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Christopher Culver has a post on a nice little linguistic find; he starts off with Eastern Mari omə̑ž ‘reed,’ a borrowing from Chuvash xămăš ‘bulrush,’ found in the Skvortsovs’ Chuvash-Russian dictionary, and continues:

But a few lines above it, one finds an entry for a remarkably similar word: xămăl ‘stubble (of cereals)’. Fedotov compares this to Tatar and Bashkir qamïl ‘bulrush’.

These must be the same words, both going back to Proto-Turkic *kamïš ‘grass stalk (or the like)’ and showing the ‑š ~ ‑l distinction that divides the family in two. Outside of Chuvash, the ‑l variant has no cognates outside of Volga Kipchak, and thus can be regarded as a Volga Bulgarian loan into Tatar and Bashkir. The ‑š variant, on the other hand, must be a loan from Volga Kipchak into Chuvash.

An amusing bit of trivia, two distantly related languages trading cognates with different meanings.

This is the kind of thing that makes me love historical linguistics.

A nice little NY Times story [archived] by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee about the efforts of the family of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language of Central California, to preserve the language and the dictionary she worked on for years; it’s accompanied by a short documentary where you can hear her tell bits of a story with onscreen translation (I could watch that sort of thing for hours). I know a lot of people think it’s futile as well as impractical to try to preserve dying languages, but most of what’s truly important to humans beyond basic food and shelter is impractical and probably futile, so I say good for the would-be rescuers. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

As I wrote here, I’m reading Veltman’s novel Приключения, почерпнутые из моря житейского (Adventures drawn from the sea of life, 1846-48), and I just got to a bit of dialogue that made me laugh, so I’m sharing it. Grigory Ivanovich and Lukyan Anisimovich are paying a visit to their old friend and former coworker Pamfil Fedoseevich and Lukyan has complained about modern literature, ending with “…and there are always some kind of peculiar words” [да всё слова какія-то особенныя]. Grigory responds:

No, Lukyan Anisimovich, don’t say that. True, there are words you can’t make sense of right away, but when you think it through, it’s the same old word, just with a new spelling. For example, we used to say Kishot [Quijote], but now they write Kikhot, which is quite a bit more delicate. In our day we called a certain astronomer Nevton [Newton], but now it’s Nyuton. All the other words are like that. For instance, yesterday as I was reading: “Pathos, what could that mean?” I thought and thought, and finally I guessed that it was Bacchus.

Нѣтъ, Лукьянъ Ансимовичъ, не говорите. Правда, есть слова, вдругъ и въ толкъ не возьмешь, а какъ подумаешь хорошенько, такъ это то же слово, да по новому правописанію; примѣромъ, по-нашему былъ Кишотъ, а теперь пишутъ — Кихотъ: гораздо нѣжнѣе; въ наше время Невтономъ называли одного астронома, а теперь — Ньютономъ, такъ-то и прочія всѣ слова: примѣромъ, вотъ я вчера начиталъ: Паѳосъ, что бы это значило? Думалъ, думалъ, наконецъ догадался, что это Бахусъ.

Incidentally, in an earlier scene we learn that Pamfil’s wife can’t take advantage of her husband’s new riches to hang out with a better crowd because she never learned French.

A couple of bits of Latinity that mix amusement and edification:

1) “I am almoost beshytten”: A 16th Century English to Latin Textbook. Phrases “excerpted from an English to Latin textbook printed in the early 16th century (Auct. 2Q 5.9(4)), which has been digitized by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford as part of an ongoing project. You can read the whole thing here or learn more about the project here.”

2) Corruptae Latinitatis Index: Or, a Collection of Barbarous Words and Phrases, which are Found in the Works of the Most Celebrated Modern Writers in Latin. With an Alphabetical Table, Shewing, what Words and Phrases, Taken from the Classics, Would Have Clearly and Fully Answered Their Purpose. By William Massey, Master of a Boarding-School at Wandsworth. The Preface gets quite censorious:

After the Roman Empire began to decay, their Language likewise was soon debased by an Inundation of foreign and new-coined Words. * The African Latin Writers, both ecclesiastic and profane, such as Tertullian, Apuleius, Arnobius, &c. are justly charged with greatly debasing the Roman Language in the Decline of that Empire, by introducing a Multitude of Words and Phrases, that would have been disgusting to a pure Roman Ear.

In the words of the excellent Conrad, who sent me the link: “Prescriptivism ca. 1755.”

I’ve linked to essays about this sort of thing before (e.g., here and here); now I present for your perusal Alice Fishburn in the Financial Times (of which she is an editor):

It was as I tried to squeeze all 784 pages of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – my final purchase of 2013 – on to an already overcrowded bookshelf that I realised I had a problem. Piles of books were all over the house, many of them unread. There were unopened political doorstops; texts from the undergraduate canon with embarrassing student notes on 10 pages – “heteronormative cliché!” was a particular favourite – before my attention petered out; stacks of classics consigned to the “one day when I have time” category. Clearly my supply and demand assessments were way, way off.

And so the pact began. My rules were simple. Books could be accepted as gifts or used when needed for work. They could be purchased for others, but not as a backhanded way of smuggling them into my own library. My fellow Brits may have spent £2.2bn on books in 2013 but I was no longer going to be one of them. Every page I turned in 2014 had to come from those already inside my house.

She mentions that “My new tactic of reading only what I already own turns out not to be new at all: Susan Hill wrote a whole book on the subject, Howards End is on the Landing, in 2009,” and some of the commenters on those earlier LH posts seem to successfully maintain policies of never buying more books until they’ve read all the ones they own already; I don’t know if I find such restraint admirable, but I know for sure that I could never emulate it. And I’m pleased to say that I have in fact eventually gotten around to many of the books that years ago no one, including myself, believed I’d ever read. But it’s true I’m adding very few these days, and the ones I acquire are usually for the Kindle. Even I am abashed by the groaning shelves and growing piles… (Thanks, Paul!)

Megan Garber, Adrienne LaFrance, and Ian Bogost have a delightful post at Citylab [now available at The Atlantic] on how the Gray Lady has dealt over the years with the jargon of the young and/or underclass, presumptively unintelligible to its well-bred readership. They open with a quote from a recent article about a $25 penalty for pot possession in Washington, D.C.:

“A ticket when you just have a jay or something?” said Clifford Gray, a lifelong District of Columbia resident who is in his 20s, using a slang term for a marijuana cigarette. “I’m good with that.”

And they continue thus:

This—”a slang term for a marijuana cigarette”—was so delightfully, perfectly Timesian. Not a joint, mind you, but a marijuana cigarette! (In related Times-speak, a whip isn’t just a car but an automobile.)

And it made us wonder: What other terms had the paper of record decided to wordsplain in this way? What else, in the Times‘s more than 150-year history, had writers and editors decided to clarify as “a slang term for X”?

We decided to find out. We searched the paper’s archives—a corpus of news articles from 1851 to the present—for any and all instances of “a slang term for,” “slang for,” and “a slang word for.” We LOLed at the results. (“LOL” is a slang term for “laugh out loud.”)

Below, our random generator of 73 pieces of Times-defined slang, many of them long forgotten, many of them deserving of resurrection, and all of them revealing about the place and time that gave rise to them.
…
We marveled at the way these expressions—the ones we understood, anyway—captured the spirit of the era in which they were defined. It makes sense, for instance, that the Times defined acid (“a slang term for the drug LSD”) in 1970, grunt (“a slang word for an infantryman”) during the Vietnam War, diss (“a slang term for a perceived act of disrespect”) in 1994, and macking (“a slang term for making out”) in 1999.

One particularly memorable example is how the Times unpacked “punk” in 1977: “Slanguist Eric Partridge speculates that punk is hobo lingo to describe very stale bread, perhaps from the French pain. Punk, applied to a person, began as a slang term for a catamite, or boy kept by a pederast, and later extended to cover young hoodlums.”

You don’t have to click their link to know that the last quote is from William Safire; the first word gives it away. Needless to say, the first sentence is utter balderdash (to use a word Bill would have enjoyed), and you should never take Eric Partridge’s word for anything. Anyway, enjoy the random generator; Yoram, who sent me the link, also sent the full list (thanks, Yoram!), and for your delectation, here is the earliest citation:

1855. “I have found by [associating] of late with [criminals] and other low people, that Marianne is argot for guillotine, just as wipe is slang for handkerchief.”

(I have added the words in brackets from the original article, which is a very enjoyable read in its own right.) As Yoram says, it’s a pity they didn’t search for “argot” as well.

That’s the title of a paper (pdf) by David Clingingsmith of Case Western Reserve University; the abstract says:

Scholars have long conjectured that the return to knowing a language increases with the number of speakers. Recent work argues that long-run economic and political integration accentuate this advantage, leading larger languages to increase their population share. I show that, to the contrary, language size and growth are uncorrelated for languages with ≥35,000 speakers. I incorporate this finding into an evolutionary model of language population dynamics. The model’s steady-state follows a power law and precisely fits the size distribution of the 1,900 languages with ≥35,000 speakers. Simulations suggest the extinction of 40% of languages with <35,000 speakers within 100 years.

It looks interesting and well written but quickly gets into more statistics than I can handle, but I’m sure some of my readers will have no problem with it. (Incidentally, if you’re curious, as I was, about the name Clingingsmith, there’s a book called Klingensmith, Klingelsmith, Clingingsmith, Etc, which is suggestive if not very enlightening.) Thanks, Kobi!

In trying to determine the pronunciation of the Belgian town of Popering(h)e, I discovered the wonderful Every-day Pronunciation, by Robert Palfrey Utter (Harper & Brothers, 1918). It had exactly what I wanted, even giving the anglicized pronunciation presumably used by the Tommies in World War I (the equivalent of “POPP-ering”):
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But wandering through its pages, I discovered all sorts of delights:
pumpkin, pum’kin, pung’kin, pump’kin. Objections to the first two are pedantic.
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sacrilegious, sakrelĭdẓ’us, sakrilēdẓ’us. The second is still the favorite of the lexicographers but they are beginning to recognize the fact that no one uses it.
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scenario, shānă’riō. So in all dictionaries, but now, through the influence of the moving pictures, pretty well naturalized as sina’rio.
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sem’inar, seminar’. The first is frowned upon by lexicographers, but in the United States it is the only pronunciation heard in academic circles where the word is current. British usage favors the second.
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Xavier (Saint Francis), zăv’ier.
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I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone say “shay-NARio,” “semi-NAR,” or “ZAV-ier” (with short a, as in “have”); I’m guessing the last is still used by some but the first two have sunk into the dustbin of history. And of course I love “Objections to the first two are pedantic.” (I’ve provided images to show the complicated system of phonetic transcription, which I haven’t tried to reproduce; I hope you can see them.)

And while we’re doing lexicography: Grantland Dictionary: Pro Wrestling Edition.

From G.W. Bowersock’s NYRB review of two books on the history of food (and I’m as pleased as Bowersock is that the subject is finally being taken seriously):

Petronius’ depiction in the first century AD of a banquet at the house of the pretentious parvenu Trimalchio remains one of the great satires of gourmandise in Western literature. A cookbook of the time […] has survived in later copies under the name of Apicius, and I cherish the account I had many years ago from Barbara Flower, the translator of this work, about her efforts to establish a sound Latin text. She prepared each of the recipes herself in the presence of the great textual critic Paul Maas, who, when the preparation was obviously in trouble, would emend the Latin original on the spot until the dish appeared to be in order. This was editing of a kind such as not even that formidable editor of Latin authors A.E. Housman could have imagined, and it illustrates the unexpected consequences of culinary studies of the past.

Bruce Moore (a former director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, currently editing the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary) discusses the meanings and history of the Australian slang verb dob in an extract from his book What’s their Story? A History of Australian Words (Oxford University Press Australia, 2010), quoted in this Ozwords post:

The verb dob has a range of meanings in Australian English. The most common meaning (often in the form dob in, dob into, or dob on) is ‘to inform upon, to incriminate’ … It can also (and less commonly) mean ‘to impose a responsibility upon (often a matter of getting someone to do an unpopular or difficult task)’ … As dob in it can also mean ‘to contribute money to a common cause’ … Finally, in Australian Rules football, dob can mean ‘to kick (the ball) long and accurately; to kick (a goal)’ … Are all these meanings related?
…
A possible clue to the origin of this major sense of dob, and also the other dobs, may lie in British dialect. … In fact, most dictionaries trace the Australian dobs back to these British dialect dobs. There, we find the verb dob meaning ‘to put down an article heavily or clumsily; to throw down’, with widespread dialectal usage… A second dialectal meaning of dob is ‘to throw stones etc. at a mark’, mainly from northern English dialects, and from Cornwall. … In Lincolnshire dob means ‘to hit’ or ‘a hit’. The underlying notion of throwing and hitting is evident in some marble games. In Cheshire the verb dob means ‘to throw a piece of slate, or other flat missile, at marbles placed in a ring at a distance of about six or seven feet from the player’, and in Northamptonshire ‘When one boy strikes another boy’s marble, without his marble first touching the ground, he is said to dob on it’. A dobber in British dialect is ‘a large, heavy marble’ and a dob-taw is ‘a large marble, a “lobber”’. In most of these uses the dialect dob is synonymous with the more familiar dab, and with some of that word’s dialectal uses—for example, a dab can be ‘an amount of money’, and to dab down means ‘to put a thing down quickly’ and figuratively ‘to pay down ready money’.
…
This is clearly a very complex etymology. The problem with what is outlined here is that those Australian words and meanings, which we are certain have their origin in British dialect, appear during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the influence of dialectal words on Australian English was at its greatest. The Australian dob and its variants are first recorded much later then this. … On these grounds we must conclude that the origin remains uncertain, although the clues provided in the dialectal material certainly provide some very likely origins.

An admirable example of how the nitty-gritty of etymology is carried on; see the link for citations, references, and further speculation.