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I’m slowly working my way through Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, a book I’d been dying to read and finally got last summer, and I just hit the brief excursus on Elamite (which is probably related to Dravidian). I had not realized that Elamite was still spoken when Alexander conquered the area (and possibly as late as the Arab conquest), nor had I realized that Elam became the heart of the Old Persian empire:

Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Dārayavauš), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Šušan) as the administrative capital, and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.

He goes on to make the following interesting observation:

The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.

Which means the Elamites played the same role with respect to the Old Persians as the Persians played with respect to the Turks a millennium and a half later.
An amusing sidelight: “Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam [after a long period of Akkadian domination], since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.” (Emphasis added.)

Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati specializing in Heidegger, has a serious obsession with typewriters, and he has written a very philosophical article (with great illustrations) called Typology: A Phenomenology of Early Typewriters (“The metaphysical significance of writing machines”):

The typewriter is in the process of becoming a thing of the past, along with dial phones and vinyl records. “Things of the past” are still present, of course — it’s their world that is absent (as Heidegger says somewhere about museum pieces). The context in which these things once fit, which gave them their appropriateness and integrated them into human lives, has slipped away — disappearing, piece by imperceptible piece, until one day we recognize that the Gestalt has already changed, that we live in a new world. …

… My own interest in early typewriters — writing machines of the 1870s through the 1930s — is primarily imaginative: these survivors draw me, both as conduits for written signs and as signs themselves of a lost world. In this talk I will try to use my imaginative interest as a basis for phenomenological reflection. I am going to focus especially on the question of “typing”: that is, both our acts of identifying types or forms of things, and the process by which types are themselves generated. What I think I see in typewriters is the finitude of typing.

If that’s too metaphysical for you, check out his Classic Typewriter Page; if you have even the slightest interest in typewriters, I guarantee you there’s something for you there, from the Brief History of Typewriters to the Typewriter Parts page (“What to call the whatchamacallits”) to ETCetera, the journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors Association (edited, of course, by Polk).

Previous LH typewriter posts: History of the Russian Typewriter and Polyglot Typewriting; I see that in the latter I linked to Polk’s list of typewriter repair shops worldwide. You can’t escape the guy! (Typology link via wood s lot.)

Another etymological adventure: I saw a reference to the fact that ajar was originally on char ‘on the turn’ (i.e., of a door, ‘slightly opened’), and I thought I’d investigate this mysterious char. The OED lists it as “chare, char,” saying the original but now obsolete sense ‘turn’ (whence either ‘occasion, time’ or ‘turning back, return’) is usually cher or char. An extension of this sense is ‘turn or stroke of work; an action, deed; a piece of work or business,’ and this develops the specialized meaning ‘an occasional turn of work, an odd job, esp. of household work; hence in pl. the household work of a domestic servant’ (1606 SHAKES. Ant. & Cl. IV. xv. 75 The Maid that Milkes, And doe’s the meanest chares; 1881 HUXLEY Sc. & Cult. ii. 34 Mere handicrafts and chares). But this, the “extant sense,” is “now usually CHORE.” Cue lightbulb over head.

What’s the etymology, you ask? Tangled:

OE. cerr, cierr, cyrr, masc. i- stem:—O.Teut. type *karri-z or *karzi-z… Often identified with OHG. chêr, MHG. kêr, Ger. kehr, MDu. kêr, Du. keer, masc.; besides which there is OHG. chêra, MHG. kêre, Ger. kehre, MDu. and MLG. kêre, LG. kêr str. fem.; but these represent OTeut. types *kairi-z-oz or kaizi-z, oz, and *kairâ or *kaizâ, the vowel of which has no connexion with that of the OE. word. No forms cognate to either are known outside Teutonic.

A few years ago I did a post on Chinese braille; now Matt of No-sword has done a couple of posts about the Japanese versions (kana, kanji), and Joel of Far Outliers has responded with Braille Family Resemblances and Mutations:

All varieties of Braille render the characters of their respective languages in a six-dot matrix (or did until until recently); all are read from left to right, even in Hebrew; all use word-spacing, even in Chinese and Japanese; and all tend to place diacritic characters before the characters they modify.

Fascinating stuff.

From a letter by Ian Mackenzie in the latest NY Times Book Review, complaining about Liesl Schillinger’s Feb. 3 review of Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children:

Schillinger approvingly quotes a sentence of Bock’s: “Electricity lit up Ponyboy’s skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravaganza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy’s nostrils.” This describes, we are told, the administration of Ponyboy’s newest tattoo. It is easy to see why, in the current literary climate, this sentence attracts admiration: it loudly conflates the human body and the book’s setting, Las Vegas; it declares the obsolescence of the comma as it pounds out a list of nouns; its zeal for gaudy metaphor nearly splits it at the seams; and it turns up the biblical volume with the sinister “brimstone.”

But the sentence suffers from several conspicuous flaws. For one, it lurks at the edge of tenability when it describes the electricity illuminating Ponyboy’s “skeletal structure.” It then attempts to shoehorn in the metaphor of a pinball machine, whose vividness further divorces the sentence’s central idea from a credible reality, and then finally, in order, I imagine, to deploy four nouns rather than three, it falls irritatingly into redundancy: brimstone and sulfur, as a quick trip to the dictionary will confirm, are synonyms.

Ouch.

Incidentally, brimstone, late Old English brynstán , is literally ‘burn-stone’; the OED adds “An identical formation in other Teut. langs. (MDu. and MLG. bernsteen, Du. barnsteen, Ger. bernstein) is used with the sense ‘amber’. The transposition in bern-, bren- was inherited from the vb.; the subsequent change to brim- may have been due to association with the adj. brim, BREME ‘fierce.'” (Odd that the OED writes German nouns lowercase.)

A reader wrote to call my attention to Barbara Partee’s Language Log post about the wonderful Russian nonword “lytdybr” and to point out that I had used it in the title of one of the earliest LH posts without bothering to explain it, which was quite cheeky of me. But in my defense, I’d been immersing myself in Russian blogs and didn’t really think of it as being completely obscure to whoever might be reading (not that there were more than three people reading at that point). So here, belatedly, is the explanation, in Barbara’s words: “it’s how the Russian word дневник, dnevnik ‘diary’, comes out if you’re typing on a QWERTY keyboard with the keystrokes you would use on a Cyrillic keyboard.” And as one of her students says, “It is often … used to tag posts in blogs that are nothing more than boring retelling of author’s life.” (I’m amazed to see that my original post is the #3 hit for it on Google! My apologies to anyone who may have clicked on it over the years hoping for clarification.)

Addendum. The reader who wrote me about it comments to say “Given that this could happen in any language with a non-roman keyboard layout, there is great potential for more examples of this as-of-yet nameless phenomenon.” An excellent point. So: Anybody have other examples?

This time in Syria, according to a story in The Economist:

In the past few months, across the country, owners have been told to Arabise the names of their shops and cafés and advertisers have been urged to use classical Arabic rather than the local Syrian dialect. “La Noisette restaurant is now called al-Bunduqa,” Arabic for hazelnut, says Ibrahim Hamidi, who has written on the subject for al-Hayat, an Arabic-language newspaper published in London. “It sounds funny to us.”
A law from the 1950s was revived by decree a year ago with the formation of a Committee for Improving the Arabic Language. It may mark a new effort to polish Syria’s Arab credentials and end the country’s isolation of recent years.

And some people think English is in need of such a Committee! (Thanks for the link, Kobi.)

Remember my curses and insults book? It still hasn’t come out in the States, but last month the “international radio news magazine” The World did an interview with me about it that will be broadcast today. The show is created by WGBH in Boston; on my local station it’s on at 3 PM. If you’re not in the US, or if your local public radio station doesn’t carry the show, or if you just don’t feel like being glued to the radio for an hour, as of 5 PM Eastern time it will be available on their website (and they are kind enough to link to individual segments, so you don’t have to listen to the whole show).

I did not use any English obscenities, but I mentioned some in other languages, one of which was Greek maláka ‘jerk, dumbass’ (or, more literally, ‘wanker,’ to use the handy British insult); my wife was listening in the anteroom (I was connected to GBH via the studio of my local station, WFCR, where everyone was exceedingly nice), and she tells me a guy who happened to be in the room smiled when he heard it and said that he once worked in a Greek-run pizza place and that was the first word he learned.

Addendum. On the subject of “bad language,” Avva posted the results of a Google search for “enbreasties.” Take a look at the results and see how long it takes you to figure out why this non-word occurs so often (e.g., “President Bush identified eight enbreasties operating in North Korea, Iran, and Syria…”). I’ll post the answer below the cut.
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Another language-related blog has come to my attention: Michael Sheehan’s Wordmall. Sheehan is a retired English professor who has a radio show called “Words to the Wise,” which “covers the joys and vicissitudes of the English language,” and he covers similar material in his blog. His latest post, Bruschetta, not only covers the etymology (“The name comes from an Italian word that meant ‘to roast over coals.’ In turn, that came from a 13th century verb that meant ‘to pass a flame over the keel of a boat in order to melt the pitch and improve waterproofing'”), it has a mouth-watering picture and links to some recipes from Mario Batali. The only thing it doesn’t address is the pronunciation; I have had to force myself to get used to the near-universal American broo-SHET-uh, since my awareness of the Italian broo-SKET-tah causes me to cringe when I hear it.

A previous post, That’ll Be Three Bucks, Please, discusses the history of buck ‘dollar’ and adduces the Journal of Conrad Weiser, Esq., whose entry for September 17, 1748, after talking about sending down “Skins by the Traders to buy Rum,” says “Whiskey shall be sold to You for 5 Bucks in your Town” and mentions a man who “has been robbed of the value of 300 Bucks.” I would want to see a reasonably clear link between this use as ‘medium of trade’ and the much later ‘dollar’ sense, but it’s certainly suggestive. (By the way, the OED has eleven separate noun entries for buck; I wonder what the record is?)

I wouldn’t accord the cockamamie notion of “National Grammar Day” any attention except that it inspired a lively column by Nathan Bierma, who says he is “one of those people who cares about the difference between a gerund and a participle, between a restrictive and non-restrictive relative clause” but has come to realize that “most of the time — when we’re among friends, family, or anyone we feel comfortable with — we should simply let our hair down and allow our unpolished emissions of language to burst out of us in all their untidy splendor.”

So I can’t join the witch hunt of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (which goes by the unappetizing acronym of SPOGG), which is sponsoring National Grammar Day as a chance to flag any violation of standard English usage in any situation.
“If you see a sign with a catastrophic apostrophe, send a kind note to the storekeeper,” urges SPOGG at nationalgrammarday.com. “If your local newscaster says ‘Between you and I,’ set him straight with a friendly e-mail.” Such corrections are seldom friendly, welcome or necessary. They are usually self-righteous, irritating and misinformed.
The policewoman behind National Grammar Day and SPOGG is Martha Brockenbrough, who serves as grammar guru for Microsoft’s Encarta Web site (encarta.msn.com), where she writes a column called “Grumpy Martha’s Guide to Grammar and Usage.”
There she urges readers to avoid using an adverb with a word like “unique” (too bad for our founding fathers, who dreamed of “a more perfect union”), and to avoid saying “decimate” unless you mean “reduce by one tenth” (if 10 percent of educated English speakers know and care about that distinction, I’ll give Grumpy Martha one tenth of my candy bar).
Brockenbrough reprimands pop stars for grammar gaffes in song lyrics, including Bryan Adams for singing “if she ever found out about you and I” (it should be “you and me,” she says) — even though that’s the best way to rhyme with the line before it: “She says her love for me could never die.” And she takes Elvis to task — is no one sacred? — for singing “I’m all shook up” instead of the proper “all shaken up.”
Raise your hand if you prefer this correction. That’s what I thought.

He goes easier on the malign stupidity of this kind of thing than I would (“self-righteous, irritating and misinformed” is a mere slap on the wrist), but I heartily applaud his attitude.

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