languagehat.com

Jim Bisso’s The Morphology of Peevology Facebook post says (I’ve added links):

Language Jones does a good job of explaining unaccusative verbs (as opposed to unergative ones). What’s that? Per the article in Wikipedia: “In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb’s subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice.”

For example, in English “the tree fell”, “the window broke”, &c. It is related to the reason why some verbs in, e.g., French or German use “to be” as the auxiliary verb in past tenses, instead of “to have”: “je suis tombé” (I have fallen) versus “j’ai travaillé” (I have worked). (It was first described, in 1978, by David Perlmutter.)

Unaccusative verbs have been mentioned a few times at LH, at length in this 2012 comment by Wimbrel:

In linguistics this distinction is encapsulated in the contrast between unergative and unaccusative verbs, i.e., intransitive verbs whose subject is, from a semantic perspective, the doer (agent) or the experiencer (patient) of the action. In Romance and Germanic languages (like French, Italian, German, and Dutch) that have two different auxiliaries for forming the perfective past (preterite), unergative verbs take “to have” (avere/avoir/haben/etc.) as the auxiliary and unaccusative verbs take “to be” (essere/être/sein/etc.). Vestiges of the unergative/unaccusative distinction seem to have survived as late as Early Modern English (hence “the Lord is come”). Radford’s Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction gives some examples from Shakespeare, like “How chance thou art returned so soon?” (Comedy of Errors, I.ii) “She is fallen into a pit of ink.” (Much Ado About Nothing, IV.i)

The Wikipedia article provides the history of the concept and gives examples in English and other languages, notably Russian: “Unlike the subtle evidence for unaccusatives in English, Russian provides strong tests to determine unaccusativity.” I’m hoping making a separate post of it will help the concept (which was invented just as I was dropping out of grad school) stick in my head. Oh, and that Language Jones video is indeed good; it ends up showing how such verbs are reflected in brain scans, aphasia, and child speech.

Peter E. Gordon, reviewing Paul Reitter’s Englishing of Capital in the LRB (3 April 2025; archived), provides one of those analyses of translations that give me so much pleasure and that I can’t resist passing along. After describing Engels’ irritation with the first English excerpts (“Mr Broadhouse is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx”) and his hard work on the first complete version, Gordon proceeds to general considerations:

The German word for translation, übertragen, implies that we can simply ‘carry over’ meaning from one language to another. But no two meanings are wholly alike; the act of translation seems, inevitably, to be an act of infidelity. Perhaps this is true of the translation of any text. But among scholars of Capital the question of what Marx meant is burdened with added importance: a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works. In this respect Engels’s comparison to the Bible was apt. When Saint Jerome produced the Vulgate, he obeyed the principle of ad fontes: he went back to the Hebrew original as the spring from which revelation flows. When Marxists wrestle over a term or phrase in Capital they honour the same philological method, treating the original as the privileged source of instruction.

Yet no translation can be definitive, for the obvious reason that language changes over time. A translation that once seemed to hit the mark will later seem stale or imprecise. What’s more, in this case, there isn’t even agreement on what should count as the original text. Marxists continue to debate whether Le Capital in the first French edition should be seen as a welcome improvement on the German edition of Das Kapital (published in Hamburg in 1867) or an unfortunate simplification.

The frontispiece of the French translation reads: ‘Traduction de M. J. Roy, entièrement révisée par l’auteur.’ In a letter to Nikolai Danielson (who translated the first volume of Capital into Russian), Marx confessed that he had felt it necessary to ‘smooth out’ (aplatir) the French version. […]

Then he gets down to business:
[Read more…]

Via Edwin Battistella’s Facebook post, I was alerted to Volume 100, Issue 1 of American Speech. I don’t have access to it, but I enjoy just reading the table of contents:

Louise Pound, H. L. Mencken, and the Founding of American Speech: In Memory of Ron Butters
Connie C. Eble

The Politics of Prescriptivism: One Style Manual, One Century
Kristin VanEyk; Anne Curzan

DARE, Literature, and Enregistered Regional Identities
Michael Adams

Algae, Fungi, Binomial Nomenclature, and the Search for “Correct” Pronunciations
Dale F. Coye

The Representation of Earlier African American Vernacular English By Charles W. Chesnutt
Irene Kimbara

Describing 400 Years of American English Can be Like Comforting, Super Interesting, and Literally Challenging
David Johnson

Discovering the Many Englishes of North America
Samantha M. Litty

And at least we can read the first page of each! (In the VanEyk/Curzan piece, the manual in question is the New York Times style guide: “By tracing the changing prescriptions over the decades, this study highlights the complicated but important nature of the politics of prescriptivism.”)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s New Yorker piece on Catullus (archived) begins arrestingly “Was it something to do with blow jobs?” He’s reminiscing about a collegiate struggle with a poem:

In class that morning, I’d been called on to sight-translate a handful of lines by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the first-century-B.C.E. poet who, the professor had warned us, was among the most erudite and sophisticated, the most doctus, of all Roman writers. In the poem at hand, Catullus ruefully recalls having served on the staff of a provincial governor, bitterly referring to him—because he didn’t let his subordinates enrich themselves at the expense of the locals—as an irrumator. When I stumbled across the unfamiliar noun, I hazarded a guess: “Cheapskate?” Professor Stocker, who’d got his Ph.D. before the Second World War and liked to wear bow ties, pursed his lips, made a face, and declared, a little too loudly, “You may render that word as ‘bastard.’ ”

So I did. But something about his discomfiture had made me curious. That evening, in the library, I took down a Latin dictionary from the shelf and flipped to the “I”s. Within moments, I saw why he’d hurried me past the word.

He goes on to talk about the two Catulluses, the “impetuous, often swaggering young writer” who tossed obscene insults around and “the doctus poeta, the refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions”:

This Catullus produced a handful of longer works that include a baroquely structured mini-epic about the marriage of Achilles’ parents and a gender-bending showstopper that the University of Virginia classicist Jenny Strauss Clay has called “the strangest poem in Latin”: a breathless narrative, cast in an extremely rare and agonizingly complex meter, about an Athenian youth named Attis, who, in a frenzy of devotion to the cult of the Eastern goddess Cybele, castrates himself. Much of the poem takes the form of an anguished monologue the young man delivers after he wakes up the next day, short on body parts and long on regrets.

[Read more…]

Nicola Davis at the Graun sez Bonobos may combine words in ways previously thought unique to humans:

Bonobos use a combination of calls to encourage peace with their partner during mating rituals, research suggests. The discovery is part of a study that suggests our close evolutionary cousins can string together vocalisations to produce phrases with meanings that go beyond the sum of their parts – something often considered unique to human language. “Human language is not as unique as we thought,” said Dr Mélissa Berthet, the first author of the research from the University of Zürich.

Writing in the journal Science, Berthet and colleagues said that in the human language, words were often combined to produce phrases that either had a meaning that was simply the sum of its parts, or a meaning that was related to, but differed from, those of the constituent words. “‘Blond dancer’ – it’s a person that is both blond and a dancer, you just have to add the meanings. But a ‘bad dancer’ is not a person that is bad and a dancer,” said Berthet. “So bad is really modifying the meaning of dancer here.” It was previously thought animals such as birds and chimpanzees were only able to produce the former type of combination, but scientists have found bonobos can create both.

The team recorded 700 vocalisations from 30 adult bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, checking the context of each against a list of 300 possible situations or descriptions. The results reveal bonobos have seven different types of call, used in 19 different combinations. Of these, 15 require further analysis, but four appear to follow the rules of human sentences. Yelps – thought to mean “let’s do that” – followed by grunts – thought to mean “look at what I am doing”, were combined to make “yelp-grunt”, which appeared to mean “let’s do what I’m doing”. The combination, the team said, reflected the sum of its parts and was used by bonobos to encourage others to build their night nests.

The other three combinations had a meaning apparently related to, but different from, their constituent calls. For example, the team found a peep – which roughly means “I would like to …” – followed by a whistle – appeared to mean “let’s stay together” – could be combined to create “peep-whistle”. This combination was used to smooth over tense social situations, such as during mating or displays of prowess. The team speculated its meaning was akin to “let’s find peace”.

The team said the findings in bonobos, together with the previous work in chimps, had implications for the evolution of language in humans, given all three species showed the ability to combine words or vocalisations to create phrases.

As the faithful reader may suspect, I am extremely dubious about all this, but hey, I report, you decide. Thanks, Trevor!

Jonathon Green has published another of his quarterly updates for Green’s Dictionary of Slang, in which he focuses mainly on one of those obscure language folk who I think should be better known:

The work of the independent Australian scholar Dr Gary Simes (1950-2017) has already been sampled for GDoS. Aside from a variety of general publications, often on gay themes, his Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang, featuring two hitherto little-known glossaries of criminal jargon, was published in 1993, and a major discussion of early gay speech, ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’, was featured in the specialist journal Dictionaries volume 26 (2005). When he died in 2017 he was at work on his magnum opus, the Dictionary of the Language of Sex and Sexuality in Modern English. Like the OED and my own lexicon of slang, it is prepared ‘on historical principles’, i.e. underpinning each headword and its senses with a chronological list of citations of usage.

It would, undoubtedly, have been a major contribution to lexicography in general and that of (gay) sexuality in particular. Nonetheless, even though the project could not be finished, and absent substantial funding will never be so,² Dr Simes had typed up a manuscript from the many file cards which – he was no fan of computers – held his research. The ms is far from complete, but a substantial amount exists and much of the research, especially as regards slang, has never so far been included in a dictionary.

It is thus a text that deserves wider circulation. To that end, and thanks to the trustees of Dr Simes’ estate and GDoS contributing editor James Lambert, who is responsible for safeguarding and overseeing the use of the physical materials, we have been allowed to see the ms, and to extract from it for GDoS use such slang-based material as seems valuable. This is a lengthy task and will doubtless consume many months work. Extracted text will appear under the tag Simes:DLSS and new tranches will become available as the regular 90-day updates continue.

I am in equal parts charmed and annoyed by scholars who refuse to use computers; thank goodness his work won’t disappear due to the good offices and hard work of both Lambert and Greene, and I look forward to Greene’s essay on the decline of reference publishing.

I’ve been putting off Maxim Gorky’s most famous play, The Lower Depths (Russian, English) — probably the most famous thing he ever wrote — for decades; it’s one of the few Famous Works of Russian Literature I had never read, even in translation. I didn’t have high regard for Gorky as a writer, and I was afraid it would just be a slush of socially significant characters saying socially significant things, and who needs that (except the Party, comrade)? But I noticed that Criterion Channel had filmed versions by two of my favorite directors, Jean Renoir (Les Bas-fonds) and Akira Kurosawa (どん底, Donzoko), and I didn’t want to see them without first becoming acquainted with the source material, so I plunged in.

As those of you familiar with the play will have expected, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, it’s chock full of social significance, but it’s also got well-drawn characters and good meaty language, so I enjoyed it; one of the characters, Satin, is fond of randomly spouting impressive words he ran across (Органон [organon]… Сикамбр [one of the Sicambri]… Макробиотика [macrobiotics]… транс-сцедентальный [transcendental]…), which of course gave me extra pleasure. (Incidentally, I hadn’t realized that macrobiotic goes back to the 18th century in the now obsolete sense “Inclined or tending to prolong life; relating to the prolongation of life”: 1797 “Hence arises a particular science, the Macrobiotic, or the Art of prolonging it [sc. life], which forms the subject of the present work… The object of the medical art is health; that of the macrobiotic, long life.”) You can read a clumsy but reasonably accurate plot summary at the Wikipedia page; what I want to focus on here is the argument that goes on throughout much of the play about lies and truth, a theme that’s come up here more than once (in Crime and Punishment, in The Devils, in Rasputin’s Downstream). I’ll quote the (archaic but online) 1922 English version by Jenny Covan (from the introduction: “Here for the first time, the vigor, the virility, the humanity and the humor of the original survive the transfer from the Russian tongue to our own, without mysterious and vaguely symbolic ‘meanings’ gratuitously appended”) and provide a bit of the Russian for those who want to search the above-linked text for the original.
[Read more…]

Amy Glover reports for HuffPost on a phenomenon that seems to distress many:

You might already know that how long you can stand on one leg has been linked to your brain age ― the position involves coordinating different parts of your body and mind, making it uniquely useful as a marker of ageing. But not all the signs are medical, as anyone who’s ever looked at a festival lineup and thought “I don’t recognise a single name here” knows.

And recently, members of r/AskUK wondered whether or not the pronunciation of the letter “z” counts as one such marker. “I was horrified to learn that a fully British colleague of mine says ‘zee’ for the letter zed and he says he always has. Is this now common and I have just lost touch?”, a now-deleted poster asked. So, we spoke to clinical linguist and CEO of Dysolve, Dr Coral Hoh, about what was really going on.

“Yes, it’s generational but not confined to the UK alone,” the linguist said of the Americanised pronunciation. “It is also the case in other English-speaking regions,” she told HuffPost UK. “For example, in Southeast Asia, in countries like Singapore and Malaysia, speakers in their 30s-40s may use ‘zee’ and ‘zed’ interchangeably.” Meanwhile, she says, “their younger counterparts prefer the former, thanks to American influence.”

[Read more…]

I started Joe Zadeh’s Noema piece The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer and was pulled up short at the very beginning:

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of “bullwhip,” the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with “dose,” as in quantity, with a “z” thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.

I like the fact that they link to the actual newspaper; the relevant text is most of the way down the left-hand column of p. 2 of the Donaldsonville Chief for November 5, 1881, so you can verify the summary. The lively little obit begins:

Louis Albert Wagner, a dissipated German about 45 years old, committed suicide in New Orleans recently by taking a dose of laudanum. He lived in East Feliciana parish a number of years prior to his death, and was the reputed coiner of the word “bulldozer” that has grown into general use and received recognition at the hands of our contemporaneous lexicographers.

But of course it’s absurd to take your etymologies from newspaper stories, however colorful, so I wanted to investigate for myself; happily, the OED revised their entries for bulldoze and bulldozer in 2022, so we have as authoritative an account as can be obtained. The latter entry says:
[Read more…]

Margie Burns, author of the new book Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice’, summarizes her findings for The Conversation:

While 2025 marks Austen’s 250th birthday, the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appeared more than 400 years ago, in religious writings by English Protestants. As the daughter, sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England ministers, Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.

If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to “pride and prejudice” – as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.

While the usage began in the Church of England, other denominations, even radical ones, soon adopted it: “Pride and prejudice” appears in the writings of Nonconformists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Dissenters and other representatives of “Schism, Faction and Sedition,” as one anonymous writer called them. One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used “pride and prejudice” as a criticism. […] At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious toleration and in pleas for inclusiveness. […]

In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing. For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics and philosophy. These popular texts spread the phrase “pride and prejudice” to even more distant shores.

One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine. In his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy: “laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government[,] that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey.” […]

After the philosophers, the historians and the political commentators came the novelists. And among the novelists, female writers were especially important. My annotated list in “Jane Austen, Abolitionist” includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising “Pride and Prejudice.”

Click through for more details; I had no idea of any of this. Thanks, Bathrobe!