languagehat.com

Via Mark Liberman at the Log, a deeply bizarre problem: How a glitch in an online survey replaced the word ‘yes’ with ‘forks’. I’ll let you visit the links for the details of the problem; this user comment will give you the idea:

“Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”

The interesting thing is the reason that “Google translate still thinks that ‘yes’ in Spanish means ‘forks’ in English”; in Mark’s words:

That may be puzzling until you realize that ye as the name of the letter ‘Y’ in Spanish can be used to mean a fork in the road, i.e. a Y-junction.

I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure that out.

John Gallagher (seen previously in these parts, e.g. 2020, 2022) reviews Bernard Cerquiglini’s ‘La Langue anglaise n’existe pas’: C’est du français mal prononcé for the LRB (6 March 2025; archived), and he is as enjoyable as ever:

Picture the scene​: it’s a few years after the Norman Conquest, and a man goes out to shoot deer in the New Forest. He’s breaking the law, as the right to hunt here is reserved to the Crown. The man is caught, and arrested – not by his own countrymen, but by ‘a group of armed jabbering foreigners’. Our hapless English hunter is forced to take a crash course in a strange language. First, he learns the word ‘prisun’; soon after, he’ll hear the words ‘foreste’, ‘rent’, ‘justise’. Uneasy in an occupied land, he will find language turned against him, his homely Saxon terms elbowed out by the language (and brute power) of a new Norman elite.

The scene comes from The English Language, published in 1949 by Charles Leslie Wrenn, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Wrenn was one of many scholars for whom the history of English after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its grace and ornament, outraging its laws, compelling it to novel forms, showing, even while it is used, how little it is regarded, and making thus not merely the wills, but the very speech of the conquered, to confess its subjection’.

Hysterics like these are nothing new. By the latter half of the 16th century, when the number of words in English increased at an unprecedented rate, anxieties proliferated about the threat to the language’s good Saxon stock from foreign lexical invaders. Authors and translators borrowed promiscuously from French to expand English’s range of expression, prompting Samuel Johnson to warn that too much translation risked shaking the foundations of English. Since no book ‘was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom’, translators’ ‘mischievous and comprehensive innovation’ in attempting to ape the style of originals – which, in the 18th century, were very often in French – meant that they wrote with an insidiously Gallic inflection. This, for Johnson, was worse than simply borrowing new terms, something which had exercised critics for years. He warned that ‘single words may enter by thousands, and the fabrick of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the columns.’ If nobody stopped the translators, the English would be left ‘to babble a dialect of France’.

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I’ll quote Nelson Goering’s Facebook post (adding italics where they seem called for):

Happy Nowruz! It’s the vernal equinox today, and also the traditional new year’s day of the Persianate world. The name of the festival means “new day”, but is etymologically basically the same as “new light” in English.

Actually the elements aren’t quite perfect matches, since there are slightly different suffixes involved — a bit like how German Heiligkeit and English holiness are related in their roots, but have different suffixes. In this case, the now- part goes back to an Old Iranian *nawa-, itself from Indo-European *new-o-. English new is from an extended form of this, *new-jo-. Both variants just meant “new”.

For -ruz, that goes back to Old Persian raucah-, which already meant “day” in the oldest records of Persian, the inscriptions of Darius the Great (around the year -500). But the older meaning was definitely “light”, and this is the sense of Avestan raocah-. Avestan is the liturgical language of the Zoroastrian religion, and the oldest language of the Iranic family attested. The word is found already in the oldest layer of Avestan, the hymns of Zarathushtra, which might be as old as c. -1000. This in turn comes from Indo-European *leuk-os-. English light comes from a slightly different formation, something like *leuk-to-.

And I’ll follow that with Martin Kümmel’s extremely interesting comment and the ensuing back-and-forth:
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Sam Anderson has an enjoyable story in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine (archived) about a once-famous wanderer in the Northeast of the U.S. in the Civil War era:

The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”

But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.

In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.

In the years following the Civil War, the wandering stranger became an object of curiosity, then a frequent subject of the newspapers. People gave him a name: the Old Leatherman.

It’s a great read, but I’m bringing it here for the Hattic bits:

Month after month, people watched the Old Leatherman clomp past their farms and through their woods and right up the main streets of their tiny towns. At mealtimes, he would stop at sympathetic households — the same ones, over and over — to ask, with a grunt, for food. He rarely spoke, and when he did his words were clipped, strange. In the silence, rumors grew. People speculated that the Old Leatherman was French, or French Canadian, or Portuguese. They said that he couldn’t speak at all, or that he just couldn’t speak English, or that he spoke English perfectly but pretended not to. […]

Who was he? Why was he doing this? People were obsessed. But try as they might, no one could figure it out. “One of the most noted philologists in the State spoke to him in a half-dozen different languages,” The New York Times reported in 1884. “He could get no reply but a guttural sound which meant nothing, and which was more animal than human in its character.”

Maybe he was… a Neanderthal! Or possibly just a Gael.

I decided to look up the surname Wigglesworth (which I’ve always found amusing), and this site said:

English (Yorkshire): habitational name from Wigglesworth in North Yorkshire recorded in Domesday Book as Winchelesuuorde. It is derived from the genitive case of the Old English byname Wincel meaning ‘child’. Additionally, it incorporates Old English worth which translates to ‘enclosure’.

I wasn’t familiar with that worth, so I checked the OED and was pleased to find they had revised the entry in 2017:

An enclosed place; spec. (a) a place surrounded by buildings, as a courtyard, court, or street; (b) a homestead surrounded by land.
Frequently as a place name or as the second element in place names (cf. discussion in etymology). […]

OE [Northumbrian dialect] Neque audiet aliquis in plateis uocem eius : ne geheres ænig mon in worðum stefn his.
Lindisfarne Gospels: Matthew xii. 19
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1557 Elizabeth Lyde widdowe holdeth oon mesuage withe a curtillage and all landes tenementes medowes fedinges and pastures to the sayde mesuage lying called the Woorth of olde astre and a cotage conteyning fyve acres withe the appurtenances lying in the Worthe of the same astre.
in J. Hasler, Wookey Manor & Parish 1544–1841 (1995) 20
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1898 Bosworth, a worth or ‘small estate’ on which stood a boose..a dialect word meaning a ‘cow-stall’ or ‘ox-stall’.
I. Taylor, Names & their History (ed. 2) 72/2
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1917 Probably the ‘worths’ were farms on clearings made later than the original settlements.
Quarterly Review October 338

2011 Tūns, worths and throps may..have been settlements too small and insignificant to attract mention.
P. Cullen et al., Thorps in Changing Landscape vii. 144

And the etymology is one of those expansive ones the online setting now allows them:
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I think Leonid Andreev (also romanized as Andreyev) first swam into my ken in 2016, when I edited Leonid Livak’s In Search of Russian Modernism — see my 2018 review of that superb book, in particular the first quoted paragraph. It took me a long while to get around to him, though, because at the time I was reading my way through the 1850s and when I finally finished my Long March through Russian literature in 2019 I headed straight to the late 20th century. But I finally caught up with him a couple of years ago, prompted by Dmitry Bykov; as I wrote Lizok at the time:

I was reading Bykov again — his “100 books for 100 years” series — and I decided to read his pick for 1900, Leonid Andrev’s “Молчание,” which he calls the beginning of Russian Gothic, and when I read it I thought “that’s Gorbunova’s line of descent.” If you eliminated a lot of details and any hint of пафос and just kept the basic story line, it could fit into one of her collections. (One of her signatures is squeezing out пафос the way Chekhov squeezed the serf out of himself.) Then I read his 1901 story “Жили-были” and could see why it was so popular: he puts vivid characters in a stressful situation and lets things develop very effectively. I’ll have to read more of him.

The story is online here; молчание means ‘silence,’ and in my Chronology I summarized it thus:

after the haughty Father Ignatii’s daughter kills herself and his wife has a stroke, an audible silence fills the house and then the world; in Zhurnal dlya vsekh 12; D. Bykov calls it the beginning of Russian Gothic: “This silence is the main sound of the 20th century”

(Bykov’s entire «100 лекций о русской литературе ХХ века», all 548 pages, is here as a pdf, or you can read it online here — the Andreev chapter is the first one.) So the other day I decided to follow it up with a longer story, his 1903 Жизнь Василия Фивейского [The life of Vasily Fiveisky, translated in 1920 by Archibald J. Wolfe as The Life of Father Vassily], about which I knew nothing — I vaguely assumed it was the life of a saint, since Vasily Fiveisky (Vasily the Theban, or Basil of Thebes) sounded very saintly. But it was not that at all, and the (very sparse) commentary I’ve found on it completely misinterprets it, so I am here to remedy that, with the aid of the earlier short story.

The Life of Father Vassily, in Wolfe’s translation, begins thus:
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Peter Dizikes writes for PhysOrg:

It is a deep question, from deep in our history: when did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin—as the researchers strongly think—the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.

“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.”

The paper, “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago,” appears in Frontiers in Psychology.

All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago. That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some resulting genetic variations have developed, over time, among the different regional subpopulations. The amount of genetic variation shown in the studies allows researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo sapiens was still one regionally undivided group. Miyagawa says the studies collectively provide increasingly converging evidence about when these geographic splits started taking place.

Anyone who has followed LH for any stretch of time will not be surprised that I have the gravest doubts about all this (the logic of MIT is not the Hat’s logic), and Bathrobe, who sent me the link, also feels uncomfortable about it, but I figured I’d put it out there and see what y’all have to say.

I was enjoying Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker piece (archived) on the various traumas of renting and buying (particularly in New York) when I got to this passage:

I imagined living in a society where people don’t need to own a home only to have something they can take out a mortgage on should calamity or college tuition strike. There, the flimsy divide between low- and middle-income workers wouldn’t be concretized through housing policy. In Vienna, for example, where income limits for government benefits are less stringent, eighty per cent of the population qualifies for social housing. (The Austrian city is famous for its Pawlatschen, “access balconies,” which open up onto a shared courtyard.)

Of course, I fixated on the Pawlatschen (you can see examples at the German Wikipedia article); it turns out the word Pawlatsche is borrowed from Czech pavlač, which is derived from the verb povléct ‘to cover,’ a prefixed descendant of Proto-Slavic *velťi ‘to drag’ (“Indo-European background unclear”). I thought that was interesting enough to share (and I envy the Viennese).

Ted Chiang is not only a good writer but a sharp and interesting thinker, a combination that is sadly rare. This LARB interview with Julien Crockett (archived) is well worth reading in full, but I’ll pull out the passage about language:

Your work often explores the way tools mediate our relationship with reality. One such tool is language. You write about language perhaps most popularly in “Story of Your Life” (1998), the basis for the film Arrival (2016), but also in “Understand” (1991), exploring what would happen if we had a medical treatment for increasing intelligence. Receiving the treatment after an accident, the main character grows frustrated by the limits of conventional language:

I’m designing a new language. I’ve reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought. […]

I’ll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect coexpressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent.

Do you think there could be a “better” language? Or is it just mathematics?

Umberto Eco wrote a book called The Search for the Perfect Language (1994), which is a history of the idea that there exists a perfect language. At one point in history, scholars believed the perfect language was the language that Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden or the language angels speak. Later on, scholars shifted to the idea that it was possible to construct an artificial language that was perfect, in the sense that it would be completely unambiguous and bear a direct relationship to reality.

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Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and they are extraordinarily interesting from a linguistic point of view; I’ll quote excerpts from each.

Becoming an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist:

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, is a test used by the Department of Defense to assess a candidate’s ability to learn a language. This is in direct opposition to testing knowledge of any one specific language, as the military most often aims to teach you a new language, not use whatever random one you happen to already know. To this day, this test is spoken and written of in hushed, fearful tones. When I (and all the others before me) took it, before information about it was readily available on the internet, it was even more fabled. Allegedly, the DLAB is written in Esperanto, or at least derived from Esperanto, a synthetic language invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in the late 1800s. If this sounds confusing and slightly silly, you can imagine how I felt when the recruiter told me some of these details (he mentioned the Esperanto part, but either didn’t know or care to include the eye doctor detail). There are apparently guides and resources to prepare for the test now; Wikipedia goes so far as to say that without using these materials obtaining a passing score would be well-nigh impossible. Unless the test has changed dramatically, I can assure you this isn’t true, as I, and thousands of others that attended language school alongside and before me, didn’t have such materials. We just took the test.

As far as I could tell, a strong grasp of English grammar, or, I suppose, any language’s grammar, would take you pretty far on much of it. While it is specific to language, the test evaluates a much broader skill, that is, the ability to assimilate unfamiliar, seemingly conflicting information and apply it to novel situations. I, characteristically, believed that this test, like all other (non-math) standardized tests before it, would be a cakewalk. It was not. The DLAB, like other tests based on logic, doesn’t have wholly correct answers. Instead, it relies on the test-taker’s ability to determine the most likely, or best available answer. This could be, and indeed was, immensely frustrating for someone who had undergone traditional public education (in rural North Florida no less), where tests are multiple choice and simply have one right answer, and three wrong ones.

At the time, the Air Force required a minimum passing score of 100 (out of 164) to be eligible for language school. Through some combination of luck, exposure to the sound of multiple languages, and unalloyed bookwormishness that had provided me with a decent understanding of English grammar, I received a score of 103. Not great, but good enough.

From Dari at DLI to AFSOC:
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