Mysterious Script Found in Vilnius.

From last September comes this Lithuanian National Radio and Television story:

A mysterious tablet with an unknown 13th-14th-century script is on display at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum. No one knows what it means or where it came from. LRT TV journalist Virginijus Savukynas reports.

The plaque was found twenty years ago while exploring Vilnius castles. Archaeologists were using a metal detector to scout the location where some of the earliest wooden structures were located. Expecting to find no more than a simple axe, instead, they discovered something else entirely – a rectangular strip of metal with strange engravings. Such scripts have surfaced in Lithuania for the first time. […]

“We tried to find a logical explanation for the markings: on the sides of the tablet, the beginning and the end were marked with crosses, as if they were marking the beginning and the end of the text,” said Gintautas Striška, head of the Archaeology and Architecture Department at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum in Vilnius. “The text is clearly composed of several lines. The top line seems to be written in two ways – signs and letters, and the bottom line has several more lines with various inscriptions,” he added.

“At the time, we thought that part of the text may have been written in ancient Greek. With the help of linguists, we saw that part of it could be translated as ‘Algirdas Basileus’ – that is, ‘King Algirdas’,” said Striška. After a while, however, the archaeologists abandoned their fruitless search. “The letters only resemble Greek letters, and a person who carved them may have missed something or combined several letters into one, making deciphering the record difficult,” he added. […]

It is also possible that the inscriptions on the plate are engraved in several languages, making it difficult to read. Now, the researchers have turned to visitors and researchers to present their ideas on how to read this 13th-14th-century text.

As Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the story, points out, there’s no link to anything scholarly, and frankly the images look like gibberish to me, but check it out!

Endangered Languages in New York City.

I’ve come to love the interactive features the NY Times publishes on its website, and Alex Carp’s piece on endangered languages in New York City is a doozy, and perfect for LH. (There are archived versions here and here, but I’m afraid you only get the text, not the interactive stuff, including the audio clips.) It opens with an outline map of Manhattan with lines pointing to locations where dozens of languages are spoken, then continues:

Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again. […]

With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

[Read more…]

Drunkonyms.

Jennifer Ouellette writes for Ars Technica about a productive element of English vocabulary:

British comedian Michael McIntyre has a standard bit in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include “wellied,” “trousered,” and “ratarsed,” to name a few. McIntyre’s bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called “drunkonym,” bolstered by a few handy examples: “I was utterly gazeboed,” or “I am going to get totally and utterly carparked.”

It’s a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre’s claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean “being in a state of high inebriation.” Given their prevalence, “It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective,” the authors wrote in their new paper published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for “drunk,” drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.

There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: “merry,” meaning “boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy.” Another OED entry from 1630 lists “blinde” (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737 Drinker’s Dictionary, listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for “drunk” listed in that year’s edition of the Dictionary of American Slang. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine noted 900 terms used as drunkonyms.

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Pawpaw.

We discussed that odd fruit the pawpaw a decade ago, at which time Bathrobe pointed out that “In Australia a pawpaw is a papaya,” but we didn’t really get into the linguistic aspect, so I’ll take the opportunity of happening on Matthew Meduri’s Belt essay “Consider the Pawpaw,” linked at MetaFilter, to do some of that. As rory says in that MeFi thread, “the UK/Aust./South Pacific pawpaw is what Americans know as the papaya. This American pawpaw is a different fruit.” To add to the confusion, the OED entry (revised 2005) says:

Variant of papaya n., of uncertain origin, apparently originally a shortening (although compare a reported disyllabic form in Otomaco pappai: see etymological note s.v. papaya n.).

Notes
The α forms reflect an earlier pronunciation /pəˈpɔː/ related to the shortening < papaya n. The β forms reflect the shift in stress to word-initial position which is now the current pronunciation.

N.E.D (1904) enters this under papaw and gives the pronunciations (păpǭ·, pǭpǭ·) /pəˈpɔː/ /pɔːˈpɔː/. Webster gives only the pronunciation /pəˈpɔː/ until the 20th cent.

And s.v. papaya (also from 2005):
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Ballot Names.

Heather Knight and Amy Qin report for the NY Times (archived) on a problem that I wouldn’t have thought of but that’s obvious once pointed out:

In San Francisco, where more than a fifth of residents are of Chinese descent, politicians have long taken a second name in Chinese characters. And any serious candidate knows to order campaign materials in English and in Chinese.

But the city’s leniency for adopted names has frustrated some Chinese American candidates, who say that non-Chinese rivals have gone overboard by using flattering, flowery phrases that at first glance have little to do with their actual names. Some candidates have gained an advantage or engaged in cultural appropriation, the critics say.

No more. For the first time, San Francisco has rejected Chinese names submitted by 22 candidates, in most cases because they could not prove they had used the names for at least two years. The city has asked translators to furnish names that are transliterated, a process that more closely approximates English pronunciations.

That means Michael Isaku Begert, who is running to keep his local judgeship, cannot use 米高義, which means in part “high” and “justice,” a name that suggests he was destined to sit on the bench.

And Daniel Lurie, who is challenging Mayor London Breed, must scrap the name he had been campaigning with for months: 羅瑞德, which means “auspicious” and “virtue.” Mr. Lurie’s new name, 丹尼爾·羅偉, pronounced Daan-nei-ji Lo-wai, is a transliterated version that uses characters closer to the sound of his name in English but are meaningless when strung together. […]

The switch isn’t universally popular. It ends a San Francisco tradition, cherished in some circles, in which Chinese leaders have bestowed names upon their favorite candidates. And it has the potential of resulting in long monikers that are difficult to remember or even cringe-worthy, since the characters that sound like someone’s name may translate into odd phrases in Chinese.

More details at the link (and personally, I think the “cultural appropriation” thing is silly); there’s also a brief excursus into other languages (“Certain towns in Alaska must translate ballots into Yup’ik […] while some counties in Arizona must do so in Navajo and Apache”). Thanks, Dmitry!

Literary Translators, Casualties of AI.

Nicole Vulser has a horrifying piece in Le Monde (archived; en français) about what AI is doing to a valuable profession:

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has already claimed its first victims in the publishing world. Literary translators − the most fragile link and the most exposed to the AI tsunami − are witnessing their working conditions worsen by the day and their orders dwindle. As the use of automatic translation programs like DeepL becomes increasingly widespread, the job of a translator is increasingly reduced to post-editing contracts (using a text pre-translated by a machine).

According to Jörn Cambreleng, the director of Atlas, an organization promoting literary translation, this practice is still considered “shameful” among publishers, who never mention AI use on book covers, but also among translators, who accept this type of cheaper contract only due to a lack of other options.

The latest survey on machine translation and post-editing conducted by the French Literary Translators’ Association (ATLF) in December 2022 among 400 people already showed a “strong lack of transparency from publishers” on AI use and “lower compensation” (lower than average translation rates in 68% of cases). […]

ATLF secretary Peggy Rolland is concerned about the arrival of AI and fears a chain reaction of challenges, starting with legal ones. “Translators are authors and must receive royalties on each book sale (usually between 1% and 2%). “However, publishers who use AI want to pay us as self-employed contractors, which is not legal,” Rolland pointed out.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to fight this other than an unlikely multinational legal ban — translators are self-employed (as far as I know) and inherently hard to organize. But it’s a wretched development.

Geoff Lindsey on Vocal Fry.

Bathrobe sent me the YouTube clip Vocal Fry: what it is, who does it, and why people hate it! by Dr Geoff Lindsey, saying:

What is fascinating is the way he looks back and finds that creaky voice was once a prominent feature of posh male RP accents, with clips from various people including Sean Connery. So it was acceptable for posh male speakers of RP but is not acceptable for young female North Americans.

The clips are wonderful (there’s a whole segment of them showing that vocal fry, aka creaky voice, is ubiquitous in Finnish, to the point that speaking the language without it sounds unnatural), and I join Bathrobe in finding the video both interesting and enlightening. It’s 27 minutes long, but I promise you won’t be bored. And it definitely sticks the ending!

Alternative Cuss Words.

The blogger nostalgicitalian (“just a guy who likes the classics”) has a 2021 post on things you can say when you don’t want to offend those offended by bad words:

I have mentioned the cartoon Bluey on here in the past. On the Bluey Facebook page a while back, they had a video of the dad (Bandit) using alternate expressions where swear words might be used. Exclamations like “Cheese and jam,” “Beans on toast,” and “Biscuits” are used in place of swear words.

“Biscuits!” is a favorite of mine right now, especially since Ella is starting to copy and say things we do. As much as I want to scream a dirty word when I step on a Lego, “Biscuits” works just as well.

And he has an image of a pleasing set of Alternative Cuss Words, from “Shucks” to “For cryin’ out loud,” with stops at “Geez,” “Nerts,” “Great googley moogley,” “Shut the front door,” and many others in between — “turd” and “bull snot” are about as vile as it gets.

Mii Dash Geget.

A couple of comments in the recent Siksimiisii! thread linked to the blog Mii Dash Geget: “Ojibwe, Algonquian languages, historical linguistics, and randomness.” The About page says “Posts here generally use linguistics jargon without explanation” and provides a list of “some good introductions to basic linguistic concepts”; it ends with a story, in Ojibwa followed by English, from William Jones, Ojibwa Texts, whose last line is Mii dash geget/And it was true. Some recent posts are Squib #1: “Winter” in Algic (“the Yurok and Proto-Algonquian terms—Yurok kipun and PA *peponwi—are cognate with one another and can be traced back to a Proto-Algic etymon **pəpwən-, despite some complications to clear up”), A Few Modest Terminological and Notational Proposals (“I use the well-established label Algic to refer to the family encompassing Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok, and Proto-Algic for its protolanguage”), and Wikipedia Sucks (“I am concerned by how ubiquitous is the practice of practically everyone, including plenty of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people, quoting or citing or linking to Wikipedia” — check out the parade of horrors cited there and marvel at those who think Wikipedia is a reliable source). This is absolutely the kind of thing I love, and I am adding it to my RSS feed.

Ohayo.

Last night we watched Yasujirō Ozu’s 1959 comedy Good Morning (お早よう, Ohayō); I had no expectation of making a post, but when I realized what it was about, I had no choice but to do so. That took almost half the movie, though. There are two plot lines, which seem to have nothing to do with each other: a group of elementary school students goof around and make fart jokes (apparently Japanese schoolkids make farts that sound like whistling), and a group of neighborhood housewives gossip with each other and wonder who stole the women’s club monthly dues. The turning point of the movie comes when two brothers, Minoru and Isamu, express their resentment at their father’s refusal to get a television set (they have to sneak over to the neighbors to watch sumo and baseball) by going on a silence strike. Being kids, they take it to extremes, refusing to talk even at school, which leads to a teacher visiting their home, or to their neighbor Mrs. Haraguchi, which leads to more gossip.

But before going silent, Minoru angrily tells his father that adults are always saying meaningless things like “good morning” and “nice weather,” so what’s the point of talking? And from there on, you can’t help but hear that in fact much of the dialogue does consist of “Ohayō” (good morning), “Konnichi wa” (good afternoon/day), “Ii o-tenki desu ne” (Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?), and the like; I noticed particularly the frequency of naruhodo, about which my indispensable Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words says:

An interj. that may indicate a mild form of surprise, wonder or admiration, but is chiefly used by a person who is listening to another’s narrative and shows by an narrative and shows by an occasional naruhodo that he is taking a polite interest in what is being said. It may be translated by: ‘really!’; ‘I see’; etc.

And when the kids finally (spoiler!) resume speaking, one of the first words out of their mouths is “Ohayō!” In other words, the movie is about (inter alia, ça va sans dire) phatic communication, and deserves a place among Movies Featuring Linguists, Linguistics and Languages.