languagehat.com

I’ve posted a number of times about the Dictionary of American Regional English (e.g., on its completion and on the Fieldwork Recordings); now, sadly, I must write about the shutdown of the entire project, as reported by one of LH’s favorite lexicographers, Jesse Sheidlower, for the New Yorker. After introducing DARE and describing its many excellences (William Safire called it “the most exciting new linguistic project in the twentieth century”), Sheidlower gets to the bad news:

DARE was primarily supported by grants, especially from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In recent years, small individual donations played an increasing role in the project’s funding. The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to “Z.” The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize. Squeaking by on royalties and individual gifts, and with several editors working on a volunteer basis, the dictionary was able to publish some quarterly updates, but by the beginning of the coming year, it will be necessary to lay off the staff.

Now the hundreds of boxes of files are going into the University of Wisconsin archives, after some last-minute work to insure that the most important records are indexed properly. Editors will try to keep some visibility—continuing to do radio interviews, for example—but this will also be on a mostly volunteer basis.

DARE will probably prove to be the last major dictionary based on personal fieldwork, as more modern techniques take over. By creating an interesting survey and getting people to complete it online, you can get a lot of data. This was the method of the Harvard Dialect Survey, a set of a hundred and twenty-two questions created by the linguist Bert Vaux, who is now at Cambridge University. When the Times created an interactive quiz based on the data, in 2013, its story “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” became its highest-traffic piece of the entire year, despite being published on December 21st—demonstrating just how fascinated people remain about their local speech.

And instead of any method of studying the speech of individuals, the most modern thing of all is corpus analysis: taking billions of words of text—from geotagged posts on Twitter, from online regional newspapers—and running them through elaborate statistical processing. The computational linguist Jack Grieve uses this approach to generate maps revealing truths about language that no one had—or, for that matter, could have—noticed before. This is probably the direction that future research will take; it’s relatively inexpensive and yields fascinating results that dramatically add to our understanding of language. But one can’t help feeling that it’s a shame to take the words out of the mouths of their speakers.

A shame indeed. But at least we have the dictionary itself.

Frequent commenter Y sent me a rare book dealer’s catalog (it’s #24, downloadable as a pdf from here if you’re curious — it’s got all sorts of great stuff, including an I.W.W. union shop sign and the 1920 First American Edition of Lenin’s Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii [Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky], “printed in an edition of about 1,000 copies and distributed by Max Maisel … After the death of Maisel the entire stock of his company was sold to a prominent Russian bookdealer Nicholas Martianoff, a former associate and one time secretary of Kerensky. Martianoff considered all radical literature held at Maisel’s shop wothless and sent it to a paper mill in New York”); he thought I’d be interested because it includes a large collection of obscure and very obscure artificial language publications (on pp. 25-32). I very much enjoyed looking through it, and had my curiosity piqued when Y added: “About the artificial languages, I’m sorry that I probably never will see performed Keilty’s ‘Three Short Plays in Prashad’, and nor will anyone else. I looked up him and his language, and it’s a fine oddball San-Francisco-in-the-’70s story.” Naturally, I googled, and I hereby present to you the account of the language, courtesy of the KPFA Pacifica Radio Program Guide for November 1979 (apparently the only source for the story):

On January 27, 1978, James Keilty died. City planner, linguist, author, Utopian, and long-time supporter of KPFA, Mr. Keilty died of cancer a scant ten days after the diagnosis. […]

I first knew James Keilty in the fall of ’49. A friend had given me his address and told me he was someone who really knew San Francisco and would introduce the city to me. He did. He made the city fascinating with his amazing insights. We became fast friends. […] He was a brilliant scholar, spoke several languages fluently, and any number of languages to some degree. In Italian he spoke various dialects. He was writing and translating plays, acting in some, and directing others. […]

He devised a phonetic alphabet with several more sounds represented than the Roman alphabet has, for use in translating Mandarin and Japanese, for example. Then, about 25 years ago, he began to invent a language to go with his alphabet. He translated Rilke into his language, which he called ‘Prashad.’ Then he translated Sophocles. He asked me what classic I felt was the most important in any language. I said, without hesitation, the Tao Teh Ching. He was delighted and immediately decided to translate that into Prashad. He looked at several English versions, but they were so dissimilar that he decided that he must puzzle it out of the Chinese original. First he translated it into English. I hope that can be published someday. One popular version, for example, has a line that goes something like, . . .when the Tao is known, race horses will be used to pull manure carts. In Keilty’s translation, that becomes, “. . .Horses are only used to produce manure.” He assured me that the original said no more nor less than that. Through these translations, the. vocabulary of Prashad had become quite extensive with all the tenses and a sophisticated grammar. So, he began to write the saga of the people who spoke Prashad. It was a consuming, though part-time activity.

When he was about 40, he said he had saved enough and inherited enough to live modestly and do only his own work. I encouraged him to retire and give himself over to his own pursuits on a full time basis. He did, and I’ve no reason to believe that he regretted his act. […] Once in a while he would produce a play. His friends would become actors, and would work very hard to please him. Usually there was only one or two performances. The audiences were often very enthusiastic. Once, he presented three short plays in Prashad using actors who were good linguists and who had actually learned the language in the course of learning their roles.

Prashad has only one word for each thing, not two or more, as in English. In the case of English, two words for the same thing often came about because of combined latin or nordic origins. Gradually, the words took on superlative or pejorative meanings, so that one can say things in English which are either laudatory or insulting without straying from the facts. This lingua-centricity has been central to cultural growth.

But Keilty wanted a language that was naturally honest. The culture he based on his language was Utopian, and his saga of the Prashadsim can be called a Utopian fantasy.

Only one small part of his entire saga has been published, in a science fiction anthology edited by Thomas Disch, The New Improved Sun.

I’ve left out most of the non-language-related stuff, for which you can read the piece in the program (it’s on the left side of p. 7). I’m always fascinated by such obsessives, though I’m glad I don’t have to spend time around them!

Adrienne Raphel reviews Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries for the New Yorker; I’ll quote the start to give you an idea:

One morning in 2001, Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, arrived at work and was given a single word: “take.” She set to work hunting down examples of where the verb form of the word had been used in the wild, from American Literary History to Us Weekly to Craigslist, and organizing these citations by part of speech and usage. Normally, editors will work on several words in a batch. But smaller, more common words are used so often and in so many different ways that a single one can be an incredible headache to revise. As Stamper explains in her recent book, “Word by Word: the Secret Life of Dictionaries,” such words “don’t just have semantically oozy uses that require careful definition, but semantically drippy uses as well. ‘Let’s do dinner’ and ‘let’s do laundry’ are identical syntactically but feature very different semantic meanings of ‘do.’ ” Lexicographers know that when they’ve been assigned a notorious small word—“do,” “run,” “about,” “take”––they’ve arrived.

This was the most ambitious and slippery project Stamper had taken on, and, at times, as she parsed the differences between “take first things first” and “take a shit,” she felt herself “slowly unspooling into idiocy.” It took two weeks to organize the verb form alone into a hundred and seven different senses and sub-senses; after a month, “take” was finally ready for the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. In the world of words, however, spending a month perfecting an entry is nowhere near the extreme. At a conference in 2013, a lexicographer from the Oxford English Dictionary told Stamper that when he revised “run” it took him nine months. Dictionary editors trade word stories the way élite marathoners collect courses. For Emily Brewster, one of Stamper’s colleagues, a career highlight was discovering a previously unrecorded sense for the indefinite article “a”: “used as a function word before a proper noun to distinguish the condition of the referent from a usual, former, or hypothetical condition.” Stamper gives as an example, “With the Angels dispatched in short order, a rested Schilling, a career pitcher 6-1 in the postseason, could start three times if seven games were necessary against the Yankees”: “a rested Schilling” tells us that, in contrast to his current rested state, he is not usually rested, or he had not been rested previously, but now he is. Each lexicographer has stories like this: epiphanies that reflect the evolution of language.

Isn’t that fun? Sounds like a wonderful book. Thanks, Trevor!

I recently ran across the unusual surname Phethean and having no idea of its etymology or even how to pronounce it, I had to do some research. It turns out it’s /ˈfiːðiən/ (FEE-thee-uhn, as in “[I’ll] fee thee an [apple]), and it’s apparently a (very weird) variant of Vivian; Rybakin, my go-to reference for English surnames, gives the other variants Fiddian, Fidgen, Fidgeon, Fithian, Phythian, Videan, and Vivien, and there is actually a dedicated website, Phethean One-Name study, which has a bunch more:

The Phethean One-Name study was established in 2012. I have been researching the PHETHEAN surname for about 20 years. More recently I have been concentrating on tracing the early origins of the surname, including all variants that I am aware of, rather than establishing a definitive family-tree of my own particular spelling of the surname

The registered variants of the name are Fithyan, Phitheon, Phithian, Phythian. Only Phethean, Phythian and Fithyan appear to be represented in England at the present day.

All the variants that I am researching are: Fethion, Fethyan, Fethyon, Fhithyan, Fithan, Fithean, Fitheion, Fitheon, Fithian, Fithion, Fithyan, Fithyon, Fitton, Fytheone, Fythian, Pheathean, Pheathian, Phethean, Phethein, Phetheon, Phethian, Phethion, Phithean, Phitheon, Phithian, Phithion, Phithyan, Phythean, Phytheon, Phythian, Phythion, Phythyan. […]

There are sparse records dating from 1250 – 1450 in various parts of the UK. The definitive spelling Phethean first appears in Tunstall, Staffordshire in 1459 where it was used as a first-name (Phethean of Tunstall) and then is found as a surname (and many derivative spellings) mainly in two locations in Cheshire – Brereton-cum-Smethwick and Warmingham from about 1500-1750. These sites are only about 15 miles from Tunstall but at present I have been unable to link the two locations.

Read more about the history of the name (“The Industrial Revolution lead to migrations of families who were yeoman farmers from the country to the cities. The Phethean line became established in Bolton, Lancashire from the late 1700s”) and frequency (“The surname is rare!”) at the link; I admire the dedication of Mr Stuart Phethean, who created and updates it.

Eric Weiskott describes “the 13th-century revolution that made modern poetry possible” — namely, the change from alliterative verse (“the form of poetry used in Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”) to the accentual-syllabic meters that underlie what we think of as traditional English verse, which began around the end of the 12th century. Weiskott gives as an example “the opening lines of the Ormulum, a very long religious tract composed by a monk named Orm”:

Thiss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum
forrthi þatt Orrm itt wrohhte
(‘This book is called Ormulum because Orm wrote it.’)

(Gotta love both the spelling and the impeccable reasoning.) I liked the apposite Pound quote (“To break the pentameter, that was the first heave”) and this interesting paragraph:

So if alliterative metre doesn’t measure stresses, syllables or even alliteration, what does it measure? Scholars have been debating the answer to this question since the 18th century. Current thinking is that alliterative metre measures a more abstract unit termed metrical position. A metrical position might contain one syllable, or it might contain more than one. Specifically, any number of adjacent unstressed syllables count together as a single metrical position. So, for example, the run of three unstressed syllables in the second half of the line from Piers Plowman, –e was the, is formally equivalent to the run of two unstressed syllables at the beginning of the line, in a. That’s right: a metre in which 1 + 1 = 3. In Beowulf, the rule is fairly simple: four metrical positions make a verse. By the time of Piers Plowman, the arrangement of positions had got more complicated.

Thanks, Jack!

Josephine Stefani, who identifies herself as “Stubbornly multilingual,” responds to the Quora question “What are some good novels that don’t have an English language version?” I love this sort of thing, and you’ve got to be impressed with her wide range of literatures. She starts off with Ana María Matute (who “is someone in the Spanish-speaking community”), Ahmadou Kourouma (“considered a classic in the Ivory Coast” — I actually have his Monnew, though I haven’t read it yet), and Moussa Ould Ebnou (“Considered one of Mauritania’s greatest novelists”); here are her Russian picks:

Evgeniy Vodolazkin (who is, unfortunately, listed as “Volodazkin”) — I love the casual “You may, however, be able to locate some of these books in Romanian or Lithuanian.”

Lidia Charskaya:

Her books about boarding schools (Zapiski Institutki) and Sibirochka: Knyazhna Dzavakha are among her most famous, but they have not seen the kind of popularity they should have had in English because children’s books don’t appear to be a priority for foreign language translation. I mean, where’s the serfdom, the Russian revolution?

I have her Gazavat but (sigh) haven’t read it.

Maks Fray (Svetlana Martynchik and Igor’ Styopin), “a huge name when it comes to contemporary Russian language literature. They’re not very critically-acclaimed, however, aside from a few secondary literary prizes here and there, given the fact that their material isn’t usually considered ‘serious literature’.”

Dina Rubina: “The Russian-Israeli author is not a new name to anyone keeping up with modern Russian literature, but her latest book, Babiy Veter, published just early this year, has not yet been translated.”

Lyudmila Ulitskaya: “One of my new favourite authors, Lyudmila Ulitskaya is well known for her intergenerational family sagas in the backdrop of political turmoil.”

There’s lots more there; check it out. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

Linguist Matthew Scarborough reports on a conference at the University of Copenhagen called The Split: Reconstructing Early Indo-European Language and Culture. He has a paragraph on most of the presentations, and they tempt me to wish I’d stayed in the field: “The Hittite verbal system and the Indo-Hittite Hypothesis,” “The Old Hittite ‘ninth case’ in areal and genetic perspective,” the etymology of Hitt. ḫišša– ‘thill, shaft (of a cart)’ and the feminine gender in Indo-European, “Did the Indo-Europeans have a word for ‘wheat’? Hittite šeppit(t)- revisited and the rise of Post-PIE cereal technology”… this sort of thing gets my blood moving faster. The third and final day of the conference consisted of archaeological papers, and he concludes his discussion with this excited paragraph:

For me, the final paper of the conference with the rather lengthy title After migration: how culture, genetics and language were reshaped by local processes of social integration: The case of Yamnaya and Corded Ware by Kristian Kristiansen was perhaps the most eye-opening contribution. To give some background, from my work with the MPI in Jena I have come to realise that the field of archaeogenetics has exploded in the last few years as the new techniques for extracting and analysing Ancient DNA (aDNA) have improved dramatically. What I hadn’t known is exactly how dramatically they have improved. The impression that I get is that it is a revolution to the field of prehistoric archaeology comparable to that of the introduction of Carbon-14 dating in the 1950s. Rather than butchering the very eloquent and well argued talk through a short summary, I would greatly encourage people check out the project that he has been investigating entitled The Rise: Travels, transmissions and transformations in temperate northern Europe during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC: the rise of Bronze Age societies. I get the impression that we will see quite a few very paradigm-shattering results for the question of Indo-European origins and the Indo-Europeanisation of Europe based on archaeological syntheses of aDNA evidence very soon within the next few years. Very exciting times lie ahead in the near future, and I wonder if the question of when and where PIE was spoken – something that I previously thought to be an impossible question – might soon be able to get some sort of a concrete answer.

David Marjanović dumps cold water on him in the comments (“o.O We already did, back in 2013 mostly”), but Matthew says “as a pure historical linguist with only a passing knowledge of these things (and mind you, keeping my head down and trying to finish a Ph.D. in the intervening time), this is the first time I’d actually realised how groundbreaking the latest aDNA stuff was,” and I’m with him — it’s pretty exciting! Anyway, if you have any interest in this stuff, check out his post.

Wyatt Mason’s NYRB review [archived] of a number of translations of Pierre Michon (an author with whom I was unfamiliar) is an interesting read (as is pretty much everything Mason writes); Michon doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, but I love the anecdote that introduces the review. Mason begins: “When I was twenty and studying French literature in Paris, I signed up for an independent project in translation. My adviser’s only stipulation was that I translate something that hadn’t made its way into English.” He asks around and is told repeatedly that Pierre Michon is “one of our greatest living writers”:

In 1989, this was very much a minority opinion. Michon’s complete works amounted to three slender books, as I discovered in a bookstore near my school. The earliest, Vies minuscules (1984), ran to two hundred pages; Vie de Joseph Roulin (1988) was fifty-nine pages; and a third, L’empereur d’Occident (1989), was forty-nine pages. And while it would speak well of me to claim that I devoted the remainder of the afternoon to reading all three until the store closed, wringing my hands as I weighed the merits of each while hesitating over which to choose, I spent all of thirty seconds deliberating. The slimmest, the pages of which were printed in uncut signatures—to read them, I would need a knife—was unapproachable. The longest, which wasn’t long, seemed by comparison huge. So I chose the middle one, because it was short, and because I didn’t have a knife.

I got the knife thirteen years later. I was sitting with Michon and his wife in a restaurant down the street from their townhouse in Nantes. Across the intervening years, I’d translated four of Michon’s books into English and found them a small US publisher. [He met with the author each time.] These meetings had always been productive. Michon, who speaks little English, was generous with his time and clear in his responses, able to illuminate the many thorny passages in his work that his translator couldn’t unpack and dictionaries didn’t help decipher.

The 2003 meetings in Nantes were different. Michon was curt, dismissive. In the past, my incomprehension was met with patience, instruction; now my perplexities displeased him. […] And yet despite that morning’s agon, Michon proposed lunch out. In a booth, across from his wife, he sat between me and the wall. Confit de canard was ordered and served, accompanied by large serrated knives. I attempted conversation; conversation did not form. Plates were cleared. Michon held on to his knife. As he turned toward me in the booth for the first time, a tap of the tip of the knife he’d retained, now pointed at me, punctuated each word he spoke.

“So,” he began, “you’re an acceptable translator. Actually, no. You’re fine. But Vies minuscules is an exceptional text. It needs an exceptional translator. Understand?”

Michon’s face was gray, grim. I made a few sounds that attempted to communicate that I didn’t understand; that we had worked together for years; that I wasn’t clear what had changed; that I’d done the same work I’d done in the past and arrived with, I thought, the same kinds of questions but—

“But you haven’t even deciphered the text,” Michon said, loudly, pounding the table now with the fist that held the knife. The voices of the lunchtime crowd dimmed as the restaurant registered the disturbance. “You haven’t even deciphered it.”

With a terminal clack, Michon released the knife to the table.

“Let me out!” Michon shouted, pushing past me. “Let me out!”

Ouch! Many thanks to Trevor Joyce for the link.

I’m reading Veltman’s Воспитанница Сара [The ward Sara], about which I will have much to say when I’ve read further, but I’ve hit a passage whose final word puzzles me, and I thought I’d canvass the assembled multitudes — those, at any rate, familiar with 19th-century Russian. He’s describing a scene outside a Moscow theater on a cold night in the late 1840s or early 1850s (“before the invention of crinoline”); the coachmen and servants are trying to keep warm while the masters are inside:

Около экипажей тѣ же nляски въ одиночку, то же хлопанье руковицами; а ужь если можно оставить лошадей и на надежныя руки своей братьи, или незябкихъ мальчишекъ-форейторовъ, такъ компанія идетъ куда-нибудь по сосѣдству, гдѣ и чай горячій, и горячіе наnитки, и всякая провизія и пріятное преnровожденіе времени, и даже машина.

Around the carriages the same solitary dances, the same beating of mittens; but those who were able to leave their horses in the reliable hands of their own kind, or of young postillions who weren’t so sensitive to the cold, went somewhere nearby, where there were hot tea and other hot beverages, and all sorts of provisions and pleasant ways to pass the time, and even a mashina.

(The italics are Veltman’s.) That word машина, literally ‘machine,’ can mean a great many things in the 19th century (Dahl mentions, among other possibilities, flints, cigar guillotines, billiard stands, locomotives, and “anything huge or cumbersome”), and I have no idea what it might mean here. I asked Sashura, and he suggested it might be a mechanical music machine, like a carillon or an orchestrion (he provided this charming YouTube clip as an illustration). Any other ideas?

Update. It turns out (unsurprisingly) that Sashura’s guess was correct; he asked the question on Facebook and got a number of answers along those lines. For example, here’s Natalia Sokolovskaya quoting a specialist from Pushkin House:

Здесь – какой-то музыкальный аппарат. Ср. у того же Вельтмана: “Заняв номер в пять рублей в сутки, он вышел в общую залу обедать и слушать, как машина музыку играет” (“Приключения, почерпнутые из моря житейского. Саломея”, 1848).

Here it means some sort of musical apparatus. Compare this, in Veltman’s 1848 novel Salomea: “Having rented a room for five rubles a day, he went into the common room to dine and listen to the mashina playing music.”

Thanks, Sashura and all his FB readers!

Gaston Dorren asks a very good question in Aeon: Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots? He describes the various attempts to pin down mankind’s original language (“German was a popular candidate, but the 17th-century Swedish scholar Olof Rudbeck favoured his own mother tongue, for a reason that was nothing if not creative: Sweden, he argued, was Atlantis, and thus the cradle of human civilisation”), citing LH’s own founding father, the Flemish author Johannes Goropius Becanus:

He claimed that the Dutch language, and the Flemish dialect of Antwerp in particular, was the direct descendant of the original language and the source of all others. His evidence was of an etymological nature. The name Adam, for instance, was derived from haat-dam (‘hate dam, dam against hate’), while Diets or Dutch was synonymous with d’oudste (‘th’oldest’). In the Low Countries, Goropius would enjoy some support for centuries to come; abroad, his name literally became a byword for fanciful etymologising: the eminent German scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz called the activity ‘goropising’. Even today, the hypothesis of Dutch as the oldest language is kept alive by at least one linguist and one poet, both of whom seem to be embarrassingly serious about it.

He then talks about William Jones’s famous 1784 lecture in which he proposed the Indo-European language family, and continues:

Given the extensive body of historical knowledge they’ve collected since, especially about Europe and Asia, one would expect that claims of Goropian and Rudbeckian absurdity would be a thing of the past. They aren’t, however. To this day, dissidents seriously assert that mainstream linguistics has it spectacularly wrong. Science is not above errors, of course, some of them collective and persistent – think phrenology, think behaviourism – and linguistics is no exception.

He proceeds to Lemuria, the Sun-language theory, Saharan (“a close relative of Basque”), climate theory, and Marrism; he concludes:

The tricky thing about history is that so much has happened; about languages, that there are so many of them. […] The fantasists and dilettantes trawl through source after source in the hope of pulling aboard what seem to be relations and other connections. But in fact, the more documents they sift through, the more likely they are to find chance similarities and connections and draw spurious conclusions. And if established scholars disagree with them, they will typically respond in a petulant manner, rather than take their criticism seriously. […]

If you enjoy crackpottery, click the link; you’ll have a good time. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)