languagehat.com

Time for another roundup of the review books that have been accumulating:

1) Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them is a writing guide that gets off on the right foot by taking as its goal not “writing well”—as he says, for most of his students “that goal is simply too ambitious,” and that’s probably true of most people—but simply avoiding the most common problems. I also like his “one-word version” of the answer to “how to not write bad” (don’t worry, he’s using the adjective-for-adverb ironically): read. He applies this in two senses: you should read as much as you can all your life, so as to absorb the style of all kinds of English prose, and (for a more short-term solution) you should read what you write out loud. He has the usual undue reverence for Strunknwhite and is not infallible (in this Lingua Franca mea culpa he is charmingly forthright about having given bad advice on p. 85, where he recommends the past tense “swang”), but it looks on the whole like a good thing to give a college student. Just don’t accompany it with Strunknwhite.

2) Benjamin A. Bergen’s Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning is, George Lakoff says in his foreword, “the first book to survey the compelling range of ingenious experimental evidence that shows definitively that the body characterizes the concepts used by what we call the mind”—or, as the author himself puts it, “in understanding language, we use our perceptual and motor systems to run embodied simulations.” It took a long time for the western world to get over its idea that the mind is some kind of abstract entity that just hangs its abstract hat in the body while thinking its abstract, rational, disembodied thoughts; now all sorts of fascinating things are being discovered about how we actually work, how we use and misuse the input of our senses and how memory is really imaginative reconstruction, and it’s good to have someone apply this approach to how we use language. I got nervous on page 188 when he quoted Whorf’s notorious passage beginning “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language,” but he goes on to mention the same kinds of effects discussed by Guy Deutscher in Part II of the book I reviewed here. And I like what he has to say about learning a second language well: “the farther the learner walks down into the garden of a second language, the more the world itself appears to take on different forms, not because its pieces are called by different names, but because the same tableau is seen to be composed of a different set of pieces… Part of what makes learning a second language so difficult is precisely this: the commitment one made early on in life to a particular cutting up of the world at its joints is hard to see as merely one possible commitment among many, and just as it is hard to see, it is hard to let go of.”

3) Marjorie Garber’s Loaded Words is a collection of essays unified by Garber’s sense that “writing today… should be fully loaded—highly charged, explosive, weighty, intoxicating, fruitful, o’erbrimming.” Garber is a literary and cultural critic who shows up frequently in episodes of the BBC’s excellent Shakespeare Uncovered series; if you like essays that bounce cheerfully between Foucault and Mad magazine, you may well like this book.

4) The New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary: does what it says on the tin. It’s got “rhymes for over 45,000 words, including proper names, place names, and foreign terms used in English,” and it’s arranged by sound rather than spelling (there is of course a complete alphabetical index).

1) The Scots Language Centre has a “Word of the week” feature that’s wonderful if you like dipping your toe into that fragrant branch of West Germanic as much as I do. The latest is on Glasgow rhyming slang; sometimes you can hear the word said by a native speaker, as with this one on quine ‘lass, girl.’

2) Did you know there’s a new all-electronic Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged? I’ve already added it to the “Language resources” section of the sidebar, and I’m very excited about it (as I was back in 2011 when I first learned it was coming). You can read all about it, and take a guided tour, at their blog [2023: dead, and not available from Internet Archive]. Frankly, I never thought I’d live to see a new edition of this great dictionary (see this post on the unfairly maligned Third).

Update. Bah, I just went there and it turns out you now have to sign up for a “fourteen-day free trial.” I guess free use was too good to be true. I’m taking it off the sidebar.

Bulletin. There is a blizzard warning for today and tomorrow in this part of the world; schools are closed, everything’s battened down, we’re supposed to get a couple feet of snow at least. We’ve got a wood stove and plenty of food, and I’ve recharged my Kindle, so we’ll be fine, but in case the power goes out I wanted to alert concerned denizens of the Hattery that I may be offline for some time, unable to post, comment, or zap spam. If such should be the case, talk amongst yourselves and think of the Hat family (including cats) warming itself before a blazing fire.

Steve Lohr, who reports on technology, business and economics for the New York Times, has a nice column in their Bits technology blog called “The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story.” The conclusion is straightforward enough—”The term Big Data, which spans computer science and statistics/econometrics, probably originated in the lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s, in which John Mashey figured prominently”—but getting there is most of the fun, and I recommend reading the whole thing (which prominently features my man Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, the only quote book worth getting). Thanks, Paul!

I have recently (prompted by Anatoly) begun reading shkrobius’s Livejournal, which is about everything under the sun and constantly thought-provoking (and often deliberately provocative). In a recent post called “Why aren’t we Teletubbies? Part 2” (the title is explained in Part 1: “Teletubbies were the exact opposite of humans. Our visual cues are as primitive as their infantile babbling… Why are not we Teletubbies? Wouldn’t flashing images be a superior way of communication?”) he quotes, at considerable length, the even more provocative Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight (who, I am interested to see, got an MPhil in Russian literature the same year I got mine in historical linguistics) on the ever-contentious issue of how language developed; I have no idea how seriously to take any of it, but it makes me think, and that’s more valuable than making me nod my head in sleepy agreement. I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs of Knight (in itals) followed by a couple by shkrobius, and you can decide if it’s interesting enough to follow the link in search of more:

…Suppose that whenever I opened my mouth to begin speaking, I found myself instantly challenged, my audience demanding on-the-spot corroboration of the very first sounds, refusing to listen further until satisfied. Denied the chance to express one transparent fiction, modify it by another, modify that in turn and so on, I could hardly display any skills I might have for handling such sequences. Faced with refusal to suspend disbelief even momentarily, I could hardly venture to refer to phenomena beyond the current context of here-and-now perceptible reality. How could I express a fantasy, elaborate a narrative or specify with precision a complex thought, if listeners demanded literal corroboration of each signal as I emitted it, refusing to wait until the end before deciding on a response? Finally, it is difficult to see how my utterance could display duality of patterning if listeners demanded literal veracity on the syllable-by-syllable level, obscuring and resisting the possibilities of meaning or patterning on any higher level.
…My freedom to speak presupposes that you, the listener, are trusting enough to offer me, at least initially, the benefit of any doubt, demanding and expecting more information before checking out what I have signalled so far. I need you to be willing to internalize literal fictions, evaluating meanings not instantaneously, item by item, but only as I construct larger patterns on a higher, ‘combinatorial’ level. By primate standards, such collusion with my deceits would appear disastrously maladaptive.
People erroneously believe that their insistence on literal truth distinguishes them in intelligence. The exact opposite is true, in things small as much as in things large. No intelligence would have existed among those not willing to believe imaginations of the others, and the willingness to contemplate fabrications is the true hallmark of human reason. You can instantly recognize a fool in someone endlessly demanding definitions, proofs and corroborations of every word and/or idea uttered by any one but himself. There is no fundamental difference between such a person and a chimp, and this person restages the same pattern of behavior that kept us in the company of apes long after we had everything needed to depart. If you want truth and only truth, go and live in the zoo with other strivers for intellectual honesty. A human can see truth shining in even the most unlikely fabrication and recognize a lie in the middle of what appears to be rock solid truth. This is what makes us human.
Our language is not designed for speaking truth, it has no built-in features for trustworthiness and reliability, and it does not even aim at them. It aims at imagining and reimagining worlds.

Not particularly related to language, but definitely related to some of the issues raised by Knight: Oliver Sacks on memory (and how we have no way to tell true from false). Riveting reading, as Sacks so often is.

From Thomas M. Barrett’s “Lines of Uncertainty: The Frontiers of the North Caucasus” (Slavic Review 54[1995]:578-601), p. 593:

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian government expended even more effort luring Armenians to the north Caucasus. The first major land grant was awarded in 1710 to an Armenian from Karabakh, Safar Vasil’ev, for the cultivation of mulberry gardens (for silkworms) in the Kizliar region. In the eighteenth century, large numbers of Armenians from Turkey and Persia resettled in the Terek River basin; others fled there from mountain, Crimean or Nogai captivity. During this period, Kizliar and Mozdok were largely Armenian: in 1796, there were 2,800 Armenians and only 1,000 Russians at Kizliar; in 1789, 55.6 percent of the population of Mozdok was Armenian and Georgian. Nearly 3,500 more Armenians resettled in 1797 along the Caucasus military line from khanates in Dagestan and along the Caspian Sea. Armenians engaged in silk production and viticulture and were the backbone of regional trade in the north Caucasus. Another large group of Armenians moved in 1839 from across the Kuban to settle along the western part of the Cossack line at Armavir, where the residents (even in 1859) spoke a Circassian dialect and resembled the mountain people. Armenian in self-identity, Christian in faith, members of the Russian Empire, surrounded by Cossacks, and Circassian in speech, dress, cuisine and custom-the Armavir Armenians demonstrate how complex this ethnic frontier could be.

Barrett also mentions “Iakov Alpatov of the Cossack village of Naur who twice fled for the mountains, converted to Islam and formed a thieving band of Chechens and Cossacks in the 1850s that robbed farmsteads, stole cattle and took captives, not only from Cossacks but also from Kalmyks and Nogais well into the steppe.” Frontiers are confusing, exciting places!

Rhode Island Public Radio has a six-minute interview with “Brown University and Trinity Rep.’s master of dialects Thom Jones” about how people speak in various parts of Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, ending with the infamous Cranston accent (in which “Cranston” sounds like “Cvanston”). Unfortunately, Jones talks about language in an entirely impressionistic way, using incomprehensible terms like “round” as if they meant something clear and obvious, but it’s still fun to hear him imitate the various dialects. Thanks, Sven!
Unrelated, but does anyone know what happened to Gilliland? I mean, what happened is clear enough—if you go there, there’s a notice “This journal has been deleted. All posts in this journal will be permanently deleted from the server 30 days after the account owner deleted it”—but I’m curious why such a dependably good read was suddenly axed.

A very nice language map at the Guardian:

The 2011 census reveals the main language spoken in 34,753 ‘output areas’ across England and Wales, each of 1,500 people. While only 0.3% of the population cannot speak English, 4m people do not speak it as their main language. This shows the country’s patchwork quilt of languages.

It seems Polish is now the third language of the UK (after English and Welsh). Thanks, Conrad!

As I said here, fish names are a tangle, and Andy Martin, writer, academic, and (according to Wikipedia) “the first surfing correspondent to The Times (London),” quickly had his fill of them when trying to produce a new translation of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, as he reports in an Opinionator post:

Somewhere around page 3 of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” I got this feeling that I was starting to drown in fish. There are an awful lot of fish down there, and there were possibly even more in the middle of the 19th century. Whereas my ichthyological vocabulary, whether in French or English or indeed any other language, was severely limited. The fish (and assorted oceanic mammals), in other words, far outnumbered my linguistic resources. I now know I should just have boned up on fish, the way any decent, respectable translator would have done. […]

Instead I started counting how many pages there were and calculating how much I was getting paid per fish. It didn’t add up. I realize now that I should have switched to “Around the World in Eighty Days” – there are far fewer fish in that one.

He goes on to describe how his Dutch translator simply omitted a metaphor he was mildly proud of, and how a French translator mangled “the classic Groucho Marx joke, which goes (in one of its variants), ‘You’re only as old as the woman you feel.'” Funny stuff; thanks, David and Bonnie!

I’m now reading Mikhail Zagoskin‘s very enjoyable 1829 novel Yury Miloslavsky, an imitation of Walter Scott that was immediately and widely popular, and I’ve gotten to the point where the Cossack hero Kirsha (a diminutive of Kirill) is telling a gaping crowd of provincials about his adventures among the basurmany (Muslims). They ask him if it was far away, and he says “Далеконько… за Хвалынским морем” [Pretty far… beyond the Khvalyn Sea]. Since he goes on to clarify that it was “beyond Astrakhan,” I figured it must be the Caspian, but where was the name from? Vasmer explained: Хвалисское [Khvalisskoe] and its variants Хвалимское [Khvalimkoe], Хвалижское [Khvalizhskoe], and Хвалынское [Khvalynskoe] are from Middle Persian Xvārēzm ‘Khwarezm.’ This gave me one of those joyous bursts of etymological surprise that I can’t resist passing on.

Kirsha goes on to say that although in those far-off lands there is gold and silver aplenty, God has stinted them when it comes to winter [Зимой только бог их обидел]: it doesn’t snow, and the water doesn’t freeze. The bailiff (prikazchik) says “No winter at all! Truly a punishment from God—but they deserve it, the basurmany!” [Вовсе нет зимы! Подлинно божье наказанье! Да поделом им, басурманам!]. Russians do love their winter.

Addendum. A little farther on, Zagoskin describes the terem (women’s quarters) in the house of an unpleasant noble; one of the items he mentions is дорогие монисты из крупных бурмитских зерен ‘expensive necklaces made of large burmitskikh pearls.’ The word бурмицкий [burmitskii] wasn’t in any of my Russian-English dictionaries, but it was in Vasmer, who explains that an earlier form is гурмицкий [gurmitskii] and that it’s from the name of Hormuz—in other words, another Russian word with an unexpected Iranian-place-name etymology!

I was listening to William H. Macy being interviewed about his TV show Shameless, and he said the writers kept finding ways to throw his character off kilter, the actor’s job being to put the character back… and here he paused (giving me a moment of breathless anticipation: how would he finish this?) and said “back on kilter.” I was amused by the tangle he’d gotten himself into, and of course I wondered what a kilter was originally and how the saying developed. Well, it turns out nobody knows; M-W, AHD, and the Concise Oxford all say the etymology is unknown. The OED (in an article unrevised from 1901) doesn’t add any etymological information, or even guesses, but it surprised me by being under the headword kelter | kilter, saying “Widely diffused in English dialect from Northumbria and Cumberland to Cornwall, and occasional in literature. More frequent in U.S. (in form kilter).” However, the Concise Oxford has it under kilter and doesn’t mention a form kelter, so I guess the latter has either disappeared or retreated into deep dialectal cover.
Also, it goes back a lot further than I expected (the first citation has the modern/U.S. spelling, the next few are with -e-):
1628 W. Bradford Hist. Plymouth Plantation in Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc. (1856) 4th Ser. III. 235 Ye very sight of one [sc. a gun] (though out of kilter) was a terrour unto them.
1643 R. Williams Key into Lang. Amer. 177 Their Gunnes they..often sell many a score to the English, when they are a little out of frame or Kelter.
1674 J. Ray S. & E. Countrey Words in Coll. Eng. Words 69 Kelter or Kilter, Frame, order.
a1677 I. Barrow Serm. Several Occasions (1678) 201 If the organs of Prayer are out of kelter, or out of tune, how can we pray?