Archives for September 2013

Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca has an interesting investigation of the phrase “in [my, etc.] wheelhouse”:

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word wheelhouse, referring to the pilothouse on a boat that contains the wheel, back to 1835. And for over 100 years, from what I have found, all written references to people “in the wheelhouse” describe the person’s physical location in the wheelhouse of a boat. The OED does not yet have a definition for the metaphorical extension of the word, from the place on the boat where one is in control to other sweet spots (assuming this is the metaphorical extension).

Baseball holds the key to the transition from boats to areas of personal strength.[…]

The earliest baseball reference she found was from 1964; in an Update she credits Ben Zimmer with finding examples back to 1959 in Paul Dickson’s The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. I’ve always liked the phrase, which I learned as a young baseball fan, and always wondered how it got to mean “in the area where a hitter likes to hit a ball.”

I’m reading Сердце и думка [Heart and head], an 1838 novel by Veltman (and one of the young Dostoevsky’s two favorites, the other being Narezhny’s Бурсак—see this LH post), and I’ve just gotten to a scene where a magpie transforms itself into a young woman carrying milk into Moscow because magpies are not allowed in the city (Veltman’s novels aren’t like anybody else’s). At that point we get a tumultuous description of the big city that begins (Russian below the cut):

She found herself in the middle of a street full of carriages, a street that it is impossible to describe, where today is unlike yesterday and tomorrow will be entirely new: signs and goods, exterior and interior, names and appellations, color and form; in place of uniformity, diversity; in place of length, width; in place of merino, Thibet and Terneau; in place of manteaus, cloaks; in place of N, ci-devant N; in place of a shop, a store, and in place of the store, a kaleidoscope…

The ever-changing metropolis! But in my edition, the annotator has misunderstood “si devant N” and explained that it refers to an incorrect pronunciation of the French nasal vowel. I guess knowledge of French among educated Russians is not what it was in the early nineteenth century.

[Read more…]

David Crystal and his son Ben, an actor who studied linguistics in college, discuss how Shakespeare works in original pronunciation in this ten-minute video, which I found very enlightening (I wouldn’t have guessed that “from hour to hour” was pronounced the same as, and intended to suggest, “from whore to whore”). I found it at David Beaver’s Log post, where the comment thread includes at least one of the usual suspects who, never having considered the issue before and knowing nothing about it, nevertheless feel free to come up with some invented problem off the top of their head and then complain that “There is however no hint that this was respected in the reconstruction.” Ah, internet! Ah, humanity!

Stan at Sentence first has a post about an informal Irish usage, give out, meaning ‘complain, grumble, moan’ or ‘criticize, scold, reprimand, tell off’:

I think this give out comes from the Irish tabhair amach, same meaning. It’s intransitive, and often followed by to [a person]. People might give out to someone for some character flaw or oversight, or about politics, the weather, or the state of the roads. Or they might just give out in an unspecific or habitual way.

There are plenty of juicy quotes (“Giving out to him the whole time: ‘I’ve hated you for years, you old fecker, so take this'”), and I recommend reading the whole thing. But I’m bringing it here because of this remark at the end: “On Twitter recently, Oliver Farry said ‘people in Kansas and Missouri use “give out” in much the same way as Irish people do’. This was news to me, and I’d be interested to hear more about it.” So would I!

As Wikipedia says, “The printed Russian alphabet began to assume its modern shape when Peter I introduced his civil script (гражданскій шрифтъ[…]) in 1708″ (though I don’t know what they mean by the following sentence, “The reform was not specifically orthographic in nature”: isn’t any change in how words are written orthographic in nature?). Thanks to the World Digital Library (see this LH post), you can leaf through Civil Alphabet with Moral Teachings on your own computer (rather than having to go to the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg), and see letters and symbols not to be used in printing civil books crossed out in Peter’s own hand! And it ends with a list of Roman numerals, which surprised me although I knew Latin had a strong presence in the curriculum back then. (Thanks, Jeff!)

The Log has a guest post by Stephan Stiller going over the much-discussed issue of language vs. dialect, but doing it with a fresh perspective and sparking an unusually interesting comment thread; I particularly enjoyed this, from frequent LH commenter J.W. Brewer:

We are of course all overlooking the fact that the long-term consequences of the Norman invasion of southern China in 1066 had a massive lexical and syntactic effect on the local topolect that other Sinitic varieties were not exposed to, such that it is unsurprising that modern Cantonese would end up more distant from modern Mandarin than Dutch is from Hochdeutsch.

Myself, I have given up on trying to convince the world to stop using the term “dialect” for forms of speech that from a linguistic point of view are clearly separate languages (notably the regional forms of Chinese and Arabic), but it would be nice if people could be brought to realize that whatever you call them, they are not like Boston English versus Atlanta English.

On another common-linguistic-inheritance front, bradshaw of the future has a typical bradshaw post bringing together far-flung descendents of a single Indo-European ancestral form, in this case queer and truss, both from Proto-Indo-European *twerk. I don’t know whether the blog’s proprietor is unaware of the current sense of that combination of sounds or was simply cheekily ignoring it, but I was as impressed by the lack of notice paid to it as Holmes was by the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Back in 2007 I posted about the start of the New Linguistic Survey of India, “a 10-year, US$100M project to survey 400+ Indian languages”; now they’re about to release a report on their work, and Chitra Padmanabhan has an interview in The Hindu with the project’s founder, Ganesh Devy:

What was the aim of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India?
[…] Primarily we wanted to find out how many living languages India has. We also wanted to see if language could be made into a fulcrum of micro-planning for development in diverse ecological and cultural contexts, especially among fragile coastal, island, forest and hill communities.
Working with tribals on their languages at Bhasha since 1996 helped me realise that there was no need to unduly privilege scripts — even English does not have a unique script of its own. Hence the thought that most other languages are derivative forms of Scheduled languages disappeared from my mind. I started according smaller languages greater respect. […]
In four years we have documented 780 languages. There are 22 Scheduled languages, 480 tribal and nomadic languages, 80 coastal languages, major regional languages not yet in the 8th Schedule (Tulu, Kutchhi, Mewati), and international languages spoken in India. The survey will be published in 50 volumes by Orient Blackswan in over a year’s time.

There’s lots of interesting stuff in there; good for Devy and his Bhasha Research and Publication Centre for sponsoring such an effort. (Thanks, Dinesh!)

Ben Zimmer sent me a link to The Great Language Game [archived], a creation of Lars Yencken, and as I told Ben, it is officially more fun than a barrel of monkeys. You hear an audio clip of a language being spoken, and you have to choose from a number of possible languages that rises from two to (at least) ten; you have three lives (after the third failed identification, game over); and you are not penalized for taking a long time or listening to the clip repeatedly (you get 50 points for each correct answer, no matter what). I coasted for the first six, and then hit my first “uh-oh, I have no idea” clip. One important thing to know is that always sometimes the same clip is used for a given language, so pay attention even if you’re at a loss as to what it is—after having missed Tigrinya the first time, I got it when it came up again because I recognized the clip. Also, it’s slow, at least on my computer; don’t keep hitting the button impatiently, just relax while it does its thing. My final score: 1300. Enjoy!

I could have sworn I’d posted about this back when it was in the news a few years ago, but apparently not, and better late than never:

The Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings is a subset of an audio archive made between 1915 and 1938 by German sound pioneer, Wilhelm Doegen. Enlisting the support of numerous academics, Doegen sought to capture the voices of famous people, and languages, music and songs from all over the world. The collection acquired by the British Library in 2008 comprises 821 digital copies of shellac discs held at the Berliner Lautarchiv at the Humboldt Universität. It includes recordings of British prisoners of war and colonial troops held in captivity on German soil between 1915 and 1918 and later recordings made by Doegen in Berlin and on field trips to Ireland and elsewhere. The content of the recordings varies and includes reading passages, word lists, speeches and recitals of songs and folk tales in a variety of languages and dialects.

Maev Kennedy, in a 2009 Grauniad story, discusses the British POW angle:

[Read more…]

Nathan Heller has a good piece in Harvard Magazine about Andrew Hoyem’s Arion Press , “a fine-edition publisher in San Francisco. Some of the books it has produced are set by hand, and all are printed in small editions whose volumes sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Following tradition, Hoyem either melts down the type or returns it to its cases after the run is complete, preserving the volumes’ uniqueness.” I have very mixed feelings about this. Intellectually, I can appreciate the fine-art appeal of such editions, and I can imagine admiring the physicality of Hoyem’s edition of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror“:

In pursuit of that perfection, …[Hoyem] imagined the printed pages as a physical object shaped by the poem’s imagery and cultural vernacular. He decided the pages would be round, rather than rectangular, with an extra-large 18-inch diameter. He printed the lines of the poem like spokes, radiating outward from the center of the page, with generous space between. He stacked the round pages in a custom-made, film-reel-like canister for each copy, in lieu of binding, and, on each canister’s exterior, fitted a convex mirror in which the viewer would see him- or herself. (“I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything.”) He commissioned eight artists, including Jim Dine and Willem de Kooning, to respond to the Parmigianino painting, and interpolated these new works among the wheels of text. Ashbery [’49, Litt.D. ’01] contributed a recording he’d made of the poem, and Hoyem included the LP, with the Parmigianino on its cover.

And he got Helen Vendler to do the critical introduction; they’ve been frequent collaborators ever since. But there’s no getting around the fact that these are luxury objects for rich people, and while in the abstract I have no objection to that—why shouldn’t rich people have works of art, and why shouldn’t publishers get some of the dough?—it rankles my populist soul. Oh, and then there’s this: “When Hoyem and Vendler hoped to produce an edition of Emily Dickinson poems, the Harvard University Press, which still holds rights to Dickinson’s oeuvre and exercises them actively, wouldn’t let them be printed even in a small fine-press edition.” The hell with Harvard! At any rate, I like my late-’70s Viking/Penguin paperback of Ashbery’s poem just fine; here’s a nice bit:

[Read more…]