languagehat.com

A cheering Science News report:

A strong ability in languages may help reduce the risk of developing dementia, says a new University of Waterloo study. The research, led by Suzanne Tyas, a public health professor at Waterloo, examined the health outcomes of 325 Roman Catholic nuns who were members of the Sisters of Notre Dame in the United States. The data was drawn from a larger, internationally recognized study examining the Sisters, known as the Nun Study. The researchers found that six per cent of the nuns who spoke four or more languages developed dementia, compared to 31 per cent of those who only spoke one. However, knowing two or three languages did not significantly reduce the risk in this study, which differs from some previous research.

“The Nun Study is unique: It is a natural experiment, with very different lives in childhood and adolescence before entering the convent, contrasted with very similar adult lives in the convent,” said Tyas. “This gives us the ability to look at early-life factors on health later in life without worrying about all the other factors, such as socioeconomic status and genetics, which usually vary from person to person during adulthood and can weaken other studies.” Tyas added, “Language is a complex ability of the human brain, and switching between different languages takes cognitive flexibility. So it makes sense that the extra mental exercise multilinguals would get from speaking four or more languages might help their brains be in better shape than monolinguals.” […]

“This study shows that while multilingualism may be important, we should also be looking further into other examples of linguistic ability,” said Tyas. “In addition, we need to know more about multilingualism and what aspects are important — such as the age when a language is first learned, how often each language is spoken, and how similar or different these languages are. This knowledge can guide strategies to promote multilingualism and other linguistic training to reduce the risk of developing dementia.”

An apple a day and a language a year, that’s the ticket. (Thanks, Pat!)

This is one of those posts that will not be of wide interest, but having put so much time and effort into understanding a few words, I feel compelled to publish my results, and since those few words are found in The Brothers Karamazov, I figure someone might benefit. So: at the end of Part One (Book Three, Chapter 11), Alyosha offers up a prayer that includes the words “У Тебя пути: ими же веси путями спаси их.” Most of this is clear: ‘Thine are the ways (or ‘paths’); by them … by the paths save them.’ But that ellipsis represents the word vesi, which I knew only as the plural of the word весь ‘village,’ which made no sense here. And when I checked the old-spelling text, I found it was вѣси (with yat), and I was even more confused.

Eventually I figured out that it was the second-person singular form of the OCS verb вѣсти/вѣдѣти, whose present-tense forms are вѣмь, вѣси, вѣсть, вѣмы, вѣсте, вѣдѧтъ; the preceding ими же [imi zhe] is the instrumental plural form of the old relative pronoun иже, equivalent to modern которыми. So the final clause of the quoted sentence means ‘by the ways that Thou knowest, save them.’ (David Magarshack, alas, misunderstood веси as a form of весь ‘all’ and translated “All the ways are thine.”) I then discovered that the phrasing was found in a number of traditional prayers, e.g. “Единый, Ты Сам точию можеши, аще восхочеши, спасти нас ими же веси путями и судьбами,” and was used in two Leskov novels, Некуда (Nekuda: Господи! ими же веси путями спаси его [Lord! save him by the ways that Thou knowest]) and Соборяне (The Cathedral Folk: Господи, ими же веси путями спаси! [Lord, save (him) by the ways that Thou knowest!]) And now you know as much as I do. (I’m guessing native Russian speakers these days have almost as much trouble as I did with that phrase.)

Update. The Bloggers Karamazov (the official blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society) has published an expanded version of this post.

I’ve already posted a couple of excerpts of rumination on the speech of Englishpersons from Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series (in The Worst There Is and A Dog Snapping at a Gnat), and to those who may have had enough of them I apologize for posting a third and even longer one from Dawn’s Left Hand (which we’re now reading), but I know AJP likes them, so he at least will appreciate this (“Hypo” is H. G. Wells, “Alma” is his wife; the first speaker is Miriam, the autobiographical heroine, whom Hypo jocularly calls Miretta):

‘I want you to repeat something for me.’ She turned to her food as the patient waiter passed on and Alma’s eye, coming round once more, reassured, took another direction; a happy sense of security closed about her, the certainty that neither his adroitness nor Alma’s permanent readiness to create diversions would prevent the launching of her discovery upon its beneficent career.

‘Say, being careful to speak slowly, “Too many irons in the fire.”’

‘Is this a parlour game? You are a dear, Miriam.’

‘It’s the time and the place and the topic, all together. Speak.’

‘There’s nothing in reason I wouldn’t do for you, Miretta, even to saying too many irons in the fire.’

‘Too fast. I wanted to beat time to the convulsions.’

[…]

‘Every one,’ she said, free to speak at ease, ‘excepting most of the people here and their like, suffer, when they say those words, seven separate, face-distorting convulsions.’

[…]

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Back in 2008 I posted about my discovery that Frank Herbert had taken the name of the Fremen language Chakobsa from Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise; it turns out someone named Khalid did an entire webpage on Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”:

In this article, I try to explain in detail where Frank Herbert got his names, concepts, and words from. This article is not meant to be a literary nor an exhaustive topical critique of the novels, which I am cannot fully do, because simply, I did not read the original novels. I have watched and enjoyed the movie and the mini-series, and read summaries of the novels. Instead, this article is a linguistic and etymological study of the major aspects of Dune as they pertain to Middle East, Arabic, and Islam.

It goes from ABA (“Loose robe worn by Fremen women: usually black. The term seems to be a direct derivation from the modern day term: ‘Abaya’ عباية, which has been the Muslim female dress for centuries. The original term عبا or عباء is how it is referred to in the classical Arabic sources”) to ZENSUNNI (“Combination of two concepts, Zen, and Sunni سني, which is the larger sect in Islam (about 90%). In Dune, followers of a schismatic sect that broke away from the teachings of Maometh (the so-called ‘Third Muhammed’) about 1381 B.G.”) and links to both sources and discussions of his article; anyone with the slightest interest in Dune should enjoy it. (See also Will Collins’s The Secret History of Dune, which focuses on links to the Lesley Blanch book.)

Kobi writes that he has known the Hebrew word plonter – פלונטר since he was born:

Morfix, which is a Hebrew – English online dictionary, says it’s (slang) entanglement, knot; (slang) imbroglio.

I find it in the Urban Dictionary but not in the OED (I have v4.0).

Google translate finds it in Russian [Google search].

It isn’t an original Hebrew word for sure. I wonder where it comes from.

Any ideas?

Back in 2011 I posted about Michael Erard’s book on hyperpolyglots, Babel No More, and briefly mentioned Cardinal Mezzofanti; now the Public Domain Review has a post, The Polyglot of Bologna, in which Erard describes his research on Mezzofanti:

Without a doubt, the most important book in English devoted to Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849), the polyglot of Bologna, is The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, written by an Irish priest, Charles William Russell, and published in 1858. When I first began research on hyperpolyglots, I knew I was going to have to spend considerable time with Russell’s book, which contains a wealth of information about Mezzofanti, his time, and his language abilities, not to mention other famous language learners. I had discovered the book by chance in the collection of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The only way to get the required time to hunt through its treasures was to get some sort of research funding, I thought. Soon I discovered that the book, because it is in the public domain, had been scanned and republished in hardcopy, and was also available for free online. […]

Russell begins by devoting nearly a quarter of the book to describing a menagerie of polyglot scholars, monarchs, missionaries, explorers, and warriors who knew many languages. […] Part of the chapter discusses infant prodigies and unschooled polyglots, such as the British traveler Tom Coryat (1577-1617), who walked all over Europe and Eastern Mediterranean countries, accumulating Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and probably a dozen other languages he had no use for at home. He walked two thousand miles in the same pair of shoes, which he hung on the wall at his hometown church as an offering. […]

Over and over, he states that his goal is to assess the claims made for Mezzofanti’s language abilities and to measure, once and for all, the cardinal’s abilities. He resists the urge to recount anecdotes about him (though a few are too good to resist, such as the time that Lord Byron and Mezzofanti had a swearing match; after Byron’s stock was exhausted, Mezzofanti asked, “Is that all?”), opting instead to collate first-hand reports from native speakers who witnessed Mezzofanti using languages. It’s as if Russell wanted to singlehandedly rescue him from the cabinet of curiosities where he had been abandoned by science. (Even though Mezzofanti lived at the height of phrenology in Europe, his skull was apparently never an object of fascination, not while he was alive, anyway.) Russell scours the literature and solicits accounts from Mezzofanti’s contemporaries. Collecting them, he concludes that Mezzofanti spoke 72 languages to varying degrees.

Russell’s biography is also important as a counterpoint to three shorter, sharper papers delivered by Thomas Watts, who was said to know 50 languages himself, before London’s Philological Society in 1852, 1854, and 1860. His 1852 paper was the first time various accounts of Mezzofanti had been collected in English, the earliest from 1806. Over the next decade or so, Russell and Watts wrote about the other’s work with alternating praise and exasperation. While Russell’s biography “is not a blind and unreasoning admiration,” Watts writes, it “may still be suspected of being drawn with too courtly a pencil.” He then proceeds to take Russell to task for over-counting Mezzofanti’s languages, which he puts at “60 or 61.” Later Russell agreed with that figure, if one subtracted languages in which Mezzofanti had only a basic knowledge of the grammar and some vocabulary. […]

One day after a meeting in the Vatican, Russell heard Mezzofanti converse, “with every appearance of fluency and ease,” in seven languages: Romaic, Greek, German, Hungarian, French, Spanish, and English. Two years later, on another trip, he witnessed Mezzofanti’s performance at the annual gathering of students from all over the world at the Propaganda of the Faith. They got up and recited poems in 42 languages, many of which had apparently been looked at by Mezzofanti. (In the Mezzofanti archives in the Archiginnasio Public Library in Bologna, I found a great number of these poems written in Mezzofanti’s hand.) But the real performance came after, when students gathered around him and engaged him in their languages. Mobbed Mezzofanti spoke this language, then that, Chinese, Peguan, Russian, and others, “hardly ever hesitating, or ever confounding a word or interchanging a construction,” in a “linguistic fusilade.” Russell added, “I cannot, at this distance of time, say what was the exact number of the group which stood around him, nor can I assert that they all spoke different languages; but making every deduction, the number of speakers cannot have been less than ten or twelve; and I do not think that he once hesitated for a sentence or even for a word!”

(I’m not sure what is meant by the distinction between “Romaic” and “Greek”; perhaps the former is the modern language and the latter the ancient?) Obviously we’ll never be able to pin down Mezzofanti’s exact accomplishments, but he was clearly a remarkable man. Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve read the first two books of The Brothers Karamazov (there are twelve, plus an epilogue), and man, is it good! I remembered having been bowled over by it in college, but that was a long time ago; it’s only gotten better with more life experience (not to mention knowledge of Russian culture and literature) under my belt. The first thing I noticed this time around is how funny Dostoevsky can be; the narrator’s preface (“To the reader”) had me laughing already, and the book’s humor ranges from dry innuendo to slapstick (people literally slap each other). The second thing is the immediate impact of Fyodor Karamazov, the father of the family (you could hardly call him a patriarch); he’s one of the great villains of world literature, and his complexity is outlined in the first paragraph (of the novel proper):

Constance Garnett:
[Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov …] was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. […] At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.

David Magarshack:
…he was a strange sort of individual, yet one that is met with pretty frequently, the sort of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else. […] And at the same time he continued all his life to be one of the most muddle-headed and preposterous fellows of our district, I repeat: it was not stupidity, for most of these preposterous fellows are rather clever and cunning, but sheer muddle-headedness, and of a special national kind at that.

Original:
…это был странный тип, довольно часто, однако, встречающийся, именно тип человека не только дрянного и развратного, но вместе с тем и бестолкового, — но из таких, однако, бестолковых, которые умеют отлично обделывать свои имущественные делишки, и только, кажется, одни эти. […] И в то же время он все-таки всю жизнь свою продолжал быть одним из бестолковейших сумасбродов по всему нашему уезду. Повторю еще: тут не глупость; большинство этих сумасбродов довольно умно и хитро, — а именно бестолковость, да еще какая-то особенная, национальная.

Fyodor Pavlovich is a buffoon (one of the chapters is titled Старый шут, ‘The Old Clown’), but lest we think him nothing but a provincial ignoramus, in an early conversation with his son Alexei (Alyosha), he quotes Voltaire (“Il faudrait les inventer”) and the Perrault brothers’ parody of the Aeneid (“J’ai vu l’ombre d’un cocher, qui avec l’ombre d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’une carrosse” [I have seen the shade of a coachman who was brushing the shade of a carriage with the shade of a brush]), and he quotes them in French.
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Lauren Vinopal reports for Fatherly about a recent study, “The ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling,” by Steven L. Elmlinger, Jennifer A. Schwade, and Michael H. Goldstein (Journal of Child Language 46.5 [September 2019], pp. 998-1011):

“Infants are actually shaping their own learning environments in ways that make learning easier to do,” study co-author Steven Elmlinger, a psychology graduate student at Cornell University, said in a statement. […]

“We know that parents’ speech influences how infants learn — that makes sense — and that infants’ own motivations also change how they learn,” Elmlinger said. “But what hasn’t been studied is the link between how infants can change the parents, or just change the learning environment as a whole. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

To get a better idea of the purpose of babies babbling, Elmlinger and his team observed 30 infant-mother pairs in a play space for two 30 minute increments, two days in a row. Nine and 10-month-old infant participants were free to roam and play with toys and animal posters, which were in the room, and their speech was recorded with a hidden wireless microphone in their overalls. Mothers had microphones as well and the sessions were recorded on video. Researchers measured parents’ syntax and vocabulary, as well as changes in how babies babbled from the first to the second day.

Data indicated that when babies babbled, moms tended to respond with less complex words, more single word sentences, and shorter words all around. The more parents did this, the faster the infants picked up new speech sounds during the second play session. The results also showed that single word utterances might have the biggest impact on babies and their ability to learn language, so that may be exactly what they’re asking for with all the babbling. Elmlinger suspects that they are likely telling mom and dad to do something and that may be it.

The research is still preliminary, further studies are needed, you know the drill.

A three-minute video describes (and illustrates) a made-up language that turned out useful for a film; in their summary:

Klingon, Elvish, Dothraki, and Nadsat: there are plenty of invented languages used in movies. But one of them, Interslavic, has the potential to be useful to hundreds of millions of people. The language just made its movie debut in a wartime drama, The Painted Bird, and its creator says it could be used by Slavic speakers from Siberia to Slovenia.

Via Trevor Joyce, who also sent this short and hilarious video, “When Irish People Cant Speak Irish,” which shows that it doesn’t pay to exaggerate your linguistic attainments. Thanks, Trevor!

That’s the title of a new book by Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist I’ve posted about a number of times (first, I think, here), and The Walrus has a lengthy excerpt that’s full of interesting stuff, for example:

Remember how you learned about swearing? It was probably from a kid around your age, maybe an older sibling, and not from an educator or authority figure. And you were probably in early adolescence: the stage when linguistic influence tends to shift from caregivers to peers. Linguistic innovation follows a similar pattern, and the linguist who first noticed it was Henrietta Cedergren. She was doing a study in Panama City, where younger people had begun pronouncing “ch” as “sh”—saying chica (girl) as shica. When she drew a graph of which ages were using the new “sh” pronunciation, Cedergren noticed that sixteen-year-olds were the most likely to use the new version—more likely than the twelve-year-olds were. So did that mean that “sh” wasn’t the trendy new linguistic innovation after all, since the youngest age group wasn’t really adopting it?

Cedergren returned to Panama a decade later to find out. The formerly un-trendy twelve-year-olds had grown up into hyperinnovative twenty-two-year-olds. They now had the new “sh” pronunciation at even higher levels than the original trendy cohort of sixteen-year-olds, now twenty-six-year-olds, who sounded the same as they had a decade earlier. What’s more, the new group of sixteen-year-olds was even further advanced, and the new twelve-year-olds still looked a bit behind. Cedergren figured out that twelve-year-olds still have some linguistic growth to do: they keep imitating and building on the linguistic habits of their slightly older, cooler peers as they go through their teens, and then plateau in their twenties.

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