Archives for February 2016

This YouTube video (four and a half minutes) has Winnie-the-Pooh’s song (Russian lyrics here) in Avar, Ossetian, Darghin, Kumyk, Lak, Lezghin, and Tatar (and at the end, for good measure, English, German, and Russian). Fun! (Via Steven Lubman’s Facebook post.)

Update. And here‘s a four-minute clip of Winnie in Chechen!

A reader writes:

I’d like to know whether there is a linguistics term for a compound made up of two doublets. I suspect the phenomenon is so rare – the only unforced example I can think of in English is “head chef” – that no-one’s ever seen the need for a term. But I’d love to have this confirmed. (I’ve read that literary Burmese delights in using such compounds, so perhaps there’s a term in Burmese – but I know nothing of that language.)

My interest stems from writing on the history of coffee in Indonesia and encountering the Indonesian compound “kopi kawa” (a tea-like infusion made from coffee tree leaves), both elements derived from Arabic qahwa. The transmission route from qahwa to kopi is well established, but perhaps paradoxically that from qahwa to kawa is unclear.

I suspect there is no such name, but it’s an interesting topic, and all thoughts are welcome.

I hope I haven’t posted this before, but it’s good enough it deserves a repeat if I have: the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas has “thousands of web pages, most of them devoted to ancient Indo-European languages and cultures”; Paul sent me their links for Old Church Slavonic and Old Irish, and they’re just terrific — if only I’d had this material available in grad school, four decades ago!

Keely Savoie of Mount Holyoke College reports on a literary genre I was unfamiliar with:

It was once inconceivable: girls and young women pursuing higher education away from home, where they lived in dorms with one another, apart from their families.

But after Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837 as the first of the Seven Sisters schools, higher education for women gained a foothold in American culture. Soon after, a new literary genre was spawned: “college girl fiction.”

“In the early twentieth century, it was suddenly possible for more women to go to college, so it became common enough that you could actually write books about it—and young girls would buy them,” explained Leslie Fields, head of Archives and Special Collections at Mount Holyoke.

Four display cases containing the College Girl Fiction exhibit will be in Dwight Hall through February 15. Each case, individually curated by a different student assistant in Archives and Special Collections, depicts an aspect of the popular imaginings of the lives of college women living away from home.

One of the cases focuses on Doris, A Mount Holyoke Girl: “The 1913 book is a first-person narrative of a fictional student who attended Mount Holyoke College from 1846 to 1847.” Another is on college girl pulp fiction. If you’re in the area, check out the exhibit; I always enjoy this sort of thing.

In today’s NY Times, Charles Kurzman presents some depressing news (if you’re a fan of cosmopolitanism):

With the permission of Will Shortz, the Times’s crossword puzzle editor, I recently downloaded all of the newspaper’s crosswords from February 1942, when the puzzle began, through the end of 2015. I created an algorithm to search all 2,092,375 pairs of clues and answers for foreign language words and place names outside the United States.

The results are imperfect, since the puzzles can be tricky and there is a lot of overlap between English and foreign words. But the broad trend is clear. The puzzle today uses one-third fewer non-English clues and answers than it did at its peak in 1966, and makes two-thirds fewer international references than its peak in 1943.

For many years, the puzzle expected educated Americans to know the German word for “with” (mit) and the Latin word for “man” (vir), for example. These words have all but disappeared from the puzzle. Solvers were expected to know details about America’s military operations, such as “Mountain battlefield” in 1943 (etna) and (misleadingly, since the answer is actually Japanese) “Forever!: Korean battle shout” in 1951 (banzai). Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, by contrast, appear in the puzzle barely more often than before the United States sent troops to each country. Since the 1990s, puzzlers were occasionally asked to recognize “Burkina ____” but over the last few years, they were given additional help, “Burkina ____ (African land)” and “Burkina ____ (Niger neighbor)” (the answer is “Faso”). […]

So are we going to see Vietnamese or Korean in The New York Times crossword?

“I want the puzzle to reflect our common culture,” Mr. Shortz notes, meaning that the answers and clues should have at least entered the general conversation before they appear. After a moment’s reflection, Mr. Shortz noted that the puzzle did include a Vietnamese word last year. The clue was “Vietnamese soup” (pho).

“This is a word I did not know a few years ago, but it has now become embedded enough in American culture that I can expect American readers to know it. With Vietnamese restaurants in many cities, it has become mainstreamed,” he said.

Recently, the puzzle added “Vietnamese sandwich” (banh mi).

Kurzman sums up, “When we turn from the New York Times news pages to the puzzle page, the rest of the world fades away.” There are interesting tidbits in the rest of the article, as well as some very cool charts.

The cries of the multitude have been heard, and Songdog, the omniscient site administrator, has added a plugin while updating LH to to WP4.4.2; you should now be able to edit your comments for a five-minute interval. Use your power wisely!

Update. The omnipotent Songdog has heard your pleas and has increased the window to 15 minutes. All hail Songdog!

From the Guardian, Not the oignon: fury as France changes 2,000 spellings and ditches circumflex:

French linguistic purists have voiced online anger at the loss of one of their favourite accents – the pointy little circumflex hat (ˆ) that sits on top of certain vowels.

Changes to around 2,400 French words to simplify them for schoolchildren, such as allowing the word for onion to be spelled ognon as well as the traditional oignon, have brought accusations the country’s Socialist government is dumbing down the language. […]

The reforms provoked a #JeSuisCirconflexe campaign (derived from the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag) on Twitter. As the row spread across the internet and social networks, some wondered why the reforms, decided 26 years ago, had suddenly become such an issue.

In 2008, advice from the education ministry suggested the new spelling rules were “the reference” to be used, but it appears few people took notice. Last November, the changes were mentioned again in another ministry document about “texts following the spelling changes … approved by the Académie Française and published in the French Republic Official Journal on 6 December 1990”. Again, the news went unremarked.

It was only when a report by television channel TF1 appeared on Wednesday this week that the ognon went pear-shaped.

A furious student union group issued a statement lambasting education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem for “believing she was authorised to overturn the spelling rules of the French language”.

The far-right Front National waded in with party vice president Florian Philippot declaring “the French language is our soul” and the centre right mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi calling the reforms “absurd”.

The growing fury forced the education ministry in France to reassure the public on Friday that the circumflex accent was not disappearing, and that even though school textbooks would be standardised to contain the new spellings, pupils using either would be given full marks.

There’s a list of ten such changes, which seem eminently sensible (e.g., nénuphar becomes nénufar) but which, I confess, do offend my hard-earned eye for orthography (a product of the severe ministrations of Mme Ruegg), not that it’s going to drive me to adopt a hashtag. We certainly are sensitive about language, we humans. (Here‘s a more soberly written BBC News story. Thanks, Nick and Eric!)

I’ve just finished Maugham’s Ashenden stories (see this thread), and in the last one I found a word even better than Tingel-tangel: “Oh, come off it. Templeton isn’t the sort of chap to play bumble-puppy bridge with a girl like that unless he’s getting something out of it, and she knows a thing or two, I bet.” Bumble-puppy bridge! Of course I ran to the OED, and was not disappointed (the entry is from 1888, though new citations have been added):

Etymology: Derivation unknown. Compare bumble v.2 [“To blunder, flounder”]

a. An old game resembling bagatelle, but played out of doors with marbles or ‘dumps’ of lead; nine-holes.

b. Applied humorously to whist played unscientifically. Also of bridge. Also attrib.
1801 J. Strutt Glig-gamena Angel-ðeod iii. vii. 242 (note) .
1884 Sat. Rev. 25 Oct. 520 ‘Bumble puppy’ or domestic whist at shilling points.
1885 Longman’s Mag. 6 597 A common form of home whist—called by Pembridge, Bumblepuppy.
1936 E. Culbertson Contract Bridge Compl. i. 34 Persons who claim they ‘play no conventions’ either play bumble-puppy Bridge or do play conventions that are tacitly understood.
1947 W. S. Maugham Creatures of Circumstance 104 Templeton isn’t the sort of chap to play bumble-puppy bridge with a girl like that unless he’s getting something out of it.

c. A game in which a ball slung to a post is struck with a racket by each player in opposite directions, the object being to wind the string entirely round the post; also, the post so used.
1900 L. B. Walford One of Ourselves xiv, They had had a great game of ‘bumble-puppy’.
a1918 J. T. B. McCudden Five Years in R.F.C. (1919) xii. 227 We had a wonderful game called ‘Bumble-puppy’, which one played with tennis rackets.
1940 M. Sadleir Fanny by Gaslight i. 43 One of the boys seized a chance to occupy the bumble-puppy… It was great fun hitting the ball in its string-bag so that it wound tightly round the pole.

I was curious about the citation “J. Strutt Glig-gamena Angel-ðeod iii. vii. 242 (note),” so I looked it up; fortunately Google Books has the volume in question (it’s also at the Internet Archive), and we can see the note itself:

Hence some say the game of nine-holes was called ‘Bubble the Justice,’ on the supposition that it could not be set aside by the justices, because no such pastime was named in the prohibitory statutes ; others give this denomination to a different game : the name by which it is now most generally known is ‘Bumble-puppy;’ and the vulgarity of the term is well adapted to the company by whom it is usually practised.

It seems clear that this belongs under sense a rather than b. At any rate, a delightful word; anybody familiar with it?

This news is three years old, but I just learned of it, and it’s still of interest; Jonathan Kaiman in the Guardian reports:

After spending eight years translating the first third of James Joyce’s famously opaque novel Finnegans Wake into Chinese, Dai Congrong assumed it was a labour of love rather than money. The book’s language is thick with multilingual puns and brazenly defies grammatical conventions. It begins: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

So the 41-year-old professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University was incredulous when the translation became a surprise bestseller in China after hitting shelves last month. Backed by an elaborate billboard ad campaign, the first volume of “Fennigen de Shouling Ye” sold out its first run of 8,000 copies and reached number two on a prestigious bestseller list in Shanghai, second only to a biography of Deng Xiaoping. Sales of 30,000 are considered “cause for celebration” according to Chinese publisher Gray Tan, so 8,000 in a month has made Joyce a distinctly hot property. Ian McEwan, for instance, is considered pretty buzzy in translation, but the print run of Atonement was only 5,000 copies.

“At first I felt very surprised, and I feel very surprised now still,” says Dai. “I thought my readers would be scholars and writers, and it wouldn’t be so popular.” […]

“The things I lost are mostly the sentences, because Joyce’s sentences are so different from common sentences,” she says, adding that she often broke them up into shorter, simpler phrases – otherwise, the average reader “would think that I just mistranslated Joyce. So my translation is more clear than the original book.”

Joyce might complain about the added clarity, but if it helps the book catch on, why not? Readers who really get into it can always attempt the original. (Thanks, Rick!)

Over a decade ago, Mark Liberman posted at the Log about a garbled account of a “magical sounding gibberish language”; I won’t confuse you with the details, which turned out to be irrelevant, but the upshot was that the actual term was grammelot, which seems to have been invented by Dario Fo. A followup post has more details, and makes it clear that the notion that it is “a gibberish language … that was first described over 500 years ago” is balderdash. Mark wrote:

The confusion seems to have arisen because of Fo’s references to the 16th-century playwright Angelo Beolco. In Fo’s Nobel acceptance speech, he gave credit to “Ruzzante Beolco, my greatest master along with Molière”, called him “until Shakespeare, doubtless the greatest playwright of renaissance Europe”, and referred to the inspiration of Ruzzante’s linguistic inventiveness:

Ruzzante, the true father of the Commedia dell’Arte, also constructed a language of his own, a language of and for the theatre, based on a variety of tongues: the dialects of the Po Valley, expressions in Latin, Spanish, even German, all mixed with onomatopoeic sounds of his own invention. It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I’ve learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the grammelot.

(Wikipedia says that Angelo Beolco was “better known by the nickname Il Ruzzante.”) Stefano Taschini suggested that “Grammelot might result from the composition of the French words grammaire, mêler, and argot.” The exact history is murky, and if anyone knows anything more, please share. Thanks for the links go to Michael Trevor, who found out about “Grammelot” from this article on the invented penguin language Pingu, which calls Grammelot “a technique that has been used in theatre and commedia dell’arte for hundreds of years,” which may or may not be true depending on how narrowly you’re defining “technique”; at any rate, it certainly wasn’t called Grammelot.