BROTHER-IN-LAW.

Is the husband of your wife's sister your brother-in-law?

I would have said "no" and been pretty sure I was reflecting standard usage, but it turns out I would have been wrong. Bill Poser at the Log has a post about this, sparked by "a news item in which men in this situation (one of whom is accused of trying to hire an assassin to kill the other) were described as brothers-in-law"; he was surprised to see it, because to him "there is no named relationship" between such men. I agreed with him, but he and I are in a distinct minority; most of the (so far) 74 comments say things like (to take the first two) "I use brother-in-law in that context, as does my wife" and "It never occurred to me not to use 'brother-in-law' to refer to my wife's sister's husband." I thought perhaps it was a generational thing, since Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary has the definition "broadly : the husband of one's spouse's sister," whereas the entry in the newest (eleventh) edition drops the "broadly" and just includes "the husband of one's spouse's sister" as one of the basic senses, but I asked my wife and she has no problem with the broad sense. Furthermore, in the Log thread, Jerry Friedman (November 20, 2009 @ 3:14 am) said, "This has come up on alt.usage.english a few times, and the results are much like those here—everything from people who've never heard the extended sense to people who thought everyone used it. I don't recall any regional pattern ever showing up."

So I thought I'd ask you all the question I began with; you might add, for scientific purposes, where you're from (or, if different, what dialect you speak), and (if, of course, you feel like it) your approximate age.

GABO AND THE DICTIONARY.

Someone at MetaFilter linked to "In the Shadow of the Patriarch," a long, long New Republic article by Enrique Krauze on "Gabriel García Márquez and the demons of his time." I'll confess up front that I've only read the first of its nine pages, and furthermore that I may very well not get any farther; I've enjoyed most of the García Márquez I've read, but I've already read more than I really need about his life, times, and politics. However, the article begins with a reflection on his relations with the dictionary, which seemed like obvious LH material:

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.

Anywhere in the world, if a grandfather presents his grandson with a dictionary, he is giving him a great instrument of knowledge; but Colombia was not just anywhere. It was a republic of grammarians. During the youth of García Márquez’s grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía, who was born in 1864 and died in 1936, a number of presidents and government ministers—almost all of them lawyers from the conservative camp—published dictionaries, language textbooks, and treatises (in prose and verse) on orthology, orthography, philology, lexicography, meter, prosody, and Castilian grammar. Malcolm Deas, a scholar of Colombian history who has studied this singular phenomenon, claims that the obsession with language that was expressed by the cultivation of these sciences—their practitioners, Deas notes, insisted on calling them "sciences"—had its origin in the urge for continuity with the cultural heritage of Spain. By claiming "Spain’s eternal presence in the language," Colombians sought to possess its traditions, its history, its classic authors, its Latin roots. This appropriation, preceded by the foundation in 1871 of the Colombian Academy of Language, the first offshoot in America of the Royal Spanish Academy, was one of the keys to the long period of conservative hegemony—it lasted from 1886 to 1930—in Colombian political history.

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Posted by languagehat at 08:19 PM | Comments (11)

VOLTA.

Volta: A Multilingual Anthology "contains seventy-five poems in seventy-five languages. Seventy-four of these poems are translations of one poem, the seventy-fifth." You can read the English poem (the original) at wood s lot for November 18, 2009, where I got the link; it and all the translations (in, among many others, Maltese, Mongolian, Nepali, Nigerian Pidgin, North Eastern English, and Norwegian) are available in pdf form via the first link. Here's an etymological passage from the long introduction by the poem's author, Richard Berengarten:

The title ‘Volta’ itself comes from Modern Greek. The noun βόλτα is a noun meaning ‘turn’ and also ‘walk’, ‘stroll’. The Greek expression πάμε βόλτα [pame volta] means literally *let’s go a turn,⁶ i.e. ‘let’s take a turn,’ ‘let’s go for a walk/ stroll,’ ‘let’s stretch our legs.’ The word βόλτα is also used to mean, more precisely, ‘evening promenade’, βραδινή βόλτα [vrathini volta]. The custom of the evening promenade is expressed in Italian by the word passeggiata and in Serbian, Czech and Slovak by the common word korzo. During certain hours of the early evening, around dusk, everyone in the town who might feel like going for a walk takes a saunter or stroll up and down the main street. The custom used to exist in widely different cultures, including for example, in Portugal. A version of it exists among Jewish communities on the Sabbath.⁷

The idea of ‘turning’ is embedded in the Modern Greek word and usage: βόλτα is a word of Latin origin (volgere [actually volvere—LH], to turn). So a volta in this sense is a ‘turn’, up and down and back again, in the pleasurable presence of an indeterminate number of other people who, for whatever reasons of their own, happen to be engaged in the same activity. The word volta also exists in Catalan, Galician and Portuguese, and is cognate with Spanish vuelta.⁸ In all these Romance languages the word has the primary idea of ‘turn’, ‘return’, and more or less the same idiomatic meaning of ‘taking a turn’ as in Greek.

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Posted by languagehat at 10:24 AM | Comments (40)

DELL HYMES, RIP.

I just read in Sally Thomason's post at Language Log that Dell Hymes died in his sleep last Friday. I do not have a particular interest in his area of specialization, the languages of the Pacific Northwest, but his work in linguistic anthropology combined brilliance in both elements of that term with a remarkable sensitivity to literary and artistic qualities in oral texts, and I am extremely fond of his book "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. A brief passage from its opening essay, "Some North Pacific Coast Poems: A Problem in Anthropological Philology," will give an idea of what he thought needed to be corrected in his chosen field:

On the one hand, some of those who concern themselves with the materials of verbal art assert or assume the irrelevance of linguistic control and analysis to their interpretive interest. Contrary to the experience and standards of scholarship in other fields, the style, content, structure, and functioning of texts seem to be declared "translated" (in the theological sense of the metaphor as well as the linguistic) bodily from their original verbal integument, and available for interpretation without it. Original texts are even declared in a scholarly review in the pages of the American Anthropologist to be of concern only to linguists — as if only linguists would mourn the loss of the original texts of Homer or the Bible! On the other hand, those who undertake linguistic description too often pursue it without effective concern for other students of the American Indian, or such fields as comparative poetics, to which American Indian studies should contribute.

TY AND VY, THEN AND NOW.

Anatoly makes a very interesting point about change in Russian usage since the nineteenth century (Russian below the cut):

On of the things that strikes me in Anna Karenina (which I'm rereading) is how ty [intimate 'you'] and vy [polite 'you'] work in comparison to now. Naturally, there's a different sense of distance, and naturally, there's intimacy[1], but what sticks in my memory is something else—that you can return from ty to vy, as Dolly and Oblonsky do when they quarrel. It's as if the passage from vy to ty is like a peg pressed on a stretched-out piece of rubber; all you have to do is let go of it, and immediately you return to the realm of vy. But in the Russian that is native to me, that doesn't happen; once you pass over to the intimate ty with someone, you never return, whatever happens: quarrel, divorce, burning hatred, it doesn't matter.

[1]"Forgive my having come, but I could not pass the day without seeing you [using vy forms]," he continued in French, as he always did, avoiding the vy that was impossibly cold between them and the ty that was dangerous in Russian.

QUADRIVIAL QUANDARY.

Rudi Seitz is a software engineer by profession but a logophile at heart, and he's started a website, Quadrivial Quandary, for fellow word aficionados: "Each day we present four words from our favorite dictionary sites. Your challenge is to use them all in a sentence that illustrates their meanings." On his Origins page, he expands:

Quandary is a site for logophiles but it is contraindicated for the prim variety. What characterizes this site is exuberance, the joy of using esoteric and sometimes questionable words...

The challenge is intensified by our occasional inclusion of slang words alongside archaic Latinate constructions. How to use words that would never be uttered by the same speaker? ... I like to think of each Quandary as rare mix of flammable substances, combusting in the minds of us who behold it, the shared memory connecting us.

THE HAT GENE.

Mark Liberman has a Log post taking the hapless NY Times science writer Nicholas Wade out behind the woodshed for a well-deserved thrashing in regard to his credulous reporting of the "language gene" (a real thing even if the popular name is misleading) and the "god gene" (not a real thing); I was pushed over the edge into blogging it by his conclusion:

The beauty part is the universality of this argument. My current favorite application leads us to postulate the Hat Gene. [...] Think of the manifold advantages of head-coverings to paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and the near-universality of head coverings among human groups at all subsequent stages of development — the Hat Gene hypothesis is a winner all around.

VERA KOKOSHKINA.

Because of my diverse set of interests, plus my dogged insistence on looking up references to even the most minor names I run across in a text, I sometimes happen on striking coincidences that bring together utterly different realms, and I am about to recount one such happenstance. (A warning for those who dislike literary gossip: this post involves literary gossip.)

I'm reading an extremely interesting book, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e: Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922 . Very few diaries exist from the period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (those foolish enough to set down their views of current events during that time of violence and starvation tended to sensibly destroy them once the all-encompassing vigilance of the Bolshevik rulers became apparent), and this one survived only because an American, Frank Golder, was in Russia in 1922 and persuaded Got'e to let him smuggle it out of the country (Got'e [Готье], by the way, is a Russianized form of Gautier—his great-grandfather, "Jean Dufayet dit Gautier," was a French immigrant during the reign of Catherine the Great, and the family had owned the main French bookstore in Moscow for over a century). It's fascinating to see this grumpy forty-something historian reacting to events as they happen; on Oct. 13, 1917, he writes "Moscow is full of rumors about a citywide strike and bolshevik manifestations—either on the 15th or the 20th. Is this the frightened fantasy of the terrorized townsman or is something really being prepared?" It turned out, of course, that the latter was the case, and within a couple of weeks he is writing about gunfire within earshot of his apartment at No. 4 Bol'shoi Znamenskii pereulok (a few blocks west of the Kremlin). On November 6 he mentions a visit by "V. E. Kokoshkina," and a footnote tells us that she was married to Vladimir Kokoshkin, the brother of Fedor Fedorovich Kokoshkin, a name well known to students of the Russian Revolution—he and his fellow Kadet and member of the Provisional Government Andrei Shingarev were murdered in their hospital beds in January 1918 by Bolsheviks, one of the first clear signs of the brutality that was about to descend on Russia.