languagehat.com

From Bill Poser’s Facebook post:

I learned a new English word. In the terminology of admiralty law, the Ever Given did not “collide” with the bank of the Suez Canal. It “allided” with it. Admiralty law distinguishes between “allisions”, in which a ship strikes something else, and “collisions”, in which two ships strike each other. This makes etymological sense, but the distinction is not made as far as I know outside of admiralty law.

Interestingly, the original OED had a very brief entry presenting it as a word found only in dictionaries:

†aˈllide, v. Obs.⁻⁰ [ad. L. allīd-ĕre to dash against, f. al- = ad- to + līdĕre = læd-ĕre to dash or strike violently.] ‘To dash or hit against.’ Bailey 1721; whence in Ash 1775, etc.

But in September 2012 they updated it as follows:

Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin allīdere.
Etymology: < classical Latin allīdere to dash or strike (against), to be shipwrecked < al-, variant of ad- ad- prefix + laedere to hurt, injure (see lesion n.). Compare earlier collide v.

rare⁻⁰ before mid 20th cent.

intransitive. To hit against something. Now Maritime Law: (of a vessel) to collide with another which is stationary, or with a static object or structure.
1721 N. Bailey Universal Etymol. Eng. Dict. Allide, to dash or hit against.

1962 Amer. Maritime Cases Apr. 974 The Court finds that the New Zealand Victory..allided with the westernmost of the two gantry cranes on that pier.
1986 Federal Reporter 2nd Ser. 778 1116/1 When a moving vessel allides with an anchored vessel.
2008 Michigan Lawyers Weekly (Nexis) 28 Jan. A vessel allided with a dock owned by defendant.

I wonder what happened in mid 20th cent. to bring it into actual use?

My wife and I saw the enjoyable proto-noir movie Pépé le Moko the other night; to get the obvious question out of the way, moko is, as that Wikipedia article says (perhaps too prominently), “slang for a man from Toulon, derived from the Occitan amb aquò (‘with that’), a term which punctuates sentences in Provence and which, in Toulon, is pronounced em’oquò.” (Y provided the same etymology here in 2014). The movie is set in French-occupied Algiers in the 1930s, and specifically in the famed Casbah; of course, I wondered about the etymology of that word (which the OED insists on spelling kasbah), and it turns out (per Wiktionary) that it’s from Arabic قَصَبَة‎ (qaṣaba), a singulative derived from قَصَب‎ (qaṣab, ‘stalk’), itself a back-formation from قَصَّاب‎ (qaṣṣāb, ‘butcher’), borrowed from Aramaic קצבא‎ / ܩܰܨܳܒܳܐ‎ (qaṣṣābā), and a doublet of indigenous Arabic قَضَبَ‎ (qaḍaba, ‘to cut off, to trim’). Messy stuff!

Also, at one point at the start of the movie, when a local cop is trying to explain to a high-handed visitor from Paris why they haven’t been able to collar Pépé despite knowing where he lives, there’s a montage of the winding streets and arched alleys of the Casbah (doused with plenty of exoticism — the movie should be avoided by those with tender sensitivities about colonialism and orientalism) in which the narrator mentions odd names like rue de l’Impuissance, r. de la Ville de Soum Soum, r. de l’Hôtel du Miel, and r. de l’Homme à la Perle; naturally, I was curious as to whether these piquant names really existed, and googling turned up this wonderful (if exasperatingly coded — you can’t copy text) webpage about the traditional street names of the city (sadly replaced by French officialdom), and it turns out all four names are genuine: see r. de l’Aigle, r. d’Ammon, impasse El-Azel, and r. de la Grenade respectively. How I love old street names! See my posts on Salonica and Vilnius; I welcome such resources for other cities (I have a two-volume book on Paris streets).

I really had no intention of just reposting everything Joel put up at Far Outliers, but the excerpts from A Death in the Rainforest (see this post) are so striking I can’t resist; here’s one about an unexpected linguistic situation:

Not only were young villagers eager to narrate; it turned out that all but the very youngest of them were also able to narrate in Tayap. Many of the narratives were short, and most of them were scaffolded by the narrator’s relatives and friends, who sat on the floor with them and helped the teller remember what things were called and figure out how verbs were inflected. But what emerged in the narrative sessions was that all young people in the village over age eighteen have some active competence in the vernacular, and some of them have excellent active competence—even though they never use it.

Several of the young villagers in their mid- to late twenties were highly proficient storytellers. They spoke relatively unhesitatingly, they had a broad vocabulary, they used a variety of tenses and verbs of motion (which are often irregular in Tayap and very tricky to inflect correctly) in the stories they told, and they also commanded other features of the grammar that showed unexpected mastery of Tayap. The truly curious thing about the speakers is that outside of these sessions, they never displayed their command of the language. I once asked Membo, a twenty-six-year-old woman, what she thought about her twenty-five-year-old husband Ormbes’s competence in Tayap. Membo laughed dismissively. “Oh, he messes it all up,” she told me, “He doesn’t speak Tayap.”

I later asked Ormbes to tell me a story in Tayap. He narrated an almost flawless tale of how he and his brother went hunting in the rainforest and speared a pig. Ormbes turned out to be one of the most fluent younger speakers in the village. That his wife, who not only had been married to him for ten years but also had grown up with him and had known him all her life, was convinced that her husband didn’t speak Tayap, was remarkable—and telling.

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I am easily annoyed by April Fools foolery, especially on the internet, but I enjoyed Grove Music’s spoof article contest:

For the first time in the history of the contest, our judges split three ways. After some internal squabbling rational, well-reasoned argument, we selected “Lip Synch” by Lisa Colton, Reader in Musicology and Director of Graduate Education at the University of Huddersfield. Although Colton’s article misses one key Grove style point—all Grove articles begin with a definition sentence that succinctly explains the subject—it made us laugh so long and so loud, that we feel it is indeed deserving of this great honor. “A quite clever and evocative parody of a performance practice article, replete with medieval terminology, Latin texts, and modern drag references,” noted Judge Root. Judge Cusick called it “an imaginative pseudo history of the performance practice as originating in a queerly illicit mix of ecclesiastically silenced nuns and the monks on the other side of many monastic institutions’ walls; parodies the ventriloquization of women in music studies, the quest for origins that drives a certain kind of musicology, the elision of technology that characterizes another kind of musicology and the elision of gender that characterizes still another kind. Needs only a mention of the theorist/practitioner of the genre, Lypsinka, whose name before monachization was John Epperson.”

Lip Synch

The popular origins of Lip Synch, or Lip Synchronization, lie in the violent Crumhorn Battles of early modern Flanders, but comparable practices can be found much earlier in northern Britain, probably arriving there with the Vikings during the tenth century. The socio-cultural impetus for combining the voice of one singer with the performance of another individual seems to have been in the exclusion of women from all vocal performance, especially in religious settings, between the edict of St Paul and the reversal of that rule by second wave feminists in 1965. Giraldus Cambrensis (De rebus a se gestis, c1204) provides the fullest description of what he termed labia simul: the Gilbertine nuns he visited at Shouldham in 1201 opened their mouths in unison, making the shapes of words, while the canons in the adjoining church provided the musical sounds themselves. Matins would begin each day with the cantrix intoning Psalm 69 (Vulgate), Domine, labia mea aperies (“O Lord, open my lips”), in secret, and thus the combined liturgical rituals would commence in a broadly synchronized fashion. The technical challenge presented by the wall separating the male and female chambers of Gilbertine houses was obviated by a revolving hatch, through which feedback from the cantor and cantrix would be exchanged with appropriate modesty. A handful of examples of their notes are extant, typically employing the high-status, Anglo-Norman vernacular. One such memorandum (now DRu-P.a.UL), dating to the Feast of the Circumcision, 1243, reads simply: “Chantez, restez”, with the appropriate liturgical response proper to the day, “Sachez awez”.

Bibliography

P.J. Nixon: ‘Giraldus Cambrensis on Music: How Reliable are his Historiographers?’, Medieval Studies: Skara 1988, 264–89

Margolyes: Hildegard von Bingen and The Flaming Lips (Tunbridge Wells, 1983)

Visage: Lip Synchronization: A Surprising History (London, 2020)

I also enjoyed the runner-up, a biography of Johann Egbert Bach Bach-Bach [b Eiburg, Prussia 1755; d Bauernomelett, Prussia 1823], German musician and composer (“His works were catalogued by Otto Hahnrei and given a Bach Musik Werk number: BMW”).

Again via Far Outliers, another quote from Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest (see this post):

The first casualty of the villagers’ increased acquisition of Tok Pisin was their competence in other local languages. Before the arrival of Tok Pisin, Gapuners were a highly multilingual people. No one in the surrounding villages bothered to learn their little language—a situation that suited Gapuners just fine since it meant that they could employ Tayap as a secret code that nobody else understood.

To communicate with people from other villages, men and women in Gapun learned the local vernacular languages that those people spoke. During my first long stay in the village in the 1980s, I listened to old people who had grown up before the Second World War confidently speaking two other local languages that were unrelated to Tayap or to each other, and I also heard those old people responding to one or two other languages, which they clearly understood even if they couldn’t speak them.

In the generation born after the war, when Tok Pisin “came up big,” competence in other village vernaculars plummeted. People no longer needed to learn local languages because, at that point, it was easier to communicate in Tok Pisin. Women lagged behind men, and they continued to learn other vernacular languages for another generation, largely because women in the area generally still did not speak Tok Pisin as easily as men did. By the 1970s, though, even Gapun women’s active competence in other vernaculars was eclipsed by Tok Pisin.

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Particuliterate is a resource I wish I’d had when I was studying Greek; from the About page:

While there is not much information in learning materials on Greek particles, there is a wealth of material elsewhere. In journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and reference sources, one will find a number of fascinating arguments about how to understand the meaning of particular particles. And yet, most students do not know where to look for these, and if they find them, the jargon and background information which the reader is assumed to know pose difficulty to the student just beginning to dip their toes into Greek scholarship.

This website is aimed primarily at that student. Its goal is to aggregate the discussion of particles, which is often spread out and hard to track down, into one place, where the views of various scholars can be summarized in a succinct and understandable manner. Particles entries include extensive hyperlinking to the Glossary page, which includes definitions for common terms and explanations of theories which underlie the arguments being described.

Yet this website is not only aimed at that student. Experienced scholars who wish to follow up on the summaries will find full bibliographies accompanying each entry.

In general, one particle entry will be added to the site each week. A schedule is provided in the Particle Directory page. Occasionally, the schedule may be disrupted by a desire to write a more general post not devoted to a single particle, or be delayed due to my other commitments, but regular updates can be expected starting on Apr 1.

Of course, you can find detailed analysis in Denniston’s The Greek Particles, but that’s over seventy years old now and perhaps a little dense for the average student. (Via Sententiae Antiquae.)

Victor Mair at the Log posts about what sounds like a very stimulating book, Mareshi Saito’s Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature. From the author’s Introduction:

The chief aim of this book is to consider the language space of modern Japan from the perspective of what I am calling kanbunmyaku 漢文脈 in Japanese, translated here as “Literary Sinitic Context.” I use the term “Literary Sinitic” to designate what is often referred to as “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese” in English, wenyan 文言 in Mandarin Chinese, kanbun 漢文 in Japanese (sometimes referred to as “Sino-Japanese” in English), and hanmun 漢文 in Korean. The Context in Literary Sinitic Context translates the -myaku of kanbunmyaku, and usually implies a pulse, vein, flow, or path, but is also the second constituent element of the Sino-Japanese term bunmyaku 文脈 meaning “(textual, literary) context.” I use the term Literary Sinitic Context to encompass both Literary Sinitic proper, as well as orthographic and literary styles (buntai 文体) derived from Literary Sinitic, such as glossed reading (kundoku 訓読) or Literary Japanese (bungobun 文語文), which mix sinographs (kanji 漢字, i.e., “Chinese” characters) and katakana. In addition to styles I also consider Literary Sinitic thought and sensibility at the core of which lie Literary Sinitic poetry (kanshi 漢詩) and prose (kanbun 漢文), collectively termed kanshibun 漢詩文.

From the publisher’s blurb:

Saito Mareshi demonstrates the centrality of Literary Sinitic poetry and prose in the creation of modern literary Japanese. Saito’s new understanding of the role of “kanbunmyaku” in the formation of Japanese literary modernity challenges dominant narratives tied to translations from modern Western literatures and problematizes the antagonism between Literary Sinitic and Japanese in the modern academy. Saito shows how kundoku (vernacular reading) and its rhythms were central to the rise of new inscriptional styles, charts the changing relationship of modern poets and novelists to kanbunmyaku, and concludes that the chronotope of modern Japan was based in a language world supported by the Literary Sinitic Context.

(Minor gripe: I don’t see the point of italicizing kanji and katakana, which are perfectly good English words, when the poor reader is already faced with a slew of genuinely foreign italicized terms.) I’m fascinated by this stuff, and I hope readers who know East Asian literatures and their history will have things to say.

Sharon Avni (an applied linguist at CUNY) writes for the Jerusalem Post:

Before I had even managed to settle down for my first Zoom meeting on Monday morning, I had already received several messages from friends and colleagues alerting me to the clip of Effie Hertzke, an 81-year-old woman being interviewed on Israeli television after receiving her COVID-19 vaccine. Bedecked with large dangling earrings, a shirt with “BADGIRLS” emblazoned across the front, and a full face of makeup, Hertzke chatted — in a mixture of Hebrew and English — with seasoned journalist Rafi Reshef while walking on the treadmill at her local gym in Ramat Gan. […]

Watching this clip from my home in New Jersey, where gym attendance is severely constrained because of the pandemic, I could appreciate Hertzke’s excitement about being back on the treadmill. But as a sociolinguist who studies Americans and their use of modern Hebrew, I was even more struck by the characteristics of the conversation between Hertzke and Reshef, as well as by the outpouring of attention in the Jewish press and in social media that her discourse attracted. When Reshef asks “ve’ech hakosher” (and what kind of shape are you in), and Hertzke responds “Oh my god! Ata rotse lirot et ha muscles sheli?” (Do you want to see my muscles), she is engaged in what linguists call translanguaging.

Coming out of bilingual education scholarship, translanguaging describes the ways that bilinguals, multilinguals and indeed all users of language use all available linguistic resources to communicate effectively with others. Instead of viewing bilingualism as strictly separated languages in the individual’s mind, translanguaging approaches language in a more dynamic way, seeing it as the natural and authentic way in which people move fluidly between languages — sometimes, as with Hertzke, within the same sentence.

What makes Hertzke’s translanguaging particularly noteworthy is that she clearly has strong Hebrew skills. She effortlessly recalls, “Ani avadti ad gil shmonim bishvil maskoret (I worked until the age of 80 for a salary) and then my children said, ‘Ma, maspeek kvar’” (enough already). Hertzke’s translanguaging does not cause a communicative breakdown. In fact, it’s what allows her feisty personality to shine. The banter between the two is seamless, and Reshef responds to Hertzke’s utterances without missing a beat, showing any signs of misunderstanding or feeling the need to translate for his audience.

She goes on to discuss comments have people made about Hertzke’s American accent and points out that “societies assume there is one way of speaking correctly, so when people hear an accent, they not only hear a different form of pronunciation, but may also make judgments about the speaker’s worth and place in society”; I like her conclusion:

Hertzke owns her multilingualism, and her translanguaging celebrates the idiosyncratic beauty of both of her languages, as well as her national identities. Ownership of who we are and how we put it out into the world — now that is a linguistic achievement we should all be proud of.

Thanks, Dmitry!

Zaria Gorvett writes for BBC Future about a fruit I was barely aware of; there are several items of linguistic interest:

The polite, socially acceptable name by which it’s currently known is the medlar. But for the best part of 900 years, the fruit was called the “open-arse” – thought to be a reference to the appearance of its own large “calyx” or bottom. The medlar’s aliases abroad were hardly more flattering. In France, it was variously known as “la partie postérieure de ce quadrupede” (the posterior part of this quadruped), “cu d’singe” (monkey’s bottom), “cu d’ane” (donkey’s bottom), and cul de chien (dog’s bottom)… you get the idea. […]

The fruit are unusual for two reasons. Firstly, they’re harvested in December – making them one of very few sources of sugar that would have been available in medieval winters. Secondly, they only become edible when they’re rotten.

When they’re first picked, medlars are greenish brown and resemble oddly-shaped onions or alien-looking persimmons. If they’re eaten straight away, they can make you violently ill – one 18th Century doctor and botanist said that they cause diarrhoea. But if you put them in a crate of sawdust or straw and forget about them for several weeks, they gradually darken and their hard, astringent flesh softens to the consistency of a baked apple. […] The process is known as “bletting”, a word made-up by a botanist who noticed there wasn’t one in 1839 [sic; see below]. […]

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Via Far Outliers, a passage from A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea, by Don Kulick (Algonquin Books, 2019):

As far back as anyone in Gapun has been able to remember, though, Tayap has never had more than, at most, about 150 speakers: the entire population of Tayap speakers, when the language was at its peak, would have fit into a single New York City subway car. Tiny as that count is, such a small language was not unusual for Papua New Guinea. Most languages spoken in the country have fewer than three thousand speakers. And linguists estimate that about 35 percent of the languages (which means about 350 of them) have never had more than about five hundred speakers.

Contrary to received wisdom, and common sense, this constellation of tiny languages was not the result of isolation; it didn’t arise because villages were separated from one another by mountain barriers or impenetrable jungle walls. Quite the opposite: throughout Papua New Guinea, the areas that have the highest degree of linguistic diversity (that is, the most languages) are the ones where people can get around relatively easily, by paddling a canoe along rivers and creeks, for example. The areas where travel is more difficult, for example in the mountains that run like a jagged spine across the center of the country, is where the largest languages are found (the biggest being a language called Enga, with over two hundred thousand speakers).

The conclusion that linguists have drawn from this counterintuitive distribution of languages is that people in Papua New Guinea have used language as a way of differentiating themselves from one another. Whereas other people throughout the world have come to use religion or food habits or clothing styles to distinguish themselves as a specific group of people in relation to outsiders, Papua New Guineans came to achieve similar results through language. People wanted to be different from their neighbors, and the way they made themselves different was to diverge linguistically.

Large swathes of neighboring groups throughout the mainland share similar traditional beliefs about what happens after one dies; they think related things about sorcery, initiation rituals, and ancestor worship; they have roughly similar myths about how they all originated; and before white colonists started coming to the country in the mid-1800s, they all dressed fairly similarly (and they all do still dress similarly, given the severely limited variety of manufactured clothing available to them today—mostly T-shirts and cloth shorts for men, and for women, baggy, Mother Hubbard–style “meri blouses” introduced by missionaries to promote modesty and cover up brazenly exposed breasts). Neighboring peoples hunt the same pigs and cassowaries that inhabit the rainforest; and they all eat sago, or taro or sweet potato—whichever of those staples their land is capable of growing.

In terms of the languages they speak, though, Papua New Guineans are very different from one another.

We discussed Kulick in 2019.