Archives for January 2014

An interesting Science News story (I’ve added italics and a link):

English speakers struggle to name odors. While there are words such as blue or purple to describe colors, nothing comparable exists to name odors. Even with familiar everyday odors, such as coffee, banana, and chocolate, English speakers only correctly name the smells around 50% of the time. This has led to the conclusion that smells defy words. Majid and Burenhult present new evidence that this is not true in all languages.

Majid and Burenhult conducted research with speakers of Jahai, a hunter-gatherer language spoken in the Malay Peninsula. In Jahai there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell. For example, ltpɨt is used to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, bearcat, etc. Cŋɛs, another smell word, is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, etc. These terms refer to different odor qualities and are abstract, in the same way that blue and purple are abstract.

…Majid and Burenhult found that Jahai speakers could name odors with the same conciseness and level of agreement as colors, but English speakers struggled to name odors. Jahai speakers overwhelmingly used abstract Jahai smell words to describe odors, whereas English speakers used mostly source-based descriptions (like a banana) or evaluative descriptions (that’s disgusting).

I don’t know how convincing it is, but it’s certainly suggestive, and it’s the sort of thing I like to see linguists looking into.

Addendum. Charlotte Mandell (see this post) sent me this link to Robert Kelly interviewing poet Anne Gorrick about some long poems she’s written “that seem to have grown from a profound engagement with scents, perfumes, the chemistry of attraction and repulsion”; she says “I think it’s funny that we can all agree on what we see, what we hear, what we taste and feel. But not necessarily on what we smell. It’s as if we don’t have the language yet for the sense of smell, but we’re working on it.” There’s a lot of interesting stuff about how we react to smell. Thanks, Charlotte!

I continue to find thought-provoking nuggets in How to Read the Bible (see this post); this passage in the “Tower of Babel” chapter makes an obvious point that had never occurred to me:

As with the story of Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel narrative has, for modern scholars, certain clearly etiological elements: not only its explanation for the name Babel, but also its accounting for the dispersion of peoples across the Near East and the replacement of an originally single, common language by an array of different, mutually incomprehensible idioms. Behind this latter element, too, modern scholars see a message not about the world as a whole, but something rather more local and specific. Semitic languages all appeared to be related: any native speaker could tell that Babylonian and Assyrian and Aramaic and Hebrew all had common roots and expressions, but a speaker of one tongue would not necessarily understand much of what was being said in the others. It is this reality, rather than the existence of different languages per se, that the story seems out to explain: all the peoples of the ancient Near East did, it says, originally speak the same language, but that unity was destroyed quite intentionally by God.

Of course, once Sumerian had fallen into desuetude, all languages spoken in the area would have been clearly related, and the story makes much more sense.

Slavomír/bulbul sent me a link to Ján Štrasser’s “My Onegin,” a very interesting account of how Štrasser came to translate Pushkin’s poem that includes a history of Slovak poetic translation and some examples comparing his version with others and with the Russian original (and “using Nabokov’s hyperfaithful translation to get as close to the original meaning as possible”). I love this kind of thing, and Slavomír says he enjoyed it too, but with the caveat that “some of the decisions are questionable:

For example in “Dosť života som na zábavy / s pôžitkom vedel premrhať”, the verb “vedel” indicates habituality, which doesn’t go at all with the finality of “dosť života” – there being only one life, one cannot habitualy do something with parts of it. Or when he translates “nahorkastý” as “embittered” and describes it as a colloquialism, he’s totally off: “embittered” (describing a person’s emotional state and attitude) is “zatrpknutý”. “Nahorkastý” is used exclusively in describing taste, whether literally or figuratively. And when he says “the personal pronoun is placed at the very end of the line. This is completely unnatural in Slovak”, he’s also wrong – “mučia ma, zjavujú sa mne” is perfectly cromulant Slovak. You would normally expect a clitic form there, but even the full form is acceptable, especially is there’s focus on the pronoun.

I leave it to Slovak speakers to judge these fine points, but as bulbul says, it’s well worth reading no matter how you feel about line-end pronouns.

I’m a little late getting to this, but check out Stan’s Introducing Indo-European Jones over at Sentence first:

…Jonathon Owen replied that he wished he’d been given a “leather jacket, bullwhip, and fedora” upon graduation, James Callan said he wanted to see an “Indiana Jones pastiche focused on a linguist”, and I felt it was a meme waiting to happen. So without further ado, let me introduce Indo-European Jones (or Indy for short).

It’s a lot of fun (“Nothing shocks me … I’m a linguist!”), and you can add to the meme yourself; he links to the blank image he used.

Mark Liberman at the Log has a very interesting post about the common origin of prepositions (and postpositions), verbal prefixes, and adverbs in the Indo-European languages, quoting Virginia Anne Goetz’s 2006 dissertation, “The development of Proto-Indo-European local adverbs into Germanic prepositions and verbal elements” (O = object; see Mark’s post for other explanations):

In the initial stage of its development, PIE x was a free constituent in a functional language. Its role was to add a place adverb (xv) modality to a sentence. Often it related a case-bearing object to a verb. In the sequence OxV, for example, O ( – village) might be in the locative case and x would provide additional place adverb information to relate O to V (= go):

the village – toward, within, into, through, around, etc. – go.

From this earliest stage, there were innovations which related x to the object or to the verb. Sanskrit and Hittite are considered to be the most conservative in terms of these developments. There are in these languages some recurring expressions in which x appears to have an attachment to a case-bearing object as an O-x, so that Sanskrit and Hittite may be seen to be on the cusp of developing x as a case assigner. […] In these languages, x was mostly xv (a free adverb of place) or part of an OxV. In the latter, the role of x is ambiguous in terms of [verb proclivity] versus [object proclivity].

The most innovative in terms of x development are Latin and Greek. While there is still some relic structure, especially in older Greek, the “classical” stages of these languages have b.xv (bound verbal prefix), x-O (“preposition”) and xv (“adverb”).

The early Germanic languages, and hence reconstructed Proto-Germanic, fall between the extremes of the conservative (Hittite, Sanskrit) and the innovative (Latin, Greek). While Germanic has a group of b.xv’s and sets of x-O, it still retains x’s that are ambiguous.

There’s plenty of other meaty historical stuff there; Mark’s conclusion:

From PIE to the present day, the consistent driver of change in this arena has been re-analysis — typically, syntactic re-interpretation of a functional relationship. Sometimes this is simply re-parsing of an ambiguous sequence, as when O x V was interpreted as O x-V. And sometimes it’s a simplification of a more complex structure, as when by cause that S becomes simply because S.

I don’t have strong opinions about whether the different functional and structural relations involved should be terminologically split or lumped or both — but I think that Geoff [Pullum] makes a good case for seeing the complex usage patterns of words like in, from, and because as variations on a single grammatical theme.

Makes sense to me.

As a follow-up to this recent post, I thought I’d share this quote from an excellent book I copyedited a few years ago (and am now understanding a lot better), The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies by Michael Legaspi; he’s discussing the University of Halle (founded 1694):

More significantly, Halle successfully dispensed with that foundation of medieval learning, the Autoritätsprinzip [principle of authority — LH]. In the view of Münchhausen and his advisors, professors in too many places still accepted the outmoded notion that education consisted of the faithful transmission of authorized knowledge. Halle had been among the first and most notable German universities to reject the Autoritätsprinzip in an open and self-conscious way. As the first of the German Enlightenment universities, Halle exemplified the way that higher education in the period served the aims of “a monarchical court bent on using [the university] to provide the state with a deconfessionalized ruling elite.”

While I’m quoting Legaspi, I also liked his discussion of varying Christian attitudes toward the Masoretic vowel points:

Crises provoked by the Reformation, however, did not only intensify interest and investment in biblical interpretation. They also created the conditions for a stringent textualism that functioned to objectify the Bible, remove it from its larger ecclesial contexts, and turn it into a kind of hermeneutical battleground. A stringent approach to the textuality of the Bible, or rather to its state of textual corruption, became, within only a few generations, a fundamental premise for Catholics and Protestants in their respective theologies of scripture. The nature and extent of this textualization of the Bible in the seventeenth century is illustrated by the remarkable collaboration of Reformed scholar Louis Cappel (1585–1658) and French Oratorian Jean Morin (1591–1659).

Both were involved in the heated controversy over the age and origin of the Masoretic vowel points in the Hebrew Bible. The traditional Jewish view in the sixteenth century was that the consonants and vowel points of the Hebrew text were both part of the original Sinaitic revelation. The reformers and their Roman Catholic opponents, by contrast, asserted that the vowel points were comparatively recent and of human origin. In 1538, Elias Levita (1469–1549), a leading Jewish scholar in his generation, provided a definitive refutation of the antiquity of the vowel points in his Masoret ha-Masoret. In the wake of Levita’s challenge, the earlier Christian consensus evaporated. Roman Catholic theologians, relying on Levita’s scholarship, argued that the vowel points, which were only added later, were necessary to understand the consonantal text. Thus, they reasoned, Protestants committed to sola scriptura and veritas hebraica did not have direct access to the Old Testament. Not only were they reliant upon tradition for their understanding of the Bible, they were reliant upon Jewish tradition. To escape this predicament, many Protestants took sides with Jewish traditionalists and affirmed the antiquity and divine origin of the vowel points. Their great champions in this effort were the Buxtorfs of Basel, Johannes the elder (1564–1629) and Johannes the younger (1599–1664), the most influential and respected Christian Hebraists of their time.

The Buxtorfs’ most famous opponent, though, was not a Catholic polemicist. It was philologist and fellow Protestant Louis Cappel. In 1624, Cappel published anonymously a work entitled Arcanum punctuationis revelatum, or Mystery of the Points Revealed. In it he provided a devastating refutation of the elder Buxtorf. Cappel argued that debates in the Talmud refer not to the pointing activities of the Masoretes but to interpretive problems that arise from working with an unpointed text. Cappel also adduced various historical and philological arguments for the antiquity of the points; for example, that Jerome and the translators of the Septuagint knew nothing of pointed texts, that the names of vowels and accents have Aramaic and not Hebrew names, and that the marginal qere, which show how to pronounce the kethib, are, oddly, never pointed. Cappel argued further that unvocalized Hebrew consonants, contrary to Buxtorf’s opinion, do not permit arbitrary readings. Like Arabic, Hebrew, he argued, is perfectly readable without vowels; its syllabic structure and the occasional use of consonants to stand for vowels (matres lectionis) prevent the consonantal text from being fatally indeterminate. Finally, Cappel showed that the Masoretes developed the system of points in order to fix the tradition of vocalization no earlier than the second half of the first millennium of the Common Era.

The changing Protestant position is a good example of philology following theology.

I can’t resist passing along this footnote from How to Read the Bible (see this post):

Mention here should be made of the proposal by F. Masclef in his Grammaire hébraique (1716) that Hebrew consonants be vocalized according to the first vowel in the name of the letter in question: thus, when the letter bet occurred in a word, it was normally to be vocalized as be, while a gimel should be vocalized as gi and a dalet as da. Thus the word consisting of the letters dalet, bet, and resh should be vocalized as daber. In addition, the letters alef, waw, heh, heth, yod and ‘ayin also sometimes functioned as vowel signs, representing, respectively, the vowels a, e, i, u, ai, and â. The name of Moses, written with the letters mem, waw, shin, and heh, should thus be pronounced: Meshi. This nutty system actually won other adherents, including, prominently, Charles F. Hioubigant [sic; should read Houbigant]…

You can read the second edition (1743) of Masclef’s Grammatica Hebraica a punctis aliisque inventis Massorethicis libera at Google Books: Vol. 1, Vol. 2.

Via Anatoly, I present “Mistresses and Marriage: Or, a Short History of the Mrs” (pdf), a paper by Amy Louise Erickson about the complicated history of the word mistress and its abbreviations Miss and Mrs. Here’s the abstract:

The ubiquitous forms of address for women ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’ are both abbreviations of ‘mistress’. Although mistress is a term with a multiplicity of meanings, in early modern England the mistress most commonly designated the female equivalent of master — that is, a person with capital who directed servants or apprentices. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, there was only Mrs (or Mris, Ms, or other forms of abbreviation), applied to any adult woman who merited the social distinction, without any marital connotation. Miss was reserved for young girls until then. Even when adult single women started to use Miss, Mrs still designated a social or business standing, and not the status of being married, until at least the mid-nineteenth century. This article demonstrates the changes in nomenclature over time, explains why Mrs was never used to accord older single women the same status as a married woman, and argues that the distinctions are important to economic and social historians.

Among other interesting points, the abbreviation Mr. was voiced as “Master” for boys and “Mister” for adult males, and I liked this footnote:

This observation, I discover, long predates me: in a footnote to the first American edition of Samuel Pepys’ Diary, Richard, Lord Braybrooke comments, ‘It is worthy of remark, that the fair sex may justly complain of almost every word in the English language designating a female, having, at some time or another, been used as a term of reproach; for we find Mother, Madam, Mistress and Miss, all denoting women of bad character; and here Pepys adds the title of my Lady to the number, and completes the ungracious catalogue.’

A couple of years ago jamessal gave me a copy of How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James L. Kugel, and I’ve finally gotten around to it (prompted by the fact that he’s now reading it himself); it makes an excellent companion to the Schniedewind book quoted in this post. I’m about halfway through the first chapter, “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship,” and I want to pass along this section, a nice illustration of how language and culture can interact:

To enter the world of scripture’s mysteries was thus a matter for trained professionals; only a priest or a monk schooled in the ways of fourfold interpretation, and especially in the interpretations of his predecessors, could say for sure what this or that verse meant. It would never occur to ordinary people to try their hand at interpretation—to begin with, they did not own their own Bibles, and they could not read. No, the Bible was something that ordinary people experienced in other ways. It was read aloud in public, preached about at church or in open markets; its stories were illustrated on stained glass windows and mosaic floors and the carved capitals of columns; it was recounted in poems, sung in hymns, and retold in passion plays—in these ways the Bible was everywhere, and no one escaped its influence. But its interpretation was not up for discussion; that had been decided a long time ago.

There was a word in medieval Latin for what drove this attitude toward Scripture: auctoritas. This is our word “authority,” but it had a special resonance in Latin. It was what the auctores—meaning both the “authors” and the “authorities”—had established long ago. Their wisdom—set down in the writings of the Church Fathers and later Christian teachers—could never be challenged, nor would anyone ever want to. (In fact, when, as sometimes happened, a later scholar had a new idea, he would usually seek to connect it to something that had been written by an earlier, authoritative figure—“This is what Augustine really meant when he said X or Y.”) Auctoritas was all- powerful and unquestioned: the Bible meant what the authorities had always said it meant. […]

[Auctoritas began to be widely questioned during the Renaissance.]

One contributory factor in the breakdown of auctoritas was the rapidly spreading knowledge of the Hebrew language among Christians. Until the late Renaissance, an astonishingly small number of Christian scholars had any notion of this tongue (although they could easily have learned it from the Jews in their towns). Starting at this time, however, Christians began to learn biblical Hebrew (as well as Greek), soon aided by the availability of little primers on the language’s grammar and vocabulary, written in Latin and printed on the recently invented printing press. Throughout the Middle Ages, the great authority on Hebrew in the Christian world had been the fourth-century scholar Jerome, translator of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. His writings about the Hebrew language in general as well as about specific words were repeated unquestioningly. Now, at first tentatively and later with greater assurance, Christian scholars began to question his authority, until some finally dared utter the words, “Jerome was wrong.” Soon, everything was up for grabs. Careful scholars ought, of course, to consult the writings of their predecessors, but people no longer assumed that the proper understanding of the Bible lay in the translations and commentaries of the past. Now they could read the Bible’s words for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

Ah, the primal thrill of extricating yourself from the swaddling clothes of dependence on Authority and finding yourself able to say “Jerome was wrong”! (For Jerome, of course, substitute Lenin, your father, or whatever might be appropriate.)

I have little patience with “word of the year” hoopla; as I wrote to Paul T. (who agreed), it seems like pure marketing nonsense.  (Needless to say, if people enjoy it, I don’t begrudge them their enjoyment — this is Liberty Hall, and I speak only for myself.)  But Geoff Pullum has an extremely interesting point to make about the American Dialect Society’s choice of because with noun phrase (a phenomenon discussed, among many other places, in Megan Garber’s Atlantic Monthly article “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet“) in his Log post Because syntax, namely that because is a preposition and not, as most dictionaries call it, a conjunction. He begins by going into great detail about why it isn’t a conjunction and then explains why because of isn’t a preposition before giving his own conclusion about because:

Contrary to all the dictionaries, it is a preposition. As its complement (the phrase that follows it to complete the PP) it may take either a clause (as in the PP because he holds ridiculous beliefs) or a PP with of as its head (as in the PP because of our public universities). Some prepositions can occur with no complement (as in We went in), some require an NP (as of does) some require a clause (as although does), and some require a PP (like out in those uses that do not involve exiting from delimited regions of space: notice that They did it out of ignorance is grammatical but *They did it out ignorance is not).

The change that has caught the eye of the American Dialect Society is simply that because has picked up the extra privilege already possessed by prepositions like of: it now allows a noun phrase (NP) as complement (with a subtly different shade of meaning: because money seems to express only a rather vague and non-serious commitment to the idea that the reason is financial).

It’s all good stuff; read the whole thing.