Archives for November 2008

Andrey Zaliznyak, a Russian historical linguist, gave a talk last month “On professional and amateur linguistics” that can be read (in Russian) here (found via Anatoly). I recommend it to anyone who can read Russian; for those who can’t, I’ll translate an excerpt of general applicability:

In school they teach the spelling and grammar of one’s native language and elements of foreign ones, but they don’t give even a basic idea of how languages change over time. As a result, to satisfy their lively interest in questions related to language, most people must content themselves with whatever information they happen to read or encounter on radio and television. But many try to get answers to these questions by means of their own thoughts and guesses. The fact that they have mastered their own language gives them the feeling that they already possess everything they need to understand the subject, and they only need to think a little in order to get correct answers. In just such a way arises what can be called amateur linguistics.

It must be admitted that part of the blame for the situation lies with the linguists themselves, who take little trouble about the popularization of their science…

In discussing one folk etymology (relating помада [pomada] ‘pomade’ to the verb мазать [mazat’] ‘to grease, smear, anoint’), he makes the point that when confronted with the true etymology (the word is borrowed from French), available in Vasmer’s etymological dictionary, people are likely to say “So what? Vasmer has one hypothesis, and here’s another; why is it any worse?” That inability to see what makes one explanation better than another is a basic problem here as well as in Russia.

He gives an interesting example of a kind of nonsense that is apparently widespread in Russia: some people claim that “not only did Moscow exist before Rome [which is Rim in Russian], but it was by Moscow’s command that the Etruscans built the city and named it Mir [‘peace,’ ‘commune,’ ‘world’] in the spirit of Russian tradition. Since Etruscans read in the reverse direction, it was read as Rim. In this city, built by the Etruscans, for whom Russian was their native language and Etruscan was a kind of soldiers’ jargon, Russian was heard for a long time. Only much later, when Latins moved to Rome, did they distort it according to their own phonetics and grammar.”

A most enjoyable little article at Néojaponisme, by Matt Treyvaud of No-sword, discusses the short, inglorious career of the Japanese “dead word” naui ‘now-y,’ “a mayfly of a word, declared dead almost as soon as it was born [in 1979], reviled as a desperate attempt to squeeze a few more youth dollars out of an already-uncool borrowed English lexeme (‘now’)”:

Back then, naui wasn’t without competition. For example, imai 「今い」, was a roughly contemporaneous and structurally identical synonym based on the Japanese word for “now” instead of the English one. But naui bested all contenders on sheer charisma. The precise image it invokes of an awkward middle-aged man finger-quote “rapping” with the finger-quote “kids” kept it in the vocabulary of both middle-aged men oblivious to their own awkwardness and all those embarrassed by and for same.

One interesting bit is a casual name-check of Cartaphilus, one of the versions of the Wandering Jew—to quote the Wikipedia entry, “a Jewish shoemaker, who, when Jesus stopped for a second to rest while carrying his cross, hit him, and told him ‘Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?’, to which Jesus, ‘with a stern countenance,’ is said to have replied: ‘I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day.'” A more familiar name is Ahasver or Ahasuerus (under which name the Russian Wikipedia, as well as some other Slavic languages, places the story).

Some of you may remember a post from last year in which I marveled at the Fry and Laurie sketch Language Conversation; I am happy to report that Stephen Fry, in his new blog, has a post called “Don’t Mind Your Language…” in which he deals seriously (well, as serious as Fry ever gets, which is serious wrapped in a delicious coating of good humor and brilliant wit) with the same topic. It is a long post and I urge you to consume every morsel of it; here I will excerpt a passage that, for reasons obvious to anyone who has spent any time here, gave me particular delight:

Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. …

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A very interesting post at A Small Gleaning Factory (“notes + observations in the style and spirit of bouvard & pecuchet”) is called “Birth of Taglish, or Why Niknok Spoke That Way.” The intro will explain the title:

Reading the passage below made me understand the phenomenon of Taglish, or the admixture of Tagalog and English. When I was in grade school, we would rush to the school library every week to read the latest Niknok komiks. Niknok, who I guess is kind of a Denise the Menace or Bart Simpson-like character, constantly found himself in trouble with his elders and with his use of Taglish. I remember educators being upset by the example Niknok supposedly held for us youngsters. Of course, this ‘problem’ had a different inflection for us in the Visayan region where we spoke the Cebuano vernacular. Instead we were reprimanded for speaking dialect in class, a vernacular that I was slowly learning.

The rest of the post is a long excerpt from Vicente Rafael’s White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Duke UP, 2000); here’s a paragraph to whet your appetite:

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I’ve been reading C. V. Wedgwood‘s classic history The Thirty Years War in an attempt to understand a very messy period of European history, and am finally, among many other things, getting a handle on who was Calvinist and who was Lutheran and why so many Catholic powers (including the Pope) opposed the ultra-Catholic Habsburgs. Wedgwood is one of those gifted storytellers who can lead the reader on a reasonably clear path through a dark forest, in this case the mind-boggling complexity of the Holy Roman Empire—quite literally, in the way she shows how the position of the Palatinate athwart the route the Habsburgs needed to take to resupply their troops in the Spanish Netherlands made it central to events at the beginning of the war.

But I’m not here to talk about the war (“Don’t mention the war!“), I want to discuss the many German words descended from Latin palātium ‘palace’ (originally the Palatine Hill). I vaguely knew that the Count or Elector Palatine (an older equivalent is palsgrave), the ruler of the Palatinate, was so called (in the OED’s words) “as exercising the sovereign’s authority in certain matters, or as having a jurisdiction within a given territory such as elsewhere belongs to the sovereign alone,” and I knew that the German equivalent of Palatinate was Pfalz; what I didn’t know was that Pfalz is also an old term for a palace, which makes perfect sense given its etymology (MHG pfalz(e), pfallaz, phal(e)nze, OHG phalanza, phalnze, from post-classical Latin palantia, an alteration of palatia, a feminine singular arising from reinterpretation of the plural of classical Latin palātium). Knowing that the normal word for ‘palace’ is Palast, I looked that up in my trusty Lutz Mackensen and discovered that the -t is secondary; the earlier form Palas is still in use for some sort of lordly building (there’s no English Wikipedia entry, and it’s not in my unabridged German-English dictionary, so I don’t know how to translate it). Furthermore, there’s a borrowing from French of the same word, Palais. That seems like more descendants of palātium than any language really needs.

Charles Nydorf has a blog proposing that Yiddish began as a form of the Gothic language:

Contact with an older form of Yiddish, got me back to thinking about the origins of the language and its relations to other members of the Germanic family. I remembered an observation of Professor Robert Austerlitz that although Yiddish was quite different from German, it was typologically very much a Germanic language. Perhaps, I thought, its origin lay not in a German dialect but in another Germanic language. I starting looking at other Germanic languages with which the early Ashkenazim could have come into contact in Europe. The first possibility I looked at was Old Scandinavian which was spoken by Varangian settlers in Ukraine between about 800 and 1000. The match was not particularly good and I turned to the East Germanic languages, known through Gothic, that were spoken in eastern Europe between about 1 CE and 700. Gothic proved to be a surprisingly good typological match with Yiddish and I eventually concluded that the earliest Yiddish took a Gothic form.

Here‘s his post on “The Gothic Background of Yiddish.” I don’t know nearly enough to begin to evaluate this proposal, but as far as I know, the standard history of Yiddish puts its origin on the other side of the German-speaking world, in the Rhine region. Does anybody have any informed thoughts about this? (Thanks for the link, rootlesscosmo!)

When I read this post by Joel of Far Outliers, I felt a lightbulb go off in my head:

Last weekend, I also had the opportunity to meet a scholar visiting from the Czech Republic, who repeatedly referred to her nation as Czechia—a most sensible formulation which I subsequently found to have had official sanction since 1993 (along with Česko, the Czech equivalent), but which seems to be very slow to spread among English speakers, who perhaps still feel guilty about agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 and want to compensate by resisting any attempt to shorten the fuller form of its current name. However, feeling no guilt on that score despite my English heritage, I henceforth resolve to refer to that glorious center of historic dissidence as Czechia, plain and simple. In fact, I’ve just added Czechia to my list of country categories for this blog. I had already added Bohemia before, but that does no justice to Moravia, which has, if anything, an even greater tradition of religious dissidence.

Sure enough, the Czech Republic Country Guide says: “Czechia is the official one-word name of the Czech Republic. In 1993 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic in its memorandum to to all Czech embassies and diplomatic missions recommended to use the full name ‘Czech Republic’ only in official documents and titles of official institutions.” I have often lamented the absence of a simple term like “Czechia” in English, but never realized that I could be helping to spread it and save people the trouble of constantly repeating “the Czech Republic.” I hereby join Joel in his resolve.

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

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I didn’t post about the passing of Studs Terkel, one of my few remaining heroes, because it didn’t seem to have any relation to the ambit of LH, but I am pleased to find, via Arnold Zwicky at the Log, that I am wrong: his writings were a great resource for linguists.

Studs Terkel, who died recently, at the age of 96, had a special place in the hearts of some linguists — those who were studying the syntax (and accompanying pragmatics) of colloquial Englsh, back in the old days, before very large corpora and automated search techniques were easily available.
There were essentially two says to investigate colloquial language non-anecdotally: collect your own corpora… or use other people’s corpora, collected for other purposes… Collecting your own corpora is hard work… Piggy-backing on other people’s corpora hugely simplifies the task.
That’s where Studs Terkel comes in. He spent decades interviewing (mostly) ordinary people and publishing the conversations, and he was fantastic at establishing a rapport with the folks he interviewed. The result was a body of corpora that’s a goldmine of data for (some) linguists, from Division Street (1966) on….
In the old days, you still had to search through the texts by hand, mark all the relevant examples, code them, put them on index cards (so that they could later be sorted and counted on your living-room floor, or its equivalent); it helps a lot if the stuff you’re reading actually has some interest for you. … Studs’s books were a big help.

So thanks, Studs, not only for being a mensch and giving public voice to the hitherto voiceless, but for helping linguists do their work. You’ll be missed by even more people than I realized.

My initial thought was that this Telegraph story must be a joke, but since it quoted a bunch of real people and the date wasn’t the first of April, I reluctantly concluded it must be factual:

Local authorities have ordered employees to stop using the words and phrases on documents and when communicating with members of the public and to rely on wordier alternatives instead.
The ban has infuriated classical scholars who say it is diluting the world’s richest language and is the “linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing”.
Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.
This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.
Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes “for this special purpose”, in place of ad hoc and “existing condition” or “state of things”, instead of status quo.
In instructions to staff, the council said: “Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult.”
The details of banned words have emerged in documents obtained from councils by the Sunday Telegraph under The Freedom of Information Act.
Of other local authorities to prohibit the use of Latin, Salisbury Council has asked staff to avoid the phrases ad hoc, ergo and QED (quod erat demonstrandum), while Fife Council has also banned ad hoc as well as ex officio.

This is, of course, gibbering idiocy, but what puzzles me is the fact that a number of councils have taken such measures, which suggests to me that there is somewhere in the U.K. a failed Latin student whose bitterness is such that he could not be satisfied with writing outraged letters to The Times but embarked on a tour of the land, stopping in Bournemouth, Salisbury, Fife, and who knows where else long enough to convince a majority of the local councils to ban the hated tongue.
I am happy to report that classicist and blogger Mary Beard has posted an appropriate response:

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