languagehat.com

Yesterday’s WSJ has an enjoyable column by Ben Cohen describing a word, or quasi-word, or pseudo-word, that was new to me:

There are few words in any language as fun to say as schadenfreude.

Its etymology is easy to understand. Schadenfreude, the pleasure in someone else’s pain, comes from the German words for those exact emotions.

But people can also take pain in someone else’s pleasure. Why isn’t there a word for that?

It turns out there is. Scholars have finally found a linguistic relative of schadenfreude, and it sounds like another German portmanteau: gluckschmerz.

Except it isn’t.

“It’s not an actual word in the German language,” says University of Kentucky psychologist Richard Smith. “You won’t find it in any German dictionary.”

It turns out that it’s sort of existed—in English, not German—for three decades, and there’s a kicker at the end that I’ll let you discover for yourself. Once upon a time I would have been irritated at the attempt to foist yet another cutesy non-word on the long-suffering English language, which has plenty of actual resources with which to describe emotions, but I’ve mellowed, and if people enjoy this sort of thing, more power to them, may they have—as they don’t say in German—Wortschatzfälschungfreude. (Thanks, Bruce!)

Aidan Doyle, author of the forthcoming A History of the Irish Language, has a mini-rant at OUPBlog that begins:

In the literature on language death and language renewal, two cases come up again and again: Irish and Hebrew. Mention of the former language is usually attended by a whiff of disapproval. It was abandoned relatively recently by a majority of the Irish people in favour of English, and hence is quoted as an example of a people rejecting their heritage. Hebrew, on the other hand, is presented as a model of linguistic good behaviour: not only was it not rejected by its own people, it was even revived after being dead for more than two thousand years, and is now thriving.

He says, “In language, as in life, it sometimes happens that a certain code outlives its use,” pointing out that “Language does not exist independently of society and culture, and if a community comes under intense pressure from another one, it has to adapt to survive.” There’s nothing profound or especially new, but it’s an enjoyable read, and of course I heartily approve of his conclusion: “Change is part of language: you can embrace it, or resist it, but there’s no escaping it.” Thanks for the link go to Trevor, who adds that he is bothered by “the omission of any mention of the penalties for using Irish in the 19th century and before.”

A nice infographic by Alberto Lucas López:

There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people. We represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. The colour of these countries shows how languages have taken root in many different regions.

Obviously one can always quibble about the details, but at least Chinese is called a macrolanguage that “includes different languages and dialects” (though Arabic is treated as a single language), and it’s a striking way to present the information.

Addendum. Matt Zajechowski and a team at Olivet Nazarene University have developed an interactive graphic/map that covers the second most spoken languages around the world, which makes a nice companion to the posted one. Thanks, Matt!

I was reading David Gilbert’s Sunday NY Times review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Making of Zombie Wars when I stumbled on a word. In the course of praising Hemon’s “wonderful, autobiographical short stories,” Gilbert wrote:

In 2000 came a highly praised collection, “The Question of Bruno,” followed a couple of years later by the even better “Nowhere Man,” after which he made a detour into novel terrain with “The Lazarus Project” before returning to the tombolo of short stories with “Love and Obstacles.”

I wasn’t familiar with tombolo, so I looked it up and discovered it was (per M-W) “a sand or gravel bar connecting an island with the mainland or another island” (it’s Italian, from Latin tumulus ‘mound, tumulus’; you can see a nice picture of one at the Wikipedia article). It’s a nice word that I’m pleased to have learned, but I don’t see what sense it makes to talk about “the tombolo of short stories.” Am I missing something, or is Gilbert misusing the word?

Update (Aug. 2024). Having forgotten all about this post and the word it discusses, I made another post about it which provoked further discussion (and eventually a reminder about this one). Sigh.

From mattitiahu of Memiyawanzi comes this fun and educational Twitter feed: Laws of IndoEuropean. He announced it in this post, where he attributed it to “peak Ph.D. writeup procrastination”; don’t miss John Cowan’s comment, in which he points out that “the Laws of AN make the Laws of IE, even *du > rk, look like absolute pikers” and gives ten examples, beginning with “*w/*y > p finally (western Manus languages).”

We seem to discuss hyperpolyglots every couple of years (2009, 2011, 2013), so it’s time for another installment; here‘s a BBC Future piece by David Robson that starts:

Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total.

Back inside, I find small groups exchanging tongue twisters. Others are gathering in threes, preparing for a rapid-fire game that involves interpreting two different languages simultaneously. It looks like the perfect recipe for a headache, but they are nonchalant. “It’s quite a common situation for us,” a woman called Alisa tells me.

It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia. Indeed, a surprising proportion of them are “hyperglots”, like Keeley and Krasa, who can speak at least 10 languages.

It claims that learning languages “is arguably the best brain training you can try”:

Numerous studies have shown that being multilingual can improve attention and memory, and that this can provide a “cognitive reserve” that delays the onset of dementia. Looking at the experiences of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Canada has found that speaking two languages delayed dementia diagnosis by five years. Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an extra nine years of healthy cognition.

There are lots of interesting tidbits, like this on Nabokov:

Different languages can also evoke different memories of your life – as the writer Vladimir Nabokov discovered when working on his autobiography. The native Russian speaker wrote it first in his second language, English, with agonising difficulty, finding that “my memory was attuned to one key – the musically reticent Russian, but it was forced into another key, English”. Once it was finally published, he decided to translate the memoirs back into the language of his childhood, but as the Russian words flowed, he found his memories started to unfurl with new details and perspectives. “His Russian version differed so much he felt the need to retranslate to English,” says Aneta Pavlenko at Temple University in Philadelphia, whose book, The Bilingual Mind, explores many of these effects. It was almost as if his English and Russian selves had subtly different pasts.

Thanks, Trevor!

It suddenly occurred to me I had no idea where the surname Turgenev was from; I figured there was probably some dialect word turgen’, but I wanted to know, so I turned to my standby, Unbegaun’s book on Russian family names. I was directed to, of all things, the section on names of Mongolian origin! There are three varieties of such names: those of Kalmyk origin (e.g., Badminov, ultimately from Sanskrit padma ‘lotus’), those of Buryat origin (e.g., Gomboev, ultimately from Tibetan མགོན་པོ། mgon-po, gönpo ‘gentleman; protector’), and those from Mongolian proper (e.g., Batyrev from баатар ᠪᠠᠭᠠᠲᠤᠷ ‘hero’), and among these last is Turgenev, from Mongolian түргэн ᠲᠦᠷᠭᠡᠨ ‘quick.’ As the kids say these days: Mind. Blown.

Michael Marder has a very silly piece at The Philosopher’s Plant that positively wallows in the etymological fallacy; Marder doesn’t like the word “plant” because:

When we say “plant,” we immediately affiliate our speech and understanding with the Latin tradition. The word recalls, through the noun planta (still preserved in the same form in Spanish and Portuguese), the verb plantāre that means “to drive in with one’s feet, to push into the ground with one’s feet,” hinting at that other sense of planta, intimately tied to our bodies—“the sole of a foot” (cf. Barnhart’s Dictionary of Etymology). A mindboggling number of assumptions about plants and our comportment toward them are built into this etymology. Some of the tacit suppositions it underwrites are the following: 1) the soil needs to be leveled and made flat before planting can begin; 2) the root is equivalent to feet, by which plants are driven into the ground; [etc. etc. etc.]

But I’m quoting it mainly for the passage on Basque, which I dedicate to the late Larry Trask, that connoisseur of Bascomania:

And what if the word for “plant” is absent? That, as a matter of fact, was the case in Euskera (Basque language, which does not belong to the group of Indo-European languages) before its speakers adopted the designation landare from the Latin-based plantāre. According to the explanation I received from my Basque colleagues, Euskera put at the disposal of its speakers names for particular plants (a birch, an oak, peas, wheat…) without generalizing them under an abstract heading, a higher class. Perhaps, the distance from the vegetal world was insufficient to transform it into an object—above all, in and through language—set over and against the human subject. Whatever the explanation, such a level of singularity is virtually inaccessible to our modern sensibilities; at the limit, we can only get an inkling of it with the help of ethical categories and precepts.

Ah, those primitive Basques, so close to the vegetable world they can’t see the forest for the trees! (Thanks go to Trevor for the link.)

According to a Times Higher Education story by Paul Jump, University College London is going to do its own publishing and move to open access in a big way:

The UCL Press imprint, which it had previously licensed to commercial publishers, was repatriated by the university earlier this year. UCL Press is now a department within the institution’s Library Services, whose director and acting group manager, Paul Ayris, told Times Higher Education that the germ of the idea had simply been his observation that, unlike UCL, “competitor” institutions already had their own presses, which “seemed a bit odd”.

But the wisdom of adopting “a more proactive approach to research dissemination” quickly became apparent to him.

One advantage is enabling postgraduates to publish earlier in their careers than would typically be possible, with student societies able to establish “overlay journals” on UCL’s repository. One example, known as Slovo – produced by postgraduates in Slavonic and East European studies – is already up and running, having been converted from its previous paper format after UCL Press’ “soft launch” in August. […]

The other major inspiration for UCL Press was the need to address the “broken” monograph business model, as well as the reluctance of some arts, humanities and social science scholars to get involved with open access, Dr Ayris explained.

“Most commercially produced monographs are aimed at the library market because of their [high] price. But library budgets are so squeezed by meeting the demands of journal inflation that there is less and less money for monographs,” he said.

Hence, UCL Press will follow Manchester University Press in also publishing open-access monographs.

Dr Ayris sees open access as a potential saviour of the monograph, provided funders are willing to follow the example of the Wellcome Trust and cover publication charges. UCL academics – at least one of whom will have to sit on the editorial board managing the monograph series – again will be exempt from author charges.

Slovo is here, and it looks very interesting (Thomas McLenachan, “Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction: The Quest for Knowledge in Andrei Tarkovskii’s Solaris and Stalker”! John A. Riley’s review of Trudno byt Bogom/Hard to be a God!). Via MetaFilter.

Addendum. Another nice bit of open access (via Memiyawanzi): the Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Greek Linguistics is out and free to download from this site (warning: almost 1,900-page pdf); most of the papers are in Greek, but there are quite a few in English (e.g., Angelos Lengeris & Katerina Nicolaidis, “Greek consonant confusions by native listeners in quiet and noise”; Nikos Liosis, “Language varieties of the Peloponnese: Contact in diachrony”; Nikos Liosis & Eirini Kriki, “Towards a typology of relative clauses in late Medieval Greek”).

I found the section on Visigothic Spain in Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome a slog (for some reason, names like Chindasuinth, Recceswinth, and Wamba are hard for me to take seriously, and reading about their endless squabbles makes my eyelids droop — incidentally, you can get lists of all the Germanic rulers of Western Europe in this period, along with maps and mini-essays on related subjects, here), so I thought I’d take a look at a book I’d had sitting around for a couple of decades, Bernard F. Reilly’s The Medieval Spains, to get another perspective on it. I was manfully trying to disentangle the regions, names, and heresies when I hit this passage:

The reader will understand, of course, that to speak of the Visigoths, or any other society, as Christian here implies merely a formal and legal adhesion. It prescinds entirely from a judgment on the spiritual or intellectual character of any individual’s religious assent.

I immediately came to attention: it does what? I turned to the OED and found a perfectly good (if recondite) verb I had been unacquainted with:

prescind, v.

Etymology: < post-classical Latin praescindere to cut off, to shorten by cutting (4th or 5th cent.) < classical Latin prae- pre- prefix + scindere to cut (see scind v.).

1. trans. To cut off beforehand, prematurely, or abruptly; to remove, cut away.
1636 R. Basset tr. G. A. de Paoli Lives Rom. Emperors 20 The brevity of his reigne prescinded many and great hopes of his good government of the whole Empire.
[…]
1872 N. Amer. Rev. July 65 Mr. Buckle does not generally care to prescind matters. It is in his nature rather to affect the circumlocutory and vague.
1994 Buffalo (N.Y.) News (Nexis) 28 Nov. 3 If one were to prescind the whole of federal benefits that go to the poor, you’d come up with about $140 billion per year.
2004 National Rev. 56 1 The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court..granted conjugal rights to gays, and the bells tolled, as they did in San Francisco under the patronage of rump political leaders who sought to prescind the law on the question.

2. a. trans. To cut off, detach, or separate from; to abstract from.
1640 J. Sadler Masquarade du Ciel 7 Whether Art or Nature, Sense or Reason, could best separate, abstract, at least prescind, a Sprightly Genius from its Body.
[…]
1856 J. F. Ferrier Inst. Metaphysic (ed. 2) . 475 Nor have universal things prescinded from the particular any absolute existence.
1947 M. Lowry Under Volcano iv. 104 The Malebolge was the barranca, the ravine which wound through the country, narrow here—but its momentousness successfully prescinded their minds from the goat.
1996 Wisconsin State Jrnl. (Nexis) 27 July 7 a, Oftentimes it is necessary to prescind the work from the surrounding environment.

3. intr. a. To withdraw attention from; to leave out of consideration; to ignore, put to one side.
1654 T. White Apol. Rushworth’s Dialogues 249 Their very words directly tel him they on purpose resolv’d to prescind from her particular Case, and not determin any thing concerning It in that Decree.
[…]
1890 W. S. Lilly Right & Wrong 98 In what I am about to write I prescind entirely from all theological theories and religious symbols.
1977 Times 13 Aug. 14/3 The various denominations..are prescinding from their differences and attending only to those matters about which they are agreed.
2005 Cross Currents (Nexis) 22 Mar. 83 The methods of religious studies generally prescind from any commitment to a particular tradition or any personal self-involvement in a religious path.

b. prescinding from: apart from.
1686 J. Goad Astro-meteorologica i. ii. 6 The Air..must be defin’d, prescinding from all Admistions that are extraneous to it.
[…]
1941 Far Eastern Q. 1 87 Prescinding from this misleading treatment of the mission history, the author’s presentation of the Tokugawa Shogunate is most elucidating.
1990 B. Bergon Exploding Eng. (BNC) 145 The last of the Victorian sages, who were men of letters and of affairs, not academics (prescinding from Arnold’s and Ruskin’s marginal tenure of chairs at Oxford).

Although, examining the citations, I see I had not been entirely unacquainted with it, since I read (and loved) Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano years ago; its momentousness must have prescinded my mind from the word as the ravine’s did the characters’ from the goat.