Chapter 3 of Sholem Asch’s motke ganef is entitled: motke zoyl nit di shmatke zoygen, which Edwin [1887-1959] and Willa [1890-1970] Muir translate as Mottke refuses his rag dummy. dos maylkhel zaynm iz geven farshtopt mit a shtikel nase layvend in velkhen es iz geven ayngebunden a shtikele zukher, un motke hot derfun ohn oyfher genogt, gezoygen. (His mouth was stopped with a dummy made of a wet linen rag wrapped round a piece of sugar, and Mottke kept sucking at it without stopping.) I had never heard of dummy used in this sense. I couldn’t find this meaning in either the American Heritage or Merriam-Webster dictionaries online, but the OED gave it as short for dummy teat. A quick look around the web showed that it is indeed a synonym for the more common term—at least in the States—pacifier. (I know that when I was teething, my grandmother let me gum at an old gold bracelet of hers.)
Not only has Proto-Indo-European been traced back to Turkish farmers, but now the links between Sumerian and Lemnite Etruscan and Turkish have been enumerated. [And there’s plenty more information at the Caucasus Foundation.] This is what happens when you try to figure out when the hero known as Gilgamesh got his new pronunciation: Bilgamesh. Philologists should take heart and always remember the Sumerian proverb: hurum titi ursãgene. (Fools are the ribcages of heroes.) [via ETCSL (The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature)]
[Update 01/02/04: I forgot to mention that this was all because of an entry at the Language Log, that great linguistic stew-pot of a blog.]
Oh, dear the year is coming to an end, and so is our good old English language. What to do with solecisms like very unique, rather unique, or most unique? It’s obviously not enough that the word unique in these examples has a secondary and common meaning different from sole or only and more like strange or unusual. Worthless excuses. And, needless to say, this has been going on for quite some time.
So, imagine my surprise to find this in Plautus:A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique. The word is a member of a depreciating series. Singular had once the strong meaning that unique has still in accurate but not in other writers. In consequence of slovenly use, singular no longer means singular, but merely remarkable; it is worn out; before long rather unique will be familiar; unique, that is, will be worn out in turn, and we shall have to resort to unexampled and keep that clear of qualifications as long as we can. Happily it is still admitted that sentences like the three given below are solecisms; they contain a selfcontradiction. For the other regrettable use of unique, as when the advertisement columns offer us what they call unique opportunities, it may generally be assumed with safety that they are lying; but lying is not in itself a literary offence, so that with these we have nothing to do.
Thrills which gave him rather a unique pleasure. [Richard H.] Hutton, [Sir Walter Scott, 1878].
A very unique child, thought I. C. Brontë, [Villette, ch. 3].
...is to be translated into Russian by M. Robert Böker, of St. Petersburg. This is a somewhat unique thing to happen to an English textbook. Westminster Gazette.
[Fowler, King’s English, 1908.]
Hegio: Alienus cum eius incommodum tam aegre feras,
quid me patrem par facerest, cui ille est unicus?Ergasilus: Alienus ego? alienus illi? aha, Hegio,
numquam istuc dixis neque animum induxis tuom;
tibi ille unicust, mi etiam unico magis unicus.[Plautus, Captivi, I.ii..146-50.]
Hegio: When an outsider like you takes his misfortune so bitterly, how must I feel, his father, and he my only son?
Ergasilus: An outsider? I? An outsider to that boy? Oh, Hegio! don’t say a thing like thatdon’t let such a thought enter your mind, ever! Your only son, yes,—but he was more than that to me: he was my only only!
[translation by Paul Nixon.]
“For he was more unique than unique to me.” And these are two upperclass Roman gentlemen speaking. It seems that some utterances are more solecist than others. Of course, it may be that Plautus is making a point by using ungrammatical Latin, but then who’s to say that folks who say a very unqiue book aren’t making a point, too. A slippery linguistic slope to be sure. In fact, Plautus uses a similar construction in his Bacchides: “Ad illam quae tuom / perdidit, pessum dedit tibi filium unice unicum.” [Bacchides III.iii.3.] (To the woman who has depraved, destroyed your one and only son!) Your uniquely unique son, indeed. (We’ll pass over the use of magis rather than the comparative suffix -ior in silence.)
1. Pig latin and here. 2. Loucherbem et ici. 3. Rotwelsch und hmm, auch Jenische / Yeniche. Liber vagatorum.
Well, another birthday has rolled on by over me. As a kid it was something less than desirable to have a birthday two days after Xmas. How do you get anybody to come to a birthday party? Your friends’ parents can barely find the door, so they can drive the ten or so miles from Sonoma to Schellville. Oh, well, it’s not as bad as my cousin Doris, whose birthday fell two days earlier. All those combined Xmas-birthday cards, half as many presents, etc. Many suggested that I just celebrate my birthday in July. Where’s the fun in that? So, one year, while I was living behind Charles “Sparky” Schultz’ place in Santa Rosa, I threw a Xmas in July party. Lots more people came to that than I ever remember coming to one of my pre-adult birthday parties. We had a cheesy little aluminum tree, presents, and home-made eggnog. I figured it was no hotter than Xmas down under. Anyway, enough whining. This year I got some great Yiddish books from V., mainly Sholem Asch (with some translations) but also a ten volume set called di geshikhte fun literatur bay yidn by Israel Zinberg. Monika sent us a mysterious present that consisted of a pair of gloves and what looked like the world’s smallest film changing bag. Turned out to be for keeping warm while you’re holding hands in frozen Old Europe. She also sent a small pocket sundial. I got V. a necklace and a Victorian brooch with some human hair under crystal. Tonight, Cliff will be coming by for dinner, and we can have great fun reading aloud from Asch’s ist river or motke ganef. I also have to figure out exactly when this blog goes into its third year.
1. For we should love the human kind, / As Jesus taught us to, / And those who don’t should be struck blind / And beaten black and blue; / I’d like to roast them in a grill / And listen to them shriek, / Then break them on the wheel until / They turned the other cheek. [via Roger Woddis “Down With Fanatics” via Michael Rosen Culture Shock via Laputan Logic.] 2. Il ne parle que du bon Dieu / A l’epoque ou Jean-sans-Terre d’Angleterre etait Roi / Dominique, notre Pere, combattit les Albigeois. [Jeannine Deckers aka the Singing Nun aka Sœur Sourire.] 3. Just lovely how the Bush administration feels about labor. [via wood s lot.]
While talking on the phone yesterday with my friend Monika from Wachtburg-Niederbachem, she used a German word I hadn’t heard before: fremdbestimmt. What a great word, but how to translate it in English? There’s a related word, Selbstbestimmung self-determination, and so foreign domination, or alien rule, might work, although the word seems to be used more with people than countries, (pace, of course, Haider, „Ich sage euch, wenn Österreich der EU beitrete, werde dieses Land fremdbestimmt. Denn Maastricht sei die Fortsetzung von Versailles ohne Krieg“, or Bush in Iraq.) There’s Fremdbefruchtung (cross-fertilization) and Fremdbestäubung (cross-pollination), but cross determined doesn’t sound right. Alien control: no, that sounds too Roswellish. Oh, well, I’m sure one of you in my faithful readership will have some ideas.
Languagehat has an entry about Messrs Pullum and Liberman’s ruminations over the number of new words that enter the language each year: placed at 20K by Don Watson in an article in the Australian newspaper The Age. “As rebarbative as ‘GDP-L-fucose synthase’ may be, I don't see any principled way to distinguish it from the long line of terms that have preceded it, from atmosphere through phlogiston and quark.” Quark, how I love it. The German dairy product, thicker than yoghurt, thinner than cream cheese and not to be confused with the desktop publishing software or the character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Here’s how physicist Murray Gell-Mann says he coined the word, pronounced kwork, for those funny little particles that physics today is so full of. And, I guess that answers the question that Paul Pfalzner asked and which I quoted in an entry earlier this year.
[Addendum 12/26/03: Mark Liberman has an update.]
1. I’m glad that Congress is busy doing something: like keeping us safe from language. [via Cinema Minima.] 2. What would be the product of an unholy union between Chick Comics and H. P. Lovecraft? Unspeakable horror! 3. Could Tom Waits have existed without Dwight Frye? [Both via Eye of the Goof.]
1. Du langage français bizarre hermaphrodite, / De quel genre te faire, équivoque maudite, / Ou maudit? [Boileau, Sur l’Équivoque, via Ad Usum Delphinorum] 2. “For the first time in my life, I felt shame.” [Ms. Mary T. Thompkins Freeman, niece of the late Strom Thurmond, quoted in a New York Times article, via Crooked Timber.] 3. Ein Hündchen wird gesucht, das weder murrt noch beißt, / zerbrochne Gläser frißt und Diamanten scheißt. [Goethe, vaya con Google.]
I’d only lived in Bonn for a few weeks when I started to hear rumors of a fabled food called Rievkoche (Reibekuchen). All I knew was it contained potatoes and tasted wonderful. I had to wait until either Yuletide or Pützchenmarkt to buy some and they had to come from one or another of the approved booths. Finally, September rolled around and my friends Ralf and Monika took me to Beuel to ride on a huge ferris wheel and to eat the Rievkoche. When I finally saw them in Ralf’s hands, I blurted out: “Oh, latkes!” Ungrateful Yanks. We ate them with apple sauce, and they were oily, and they were delicious.
There’s been a skirmish of entries over at the Language Log about Effle, i.e., meaningless English sentences from EFL textbooks. Somehow, the lovely sentence the farmer kills the duckling got included. I have to agree with Geoff Pullum that Edward Sapir originated the duckling-killing sentence:
Let us begin with a simple sentence that involves various kinds of concepts—the farmer kills the duckling. A rough and ready analysis discloses here the presence of three distinct and fundamental concepts that are brought into connection with each other in a number of ways. These three concepts are “farmer” (the subject of discourse), “kill” (defining the nature of the activity which the sentence informs us about), and “duckling” (another subject of discourse that takes an important though somewhat passive part in this activity). We can visualize the farmer and the duckling and we have also no difficulty in constructing an image of the killing.
[Edward Sapir. Language, 1921, p. 86.]
Removing this sentence from its context may diminish its beauty, but it is as simple as it needs to be to illustrate Sapir’s point and really has nothing to do with English as a Foreign Language, except, of course, that his was. Anyway, I’ve always preferred the rurality of Sapir’s simple sample sentence to the forced urbanity of Chomsky’s colorless green one. Quack.
By now everybody’s heard or read of the beautiful, 30,000 year old, carved ivory figurines found in Swabia, but I link here just in case you, faithful reader, have not. [via Nature; see also Mirabilis dot ca, Phluzein, and National Geographic.]
My office mate at my new job is half Cayuga (Iroquois), and that lead me to look for some Native American or Canadian linguistic material online. I found a great site. It has digitized phrases and fonts for downloading. The Cayuga are part of the Six Nations of the Grand River of Ontario. Later, when I got home after work, I noticed that Languagehat had found another great online Native North American languages site: Languagegeek.
Since I’ve been working in Menlo Park, California, these days, my thoughts have turned to the other city with the same name on the other coast that contained the famed laboratory complex of Thomas A. Edison. In keeping with yesterday’s entry, did William Dickson actually demonstrate projected film to Edison in 1889 or later? Short answer, no, despite all the history and litigation. I had read a tattered copy of Gordon Hendrick’s The Edison Motion Picture Myth about a decade ago. It was around the same time that I read the debunking of Fritz Lang’s dramatic exit from the Third Reich after turning down Goebbels’ request that Lang head the German film industry. Lang had told his story a few times, but his passport showed that at the time he was coming and going, to and fro, closing down his household in Berlin. Also, Goebbels didn’t mention it in his diary. What next? How old were the Marx Brothers and did Kuleshov really conduct his experiment with Ivan Mosjoukine’s image?
Alberto Santos-Dumont, Wilbur and Orville Wright, or the one-time Smithsonian champion Samuel Pierpont Langley? It depends on how one frames the question.
[Addendum 12/20/03: Maciej Ceglowski has a wonderful entry on the whole who flew first thing. The Wrights’ is a fascinating story of genius invention hampered by their litigious and anti-social mood.
I believe that the Wright patent story drives home the intellectual bankruptcy of our patent system. The whole point of patents is supposed to be to encourage innovation, reward entrepreneurship, and make sure useful inventions get widely disseminated. But in this case (and in countless others, in other fields), the practical effect of patents turned out to be to hinder innovation—a patent war erupts, and ends up hamstringing truly innovative technologies, all without doing much for the inventors, who weren’t motivated by money in the first place.]
1. Chicken or Beef has taught us about the Disinfopedia. (And, I wonder if his first favorite Wiki is the Portland Pattern Repository’s Wiki; I know it’s mine.) 2. Laputin Logic has quoted a 163-year-old article on daguerreotypes written by E. A. Poe. (That reminds me, I haven’t finished that Borges Poe book I bought a couple of months ago. Nice photo—taken in the Poe museum—of Jorge and a stuffed raven on the cover.) Meanwhile, it’s a slow blogging month this one.
Dean Gooch invited me along last night to see Peter Schickele, professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, do his shtik in Davies Hall: P.D.Q. Bach Strikes Back. It was a Christmas present for his mother, Marge. She doesn’t get out much anymore what with being 80 and being unsteady on her legs, but nothing kept her from this concert. I remember back in our junior high school days, going over to her house and listening to forty-fives of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. The guest (labeled semi-) conductor was Edwin Outwater who, along with other members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, seemed to take the low puns and high jinks in good stride. Schickele no longer lowers himself into the pit on a rope, but he’s obviously still having great fun stealing themes and chronicling the mishaps of J.S. Bach’s youngest and most forgotten son. It was nice to hear the Unbegun Symphony again, as well as newer—to me—pieces such as the Safe Sextet and the Variations on a Unusually Simple-Minded Theme for Piano and Orchestra. The latter ended with a police officer pulling over Schickele, at the grand piano, during the encore finale: “Do you know how fast you were going?” “Just a quarter note equals fifty-five, officer.”
Erling Wold passed along this link to a page full of ten codes, (e.g., 10-4 for OK), that police use. These codes are from an official list collected by the APCO (Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials). Charley Kline, whose site they’re on, also has a list of procedural signals, (e.g., QRX for When will you call me again?).
Geoffrey Nunberg had a daring piece this morning on Fresh Air about the “incantatory power” of taboo words (especially racial epithets). There’s no link on his site yet, but I assume within the next day or so he’ll make one. It reminded me of the first time I saw the opening formula for a brokhe in a small liturgical book and tried to sound out the words. My friend Cliff was horrified when I got to the word usually vocalized as ’adonai, which I read out as it was actually spelled. He then told me about how another of the words should be mispronounced ’elokeinu so that the blessing is invalid, i.e., when you’re practising as I was. So many languages, so many rules.
[Addendum 12/11/03: Iurer. To sweare, depose, take an oath, rap out an oath. / Iurer és mains d’autruy. (The old fashion of swearing) Looke Main. / Il iure comme vn Abbé; chartier; gentilhomme; prelat. Like a Tinker, say we. / Randle Cotgrave. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, London, 1611, p.564. All thanks be to Miladus, because of whose trackback this morning, I pulled down both Benveniste and Geoffrey Hughes, and played at sortes. The latter lead me to Cotgrave, and then Google lead me to Greg Lindahl’s loving assemblage of Cotgrave’s Dictionarie which was digitized as part of the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD).]
A developer I’m currently working with is from Romania, and so I’ve decided to learn a bit of his language because it’d be fun, and he’s a convenient informant. I picked up a previously owned Winter Verlag grammar last weekend, surfed the web for some mp3s of pronunciation this weekend, and today I think I'll try a little banal applied linguistical dialogue. M-am rătăcit. Unde este gara? The Wikipedia entry on Romanian has some great information, including a link to an online monolingual Romanian dictionary.
“A little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese (= pieni pala leipää ilman juustoa) on sirkku kertonut englantilaiselle ja zu-zu-zu-zu-zu-zu-früh (= liian-liian-liian-liian-liian-liian-varhain) varoittaa huolestunut saksalainen yksilö pohjoiseen kiirehtiviä muuttolintuja.” [©1991 Harri Viitanen via FMIC Finnish Music Information] “yellow-(h)ammer. It cannot be said with safety either that the h is due to ignorant assimilation by popular etymology to hammer, or that the absence of h is mere h-dropping. Each form has its etymological theory on its side, and OED says that both forms ‘are historically justifiable’. The only reason for resisting the prevalent h is thus removed.” [Fowler’, 2nd edition, p.723.] Emberiza citrinella. (We had kissed beneath the tress, / And then we heard again / The yellowhammer say, quite plain / “A little bit of bread and no cheese!” [Anonymous & Liza Lehmann Bird Songs Cycle]) A bunting.
You all know the drill. Use that in restrictive relative clauses and which in nonrestrictive ones. Example:
In the first sentence, the information in the relative clause restricts which cars we’re typing about, but in the second sentence, we’re merely throwing in an extra factoid about a group of autos that has been defined in an earlier sentence (ungiven). [This example comes from Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, p. 648.] For a bit of hilarious hoof in mouth disease amongst the grammarian sticklers search for restrictive and unrestrictive (not a word) in Google. Whether restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses are better a matter of punctuation than grammar, I will not say. But here are some views from the experts:
Relation between that and which. What grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize; usage evolves itself little disturbed by their likes and dislikes. And yet the temptation to show how better use might have been made of the material to hand is sometimes irresistible. The English relatives, particularly as used by English rather than American writers, offer such a temptation. The relations between that, who, and which have come to us from our forefathers as an odd jumble, and plainly show that the language has not been neatly constructed by a master builder who could crate each part to do the exact work required of it, neither overlapped or overlapping; far from that, its parts have had to grow as they could.
[...]
The two kinds of relative clause, to one of which that and to the other of which which is appropriate, are the defining and the non-defining; and if writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain in lucidity and in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers.
[H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, second edition, pp.625f.]
As usual, Fowler has it both ways and brilliantly. Earlier in the last century, Professor Jespersen observed:
In early Modern English that is the favorite relative and is found in non-restrictive as well as in restrictive clauses, but there is in literature a growing tendency to extend the sphere of the wh-words, which more and more oust that from non-restrictive clauses. Who and which reminded scholars of the Latin pronouns and came to be looked upon as more refined or dignified than the more popular that.[Otto Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar, volume 3, p 80.]
And, I close with a quotation from the marvelous “Humble Petition of Who and Which” by Addison in The Spectator, No. 78, 30 May, 1711; cited by Jespersen.
Go forth and use that and which properly. The future of the English language depends on it.
According to an article in Nature, the “English language [has been] traced to Turkish farmers.” Stop presses, &c. Professor Russell Gray, evolutionary biologist in the psychology department, and a PhD student Quentin Atkinson at Auckland University say that Proto-Indo-European came out of Anatolia almost 10,000 years ago. Gray also admits that his findings may be controversial.
Gray and Atkinson had analysed thousands of words from 87 languages (past and present) to find out when the various branches of the Indo-European family tree started diverging.
“We looked at words from different languages that were clearly related and grouped them in sets.”
Gray said a simple example was that five was cinq in French and cinque in Italian.
“We built matrices of all our information, gleaned from the Internet and every obscure etymological dictionary we could find.”
I wonder if the data they entered into their matrices was of the order of cinq and cinque or s̃ɛk and tʃɪnkʷɛ? I have often wondered whether Gaulish would end up being more closely ranked with Latin than Irish based on these algorithms? [via Desbladet]
[Addendum 12/02/03: Languagehat has added to the bloggage on this, as well as Phluzein, whose entry predates Des’ and mine.]
[Addendum 12/12/03: Bill Poser has a great critique of the Gray and Atkinson article over on Language Log.]