languagehat.com

The Economist reports on a little-known linguistic enclave (archived):

Introducing House Bill 561 to the Idaho Legislature, Ted Hill did not expect to stoke international controversy. The law, which originally banned local governments from flying the flags of non-states, was intended to stop Boise from flying the gay-pride flag. Earlier this year the president of the Basque Country, an autonomous region in Spain, sent a letter expressing concern about the effect HB 561 might have on the flying of the Ikurrina, the Basque flag, during Jaialdi, the 40,000-person Basque festival the city hosts every five years. Worried about flagging support for the bill, Representative Hill offered the Basques a carve-out for the Ikurrina.

Speakers of the language first came during California’s gold rush, then moved from mining to sheep herding. By 1900 chain migration saw nephews follow uncles as Basque shepherds spread across federal land. They carved 25,000 Basque-language messages into trees across the West. Some with Basque ancestry tried to shed it. “My great-grandparents’ generation said, ‘Learn English, don’t speak Basque.’ But my mom’s generation worked to get Basque back,” says Olaia Urquidi Beals of Txantxangorriak, a musical group. On Tuesday nights they gather with trikis (accordions) and panderos (tambourines) and sing in Basque. Afterwards, some musicians visit Ansots Basque Chorizos & Catering around the corner. Just down the road is Boiseko Ikastola, America’s only Basque-language pre-school.

There was a time, in the late 1970s, when it looked as if the language and culture would fade away, says Dave Bieter, a former mayor of Boise. Now when he plays Mus, a Basque card game, he says a third of players speak Basque. There are about 40 Basque clubs in America, mostly in the West. Jainkoak Amerika bedeinka dezala!

(That last exclamation means, according to GT, “God bless America!”) Thanks go to cuchuflete for what he calls a “superficial puff piece” but I call a fun bit of language fluff. Also, I’m glad to know there’s such a thing as a Basque-language pre-school in Idaho.

I’m finally getting around to Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which bulbul gave me back in 2018, and I thought I’d quote this passage from the introduction (p. 11; I added a few links):

Many errors arise from the interaction of more than one factor in the form and content of the text and the mental state of the scribe. One of the nicest examples of apparent error Christianus, the misreading in Petronius’ Satyricon 43.1 of ab asse creuit (‘he has grown from a penny’ or ‘he started out with only a penny’) as abbas secreuit (‘the abbot has hidden it away’), was almost certainly prompted as much by absence of word division in the exemplar and the scribe’s lack of familiarity with the coin term as, assis as by any grievances he may have harboured against his superior.

Finally, I cannot resist mentioning a slip for which I was responsible when editing the Canadian classical journal Phoenix. The Spring 1980 issue included a review of the edition of a text on military surveying, De metatione castrorum (‘On measuring camps’). In typing up the table of contents, I rendered the title as De metatione castorum, which could mean either ‘On measuring chaste men’ or ‘On measuring beavers’. An alert reader who adopted the second interpretation wrote to congratulate me on perpetrating such a quintessentially Canadian error.

It’s a well-written book full of good information, and I’ll probably be quoting more bits from it. Thanks again, bulbul!

This is the kind of thing that enrages me; Natricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg report in the Guardian:

When the Jamaican MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden speech, she was keenly aware of how much her country’s parliament mirrored the Westminster version thousands of miles away in London. […] Burchell, the opposition spokesperson for culture, creative industries and information, approached the microphone and began to speak. “Madam speaka, mi git up dis afta noon fi mek mi fuss sectoral speech, pan me portfolio …”

The speaker, Juliet Holness, immediately cut her off. “Hold on, hold on, hold on! Standing orders, and I think you are fully aware,” said Holness, who is the wife of Jamaica’s prime minister. The regulation to which Holness referred was the rule that only English – and certainly not Jamaican – is allowed in parliament. “If I have to stop you again during your presentation, you will not get any additional time,” Holness told Burchell as parliament erupted into protest, with someone chiding “broken English”.

Burchell had ignited an explosive debate across the country and beyond about the enduring legacy of British colonialism and whether robes, prayers for the British monarch and the “king’s English” are still right for Jamaica, more than 60 years after it gained independence.

Burchell continued her speech in standard English. “Madam speaker, perhaps I should abandon that attempt to use our local language because I have been reminded of the linguistic conventions of this honourable house,” she said. “Because maybe there is no more fitting way to begin a presentation on culture than to speak briefly in the language understood by the overwhelming majority of Jamaican people – even if that language still struggles for full acceptance in some of our most formal national spaces, including this very parliament.”

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I was reading about a recent documentary called Nuestra Tierra (apparently translated as both Our Land and Landmarks), which “examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and interrogates the role of this history in the murder of Javier Chocobar, a Chuschagasta leader in the struggle for indigenous land rights,” and of course wanted to know more about the Chuschagasta and their striking ethnonym — what language did they speak, for instance? There was no link attached to the word in that Wikipedia article, so I tried Indigenous languages of the Americas with no luck, even though its long list of “Widely-spoken and officially-recognized indigenous languages” went all the way down to languages with zero speakers. The List of Indigenous languages of Argentina and Indigenous peoples in Argentina were likewise no help. Eventually I googled up Manuel Lizondo Borda’s Estudios de voces tucumanas, Vol. 1, Voces tucumanas derivadas del quechua (M. Violetto & cia., 1927; Google Books, HathiTrust), where on p. 168 we find “CHUSCHA, n.p.”:

ORIG.: De CHHUJCHA: cabello (I; III, p. 176 y 239). La razón de nuestras acepciones 2ᵃ, 3ᵃ y 4ᵃ, parece estar, o está, en un poblado indígena llamado Chuschagasta o Chugchagasta (V. II parte), situado más o menos donde hoy se halla Chuscha, 2ᵃ acep.. Y habitantes de ese poblado, trasladados a Chuscha, 3ᵃ acep., dieron sin duda el nombre a este lugar; y de éste se originó seguramente el del río citado.
G. Holguín y Torres Rubio registran la voz quichua citado.

So apparently the name of the people is derived from the Quechua word given in Wiktionary as chukcha ‘hair’; I still don’t know what language they speak or anything more about them (or why they’re called both Chuschagasta and Chugchagasta), but let this serve as a reminder that there are many things in heaven and earth that are beyond the ken of Wikipedia.

Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward:

Pain is at the core of nostalgia, a term that a Swiss medical student coined in 1688 to diagnose a manifest malady, a homesickness intense enough to dysregulate the heartbeats of mercenaries serving abroad. Some of us are especially prone to such acute symptoms, but all of us, at one time or another, have experienced nostalgia as a proper ache. And yet, that isn’t what makes nostalgia a hard feeling to write about. There is often a sweetness to nostalgia, a sugar coating that, left unchecked, thickens until it obscures the 
painful kernel. The longing for a past purified of its faults—or a past we never knew firsthand, encountered only on the page, on the screen, or in tales told to us before sleep or from a podium—becomes an indulgence. What makes nostalgia difficult to treat honestly in poems is how easily some of us fall under its spell.

I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it. This inner conflict—my attraction to the past, my effort to remind myself that the past is always a dream—has guided much of my work as a poet and translator. I suppose I could blame my personal history. Uprooted as a child from my native town of Odesa, Ukraine, thrust into an alien culture, I sought comfort in memories: of playing in the park with herds of cats and one terribly loyal stray dog as the sun set, while old men swapped inflated war stories over games of checkers and dominoes; of racing back from the water of the Black Sea to bite into incomparably flavorful tomatoes sprinkled with salt; of listening to my mother’s guests crack jokes in our warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. The memories grew ever cleaner, ever more pillowy in response to my needs.

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Two unrelated things I’ve enjoyed recently that can be shoehorned in here via their relation to language and/or communication:

1) Ildikó Enyedi has been one of my favorite directors ever since I saw her weird, brilliant My 20th Century (Az én XX. századom); the other day my wife and I made a rare excursion to an actual movie theater to see her new one, Silent Friend (Stiller Freund). It too is weird and brilliant, not to mention mind-bogglingly beautiful, and its main focus is on communication with plants in three periods, 2020, 1972, and 1908. You can read a synopsis here, and I’ll quote the Director’s Statement:

It is a film made by humans (by an amazingly open minded, dedicated team) for fellow humans — the spectators. We humbly acknowledge and embrace our specific perceptual limits. This film speaks, with the help of light and sound waves available for the human eyes and ear, of world perceptions outside these limits. We acknowledge that we are not the default — our is one of the many, equally valid worlds. What is it like to be a tree? We don’t know. So, we won’t show it. Instead, we show human curiosity, touchingly imperfect attempts of connecting, of acknowledging the “other” and accepting that for them we are the mysterious “other”. We show glimpses through more than 100 years of the botanical garden of a university. A place that was always (“universitas”) the hub of free and limitless human curiosity, of science. In times when it is so dangerously questioned and attacked, we would also like to draw attention not only to the importance, but also the beauty and the naive, daring force of scientific research. It can help us walk down from the frighteningly dizzy spot on top of the pyramid to a place better deserved and more homey — to be part of this world.

Also, it stars the great Tony Leung. Highly recommended.

2) Konstantin Kakaes writes for Quanta about Peter Scholze and Dustin Clausen, who “are taking the first step in a far bigger program to understand why numbers behave the way they do”; it’s one of the rare general-interest articles on math that a nonspecialist can understand, and it makes me nostalgic for the long-gone days when I myself wanted to be a mathematician (I was interested in number theory, topology, that kind of thing, none of your applied math). This is the bit that made me want to bring it here:
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A NY Times interactive story about “the world’s rarest pasta,” by Matt Goulding, is interesting on a number of counts. Of course if one likes pasta it’s great to see it being made in such an elaborate way (“Stretched by hand, a single ball of dough is converted into 256 gossamer strands that are stretched across a drying rack called a fundo in a triangular pattern, to evoke the Holy Trinity”), but it’s the name that’s of Hattic interest: “su filindeu, the threads of God.” Actually, that has to be singular, because according to the Wikipedia article on Sardinian su is the singular article, the plural being sos. The town where the pasta is made is Nuoro (Italian pronunciation [ˈnuːoro] or “less correctly” [ˈnwɔːro]; Sardinian Nùgoro [ˈnuɣɔɾɔ]); the English article gives no etymology, while the Italian one provides some speculation (“Secondo un’altra interpretazione, il toponimo Nùoro deriva dalla radice paleosarda nur, da cui il termine nuraghe”). This map shows the dialect regions and gives the Sardinian names of major towns; you will note that the capital, Cagliari, has two very different names, as explained in the relevant Wikipedia article:

Cagliari was known to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians as Karaly (Punic: 𐤊𐤓𐤋‬𐤉, ᴋʀʟʏ). This was Latinized variously as Carales, Karales, Caralis, and Calares (grammatically plural). […] Over time the judicial city became the center of what is now the neighborhood of Santa Gilla or Stampace, and in medieval Sardinian was thus called Santa Igia (contraction of Saint Cecilia). With the arrival of Pisans the new citadel on the top of the hill was identified in the documents as Castellum Castri de Kallari and later by the Catalan-Aragonese as Castell de Caller in Catalan. Then on adoption of the Spanish language during Spanish rule the name became Callari and finally in the House of Savoy period the name was simply transliterated into Italian, obtaining the current Cagliari. In the Sardinian language the current name Casteddu identifies the city with the city’s fortified castle built during the rule of Pisa. Other scholars think that the name Casteddu is much older, going back to the very beginnings of Roman rule, and is nothing but the translation into Latin of popular Karalis. The two place names survived, the one as the official name of the Municipium (municipality) until today, the other as a literal translation of the Latin which became prevalent in common parlance when pre-Latin languages became extinct in the city and throughout the whole island.

Sardinian looks quite interesting; we discussed its prehistory last year.

Andrew Keh reports in the NY Times (archived) about a divergence in pronunciation that astounds me as much as if you told me a lot of people pronounced New York “NYE-rock”:

New Yorkers, among other neuroses, can be particular about the local vernacular.

You wait on line, not in line. The subway goes uptown or downtown, not north or south. And “the city” never, ever refers to the whole city — just Manhattan.

But for some reason, no matter how many times they’ve ridden the Long Island Rail Road out to Jones Beach or back and forth between Midtown and Ronkonkoma, New Yorkers can’t agree on how to pronounce it. The evidence has been on everyone’s lips since about 3,500 L.I.R.R. workers went on strike on Saturday. “There are a lot of things to debate and to discuss right now,” said Shekar Krishnan, a City Council member representing parts of Queens, including Woodside, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. “But there’s one thing that’s not debatable: We say Lurr.”

Try telling that to Kieran McShane, 69, a retiree who spent almost 40 years catching the 6:09 a.m. train from Babylon to Penn Station, the whole time calling it the L-I-R-R — each letter enunciated individually. “Now, I know certain people say L-I-double R,” he said. “But I’d never say that.”

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Ben Yagoda discusses a niche usage that produces hilarity among a restricted group of English-speakers:

In the language wars, I am pretty firmly a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) but even descriptivists have pet peeves, and one of mine is basketball announcers who refer to “made three-pointers,” “made baskets,” and “made field goals.” My problem here is redundancy—three-pointers, baskets, and field goals have by definition been made. But a separate issue is I find those phrases funny. Along with referring to a basket as a “make.”

To give you a sense of why, I quote from a message sent in 2017 to the language columnist of the Jewish magazine Tikvah, who has the pen name Philologus. The correspondent, an academic dean at MIT, wrote:

Last year, I found myself in a meeting at which the head of the entrepreneurship center was describing a new course he was excited about. Related to what has lately been described as the “Maker Movement,” it was to be a joint project of the Management and Mechanical Engineering departments that was supposed to get engineers and managers more involved in manufacturing by closing the gap between designs and products.

After stating this in his introductory remarks, the proposed giver of the course then announced its name: “Intro to Making.”

This cracked the dean up. However, he reported, “when I looked around the room, I saw that no one was smiling but me.”

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Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this LH post) features the 21st-century sense of “smart”:

The 21st-century tech industry has accomplished a lot of cool things, but among the most remarkable may be a trick of language: It managed to make the word “smart” feel repulsive and the word “dumb” sound appealing.

How else to explain the news that more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a “dumbphone?” (That’s a cellular handset with only basic features — perhaps an old-school flip phone with push-button T9 texting, or perhaps a purpose-built minimalist device like the Light Phone.) […]

The “dumb” attached to these products is creating retronyms — those labels, like “landline” or “snail mail” or “silent film,” that are only necessary in hindsight, after we’ve invented phones that roam and movies that talk. It wasn’t until a million gadgets started billing themselves as “smart” that we had any reason to distinguish their predecessors as less so. “Smart” arrived earlier than you might think: Ericsson called its GS88 a “smart-phone” in 1997, a decade before Apple entered the market. It was after internet-connected touchscreens were in everybody’s pockets, though, that we experienced the great push to make everything smart. […]

Here, too, there is a funny trick of language. Both “smart” and “dumb” seem to have arrived at their usual meanings via metaphor. “Dumb,” for most of its life in English, meant mute, unresponsive — stupefied, potentially, but mostly just silent. This is why a previous tech innovation was called the “dumb waiter”: It would pulley something upstairs without a word. The change to indicating stupidity is only a few hundred years old — recent enough that most of us have no trouble understanding a word like “dumbstruck.” As for “smart,” the original meaning is the one involving a sharp pain. But we use a lot of bladelike metaphors to describe intelligence — sharp, keen, cutting, incisive, piercing, penetrating — and sometime around the 16th century, “smart” attached itself to a sharp mind.

Which means that, on some strange level, we may have circled around to the origins of these words. The smart things are paining us. The dumb ones are blessedly quiet — which, at this point, can feel like the more intelligent option.

I like the etymological bit at the end, of course, but I highly approve of any and all bashing of the excessively connected life; click through for horrific examples like Smalt (a smart saltshaker that could interface with Amazon devices and dispense salt in an “interactive way”). Thanks, cuchuflete!