Reinventing Spanglish.

Sophie Hardach writes for BBC Future about Spanglish, a topic that’s been featured here a number of times (e.g.); a lot of it is, of course, the inevitable background info (“according to Pew Research, Spanglish is widespread”), but there are some nice details which I will excerpt here:

“Vamos de punches punches punches”, Yamilet Muñoz texted her friends in Austin, Texas. It means “let’s go and party”, but it’s not a phrase you’ll find in any dictionary. It’s a remix of Spanish and English words seasoned with a in-joke about punching the air as you dance, and it’s just one example of the countless linguistic innovations happening every day as these two major American languages meet. […]

Meghann Peace, an associate professor of Spanish at St Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, defines Spanglish as “a dialect of Spanish that is influenced by English”. […] Eloy Cruz, a 22-year-old former student of Peace’s, describes Spanish as his first language and one he naturally prefers, though he is also fully comfortable in English. […] In his work at a public school in Texas, supporting young people as they go to university, Cruz effortlessly shifts between his languages. Many of the students’ parents, for example, come from different parts of Latin America, and many only speak Spanish. On the other hand, there are those who may want to learn more English, and then he responds accordingly: “If they start throwing in more English, I’ll also throw in more English, to help them out. I need to get a feeling for what they’re like, and then I’ll throw in more Spanish or English.”

He also enjoys trading words from different Spanish dialects: he learned “pana”, a Peruvian word for friend, from Peruvian students at his university. He in turn taught them the Mexican expression “nombre”, a contraction of “no, hombre!”, meaning something like, “no way, man!” Once, he found himself exclaiming: “Nombre, pana!” – “No way, man!”, with a Mexican-Peruvian twist.

One of his current favourite words is “eslei”, Spanglish for “slay” – as in, to do something extremely well. […]

Peace has analysed how Mexican Americans subtly change their Spanish when studying abroad in Spain. Research by her and others has shown that during such extended stays in Spain, Mexican Americans and other US Spanish speakers tend to pick up certain aspects of European Spanish, but not others. For example, they often adopt one particular European Spanish word with special enthusiasm, according to the research: “vale”, meaning, “right”, or “ok”.

“They love saying vale,” Peace says, even though equivalent words exist in their own US Spanish, such as “bueno”. What made the students adopt this word, but not others? The answer has to do with finely calibrated judgments around identity, research by Peace and others suggests. Sprinkling in “vale” allowed the speakers to add some global flavour to their speech, while still holding on to their own identity, Peace says: “It’s seen as cosmopolitan, and shows that you’re capable of adapting. It’s a way of saying, ‘I am an international person’,” she says. […]

Some expressions, [Muñoz] says, are also just satisfying to say, such as “no manches!”, which she translates as “dang!”, as in: “No manches, I forgot my pencil case!”

Thanks, Trevor!

Forgotten Catchphrases.

Via Louis Maistros’ Facebook post, I found a great newspaper squib (which you can see at Reddit if you don’t have access to FB) called “Progress of Civilization or Wise-Cracking Thru the Ages” and listing snappy comebacks from 1895 (“What’s your name? Puddingtame, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same”) to 1930 (“Oh, yeah?”). I presume it was published in 1930 or shortly thereafter; if anyone can source it, that would be great. At any rate, what struck me was that though some were still familiar, if antiquated (“Go jump in a lake,” “So’s your old man”), others have been utterly forgotten. If you google “You’re the Candy Kid” (the entry for 1900), you get all sorts of examples, e.g.:

“Captain Joe,” whispered Alex, patting the dog on the head, “you’re the candy kid! That’s Clay, without the shadow of a doubt. Now you tell him that we want to come aboard.” (Harry Gordon, The River Motor Boat Boys on the Ohio, 1913)
“Dear Sweetheart: ‘Ive watched You for a long Time, and I have decided that you’re the Candy Kid for sure.’” (Mattoon [Illinois] Morning Star, April 18, 1907, p. 1)
“You’re the candy kid!” (line of dialogue from The laughing cure, a comedy in two acts [c. 1916])

But where did it come from? I checked Eric Partridge’s indispensable (if unreliable) A Dictionary of Catchphrases, but he didn’t have it, and the same is true for the others I’ll mention. 1909’s “go to and stay put” is short and memorable (cf. the recent “keep calm and carry on”) and was used for some time (Dorothy Speare’s Dancers in the Dark [1922], p. 117: “I told him to go to and stay put”; John Bernard Mannion, “Pointers on Business Letter-Writing,” Postage and the Mailbag, Sept. 1921, p. 341: “We’d really like to have told our reader to go to and stay put”), but who came up with it? The same goes for 1912’s “You know me, Steve”; a good example with a doubtless fictional origin story is in M. H. Hirst’s “A Study in Contrasts,” The Central Literary Magazine, Vol. 23, p. 646:

He never moves even now, without a loaded automatic; and there are certain phrases of his which have become current coin in the mess — such as, in quick staccato accents, “ Got yer covered ” ; or “ You know me, Steve ! ” in tones of quiet menace.

“So I took the fifty thousand” (1926) is presumably from the 1923 song (YouTube); “Faw down and go boom” (1929) is from the Eddie Cantor song “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom!” (1928). Somebody should really do a proper historical catalogue, comparable to Green’s Dictionary of Slang; catchphrases are just as interesting as slang words!

Cod.

I shared Zaria Gorvett’s BBC story with my wife, telling her it was “everything you ever wanted to know about codpieces,” and she had a question for me: was the cod of codpiece related to the name of the fish? I said I wasn’t sure and headed to the OED, where I found that the answer was “Maybe.” The OED entry (revised 2020) for the fish name said “Origin uncertain. Perhaps shortened from codling n.¹, and hence perhaps ultimately related to cod n.¹ [A bag or pouch; A purse or wallet; A pod of a pea, bean, or other leguminous plant; The scrotum] (see discussion at codling n.¹).” Under codling ‘cod(fish)’ (also revised 2020) we find:

Origin uncertain. Perhaps < cod n.¹ + ‑ling suffix¹.

Compare cod n.² and codfish n., which may both derive ultimately from this word.

Notes
The original sense was perhaps ‘fish found in the cod end of a trawl net’: compare cod n.¹ 5a and cod net n. As a demersal fish, cod was made more accessible by the development of the trawling technology, and would have been found often in the cod ends of trawl nets. (Perhaps compare similarly dogdrave n. [A marine fish used for food … Sometimes identified with the cod])

Earlier currency is implied by the following example, showing a Latin borrowing of the English word:

  1289 In .v..xx. x. codling’ empt’ Glouc’ xvij.s.
     in J. Webb, Household Expenses R. de Swinfield (1853) 31

Perhaps attested earlier as a surname: Robert Codling (1275, Lincolnshire).

And for cod n.¹ ‘bag; purse; pod; scrotum’ we have:
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Arwi.

Kamala Thiagarajan writes for BBC Travel about a very interesting form of Tamil, starting with a dramatic anecdote:

One warm summer evening in 2008, when Mohamed Sultan Baqavi was a 26-year-old student at Arabic College in the South Indian town of Vellore, he made a remarkable discovery. After offering prayers in the city’s Labaabeen Qabrusthan mosque, where generations of his spiritual gurus were laid to rest, he caught sight of a man sweeping the courtyard.

The man gathered the debris – scraps of paper, rubble and leaves – and piled them up beside a dried-up well near the mosque’s entrance to set alight. As Baqavi was preparing to leave, a gentle breeze blew his way, carrying with it a page from the rubbish heap. When he pried it from his face, Baqavi was startled to find that the scrap of paper was a part of a book. He knew that some mosques used their dried-out wells as storage for rare manuscripts, and stray pages from these often littered courtyards. Could this be one of them, he wondered?

Baqavi took a closer look at the now-burning heap of rubbish and hurriedly fished out an entire book from the bonfire. After dousing the flames, he opened it to find pages of rare script that he immediately recognised. It was written in the long-lost language of Arwi.

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Tolstoy’s Resurrection.

I can no longer recall precisely why, in late December, I decided to read Tolstoy’s last big novel Воскресение (Resurrection), but it was a slog — it took me almost two months to read a book that should have taken three weeks or so at my usual pace. Frankly, if it hadn’t been by Tolstoy (and the most widely read book of his during his lifetime) I might well have given up. The problem is that what should have been a hundred-page novella has been stretched out to almost six hundred pages by dawdling, repetition, and ranting. By this time he didn’t really want to be writing fiction at all (he thought he’d given up after Anna Karenina), and only finished and published this one (in 1899, after a decade of desultory work) because he urgently wanted to raise money to help the heretical Dukhobors resettle in Canada. The result is an ungainly mix of gripping characters and plotlines (Tolstoy couldn’t help being Tolstoy) and long-winded preaching, with a side of social mockery. Here’s the meat of Prince Mirsky’s discussion in A History Of Russian Literature, incisive as usual:

Resurrection is not a perfect work of art: the moral idea, profusely supported by texts from the Gospels, is not organically fused into the fabric. The story of Nekhlyúdov’s conversion is on an inferior plane to that of Tolstóy’s own in A Confession, or of Iván Ilyích’s, or of the merchant in Master and Man. It is not a revelation of inner light, but a cold decision to adapt himself to the moral law so as to escape the stings of conscience and acquire inner peace. Resurrection presents Tolstóy and his teaching from the most unattractive side. For all that, it is a book by Tolstóy. But its best qualities are not characteristic of the later Tolstóy: they are rather, in a minor degree, those of Anna Karénina and War and Peace. The best thing in the novel is the minor realistic details he condemned so severely in What Is Art? The early story of Máslova is the best part of the book. It is full of that elusive poetry which reminds one of the subtle poetic atmosphere that accompanies Natásha in War and Peace. The account of the trial is excellent — sustained, concentrated, unexaggerated satire. It has not been surpassed by Tolstóy, except perhaps in the second part of the same novel, where he satirizes the bureaucratic society of Petersburg.

The style is severely impacted by all the moral tales he’d been cranking out for the edification of children and peasants; here’s a sample, from Louise Maude’s widely read translation (which came out the same year as the novel, 1899in 1900):
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Dote.

My wife wondered where the word dotard was from, so I investigated; of course it’s derived from the verb dote, originally (per the OED) ‘To act or talk foolishly, stupidly, or irrationally; to have lost control of one’s mental faculties,’ but where was that from? The OED entry (revised 2019) has one of those nice discursive etymologies:

Either (i) < Middle Dutch doten, to be deranged, to become light-headed, dutten to rage (early modern Dutch doten, dutten (1588 in Kiliaan)), cognate with Middle Low German (rare) dōten to be out of one’s mind (rare), further etymology uncertain (see note),

or perhaps (ii) the reflex of an unattested Old English verb possibly related to these.

Notes

It is unclear whether Dutch dutten ‘to take a nap’ (c1599) shows the same word as Middle Dutch doten, dutten. Compare also Middle High German totzen to take a nap, Icelandic dotta to nod from sleep. If the two Dutch verbs do show the same origin, the likelihood is that they are < the same Germanic base as theoten [“To howl”] v.

Compare also Old French, Middle French, French radoter to become childish or senile (late 12th cent.), to waffle (1613), a remodelling (after prefixed verbs in ra-) of Old French redoter to become childish or senile (c1100; < re- re- prefix + an unattested simplex verb *doter ‘to rave, to be out of one’s mind’, either directly < Middle Dutch doten or < its Germanic base).

With the β forms compare doited adj. [“Foolish, crazy; (also) having one’s mental faculties impaired, esp. by old age”] and discussion at that entry [“Apparently a variant or alteration of doted adj.¹, although the quality of the stem vowel (which is a true diphthong and not a digraphic representation of long ō) is difficult to account for; perhaps after doiled adj. (although this is first attested slightly later)”].

(There was a brief mention of dotard here in 2018.) I find that “perhaps the reflex of an unattested Old English verb possibly related to these” somewhat odd; do they do that sort of thing often?

AI + Language Learning = Whee!

Carolyn Y. Johnson reports for the Washington Post (February 2, 2024) on helping AI to pick up basic elements of language:

For a year and a half, a baby named Sam wore a headcam in weekly sessions that captured his world: a spoon zooming toward his mouth, a caregiver squealing “Whee!” as he whizzed down an orange slide or a cat grooming itself. Now, scientists have fed those sights and sounds to a relatively simple AI program to probe one of the most profound questions in cognitive science: How do children learn language?

In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers at New York University report that AI, given just a tiny fraction of the fragmented experiences of one child, can begin to discern order in the pixels, learning that there is something called a crib, stairs or a puzzle and matching those words correctly with their images. […]

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Two Animal Names.

1) I hadn’t been familiar with dieb ‘canine of northern Africa, the African golden wolf (Canis lupaster, formerly considered an African variant of the golden jackal, Canis aureus)’; it’s from Arabic ذِئْب‎ (ḏiʔb) ‘wolf; golden jackal (Canis aureus), which is from Proto-Semitic *ḏiʔb- ‘wolf,’ and at that link you can see a whole bunch of descendants, from Akkadian 𒉡𒌝𒈠 (zībum) to Tigrinya ዝብኢ (zəbʾi, ‘hyena’). Aha, and I just noticed that in the middle there is Moroccan Arabic ⁧ديب⁩ (dīb), which was borrowed into Spanish as adive, which in turn was borrowed into English, so adive ‘golden jackal’ is a doublet of dieb. This all came up because I saw a recommendation for the movie Theeb.

2) I love the word numbat ‘A small marsupial carnivore, Myrmecobius fasciatus, endemic to western Australia, that eats almost exclusively termites,’ and the creature itself is quite fetching (there’s an image at that link). Although that Wiktionary article is missing an etymology, the OED (entry revised 2003) says it’s “< Nyungar (Perth–Albany region) nhumbat.”

As lagniappe, I recently learned the phrase argue the toss ‘to disagree with a decision or statement’; it’s one of those UK idioms that doesn’t seem to have made it across the Atlantic.

Phylogenetics and Histories of Sign Languages.

Natasha Abner, Grégoire Clarté, Carlo Geraci, Robin J. Ryder, Justine Mertz, Anah Salgat, and Shi Yu have a paper in Science (1 Feb 2024, Vol. 383, Issue 6682, pp. 519-523; DOI: 10.1126/science.add7766) that studies family structure among sign languages; the abstract:

Sign languages are naturally occurring languages. As such, their emergence and spread reflect the histories of their communities. However, limitations in historical recordkeeping and linguistic documentation have hindered the diachronic analysis of sign languages. In this work, we used computational phylogenetic methods to study family structure among 19 sign languages from deaf communities worldwide. We used phonologically coded lexical data from contemporary languages to infer relatedness and suggest that these methods can help study regular form changes in sign languages. The inferred trees are consistent in key respects with known historical information but challenge certain assumed groupings and surpass analyses made available by traditional methods. Moreover, the phylogenetic inferences are not reducible to geographic distribution but do affirm the importance of geopolitical forces in the histories of human languages.

In their conclusion, they say “most notably, we found a closer relationship between the Western European sign languages and British and New Zealand SL than has been previously assumed and present a Western European sign language family tree that better reflects the broad scope of influence of French SL.” I don’t know enough to have any idea whether they’ve done a good job (although previous experiences with phylogenetic analysis, e.g., have jaundiced me); I hope better-informed Hatters will be able to say more. Thanks, Y!

Siksimiisii!

Michael Schulman of the New Yorker has an interview with Lily Gladstone (archived) that is well worth your time in general (she’s a wonderful actress, the most unforgettable element of Kelly Reichardt’s fine movie Certain Women), but I’m bringing it here for what she has to say about language:

Gladstone, who is thirty-seven, was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, in Montana, the daughter of a white mother and a father of Blackfeet and Nez Perce ancestry. […] When we spoke recently, she was in Washington, D.C., for a screening of “Killers [of the Flower Moon]” at the National Museum of the American Indian, along with the Osage musician Scott George, who is nominated for his original song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People).” […]

As a student of Oscar history, I know that it’s been a mixed experience for people who have been the firsts in their categories. […] I’m curious if you’ve felt that tension of being out here as an actor, but also as the face of a community. And, in addition to that, you’re playing an Osage woman, so it’s not even quite your community.

That’s something that I try to highlight first. There’s just the roadblock that a lot of Natives have in representation, that people don’t even think we’re still here. There’s some empirical data out there, some surveys—in one study I was reading, forty per cent of people didn’t think that Native Americans still existed. The perception of who we are, which has largely been shaped by Hollywood—it’s very narrow. There’s an assumption that we just disappeared.

There’s an incredible diversity in Indian country. I’m not Osage, but as a Native actor I’ve played a lot of roles now that required that I speak another Indigenous language. And I’m by no means even fluent in Blackfoot! I can introduce myself. I have a few words and phrases. I know some of the bad words.

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