oel ngati kameie

In keeping with all the now-vanished merriment, V. & I found ourselves on Xmas eve standing in line a 1830 hours waiting with the rest of the crowd to be let in to see Avatar in IMAX 3D. We usually go see some blockbuster du jour on Xmas morning for matinée prices, but this year, in keeping with our efforts to shore up the Californian economy during the Great Recession, we plunked down over thirty bucks and waited to get our 3D specs and a seat not too far in the back of the theater. I wanted to see it because I had been intrigued by interviews with Paul Frommer, a USC linguist, who had designed the Na'vi conlang used in the movie. Frommer had even guest blogged over at Language Log (link) about it. We had fun. The story is a simple morality tale with kick-ass 3D effects. The best take I’ve seen so far online is by James Kunstler (link). There were some obvious bits retreaded from Aliens, and V. noticed that the pacing was similar to Titanic, a film that I never got around to seeing. When we got home we were not sleepy enough yet to go to bed, so we watched another film, Ein Frau in Berlin. It’s based on a memoir published in 1954 (in English and in the USA) about the events in one neighborhood during the Battle for Berlin during the period from 20 April to 22 June 1945. Its publication caused outcries in Germany about the honor of German women being besmirched.

learning standard english as second dialect

While enjoying a funny entry on Language Log (link) about a recent story arc thread on the Non Sequitur comic strip, I came across the following in the commentary:

I took a Russian course in the 1980s, and helped out a classmate who was struggling with the material. He had graduated with excellent marks from an American high school, but I quickly discovered that the reason he couldn't make his adjectives agree with his nouns, or choose the correct noun case, was that he did not know what a noun was.

I spent hours in Canadian grade school, circling nouns, underlining verbs and drawing boxes around articles and squiggly lines under adverbs. I had to memorize and parrot on exams lists of relative pronouns and prepositions.

It fascinated me that my classmate could speak coherently and write essays in his native language without knowing what the components are.

It’s that last sentence that struck me as odd. The idea that a person could not speak or write a language without knowing its grammar (in this case defined as being able to identify parts of speech) does not make sense to me. The grammar of a language has many components: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. To many of my co-Anglophones, grammar instead means usage, orthography, etymology, and punctuation. This latter non-linguistic view of grammar is a holdover from the days when Latin and Greek were the languages being taught in grammar schools. And, pedagogically speaking, when you’re learning a new language (as an adult), it helps to be able to speak about its grammar using some terms, hopefully from the language grammatical tradition itself. (I have been thinking about this because recently I have been slowly learning Japanese linguistic terms in my Japanese class.) Latin these days has been replaced by General American English in US schools. And GAE is for many speakers in this country a different dialect of English than the one they learned on their mother’s lap.

floppy ears

Thanks to Languagehat, I’ve started to read a Greek linguistics blog, Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (link) and immediately got caught up in a thread about a rare (Modern Greek) word for the European ground squirrel (Spermophilus citellus) λαγόγηρως which occurs in Suidas. Read about it at Old Man Hare (link). There’s a Bulgarian word for the animal лалугер (variant лагудер) that looks like a loan from Greek. There are minor difficulties such as the γ mapping to the л that could be explained by dissimilation from the second γ (and the dialectal variant has the second γ becoming д). The word analyses morphologically into λαγώς ‘hare’ and γῆρας ‘old age’ hence the entry’s title. Greek λαγώς is usually traced to two PIE roots *(s)lēg (*(s)ləg, *(s)leg) ‘limp, floppy; soft’ and *ōus (*əus, *us) ‘ear’. The ο rather than an ω as in other Greek compounds with λαγώς, e.g., λαγωφόνος ‘har-killer’ , λαγώπους ‘hare-footed’ is not a problem as there are some compounds with ο, e.g., λαγοδαίτης ‘hare-devourer’. Greek γῆρας traces back to PIE *grē ‘mature, rotten’.

mandelshtam et trubetskoj

Mr Verb posted an entry (link) about a passage from a book he’s reading, The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell.

"I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said that he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects—languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without."

It’s in the context of Osip Mandelshtam in transit to a correction camp where he would die of an unspecified illness. We’ve all heard the aphorism, and it has been attributed to Antoine Meillet and Max Weinreich, though the latter gave it its first appearance in the literature, and that in Yiddish (link).

So, just who is that professor linguistics supposed to be? Since it’s a work of fiction, I’d like to add my candidate to the offerings in the commentary: Nikolai Trubetzkoy (link). He too died in ’38 and likewise at the hands of a totalitarian regime, this time the Gestapo in Austria, rather than the NKVD in the USSR. And somehow I’d like to fit Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski in therre, too.

erzjan' kel'

The Russian Orthodox Church has its 16th patriarch, Kiril I (né Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev; Wikipedia; Novinite). According to the Wikipedia article he is of Erzya-Mordvin ethnic origin. Erzya (Эрзянь кель) is a Finno-Ugric language with about half a million speakers. Reading up on Erzya led me to the Finno-Ugric Electronic Library (link). (The English interface has some problems, but for those who read Russian it’s a good resource.)

mapping bad habits

Cartocacoethes :- a mania, uncontrollable urge, compulsion or itch to see maps everywhere. John Krygier discusses the world’s allegedly oldest map from Çatalhöyük (link).

The Çatalhöyük “map” provides a great case study of the perils of prehistoric map hunting.

The Çatalhöyük map was first brought to attention in a 1964 article entitled “Excavations at Çatal Höyük, 1963, Third Preliminary Report” by James Mellaart Anatolian Studies 14 (1964, pp. 39–119).

Image by John Swogger via Flickr.

[Via Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary (link) via Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words Newsletter (link).]

ick bin ein lexikon

Languagehat recently posted about reading Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (link), and that got me to started wondering about the Berlin dialect. Long post short, I found a Berlinisch Lexikon online (link).

be all like

Two things about seeing Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York in a Berkeley multiplex cinema yesterday: (1) the small theater in which we saw the movie was furnished with a small number of comfy chairs and couches, and (2) I found myself drawn into the conversation of a couple of strangers sitting behind me. It started with one fellow’s lament about the abuse of like as a discourse marker, a quotative, and a linguistic hedge or filler (link, link, and link). I held my silence, but when they were all like: “And then there’s go for said!” Still I ignored them. Mainly because I could not remember the linguistics term quotative go for this grammatical feature of the informal register in my own ideolect. But, they did not stop there, and finally they wondered, just a bit too loudly, about using the present tense to report something that had happened in the past. “It’s called the historic present,” I said (link). And then after a awkward pause, I added: “It’s good to finally get some use out of my linguistic degree.” We all of us laughed nervously and then lapsed into silence and waited for the movie to begin. It was wonderful.

denominal adjectival suffices

What is it about words changing their lexical category (or part-of-speech-hood), especially by way of zero morphology, that lights a fire under the tails of word snoots and their ilk? Somebody was just blogging about the use of crater as a verb (as in something the world economy just did), and just generally pissing and moaning about language change and word use. The first thing I thought about was Greek κρατηρ ‘mixing bowl’, which in turn led to a reverie on the sacro catino in the Duomo di San Lorenzo in Genova, one of four or so candidates for the Holy Grail. But when my mind returned to linguistics, I marveled how the participial suffix -ed in English could be applied to nouns to create adjectives. (What is it about adjectives and verbs and their transgressive relationship with one another?) For example, cratered, bearded, horned, etc. Then I realized something similar happens in Latin: aurītus ‘long-eared’ < auris ‘ear’, barbātus ‘bearded’ < barba ‘beard’. This was not the first time I had wondered about verbal suffixes pulling double duty with nouns and adjectives: cf. -l- and -n-.

creamling

Over at Bradshaw of the Future, goofy has a post about the etymology of butterfly (link). I looked in a bunch of books and googled about online, and here’s some of the stuff I ran across.

• The idea of butterflies stealing milk or butter is is connected with a dialectal German word for the insect Molkendieb ‘milk-thief’. I found a great collection of German archaic and dialect words for butterfly (link). Some connect schmetterling with the German Schmetten ‘cream’, cf. Schmand ‘sour cream’, Czech. smetana, but others with the verb schmettern ‘to gossip, prattle; dash (in sports)’.
• The Dutch word butterschijte ‘butter-shit’ has a curious parallel in Slavic: Russian мотыль, Polish motyl, et al. Here’s what Vasmer has to say about its etymology Wohl aus ‘Mistfalter’ mit -jo-Bildung zu aruss. motyla f. motylo n. ‘Mist’, ksl. motylo κοπρος r.-kslav. Motylьnikъ κοπρωνυμος (s. Srezn. Wb. 2, 179), das zu abg. metǫ, mesti ‘werfen, fegen’ gehört, vgl. MiEW. 194, Meillet MSL. 14, 333, Brandt RFV. 22, 156 (nach ihm: ‘sich hin- u. herwerfen’), Brückner KZ. 42, 342ff. (als ‘Krautscheißer’).
• Pokorny IEW p.801: Wörter für ‘Schmetterling’: redupliziert lat. pāpiliō, -ōnis m. (*pā-pil-); germ. *fīfalðrōn- in aisl. fīfrildi n., ags. fīfealde, ahd. fīfaltra, mhd. fīfalter, nhd. Falter; lit. petelìškė ds., lett. petelîgs ‘flatterhaft’ (*pel-tel-); von derselben Wurzel die balto-slav. Wörter (*paipalā-) für ‘Wachtel’: lit. píepala f., lett. paîpala, apr. penpalo (dazu apr. pepelis, Pl. pippalins ‘Vogel’); čech. přepel, křepel, slov. prepeliíca (auch ‘Schmetterling’) usw. The PIE root in Pokorny is *pel- ‘to pour, flow, fill’ whence English fleet, float, and flutter. (Shades of the folk etymological flutter by.)
• Latin pāpiliō means both butterfly and tent. (It’s from the latter meaning that our pavilion comes.) Some think there is a parallel between Greek σκηνη ‘tent, booth; stage’ and σκην ‘butterfly’. The Classical Greek word for butterfly is ψυχη and the Modern Greek word is πεταλουδα.

nzadi

Languagehat’s recent posting (link) on an article in the San Francisco Chronicle (link) got me wandering down memory lane. Why? Because I took an earlier incarnation of this self-same Introduction to Field Methods class at Cal almost thirty years ago. Jesse O. Sawyer taught it then. Our informant was a grad student in the math depart, and the language he spoke (his fourth) was Kiswahili. We used old reel-to-reel analog tape recorders. But, there was one high tech innovation: our class had a joint UNIX account. I was the only one who ever logged in or used it, including Jesse. I used it to write papers (marked up in troff and edited with vi). (Bill Joy wrote vi while he was at Berkeley, and years later I would work at a company he co-founded, Sun.) I could log in in the linguistics department office (in Dwinelle) using a huge terminal with an acoustic-coupled 100-baud modem, or I could trudge off to the basement of Evans and sit at one of the faster and smaller terminals there. I really had no concept of an operating system at the time, and I thought the computer itself was called Eunuchs, which I thought was a pretty cool name for a computer. I just printed those papers off at the printing-terminals located the ends of the tables on which the CRT terminals sat. Two things stand out in that article: (1) that they still teach a field methods class in my old linguistics department and (2) that there are still “unknown” languages to be recorded.

moderate minusculization

Anybody having a passing acquaintance with the German language knows that all nouns are capitalized and not just proper ones as in English. Over the past decade or two, I have noticed a tendency in some 19th century German books towards only capitalizing words which begin a sentence and proper nouns (e.g., this page from the forward to Jacob Grimm’s deutsche grammatik (link). I had asked a couple of Germans (though not Germanists or linguists) if they knew why this was, but none of them even knew about it. So, it was only today that I finally decided to look into it.

This article in the Berliner Zeitung (August 13, 2004, link) is a good place to start. It turns out that capitalizing nouns is a fairly recent event. It started in the Baroque period and its origins seems to have been one of the fear of upsetting God (Gottesfurcht). In fact, in some Baroque texts, Gott is spelled with two initial capitals GOtt. Reading this and some German Wikipedia articles increased my vocabulary by quite a bit. First we have Majuskel and Minuskel for an upper- or lowercase letter, though the former can also be called Versal (in printers’ terminology) or Großbuchstabe for a more German look and feel, and the latter Kleinbuchstabe. Capitalization is Großschreibung and its antonym (which we don’t really have a word for in English) is Kleinschreibung, though I have seen minusculize for the verb and minusculization for the abstract noun). And because this is German we’re talking about there is something called gemäßigte Kleinschreibung (which yields the title for this blog entry), and furthermore, as soon as I started off down this slippery slope I ran across some groups advocating moderate and radical minusculization reforms for German orthography (d.h., deutsche Rechtschreibung): der bund für vereinfachte rechtschreibung (link and die kleinschriftbewegung (link). Finally, CamelCase (or NerdCaps) is Binnenmajuskeln or Binnenversalien.

tenebrae

Adyates over at De Grypis blog has a post (link) about the etymology of Latin tenebrae. It’s an extended comment on Chris Jones’ post at the LatinLaguage.us blog (link). Let’s see what some of the authorities have to say.

Alois Walde offers this (in the 2nd edition of Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch): “Lat. tenebrae zunächst aus *temefrā (*temafrā) durch Dissimilation von m gegen folgenden Labial (Niedermann BB.XXV, 87, Contrib. à la crit. de gloses lat. 31)”.

Ernout & Meillet (in their Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: Histoire des mots): “Lat. tenebrae repose sur *temə-s-rā-; le passage de -m- à -n- fait difficulté; car il suppose l’intervention d’une forme où la voyelle de syllable intérieure était syncopée, à moins qu’on n’admette une dissimilation, tout hypothétique, de m en n par la labiale *f, d’où est sorti b; on ne peut restituer le détail des faits”.

Tucker (in his A Concise Etymological Dictionary of Latin 1931): “Possibly *temsrā > *tensrā & anaptyxis occured (v. umerus). [It is not, however, entirely out of the question to suppose a compound t-enebh- (cf. nebula, νεφος), similar to δ-νοφος, κ-νεφας]”. But, Chaintraine (in his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) discusses these two Greek words: “Fait penser à la fois à ζοφος, à κνεφας : les mots de ce genre se prêtent à prendre des formes variées par une tabou linguistique. Tout effort pour préciser (croisements des mots, etc. ?) est malaisé, v. Güntert, Reimwortbildungen 112 sq., Petersen, Am. J. Ph. 56, 1935, 57 sqq.”.

Finally, Mallory & Adams (in their Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture) reconstruct the PIE root tómh_xes- ‘dark’ with an unknown laryngeal.

-ize write

To the second rancke of reprehenders, that complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending my Italionate coyned verbes all in ize, thus I replie: That no winde that blowes strong but is boystrous ; no speech or wordes of any power or force to confute or perswade, but must be swelling and boystrous. For the compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men, who, having store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little sentes into great peeces of gold, such as double pistoles and portugues. Our English tongue, of all languages, most swarmeth with the single money of monosillables, which are the onely scandal of it. Bookes written in them, and no other, seeme like shop-keepers’ boxes, that containe nothing else saue halfe-pence, three-farthings, and two pences. Therefore what did me I, but, having a huge heape of those worthlesse shreds of small English in my pia maters purse, to make the royaller shew with them to men’s eyes, had them to the compounders immediately, and exchanged them foure into one. and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Thomas Nashe, Introduction to Sydney’s Astrophel & Stella Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem 1593.

Jeopardize. This is a modern word which we could easily do without, as it is neither more nor less than its venerable progenitor to jeopard, which is greatly preferred by all careful writers.

Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist, 1895, p.109

jeopardize. Richard Grant White called jeopardize “a foolish and intolerable word” in 1879, and he was not the only one who thought so. A popular view among American critics in the 19th century was that the proper verb was jeopard, an older word which, according to the OED, had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1600s. The first record of jeopardize is from 1646, but there is no further evidence of its use until it turns up in Noah Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828 with the note, “This is a modern word used by respectable writers in America, but synonymous with jeopard, and therefore useless.” Useless or not, jeopardize became increasingly common, both in America and in Great Britain, as attempts to resurrect jeopard met with predictable failure. The voices of protest against jeopardize, all of which have been American, began to die down by about 1900, and it was not long before this minor controversy was entirely forgotten. It has now been many decades since anyone found anything wrong with jeopardize.

Merriam-Webster‘s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp.570f.

-ize; -ise. But neologisms ending in -ize are generally to be discouraged, for they are invariably ungainly and often superfluous. Thus we have no use for accessorize, artificialize, , audiblize, cubiclize, fenderize (= to fix a dented fender), funeralize, ghettoize, Mirandize, nakedize, and so on. Careful writers are wary of new words formed with this suffix.

Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, 1998, p.389.

Addendum. Thanks to Conrad over at the simply marvelous blog Varieties of Unreligious Experience (link) for the Nashe attribution correction; see commentary hereunder.]

a budget of grammatical peeves

A discussion I had recently online about what peevologist meant (see this Wishydig blog entry for a discussion of its origin) revealed to me a great truth about soi disant snoots: they are as lacking in their quivering aggregate of absolutist rules of “grammar” as they are in their erudition and scholarship. (Well, perhaps I’d already had an inkling of that.) Their Weltanschauung causes them to hound anybody who uses a word with a slightly different meaning to the one which their grammar teacher beat into them, e.g., decimate to mean destroy. Any whiff of semantic drift causes the customary ejaculation “And look at how gay was co-opted! It used to mean merry or joyful!” Some say it still does in some contexts. I usually try to explain to them that gay has had a long and varied semantic drift since emigrating from Normandy to England about a millennium ago.

From Partridge A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (in two volumes), Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961:

Gay. (Of women) leading an immoral, or a harlot’s, life: 1825, Westmacott (OED), In C. 20, coll., on verge of SE.—2. Slightly intoxicated; ob. C.19–20; Perhaps orig. a euphemism.—3. Impudent, impertinent, presumptious: US (—1899), anglicized in 1915 by PG Wodehouse, OED (Sup.).

Also, gay house ‘brothel’, gay in the arse ‘(Of women) loose’, to lead a gay life ‘to live immorally’, the gay instrument ‘the male member’, gaying it ‘sexual intercourse’.

The grammar mavens’ll have nothing of the sort, thankee. They’ll blink myopically and tell you that though they have nothing against homosexuals personally, but they do want their word back. Yeah, right. Why are similarly polysemous words like symbology not being ranted about? I count at least three meanings of the word: (1) The study of symbols; (2) the use of symbols; and (3) a collection or system of symbols. And don’t even ask them about mole or put.

txting the fall of the rome

One of the fun things to do in museums is to try to read and decipher ancient inscriptions. Just knowing Latin or Greek is not enough, because of the extensive use of abbreviations in monumental inscriptions. Marble being an expensive material on which to write, the messages needed to be brief. Take for example, a milestone from the Via Trajana in Italy from the early second century CE. First is the original message, second is the unabbreviated version in Latin, and third is an English translation:

LXXIX
IMP CAESAR
DIVI NERVAE F
NERVA TRAIANVS
AVG GERM DACIC
PONT MAX TR POT
XIII IMP VI COS V
P P
VIAM A BENEVENTO
BRVNDISIVM PECVN
SVA FECIT

LXXIX
Imperator Caesar
divi Nervae filius
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus Germanicus Dacicus
pontifex maximus tribunitia potestate
XIII imperator VI consul V
pater patriae
viam a Benevento
Brundisium pecunia
sua fecit.

79
The emperor Caesar,
son of the deified Nerva,
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus, victor over the Germans and the Dacians,
chief priest,
holder of the tribunician power 13 times, saluted emperor 6 times, consul 5 times,
father of his country,
made the road from Beneventum
to Brindisium
at his own expense.

[From Lawrence Keppie (1991) Understanding Roman Inscriptions, pp.65-6.]

So, it occurred to me, that the Roman Empire fell, not because of lead poisoning, moral turpitude, or invading Goths and Vandals, but as a result of their language being diluted and degraded by a plague not unlike text messaging abbreviations. This also explains how the noble tongue Latin devolved into the barbarous jargons that are Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romantsh, and Romanian. (Published on the InterWeb earlier. And a tip of an iceberg to Professor Pullum over in the UK for posting this and jogging my memory.)

lexica supina

More and more dictionaries have been showing up on my browser. Here’s a list:

1. John Florio. 1611. Queen Anna’s / New World / of Words, / or / Dictionarie / of Italian and English / Tongues, / Collected, and newly much augmented by / Iohn Florio, / Reader of Italian vnto the Soueraigne / Maiestie of Anna / Crowned Queene of England, Scotland, France, / and Ireland, &c. / And one of the Gentlemen of hir Royal Priuie / Chamber.
2. Edward Robert Tregear. 1891. Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary.
3. Ralph Lilley Turner. 1962–1966. A comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages.
4. Woxikon, the Online Dictionary. German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish.

bleedin pony, innit?

We all know that English is going to wrack and ruin, and that the road to its destruction was paved by descriptivist linguists and skulking lexicographers. And the media are doing their part preaching to choir:

It had four wheels and cost a lot of money but, sadly for one impatient teenager, the similarity ended there.

A teenager was greeted by a display cabinet instead of a taxi because her Ali G-style slang confused a series of phone operators.

The girl hurriedly dialled directory inquiries to book a taxi from her home in London to Bristol airport, using the cockney rhyming slang Joe Baxi.

Yesterday when the “story” broke, there were along a score or so of ghits. Today, we’re up to 2,670 ghits. More blogging and bloviating. But there is some debunking is going on, too, at Five Chinese Crackers (link), Obsolete (link), and Chimp Media Monitor (link) blogs. A likely origin seems to be a press release (link).

certitudo indoctorum

It’s the sort of grammatical rule that’s easy to remember: use between with two conjoined noun phrases, but among with three or more. It also has nothing to do with English grammar or usage, but that does not stop the learnèd ignorant from foisting it upon you. It is an example of the etymological fallacy. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (link) quotes J A H Murray (the first editor of the OED):

[Between] is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely.

The editors go on to say The OED shows citations for between used of more than two from 971 to 1885. 971 is the date the Bickling Homilies were composed (link). I took a look at the index. The entries for betweonum show that it is used four times as a postposition (probably more of a verbal particle), and a couple of times split with its complement coming between the two parts. For example:

þa cwædon þa apostolas to þæm folce, ‘Heo bið swiþor gestrangod be us tweonum þurh Drihtnes gehát’. p.143.ll.11f.

then said the Apostles to the people, ‘She shall be much more strengthened among us by God’s promise’.

In other words, pretty much since English has been written down, between has been used with more than three items.

tiberius at capri

Just read this today:

The keynote of modern pedagogy is a protest against tradition, whether in subject-matter or in methods of presentation. No subject of instruction has, when compared with other studies of the curriculum, so long a tradition behind it as has Latin. Inasmuch as every study in our modern system of education must, as is fitting, prove its ability to secure a definite result of actual worth, we shall first attempt to ascertain what credentials it needs to present to prove its right of admission as a subject of instruction.

[...]

Of this fact the writer can recall two instances, the one connected with arithmetic, the other with English grammar. His teacher in arithmetic insisted that in a case of division of fractions he must not invert the divisor and multiply, but work instead by the method of finding a greatest common divisor. The case in grammar was that complex system of “diagramming” a sentence by countless lines and sub-lines until the thing looked like a railroad map; wherein the grammatical interest of the sentence had long since yielded to its possibilities as a model in drawing. Studies and the methods employed in their elucidation must produce a definite and practical result; if their aim is mental gymnastic alone, they have no place in secondary schools. They may yield a return in dollars and cents; or they may explain the laws of nature and their relations to our bodies; or they may present the evolution of the races; or mould character, inculcate ideals, and develop a feeling for the beautiful; and the like. But some definite and practical result, bearing directly on life, each study must effect before we can admit it. The study of Latin will yield no particular financial return.

[Eugene A. Hecker. 1909. The Teaching of Latin in Secondary Schools, pp.1f.]

How refreshing to see sentence diagramming slammed in favor of studying Latin. The best way to learn grammar is to learn another language than one’s own.

comes nomen

I hang out at several words-related forums online: Wordcraft, Wordsmith, Word Origins, and Wordwizard. Most of the people are united by logophilia, but they tend to clump together into two distinct and oftentimes mutually antagonistic groups: the linguists and the old-school word mavens. The latter are openly hostile to any grammatical terminology or concepts developed later than the late-18th to mid-19th centuries. You know the drill: dictionaries are lax, school children need to have grammar beaten into them (and by grammar they usually mean usage), words must have a single meaning, no neologisms, diagramming sentences should be taught in schools again, etc. I’ve been mulling this over, because recently on one of the forums, a non-native speaker of English asked a question about count nouns. The general consensus seemed to be that the term (and concept) was less than useless. The discussion degenerated further. Of course, sentence diagramming tells us absolutely nothing about why a sentence is ungrammatical.

a zed and two nods

Recently I’ve been pondering something that sets some people’s teeth on edge: verbing nouns, i.e., deriving a verb from a noun, which used to be called a denominal verb and is best illustrated by the Calvin & Hobbes strip about verbing weirds the language. Anyway, I’m tired of shrill and uninformed grammar fascists pissing and moaning about the state of the language and how letting words into the dictionary from the demon Web is destroying the language. I mean if it was good enough for Shakespeare—“it out-Herods Herod (Hamlet III.ii)”—it’s grammatical enough for me. It’s not enough that these dour, so-called lovers of language are more-than-often clueless about the basics of the English language and how it works, they are hostile to linguistics as a field of study, usually without having bothered to read anything, popular or academic, whatsoever. They seem to have retained some odd sound-bites of their grammar school teachers parsing and diagramming sentences and filled in the cracks in their crackpot theories of the devolution of language at the tongues of teens, foreigners, and other unpopular kinds of folks, with illiberal, toxic doses of Strunk & White or Fowler’s Modern English Usage (first edition please and thank you). The only linguist they’ve ever heard of, not read though, is Noam Chomsky. The works of Sweet, Saussure, Bloomfield, Sapir, Jespersen, and others, are as unknown to them.

The fear of verbing nouns is due mainly to ignorance. English, for about thousand years now, has been less of an inflectional language (think Latin and all those declensions and conjugations) and more of word-order language (see Chinese for the ultimate example of this). One of the few things that most people remember from their grammar classes (really an ragbag of usage fiats and ukases posing as grammar) is parts of speech. English has a whole slew of words that it borrowed (when are they going to be returned?) from Latin and French, and those languages are more inflectional than present-day English is. So, we have groups of words like receive and reception, jeopardy and jeopardize, et al. The grammar nazis suffer from affixal envy. They crave a derivational morphology that explicitly shows a word’s lexical class on the surface. What most of them don’t realize is that there is a vast literature on the grammatical analysis of language that their grammar school teachers kept from them so their little pea brains wouldn’t explode. For example, this is what a real grammarian had to say over 80 years ago about verbing nouns:

We may imagine two extreme types of language structure in which there is always one definite formal criterion in each word-class, and one in which there are no such outward signs in any class. The nearest approach to the former state is found, not in any of our natural languages, but in an artifical language such as Esperanto or, still better, Ido, where ever common substantive ends in -o (in the plural in -i), every adjective in -a, every (derived) adverb in -e, every verb in -r, -s, or -z according to its mood. The opposite state in which there are no formal signs to show word-classes is found in Chinese, in which some words can only be used in certain applications, while others without any outward change may function now as substantives, now as verbs, now as adverbs, etc., the value in each case being shown by the syntactic rules and the context.

English here steers a middle course through the inclining more and more to thje Chinese system. Take the form round: this is a substantive in “a round of a ladder,” “he took his daily round,” and adjective in “a round table,” a verb in “he failed to round the lamp-post,”, an adverb in “come round tomorrow,”, and a preposition in “he walked round the house.” While may similarly be a substantive (he stayed here for a while), a verb (to while away time), and a conjunction (while he was away). Move may be a substantive or a verb, after a preposition, an adverb, or a conjunction, etc.

On the other hand, we have a great many words which can belong to one word-class only; admiration, society, life can only be substantives, polite only an adjective, was, comprehend only verbs, and at only a preposition.

To find out what a particular class a given word belongs to, it is generally of little avail to look at one isolated form. Nor is there any flexional ending that is the exclusive property of any single part of speech. The ending -ed (-d) is chiefly found in verbs (ended, opened, etc.), but it may also be added to substantives to form adjectives(blue-eyed, moneyed, talented, etc.). Some endings may be used as tests if we take the meaning of the ending also into account; thus if an added -s changes the word into a plural, the word is a substantive, and if it is found in the third person singular, the word is a verb; this, then, is one of the tests for keeping the substantive and the verb round apart (many rounds of the ladder; he rounds the lamp-post). In other cases the use of certain words in combinations is decisive, thus my and the in “my lover for her” and “the love I bear her” as against “I love her,” show that love is a substantive and not a verb as in the last combination (cf. my admiration, the admiration as against I admire, where admiration and admire are unambiguous.

It is, however, very important to remark that even if round and love and a great many other English words belong to more than one word-class, this is true of the isolated form only: in each separate case in which the word is used in actual speech it belongs to one class and to no other. But this is often overlooked by writers who will say that in the sentence “we tead at the vicarage” we have a case of a substantive used as a verb. The truth is that we have a real verb, just as real as dine or eat, though derived from the substantive tea—and derived without any distinctive ending in the infinitive. To form a verb from another word is not the same thing as to use a substantive as a verb, which is impossible. Dictionaries must therefore recognize love sb. and love v. as two words, and in the same way tea sb. and tea verb. In such a case as wire they should even recognize three words, (1) sb. ‘metallic thread,’ (2) ‘to send a message by wire, to telegraph’— a word formed from the first word without any derivative ending, (3) ‘message, telegram’, a sb. formed from the verb without any ending.

Otto Jespersen. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar, pp.60ff.

And some more on prepositions and adverbs:

In nearly all grammars adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are treated as four distinct “parts of speech,” the difference between them being thus put on a par with that between substantives, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. But in this way the dissimilarities between these words are grossly exaggerated, and their evident similarities correspondingly obscured, and I therefore propose to revert to the old terminology by which these four classes are treated as one called “particles.”

As regards form they are all invariable—apart from the power that some adverbs possess of forming comparatives and superlatives in the same manner as the adjectives to which they are related. But in order to estimate the differences in meaning or function that have led most grammarians to consider them as different parts of speech, it will be necessary to cast a glance at some words outside of these classes.

Many words are subject to a distinction which is designated by different names and therefore not perceived as essentially the same wherever found, namely that between a word complete in itself (or used for the moment as such) and one completed by some addition, generally of a restricted nature. Thus we have the complete verb in he sings, he plays, he begins; and the same verb followed by a complement in he sings a song, he plays the piano, he begins work. In this case it is usual to call the verb intransitive in one case and transitive in the other, while the complement is termed its object. [...]

If we now turn to such words as on or in, we find what is to mind an exact parallel to the instances just mentioned in their employment in combinations like “put your cap on” and “put your cap on your head”, “he was in” and “he was in the house”; yet on and in in the former sentences are termed adverbs, and in the latter prepositions, and these are reckoned as two different parts of speech. Would it not be more natural to include them in one class and to say that on and in are sometimes complete in themselves and sometimes followed by a complement (or object)? Take other examples: “he climbs up” and “he climbs up a tree,” “he falls down” and “he falls down the steps” (cf. “he ascends, or descends” with or without the complement “the steps” expressed); “he had been there before” and “he had been there before breakfast.” Is near in “it was near one o’clock” a preposition or an adverb according to the usual system. (Cf. the two synonyms almost and about, the former called an adverb, the latter a preposition.) The close correspondence between the object of a transitive verb and that of a “preposition” in seen in those cases in which a preposition is nothing but a verbal form in a special use, as for example concerning (G. betreffend) and past in “he walked past the door at half-past one,” which is simply the participle passed written in a different way; in “he walked past” it has no complement.

Ditto, pp.87ff.

baqaqi ts'qalishi qiqinebs

There is a Georgian tongue-twister: ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (baqaqi ts'qalishi qiqinebs) ‘the frog in the water croaks’. (If the Georgian alphabet probably doesn’t display properly, one may download and install the BGP Classic font.) Here’s a video of an interview with Katie Melua, where she pronounces the phrase. The characters transcribed as q and ts' are a uvular ejective (stop) and alveolar ejective (affricate) respectively.

notitia dignitatum omnium tam civilium

Decades ago, when I was living in self-imposed, political exile in Bonn, a friend sent me a letter. I don’t really remember anything much from the letter, except (his knowing that I was a linguaphile) a bold request for the Latin translation of the title of his then-current favorite movie, Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s the sort of thing that makes linguists shudder, but it would burn up some free hours, or, so thought I. Long story short, Cairo is a rather modern city, but the Roman legions (specifically Legio XIII Gemina) were hanging about in its general environs, and the fortress they were occupying was called Babylonia. Anyway, reminiscing about this this morning led me to discover a wonderful little corner of the Web: Dr Ingo Maier’s The Cnh or Notitia Dignitatum links site. The Notitia Dignitatum is a fifth century example of a Roman bureaucratic document: a detailed list of the offices, both civilian and military, of both halves of the Roman Empire.

feet of quine and old aside of pope

As the war between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists wages wroth with no end in sight, this gnome flew in over the transom the other day (from a friend via email):

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.

[Willard van Orman Quine Quiddities (1987) p.231.]

I hadn’t read much Pope, so the professor’s allusion was lost on me, but Google is your friend:

Expression is the dress of thought, and still
Appears more decent, as more suitable;
A vile conceit in pompous words express’d,
Is like a clown in regal purple dress’d:
For diff’rent styles with diff’rent subjects sort,
As several garbs with country, town, and court
Some by old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense;
Such labour’d nothings, in so strange a style,
Amaze th’ unlearn’d, and make the learned smile.
Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play,
These sparks with awkward vanity display
What the fine gentleman wore yesterday;
And but so mimic ancient wits at best,
As apes our grandsires, in their doublets drest.
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are try’d,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

[Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism (1709-11) ll.318-36.]

Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are try’d, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. Words to live by, no doubt about it.

gdansk for the memories

I recently found what may be the world’s first, and perhaps only, blog in the Kaszubian language. It's called Czëtnica. Kaszubian (along with Czech, Slovak, Pannonian Rusyn, Lachian, Polish, Silesian, Slovincian, Polabian, and (Upper and Lower) Sorbian) is a West Slavic language. I first learned about Kaszubian reading the Tin Drum. And, of course, there is a Kaszubian version of Wikipedia (Wikipediô).

[Addendum: It seems I was all wrong about Czëtnica. It isn’t really a blog, even though it uses WordPress software. Thanks to Mihoł for setting me straight. It’s a vortal for literature, both Kaszubian and worldwide. He suggested a couple of other Kaszubian sites, Kaszëbskô Wëdowiédnô Starna and formæ formarum. which really are blogs in spite of their using CMS software. Now I guess I have no excuse but to learn Kaszubian.]

I note that there’s a German Minority (Mniejszość Niemiecka) party in Poland. I wonder if there’s a Silesian dialect of German that’s still spoken there? There is a German-language newspaper in Silesia: Schlesisches Wochenblatt.

ogmios

I’ve been looking for A Primer of Irish Metrics (1909) by Kuno Meyer [1858–1919] for years. I’ve never seen it for sale on Abebooks at any price. Google Books hasn’t gotten around to digitizing it, though they advertise the one or two reprints from the ’80s. Then today I ran across a nice scan of the whole of its 62 pages at a Celtic language and lore site called The Summerlands.

rope butt

More than three years ago, Languagehat had an entry on the Suidas On Line project. Suda (‘fortress’) is a huge 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedic lexicon of the Classical world. I browsed around it at the time, but had pretty much forgotten it until today, when on a logophiliac forum (Word Origins), a thread was started regarding rich people getting into heaven and camels threading through the eye of a needle (cf. Matth. XIX.24: et iterum dico vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum). One of the standard interpretations (from rich hermeneuts, no doubt) is that kamēlon ‘camel’ is an error for kamilon ‘rope’. Others argue lectio difficilior lectio potior (‘the more difficult reading is the more probable one’). Others point out that a similar bit of hyperbole exists in the Talmud (Berachos 55b and Bava Metzia 38b) where it is an elephant going through the eye of a needle. (Interestingly, in the second citation, Rabbi Rava [ca.270–352 CE] asks Are you from Pumbedita, where they make an elephant pass through the eye of a needle?; Pumbedita, a center of Babylonian Talmudic scholarship, is the modern-day Fallujah.) It is interesting to note that camel is associated with the letter ג (gimel or g) in Hebrew and eye of the needle with the letter ק (qoph or q), and that the former is a voiced velar stop and that the latter is a voiceless uvular one. Least you think it’s only of concern to theology students, let me point out that kamelos occurs in Aristophanes’ The Wasps (l.1035) where one reads of prōkton de kamēlou (‘the arse of a camel’), besides the stench of a seal and the unwashed balls of a Lamia.

turkalsa

While contemplating the conlanging ruckus over at Omniglot, The Blog, I paused for a moment to reflect on La Verda Stelo’s older sister, Volapük. I have been browsing the non-anglophone versions of Wikipedia, and was delighted to find the Vükiped, which is in the same category as Czech, Slovak, or Esperanto: i.e., over 10K entries. And not just little one liners, e.g., have a look-see at the entry on Mata Hari. Somebody seemingly went to some trouble to translate the English entry. (Though I am pretty sure that Volakrig Balid means World War One.) The entry on Esperanto is pointedly short. I have a poor xerox of a Volapük grammar somewhere in the garage, but who needs that with the Web at one’s fingertips? What always struck me about this language, was how utterly foreign it looks. Esperanto seems like a Welcome to Side Six kind of friendly mishmash of Romance with some odd Germanic or Slavic roots thrown in for good measure. (On further inspection, most articles seem to be the work of one person.)

lutakujababot oba binon fulik senkafitas

I don’t know how I got this far in life without having heard of English As She Is Spoke. Suddenly why Little Johnny can’t speak Portuguese and all those hovercrafts full of eels make so much more sense. Vade mecum.

mind you, literally literal-minded

The blogoshphere just got a little smaller. Today I was going through my blogroll and—long story short—I noticed that there are two language blogs out there with the same name (Literal-Minded) and the same sub-title (linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally). One is hosted on Blogger and run by a guy name Mack is a spam blog and that ripped off the IP of the other one which is hosted on WordPress and run by a guy named Neal Whitman. Neal also has another website called Literal-Minded Linguistics. The former has been online since June 14, 2007, and the latter since January 18, 2004.

[Addendum: Neal noticed this entry and was kind enough to explain in the commentary what’s up.]

what are you packing trickster?

I was googling around, looking for information on Hermann Güntert’s 1916 monograph, Indogermanische Ablautprobleme, Untersuchungen über Schwa secundum, einen zweiten indogermanischen Murmelvokal, when I ran across this folktale, called Trickster Loses Most of His Penis, in the Ho-Chunk (aka Hotcâk, Hotcąk, or less politely Winnebago) language. The tale was written down by Sam Blownose in 1912 transcribing an older tribe member’s telling of the tale. Mr Blownose used the Hotcąk alphabet which in turn derives from the Fox (aka Mesquakie) syllabary. The tale was subsequently translated by Oliver LaMère.

There as he was going about, there, unexpectedly, as he was going, something right by his side sang, saying,

What are you packing Trickster?
It’s your penis that you’re packing!

“Howá!” he said. “What a bad one he is. Furthermore, what does this one mean to say? He himself has full knowledge of what I am carrying,” he said.

The story is a little hard to follow, but it seems that Trickster is walking around with his genitalia in his pack. (I am reminded of the song Detachable Penis by King Missile.) I suppose this tale would be classified as coming under motif number S176 mutilation; sex organs cut off.

Another link turned up was Bruce Lincoln’s “Hermann Güntert in the 1930s: Heidelberg, Politics, and the Study of Germanic/Indogermanic Religion,” in Horst Jünginger, ed., The Study of Religion under the impact of National Socialist and Fascist Ideologies in Europe (forthcoming). Güntert was also one of Georges Dumézil’s influences.

linguistic ignorance and real pedantic bliss

Mark Liberman, the proprietor of the wonderful Language Log (the group linguistics blog), has a great post on dropping gs which I somehow missed back in May when he wrote it. (It was pointed at hyperlinkishly in one of today’s entries.) It sums up an argument I’ve had countless times with self-appointed, and so-called, grammar mavens, both colleagues and strangers alike. There’s no g there to be dropped!

What is “g-dropping”? The term comes from the conventional orthography: -ing is written as -in’, as in she’s openin’ the door.

In fact, there is no “g” involved at all, except in the spelling. Final -ng (in English spelling) stands for a velar nasal, which is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet as an “n” with a hook on its right leg: [ŋ], a symbol called “eng”. The final -n’ in spellings like openin’ stands for a coronal nasal, which is written in IPA with an ordinary “n”: [n]. In IPA, opening is written as [ˈopənɪŋ], while openin’ is written as [ˈopənɪn]. The only difference in pronunciation is whether the final nasal consonant is velar (made with the body of the tongue pressed against the soft palate) or coronal (made with the blade of the tongue pressed against the ridge behind the front teeth).

Thus is “g-dropping” nothing is ever really dropped—it’s just a question of where you put your tongue at the end of the word.

If grammar mavens were actually such sticklers for and about language (code for The King’s English and not language in general), they’d learn a bit about linguistics so they at least could discuss the matter at hand intelligently, with a minimum of ambiguity, and unnecessary digressions, instead of resorting to such horrors as add-hoc phonological transcription schemes, misused Græco-Latinate grammatical terms, and the proud and willful ignorance of the processes of language change that have been studied for the past couple of centuries by historical linguists. Feh! At times, I feel I should develop a sort of motif-index of grammatical prescriptions à la Stith Thompson.

gripholdus knickknackius ex floilandia

All thanks be to Languagehat. Because of him, I have discovered a new (to me) blog: Varieties of Unreligious Experience. This is my kind of blog: well-written, quirky mini-essays on little known bits of letters and languages. For example, this entry about some strange varieties of Latin. Not your Cicerone’s classical Latin, not your Scaliger’s deracinated, humanist Latin, and not your father’s bog or kitchen Latin, but the over-the-top, outré Latin of the Hisperica Famina, of Vergilius Maro Grammaticus [fl. 658 CE], or of (my personal fave) Merlinus Coccajus (né Teofilo Folengo [1491–1544]). That’s the latter’s portrait, scanned from the frontispiece of Theophili Folengi vulgo Merlini Coccaii opus macaronicum notus illustratum. Cui accessit vocabularium vernaculum, Etruscum, et Latinum. Editio omnium locupletissima. Pars prima. Amstelodami. MDCCLXVIII.

I’ve been a big fan of Macaronic poetry ever since running across a reference to it in Ernst Robert Curtius’ Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948). Inaugurated by Typhis Odaxius (or, Tifi Odasi) in his Macaronea and perfected by Folengo [1496–1544] in his sublime mock-heroic Baldus. Written in Latin hexameters, with überlatinifized vulgar-language words. Although, the term macaronic stems from the early 16th century, the tendency to mix languages in poetry has been around at least as early as Ausonius. Here’s a late 16th century German example:

Angla floosque canam, qui Wassunt pulvere svvarto,
Ex watroque simul stoitenti et blaside dicko,
Multipedes deiri qui possunt huppere longe,
Non aliter quam si flöglos natura dedisset.
Illis sunt equidem, sunt inquam corpora kleina,
Sed mille erregunt menschis matrasque plagasque,
Cum steckunt snaflum in livum blautumque rubentem
Exsugant; homines sic, sic vexeirere possunt!
Ex quæ tandem illis pro tantalonia restant
Vexeritate, et quem nemant pro vulnera lodum!
[Flöia, cortum versicale, de flôis schwartibus, illis deiriculis, quæ omnes ferè Minschos, Mannos, Vveibras, Iungfras, &c., behùppere, et spitzibus suis schnaflis steckere et bitere solunt, authore. Gripholdo Knickknackio ex Floilandia. Anno 1593. Via Carl Blümlein Die Floia und andere maccaronische Gedichte, 1900]

This succulent post on palæological grammar has reminded me that I am still searching for a copy of Non olet; oder, Die heiteren Tischgespräche des Collofino über den orbis cacatus, nebst den neuesten erkenntnistheoretischen Betrachtungen über das Leben in seiner phantastischen Wirklichkeit erzählt von ihm selbst (1939) by Collofino [1867–1947].

winfred p lehmann 1916-2007

I just learned that Professor W P Lehmannn passed away on August first. He will be missed. I never met him, but I’ve read quite a few of his books, and I studied with one of his students. He founded the Linguistic Research Center at UT Austin. [Via Mr Verb.]

[Addendum: I just learned, after looking at this posting to the Linguist List, that Carol Justus, whom I just sent email to and alluded to above, has passed away also. Sigh.]

black and white and blue all over

All the following words ultimately go back to PIE *bhel- ‘bright, shine, gleam, glitter; white’ English black, blank (French blanc ‘white’), blanch, blanket, bleach, blue (> *bhlē-wo-), flame, and flagrant; Old English blǣco ‘paleness, leprosy’, Latin flāvus ‘yellow, yellow-red, blond, red, golden’ (> *bhl̥ə-wo-). See IEW bhel- 118ff., bheleg- ‘shining’ 124, & bhleu-k- ‘burning’ 159. That’s quite a semantic spread there.

caron, wrapped in mystery

bubul, over on bulbulovo, has an hilarious entry on how his family name, which is of Hungarian origin, gets mangled by the bureaucratic and the clueless. (My favorite was a French reading of an escaped XML entity of capital Č as &#268; on a written form copied from some email or online form.) This bittersweet anecdote brought to mind the how and why behind Unicode calling č a Latin small letter c with caron, rather than c háček (which is what I learned in my intro phonology class).

bloggarum thesaurus

According to this blog entry over on The Guardian, the Oxford University Press is conducting a study on the vocabulary of the blogosphere. Ipse dixit John Moore. Who? He’s a guest journalist for The Guardian who used to be a drummer for the band The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Next time you convey your velocipede along Walton Street in Oxford, spare a thought for the poor souls suffering behind its elegant facades. I am not referring to the mortal coil shufflers at the John Radcliffe, but to the researchers at the Oxford University Press, charged with the life-sapping task of monitoring the use of English in weblogs.

Secundum Moore, the OUP has determined that the top fifteen words used in the blogosphere are: “blogger, blog, stupid, me, myself, my, oh, yeah, ok, post, stuff, lovely, update, nice, shit.” Quite a list. I sat, and I pondered. I googled around for some news story on the OUP and its study. I found something on The Chronicle (by Jennifer Howard) which linked to a Telegraph article (by Mark Sanderson). The same old kernel of a story (except for a quaint em-dash in medias dirty word because—no doubt—of the The Telegraph’s style guide) but no links to an OUP press release. Then, I surfed on over to MySpace, and I took the first entry on Moore’s blog there, and then I ran the text through a word count program. Here’s Moore’s top fifteen words: “the, to, I, and, of, a, was, he, it, in, my, his, with, that, shop”. The first thing I noticed was that the little function words like the and and weren’t there, but then I was absent, though me, myself, and my weren’t. I realized that the boys chez OUP probably know a thing or two about counting words and what constitutes one, too: lemmatization and all that.

[Via Taccuino di traduzione.]

golden yellow

Goofy’s entry on the etymology of mildew (originally it meant honeydew, as in the secretions of aphids) got me to thinking about the three different PIE roots that give us the reflexes of honey in modern IE languages: *melit- ‘honey’, *médhu- ‘honey; mead’, and *k_enǝkó ‘honey yellow, golden yellow’ (IEW 723f., 707, & 564f.). For some reason, the word for honey got replaced in the Germanic languages (save for Gothic miliþ) with a color word. The same sort of thing happened for the word for bear: Germanic has replaced the word for bear with one for brown, while Latin keeps ursus, Greek αρκτος (arktos), and Welsh arth from PIE *r̥k̑þos (875) while Slavic is satisfied with medved, literally ‘honey-eater’.

banian

I learned a new word in Udhagamandalam (or Ooty as everybody called it): banian. It’s what the British call a vest and we a t-shirt. The sleeveless kind which I have also heard called a wife-beater. The etymology offered in the OED1 is: “a. Pg. banian, probably a. Arab. banyān (16th c.), ad Gujarāti vāṇiyo man of the trading caste, ad. Skr. vaṇij merchant ‘The terminal nasal may be taken from the plural form vāṇiyan’ (Col. Yule)”. From its primary meaning of ‘a Hindoo trader, especially one from the province of Guzerat’ to its later meaning of ‘a loose gown, jacket, or shirt of flannel, worn in India’. And, it yields banyan tree, its fifth meaning. So, its meaning changed in India. It went from a kind of dressing gown to a sleeveless undershirt. The first a is pronounced as a short a or schwa, per its Hindi or Sanskrit value, in spite of its length in Gujarati.

view from a room

The view from the apartment I stayed in in Tiruchirapalli. Well, OK, it's really the former temple town of Srirangam which has since been absorbed into Trichy. As far as signage in Tamil Nadu goes, this one is rather professional looking.

Just above the roof of the buildings you can see a red brick wall that encircles the old town itself. The Sri Ranganathaswamy temple itself is not visible but easily accessible by foot a few blocks away. The street is clean since the ragpickers and garbage collectors have been through earlier. (It’s good to live on the same street as the deputy commissioner of police.) What you can’t see or smell is the fish market next to the school. Whoa! The two trees on the left are coconut trees. There are some cow patties drying on the roof near the bottom of the picture.

razbliuto [sic]

Tingo from the Late Latin meaning 'I laugh at (these superstitions)'. Forms: tingo, tingere, tengi, tanctum. Borrowed and Englished by John Skelton as a fictive strong verb: to ting (tang, tung). There are two schools of thought regarding tingo: one is that it only has one meaning and is untranslatable and the other is that it has no meaning and is translatable. Though, one lexicographer maintained that it had many meanings, but she did not concern herself with translatability per se.

Of course, the previous paragraph is all a bunch of stercus taurinus. The word tingo comes from a book, The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World, by Adam Jacot De Boinod. This is one of a handful of books that collect a ragbag of words in different languages that are deemed “untranslatable” into English. (Untranslatable, in this case, means that English does not have a single lexical item for the word.) The linguist, Benjamin Zimmer, posted an excellent review of The Meaning of Tingo when it came out in 2005. (There are some other posts at Language Log, a collective linguistics blog.)

Tingo is not the first of its kind. There is a short but popular line of books stretching back into the ’80s: Howard Rheingold’s They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases (1988) and C J Moore’s In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World (2004). Except for Rheingold’s book, the others never cite bibliographical information as to the origin of their words, but it’s obvious reading through them that each succeeding author has borrowed heavily from the earlier ones.

And, sometimes things get messy. An example: William Safire wrote in his April 17, 2005, New York Times Magazine column mentioning Moore’s book and listing some of its words, one of which is the putative Russian razbliuto ‘a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about’. Cool word, and, there’s definitely not a single English word that conveys its meaning. The only problem is, as Language Hat soon pointed out in a blog entry, there’s no such word in Russian. The word itself came from Rheingold’s book, and, he gives a source: J. Bryan III’s Hodgepodge (1986). I soon picked up a used copy of this book and wandered through it looking for Russian words. Only one chapter of Hodgepodge is concerned with languages in general, and so my perusal was short. There it was on page 113, a sort of call to arms for the misguided, foreign, untranslatable-words horde.

Words we need in English:
Magari! (Italian): “Would that it were so!”
cursi (Spanish) or moche (French): “tacky”
razliubito (Russian): the feeling you have for someone you once loved, but now no more.
porte-douleurs (French): someone to share your sorrows gemütlich (German): “cozy, comfortable”

But, wait, the word is not razbliuto, but razliubito, which, except for the weird transliteration of the final soft sign as an o, is a verb in Russian, razljubit' ‘to cease to love, care for; get tired of’. So, one little mistake ripples out across the decades.

word hoards

I’ve been collecting links to online dictionaries for quite a while and thought I’d share them:

• Gran Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana :- the great language of caganers everywherre
• Diccionari Anglès-Català de Codi Obert
• Cockney Rhyming Slang :- 'Allo me old china - wot say we pop round the Jack. I'll stand you a pig and you can rabbit on about your teapots. We can 'ave some loop and tommy and be off before the dickory hits twelve.
• den danske online ordbog :- Danish dictionary
• ordbog over det danske sprog :- one Danish dictionary is not enough
• Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé
• Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm
• LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch :- the translation forums are great, too
• An Anglo-Saxon dictionary :- Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller
• Middle English dictionary :- trace the origins of the third person singular generic pronoun they in Chaucer
• the Jargon File :- version 4.4.7
• Online-Wörterbuch :- Akademie för uns kölsche Sproch
• The Perseus Digital Library :- amongst their many classical philological texts are such dictionaries as Liddell-Scott and Lewis-Short
• Vocabularia computatralia :- a classic
• Sanskrit, Tamil, and Pahlavi dictionaries :- Monier-Williams online
• Ditzionàriu de sa limba sarda :- Sardinian, a Romance language
• Slovenské slovníky
• Slovak-English dictionary
• Sumerian lexicon :- one of the first online dictionaries I came across, newest version available in print
• multiple online dictionaries small but useful dictionaries