languagehat.com

I wasn’t originally planning to post Jessica Contrera’s Washington Post story (archived) about a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages; after all, I’ve done a bunch of posts about polyglots (e.g., 2007, 2008, 2015, 2020, and of course Michael Erard’s Babel No More). But I soon realized this was exceptionally well done — Contrera spent months with her subject, 46-year-old Vaughn Smith, and interviewed all sorts of people about him — and I couldn’t resist sharing it. Here are some excerpts:

“So, how many languages do you speak?”

“Oh goodness,” Vaughn says. “Eight, fluently.”

“Eight?” Kelly marvels.

“Eight,” Vaughn confirms. English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak.

“But if you go by like, different grades of how much conversation,” he explains, “I know about 25 more.”

Vaughn glances at me. He is still underselling his abilities. By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He’s teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico’s Nahuatl. to Montana’s Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain. […]

How did he get this way? And what was going on in his brain? But also: why was he cleaning carpets for a living?

To Vaughn, all of that is missing the point. He’s not interested in impressing anyone. He only counted his languages because I asked him to. He understands that he seems to remember names, numbers, dates and sounds far better than most people. Even to him, that has always been a mystery. But his reason for dedicating his life to learning so many languages has not.

His origin story:
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I recently looked up the abbreviation Z”L (= Hebrew ז״ל for זכרונו לברכה zikhrono livrakha ‘of blessed memory’) and found the ” between the letters referred to as a “choopchik” (so spelled). Needless to say, I was intrigued, and googled up the Haaretz article “Word of the Day / Chupchik” by Shoshana Kordova:

If you’ve been in the market for a handy, versatile word that can refer to a wide variety of objects, look no further than chupchik. This word, pronounced CHOOP cheek, is defined as a protrusion or protuberance but is often used to mean just about any small item or part of an item whose name has escaped you or that doesn’t necessarily have a name. […]

Chupchik comes from the Russian word for “curly forelock,” originally chubchik, according to the Hebrew etymology site Hasafa Haivrit.

Chupchik actually features two chupchiks in the word itself, in the form of the apostrophe that come after the letter tzadi (which makes a double appearance here) to turn it into the “ch” sound that features so prominently in sentences like “Chuck chowed down on Chinese food.”

What a great word! (I decided to use Kordova’s spelling as more scientific-looking.) Its Russian forebear is чубчик, diminutive of чуб ‘forelock’; when I looked it up in my Webster’s New World Hebrew Dictionary, there were so few words under “CH” and they were mostly so piquant that I thought I’d list them all (giving only the entry form and definition):
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Orrajt (Eng Title: Alright) is an “Award Winning Maltese Short Film – 2021” about “The uphill bilingual battle George needs to face as being both an English and Maltese speaker.” The Maltese is not subtitled, which is fun and shouldn’t cause a problem — the English dialogue makes it clear what’s going on. It’s only nine minutes, and it’s a sympathetic look at a problem a lot of people have to deal with in this increasingly multilingual world. (It was shot in the Beggars Inn Pub, which looks a little rowdy for the likes of me but is certainly photogenic.) Via Slavo/bulbul at FaceBook.

And if that doesn’t interest you, I present HamBam: The Hamedan-Bamberg Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian:

The HamBam corpus contains annotated recordings of contemporary spoken Persian, compiled as part of a cooperation between Bu-Ali Sina University in Hamedan, Iran (team coordinator: Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand), and the University of Bamberg in Germany (Geoffrey Haig). […]

The corpus was primarily designed for investigations into the impact of information structure on word order variation in spoken Persian, but is freely adaptable to other research questions, including research on prosody, referential density, or usage-based approaches to grammar.

1) This Twitter thread by The Meanest TA, PhD. starts off “Everyone on my team (5 men ages 48-75) texts me to make sure the slang they’re using is correct in context. Some examples below.” It’s very funny:

From Boss (74): “Can I say this meeting got lit if I mean people were getting upset?”
Me: “No but you can say they were salty about it.”
[…]

Project Manager (48): “Do people still say hella?”
Me: “Not in this state.”

In return they translate my frustrations into professional corporate.

Me: “How do I say this meeting is a waste of my time I am not paid enough to deal with your bullshit?”
Boss: “Can you provide me with a meeting agenda so I can ensure my presence adds value? I want to prioritize my schedule to support our most urgent needs.”

Me: “How do I say there is no way you are this fucking stupid?”
WorkDad: “I think there was a disconnect, can you restate your definition of this concept so we can ensure there’s no miscommunication?”

Thanks, Nick!

2) Caleb Madison of The Atlantic writes about a new use of “go off”:

Go is up there with be as one of the most versatile and abstract verbs in the English language. […] Add off, easily the most dramatic preposition, and you’ve got the key to semantic ignition: “Change to be really far away” in the rapid fire of two sharp syllables. And on the internet in the mid-2010s, people truly started to go off. Go off first came into the common vernacular sandwiched between but and I guess as a sarcastic flourish at the end of a categorical disagreement. If I read a post saying that bees are scary and bad, I might respond with, “They actually play a crucial role in the global ecosystem, but go off, I guess.” And while to go off on had long been used to describe a strong reprimand, this smug final flourish after owning someone with logic drew the phrase more specifically into the world of internet discourse. Eventually the internet winnowed it down to just go off (as in, “to go on a passionate tirade without concrete structure or purpose”).

Thanks, Ariel!
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Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s TLS review (Nov. 20, 2020; archived) of Ben Katchor’s The Dairy Restaurant is full of delights, though not as full as I’m sure the book is — Katchor has been one of my favorites ever since his strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer was running in the New York Press a generation ago. I’ll quote some excerpts below, the linguistic hook being the Yiddish word מילכיג (milkhig, aka milchig):

The dairy restaurant is hard to define. It sprang from two comingling histories: those of kosher law and of the restaurant as it arose in its modern form in eighteenth-century France (Katchor’s citation, which would be mine, too, is Rebecca Spang’s wonderful The Invention of the Restaurant, 2000). Kashrut’s injunction against mixing milk and meat produced a tripartite taxonomy of kosher foods: meat (fleisch, in Yiddish – meat foods are fleischig), dairy (milch; milchig), and foods that can be served with either (pareve). But dairy restaurants are not necessarily kosher – nor necessarily vegetarian, especially if you consider fish to be meat (which kosher law does not). The cuisine itself generally complies with kashrut, and consists of a range of specific dishes, usually Eastern European Jewish. Here is Scholem Aleichem in praise of milchig cuisine: “From meat you have a roselfleisch, and esikfleisch, a roast. … and that’s it. From milk you have milk, cheese, butter, sour cream, pid-smetene, whey, kasha with milk, noodles with milk, rice with milk …”. This list, from the short monologue “Milchigs” (1903), truly goes on. […]

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I’ve finished Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Весёлые похороны (The Funeral Party; see this post), and it sure was a different experience from the Makanin I’d read just before: shorter, lighter, less demanding, less likely to stick with me or be reread. I was trying to think how to describe it, and then I realized it resembles a television series — perhaps Six Feet Under, which is set in a funeral home and, like Ulitskaya’s novel, features stories of love, betrayal, and family chaos with death as a constant background. The Ulitskaya series could be called Alik’s Still Alive; the central character, the painter Alik (short for Abram), is slowly dying of some ALS-like disease in his Chelsea loft, which he’s had since the early 1970s at a rent-controlled $400 (and thus the landlord is eagerly awaiting his death so he can jack up the rent). The action is set in the summer of 1991; at one point the TV is turned on and there is news of the coup d’état attempt, so everyone is glued to the screen for days. There is much coming and going — Alik’s former Moscow friends and acquaintances, the new ones he’s made in New York, and various former wives and girlfriends, not to mention his current wife, the childlike Ninka, are constantly reminiscing, drinking, and trying to keep him comfortable — and many flashbacks to earlier times. You get the idea.

It’s by no means a great book, and I might have been harder on it except for its setting: the NYC of the ’80s and early ’90s is my town, and Ulitskaya — who clearly spent a lot of time there — gets it just right. It ignores the standard tourist sights but name-checks many of the beloved downtown hangouts of the day: Katz’s Deli! CBGB! the Knitting Factory! McSorley’s (not named but unmistakably described)! People order out for pizza and Chinese food; at one point there’s a bravura description of an all-night visit to the Fulton Fish Market (then at the east end of Fulton Street near the East River, since evicted to the Bronx) that’s worth reading for its own sake. It gave me intense and pleasurable nostalgia.

One thing that did bother me was the plot line involving Ninka’s insistence on baptizing Alik (thanks to the babblings of an itinerant “healer” brought over from Russia to help a guy who had died by the time she arrived and now earning a sub rosa living with her folk remedies). I realize this is part of Ulitskaya’s “theology of inclusiveness” and desire to bring Christianity, Judaism, and Islam together, but it grates on me — I can’t help but think about how my late friend Allan would have hated it (he despised Jews for Jesus and suchlike). See the last paragraph of my animadversions on Doctor Zhivago for further grumpiness along those lines.

A bit of linguistic fun:

— Ребята, я не могу вам сказать спасибо, потому что таких спасиб не бывает.

“Guys, I can’t say thanks to you, because there is no such thank.”

(The original creates a nonexistent genitive plural to спасибо, treating it as a neuter noun rather than an indeclinable particle; Cathy Porter renders the sentence “My friends, I can’t thank you, because no such thanks exist,” which ignores the fun and gives an absurdly high-flown translation of “Ребята.”) And in the penultimate chapter there’s a passage on chastushki in which a sax player asks a Russian character what they are, and she says “Это русский кантри” [It’s Russian country music]. Gave me a chuckle.

Tessa Hadley’s latest New Yorker story, “After the Funeral” (archived), is as excellent as I expect from one of my favorite contemporary authors (two quotes I can’t resist sharing: “his face alight with reason and cleverness”; “the closing of the front door […] gave out a certain twanging sound, subdued but resonant, which reached the girls like a signal, resolving something even in the deep chambers of their dreams”), but it’s a reference to “gabardine macs” that led to this post. I knew “gabardine” was some sort of fabric, but what kind exactly? And where did the word come from? The first was simple enough; AHD says “A sturdy, tightly woven fabric of cotton, wool, or rayon twill.” But the second is a ball of confusion. The AHD, s.v. the earlier form gaberdine, says:

[Obsolete French gauvardine, from Old French galvardine, perhaps from Middle High German wallevart, pilgrimage : wallen, to roam (from Old High German wallōn; see wel-² in the Appendix of Indo-European roots) + vart, journey (from Old High German, from faran, to go; see per-² in the Appendix of Indo-European roots).]

OK, wallevart, that’s pretty cool. But the new OED etymology (updated June 2018) tosses out the German form:

Etymology: < Middle French gavardine (1483) < Spanish gabardina (1423), apparently an alteration of tabardina kind of outer garment (1397 as tavardina; < tabardo tabard n. + -ina -ine suffix¹), after gabán (1367 as gavant; < Arabic qabā’: see cabaan n.).
Compare Catalan gavardina (1486), Portuguese gabardina (15th cent.).

There’s no way I’ll ever remember that, but I offer it for your delectation. Also, the original meaning was “An outer garment worn by men, consisting of a loose coat, gown, or smock made from a coarse fabric” (1520   Will of Mathew Beke in G. J. Piccope Lancs. & Cheshire Wills [1857] I. 39   I bequeth unto litill Thomas Beke my gawbardyne to make hym a gowne).

I was reading Margaret Drabble’s TLS review (November 20, 2020) of The Walker: On finding and losing yourself in the modern city by Matthew Beaumont when I was driven to post by the following paragraph:

The most entertaining chapter in the volume, on the Big Toe, takes as its starting point a fragmentary essay on the mouth by the surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille, from 1930, which ranges widely through iconography, anthropology, the history of bipedalism, the French physician de la Tourette’s analysis of human gait, and the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Carlo Emilio Gadda. It is full of puns, and thoughts about the nature and meaning of punning. Gadda’s “late modernist masterpiece”, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (1957) contains, we are told, “an elaborate pun on la luce (meaning ‘light’) and l’alluce (meaning ‘big toe’)”, and introduces us to the feet of various painted saints, with their “flocks” or “herds” of toes. It speaks of the magnificence and hideousness of big toes, which we must stare at, Beaumont admonishes us, “unflinchingly, affirming our fear, horror and hilarity, to celebrate their humanity and inhumanity alike”. Gadda’s puns lead us, mysteriously but inexorably, to the thought that “It is as if creation itself is a ridiculous, Beckettian accident caused by a slip of the tongue”. Beaumont’s own contribution to the rich world of puns comes in a discussion of the opening scene of Coriolanus, where the aristocratic Menenius memorably addresses the rebellious First Citizen as “The great toe of this assembly”. This leads Beaumont, via Bataille and Roland Barthes, to declare that “Bataille, it might be said, calls for the dictatorship of the toeleprariat”.

In the first place, la luce and l’alluce make for a lousy pun, because the latter is stressed on the first syllable (and frankly I’m not impressed by “toeleprariat” either, but then I haven’t read Bataille and Barthes). But l’alluce sent me on a confusing etymological quest. Wiktionary says “From Late Latin (h)allucem, from Latin hallus/allus,” and the hallus entry says “Uncertain; probably a borrowing from a non-IE language. hallux is the only form that suggests an Indo-European structure.” What does that last sentence mean? And how did Italian go from hallus (genitive hallī) to alluce, as if from hallux? Well, there is a hallux, and it’s in the OED — “The innermost of the digits (normally five in number) of the hind foot of an air-breathing vertebrate; the great toe”; unfortunately, the entry is unchanged since 1898, and the etymology is not very helpful: “modern Latin, corrupted < allex (allic-) the great toe (Isidore Gloss.), found once in Plautus in phrase allex. viri a ‘thumb of a man’, a thumbling.” I turned to my Oxford Latin Dictionary and looked up hallus: “see allus.” That took me to:

allus or hallus, m. (app.) The great toe (cf. allex).

The “app.” stands for “apparently”; does that refer to the “m.” or the definition? And allex says “see hallec.” But (h)al(l)ec is a fish sauce! If anyone can bring any order to this mess, I’ll be grateful.
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1) Frequent commenter Jen (in Edinburgh) writes:

I’m reading Peter Moore’s Endeavour, a history covering the life of the ship and its journeys, rather than e.g. a biography of Cook or Banks. Having reached Tahiti, some of the members of Cook’s first expedition have been collecting Tahitian words, and the book notes that one they didn’t collect is Tōtaiete mā, the local name for the archipelago which Cook called the Society Islands.

I have a strong suspicion that it would have been impossible for them to do so – that ‘Tōtaiete’ is a form of the English word ‘society’, in the same way that ‘Kiribati’ is a form of ‘Gilberts’. But I can’t turn up anything about the etymology of the name on a quick search, and Wikipedia just cites the book itself. Do you think your erudite community might know more?

I join her in her suspicion and her quest for knowledge.

2) I just watched the very silly movie Green Dolphin Street (solely because I’ve long loved the Miles Davis version of the movie’s theme, “On Green Dolphin Street,” and I was curious about its original setting). Executive summary: the sisters Marguerite (Donna Reed) and Marianne (Lana Turner) are both in love with the hunky young scapegrace William Ozanne (Richard Hart), who is in love with Marguerite but (having inadvertently deserted from the Royal Navy and wound up helping run a lumber concern in New Zealand) drunkenly sends a letter proposing marriage to Marianne rather than her perkier sister, and when the prim, ambitious Marianne shows up and he realizes his error, there is nothing for it but to swallow hard and marry the wrong woman, which occasions a great deal of hand-wringing, hangdog looks, and emotional outbursts. At any rate, in the section of the movie set in New Zealand there is a fair amount of spoken and chanted Māori (you don’t want to know how the movie treats its Māori characters), and I was curious about how accurate the language was. Anybody happen to know?

Back in 2013, the excellent blog called odamaki posted about an unusual word that the OED had missed (and it’s still not there):

It is incredible to me that the Oxford English Dictionary does not have the word pogonip. Merriam-Webster say that they have a cite from 1865. I had thought that the OED had put all of their material for the letters M through R online, before the editors started jumping around more last year. How did this word fall through the cracks in the OED’s reading program for American genre fiction?

Perhaps pogonip got swept up into general-use dictionaries because it was used in a Louis L’Amour story “Down the Pogonip Trail”. Later writers of Westerns and frontier fiction seem to have propagated the word after that. […]

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