Archives for February 2004

From Nancy Gandhi’s under the fire star:

In the Urdu alphabet, the short vowels are not written. So, if you read chaat you will see an ‘a’; but the letters ‘cht’ could be pronounced chat, chit or chut. Chat means ‘roof,’ but chut is a part of the female body. Once a friend of mine who was an Urdu teacher told me that in the school where he taught foreigners, one of the early reading tests always included the sentence, “When it is hot, I sleep on the roof.” Invariably, some poor sucker would read, “When it is hot, I sleep on the (female body part),” and all the teachers would snicker like little boys. I guess it shows that embarrassment is an excellent way to imprint something in one’s memory.

My friend Nick Jainschigg has sent me a link to a Finnish site, coloria.net, that appears to contain investigations of all sorts of color-related phenomena. I say “appears” because my Finnish is, sadly, nil; of course I have dictionaries (though poor ones), and when I get the chance I’ll play with them a little, but basically it’s going to remain a closed book to me… with the important exception of the color pages themselves. If you click on the color boxes under the heading VÄRIT on the left, you are taken to pages featuring the color you clicked, and each one has a section labeled etymologiaa… that begins (for reasons that escape me) with an etymology of the English word, black for example:

Englannin black (tullut käyttöön ennen 1100-lukua) juontuu vanhan englannin sanoista blac, blæc, blak – ja on sukua esim. vanhan yläsaksan blah, blach; ehkä peräisin latinan polttamista tarkoittavasta sanasta flagrare (kreikk. phlegein). Sana tarkoittaa kirjaimellisesti ‘kaiken valon imevä’.

It continues with an amazing collection of words for that color in as many languages as they could find:

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A correspondent has kindly pointed me to William Drenttel’s explanation (in his blog Design Observer) of the temporary names of newly discovered elements, based on the Latin names of the numbers (so that 111 is “unununium” until it is confirmed and permanently named). If you’ve been wondering about stories like “Uut, Uup add atomic mass to periodic table,” this will tell you all about it. As he says, “Oh, that our cereal aisle had brands named Uuu, Uub, Uut, Uuq, Uup, Uuh, Uus and Uuo.”

Watching a documentary on Shakespeare, I learned two new words. John Shakespeare, William’s father, was described as a brogger: in the OED’s definition, “An agent; a jobber, esp. a corrupt jobber of offices; a broker.” What he dealt in was wool, and wool, it turns out, was measured in tods, a tod being “a weight used in the wool trade, usually 28 pounds or 2 stone, but varying locally.” He got in trouble for (as I recall) evading duties on a large number of tods. I don’t know if this had any influence on the Bard’s development, but I like the words.

I am a Dove that represents
the opposite of a raven. I stand
for peace, my skin is so white,
girls admire me. What’s the big
fuss about how I look? I always
wonder about that question.
I fly up high, I always
worry someone will shoot me.
I have a lucky life. I am
harmless as can be, because I am
full of peace.
    —Julia Mayhew

This poem reminds me of the ancient Greek “cicada poem” beginning “makarizomen se tettix” (‘we bless you, cicada’), but I can’t find it online, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Incidentally, Julia has had her first acceptance, from Spoon River. Congratulations, Julia, and I look forward to reading it!

K. David Harrison, of the Swarthmore Linguistics Department, claims to have discovered is working on a new previously undescribed language in Siberia. The Swarthmore press release quotes him as saying:

“We went looking for a language we weren’t sure even existed… It had been misidentified and falsely lumped together with other languages in Russia for convenience and political reasons, and we didn’t know if any speakers were left. No scientists had visited them in 30 years, and no one had ever recorded a single word of the language.”

It continues:

Harrison says the Chulym people continue to practice their ancestral lifeways of hunting, gathering, and fishing, but because of a variety of social, political, and demographic factors are now clearly losing their ancestral language. “They live in six small, isolated villages, often intermixed with a majority Russian population,” he says. “Only 35 people out of a community of 426 still speak it fluently, and we didn’t find any fluent speakers under age 52. The remainder of the Chulym have switched to speaking only Russian. It’s now considered a moribund language.”

Harrison says the unique Chulym number systems, grammatical structures, and classification systems may be lost with the language. Their highly specialized knowledge of medicinal plants, animal behavior, weather signs, and hunting and gathering technologies is also threatened. “Not least of all,” he says, “their rich pre-literate oral tradition, including religious beliefs, stories, and songs, will soon be completely lost, both to themselves and to science.” Harrison hopes to preserve some of that tradition by returning in 2005 to produce a grammar of the language and a children’s storybook.

(News story based on the press release here.)

Now, I’m a little confused, because the only references I can find to a Chulym people (Chulym is the name of a couple of Siberian rivers) are to the Chulym Tatars, who speak a Turkic language. Ethnologue’s entry calls it a Western Turkic language and says “Closely related to Shor; some consider them one language.” But their entry for Shor has it as a Northern Turkic language, but goes on to say “Some sources combine Shor and Chulym.” Either way, if it’s Turkic, it’s not some amazing new language with a unique worldview, so presumably these aren’t the Chulym Tatars but some other group. I look forward to reading more about it.

(Thanks to Bonnie for alerting me to this story.)

Update. USA Today has published a story on Chulym, by Joann Loviglio of Associated Press, that wins David Harrison’s seal of approval. (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)

This week’s “On Language” column by the jovial and often clueless William Safire focuses mainly on the word bogeyman, alias boogeyman. Safire claims there’s a transition from the latter to the former in progress; I think the latter is a colloquial/childish version of the former, which has always predominated in formal contexts. A section of the tax code (cited by Safire) is a bogeyman; the thing that’s gonna getcha if you don’t watch out is a boogeyman. Furthermore, I seriously doubt his hypothesis that political correctness is involved; I certainly never associated the word with the rather obscure racial slur boogie, and I doubt many people do, though (as always) I’m willing to be corrected.
But what really surprised me was his use of the word scarifying in this context:

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Avva has been reading Chandler and has posted about what he finds a strange use of like, postposed rather than preposed (the current use, as in “It was, like, weird”):

“She thought I ought to be willing to throw a scare into the roommate just on the telephone like, not mentioning any names.” (from The Long Goodbye)
“Only that half is folded back like, so I guess maybe you can’t see it.” (from The Little Sister)

This is a quite distinct usage from the currently fashionable one, and much older. The Cassell Dictionary of Slang says:

1 [late 18C+] used to express ‘approximately’, ‘just about’ or poss. to draw attention to the subject matter when used prenominally, as in he ran down the road like, and … 2 [1940s+] (orig. US Black/beatnik) to express ‘kind of’, ‘in a way’ or ‘so to speak’ when used postpositively, as in it takes like ten minutes; I feel, like, sick 3 [1950s+] (orig. US jazz/beatnik/hippie/teen) usu. used as an interjection or to draw attention to what follows, or to indicate uncertainty, or simply as a meaningless filler as in Like man, it’s out of sight, Like he drove so fast…

The OED, unfortunately and uncharacteristically, jumbles up these uses, but it’s easy to disentangle them from the citations (and it’s quite something to see the Noctes, Henry Green, and Black Panther all cited in the same entry!):

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The great Arabic writer Abdelrahman Munif (more here) died in Damascus on January 24 at the untimely age of 71. Had he lived, he might well have gotten the Nobel. I highly recommend Cities of Salt to anyone who wants to understand how Saudi Arabia got where it is today.

Update. Abdul-Rahman Mounif: the Guardian obit, by Abdul-Hadi Jiad. (Via MoorishGirl.)

The NY Times has a regular weekly feature consisting of humorous squibs about life in the Big City. Today’s had two of linguistic interest:

DEAR DIARY:
I was at a hip New York bar recently celebrating my boyfriend’s birthday.
At the table next to us were a group of out-of-towners discussing their plans to visit the Empire State Building the following day.
Needing help with transportation, one of the women turned to our party and said, “Do y’all ride the subway?”
Before we could answer, she asked a follow-up question: “Oh, wait, are y’all from here?”
Our group replied in unison, “Yes.”
The thoughtful tourist paused for a moment and then quickly rephrased her question: “Excuse me, do youse guys ride the subway?”
       Jamie L. Rubin

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