languagehat.com

I’m pretty sure that as far back as I can remember—certainly in my college days in the late ’60s—the plural guys has been used to address groups including women, or even (usually, I think, by women) groups exclusively composed of women. There is an interesting “Dear Abby” column today addressing the issue; it opens with the following letter from “Jacki in Wilbraham”:

I had to write regarding the letter from “Disgruntled in Lompoc, Calif.” (Dec. 28), whose pet peeve is waitstaff (in particular) referring to her and her lady friends as “guys.”

Well, 3,000 miles away, I, too, am sick to death of being called a guy. When it happens to me, I tell my server that “the last time I looked, I was NOT a guy!” Sometimes they get it — sometimes not.

I notice that on some of the TV shows I watch, even women refer to a group of people as “guys.” I hate it — and would ask you, with your worldwide influence, to bring the issue forward. We are NOT “guys,” we are “people” or “folks” or “ladies and gentlemen”! Or else, Merriam-Webster will have to change its definition of “guys.” Thanks for letting me vent.

The interesting thing is that “Abby” (Jeanne Phillips) does not simply agree, though she says she too “would prefer to have my femininity acknowledged rather than to be called a guy”—she actually looks in the dictionary, and lo and behold:

And, as to Merriam-Webster’s definition of a “guy,” — my 11th Edition says in black and white that “guy” can refer to “any person” when used colloquially. Frankly, I found it so surprising that I looked in the American Heritage College Dictionary to see if there was agreement, and it also states: “Informal (ital.): Persons of either sex.”

She then presents a selection of other letters on the topic, one agreeing with the original outrage (“My solution is to smile sweetly and ask, ‘Honey, do I LOOK like a guy to you? Because if I do, you need your eyes checked'”) but most either neutral or positive (“As I have told my ESL students, ‘guys’ is acceptable colloquial English”; “It’s not meant to be disrespectful. It’s a regional colloquialism”). It’s nice to see such an open-minded approach to usage on the part of one of the keepers of the flame of mainstream ideas of right and wrong. (Incidentally, my wife agrees that the use in question is perfectly OK.)

OK, that may be too apocalyptic a question, but I’m astonished by the results of a study conducted by Dalila Ayoun of the University of Arizona and reported on by Heidi Harley at Language Log: “Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed [on] only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.”

There’s an even more interesting twist in Ayoun’s native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers’ native-language abilities are identical to adults’ abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, ‘target’. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Heidi reproduces one of Ayoun’s tables “illustrating significant differences in the rates at which adults and teenagers agreed on the gender of 10 feminine nouns”; it’s well worth the look. I wouldn’t have known that primeur ‘early fruits and vegetables’ (often used metaphorically: avoir la primeur d’une nouvelle ‘to be the first to hear a piece of news’) was feminine without looking it up, but that only one of the French teenagers did is amazing. Mme Ruegg (my high school French teacher) would be wielding her ruler vigorously and/or emptying the bottle of booze she kept in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet.

Rikker Dockum’s blog Thai 101 covers “Thoughts on Thai language, media, and culture,” and his latest post is on “Simplifed Thai spelling during World War II.” I hadn’t known anything about it, and it’s not mentioned in the (admittedly short) books I own on the country, but thanks to Rikker—and Matt of No-sword, who sent me the link—now I do:

I understand that it was mandated by Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram [who was known as “Marshal Pibun” when I was living there in the late ’50s—LH], and even people’s names had to be respelled under this system. One remnant legacy of this is that famous name in dictionaries, So Sethaputra, whose last name is spelled เสถบุตร to this day. The original spelling of his last name is เศรษฐบุตร, but since his name became famous along with his first dictionary under its revised spelling, he was one of the few that didn’t revert the spelling after Field Marshal Plaek was ousted.

Rikker reproduces some passages from a 1944 “Thai Language Textbook” with the simplified spellings in red; it should be fascinating to those who can read Thai, an ability which, alas, almost half a century has deprived me of, to the limited extent I ever had it. (I assume the spelling reform wasn’t well done, since it was abandoned after the war.)

Incidentally, So Sethaputra sounds like an interesting guy, who started compiling his dictionary while serving time as a political prisoner in the ’30s; unfortunately, all I can find online about his life is this review of a biography, which annoyingly doesn’t even mention his birth and death dates (though it does say that his wife, the author of the book, died in 2000).

The Times (U.K.) reports on an unusual new museum:

The English language might be abused and misused, as well as celebrated, but it is the means by which two billion people communicate as a first or second language. Now its story is to be told in the world’s first museum dedicated to a language.
The English Project — which is due to open in 2012, as part of the Olympics cultural programme, with support from the British Library and the BBC among others — will aim to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the richness of the English language.
It will trace its development from the mixed tongue of three tribes — the Jutes, Saxons and Angles who crossed the North Sea to make their homes in Britannia in the 5th century — to the global lingua franca of today.
The museum will be built in Winchester — the city of King Alfred, who promoted Old English as a language of learning, literature and law. The city was also a unifying factor for the disparate English, or Anglo-Saxons, at a time when they were threatened by the Viking onslaught.
A campaign is planning to raise up to £25 million from public bodies, individual donors, trusts and foundations. The museum will be announced on March 5 by, among others, David Crystal, an expert on the history of the English language, who will analyse the state of English today.

I’m not sure what it has to do with the Olympics, but Crystal is indeed an expert; who knows, maybe it will be worthwhile. Here‘s the Winchester city website, and here‘s the university’s announcement. Thanks for another interesting link, Paul!

Update: The English Project “launched the world’s first English Language Day in 2009” and seems to still be going strong in 2024.

The University of Edinburgh’s School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences has created the website Sound Comparisons “to provide an overview of the variety of the sounds of the English language on various levels: in time, with our transcriptions of historical ancestor forms of English, from present-day back to Late Modern English, Early Modern, Middle and Old English, as far back even as Proto-Germanic; over geographical space; by sociolinguistic context.” More details can be found at their Information page; of the historical element, they say:

Obviously, we cannot provide recordings of the various historical stages in the development of English, but linguistic analyses do make it possible to work out what the likely pronunciations were to a reasonable degree of accuracy. With each step further into the past, however, the more and more we ‘reconstruct’, the more linguists’ confidence in the real phonetic accuracy of our transcriptions necessarily reduces. All our transcriptions for historical varieties are therefore always to be taken with this caveat in mind.

An interesting site; thanks, Paul!

Occasionally I dive into Nabokov’s insanely detailed commentary on Eugene Onegin for a bracing refresher, and recently my attention was caught by his perverse insistence (pp. 70-71) that the correct way to translate Russian shinel’ ‘greatcoat’ is “carrick”—he goes so far as to render the title of Gogol’s famous story as “The Carrick.” It is, of course, absurd to use in translation a word that not more than a handful of readers will understand, but that’s the kind of absurdity that makes Vladimir Vladimirovich such a lovable crank, and hey, it was a new word to add to my vocabulary.

So I went to the OED… and it wasn’t there! I found it hard to believe that such a word, from the early 19th century, wouldn’t have been scooped up by the OED’s famed readers, so I considered the possibility (unlikely but not unheard of) that VV was simply mistaken. A little googling, however, convinced me that there was indeed such a word: a fashion timeline (placing it under “Directoire/Empire 1795-1815”), an ad, a Dictionary of Costume (“carrick a gentleman’s greatcoat for driving. Of heavy fawn-colored cloth, double-breasted and with deep collar.”), and Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging (“Carrick/ use GREATCOAT”) were a convincing bunch of sources. So I followed up Nabokov’s hint that the word came from France and checked the Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise, where I found “CARRICK n. m. XIXe siècle. Emploi métonymique de l’anglais carrick, « sorte de cabriolet ». Sorte d’ample redingote qui a plusieurs collets ou un collet très long. Un carrick de cocher.”

But now we have a further problem: the Académie claims that the French word is borrowed from English carrick ‘sort of cabriolet‘—and that isn’t in the OED either! I give up.

Update (March 2009). Alexander Dolinin in his article “Pushkinian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading” (translated by Jeff Edmunds) has an excursus on carricks:

The clothing worn by the doll-like Pushkin was chosen with equal care by Nabokov. The mention of the “fur carrick” should be seen as a reference to very important testimonies included in Veresaev’s book. First, a carrick (bekesh’) occupies a central place in a fragment from the recollections of N.M. Kolmakov: “Amidst the public strolling along the Nevsky it was often possible to glimpse A.S. Pushkin, but he, arresting and attracting the attention of each and everyone, was not startling because of his dress, on the contrary, his hat was far from being distinguished by its newness, and his long carrick was also old-fashioned. I will not be sinning against posterity if I say that his carrick was missing a button on the waist at the back. The absence of this button embarrassed me every time I met A. S-ch and saw it.”

[Footnote 33:] V. Veresaev, op. cit. [i.e., Pushkin v zhizni: sistematicheskii svod podlinnykh svidetel’stv sovremennikov, 6-e izd., znachitel’no dopolnennoe (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1936), T. 2], p. 251. Gavriel Shapiro groundlessly traces the image of Pushkin in a fur carrick to a well-known drawing by Pushkin, in which he depicts himself and Evgenii Onegin on the embankment of the Neva (see G. Shapiro, op. cit. [i.e., Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Peter Lang, 1998)], pp. 132-133). Shapiro’s assertion notwithstanding, both figures in the drawing, illustrating stanzas XLVII-XLVIII of the novel’s first chapter, are not in fur carricks, but in frock-coats, which is entirely natural given the “summer-tide” being described by Pushkin.

A correspondent wrote to ask me about the Farsi term “Farārood” which is given in Wikipedia as the Persian name for Transoxiana. When I saw the odd spelling (it should be transliterated Farārud) and the [citation needed], and especially when I was unable to locate it in any of my dictionaries or in Steingass, I was ready to delete it from the Wikipedia article, until I had the bright idea of checking the Farsi version, which to my astonishment was indeed headed فرارود (Farārud). Investigating further, I found (via Google Books) that it was used for a river in western Afghanistan, the official name of which is Farāh Rud = Farāh River. I don’t know what all this adds up to, or why the Iranians now call Transoxania that instead of the traditional name ماوَراء النَّهْر Māvarā-onnahr (from Arabic, literally ‘what is beyond the river’), so I’m throwing it out there to see what the Learned Readership might know.

Update. Ian (of Beyond the River) explains in the comments that farā “is an antiquated word meaning ‘beyond, behind’, and ‘rud’ is ‘river.’ So it’s just a Persian calque of ‘ma wara’ an-nahr.’ Fara is almost certainly derived from wara’.” Thus nothing to do with the Afghan river. He adds that “Tajiks especially like to use the word (there’s a news agency named Varorud) prob because of the general tilt away from Arabic during the Soviet period.” Thanks, Ian! So is there free variation between f- and v-?

Another interesting etymology: trade winds have nothing to do with trade in the sense of ‘commerce,’ though as the OED says “the importance of those winds to navigation led 18th c. etymologists (and perhaps even navigators) so to understand the term”; it originates in the phrase to blow trade, meaning ‘in a constant course or way; steadily in the same direction.’ Now, trade, when it was borrowed from Low German in the 14th century, meant ‘course, way, path’ (it’s historically the same word as the native tread, which originally meant ‘footprint’); it developed the sense ‘course, way, or manner of life; course of action,’ whence ‘regular or habitual course of action’ and (of winds) ‘in a regular or habitual course.’ The sense we’re familiar with is a later development: ‘the practice of some occupation, business, or profession habitually carried on.’ The trade winds tread in their habitual paths as we tread in ours.

A while back I got M.J. Harper’s The Secret History of the English Language in the mail from Melville House, its publisher. I didn’t have time to read it, but I flipped through it and noted that it purported to be claiming that Middle English never existed and that English was the ancestor of the Romance languages, among other things so silly I assumed it couldn’t be serious. I was cheered by the blurb “The best rewriting of history since 1066 and All That” (from the Fortean Times); I thought “1066 and All That is a damn funny book, and I could use a good laugh,” so I looked forward to reading it when I got the chance.

Well, I learn from Sally Thomason at Language Log (and the follow-up by Mark Liberman) that it’s not a joke at all: Harper is serious about all that nonsense. The blurb at Amazon.com, presumably written by the author, reads:

In a hugely enjoyable read, not to mention gloriously corrosive prose, M.J. Harper slashes and burns through the whole of accepted academic thought about the history of the English language. According to Harper: The English language does not derive from an Anglo-Saxon language. French, Italian, and Spanish did not descend from Latin. Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by well-meaning but deluded academics. Most of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary are wrong. And that’s just the beginning. Part revisionist history, part treatise on the origins of the English language, and part impassioned argument against academia, The Secret History of the English Language is essential reading for language lovers, history buffs, Anglophiles, and anyone who has ever thought twice about what they’ve learned in school.

Now, I have nothing against crackpots; throughout history they’ve provided harmless amusement for the rest of us. I don’t even blame the publishers who put out the stuff without a proper warning label—they’re just trying to make a buck, putting it all on the market and seeing if anyone will buy it. No, I blame the professional reviewers who take the nonsense seriously. The New Statesman, for example, says:

Unusual, funny and provocative, Harper wears his learning lightly, but has a serious point to make. While admitting that his own theories about the early Brits “may or may not be acceptable”, he warns that historical anomalies are routinely ignored by the academics we rely on to explain our past. Whatever your stance on the Anglo-Saxons (and Harper’s suggestions are rather seductive), this fascinating book is a useful investigation into the ways in which history is constructed and the dangers of “unassailable” academic truths.

If the book were claiming that Queen Elizabeth was the illegitimate son of Rasputin, or that mixing salt and sugar provides an inexhaustible source of energy that will replace oil and gas, no one would take it seriously; if it were reviewed at all, it would be as an example of how absolutely anything can get published. But equivalent nonsense about language is reviewed respectfully, and it makes me despair. Sally Thomason takes consolation from the fact that good books are also being published (and I certainly look forward to David Crystal’s The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left), but such books have been published for many years, and they don’t seem to make much of a dent. People just don’t want to think sensibly about language.

Today’s etymology: tender ‘a boat for communication or transportation between shore and a larger ship; a car attached to a steam locomotive for carrying a supply of fuel and water’ is short for attender: it’s a boat or train car that attends another one. (OED citation: 1825 MACLAREN Railways 32 note, A small waggon bearing water and coals follows close behind the engine, and is called the Tender, i.e. the ‘Attender’.) Simple and obvious once you know it, but I hadn’t known it.

Another t word: tee (the thing you hit the golf ball off of) was teaz in 17th-century Scotland (1673 Wedderburn’s Vocab. 37, 38 (Jam.) Baculus, Pila clavaria, a goulfe-ball. Statumen, the Teaz), so it was presumably reanalyzed like pease > pea, but nobody knows where teaz came from.