languagehat.com

The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes has put its results online (link is to a mirror site, since the original crashed due to, presumably, unexpectedly massive interest):

The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.

The linked page shows the soda/pop/coke map; use the pull-down menu at the upper left (labeled “Question:”) to see the others. There’s a selection here.

Only vaguely related, but I can’t resist passing it along: here‘s “Chaffinch Map of Scotland,” a poem by Edwin Morgan (quondam Poet Laureate of Glasgow and since 2004 Scottish National Poet) showing “the different names used in Scottish dialects for chaffinch, varying from chaffinch in the north over shielyfaw in the middle to britchie in the south.” As the site says, “a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism.”

“Pleiades gives scholars, students, and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create, and share historical geographic information about the ancient world in digital form. At present, Pleiades has extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world, and is beginning to expand into Ancient Near Eastern, Byzantine, Celtic, and Early Medieval geography.” Great idea; thanks for the heads-up, Paul!

Vissarion Belinsky‘s “Литературные мечтания” [Literary musings] has been called “the beginning of Russian intelligentsia journalism”; he wrote this, his first major essay, at the age of twenty-three, and when it was published at the end of 1834 it attracted immediate attention. It’s a long survey of the history of Russian literature, which he divides into four periods; the third, dominated by Pushkin, ended in 1830, but the new prosaic period has as yet no leaders, though Veltman and Lazhechnikov are promising talents. His main claim, which he keeps returning to, is that there is no truly national literature in Russia, by which he means authors who “fully express and reproduce in their works the spirit of that people among whom they are born and raised, by whose life they live and whose spirit they breathe” [вполне выражающих и воспроизводящих в своих изящных созданиях дух того народа, среди которого они рождены и воспитаны, жизнию которого они живут и духом которого дышат]. He says of Pushkin that any European poet could have written “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” or “The Gypsies,” but only a Russian could have written “Eugene Onegin” and “Boris Godunov”: “Absolute national character [narodnost’] is available only to people free from foreign influences” [Безотносительная народность доступна только для людей, свободных от чуждых иноземных влияний]. This was, of course, an expression of the spirit of nationalism that was spreading all over Europe at the time, and it might have been harmless enough as a passing fancy, like the philosophy of Schelling which was so popular in those days; unfortunately it took root to such an extent that it’s never really been dislodged, and combined with the insistence on socially useful literature espoused by Belinsky and his fellow radical critics Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, it created an entirely new environment for Russian writers, one in which that brilliant fantast Gogol was pressed into service as an analyst of social ills and every new novel was scrutinized for its service to the cause of the People. This, of course, is exactly what Nabokov reacted against so strongly (and what got him condemned as un-Russian when he was publishing his early novels), and the more I read what was published in the first third of the nineteenth century, the more I realize what was lost.

Don’t get me wrong: Belinsky and his ilk didn’t ruin Russian literature; it went from strength to strength, and by the end of the century Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were seen everywhere as giants of world literature. But they, and the intellectual climate they produced, closed off avenues that were reopened only briefly in the 1920s, before Stalin closed them off again with his ungentle grip. It’s comparable to what happened in European classical music; after Beethoven, nobody could write symphonies that were simply pleasant to listen to, they had to storm the gates of heaven and express new Truths about Life. Well, I don’t always want to see gates stormed; sometimes (often, in fact) I just want to see artistic magic worked by artists who are enjoying themselves and their art and surprising me with the results. Let me give you a couple of examples from my recent reading, both published in 1833 (Russian at the end of the post).

Vladimir Odoevsky‘s “Сказка о том, как опасно девушкам ходить толпою по Невскому проспекту” [Tale of How Dangerous It Is for Girls to Walk in a Crowd along Nevsky Prospect] describes eleven young women walking down the street accompanied by three nannies. Unfortunately, the nannies lose count and leave one of them behind in a fashionable store whose proprietor turns out to be a wizard (and a “foreign infidel” [заморский басурманин]) assisted by a brainless French head, an English belly, and a German nose; he puts a glass bell jar over her and considers how to proceed:

[Read more…]

A couple of years ago I posted about “an enjoyable and useful vocabulary test that gives you a bunch of words, asks you to check whether you know them, and extrapolates your total vocabulary size”; now they’ve put online a summary of their results, and I thought I’d pass it along, since the original test attracted quite a bit of interest. Some of the bullet points:

• Most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words
• Average native test-takers of age 8 already know 10,000 words
• Average native test-takers of age 4 already know 5,000 words
• Adult native test-takers learn almost 1 new word a day until middle age
• The most common vocabulary size for foreign test-takers is 4,500 words
• Foreign test-takers tend to reach over 10,000 words by living abroad

There’s more info, and links to details, at the site. (Thanks, Paul!)

As I said here, my wife and I are now reading the Edinburgh mystery novels of Alexander McCall Smith, and we’re about halfway through the second one, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. The opening scene has a man standing in Canongate Kirkyard and reading a 1962 poem by Robert Garioch, “At Robert Fergusson’s Grave,” which is such a lovely Scots sonnet I thought I’d post it here:

Canongait Kirkyaird in the failing year
is auld and grey, the wee rosiers are bare,
five gulls leam white agin the dirty air:
why are they here? There’s naething for them here.
Why are we here oursels? We gaither near
the grave. Fergusons mainly, quite a fair
turn-out, respectfu, ill at ease, we stare
at daith – there’s an address – I canna hear.
Aweill, we staund bareheidit in the haar,
murnin a man that gaid back til the pool
twa-hunner year afore our time. The glaur
that haps his banes glowres back. Strang, present dool
ruggs at my hairt. Lichtlie this gin ye daur:
here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.

Rosiers are rose bushes, leam is ‘gleam,’ haar ‘mist,’ glaur ‘mud,’ haps ‘covers,’ dool ‘sorrow,’ ruggs ‘tugs,’ and mool ‘earth’ (in my Scots dictionary s.v. muild, cognate with English mo(u)ld ‘earth, topsoil’; cf. Alexander Fenton’s “it was said of Birsay parish that old men would seat themselves naked on mother-earth to see if the mould could be trusted with the bere-seed”); the most surprising (to me) word is lichtlie, which looks like “lightly” and means “lightly”—but in Scots it’s also been turned into a verb meaning ‘make light of, disparage,’ so that “Lichtlie this gin ye daur” means “Disparage this if you dare.” Offhand, I can’t think of an -ly adverb that’s been verbed in Standard English.

I just learned a fine old expression which Brewer explains efficiently: “To break Priscian’s head (in Latin, Diminuĕre Priscia’ni cap’ut). To violate the rules of grammar. Priscian was a great grammarian of the fifth century, whose name is almost synonymous with grammar.” The locus classicus is Samuel Butler’s long poem Hudibras, in which Quakers are said to “hold no sin so deeply red,/ As that of breaking Priscian’s head” (sc. by using the plural pronoun you in the singular, hence their thee-ing everyone). You can see it in action in the Edinburgh Dramatic Review (Feb. 15, 1825, No. LXXV, Vol. II, p. 298):

People speak of breaking Priscian’s head; but were Priscian in life, we strongly suspect he would break our author’s head for certain glaring solecisms in style,—such as, “as my strongest wishes could expect;” “chaste virginity,” (a phleonism;) “my most sanguine expectations could expect;” “a place vacant;” pro vacated, by some one or other.

I discovered it via Google Books, which brought to my attention J. Y. T. Greig‘s 1929 book Breaking Priscian’s Head: Or, English as She Will Be Spoke and Wrote, which Greig apparently wrote in reaction to an essay by Basil de Sélincourt:

I am not a typical Englishman, but a Scotsman born abroad, and in all the ninety-odd pages of Mr de Sélincourt’s essay on the future of the English language I can find scarcely a paragraph to agree with. Inevitable, that. To nine Scotsmen, ten Americans, and eleven Irishmen, his essay breathes just that spirit of Englishry — rather insular, but oh how gentlemanly ! — which has always infuriated them.

One of his points is that the English should not be so worried about encroaching Americanisms, and in a lively passage on page 83 he says “Certain modern American slang terms are so appropriate and necessary that only incorrigible purists will deny them entrance into good English,” listing, among others, “Bellhop (a page in a hotel, a far better word than page, if only because its use would reduce the number of homophones),” “Blurb (an indispensable word that I am glad to see coming into general use,” “Get one’s goat,” “Junk (which combines into four letters the notions of rubbish and odds-and-ends),” “Movies (a great improvement on cinema),” and “Rubberneck (one of the best words ever coined),” admitting that there are unfortunate terms as well (“the use of mortician for undertaker is ridiculed by the Americans themselves”) but concluding “to cry out for a barrier against all Americanisms as such — that is sheer imbecility.” He then goes on to canvas other sources for “the freshening and replenishment of our language”: “I am not overlooking sources in the British Isles. We have the local dialects, for example, and in particular the virile local dialects of the North, which have been quite absurdly neglected by Southern Englishmen for more than two centuries.” I like his attitude.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee, which I wrote about here, is over, and the winner is Arvind Mahankali, a New Yorker who correctly spelled the final word, knaidel (NY Times story). The word is, via Yiddish, from German knödel (also the source of the knedlíky the Czechs serve with everything), and the first thing I thought when I saw the story was “Really? you spell it knaidel?” Well, that turns out to be a common reaction, and the Times has a follow-up story by Joseph Berger about the controversy, “Some Say the Spelling of a Winning Word Just Wasn’t Kosher.” YIVO prefers kneydl, which is how I probably would have spelled it, but:

The spelling contest, however, relies not on YIVO linguists but on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, and that is what contestants cram with, said a bee spokesman, Chris Kemper. Officials at Merriam-Webster, the dictionary’s publisher, defended their choice of spelling as the most common variant of the word from a language that, problematically, is written in the Hebrew, not Roman, alphabet.

“Bubbes in Boca Raton are using the word knaidel when they mail in their recipes to The St. Petersburg Times,” said Kory Stamper, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Mass.

Berger reports on a lively discussion of the issue:

On Friday in the Bronx, a great knaidel debate was in full swing during lunch at the Riverdale Y Senior Center, where many of the 60 diners had already heard about the young spelling whiz from Queens. As they munched on brisket and kasha varnishkes, most everyone agreed on pronunciation, but there was wide discussion on how to spell it, how to make it and who makes the best one.

“K-n-a-d-e-l,” said Gloria Birnbaum, 83, whose first language was Yiddish. She teaches a class at the center in “mamalushen,” the mother tongue of Yiddish, to seniors who want to better understand “the things you heard your mother say.”

“I wouldn’t have spelled it with an ‘i,’ ” she added.
But Aaron Goldman, a former accountant and sales manager in a blue baseball cap, jumped to his feet and banged on the table as plastic wear bounced.

“That would be ‘knawdle,’ not knaidle!” he said.

May Schechter, 90, told Claire Okrend, who is in her 80s, that she did not learn the word until she came to America from Romania in 1938. But, she said, she did not think any of the variants were wrong. “You can spell it any way you want,” she said.

“As long as it’s understood,” Ms. Okrend agreed.

Fun stuff; thanks, Bonnie!

Addendum. I forgot to mention how shocked I was to see the correction appended to the Berger article: “An earlier version of this article said the Second Avenue Deli was in the East Village. It is in Midtown East.” What? (thought I)—it is in the East Village! But Wikipedia set me straight: “It relocated to 162 East 33rd Street (between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue) in Murray Hill in December 2007.” O tempora, O matzohs! Le vieux New-York n’est plus!

The story of Bedřich Hrozný realizing that Hittite was Indo-European when he saw that wa-a-tar must mean ‘water’ is well loved among historical linguists and is familiar to anyone who’s read anything about the decipherment of Hittite. But it’s easy to misunderstand, and Piotr Gąsiorowski devotes his latest Language Evolution post to explaining exactly how the correlation works and why it is so important. Much has been learned since I left the field several decades ago, and I confess I find it both exciting and moving to see the correlations laid out so clearly and convincingly; it’s one of those things that makes me intensely nostalgic for the days when I had my nose in dusty volumes of Kuhns Zeitschrift. Here’s his conclusion:

To sum up, the fact that Hittite wātar is similar to English water is interesting but not particularly impressive as an isolated observation. Similarities can be found between any languages chosen at random. It’s far more significant that the inflectional pattern visible in Hittite helps us to understand the origin of the diversity displayed by cognate ‘water’ words elsewhere in the IE family and is part of the evidence used in the reconstruction of the PIE morphological system. It’s those pervasive shared patterns that demonstrate the membership of Hittite in the IE family.

But I urge you to read the whole thing; it’s a mini-course in Indo-European, and if you can get it under your belt you’ll never again be fooled by flashy claims based on surface similarity.

An interesting language-oriented letter in the May 10 TLS:

Sir, – Although as a senior citizen I cheer Hugo Williams on in his research into newfangled words (Freelance, May 3), I must defend “I was stood/sat”, which is standard Northern speech (along with “he trett her so badly that she sellt the house”, which hasn’t made it South). The different past participles are not a recent import into England, only into southern England.
Having just had the rare pleasure of a reading by Tony Harrison, I’m reminded that “the great BBC class slippage” also has a regional element.
JENNY KING 84 Knowle Lane, Sheffield.

Defend and keep your fine old participles, ye of the North!

There are a number of Russian authors known by a hyphenated combination of their real surnames and their pseudonyms (I wrote a brief post about one such name here), and I always assumed everybody knew the names were connected, but I learn from Contemporaries thought Bestuzhev and Marlinskii were two different people, at XIX век, that, well, contemporaries thought Bestuzhev and his pseudonym Marlinsky were two different people.

And while I’m sending you over to XIX век, perhaps somebody can help out with the previous post, Question for Russian grammar experts? The question is what the “confusing extra что” is doing in sentences like “Первая мысль его при этом была, что ответствен ли он перед этой женщиной” and “Ему всего приятнее было подумать, что в каких дураках останется теперь г-н доктор.” It’s a curious construction, and now I’m curious too.