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Allan Metcalf has a Lingua Franca piece on the word equinox which is mildly amusing but which I wouldn’t bother posting here except for this bit: “So getting back to equinox: The first observation is that there are two exquinoxes (yes, that’s the plural) every year…” My first reaction was “No, that isn’t the plural, what the hell are you talking about?” But of course I’ve learned not to trust first reactions, so I looked it up and confirmed my sense of things: not only is there no mention of such a plural in my various dictionaries (though there is an alternative plural equinoctes), but an Advanced Search of the OED produces the unequivocal “No results found for ‘exquinoxes’.” In other words, this silly form does not occur anywhere in the text, citations, or etymologies of the most comprehensive dictionary of English. So I was about to write an indignant letter to Allan Metcalf saying “What the hell are you talking about?” … but I decided to make one last try and search Google Books, and to my amazement there were pages of results like “The Ouse, or Isis, as Sir Henry Spelman says is its proper name, ‘is remarkable for its extraordinary over-flowing’ at the two Exquinoxes” (1781), “Great atmospherical commotions also excite and exasperate them, and hence they are more obstreperous, and require more care at the period of the exquinoxes than at any other time” (1839), “The port of Tripoli is anything but a safe one, the rottenness of its bottom rendering the anchorage very unstable, especially during the tremendous gales that blow there during the exquinoxes” (1878), “that anyone should have mixed up three arbitrary methods of determining the exquinoxes of a planet” (1902), etc. They’re virtually all from the nineteenth or very early twentieth centuries, but there are recent outliers, e.g. “FE and HE are the group means for vernal and autumnal exquinoxes, respectively” (1973) and “The exact dates of the Vernal and Autumnal Exquinoxes may vary by a day or two” (2001). Does anybody have any idea what might be going on here? How was this misbegotten form invented, and how did people get the idea it was a good thing to keep using?

Update. After all that, it tunrs out that “exquinoxes” was in fact a typo as some commenters suggested, and Prof. Metcalf has asked his editors to correct it. Ah well, we all had fun guessing!

I had seen links to Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello’s Scientific American piece “Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning,” but having recently posted yet another anti-Chomsky piece I thought I should probably let this one go by, much as the topic attracts me. However, reader elessorn sent it to me with this cover note:

Nothing in it will be new to you or most people on Languagehat, but I can’t recall seeing many articles like it before — lucid, anti-Chomskian without the ranting (not that I don’t like a good rant!), and with an upbeat outlook. The last one especially. All too often academic fights seem to involve a lot more “death to theory X” than “look what we can do now without theory X in the way.” This was a refreshing exception. Either way, I bet you’ll like the last paragraph.

He was absolutely correct about all of that, and I heartily recommend it. To give you a sample, after a good history of the dispute and the evidence against the Chomsky position, we get:

All of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong. Of course, scientists never give up on their favorite theory, even in the face of contradictory evidence, until a reasonable alternative appears. Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived. The theory, which takes a number of forms, proposes that grammatical structure is not in­­nate. Instead grammar is the product of history (the processes that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next) and human psychology (the set of social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place). More important, this theory proposes that language recruits brain systems that may not have evolved specifically for that purpose and so is a different idea to Chomsky’s single-gene mutation for recursion.

In the new usage-based approach (which includes ideas from functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar), children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. Instead they inherit the mental equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: a set of general-purpose tools—such as categorization, the reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making, with which children build grammatical categories and rules from the language they hear around them.

The new approach (which of course is discussed in greater detail) sounds sensible to me. And here’s that last paragraph:

Universal grammar appears to have reached a final impasse. In its place, research on usage-based linguistics can provide a path forward for empirical studies of learning, use and historical development of the world’s 6,000 languages.

This piece by Daniel A. Gross in the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner series is a moving account of two men who have had a close, though largely epistolary, relationship ever since 2004, when Robin Woods sent Mark Stevens a letter beginning “I am writing to you at this time to advise you of a misprint…” (My thanks to Paul Ogden for sending me the link.)

Back in June I posted about Janet Malcolm’s NYRB review [archived] of various Tolstoy translations; the letters section of the latest issue includes a full page of responses (and I thank Trevor and Rick for alerting me to it). The longest and most interesting is by translator Judson Rosengrant; he quotes Malcolm’s passage attacking Schwartz’s rendition of образуется by “shapify,” and continues:

The word in question, obrazovat’sia, given to Matvey in a conjugated form (“Nichego, sudar’, obrazuetsia”), is not in fact a neologism at all, nor is it meant to be funny (the “good joke” refers to Stiva’s ponderous witticism about the German clock master who visits the Oblonsky home every Friday). There is, however, more at stake here than the accurate identification of a lexical category, or the intention of a phrase, and the issues deserve an extended analysis. In regard to the Russian word itself, there are two main aspects: the morphological and the semantic.

The morphological aspect is straightforward. The root obraz is very old, going back at least a millennium, and is found not only in Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic but also in other Slavic languages. The derivational suffix –ovat’, used to turn the root noun into a verb, is very well established, too, and so is the additional reflexive suffix –sia that makes the transitive verb an intransitive, passive one, as in the usage in question: obraz-ovat’-sia. Thus the structure of the word was not new, nor were any of its elements; it was and is a very standard Russian verb with a deep history and not a neologism either for Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, or for Goncharov in Oblomov in the 1850s, or for the critic Belinsky in the 1840s, or for Pushkin in the 1820s and 1830s in the several places that he used it.

This means that any translator wishing to render obrazovat’sia in English must respect the brute historical fact that, unlike the bizarre word “shapify” cited by Malcolm, it is not an unusual form at all but rather a very ordinary one that does not call attention to itself as such (something that would in any case have been quite uncharacteristic of Tolstoy, whose innovations were syntactic and in the sheer cognitive wealth, range, and precision of his vocabulary).

The semantic aspect is more complex. Because of its long history, the word has multiple meanings, some archaic or obsolete, some still active, some more colloquial, some less so, but all overlapping in their basic sense, and all—as with any usage—affected by the various ways in which the word has been employed. Briefly, the root obraz denotes an image, a representation, a picture, or an icon (it is commonly used that way in current Russian), and, by extension, a form, with the verb meaning, in modern Russian, to represent or depict (to produce an image of), to constitute, to give form or a form to, to result in, or even to educate (as in the formation of a mind).

Some of those meanings and others were latent, at least to some degree, in Matvey’s colloquial use of the word, but the one that is operative is the one that Stiva made so by selecting it, by eagerly seizing upon it and repeating it, thereby providing (as Tolstoy contrived it, for the issue here is the intricacy of his art) what will for the attentive reader have been a moment of rich thematic implication.

There’s considerably more, and I recommend reading the entire discussion (at the last link); it’s rare that a general-interest periodical sees such detailed analysis of Russian morphology and semantics!

I was more than usually pleased to see Arika Okrent’s latest mental_floss post, 5 Annoying Latin Errors from an Ancient List That Predicted Latin’s Descendants, because for decades now I’ve been trying to remember or find out the source of my vague memory of a Late Latin peever’s list of incorrect words that were actually (in hindsight) proto-Romance, and this is it!

Sometime around the 7th century, a grammarian got fed up and started collecting all the annoying mistakes that people kept making in Latin. He wrote them up in the Appendix Probi, a straightforward list of the “say this, not that” variety. The most interesting thing about the Appendix Probi is not that it shows that people have always been making usage errors, but that the errors people made in Latin show the specific ways that Latin turned into its descendants, the Romance languages, including Spanish, French, and Italian.

The Appendix Probi, that’s the ticket! Arika quotes “Februarius non Febrarius,” “Auris non Oricla,” “Calida non Calda,” “Exequiae non Execiae,” and “Tabula non Tabla,” and you can see the whole magnificent list here. Another long-time dream fulfilled by the internet; thanks, 21st century!

I’ve gotten to the Sixth Promenade in The Gallery (see this post), in which the narrator finally gets to Naples after a spell in North Africa, and was delighted to come upon a passage of linguistic interest. After an extended “poetic” peroration on the standard language (“Italian is a language as natural as the human breath…”), he gets to the local dialect, and becomes more descriptive:

I remember also the dialect of the city of Naples, which is Italian chewed to shreds in the mouth of a hungry man. It varies even within the city. The fishermen in the bay talk differently from the rich in the Vomero. Every six blocks in the squashed-together city there’s a new dialect. It’s as raw as tenement living, as mercurial as a thief to your face, as tender as the flesh on the breast. Sometimes in one sentence it’s all three. The stateliness of Tuscan Italian is missing in Neapolitan. But there’s no false stateliness in Naples either, except in some alien fountain presented by a Duchess of Lombardy. Neapolitan dialect isn’t ornamental. Its endings have been amputated just as Neapolitan living pares to the heart and hardness of life. Wild sandwiches occur in the middle of words, doublings of z’s, cramming of m’s and n’s. When they say something, the Neapolitans scream and moan and stab and hug and vituperate. All at once. And O God, their gestures! The hand before the groin, the finger under the chin, the cluckings, the head-shakings. In each sentence they seem to recapitulate all the emotions that human beings know. They die and live and faint and desire and despair. I remember the dialect of Naples. It was the most moving language I ever listened to. […] Those tongues that spoke it were like lizards warm in the sun, jiggling their tails because they were alive.

There’s Hemingway-era manly poeticizing there, too, but you’ve got to love “Wild sandwiches occur in the middle of words.”

In an earlier chapter there’s an amusing portrait of a villain who “could never forgive the war for interrupting his doctor’s dissertation in Erse philology” and who “always carried with him Fowler’s Modern English Usage,” and when in the course of sucking up to the foolish and bigoted head of the censorship department (whom he calls “a modern Actaeon”) he uses the word “bigwigs” adds: “Pardon the vulgarism…” Beware a man brandishing Fowler!

I had heard of Victor Segalen only fleetingly and long ago, and I’m not even sure whether in connection with poetry or Sinology, but he was clearly an interesting guy: the (absurdly skimpy) Wikipedia article says he was “a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic” and that he “died by accident in a forest in Huelgoat, France (‘under mysterious circumstances’ and reputedly with an open copy of Hamlet by his side).” The much more expansive French Wikipedia article goes into detail about his two expeditions to China, whose language he studied and loved; what Wesleyan University Press calls “his bilingual poetic masterpiece Stèles / 古今碑錄” sounds amazing:

Stèles / 古今碑錄 is a hermetic collection of wry, intriguing, and at times haunting prose poems that are presented like translations of imaginary Chinese “steles” or inscribed stone monuments (shibei 石碑), each of which bears a heading in classical Chinese — sometimes quoted from classical texts or actual monuments, sometimes composed in literary Chinese by Segalen himself. Although written in a tightly formal French and a broadly allusive style in imitation of Chinese inscriptions, these poems often speak of the more intimate matters of friendship and erotic love, the self and otherness, the spiritual and supernatural, in addition to the corruptions within organized religions (from Buddhism to Christianity). Among Segalen’s creative work, this collection of poems is the most sustained and concentrated realization of his ideas about l’exotisme and the transformative power of what he termed le Divers or la Diversité. It is a truly original work that continually thwarts the expectations of the typical critiques of Orientalism, and that has an immediate appeal and an enduring interest to lovers of poetry and theorists alike.

Wesleyan has published it in two volumes; the first, which contains a facsimile reproduction of the 1914 edition, a complete English translation, and extensive critical notes and materials, is available only in print, but they’ve put the text online, and “Volume Two (available only online) contains excerpts of sources and contexts as well as the unpublished stèles found in Segalen’s manuscripts, and much more.” What a great thing to do! I’m very glad to know about it, and I thank Jon for the link — it is, as he says, “a lovely model for how to share this sort of scholarship.”

(Incidentally, the name of the Breton village where he died, An Uhelgoad, means ‘high woods’; uhel ‘high’ = Welsh uchel, and koad ‘woods’ = Welsh coed. I don’t know whether there are standard rules of Frenchification that explain why it’s Huelgoat in French.)

Merrill Perlman has an edifying rundown of the chaotic situation with regard to single or double consonants before suffixes in English. After laying out what might laughably be called the rules, she says:

“Worship(p)er” is a victim of the confusion that can arise when there are too many “rules.” Generally, the final consonant is not doubled if the last syllable is not accented (in American English, that is), as in “listen/listener.” That means “worshiper” should be a no-brainer. For whatever reason, though, as Bryan A. Garner says in Garner’s Modern English Usage, the single “p” never caught on in American English; the double “p” appears three times as often as the single.

Let’s move to the “l” problem, which is where British and American English diverge the most. someone is a “jeweller” there and a “jeweler” here; a legal document is “initialled” there and “initialed” here. And a favorite TV show is “cancelled” there and “canceled” here. Most words that end in “l” add a second one before many suffixes that begin with vowels.

Except.

In The New Yorker and Chicago style, the show is “cancelled.” Just to play with your head more, everyone uses “cancellation.” And though many dictionaries, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Moon prefer “tranquillity,” many people seem to prefer “tranquility.”

The important thing to remember, as we say so often, is that sometimes things are not necessarily “right” or “wrong,” just a matter of choice or style. With doubled consonants before a suffix, the answer sometimes is simply “it depends.” Or, maybe, you could look it up.

An admirable conclusion. Just to repeat for emphasis: sometimes things are not necessarily “right” or “wrong,” just a matter of choice or style. Life would be so much more pleasant if people would keep that in mind.

One of the incidental pleasures of reading books like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery, in which people bounce around between cities, is discovering another example of the Grand Historic Hotel, one of my favorite phenomena. To honor the occasion, I’ve compiled a list of them, the sort of place movie stars, counts, and foreign correspondents were likely to be found in l’entre-deux-guerres, having a drink on the terrace or losing their shirts in the casino. I’ve had to eliminate those with excessively common monikers like Grand, Plaza, Europe, Ritz, and Astor(ia); I’ve arranged names and cities alphabetically, and your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to match them. There are no prizes, since this stuff is easily googled. The city names are historic because the hotels are, and this is an exercise in nostalgia. I imagine most of you will recognize at least a few, but I doubt anyone will know them all. (Alas, I have only stayed in one, but I have had eaten in another and set eyes on a couple more.) Without further ado, the hotels:

Aletti
Baron
Cathay
Cecil
Continental
Grande Bretagne
Imperial
La Mamounia
Nacional
Peninsula
Pera Palace
Phoenicia
Raffles
Shepheard’s
Strand

And the cities:

Aleppo
Alexandria
Algiers
Athens
Beirut
Cairo
Havana
Hong Kong
Istanbul
Marrakech
Rangoon
Saigon
Shanghai
Singapore
Tokyo

Needless to say, I welcome both additions and anecdotes. (Oh, and there’s a nice list of historic hotels here.)

Alison Flood reports on a clever initiative:

It’s not quite as vital as the battles to save the likes of the Amur leopard and giant panda from extinction, but a campaign to preserve a host of endangered regional American words and phrases has been launched, looking to save the likes of “wamus” to “sonsy”, and “spouty” to “bonnyclabber”.

The list of 50 words and phrases was compiled by the Dictionary of American Regional English, a project that has been running since 1965, when almost 3,000 face-to-face interviews were conducted with people across the US to map the thousands of differences in dialect across the states. DARE has chosen the words it believes to be “on the cusp of extinction” and teamed up with podcasting platform Acast, asking its producers and presenters to “adopt” an endangered word or phrase and use it on their shows.

The words and phrases range from to “be on one’s beanwater”, a New England phrase that means to be in high spirits or to feel frisky, to the south Atlantic verb “to fleech”, meaning to coax, wheedle or flatter. A heavy rain is described as a “frog strangler” in the southern states and south midlands, or a “goose drownder” in the midlands; “to vum” is to swear or declare in New England; “the last button on Gabe’s coat” is used in the south to refer to the last bit of food.

“Although language change is inevitable, it’s too bad to see some of our most colourful expressions going out of use,” said Joan Hall, former editor of DARE. “It would be fun to see them revitalised.”

I agree, and I hope people will take them up on it; the piece ends with a list of “the 50 endangered words and phrases.” A couple of quibbles: they should have made more of an effort to separate out “cute dialectal terms that nobody else is ever going to use” (e.g., Racket store: a variety store; Skillpot: a turtle) from words that one can imagine being adopted (Cuddy: a small room, closet, or cupboard; Fogo: An offensive smell; Sonsy: cute, charming, lively). Also, Shat: a pine needle? Get serious. (Thanks, Trevor!)