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Some years ago I posted about Nicaraguan sign language; now a story in Discover magazine discusses “a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College”:

By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.[…]

Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”

This is a fascinating result, especially since the first group of adults were older and had been signing for a longer time. It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for.

It’s not the dreaded Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it’s interesting stuff. Check it out. (Thanks, Aidan!)

I keep forgetting to mention this, but it’s not too late to join The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly in their summer-long reading of The Tale of Genji. I’d do it myself, but my schedule is already full.

“Gabby” Street was an old-time catcher, manager, coach, and broadcaster who died the year I was born. I always assumed his nickname came from his talkativeness, but no, it came from his racist behavior. In his own words:

“We used to call the colored boys ‘Gabby’ down in Alabama, and when I wanted a new baseball thrown into the game I used to call, ‘Hey Gabby, where’s the baseball?’ . . . If you see a black boy and you want him, and you don’t know his name, you yell, ‘Hey, Gabby.’ It works in St. Louis, too, and if you don’t believe it, try it. To me all black boys have been ‘Gabby,’ and I got my nickname from the use of that word and not, as is commonly believed, because I am a chatterbox.”

I got this telling bit of information from the best book of social history I’ve read in some time, Martha Ackmann’s Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone: The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Ackmann is a journalist and scholar who is on the faculty of the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College, teaching courses in women’s public writing, biography and Emily Dickinson; her previous book was The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight. She’s also a lifelong baseball fan (she says in her acknowledgments that she’s “attended Boston Red Sox games for three decades”), and it shows; the book is suffused with the same love of the game that was the animating force in the life of its subject, Marcenia “Tomboy” (later “Toni”) Stone. But if it were just a well-written biography of a forgotten baseball pioneer, Curveball would be a specialized item for connoisseurs of women’s history and/or the Negro League. As it is, I recommend it to anyone interested in America’s difficult journey from the open, vicious racism of American before World War II to the subdued and hopefully fading racism of today, and the almost incredible courage and determination it took for a young woman obsessed with baseball but with the bad luck to be born in 1921 to fight not only the racism of society at large but the sexism of the sport she loved. Ackmann has a real gift for inserting background material seamlessly into her story, describing the (long vanished) Rondo neighborhood of Stone’s native St. Paul and the Fillmore district of San Francisco where she lived after she left home, explaining the workings of Negro League baseball in clear and affecting terms, and providing concise and illuminating footnotes on just about everything you might want added information on. She has miniessays on the effect of the war on the employment possibilities for blacks and women, the jazz scene of 1940s San Francisco, and much else. And the book is written in such a lively style that I would have devoured it more quickly if I hadn’t had to keep putting it down to get over the bitterness of reading about what she, and so many other people who just wanted to play a game and live their lives, had to deal with. I’m just glad Stone was able to enjoy some belated recognition before she died in 1996, and I’m very much looking forward to Ackmann’s next book, on Emily Dickinson.

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The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is online in full:

The only resource of its kind, this encyclopedia provides the most complete picture of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present. This Web site makes accurate, reliable, scholarly information about East European Jewish life accessible to everyone.

The first thing I looked up was “Kiev,” and I found not only a full article, with history, photos, and bibliography, but a map showing the location of not only the synagogues but the Jewish Theater, the Jewish Market, the Jewish Bathhouse, the Jewish Gate (from the 11th century), the Zionists Club, the houses where Ilya Ehrenburg, Sholem Aleichem, and other well-known Jews lived, the Continental Hotel (where Mandelstam, Ehrenburg, and Babel lived at various times)… well, you get the idea. It’s a treasurehouse, and I look forward to exploring it at length. Via Dumneazu (“Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere”).

There is a condition (terrifying to the bibliophiles among us) called alexia, “an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness or visual aphasia.” Oliver Sacks, always a stimulating writer, describes it in the latest New Yorker in “A Man of Letters” (June 28, 2010, pp. 22-28; not online, but here‘s a summary). Unfortunately, having blown my circuits by finishing the book I was editing, watching (and shouting myself hoarse over) the terminally exciting U.S. win over Algeria at the World Cup, and then subjecting myself to the longest tennis match in history (suspended for the night after almost ten hours, with the score 59-59 in the fifth and final set), I am not in condition to provide a thoughtful analysis; I will just quote a poignant line from the subject of the article, the novelist Howard Engel—”My life had been built on reading everything in sight”—and urge you to find a copy of the magazine. Oh, and here‘s an NPR story on the subject (with a link to an audio file), and here‘s “Johnson”‘s take on it. Fascinating stuff.

Claire Bowern of Anggarrgoon (and a frequent LH commenter when she isn’t as busy as she apparently is these days) has joined Quentin Atkinson and Russell Gray in creating the North American English Dialect Survey:

We are doing research on different accents in American English. We know that Americans and Canadians have a great deal in common in the way they speak, but there are also differences. In order to study the ways that North American accents differ, we have put together a survey of common words, and we’d like you to participate!

As Mark Liberman says at the Log post where I learned about it, “All you need is an internet-connected computer with a microphone and a web browser that can run Flash. […] This is a great idea, and I certainly encourage participation.” As do I.

Movie subtitles have been a perennial topic of discussion here at LH (e.g., 1, 2, 3), and Nate Barksdale provides another interesting link with his essay Subtleties. He starts off with a discussion of yellow subtitles (which I’m all in favor of, even if they’re occasionally obtrusive) and works his way via a history lesson (“They worked their way into the silent cinema as printed cards explaining or commenting on what was happening in the filmed sequences”) to the inevitable “moment[s] in which the subtle subtitle machinery has gone wrong”:

The film in question is usually from India; Bollywood movies (and their regional equivalents) present a unique subtitling situation. First of all, the target idiom is generally a variety of Indian English, which of course makes sense given the speech of both translator and average viewer, meaning that even perfect execution will often look odd to American eyes.

Secondly, Indian movies are generally quite long, and I’ve noticed that the quality of the subtitles generally plummets by the time you enter the third hour of the film: grammar goes slack, dialogue becomes terse, there are long awkward stretches where you hear voices but see no words. I figure the screen translation economics work out such that somewhere around the one hundred twentieth minute, anyone still watching is sufficiently committed to the film that there’s no additional return on investment for perfecting the subtitles that remain. I imagine a video editing suite somewhere in the suburbs of Mumbai or Chennai, where the key moment arrives and the lead translator hands off the balance of the film to some sub-subtitler and heads outside for a well-deserved masala dosa.

He says that “the greatest amount of South Asian subtitle strangeness” occurs in the songs, and presents a couple of wondrous examples: “On the tip of the noses love enjoys even the beauty of crows!” and “Thoughts of various spinaches make me yearn.” The latter is from from Mullum Malarum (Tamil, 1978), and I have to say, it tempts me to see the movie.

Months ago, I was following a Google path I no longer remember and Google Books showed me a book that had the “Hail Mary” in Russian. Not a Russian religious book, mind you, but a sort of textbook in English that (as a quick look revealed) had all sorts of odd things in Russian: games, arithmetic, mushrooms… It was The Russian’s World: Life and Language, by Genevra Gerhart. The Amazon page included snippets of professional reviews like “…irreplaceable resource for the non-native scholar … invitation into the culture … author deserves the title ‘Hero(ine) of Scholastic Labor’…” (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) and “a treasure trove … what all Russians know just by being Russian, and what all students of Russian should know…” (Slavic and East European Journal), and reader reviews like “It cannot be easy to describe an entire country, its People, its culture and its customs, in 400-odd pages. Nonetheless, that is exactly what Ms. Gerhart has done here. She covers not only the basics, the ‘everything you want to know about Russia’ — she delights her readers by covering several things they may not have realized they wanted to know,” “It’s simply awesome! It gives a unique insight into the customs of Russian people as related to their history, their land, and their language,” and “Having lived in Russia for the last two years, and dealt with Russians and Russian life daily, I believe the author has accurately summarized everything you should know prior to arriving or doing business here” (all five-star reviews). Needless to say, I wanted a copy. There was a more recent edition, but it cost more than I felt like paying, and I figured the second edition, from 1994 (after the fall of the USSR), would be up-to-date enough for my purposes, so I ordered it, and I’ve been working my way through it since then.
Having finally finished it—even the appendices on Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, how to read chemical formulas, Morse code, Braille, and common Russian birds—I’m here to tell you that it’s every bit as good as those reviews made it sound. If it had been around back when I was a Russian major, I might have continued in Russian rather than switching to linguistics; I’ve never seen a book that so effectively immersed you in a culture and showed you what it was like to live in it. Opening the book at random, the Names section has six pages of a Table of Names, giving full name, patronymic form, regular diminutive, and “endearing forms”; then it describes how different forms are used as one grows up:

Small children hear their endearing name form (from the table’s third column) so often that they might think it their official name.[…] The boy will hear Юрочка throughout his life, first from his mother and later, though less frequently, from his wife (who will usually call him Юра). When he is old enough to socialize, his mother will introduce him to new friends as Юра (from the second column). He will address those other children in like manner until he considers them good friends, at which point he and they will often switch to the usually derogatory name: To his friends and siblings he will be Юрка. The derogatory -ка endings are actually used in several ways: they can be used among children to say “You’re my pal”; among adult friends who might be saying something like, “You’re crazy, but I like you anyway”; and by adults toward particularly offensive children. The neighborhood brat would probably be so referred to by almost everyone. […] In class, Yuri’s teacher will often refer to him by his last name alone, or sometimes as Юрий or Юра. The younger he is, the more familiar the teacher will be. Out of class the teacher might call him Юрий, Юра, or Юрочка depending on the situation — Юрий or Юра if emotion is not involved, and Юрочка if he has been hurt, for instance. He will always address his teacher and adults who are not in his family by their full name and patronymic.
At puberty many things change, not the least the boy’s name. Now his friends call him Юра or Юрий most of the time; Юрочка and Юрка remain for special rather than normal use. He comes into his own when he starts work; then he will normally be addressed by his full name and patronymic: Юрий Иванович. Only his relatives and good friends have the privilege of using the diminutive forms of his name.

There follows a section on names before the Revolution (distinguishing educated from peasant names) and after (“In the 1920s it was not uncommon to name one’s child after revolutionary events, leaders, and ideals”). And this is just one section; the book goes into similar detail on clothing (contemporary and folk), housing (apartments both self-contained and communal, peasant houses from various parts of Russia, all with illustrations), food, transportation, education, nature… pretty much any aspect of being Russian is described and analyzed, including mat (Russian cursing), about which Ms. Gerhart is squeamish (“Never, ever use these words. They are not cute or funny, nor will you be if you say them”) but of which she gives a good account, including the occasional pungent saying (Хоть сци в глаза, всё Божья роса, “Pee in their eyes and they still say it’s God’s dew”). She tells you how to talk to animals, she tells you which fish are especially valued, she has illustrations of horse collars and street signs, she explains the rules of gorodki and why bottles of vodka were traditionally drunk by three people (“one could buy half a liter for 2.60 rubles, with 40 kopecks left for a little food to go with it—three people with a ruble each could get together and have a party”). You get the picture. If you’re interested in Russian life and have a minimum acquaintance with the language, I really don’t know how you can do without this book. (I wonder if similar books are available for other languages and cultures?)

I have added to my blogroll the wonderful Sentence first (“An Irishman’s blog about the English language”). It is written by Stan Carey, an occasional LH commenter who says on his About page:

I’m a scientist and writer turned editor and swivel-chair linguist. Sentence first is my blog about the English language: its usage, grammar, styles, literature, history, and quirks. There will also be stories, photos, and miscellany. I live in the west of Ireland, but thanks to modern technology you can read my blog (almost) anywhere. Its title is from a line spoken by the Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”

I am interested in how people communicate. Words are powerful tools and deserve careful use, but language usage changes constantly. For formal writing and editing I like the plain style, and I am contrarily fascinated by gobbledegook. But because I have had love affairs with various kinds of writing, from science writing and travel writing to fiction and poetry, I am interested in all styles and in the countless ways we express our ideas.

He is clearly a man after my own heart (I am always glad to meet fellow descriptivists, but when they are also professional editors it brings an extra burst of joy), and I particularly commend to your attention his latest post, on snuck as the past tense of sneak. He smacks around a hissy fit thrown by someone at some website called The Awl over the Paris Review’s use of the form (which in a comment to Stan’s post I called “a wonderful word, short, snappy, and vivid”) and provides a detailed account of its history and increasing acceptance, ending with the admirably concise “In conclusion, then, The Awl and Jennifer Garner were wrong, and the Paris Review and Conan O’Brien were right.” (Via Mark Liberman at the Log.)

I wrote about the issue of cannot versus can not way back in 2003; as I said there, “The only context in which can not, two words, occurs is as an emphatic alternative: ‘You can do it, or you can not do it.'” Today ESPN provided a perfect illustration of why the negative must always (except in that rare circumstance) be spelled as one word, cannot. In a graphic at the top of the screen during the disastrous first half against Slovenia (the 2-0 score looked so bad that my brother turned off the TV and took a nap, having gotten up at 3:30 AM to watch the first game of the day), they ran the following announcement:

U.S. CAN NOT ADVANCE OR BE ELIMINATED TODAY

Now, what that unambiguously says, and the way I first read it, is: “The U.S. team can either fail to advance or be eliminated as a result of today’s games.” That doesn’t make any sense, of course, because if they fail to advance, they’re eliminated, but that’s what it says. A moment’s thought showed that what they meant was not CAN NOT but CANNOT: “It is not possible for the U.S. team to either advance or be eliminated as a result of today’s games.” People make fun of style rules as the hobgoblin of little minds, but this is a good example of why clarity demands them.
Here‘s the NY Times report on the game, which was a thriller. This is not a sports blog and I do not usually say this kind of thing, but the U.S. was robbed by some of the worst refereeing I have ever seen. There was no reason to call back the goal that would have made it 3-2 in the final minutes except blindness or worse. Fie, I say! Fie!