Archives for April 2004

That’s the famous New Orleans greeting (to which the proper response is “Awrite”). N’Awlins natives have a special way of talking, which is entertainingly documented in the site How ta tawk rite: A Lexicon of New Orleans Terminology and Speech:

I hope that this brings back memories for natives, and I also hope that it may enlighten visitors to the Crescent City. It may help make the difference between a mere tourist and a truly interested visitor, and I think that’s an important distinction. You don’t want to look like an idiot, saying “Huh?”, when the lady behind the counter at the po-boy shop asks you, “Ya want dat dressed, dawlin’?”

I particularly direct your attention to the section “A guide to the pronunciation of local place names” (most of the way down the page), where you will learn the proper pronunciation of the street names Burgundy (bur-GUN-dee), Burthe (BYOOTH), Cadiz (KAY-diz), and the like.

Another, less systematic, site is here; I note with bemusement that this site refers to “Eye-berville” Street, whereas “How ta tawk rite” says “IBERVILLE STREET – Pronounced IB-ber-‘vil, not EYE-ber-‘vil.” Y’all get your act together, heah?

Update (February 2010): See now this Language Log post.

So I thought I’d get away from the heavy-duty reading I’ve been doing lately and have some fun. I’ve been wanting for years to read Alan Furst, supposedly the heir to such great spy-thriller writers as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John Le Carre, and checked out his first novel, Night Soldiers, from the library. I was especially interested because he writes about the period leading up to WWII, and I’ve been lately immersed therein (via Brandon and Klemperer). I opened it, saw a map of the Danube basin 1934-1945, and sighed with pleasure—maps are always a good sign. I plunged in and was rapidly drawn into the story of a young man forced to leave his home and finding terrifying shelter. The hero’s name was Stoianev, which I thought should probably be Stoianov, but what do I know from Bulgarian? I wondered a bit when a scene was set in a supposed Russian village called “Belov,” which is a family name rather than a place name (a village named for Belov would be Belovo, and there is in fact such a place), but I didn’t allow myself to be distracted; I don’t know everything about Russian toponymy, after all, and maybe the name could exist. I didn’t get seriously annoyed until I encountered a Russian character named Yadomir. I think I’m on fairly safe ground in asserting that Yadomir is not a Russian name, and I can’t stand it when novelists make up fake Russian names when it’s so easy to find real ones. And when I checked the street names in the Madrid section of the book, I found that two that were supposed to be contiguous were in fact far apart, and a third does not exist.
Dammit, one of the small pleasures in my life is following novelists in their dealings with the real world, seeing how smoothly they work their fictions into it. When they don’t even bother to try, it pisses me off. I don’t expect them to be perfect, mind you; they’re novelists, not scholars. I caught Pynchon misusing some Arabic in V.—but I could see exactly how he’d gone wrong, because I was following along in the very Baedeker he’d used to create his vision of Alexandria, Egypt, in 1898, and the phrases and translations given in the conversation section of the guidebook were run together in such a way it was easy to connect them wrongly. The main thing was that he’d done his homework: every walk was based on the actual map of the city, every building was where Baedeker said it was (I could even identify ones he didn’t name, like the “chemist’s shop” on p. 73 of the Bantam edition, according to Baedeker the German and English Dispensary), and that reliability allowed me to relax into the story. When the novelist simply makes up names and places, it’s playing tennis without a net (as Robert Frost famously said of free verse). I’m cutting Furst a little slack because it’s his first book and I’m enjoying the thriller aspects, but if he doesn’t shape up in his second, Dark Star, his name will be mud chez Languagehat.

The Eudæmonist has a wonderful entry about the use of the word choir in poems by Wilfred Owen and Shakespeare and the way the ghost of the homonymous quire lurks behind it.

In a bound book, the text-block is composed of quires. In the case of the ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ it adds to the tone of the shells a second quire, a second voice of mourning: the poet’s own; but I do not think this formal parallel was conscious for Owen. For Shakespeare, though, it’s almost impossible to deny the pun. The yellow leaves lingering on the branches might just as well be the leaves of a book—pages which must be unwritten, of course, when the poet dies (just as the branches ‘where late the sweet birds sang’ become ‘bare ruin’d choirs’). The full quires containing the sonnets, however, will continue their serenade (dare I say, ‘twittering’?) despite the changing seasons, despite death, in a typical declaration of immortality…

In the course of a post on the Australian National University’s new online edition of Out of the Ashes: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of East Timor, Joel of Far Outliers quotes the following passage from the first chapter (by James J. Fox), which obviously resonated strongly with me:

With their strongholds on both Flores and Timor, this mixed, part-Portuguese population of local islanders resisted all attempts to dislodge them. This population became known as the Larantuqueiros or as the Tupassi (‘Topasses’, purportedly from the word for hat, topi, because the Topasses regarded themselves ‘Gente de Chapeo‘: ‘People of the Hat’)—or, as was common in all Dutch documents, the ‘Black Portuguese’ (Swarte Portugueezen). In the language of the Atoni Pa Meto population, who had the longest established contact with them on Timor, these Topasses were known as the Sobe Kase: ‘The Foreign Hats’. (Yet another variant of this designation, among the Rotinese, on the small island at the western tip of Timor, was Sapeo Nggeo: ‘The Black Hats’.)

These Topasses became the dominant, independent, seafaring, sandalwood-trading power of the region for the next 200 years. They were a multilingual group. Portuguese was their status language which was also used for worship; Malay was their language of trade, and most Topasses spoke, as their mother-tongue, a local language of Flores or Timor.

The chapter has extremely useful material on the peoples of the country, with a nice linguistic map (Map 1): “All the languages of Timor belong to one of two major language groupings: the Austronesian language family or the Trans-New Guinea phylum of languages.”

One strand in this extremely interesting thread at Negro, Please involves the current meaning and proper use of the adjective “ghetto”; since I haven’t listened to rap since the heyday of Public Enemy and have otherwise been sadly out of touch, I was glad to be told that the term refers to an “unpleasantly selfish and materialistic world view that is a product of both poverty and modern hip hop culture.” The post is about Jason’s mixed reactions on hearing a white woman friend say “That show is so ghetto”; the ensuing discussion covers a lot of ground.

[Read more…]

Just in case any of you were under the impression that a wild-eyed descriptivist like myself was incapable of applying the silly-but-fun traditional Rules of Grammar, here’s my result from the quiz that’s making the rounds:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

You’re welcome, but my mission in life is to wipe out everything you hold dear. En garde!

A strange word, or rather two strange words. The first is encountered only in the phrase court of cassation, referring to a French supreme court of appeal, and it’s pretty straightforward: it’s from Latin cassāre ‘to bring to nought, annul’ (: cassus empty, void), also the source of the verb quash, and such a court quashes decisions of other courts. The other word refers to ‘a piece of instrumental music of the eighteenth century similar to the serenade, and often performed out of doors’ (OED), and it can be traced back only to Italian cassazione. Willy Apel’s Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music says “The name may be derived from It. cassare, to say farewell, or from L. gassatim, streetlike,” but my Italian and Late Latin books know no such words. And yet it has such an open, transparent look: what, me obscure? And such a useless word, too, given the equivalent divertimento. But I like it. There’s something so old-fashioned and Old World about it.

As a Sopranos fan, I was delighted to see the show featured in a Mark Liberman post on Language Log. Mark links to a hilarious exchange of letters between Jeffrey Goldberg, Jerry Capeci, and Leon Wieseltier, part of a regular feature called “Mob Experts on The Sopranos” that I intend to follow religiously. Mark focuses on the lack of a clear way to refer to pronunciations of the -ing suffix; I will call attention to a technical term new to me, used by Wieseltier in describing his experience on the set: “Who did I meet? Just about everybody who was in my episode. Not on the set, which was an all-nighter at the New Jersey Botanical Gardens, where I had the honor of being the martini…” (Emphasis added.) Goldberg asks “Leon—a martini? What’s a martini? I always pictured you more as a bottle of slivovitz…” and Wieseltier responds:

Glad you asked: The martini is the last shot of a shoot, after which work is over and the customary depredations of the artistic life may resume. It was cheap of me to use the term as if I have known what it means for more than 20 minutes. A useful lesson, I plead contritely, in the distinction between knowingness and knowledge. (Note that I could have continued to play the knowingness game by explaining it to you this way: “The martini, of course, is …” You will be familiar with that particular device for intimidating readers from the work of many distinguished writers.)

Kate, “an undergraduate student of linguistics somewhere in the American Midwest,” has started a language-oriented blog called CHAINIK (Russian for ‘teapot; (sl.) stupid person, dunce’); she has an interesting post about the “sharp divide between the students in our class who are learning Russian in order to use it, whether for reading literature or for job-related communication, and those who are learning Russian to understand it. The latter group is outnumbered 4:1.”

One of the more interesting observations I’ve made is that members of the smaller group tend to learn by taking in the whole picture, while members of the larger group are more able to integrate new facts into their Russian knowledge without analyzing them too closely. This is completely anecdotal, of course, but it does make me wonder if those that study linguistics are naturally predisposed to learn new languages in a different way.

I look forward to much more tea from the chainik!

I ran across the following amusing etymology in California Place Names, by Erwin G. Gudde (pronounced “goody”):

Coachella (ko-CHEL-a, ko-a-CHEL-a): Valley, town [Riverside Co.] …Since shells could be found in the valley… Dr. Stephen Bowers called it Conchilla Valley in a lecture before the Ventura Society of Natural History in 1888, after Spanish conchilla ‘shell’… and when the region was surveyed by the USGS before 1900, A.G. Tingman, a storekeeper in Indio, proposed the change of the name to Conchilla Valley. This name was accepted by the prospectors and homesteaders, and apparently also by W.C. Mendenhall of the USGS. At any rate, he used the name Conchilla as late as 1909… But the cartographers apparently misread the name, and it appeared as Coachella Valley on the San Jacinto atlas sheet—a “bastard name without meaning in any language,” as Mr. Tingman is reported to have remarked. But other inhabitants of the valley considered the name “unique, distinctive and euphonious,” and in 1909 the BGN made the name official.

Which explains why it’s not pronounced with the Spanish /y/ for ll: it’s not Spanish, it’s Bastard.
Addendum. You can investigate Gudde courtesy of Google Book Search.