languagehat.com

A reader writes:

I was trudging through Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down” when the following caught my eye:

“You Englishmen, who have no right in this Kingdom of France,” she writes on a sheet tied to an arrow and shot out of besieged Orleans, “the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, that you quit your fortresses and return into your own country or if not I shall make you such babay that the memory of it will be perpetual.” (May 5, 1429)

“Babay” did not yield its secrets on wiktionary […] Perhaps it was an error in print or translation, so I looked up the source in French:

«Vous, Anglais, qui n’avez aucun droit sur ce royaume de France, le Roi des Cieux vous ordonne et mande par moi, Jeanne la Pucelle, que vous quittiez vos fortresses et retourniez dans votre pays, ou sinon, je vous ferai tel babay dont sera perpétuelle mémoire. Voilà ce que je vous écris pour la troisième et dernière fois, et n’écrirai pas davantage. Signé : Jhesus-Maria, Jeanne la Pucelle» […]

I tried Google’s ngram viewer and the French and English corpora, with not-very-encouraging results. “Babay” was capitalized in most of them, with the few exceptions reverting to the Philippines. A near hapax legomenon?

What else could I do? I tried a few online dictionaries for old French, to no avail, with “0 results” mutely judging me the way only specialized search engines can do.

This is the sort of thing the Hattery is good at, so have at it!

David Eddyshaw has been for some years now praising the work of Kofi Yakpo, e.g., here in 2019:

Talking of English-lexifier Atlantic creoles (we were, you know, you just didn’t notice), a kind person got me Kofi Yakpo’s A Grammar of Pichi for my birthday. [Fernando Po creole.] Best account I’ve yet come across of one of those languages. At 500+ entirely unpadded pages, it’s a sort of counterargument in itself to John McWhorter’s standing views about creole exceptionalism. It’s got lexical tone! It’s got a distinct narrative perfective! What more could you want?

Now, thanks to a Facebook post by Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul), I have learned about his background; it’s quite a story:

Twice in his life, Kofi Yakpo has made a name for himself as a linguist: Once as a rapper in the German hip-hop band, Advanced Chemistry, where his stage name was “Linguist”. The 1992 single “Fremd im eigenen Land” (Foreigner in my own country) made the band famous whilst his academic career only began shortly before his 40th birthday.

Since 2013, Yakpo has been teaching linguistics at the University of Hong Kong und conducting research into Afro-Caribbean Creole languages: languages that develop when two or more languages converge and form a new one. This kind of hybridisation emerged during the colonial era, the linguistics professor explains, often under duress. And although there are nearly 200 million speakers of Creole languages worldwide, unlike European languages, so far, they have often not been studied sufficiently.

The fact that he has this second career as a researcher at all, says Yakpo, is not just a result of his huge interest in languages but also because of his hip-hop outlook. “As hip-hoppers, our attitude was: I am large. We were always brimming with confidence.” At the time of our video conference, Yakpo is in Nairobi, Kenya, where he is exploring the linguistic variants of Swahili.

[Read more…]

I just saw, for the first time in years, Godard’s Weekend, the most repugnant of his pre-Maoist films to bourgeois sensibilities, featuring as it does murder, cannibalism, and other violations of the traditional order, not to mention the famous nearly-eight-minute-long traffic jam (not in fact done in a single tracking shot, but close enough to be impressive) accompanied by nonstop, and very loud, honking. I probably won’t need to see it again for another few years, but it’s got enough enjoyable bits to keep me coming back, including the “musical interlude” with Paul Gégauff as a pianist performing Mozart in a barnyard and lecturing on how the “serious” classical music of today has no audience and it’s the pop music of the Beatles and “les Rolling” that is popular by virtue of its use of Mozartean harmonies. Godard ended the movie with the intertitle FIN DE CONTE/FIN DE CINEMA (you can see the frames here), and indeed he didn’t make another movie in the traditional sense for some years.

But never mind that, I’m here to talk about one of the many other intertitles — the one that reads FAUX RACCORD. The subtitle translates it as JUMP CUT, but that appears not to be accurate; even though the French Wikipedia article Raccord (cinéma) says “Il y a peu de solutions à ce type de faux raccord (jump cut),” I think Mathilde Dioux in the WordReference.com Language Forums (faux-raccord) is correct:

As Wikipedia puts it, a jump cut is: “a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to “jump” position in a discontinuous way.”
That is not what a “faux-raccord” means. A “faux-raccord” is a mistake in the continuity of characters, plot, … in a movie. Typical examples of faux-racords involve changing levels of drinks in glasses or clock hands shifting back and forth in the same scene. (I am not sure I am making myself clear.)
I think the English for “faux-raccord” is “continuity error”. To see examples of both “continuity errors” and “faux-raccords”, just look for videos with these tags… Some people made a hobby from digging continuity errors 🙂

That French Wikipedia article on raccord that I linked above is long and daunting; the supposed English equivalent is Match cut, but that is clearly a much more limited concept. In general, film terminology is extraordinarily hard to grasp if you’re not part of the industry, and the fact that it differs so greatly between languages doesn’t help.
[Read more…]

Richard Hershberger has been making regular Facebook posts about his specialty, early baseball (including a series “150 years ago today in baseball” which is always enjoyable reading), but sometimes he makes posts having nothing to do with the game, and one such is this, presenting a cartoon from the Pittsburg Press of March 4, 1894 (note the old spelling of the city’s name). The caption of the first panel begins “Nothing like a lard bucket for a growler,” and that reminded me of the much-missed Daily Growler (the blog of Mike Greene, aka thegrowlingwolf) and also made me wonder if I’d ever posted about this use, meaning (in the words of Green’s Dictionary of Slang) “a container, usu. a covered pail with a carrying handle, in which beer is purchased at a tavern, then brought home for consumption.” It turns out I hadn’t, so I’m doing so now. Alas, nobody knows its etymology; Green (“All Green[e]s are kin,” Mike used to say) has this roundup of possibilities:

[ety. unknown; ? the growling, grating noise of the can as it slid, full of beer, across the bar, or the ‘growling’ or grumbling of the children who were sent on the errand, or the drunken arguing that ensued among recipients of the liquor; for full discussion see Cohen, Studies in Slang VI (1999) pp.1–20]

His first citation, offering its own hypothesis, is from 1883:

Trenton (NJ) Times 20 June 2/2: The growler is the latest New York institution. It is a beer can, the legitimate outgrowth of the enforcement of the Sunday liquor law. Young men stand on the sidewalk and drink their beer out of a can, which, as fast as emptied, is sent to be refilled where-ever its bearer can find admittance. It is called the growler because it provokes so much trouble in the scramble after beer.

But I expect that can be antedated using all the resources now available. At any rate, it’s an excellent word.
[Read more…]

I was recently reminded of this comment, where I said “I could swear I’d posted about ‘Misirlou,’ but it seems not,” and I thought, “Well, why don’t I?” It’s a perfect LH topic, and not only because of the derivation of the name: Greek Μισιρλού < Turkish Mısırlı ‘Egyptian’ < Arabic مصر Miṣr ‘Egypt’ (to quote the Wikipedia article). No, there’s also the gender issue; as I said at MetaFilter fifteen years ago, quoting the Wikipedia talk page:

[Turkish] Misirli is a gender-neutral word that could refer to any person or object from Egypt. Misirlou [the Greek word, borrowed from Turkish] refers specifically to a Egyptian female person, and even more specifically to a member of the country’s predominant Arab/Muslim population (members of the large Greek/Christian community at the time would never be referred to as ‘Misirlides’ but as ‘Egyptiotes’).

Thus words shift connotation as they wander. As for the song, this is the oldest version I know about (Tetos Dimitriadis, 1927), and this is the rocked-up version (Dick Dale, 1962) that made it famous in America, first when I was a lad and then again when Quentin Tarantino used it in Pulp Fiction (1994). Any way you play it, it’s a great tune.

I just watched Godard’s 1966 La Chinoise, which is shockingly underappreciated; a film-studies guy who has done a number of Godard retrospectives says it’s the only one of his famous ’60s movies that never sells out. Obviously the reason is that it focuses on Marxism-Leninism — or, to quote someone who recently complained about it to me, “a bunch of self-important, privileged Parisian twits playing at politics” — but that’s like rejecting Moby-Dick because it’s about whaling. It’s absolutely gorgeous and frequently funny, and any lover of Godard should see it; Craig Fischer has a long and thoughtful take from 2011 that will provide some useful approaches.

But this is not a movie blog, and what induced me to blog about it is a remark by Michel Semeniako (who played Henri, the guy kicked out of the group for being “revisionist”) in an interview included on the Kino DVD. He said Godard addressed them as tu when they were engaged in shooting the movie, though he used vous when they met elsewhere — it was part of the intimacy of the workplace. I thought that was an interesting wrinkle. (It’s also interesting that Godard had Anne Wiazemsky, in her role as the intransigent Maoist Véronique, use lines in her dialogues with her onscreen lover Jean-Pierre Léaud that she had previously used with Godard, her lover in real life; understandably, it made her uncomfortable. But it goes with his general Brechtian insistence that actors should quote, not emote.)

We’ve discussed tu and vous a number of times, e.g. in 2012 (“Today, French people in their 20s hardly ever use vous”) and last year (“Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme”).

Nikhil Krishnan writes in the New Yorker about the extent to which “things that seem natural may be artifacts of culture”:

When I left India for college in England, I was surprised to find that pinching my Adam’s apple didn’t mean, as I had thought it meant everywhere, “on my honor.” I learned to expect only mockery at the side-to-side tilts of the head with which I expressed degrees of agreement or disagreement, and trained myself to keep to the Aristotelian binary of nod and shake.

Around that time, I also learned—from watching the British version of “The Office”—that the word “cringe” could be an adjective, as in the phrase “so cringe.” It turned out that there was a German word for the feeling inspired by David Brent, the cringe-making boss played by Ricky Gervais in the show: Fremdschämen—the embarrassment one feels when other people have, perhaps obliviously, embarrassed themselves. Maybe possessing those words—“cringe,” Fremdschämen—only gave me labels for a feeling I already knew well. Or maybe learning the words and learning to identify the feelings were part of the same process. Maybe it wasn’t merely my vocabulary but also my emotional range that was being stretched in those early months in England.

Many migrants have such a story. In “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” (Norton), the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita describes her puzzlement, before arriving in the United States, at the use of the English word “distress.” Was it “closer to the Dutch angst (‘anxious/afraid’),” she wondered, “or closer to the Dutch verdriet/wanhoop (‘sadness/despair’)?” It took her time to feel at home with the word: “I now no longer draw a blank when the word is used. I know both when distress is felt, and what the experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an ‘emotion’ to me.”

Mesquita “came to believe that the idea of a culturally invariant core of basic emotions was more of an ideology than a scientific truth”:
[Read more…]

A piquant post at Laudator Temporis Acti:

Oxford English Dictionary, entry for helluo librorum:

Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin helluo librorum.

Etymology: < post-classical Latin helluo librorum (in some medieval manuscripts of Cicero) < classical Latin helluō HELLUO n. + librōrum, genitive plural of liber book (see LIBRARY n.1).

In early editions of Cicero De Finibus 3. 7, it is said that Cato ‘quasi helluo librorum..videatur’ (‘appeared like a glutton for books’); the modern reading, restored from manuscript evidence by Jan Gruter in his edition of 1618, is ‘quasi helluari libris..videatur’ (‘appeared as if to devour books’).

The OED’s quotation from Cicero is faulty. For videatur read videbatur. The variant helluo doesn’t even appear in L.D. Reynolds’ OCT edition of De Finibus (1998); here is the text and apparatus from Claudio Moreschini’s Teubner edition:

Quo magis tum in summo otio maximaque copia quasi helluari libris, si hoc verbo in tam clara re utendum est, videbatur.

helluari NV BE: helluaris R, belluari AM, belluaris Pmg., helluo PLSY libri R PLSY, corr. P²

Madvig in his critical apparatus records manuscripts LC as reading helluo librorum.

A helluo is “A person who spends immoderately on eating, etc., a squanderer,” and helluor is “To spend immoderately on eating and other luxuries” (Oxford Latin Dictionary). There is no satisfactory etymology.

I suspect we can all identify with helluones librorum in this hattery.

Leanne Ogasawara writes for The Millions; the main focus is on creative writing workshops and MFA programs (everyone told her “Whatever you do, don’t get an MFA”), and there is some (to my mind) crap about the “pit self” of the Western world versus the “flexi-self” associated with “collectivistic societies,” but she has some interesting things to say about differing structures of storytelling:

After 20 years in Japan, where for the last decade I thought, dreamt, and read mainly in Japanese, my thinking and writing now reflects Japanese storytelling styles. I prefer more meditative writing with constant pivots and turns. I love surprises, and prefer the lyric over the concrete, the “nobility of failure” over the hero’s journey. And more than anything, I love books that refer to other books.

[Matthew] Salesses [author of Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping], who was born in Korea, reminds us that not all traditions favor conflict, or character-driven models, like the hero’s journey. He cites Chinese, Korean, and Japanese stories, which “developed from a four-act, rather than a three- or five-act structure: in Japanese it is called kishōtenketsu (ki: introduction; sho: development; ten: twist; ketsu: reconciliation).” The kishōtenketsu structure informs fiction, nonfiction, theater, and even the movements of the tea ceremony. It is a profoundly different aesthetic system from the Western model, with its primary focus on conflict. Perhaps the most common critique I hear from Western readers about Japanese fiction is that nothing ever seems to happen. […]

In workshop, “Nothing happens” is always meant as a criticism, an inherently bad thing. This can be stifling for a writer who doesn’t read for urgency or conflict in everything.

I too love books that refer to other books, not to mention books that openly discuss ideas — Matthew Salesses, criticizing the workshop model and the cookiecutter prose it produces, says of such stories: “Instead of a political argument, a character might angrily eat a potato.”

I always like it when I can combine both the remits of this blog, and Lola Méndez’s Smithsonian Magazine article “The Real Panama Hat” allows me to do so. Obviously it’s about hats, and in fact features a hat I knew nothing about; meanwhile, the third paragraph introduces a slew of plant names equally unfamiliar to me:

The Panama hat is infamously misnamed. The handmade straw headgear actually hails from Ecuador. Construction workers building the Panama Canal wore the hats, though, as their wide brims protected them from the harsh hot sun. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt inspected the construction of the canal in a white linen suit topped off with one of the Ecuadorian hats. Photos of Roosevelt unintentionally launched a fashion trend, and the name stuck.

The real Panama hat is the sombrero pintando (“painted hat”), also known as the pinta’o.

The pinta’o originated in the province of Coclé southwest of Panama City, where the hats are still made today. Like the Panama hat, the pinta’o is also handwoven with natural fibers, but it is defined by intricate dark patterns that are woven throughout the hat. Exquisite artisanship is required to craft the sombrero from the fibers of several local plants—bellota for the white part of the hat, chonta for decoration, chisná for dying fiber, junco to make the ornate tarco stripe, and pita for stitching the hat. The bellota fibers are boiled before being sun-dried for about a week, as the whiter the fiber, the more valuable the hat. After the fiber has dried to the desired shade, it’s woven into braids. To form the hat, braids are wrapped around a wooden block and carefully sewn together by hand. Intricate geometric motifs—straight lines, waves and zig-zags—are formed from bands of chonta fiber dyed with chisná leaves. The design creates the appearance of a “painted hat.”

It is indeed a fine piece of headgear; click the link for photos and history. Alas, I also have to put on my editorial hat and shake a monitory finger: the full phrase is sombrero pintado, as seen here, not “pintando”; pinta’o shows the perfectly normal development of the -ado ending in the spoken language, and in fact the Spanish Wikipedia article is called Sombrero pintao, with not even an apostrophe to mark the missing d. (Thanks, Bonnie!)