languagehat.com

Courtesy of Stu Clayton, a brief and enjoyable video clip in which two guys try to guess the ten most spoken languages in the world (lumping together first- and second-language speakers). Stu says “Being ignorant, I was surprised by nr 10”; I wasn’t surprised, but I did enjoy the ride, as I hope will you.

Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms discusses a phrase I was familiar with but didn’t realize was making inroads over here:

I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression “to move house,” which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, “to move.” It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, “the thrill of seeing,” in a New Yorker Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein, published eight years earlier, a sentence that began, ‘She and [Alice B.] Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…’”

I didn’t mention that the first time I ever encountered the expression also had a New Yorker connection. It was in 1996 or so, and I was interviewing Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor in chief (who is British, as Janet Malcolm is not), and she said something about “moving house.” I had not yet devised the concept of NOOBs, but the expression was so striking and different that I filed it away in the recesses of my consciousness.

The OED‘s first two citations for the phrase were both written by Thomas Hardy, the first in an 1888 short story called “Waiting Supper”: “Side by side as they had lived in his day here were they now. They had moved house in mass.” (Incidentally, the OED defines the word “wait,” as Hardy used it in the story’s title, as “To postpone (a meal) in expectation of the arrival of someone. colloquial.” It has four citations, all English, from 1788 to 1861. From an 1836 Charles Dickens letter: “I hope and trust you did not wait dinner for me.” The only time I’ve ever encountered it, till now, is from my wife, born in Massachusetts, where a lot of Britishisms, like “rubbish,” linger.)

But “move house” had been in circulation for at least three decades before Hardy’s story–probably well over three decades.

Click through for the antedates (which are always fun); I normally have no objection to Yanks picking up shiny bits of Britspeak, but this one is (in my opinion) dumb: “moving” is short and punchy, “moving house” is long and dull.

One of those silly but enjoyable online quizzes, from Isabella Kwai at the NY Times: “Hey, Bampot! Can You Tell Real British Insults From Fakes in This Quiz?” (archived). The intro:

How do I snub thee? Some British researchers are counting the ways, asking people around the country to send them swear words and insults that might be little known to outsiders.

“We’re really interested in those words that only make sense if you’re from a particular place,” said Chris Montgomery, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield who is leading the endeavor along with Modern Toss, an arts group.

Their hope, Dr. Montgomery said, is to preserve the diversity of curse words being used around Britain, particularly if they are obscure. “It’s a real window on people’s creativity with language,” he said.

Can you find the genuine British insult among the fakes?

I got 6 of 8, through sheer luck — I only knew a couple of them. Thanks, Nick!

I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section on a topic dear to my heart, the importance of a clear personal voice in any literary writing:

The play’s comic and transhistorical virtuosity arises in part from a half-concealed argument—which Smith makes everywhere in her work—about the moral significance of a personal voice. “From the moment Alyson opens her mouth” in The Canterbury Tales, Smith recalls in her introduction,

I knew that she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart…. Alyson’s voice—brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic—is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week. The words may be different but the spirit is the same.

Like everyone in the modern world, Alvita constructs her voice by amalgamating scraps and fragments of other voices into something uniquely her own. A stage direction reports: “Her accent is North Weezy [i.e., Northwest London] with moments of deliberate poshness as well as frequent lapses into Jamaican patois and cockney for comic effect.” In one of the paradoxes of personhood, Alvita becomes herself by containing multitudes, which is what makes possible her connection across the centuries with the unique voice and spirit of Chaucer’s Alyson.

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Yesterday it was Basques in Idaho, today it’s Hmong in Minnesota — Phineas Pope of MPR News says “Tuj lub players want more Minnesotans to give the Hmong sport a whirl“:

A unique sport, thousands of years old, is played in areas across the United States, including in Minnesota. Tuj lub, pronounced “tuh-LOO,” has strong ties to Hmong heritage. Now, players want to share the sport with more Minnesotans.

Tuj lub, or “spin top,” has quite a few rules and penalties, and each round is a little bit different. At its core, the sport consists of players launching tops through the air at other tops on the ground, trying to knock them over. When the tops — themselves actually called tuj lub — make contact with each other, they produce a loud clicking sound. […]

“You might bump into a group of people, maybe look like they were picnicking. But you look closely, they’re playing a top spin game,” said state Sen. Foung Hawj, who helped explain the game by comparing it to some other sports. “It’s like bowling, bocce ball or horseshoes, because they take a little range,” he said. […]

Striking the tops takes some real skill, even at close range. But Hawj says even if you’re not very skilled at tuj lub, players are good at complimenting those who are new to the game — at least in the United States. “In Highland Laos, we expect that everybody know how to play. So, if you play bad, they going to pick on you, say, ‘Why are you bad at this?’” he said with a chuckle.

Click through for more, including images; since Wiktionary seems not to have much Hmong, I can’t give you etymologies for tuj and lub, but I can tell you that the final consonants are actually tone marks — see Wikipedia for the messy details. Thanks, JWB!

The Economist reports on a little-known linguistic enclave (archived):

Introducing House Bill 561 to the Idaho Legislature, Ted Hill did not expect to stoke international controversy. The law, which originally banned local governments from flying the flags of non-states, was intended to stop Boise from flying the gay-pride flag. Earlier this year the president of the Basque Country, an autonomous region in Spain, sent a letter expressing concern about the effect HB 561 might have on the flying of the Ikurrina, the Basque flag, during Jaialdi, the 40,000-person Basque festival the city hosts every five years. Worried about flagging support for the bill, Representative Hill offered the Basques a carve-out for the Ikurrina.

Speakers of the language first came during California’s gold rush, then moved from mining to sheep herding. By 1900 chain migration saw nephews follow uncles as Basque shepherds spread across federal land. They carved 25,000 Basque-language messages into trees across the West. Some with Basque ancestry tried to shed it. “My great-grandparents’ generation said, ‘Learn English, don’t speak Basque.’ But my mom’s generation worked to get Basque back,” says Olaia Urquidi Beals of Txantxangorriak, a musical group. On Tuesday nights they gather with trikis (accordions) and panderos (tambourines) and sing in Basque. Afterwards, some musicians visit Ansots Basque Chorizos & Catering around the corner. Just down the road is Boiseko Ikastola, America’s only Basque-language pre-school.

There was a time, in the late 1970s, when it looked as if the language and culture would fade away, says Dave Bieter, a former mayor of Boise. Now when he plays Mus, a Basque card game, he says a third of players speak Basque. There are about 40 Basque clubs in America, mostly in the West. Jainkoak Amerika bedeinka dezala!

(That last exclamation means, according to GT, “God bless America!”) Thanks go to cuchuflete for what he calls a “superficial puff piece” but I call a fun bit of language fluff. Also, I’m glad to know there’s such a thing as a Basque-language pre-school in Idaho.

I’m finally getting around to Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which bulbul gave me back in 2018, and I thought I’d quote this passage from the introduction (p. 11; I added a few links):

Many errors arise from the interaction of more than one factor in the form and content of the text and the mental state of the scribe. One of the nicest examples of apparent error Christianus, the misreading in Petronius’ Satyricon 43.1 of ab asse creuit (‘he has grown from a penny’ or ‘he started out with only a penny’) as abbas secreuit (‘the abbot has hidden it away’), was almost certainly prompted as much by absence of word division in the exemplar and the scribe’s lack of familiarity with the coin term as, assis as by any grievances he may have harboured against his superior.

Finally, I cannot resist mentioning a slip for which I was responsible when editing the Canadian classical journal Phoenix. The Spring 1980 issue included a review of the edition of a text on military surveying, De metatione castrorum (‘On measuring camps’). In typing up the table of contents, I rendered the title as De metatione castorum, which could mean either ‘On measuring chaste men’ or ‘On measuring beavers’. An alert reader who adopted the second interpretation wrote to congratulate me on perpetrating such a quintessentially Canadian error.

It’s a well-written book full of good information, and I’ll probably be quoting more bits from it. Thanks again, bulbul!

This is the kind of thing that enrages me; Natricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg report in the Guardian:

When the Jamaican MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden speech, she was keenly aware of how much her country’s parliament mirrored the Westminster version thousands of miles away in London. […] Burchell, the opposition spokesperson for culture, creative industries and information, approached the microphone and began to speak. “Madam speaka, mi git up dis afta noon fi mek mi fuss sectoral speech, pan me portfolio …”

The speaker, Juliet Holness, immediately cut her off. “Hold on, hold on, hold on! Standing orders, and I think you are fully aware,” said Holness, who is the wife of Jamaica’s prime minister. The regulation to which Holness referred was the rule that only English – and certainly not Jamaican – is allowed in parliament. “If I have to stop you again during your presentation, you will not get any additional time,” Holness told Burchell as parliament erupted into protest, with someone chiding “broken English”.

Burchell had ignited an explosive debate across the country and beyond about the enduring legacy of British colonialism and whether robes, prayers for the British monarch and the “king’s English” are still right for Jamaica, more than 60 years after it gained independence.

Burchell continued her speech in standard English. “Madam speaker, perhaps I should abandon that attempt to use our local language because I have been reminded of the linguistic conventions of this honourable house,” she said. “Because maybe there is no more fitting way to begin a presentation on culture than to speak briefly in the language understood by the overwhelming majority of Jamaican people – even if that language still struggles for full acceptance in some of our most formal national spaces, including this very parliament.”

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I was reading about a recent documentary called Nuestra Tierra (apparently translated as both Our Land and Landmarks), which “examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and interrogates the role of this history in the murder of Javier Chocobar, a Chuschagasta leader in the struggle for indigenous land rights,” and of course wanted to know more about the Chuschagasta and their striking ethnonym — what language did they speak, for instance? There was no link attached to the word in that Wikipedia article, so I tried Indigenous languages of the Americas with no luck, even though its long list of “Widely-spoken and officially-recognized indigenous languages” went all the way down to languages with zero speakers. The List of Indigenous languages of Argentina and Indigenous peoples in Argentina were likewise no help. Eventually I googled up Manuel Lizondo Borda’s Estudios de voces tucumanas, Vol. 1, Voces tucumanas derivadas del quechua (M. Violetto & cia., 1927; Google Books, HathiTrust), where on p. 168 we find “CHUSCHA, n.p.”:

ORIG.: De CHHUJCHA: cabello (I; III, p. 176 y 239). La razón de nuestras acepciones 2ᵃ, 3ᵃ y 4ᵃ, parece estar, o está, en un poblado indígena llamado Chuschagasta o Chugchagasta (V. II parte), situado más o menos donde hoy se halla Chuscha, 2ᵃ acep.. Y habitantes de ese poblado, trasladados a Chuscha, 3ᵃ acep., dieron sin duda el nombre a este lugar; y de éste se originó seguramente el del río citado.
G. Holguín y Torres Rubio registran la voz quichua citado.

So apparently the name of the people is derived from the Quechua word given in Wiktionary as chukcha ‘hair’; I still don’t know what language they speak or anything more about them (or why they’re called both Chuschagasta and Chugchagasta), but let this serve as a reminder that there are many things in heaven and earth that are beyond the ken of Wikipedia.

Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward:

Pain is at the core of nostalgia, a term that a Swiss medical student coined in 1688 to diagnose a manifest malady, a homesickness intense enough to dysregulate the heartbeats of mercenaries serving abroad. Some of us are especially prone to such acute symptoms, but all of us, at one time or another, have experienced nostalgia as a proper ache. And yet, that isn’t what makes nostalgia a hard feeling to write about. There is often a sweetness to nostalgia, a sugar coating that, left unchecked, thickens until it obscures the 
painful kernel. The longing for a past purified of its faults—or a past we never knew firsthand, encountered only on the page, on the screen, or in tales told to us before sleep or from a podium—becomes an indulgence. What makes nostalgia difficult to treat honestly in poems is how easily some of us fall under its spell.

I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it. This inner conflict—my attraction to the past, my effort to remind myself that the past is always a dream—has guided much of my work as a poet and translator. I suppose I could blame my personal history. Uprooted as a child from my native town of Odesa, Ukraine, thrust into an alien culture, I sought comfort in memories: of playing in the park with herds of cats and one terribly loyal stray dog as the sun set, while old men swapped inflated war stories over games of checkers and dominoes; of racing back from the water of the Black Sea to bite into incomparably flavorful tomatoes sprinkled with salt; of listening to my mother’s guests crack jokes in our warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. The memories grew ever cleaner, ever more pillowy in response to my needs.

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