languagehat.com

Emily Chung has a CBC story reporting on an interesting discovery:

You may not recall any memories from the first year of life, but if you were exposed to a different language at the time, your brain will still respond to it at some level, a new study suggests.

Brain scans show that children adopted from China as babies into families that don’t speak Chinese still unconsciously recognize Chinese sounds as language more than a decade later.

“It was amazing to see evidence that such an early experience continued to have a lasting effect,” said Lara Pierce, lead author of the study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an email to CBC News.

The adopted children, who were raised in French-speaking Quebec families, had no conscious memory of hearing Chinese.

“If you actually test these people in Chinese, they don’t actually know it,” said Denise Klein, a researcher at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute who co-authored the paper.

But their brains responded to Chinese language sounds the same way as those of bilingual children raised in Chinese-speaking families.

Only a preliminary study, but certainly suggestive. (Thanks, Kobi!)

Tamas Deak at Poemas del río Wang posts about a courageous man and his unique Polish-Hungarian phrasebook:

Wladysław Szabliński vel Krawczyk was the Polish lector of the Tisza István University in Debrecen from the thirties. He was born in Warsaw on 7 December 1912. On 1 September 1935 he was already teaching at the university, and took an active part in the work of the summer university, too. He had an excellent command of Hungarian, many people only knew him as “Szablinski László”, and he had a Hungarian wife, Ágnes Juhász. The example sentences of his phrasebook make you understand why the Nazi cultural attaché demanded his dismissal in the summer of 1941. […]

WAR / the British government sent an ultimatum to the German government / the German government rejected the ultimatum / England declared war on Germany / the Germans invaded Poland without ultimatum / the technical superiority was on the German side / defense reports / our army is rapidly advancing
our troops repulsed the hostile attack / there is tranquility on the front / the enemy was lured into a trap / the French troops went on counterattack / the soldiers dug trenches and forced the taken positions / the German troops retreated to the previously chosen positions / the hostile troops fled in disorder / we have won the battle! / the enemy’s defeat is unavoidable / the Siegfried Line was broken through / an air attack was ordered against Warsaw / the anti-aircraft artillery shot down two planes / they dropped twenty bombs / the public buildings were bombed / the civilians suffered the most / they bombed the Red Cross hospital / we had ten casualties and forty-three wounded / the losses of the enemy are unknown / the troops encamped / the siege of Warsaw lasted nearly a month / the fort garison surrendered

A glorious alternative history unfolds from the example sentences of the book. Britain and France did not let down their ally in a shameful way, as they did in reality, but, as they previously agreed, they immediately attacked the German aggressor. Thus, Poland came out of the war as a winner.

Britain successfully continues his anti-submarine campaign / the resources of the enemy are exhausted / they signed an armistice / peace talks began / they made peace / the defeated enemy had to sign the peace treaty

See the post for images and more.

Matt of No-sword posts a quote from Dixon’s The Languages of Australia (which looks wonderful — insert ritual complaint about overpriced academic books here) involving George Grey‘s “second great breakthrough in Australian linguistic studies”, in Grey’s 1841 Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, During the Years 1837, 1838, and 1839:

Grey showed not only that there was a typological similarity between the languages of Australia, he also gathered enough cognates to suggest an historical connection between them: in effect, he suggested that the languages all belonged to a single genetic ‘language family’.

Matt points out that the Journals are online, quotes the actual passage from Grey, and compares it to William Jones‘s famous proclamation of the unity of the Indo-European languages (though that name was not then in use, and he was far from the first to make the observation).

I did a series of posts on Dixon and Australian languages back in January 2006: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Even after all these years of looking up words, there are still plenty whose origins and history I’m unfamiliar with. Sometimes when I look one up, I nod and think “about what I expected”; sometimes I’m surprised; and sometimes I’m so taken aback that “astonished” doesn’t really cover it. This just happened to me with a word I’d been meaning to look up because I kept running across it in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a series of novels about WWI my wife and I are currently reading. Now I learn from a Wordorigins thread that it meant “A man in charge of a bat-horse and its load; a military servant of a cavalry officer. Now generally, an officer’s servant” (“now” being 1885, when the unrevised OED entry was written), that the “bat” in both batman and bat-horse was French bât ‘pack-saddle’ (Old French bast < late Latin bastum), and that the old-fashioned pronunciation was /ˈbɑːmən/, with French-style /bɑː/! Now I want to know when the spelling pronunciation /ˈbætmən/ came into use; from the OED citations (1844 “A Bât Man is allowed to the Surgeon for the care of the horse carrying the Instruments,” where the â clearly indicates a French-style pronunciation; 1855 “The English loss was..a waggoner, three bat-men, and a horse,” where it’s ambiguous) I’d guess the mid-19th century. At any rate, by WWI I imagine only the most aged of officers still said /ˈbɑːmən/; my Daniel Jones Pronouncing Dictionary (13th ed., 1967) doesn’t even mention it, and it’s pretty careful to include obsolete forms that might still be encountered.

Geoff Watts reports on “the lives and minds of real-time translators”:

…As the delegate spoke, Pinkney had to make sense of a message composed in one language while simultaneously constructing and articulating the same message in another tongue. The process required an extraordinary blend of sensory, motor and cognitive skills, all of which had to operate in unison. She did so continuously and in real time, without asking the speaker to slow down or clarify anything. She didn’t stammer or pause. Nothing in our evolutionary history can have programmed Pinkney’s brain for a task so peculiar and demanding. Executing it required versatility and nuance beyond the reach of the most powerful computers. It is a wonder that her brain, indeed any human brain, can do it at all.

Neuroscientists have explored language for decades and produced scores of studies on multilingual speakers. Yet understanding this process – simultaneous interpretation – is a much bigger scientific challenge. So much goes on in an interpreter’s brain that it’s hard even to know where to start. Recently, however, a handful of enthusiasts have taken up the challenge, and one region of the brain – the caudate nucleus – has already caught their attention.

The caudate isn’t a specialist language area; neuroscientists know it for its role in processes like decision making and trust. It’s like an orchestral conductor, coordinating activity across many brain regions to produce stunningly complex behaviours. Which means the results of the interpretation studies appear to tie into one of the biggest ideas to emerge from neuroscience over the past decade or two. It’s now clear that many of our most sophisticated abilities are made possible not by specialist brain areas dedicated to specific tasks, but by lightning-fast coordination between areas that control more general tasks, such as movement and hearing. Simultaneous interpretation, it seems, is yet another feat made possible by our networked brains.

There’s lots of good stuff in there, and of course no such piece would be complete without the requisite funny translation stories:

Word order is a particular problem in fish meetings, which Miles said she dreads. In a long sentence about a particular variety of fish, and in a language where the noun – the name of the fish – comes towards the end, the interpreter is left guessing about the subject of the sentence until it’s completed.

There’s humour in these pitfalls, of course. Miles told me about an agricultural meeting at which delegates discussed frozen bull’s semen; a French interpreter translated this as “matelot congelés”, or ‘deep-frozen sailors’. And she shared an error of her own, produced when a delegate spoke of the need to settle something “avant Milan” – ‘before Milan’, the city being the venue for a forthcoming meeting. Miles didn’t know about the Milan summit, so said that the issue wasn’t going to be settled for “mille ans”, or ‘a thousand years’.

These people are amazing, and I take my hat off to them (and to the scientists who are figuring out how they do it).

Erik’s latest post at XIX век alerted me to a journal I hadn’t been aware of:

Here’s another open access and (as of 2014) peer-reviewed journal: Полярный вестник (The Polar Herald), out of Norway. The 2014 volume has an article about Baratynskii by Elena Pedigo Clark, one about Gertsen by Kathleen Parthé (whose book on village prose I liked very much), and articles about language by Maria Nordrum and Olga Steriopolo. You can download pdfs of anything in their archive going back to 1998 for free without registering.

Aside from the articles Erik singles out, I was taken with “Four Ways to Get Tangled Up in Russian” by Maria Nordrum (“In this paper I will analyze the four Natural Perfectives of the simplex verb путать ‘tangle up’, namely впутать, спутать, перепутать and запутать. […] My hypothesis is that the choice of prefix largely depends on the construction in which the verb appears and the semantics of its internal argument”); when I went to the archive, I tried Vol 1 (1998) and was immediately struck by “Оценка языка-пиджина руссенорск глазами современного лингвиста (Assessment of the pidgin Russenorsk (RN) seen with the eyes of a contemporary linguist),” by Ingvild Broch. I’m obviously going to be exploring this for a while.

And I was glad to learn about Parthé’s book, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past; it’s a topic I’m interested in, and I’ll have to add it to the to-read-someday list.

John Cowan sent me a link to Roger Blench’s paper (draft circulated for comment) “Suppose we are wrong about the Austronesian settlement of Taiwan?,” a fascinating attempt to upend the usual narrative. Here’s the abstract:

The current model of the prehistory of Taiwan assumes that it was first settled some 25,000 years ago by a population of unknown affinities, who reached what is now an island via a landbridge, at a time of much lower sea-levels. Some 5500 years ago, the Ta Pen Keng (TPK) culture, attested on the Peng Hu islands in the Taiwan Strait, apparently represents an incoming Neolithic population. Similar TPK sites are recorded around the shores of Taiwan in the centuries immediately following this. The pervasive assumption has been that these early settlers were the bearers of the Austronesian languages, which then diversified. If so, related Austronesian languages were formerly spoken on the Chinese mainland and these subsequently disappeared as a consequence of the Sinitic expansions. The indigenous Austronesian languages of Taiwan are claimed to reconstruct to a single proto-language, PAN, and from these reconstructions we can derive hypotheses about the lifestyle and subsistence of the earliest settlers.

This paper will argue that the single migration model is mistaken, and that it is not consistent with either the archaeology or the lexicon. If Formosan languages appear to reconstruct to a proto-language it is because they have been interacting over a long period, but they actually represent a continuing flow of pre-Austronesian languages from the mainland. Part of the evidence for this is the exceptional diversity of lexical items which are supposedly part of basic subsistence vocabulary.

Three phases of migration are distinguished, the TPK, the Longshan type culture and the Yuanshan, all of which originate on different places on the Chinese mainland. A further back migration from the Philippines may be responsible for the primary settlement of Green island and parts of the east coast, resulting in the present-day Amis population.

From the conclusion:

From this it follows that a single PAN cannot be reconstructed, in the sense of an apical ancestor, merely a Common Formosan (CF). The Formosanisms identified by Dyen and Blust are not PAN but rather local innovations. This explains why reconstructions of PAN phonology and grammar have always tended to be inconclusive. The flat arrays proposed by Blust and Ross would thus be a reflection of prehistory, although not in the sense originally intended.

It’s clearly written, and there are very useful maps, tables, and illustrations; I’ll be interested to see if the theory becomes accepted.

A correspondent writes: “I use an ingressive sound when I say ja in Norwegian. I don’t have a sense of how common this is across the spectrum of languages, but it is absent in the other ones I speak.” He included a link to this The Local piece about the phenomenon in Swedish:

Northern Swedes have the unique ability to give their assent with a simple inhalation – a sharp sound of apparent shock, often mistaken by foreigners as a gasp of surprise. Perhaps not strong enough to suck up dust, but strong enough to shock a foreigner.

In fact, many a visitor to Sweden can remember the first time they came across the “northern vacuum”, a short, sharp noise pronounced like “shhh” but while breathing inwards. Let’s spell it “Shoop”. […]

According to [Linköping University’s Professor of Phonetics Robert] Eklund, the phenomenon is called “ingressive speech” or “phonation”.

“Ingressive speech is when people produce language – sounds, single words, or even entire phrases – while breathing in,” he explains.

For Swedes, “shoop” is reserved exclusively for “yes”, and Eklund estimates that Swedes make the sound once for every ten yesses they say.

Eklund has collected data on the phenomena from around the world, concluding that the sound is not so unique, and is even found among donkeys and purring cheetahs.

In the human race, ingressive speech is often cited by proud Swedes as unique to Sweden, especially to northern Sweden, but Eklund’s research suggests otherwise.

“In Norway they say it only happens in Norway,” Eklund laughs.

In fact, ingressive speech takes place in every continent, in as many as fifty languages. In Canada and the US, some people even use it in the same way as the Swedes.

“But in the Philippines and Greece boys used it when flirting with girls to disguise it from their fathers,” says Eklund.

Interesting stuff, and I agreed that it was worth a post (thanks, Jeff!).

Bonus: Betty Everett Shoop Shoop Song, a classic of my youth.

Sarah Menkedick has a nice piece on Spanglish in the Oxford American; an excerpt:

The term “Espanglish” was first coined in 1948 by a grumpy Puerto Rican humorist named Salvador Tió in a newspaper column entitled “Teoría del Espanglish,” or “Theory of Spanglish.” Tió lamented the encroachment of English into Puerto Rican Spanish, to the degradation of his native tongue. […]

Though Tió was right in identifying Spanglish as an emerging hybrid language, he was wrong about its aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications. Like the stiff-collared linguists at the Real Academia Española who would later echo his sentiments of a deformed and bastardized dialect, he failed to grasp that Spanglish is as much a manifestation of multicultural identity as a mash-up of languages; that its seemingly mangled grammar follows a logic both interior, intuitive, and morphological, mappable; that it allows its speakers to belong to multiple worlds, cultures, identities, and languages at once, while forming a third sense of belonging. Spanglish is not one language seeping into and diluting another. It is not the product of a straightforward hierarchy, an oppressive and simplifying domination. Spanglish is more complex, the result of a speaker’s mutable identity—Spanish sometimes trumping English, English sometimes supplanting Spanish, depending on the speaker’s interior map of cultural associations. Rather than colorful peons unknowingly co-opted by imperialism, Spanglish speakers are cunning and empowered linguistic craftsmen.

But this is not what a certain well-born, well-bred, highly educated class of Spanish and Latin American academic would like one to think. There is a barbarians-at-the-gates feel to critiques of Spanglish, which tend almost invariably to come from severe-looking men posing before bookshelves and stately desks. In their critiques, one can feel a grave, gravelly respect for the language of Cervantes, for the language of all the august men of letters with their admiration for the bound rules of high culture. Here is Roberto González Echevarría, Yale’s Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature, in the New York Times in 1997: “Spanglish treats Spanish as if the language of Cervantes, Lorca, García Márquez, Borges and Paz does not have an essence and dignity of its own.” Octavio Paz himself put it more succinctly in 1985: “No es ni bueno ni malo, sino abominable.” It’s neither good nor bad, but abominable. Here again Spanglish appears as a mongrel, corrupting an essential purity—an indictment that ignores the fact that Latin America is a landscape of hybrid identities, cultures, and tongues shaped by the brutal centuries-long domination of the Spanish empire. There are ironic imperialist and racist overtones in these arguments, with Spanish as the language of “dignity” contrasted with the implied savagery of Spanglish; we could be in Mexico in 1600, when the Spaniards referred to themselves in colonial documents as “men of reason” contrasted with the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Perhaps, since Spanish succeeded in thoroughly crushing so many indigenous languages, its “essence” must now be preserved from a potential resurgence of indigenous expression. […]

What Echevarría misses is that most Spanglish speakers are neither poor nor illiterate but rather aspiring middle-class and second-generation Latinos; artists, scholars, and writers; educated Mexican-American immigrants; Mexican immigrants who’ve returned to Mexico from the U.S.; and gringos who’ve somehow wound up straddling the border. They are expert jugglers of contrasting cultures and identities, code-switchers extraordinaire, fluently bilingual and bicultural. They have not been robbed of an essential static identity but rather gained new layers of ipseity, albeit layers often fraught with moral and personal conflicts: where and to whom do I belong, when, how, and why? They—and my husband and I count ourselves among this group—use their fluid understanding of diverse languages and cultures to craft creative new responses to “the changing culture that surrounds them.”

Needless to say, I like her take on it. There’s lots more good stuff there, for instance on code-switching (“Linguist Richard Skiba breaks down the average usage of Spanglish into percentages: 84 percent of the time, Spanglish speakers employ single word switches; 10 percent of the time, phrase switches; and 6 percent of the time, clause switches”); check it out. And if somebody sent me the link, let me know so I can thank you; sometimes a tab will sit there so long I forget where it came from.

Ben Zimmer discusses the expression “get one’s goat,” which he’s been investigating:

All of the sources start with a 1904 book called Life in Sing Sing, a prison memoir by the anonymous convict “Number 1500.” In the chapter on “Slang Among Convicts,” the word goat is glossed as “anger; to exasperate,” but that doesn’t get us very far in figuring out the full phrase “get one’s goat,” which the slang dictionaries record from 1908 onwards. […]

Stephen Goranson discovered what is currently the earliest known example, from an article in the Oct. 21, 1905 edition of the New York journal Public Opinion. It was part of a series by Elizabeth Howard Westwood called “Experience of a Shop Girl,” and in the installment “In the Working Girl’s Home,” a girl named Alice Bailey reacts testily to a fellow boarder’s complaint about her table manners: “‘Well, that gets my goat,’ gasped Alice when we recovered speech. ‘The nerve of her.'”

The ADS-L discussion ended up inspiring Peter Reitan, who writes under the nom de blog Peter Jensen Brown. As it turns out, he had been collecting his own evidence for the origins of “get one’s goat.” On his Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, Peter lays out a compelling case, based on his extensive research, that we owe the expression to boxers in the U.S. Navy. He ties this to the Navy tradition of keeping goats aboard ships as mascots, and the historical evidence seems to support his theory.

But other theories have flourished […]

Ben says “research is still ongoing,” and invites readers to help: “If you do turn up any early appearances of ‘get one’s goat,’ let us know in the comments below or email lexiconvalley@slate.com.” (I have to say, if you’re going to use a nom de blog, why pick one as boring as Peter Jensen Brown?)