languagehat.com

I thought this Facebook post by Alin Suciu was interesting enough to share:

I find it striking that most Eastern Christian traditions—with the notable exception of the Syriac—began to explicitly date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century CE. From this point onward, scribes often recorded the date when the transcription of the manuscripts was completed in a colophon. Therefore, manuscripts copied before the 9th century must be dated based on more ambiguous criteria, such as paleography, realia, radiocarbon analysis, and archaeological context. This overlooked pattern of dating manuscripts starting from the 9th century CE marks a shift in scribal culture and may provide significant details about broader developments in book production throughout the Mediterranean world. So it’s worthy of more serious consideration.

The earliest known dated Coptic manuscript is a parchment codex housed in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (M579), which was copied in 822/823 CE. In the Greek tradition, the first manuscript to bear a date is the Uspenski Gospels, copied in Constantinople in 835 CE. Christian Arabic manuscripts follow a similar trajectory, with the oldest known dated example being a Sinaitic codex (Sinai Arabic NF Parch. 3) whose transcription was completed either in 858 or between 858 and 867 CE, depending on how we interpret the second digit of the year recorded in the colophon—a brilliant discovery made by my friends Miriam Hjälm and Peter Tarras [Literary Snippets, p. 58]. The Armenian and Georgian traditions align with the same trend. The earliest known dated Armenian manuscript is the Queen Mlk’e Gospels, copied in 862 CE and now housed in the Mekhitarist Library in Venice. Similarly, the oldest dated Georgian manuscript was copied in Sinai in 864 CE (Georgian 32-57-33).

However, unlike the Coptic, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian traditions, the Syriac stands out as an exception to this pattern, predating all others by over four centuries. There are at least six Syriac manuscripts explicitly dated to the 5th century CE. The earliest is British Library Add. 12150, a manuscript copied in Edessa in 411 CE. It was brought to Egypt in the 10th century by Moses of Nisibis and preserved at the Monastery of the Virgin in Wadi Natrun, the famous monastic hinterland situated west of the Nile Delta. It’s a mystery to me why the Syrians chose to date their literary manuscripts so early, at a time when the practice was most likely unknown elsewhere. The remarkable antiquity of this tradition highlights the unique textual culture of Syriac Christianity.

The fact that all the other Eastern Christian traditions began to date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century suggests that a broader transformation in scribal practices took place all over the Mediterranean during this period. Whether this practice was due to administrative needs, a growing awareness of historical documentation, or external influences, it marks a significant moment in the history of book production. The implications of this phenomenon deserve further scholarly inquiry.

I’ve quoted the whole post; here are a couple of good exchanges from the comment thread for those without FB access:
[Read more…]

Peter McGuire’s Irish Times article on teaching Irish (Feb. 4; archived) starts by focusing on dyslexic students, concluding:

Much of the discussion around this, intentionally or otherwise, effectively pits one minority community (Irish-language speakers) against another (people with dyslexia). But many Irish speakers are dyslexic, and many dyslexic people want to learn Irish.

Then it goes on to more general issues:

At Leaving Cert level, Irish consistently has the highest number of top grades outside minority languages and music – subjects that tend to attract students who are already reasonably skilled. But despite decades of discussion about Irish language teaching, only a minority have anything approaching fluency.

While the focus on oral skills has increased (to 40 per cent at Leaving Cert), teaching of Irish remains dominated by the written word – in contravention of everything we know about language acquisition. So why does our education system continue to teach it in a way that is inaccessible to many?

“I want my daughter to study Irish,” says Fahey. “I want her to experience Irish culture and the language, but without expectation.

“She was struggling to learn English and the extra pressure of an additional language was damaging her confidence. I availed of the exemption for her, but asked her school – who have been great – if she could still take part in Irish class, just not be tested or have to read it. I have seen a huge change in her confidence and self-esteem.”

Rosie Bissett, chief executive of Dyslexia Ireland, says growing awareness and diagnosis of learning differences and neurodiversity (a broad term that includes dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism, ADHD and more), as well as increased numbers entering the Irish school from abroad after the age of 12, have led to growing exemptions. […]

[Read more…]

The Random Link feature took me to this 2013 post focused on James Harbeck’s word blog Sesquiotica, and (as is my wont) I clicked through to see if the blog was still there. Against all expectations, not only was it there but it was still going strong, and the latest post was so interesting I thought I’d bring it here:

For brunch on Sunday, I made ramekins.

Can I say that? Is ramekin like casserole or paella, a dish (recipe) that has gotten its name from the dish (vessel) that the dish is dished from?

The answers to those questions are (a) yes and (b) no. Ramekin has not transferred the name of the container to the name of the foodstuff. In fact, it’s the reverse: the little round ceramic vessels (like cute little food parentheses) are named after a foodstuff that is made using them.

I should say, first, to be fair, that what I made is more typically called shirred eggs. But there are many ways to make shirred eggs, and the recipe I made also fits the definition of the culinary item called ramekin, which is, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “A type of savoury dish based on cheese, mixed with butter, eggs, and seasonings, and usually baked and served in a small mould or dish.” The word has been used in that sense in English since the mid-1600s – borrowed over from French – while the metonymic transference to the ceramic vessel happened only by the later 1800s (Funk’s 1895 Standard Dictionary of the English Language defined that kind of ramekin as “a dish in which ramekins are baked”).

Did you wonder, when I said “borrowed over from French,” why it’s not ramequin? In fact, at the time we borrowed it, it was. So why did we change it? Well… we changed it back. You see, French didn’t invent the word; it traces back to regional Dutch rammeken and Low German ramken. It’s like mannequin, which came from the Dutch manneken – meaning ‘little man’. The -(e)ken suffix is a diminutive.

So the next question must be “Little ram?” Heh. That has produced some perplexity; the OED (and Wikipedia, citing it) scratches its head and says that it seems to come from ram ‘battering ram’, “although the semantic motivation is unclear.” Meanwhile, Wiktionary notes that Rahm is a German word for ‘cream’, cognate with Dutch room (‘whipped cream’ is slagroom, but I’ll have it anyway) and the now-disused English word ream (displaced by cream, which is, go figure, unrelated). That seems a bit more semantically motivating, for what it’s worth.

Fascinating stuff, none of which I knew (except the name of the container, which — if you’re unfamiliar with it — is trisyllabic: /ˈræməkən/). Harbeck goes on to provide his recipe for shirred eggs, in case you’re interested; I’ll finish up with some OED citations and their head-scratching etymology (the entry was revised in 2008):
[Read more…]

Carl Zimmer (brother of lexicographer Ben Zimmer, as J.W. Brewer points out in a comment on the Log post about this) has a story in the NY Times (archived) that starts with a potted history of Indo-European and then continues:

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

The linked study is “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans” by Iosif Lazaridis et al., and the abstract reads:

The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 ʙᴄ across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 ʙᴄ it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines. A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river. Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk. The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 ʙᴄ and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 ʙᴄ. The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite. We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 ʙᴄ and 4000 ʙᴄ.

There are more details at both the Times article and the Log post linked at the start of this one; I suppose I could have added this to one of the earlier Yamnaya-related LH posts, but those threads are getting long and people have been sending this to me, so I thought I’d give it its own post. Thanks, Eric and Jack!

I was reading Miranda Seymour’s NYRB review (November 23, 2023 issue; archived) of Antonia Fraser’s new biography of Lady Caroline Lamb (which makes for very lively reading) when I hit the following paragraph:

Initially, and on some level irrevocably, Byron adored Caroline, addressing her, in the first flush of delight, as “the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” But the born outsider also wanted a place in the Regency’s ton, the exclusive London circle presided over by the lady patronesses of Almack’s, the city’s most fashionable club. Caroline’s grand pedigree swept her lover across that threshold. Lady Melbourne, a charming but treacherous woman with whom Byron initiated a flirtatious relationship while seeking (but seldom heeding) advice on how best to handle her reckless daughter-in-law, did the rest.

I knew, of course, that ton was a borrowing from French and in general meant (to quote the OED) “The fashion, the vogue, the mode; fashionable air or style,” but I didn’t understand its use here. For that I had to scroll down to “b. transferred. People of fashion; fashionable society; the fashionable world”:

c1770 Miss P…D…will only..take engagements from billiard table gentlemen, gentlemen of the ton, and young shop~men.
in L. de Vries & P. Fryer, Venus Unmasked (1967) 33

1815 All the ‘Ton’s’ a stage, And Fashion’s motley votaries are but play’rs.
Sporting Magazine vol. 46 93

1855 The princess, the nobles, and all the ton had disappeared.
J. S. C. Abbott, History of Napoleon vol. I. xiv. 255

1969 A waste, when all the ton will flock here for this event.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 99

1969 The ton are here in force.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 103

Odd to give two cites from Hebe Elsna (Dorothy Phoebe Ansle), an obscure romance novelist who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page — surely one would have sufficed to document its (presumably marginal) late-20th-century use? At any rate, it’s an interesting extension of meaning that I hadn’t been familiar with, so I pass it along.
[Read more…]

Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, writes for The Conversation about a great project:

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother? Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.

Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.

The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University. Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.

While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt. […] In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.

More details at the link, along with an audio clip that allows you to compare the sound before and after restoration (the difference is really remarkable). Thanks, Bathrobe!

Via Adam’s Notes for January 30, I bring you this cacalicious quote from Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century:

Girardo Cagapisto is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit’. The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily, although an excellent recent article by François Menant finally lists the names and discusses their etymologies; but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. (Similar names exist in other Italian cities too—Menant stresses Cremona in particular—but they are not usually so prominent.) Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means ‘shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means ‘shit-in-your-pants’. Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, ‘shit-slowly’, the Cacainbasilica, ‘shit-in-the-church’, the Cacarana, ‘shit-a-frog’, the Cagatosici, ‘toxic-shit’, and there were many more. The twelfth century was a period when nicknames became surnames or even first names in Italy; there was a vogue for Mala- names, boasting of evil, among the aristocracy, for example (as with the Milanese aristocratic consul Malastreva, ‘evil-stirrup’), whereas in more clerical Rome, alongside some Caca- names, many names were formed from Deus-. But what would, say, the German court have thought, full of snobbish aristocrats from old families as it was, to find an authoritative representative from northern Italy’s biggest city called Shit-pesto? In fact, we can tell; for one of them, Otto of Freising, when he narrates with some schadenfreude the travails of Girardo in 1154, calls him Girardo Niger, ‘the black’, a name never attested in Milan, which Otto must have invented as a politer alternative. This may have also been in the historian’s mind when, just before, he wrote his famous trope about how awful it was that Italians allowed ‘youths of inferior condition’ and even ‘workers in the contemptible mechanical arts’ to assume the miliciae cingulum, that is to say public office. Not that it is likely that any of the people we have just looked at were also artisans, as Otto implies, but there is no reason to take that statement too seriously—anyway, for Otto, a medium landowner called Shit-pesto with a leading civic role would have been quite as bad as a rude mechanical. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750–1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side. But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the ‘civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.

Supercacafragilisticexpialidocious!

Not worth a separate post, but it has been brought to my attention that there is a word tetraplegia that is synonymous with quadriplegia and that, according to the OED (entry from 1986), has been around, if not in general use (it’s not in my print M-W or AHD), since 1911. Why?? I realize that quadri- is Latin and ‑plegia is ultimately from Greek (though we got it from Latin), but so what? Does that justify creating a pointless alternative term just to confuse people? What’s next, teleorasis for television?

Saleem Vaillancourtaz writes in LRB blog about a movie I’d definitely like to see:

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent screening of his movie Universal Language. I come from both countries, but it’s the furniture gag that struck home. Written by Rankin, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, the film is set in a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian. Buildings are covered with Persian signs (one says ‘Robert H. Smith School’); carts sell cooked beets, an old Iranian staple.

When I spoke with Rankin and Nemati after the screening, they said the movie is neither Iranian nor Canadian (though it’s Canada’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars). Nemati, who plays a tour guide showing visitors around Winnipeg (‘this is one of the first residential structures in the historic beige district’), recalled the praise offered by one ‘Iranian grandma’ at a Toronto screening. ‘She wasn’t a cinephile, but she said she just felt the film,’ that it connected people during a time of ‘distance’. Universal Language is not didactic, Rankin said, but ‘the experience of watching it does propose a way of looking at the world, and I think that’s what people respond to.’[…]

‘I liked that there was this strange echo on the other side of the world,’ he said, between his family’s history and Iranian cinema. I suggested that Universal Language speaks to the strand in Iranian culture that uses the particular to speak to the universal. The ‘Iranian-ness’ in the film ‘is not really Iranian-ness’, Nemati replied. He mentioned the Saadi poem at the entrance to the United Nations building in New York. ‘Persian poetry became universal because it wasn’t Iranian any more,’ he said. ‘Winnipeg, in Persian, loses itself and finds itself again.’

According to Rankin, the film inhabits ‘this new third space … at the confluence of different stories and experiences and understandings and baggage, and that’s what’s fun about the movie. It doesn’t belong in one Tupperware container that is sealed off from all other Tupperware containers.’

An Iranianized version of Canada — what a great concept for a movie!

Syntinen Laulu wrote in this Wordorigins thread, in response to a comment about Theodoric:

When I was young I was greatly puzzled by his moniker in German legend being Dietrich von Bern. What had he to do with Berne, I wondered? I don’t know how long it took me to find out that that was (still is, for all I know) the German name for Verona.

I responded:

No, they call it Verona just like us; that German Wikipedia article doesn’t even mention the “Bern” form except in a brief reference to Theodoric:

Aus dem Sagenkreis um Dietrich von Bern stammt auch der alte Name der Stadt: „Dietrichsbern“. Weiterhin war in alter Zeit die Bezeichnung „Welsch-Bern“ gebräuchlich (zimbrisch: Bearn)

[The old name of the city also comes from the legends surrounding Dietrich von Bern: “Dietrichsbern”. Furthermore, the name “Welsch-Bern” was used in ancient times (Cimbrian: Bearn).]

So I began to wonder about it, and googled up Dietrich von Bern und Karl der Große by Wim S. W. Rass, who says on p. 37:

Doch ist „Dittrichs-Bern“ eine Ortsbezeichnung für Verona, die es in dieser Form erst seit dem Spätmittelalter gibt […]. Mir ist sie noch nirgendwo sonst begegnet. Man beachte aber, dass hier nicht Dietrich nach dem Ort („von Bern“) benannt ist, sondern der Ort nach Dittrich benannt wurde (also gewissermaßen das „Bern des Dietrich“). Und es dürfte sich außerdem um eine germanische, vielleicht eine „deutsche“ Bezeichnung handeln, aber wohl kaum um eine lateinische / gotische / langobardische / italienische.

He goes on to discuss the issue at some length, but I have no idea how seriously to take him, and I wonder if “Bern” for Verona exists outside of the Dietrich story. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Trevor Joyce has a poem called “The Turlough,” part of his 1995 collection stone floods (reprinted in With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold — see this post), that starts:

It is raining elsewhere

Vertical rivers reverse
stone floods
the karst domain
each sink turns source

and ends:

There is thunder now elsewhere

Under an incandescent sky
flash floods
spread out this lake
is on no map

The end note begins:

The turloughs or winter lakes of western Ireland occur in areas of karstic limestone. Rain falling on this land drains away through swallow-holes or sinks, but precipitation anywhere within the watershed may cause the water table to rise again above the valley floor, whereupon streams issue through the crevices by which they had previously drained away.

Of course I was curious about the word, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1915), which in lieu of a definition says “(See quots.)”:
[Read more…]