languagehat.com

New York Magazine‘s “Vulture” column recently ran a very funny piece on a scene in the TV show “The Wire”:

The go-getting young reporter played by Michelle Paress gets chastised for writing that (paraphrasing) “the Fire Department evacuated 120 people” during a fire. “You evacuate a building. You don’t evacuate people,” Old Curmudgeon Editor grunts. Cut to Paress’s character looking in some sort of reference book, then admiringly muttering, “He’s right, you know,” to a fellow reporter. But is he really right?

I had never heard this particular Silly Shibboleth before, but I immediately realized the etymological principle involved: the verb is from a Latin word meaning ‘to make empty [vacuus]’ and thus should be used only of emptying a building. David Simon (who wrote the dialog) explains in his response:

At the Baltimore Sun in my day, I was chastised by the great Jay Spry, rewrite man to the world, for evacuating people in my report of a downtown gas leak. I plead guilty to an anachronism if indeed that is what it now is. […]
I could not resist having the fake Jay Spry deliver the real Jay Spry’s admonition to Alma, much as he delivered it to me. Plain and simple, it was homage to a wonderful newspaper character and one of my earliest memories of my time at the Sun.

Also of note: The Baltimore Sun would never allow you to refer to a funeral home in an obit. No one lives at a funeral home, we were told. Funeral establishment was the required phrase.

The comments contain other such dictates (“Technically you can’t perform an autopsy on a different species, so if a racehorse died mysteriously and some reporter wrote that veterinarians hoped to learn more after an autopsy, it would be changed to ‘necropsy’ or ‘post-mortem examination.’ Every reporter has a million stories like this, and they’re all different”); the whole thing is lots of fun. Thanks for the tip, Doug!

I’ve recently become aware of these language-oriented blogs:

Cognition and Language Lab focuses on “experiments through the Web testing human reasoning, particularly in the domain of language”: “Long-time readers know that the major focus of my research is on how people resolve ambiguity in language.” This post has a nice quote from Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, Nieuwland (2007):

However, the flexibility of language allows us to go far beyond this. For example, as revealed by a brief Internet search, speakers can use “girl” for their dog (“This is my little girl Cassie…she’s much bigger and has those cute protruding bulldog teeth”), their favorite boat (“This girl can do 24 mph if she has to”), or a recently restored World War II Sherman tank (“The museum felt that the old girl was historically unique”). Such examples reveal that for nouns, it is often not enough to just retrieve their sense, i.e., some definitional meaning, from our mental dictionaries.

The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse, PhD student in the Language and Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, bills itself as “Notes on expressivity, African languages, and more”; there are all sorts of interesting posts on things like Expressivity in Berber and Mawu folk etymologies, but what I want to highlight here is the latest post, On the history of the term ‘ideophone’, which LH readers may be able to help with. Mark writes:

A common term for expressive vocabulary in African linguistics is ‘ideophone’… According to the OED, the term ideophone can be traced back to an 1881 work by philologist/ethnomusicologist Alexander J. Ellis. … Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down the citation provided by the OED, which runs thus: ‘1881 A. J. ELLIS Synops. Lect. Lond. Dialectical Soc. 2 Nov., Mimetics, ideographics, and ideophonetics. Fixed ideograph, variable ideophone, and their connection.’ (Suggestions welcome.)

As I wrote him, “I thought I was good at digging up the OED’s sources, but this one defeats me; I’ve googled everything that seemed relevant and come up empty. The London Dialectical Society (as you’ve doubtless discovered) did a lot of paranormal investigations (Logie Barrow calls it ‘the semi-respectable London Dialectical Society’), and Ellis gave a talk ‘On Discussion as a Means of Eliciting Truth’ that was published in 1879, but I can’t find anything combining him, the Society, and the year 1881.” So can any of you clever folk do better?

Update. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower provides the answer in the comments:

The OED is citing a printed card announcing two of the London Dialectical Society’s November meetings, mailed by Ellis to James Murray (they were friends), and subsequently deposited by Murray in the OED archives.

Thanks, Jesse!

The publisher, Walker & Company, was kind enough to send me a review copy of Nicholas Ostler’s new “biography of Latin,” Ad Infinitum, and I’ve finally finished reading it. I must preface my remarks by saying that I’ve never liked the language all that much. I was taught it in Catholic school by the efficient but unappealing combination of Caesar and the ferula, and in the great division of classical snobbery, I am definitely a Hellenist and not a Latinist. That said, I am of course an eager reader of anything labeled a biography of a language, and I enjoyed this one a great deal.

Ostler’s basic approach is to move from the language’s origin as just one of the twigs on the Italic branch of Indo-European through its heyday as common language of first the Roman Empire and then Catholic Europe to its current fallen status, which he describes at the beginning by saying it “seems a comical language” and at the end by quoting the last of his many Latin tags, Sic transit gloria mundi, in the process tying its fate to the historical tides that swept Europe during that stretch of time (the last 2,500 years or so). It’s a sensible strategy, somewhat compromised by the fact that he’s not a historian and of necessity has to present a simplified and out-of-date picture of what historians have to say. On the second page of Chapter 1, for example, he writes “ROMANITAS—the Roman way as such—was never something voluntarily adopted by non-Roman communities.” (N.b.: When quoting Latin in the early chapters he uses small capitals; after the fall of the Empire, he uses italics.) He qualifies this in a footnote by mentioning the bequest of Pergamum to Rome in 133 B.C., which is hardly relevant; much more so is the insistence of Germanic tribes on joining the Empire a half-millennium later, which he himself describes in Chapter 9 (“First the Goths… applied to enter the Empire”). His general picture of Rome facing the barbarian hordes seems to ignore the recent trend in frontier studies to see permeable zones of trade and cultural contact where traditional historians saw hard and fast borders. Also (to get a minor nitpick out of the way), he doesn’t seem to understand the concept of irony. On p. 57, talking about the Romans’ advantage in having a single dominating city, he says “Ironically, this single urban core turned out to be much more effective than the multiple urban cores that the Etruscans had developed for themselves”; on p. 318, he says “[Latin] was largely propagated through violence, even if … that violence was nominally being deployed on behalf of the Christian God of love, and (just as ironically) knowledge of Latin was until recently passed on to each new generation with ample use of the ferula, that painful instrument of educational discipline.”

But that’s by the by; any book that takes in so much is going to have minor errors and infelicities. The real test is whether there is plenty of good, interesting material that makes you glad to have read it, and the answer here is unamiguously positive. I’ll go through and pick out some bits that struck me.

In Chapter 5, on the relations between Latin and Greek, he talks about “hermēneumata ‘translations’, parallel school texts, apparently dating from the third century AD or earlier, filled with everyday language showing how to say the same things in good Latin and Greek, and (like modern phrase books) sometimes illustrating the right words for a crisis”—and presents two pages of examples, in three columns, Greek, Latin, and English. One example translates as “Isn’t this the Lucius who owes me money? It is. I go up to him then and greet him. ‘Good morning, good sir! Can I still not have back what you have owed me all this time?’ ‘What? You’re mad.’ ‘I lent you money and you say, “You’re mad”? You cheat, don’t you know me?’ ‘Go away, ask the person you lent it to. I don’t have anything of yours.’ … ‘Okay then, it’s not right for a free man and a householder to have an argument.'” I found four collections of Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana at the Bibliotheca Augustana, a useful collection of Latin texts; it only has the Greek and Latin in parallel, but if you know those languages, it’s a lot of fun. If only I’d known about these dialogues in college!

In Chapter 8, he has a discussion of Christian Latin with some great quotes:

A general feature of Latin as used by Christians was its aggressively vulgar, plebeian, tone, quite happy to commit what traditionalists would call solecisms or barbarisms. This is unsurprising, since it was the converse of their worries about excessive eloquence. As Arnobius had put it, writing in 303, “When the point is something serious, beyond showing off, we need to consider what is being said, not how elegantly; not what soothes the ears, but what brings benefits to the hearers.” But the fact that it seemed easier to write ungrammatically also shows that maintaining the full traditional grammar of Latin was becoming a burden even to native speakers, within the fourth century AD. Augustine observed:

For what is called a solecism is nothing other than putting words together on a different rule from that followed by our authoritative predecessors. Whether we say inter homines [‘among men’—accusative case] or inter hominibus [ditto—ablative case] does not concern a man who only wishes to know the facts. And likewise, what is a barbarism but pronouncing a word differently from those who spoke Latin before us? For whether the word ignoscere [‘pardon’] should be pronounced with the third syllable long or short is indifferent to the man who is praying to God, with whatever words he can, to pardon his sins. What is correctness of diction beyond sustaining images that happen to be hallowed by the authority of former speakers?

He even explicitly enjoined breaking the grammatical rules on occasion:

Feneratur [a deponent verb, with passive form but active sense] is the Latin for giving a loan, and receiving one: but it would be clearer to say fenerat [i.e., the corresponding active form]. What do we care what the grammarians prefer? Better you understand through our barbarism, than get left behind [deserti] through our elevated finesse [disertitudine].

Good for Augustine! (This might be a good time to point out that all translations from Latin are referenced to the original texts in the footnotes.)

In Chapter 11, he talks about the beginnings of the Romance languages; this passage presents an interesting theory about how and why Latin became a “foreign language”:

Alcuin enjoined a new, universal style of pronunciation for Latin, deliberately reconstructed to be close to its original sound. Rather than allow each local community to pronounce its Latin as came naturally, he proposed that all should follow a single norm….

This would perhaps give scholars closer access to the true sound of Latin poetry and rhetoric; importantly, it would certainly make it easier for them to communicate orally in Latin, wherever in Europe they might hail from. As a reform, it did not in itself tend toward vernacular literacy: indeed, quite the reverse, for the immediate effect of the new pronunciation was to make priests reading out their sermons or their church offices more or less incomprehensible to their illiterate parishioners. In the favorite—somewhat extreme—example, the word viridiarium ‘orchard’ could no longer be pronounced in northern France as verdzer, by then its natural rendering in the local variety of Romance. With each priest following his home pronunciation, it was possible—at least in Romance-speaking countries—for the Latin text to have been read pretty much in line with the local language…. The newly antiquated, universal Latin, by contrast, was a foreign language everywhere, accessible only to those who had studied it.

Compare the results of the Renaissance humanists’ insistence on following classical models, especially Cicero (Chapter 15):

By insisting on ancient models, the humanists tore Latin away from its old, massive root structure, pruned it, and replanted it in well-weeded display beds, in admirable but alien splendor. Latin remained a privilege of the educated: Renaissance humanism did nothing, for example, to bring Latin closer to the growing multitudes who were learning to read in the vernacular. But even for those who were brought up with it, Latin was now that little bit harder to learn, as its links were cut with modern discourse, however ponderous that discourse might have been. Appreciating Latin neat, in its supposedly purer, pristine form, was an aesthetic achievement; but paradoxically it made the language harder to master, and to use as a living medium of day-to-day expression, let alone as a vehicle for original thought.

And there are all sorts of incidental tidbits, like his reference to Maffeo Vegio, “an epic poet who dared to complete Virgil’s Aeneid with a Book XIII of his own devising, carried off with pure Virgilian panache” (online here), and this splendid quote from John Colet‘s preface to Lily’s 1511 grammar: “In the beginning men spake not Latin because such rules were made, but, contrariwise, because men spake such Latin the rules were made. That is to say, Latin speech was before the rules, and not the rules before the Latin speech.” If all this appeals to you, you will like the book, which is well written, comprehensive, and delightfully discursive.

One thing I found hard to understand, though, was his gloomy sic transit gloria conclusion. Sure, Latin is no longer the world language it was, but there’s been a revival of interest in recent years; there are Latin blogs, you can get the news in Latin, and there’s a whole movement to promote spoken use (read Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker article on Luigi Miraglia). Lingua latina vivit!

I was looking up something else in the OED when I happened on sense 6.b. of the entry buff, n.² ‘A buffalo, or other large species of wild ox’:

‘An enthusiast about going to fires’ (Webster 1934); so called from the buff uniforms worn by volunteer firemen in New York City in former times. Hence gen., an enthusiast or specialist. Chiefly N. Amer. colloq.

The first cite for the fire-enthusiast meaning is 1903, the first non-fireman-related one 1931 (Lavine Third Degree vi. 62 “A dentist, known to many cops as a police buff (a person who likes to associate with members of the department and in exchange for having the run of the station house does various courtesies for the police)”). Who knew that the buff of “sports buff” goes back to buffalo, via the buff(alo)-colored uniforms worn by volunteer firemen in New York City? The actual facts of etymology are so much fun I don’t see why people have to resort to imaginary acronyms and the like.

LH reader kattullus sent me a link to this post at strange maps: it reproduces an amazing 18th-century map by Gottfried Hensel (the post says 1730, but other sources say 1741) that shows Europe divided into linguistic areas, with the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in each. It doesn’t reflect the situation at any one period, but in general it’s antiquarian (England is shown with Anglo-Saxon and the south of Spain with Arabic); “Russica” is actually a variant of the Church Slavic version (which you can see correctly written here), and above it is one of the strangest features of the map, an area labeled “Nova Zemblicæ” (‘Nova Zemblan’) with a different variant of Church Slavic. If anyone knows what’s going on there, I’d love to hear about it.
The map is one of a set of four, the other three showing Asia, the Americas, and Africa; you can see them all at this page (in Ukrainian), but the first two aren’t available in quite as much detail (and Africa isn’t enlarged at all)—enough, though, to see that the ugly Chinese characters were written by someone with no idea of how to do it! (Also, what the heck are those squiggles in Japan?) I would love to see a thorough analysis of all four maps, and I find it hard to believe there’s never been one. The comments at strange maps discuss the differences between the texts on the map and those in use today, which is handy.

[Read more…]

Everyone is familiar by now with the use of yo as an attention-focusing device (Yo, be careful!). Apparently in Baltimore it has evolved into a gender-neutral pronoun; as a Baltimore Sun story says:

Elaine Stotko, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins, began hearing of kids here who say “yo” to indicate another person of whatever gender, and after pursuing survey work over two years has nailed that usage down. Now she has a paper in American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society.

Some examples: “Yo handin’ out papers.” “Yo threw a thumbtack at me.” “She ain’t really go with yo.”

A little further study showed her (showed yo – it can stand in for “her” and “him,” too) that this use of the word doesn’t show up in other cities; kids in Washington say “youngin'” in a general sense, but typically that’s reserved for boys.

There’s much more, including news links, at Mark Liberman’s Language Log post; new pronouns don’t come along very often, and it will be very interesting to see if this spreads.

When I saw the subhead of a review in the Book Review section of today’s NY Times (this week devoted entirely to Islam)—”The ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ of medieval Persia is presented in a hefty new English translation”—I was sure I knew what it referred to. But it wasn’t the Shahnama, it was something I’d never heard of, the Hamzanama, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi as The Adventures of Amir Hamza. The website has links to a bunch of reviews, and it sounds like a lot of fun—the Times review says:

Born as early as the ninth century, it grew through oral transmission to include material gathered from the wider culture-compost of the pre-Islamic Middle East. So popular was the story that it soon spread across the Muslim world, absorbing folk tales as it went; before long it was translated into Arabic, Turkish, Georgian, Malay and even Indonesian languages…
“The Adventures of Amir Hamza” collected a great miscellany of fireside yarns and shaggy-dog stories that over time had gathered around the travels of its protagonist, the historical uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. Any factual backbone the story might once have had was through the centuries overtaken by innumerable subplots and a cast of dragons, giants, jinns, simurgh, sorcerers, princesses and, if not flying carpets, then at least flying urns, the preferred mode of travel for the tale’s magicians.

The translation is from an Urdu version. If you’re curious about the illustrations commissioned by Akbar, you can see a nice selection of them at La boite à images.

Of all the brilliant writers who flourished during the brief period of relative freedom between the Revolution and the time Stalin brought the hammer down, Boris Pilnyak is probably the least-known outside Russia (and maybe inside as well). There are reasons for this; he was not much interested in plot and character development, and his Russian is so full of dialectal expressions and recondite allusions that it’s hard to blame his translators for stumbling occasionally. His idiosyncratic emphasis on nature, instinct, and biology—his plots are interspersed with apparently irrelevant descriptions of wolves, forests, and clouds—combined with his indifference to historical accuracy and verisimilitude can cause problems for even a favorably disposed reader (Solzhenitsyn, in an otherwise admiring discussion of his most famous work, the novel Golyi god [The Naked Year], keeps pointing out irritatedly that the kombedy were dissolved before the novel’s 1919 setting, that there were no anarchists active in that part of Russia at the time, etc.). But his devotion to literature was total, and his courage in defending its rights against those who would subject it to politics was breathtaking (and virtually suicidal). His response to demands in the early ’20s that he declare support for Communism:

This is what I am against: that I must pant breathlessly when I write about the Communist Party like very many do, especially the quasi-communists, who thereby give our revolution a tone of unpleasant boasting and of self-congratulation. I am against a writer having to live “willingly not seeing”, or, simply, lying. And a lie results when some sort of statistical proportion is not observed. … I am not a communist, and for that reason I do not agree that I should have to… write in a communist manner. … To the degree that the communists are with Russia, I am with them (so now, at this time, more than ever before, for I do not agree with the philistines.) I admit that the fate of the communist paty is less interesting to me than the fate of Russia. The CP for me is only a link in the history of Russia.

And even in 1936, when it was apparent to all that Stalin would not allow even the slightest independence, he was defiant; from the first link above:

A writers conference was held in March 1936 to consider how to battle against formalism and naturalism. Pilnyak, Pasternak, Leonov, Fedin, and Lidin were all blasted. Then in August 1936 came the trial of the “Trotskyite Center”. A meeting of writers, critics, and publishers was held in September, giving everyone a chance to bare their souls of any Trotskyite or other deviant sympathies. Leonov, Fedin, Olesha, and others were sufficiently abject and apologetic. Pilnyak, however, while admitting that he gave financial help to Karl Radek, didn’t present himself as politically culpable in any way.

Pilnyak’s recalcitrance led to a meeting of the presidium of the Writers Union in October 1936 to examine his position. Again Pilnyak failed to display any repentance. He labeled the attacks on him as “malicious criticism” and stressed the importance of independence for himself as a writer. Many writers, including friends such as Aseev, Pogodin, and Pasternak, rose to criticize Pilnyak for his excessive calmness, self-assurance, and political blunders.

I wonder if Pasternak remembered this later on, when he was the one in disgrace?

[Read more…]

I had been planning to write about Pilnyak, but chastened by Conrad‘s remark in his farewell post—yes, remorseless time has eaten away the Varieties until there is not a single one left—that I am “adrift in Nova Zembla,” I will honor the memory of the sometimes anfractuous but always amene Vunex by posting on the kind of historico-cultural-linguistic nexus to which Conrad is drawn as a wasp is drawn to sunlight: the history and divers uses of the word normal.

As every schoolboy knows, normal is derived from Latin normalis, in the classical language meaning ‘right-angled’ but in later use also ‘conforming to or governed by a rule’ (norma meaning ‘square used for obtaining right angles, a right angle, a standard or pattern of practice or behavior’). Now, when it was first sucked up through the proboscides of the hungry languages of Europe from the sweet nectar of the Latin lexicon, the word had the humble original sense of ‘right-angled,’ but it gradually took on the later ones as well, and then underwent an efflorescence that varied by region and is tied in with the distasteful but inescapable realm of politics. Frankly, to delve into that realm myself would be both time-consuming and depressing; fortunately, Alexander Kiossev (Bulgarian Александър Кьосев) has done the spadework for me in his Eurozine article “The oxymoron of normality” (found via wood s lot). Kiossev starts with philology:

It is remarkable, that, despite the various waves of linguistic patriotism and purist filtering of foreign words, the Latin words “norm” and “normal” are present in all three major European language groups: Germanic, Roman, and Slavic. “Normal” is used even in Hungarian and Finnish, which belong to Finno-Ugric, a rare, non-European language family. … According to dictionaries, these words penetrated European languages at around the same time – roughly speaking, between 1810 (the first rare usages) and 1850 (common usage)….

Yet the semantic stability of the term’s meaning is no less remarkable. Along with its specialized meanings, old lexicons display four major meanings of “normal” in everyday speech:
– obeying the norm, following a rule, regular;
– habitual, frequent, usual, ordinary, moderate;
– standard, not deviating from;
– sane, healthy….

Despite this stability, one can notice a slow semantic shift in the meaning of “normal”. In contemporary lexicons, the normative meaning of “normal” (“obeying a norm”, “following a rule”) makes way for dominant descriptive meanings such as “usual”, “ordinary”, “typical”, “customary”, “common”, and “average”. Moreover, in meanings such as “standard” and “regular”, normative nuances are weak: these definitions imply technical procedures for measuring and ordering rather than moral or religious norms. It is as if the “norm” in the “normal” is gradually disappearing.

Then he gets into a more sociological kind of history:

Did the words “normal” and “normality” alter the “conceptual limits” (Koselleck) of European populations between 1810 and 1850? I believe it is highly probable that the word “normal” and its derivates contributed to a longue durée process – the ascendance of the new moral order. “God-given” virtues, laws, and decrees were gradually replaced by a dominant sociological imagination operating with overall trends and “statistical” norms. This meant replacing the Christian moral notion of a pious life with conformity to “typical”, “normal”, mass behaviour; divine normative guidelines were replaced with worldly, descriptive ones….

[Read more…]

So says Robin J. Sowards in “Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics” (The Minnesota Review, Spring 2007); he’s specifically thinking of literary critics. And he’s absolutely right, of course; that’s the good news. The bad news is that he thinks structuralism “has been stone dead for nearly half a century in linguistics departments” (he means, of course, MIT) and “the kind of linguistics that [everyone should be studying] (and that is presently the dominant model in linguistics) is what is sometimes known as ‘theoretical linguistics’ or ‘generative linguistics.'” Sigh. Will no one rid us of this wretched albatross? Marxism and Freudianism are relics of the past century; Chomskyism needs to join them on the dustheap ASAP, so linguists can get back to what they do best, studying actual languages instead of their theoretical constructs. (Via Mark Liberman at the Log, who of course is not implicated in my rants against the Dark Lord of Linguistics.)

Unrelated: Anyone interested in my book should go read bulbul‘s essay on Slovak cursing, most of which, inevitably, got cut from the book. A small excerpt to whet your appetite:

Imagine you are a Slovak hockey fan watching your beloved national team score in an Ice Hockey World Cup semifinal, but the referee declares the goal invalid. In a situation like this, exclamations like Sviňa! or Kus vola! are simply insufficient to express one’s feelings for the idiot with the whistle. The only word that will do is Kokot! („dick, prick”). That is because unlike in Czech, the most and most frequent terms of abuse and insults employed in Slovak are derived from terminology associated with sexual organs and sexual behavior.

He broke his “regularly scheduled radio silence” to bring us the essay, and I for one am touched (and hope that the experience will remind him of how much fun blogging is and how much he wants to get back to it).