languagehat.com

I don’t normally link to podcasts when they don’t have transcripts (and why don’t they? grr!), because I prefer reading and don’t want to be forced to spend most of an hour taking things in aurally, but I’m making an exception for the BBC’s Free Thinking episode What language did Columbus speak? (44 minutes):

Christopher Columbus spoke to lots of people: his family and kin in Genova, merchants in Venice, royalty in Madrid, the crew of his ship, not to mention the people he met on the other side of the Atlantic. Today, we would consider this a case of multilingualism. But is that how Columbus would have seen it? What language did he think he spoke himself? In the same period a pidgin language developed to allow linguistically diverse communities in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa to carry out trade, diplomacy, and general communication. We look at the latest research on this language, known as lingua franca, and consider what it might tell us about communication amongst the linguistic communities of the same region today. New Generation Thinker John Gallagher is joined by guests Dr Joanna Nolan, Professor Nandini Das, Dr Birgül Yılmaz, and translator David Bellos.

That gives you a good idea of the material covered, and it’s all extraordinarily interesting. Columbus spoke Genoese, Latin, at least some Greek (he used it for coding), Castilian Spanish (at least for writing, perhaps with help), and doubtless lingua franca (he couldn’t have plied his trade without it); did he think of Latin and its Italian and Spanish descendants as separate languages? How common was the possession of such a linguistic mix? (Spoiler: Quite common.) What was the first encounter with Amerindian languages like? There’s a deep dive into lingua franca with Joanna Nolan: it was a pidgin, probably with a Venetian lexical base plus Genoese, Sicilian, Spanish, etc.; its pronunciation seems to have been influenced by Arabic (only three vowels); it became established by the early 17th century, but was first mentioned in 14th-century JavaDjerba, and was originally “a language for giving orders.” (I posted about it back in 2005.) A Belgian diplomat who spent time in a bagnio (OED: “An oriental prison, a place of detention for slaves”) said 22 different languages were spoken there. There was a sort of lingua franca in camps like Auschwitz (Primo Levi is quoted), and there are comparable “linguistic repertoires” in refugee camps in Greece today (refugees are resistant to learning Greek because of bad experiences — they prefer English or German). In some places it’s normal to switch naturally between languages and registers. The program ends with Edward Sapir’s quote about all languages being equal in their ability to express things but not equal in power, and GallagherDavid Bellos won my heart by saying we “need to get over the great romantic nonsense of ethno-linguistic nationalism.” (Incidentally, he says “multi-ling-you-al” and “mono-ling-you-al” with four five syllables, which surprised me; it isn’t a UK thing, because the OED has only /ˌmʌltɪˈlɪŋɡw(ə)l/, /ˌmɒnə(ʊ)ˈlɪŋɡw(ə)l/.) Thanks, Maidhc!

From Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder:

Gespräch einer Hausschnecke mit sich selbst

Soll i aus meim Hause raus?
Soll i aus meim Hause nit raus?
Einen Schritt raus?
Lieber nit raus?
Hausenitraus –
Hauseraus
Hauseritraus
Hausenaus
Rauserauserauserause …

(Die Schnecke verfängt sich in ihren eigenen Gedanken oder vielmehr diese gehen mit ihr dermaßen durch, daß sie die weitere Entscheidung der Frage verschieben muß.)

At the link you can hear it read in a very lively fashion. Max Knight’s translation:
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Frédéric Gouaillard and Thomas Poupeau write in Le Parisien (Sept. 4; paywalled) about the phenomenon of omitting que ‘that’ in certain contexts in spoken French; the teaser says:

“I admit I don’t know”, “I have a feeling it’s going to be hot”… but where has the “that” gone in spoken language? More and more often, the subordinating conjunction que is disappearing in oral use. Young people are fond of these shortened expressions, but it is actually an old phenomenon that affects everyone.

«J’avoue je sais pas», «J’ai l’impression il va faire chaud»… mais où est passé le «que» dans le langage parlé ? De plus en plus souvent, la conjonction de subordination «que» disparaît à l’oral. Les jeunes sont friands de ces expressions raccourcies, mais c’est en réalité un phénomène ancien qui touche l’ensemble de la population.

I’ll quote the first few paragraphs below (in French; I’m feeling lazy, and GT and DeepL should do a good job with it) and summarize the rest:
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IMAGINARY, a non-profit organization for open and interactive mathematics, presents a nifty project:

Pink trombone is a model of the human vocal tract that synthesizes human voice from scratch, controllable with your fingers.

Your voice is the oldest and most likely the most complex musical instrument. By interacting with this model, you can discover how the human voice works.

The voice system consists of two components: sound production and sound articulation. The sound is produced with the vocal cords and the vocal folds, were we can control its pitch and loudness. The articulation is what makes our voice sound like a recognizable speech sound (vowels, consonants…). This happens in the vocal tract, a tube where the sound wave travels and bounces back and forth. Using the tongue, lips and nose, we can change the profile of the tube, affecting how the sound bounces on its interior. The final wave that comes out of the lips is the sound we hear. This program is based on a simplified model of the voice tract and a discrete solution to the wave equation (discrete d’Alembert solution).

Enjoy! (Thanks go to that fine poet and provider of links, Trevor Joyce.)

I had heard of Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version but couldn’t have told you anything about it; apparently it’s about Andrew Crocker-Harris, a notoriously strict classics teacher at an English boys’ school. Laudator Temporis Acti quotes a passage that will bring back bad memories for anyone who has had to construe the classics:

He picks up a text of the Agamemnon and TAPLOW does the same.

Line thirteen hundred and ninety-nine. Begin.

TAPLOW. Chorus. We — are surprised at —

ANDREW. (Automatically.) We marvel at.

TAPLOW. We marvel at — thy tongue — how bold thou art — that you —

ANDREW. Thou. (ANDREW’S interruptions are automatic. His thoughts are evidently far distant.)

TAPLOW. Thou — can —

ANDREW. Canst —

TAPLOW. Canst — boastfully speak —

ANDREW. Utter such a boastful speech —

TAPLOW. Utter such a boastful speech — over — (In a sudden rush of inspiration.) — the bloody corpse of the husband you have slain —

ANDREW looks down at his text for the first time. TAPLOW looks apprehensive.

ANDREW. Taplow — I presume you are using a different text from mine —

TAPLOW. No, sir.

ANDREW. That is strange for the line as I have it reads: ἥτις τοιόνδ’ ἐπ’ ἀνδρὶ κομπάζεις λόγον. However diligently I search I can discover no ‘bloody’ — no ‘corpse’ — no ‘you have slain’. Simply ‘husband’ —

TAPLOW. Yes, sir. That’s right.

ANDREW. Then why do you invent words that simply are not there?

TAPLOW. I thought they sounded better, sir. More exciting. After all she did kill her husband, sir. (With relish.) She’s just been revealed with his dead body and Cassandra’s weltering in gore —

ANDREW. I am delighted at this evidence, Taplow, of your interest in the rather more lurid aspects of dramaturgy, but I feel I must remind you that you are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus.

TAPLOW. (Greatly daring.) Yes, but still, sir, translator’s licence, sir — I didn’t get anything wrong — and after all it is a play and not just a bit of Greek construe.

ANDREW. (Momentarily at a loss.) I seem to detect a note of end of term in your remarks. I am not denying that the Agamemnon is a play. It is perhaps the greatest play ever written —

TAPLOW. (Quickly.) I wonder how many people in the form think that?

The original Greek, as well as another brief passage, at the link.

Biodun Jeyifo, a scholar of African studies and comparative literature, published an article that a kind reader brought to my attention, English is an African language – Ka Dupe! [for and against Ngũgĩ] (Journal of African Cultural Studies 30.2 [June 2018]: 133-147), which is a (to my mind) convincing response to the ideas of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o ([ᵑɡoɣe wá ðiɔŋɔ]; see this LH post for previous discussion) concerning the English language in Africa. The article is behind a paywall, but you should be able to get limited JSTOR access for free if you want to read it (which I recommend). Here’s the abstract:

In a radical departure from the orthodoxies of postcolonial African cultural and linguistic nationalism, the paper calls for acceptance of English as an African language with a central argument that insists that all languages widely used in Africa ought to be classified as either indigenous or non-indigenous. This argument rests on a vigorous critique of what the author identifies as the principle of absolute autochthony as the only determinant of which languages are African and which are not. As the most eloquent and influential proponent of this principle, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the central focus of the paper with regard to both the positive and negative aspects of his ideas and positions on the language question in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

And here are a few excerpts:
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I recently ran across the odd word aviso — odd not in itself, but because of its variety of meanings and its restricted usage. I found its Russian equivalent in Irina Polyanskaya’s 2002 novel Горизонт событий [Event horizon], which I’m enjoying even as I have no idea what it’s “about” or where it’s going. Here’s the passage:

Зима 1992 года выдалась снежной. Белым снегом засыпало фальшивые авизо, чемоданы с компроматом, офисы с компьютерами, русские батальоны из Пскова и Рязани, переброшенные в Таджикистан, Абхазию и Приднестровье.

The winter of 1992 was snowy. White snow covered fake avisos, suitcases with kompromat, offices with computers, and Russian battalions from Pskov and Ryazan deployed to Tajikistan, Abkhazia, and Transnistria.

My Oxford Russian-English dictionary has the following entry:

ави́зо, indecl., n. 1. (comm.) letter of advice. 2. (naut.) aviso, advice-boat.

Which certainly makes it seem as if aviso is an English word, but it’s not in AHD or M-W, even the unabridged Third New International. It is, however, in the OED (entry updated December 2011):
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Yakov Pichkar and Nicole Creanza have a preprint “Subtle cultural boundaries reinforce genetic structure in England” whose abstract reads:

Genes and languages both maintain signatures of human history. The evolution of genetics and of culture both have features that can track population movements and demographic history. Further, cultural traits may themselves impact these movements and demography. In particular, while speaking a different language appears to act as a barrier to gene flow, it is not clear whether more subtle dialect-level linguistic differences within a language can influence mating preferences and thus affect genetic population structure. We examine the strength of cultural barriers and of association within England using the spatial similarities between rates of linguistic and genetic change. We find that genes and dialect markers have similar spatial distributions at all geographic scales, though these similarities are more pronounced at larger scales. This covariation, in the absence of geographic barriers to coordinate linguistic and genetic differentiation, suggests that some cultural boundaries have maintained genetic population structure in England.

Interesting stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what Hatters have to say. Thanks, Dmitry!

JC wrote me about Piotr Gąsiorowski’s paper “Gruit Grus: The Indo-European Names of the Crane,” saying “Cranes do indeed crane, but the Latin verb means to cry out like a crane.” Here’s the abstract:

The purpose of this article is to show that the variety and irregularity of the Indo-European ‘crane’ words is apparent rather than actual, and that their derivational history is in fact quite simple. In brief, they can be reduced to only a couple of related PIE lexemes, rather than a whole constellation of “dialectal” forms.

As you would expect from Piotr, it’s careful and thoroughgoing, and for what it’s worth I find it convincing. I especially like the modesty of passages like this:

The purpose of this section is to point out that Arm. kṙownk is a possible direct cognate of the ‘crane’ term found in Balto-Slavic and Latin. The relative insecurity of some aspects of reconstructible Proto-Armenian makes it impossible to clarify every detail, so the proposed derivation must be regarded as tentative. A large dose of scepticism is recommended in such cases, especially when the words we attempt to etymologise come dangerously close to being cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.

Thanks, John, and a shanah tovah to all my Jewish readers!

A reader writes “this article about the Yiddish translation of that NYtimes yeshiva article is super interesting,” and it certainly is; Zach Golden reports for the Forward:

The NYT report has been translated into an extraordinarily high-quality Hasidic dialect of Yiddish. The online version has been widely read and shared on Hasidic online forums. A PDF version, created to circumvent the community’s strict internet filters, has also been making the rounds.

In the Hasidic community, even worse than people who reject their way of life are those perceived as betraying their own community. Known as moyserim, or informers, they can face harassment, excommunication or even extrajudicial violence.

Members of advocacy groups for improved secular education in Hasidic schools have been labeled as such, making anyone perceived as supporting them — say, a Yiddish translator of a critical New York Times report — a persona non grata within the Hasidic community. It is for this reason that the identity of the Yiddish translator remains a secret.

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