Archives for January 2006

In a previous entry I promised a series of posts with excerpts from Dixon’s Memoirs of a Field Worker, and since three commenters in that thread mentioned the story of the Mbabaram word for ‘dog,’ I think I’ll start with that. Here’s the setup:

When Ken Hale had sent the Jabugay tape, he’d urged me to find a speaker of Barbaram, the apparently aberrant language that Lizzie Simmons [“eighty years old, toothless, and cranky”–p. 54] had declined to speak to us. Certainly Dyirbal and Jabugay had very normal Australian grammar and vocabulary, not radically different from the Western Desert language, almost two thousand miles away. But from the few words that Norman Tindale had published of Barbaram, that language looked really different.

People at Mareeba had mentioned Albert Bennett, at Petford, and early one Sunday morning I set out to try to locate him… Albert was an oldish, square-framed man with curly grey hair. He was sitting stolidly on a bench just outside his open front door. I introduced myself, but he really wasn’t very interested. He didn’t remember any Barbaram language, but who’d want it anyway? What good was it?… Finally he volunteered a word.

“You know what we call ‘dog’?” he asked. I waited anxiously. “We call it dog.” My heart sank… [pp. 105-107]

And here’s the payoff, from his visit the following year:

Barbaram was still a major priority… I met the third and last living member of the Barbaram tribe, Jimmy Taylor, who had walked down from his barracks near the store… We had a good session, getting another seventy-five words and—even more important—bits of grammar… Most exciting of all, I could see a relationship between Barbaram and the other languages I’d studied. “Stomach” is bamba in Dyirbal but mba in Barbaram; “we two” is ngali in Dyirbal and Wagaman but li in Barbaram… Barbaram had simply dropped off the initial vowel and consonant… So Barbaram did seem to be a language of the Australian family, only it had undergone a quite regular change that had produced odd-looking words. Stress probably shifted from first syllable (as in Dyirbal) to second syllable—bámba to bambá. Then the first syllable was gradually dropped off in pronunciation, yielding modern mbá… [Dixon discovers at this point that the name of the language is actually Mbabaram and not Tindale’s “Barbaram.”]

Four years later, when I was spending a year at Harvard and first met Ken Hale, he pointed out that the e and o had developed in Mbabaram in the same sort of way as in some languages he had worked on from further up the Cape York Peninsula. An a in the second syllable of a word had become o if the word had originally begun with g. So from guwa “west”, Mbabaram had derived wo. We were sitting on a bench near Gloucester, Massachusetts one Sunday in September when Ken suddenly saw the etymology for dog “dog”. It came from an original gudaga, which is still the word for dog in Yidin (Dyirbal has shortened it to guda). The initial g would have raised the a in the second syllable to o, the initial gu dropped and so did the final a (another common change in the development of Mbabaram). Ergo, gudaga became dog—a one in a million accidental similarity of form and meaning in two unrelated languages. It was because this was such an interesting coincidence, that Albert Bennett had thought of it as the first word to give me. [pp. 125-129]

For a linguist, that kind of insight is as thrilling and beautiful as a really nice proof for a mathematician (which is what I once intended to be, and I still remember my excitement on understanding Gödel’s proof when I read this excellent book). And now I have another instance to set beside my standard Persian bad ‘bad’ when explaining to people that similar words are not necessarily related.

Mark Liberman has a very interesting Language Log post that takes off from an LSA paper by Alexandra Jaffe about “Transcription in Sociolinguistics: Nonstandard Orthography, Variation and Discourse”:

She started with her own work on the “polynomic” orthography of Corsican, where “variation in spelling is understood to be a systematic representation of coherent linguistic systems (regional dialects of Corsican)”. In contrast, she observed, we Americans most often use respelling to index stigmatized dialects. This effect is especially striking when the respelling represents ubiquitous, pan-dialectal pronunciations, like “wuz” for was, “hist’ry” for history, or “subjecks” for subjects.

Mark then repeats a quote from her handout, which I liked so much I will pass it on in my turn; it’s by the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard (see this post for more by him):

Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that’s no thi way a say it. Nif yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wit hi page covered in letters stuck thigither, nwee dots above hof thi letters, in fact yi end up wi wanna they thingz yi needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be able ti read. But that’s no thi way a think, as if ad took a course in phonetics. A doan’t mean that emdy that’s done phonetics canny think right—it’s no a questiona right or wrong. But ifyi write down “doon” wan minute, nwrite doon “down” thi nixt, people say yir beein inconsistent. But ifyi sayti sumdy, “Whaira yi afti?” nthey say, “Whut?” nyou say “Where are you off to?” they don’t say, “That’s no whutyi said thi furst time.” They’ll probably say sumhm like, “Doon thi road!” anif you say, “What?” they usually say “Down the road!” the second time—though no always. Course, they never really say, “Doon thi road” or “Down the road!” at all. Least, they never say it the way it’s spelt. Coz it izny spelt, when they say it, is it?

Perhaps if I reframe the first sentence as “normal” English, it will help those unfamiliar with the dialect: “You write down a word, and you say to yourself, that’s not the way I say it.” Let’s see, nwee is “and wee” and emdy is “anybody”; let me know if there’s something you can’t figure out.
He then discusses Mark Twain’s famous use of carefully rendered dialects in Huckleberry Finn, and in an update quotes an intriguing suggestion by Ben Zimmer:

[Read more…]

A new comment by MAB in the Pevear-Volokhonsky thread from a few months ago brings up Dead Souls, which I am reading in Russian, and reminds me of a gaffe I recently came across in Andrew MacAndrew’s translation, which I keep around as a backup for difficult passages. I’m on Chapter Seven, perhaps my favorite (it starts with a wonderful passage comparing a writer to a voyager, continues with Chichikov’s speculations on the lives of the dead serfs he’s buying up, and ends with a drunken feast and, in a final flourish, a boot-fetishist lieutenant from Ryazan who can’t make himself pull off his boots and go to bed), and in the course of describing the much-loved police chief who gives the feast, Gogol says: Даже все сидельцы обыкновенно в это время, снявши шапки, с удовольствием посматривали друг на друга и как будто бы хотели сказать: «Алексей Иванович хороший человек!» Which is to say, ‘Even the prisoners shop assistants would usually, in those days, taking off their caps, all look at one another with pleasure as if to say “Alexei Ivanovich is a good man!”‘ But MacAndrew has: “And all those around, their heads uncovered, would exchange glances which meant, ‘Yes, our police chief is a good man.'” He evidently mistook сидельцы sidel’tsy, which is on its face a derivative of сидеть sidet’ ‘to sit,’ for a deverbative meaning ‘the guys sitting around’ or the like. He forgot that ‘to sit’ is a long-standing Russian equivalent for ‘to be in prison’; in Russian, the normal way to say someone served a ten-year sentence is “He sat for ten years.” It’s true that sidel’tsy is not much used in that sense any more, but if you’re translating Gogol, it behooves you to seek out historical meanings. Anyway, if anyone has the P-V translation, could you let me know how they render this? It’s in a long paragraph not far from the end of the chapter.
Addendum. Tatyana has convinced me that sidel’tsy in fact means ‘shop assistants’ here; this does not change the fact that MacAndrews blew it, and I’d still be curious how P&V rendered it.

I’ve been reading, with increasing pleasure, R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, and I find myself unable to wait until I’ve finished it before sharing it with you all. It’s by far the best book I’ve read on what it’s like to be a field linguist, which is what I think of as a “real” linguist—it’s all very well to sit in an office and pore through monographs, but to me (and this is, or used to be in pre-Chomsky days, a typically American point of view) a linguist should be out there engaging with living languages, preferably ones that can use his services for purposes of education or salvage. His mix of linguistic description (carefully explained so that amateurs should be able to follow it) and reportage (he’s properly outraged by the appalling conditions under which Aborigines lived in Queensland in the early ’60s, when he first went to Australia, and he draws vivid word-pictures of his informants and other friends) is exhilarating, and if this book had been available when I was in college I’m pretty sure it would have inspired me to drop Indo-European and head to Australia myself (and I’d probably still be a linguist today).
Rather than trying to select a few paragraphs, an impossible task, I’m going to follow the lead of Joel at Far Outliers, one of my favorite blogs; while he’s reading a book, he posts nice fat chunks of it over the course of a week or so, giving a good idea of what it’s like. So you’ll be seeing a series of Dixon posts here; I’ll start small, with a little anecdote that reminds me of a scene from An American Werewolf in London. Dixon and his wife Alison are driving through North Queensland on his first field trip:

The heat was overwhelming as we parked our caravan on the only available plot… We went across to Lucey’s pub. Alison sat in the lounge while I went through to the bar—into which women were not allowed, by Queensland law—to ask for a coke and a gin and tonic. The weatherbeaten, red faces of the cattlemen sitting on stools around the bar all slowly swivelled and surveyed me. “Pommy!” ejaculated one of them. I was made to feel that no one had ever asked for a gin and tonic in that pub before.

I should point out that Dixon is not, in fact, a Pommy but a Scot who had been doing graduate work at Edinburgh, but it was clearly a distinction without a difference as far as the cattlemen were concerned. Or are Scots in fact Poms? I welcome clarification from Australian readers.
Addendum. I am informed by Claire in the comments that Dixon is in fact a Pom by any definition, being from Gloucester originally. He sure doesn’t advertise it in the book; I guess those surly cattlemen made a deep impression!

An essay by Dr Shadyah A.N. Cole in the Umm Al-Qura University Journal, “The Rise of Prescriptivism in English,” is a 23-page investigation of its subject. The abstract says:

The social milieu of eighteenth-century England gave rise to the middle classes. As their numbers, wealth, and influence grew, they felt the need for an authority on language to settle disputes of usage and variation. An English Language Academy was proposed but came to naught. Instead, dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson’s, and grammars, such as Robert Lowth’s, took the place of a language academy. Together, dictionaries and grammars were felt to have accomplished the three goals that were deemed necessary: to ascertain, refine, and fix the English language once and for all.

And the introduction gives a summary of her approach:

Where do these rules and exceptions to the rule come from? This paper traces the beginnings of the phenomenon of prescriptive grammars in English. Part Two describes the milieu which led to the writing of prescriptive grammars. Part Three details the attitudes toward language itself that prevailed at this time. Part Four discusses the call for an English Language Academy and why it failed. Part Five shows that an English dictionary and an English grammar were found to be adequate substitutes for an English Academy. In Part Six prescriptive grammars are discussed in detail, and Part Seven shows what the results of this prescriptivist movement are today.

Her conclusion is admirably even-handed:

Whatever the grounds on which the decisions were reached about the correct standards, however arbitrary the choice, however faulty the reasoning behind the choice, the work of prescriptivist grammarians has indeed led to the fixing of an amazing number of points of disputed usage.

You can see some further quotes in aldiboronti’s Wordorigin.com post, from which I shamelessly stole the link. I swear, aldi, I’d split the profits from this site with you if there were any.

In the course of investigating Joel Hoffman’s book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, I ran across David Steinberg’s useful web page “History of the Hebrew Language” (which cites Hoffman in the bibliography). It’s got tables of phonetic correspondences and brief descriptions of each phase of the language, with some interesting insights:

It is in semantics that Israeli Hebrew can be said to break radically with the past and semantically and hence culturally become a European language…
The process worked as follows. When reviving Hebrew, the revivers asked the “fatal question” i.e. “what is the Hebrew word for X” with X being a Yiddish, Russian or German (and more recently English) word. He would… select a Hebrew word (verb, adjective, noun etc.) with a historical semantic range that overlapped the particular meaning of the foreign word he was trying to translate. Then, the Hebrew word would come to mirror the semantic range of word X. I.e. it would take the range of meanings of X and lose all of its original meanings not included in the semantic range of X. This is a development with huge cultural implications…
[For example,] Biblical Hebrew taḥana (Israeli Hebrew takhana) was originally a fairly rare word, from a root meaning “bending down” used meaning a stop for camping. It was used for describing the Israelites camping places in the wilderness. The root being similar in meaning to se station[n]er in French, takhana was chosen as the Hebrew calque… of the word “station”. It is now used to translate any English use of station without any connection, any longer, with the root meaning. In fact, since “station” is not used in European languages to denote a camping place, it can no longer be used in its original meaning! Arabic used a more “authentic” approach i.e. the Arabic word for bus stop is related to the word “to stop”; for police station Arabic uses a word meaning center of diffusion. What this means is that Hebrew has accepted an idiosyncratic development of this vocabulary item which stems from internal developments in another, historically unrelated, language.
Similar developments have taken place for sherut to translate all senses of service and tenu’a… for all senses of movement e.g. scout movement!

However, I’m still trying to get a handle on the Hoffman book, which apparently has some controversial theories about how ancient Hebrew sounded (he discounts the entire Masoretic tradition). Anybody have an informed opinion they’d like to share?

I’ve been trying to lay off William Safire—we all know his limitations and he’s frequently amusing and occasionally even informative, so why keep thumping him?—but sometimes he says something so mind-bogglingly ridiculous I can’t be satisfied simply muttering at my copy of the newspaper, I have to go public. In today’s On Language column, he begins by quoting an allegedly new usage of the word good (in the reply “I’m good”), then calls it “one of the basic words of the English language – originally used in the place of God to avoid irreverence.” Wha? He seems to be claiming the word good was first (“originally”) used as a substitute for the word God (what, they stuck in the extra -o- to avoid blasphemy?), but surely even he can’t believe that. The OED knows of only one such use (“The Good, that guides And blessed makes this realm which thou dost mount”), and that’s from Cary’s 1814 translation of Dante. The original meaning of good was, not surprisingly, ‘good’—or, to be more specific, “Of things: Having in adequate degree those properties which a thing of the kind ought to have… Of persons, as a term of indefinite commendation.” It’s from a different Indo-European root, *ghedh- ‘to unite, join, fit’ (god is from *gheuH- ‘to call, invoke’); the similarity of sound is rhetorically useful but otherwise irrelevant.
He follows this historical blunder with a religio-semantic one: “Early on, I’m good meant ‘I am without sin,’ but that is now seldom the meaning.” I search the OED entry in vain for any hint of sinlessness; I search my memory of Sunday school for any suggestion that it was possible for human beings (with an exception or two, who didn’t speak English) to be without sin. I can only conclude that our boy William dashed the column off before his first cup of coffee and (as usual) nobody at the Times bothered to even read it over before sending it to the printer.
Incidentally, the last half of the column is devoted to dedication pages in books. Don’t ask me why.

People keep sending me the L.A. Times article “Cantonese Is Losing Its Voice” by David Pierson, so I might as well post it. As John Emerson put it in his e-mail, it’s “a mix of classic stupidities and interesting information.” Among the former: Cantonese is “a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions”; it “is said to be closer than Mandarin to ancient Chinese” and “is also more complicated” (because it has more tones, you see); and (a particular favorite) “it is far more difficult to learn Cantonese than Mandarin because the former does not always adhere to rules and formulas.” But there’s a lot of the latter too:

Popular phrases include the slang for getting a parking ticket, which in Cantonese is “I ate beef jerky,” probably because Chinese beef jerky is thin and rectangular, like a parking ticket. And teo bao (literally “too full”) describes someone who is uber-trendy, so hip he or she is going to explode.
Many sayings are coined by movie stars on screen. Telling someone to chill out, comedian Stephen Chow says: “Drink a cup of tea and eat a bun.”
Then there are the curse words, and what an abundance there is.
A four-syllable obscenity well known in the Cantonese community punctuates the end of many a sentence. […]
Even quintessential Hong Kong-style restaurants, including wonton noodle shops, now have waitresses who speak Mandarin, albeit badly, so they can take orders. Elected officials in Los Angeles County, even native Cantonese, are holding news conferences in Mandarin.
Some Cantonese speakers feel besieged.
Cheryl Li, a 19-year-old Pasadena City College student whose parents are from Hong Kong, is studying to become an occupational therapist and volunteers at the Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, where most of the patients are Chinese.
Recently, she was asking patients, in Mandarin, what they wanted to eat. When one man thought her accent was off, he said, “Stupid second-generation Chinese American doesn’t speak Mandarin.”
Li responded angrily, “No! I was born here. But I understand enough.”
“We’re in the minority,” she added, reflecting on the incident. “I’m scared Cantonese is going to be a lost language.”
Still, Li is studying Mandarin.

I suspect the “four-syllable obscenity” mentioned in the article is diu nei lo mo, cited by the esteemed Jimmy Ho in an enjoyable LH obscenity thread.
Addendum. See also Amida’s irritated response to the article.

I have come across yet another of the internet’s little-known lexicographical resources, Babawilly’s Dictionary of Pidgin English Words and Phrases:

Pidgin English is spoken widely across Nigeria. It is a language made up of elements of the Queen’s English and the local dialects. With Nigeria having about 250 tribes in all, one finds a lot of variation in the type of Pidgin English spoken by the different ethnic groups. In this compilation I have limited myself to what I would call ‘Lagos Pidgin’ as this is what I am familiar with. The three major Nigerian languages namely Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa feature prominently in Pidgin English in general, however with Lagos being historically a Yoruba city ‘Lagos Pidgin’ consists of a disproportionately high number of Yoruba words.

A couple of entries will suggest the flavor:
Dey: 1. Is e.g. wetin dey happun 2. Location e.g. where you dey 3. Stance in the matter e.g. which one you dey sef. 4. In existence 5. Spectacular e.g. dat car dey well-well.
Dey laik Dele: (Dele is a Yoruba name) 1. I am barely surviving e.g Man juss Dey laik Dele. 2. Being idle e.g You juss dey there laik Dele . Also – Standing like Standard Bank, Looking like Lucozade and Dey like you no dey.
I was led to this site by investigating a Lagos term used in teju cole, a temporary blog reporting on a visit home by a Nigerian long resident in the U.S.; it’s full of beauty, sadness, and keen observations on life in Nigeria and in general, and I recommend it to your attention before it vanishes away at the end of the month.
Addendum (June 2008): Correspondent Adim alerts me to Naija Lingo, “a dictionary for people who want definitions to Nigerian words or slang, names and phrases and created by the people (you) who know them. Naija Lingo is an open dictionary where you the user are free to add and edit words as time changes, and as the meaning of words evolve and new words are formed.”

When the occasion arises to discuss the English phrase that once meant what is unambiguously termed petitio principii but is now universally (except by pedants) used to mean “raise the question,” I used to reflexively link to my earlier discussion of the issue (scroll down to final paragraph). Now I have another choice: the latest episode of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics. Many thanks to John Emerson for the prompt heads-up!