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Cecily Hilleary of VOA News writes about a remarkable recent find and the history it represents:

In early September 1930, the Blackfeet Nation of Montana hosted a historic Indian Sign Language Grand Council, gathering leaders of a dozen North American Nations and language groups.

The three-day council held was organized by Hugh L. Scott, a 77-year-old U.S. Army General who had spent a good portion of his career in the American West, where he observed and learned what users called Hand Talk, and what is today more broadly known as Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). With $5,000 in federal funding, Scott filmed the proceedings and hoped to produce a film dictionary of more than 1,300 signs. He died before he could finish the project.

Scott’s films disappeared into the National Archives. Recently rediscovered, they are an important resource for those looking to revitalize PISL.

Among them is Ron Garritson, who identifies himself as being of Cree, Cherokee and European heritage. He was raised in Billings, Montana, near the Crow Nation.

“I learned how to speak Crow to a degree, and I was really interested in the sign language,” he said. “I saw it being used by the Elders, and I thought it was a beautiful form of communication. And so I started asking questions.”

Garritson studied Scott’s films, along with works by other ethnographers and now has a vocabulary of about 1,700 signs. He conducts workshops and classes across Montana, in an effort to preserve and spread sign language and native history.

Prior to contact with Europeans, North American Native peoples were not a unified culture, but hundreds of different cultures and tribes, each with its own political organization, belief system and language. When speakers of one language met those of another, whether in trade, councils or conflict, they communicated in the lingua franca of Hand Talk.

Scholars dispute exactly when, in their 30,000-year history in North America, tribes developed sign language. It was observed among Florida tribes by 16th Century Spanish colonizers. […]

While each tribe had its own dialect, tribes were able to communicate easily. Though universal in North America, Hand Talk was more prominent among the nomadic Plains Nations.

“There were fewer linguistic groups east of the Mississippi River,” said Garritson. “They were mostly woodland tribes, living in permanent villages and were familiar with each other’s languages. They still used sign language to an extent, but not like it was used out here.” […]

By the late 1800s, tens of thousands of Native Americans still used Hand Talk. That changed when the federal government instituted a policy designed to “civilize” tribal people.

There’s more history at the link, along with an eight-minute clip from the film, a useful map, and photos. Thanks, Trevor!

I always enjoy limericks and have posted about them before (e.g., here); now, courtesy of Mark Liberman at the Log, I bring you Stephen Goranson’s suggestion as to the origin of the name:

Might the English verse form have gotten its Irish name in America? Maybe, maybe not, but consider the entry on Limerick in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Jonathan Lighter, editor). “Come to Limerick”–only in American slang–used to mean, more or less, to settle, to come to terms. Members of the American Dialect Society discussion list added to the three examples given in the Dictionary. They range in date from 1859 to about the end of the century. The first uses mostly relate to the looming and then raging U.S. Civil War; they later referred to more diverse put-up-or-shut-up situations. (More details to come in the comments, if interested.) There were many “Limericks” published then in America. I suggest the reference was to the end of the earlier Irish Civil War that was partly concluded with the Treaty of Limerick.

The OED quotes J. H. Murray–not to be confused with J. A. H. Murray, the OED editor (proof available on request)–in 1898 writing in Notes & Queries that Limericks were offered at convivial parties with the “come [up] to Limerick” chorus sung as a challenge for a new verse: in effect, offer another new one or surrender.

Admittedly, the above does not prove an American origin of the name. But here’s another hint that the name did not refer to poets literally and literarily from Limerick, having left, as the Treaty allowed, in the Jacobite “Flight of the Wild Geese” to France. In 1881 the Church of England Bishop of Limerick, who was also a poet (and relative of author Robert Graves), received an honorary degree from Oxford. This is recounted by his son, also named Charles Graves, in “The Cult of the Limerick,” Cornhill Magazine, Feb 1918, 158-66 (here 158):

“…he [the Bishop, in June, 1881] was greeted in the Sheldonian by cries of “Won’t you come up, come up, Won’t you come up to Limerick town?”–which we believe to be the correct form of the refrain. But the reason for the connection of the City of the Violated Treaty with this particular form of pasquinade remains, as Stevenson said of the young penny-whistler, ‘occult from observation.'”

(I have added the italics.) There is, of course, good stuff in the comments.

Charles Dillon, editor of the Foclóir Stairiúil Gaeilge [Historical Dictionary of Irish], writes (for the Royal Irish Academy’s library blog) about Johann Kaspar Zeuss (1806-1856), whose magnum opus Grammatica Celtica (1853) “established incontrovertibly through the study of Old Irish sources the relationship of the Celtic languages to the Indo-European family”:

This was the age of ‘Celtomania’, a phenomenon which for want of learned, scientific and empirical research into their origins, had ascribed various fanciful and unproven ancestry to the Celtic languages, often relating them to mysterious peoples and exotic tongues. Only tentatively, by the time of Zeuss, had serious scholars suggested that Celtic was related to the Indo-European family, and it is notable that the great philologists Jacob Ludwig Grimm (he, with his brother Wilhelm, of fairytale fame) and Franz Bopp did not include Celtic in their great comparative surveys of German, Sanskrit, Zend (Avestan), Greek, Latin, Lithuanian and Gothic, which traced the ancestry of the premier European languages eastwards to the heart of India. […]

It was to this gap in the knowledge of the situation of Celtic that Zeuss addressed himself, setting about his task through his study of Old Irish sources. What is perhaps most remarkable by today’s standards is that he never visited Ireland, and it is questionable whether indeed he ever met an Irish speaker. His approach to the problem led him ad fontes; he travelled to libraries across Europe wherein were housed the earliest examples of written Irish. These were in the form of glosses, such as those found in Würzburg, Karlsruhe, Milan and Turin (mostly from the 8th century, but some in the so-called prima manus, from the 7th), in which commentaries in Irish on, for example, the epistles of Paul are found between lines and in text margins. Zeuss transcribed and interpreted these and other such examples and from his analysis he was able to lay out in Grammatica Celtica, for the first time, the grammar of the language. In his return to the earliest extant forms of the language, Zeuss was a pioneer; earlier in the eighteenth century the glosses had been identified as Irish but mistakes had been made in their interpretation. Zeuss brought to their study his modern training that enabled him to tackle the scientific study of any language. His reliance on the glosses is almost absolute, and he barely refers to any extant scholarship in Celtic, obviously preferring to build all his conclusions solely on the foundation of the sources.

Studying Old Irish made me happier than almost anything else I did in grad school, and the very words “Würzburg glosses” send me back forty years and more to the period when I was carrying around my beat-up copy of Thurneysen’s Grammar of Old Irish (1970 reprint of the 1946 translation); I now learn that Thurneysen’s work would have been impossible without his predecessor Zeuss, and I join Dillon in honoring him. Thanks, Trevor!

Almost a decade ago I posted about “Jewish Arabic” and “Muslim Arabic” in Iraq; now Jacky Hugi (translated by Aviva Arad) reports on an effort to preserve the former:

On Friday mornings in a class on the heritage of Babylonian Jewry, Oded Amit has taught a small group of Israelis to speak Jewish Iraqi, the language of his ancestors. Amit, 70, was born and raised in Baghdad, and Jewish Iraqi was the language in which his mother raised him.

“It’s a beautiful language, rich, full of wisdom and wit, but it is disappearing,” Amit told Al-Monitor. “What I’m doing is an attempt, perhaps desperate, to save something of it — to keep it alive a little longer. The younger generation doesn’t speak it anymore. They heard their aunt or grandma speaking it, but for them it’s not a mother tongue, it’s a curiosity.” […] Before Amit began teaching, he spent long hours extracting the rules of grammar from his mother’s language.

“I conjugated the verb ‘to write’ and derived the rules from that,” he said. “The problem is that there are many exceptions.” His work is important for historical documentation, because literature on the Babylonian dialect is relatively scant. It includes a dictionary published by Gila Yona and Rahamim Rajouan in 1995, a dictionary by Yitzhak Avishur published in 2008 and the updatable online collection of researcher Yehuda Katz from Herzliya. The Center for Babylonian Jewish Heritage has a collection of many items, including vocal and visual documentation of the language. It is clear to all that, within a decade at the most, the living language will no longer be heard. […]

One of the well-known aspects of the dialect of Babylonian Jewry is its juicy curses. Yona and Rajouan included an appendix dedicated to curses in their dictionary. Especially entertaining are those that wish death by certain means on others. Someone you wish to see hanged is called “maqtua al-raqba,” that is, “decapitated neck.” For someone you wish would die in agony, you say, “Nfaqsit eino,” that is, “May his eye burst.” For wishing a simple death, there’s the moniker “zawaj a-almana,” meaning “the widow’s husband.” If the death wish applies to several people, you say “wahad thakal lakh,” meaning “that each would mourn the other.” Many curses are surprisingly also forms of praise. For instance, the word “naghl,” meaning “bastard,” is a curse that suggests spitting at a father’s crotch, since thanks to it, the child came into the world. It is usually meant as an expression of admiration.

Thanks, Trevor!

The language blog linʛuischtick has been around for almost five years, but I was unaware of it until a reader alerted me to it (thanks, Yoram!). The About page says:

I’m a linguist working in Canada. I use this blog to write about linguistics and language analysis, focusing on problems with traditional (prescriptive) grammar. I also have a series on the International Phonetic Alphabet. My preference is to write long-form posts that consider an issue in detail. Currently, my schedule allows me to update this blog about once per month. I still regularly update my Twitter @LinguaDiem, where I post about as many languages as I can (now past 600!).

The blogger also has a Twitter account called LinguaDiem, where the goal is to post about as many languages as possible; it is discussed at this post from last year:

One thing that has surprised me about LinguaDiem is how easy it has been. I always hear about how little documentation exists for languages, but finding at least one source for 500 languages was not hard. I’m really wondering when this is going to slow down. On the other hand, I’m only looking for one paper to read, and I don’t care about the topic. If you’re a linguist who wants to do research on a specific language, or investigate a particular phenomenon, then things would be much harder.

I have only once had a request for a language. And that was the only time that I couldn’t dig up any information, damn it. If there’s someone reading who knows about Kono, please leave a comment, or contact me on Twitter.

One of the things that I struggle with is how to write the name of a language. Languages have an enormous array of consonants and vowels, and the English alphabet is not well-suited to writing all of them. For this reason, there are often disagreements about how to transcribe names. For instance, there is a language spoken in China that can be spelled Akeu, Akheu, Akui, or Aki. The group that speaks this language is variously known as the Akha, the Aini, or the Kha Kaw.

I’ve just started investigating the archives; looks like a lot of interesting stuff there. Oh, and the “funny G” in the blog name represents a voiced uvular implosive.

A MetaFilter post included a video on “how to wear a shemagh,” and I left a comment saying:

In case anybody else is ignorant/curious, like me, it turns out a shemagh is what I knew as a keffiyeh; Wiktionary says it’s “British military use, from Arabic شْمَاغ (šmāḡ).” Which would explain why Yanks like me don’t know it.

Another commenter wrote:

languagehat: I think the “shemagh” term is gaining heavy use in the US – at least among military and wannabees – thanks to US military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which means that various edc/prep/etc places sell them but with zombie skulls on them and such.

So of course now I want to know: do you, Varied Reader, know this term, and if so where do you know it from?

Novy Mir, the famous Russian (ex-Soviet) monthly literary magazine that published so many works that are now classics, has been putting its archives online; I got the news via XIX век, where Erik says “as of now they have most of 1925-30, everything since mid-1993, and isolated issues in between.” I have a treasured collection of old issues with their faded blue covers, and anyone who studied Russian, as I did, in the latter decades of the existence of the USSR will presumably be as pleased as I am at this news.

I’m only on the first chapter of Dominic Lieven’s The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution, but I can already tell it’s going to be one of those books I’ll recommend to people for years to come — I have to pause after just about every paragraph to think about what he just said and integrate it with what I already (thought I) knew. At any rate, one of his footnotes said “On the background to all the issues discussed in this paragraph, see A. Rose, Zwischen Empire und Kontinent: Britische Aussenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2011), esp. pp. 279–99 on Anglo-American relations,” and I was waylaid by the word Empire, which I didn’t recall seeing in a German context (the normal word for ’empire’ being Reich). The burning question was, how is it pronounced? It wasn’t in my pocket Bantam dictionary, so I went to the big gun, the Harper-Collins Unabridged (900 pages, weighs enough to stun a small bear with), and found it. I found it twice, in fact:

Empire ¹ [ãˈpiːɐ] nt -(s), no pl (Hist) Empire; (~stil) Empire style.

Empire ² [ˈɛmpaɪə] nt -(s), no pl (British) Empire.

So I guess since the referenced title appears to be about the British Empire, it would take the second pronunciation, which is essentially the English one (as opposed to the first, which is French). But this is an odd situation; can my German-speaking readers confirm for me that there are two (rare) words Empire with different pronunciations depending on whether the empire in question is British or not?

Gero Schliess reports on what the title accurately calls a “mammoth task”:

Precisely 70 years ago, the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin initiated the huge project of the Goethe dictionary – a lexicon precisely listing, describing and explaining every single word used by Goethe in his poems, dramas, letters, official writings and scientific essays.

In his speech on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the initiative, project manager Michael Niedermeier of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) said that back then, the time was ripe for this project.

Following the Nazi era, people were yearning for the imperturbable values epitomized by Goethe and his era. At the time, nobody could have imagined that the project would go on over several generations, including the reunification of Germany.

Goethe commanded the biggest ever documented individual lexicon of 93,000 words. The researchers have collected everything, ranging from verbs and nouns to prepositions and articles. Martin Luther, by comparison, “only” commanded 23,000 words.

It took more than 20 years just to list and evaluate these 93,000 words. But now, an end is in sight. In terms of lexical evaluation, the present team consisting of 17 academics has reached the letters S and T. It is hoped that the project will be completed in 2025. Originally, the researchers had the year 2040 in mind. However, the patience and the budget of the BBAW and of the academies in Heidelberg and Göttingen cooperating with it turned out to be limited after all.

Michael Niedermeier says the dictionary, whose website is here, is a “central instrument of exploring Classicism, and it will take decades and centuries until its full effect will be realized.” Hyperbolic, perhaps, but surely one is permitted a bit of proud hyperbole when discussing a project like this. Thanks, Trevor!

Your enraging tidbit for the day, courtesy of Tristan Bridges:

Knowledge production is a collective endeavor. Individuals get named as authors of studies and on the covers of books and journal articles. But little knowledge is produced in such a vacuum that it can actually be attributed to only those whose names are associated with the final product. Bruce Holsinger, a literary scholar at the University of Virginia, came up with an interesting way of calling attention to some of women’s invisible labor in this process–typing their husbands’ manuscripts.

Holsinger noted a collection of notes written by husbands to their wives thanking them for typing the entirety of their manuscripts (dissertations, books, articles, etc.), but not actually explicitly naming them in the acknowledgement. It started with five tweets and a hashtag: #ThanksForTyping.

The most mind-boggling one: “my wife typed my manuscript drafts as soon as I gave them to her, even though she was caring for our first child, born in June 1946, and was also teaching part time in the chemistry department.” There are many more examples at the first link, as well as an interesting Google Ngram; I got there via MetaFilter, where appropriate indignation is expressed (and further tales of women’s contributions being given a dismissive head-pat are provided).