I was just reading William Lee Miller’s review of David Herbert Donald’s We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends
[Donald] likes to imagine, and I do too, an incident, possibly apocryphal, when this president and his secretary of state [William Henry Seward] were strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. The president pointed to a sign saying ”T. R. Strong,” and wisecracked, ”but coffee are stronger,” and the two collapsed in laughter.
I like a man with a weakness for bad puns.
Geoff Pullum has posted some truly intriguing questions: how do we acquire intuitions about the word wronger, given that it is hardly ever used? Why is it so rarely used, given that wrong is so common? (The same goes for right and righter.) And if your intution, like mine (and my wife’s), says that it is pronounced RONG-er and not RONG-ger—why is that, given that the other three one-syllable adjectives ending in -ng, long, strong, and young, all have comparatives whose pronunciations end in –ger? Very strange, and I (and I presume Geoff) welcome both theories and testimonies about how you pronounce (or would pronounce) wronger.
Joel of Far Outliers has a post called “Traditional China: Multilingual” on the Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, a book that tries to “capture the complexity of the Chinese cultural mosaic” and “take into account virtually every aspect of traditional culture, including sources from the non-Sinitic ethnic minorities,” in which he quotes the introduction on the many languages spoken in China:
Take language, for example. When one thinks of what defines “China,” perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that it is a place where the people all speak “Chinese.” But what is this “Chinese” that everyone is supposedly speaking to each other? Unfortunately, China does not today possess, nor has it ever in the past possessed, such a universally understood tongue. For starters, we have to take into account the tens of millions of speakers of non-Sinitic languages who make up a significant proportion of the population of the Chinese nation as it is currently configured…. These languages belong to such disparate groups and families as Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Turkic, Tungusic, Iranian, and Slavic. These are the “minorities” of the Peoples Republic of China, all of whom have roots that lie deep in the past of East Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia.
It goes on to discuss the complex linguistic facts subsumed under the rubric “the Chinese language,” succinctly and well. The post and the linked introduction deserve reading, and the book sounds like an excellent place to start learning about the diverse place that is China.
Incidentally, anyone who wants a more detailed look at the linguistic situation should get hold of S. Robert Ramsey’s The Languages of China (reviewed here).
The International Children’s Digital Library [archived 2004 version], a joint project of the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, is both worthwhile and fun. Its main goal is “to create a collection of more than 10,000 books in at least 100 languages that is freely available to children, teachers, librarians, parents, and scholars throughout the world via the Internet”; at the moment they’ve only got 23 languages, but that’s a good start, and includes Khmer and Niuean as well as the less exotic Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish, each with a large selection. I hope they’ll expand the Russian section, which at present has only five titles (just one more than Khmer), but one of those is 10 knizhek dlya detei, which contains ten separate books illustrated by A.F. Pakhomov, so that helps alleviate the drought. This splendid find is brought to you via wood s lot [02.13.2004].
Update (Nov. 2024). I’m glad to see they’ve got a spiffy new site, and that they’re up to 76 languages, but disappointed that there are still only the same five Russian books. (And still no Welsh!)
Everyone is fascinated by words like disgruntled and unkempt that have no corresponding unprefixed forms; aldiboronti, in a Wordorigins thread on the subject, links to an excellent World Wide Words post that goes into the history of the best-known such words with admirable thoroughness. On unkempt, for instance:
The word unkempt has a complicated history. Kempt comes from the Old English word kemb, “comb”. It seems to have gone out of use about 1600 but to have been reintroduced about 1860. Its usual and literal negative form was unkembed which survived into the middle of the nineteenth century. The form unkempt began to be used about 1580 to mean “language that was inelegant or unrefined”. In the eighteenth century it came to mean specifically “uncombed; dishevelled”, perhaps influenced by the Flemish equivalent ongekempt, and was used alongside the older form for about a century, only taking on a stronger sense of “neglected; not cared for” in the middle of the nineteenth century. Incidentally, the root form of kemb seems to come from a Germanic form which meant “tooth”, so a comb is named for its teeth; the modern form uncombed appeared about 1560.
As a side effect of a fruitless search for material on Armeno-Kipchak, I stumbled on Wolfgang Schulze’s excellent online grammar of Udi, which Ethnologue calls “one of the most divergent of the Lesgian languages.” I’m particularly taken with the sample text, which is followed by interlinear analysis and translation:
ostavar ostavar ait-p-es-ax uk’-a-n-te ic^ z/om-oxo arux-ne bar-sa.
strong strong word-say-inf-dat2 say:fut-opt-3sg:a-sub (>as if) refl mouth-abl fire-3sg:a come=out-pres
in order to say very strong words, as if FIRE comes out of his mouth
And with the appended lexical analysis, which gives the etyma of borrowed words (te < Armenian et’e ‘that’; yesir < Arabic asir ‘imprisoned’) and reconstructions for indigenous words. Don’t miss it, O fans of Caucasian languages!
A Telegraph story by Neil Tweedie reports on a new online repository:
For those who fear that the great Northern dialects are about to be overwhelmed by a tide of Estuary English – that words such as mebbies, bleb and gan will soon be as rare as proper mushy peas – comes comforting news.
Yesterday, the British Library unveiled a new website intended to preserve for all time the language and accents of the North, saving them for the day when its inhabitants will know it only as the Norf.
The site contains more than 11 hours of recordings made during two surveys carried out in 1950 and 1999, and provides an insight into the changes that have overtaken dialects in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland in the past half century.
Needless to say, standard English has been advancing at the expense of regionalisms:
Take Jim Eden and Catrina Dougal, both natives of Bedale, North Yorks. When Mr Eden, a sadler, was interviewed in 1950 at the age of 65 by researchers from Leeds University, he related a joke about a man who thinks he has passed a balloon while sitting in an earth closet.
His language is scattered with words such as midden (dunghill), frae (from) and naught (nothing).
But when Miss Dougal, a sixth form student, was interviewed in 1999 at the age of 18, only the accent remained, and that much reduced. The one remarkable feature was her use of an Essex-style glottal stop.
Jonathan Robinson, the curator of English accents and dialects at the British Library, said levelling appeared to result from greater geographical and social mobility, better education and a universal pop culture…“The outer regions tend to adopt the language emanating from the centre which, in the case of England is the South-East. The effect can also be seen regionally. Take Liverpool: its accent has gradually expanded into areas of south Lancashire.”…
Later in the year, recordings from all parts of England will be added to the Northern archive, providing a definitive portrait of changes in accent and dialect over 50 years.
(Via mirabilis.ca.)
Responding to a recent Language Log post by Geoff Pullum (perhaps a tad overheated: “Why do people yearn so desperately to believe that there is some kind of incredible profusion of words for such things among hunter-gatherer peoples, when they have never been shown a single scintilla of quantitative evidence?”), Mark Liberman discusses Somali words related to camels, and the metaphorical use thereof. For instance the verb doobbadillaacso, meaning ‘to reach sexual maturity (of a camel),’ etymologically ‘to uncork one’s rutting-froth,’ “or in a more contemporary idiom ‘to bust a froth’,” is used of humans to mean ‘to reach intellectual maturity; be capable of speaking in public.’ (I note for the benefit of those who like trying to pronounce exotic words that the Somali letter c represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative like Arabic ‘ayn; you can hear it, and the other Somali consonants, here.) A more striking example is “the verbal form foolbaxso, glossed as ‘to rub the oil of fried coffee beans onto one’s face and body (when eating breakfast)’.” Liberman at first derives this from foolbaxsi ‘agitated circling movements of a pregnant camel prior to giving birth’ but then decides it’s from another fool, meaning ‘face; brow, forehead; front tooth, incisor.’ No matter: the oil-rubbing is intriguing enough. I may try it myself.
The Dictionary of Newfoundland English has been put online as part of Memorial University of Newfoundland‘s Heritage Web Site. The Introduction says:
It is the purpose of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English to present as one such index the regional lexicon of one of the oldest overseas communities of the English-speaking world: the lexicon of Newfoundland and coastal Labrador as it is displayed in the sources drawn upon in compiling the work, sources which range from sixteenth-century printed books to tape recordings of contemporary Newfoundland speakers. Rather than attempting to define a ‘Newfoundlandism’ our guiding principles in collecting have been to look for words which appear to have entered the language in Newfoundland or to have been recorded first, or solely, in books about Newfoundland; words which are characteristically Newfoundland by having continued in use here after they died out or declined elsewhere, or by having acquired a different form or developed a different meaning, or by having a distinctly higher or more general degree of use.
Thus, among the latter are articles on such words as cod, haul, quintal, salt water; articles on bawn, belay, cassock, cat, dog, graple, lanch, room, strouter, and tilt, for words which have been given a new form or meaning in the region; on droke, dwy, fadge, frore, keecorn, linny, nish, still, suant, as examples of the many survivals, or, equally common, dialectal items in use, or former use, in the British Isles; on bawk, caplin, janny, landwash, nunny-bag, penguin, steady, sunker, ticklace and water-horse among words apparently invented in Newfoundland or appearing first in books about the region. And to these are to be added a number of words which, while they are often in varying degrees part of the common English vocabulary, are nevertheless given entries in the Dictionary because they occur with important nuances in Newfoundland usage, are displayed with unusual fullness in our data, or themselves stand at the centre of semantic fields of great regional importance: barren, bay, coast, harbour, ice, salt, ship, shore, spring, trap, water, and so on. These take their place in the Dictionary side by side with many other words the precise regional discriminations of which have often been hard won—subtle, but critical, terms such as in and out, offer and outside, up and down, which display a people’s exact sense of place; terms such as bank, berth, ground, fouly, ledge, shoal, etc, which reflect a complex system of classification of water bodies according to the types of ocean floor perceived by and significant for a coastal fishing people; names for birds and plants, especially those of economic or other importance; the seemingly endless nomenclature of seals at every stage of growth and development (bedlamer, dotard, gun seal, jar, nog-head, ragged-jacket, turner, white-coat, and a score of others); words for conditions of ice (ballicatter, clumper, quarr, sish, slob); and names for familiar operations in the woods or on the water, at work or play, in the ordinary and long-established patterns of Newfoundland and Labrador life.
The Dictionary therefore has both a breadth and a detail considerably greater than we originally envisaged, and this realization has been forced upon us by the evidence at our disposal and has increased with the progress of the work. The levels and kinds of lexical record included might be displayed graphically as a series of concentric rings spreading out from a centre, these rings formed by successive stages of the historical experience of English-speakers in Newfoundland; or as a series of isoglosses marking the special lexical features shared by Newfoundland speakers with those of their principal points of origin, especially the south-west counties of England and southern Ireland, and, across the Western Ocean, with those with whom Newfoundlanders have been in language contact: the native peoples of the region (adikey, oo-isht, sina, tabanask), speakers in the Canadian North (fur, stove cake, trap line), along the Atlantic seaboard of North America from Nova Scotia to New England (banker, dory, gangeing, scrod, trawl, tub), and in a sea-faring world which has left a ubiquitous record of nautical terms and nautical transfers in the regional lexicon.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to link to individual entries (or at least I can’t figure out how) Individual entries can be linked to from here; to give you a taste, here’s the entry for bawn:
bawn n also bon [phonetics unavailable]. EDD ~ sb 4 Ir; JOYCE 214; DINNEEN badhún for sense 1.
1 Grassy land or meadow near a house or settlement.
1897 J A Folklore x, 203 Bawn … particularly where the Irish have prevailed, is the common name for the land about the house. P 113-55 Setting spuds on the bawn (flat expanse of freshly-turned sods). 1968 DILLON 131 ‘We have to break up some bawn tomorrow.’ ‘When cattle are dry, they’re out on the bawn in the spring o’ the year.’ M 69-29 About half-way between my house and the theatre there was a big grassy bonne (meadow) and this was a favourite place for courters to go. C 71-24 [In Calvert] a baun was an enclosed pasture which was used for the grazing of sheep. In Carbonear [it] meant ground that hadn’t been ploughed before. C 75-136 ~ a plot of grass land where children play and where fishermen spread their trap when they take it up to dry or mend.2 Expanse of rocks on which salted cod are spread for the quick-drying process of the Labrador and Bank fisheries; BEACH. Cp FLAKE.
1895 GRENFELL 66 Newfoundlanders spread [cod] on poles called ‘flakes,’ or on the natural rocks, called ‘bournes.’ [1900 OLIVER & BURKE] 34 “Fanny’s Harbor Bawn”: Which caused this dreadful contest on [Fanny’s] Harbor Bawn… / So pray begone, all from the Bawn, or I’ll boot you in your bloom. 1936 SMITH 17 [The fish] would then lie in the waterhorse for twenty-four hours. It was then brought out on the bawn and spread ‘heads and tails.’ 1937 Seafisheries of Nfld 47 When the fish is dried by natural means, it is placed upon flakes, beaches, rocks and bawns (i.e. artificial beaches), where the sun and wind are permitted to perform the task of extracting the moisture. 1955 DOYLE (ed) 78 … ” ‘Twas Getting Late Up in September”: To spread fish on the bawn makin’ wages / We went there without much sleep. T 393-67 This is where they’d make their fish—on all those small rocks about the size o’ your fist. They used to call it the bawn. M 71-117 Finally the fish would be taken in hand-barrows to the bawns—something like flakes except that the boughs were laid on the rocks—and spread to dry. 1977 Inuit Land Use 218-19 First, the cod were washed to remove the salt, then they were placed on small flat stones called bons to dry. The bons were loosely separated to permit air to circulate around the fish.3 Phr make bawn: to prepare beach for drying salted cod by making a flat expanse of rocks.
C 70-10 Sometimes the fishermen would fill in the crevices with beach rocks, and this would be called making bawn. My grandfather said that he has made bawn down in Labrador while fishing there in the summer-time.
Many thanks to wood s lot for this remarkable resource.
The gifted and generous taz (check out her site for all manner of free backgrounds and tiles) has sent me a link to Michael Chabon‘s melancholy essay “Useful Expressions,” a meditation on a strange little book I’ve owned for years, Say It in Yiddish by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich. (It’s still available from Dover for $4.95; I have the original 1958 paperback, priced at 75 cents.) It’s part of the “Say It” series, little phrasebooks that help you get by in countries where they speak languages other than English—Japanese, Spanish, Russian… The unavoidable question, of course, is: in what country do they speak Yiddish? I’ve often flipped through the book with an inchoate mix of feelings; Chabon has thought about it more systematically and written about it well:
What were they thinking, the Weinreichs? Was the original 1958 Dover edition simply the reprint of some earlier, less heartbreakingly implausible book? At what time in the history of the world was there a place of the kind that the Weinreichs imply, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees? A place where you could rent a summer home from Yiddish speakers, go to a Yiddish movie, get a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairstylist, a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shineboy, and then have your dental bridge repaired by a Yiddish-speaking dentist?…
He quotes the sentence “Can I go by boat/ferry to—-?” and continues:
The blank in the last of those phrases, impossible to fill in, tantalizes me. Whither could I sail on that boat/ferry, in the solicitous company of Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, and from what shore?
I dream of two possible destinations. The first might be a modern independent state very closely analogous to the State of Israel—call it the State of Yisroel—a postwar Jewish homeland created during a time of moral emergency, located presumably, but not necessarily, in Palestine; it could be in Alaska, or on Madagascar. Here, perhaps, that minority faction of the Zionist movement who favored the establishment of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews were able to prevail over their more numerous Hebraist opponents. There is Yiddish on the money, of which the basic unit is the herzl, or the dollar, or even the zloty. There are Yiddish color commentators for soccer games, Yiddish-speaking cash machines, Yiddish tags on the collars of dogs. Public debate, private discourse, joking and lamentation, all are conducted not in a new-old, partly artificial language like Hebrew, a prefabricated skyscraper still under construction, with only the lowermost of its stories as yet inhabited by the generations, but in a tumbledown old palace capable in the smallest of its stones (the word nu) of expressing slyness, tenderness, derision, romance, disputation, hopefulness, skepticism, sorrow, a lascivious impulse, or the confirmation of one’s worst fears…
I can imagine another Yisroel, the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I once read, Franklin Roosevelt was nearly sold on such a plan.) Perhaps after the war, in this Yisroel, the millions of immigrant Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Austrian, Czech and German Jews held a referendum, and chose independence over proferred statehood in the U.S. The resulting country is obviously a far different place than Israel. It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer. The portraits on those postage stamps we buy are of Walter Benjamin, Simon Dubnow, Janusz Korczak, and of a hundred Jews unknown to us, whose greatness was allowed to flower only here, in this world. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and almonds, in such a place. This Yisroel—or maybe it would be called Alyeska—is a kind of Jewish Sweden, social-democratic, resource rich, prosperous, organizationally and temperamentally far more akin to its immediate neighbor, Canada, then to its more freewheeling benefactor far to the south. Perhaps, indeed, there has been some conflict, in the years since independence, between the United States and Alyeska. Perhaps oilfields have been seized, fishing vessels boarded. Perhaps not all of the native peoples were happy with the outcome of Roosevelt’s humanitarian policies and the treaty of 1948.” Lately there may have been a few problems assimilating the Jews of Quebec, in flight from the ongoing separatist battles there.
This country of the Weinreichs is in the nature of a wistful fantasyland, a toy theater with miniature sets and furnishings to arrange and rearrange, painted backdrops on which the gleaming lineaments of a snowy Jewish Onhava can be glimpsed, all its grief concealed behind the scrim, hidden in the machinery of the loft, sealed up beneath trap doors in the floorboards. But grief haunts every mile of that other destination to which the Weinreichs beckon, unwittingly perhaps but in all the awful detail that Dover’s “Say It” series requires. Grief hand-colors all the postcards, stamps the passports, sours the cooking, fills the luggage. It keens all night in the pipes of old hotels. The Weinreichs are taking us home, to the “old country.” To Europe…
Much food for thought and for fantasy. Read the whole thing. (And thanks, tazoula!)
Update (2014): The link to the essay is now dead, but it is available (under a different title) here — thanks, John!
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