languagehat.com

My wife and I watched the 1963 movie Charade for the first time in decades; it’s been called “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made,” and it holds up pretty well despite a fair amount of silliness — it’s worth seeing just for the Paris setting, especially the scene set in Les Halles (stupidly demolished in 1973). But what I’m posting about is a plot point involving stamps, specifically one that was said to be the rarest in the world; it bore the Cyrillic inscription ПОРТО СКРИСОРИ (i.e., PORTO SKRISORI) and was so primitive and odd-looking I thought perhaps it had been invented for the movie (especially since I, a stamp collector in my youth, had never heard of it). But Google told me it was a real thing, a Moldavian Bull’s Head; it looked just like the first illustration at that Wikipedia article except that the number was 82 instead of 27. (You can read about the philatelic aspects in this post by Frank Moraes; the real “cap de bour” had a face value of 81 paras, not 82, and “Strangely, the 1858 Romanian 81 Parale Blue that was worth the most in the film, is worth the least in reality.”)

The important thing here, of course, is the inscription, which represents the Romanian phrase porto scrisori; scrisori (which has only two syllables — the -i indicates palatalization of the r) is the plural of scrisoare ‘letter,’ and Wikipedia says:

Around this circle, in the interior above the head, are the Romanian Cyrillic letters ПОРТО СКРИСОРИ (PORTO SCRISORI; “letters to be paid for by the recipient”). The use of the word PORTO is a mistake; FRANCO denotes letters where the postage has been paid by the sender, as was the case for letters using these stamps.

I’m not exactly sure how the word PORTO got there (as far as Wiktionary knows, it means ‘port wine’ in Romanian), but there must have been a good reason.

This seems to be Ancient Week at the Hattery; after Greek and Latin shorthand and the Canaanite comb, we come to Enheduanna, the Woman Who Was History’s First Named Author, as the NY Times puts it (archived):

It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending.

Suddenly, the ancient Mesopotamian priestess, who had been dead for more than 4,000 years, was a hot topic online as word spread that the first individually named author in human history was … a woman?

That may have been old news at the Morgan Library & Museum, where Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of ancient Near Eastern antiquities, was about to offer a tour of its new exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400-2000 B.C.” Babcock was thrilled by the attention, if not exactly surprised by the public’s surprise.

Ask people who the first author was, and they might say Homer, or Herodotus. “People have no idea,” he said. “They simply don’t believe it could be a woman” — and that she was writing more than a millennium before either of them, in a strikingly personal voice. […] “It’s the first time someone steps forward and uses the first-person singular and gives an autobiography,” Babcock said. “And it’s profound.”

[Read more…]

“A Canaanite’s Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from Lachish” (Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 2 [2022]: 76-119), by Daniel Vainstub, Madeleine Mumcuoglu, Michael G. Hasel, Katherine M. Hesler, Miriam Lavi, Rivka Rabinovich, Yuval Goren, and Yosef Garfinkel, might seem to the profane eye much ado about a few words scratched on a broken comb, but the few words are very interesting (as, I gather, is the comb to those whose remit, unlike mine, goes beyond the linguistic). The abstract is strikingly short:

An inscription in early Canaanite script from Lachish, incised on an ivory comb, is presented. The 17 letters, in early pictographic style, form seven words expressing a plea against lice.

The body of the paper begins with a discussion of dating and context, proceeds to a detailed description of the comb (made from elephant ivory), and on p. 90 gets to what interests me, the inscription:

The inscription contains 17 tiny letters that vary in width from 1 to 3 mm, engraved on the not-completely-smooth surface of the comb. The letters form seven words that for the first time provide us with a complete reliable sentence in a Canaanite dialect, written in the Canaanite script.

On pp. 91-102 the individual letters are analyzed (“our letter is most probably the first known example of the Canaanite letter ś”), pp. 103-107 deal with the vocabulary, and pp. 107-108 the grammar. I was particularly interested in the word qml:
[Read more…]

The Cleveland Clinic’s healthessentials article published October 31, 2022 (no author given) discusses studies that “have linked profanity to health benefits — like pain relief — and traits — like honesty”; it starts with the 2015 study by Kristin L. Jay and Timothy B. Jay which we discussed here, concluding “there isn’t enough evidence to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between profanity and brain power,” and continues as follows:

While much of the literature on the benefits of cursing is theoretical, some ideas have been put to the test. Scientists have found correlations between cursing and:

● Honesty. Profanity has been positively correlated with honesty and integrity across three different 2017 studies.
● Creativity. Unsurprisingly, researchers also used tests like the COWAT to measure creativity. Equally unsurprising: They found the same positive correlation between swearing and creativity that they found between swearing and intelligence. Doctors have also observed that people who experience aphasia after a stroke oftentimes retain their ability to curse like sailors. There are a lot of reasons that might happen. One theory is that cursing and other “automatic language” lives in the right side of your brain. For better or worse, we commonly regard the right side of the brain as the “creative side,” therefore, cursing is a sign of creativity.

It’s fun to talk about whether or not bad language = good people at a party, but the science to support those ideas is ultimately quite thin.

Instead, try discussing the findings around the impact of cursing on pain tolerance. They’re much stronger, and — depending on your luck— might come in handy someday.

[Read more…]

Candida Moss has an extraordinarily interesting Daily Beast piece on something I hadn’t been aware of:

Several years ago, Ryan Baumann, a digital humanities developer at Duke University, was leafing through an early 20th-century collection of ancient Greek manuscripts when he ran across an intriguing comment. The author noted that there was an undeciphered form of shorthand in the margins of a piece of papyrus and added a hopeful note that perhaps future scholars might be able to read it. The casual aside set Baumann off on a new journey to unlock the secrets of an ancient code.

Initially, Baumann told me, he thought that perhaps everything had been deciphered. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, it’s been about 100 years, maybe someone has figured it out!’ So, I looked into it, and to my delight, the system of ancient Greek shorthand does seem to have been largely figured out.” To his dismay, though, this century-spanning scholarly achievement has also been largely overlooked and underexplored. Very few people are interested in shorthand.

Why does this matter? Well, ancient Greek and Latin shorthand (also known as stenography or tachygraphy) were the bedrock of ancient writing and record keeping. The scripts that emerged in the first century BCE allowed people to record things faster than “normal.” Just like today, said Baumann, stenography was “crucially important” for recording courtroom proceedings and political speeches, but dictation was also used to compose letters, philosophy, and narrative. Everything from ancient romance novels to foundational political theories were first transcribed in shorthand. Often this would have happened on erasable wax tablets (we have many examples from archaeological excavations), but shorthand was also used on papyri and parchment.

[Read more…]

I usually ignore these “word of the year” stories, which are basically clickbait for lexicographers, but hell, this one (by Helen Bushby for BBC) includes splooting (“The act of lying flat on the stomach with the legs stretched out” — see this LH post), so how could I not post it? This one is useful:

Carolean: Of or relating to Charles III of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or his reign.

And the story also gives me a hook to vent about the repulsive term “quiet quitting,” defined as “The practice of doing no more work than one is contractually obliged to do, especially in order to spend more time on personal activities” — in other words, what I would call “doing what you’re paid to do.” The modern world has many terrible features, but one of the ones that makes me grind my teeth the hardest is the general acceptance of the idea that you owe your employer every speck of your time and brainpower (and this has, of course, only gotten worse with everyone being eternally connected). You’re probably not paid enough anyway, unless you’re a CEO or entertainment star; you don’t owe them a damn thing beyond what you were hired to do. Solidarity forever! (Thanks for the link go to the excellent cuchuflete, who is of course not responsible for my wild-eyed ranting.)

My pal Monica loves odd words as much as I do, and she recently sent me one so weird I have to share it with all and sundry. OED (entry from 1976):

hoden, adj.

Pronunciation: /ˈuːdən/
Forms: Also hooden.
Etymology: Origin uncertain: perhaps from association with wooden from the wooden horse’s head.

Kentish dialect.

Of or pertaining to the horse with wooden head and clapping jaws featured in a masquerade which formerly took place, spec. in Kent, on Christmas Eve. ˈhodener n. a performer in this masquerade. ˈhodening n. the name of the performance; also attributive.

1807 European Mag. 51 358 This [mumming] is called, provincially, a Hodening, and the figure above described a Hoden, or Woden horse.
1887 W. D. Parish & W. F. Shaw Dict. Kentish Dial. 77 Hoodening.., the name formerly given to a mumming or masquerade.
1891 Church Times 2 Jan. 20/1 ‘Hodening’ still goes on..at Deal and Walmer.
1909 P. Maylam Hooden Horse i. 2 Everyone springs up, saying, ‘The hoodeners have come, let us go and see the fun.’
[…]
1966 G. E. Evans Pattern under Plough xix. 193 The hobby-horses that appear in many countryside ceremonies and ritual dances, notably the Hodening Horse.
1971 Country Life 17 June 1533/1 The Hooden Horse, a mystic man-animal found only in East Kent, will be at large in Folkestone..June 19.

So much weirdness here, starting with the pronunciation, as if it were “ooden”! If there’s no /h/, why is it spelled that way? Do they no longer have the masquerade at all, even in the remoter regions of the county? Does the expression survive even if the thing itself has vanished? Any Kentishpersons (or persons of Kentishness) among my readership?

Via Catriona Kelly’s Facebook post (with some nice photos) I learn of the best church name ever, Saint Vedast-alias-Foster:

Saint Vedast Foster Lane or Saint Vedast-alias-Foster, a church in Foster Lane, in the City of London, is dedicated to St. Vedast (Foster is an Anglicisation of the name “Vaast”, as the saint is known in continental Europe), a French saint whose cult arrived in England through contacts with Augustinian clergy.

And if we follow that Vedast link, we discover that he’s called Saint Gaston in French. You first, my dear Gaston!

I just learned something interesting from M-W’s Word History post Why Jaywalking is Called Jaywalking:

The meaning of jaywalker is different than it was when it first began to be used. The word was formed in imitation of a slightly older word, the jay-driver. This initially referred to a driver of horse-drawn carriages or automobiles who refused to abide by the traffic laws in a fairly specific way: they drove on the wrong side of the road.

An article in The Junction City Union (Junction City, Kansas) on June 28th, 1905 begins “Nearly every day someone calls our attention to articles that have been appearing in The Kansas City Star concerning ‘The Jay Driver’”, and then goes on to warn against these miscreants who cannot seem to figure out that they should be driving on the right side of the road.

Stop at the corner of any well traveled street in the business part of the city and see how many know how to drive—that is to keep to the right hand side of the street—and you will be astonished at the number who don’t know that this is the right way to do or who are careless in regard to the matter.

In October of that same year in The Kansas City Star, we find mention of the pedestrian version of these drivers:

Much annoyance would be obviated if people when meeting others going in the opposite direction would keep to the right and avoid collisions and being called a ‘jay walker.’

For the first few years that it was in use jaywalker had little, if anything, to do with pedestrians crossing the street, and was used solely to scold those who lacked sidewalk etiquette.

Both jaywalker and jay-driver are taken from a sense of the word jay, meaning ‘a greenhorn, or rube’. It is unclear why jaywalker shifted its meaning and survived for more than a hundred years now, while jay-driver languishes in obscurity. And if you are one of those who find the conduct of the jaywalker objectionable beyond words, take heart, for the sentiments of early 20th century America are in line with yours; in the words of The Chanute Daily Tribune in 1909: “The jay walker needs attention as well as the jay driver, and is about as big a nuisance.”

The OED (entry not updated since 1933) will presumably catch up to this derivation when they get around to revising the jaywalker entry, which currently says simply “Etymology: < jay n. 3d + walker n.¹.”

I am definitely not “one of those who find the conduct of the jaywalker objectionable beyond words”; as a proud New Yorker, even if I no longer live in the city, I think of jaywalking as a noble tradition, and am delighted to learn that California has eased up on its former notoriously intolerant laws. (I am, on the other hand, depressed to see the sloppy copyediting in the M-W post: the stray “The” in “The Junction City Union” and “The Kansas City Star,” no italics in “The Kansas City Star,” and only one properly italicized usage in “The Chanute Daily Tribune” — though my personal preference would be to ignore “The” in the names and just say, e.g., “the Kansas City Star.”)

In unrelated news, New giant bookstore in east Japan hopes to offer ‘treasure hunt’ with 500,000 volumes — holy cow!

In response to Dave Wilton’s Big List post on the words Gaelic, Gaul, and Gallic, zythophile wrote:

As I’m sure you know, Dave, the Irish tale of the was betweeb Brian Boru and the Vikings is called Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib, generally rendered in English as The war between the Gael and the Gall. I have long wondered about rhe origins of Gall meaning foreigner here, but I have yet to find an explanation.

Dave responded:

My knowledge of Celtic languages is close to zero. But my wild-ass guess is that Gall is cognate with Gael and both have a generic meaning of “people.” Gallaibh means foreigner and is literally something like not-Irish. That’s just guess work based on how demonyms work generically across languages.

I do see in the eDil—Irish Language Dictionary that finn-gaill means Norseman, dub-gaill means Dane.

I’m pretty sure the “Gall” here is just an Anglicization of the Irish root.

And I said:

For what it’s worth, James Henthorn Todd’s 1867 edition says:

The love of alliteration appears in the very title of the work, Cogadh Gaedhil re Gallaibh, “The wars of the Gaedhel with the Gaill,” or of the Irish with the Foreigners. Gall was in all probability a name given to all strangers who spoke a foreign language, and were therefore at first confounded with the Galli, or Gauls, the foreigners best known to the aboriginal Irish.

I have no idea what current Celticists say, but it would be interesting to find out.

I just looked up Gall in eDIL and found “(a) Oldest meaning a Gaul […] (b) a Scandinavian invader (finn-gaill being the Northmen, dub-gaill the Danes) […] (c) an Anglo-Norman, an Irishman of Norman descent, an Englishman […] (d) a foreigner […] (e) Hebridean.” Which would seem to support Todd’s guess, but I’m curious to find out if anyone knows more about the term. (The Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh turned up in this post from last year.)