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A NY Times Magazine piece by Lydia Kiesling about her experiences with the Uzbek language begins:

Four years ago, the federal government paid me a large sum — a year of graduate-school tuition, plus a stipend — to study Uzbek at the University of Chicago. Uzbek is among the least commonly taught of the so-called Less Commonly Taught Languages, or L.C.T.L.s. So uncommonly is it taught, in fact, that without federal largess it would hardly be taught at all. Because I happened to speak decent Turkish, a cousin of Uzbek, and because I spent a week in Uzbekistan when I was 22, and because life is nothing if not a sequence of odd choices vaguely considered, for two years I sat in a room with two other students and produced some extremely literal translations.

It’s a charming reminiscence, but I’m bringing it here for this brief section:

The grammar is simple, but the history is complex. National borders can be risibly at odds with reality, especially in Central Asia, where Turks, Mongols, Persians and others roved and mingled, where “Uzbek” was, for a time, more of a descriptive antonym of “Tajik” — no­­madic versus settled — than an ethnic classification. Later, the Soviets complicated things with mass reorganizations of their Central Asian subjects. The question of whether there is mutual intelligibility among Turkic languages is not simply a linguistic matter but an ideological one, at the core of nationalist movements that have formed and reformed across time and empires.

There is more actual, verifiable, sensible information about language and history packed into those few sentences than in the entirety of most Times “news” articles on linguistic topics. Well done, Ms. Kiesling!

Having greatly enjoyed the writing of Svetlana Boym (LH posts 1, 2), I was sorry to learn of her death from this reminiscence by Cristina Vatulescu:

August 6, the first morning we woke without Svetlana among us, found me in the old Jewish Quarter in Bucharest, in a hotel room, with an archive day ahead of me. The previous day, upon finding the news of her passing, I had left the room in distress. A walk, I thought, would give me some space to mourn. The neighborhood appeared like a mise-en-scene of a description of Svetlana’s photoscapes in her story “Remembering Forgetting: Tale of a Refugee Camp:” “transit spaces,” “warzones” “ruins,” “the banal,” “the unmemorable,” and “the unmonumental.” I first came upon the once famous Jewish Theater. It appeared to be in ruin, with a poster of its star, Maya Morgenstern, missing an eye. Making my way to the museum of the Holocaust, housed in what my guidebook said was the resplendent 1846 grand Synagogue, I found it choked and dwarfed by a monstrous semicircle of decayed communist era apartment buildings. I took some photographs and then took my mourning home, but not before noticing a row of French doors on one apartment building: most had been stifled with mortar or metal sheets, but one had survived; its metal grid recalled a menorah for me. I brushed my association away as far fetched and decided not to take a photo of it. The next morning I woke up with the thought of the metal menorah and decided I had to go photograph it at the cost of being slightly late to the archive. I thought Svetlana would approve. She always approved of detours, of flanerie, which came with Baudelarian and Benjaminian pedigree, two authors she had learned to love from her dissertation advisor at Harvard, Barbara Johnson.

So I left my room and what had to be a five-minute detour turned into a few hours […]

She makes Boym sound like a wonderful person to have known.

Gordon Smith has a Conglomerate post about a Utah Supreme Court case, State v. Rasabout, which involved the question of whether a man was properly convicted of 12 counts of “unlawful discharge”: was each shot a separate “discharge,” or should the 12 shots together be considered a single “discharge”? The court held that “each discrete shot” is one “discharge,” but the interesting thing is that Associate Chief Justice Tom Lee was uncomfortable resolving the statutory ambiguity by reference to the dictionary; Smith says that “the gist of the problem is that the dictionary definition of ‘discharge’ could mean ‘to shoot’ or it could mean ‘to unload.’ And the dictionary does not tell us the best meaning in this context. To resolve this problem, Justice Lee turns to corpus linguistics:”

In this age of information, we have ready access to means for testing our resolution of linguistic ambiguity. Instead of just relying on the limited capacities of the dictionary or our memory, we can access large bodies of real-world language to see how particular words or phrases are actually used in written or spoken English. Linguists have a name for this kind of analysis; it is known as corpus linguistics.

The fancy Latin name makes this enterprise seem esoteric and daunting. It is not. We all engage in it even if we don’t attach the technical label to it. A corpus is a body, and corpus linguistics analysis is no more than a study of language employing a body of language. When we communicate using words we naturally access a large corpus—the body of language we have been exposed to during our lifetimes—to decode the groups of letters or sounds we encounter. The most basic corpus linguistics analysis involves our split-second effort to access the body of language in our heads in our ongoing attempt to decode words or phrases we may be uncertain of. We all do that repeatedly every day.

…

It is a small step to utilize a tool to aid our linguistic memory. Judges do this with some frequency as well. Naturally. If judges are entitled to consult the corpus of language in our heads (and how could we not?), we must also be permitted to supplement and check our memory against publicly available sources of language.

As Smith says, “Yes, yes, yes!” Via Mark Liberman’s Log post, where you will find a good discussion (including a response from Smith, who has fixed a typo I pointed out).

Well, there isn’t one. But there should be! That’s the conclusion of this Izvestia story (by Evgenia Korobkova — thanks, Sashura!), which is so wonderful it’s worth stumbling through it via Google Translate if you don’t read Russian. It starts off talking about how translators usually just transliterate English onomatopoeia: “beng,” “kresh,” “bems,” “vaw,” and so forth. Then comes the good part: translators from the Vinogradov Center of Comics and Visual Culture are calling for localized onomatopoeia using the resources of minority languages, such as Lezgin “khurt” (‘swallow’) for the sound of drinking water, Armenian “sssurch” (‘coffee’) for the sound of gulping hot liquid, and instead of “vaw” (= “wow”) to use Abaza “UAA,” Lezgin “yo,” or “vababay,” which is apparently what they say in Makhachkala. And, best of all, from Mari: “Galdyrdyms” for something big falling, “duberdyms” for something medium, and “tsingeldyms” for something small or made of glass. I strongly support these suggestions and the call for a dictionary, though I have to agree with editor Artyom Gabrelyanov that “to talk seriously about using ‘vababay’ instead of ‘wow’ is not necessary.” Thanks, Andy!

This Log post by Mark Liberman reproduces a letter sent by Helen DeWitt to Kenn Harper, an expert on Inuit dialects, and his response, which is extremely interesting from both a linguistic and political point of view. The reason for the letter was that she wanted to make sure she used the right term for the Labrador dialect in the forthcoming new edition of The Last Samurai (bold to represent the thrilling nature of the news — unbelievably, this great book has been out of print). Some excerpts from Harper’s response:

Traditionally, the term Inuktitut was used among laymen to include all Canadian Inuit dialects. But the term Inuttut was often used for the Labrador dialect.

Recently, the Government of Nunavut has decided that they should use Inuktitut to refer to all Nunavut dialects except the Copper Inuit dialect which is called Inuinnaqtun. So the Government of Nunavut now refers to the “Inuit language” in Nunavut as containing two dialects: Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun. This is not really correct as Inuktitut within Nunavut contains other dialects. Apparently they do not see the need for an over-all term that subsumes them both. This is more a political statement than a linguistic one, as the small population in the Inuinnaqtun-speaking region demands that their dialect be distinguished from the majority because the Inuinnaqtun speakers do not use the Syllabic writing system, using instead an alphabetic system. The majority in Nunavut use Syllabics. The Inuinnaqtun speakers fear that if they do not differentiate themselves linguistically from the majority, then Syllabics might be imposed upon them as a writing system. The irony is that very few Inuit in the Inuinnaqtun-speaking area actually speak Inuinnaqtun – it’s almost dead, and most Inuit there are unilingual English speakers. […]

Now, the situation in Labrador. As I mentioned, it used to be called Inuttut. But now the Nunatsiavut Government (set up when the land claim was settled) is calling it Inuttitut, so that is the official usage in Labrador now. But either should be accepted. Current modern usage is Inuttitut. Historic usage is Inuttut. Incidentally, they both really mean the same thing. One is singular, the other plural. The word is made up of Inuk (generic person or specifically an Inuk person – Inuk being the singular of Inuit) + a suffix meaning “in the manner of” or “like”. So in the singular that suffix is “-tut”; in the plural it is “-titut”. And in this dialect that combination creates a vowel sequence “kt” which geminates into “tt”.

Talk about your Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen! And as far as the book is concerned, I agree with leoboiko in the comment thread:

Wonderful that a new edition is coming. They could take up this opportunity to rename it to The Seventh Samurai, as the author originally intended. Not only it’s a better title, and not only it immediately evokes the importance of Akira Toriyama’s The Seven Samurai to the plot, it also avoids the single biggest hurdle I had in my cultist practice: convincing people that the book is entirely unrelated to Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, to stories like Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, or to anything remotely resembling Tom Cruise.

New website wants your speech mistakes:

We’ve all had our mind go blank in the middle of a conversation. Suddenly, it’s impossible to pull up the word for a thing, place, or person. We gesture with our hands and feel like we’re on the verge of remembering—but the word just won’t appear.

It’s a predicament language researchers dub the “tip of the tongue” state.

These and other speech errors are tough for researchers to document and analyze because they can’t be replicated easily in a lab setting.

Now, there’s an online tool (registration required) allowing everyday people to engage in “citizen science” by recording speech errors. Its creators hope to crowdsource the most complete database of speech errors ever created and forge new insight into the acquisition, production, and perception of language. […]

Researchers hope users will enter their own and others’ experiences of tip-of-the-tongue states, as well as slips of the tongue, slips of the ear (where people misperceive words), and malapropisms. A description of the website appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Discussion of malapropisms and mondegreens at the link. Thanks, Paul!

Greg Pringle, known around these parts as Bathrobe, has put together a wonderful Spicks and Specks post, The Bell Miner: How orthography and ornithology catalysed a new folk etymology, that begins:

The Bell Miner (Manorina melanophrys) is an Australian bird belonging to the honeyeaters (Meliphagidae). It lives in temperate rainforests of southeastern Australia, preferred habitats being woodlands with dense shrubby understorey, gullies near rivers and creeks, swamp gum woodlands, and even well-treed suburban areas and gardens. […]

While there is much that is culturally and ecologically interesting about the Bell Miner, what is of particular interest to Spicks and Specks is its name. According to several sites on the Internet, Bell Miners were given their common name because of their habit of “mining” the sugar-domes of the bell lerps.

This etymology is cited at the Beauty of Birds, the Mount Eliza Association for Environmental Care, Flickr, and most notably at GrrlScientist’s mystery bird at the Guardian in August 2012. GrrlScientist appears to get a significant portion of her scientific knowledge from Wikipedia, because the original source for all four was the Wikipedia article on Bell Miner.

Given their great fondness for the psyllid’s sugary secretions, the picture of a Bell Miner assiduously tending its bell lerps and “mining” their sugar domes without harming the insects is an engaging one, lending the etymology an undeniable ring of authenticity. Unfortunately it has no basis in fact. “Bell” does not refer to the bell lerps, nor does “miner” refer to the mining of their sugar domes.

It’s the kind of dogged, detailed etymological investigation I love, and it comes to a surprising conclusion that I won’t spoil here for those who want to follow Greg’s story as he wrote it; I’m sure it will be discussed in the comments, so if you want to avoid spoilers, read the link before clicking through to the comments. You’ll learn all about the bizarre folkways of ornithologists!

Another great online find: syri.ac, “An annotated bibliography of Syriac resources online.” From the About page:

Welcome to syri.ac! This site is a comprehensive annotated bibliography of open-access resources related to the study of Syriac. […]

It was not that long ago that people interested in Syriac studies who did not have the good fortune of living in ancient centers of learning in Europe or close to a handful of great university libraries or research institutions in North America were hamstrung by not having access to important and fundamental works of Syriac scholarship.

Institutions interested in developing new programs in Syriac studies were at a distinct disadvantage, too: while they might be able to purchase new materials in the field of Syriac and Eastern Christianity, older, rarer works were either extremely expensive to purchase or simply not available. A person, for instance, looking to buy Paul Bedjan’s editions of Jacob of Sarugh’s poetry might look long and hard for them and yet still not locate copies available for purchase, no matter how deep his or her pockets.

The advent of digitization initiatives by Google, Microsoft, the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Brigham Young University, ULB Halle, Beth Mardutho (eBeth Arke), the Goussen Library, and others, have, however, completely revolutionized this situation and had a radically democratizing effect on the study of Syriac. The world, so to speak, is now flat. So long as he or she has access to the internet, a student can now be anywhere in the world and read, enjoy, and make use of the riches of centuries of Syriac scholarship. […]

More information, better resources, and a richer breadth of literature are now readily available to more people, everywhere. One of the happiest results of these developments is that people living in the Middle East and India, the homes of the Syriac Christian tradition, are now able to access texts and study aids which have previously only been found in libraries outside the two regions. The internet has made it possible for these texts to, as it were, return home.

Our goal for these pages is to collect, organize, and annotate as many of the fundamental works of Syriac scholarship that are to be found freely available online.

This kind of thing helps me keep from despairing for my species. Thanks for the link, Paul!

Professor Thomas Beyer of Middlebury has a very useful website, Russians in America: The Third Wave. His front page begins:

In 1972 Joseph Brodsky (Иосиф Бродский) leaves the Soviet Union and comes to settle in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the previous year Carl and Ellendea Proffer found Ardis and would begin publishing Russian Literature Triquarterly. With the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to Trade Act of 1974 and increased scrutiny to human rights called for in the so-called “Helsinki Final Act” of 1975, the Soviet Union after some delay permitted the emigration of Jews in ever increasing numbers. Ultimately some 500,000 would come to the United States. This constituted what has been called “The Third Wave” of Russian emigration in the Twentieth century. The end came gradually with the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. By the end of 1986 Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the poems of Joseph Brodsky were published openly in the Soviet Union. The complete collapse of the Soviet Union clearly marked a new period and a new reality for Russians and their ability to cross frontiers and national boundaries freely.

He says “there were in fact two emigrations, largely separate and distinct,” one of Jews who were finally able to escape and one of intellectuals, “primarily writers or human rights advocates, some expelled from the Soviet Union” (some of these were Jewish as well, of course):

In both cases, this new “Third Wave” found little in common with earlier emigrations. Products of the Soviet Union, its systems of education, social services and employment, atheistic or Jewish as opposed to Russian Orthodox, they represented for earlier generations, the so-called First and Second waves, a completely different set of values. Even linguistically they were distinct because of this Sovietness from earlier Russians in America.

His intention is “to help ensure that the legacy of ‘The Third Wave’ would be preserved here in the United States,” and he’s got sections on various aspects: people, works, periodicals (one of the first things I did when I moved to New York was buy a copy of Новое Русское Слово [The New Russian Word]), and so on; I highly approve of this sort of online venture and hope it stays up and thrives.

Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson have a new paper that looks intriguing: “Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages” (published online before print PNAS, August 3, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1502134112); the “Significance” box says:

We provide the first large-scale, quantitative, cross-linguistic evidence for a universal syntactic property of languages: that dependency lengths are shorter than chance. Our work supports long-standing ideas that speakers prefer word orders with short dependency lengths and that languages do not enforce word orders with long dependency lengths. Dependency length minimization is well motivated because it allows for more efficient parsing and generation of natural language. Over the last 20 y, the hypothesis of a pressure to minimize dependency length has been invoked to explain many of the most striking recurring properties of languages. Our broad-coverage findings support those explanations.

There are popularized accounts of it by Michael Balter at Science (“All languages have evolved to have this in common“: “All [languages] have evolved to make communication as efficient as possible”) and by Cathleen O’Grady at Ars Technica (“MIT claims to have found a ‘language universal’ that ties all languages together“: “The idea is that when sentences bundle related concepts in proximity, it puts less of a strain on working memory”); thanks go to Paul, Trevor, and Peter for the various links. I’ll be curious to see what the folks at Language Log have to say when they get around to covering it.