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Trying to finish last week’s New Yorker before the new one arrives, I began “The End of Ice: Exploring a Himalayan glacier” by the estimable Dexter Filkins and was pulled up short before I finished the first paragraph:

The journey to the Chhota Shigri Glacier, in the Himalayan peaks of northern India, begins thousands of feet below, in New Delhi—a city of twenty-five million people, where smoke from diesel trucks and cow-dung fires dims the sky and where the temperature on a hot summer day can reach a hundred and fifteen degrees. The route passes through a churning sprawl of low-land cities, home to some fifty million people, until the Himalayas come into view: a steep wall rising above the plains, the product of a tectonic collision that began thousands of years ago and is still under way.

“Thousands of years ago?” I thought. “What the hell?” I looked it up, and found what I expected: “The Himalayan mountain range and Tibetan plateau have formed as a result of the collision between the Indian Plate and Eurasian Plate which began 50 million years ago and continues today.” But then it occurred to me that, technically, “thousands of years ago” is perfectly correct — it’s just a whole lot of thousands. And I reflected on how it is we use such words; there’s no fixed amount at which it stops making sense to say “thousands” (you could certainly use it of something that happened, say, 12,000 years ago, but not a million years ago, and I personally would stop well before the 100,000-year mark), but that doesn’t mean it’s endlessly flexible. I guess it’s a sorites problem.

At any rate, when I went to the online version of the article to copy the paragraph, I found it had been rewritten to say “a tectonic collision that began millions* of years ago,” with a footnote reading: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified when the tectonic collision that formed the Himalayas began.” So for the New Yorker, at any rate, “thousands” here wasn’t just absurdly understated, it was out-and-out incorrect.

I recently read Marcel Möring’s novel In Babylon (translated by Stacey Knecht), and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys tangled family tales with supernatural/mystical elements but doesn’t worry overmuch about prosaic answers or how it all hangs together. My wife and I both felt let down, after initial enjoyment of the growing mystery and complexity, by how it just sort of petered out after a grab-bag of Major Events suddenly being tossed into the mix. But I’m not sorry I read it, because I learned a useful word from it. You know those dealies you open and close French windows with? You turn a lever, and a long rod goes into or emerges from holes at the top and bottom, fastening or freeing the door? Those are called espagnolettes, presumably because the French associate them with Spain, or did when they coined the word. Now you know (except for AJP Crown, who probably knew all along).

Processing tax statements could be a frustrating job for any individual. It requires lots of energy to keep track of all revenue and expenses throughout every season. Many people perhaps employ duty instructors to complete their personal taxation statements. Nonetheless, if you FAIL to afford several of those consultants’ extreme charges, you might have to really make the finest of one’s busily held documents do yourself to it. More excruciating than paying the specific taxes is filling the federal income tax types out. [Read more…]

Katie Butler Gao, a PhD student in linguistics, is working on an interesting project:

The Language of Tea (2015, work in progress)

The word for “tea” in the majority of the world’s languages comes from a borrowing of either the Northern Chinese word cha or the Southern Chinese word te (e.g. the Hindi word chai and the English word tea). The widespread borrowing of the word for ‘tea’ is linguistically fascinating because it is directly related to contact that occurred through major land and sea trade routes since the 15th century.

Inspired by the WALS chapter on tea and Dan Jurafsky’s The Language of Food (2014), this map is a project that grew out of a 2014 Map Design and Production course, taught by Everett Wingert in the UH Mānoa Geography Department.

The map (above) was originally designed as a wall map, but I hope to develop this into a digital interactive map more readily accessible online. I am in the process of converting the language names and words for tea into a spreadsheet with longitude and latitude points. I currently have around 300 languages (for aesthetic reasons), but would like to add more to a digital version!

If you would like to contribute information on your language or one you know about, shoot me an email at katiebgao@gmail.com with this information: language name, location of language (long/lat point would be great), word for ‘tea’ in Romanized script and local script, variations of the word for Camellia sinensis or words for other local kinds of tea (i.e. leaves/herbs steeped in water to make a beverage).

Here’s a direct link to the map; I wrote about Jurafsky’s blog The Language of Food, and his post Tea if by Sea, here. Thanks, Yoram!

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s NY Times story is not your standard “saving the dying languages” piece (of which I’ve featured many over the years here at LH); in a sense, it’s not about the languages at all, but I thought it was interesting enough to post:

A growing number of [composers] are turning their attention to languages that are extinct, endangered or particular to tiny groups of speakers in far-flung places with the aim of weaving these enigmatic utterances into musical works that celebrate, memorialize or mourn the languages and the cultures that gave birth to them. On Saturday, April 9, at the Cologne Opera in Germany, the Australian composer Liza Lim unveils her opera “Tree of Codes,” which includes snippets of a Turkish whistling language from a small mountain village. On her most recent album, “The Stone People,” the pianist Lisa Moore sings and plays Martin Bresnick’s hypnotic “Ishi’s Song,” a setting of a chant by the last member of the Yahi, who died in 1916.

In February the New York Philharmonic performed Tan Dun’s multimedia symphony “Nu Shu,” the result of the composer’s research into a language and writing system that was passed down among the female inhabitants of a small village in Hunan Province in China for 700 years. Other composers who have done their own fieldwork include Vivian Fung, who investigated minority cultures in the Chinese province of Yunnan, and Kevin James, who sought out some of the last native speakers of minority languages in the Pacific Northwest, Australia and Japan.

A humorous side note involves the following paragraph:

In a phone interview, Mr. Bresnick said it was a television documentary about Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe, that inspired his work for piano and voice. He said he related the story to his mother, a fluent Yiddish speaker, who was then 94 years old. “I told her, ‘You’re my Ishi, you’re the last to speak this language,’” he said. “She pointedly looked at me and said: ‘No, you are. Because you still care to know.’”

I was reading rather hastily, and my first reaction was “Ishi’s mother was a fluent Yiddish speaker?!” But then I reread and all was clear.

I’m glad Fonseca-Wollheim mentioned “ethical questions of outsiders’ drawing financial benefit or prestige from such expeditions, or using the recorded voices of the dead in cultures where that is taboo,” and it’s important to consider such objections, but I’m glad the composers are going ahead and working with these languages; I will always lean toward favoring openness over secrecy. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

The latest New Yorker leads off with an article called “Come to the Fair” (“The food-and-booze fest that is France’s national agricultural exhibition”) by Lauren Collins; before I had read a word, the photo of a butcher’s display at the Salon de l’Agriculture made me want to move to France. But I digress — I’m bringing it here for this paragraph:

In 2013, the first year I went to the Salon, I was living in Geneva. One Sunday morning, my husband and I caught the seven-forty-two train to Paris. By eleven-thirty […], we were sampling what would become my favorite delicacy in all the land, the tourteau fromagé of Poitou-Charentes. (Giving Mancunians and Arkansawyers a run for their money in the demonym stakes, the area’s residents are known as the Picto-Charentais.) The tourteau fromagé is—getting into the compound-word spirit here—a goatcheesecake. The shortcrust pastry of the bottom part forms a lip where it meets the upper half, which rises domelike from the cereal-bowl-shaped base, and looks as though it were composed of volcanic ash. The burnt top is deceiving. It imparts just the slightest char, in the manner of a good pizza crust. The inside is tangy. Poke the crumb, and your finger emerges feeling almost wet, as though you’d stuck it into a loofah. At Tourteaux Jahan, Joël Ricard’s stand in Pavilion 3, the wares are displayed on risers, like a boys’ choir at a holiday concert. Ricard has been coming to the Salon since 1983. In a week, he sells five thousand cakes.

I love a good demonym (see this post, and note the update in which I point out that Garner has actually amended the sillier entries in his list), and Picto-Charentais is certainly among the very best. I must say, though, she missed an opportunity with “goatcheesecake”; surely, getting into the Picto-Charentais spirit would mean calling it “capricaseate cake.”

Dan Nosowitz’s “The Enduring Mystery Of ‘Jawn’, Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun” is a fascinating look at a feature of Philadelphia English, though Nosowitz goes way overboard claiming uniqueness for it:

The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”

But after riffing for a while on how amazing it is, he gets down to business:

“The consensus is that it came from ‘joint,’ and from New York,” says Jones. Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist who’s written and talked about “jawn” before, agrees, writing in an email that “‘jawn’ evidently developed as a Philly variant of ‘joint’ in the ’80s,” following the release of the popular 1981 single “That’s The Joint” by Funky Four Plus One, an early hip-hop group from the Bronx.

The word “joint” has a much older set of meanings. Originally from the Latin iunctus, it was Old French that turned it into “joint,” meaning a connection or association, multiple things coming together, a juncture. The definition broadened in the American southeast around the time of emancipation, with the prominence of “juke joints,” bars and clubs that served as safe spaces for black Americans to come together and hang out. The concept of a joint as a place expanded a bit, and is still in use today; think of a pizza joint.

There are a few other meanings of joint, the drug slang being the most common. Since “joint” was used already as a place, and specifically, in the minds of some Americans, as a disreputable place, it came to be used for other disreputable places: betting parlors at first, then opium dens. The opium joint led to the word becoming kind of a general purpose slang in the drug world for paraphernalia, and by the 1950s the word was firmly and commonly understood to refer to a cigarette-like roll of marijuana.

Funky Four Plus One’s use, though, is one of the earliest recorded uses of the word as a kind of general, positive term. Calling something “the joint” means it’s something you like, something that you connect with, and a slight tweak of that to “my joint” means that it’s something that you cheerfully embrace as yours.

There’s much more, including discussions of “semantic bleaching,” Labov’s Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, African-American Vernacular English, and the diverging of white and black dialects in Philly, not to mention a YouTube clip of “That’s The Joint” (a record I remember fondly from my first years in New York). Thanks, Bonnie!

Last year we discussed Curse Words as Dialect Maps; now Stan Carey at Strong Language has a much wider selection in his post Sweary maps 2: Swear harder. He says he “went searching for swears and euphemisms” and found “some intriguing – and visually very appealing – patterns of rude word use in contemporary discourse”; there are maps for af (as fuck), asf (as fuck), badass, bullshit, cock, crappy, dammit, damnit, damned, dang, dick, dickhead, douchebag, effing, fart, freakin, freaking, frick, frickin, friggin, fuck, fucked, fucker, fuckers, fuckery, fuckin, fucking, fw (fuck with), goddamn, gtfo (get the fuck out), heck, idgaf (I don’t give a fuck), lmfao (laughing my fucking ass off), mf (motherfucker/-ing), mofo, motherfucking, nigga, omfg (oh my fucking god), piss, pissed, pissy, prick, scum, shit, shits, shitty, shittiest, shitting, slutty, stfu (shut the fuck up), sucks, swear, tf (the fuck), twat, turd, wtf (what the fuck), and wth (what the hell). Enjoy! (Via the Log.)

I just discovered by accident something I’m very glad to know exists, the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. At $356.92, it’s not going to be showing up on my bookshelves, but Google Books and Amazon’s Look Inside the Book will allow me to use it to some extent, and of course in cases of desperation there’s always the library. Here’s a sample, the discussion of Aksyonov’s Звёздный билет/A Starry Ticket (see this LH post):

[Alec] Brown’s translation (1962) of Aksenov’s second novel, under the title A Starry Ticket, is notable for its often incongruous rendering of colloquial speech and slang expressions. Brown translates most of the slang with English and American slang equivalents taken from a variety of epochs and regions, which often results in an unnerving tension between the characters’ speech and Soviet realia. An old woman in chapter 1 erupts in archaic English: “It fair makes me blood run cold.” Brown often translates neutral Russian expressions with clumsy colloquialisms: drinking becomes “gurgling down”; tired of becomes “fed up to the gills with”; a grade of C becomes a “just-scraped-through”. Even more curious in this translation are Brown’s unwarranted additions to the text. When the narrator sits by the window to shave, Brown adds, in parentheses, “to get the light”. Inaccuracies abound, including mistakes in rendering tense in English, and Brown takes great liberties in translating the chapter headings. [Andrew] MacAndrew’s translation (1963) of Zvezdnyi bilet appeared a year after Brown’s under the title A Ticket to the Stars. This translation is readable and avoids the gross inaccuracies and ill-chosen turns of phrase typical of Brown’s translation. MacAndrew tends consistently to choose slang equivalents from standard American slang, avoiding expressions that too vividly conjure images of the culture of the target text.

Isn’t that useful? Now I know where to send people who want to know which is the best translation of some foreign work.

Over at Wordorigins.org, OP Tipping quotes Silk Road Seattle’s page “The Kingdom of Da Qin 大秦 (the Roman Empire)“:

Da Qin 大秦 [Ta Ch’in] = Rome or Roman territory, depending on the context. The use of such a name (literally, ‘Great Qin’ = Great China) for a foreign state probably reflects the common process of mythologizing distant and unfamiliar cultures. Pulleyblank (1999), p. 77 notes that it “…is clearly not a transcription of a foreign word” and that the “…earliest datable occurrence seems to be with reference to Gān Ying’s mission of 97 C.E.”

and asks, “Why would China call Rome ‘the Great China’?” I thought that was an excellent question, and since Hatters did such a good job with Dashi (what the Chinese called the Arabs in the 8th century), I thought I’d bring it here. Anybody know anything?