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I have long been a fan of Luc Sante (see PATAPOUFS! ANTHROPOPHAGES! from 2004), and I should long since have alerted you to his blog Pinakothek (“A blog about pictures. All kinds of pictures.”):

I won’t pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything. Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife. Generally I favor humble over great, marginal over central, old over new—but not always, because like a four-sided porch I’m open to all winds.

I want to call to your attention his post Unpacking My Library, with its poignant evocation of the lot of us hopeless book accumulators:

But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Now that I have moved again—into a house that’s not necessarily smaller but that I am determined to keep from being choked with books like kudzu—I have just weeded out no fewer than twenty-five (25) boxes worth: books I won’t read and don’t need, duplicates, pointless souvenirs. I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton’s Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway’s True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don’t actually read. Etcetera. It was time to end the madness….
I do have a few hundred books that I reread or refer to fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live forty minutes away from the nearest really solid library. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind—my brain isn’t big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help…

I’ve moved too often and discarded too many books; I hope I never have to triage my burdensome but beloved library again. (Thanks for the link, Kári!)

If your reaction to that question is like mine, you will be muttering “There’s no such thing as ‘Indo-Europeans’—Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language with a few clear features and lots of hypotheses, and barring the development of a time machine we’ll never know who spoke it.” But many people are unhappy with that degree of skepticism, so there will probably always be attempts to pose and answer the question. The latest is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony; the NY Times review is by Christine Kenneally (author of The First Word, a book that attempts to answer another unanswerable question, how language began), and you can read the first chapter here. As Kenneally says:

The impact of horses on the reach of language is particularly important to Anthony, and he conveys his excitement at working out whether ancient horses wore bits (and were therefore ridden by Proto-Indo-Europeans) by comparing their teeth to those of modern domesticated and wild horses. He muses on the “deep-rooted, intransigent traditions of opposition” that existed along the Ural River frontier, slowing the spread of herding and the cultural innovations that went with it.

If the idea of using primeval horses to illuminate protolanguages excites you, you will probably want to read the book. If you find it (and similar speculation about “a world in which spoken poetry was the only medium”) too hypothetical to take seriously, at least it allows the mind to roam freely over the ancient steppes, snorting and whinnying and heading wherever its fancy takes it, trampling underfoot the captious questions of carping quidnuncs.

An interesting NY Times story by Simon Romero describes the complicated linguistic situation in Suriname:

Walk into a government office here and you will be greeted in Dutch, the official language. But in a reflection of the astonishing diversity of this South American nation, Surinamese speak more than 10 other languages, including variants of Chinese, Hindi, Javanese and half a dozen original Creoles.

Making matters more complex, English is also beamed into homes on television and Portuguese is the fastest-growing language since an influx of immigrants from Brazil in recent years. And one language stands above all others as the lingua franca: Sranan Tongo (literally Suriname tongue), a resilient Creole developed by African slaves in the 17th century.

So which language should Suriname’s 470,000 people speak? Therein lies a quandary for this country, which is still fiercely debating its national identity after just three decades of independence from the Netherlands….

The use of Sranan became associated with nationalist politics after Desi Bouterse, a former dictator, began using Sranan in his speeches in the 1980s. The slogan of his National Democratic Party, the biggest in Suriname, remains “Let a faya baka!” Sranan for “Turn the lights back on!” or, figuratively, get things working again.

But even though relations with the Netherlands are tepid, Dutch is taught in schools rather than Sranan. In 2004, Suriname became an associate member of Taalunie, a Dutch language association including the Netherlands and Belgian Flanders.

Other languages spoken in the country include Surinamese Hindi, Javanese, the Maroon languages (Saramaka, Paramakan, Ndyuka, Aukan, Kwinti, Matawai), Amerindian languages (Carib, Arawak), Chinese (Hakka, Cantonese, and Mandarin), and the geographically inevitable English, Spanish and Portuguese (according to Wikipedia; Ethnologue has a somewhat outdated list).

Incidentally, my problem with the recent switch from the traditional English spelling Surinam to the Dutch Suriname is that it introduces an unnecessary split between spelling and pronunciation (of which English already has more than a sufficiency): to be consistent, the pronunciation should be changed to soo-ri-NAH-muh, but I’m pretty sure nobody says that. What was wrong with Surinam, anyway? I know, I know, I’m a hopeless reactionary when it comes to place names. If it was good enough for granddad, it’s good enough for me.

I recently had occasion to discuss the Persian names for Transoxiana, the region of Bukhara and Samarkand; now, thanks to this MetaFilter post, I’ve found the mother lode of papers about the place itself, which has always fascinated me: Transoxiana, “Journal Libre de Estudios Orientales.” Just the papers by Shamsiddin Kamoliddin alone are enough to keep me mesmerized for hours; check out To the Question of the Origin of the Samanids and On the Origin of the place-Name Buxārā (i.e., Bukhara). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love the internet.

The Journal of Language Contact [2025: now at Brill] has as its subhead “Evolution of languages, contact and discourse” and as its motto the excellent quote (from Hugo Schuchardt, specialist in mixed languages, pidgins, creoles, and lingua franca) “Es gibt keine völlig ungemischte Sprache” (‘There is no completely unmixed language’):

We wish JLC to focus on the study of language use and language change in accordance with a view of language contact whereby both, empirical data (the precise description of languages and how they are used) and the resulting theoretical elaborations (hence the statement and analysis of new problems) become the primary engines for advancing our understanding of the nature of language. This will also involve associating linguistic, anthropological, historical, and cognitive factors. We believe that such an approach would make a major new contribution to understanding language change at a time when there is a notable increase of interest and activity in this field.

Hey, maybe they can solve the problem of the newest language!

Linguistically, that is. According to this Linguist List report from Edward Vajda, Johanna Nichols, and James Kari:

A long-sought connection between Siberian and North American language families has been demonstrated by linguists from Washington and Alaska. Professor Edward Vajda of Western Washington University (Bellingham), a specialist on the Ket language isolate spoken by a shrinking number of elders living along the Yenisei River of central Siberia, combining ten years of library and field work on Ket and relying on the earlier work of Heinrich Werner on the now-extinct relatives of Ket, has clarified the dauntingly complex morphology and phonology of Ket and its Yeniseic congeners. At a symposium held Feb. 26-27 at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and a panel to take place Feb. 29 at the Alaska Anthropological Association annual meeting in Anchorage, Vajda shows that the abstract forms of lexical and grammatical morphemes and the rules of composition of the Ket verb find systematic and numerous parallels in the Na-Dene protolanguage reconstructed to account for the modern Tlingit and Eyak languages and the Athabaskan language family (whose daughters include Gwich’in, Koyukon, Dena’ina and others of Alaska, Hupa of California, and Navajo of the U.S. Southwest). The comparison was made possible by recent advances in the analysis of Tlingit phonology and Tlingit-Athabaskan-Eyak presented at the same symposium by Prof. Jeff Leer of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and by earlier work by Prof. Michael Krauss of UAF on the now-extinct Eyak language and on comparative Athabaskan, and on Athabaskan lexicography and verb stem analysis by symposium organizer Prof. James Kari of UAF. Working independently, Vajda and the Alaska linguists have arrived at abstract stem shapes and ancestral wordforms too numerous and displaying too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than common descent. The comparison also shows conclusively that Haida, sometimes associated with Na-Dene, is not related.

The distance from the Yeniseian range to that the most distant Athabaskan languages is the greatest overland distance covered by any known language spread not using wheeled transport or sails. Archaeologist Prof. Ben Potter of UAF reviewed the postglacial prehistory of Beringia and speculated that the Na-Dene speakers may descend from some of the earliest colonizers of the Americas, who eventually created the successful and long-lived Northern Archaic tool tradition that dominated interior and northern Alaska almost until historical times.

Vajda’s work has been well vetted. In addition to Na-Dene specialists Krauss, Leer, and Kari, who have reacted favorably, the symposium was also attended by historical linguists Prof. Eric P. Hamp of the University of Chicago and Prof. Johanna Nichols of the University of California, Berkeley, both of whom announced their support for the proposed relationship, and Bernard Comrie, Director of the Linguistics Department, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig and professor at UC Santa Barbara, endorsed Vajda’s method.

As George Bryson says in his (remarkably thorough and accurate—kudos, Mr. Bryson!) Anchorage Daily News story, “Establishing that two such far-distant language groups are closely related is both demanding and rare in the exacting field of historical linguistics.” (Thanks for the links, Patrick!)

One of American’s national treasures, the poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, has died:

“His public persona was a real crank, a gadfly, a loose cannon,” said Thomas Meyer, a poet and Williams’ partner for more than 40 years. “But there was this extraordinary generosity.” …

“Jonathan Williams was truly a Renaissance man. He was articulate on topics as various as baseball and music in the same breath. He spent his career combining visual arts with the spoken and written word, integrating all the arts since his days at Black Mountain College,” said Pam Meyer, executive director of the Asheville Art Museum, which has a wide collection of Williams’ photography. …

Besides his work as a publisher, Williams was a prolific poet, essayist and critic in his own right, with more than 100 books, broadsides, postcards and other published works. His last book “Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems” contained a selection of 1,000 of Williams’ poems. …

Williams said in a 1995 interview that the world didn’t owe him anything as an artist. He adopted his motto from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: “I am frankly a bourgeois living in seclusion in the country, busy with literature, and asking nothing of anyone, not consideration, nor honor, nor esteem…. I jump into the water to save a good line of poetry or a good sentence of prose from anyone. But I don’t believe, on that account, that humanity has need of me, any more than I have need of it.”

I wrote about him here and quoted a couple of poems, which I urge you to read; Mark at wood s lot has a full set of links and more poems. Here’s one for the road:

Gardyloo! (A Salutation for Christopher Murray Grieve
On the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, August 11, 1967)

May Glen Fiddich trickle down the burns
and white roses replace heather!

May Burns, Dunbar, MacDiarmid
trickle in the minds
and climate replace weather!

May your conturbation
rouse the artless Nation!

“May your Bottom
never be used
to stretch a Banjo!”

—the latter toast
Chris Grieve gave me in Langholm,
presumably a gist
from the Gaelic-Scots, the original, alas,
now lost . . .

I salute his zest!

You probably think English has a future tense, don’t you? Past, present, future, that’s what they teach you in grade school (with some complications involving “present perfect” and “past progressive” and what have you). Well, it doesn’t. Don’t believe me? Believe Geoff Pullum, who explains that “Instead of a future tense, English makes use of slew of verbs (auxiliary and non-auxiliary, modal and non-modal) such as be, come, go; may, shall, and will, various adjectives such as about, bound, and certain, and various idiomatic combinations involving infinitival complements” and provides a table of uses of will “ranging over volition, inclination, habituation, tendency, inference, and prediction” that should convince anyone that it is not a marker of “future tense.”

[Read more…]

Since the year 2000 the OED has been trudging its way through the alphabet (starting from M), revising as they go: “According to that model, the present publication batch would include words from quits to somewhere early in the letter R.” The announcement by Chief Editor John Simpson continues:

But after several years of steady alphabetical publication, we have decided to vary the publication mix. The present publication range departs radically from the former model, in that its 2,116 entries consist for the most part of key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them. From now on, we expect to alternate between these two models each quarter, with the next publication range (in June 2008) continuing from quits, and the subsequent one (September 2008) presenting a further range of major words and their associated alphabetical clusters.

The main purpose of this change is to revise, much earlier than would otherwise have been the case, important English words whose meanings or application have developed most over the past century. Some of these key words are, as one might expect, among those often looked up by readers of the OED. This change also brings the revision more in line with our policy for publishing new words and senses, which have since June 2001 been taken from across the full alphabetical range.

You can see the complete list of newly revised words here. Yes, I went straight to the entry for fuck, and I am happy to report that the etymology is greatly expanded. The old one is so spare it suggests a desire to sweep the subject under the rug:

[Early mod.E fuck, fuk, answering to a ME. type *fuken (wk. vb.) not found; ulterior etym. unknown. Synonymous G. ficken cannot be shown to be related.]

Now see the riches the Mar. 2008 draft revision provides:

[Prob. cognate with Dutch fokken to mock (15th cent.), to strike (1591), to fool, gull (1623), to beget children (1637), to have sexual intercourse with (1657), to grow, cultivate (1772), Norwegian regional fukka to copulate, Swedish regional fokka to copulate (cf. Swedish regional fock penis), further etymology uncertain: perh. < an Indo-European root meaning ‘to strike’ also shown by classical Latin pugnus fist (see PUGNACIOUS adj.). Perh. cf. Old Icelandic fjúka to be driven on, tossed by the wind, feykja to blow, drive away, Middle High German fochen to hiss, to blow. Perh. cf. also Middle High German ficken to rub, early modern German ficken to rub, itch, scratch, German ficken to have sexual intercourse with (1558), German regional ficken to rub, to make short fast movements, to hit with rods, although the exact nature of any relationship is unclear.

   On the suggested Indo-European etymology (and for a suggestion that the word was probably a strong verb during its earlier history in English) see especially R. LASS ‘Four letters in search of an etymology’ in Diachronica 12 (1995) 99-111.

   It seems certain that the word was current (in transitive use) before the early 16th cent., although the only surviving attestation shows a Latin inflectional ending in a Latin-English macaronic text: see quot. a1500 and note at sense 1b. See discussion at FUCKER n. on various supposed (but very doubtful) earlier occurrences of the word in surnames. However, if the bird name WINDFUCKER n. (also FUCKWIND n.) is ult. related, it is interesting to note an occurrence of the surname Ric’ Wyndfuk’, Ric’ Wyndfuck’ de Wodehous’ (1287 in documents related to Sherwood Forest) which may show another form of the bird name. For discussion of a possible (although not certain) occurrence of FUCKING n. in a field name fockynggroue recorded in a Bristol charter of c1373 see R. COATES ‘Fockynggroue in Bristol’ in N. & Q. 252 (2007) 373-6.

   Many alternative theories have been suggested as to the origin of this word. Explanations as an acronym are often suggested, but are obviously much later rationalizations.

   Despite widespread use over a long period and in many sections of society, fuck remains (and has been for centuries) one of the English words most avoided as taboo. Until relatively recently it rarely appeared in print, and there are still a number of euphemistic ways of referring to it (cf. e.g. EFF v., FECK v.2, F-WORD n., F-WORD v.). It is also frequently written with asterisks, dashes, etc., to represent suppressed letters, so as to avoid the charge of obscenity. Modern quotations for the term before the 1960s typically come from private sources or from texts which were privately printed, esp. on the mainland of Europe. Bailey (1721) included the word (defined ‘Foeminam Subagitare’), but not Johnson (1755), Webster (1828), and later 19th- and early 20th-cent. dictionaries. Partridge (1937) included the word as ‘f*ck’, noting that ‘the efforts of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence have not restored it to its orig. dignified status [in dictionaries]’. A gradual relaxation in the interpretation of obscenity laws in the U.K. followed the unsuccessful prosecution in 1960 of Penguin Books Ltd. (under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959) for the publication in the London edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (see, for example, quot. 1928 at sense 1b). The first modern dictionary of general English to include an entry for the verb fuck was G. N. Garmonsway’s Penguin English Dictionary of 1965).]

Here, by contrast, the luxuriance (with gleeful repetition: “ficken … ficken … ficken …ficken“) suggests a reveling in previously forbidden four-letter fruit.

I am pleased to see that the earliest citation is still the one I quoted in my curses book (a1500: “Non sunt in cœli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk [= fuccant uuiuys of heli]”), and I am absolutely delighted by the first cite for go fuck yourself, and especially by the source, the New York (State) Legislature, Senate Committee on the Police Department of the City of New York, Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York:

1895 Rep. Senate Comm. Police Dept. N.Y. III. 3158 By Senator Bradley: Q. Repeat what he said to you? A. He said, ‘Go on, fuck yourself, you son-of-a-bitch; I will give you a hundred dollars’; he tried to punch me, and I went out.

And who could fail to love the surname Wyndfuck de Wodehouse, or the place name Fockynggrove?

There’s a word tare, meaning “The weight of the wrapping, receptacle, or conveyance containing goods, which is deducted from the gross in order to ascertain the net weight” (OED), that I’ve looked up any number of times but never remember because it’s not part of my mental world. (If you’re curious, it’s via French from Arabic ṭarḥah ‘that which is thrown away,’ from ṭaraḥa ‘to throw (away),’ which is also the root of mattress, from Arabic maṭraḥ ‘place where something is thrown, hence carpet, cushion, bed.’) Today, reading a fascinating 1986 interview (in Russian; found at Avva) with the manager of a fruits-and-vegetables store that throws a great deal of light on the realities of doing business in the late-Soviet period, I hit the word тара [tara], looked it up, found it meant tare, cursed, looked that up, and got the definition above, which I think may finally stick. But looking through the OED entry I found the following phrase:

tare and tret: the two ordinary deductions in calculating the net weight of goods to be sold by retail: see TRET; also, the rule in arithmetic by which these are calculated.

So I saw TRET, and here’s what I found:

An allowance of 4 lb. in 104 lb. (= 1/26) on goods sold by weight after the deduction for tare.

The reason or ground of the allowance was apparently forgotten already in the 17th c., and has been variously given since: see quots.

(“Origin and history obscure.”) Some of the various explanations:

1670 BLOUNT Law Dict. s.v. Tare and Tret, The other [Tret] is a consideration allowed in the weight for wast, in emptying and reselling the Goods.
1678 PHILLIPS (ed. 4), Tret, a certain allowance that is made by Merchants, before a Commodity is garbled from its refuse [1706 ed. Kersey adds] as Dust, Moats, &c., which is always 4 in every 104 Pounds.
1882 BITHELL Counting-ho. Dict., Tret, an allowance made for wear, damage, or deterioration in goods during transit from one place to another.

Another citation mentions cloff, which is “An allowance (now of 2 lbs. in 3 cwt., or 1/168), given with certain commodities, in order that the weight may hold good when they are sold by retail,” but de minimis non curat Languagehat.