languagehat.com

Reading Ford Madox Ford’s memoir Memories and Impressions (highly recommended by my wife, who’s become a Ford devotee), I ran across an expression that baffled me. In his encomium to Holman Hunt Ford says:

But I think I never did advance — it was never my intention to advance — any suggestion that the true inwardness of Pre-Raphaelism, the exact rendering hair for hair of the model; the passionate hunger and thirst for even accidental truth, the real caput mortuum of Pre-Raphaelism was ever expressed by any one else than by the meticulously earnest painter and great man, whose death was telegraphed from the dim recesses of London into the chess-board pattern of sunlit Pre-Raphaelite Hessian harvest lands.

My exiguous Latinity told me that caput mortuum meant ‘dead head,’ but what on earth could that signify in this context? I turned to my trusty Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English and found:

caput mortuum [Lat. ‘dead head’] the residue left after prolonged distillation; worthless residue; red oxide of lead used as a pigment. 17c.

The first definition was clearly the applicable one, and I approve of Alan Bliss (the compiler of the dictionary) having arranged the senses in that order, with what is presumably the historically prior one last because it is the least likely to be encountered. Has anyone else run into this now obscure term?

Kirk Hazen, professor of linguistics at West Virginia University (i.e., he’s not some bloviating amateur), has a good piece at The Conversation on “the hillbilly problem”:

Many qualities come prepackaged with the hillbilly stereotype: poverty, backwardness and low levels of education. One of the most prevalent is the idea that the way the people of Appalachia speak – the so-called Appalachian dialect – is somehow incorrect or malformed.

From years of research, linguists understand that this perception is simply untrue. But few people are actually interested in discrediting it.

In 1998, I founded the West Virginia Dialect Project to conduct research on the different and changing dialects of West Virginia, a state wholly contained within Appalachia. The language variations that we have identified are far more nuanced than the kind that appear in the media.

He discusses the “frozen in time” myth (which goes back to an 1899 article by Berea College President William Goodell Frost) and goes on to an interesting feature of the dialect, the “leveled ‘was’”:

One pattern of language variation that has existed in English since its beginning in A.D. 449 is the fluctuation between “were” and “was.” The variation of “we was” and “we were” is widespread in English today, and linguists call the “we was” form “leveled” because the same form is used for every subject.

In West Virginia in the early 1970s, the usage rate of the leveled “was” hovered around 70 percent in the speech of the residents of Mercer and Monroe counties. However, looking across generations at the end of the 20th century, usage rates of the leveled “was” declined. Fifty-four percent for speakers born before 1947 used it, while only 8 percent of speakers born after 1980 did so.

The story is actually more complex: the leveled “was” can be used as a social flag, waving to show a person’s rural identity or in-group status. Plus, certain related forms, such as contracted “was” (“We’s out late last night”) aren’t declining, but seem to operate under the radar of social evaluation.

He says “There’s no monolithic ‘Appalachian dialect,’ and language variation – an important component of language everywhere – is just as diverse within Appalachia as it is outside of the region,” discusses the stereotypes, and ends with a hopeful account of dialect-focused projects that are attempting to fight them. As I said at MetaFilter, where I found the link, “The Appalachian dialect is quite similar to the Ozark dialect of my (father’s) people, so I bristle in solidarity when people mock it and its speakers.”

Joanna Hlavacek reports for LJWorld.com on a heartening development:

[Andrew] McKenzie, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas, recently secured a grant from the federal government that will allow him to continue his great-grandfather’s work in preserving the Kiowa language — a pressing need, McKenzie says, as the number of fluent Kiowa speakers dwindles by the year.

“Languages only exist in our minds, so once those speakers leave us, they take the knowledge with them, essentially, unless that knowledge is preserved through documentation,” says McKenzie, who began formally studying Kiowa about 20 years ago. “In that sense, the documentation becomes essential because it would allow the language to survive into the future.” […]

Earlier this month, McKenzie learned he’d won a three-year grant from the Documenting Endangered Languages program of the National Science Foundation. The $112,000 award will allow him to “fill a gap” in the study of Kiowa grammar, work his great-grandfather started as a kid passing notes in his native tongue — speaking Kiowa was strictly forbidden at the boarding school he and other Native Americans were forced to attend — during class to his girlfriend, funnily enough.

That early system devised by Parker McKenzie became the basis for methods still used today, though there’s no consensus on the matter, McKenzie says. The Kiowa tribe has never voted to designate an official writing system.

I’m glad the NSF has gotten more sensible about how they spend their money; forty-five years ago, they blew a bunch of it sending me to grad school in linguistics, and all they got for it was this blog. (Thanks, Trevor!)

A reader (thanks, Bruce!) sent me a link to AWOL – The Ancient World Online, saying it has access to “all kinds of good stuff,” and he was right!

AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University […]

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The latest post is Newly Open Access Journal: Archäologie in Ägypten (“Magazine of the German Archaeological Institute Cairo”); below an updated one from 2011, there’s Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of the Sumerian Language; there’s a sidebar of Open Philology Project digitized books (UPDATE: Miles gloriosvs, Volume Tom. 4, fasc. 2; NEW: Parmènide, Volume T. 8, Partie 1); in short, there’s all kinds of good stuff — check it out!

Ursula Sims-Williams at the British Library’s Asian and African studies blog posts about a unique manuscript:

The British Library’s sole Judaeo-Urdu manuscript is a copy in Hebrew script of the well-known Urdu theatrical work, the Indar Sabha, written by Agha Sayyid Hasan ‘Amanat,’ a poet at the court of Vajid Ali Shah of Awadh.

Our manuscript seems to have been created in the early 20th century, perhaps by a member of the Baghdadi Jewish community of India. Originating in the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire, the Baghdadi Jewish community settled in India from the late 18th into the 19thcentury and was primarily centred in two major urban centres of India, Calcutta and Bombay. A printing industry in Judaeo-Arabic grew in both locations to cater to the religious needs of the community as well as its appetite for news and entertainment, producing devotional treatises, gazettes, and also the occasional historical novel, murder mystery and romance (Musleah, On the Banks of the Ganga, p. 522-531). The British Library’s collections are a rich resource for these publications and for the history of the Baghdadi Jewish community in India, and our Hebrew curator has previously written about a Judaeo-Arabic serial issued in Bombay for our blog. […]

Establishing a direct link between the Baghdadi Jewish community and theatrical production of the Indar Sabha has proven elusive. […] While such a conclusion is purely speculative at this point, it might be the case that this Judaeo-Urdu manuscript was created for (or by) one of the actors or theatre producers of the Baghdadi Jewish community.

Fortunately, due to the generosity of the Hebrew Manuscripts project, this unique Judaeo-Urdu manuscript will be digitised and made freely available online, which we hope will encourage further research into the language, cultural context, and history of this fascinating manuscript.

There are more details, a bibliography, and gorgeous illustrations at the link. What a wonderful world, where there are such things as Judeo-Urdu manuscripts and we can all admire them without having to go to the museum!

We’ve done whistled languages before here — Yupik in 2005, La Gomera most recently in 2011 — but it’s been a while, so herewith please find sfyria, according to the breathless BBC Travel report by Eliot Stein “one of the rarest and most endangered languages in the world” (what would reporters do without superlatives?):

Hidden deep in the south-east corner of the Greek island of Evia, above a twisting maze of ravines that tumbles toward the Aegean Sea, the tiny village of Antia clings to the slopes of Mount Ochi. There are no hotels or restaurants within 40km, and the hamlet is so remote that it doesn’t exist on Google Maps.

But as you travel here along a dizzying road from Karystos, through a mythical landscape of megalithic ‘dragon house’ stone tombs and giant Cyclopic boulders, you’ll hear an ancient siren song reverberating against the mountain walls. That’s because for thousands of years, the inhabitants of Antia have used a remarkable whistled language that resembles the sounds of birds to communicate across the distant valleys.

If you’re wondering where they got the “thousands of years,” voilà:

No-one can recall exactly how or when the villagers here began using sfyria – which comes from the Greek word sfyrizo, meaning ‘whistle’ – to communicate. Some residents speculate that it came from Persian soldiers who sought refuge in the mountains some 2,500 years ago. Others claim the language developed during Byzantine times as a secret way to warn against danger from rival villages and invading pirates. There’s even a belief that in ancient Athens, they’d post whistlers from Antia on the mountaintops as sentries so they could signal an imminent attack on the empire.

Remarkably, sfyria was only discovered by the outside world in 1969, when an aeroplane crashed in the mountains behind Antia. As the search crew went out to look for the missing pilot, they heard shepherds volleying a series of trilled scales back and forth across the canyons and became enchanted by their cryptic code.

The BBC would presumably not take “some residents speculate” as a reliable source for anything important, but hey, it’s just language. Carping aside, this sort of thing is always fun, and I thank Trevor for passing it along!

I love a good debunking, and Peter Gainsford specializes in them at his blog Kiwi Hellenist: Modern myths about the ancient world. I’ve taken the post title from Salt and salary: were Roman soldiers paid in salt? because it’s perfect LH material, being a thorough demolition of the idea “that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, or received an allowance of ‘salt money,'” an idea that is extrapolated wildly from the perfectly sound etymology that derives English salary from Latin salarium ‘stipend, money allowance’ (and a couple of misused quotes from Pliny the Elder and Livy), but there’s plenty more good stuff there, like Vomiting Romans: “So not only were vomitoria as vomit-rooms never a thing: vomitoria in theatres weren’t a thing either. Vomitoria weren’t a thing at all.” Explore and enjoy!

It’s been over four years since I bought Jan Vansina’s Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa; I was excited about it at the time, but then (you know how it is) it sank to the bottom of the stack and I never got around to reading it. Well, now that I’m editing a book on Africa and seeing it in the reference lists, I’ve hauled it out and started it, and it’s absolutely terrific. I haven’t even gotten to the meat of it, the history of Western Bantu expansion, but I’m so struck by the preliminary methodological sections that I’m just going to quote some passages I’ve marked in the margin:

A living cell testifies to its ancestors of long ago. And so, too, language and specifically words carry an imprint from the past in the present, an imprint that can be put in its proper time perspective.

To achieve that goal much of the recovery of the past in equatorial Africa must be based on the evidence of language and especially words. […] The techniques involved in such a study are not novel. Linguists have used them to reconstruct the history of languages themselves. But the methodology is new in the sense that the conclusions drawn from the technical analysis are different. The goal for which the techniques are to be used is different. Here one wants to reconstruct the past of a society and culture, not language itself. The methodological approach, then, is new. If the methodology is valid, all will be fine. The story to be told in later chapters will be credible “fact.” But if the methodology is wrong, the tale is fiction and heavy-fisted fiction at that.

[. . .]

A convention of the ethnographic genre was that peoples constituted territorial groups called “tribes,” which were the given units of observation. Tribes were of almost indeterminate age. Within a tribe everyone held the same beliefs and practices, and observations made in any part of the tribal territory were valid for any other part. Moreover, by definition, every tribe differed from its neighbors. […]

Actually, ethnic identities change over time. They are not givens and they do not necessarily correspond to homogeneous units of social institutions or culture. The study of ethnic identity over time belongs to the history of ideas. In practice many modern ethnonyms were of colonial vintage. The Bondjo ethnic group on the shores of the Ubangi River seems to have existed only in the minds of French administrators. In the 1920s Belgian administrators argued for years about the status of “the Ngando”: Should they be included in the Mongo ethnic group or kept separate? They concluded that Ngando were Mongo. As a result, by the 1950s the Ngando of Equateur province felt themselves to be Mongo. They had adapted their vision of ethnic identity to colonial reality.

[. . .]

Observers often left out of their accounts anything that referred to an obvious colonial practice. This applied even to photographs: no bicycles, no kerosene lamps, no office buildings, no policemen, etc. And, naturally, “traditional” clothing and housing was a must. The authors seem to have believed that they had thus expunged any influence of the colonial conquest. They did not realize that the foundations of every local community had been drastically altered by the colonial conquest or that substantive culture was no longer a “pristine” precolonial culture.

[. . .]

Language competence is also fundamental. How well did the outsider really know the local vernacular or the lingua franca that was being used? Did he or she in fact use the vernacular, a lingua franca, a European language, or did he or she employ an interpreter? Many writers do not tell you. The prefatory statements of those who do are often empty boasts or leave unclear what level of competence they had achieved. Most residents had only a rudimentary knowledge of African languages, except for missionaries who had to preach in the vernacular. And even they were not always fluent. Transients were not very proficient. They used interpreters, as did most anthropologists, at least for the first year or so of their stay. Often the text of the report reveals more about language competence than any statement does. The transcriptions of items, even proper names in the local or regional language, are often dead giveaways. The writer reveals even more when indulging in etymological reasoning or in general statements about the language. In such ways one can often infer some information in this matter. […]

One usually thinks that the academic specialist, especially the anthropologist, is infinitely better qualified and hence more reliable than others. An article about the X by an anthropologist must rank higher than even a short book about the X by the local missionary or administrator. Such reasoning fails to take into consideration that academics too have their biases and fads, their preferred topics, and their taboos. One scholar may be a devotee of kinship systems and will see ambiance only in local music or dance, another is enthralled by cosmologies and does not care for kinship terminology. Anthropologists, moreover, are not the only trained observers. It is easy to forget that others, such as physicians or students of law, or indeed Pecile, the farmer servant of P. de Brazza, were also trained to observe, albeit to observe different things. As a result the rarity of writings by professional anthropologists is not nearly as great a handicap as one would think. Just like any other text their reports must be confronted whenever possible with the whole available record, whether emanating from specialists or not.

Last but not least, gender is given for every named writer. There are very few female authors and hence the corpus shows an obvious lack of data about women, their lives, and their points of view. Not a single text about women’s associations in Cameroon, Gabon, or Congo comes from a woman, and, in consequence, very little is known about them, since men were prevented by their gender from learning about them.

I could go on, but you get the idea. This guy seems to have thought about every conceivable source of error, to have done his best to compensate for them where possible, and otherwise to at least remain aware of the inevitable blind spots. An admirable scholar; I’m sorry he died in February.

This is one of the more simpleminded questions I’ve posted, but I can’t find an answer to it, so I turn to the Varied Reader. Wikipedia sez:

The Lozi people are an ethnic group primarily of western Zambia, inhabiting the region of Barotseland. […] The Lozi are also known as the Malozi, Silozi, Kololo, Barotose, Rotse, Rozi, Rutse, or Tozvi. The Lozi speak Silozi, a central Bantu language.

The word Lozi means ‘plain’ in the Makololo language, in reference to the Barotse Floodplain of the Zambezi on and around which most Lozi live. It may also be spelt Lotse or Rotse, the spelling Lozi having originated with German missionaries in what is now Namibia. Mu- and Ba- are corresponding singular and plural prefixes for certain nouns in the Silozi language, so Murotse means ‘person of the plain’ while Barotse means ‘people of the plain.’

OK, so if “the spelling Lozi […] originated with German missionaries” and the forms referring to the people are Murotse and Barotse, then it stands to reason that “Lozi” = Lotsi (or Lotse?). And indeed, “The Lozi are also known as the […] Rotse.” But both Oxford and Collins give the pronunciation as /ˈləʊzi/, with a -z-. Now, you can say that’s just anglicization, but that doesn’t happen with other German-origin words, like Nazi (/ˈnɑːtsi/). So how is it pronounced by those who actually deal with the language? And if it’s /ts/, why do most of the “also known as” forms have -z-? Is there a dialect difference (as presumably with the l/r variation)? What’s going on here?

Update. I’ve just found an extended discussion in Paul S. Landau’s Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948, pp. 54-56. He’s talking about the Rozvi:

We do not know much about the next few generations on the highveld; but much later, at the end of the nineteenth century north of the Molopo and Limpopo, a Rozvi elite still claimed the right to install new chiefs over a wide area. A presiding official proclaimed, “I am the Rozvi who stands here today.” This sounds very like the ceremonial stature recognized for the “BaHurutshe” of the highveld. Often called “the senior Tswana tribe” in the ethnic CP model, their history also extends at least back to the 1600s. South of the Limpopo, the first part of the Rozvi’s statement, above, would most likely be “Ke morotzi,” or perhaps (if far enough south) “ke mogarotse” (cf. mohu-rutshe), “I am he (or they are they) of the place of Roz[v]i.” Words differed in their pronunciation across speech communities, even nearly adjacent ones. Thus “the place of Roz[v]i” appeared as Ga-rotse (alt. Ha-rotse) and Fhoo-Rotshe or Khoo-Rotshe, the latter two signifying distance (foo and koo). One finds Harootsi, Kurutse, and Fhurutshe recorded on the highveld before the synthesized and standardized name of the twentieth century, “Hurutshe” or “BaHurutshe,” emerged as the “correct” spelling and became known as the parent tribe of the others.

In a list of thirty highveld “tribes” provided by Thomas Hodgson in 1823, the number 10 is “Bamarotsi.” Is this the same as “Hurutshe”? Yes, it is. Burchell in 1812 offered Mõrútzies, and Chief Mothibe, in 1813, told Campbell of the Marootze. Later, Andrew Smith in 1839 offered “Baarootzie,” and elsewhere Smith says he heard “that all the Bechuanas were [once] govered by the Barootzi king” (ba-rootzi) and that circumcision began with the “Barootzie” [sic]. Rotse spoken in one place is Rootzi in another. Lichtenstein, a naturalist who prided himself on precise representation, wrote “Muchuruhzi” on his map, probably a rendition of mo (person) goo rozi. He located these people to the far north and they, with hardly more specificity possible, said their forebears came from north of that.

On the highveld, ga– or ha-rotse (rotse-place) people instantiated the centralizing trend of the 1600s. [There follows a table with the Shona form varozvi and a whole variety of Sechuana forms, including barotse and marotse as well as some of the ones mentioned above.]

Most likely Rozvi (rozvi) is the initial template for this rutzi, ruhzi, rotse, and so on, on the highveld. There may also, however, be a loan-term behind all three that we do not know. Folk etymology on the highveld points to the melons of the first fruits ceremonies, marotse. In some areas rotse is a verb in the perfect form meaning to have unloaded a burden or a present. In Shona, “Rozvi” may have an early connotation as “defrauder” (conjugated from the verb, roza). Perhaps the stimulation of Indian Ocean commerce early on bequeathed a spoken morpheme to Africans; perhaps the source was even “Shirazi,” a word heard along inland routes from the Swahili coast and so appropriatable like any other — but this cannot be considered likely.

Whew! That’s more than you ever wanted to know about this obscure term, but at least I’ve collected a bunch of data and speculation in one place.

I’m editing a book on language in Africa, and a chapter on Senegal has introduced me to two obscure French terms:

Signare “was the name for the Mulatto French-African women of the island of Gorée in French Senegal during the 18th and 19th centuries”; according to Wikipédia, it’s from Portuguese senhora, which makes sense but which I wouldn’t have guessed.

Laptots “were African colonial troops in the service of France between 1750 and the early 1900s. The term laptot probably derives from the word lappato bi in the Wolof language, referring to interpreters, intermediaries or brokers.” If anyone can explain how lappato bi works in Wolof, I will of course be grateful; I don’t have a Wolof dictionary.