languagehat

2003-04-09T18:48:00.000-04:00

LANGUAGEHAT HAS MOVED!

Languagehat has made its long-promised peregrination to Movable Type (thanks, Songdog!); it is now to be found at http://www.languagehat.com/, complete with comments that work, snazzy graphics (thanks, taz!), and the possibility of RSS feeds. Please update your links and bookmarks accordingly, and make yourselves at home! The existing entries and archives will remain here (as well as being replicated at the new address), but will not be updated. Thank you for your patronage, and I hope you will continue to provide stimulating comments and e-mails whenever you feel talkative.

Over and out...

2003-04-09T16:36:00.000-04:00

ATTENTION PASSENGERS... We are experiencing delays due to system maintenance. By ~~the spring of 2005~~ tomorrow Languagehat should be up and running at its new site, with improved graphics and functioning comments, not to mention an RSS feed. In the meantime garble mumble grackle...

We appreciate your patience!

2003-04-06T11:18:00.000-04:00

IDENTIFONT. If you're a lover of typography, you'll want to bookmark this site; find a capital Q in the text whose type you want to identify, answer a question about it, and you're started on a journey that will end in satisfaction. (If it doesn't, let them know—they're always adding new fonts.) Thanks, Chris!

2003-04-05T10:32:00.000-05:00

A POEM FOR MOIRA. This is from Dark World, a 1974 book by one of my favorite American poets, Hayden Carruth (also editor of my favorite American anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us); Dark World has an epigraph from Rabbi Baruch of Mezbizh: "What a good and bright world this is if we do not lose our hearts to it, but what a dark world if we do!"

STEPPING BACKWARD

I waken and
   lean and look out
      to see the darkness
flee,
   sunken westward
      over curving earth,
departed
   like the long ocean
      running in tide
so fast and far
   it can never return
      or darken
this wide shore.

The last green star
   dies
      and the trees
lean in their green leaves
   westward
      as if in yearning
and then they straighten.

I rise
   from my window
      thinking now
the new words I must say
   as I step backward
      into day.

2003-04-04T21:19:00.000-05:00

OLIVIER. I just saw Linda Winer interview Rosemary Harris, who knew Laurence Olivier and insisted that he pronounced his name in the traditional anglicized fashion ("oh-LIHV-ee-er," with the ending as in "heavier") and disliked the "oh-LIHV-ee-ay" pronunciation that has become universal ("It's not French!"), though he learned to accept it. (The same is true of the jazz drummer Paul Motian, who used to insist on pronouncing his Armenian name "MOW-tee-an" but finally gave in to the ubiquitous "MOW-shun.") Since I can't find any mention of this on the internet, and all my reference books give the French-style version, I thought I'd better post it here so there will be some record of the fact.

2003-04-04T16:29:00.000-05:00

SHE'S THE GREATEST. Some of you may have noticed Languagehat was looking distinctly green about the gills lately. I tried my usual amateur haruspication of the template and gave up in despair; Caterina stepped into the breach, waved her magic wand over it, and hey presto!—the poor little blog was good as new, wagging its tail and begging for new entries. All praise and honor go to Caterina the Great, who may be a Fake but is the real thing.

(Comments and archives seem to be missing at the moment, but that's just Blogger being Blogger, I presume. Which reminds me: this little episode has finally gotten me off my lazy butt; I have bought languagehat.com and will be moving to MT soonest. Prepare to update your links!)

2003-04-03T10:28:00.000-05:00

THE MYTH OF THE SMALL VOCABULARY. It is sometimes said that "primitive peoples" (or welfare mothers, in a particularly obnoxious use of the trope) have a pathetically small vocabulary—a thousand words, perhaps. I've just found an excellent essay by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg (the language maven of Fresh Air, among other things) debunking this nonsense. By the way, although Nunberg doesn't give a figure, the average adult vocabulary appears to be somewhere around 40,000-50,000 words (or, if you believe Steven Pinker, not one of my heroes, something closer to 60,000). (Thanks to Jonathan Mayhew for pointing me in this direction.)

Addendum. Check out the other essays at Nunberg's homepage; there are eminently sensible ones on American attempts to pronounce "Iraq" and "Qatar" (and foreign names in general) and on the use of "Gallic" and other symptoms of our conflicted Francophobia, inter alia.

2003-04-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

LINGUISTIC X-FILES. You thought Yiddish was descended from German? Wrong. It's from Basque. The truth is out there...

Note: Since it is no longer April 1, I'd better add, to clear things up for the overly literal, that the above should be read with eyebrows raised to the maximum level. The linked site is completely loony, despite its neat, professional appearance. As a matter of fact, I wondered if I myself was being taken in by an elaborate joke. I mean, "diaspora (exile, dispersion), .di-as.-.po-ora: adibide (advice) asagotu (to go far away) apokeria (filthy deed) oraintxe (right now): 'The advice is to go right now, far from the filthy deeds'"? "Diaspora" isn't even Yiddish! But naah, it's way too much trouble for a practical joke. It has to be in earnest.

Mea culpa. My deepest apologies. I failed to investigate the linked site further; I was satisfied with the first morsel of yummy lunacy. Moss was not so lazy, and he has directed my attention (see Comments) to the deep well from which the Yiddish stuff is drawn. It turns out that "Basque" is actually ancient Saharan, the base from which linguists invented all other languages. Yes, linguists. Why wasn't I in on this? It would have been so much more fun than digging around in dusty nineteenth-century German journals. Anyway, here is the inspiring conclusion, and I thank Moss for bringing this treasure our way:

From my work in with the following languages it appears that all highly developed languages, without exception, were invented by linguists; some languages turned out more elegant and useful than others. If this is indeed the case, then we should be entitled to start facing out some of the unnecessary and dying ones, such as Celtic, Friesian, Wallonian, Flemish, Catalan etc. Danish and Norwegian are almost the same so why not combine them, as the Basques did with their seven languages, which are now together called Euskera Batua or Unified Basque. Ukrainian and Russian, Galician and Portugese, Finnish and Estonian, Polish and Kashubian, Czech and Slovak, Macedonian and Bulgarian etc. all can be combined with a bit of good will. Why treasure something as artificial and unauthentic as the many unnecessary and people-dividing Benedictine language creations we we are now stuck with?

The European nations are making tremendous strides to unify under one government, one monetary system, one army, no boundaries, and now it is time to simplify the church-caused language bewilderment and start working toward a Unified European language, which we could call Euro Batua, which could be English or Spanish, but not German. The coming of the third millennium B.C. could be celebrated by starting to work toward the Universal language, it is long overdue. It is a pity that this Universal language cannot again be the Saharan of our ancestors, because it is just too complicated and too difficult to learn, but the oldest highly developed language in all the world shall not be allowed to die. Let Latin and Greek and Sanskrit only be remembered in books, we can well do without them, but the Basque language must survive and be spoken by a vibrant population, if necessary through the creation of a United Nations Heritage Region called Euskadi. It would be a worthy "Year 2000" project for the U.N.

2003-04-02T14:29:00.000-05:00

MEDITERRANEAN. From a beautiful little book by Predrag Matvejevic (translated from the Croatian by Michael Henry Heim) featuring lots of centuries-old maps and drawings of cities and the kind of rambling but painstakingly precise commentary I love:

The name of a sea depends on its location and its links to the lands along its shores and to their peoples. Ancient peoples like the Egyptians and Sumerians called the Mediterranean the Upper Sea because of its position with respect to them. It had many names in the Bible: the great sea (yam ha-gadol, Joshua 1:4), the uttermost or utmost sea (yam ha-aharon, Deuteronomy 11:24, 34:2), the sea of the Philistines (yam pelishtim, Exodus 23:31). At times it was called simply The Sea, everyone assuming the sea in question was the Mediterranean....

Both Hecataeus and Herodotus call the Mediterranean the Great Sea, as do the Phoenecians, who appear to have been the first to navigate it. In The Peloponnesian War Thucydides calls it the Hellenic Sea (1:4) because it belongs to Greece. The Greeks called it, accordingly, "our sea," which nomenclature the Romans borrowed (mare nostrum) as did many after them. Plato is a bit more circumspect when he says, "the sea beside us" (par' hêmin thalassa, from Phaedo 113a). In a text known under the title "De mundo" and perhaps wrongly attributed to Aristotle we find the fateful designation of "inner sea" (hê esô thalassa, 3.8) as opposed to the outer sea or ocean: it is this designation that will later give rise, in Latin translation, to the term Mediterranean.

Philology will help us to trace our sea's history. The adjective mediterraneus was not a particularly refined word. Festus, a grammarian of the golden age, recommended that it be replaced by mediterreus, but recommendations of the sort are rarely heeded once a word has come into common use, and this was a time when Rome was on its way to becoming a major sea power. (By then the adjective meditullius—from tellus [earth] and possibly related to the Greek mesogaios [inland, in the heart of a country]—was archaic.) The word mediterraneus designated a landlocked space on the continent as opposed to maritimus. Cicero calls inland inhabitants "the most mediterranean of people" (homines maximi mediterranei, from In Verrem 2.5). Similarly, the noun mediterraneum designated the heart of the country (for example, and in the plural, mediterranea Galliae [the continental parts of Gaul]). The epithet mediterraneus came to be linked with the "inner sea" because the "inner sea" was itself landlocked.... But it was Isidorus Hispalensis, or Isidore of Seville, who turned the adjective into a proper noun: "The Great Sea [Mare Magnum] flows from the ocean in the west; it faces south and reaches north. It is called 'great' because other seas pale in comparison; it is called the Mediterranean because it washes against the surrounding land [mediam terram] all the way to the east, dividing Europe, Africa, and Asia" ("De Mediterraneo Mari," Origines 12.16).

Isn't that interesting? And the next time some Safiresque pedant criticizes current usage, ask him or her "So as a person of refined understanding, do you think the Mediterranean should properly be called the Mediterrean or the Meditullian Sea?" and watch the latter-day Festus flounder.

2003-04-02T12:52:00.000-05:00

DO CHIMPS SPEAK? Ask Cecil for the Straight Dope on the subject. I pretty much agree with his conclusion ("I've seen nothing to persuade me that animals can use language as we do, that is, as a primary tool with which to acquire and transmit knowledge"), but then I'm a linguist, so I would. (Via Linguistiblog.)

2003-04-01T18:02:00.000-05:00

PROPOSAL FOR NEW UNICODE SYMBOLS. My heart leaps up when I behold new typography being created. I especially like the Arabic/Persian samples. (Via Avva; pdf file.)

2003-04-01T14:03:00.000-05:00

THE FLONG OF SAN SERRIFFE. I have tried the bitter-sweet swarfega and celebrated the Sonorous Enigma, but I have not been able (despite much effort) to find any information about the language of the Flong. If anyone out there can help, it will be much appreciated.

2003-03-31T18:47:00.000-05:00

KLALLAM REVIVE LANGUAGE. The 950 members of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe of a reservation outside Port Angeles, Wash. (and nearby areas) have taken steps to stop the apparently inevitable decline of their language, according to this Washington Post article by Robert E. Pierre.

After a century of open hostility toward these languages, the federal government is helping to foot the bill. But the task is daunting: Of about 175 indigenous languages still spoken in the United States, about 20 are being passed on to another generation. The pressure to converse in English, the worldwide language of commerce, also isn't abating....

In this northwest corner of Washington, the Lummi have just one remaining speaker. The last fluent speaker of Makah died in August at age 100. As far as anyone can tell, there are only three or four remaining speakers of Klallam, which is one of the large family of Salish languages that were once prevalent in the upper Northwest and British Columbia.

Even in California, which has speakers or semi-speakers of about 50 indigenous languages, the future seems grim.

"The trouble is that there is not an indigenous language where children are learning, and all the fluent speakers are over 60," said Leanne Hinton, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who has written books and essays about California languages. "All of them are in their last stages of existence unless something is done. Documenting the language is absolutely vital because . . . even when trying to revitalize them, you're not able to produce speakers as fast as speakers are dying."

So linguist Timothy Montler (see his web page for links to information on Klallam and other languages) "has devoted much of the past decade to preserving the language of the Klallam," having been asked by the tribe to help in 1992. He has created an alphabet, a dictionary, other reference works, even computer games, and trained "cultural specialists" are going into the schools and helping the young people learn. I can't think of a better way for linguists to spend their time. (Thanks to Andrew Krug for the link.)

2003-03-31T15:17:00.000-05:00

IRISH CURSE ENGINE. We've had Iraqi ire; here's Irish ire. Choose your terms and it will give you an Irish curse, with pronunciation. Example:

English: May the hounds of hell destroy your underwear.
Irish: Go scriosa cúnna ifrinn do chuid fo-éadaigh.
Phonetic: guh SHKRIH-suh KOO-nuh IHF-rin duh khwihj FO-AY-dee.

Via Out Of Ambit.

2003-03-31T10:18:00.000-05:00

LEXICON OF IRAQI IRE. Through the kind offices of David Quidnunc I have discovered this list of words used by Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Said Al-Sahhaf at his morning press conferences. Some samples:

Isabat al-Awghad al-Dawliyeen: The Gang of International Villains
a reference to the American administration
Akrout (pl. akarit): loathsome, pimp
a reference to British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Ahmaq: stupid
usually a reference to President Bush
al-Tabe: The subordinate
a reference to PM Blair
al-Tabe al-Jadid: The New Subordinate
a reference to Spanish Prime Minister Aznar

The information was provided by the Middle East Media Research Center, who are to be commended for their diligence.

2003-03-30T17:08:00.000-05:00

ENGLISH IN JAPANESE. That's the title of a book by Akira Miura that I picked up on my last visit to the Strand. It contains a selection of the many English loanwords in Japanese, and it has that combination of scrupulous accuracy (in this case, even giving pitch contours, which I have replaced with an acute accent on the last high-pitched vowel) and wide-ranging, even eccentric, commentary that I find almost impossible to resist. Some sample entries:

baipuréeyaa (lit. byplayer)
A supporting actor or actress is called wither wakiyaku, a non-loan, or baipureeyaa, a pseudo-loan. Baipureeyaa is such a cleverly made pseudo-loan that most scholars don't seem to realize that there is no such word as *byplayer in English. Of all the dictionaries and other publications I consulted, Bunkacho (p. 69) was the only one that pointed this out. In fact, most loanword dictionaries list the nonexistent English *byplayer as the origin of baipureeyaa!

beniya-íta (< veneer + Japanese ita 'board')
Veneer was introduced into Japanese in the Taisho era (1912-26) and became beniya (Arakawa, p. 1207). Later, however, the non–loan word íta 'board' was added to form beniya-ita (lit. veneer board). *Veneer board would, of course, be redundant in English, but since beniya alone would have sounded a little too unfamiliar to most Japanese, it is quite understandable why ita was added to make the meaning clear. Concerning this point, Umegaki (1975b, p. 208) proposes an extremely interesting hypothesis. He suggests that beniya must have been misinterpreted by some Japanese as the name of a lumber dealer since, as everyone knows, the names of many Japanese stores, dealers, and manufacturers have the suffix -ya at the end, as in the case of Matsu-ya and Fuji-ya. According to Umegaki, people who thus analyzed the word as Beni plus -ya must haave added ita to indicate 'boards manufactured by Beni-ya'! Be that as it may, beniya-ita has since come to mean not only 'veneer' but also 'plywood.' In other words, although veneer and plywood mean two different things in English, beniya-ita covers the meanings of both in Japanese.

cháko (< chalk)
Chako, from English chalk, refers to a special kind of chalk used for marking in sewing. The regular kind of chalk used for writing on a blackboard is chóoku, also from chalk. The fact that chako does not reflect the spelling of chalk indicates that the word was learned through the ear.
Chalk is one of the limited number of English words that have yielded more than one corresponding loanword in Japanese. Other examples of this type are iron (which has become both aian 'an iron-headed golf club' and airon 'an iron for pressing clothes') and ruby (which has produced both rúbi 'small kana printed alongside Chinese characters' and rúbii 'a kind of jewel').

Some other interesting loans: fákku 'fuck' (he warns Japanese readers that the English word is "far more strident"), feminísuto (which means 'man who is indulgent with women,' giving his seat to them or buying presents for them, rather than 'feminist'), hóchikisu 'stapler' (from the name of its inventor, Hotchkiss), and múudii (which is from "moody" but is associated by Japanese with "mood music" and thus has the implication 'creating a pleasant, langorous mood,' which can cause problems when Japanese try using the word in English).

2003-03-30T11:01:00.000-05:00

ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES OF AUSTRALIA. A comprehensive collection of links. Via Plep.

2003-03-29T19:57:00.000-05:00

LOGOLEPT'S DELIGHT. Avva describes how he hit upon the word "uglyography" (an invention of Southey's) in the OED, looked for it online, and found exactly one Google hit: on a page of Forthright's Phrontistery. I thought I'd share this remarkable site with you; its primary feature is a "14000-word dictionary of obscure and rare words, the International House of Logorrhea," and anyone who enjoys the dustier corners of the English vocabulary will want to explore it.

2003-03-29T09:57:00.000-05:00

ROMANIZED RUSSIAN? Via Ilya Vinarsky comes this 1975 article (pdf format) by Eugene Garfield urging Russians to give up their ugly Cyrillic ("Cyrillic has nothing but capitals") for the flexible, international Roman alphabet. Before you join the lynch mob ("I have been accused of scientific and linguistic imperialism and chauvinism..."), let me remind you that none other than Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov thought the same thing! (Edmund Wilson, naturally, disagreed: "This alphabet, since five useless characters were got rid of at the time of the Revolution, is one of the only features of Russian that are really convenient and logical—far more practical than the English alphabet.")

2003-03-28T22:30:00.000-05:00

KARL KRAUS. A couple of quotes from one of my favorite cynics and masters of language ("I master only the language of others; mine does with me what it will"), Karl Kraus:

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print. (Wie wird die Welt regiert und in den Krieg geführt? Diplomaten belügen Journalisten und glauben es wenn sie`s lesen.)

War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off. (Krieg ist zuerst die Hoffnung, dass es einem besser gehen wird, hierauf die Erwartung, dass es dem anderen schlechter gehen wird, dann die Genugtuung, dass es dem anderen auch nicht besser geht, und schließlich die Überraschung, dass es beiden schlechter geht.)

2003-03-28T16:56:00.000-05:00

EDENIC LANGUAGE. The very first Languagehat post was about the language spoken by Adam and Eve, or rather theories thereof, so my eye was lured by a book by Maurice Olender called The Languages of Paradise on that very subject. I managed not to buy it (I'm trying to cut back, honest), but I found an article (pdf file) by Olender from a post on crank linguistics by Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who seems to know a lot about language, so you can find the story (or his version of it) there. If scholarly wackiness amuses you, you'll enjoy it.

2003-03-26T13:11:00.000-05:00

NEW LINGUABLOG. A big hello to Meredith, whose Linguistiblog looks very promising; she doesn't give an e-mail address, so I can't drop her a line, but I assume she'll see this eventually. Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

2003-03-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

ELVIS IN SUMERIAN. I got excited when Juliet posted this link, but when I went there I discovered there was no Sumerian text, just an interview with Dr. Simo Parpola, the Assyriologist who did the translation; I guess you have to buy the CD if you want the goods. Still, it's worth posting if only for the remarkable picture of Doctor Ammondt (who did an earlier CD Rocking in Latin) as a Sumerian deity—as is the extensive page of Sumerian links where Juliet found the Elvis. Furthermore, it led me to this article by Parpola on the survival of Assyrians and their culture after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, which should fascinate anyone who, like me, is interested in ancient Mesopotamia:

Yet it is clear that no such thing as a wholesale massacre of all Assyrians ever happened. It is true that some of the great cities of Assyria were utterly destroyed and looted—archaeology confirms this—, some deportations were certainly carried out, and a good part of the Assyrian aristocracy was probably massacred by the conquerors. However, Assyria was a vast and densely populated country, and outside the few destroyed urban centers life went on as usual....

Distinctively Assyrians names are also found in later Aramaic and Greek texts from Assur, Hatra, Dura-Europus and Palmyra, and continue to be attested until the beginning of the Sasanian period. These names are recognizable from the Assyrian divine names invoked in them; but whereas earlier the other name elements were predominantly Akkadian, they now are exclusively Aramaic. This coupled with the Aramaic script and language of the texts shows that the Assyrians of these later times no longer spoke Akkadian as their mother [tongue]. In all other respects, however, they continued the traditions of the imperial period.

Contemporaries and later Greek historians did not make a big distinction between the Assyrian Empire and its successors: in their eyes, the "monarchy" or "universal hegemony" first held by the Assyrians had simply passed to or been usurped by other nations. For example, Ctesias of Cnidus writes: "It was under [Sardanapallos] that the empire (hegemonia) of the Assyrians fell to the Medes, after it had lasted more than thirteen hundred years."....

The Babylonian, Median and Persian empires should thus be seen (as they were seen in antiquity) as successive versions of the same multinational power structure, each resulting from an internal power struggle within this structure. In other words, the Empire was each time reborn under a new leadership, with political power shifting from one nation to another.

He concludes by saying that he takes seriously the assertion of Assyrian identity by Syrians in Greco-Roman times (like Iamblichus, whose name "is a Greek version of the Aramaic name Ia-milik, which is already attested in Assyrian imperial sources") and its continuation in "the oppressed and persecuted, Aramaic-speaking Christian Assyrians of today." This resonates with similar ideas in the controversial (and irresistibly snotty) Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (see description here). I don't know whether it will hold up under scholarly assault, but it makes you rethink history, and that's always a good thing.

2003-03-25T22:49:00.000-05:00

ARABIC FOR INVADERS. A few useful phrases if you happen to find yourself in a situation where they are called for:

HANDS UP -- IRFAA IDAK ("EAR-FAH EE-DAHK")
HALT -- QIFF ("KIF")
I AM AN AMERICAN SOLDIER -- ANA JUNDI AMRIKI ("AHNA JOOM-DEE AHM-REE-KEE")
LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS -- ILQI SLAAHAK ("ILL-KEE SLAH-HAHK")
STAY THERE -- QIFF HINAK ("KIF HEE-NAHK")
YOU ARE A PRISONER -- INTA SAJEEN ("IN-TAH SAH-JEAN")

(Courtesy of the amazingly multilingual Bob "zaelic" Cohen.)

2003-03-25T16:23:00.000-05:00

MIXED LANGUAGES. In the Strand today I saw a book by Carol Myers-Scotton called Contact Linguistics. The book is written in a rebarbative theoretical jargon that (for instance) replaces "clause" with CP, which stands for some gobbledygook phrase that thankfully eludes my memory, but it includes brief sections on three "mixed languages" that I had been unaware of and that sound fascinating.

The first is Michif, described in this online article as follows:

The Michif language is spoken by Metis, the descendants of European fur traders (often French Canadians) and Cree-speaking Amerindian women. It is spoken in scattered Metis communities in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada and in North Dakota and Montana in the United States.... It is spoken outside the French-speaking part of Canada and the Cree-speaking areas of North America.... Michif is a rather peculiar language. It is half Cree (an Amerindian language) and half French. It is a mixed language, drawing its nouns from a European language and its verbs [and grammatical structure—LH] from an Amerindian language.

The second is Medny Aleut (also called Copper Island Aleut), probably now extinct or close to it, which has Aleut lexical items embedded in Russian grammar; the third, and best known, is Mbugu (also called Ma'a), which has Cushitic vocabulary and Bantu grammar. More such languages are dealt with in this 1994 collection of papers.

These languages pose a problem for historical linguists, who tend to like neat "family trees" (as in this amazing page, which also has beautiful maps) showing languages splitting neatly into daughter languages in such a way that each language is traceable (in theory) back through a single lineage; fortunately, these mixtures are rare enough not to disturb the general picture too much, and they don't destroy the usefulness of the traditional model any more than the existence of people who cannot be clearly defined as "male" or "female" nullifies the concept of gender. (If you think it does, you may have wandered into this blog by mistake; I suggest you flee back here.)