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From Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, pp. 8-9:

One sign that refugees as a category did not impinge on the European consciousness is the absence of a general term to designate them until the nineteenth century, the starting point for this study. Before this time, “refugees” almost exclusively denoted the Protestants driven from the French kingdom at the end of the seventeenth century. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1796, first marked a change: “refugees,” it said, was a term originally applied to the expelled French Protestants, but had since “been extended to all such as leave their country in times of distress, and hence, since the revolt of the British colonies in America, we have frequently heard of American refugees.” Yet there are few indications that the shift in usage noted in 1796 was widely adopted. Well into the 1800s, French and English dictionaries referred to “refugees” as the victims of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Those who quit France at the time of the French Revolution, the “joyous emigration” of monarchists loyal to Louis XVI, preferred the term “émigrés” and hardly considered their decision to leave France akin to the expulsion of the French Calvinists a century before. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century there was no mention of refugees in international treaties, and states made no distinction between those fleeing criminal prosecution and those escaping political repression. In German there was no term for refugees until well into the nineteenth century. German dictionaries included the French word “réfugiés,” repeating the generally understood definition applying to French Protestants. Flüchtling, the modern term for refugee, was noted in 1691 as designating a fugitive or a “flighty” person — “profugus, homo inconstans, fluctuans, vagus, instabilis.” Heimatlos or staatenlos began to designate certain categories of stateless refugees after 1870, but only following the First World War did the word Flüchtling denominate them all.

The OED Third Edition (entry updated September 2009) has the following early uses of the more general sense, which do not contradict Marrus’s point (for which his Britannica quote is proof enough) but provide interesting context:

1692 W. Sherlock Let. to Friend conc. French Invasion 17 He [sc. James II] wanted nothing but Power to make himself Absolute, and to make us all Papists, or Martyrs, or Refugees.
1702 True Acct. Eng. Flying Squadron 21 Those..Deserters..were not forc’d to fly their Native Country, and become Refugees in Foreign parts, for the Security of their Lives.
1725 T. Lewis Origines Hebrææ III. vi. vi. 156 Whilst the Temple of Jerusalem stood, the Eastern Refugees sent their Presents to Jerusalem, and came thither from Time to Time, to pay their Devotions.
1771 H. Husbands Fan for Fanning Introd. p. vi Hence it was, that refugees from the western Governments, and from Connecticut, found a safe retreat in North-Carolina.

And a couple of citations for the American usage (“During the American Revolutionary War: a member of a group of guerrilla fighters active in support of the British cause, esp. in New York, and nominally affiliated with the Tories”):

1780 J. André (title) Cow-Chace, in Three Cantos published on Occasion of the Rebel General Wayne’s attack of the Refugees Block-House on Hudson’s River.
1781 J. Adams in J. Adams & A. Adams Familiar Lett. (1876) 403 I expect all the rancor of the refugees will be poured out upon Cornwallis for it.

Poemas del río Wang has a doozy of a post about the fabled city of Novgorod and its long and contentious history; it’s probably superfluous to say it has many splendid illustrations, since that’s the spécialité de la maison. The main focus of the post is icons, and there are fascinating details like this:

The half-figure icon [of St. George], which has been in the Uspensky Cathedral in Moscow since 1570, was probably ordered by Prince Yuri Bogolyubsky after his patron saint. In 1174, he left the city for Georgia, to marry Queen Tamar: this indicates the ante quem of the icon’s preparation. It is very interesting, that the most popular and much-copied icon in Georgia, a half-figure icon of St. George, exhibited today in the Svaneti National Museum, which resembles very much the Novgorod St. George icon, albeit with some folk features, was prepared and popularized shortly after the arrival of the prince to Georgia.

But near the start there’s an account of the birch bark letters (discussed here in 2011 and elsewhere), with this clearly LH-relevant passage:

Another interesting thing emerges from the birch bark texts: that the peculiar dialect of Novgorod is not due to a change in the way of speaking of the Eastern Slavs who emigrated to the isolated north, but rather to the fact that the accent of the Slavs from somewhere else was assimilated to that of the Eastern Slavs. “From somewhere else” roughly means the place where I am writing this now: the area around Berlin, the eastern part of present-day Germany and the western part of Poland, which was a Slavic region at that time, before the medieval German Drang nach Osten. From here came the two Slavic tribes, the Slovenes and the Krivichs, which, together with the Finno-Ugric Chuds, founded Novgorod and invited the Viking Rus.

Go and enjoy!

Trevor Joyce alerted me to the passing of author and cartographer Tim Robinson a couple of weeks ago, but what with one thing and another I haven’t gotten around to posting about it; now per incuriam has reminded me and linked to a fine tribute by Fintan O’Toole:

The word “geography” means in its origins “the writing of lands”. Ireland was blessed to have had, for almost 50 years, the loving attention of one of the greatest writers of lands. Tim Robinson, who has died a fortnight after he lost his beloved wife, Máiréad (the M evoked in so many of his works) was a Yorkshire man who came to know, as they have never been known before or since, three Irish landscapes: the Burren, the Aran Islands and Connemara.

Generations of tourists have been guided and enthralled by his marvellous maps of these radiant places. But it is his astonishing books, the two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, that will stand as timeless monuments to a genius who combined the linguistic brilliance of a poet with the precision of the mathematician he once was. […]

Perhaps only an English outsider could have given this project such care. “Among the historical roots of Ireland’s carelessness of place,” he wrote, “is the retreat of its language and the accompanying anglicization of its placenames, which have been defaced, rendered dumb and sometimes reduced to the ridiculous. To undo a little of this damage has been for me, an Englishman, a work of reparation.” […]

He paid attention to the people who lived in and worked the land as much as to the landscape itself. “A rush of talk like the whirl of starlings coming to roost” – a lot of it talk in Irish – lies beneath his writings, in the stories he gathered, the old (and sometimes not so old) place-names he recorded.

Robinson believed in bringing to bear every kind of knowledge and delighted in the way every place became richer and more complex the more you looked at it and the more you listened to its people. “Every tale,” as he writes at end of the Connemara trilogy, “entails the tale of its own making, generalities breed exceptions as soon as they are stated, and all the footnotes call for footnoting to the end of the world.”

As I told Trevor when he posted an image of Robinson’s work on Facebook:

That photo of all the books rang a bell, and I dug out my old “map and guide” to the Aran Islands from when I spent time there almost half a century ago now, and sure enough it was by Tim Robinson, and I remembered how impressed I had been with the drawing and writing.

I’m endlessly impressed with people who combine such varied skills and passions.

Luí fada gan faoilte air! Seacht n-aicíd déag agus fiche na hÁirce air! Calcadh fíodáin agus stopainn air! Camroillig agus goile treasna air! An ceas naon air! An Bhuí Chonaill air! Pláigh Lasaras air! Eagnach Job air! Calar na muc air! Snadhm ar bundún air! Galra trua, bios brún, péarsalaí, sioráin, maotháin agus magag air! Glogar Chaoláin ní Olltáirr ann! Galraí sean-aoise na Caillí Béara air! Dalladh gan aon léas air agus dalladh Oisín ina dhiaidh sin! Tochas Bhantracht an Fháidh air! An Galra glúiníneach air! Deargadh tiaraí air! Gath dreancaidí air!…
Cré na Cille, Máirtín Ó Cadhain,

May his lying be long and without relief! The thirty-seven diseases of the Ark on him! Hardening of the tubes and stoppage on him! Graveyard club-foot and crossed bowel on him! May the pangs of labour consume him! May the Yellow Plague consume him! May the Plague of Lazarus consume him! May the Lamentations of Job consume him! May swine-fever consume him! May his arse be knotted! May cattle-pine, bog lameness, warbles, wireworm, haw and staggers consume him! May the squelching of Keelin daughter of Olltár consume him! May the Hag of Beare’s diseases of old age consume him! Blinding without light on him, and the blinding of Ossian on top of that! May the itch of the Prophet’s women consume him! Swelling of knees on him! The red tracks of a tail-band on him! The sting of fleas on him!…
Cré na Cille/Graveyard Clay, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, trans: Mac Con Iomaire/Robinson

Via Neil Patrick Doherty‎’s Facebook feed; we discussed Cré na Cille in 2017 and this January. If you’re curious about “warbles,” the OED says it’s “Of uncertain origin; compare Middle Swedish varbulde boil” and means “A small hard tumour, caused by the pressure of the saddle on a horse’s back. Usually plural.”

A.Z. Foreman (to quote his blog profile) “is a translator and poet who has been obsessed with languages and literature since childhood”; you should check out his translation blog, with lots of poems accompanied by his translations (and sometimes audio files of him reading the original) in languages from Arabic to Yiddish. But right now I want to feature a post from his other blog, The bLogicarian (“essays, translations of prose, original poems and so forth”) — Six Degrees of Deuteronomy: the phonological journey of Biblical Hebrew. He takes Deuteronomy 32:1-6 and gives versions of it in six stages of Hebrew: Pre-Exilic, Roman Empire, Late Amoraic, Late Ge’onic, Babylonian, and Medieval Andalusi (ancestral to “every modern Hebrew liturgical dialect in current use outside of Yemen”). For each he gives a phonetic transcription and an audio file, along with a paragraph of explanation. As an example, for Popular Reading of Jews in the Roman Empire he writes:

Fast forward through the Exile and the Second Temple period to the 3rd century. Hebrew has ceased being anybody’s native language, though pretty recently. There are many people who can remember remember hearing Hebrew spoken by their grandparents. What you have here is the pronunciation recorded in Origen’s Hexapla except with even more reduction. The lingering nasal-weakening of /m/ after long vowels seemed like a proper touch, and supported by the transcriptions. Like a residual trace of Hebrew’s last stage as a native vernacular. Aramaic influence is pervasive, from phonology to morphology. Begedkefath spirantization has long ago kicked in. There is heavy vowel reduction, and the native speakers of Palestinian Aramaic using this pronunciation use a dorsal /r/. I went out on a limb to posit that the tetragrammaton in this type of reading gets realized with the Aramaicism /jahoː(h)/. Note that spirantization is a completely synchronic rule. The resyllabification caused by proclitic ו in ופתלתל ends up despirantizing the first ת.

I absolutely love this kind of thing, and listened to all the stages.

Back in 2017, we discussed Michael Gavin’s attempt to answer the questions: “Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?” At that time he and his coworkers were investigating language diversity patterns in Australia; last year there was an update by Gavin and Marco Túlio Pacheco Coelho, “Why are so many languages spoken in some places and so few in others?”

Our research team has been tackling this longstanding question by exploring language diversity patterns on the continent of North America. Prior to European contact, North America was home to speakers of around 400 languages, unevenly spread across the landscape. Some places, such as the West Coast from present-day Vancouver to southern California, had far more languages; other areas, such as northern Canada and the Mississippi delta region, appear to have had fewer languages. We drew on methods from ecology originally developed to study patterns of species diversity to investigate these patterns of language diversity. […]

Recently, our interdisciplinary research group tried to untangle which factors had the most influence on language diversity in different places. Combining ideas from linguists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists and geographers, we took a unique approach. We used statistical techniques to estimate how the effects of environmental and sociocultural factors on language diversity changed from one location to another. In our study, each location was represented by a 300 km² grid cell, as is visible in all our maps.

We found that the most important variables associated with language diversity varied from one part of North America to another.

For example, on the West Coast, we found that variability in temperature over time is a key driver linked to language diversity. This result provides some support for the idea that in areas with more stable environmental conditions, human social networks can be smaller and more languages may exist. However, in the eastern part of the continent, potential population density tends to be the factor most strongly linked to language diversity.

We also found that in some places, such as the high-language-diversity regions on the West Coast, our model could predict the number of languages present very accurately, whereas in other areas, such as the Gulf Coast of the U.S., we have limited understanding of what drove language diversification.

Maps and further details at the link; thanks, jack!

I was looking up Chalcedon (now a district of Istanbul called Kadıköy, but famous as the site of the Fourth Ecumenical Council) in Wikipedia when my eye fell on the following statement: “The Greek name of the ancient town is from its Phoenician name qart-ħadaʃt, meaning ‘New Town’, whence Karkhēd(ōn),[3] as similarly is the name of Carthage. The mineral chalcedony is named after the city.[4]” I wondered what the Phoenician origin was based on, so I checked the footnotes; the first, the entry for chalcedony from the Online Etymology Dictionary, says:

semi-precious stone, a cloudy white variety of quartz, c. 1300, from Latin calcedonius, a Vulgate rendering of Greek khalkedon in Revelations xxi.19; found nowhere else. “The word is of very complicated history” [OED]. Connection with Chalcedon in Asia Minor “is very doubtful” [OED].

This says nothing about Phoenician origins, though it does directly contradict the next statement that “The mineral chalcedony is named after the city” (cited to Erika Zwierlein-Diehl’s Antike Gemmen und ihr Nachleben). Googling around, I can’t find anything scholarly about the etymology of Chalcedon. Anybody know anything? (For a description of today’s Chalcedon/Kadıköy, see Aidan Kehoe’s comment from an interesting five-year-old thread.)

I finally checked out frequent commenter Fancua’s blog, also called Fancua (“Languages, Linguistics, and Translation”), and it has lots of good stuff. The first post I saw was Why Does the Word “Mosquito” Come from Spanish?, which investigates the history of the word “mosquito”:

Looking up the etymology of the word, I found that “mosquito” was in fact a post-Columbian borrowing from Spanish, with the earliest occurrence of the word in English being from the 1580s (although the website does not specify if the borrowing occurred in the Americas or Europe). But were mosquitoes present in Europe before colonization, and if so, what were they called in English?

Recently, I decided to dig deeper. Mosquitoes apparently did exist in Europe before Columbus, being a thorn in the side of the Byzantines, Ancient Greeks, and Romans. Given that mosquitoes were present in pre-Columbian Britain and that the English word “mosquito” is of post-Columbian origin, the original word for the animal must have been something else. I found a page on the Maryland Department of Agriculture website stating the English word for “mosquito” was originally “gnat”, but it cites no sources. Nevertheless, coming across that page led me to look up “gnat” in the Historical Thesaurus of English, and as a result, I found that the word has indeed been used since Old English times to refer to mosquitoes, though only to certain genera (I assume the genera present in Britain during that period). The first word to be used to refer to the entire Culicidae family was “mosquito” in about 1583.

But the fact that the word “mosquito” is used throughout the English-speaking world rather than only in North America puzzled me. There is nothing unusual in North American anglophones in close contact with Spanish speakers borrowing Spanish equivalents for existing words, but for British English to do so strikes me as odd. Why would British English borrow a term for an animal already existing in Europe from Spanish (presumably Latin American Spanish via North American English) rather than French or Latin, which are geographically and culturally closer and its usual sources of loanwords?

Given that “gnat” originally referred to a specific subset of mosquitoes, I assume that English speakers felt the need to refer to the mosquitoes they encountered in the Americas as “mosquitoes” rather than “gnats” because they were different from European “gnats” in some noticeable way, with this semantic difference thus providing a reason for the adoption of the word in British English. In what way specifically these species might have differed, I don’t know, as I neither am a biologist nor know the historical differences between European and American mosquitoes. If anyone has more information, please let me know.

A good question that hadn’t occurred to me. And if you’re wondering about the word “fancua” itself, here’s what his About page says:

In Oscan, an extinct Italic language closely related to Latin, fancua means “tongues” and is related to the Latin word lingua, meaning “tongue” or “language”.

However, according to Matthew Dillon and ‎Lynda Garland, Ancient Rome (p. 163), “The meaning of fancua is unknown.” Clearly, further research is needed.

Look at the scholar, he has still not gone to bed,
Raking the dictionaries, darting at locked presses,
Hunting for keys. He stacks the books to his oxter,
Walks across the room as stiff as a shelf.

His nightwork, to make the price of his release:
Two words, as opposite as his and hers
Which yet must be as close
As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard
Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note
On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle —
As close as the grain in the polished wood, as the finger
Bitten by the string, as the hairs of the bow
Bent by the repeated note —
             Two words
Closer to the bone than the ones I was so proud of,
Embrace and strict to describe the twining of bone and flesh.

The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.

        –Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin

[Read more…]

Ankhtuya reports on the latest linguistic developments in Mongolia:

Mongolia has announced plans to restore the use of its traditional alphabet by 2025, replacing the Cyrillic script adopted under the Soviet period as it moves away from Russian influence. It will take transitional measures to prepare for the “comprehensive restoration” of the traditional alphabet, which is written in vertical lines, said a representative of the ministry of education, culture, science and sports.

The ministry has ordered the department of information and communication technology to adopt traditional Mongolian to the “electronic environment”. Scientific, literary and state registry offices have been asked to establish a system for Mongolian names. Media are required to publish in both scripts until 2024, and schools must increase learning time to study the traditional vertical script. Cultural centres must study and promote the Mongolian written heritage, according to an official statement.

Mongolia, which is between Russia and China, adopted the Cyrillic alphabet in the 1940s as Moscow sought to control it as a buffer against Beijing. For many years Mongolia was seen as the “16th Soviet republic”. The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed Mongolia has been returning to its linguistic roots. A generation has grown up without learning Russian, and in 2003 it was replaced by English as the mandatory foreign language in schools.

A tip o’ the Languagehat hat to Garrigus Carraig.