languagehat.com

I was reading Libby Purves’ lively TLS review (archived) of Siân Evans’ Maiden Voyages: Women and the golden age of transatlantic travel when I found myself baffled by this sentence:

Exercise became fashionable (Nancy Astor caned the rowing machines and ran laps of the deck) and onboard pools needed swimming instructresses.

She did what to the rowing machines? Fortunately the OED (s.v. cane) came to my aid:

transitive. Chiefly British.

a. To punish severely, to subject to rough treatment; to use excessively or carelessly.

1925 E. Fraser & J. Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 46 ‘Smith got properly caned at the Orderly Room this morning’, i.e. got a stiff sentence of C.B. [= confinement to barracks].
1932 R. G. Curtis Edgar Wallace xii. 206 Ruthlessly caning a decrepit car all the way from London.
1968 R. Mann Headliner xxxiv. 222 They really caned him. £250,000. I’d no idea they awarded that kind of money.
1998 R. Newman Manners 137 Next day I discovered there’d been two youths in the kitchen holding his health visitor hostage, while a third was out caning her Mastercard.
2007 Independent 17 Mar. (Save & Spend section) 14/2 We’ve all been caned by the stock markets lately.

b. Chiefly Sport. To defeat heavily; to beat easily.

1961 E. Partridge Dict. Slang (ed. 5) II. 1027/2 Cane, to defeat.
[…]

c. slang. To take or consume (recreational drugs or alcohol), esp. rapidly or to excess. Also to cane it (frequently implying long-term or habitual behaviour of this type).

1991 K. Waterhouse Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell II. 35 Oh, and talking of the law, Norman, I appear to have caned the best part of a bottle of vodka.
1992 R. Graef Living Dangerously iv. 97 My friend’s uncle was a Charlie dealer so my friend used to get ounces on tic. He had an ounce and we all went up his house and we washed out a gram of it and had a bit, and then that progressed into washing out the whole lot and just caning (taking) it all.
[…]
2008 C. Newkey-Burden in J. Burchill & C. Newkey-Burden Not in my Name App. 181 He took drugs for England, he knocked the drugs on the head… Most importantly, he has never hypocritically dissed anyone else who still canes it.

This is a public service message for those Yanks who, like me, had never encountered the term; I guess we’d say “Nancy Astor hit the rowing machines.”

I learn via Jenny Larsson’s Facebook post that there will be a hybrid symposium “Exploring New Methods – Quantitative Approaches to Indo-European Linguistics” on May 11; it’s “an event of the research program LAMP – Languages and Myths of Prehistory and the Centre for Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture at Stockholm University, in collaboration with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.” The Collegium’s Events page says:

11 May, 2:15 p.m. SYMPOSIUM – HYBRID EVENT
Exploring New Methods: Quantitative Approaches to Indo-European Linguistics
Oscar Billing, Erik Elgh, Harald Hammarström, Philipp Rönchen
The symposium will be followed by a reception.
Pre-registration is required for the physical event. Please sign up via rsvp@swedishcollegium.se by 6 May 2022 at the latest.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/69022550575
This is an event of the research programme LAMP – Languages and Myths of Prehistory and the Centre for Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture at Stockholm University, in collaboration with SCAS.

In recent years, quantitative methods developed in the field of biology have been repurposed and applied to linguistic data. The aim of this symposium is to provide an insight into this ongoing work. At the symposium, we will discuss the scientific advances it promises as well the potential limitations to the method, both specifically in relation to the Indo-European language family and to comparative linguistics in general.

The programme will be available shortly.

I’m inherently skeptical of applying the methods of biology to linguistics, but only because it’s so often done badly; I’ll certainly be interested to see the program when they put it online, and I’ll be curious to know the reactions of anyone who knows more than I do about the people involved and the topics (when they’re available).

Alexandra Alter has an amazingly good NY Times story (archived) about one of the most important contemporary Russian writers, Vladimir Sorokin (see my posts about Roman and Norma and his translator Max Lawton); it actually sounds as if Alter knows what she’s talking about, which is not something I’m used to in American media accounts of Russian literature. Here are some excerpts:

Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, with subversive fables that satirize bleak chapters of Soviet history, and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia. But despite his reputation as both a gifted postmodern stylist and an unrepentant troublemaker, he remains relatively unknown in the West. Until recently, just a handful of his works had been published in English, in part because his writing can be so challenging to translate, and so hard to stomach. Now, four decades into his scandal-scorched career, publishers are preparing to release eight new English-language translations of his books. […]

Sorokin doesn’t fit the classic mold of a dissident writer. While he’s been critical of Putin’s regime, he’s hard to pinpoint, stylistically or ideologically. He’s been pilloried for violating Russian Orthodox Christian values in his stories, but is a devout Christian. He deploys gorgeous prose to describe horrifying acts. He’s celebrated as a literary heir to giants like Turgenev, Gogol and Nabokov, but at times, he’s questioned the value of literature, dismissing novels as “just paper with typographic signs.” […]

[Read more…]

France Culture has a set of old recordings that have been nicely cleaned up; I present for your listening pleasure Archive exceptionnelle : écoutez l’accent parisien en 1912. In 1912 the linguist Ferdinand Brunot, studying the speech of workmen, recorded Louis Ligabue, an upholsterer in the 14th arrondissement, talking about the neighborhood and then about his voice when it was played back to him: “C’est très drôle, il me semble même que c’est extraordinaire que j’aie une voix si traînarde, jamais je ne l’aurais cru !” [It’s really funny, it even seems to me that it’s extraordinary that I have such a drawling voice, I would never have believed it!] There’s a transcript, and the audio is accompanied by period views of Paris. His voice makes me think of Jean Gabin (though I’m sure their accents would seem quite different to a Parisian). And if you scroll down, you’ll find links to recordings of Émile Durkheim in 1913 and Tolstoy talking about God in 1909. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Tom Shippey’s LRB review (3 December 2020; archived) of Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood by Tom Licence makes a good point about one of Edward’s posthumous problems:

It didn’t help his reputation to be saddled with the designation ‘the Confessor’, for hardly anyone knows what that means. Did he have things to confess? Was he someone people confessed to, like a priest? The term seems to have been attached to him by successive biographers in an attempt to get him canonised as a saint, and in that context ‘confessor’ is a term for someone slightly lower down the sanctity scale than a martyr, one who professes his faith in and adheres to Christianity in spite of persecution (which doesn’t seem to apply to Edward at all: his enemies were all Christians too).

The OED (entry from 1891) defines it thus:

technical. One who avows his religion in the face of danger, and adheres to it under persecution and torture, but does not suffer martyrdom; spec. one who has been recognized by the church in this character. (The earliest sense in English.)

And they have this interesting note on pronunciation:

The historical pronunciation, < Anglo-Norman and Middle English confeˈssour, is ˈconfessor, which is found in all the poets, and is recognized by the dictionaries generally, down to Smart, 1836–49, who has ˈconfessor in senses 2 [the one I quoted], 3 [“One who hears confessions”], conˈfesser in sense 1b [“One who makes confession or public acknowledgement or avowal … of a crime, sin, or offence charged”]; for these, Craig 1847 has ˈconfessor and conˈfessor; but conˈfessor is now generally said for both.

Daniel Jones (13th ed., 1967) says first-syllable stress is used by “some Catholics.”
[Read more…]

I’m making my way through Mikhail Shishkin’s Взятие Измаила [The taking of Izmail] (see this LH post on Shishkin) and trying to grasp all his far-flung references, but one has so far defeated me, and I’m hoping against hope that one of my variously learned readers can explain it. Here’s the passage, part of a long speech by a defense lawyer trying to convince a jury not to convict his client, a mother who killed her own child (the time, though unclear, is sometime between the legal reforms of the 1860s and the Revolution):

How can killing be avoided?! Just imagine for a moment that Cain did not kill Abel! And then it turns out that there was nothing: no Julius Caesar, no Napoleon, no Sistine Madonna, no Appassionata, no Shakespeare, or Goethe, or War and Peace, or Crime and Punishment! Nothing! And you keep repeating your “Thou shalt not kill”! Come to your senses, Hipponians!

Да как же не убивать?! Представьте себе только на минуту — Каин не убивал Авеля! И тогда получается, что ничего не было: ни Юлия Цезаря, ни Наполеона, ни Сикстинской мадонны, ни Аппассионаты, ни Шекспира, ни Гете, ни «Войны и мира», ни «Преступления и наказания»! Ничего! А вы талдычите свое: не убий! Иппонийцы, опомнитесь!

There were various towns called Hippo — Thucydides mentions one in Italy, Josephus one that helped massacre Jews, and of course there was Augustine’s — but I have no idea which one’s citizens might be brought into this context or why.

A couple of other interesting bits from the novel: at one point, a speaker says “если у бедя дазборг” [if the bed′ has a dazborg], and I was at a loss until I realized it stood for “если у меня насморк” [if I have a cold]; i.e., it’s the Russian equivalent of “if I hab a code.” In another legal speech, the orator says “Да вы сами посмотрите на галиэю” [But look at the galieya yourselves]; a little googling convinced me this was the Heliaea (Ἡλιαία, Doric Ἁλία), the supreme court of ancient Athens. And in yet another long speech, Guryev, a bitter young man recently released from the Gulag, says “Не в силе Бог, но в правде!” [God is not in strength, but in truth!] I immediately recognized this as a familiar quote, and a little googling told me that I knew it from The Brothers Karamazov: the “Mysterious Visitor” tells Zosima “Господь не в силе, а в правде” [God is not in strength but in truth]… but also from the movie Брат 2 (Brother 2), where Danila says to Mennis:

Вот скажи мне, американец, в чём сила! Разве в деньгах? Вот и брат говорит, что в деньгах. У тебя много денег, и чего? Я вот думаю, что сила в правде: у кого правда, тот и сильней!

Tell me, American, what is strength? Is it in money? My brother says it’s in money. You have a lot of money, and so what? I think strength is in truth: whoever has the truth is the strongest!

And I learned that it’s originally from the speech of Alexander Nevsky to the Novgorodians before leading them out to defeat a stronger Swedish army in 1240. I love the way a cultural nugget like that can make its way from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first, acquiring different connotations along the way. (Oddly, the Russian Wikipedia article only discusses Alexander Nevsky, ignoring all later uses.)

The Economist (no author given) reports (archived) on an interesting aspect of Brazilian Portuguese:

The song, a hit at Brazil’s carnival in 2014, starts like any other. A man wonders whether a woman will still love him after he loses his job, his house and his car. But then the chorus gets weird. If the woman stays, the singer belts over a thumping drum, it is because she likes his “lepo lepo”. Most Brazilians had no idea what “lepo lepo” meant.

A talk-show host put the question to strangers on the street. “I use it a lot, but I don’t know,” one man admitted. Some people guessed that it was slang for penis (it is actually slang for sex or sexual prowess). It turned out that the phrase was unfamiliar outside Bahia, the north-eastern state where Psirico, the band, is from.

No matter. Its construction, a loose example of what linguists call reduplication, a way of forming words in which an existing word or part of a word gets repeated, is common in Brazilian Portuguese. “We play around with words, and end up making new ones,” says Márcio Victor, the lead singer of Psirico.

[Read more…]

OK, it should be “no left temporal lobe,” but my title is punchier. Anyway, Grace Browne writes for WIRED about a remarkable case study:

In early February 2016, after reading an article featuring a couple of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were studying how the brain reacts to music, a woman felt inclined to email them. “I have an interesting brain,” she told them.

EG, who has requested to go by her initials to protect her privacy, is missing her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain thought to be involved in language processing. EG, however, wasn’t quite the right fit for what the scientists were studying, so they referred her to Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist, also at MIT, who studies language. It was the beginning of a fruitful relationship. The first paper based on EG’s brain was recently published in the journal Neuropsychologia, and Fedorenko’s team expects to publish several more.

For EG, who is in her fifties and grew up in Connecticut, missing a large chunk of her brain has had surprisingly little effect on her life. She has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian—a second language–so well that she has dreamed in it. She first learned her brain was atypical in the autumn of 1987, at George Washington University Hospital, when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. The cause was likely a stroke that happened when she was a baby; today, there is only cerebro-spinal fluid in that brain area. […] Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says.

[Read more…]

Boy, is this a handy site (and a natural for LH): Linguist names.

How often does this come up? You encounter a name of a linguist that you need to say out loud, and you have no idea how to say it. The goal of this page is collect some names that have presented this sort of problem either for me or for other linguists.

People who are linked without comment have included IPA transcriptions of their name pronunciations on their websites. NB: If people pronounce your name differently from how you’d like it to be pronounced, or if you’ve ever been asked how to pronounce your name, that’s a hint that you should put that information on your website. It is more likely to reach the target audience if it’s on your site than on mine. Roman Jakobson–you’re off the hook on this one.

As I scrolled down, I kept thinking “Huh — I never would have guessed.” Who knew that William Labov says [ləbˈoʊv]? And I would have pronounced Katherine Demuth’s surname like the painter Charles (/dɪˈmuθ/) if it hadn’t been for Maria Gouskova informing me it was [dˈiməθ]. Gouskova modestly doesn’t include her own name on the list, but on her homepage she conveniently has it in both English ([məˈɹijə ɡuˈskoʊvə]) and Russian ([mˠaˈrʲijə ɡˠusʲˈkˠovˠə]) versions, with audio files. (Thanks, Y!)

Mark Liberman at the Log posts about Lau, Geipel, Wu, & Keysar, “The extreme illusion of understanding” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022), whose abstract reads:

Though speakers and listeners monitor communication success, they systematically overestimate it. We report an extreme illusion of understanding that exists even without shared language. Native Mandarin Chinese speakers overestimated how well native English-speaking Americans understood what they said in Chinese, even when they were informed that the listeners knew no Chinese. These listeners also believed they understood the intentions of the Chinese speakers much more than they actually did. This extreme illusion impacts theories of speech monitoring and may be consequential in real-life, where miscommunication is costly.

Mark says:

In the first phase of the study, 240 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were paired, and given 12 pragmatically ambiguous phrases […] Both speakers and listeners tended to overestimate the success of the verbal disambiguation […].

In the second phrase of the experiment,

We recruited 120 native English-speaking Americans as listeners. Each American listener was yoked to a Chinese speaker and was presented with an English version of the phrases and meanings. The procedure for the American listeners was identical to that of the Chinese listeners, except that they heard the speakers via audio recordings.

A similar overestimation of understanding persisted:

Next, we report the most surprising finding: the illusion of understanding persists even when the listener doesn’t know the language.

[…]

On average, American listeners who did not know Chinese identified the intended meanings 35% of the time, which was better than chance (25%) […] Though American listeners were less accurate than Chinese listeners, […] they still overestimated their success by 30pp, believing that they succeeded 65% of the time […] The Chinese speakers overestimated here as well. While Chinese speakers indicated that the American listeners would understand less (50%) than the Chinese listeners (70%),[…] they still overestimated the American listeners’ understanding by 15pp […].

I’m surprised at how surprised I am that people would think they could understand so much of a language they don’t know; I thought I was more cynical.