languagehat.com

I know this is being discussed everywhere, and I try to avoid bandwagons and the news of the day, but damn if this isn’t too worrying to let slide. Alexandra Alter writes for the NY Times (archived):

For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I. The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”

Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated. “I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January. […]

In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.

You can get more details at the link; they don’t really matter, and the facts about this particular novel don’t really matter — it’s clear that so-called “AI” (large language models) will soon be producing work that nobody will be able to prove did not come from a human mind. I realize some will say “Therefore AI is intelligent!” and others will say “Who cares? Let a thousand flowers bloom!,” but as an old-fashioned humanist I feel the foundations crumbling. Will we have to go back to telling tales by the campfire (while making sure the tale-teller isn’t plugged in)?

From Nippon.com, a spectacular Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas:

From bad manners to taboo, there are certain ways of using chopsticks that are considered as going against dining etiquette. These various acts, known as kiraibashi, are listed below.

(Listed in Japanese syllabary order)

🥢 あげ箸 Agebashi
To raise the chopsticks above the height of one’s mouth.

🥢 洗い箸 Araibashi
To clean the chopsticks in soup or beverages.

🥢 合わせ箸 Awasebashi (also known as 拾い箸 hiroibashi or 箸渡し hashiwatashi)
!!! (Serious) To pass food from one pair of chopsticks to another. This is taboo due to the custom after a cremation service of picking up remains and passing them between chopsticks.

That’s just the start; there are dozens of them, and it’s fun from both linguistic and cultural points of view. I got the link via MetaFilter, where most of the comments are knowledgeable and/or appreciative but inevitably some are the tedious “ooh, how hoity-toity, fuck that” responses that for some reason people feel impelled to share. Yes, cultures have “right” ways and “wrong” ways to do many things, and they are often not “rational” — get used to it! Also, there is a comment that made me sad and gloomy:

Can anyone with more culture than me comment on the etymology of chopsticks? We usually say hashi in our house cause realizing ‘chop’ is an old cowboy slang for ‘cooked food’, chopsticks seems about as racist as calling a fancy spoon a ‘grub-handle’.

Nobody knows where the “chop” came from (see the brief discussion at Wiktionary), but it doesn’t really matter: people who are determined to avoid any possible violation of progressive standards don’t care about facts, random guesses will do as an excuse. The English word is chopsticks, end of story; if you want to say hashi, be my guest, but you might as well sing The Vapors.

Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to “Natural selection and language genes in humans” by Rob DeSalle, Guilherme Lepski, Analia Arévalo, et al. (Scientific Reports 16:9382, 17 February 2026; open access), adding “I am not ready to believe any of it, but technically it says that the genetic basis of speech consisted of a broad network of genes with the foundations laid back in the ape times and most of the subsequent changes made during the emergence of the common ancestor of our species, Neanderthals and Denisovans.” I too am not ready to believe any of it, but I don’t have the technical background to make any useful judgments, so I present it for your appraisal. The abstract:

In this study we construct lists of candidate genes for articulate language. Analysis of coding regions of over 100 candidate genes for the effects of natural selection (directional episodic selection and relaxed/intensified selection) in the various lineages of primates (thirty-four nonhuman primate species, plus Homo sapiens Neanderthals and Denisovans) revealed a burst of altered selection effects on neural genes at the node leading to the Homo sapiens-Neanderthal-Denisova triad, followed by bursts of selection effects on neural genes related to language in both the Denisovan and Neanderthal lineages. Those latter increases in involvement of neural genes in Neanderthals and Denisovans can be contrasted with the missing or slight response to selection on those same genes in the H. sapiens lineage. The genes involved in these bursts can mostly be classified as involved in synapse structure and maintenance. We develop a hypothesis for how synaptic efficiency could be related to language acquisition in these lineages.

Thanks, Dmitry!

Robyn Creswell’s NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus by Eric Calderwood should be worth reading for anyone interested in the period of Islamic rule over the Iberian Peninsula, but what drives me to post is this (bold added):

The most popular tool in this interpretive kit, which a host of thinkers have used to understand al-Andalus, is the concept of convivencia, or coexistence. Many English-language readers encountered this idea in the scholar María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World (2002), a lyrical portrait of what she calls medieval Spain’s “culture of tolerance.” […]

The idea of convivencia, though often associated with Andalusia, is not Andalusian: its roots lie in the much more recent past. The word was first used in the peculiar—and conveniently vague—sense of religious and ethnic coexistence by the Spanish historian and literary critic Américo Castro in his book España en su historia (1948). Borrowing the term from philology, where it denoted the struggle for supremacy among vernacular variants of a word, Castro gave it an existentialist turn, using it to characterize the daily interaction between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish “castes,” which he took to be the basis of Spanish identity.

I find it hard to believe that a word which appears to mean simply ‘living together’ (and is so defined in the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española) originally had the specialized sense of ‘the struggle for supremacy among vernacular variants of a word’ and that this had to be borrowed and repurposed by Castro, but since there is no OED for Spanish, I have no way of finding out. Anybody know the history of this word?

I’ve now read my second novel by Gaito Gazdanov, История одного путешествия [The story of a journey], and he’s starting to come a bit more into focus — when you’ve only read one novel by an author (or heard one piece of music by a composer, etc.), you don’t really have a sense of them. As I wrote here, “I reread Gaito Gazdanov’s Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire], which I last read shortly after moving to NYC in 1981 (I checked it out of the much-missed Donnell, with its superb foreign-language collection); I don’t know why I didn’t post about it, but I enjoyed it even more than I had before.” Well, I think I know why I didn’t post about it; I didn’t know what to say about it. I’m still pretty uncertain, but I think I have enough of a hold on his style to flail around for the length of a post (with copious quotes); as I read more of him, I’ll probably have more focused things to say.

At any rate, a brief description might go: young émigré Volodya Rogachov travels from Constantinople to Paris (via Prague, Berlin, and Vienna), where his older brother Nikolai sells cars, and spends time with him and his wife Virginia and their friends while working on a novel before leaving Paris for the Levant (to sell cars for his brother). Many of the characters are non-Russians: the Englishman Arthur Thomson, who lived in Russia for a while and speaks perfect Russian; the Austrian Viktoria; and various French people, including Andrée, who doesn’t speak much Russian but lives with the painter Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, who won’t interact with anyone but her and Volodya. There are loving descriptions of Parisian neighborhoods and itineraries, name-checking famous hangouts like the Coupole and the Rotonde. It’s a lot of fun for anyone who loves Paris.

But there’s no plot. We get Volodya’s impressions of these people and their interconnections and memories, but nothing leads to anything else: he wanders around, talks to people, feels things, and eventually leaves town. This frustrates a lot of people and would once have frustrated me; fortunately, in recent years I’ve gotten much less interested in plot, having immersed myself in writers like Dorothy Richardson and Irina Polyanskaya, and all I really care about is good writing, which is what Gazdanov provides in full measure. Alas, reviewers of his day were more severe; they had appreciated his first novel, but this one disappointed them (though they continued to be ravished by his prose) — even the usually perceptive Khodasevich complained that any of the episodes could be omitted without harming the structure of the novel. And this was the last of his novels to receive any substantial criticism; WWII swept away the whole émigré literary scene, with its journals and critics, and he fell into obscurity for his final decades.

I’ll quote some passages from László Dienes’s Russian Literature in Exile: The Life and Work of Gajto Gazdanov, which while not especially impressive as criticism (note his snooty reference to “third-rate trash writers”) is valuable as the work of someone who’s read everything Gazdanov wrote and thus provides useful orientation, and then (as usual) quote some bits of linguistic interest. Here’s Dienes (the surname is apparently an archaic equivalent of Hungarian Dénes = Dennis):
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I ran across the information that Mafia was derived from a Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which surprised me and made me curious about further etymology. The OED (entry revised 2000) wasn’t much help — it just says “< Italian mafia (1865; also †maffia), probably back-formation < mafiuso, Italian regional (Sicily) mafiusu” — but the Wikipedia article has this fairly astonishing etymology section:

Mafia (English: /ˈmɑːfiə/; Italian: [ˈmaːfja]) derives from the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which roughly translated means “swagger” but can also be translated as “boldness” or “bravado”. According to scholar Diego Gambetta, mafiusu (mafioso in Italian) in 19th-century Sicily, in reference to a man, signified “fearless”, “enterprising”, and “proud”. In reference to a woman, the feminine-form adjective mafiusa means “beautiful” or “attractive”. Because Sicily was under Islamic rule from 827 to 1091, Mafia may have come to Sicilian through Arabic, although the word’s origins are uncertain. Mafia in the Florentine dialect means “poverty” or “misery”, while a cognate word in Piedmontese is mafium, meaning “a little or petty person”. Possible Arabic roots of the word include:

■ maʿfī (معفي), meaning “exempted”. In Islamic law, jizya is the yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands, and people who pay it are “exempted” from prosecution.
■ màha, meaning “quarry” or “cave”; the mafie were the caves in the region of Marsala that acted as hiding places for persecuted Muslims and later served other types of refugees, in particular Giuseppe Garibaldi’s “Redshirts” after their embarkment on Sicily in 1860 in the struggle for Italian unification. According to Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo [it], cave in Arabic literary writing is Maqtaa hagiar, while in popular Arabic it is pronounced as Mahias hagiar, and then “from Maqtaa (Mahias) = Mafia, that is cave, hence the name (ma)qotai, quarrymen, stone-cutters, that is, Mafia”.
■ mahyāṣ (مهياص), meaning “aggressive boasting” or “bragging”.
■ marfūḍ (مرفوض), meaning “rejected”, considered to be the most plausible derivation; marfūḍ developed into marpiuni (“swindler”) to marpiusu and finally mafiusu.
■ muʿāfā (معافى), meaning “safety” or “protection”.
■ maʿāfir (معافر), the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo. The local peasants imitated these Arabs and as a result the tribe’s name entered the popular lexicon. The word Mafia was then used to refer to the defenders of Palermo during the Sicilian Vespers against rule of the Capetian House of Anjou on 30 March 1282.
■ mafyaʾ (مفيء), meaning “place of shade”. Shade meaning refuge or derived from refuge. After the Normans destroyed the Saracen rule in Sicily in the 11th century, Sicily became feudalistic. Most Arab smallholders became serfs on new estates, with some escaping to “the Mafia”. It became a secret refuge.

Does anyone have any thoughts about that parade of possibles?

Sam Dolbear writes at the indispensable Public Domain Review:

Go to your local DIY store and the paints will no doubt carry strange names: Tawny Day Lily, Meadow Mist, Candied Yam, Marshmallow Bunny, to name but a few. As Daniel Harris points out in Cabinet magazine, paint names developed their own poetic style and, like a certain tradition of lyric poetry they make reference to nature to express mood or atmosphere. Likewise, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour (first published in 1814) constructs a system or taxonomy for the classification of colour with reference to things in the natural world, (rather than to objects of everyday artifice, as with the work of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel). And though the goal is to primarily enable a scientific structure of identification, rather than evoke mood, the end product can’t help but veer to the poetic.

The book is based on the work of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who, in his 1774 book Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils (translated into English in 1805), developed a nomenclature of colours so as to offer a standard with which to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. Clearly taken by the idea, some three decades later the Scottish painter of flowers Patrick Syme amended and extended Werner’s system. In addition to the mineral referent, for each of Werner’s colours Syme added an example from the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as providing an actual patch of colour on the page to accompany the words. While Werner found a suite of 79 tints enough for his geological purpose, now opened up to other realms of nature, Syme added 31 extra colours to bring the total to 110.

With Syme’s new reference categories there’s born a whole new world of relationships between disparate aspects of nature, encounters dictated solely by colour. For example, for “skimmed-milk white” we have the white of the human eyeballs (animal), the back of the petals of blue hepatica (vegetable), and common opal (mineral); for “lavender purple” we have “the light parts of spots of on the under wings of Peacock Butterfly” (animal), “dried lavender flowers” (vegetable), and “porcelain jasper” (mineral). Wonderfully odd monochrome tableaux are conjured: upon a crop of calamine a bed of straw in which sits a polar bear; or the style of an Orange Lily encrusted with Brazilian topaz and the eyes of the largest flesh fly.

Syme’s confidence in obscure references to the natural world came from an obsession with taxonomies at the time, a line developed from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin (who made use of Werner’s Nomenclature on the Beagle). Such people often relied on a network of collectors and explorers, those obsessed with ordering and categorizing, pinning down butterflies and stuffing birds. In an age of mass digital reproduction, the pinning down of colour is perhaps as difficult as ever. It might be easier to turn to Pantone though, rather than Abraham Gottlob Werner.

The link was sent me by the indispensable Trevor Joyce; thanks, Trevor! (Speaking of whom, check out his new project, Possession, which begins “well here goes nothing and it’s not funny at all” and continues with a series of six-line stanzas that capture our present moment as well as anything I’ve seen.)

I was excited to discover that the Centre for Expanded Poetics has an Archive section that presents the complete runs of Caterpillar (1967-1973), Sulfur (1981-2000), and transition (1927-1938). I don’t remember being aware of the first (which you can read about here: “Caterpillar was started by Clayton Eshleman as a series of chapbooks by such writers as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Paul Blackburn, and Louis Zukofsky”), but the other two are very familiar; I was excited when Sulfur first came out (I’ve probably got the first few issues kicking around somewhere), and of course transition is known to every aficionado of English-language modernism. What a gift to the online world!

For those who don’t care about defunct little magazines, try sengi, which is really two different words, one meaning ‘elephant shrew’ (from Swahili sengi, probably from another Bantu language) and the other the name of a former monetary unit of Zaire, one hundredth of a likuta and one ten-thousandth of a zaire — you might think it was named after the little mammal, but no, it’s from Kongo sengi, senki, from French cinq (in the sense of five sous). The second is in the OED but not, so far, the first.

This is via MeFi, and I’m just going to reproduce growabrain’s wording there because I can’t improve on it:

In Every Language collects images that different language versions of Wikipedia use to illustrate concepts. Refresh to see more.

It was created by Riley Walz. (wiki)

A couple to get you started: house, street. It’s interesting to see which articles use images from their own culture and which fetch them from elsewhere (e.g., the Japanese “street” image shows Wall Street).

Oh, and when I clicked on the Persian “street” article I chose the Google Translate option, and I thought I’d reproduce what it did with the etymology section:

Theology of the word

The word street is two parts of Khi and Aban Persian. The word “Khi” is one of the roots of two Persian words, chid and musk. ۳]

The word “wrough” in Middle Persian is (*xīg, *xēg, leather bag) of Mazandarani (xek). With the old Scandinavian kagi (Bashkeh) the doppelganger. And the word “worn” is from the root of the word Persian pig. ۴]

Jesse McKinley writes for the NY Times (archived) about a word that is apparently showing up all over the place:

With roots in the Renaissance and a long history of use by economists, tranche has been given new prominence in recent weeks as writers and pundits seek to describe the some three million pages released by the Justice Department in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier.

In the month since the Jan. 30 release, there have been tranches heard on the radio, on television, online and in print. There have been descriptions of “massive” and “enormous” tranches, “giant” and “voluminous” tranches, and — conversely — “small” tranches inside big tranches. There have been “recent” tranches and “new” tranches and “possibly last” tranches. There have been Spanish-language tranches (“tramo,” roughly) and, of course, French tranches, a natural outgrowth of its ancestry as a French verb, trancher, meaning to slice.

In English, tranche has made the leap from verb to noun, and is generally defined as a portion of a larger whole. […]

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