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Dave Wilton’s latest Big List entry is on the phrase “agree to disagree”; he begins by saying Methodists like to claim that the phrase was coined by John Wesley, because the OED has a 1775 letter by Wesley as the first citation, but Dave finds it in Wesley’s 1770 funeral sermon for the Reverend George Whitefield (pronounced /ˈhwɪtfiːld/, as if written Whitfield). So far, so not-all-that-interesting (a five-year antedate is not hard to achieve in the world of Google Books), but Dave is just getting started; he discovers that the phrase was used by Whitefield himself twenty years earlier:

In a 29 June 1750 letter, Whitefield, a strong advocate for ecumenism, wrote:

If you and the rest of the preachers were to meet together more frequently, and tell each other your grievances, opinions, &c. it might be of service. This may be done in a very friendly way, and thereby many uneasinesses might be prevented. After all, those that will live in peace must agree to disagree in many things with their fellow-labourers, and not let little things part or disunite them.

[…]

But Whitefield didn’t coin it either. The earliest use of the phrase that I can find is in another funeral sermon preached some 175 years earlier in 1601 by William Harrison, Roman Catholic archpriest of England [no — see comment thread below] who argued against the existence of purgatory:

It would require a longer discourse, then now I can stand vpon: to descend into each of these particulars, beeing limited with the time, mine owne weakenes, and your wearines; yet if any man doubt, let him demurre with mee vpon a further tryall, and conference, when I shall (if God will) satisfie him to the full; that in all these seuerall points, they doe nothing else but agree to disagree: in the meane time I dare auouch as first I did, that purgatorie is not at all.

He adds that “in a secular and poetic context, William Wycherley used it in a 1704 poem,” and concludes:

Agree to disagree is a good example of how coinages credited to famous people are often incorrect. Celebrities get the credit because either their words are preserved while those of lesser mortals are forgotten, or simply because more people read them and they come to the attention of lexicographers (and in this case, preachers).

An impressive antedating and a good moral at the end.

This site looks interesting, but the details are above my pay grade:

Building a word game forced us to solve a measurement problem: how do you rank 40+ ways to associate any given word down to exactly 17 playable choices? We discovered that combining human-curated thesauri, book cataloging systems, and carefully constrained LLM queries creates a navigable network where 76% of random word pairs connect in ≤7 hops—but only when you deprecate superconnectors and balance multiple ranking signals. The resulting network of 1.5 million English terms reveals that nearly any two common words connect in 6-7 hops through chains of meaningful associations. The mean path length of 6.43 hops held true across a million random word pairs—shorter than we’d guessed, and remarkably stable.

This is consistent with the small-world structure and near-universal connectivity seen in lexical network research on smaller datasets. The network’s structure makes intuitive semantic navigation possible—players can feel their way through meaningful transitions: a crown’s gemstones lead to emerald’s foliage and finally to a forest canopy, or a flame becomes an ember, then a glowing memory, a mental recall, and finally the action to cancel.

English exhibits network effects remarkably similar to social networks—nearly any random pair of words can reach each other in just a few hops through chains of meaningful associations. This “small world” phenomenon was first measured in word co-occurrence networks, and persists even after we deprioritize superconnector words that might otherwise dominate many paths. To probe this, we randomly sampled 1 million word pairs (4 days processing on 32 cores), to get a strong statistical sampling of the connected core of English.

There’s much more at the link, including many charts and examples; there’s a section “Understanding Our Biases,” which is a good thing, and at the end there’s a “Making the Game” link which gives the background. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)

I was enjoying Lauren Collins’s New Yorker piece “How a Hazelnut Spread Became a Sticking Point in Franco-Algerian Relations” (archived) but of course kept wondering about the origin of the name of the spread, El Mordjene. Then I got to this key passage:

Cebon, which now employs eight hundred people, has three factories. The one that manufactures El Mordjene is only a few miles from the Mediterranean. The sea inspired the Fouras to give the product its name, which means “red coral” in Arabic.

With that information, I was able to discover that the Arabic word is مرجان ‘small pearls; corals,’ which has a very interesting etymology:

From Classical Syriac ܡܪܰܓܳܢ (margān, “pearl-like”), from ܡܰܪܓܳܢܺܝܬܳܐ (margānīṯā, “pearl”), from Ancient Greek μαργαρίτης (margarítēs, “pearl”), an Iranian borrowing.

At that μαργαρίτης link, we find:

Borrowed from Indo-Iranian.[1] According to Beekes, possibly from Proto-Iranian *mŕ̥ga-ahri-ita- (“oyster”, literally “born from the shell of a bird”).[2] Compare Middle Persian [script needed] (mwlwʾlyt’ /⁠morwārīd⁠/) (whence Persian مروارید (marvârid)), Sogdian [script needed] (marγārt), Sanskrit मञ्जरी (mañjarī), and Avestan 𐬨𐬆𐬭𐬆𐬌𐬌𐬀 (mərəiia).

Among the list of descendants they give Aramaic מרגניתא, מַרְגָּלִיתָא (margālīṯā), as well as Classical Syriac ܡܪܓܢܝܬܐ and the Hebrew loan word מַרְגָּלִית (margalít); English margarite; and Latin margarīta (see there for further descendants), but they neglect to add “see there for further descendants” to the Syriac, which richly deserves it — someone who edits Wiktionary should add the parenthetical.
[Read more…]

I’m still working my way through Douchet’s Nouvelle Vague (see this post), which is one of the best books I’ve read about movies and which I recommend to anyone interested in the change that took place in the late 1950s which we summarize as “New Wave” (there’s an English translation by Robert Bonnono); in the section on dialogue, he describes the passage from the stylized exchanges of the classic French cinema of the ’30s, when the screenwriter was considered the most important creative element, to the more naturalistic speech of movies like The 400 Blows and Breathless (“le discontinu, le ce qui passe par la tête, l’imprévu et l’impromptu, bref qui obéit à l’humeur de l’instant”) and gives this description of Rohmer’s attempt to find a middle way:

Rohmer, bien qu’appartenant à cette génération, participe, cinématographiquement parlant, de l’esprit de la suivante. Si ses dialogues sont un modèle du genre, considérés comme littéraires au point d’être publiés (ce qui est peu fréquent), il n’empêche qu’ils ont pour ambition première de saisir, quasi sociologiquement, le parler de notre temps. On sait comment il procède: fréquenter ses futurs interprètes, et ce de six mois à un an avant le tournage, et retenir des constantes conversations badines qu’il entretient avec eux les tournures de phrases et d’esprit, les tics et les mots propres aux actrices et acteurs. Il les injecte dans un dialogue très écrit qui prend, ainsi, un tour familier, procure l’illusion de l’instantané et du pris sur le vif. La rigueur grammaticale va de pair avec la ligne de conduite des personnages. Elle est nécessaire pour donner du jeu — un jeu pervers — à la rectitude de leur parcours, pour instiller, par un glissement libertin des mots et des phrases, une licence à leur morale. Rohmer fabrique ainsi un parler qui serait le français de notre époque si on savait garder encore, correctement et simplement, le bon usage de notre langue. Tentative de fusion entre le «parler écrit xᴠɪɪɪᵉ siècle» et le «parler parlé» de la fin xxᵉ. En résulte une impression d’étrangeté, fascination en forme de suspense qui attache à de longues discussions a priori anti-cinématographiques un public désormais captif et attentif.

My translation (I don’t have access to Bonnono’s):

Rohmer, although belonging to this [earlier] generation, participates, cinematically speaking, in the spirit of the following one. If his dialogues are a model of their kind, considered literary enough that they were published (which is rare), their primary ambition is nevertheless to capture, almost sociologically, the speech of our time. We know his working method: he spends time with his future actors, for six months to a year before filming, and from the constant light-hearted conversations he has with them he learns the turns of phrase and wit, the mannerisms and words specific to the actresses and actors. He injects these into a dialogue that is very much scripted but which thus acquires a familiar turn, providing the illusion of a snapshot, something caught in the moment. Grammatical rigor goes hand in hand with the characters’ line of conduct. This is necessary to introduce some play – a perverse play – into the straightness of their journey, to instill, by a libertine slippage of words and phrases, some license into their morality. Rohmer thus manufactures a way of speaking that would be the French of our time if we still knew how to maintain, correctly and simply, the proper use of our language: an attempt to fuse the “written speech of the 18th century” with the “spoken speech” of the late 20th century. The result is an impression of strangeness, a fascination in the form of suspense that binds a now captive and attentive audience to long discussions that one would assume would be anti-cinematic.

That’s extremely enlightening, and provides a clue as to why I always have a slight problem with Rohmer, even though I’ve greatly enjoyed many of his movies: there’s something excessively formal about them, something that contrasts with the spontaneous feel of films by Godard, Truffaut, and others of his cohort. Of course, Rohmer is trying to do something different and has a right to his method, but it leaves me feeling a tad dissatisfied.

And speaking of being dissatisfied, I recently watched a movie by Alexandre Astruc, who has the reputation of being a cold formalist (he invented the notion of the caméra-stylo, and cared more about the perfection of his images than the human impact of the whole); I liked it more than I expected (Annie Girardot’s acting is terrific), but the story is still a tedious rehash of the sad-adulteress plot (she leaves her domineering husband for a man who also proves unsatisfactory and winds up miserably alone). What really bothered me was going to the Wikipedia page and discovering that it was under the title Prey for the Shadows. As I indignantly explained in the note I left when moving it to be under its French title La Proie pour l’ombre, “‘Prey for the Shadows’ is never used in English and is based on a misunderstanding of the French title.” I added the following explanation to the article text: “the title is from the French expression lâcher la proie pour l’ombre, which literally means ‘to let go of the prey for the shadow’[5], referring to Aesop’s fable The Dog and Its Reflection.” We don’t really have an equivalent expression in English.

I was reading along in Colin Thubron’s NYRB review (archived) of four novels by Kapka Kassabova when I got to this passage:

A gleam of such idealism—and an ingrained restlessness—led the poet and narrative writer Kapka Kassabova to join some of the last migratory pastoralists in Europe on their seasonal ascent to the high pastures in the Pirin Mountains of her native Bulgaria. This was not an epic migration like that of Iran’s Bakhtiari people, for instance, some of whom still trek with their goats and high-packed mules between the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf, but a near-solitary journey with a wayward flock of sheep to rocky uplands and a spartan hut.

She was entering a world of old transhumance, of annual migration, for this was the traditional terrain of the nomadic Karakachans, whose lives were grounded only in the last century. Their unseen presence haunts Kassabova’s latest book, Anima: A Wild Pastoral. Most widely studied in Greece, where their elusiveness—they avoided human habitation and often traveled by night—provoked both curiosity and unease, the Karakachans still inhabit mountainous regions in Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania, but their origins are unknown. They perhaps descend from prehistoric Thracian-Illyrian peoples, who were early Hellenized. Their traditions were austerely patriarchal. Elaborately sashed and kilted, they trekked under huge goat-hair capes so coarse and stiff, one traveler wrote, that a man could almost step out and leave it standing like a sentry box. Their spoken Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time, to the excitement of anthropologists, and the geometric patterns of their textiles are teasingly reminiscent of those on preclassical Greek vases.

Who were these Karakachans? If you put it into the Wikipedia search box, it redirects to Sarakatsani, and that name was familiar; the Wikipedia article says:

The most widely accepted theory for the origin of the name “Sarakatsani” is that it comes from the Turkish word karakaçan (from kara = ‘black’ and kaçan = ‘fugitive’), used by the Ottomans, in reference to those people who dressed in black and fled to the mountains during the Ottoman rule. According to other theories, the name could stem from the village of Sakaretsi (the supposed homeland of the Sarakatsani), or from the village of Syrrako.

That’s a lot of hypotheses; Sarakatsani and karakaçan are certainly strikingly similar, but it’s not clear why the k- would have become s-. The OED’s entry for Sarakatsan is from 1993, but the etymology says only “< modern Greek Σαρακατσάνοι the Sarakatsans.” They do not have an entry for Karakachan, and frankly I think it’s unhelpful to use that term in English. As for “Their spoken Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time”: I don’t doubt it, since all of Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time. I guess this is one of those folk-linguistic things like “Appalachian English is full of words from Shakespeare’s time” or whatever.

I’ve long known the term “friends with benefits” — in the words of Wikipedia, “A friends with benefits relationship […] is a sexual arrangement between friends that involves recurrent physical intimacy and varies in its formation, outcomes, and attributes.” But it never occurred to me to wonder how it arose; now I’ve had this section of the Wikipedia article pointed out to me:

Terminology

Some researchers assign the origin of the term “friends with benefits” earliest known usage to Alanis Morissette’s 1995 song “Head over Feet” in the lyrics, “You’re my best friend, Best friend with benefits.”[1] However, others primarily believe it to have originated from the 2011 film known as Friends with Benefits.[1]

That footnote goes to “Have a Friend with Benefits, Whom off and on I See.” Friends with Benefits Relationships, but it’s behind a Springer paywall; in any case, I wouldn’t trust a chapter in the International Handbook of Love to do adequate philological investigation. A Google Books search has turned up a bunch of bad metadata. So I turn to the assembled Hattery: anybody know anything of the phrase’s history? Thanks and a tip of the Languagehat hat to James!

Chris Fitzpatrick reports for ABC Alice Springs on a cheering initiative:

In March, four-year-old Zoday Bearpaw stood before a crowd at a language forum in Alice Springs and told a story in the Native American Yuchi language. “The rabbit went back inside the bag and rolled down the hill. The turkeys wanted to try that too,” he said. It sounds like a simple folktale, but for the Yuchi tribe of Oklahoma, USA, it marked something far more significant. Zoday is among the first new generation in 100 years to speak Yuchi as a first language.

That moment unfolded in Alice Springs, on Arrernte Country, where Yuchi families who had travelled to from Oklahoma to meet with the Pertame people — one of the First Nations groups whose country lies south of the town.

Samantha Armstrong, a Pertame language worker and coordinator of the Pertame school, was in the crowd that day. Despite the distance between them, the Yuchi and Pertame people have discovered deep common ground in saving their languages. “We have less than 31 language speakers of Pertame that grew up only speaking Pertame as their first language — they’re mostly grandparents or great-grandparents,” Ms Armstrong said.

Zoday’s parents, Micha and Keland Bearpaw, are among those leading the revival, raising their children to speak Yuchi as a first language. “We dropped down to one speaker … and from her, we’ve been able to create at least 40 to 60 speakers now,” Yuchi man Keland Bearpaw said. […]

Despite being oceans apart, the Yuchi and Pertame are walking parallel paths — reviving their languages not through institutions, but by raising children to speak, live and dream in their mother tongue. The connection between the Pertame and Yuchi people began in 2019, when Pertame woman Vanessa Fairly and her grandmother, Kathy Bradshaw, attended a UN Indigenous Language workshop in New York. It was organised by Richard Grounds, a Yuchi elder and inventor of the Yuchi’s written language. There, they learned about the Yuchi immersion methods and their shared struggle in saving their languages, sparking a friendship that’s continued across years and continents.

More at the link, including photos. (Yuchi, by the way, is a language isolate; Pertame is Arandic.) I think it’s great that representatives of struggling languages are banding together; we unpowerful folk need to help one another.

Craig wrote me via e-mail (I’ve added links):

Family of mine are going fruit picking today at a local orchard/golf course where they can pick honeyberries, a fruit we had never heard of. The plant Lonicera caerulea is a “non-climbing honeysuckle native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere regions of North America, Europe, and Asia.” (WP)

Its other name “haskap” comes from Ainu. Per Wiktionary, its etymology is “ハㇱ (has) +‎ カ (ka) +‎ オㇷ゚ (op), meaning ‘something that grows abundantly on branches'”. [Ainu is written in modified katakana.] While カ (ka) and‎ オㇷ゚ (op) have entries in Wiktionary as “on” and “spear”, ハㇱ (has) has no entry, making it difficult to judge the rather florid “something that grows abundantly”.

John Batchelor’s 1905 “An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language)” has ハシ (hash) alone and in compounds meaning “scrubwood” or “shrubs” as well as ハツ (hat) meaning “grapes” [all on p. 138].

If any commenters know anything more about the language, I am curious how the etymology actually plays out. One thing is clear: too many websites selling the berry propound a cringeworthy exoticized false etymology of a “berry of long life and good vision” in Japanese!

An interesting question; I know almost nothing about Ainu and would like to hear more about it.

I’ve been on a Jacques Rivette kick recently — he’s one of those directors of whom I can say he’s a favorite only with the important proviso that when his movies are to my taste I like them a lot, but when they’re not (e.g., 1976’s Noroît) I have no desire to see them again. (Contrast with Godard, whose movies I’m eternally interested in experiencing even when I don’t like them very much.) So far my favorites are Paris nous appartient (1961, his first), L’Amour fou (1969), and Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974); I’m likely to add Le Pont du Nord (1981) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991) to the list, but I’ve only seen them once each and can’t be sure. I’m currently watching La Bande des quatre (1989), and I think it too will wind up on the approved list, since it’s got the kind of lively acting and productive life/theater interaction that make his movies work. But I keep having to pause to investigate things vital to appreciating the movie, like Marivaux’s La double inconstance, the play the student actresses in the movie are studying/rehearsing, and just now I had to look up “La prière d’Esther” from Racine’s play Esther (used as an audition piece by a prospective student) and found myself at this page, which is very helpful in explicating the passage. But I ran into a stumbling block here (bold added):

L’alexandrin a des césures qu’il faut faire apparaître : la césure lyrique après « perfide », qui met en valeur l’argument adversatif (après tant de miracles) qui suit, l’arrêt après « anéantir » qui (outre sa rime avec le perfide du vers au-dessus) permet de bien faire apparaître l’importance du cod « la foi de tes oracles » ; et après « aux mortels » : même chose , mise en valeur du complément, la venue du Messie promise, le messie défini par les deux relatives : une promesse et une attente.

What was this “cod” that was so important? It doesn’t even look like a French word! But I let it go for the moment and continued reading, soon getting to this:

Les deux derniers vers sont très beaux avec l’antithèse vains ornements / cendre, le parallélisme « je préfère/ n’ai de goût » et le chiasme : « A ces vains ornements » en tête avant son verbe et « aux pleurs» après son verbe (mais les deux cod se retrouvent chacun à l’hémistiche et ne s’en opposent que mieux), avec la succession de monosyllabes du dernier vers : une pauvreté un dénuement, qui s’oppose aux « ornements » qui en fait sont la réelle pauvreté (« vains ») , les allitérations (G/K) et enfin ce « que tu me vois » : Esther prend Dieu à témoin de sa contrition.

There it was again, and this time the plural turned out to be cod! What was going on? Some googling took me here: “Qu’est-ce qu’un COD ? Complément d’objet direct : Un complément d’objet direct est un mot ou groupe de mots qui vient compléter l’action du sujet dans une phrase.” It would have been helpful if the author of the Esther’s-prayer page (which could use proofreading, e.g. “à al familiarité”) had used capital letters to make it clear it was an acronym, but at least I now knew it was a direct object, and now so do you. But my question for French speakers is this: would you know automatically what was meant by “l’importance du cod,” or would you have had to look it up? And (while I’m at it) do you pronounce it like code or say the letters separately?

David Farrier’s Guardian piece on AI and animal communication is a classic thumb-sucker — take some half-understood and poorly digested scientific news and mix it with wild speculation ad libitum — but the idea at its center is of some interest:

The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.

Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.

The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals’ interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another’s native vocabulary.

The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic “conversation” with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as “whup/throp” with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U.

It goes on to reference the impressively mustachioed Jakob Johann von Uexküll and his notion of Umwelt; does anyone know the derivation of his surname? At any rate, I suspect that, as usual, whatever sounds exciting is wrong or misunderstood, and whatever is accurate is not that interesting (I can well believe that scientists exchanged “whup/throp” with a whale for twenty minutes; did the whale get bored, or did they?). I’m quite sure none of these animals use anything comparable to human language. But still, if the complex calls can be analyzed in any fruitful way, well, that’s a result. Thanks, Trevor!

Addendum. When this was posted, everyone had forgotten our 2017 discussion of Uexküll, beginning here.