Archives for December 2002

EL CASTELLANO EN NUEVA YORK.

Today’s NY Times has an article by Janny Scott about the researches of Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella into the nature of Spanish in New York City; they are attempting to determine whether the various immigrant dialects are maintaining their identities or merging into a unified “New York Spanish.” One focus of research is the use or nonuse of subject pronouns:

The use of subject pronouns in Spanish has long been of interest to linguists. (There is an entire book on so-called subject expression among Spanish speakers in Madrid.) In English, the subject of a sentence is always expressed; in Spanish it can be, and often is, left out.
For example, where an English speaker would say “We sing,” a Spanish speaker could say either “Nosotros cantamos” or simply “Cantamos.” Linguists say Spanish speakers from the Caribbean tend to use a lot of pronouns; people from Central and South American countries use them less.
“What makes New York City interesting, and why we grabbed this issue, is that New York contains people from areas that differ with respect to this feature,” said Ricardo Otheguy, a professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a researcher on the project.
“It’s interesting to compare Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Cubans with the Mexicans, who use few pronouns,” he said. “And communities are different in their exposure to English. The Mexican community in New York is new; the Puerto Rican community is well settled.”

Otheguy is also studying borrowings from English:

For example, he said, early Spanish-speaking settlers in New York were mostly from the Caribbean, so they took “the winter vocabulary of English,” creating words for things like steam, coat and boiler — words that are spoken rather than written but that resemble their English counterparts.
“Many times the loan takes place even though there is a word that’s usable and perfectly accessible to the people who borrow the English word,” he said. “So it isn’t simply a matter of filling a gap because the gap ain’t there. The person knows a Spanish word and uses both of them.”

The Times article will only be available for a week, but here is a good piece (in Spanish) on Otheguy’s research.

(Note: I learned my Spanish in Buenos Aires, where they call the language castellano, whence the heading of this entry.)

HA!

From Dr. Weevil:

Someone once told me that the University of Pennsylvania was reshaping its language departments a few years back and briefly considered putting Hebrew in with Russian, Polish, and German. It wouldn’t be easy to come up with a brief and accurate description for such a disparate collection of languages, and someone facetiously suggested that it could be called the Department of Semitic and Anti-Semitic Languages.

And from Alas, a Blog:

Headline from the English edition of Pravda:
“Black to Swallow Planet Earth”
The story (which turns out to be about a black hole about 6,000 light years away, rather than a very hungry person of color) also contains a new definition of “good news”: “This is good news, is it not? It’s like learning that there is a blood-thirsty killer living next door to you.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO ‘THOU’?

Mark, in the comments to an earlier entry, brought up an interesting point: why did the “thou/thee” form disappear from English (except for a few dialects)? There is a fascinating discussion of this on LINGUIST List, from which I quote the following, by Larry Trask:

English-speakers began to use ‘you’ as a respectful singular in the 13th century, probably under French influence. Except in conditions of intimacy, ‘you’ quickly became established as the ordinary way for an upper-class speaker to address an equal, as well as a superior, and by the 16th century ‘thou’ was all but non-existent in upper-class speech, except in addressing obvious inferiors. Naturally, this usage began to be copied by the middle class, and by the 16th century ‘thou’ was likewise rare in middle-class speech, except in addressing obvious inferiors. But ‘thou’ lingered long among working-class people, especially in rural areas, and it still survives today in parts of the north of England, where it has reportedly become something of a badge of solidarity.

None of this requires any particular explanation, but one point does: why did the non-reciprocal use of ‘you’ and ‘thou’ in power-based relationships disappear? Now, as Brown and Gilman argue in their famous paper [“The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Ed. T. A. Sebeok. Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. 253-277], there has been a steady trend (now mostly gone to completion) in European languages to replace the older non-reciprocal power-based use of T and V pronouns with a newer reciprocal solidarity-based use. Something similar appears to have happened much earlier in English, with the added twist that `thou’ was driven out of the standard language altogether. Nobody knows why, but Leith has an interesting suggestion. He proposes that 16th-century England, in comparison with most other European countries, was characterized by a fluid and prosperous middle class, in which rapid rise was possible by entrepreneurial success. England, he argues, therefore lacked the comparatively rigid social structures typical ofother countries, at least as far as the middle class was concerned. Whereas every speaker of French or Spanish knew his own station and knew that of everyone else, so that power-based non-reciprocal usage could be readily maintained, a middle-class English person was by comparison insecure: he could never quite be sure whether a stranger was an inferior, an equal, or a superior. Therefore, Leith concludes, the reciprocal use of ‘you’ rapidly took hold among the middle class as the safest option, as a safe way of avoiding giving offense to a person one might need to do business with or ask favors of.

Another discussion includes pronoun distinctions in Italy, Belgium, Australia, and Providence (Rhode Island), and an article on the subject by Sara Malton includes a bibliography for those who wish to pursue this intriguing issue further.

Addendum. There is a discussion of this going on at Page of Moss; no Korean yet, but lots of Mongolian and Buryat, as well as a reference to the prerevolutionary honorific use in Russia of the third person plural for a single individual: a housemaid, asked if her master were in, would reply “Yes, sir, they are.” Also, Karin has this to say:

In Norwegian it is du – informal and de – formal. I always found it a pain in the neck. De always felt awkward to me, but as a child I was supposed to use it when talking to grownups: teachers, my sister’s in-laws, the tramcar conductor, neighbors—you name it. It was such a relief coming to the US and just say you. Easy, comfortable, no (class distinction). Thank you English!

I have also found a discussion of the polite-pronoun issue here; Mark J. Reed is investigating the matter and presumably will put a summary of what he learns online when he learns it; the phenomenon of voseo (use of the singular pronoun vos as a neutral form of address, avoiding the choice between and usted, used in Argentina and Uruguay and less widely elsewhere) is described here (some illustrations here); and Mikhail Epstein discusses the ideology of Soviet forms of address, including Vy/ty, here (scroll down to CHAPTER 9. IDEOLOGICAL SYNTAX: FORMS OF ADDRESS). A sample:

Ideological language, however, most often combines the familiar pronoun with the formal name and patronymic: “ty, Aleksei Nikolaevich.” This form of address is the norm between members of the Communist Party, even in the Politburo. Such a combination reflects the two-fold nature of ideological language: in addressing an ideological brother it is impossible to use the vy form, but since this “brother” is not a blood-relation, it is necessary to retain some element of formality when addressing him. The element of formality was strengthened when ideological language became the official language of Soviet society. Ideological language is thus simultaneously brotherly and official, a combination of familiarity and formality.

HIRSEL.

It is not often that I (lexicomane that I am) run across an English word with which I am entirely unfamiliar, but I have just encountered “hirsel” for the first time. It is primarily a Scottish and northern word meaning ‘the entire stock of sheep on a farm or under the charge of a shepherd’; it is related to “herd” (though borrowed from Old Norse hirzla, from hirtha ‘to herd, tend’), which is a help in remembering its meaning. I found it in the following passage (from an interesting article, “The Ecology of Medieval English Monasteries” by Austin Mardon of Greenwich University):

Several of the herds that roam the Yorkshire dales today have existed continuously since the 13th century. It is worth noting that it is illegal to sell off a complete hirsel from any mountain because it takes several generations of sheep to learn their individual “sheep-walk” and some of the older, experienced sheep must be left to guide the young, who would otherwise starve.

I hope the law is still on the books; I like it a great deal.

DU REFORM.

I have learned from Avva that Swedish, which used to have a formal/informal pronoun distinction Ni/du comparable to French vous/tu or German Sie/du, has virtually lost it, and the change occurred in a remarkably short time. The origins of the change are recounted in a fascinating discussion at soc.culture.nordic; as Jan Böhme explains,

Bror Rexed, when he became General Director [of] the National Board of Social Issues and Medicine (Socialstyrelsen), in 1968(?), issued a formal decree[…] that he wanted to be called by first name and “du”, and expected the rest of the staff to do the same.

The development was considerably speeded up when Olof Palme, as new Prime Minister in 1969, let reporters call him “du” on live broadcasts.

One reason the change occurred so quickly is that Swedes traditionally addressed anyone with a title by that title, using the third person: “Would the professor like more tea?” (Jan Böhme’s father was called “Mr. Appeals Court Justice” until the late ’60s.) Thus the use of “Ni” was slightly derogatory, implying that one’s interlocutor had no title or office worth bothering about. With that kind of system, it must have been a relief to start using one pronoun for everybody. The interesting thing is that, according to Jon Kåre in the same discussion,

Norway almost immediately followed Sweden in adopting “du”, although our polite form of address was simply “De”. That is, the system was like in French or German, and not at all like in Swedish.

If anyone knows anything more about this, please leave a comment.

Avva speculates on the possibility that Russian itself might lose its parallel Vy/ty distinction within a generation, since young people routinely use “ty” with each other, but decides it’s unlikely because of the ingrained use of the distinction to reinforce subordination in the workplace: the boss addresses his underlings as “ty” and they must respond with “Vy.” Avva despises this (as would I), but since he lives in Israel he doesn’t have to put up with it.

Addendum. Avva points me to a discussion by Dmitri Evmenov of the origin and history of Swedish Ni; it was originally I, borrowed from German, and became Ni through reanalysis (ären I > äre ni).

Further addendum. Des says Ni is making a comeback (thanks to SAS)! See comment #4 within.

LEXICOGRAPHY IN A HARD TIME.

The most moving dictionary preface that I know of adorns the second volume of the Persidsko-Russkii Slovar’ [Persian-Russian Dictionary] by M.A. Gaffarov (Mirza Abdallah ebn-e Abd-ol-Ghaffar Tabrizi). The first volume (alef to zhe), replete with explanations of roots, proverbial usages, and quotations from Hafez and Sa’di, had appeared in 1914; the second was delayed by circumstances that will readily, I am sure, suggest themselves. I will let the editor of the second volume tell the story:

The second volume of M.A. Gaffarov’s Persian-Russian Dictionary makes its appearance thirteen years after the publication of the first and twenty years after the author began his work. The editor of the first volume, Academician F.E. Korsch, has since passed away, and almost the entire work of putting together the second volume has gone on without his irreplaceable participation. Between the appearance of the first volume and that of the second—everything has changed, even the generally accepted spelling of the Russian language. The initial pages of the second volume (up to the word saf) still preserve the form in which they were published following the appearance of the first volume, i.e., in the old Russian orthography. After the aforementioned word the spelling, paper, and typeface of the book all change—the pages were printed last year and this year, when it has been necessary to content oneself with whatever paper could be found, and to take such type as the printers now have available.

Naturally, during the preceding years, so rich in events and changes for both Persia and Europe, the languages have changed as well. Both the Persian and Russian languages now include many new words and terms, for the most part pertaining to the social and political spheres, that did not exist when the basic text of the dictionary was being prepared. This unavoidable obsolescence of the material had to be rectified by an extended edition. For the sake of keeping to the plan, it was decided to place all new words and meanings, as well as words added to remedy omissions, in a special section of Addenda. These addenda are quite extensive—the lexicon has undergone too many changes, introduced into the language by life. The not infrequent emendations of the basic text, as well as the not infrequent misprints, are due for the most part to the conditions in which the author was forced to work before and during the war. He worked in the evenings, in the course of long years, after a whole day’s labor. The setting of type of various sizes, with lead lining, as well as the lack of skill and experience of the young compositors observable in the beginning, also made matters more difficult and multiplied the deficiencies of the book.

The late F.E. Korsch in his preface to the first volume pointed out the significance of the Dictionary…. The present Dictionary represents the fruit of the living linguistic feeling and extensive erudition of an educated and intelligent Persian. Therein we may see the fundamental significance and fundamental value of this work. The Dictionary presents the entire lexical stock of its author. Thus everything in the Dictionary represents an indisputable fact, existing in a living linguistic consciousness, whereas in the heretofore large Persian dictionaries too much has represented the fruit of the compilers’ copying, with varying degrees of critical scrutiny—sometimes greater (Vullers), sometimes lesser (Steingass), and sometimes completely lacking in criticism (Jagiello). In the present Dictionary, perhaps in some respects less material is given, but all of it is unconditionally reliable in the above sense….

For many words in the Dictionary, examples are cited from colloquial, literary and poetic language. On occasion a poetic citation will be encountered even for a word whose meaning would be clear without it. The author thinks that some excess in this respect is no great sin, and hopes that readers and critics will excuse him.

L. Zhirkov.

The author of the preface was Lev Ivanovich Zhirkov, “one of the founders of national literacy for many unwritten languages of the Northern Caucasus and of the Turkic languages of the USSR” (Vsemirnyi biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’). I am happy to report that he lived to a ripe old age and died in 1963.