languagehat.com

Y sent me a link to Matt’s 2017 post New Approaches to Ethno-Linguistic Maps at the linguistics blog Humans Who Read Grammars, calling it “neat,” and I felt the same way when I clicked the link:

One major issue with most modern maps of languages is that they often consist of just a single point for each language – this is the approach that WALS and glottolog take. This works pretty well for global-scale analyses, but simple points are quite uninformative for region scale studies of languages. Points also have a hard time spatially describing languages that have disjoint distributions, like English, or languages that overlap spatially. […] I believe that, thanks to greater computational efficiency offered by modern computers and new datasets available from social media, it is increasingly possible to develop better maps of language distributions using geotagged text data rather than an expert’s opinion. In this blog, I’ll cover two projects I’ve done to map languages – one using data from Twitter in the Philippines, and another using computationally-intensive algorithms to classify toponyms in West Africa.

Those maps are amazing! Then I thought “I should really investigate that blog,” and when I went to the main page I found a 2019 post by Annemarie Verkerk, Language family maps, that begins:

Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie’s (2017) chapter ‘The Languages of the World’ (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It’s a basic overview of the world’s language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments.

It’s a very useful resource, as is the entire blog (here’s the About page). Thanks, Y!

You know, this blog has always been a comfort to me, first when I was working for Hideous Soulless Corporation and then when I had left the familiar environs of New York City and was trying to establish myself as a freelancer, but in these pestiferous times it’s more important to me than ever. I hardly see anyone but my wife from week to week, but I have all you good folks to keep me company and carry on lively conversations (many of which I can only understand scraps of, but that’s good for me). It no longer seems quite so amazing LH is still around — one does get accustomed to things — but it’s even harder to imagine giving it up. My deepest appreciation to all of you; thanks for hanging around and chatting so companionably!

A quick update on my literary adventures: I had been reading Tessa Hadley novels to my wife at night (I particularly recommend The Past), but we’re taking a break to read something both of us, George Eliot fans that we are, have been wanting to try, Daniel Deronda. So far it’s a delight (and reminds me of Russian novels set in German spas where gamblers congregate). In Russian, I read a bunch of Andrei Bitov stories (recommended: «Большой шар” [The big balloon], about a little girl who falls in love with a big red balloon, and «Инфантьев» [Infantyev], about a guy mourning his wife); then I went back to the 19th century and read Chekhov’s famous «Палата № 6» (“Ward No. 6”), which is very good indeed, and Leskov’s 1893 «Загон» (The cattle pen), which is frustrating in the same way so much Leskov is frustrating: the writing is excellent, the individual anecdotes are often hilarious, but the thing doesn’t hang together. Leskov had no sense of form — it starts with stories of Russian peasants refusing to accept Western improvements in farming and ends with stories about thievery, fakery, and Baltic churches, all supposed to be somehow connected with the idea of Russia as a cattle pen walled off from the world. Now I’m going to return to the 20th century and read my first Trifonov, the 1969 «Обмен» [The Exchange].
[Read more…]

Rosy Carrick, a “poet, playwright, performer and translator” who “has a PhD on the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and has released two books of his work in translation,” has put online her version of Mayakovsky’s Что ни страница — то слон, то львица [On every page a lion or an elephant], and it’s an admirable presentation, with a large image of each original page with an illustration by Kirill Zdanevich (brother of Il’ia — see this LH post) followed by her translation. She hasn’t tried to rhyme her lines, which is probably a wise decision, but that makes it hard to understand why she renders председатель ‘chairman’ by “Party Leader” on the first page (chairmanship had nothing to do with Party membership) and omits Америки ‘America’ on the last (replacing it with the vague “hotter climes”). But never mind, it’s a nice thing to have online and I hope there are many more such webpages.

For those who read Russian, Lev Oborin’s wonderful Polka site (see this LH post) has put up an awe-inspiring roster of 77 Russian travel accounts, from the medieval (Афанасий Никитин. Хождение за три моря, 1469–1474) to the very modern (Эдуард Лимонов. Старик путешествует, 2020). I applaud their ongoing efforts to document and promulgate the history of Russian literature.

Joe Gillard’s “14 Colonial-Era Slang Terms” is just another of those lists of fun words, but hey, they’re fun words, and I enjoy this stuff:

1. Kedge

What It Meant: Doing well

In you lived in a country town in Colonial-era New England and someone asked how you were doing, you might have replied, “I’m pretty kedge.” It’s a bizarre but wonderful term that essentially means in being in good health—but it also kind of sounds like something a teen in an ‘80s movie would say.

4. Scranch

What It Meant: To crack something between your teeth

Though this apparently “vulgar” term sounds like it was named after what it sounds like to crack something with your teeth, it supposedly comes from the Dutch word, schransen.

14. Circumbendibus

What It Meant: Roundabout

Of all the ways to describe something unnecessarily roundabout— like someone telling a rambling story or taking a weird road when driving somewhere—this word, which dates to 1681, might be the most delightful. It also shows how much we fun we had and still have with language, combining prefixes and suffixes to make new words.

Some of them don’t really seem to belong on the list (shaver was current in my youth, and I’ll bet there are still people who say it), but that last one is a magnificent example of the rumbustious grandiloquence that has always appealed to the American soul, and I’ll try to remember to start calling things “circumbendibus” myself. Thanks, jack!

Back in March (which seems like at least a year ago) I posted about a thought-provoking essay by Joel Christensen of Sententiae Antiquae called “On Not Reading Homer”; now he’s got a follow-up that’s even better, “On Reading Homer,” and I hope anyone who found the earlier post worthwhile will click through and read it. A few excerpts, as usual, to whet the appetite:

Advocates often imagine that the strongest argument for Homer is that Homer was influential in the “Western Canon” and that you need to be familiar with Homer to appreciate and understand everything that came after. I think that this argument sounds nice, but it overstates the existence of the “Western Canon” (which is relatively recent), ignores the motivations for enforcing it, and radically misunderstands the impact of Homeric epic in the development of European literatures.

[…]

The difference between what we actually have in the Homeric epics and what we find in later generations can help us unlearn what we think we know about literary traditions. This argument makes me nervous in general because it runs the risk of merely repeating the damaging “Greek Miracle” nonsense. But it is also an argumentum ex silentio. I don’t know that other works we lost were any less unique and different.

[…]

The Homeric epics are dialogic and aporetic and in these functions they teach us not what to do but how to think about what we do as communities. […] Homeric epic, like Platonic dialogue, invites its audiences to follow the folly and success of its characters and then to retrace them, to come to a deeper understanding of the conditions that put them in the position to fail. For Platonic dialogue, Laura Candiotto (2015) has argued that the state of aporia itself is transformative, that it forces us to “imagine an otherness” (242) but that this process requires shared or collective emotional and intellectual work. The shared work of interpreting epic with its characters is a kind of extended mind over time. When we read them and discuss them with others, we engage in the transformative process of creating community around the interrogation of the self. […] What makes Homer different from reading Game of Thrones together or spending semesters contemplating Marcel Proust’s associative sense of smell is the depth of interpretive traditions to add to the complexity of the community of meaning and the nature of epic poetry itself. Homeric ambiguity, interdeterminacy, and dialogism provides a capaciousness of time rare in any art form and the essential, irrefutable absence of the author provides the opportunity to think and rethink without that devils’ trap of authorial intention.

(Please, no complaints about technical terms like dialogic and aporetic; he’s not writing for the daily paper, and he defines them as he goes.) He links to various other material relevant to the topic, including Gregory Nagy’s Homer’s Text and Language (which I am eager to investigate), and in general provokes questions that make one think afresh. I have to say that the quote from Gladstone beginning “If the works of Homer are, to letters and to human learning, what the early books of Scripture are to the entire Bible and to the spiritual life of man; if in them lie the beginnings of the intellectual life of the world…” made me feel a little nauseated (though that may be the heat and humidity). I want to slap Gladstone around and tell him that spiritual life is not confined to inheritors of the Greco-Roman tradition; he didn’t have the excuse of not knowing any better, and still less do we. Homer is magnificent, but so are the classics of China, Persia, and other loci of civilization; the world is a big place, and none of us can absorb more than a tiny fraction of the available greatness.

I enjoyed this paragraph from Jerzy Linderski, “Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum: Concepts of Defensive Imperialism,” for its own sake (via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):

For Roman facts are not waiting there to be collected; the act of picking them up is the act of choice and interpretation. No fact exists without an interpretation imposed upon it. For facts are like words in a dictionary; they are dead. In the real language words come to life only in enunciations; in the real world facts come to life only in the flow of history. And the flow of history, as we know it, flows from the ordering mind of the historian, ancient or modern. The tools of order are unexpressed philosophy and assumed terminology. Hence even the most extensive erudition and deepest knowledge of the quisquilia of epigraphy may still result in specious history. In order to understand or refute what a historian says, we must investigate his frame of mind. This appears to us a natural postulate with respect to our ancient forefathers, but the dissecting of the minds of our contemporary colleagues many would feel is a different matter: a task unbecoming a scholar and gentleman. Yet we are not questioning honesty; we are questioning philosophy. We are seeking premises unexpressed, unrealized, unsuspected.

But I bring it here for the excellent Latin word quisquilia ‘admixed twigs or stalks; odds and ends; rubbish, dregs,’ which while not much used in English is current in Italian, where it means ‘trifle, minor detail.’ I’m afraid it has far too dusty a scent to be usable in English other than by classicists, but I do like it.

Also, note Linderski’s title “Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum”; this is, of course, a Latin saying meaning “If you want peace, prepare for war,” and it is the source of the pistol name Parabellum, which in turn is the source of Russian парабеллум ‘automatic pistol,’ which I probably first encountered in Ilf & Petrov’s classic Двенадцать стульев (The Twelve Chairs, 1927), where Ostap says:

― Мы надеемся с вашей помощью поразить врага. Я дам вам парабеллум.

“We hope, with your help, to defeat the enemy. I’ll give you a pistol.”

Allen Amsbaugh writes (originally for NASA’s ASRS Directline) about “an intriguing intersection of aviation and language which shows just how important it is to consider the human factor, even for something simple like naming airspace fixes”:

Over the years, the ASRS has received many reports regarding navigational identifiers that sound similar to other fixes, or are not spelled in a logical fashion. Two caught my eye recently and were the impetus for this article. The first incident was reported by two crew members. One of these reporters stated:

“Enroute to PDX from DEN. Near BOI cleared direct DUFUR, direct PDX. Inadvertently spelled DUFER into the FMC. Note: DUFER is 14 DME, ILS 16R Seattle. Since the course seemed reasonable, I did not double-check for route deviation DUFER to PDX. A lesson learned! I am surprised that two intersections would be so close with similar names.” (# 258559, 258669)

SEA is about 50 miles farther from BOI than PDX, and about 17 degrees farther to the north. The ARTCC Controller rectified the situation by a gentle, “Where are you going?” The ASRS has issued a For Your Information Notice to the appropriate agencies and FAA offices in an attempt to rectify this problem. It was recommended that the name be changed on one of the intersections. We all hope that one of the spellings will not be changed to DOOFR!

There are plenty more examples, including the one from which I took my post title:

“Controller gave route change ‘Direct PERRI intersection, J8 OTT, OTT 3 arrival KBWI.’ He spelled out the intersection. The Captain began programming the FMS while we both reached for enroute charts. The Captain loaded ‘Direct PERRY,’ and the course indicated about 140° which was reasonable from the assigned 090° heading. The FMS would not accept J8, and we began to analyze why. TCAS II indicated traffic which was descending through our altitude and a potential conflict. The Captain initiated a left turn to avoid the traffic. Center issued a ‘Left turn immediately!’ and then assigned 100° [heading]. The conflict could have been averted by my verifying PERRI versus PERRY as the FMS entry. The Controller spelled out P-E-R-R-I, and I wrote it down correctly, but did not verify the Captain’s input…” (# 264927)

This error resulted in a traffic conflict because of the wrong heading. The Controller wanted the reporter to go to PERRI, a fix east of Charleston, WV, while the Captain entered PERRY, a fix southeast of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean! The FMS would not take J8 from PERRY because PERRY is not on J8, but PERRI is. Both man (the Controller) and machine (the FMS) tried to help this crew—to no avail.

Thanks, hat_eater!

Victor Mair at the Log posts about Turkish (and other) words for ‘cat’; he shares a long and interesting communication from Mehmet Olmez, who says:

There was not a Turkic word for ‘cat’, there were some words for ‘wild cat’. Detailed description about the cat we can find in Divanu Lugati’t-Turk (from 11th century, 1072-1074). Turkish kedi ‘cat’ must be related to European CAT and KATZE. But it cannot be a direct borrowing as mentioned from Europe. According to A. Tietze and R. Dankoff, it can be related with Armenian kadu or Ar. qiṭṭ. In Siberian languages there is just ‘wild cat’ (similar Mongolian malur and other forms): manu. […] I can share here Clauson’s explanation:

?F çetük ‘(female) cat’. The various Turkish words for ‘cat’ are collected in Shcherbak, p. 129. Some of them, e.g. maçı:, VU mö:ş, and mışkıç, are demonstrably l.-w.s, and it is likely that the rest, including this one, which has no obvious etymology, are also l.-w.s. The Turks prob. did not meet cats early enough to have their own word for them. (Xak.?) xıv Muh. al-sinnūr ‘cat’ çetük Mel. 72, 6; çe:tük Rif. 174: Oğuz xı çetük al-hirra ‘female cat’; (VU) küwük (unvocalized) çetük al-ḍaywan ‘tom cat’ Kaş. I 388; a.o. III 127 (mö:ş): Xwar. xıv çetük ‘(female) cat’ Qutb 42: Kıp. xııı al-qiṭṭ ‘tom cat’ (ma:çı:, also called) çe:tük Hou. ıı, ıı: xıv çetük (c-c) al-qiṭṭ İd. 42; Bul. 10, 10: xv al-qitt setük (sic) Kav. 62, 3; sinnūr (maçı and) çetük Tuh. 19a. 11: Osm. xıv ff. çetük, occasionally çetik, ‘cat’; common till xvı, occasionally later TTS I 155; II 222; III 147; IV 165: xvııı çetik (spelt) in Rūmī, gurba ‘cat’, in Ar. hirra and sinnūr San. 205r. 14. [Clauson 402b:]

Juha Janhunen talks about Mongolian and Finnic languages and says “Words for ‘cat’ are often recent, descriptive / onomatopoetic, or borrowed”; Mair says:

All of this leaves me with two burning questions:

1. Why are words for the domestic cat, an animal now so widespread and much adored (think of Hello Kitty, the zillions of cat videos, etc.), relatively late in many languages?
2. Why is the evidence for cats so relatively scant in the archeological record? — except for ancient Egypt, where there were millions of mummified cats, so many that in the 1800s they were sold for fertilizer in Europe.

Good questions, and I will add: what the hell is Clauson’s “l.-w.s”? I hate opaque abbreviations, especially when the book is unavailable by online preview. (Also, Olmez’s “Turkish kedi ‘cat’ must be related to European CAT and KATZE” is of course overstated; why do people always ignore the prevalence of coincidence?)

Daniel Oberhaus writes for Wired about the (so far hypothetical) problem of contacting aliens that begins by describing Sónar Calling GJ273b, “an interstellar messaging project by the nonprofit METI International that began in 2017” which “was notable for rehabilitating an extraterrestrial language developed by the physicists Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas in the late 1990s”:

This custom symbolic system begins by introducing ET to numerals, and then progresses to more complex topics like human biology and the planets in our solar system. An earlier version of the language was first sent into space in 1999 and again in 2003 as part of the Cosmic Call messages—a crowd-sourced interstellar messaging project that marked the first serious attempt at interstellar communication since Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sent the Arecibo message into space 25 years earlier.

All of these formal messaging attempts have taken basically the same approach: Teach numerals and basic arithmetic first. But as some recent insights in neurolinguistics suggest, it might not be the best way to greet our alien neighbors.

The world’s first interstellar communication system, the lingua cosmica, or Lincos, set the tone for all subsequent attempts by placing basic math at its core. Designed by the Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal in 1960, Lincos inspired several other mathematicians and scientists to try their hand at designing extraterrestrial languages. Each system is ultimately an attempt at solving a remarkably complex problem: How do you communicate with an intelligent entity you know nothing about?

The question gets at the nature of intelligence itself. Humans are the only species on Earth endowed with advanced mathematical ability and a fully fledged faculty of language, but are these hallmarks of intelligence or human idiosyncrasies? Is there an aspect of intelligence that is truly universal?

There’s some tosh about “universal grammar,” then:

There is a good chance that ET’s planet will be quite a bit different from our own, and the species there will adapt accordingly. But the course of evolution on ET’s planet will still be bound by the same physical laws, and ET will face the same fundamental constraints on time, energy, and resources. So it is reasonable to assume that extraterrestrial evolution might arrive at similar solutions to these common problems, such as a brain capable of wielding hierarchical, recursive languages.

If that’s the case, then the best way to communicate large amounts of information may not be painstakingly designing artificial languages from scratch, but sending a large corpus of natural language text, such as an encyclopedia. This is how we train natural language algorithms on Earth, which tease out the rules of human language by statistically analyzing large collections of text. If ET has developed its own AI, it could potentially decipher the structure of a natural language message.

Which makes sense to me. Thanks, Bathrobe!

From John Kelly’s The Great Mortality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), courtesy of Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti:

By the early fourteenth century so much filth had collected inside urban Europe that French and Italian cities were naming streets after human waste. In medieval Paris, several street names were inspired by merde, the French word for “shit.” There were rue Merdeux, rue Merdelet, rue Merdusson, rue des Merdons, and rue Merdiere—as well as a rue du Pipi.

(LH on street names in 2007.)