languagehat.com

Hannah Sarvasy reported back in 2020 on some suggestive research:

Languages like Japanese, Korean, Turkish and the indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea build sentences in a way that lets them grow to enormous length. Our research shows learning one of these languages may help children create complex sentences that express multiple ideas at a younger age.

Try recounting what you did this morning, or telling a story, and chances are you’ll use a series of several sentences: “This morning, I woke early. I dressed and ate breakfast. I gathered my things, said goodbye to my family, and they waved goodbye to me. Then I drove to work.” In English, the simplest sentence, or “clause,” is just a subject plus a verb (“I dressed”). You can also join two clauses into a sentence using words like “and” or “while,” but it’s unnatural to join more than about three clauses into one English sentence.

But in many languages across Central Asia (from Turkish to Tibetan, Mongolian, Japanese, and Korean), and in many indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea, stories can take the form of one long sentence. These sentences look more like this: “Waking up early this morning, dressing, making breakfast, eating, washing the dishes, gathering my things, saying goodbye to my family, they waving goodbye to me, I drove to work.”

These long sentences are known as “clause chains.” Unlike in English, where most of the clauses in a story would make sense if you spoke them outside the story (“I dressed”), all but the very last clause in a “clause chain” are abbreviated—they can only function in a clause chain. “Dressing” or “making breakfast” sounds unfinished on its own, and only the final verb of the clause chain tells you whether the events are happening in the past, present, or future.

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It suddenly occurred to me that the Russian word кролик ‘rabbit’ looked sort of like a diminutive of король ‘king’; I chuckled at my homemade folk etymology, and then wondered what the actual history was. Lo and behold, it turns out my jokey guess was substantially correct; Vasmer:

(Л. Толстой, Блок и др.), укр. крíлик. Заимств. из польск. królik – то же, которое является калькой (“маленький король”: król; см. коро́ль) с нов.-в.-нем. диал. Künigl, Königshase, ср.-в.-н. küniklîn из лат. cunīculus; см. Мi. ЕW 131; Бернекер 1, 572; Унбегаун, RЕS 12, 20; Брюкнер 269; Карлович 261. Лит. kralìkis происходит из польск.; см. Брюкнер, FW 96, 175.

In other words, the Russian word is borrowed from Polish królik, literally ‘little king,’ which is a calque of MHG küniklîn, which is borrowed from Latin cuniculus ‘rabbit’ but adapted to look like a German diminutive of künik ‘king.’ Fun with etymology! (Oh, and the Latin word is the source of English con(e)y, as in Coney Island.)

Alex Foreman asks an interesting question at FB:

One thing I’m curious about wrt. Hebrew that I haven’t seen much scholarship about: What evidence is there for conversational use of Hebrew among Jews in the Middle Ages?

There’s fairly extensive evidence that learned people from different countries in Latin Christendom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe could and regularly did coverse in Latin. Tunberg has written a pretty amazing monograph about this.

Everything I know tells me the same ought to have been true among Jews who knew Hebrew, even if Hebrew was not the oral medium of higher instruction for Jews the way Latin was in so many contexts in the Middle Ages. Like, suppose that Jacob ben Meir met the Rambam. They’d have lots to talk about. Their only language in common would be Hebrew. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have spoken it to each other. They’d only have needed a little work to get used to each others’ accents.

Has anyone written about this somewhere? They must have.

Seems like they must have; I thought I’d see if the Hattery can come up with anything.

Anthony Grafton’s LRB review (17 November 2022; archived) of The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are, by David M. Henkin, is full of interesting historical tidbits (we’re passing it on to a postmaster acquaintance for the mail-related stuff: “Meanwhile American culture developed a rich epistolary strain, with distinct rules for the brief, matter-of-fact business letter that should not be written on a Sabbath and the long, personal letter that could”), but its appearance here is due to the mention of “Saint Monday,” a phrase I hadn’t seen. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a decent article:

Saint Monday is the tradition of absenteeism on a Monday. […] The tradition of taking Monday off has been common among craft workers since at least the seventeenth century, when the workweek ran from Monday to Saturday as had been the custom and expectation for centuries.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin refers to the practice, saying of his youthful employment in a London printing house, “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master”.

Later writers often ascribed Saint Monday to the organisation and improvement of working class life which occurred with industrialisation. Pay day was typically Saturday, and therefore workers often had spare money on Monday. In other industries, business owners had become accustomed to workers not showing up on Mondays and were prepared to put up with it. Food would commonly be left over from the weekend, thus workers did not need to visit the works canteen, and since many workers were taking the day off, there was often company to be had.

The tradition declined during the nineteenth century, but the provision of entertainments, such as railway excursions, was initially common on Saturday and Monday, and it was not until the middle of the century that workers were able to enjoy a weekend. In part, the decline can be attributed to the adoption of half-day working on Saturdays, which legitimated leisure time for workers.

Saint Monday remained in place longest among the better-off workers, including the self-employed who retained some say in their hours and were not economically compelled to work long hours.

I wish I’d known about that back when I worked in an office; it would have been a useful reference. (Also, workers should go back to grabbing as much time for themselves as they can and stop letting bosses treat them as available around the clock. But I digress.)

This is very niche and very silly, but I can’t resist it (and hey, it taught me about Hermann’s Bridge and Meyer’s First Law); via Laudator Temporis Acti:

   But she bore Chimaera, who breathed invincible fire…

   ἣ δὲ Χίμαιραν ἔτικτε πνέουσαν ἀμαιμάκετον πῦρ…

West in his commentary ad loc.:

This peculiarly ungainly verse is the result of determination to combine the Chimaera’s epithets πῦρ πνείουσα (fr. 43 (a) 87, cf. Il. 6.182, Pi. O. 13.90) and ἀμαιμάκετος (Il. 6.179, 16.329), which has become transferred to πῦρ in the process. Wilamowitz is justified in calling it Hesiod’s worst hexameter (Gr. Verskunst, p. 8, n. 1: it violates Hermann’s Bridge, and it is the only line in early epic to combine such a violation with a final monosyllable; it also violates Meyer’s First Law (p. 95); and it has an un-Homeric correption before a mute and nasal combination (p. 98).

West, Introduction to Greek Metre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 21:

A ‘bridge’ is the converse of a caesura: a place where word-end is avoided. Gottfried Hermann observed in 1805 that it is avoided between the two shorts of the fourth biceps.

West in Ian Morris and Barry Powell, edd., A New Companion to Homer (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 225:

Meyer’s First Law states that words which begin in the first foot do not end between the shorts of the second foot, or at the end of that foot.

Rosemary Hill’s LRB review of Menu Design in Europe: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1800-2000, edited by Jim Heimann (17 November 2022; archived) has a passage near the start containing various items of linguistic interest:

With an equally sweeping approach to geography, Heimann pays little attention to national cuisines within Europe, beyond acknowledging France as ‘the fountainhead’ of culinary distinction. French was the international language of food for centuries and features on menus from Spain to Scandinavia, though nowhere so much or so persistently as in Britain, where it signals a cringing sense of inferiority and the fond hope that anything described as ‘à la’ something else will sound sophisticated. Conversely when a French menu uses English it feels like an implicit snub. If France has no word for ‘pouding’ it is because it does not care to be associated with such a thing. Eighteenth-century England could boast food as good as any on the Continent, but industrialisation and depopulation of the countryside combined to fracture culinary traditions, ushering in the Victorian Age of Indigestion, when quantity had to stand for quality. It was perhaps after the Second World War and on into the early 1960s, when ingredients as well as professional cooks were in short supply, that British food reached its nadir. One sign of better and more cosmopolitan food is the gradual dwindling of menu French over time, though it lingers on in the socially aspirational world of rotary clubs, livery companies and Oxford colleges, giving birth to such chimeras as ‘dim sum de légumes avec daikon et gingembre confit’.

As physical items, menus seem to have taken permanent form only in the mid-19th century, replacing the handwritten list. Heimann has little to offer for the first decades of his period. His earliest example is a lithographed carte from the Hôtel du Commerce in Bruges. A massive baroque frame supporting a hefty cornucopia and looking unhappily like a memorial tablet surrounds the extensive list of dishes on offer for 7 February 1844. It promises to take diners through from turbot to kirsch jelly, but there are no prices. These were a surprisingly late introduction, and the first example here is from May 1906. The Carlton Restaurant in Wiesbaden, which boasted an elegant Wiener Werkstätte-inspired green and cream design, offered an all-inclusive dinner for four marks fifty, with individual plates mostly at two marks fifty, though what this meant in terms of relative expense is hard to know. The food is described in a bewildering concoction of Germano-franglais culminating in ‘Porterhousesteak à la Jardinière’, the elaboration perhaps a reflection of the price, which at eight marks made it the most expensive choice by some way.

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People are sending me this Esther Addley piece in the Guardian (archived) with such frequency that I figure I’d better post it before the roster of acknowledgments grows longer than one of those Nature author listings. It’s about the language normally known as Pontic Greek (“an endangered variety of Modern Greek indigenous to the Pontus region on the southern shores of the Black Sea”) but in the news under the confusing moniker Romeyka (i.e., Ρωμαίικα), which is a general Greek term for the Modern Greek language. It features Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou, who has been studying the language for many years and campaigning for public awareness of it and its speakers; since I posted about her and a previous wave of publicity back in 2011 (and linked to this Hellenisteukontos post debunking the claim that Pontic has an infinitive — a claim that, alas, is still being repeated, as in this Grauniad story), I will focus here on what is new (to me, at least):

With its remaining speakers ageing, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading a University of Cambridge academic to launch a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record its unique linguistic structures before it is too late.

The Crowdsourcing Romeyka project invites native speakers across the world to upload a recording of themselves talking in the language. Ioanna Sitaridou, a professor of Spanish and historical linguistics, said she anticipated that many were likely to be in the US and Australia, as well as spread across Europe.

“There is a very significant diaspora which is separated by religion and national identity [from the communities in Turkey], but still shares so much,” she said.

I hope it does some good. (See also my 2019 post Pontic Greek Dictionary.) Thanks go to Trevor, Peter, Eric, and John Emerson, as well as Steven Green on FB!

The Irish writer and documentary-maker Manchán Magan has featured here a number of times (e.g., 2007, 2017, 2020), mostly for entire essays; I’m citing the March edition of his Substack newsletter for just one paragraph, but I like it:

Mayo Books also published Focail na mBan (Women’s Words), a book of Irish words for vagina, vulva, periods, etc that I did with 30 artists in November 2023. Some of my favourite words from that were Ribe an tsiabhrán – Clitoris (a colloquial, euphemistic term). Its literal meaning is bristle of delusion, or hair of derangement, or tuft of mental confusion. Pis/Pit – Vulva. Roe. Pea. A shell-less crab. What you say to attract a cat’s attention. Faighin – Vagina. Scabbard. Sheath. Shell.

I can’t help but think of a dustman’s dumpling. Thanks, Trevor!

The subreddit r/MapPorn has an amusing map Zero fucks given in different languages that translates into English allegedly canonical national sayings expressing utter lack of interest. The first thing that comes to mind is the oddity of the name; as Orri says in the comments:

I’ve never heard “Zero fucks given” in England, it’s normally “I don’t give a shit”.

I’m pretty sure “Zero fucks given” is a niche expression even here in the US. But never mind that, what about the other countries? Well, everynameisalreadyta writes:

I had to think for a sec what it means in Hungarian (Kutyát sem érdekel), because I “shit on it” is way more frequently used.

And I beg leave to doubt that “flowers on my dick and bees all around” is very commonly used in Greek. But what I do know is that the alleged Russian equivalent, “it’s horseradish to me,” is absurdly mealymouthed. Yes, the word хрен ‘horseradish’ is used in many expressions — хрен с ним ‘the heck with him/it,’ на хрен мне это ‘this is no damn use to me,’ etc. — but the point is that it’s always a euphemistic replacement for the Big Bad Word хуй ‘cock’ (traditionally both unprintable and unspeakable in decent company); why would you provide a euphemism to represent the most vigorously obscene language around? If you want to provide a Russian equivalent for ‘I don’t give a fuck’ it would be either мне по хуй ‘it’s along the cock for me’ or мне до пизды ‘it’s up to the cunt for me’ (those literal translations make no sense, of course; I’m just trying to give the general idea). Let mat be mat!

I’m a day late with this; our favorite polyglot vegetarian, MMcM, posted about idli yesterday, which was apparently World Idli Day, “a holiday started nine years ago by M. Eniyavan in Chennai, who runs a catering business specializing in idli.” But time means nothing to us here at LH, where Homeric Greek is coin of the realm and Proto-Indo-European is just over the next hill, so never mind. I’ll reproduce a couple of tempting tidbits; from near the beginning:

The same batter can be used to make (the ordinary varieties of) idli, dosa, and uttapam.. This is made from urad dal,(उड़द दाल), that is, dehulled beans (cotyledons) of black gram (Vigna mungo), soaked and ground, then mixed with soaked and ground polished rice. […]

Uttapam is from ūtu ‘blow’ (that is, ‘inflate’) and appam, a sweet rice-flour cake. A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary only lists cognates, all referring to the same dishes, for iṭṭali ‘idli’ and tōcai ‘dosa’. Wiktionary for Tamil தோசை tōcai gives an etymology from தோய் tōy ‘soak; curdle’, that is, ‘ferment’, citing a 1967 article in செந்தமிழ்ச்செல்வி Senthamilchelvi (that does not seem to be anywhere on the site to which it links or among the scanned issues). Devaneya Pavanar’s A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Tamil Language gives a similar derivation: தோய் tōy→ தோயை tōyai → தோசை tōcai. Wikipedia for தோசை tōcai adds a couple that sure look like folk etymologies: தேய் tēy ‘rub’ + செய் cey ‘do’, on account of how dosas are cooked; and ஸ்ஸை ssai, the hissing noise dosas make when cooking, prefixed by தோ tō < Hindi दो dō ‘two’ because you hear it twice. This latter is even cited by Pavanar as the perfect example of a “Playful Etymology”, that is, a joke. Pavanar for இட்டளி iṭṭaḷi again lists cognates: ம. இட்டலி Ma. iṭṭali (ഇട്ടലി); க. இட்டலி Ka. iṭṭali (ಇಟಿಟಲಿ); தெ. இட்டென Te. iṭṭeṉa (ఇటిటెణ?). And some relationship with இட்டம் iṭṭam which I am not sure I get. Kamil Zvelebil’s Comparative Dravidian Phonology 1.24.2.2 proposes that, for these idli words, the -ṭṭ- in the Literary Tamil indicates a loanword from Kannada through a Colloquial Tamil -ḍḍ-.

And from near the end:
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