic cognates), they provide this exhaustive inquiry into its alternate spellings:
Each of the current spellings has some analogical support. The only mod.Eng. words repr. OE. words ending in -ǽᵹ are key (which is irrelevant on account of its pronunciation), whey, and clay. If we further take into consideration the words repr. OE. words in -ǽᵹe, viz. blay or bley, fey, wey, we have three (or four) instances of ey and only two (or one) of ay. On the other hand, this advantage in favour of grey is counterbalanced by the facts that clay is the only word of the five which is in very general use, and that grey is phonetically ambiguous, while gray is not. With regard to the question of usage, an inquiry by Dr. Murray in Nov. 1893 elicited a large number of replies, from which it appeared that in Great Britain the form grey is the more frequent in use, notwithstanding the authority of Johnson and later Eng. lexicographers, who have all given the preference to gray. In answer to questions as to their practice, the printers of The Times stated that they always used the form gray; Messrs. Spottiswoode and Messrs. Clowes always used grey; other eminent printing firms had no fixed rule. Many correspondents said that they used the two forms with a difference of meaning or application: the distinction most generally recognized being that grey denotes a more delicate or a lighter tint than gray. Others considered the difference to be that gray is a ‘warmer’ colour, or that it has a mixture of red or brown (cf. also the quot. under 1c below). In the twentieth century, grey has become the established spelling in the U.K., whilst gray is standard in the United States. There seems to be nearly absolute unanimity as to the spelling of ‘The Scots Greys’, ‘a pair of greys’. As the word is both etymologically and phonetically one, it is undesirable to treat its graphic forms as differing in signification.(I love the Victorian appeal to the printers of The Times, Messrs. Spottiswoode and Messrs. Clowes, and "other eminent printing firms.") I find it somewhat bizarre that a lot of people tried to differentiate the spellings according to meaning, but on reflection, it's just one more example of humanity's insistence on imposing meaning everywhere it turns.
In the entry proper, I found this (presumably long-forgotten) proverb: "the grey mare is the better horse: the wife rules the husband. Hence, in allusion to this proverb, simply the grey mare: the wife who rules her husband." And I was amused to see, among the DRAFT ADDITIONS FEBRUARY 2004, "(A name for) a member of any of various supposed species of grey-skinned, humanoid, extraterrestrial beings. Usu. in pl." First two cites:
[1987 Chicago Tribune (Nexis) 22 Mar. 6C, Skeptics who balk at the notion of flying saucers and little gray men are called closed-minded.]
1989 UFO Sept.-Oct. 37/1 The ETs I've experienced have exhibited a wide range of forms. I have had no contact with the ‘greys’ (from Zeta Reticulum), and have been told that I will not need to.
"And have been told that I will not need to": must have been a relief!
I've only got a couple of chapters left in Beckwith
The first is what to me is a convincing etymology of the name Manchu. On page 225 he writes:
In 1616 Nurhachi (Nurhači, 1559-1626), the leader of the Jurchen in southern Manchuria north of Liaotung, established a Chinese-style dynasty, the Later Chin, named after the Chin Dynasty of his Jurchen forebears. ... In 1636 his son and successor Hung Taiji (1592-1643) changed the dynasty's name to Ch'ing ('Clear') and in 1643 adopted a new ethnonym, Manju (Manǰu) 'Manchu', apparently after the name of the Boddhisatva of wisdom, Mañju-śrî 'Lord Mañju'.A footnote sends us to endnote 89, which says:
By the time of Nurhachi's son, Hung Taiji ('Abahai'...), the Manchus had been converted to Tibetan Buddhism, mainly through the efforts of the Mongols and Uighurs, who had themselves been converted to Tibetan Buddhism in the Mongol Empire period. The Manchus belonged to the "reformed" Dgelugspa ('virtuous school') sect headed by the Dalai Lama, who had become a politically important reincarnation lineage with the help of the Mongols.... The dynastic name Ch'ing 'clear' is evidently connected to the name of the holy mountain Ch'ing-liang Shan ('Mount Clear and Cool') in Shansi (Shanxi), where Manchu, Mongol, Uighur, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhists believed Mañjuśrī resided.... There are other well-argued theories about the etymology of the name Manju (e.g., Stary 1990 [Giovanni Stary, "The Meaning of the Word 'Manchu': A New Solution to an Old Problem," Central Asiatic Journal 34.1-2: 109-119]), and it is quite possible that the Manchus deliberately fostered different interpretations among the different peoples who made up their empire, but for the Manchus themselves it is difficult to imagine most of them, as fervent new converts to Buddhism, seeing the name as anything other than Mañju, the name of the Boddhisatva of wisdom.(The OED, in an entry revised June 2008, simply says "Manchu Manju is said to have been the name adopted by Abahai, leader of the Altaic-speaking Ruzhen tribes of Manchuria, who conquered China and ruled as the Qing dynasty from 1644-1912.") I like both the laying out of the reasons he supports this etymology and the fact that he refers to "other well-argued theories"; although he sometimes seems overly certain of his own theories, he doesn't try to paper over controversies, and is perfectly willing to say some of his previous views were mistaken, a form of humility that is welcome in a scholar (and not as common as one would like).
On pages 76-77 he introduces one of the major themes of the book, the mutual dependence and comparable nature of nomads and settled peoples:
Trade was important for both nomadic and non-nomadic cultures, but it was critical for the nomadic states. The crucial nature of trade was not, however, because of the supposed poverty of the nomads. Nomads were in general much better fed and led much easier, longer lives, than the inhabitants of the large agricultural states. There was a constant drain of people escaping from China into the realms of the Eastern Steppe, where they did not hesitate to proclaim the superiority of the nomadic life-style.... Central Eurasian peoples knew that it was far more profitable to trade and tax than it was to raid and destroy....All of the Central Asian cities depended primarily on irrigated agriculture.... Yet, despite their urbanity, the peoples there were just as warlike or non-warlike as the nomads—who were just as interested in trade as the urban peoples.... The ancient Chinese travelers to Sogdiana found it an intensely cultivated agricultural region with many cities and huge numbers of warriors. The Sogdians, no less than the nomadic peoples around them, needed to trade to acquire the wealth to bestow on their comitatus members; it was clearly not the reverse. They needed their warriors for their internal political purposes, just as the nomads did.
This is not an especially original insight, but a useful thing to point out (pp. 176-77):
The limitation in the size of states in the period between the Early Middle Ages and the Mongol Conquest limited the evil that governments and politicians could do to individuals. Especially in Western Europe, the Islamic world, Tibet, and East Asia, it became possible for philosophers, scientists, and other creative people to escape to another more amenable state when they were endangered in their homeland. The result was increased international movement, and with it continued intellectual growth.On page 202 he mentions that Persian miniature painting was "a result of the Mongols having brought with them numerous Chinese scholar officials to help them run the Il-Khanate," and on page 240 he describes the massacre in 1756-57 of the Junghars, until then the main power in Central Asia, at the orders of the Ch'ien-lung Emperor: "only about 10 percent of the Junghars, mainly women and children, survived." That's just a sampling; amid the (rather dry) chronological rundown of rulers and tribal movements, there are all sorts of eye-openers like those.
I imagine most LH readers are at least vaguely familiar with the mysterious script associated with the Indus Valley Civilization that flourished over four millennia ago; the great question is whether it is a writing system representing a spoken language (the question of what that language might have been is another issue) or simply a collection of symbols. The argument for a writing system has always boiled down to the fact that the civilization was widespread, advanced, and in contact with other civilizations that used writing; how could they not have had it themselves? The contrary argument has been that almost all the inscriptions are extremely short and don't show any clear evidence of being linguistic in nature.
Now a group of authors (Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and Iravatham Mahadevan) have published a paper in Science claiming that "the script’s conditional entropy is closer to those of natural languages than various types of nonlinguistic systems." This has stirred up a fair amount of controversy. While I'm not competent to deal with the information-theoretic arguments deployed, I'm willing to take the word of Cosma Shalizi and Mark Liberman that the paper doesn't prove what it claims to prove (Fernando Pereira says, "Once again, Science falls for a glib magic formula that purports to answer a question about language"); one of the authors of the paper responds to criticism by Steve Farmer and Michael Witzel but does not address the problem Shalizi and Liberman point out. In a MetaFilter thread on the subject, the evidently knowledgeable Sova (Сова being the Russian word for 'owl') says "the idea that there is a language beneath these symbols, or even that the symbols have the kind of order to encode any information - linguistic or otherwise - is up for debate," and that's still my default position, but I'm wondering if any LH readers have something to say about it.
I am delighted to report that regular LH commenter Siganus Sutor, under the nom de blog Siganusk, has started Martian Spoken Here ("Mauricianismes et autres petites entorses à la langue"). As he says in his introductory post, his starting point was Didier de Robillard's Contribution à un inventaire des particularités lexicales du français de l’île Maurice (available online):
Like probably most Mauritians knowing some French and going through this list, I wanted to add my bit. There were also words and expressions I hadn’t really heard or with which I didn’t agree completely. Little by little, by asking my memory to get things out and by interrogating relatives, friends, colleagues or acquaintances, the list grew up, until there was a feeling that this would work better if I put it on the internet with a possibility for visitors to contribute their own bit and give their own feelings about this, that or the other. Especially the other. Very often digressions have a better taste than the main course.As a fellow lover of dialects and digressions, I for one welcome our Martian
Helen DeWitt has a wonderful post at paperpools, quoting a Russian reader who was given a copy of The Last Samurai (for description, see my enthusiastic burble from 2003) by someone who said "You know, maybe, being a single mom of a five-year-old girl, you will find this stuff interesting. It is about how to teach kids foreign languages. I think you’ll enjoy it." The story she tells is touching and should inspire everyone to teach their kids something of a foreign language or three. Read the post, then (if you haven't already) buy the book!
(Incidentally, you can see the Yo-Yo Ma quote cited in the title of this post, and on page 44 of the novel, here, towards the bottom of page 8.)
I have fond memories of the semester I spent studying Gothic in grad school, but the texts were a little dry. That's not a problem with Ben's series of videos "Gothic for Goths," which uses for its dialogue someone trying to find a lost chupacabra. The first video (10 min.) is an introduction to the alphabet, with explanations of the names of the letters and where they came from; the second (just a couple of minutes, created because YouTube cut his first off at ten minutes) is a continuation, discussing the diphthongs; and the third, "Gaitsugja Meins" ['My chupacabras'] (5 min.), is a dialogue with explanations of grammar. It's a lot of fun, and I hope he does more of them. (Thanks, Jonathan!)