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I’m reading Toby Wilkinson’s excellent The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, and I was struck by this paragraph on the origin of Egyptian writing:

Among the great inventions of human history, writing has a special place. Its transformative power—in the transmission of knowledge, the exercise of power, and the recording of history itself—cannot be overstated. Today, it is virtually impossible to imagine a world without written communication. For ancient Egypt, it must have been a revelation. We are unlikely ever to know exactly how, when, and where hieroglyphics were first developed, but the evidence increasingly points toward a deliberate act of invention. The earliest Egyptian writing discovered to date is on bone labels from a predynastic tomb at Abdju, the burial of a ruler who lived around 150 years before Narmer. These short inscriptions already used fully formed signs, and the writing system itself showed the complexity that would characterize hieroglyphics for the next three and a half thousand years. Archaeologists dispute whether Egypt or Mesopotamia should take the credit for inventing the very idea of writing, but Mesopotamia, especially the southern city of Uruk (modern Warka), seems to have the better claim. It is likely that the idea of writing came to Egypt along with a raft of other Mesopotamian influences in the centuries before unification—the concept, but not the writing system itself. Hieroglyphics are so perfectly suited to the ancient Egyptian language, and the individual signs so obviously reflected the Egyptians’ particular environment, that they must represent an indigenous development. We may imagine an inspired genius at the court of one of Egypt’s predynastic rulers pondering the strange signs on imported objects from Mesopotamia—pondering them and their evident use as encoders of information, and devising a corresponding system for the Egyptian language. This may seem far-fetched, but the invention of the Korean script (by King Sejong and his advisers in A.D. 1443) provides a more recent parallel, and there are few other entirely convincing explanations for the sudden appearance of fully fledged hieroglyphic writing.

I like the image of the inspired genius “pondering the strange signs on imported objects”; does anybody know how widely accepted the sequence of events described here is?

People keep pointing me to this story (thanks, Bonnie, John, Frank, and anyone I’m forgetting!), so I’m posting it, despite my inherent skepticism. There’s a new Science article, “Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration” by D. E. Blasi, S. Moran, S. R. Moisik, P. Widmer, D. Dediu, and B. Bickel, that supports an old conjecture of Hockett’s; here’s the abstract, which begins:

Linguistic diversity, now and in the past, is widely regarded to be independent of biological changes that took place after the emergence of Homo sapiens. We show converging evidence from paleoanthropology, speech biomechanics, ethnography, and historical linguistics that labiodental sounds (such as “f” and “v”) were innovated after the Neolithic. Changes in diet attributable to food-processing technologies modified the human bite from an edge-to-edge configuration to one that preserves adolescent overbite and overjet into adulthood. This change favored the emergence and maintenance of labiodentals. Our findings suggest that language is shaped not only by the contingencies of its history, but also by culturally induced changes in human biology.

It’s been written up in the Guardian and the NY Times (and doubtless elsewhere), and Mark Liberman has a sensible response at the Log:

I agree with Ray Jackendoff that the idea is “is interesting but not earthshaking” — the contribution is not so much a partial explanation for the distribution of labiodentals, because basically who cares, but rather some support for the general concept that physical population differences in principle might sometimes affect language structure. Which again is obviously true in principle, but it’s not clear how often it applies in practice. This result would move the needle from “maybe never” to “apparently once in a while”.

The usual line of reasoning is the opposite, that vocal tract anatomy has (co-)evolved over the eons to serve the needs of speech communication. (See e.g. the section on “Vocal tract changes in hominid evolution” in my lecture notes for ling001.) That seems pretty well supported, though as with functional-evolutionary explanations for anything, there are disagreements.

I have little interest in unprovable origin stories, but boy, people sure do like to speculate.

I’ve just finished one of the most annoying novels I’ve ever read, Подросток (The Adolescent, aka A Raw Youth). If it weren’t by Dostoevsky I’d have given up on it as soon as I realized what a mess it was, but the true Dostoevsky fan wants to read everything — there are always good tidbits hidden in even the mushiest mess. But I’m taken aback by how seriously the novel is treated by those who write about it (Prof. Thomas Beyer has a useful little summary of criticism here); it’s never called one of his greatest, but it’s discussed with far more gravitas than is generally granted to The Gambler, the last of his novels I trashed. In fact, my discussion of The Gambler gives a clue as to what has gone wrong here:

I can’t help but think that one of the problems with the novel is the choice of first-person narration; Dostoevsky originally planned to write Crime and Punishment that way, but eventually settled on the brilliant third-person approach that allowed him to open the story up and give it depth. But that was a lot of work, and he didn’t have time for it with The Gambler.

The problem here is even worse, because at least the gambler, though a young man, was not quite so callow; Arkady Dolgoruky, the narrator here, is barely 20 and understands nothing whatever about life or people, let alone how to tell a story — the narration is full of “but I will jump ahead here and explain something so the reader will understand” and “then I came to a realization, but I won’t tell the reader about it at this point.” And the effect is very much like reading the diary of an actual adolescent: “I have a brilliant idea that I’m organizing my whole life around, but I won’t tell anybody… OK, I’ll tell you: I’m going to become rich as a Rothschild! But I won’t use the money to live like a rich man, I just want to be strong and independent, I’ll live simply and maybe use the money to help humanity! I hate my father but I love him… I despise my mother but I love her… I hate women but I want to marry one but then I’ll keep her in line… I know I shouldn’t go see this guy but I’m doing it anyway… I know I shouldn’t have done that stupid, awful thing but I don’t regret it, I’m proud of it!” etc. etc. Every once in a while I would try to imagine what the book would be like if it were told in the third person; Arkady would still be a young idiot, but he’d be viewed from a distance, like Raskolnikov, and the story would have some perspective. As it is, Arkady is the quintessence of the unreliable narrator.

Now, the unreliable narrator can be used effectively; a classic example is the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury, told from the point of view of the mentally retarded Benjy (“Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting”). Faulkner makes you work hard to try to figure out what’s going on. But that takes up less than a quarter of the novel; the second chapter is told by Quentin, the third by Jason, and the final part is third person omniscient. That gives you a well-rounded picture of events. Here we get nothing but Arkady’s self-indulgent, self-lacerating, self-centered ramblings, and as a result we can’t believe anything he tells us, and there aren’t really any other characters. People talk about Versilov (his biological father) as a vivid character who takes over the novel, but to me he’s not a character, just the object of Arkady’s ever-changing emotional reactions. And the plot! I’ve complained about melodrama before, and accepted that I need to come to terms with it because it’s central to Dostoevsky — he’s simply not interested in “ordinary” life the way Tolstoy and Turgenev are, he only cares about moments of heightened intensity, and he’s not particular about how he gets them: endless coincidences, overhearings, surprise encounters, you name it. But it’s just too much for me. After a while (especially when a revolver started getting waved) I thought maybe he was deliberately hyping it for comic effect, but I’m pretty sure he just can’t help it. He was aware of it, too; Mochulsky says “The writer cautioned himself against misuse of the device of enigma and endeavored to free himself from his main failing: excessively complicating the intrigue and overloading the action.” But he couldn’t.

I think Kafka got something essential from that aspect of Dostoevsky; think of “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”), which starts off in normal bourgeois fashion and ends in wild, melodramatic tragedy. Dostoevsky would have loved it! But it’s very short (less than ten pages in my Sämtliche Erzählungen); if it were extended much longer, it would have become ridiculous, as does The Adolescent. I can’t help but wonder what Dostoevsky’s reputation would have been if he had died just after publishing this, never having written the Writer’s Diary or The Brothers Karamazov — I suspect he’d be remembered as a very fine writer like Turgenev rather than Tolstoy’s equal and rival. Fortunately, he survived and triumphed.

Let me end with one of those tidbits that made me keep reading. Versilov says he can’t stand sanctimonious people who insist on puncturing other people’s lies; they have no heart:

Друг мой, дай всегда немного соврать человеку — это невинно. Даже много дай соврать. Во-первых, это покажет твою деликатность, а во-вторых, за это тебе тоже дадут соврать — две огромных выгоды — разом. Que diable! надобно любить своего ближнего.

My dear boy, we must always let a man lie a little. It’s quite innocent. Indeed we may let him lie a great deal. In the first place it will show our delicacy, and secondly, people will let us lie in return — two immense advantages at once. Que diable! one must love one’s neighbour.

Back when I was a grad student in linguistics, I dreamed… well, maybe “dreamed” is a bit much, but I certainly hoped I would see my name in Language, the journal of the Linguistics Society of America; one might have thought the dream was dead once I left grad school to become a bum minimum-wage bookstore worker, eventually graduating to proofreader and then editor, but lo, the March issue includes “Expressive updates, much?” by Daniel Gutzmann and Robert Henderson (free preprint version here), which includes this passage:

We dub this construction »expressive much« (henceforth x-much).³ While x-much is firmly colloquial, and so it is possible to find English-speakers who do not control the construction, it is not particularly new. The earliest documented example comes from 1978 episode of Saturday Night Live (Sullivan 2010), though OED citations and discussion online pick out the late 1980s and early 1990s as an important moment for the x-much, in particular, with its prominent place in the movie Heathers and on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Adams 2003; Dodson 2010).

“Dodson 2010” represents the following entry in the References:

Dodson, Steve. Dec. 8, 2010. »Much?« Blog post. url: https://languagehat.com/much/.

I’m chuffed.

(Via MetaFilter.)

Lev Oborin posted a poem on Facebook that I liked so much I wanted to repost it here and make an attempt to translate it; he gave me the go-ahead and explained a couple of difficult bits, so without further ado:

смешно уму с телом
то течёт красным
то стреляет белым

то к делам опасным
само себя клонит
то курсом напрасным

само себя гонит;
то снова здорово;
то от боли стонет
то от иного

смешно, право слово

оно треугольник
и над ним кружочек:
мяч прыгнул на столик

сел на клиночек;
пухни, тело, пухни,
лезь из сорочек,

пульсируй на кухне,
выжимайся в сушке;
потом все рухнет —
шлам, хлам, кольца, дужки,

крючки, завитушки

смешно уму с телом
устарелой картой
хоть ножом как мелом

по доске шаркай
хоть наклонись над
исписанной партой

все одно виснет
ум, понять силясь:
как признаки жизни
спеклись помутились

во что превратились?

ум раскинул сети —
монашеским плачем,
бодрым междометьем,

воем собачьим,
внутри себя вечем,
счётом неудачам:

улов не замечен,
ожиданье зряшно,
рыбарь не вечен,
ворону брашно.

смешно уму, страшно.

My version:
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I recently discovered Uppercase Alif, “Andreas Hallberg’s notes on Arabic linguistics.” From the About page:

I am an Assistant Professor in Arabic at the University of Gothenburg. This blog is a space for me to write informally about Arabic linguistics, research and writing tools, and related things that interest me. Posts are written in English or Swedish depending on topic. Typos and poor grammar may occur. Typically, posts that get more views are more carefully edited post publication.

My dissertation, Case Endings in Spoken Standard Arabic (Lund University, 2016), can be downloaded here.

There’s plenty of interesting stuff, like Minimal pairs in Standard Arabic. Check it out!

I was if not shocked then, perhaps, unsettled to learn of the death of the redoubtable Reinhold Aman, who was an expert in both collecting and using offensive language; he even did me the honor of dropping by LH in 2005 to call me an “anonymous dickhead” and a “backstabbing faceless weasel.” Jesse Sheidlower at his blog Strong Language has a well-balanced and thoughtful reminiscence:

Reinhold “Rey” Aman, the expert on offensive language, died on March 2 at the age of 82. Aman is best known as the editor and publisher of the journal Maledicta (“The International Journal of Verbal Aggression”).

Born in Bavaria in 1936, Aman gained fluency in several languages at a young age, and worked as a translator for the U.S. Army in Frankfurt. He studied chemistry and chemical engineering, and worked as an industrial chemist before and after he emigrated to Milwaukee in 1959. He received his PhD in Medieval German from the University of Texas in 1968, his dissertation analyzing the 151 battle scenes in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. A scholar with high standards for the work of others and higher standards for his own work, he was rooted in Bavarian scholarship. After receiving his PhD, he returned to the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee as an assistant professor of German, teaching a range of courses in linguistics and German; he retained an interest in German dialectology, writing about Bavarian and Yiddish, and published Bayrisch-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch (“Bavarian-Austrian Dictionary of Swearing”) in multiple editions.

Maledicta was published in 13 volumes from 1977 to 2005, and was a useful mix of scholarly and irreverent study of a tremendous range of offensive language. Articles covered AIDS jokes, “The Pronunciation of Cunnilingus in Dictionaries”, “Verbal Aggression in Dutch Sleeptalking”, the OED’s entry for cock ‘penis’, a translation of Catullus 41, the politics of excrement in Black Arts poets, a semantic analysis of terms for sexual intercourse, “Canadian Gay Jokes”, and “I Wanna Hot Dog for My Roll: Suggestive Song Titles.” Contributors included many prominent figures in the study of language and folklore, such as G. Legman, Allen Walker Read, Leonard R.N. Ashley, Vance Randolph, Roger Steiner, Laurence Urdang, Irving Lewis Allen, Richard Lederer, Dennis Preston, Wolfgang Mieder, and Timothy B. Jay, as well as a number of anonymous or pseudonymous academics. Special issues included festschrifts for Peter Tamony, G. Legman, and the Yiddishist Lilliam Mermin Feinsilver.

He goes on to catalogue Aman’s less attractive side (he was actually imprisoned for sending threatening materials to his ex-wife, her lawyer, and a judge) and ends:

In person, Aman was polite and often charming. He had deep, unqualified love and loyalty to his daughter and her family. He loved feral cats, maybe above all, and would skimp on his own needs to provide for them.* [*The family has requested that any donations go to Forgotten Felines.] He reserved his antagonism for his perceived enemies. Aman genuinely loved language and insults, and loved arguments. His inability to control his conduct was based on a genuine belief that it was the right thing to do; he did not suffer fools lightly, and had absolutely zero tolerance for the hypocrite. The slang lexicographer Tom Dalzell says, “He considered hypocrisy to be his mortal enemy. He was a First Amendment absolutist who spoke what he considered truth to power,” adding “He was as loyal a friend as I have ever had.”

Though his legacy is tarnished by his problematic behavior, it’s nonetheless the case that he was willing to explore difficult topics at a time when serious, or indeed any, treatment of such language was not really possible in academia. Maledicta remains an important source for the study of offensive language. Aman’s wide-ranging knowledge of offensiveness was unparalleled, and he often complained about being typecast as the dirty-words guy. “Obscenity is less than 2 percent of what I do,” he told an interviewer. “I’m interested in verbal aggression. Anything negative. Unfortunately, it’s the vulgarity that gets all the attention. If I never have to write about ‘fuck,’ ‘shit,’ and cocksucker’ again, I’m happy.”

A complicated man. As I wrote elsewhere: He wouldn’t want to rest in peace, so I’ll just hope he’s resting however he would prefer.

Another interesting term has come up in my editing work: the Adena culture, “a Pre-Columbian Native American culture that existed from 1000 to 200 BC, in a time known as the Early Woodland period.” My questions were two: how is the word Adena pronounced, and what is its origin? The Wikipedia article I linked to says “The Adena Culture was named for the large mound on Thomas Worthington’s early 19th-century estate located near Chillicothe, Ohio, which he named ‘Adena’,” which is helpful but doesn’t go far enough. Some scavenging in Google Books turned up E. S. Blackwell’s Stories Told In Whispers (Lulu.com, 2014), where a footnote says “Adena: Word meaning ‘a place remarkable for the delightfulness of its situation’, according to Sept. 18, 1811 diary entry by Thomas Worthington,” and further Googling found Wonderful West Virginia (Volume 35, Issue 11, p. 9):

ADENA
Oddly, the name given to an important Indian culture existing in West Virginia from about 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1 is Adena, a Hebrew word meaning a place remarkable for the delightfulness of its situation.

I’m guessing the Hebrew root is עדן, from which Eden is derived, but I’d be curious to know more. And I’m morally certain Worthington would have pronounced Adena with “long e” (/əˈdiːnə/, ə-DEE-nə), and that is how I’m mentally saying it, but I would not be even a little bit surprised if it has been retro-“corrected” to /əˈdeɪnə/, ə-DAY-nə. (I would also not be surprised if people assumed it was of Native American origin.) Anybody know how anthropologists, historians, and others who study Adena culture say it?

Like most aging culture-vultures, I find I have less and less time for new additions to the culture-hoard and less appreciation when I try to sample them. In particular, I tend to skim over the poems in the New Yorker with a mental note of either “This isn’t what I call poetry” or “This seems like it might be good if one liked that sort of thing.” But just now I hit a poem by a name I wasn’t familiar with, Bianca Stone, that set my poetry bells ringing; it’s called “Artichokes,” and here’s the start:

I bet I’ll never appear in a dream or a summer dress
or next door. Displaying on one hand my prowess, the other
my difficultness, I bet there will be just enough pain
to keep me alive, long enough for the moon to be mine,
just as the sea is of women: the cockle, the star,
and the movements of the earth. Just as
the whale, stuck in its baleen grin, climbs up
out of the depths and moves to its hidden
spawning grounds—

I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forget
it’s language I long for. Man and his ciphers
cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up
with more meaning.

You can read the rest (and, if you like, hear it read by the author) at that link. It grabbed me with that opening, especially the surprising “or next door,” and kept grabbing me with “difficultness” and “just enough pain to keep me alive” and “baleen grin,” and later in the poem “having felt/ like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,/ one scale at a time, worked down/ to the meaty heart”: I mean, just that lovely phrase “scraped away at with the front teeth” tells you this is somebody who loves the sounds and syntax of the English language and knows how to wield them. There’s more Stone at Poets.org and at her website; we discussed artichokes (their etymology and uses) back in 2007.

Lynne Peskoe-Yang has an enjoyable piece for Popula on the problems with the term “vegetable”; she begins with the Supreme Court case (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 [1893]) that determined that John Nix’s tomatoes were properly subject to vegetable tariffs even though they were technically “fruits” in botanical terms, because they were commonly understood to be vegetables:

In this way, Gray and his fellow jurists sealed the tomato’s identity crisis into law. The legal definition would be what common speech suggested, even if biology indicated the opposite. Nix’s tomatoes would be called “vegetables” because that’s what everyone called them. […]

Botanically speaking, it’s still clear: eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, and squash are all fruits. It’s equally clear that mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants. But these are all, also, in common usage, “vegetables.” Yet when an authority like the Oxford English Dictionary should provide clarity on what a vegetable actually is, it instead defines vegetables as a specific set of certain cultivated plant parts, “such as a cabbage, potato, turnip, or bean.” And since carrots and turnips are roots, potatoes are tubers, broccoli is a flower, cabbage is a leaf, and celery is a stem, we find that “vegetable” rarely applies to the entire plant (or to the same parts of the plant), while it also has a way of applying to things that aren’t actually vegetables. It is a category both broader and more specific that the thing it’s supposed to describe.

In a botanical sense, it’s easy: vegetables don’t exist as a discrete, coherent category. And the more you know about botany–the nuanced phylogeny that gardeners and farmers know and the centuries of research into plant evolution that botanists have learned–the more likely you’ll be a dissenter in the vegetable debate. “This is why people hate botanists,” as one disillusioned commenter wrote in a particularly heated r/Botany thread.

Unfortunately, there’s a silly excursus on how dictionaries “betray the [descriptivist] cause by appealing to the etymological past, breaking words down into their simplest and oldest-known usages” (!), but there’s plenty of good stuff about veggies and their history, e.g.:
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