Archives for April 2003

La grande rousse [archived] emphasizes for the benefit of lazy pluralizers that there is no such word as “chevals“; in so doing, she links to an interesting brief entry at the Banque de dépannage linguistique of the Office québécois de la langue française, which in the course of explaining why the word is chevaux clears up a detail I had never thought to wonder about, namely why -x is used for plurals in the first place. It seems that the ending -us resulting from the pre-French change of /l/ to /u/ before another consonant was written by scribes with an abbreviation that looked like an “x”; later scribes, thinking it was in fact an “x,” wrote it that way, so that what had been “chevaus” now read “chevax.” Still later copyists thought a “u” had been omitted and inserted it, producing “chevaux,” which became established—just one of the bits of weirdness that make the French one of the few peoples on earth who cannot plausibly make fun of English spelling.

Yemsa is a minor language of Ethiopia, the language of the former kingdom of the people who call themselves Yamma and were absorbed into Ethiopia in 1894; people, kingdom, and language are traditionally called Janjero or Zenjaro, an insulting Amharic term meaning ‘baboon.’ A book by G.W.B. Huntingford, The Galla of Ethiopia: The Kingdoms of Kafa and Janjero, contains the following description (quoted in Andrew Dalby’s Dictionary of Languages, p. 475) of a remarkable feature of the language:

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In an earlier entry I referred to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that the way we see and think about the world is influenced (in the moderate version) or determined (in the strong version) by the language we speak. A short article by Daniel Chandler summarizes thus:

Whilst few linguists would accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its ‘strong’, extreme or deterministic form, many now accept a ‘weak’, more moderate, or limited Whorfianism, namely that the ways in which we see the world may be influenced by the kind of language we use. Moderate Whorfianism differs from extreme Whorfianism in these ways:

* the emphasis is on the potential for thinking to be ‘influenced’ rather than unavoidably ‘determined’ by language;
* it is a two-way process, so that ‘the kind of language we use’ is also influenced by ‘the way we see the world’;
* any influence is ascribed not to ‘Language’ as such or to one language compared with another, but to the use within a language of one variety rather than another (typically a sociolect – the language used primarily by members of a particular social group);
* emphasis is given to the social context of language use rather than to purely linguistic considerations, such as the social pressure in particular contexts to use language in one way rather than another.

(Other discussions here and here, here is a collection of old LinguistList posts on the topic [1991-99], and Stavros has a recent entry discussing it in relation to Korean hierarchical forms of language.)

I have no new insights to offer regarding the hypothesis itself (though I will say that the Chomsky-Pinker outright dismissal of it is based on their assumption of the underlying identity of all languages, which I consider absurd.) I would, however, like to mention an experiment I carried out in my college years, when I was too ignorant to realize I had neither the experience nor the resources to do a good job of it. I copied a number of illustrations of simple scenes, simple enough that there were only a few elements to describe (a woman getting water from a well, a man going through a door, that kind of thing). I then showed the series to native speakers of as many different languages as I could find on my (fortunately very diverse) campus and asked them to write one-sentence descriptions in their native languages. My hope was to show skewing of description that would correlate with the grammatical structures of their languages; as I recall, the results were suggestive but not conclusive (and how could they have been, given that I was wet behind the ears and stumbling around in the dark?). But it seems to me that a similar experiment, done by people who knew what they were doing, could provide some valuable insight, more valuable than the simple asseverations that pass for argument at present. If anyone knows of work along those lines, please let me know. And if anybody thinks I’m talking through my hat, they’re probably right. All comments are welcome.

Rara Avis illustrates an entry on the former hierarchy of languages in Finland with this photo of a trilingual street sign, which reminds me of my only visit to Helsinki, back in 1971. At that time nobody in the city seemed to speak English, and I spoke no Finnish or Swedish, so the only common language available was Russian—except that nobody in Finland wanted to speak Russian (except for the aged caretaker of the Russian Orthodox cathedral), so I was effectively cut off from verbal communication. A very strange experience. (When I say I spoke no Finnish, by the way, I exaggerate slightly. I had painstakingly taught myself one Finnish sentence, which still rolls easily off my tongue over 30 years later: Puhutteko englantilainen englantia? Do you speak English? [Thanks for the correction, Dmitri!] Alas, the response to my fluently produced query was invariably a flood of incomprehensible Finnish. Belatedly, it dawned on me that the only useful sentence in that context is “Do you speak English?” In English. Live and learn.)

In an entry today, incidentally, Rara refers to the Academic Bookstore, which is apparently the Foyles of Helsinki; I suspect it’s the huge bookstore where I found all the Russian books I’d been unable to find in Russia itself (these were the days when the only books available in Soviet bookstores were the complete works of Lenin and whatever books had just been published that week—unless they were of any interest, in which case they had vanished within minutes). Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Rara!

Update (Mar. 2021). I’ve gotten spoiled by the Wayback Machine; I feel bitter and resentful that they didn’t capture any Rara Avis links from this incarnation (though they do faithfully preserve the one trial post from a later blog at the same URL). Needless to say, the links in the post are dead. Bah.

From Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems:

Last, he with muscle as big as his voice, the strength of him
in that blizzard
to have pulled the trawl slack from the very bottom and released
his mate from the cod-hook had him out, and almost off,
into the snow. It wasn’t that there was so much sea. It was the cold,
and that white, until over the dory went and the two of them,
one still,
were in. The wild thing was, he made the vessel, three miles, and fetched her,
found that vessel in all that weather, with his fellow dead weight
on him. The sort of eye
which later knew the Peak of Brown’s
as though it were his own garden (as Bowditch brought the Eppie Sawyer
spot to her wharf a Christmas morning)

from Letter 2.

And the self-correction, in Letter 15:

It goes to show you. It was not the “Eppie Sawyer”. It was the ship “Putnam”. It wasn’t Christmas morning, it was Christmas night, after dark. And the violent north-easter, with snow, which we were all raised to believe did show Bowditch such a navigator, was a gale sprung up from W. hit them outside the Bay, and had blown itself out by the 23rd.

On the 25th it was fog Bowditch had to contend with. The wind was NE allright, but there is no mention of snow[…]

    1
He sd, “You go all around the subject.” And I sd, “I didn’t know it was a subject.” He sd, “You twist” and I sd, “I do.” He said other things. And I didn’t say anything.

(Exit Olson, enter Languagehat.) Facts are hard to come by, and we all twist, but it’s refreshing that he took the trouble to straighten it out, no? (Exit, pursued by a postmodernist.)

Anyone who, like me, has been inspired and energized by Shelley’s consistently excellent writing and thinking over at Burningbird should be aware that she’s in danger of losing her forum, her microphone, her virtual voice. Jonathon Delacour has set up a PayPal fund for her; you can click on the button below or go to his site if you want to contribute. Burn on, Shelley!

Update. The campaign has been very successful, and Jonathon has removed the PayPal button and asked others to do likewise. I’d like to join him and Shelley in thanking anyone who contributed to the fund; it’s heartening to see the oft-derided “internet community” act as a community. Kudos all around.

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Jonathon Delacour, at the heart of things, has a brilliant post about a genre of Japanese novel called shishōsetsu, the “I novel,” which uses “the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience” and is apparently a basic component of the Japanese understanding of what a novel should be. After an analysis of the phenomenon itself, he ties it in to the truth in blogging issue that has been roiling a section of the community. Read it and think.

Go over to Laputan Logic and read today’s clear, illustrated entry (you may have to scroll and/or hit Stop; John’s trying out a stylesheet-based system, and it’s very slow and wonky). A sample:

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The literary journal Two Lines has been around since 1994, but I only recently discovered it (at the Fifteenth Annual Small Press Book Fair, March 29 and March 30, here in NYC). Each issue is organized around a theme (the three most recent are “Crossings,” “Cells,” “Ghosts”), and they present everything bilingually—completely in the case of poetry, usually only the first page in the original for prose. You can see the complete list of issues here, and clicking on the Contents link will tell you what’s in each (here, for example, is the 2002 issue); most of the actual content is not online, but it’s a venture worth shelling out to support. And if the theme of the next issue appeals to you, you might want to submit something; it’s too late for this year’s “Parties” issue, but I imagine they’ll have a theme for 2004 up soon.

In my perusal of the OED, I have run across the most extreme example I’ve seen of disparity between the weight of scholarly apparatus brought to bear on a word and the fugitive nature of the word itself, which occurs once in the 15th-century morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Ordinarily, I’d urge people to start putting the word back into use, to justify the labors of the OED’s etymologists, but since the word is an abusive term for a woman, that won’t do. At any rate, here’s the entry (warning: the following contains both misogynistic language and rank etymological speculation):

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