Archives for July 2012

SOLAR PLEXUS.

I was reading one of gilliland‘s wonderful posts, Jul. 11th, 2012 (in exhilarating Russian, like all of them), where after discovering the phrase таёжный богатырь ‘mighty warrior of the taiga’ (anybody know the original source? Google tells me it’s applied to Yakuts, Russians, and bears) I came to grief on “на уровне солнечного сплетения” ‘on the level of the sunny… interlacing?’ I got a good laugh on looking it up and discovering that солнечное сплетение [sólnechnoye spleténie] means, and is the literal equivalent of, ‘solar plexus,’ plexus being the past participle of Latin plectere ‘to plait, twine, interweave.’ But this led to another question: why the devil is the solar plexus called that? The dictionaries say it’s so named because of its radiating nerve fibers, but I’d be curious to know the history of the term. (It’s properly called the celiac plexus, celiac meaning ‘of the cavity’; I hadn’t known that either.)

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO PLAYERS.

I ran across a link to this remarkable document some years ago and was charmed and amused, but figured it was probably a fake. But apparently it’s been authenticated by none other than Keith Olbermann, so as a lover of both baseball and filthy language I can’t resist passing it along. Here’s the introduction from Letters of Note, to set the scene:

This incredible memo, purportedly issued to all Major League Baseball teams in 1898 as part of a documented campaign — spearheaded by John Brush — to rid the sport of filthy language, was discovered in 2007 amongst the belongings of the late baseball historian Al Kermish, also a respected collector of memorabilia. Essentially an on-field code of conduct, most amusing is that the memo was in fact so expletive-laden and obscene as to be “unmailable” to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League’s 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.

Warning: filthy language!
Addendum. I just discovered, while going through old posts for my tenth-anniversary compilations, that I wrote about this back in 2007. I grow old, I grow old…

THE CULPRITS OF SOUND CHANGE.

Mark Rosenfelder has another gem at zompist.com (which I really should visit more often): Sound change: Who are the culprits? He starts off:

I just finished William Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors, which is a detective story. No, really. You don’t expect a linguistic tome to have the literary quality of suspense, but this book does. It’s organized around the central puzzler of historical linguistics: why does language change? Why do people bother with sound changes, especially when everyone agrees that they’re destructive if not positively evil? It takes the whole book to create a framework to answer the question.

Rather than keep you in suspense, I’ll quote Mark’s summary:

◘ The leaders of sound change are almost always women; they’re often a generation ahead of the men.
◘ Women keep advancing a sound change in a linear fashion; men’s advance is stepwise. The obvious interpretation is that men don’t pick up the change from their contemporaries, but from their mothers.
◘ There’s a typical curvilinear function of class: neither the lower class nor the upper class are in the forefront of change, but those in the middle– even more specifically, the upper working class.
◘ Nonstandard variants often peak in adolescence. So older speakers may retreat from a change.
◘ There’s only a very small contribution from ethnicity or neighborhood (except to the degree that these correlate with class).
◘ A phoneme doesn’t change all at once; some words are leaders, some laggards. For some reason, the tensing of short a in Philadelphia strongly affected the word planet, while Janet remained lax. (This is reminiscent of the effect of Trojan horse words in gender change.)

He also “was able to identify individuals who were in the forefront of sound changes in Philadelphia”; go to the link for the exciting details. (Via Sentence first.)

MORE FROM BOBRICK.

In hopes of enticing slawkenbergius to share more of his hard-won knowledge, herewith a couple more language-related anecdotes from Benson Bobrick (see yesterday’s post). First, on the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689:

The talks got under way on August 12, and were conducted through interpreters in Latin, with the Chinese relying on two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Francis Gerbillon and Thomas Pereyra (both long resident in Peking), and the Russians (for form’s sake) on Andrei Belobotskii, a university-educated Pole, although Golovin was fluent in Latin himself.

(Russian Wikipedia says that Belobocki, as his name would be spelled in Polish, was actually named Jan, but Google says “Your search – Jan Belobocki – did not match any documents.”) It makes sense that Latin was used for an international conference in the seventeenth century, but I’ll bet not many people would have guessed the Russians and Chinese would have so employed it. And here’s a bit on the unfortunate Dembei, a Japanese merchant clerk who was shipwrecked and floated to Kamchatka, where he was rescued from the Kamchadals by Vladimir Atlasov:

Atlasov brought him to Anadyrsk, from where he was conveyed under escort to Moscow in 1701 and presented to Peter the Great. Peter made him the nucleus of a Japanese language school in the capital, but despite a promise to the contrary, never allowed him to return home. Eventually, he was baptized under the name of Gabriel, but lived out his days in profound melancholy in St. Petersburg — the first casualty of Russia’s chronically troubled relations with Japan.

(I imagine slawkenbergius will object to the editorializing about “Russia’s chronically troubled relations with Japan.”)

FOR WANT OF A TRANSLATOR.

From my latest reading, Benson Bobrick’s East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia, this striking anecdote about early Russian contacts with China:

In pursuit of the commercial bounty that might flow from relations with such a highly developed state, Ivan Petlin, Russia’s first envoy to China in 1618, had returned with a letter of invitation to trade. But unfortunately the Russians were unable to find anyone to translate it until 1675! That lapse in linguistic competence within the Russian foreign service had such drastic consequences for their later relations that seldom has the lack of a little academic knowledge meant so much. For even as hostilities arose, the negotiation of a bilateral trade agreement — the Kremlin’s original objective — remained the principal motive behind Russia’s bellicose acts.

ALOUETTE, PEAR TREE, GOAT.

A correspondent writes, apropos of teaching kids songs like “Frere Jacques” and “Alouette”:

The latter (Alouette) is bringing back memories: specifically, I recall vaguely from my childhood in l’Acadie that speakers of Quebecois French would often end a long list with “alouette, alouette” (which is how the verse ends, after a long list of the parts of the bird that the singer plans to pluck), as a humorous way of saying “well, that was a long list, wasn’t it?” In this respect, the phrase “alouette, alouette” could be considered the Quebecois French equivalent of “and a partridge in a pear tree,” which you hear used in English for exactly the same thing, and which has its origins in a similarly structured counting-rhyme.
In our house, the Aramaic phrase “chad gadya, chad gadya” (“one little goat, one little goat”) often serves the same function. It comes from the Passover song of the same name, and it holds the same position in the song as the phrases “alouette, alouette” and “and a partridge in a pear tree,” i.e., that of last term in a long list of counted items; but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone else do this, in English or Hebrew, so I don’t know whether it constitutes a third example. I suppose it would be too much to ask for there to be other counting-rhymes in other languages which have given rise to similar phrases – but maybe you could poll the LH readership to see, assuming you think it’s an interesting question too?

I do, and I welcome all contributions.

SEMICOLONS: A LOVE STORY.

A nice post by Ben Dolnick (on the NY Times Opinionator blog) describing how he overcame a Vonnegut-inspired contempt for the semicolon and learned to appreciate it: “But I can’t agree that semicolons represent absolutely nothing; they represent, for me anyway, the pleasure in discovering that no piece of writing advice, however stark, however beloved its deliverer, should ever be adopted mindlessly.” Thanks, Paul! (Semicolons previously on LH: 2004, 2008, 2009.)

PROFANITY IN THE NEW YORKER.

Unfortunately, John McPhee’s New Yorker piece “Editors & Publisher: The name of the subject shall not be the title” is not online (you can read an abstract here)—it’s a delightful reminiscence, and I recommend it if you have access to the physical magazine (July 2, 2012 issue)—but the magazine’s blog has Mary Norris’s “Dropping the F-Bomb,” which points out that McPhee “broke new ground in this piece by using ‘fuck’—as verb, noun, adjective, and interjection—fourteen times in a single paragraph” and discusses other aspects of the magazine’s battle (now, happily, over) against profanity, as well as the proposed “‘activating’ hyphen” in star-fucker (which I would, in any case, write as one word).
And on the Russian front, don’t miss Sashura’s post on the jargon used by Russian office workers, which includes this classic:

Фуй – fui, from FYI (for your information) read phonetically, with the English ‘y’ read as the similarly looking “у” [u, or u:]. This one is wonderful, because ‘fui’ is not only a slightly archaic interjection of disapproval or disgust, but also a mask-word for the very powerful, unprintable swear-word “хуй” (khui – cock). BFM says фуй is widely used in office correspondence.

CHADORS AROUND THE WORLD.

A correspondent writes:

I am fascinated by the way chador has entered other languages but with different meanings, eg in Serbian it means tent (šator), in Indonesian bed-linen (cadar). Does anyone have or know of a comprehensive list?

An excellent question! The sources of all these far-flung words are Turkish çadır ‘tent’ and its etymon, Persian chādor ‘tent; chador‘; the first cousin that came to my mind was Russian шатёр [šatyor] ‘tent,’ about which Vasmer says:

шатёр, род. п. -тра́, укр. ша́тер, шатро́, др.-русск. шаторъ (Нестор, Жит. Бориса и Глеба; см. Абрамович 10), шатьръ (Ипатьевск. летоп., Георг. Амарт.; см. Истрин 3, 346), сербск.-цслав. шатьръ σκηνή, болг. ша́тър, сербохорв. ша̀тор “шатер, палатка”, ша̑тра “прилавок, лавка”, словен. šátor, слвц. šiator, польск. szatr м., szatra ж. “цыганский шатер”.
ORIGIN: Древнее заимств. из тюрк.; ср. казах. šаtуr “палатка”, тур., азерб., уйг., тат., алт. čаdуr “шатер, палатка”, шор. šаdуr, саг., койб. sаdуr (Радлов 3, 1903 и сл.; 4, 387, 969, 972). Первоисточником является перс. čаtr “заслон, палатка”, др.-инд. cháttram “заслон”; см. Мелиоранский, ИОРЯС 10, 4, 134; Мелих, ZfslPh 4, 96 и сл.; Бернекер I, 133; Мi. ТЕl. I, 270; Гомбоц 115 и сл.; UJb. 8, 271. Ввиду наличия š- Мелих (там же) предполагает венг. посредство.

What puzzles me is that he derives the Turkish word from Persian čаtr, which my dictionaries say means ‘umbrella’ but which he defines as ‘screen, tent,’ rather than from chādor, and that he derives the Persian word from Sanskrit cháttram, which he defines as ‘screen’ but which my Sanskrit dictionary says is an alternate reading of chāttram ‘spindle’—other sources say or imply that the Persian word is of unknown origin.
Other cousins I’ve turned up are Hungarian sátor ‘tent,’ Greek τσαντίρι [tsa(n)díri] “[a gipsy’s] tent” (which makes me wonder if Kalderash Romani tsera ‘tent’ is related), and Albanian çadër ‘umbrella.’ With that, I throw the floor open and welcome further variants as well as elucidation of the interrelationships of all these words.
Addendum. Earlier discussion (thanks, MMcM!).

THE ZORIL IS A MUISHOND.

My eight-year-old grandson was over here playing Scrabble this afternoon; we let him use the Scrabble dictionary to look for words because it’s good for his vocabulary, and when I walked in he had just played the word zoril (and was winning handily). Not knowing the word, I looked it up in Webster’s Third New International and discovered that it was either a striped muishond or a North African muishond related to the striped muishond. This was not a great help, so I looked up muishond and learned that it was “either of two southern African weasels that are black with white stripes and that emit a fetid odor when disturbed.” All right then! But the interesting thing is that both odd-looking names are perfectly transparent when you know their etymologies; zoril, more commonly zorilla, is from a diminutive of Spanish zorro ‘fox,’ and muishond (pronounced /ˈmeɪs(h)ɔnt/ “MACE-haunt” because it’s Afrikaans in origin, from “transferred and spec. uses of Dutch muishond weasel, stoat”) is literally “mouse-hound”—in fact, the OED sends you to a separate entry mouse-hunt “An animal that hunts mice; spec. a weasel, a small stoat,” an earlier borrowing from Dutch (< muus mouse n. + hont dog; apparently altered after hunt) that goes back to the fifteenth century and was used by Shakespeare (“Moth: I you haue beene a mouse hunt in your time”).