Archives for April 2019

I like John McWhorter, really I do. He’s well-informed about his specialty of creole languages and he’s genial and writes well; I once called him “a favorite here at LH.” But just this past January I said “I have often expressed a combination of irritation and admiration when it comes to John H. McWhorter”; like so many men accustomed to a bully pulpit, he loses sight of what he actually knows and blathers about whatever pops into his head as if he were an expert on everything. For this reason, I was pleased to see Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa (aka the Vocal Fries) take him down briskly and entertainingly for his thoughts on “kidspeak”:

Both of us, but especially Megan, who is a literal scholar of literal kid speak, take extreme issue with McWhorter’s notion of “kidspeak” in his article Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids in The Atlantic. Kidspeak is a thing — as we’ll get to — but what he describes is not that.

But before all that, we do want to point out the points where he is right. He correctly notes that –y is used to create adjectives. He also points out that women tend to be on the forefront of language change and that language change is a natural part of language existing. And he’s right that playful language of the “pilly” type is a way of softening the message. But none of these things have anything to do with how children speak.

He claims — based on exactly nothing — that “pilly” is “wonderfully childish”. Can you imagine a child using that word in the way McWhorter describes (as a particularly debauched time of life)? We can’t. He mentions things that kids do, in fact, do, but none of them are anything like the –y that creates adjectives. For example, kidspeak involves omitting words, yes. However, omitting words is not for any rhetorical effect, as it is with adults. Children omit words because they haven’t got the system down yet. They can’t speak in full sentences yet (for various linguistic and cognitive reasons). They also “over-regularize” rules — as in his “feets” example, where the -s gets used on a noun that (for most speakers) has an irregular plural form (“feet”). […]

Another thing that he gets completely wrong is “because X”. “Because X” (e.g., We’re writing this because anger) is not an example of kidspeak — you have to be a fairly sophisticated speaker of English to be able to use this construction. He argues it’s kidspeak because it’s like a child not giving an answer, but that is absolutely, 100% incorrect. “Because X” gives you an answer. (Anger. Anger is the answer!)

The things he lumps together as kidspeak are mostly sophisticated adult uses of language that are playful and have particular rhetorical effects. […] If adults were really trying to sound like kids, then they would trade in all of their “r” sounds for “w”s (e.g. “ride” becomes “wide”), omit the unstressed syllables in words with two or more syllables (e.g. “banana” becomes “nana”), and call all animals with four legs “doggie”. […]

The idea that 20 year olds (or 40+ year olds — Carrie uses all of the things he discusses and has for quite some time) would copy 5 year olds is laughable. And harmful. When we plead for journalists (and others) to #AskALinguist, we mostly mean linguists who actually know what they are talking about. Embarrassingly, McWhorter does not understand how kids or adults actually speak.

Harsh but fair. Stop blathering, men with megaphones! And keep giving ’em hell, Vocal Fries! (A tip o’ the LanguageHat hat to bulbul for the link.)

A reader sent me a number of links, the first of which is From Koguryǒ to T’amna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean, by Alexander Vovin (whom we’ve discussed before, e.g. here and here); the abstract:

This article recapitulates some old evidence for the Japonic linguistic substratum in Silla and Paekche in and for the lack of thereof in Koguryǒ. It also introduces some new evidence for the same linguistic distribution. The new evidence for Koguryǒ comes mainly from words recorded in Chinese dynastic histories and from additional Korean loanwords identified in Manchu, the new evidence for Paekche from Liang shu, while the new evidence for Silla is based on the analysis of Silla placenames recorded in the Samguk sagi, which are traditionally considered to be opaque. The present article identifies a number of them as Japonic. Finally, I present the Japonic etymology for the former name of Chejudo island, T’amna.

Accompanying it were some Google Books links (1, 2, 3) and an article in Japanese. It’s all way out of my area of knowledge, but I know there are Hatters who revel in this stuff, so have at it. (Thanks, Ike!)

Anatoly’s post монолог таксиста [a taxi driver’s monologue] reproduces the remarkable story told him by a taxi driver of Moroccan origin while they were stuck in traffic in Eilat. The whole thing is worth reading if you know Russian; I’ll translate a couple of paragraphs that deal with language:

“All my other relatives? No, what would they be doing in Eilat, they’re all in Morocco. I came from there to Israel by myself, made aliyah in 1970, I was only 17 years old. My parents and brothers are still there. Yes, of course, we see each other, we’re always flying to visit each other. No, they don’t speak Hebrew, of course. Arabic and French. It’s fine, my children communicate well with them. In our family, the children learned Hebrew, Arabic, French, English and Polish. My wife spoke Polish to them, and both of us spoke French. […]

“How did I get to know my wife? Well, the lieutenant colonel [whom he had met in the army, a Polish Jew who spoke French], he saw that I was alone in the country, I didn’t know anyone, so he says come visit me, don’t be shy. I came one, two, three times, and kept visiting. I fell for his sister, and since then she’s been my wife. At first, we spoke French, her Hebrew was even worse than mine. The lieutenant colonel also came to Israel much earlier, but had brought his parents and sister over not long before. We made fun of each other’s Hebrew, she laughed at some of my mistakes and I laughed at hers. That’s how it got started.”

Victor Mair at the Log has one of his occasional posts investigating murky areas of East and Central Asian etymology; the latest is Tocharian, Turkic, and Old Sinitic “ten thousand”, and it’s extremely interesting to see the takes of various specialists on the conundrum he introduces with a quote from Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish:

F tümen properly ‘ten thousand’, but often used for ‘an indefinitely large number’; immediately borrowed from Tokharian, where the forms are A tmān; B tmane, tumane, but Prof. Pulleyblank has told me orally that he thinks this word may have been borrowed in its turn fr. a Proto-Chinese form *tman, or the like, of wan ‘ten thousand’ (Giles 12,486).

More or less at random, I cite the response from Gerd Carling:

This is complex. As far as I understand, the explanation by Adams (2013:318) apud Winter 1991: the Tocharian word is ultimately borrowed from Middle Iranian, is possibly problematic due to the fact that it is attested in Modern Iranian only, indicating that the Iranian words may be borrowed from Turkic, which in turn is likely borrowed from Chinese (or, alternatively Tocharian, which possibly borrowed from Chinese).

There are a bunch of others, and I agree with Mair’s summation:

I do believe that Old Turkic tümen (“ten thousand”, but often used for “an indefinitely large number”), Tocharian A tmān; B tmane, tumane (“ten thousand”), and Sinitic 萬 (MSM wàn; Old Sinitic Schuessler /*mans/, Baxter-Sagart /*C.ma[n]-s/, Zhengzhang /*mlans/) (“ten thousand”) are somehow related, but it is not clear to me what that relationship is.

If you have any interest in the topic, by all means read both post and comments.

I’m reading the free sample of Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, that Amazon sent me for my Kindle (a very useful service), and I’m enjoying it greatly — he’s a fine writer with a deep knowledge of Yemen (where he lives) and history. But he has an unfortunate weakness for recondite words that will mean nothing to almost any conceivable reader and that (to my mind) are not worth the effort of winkling out from the resources of the internet. The one I just ran across is ataurique, which occurs in this sentence: “The growth is both vegetal and formal, a three-dimensional ataurique or ‘arabesque’, continually throwing out new shoots, but also sending down new tap-roots into other cultures, hybridizing all the way to Andalusia, Turkestan, Sind and far beyond.” In that context, unitalicized and set next to the scare-quoted ‘arabesque,’ you’d think it was a normal word put there to explain the quoted one. In fact, it’s barely an English word at all; it’s a Spanish one, borrowed from Hispano-Arabic attawriq = al-tawriq (a derivative of ورق ‘leafage,’ from Proto-Semitic *waraq-), and thus is presumably pronounced (by those very few English-speakers aware of it) as /ɑːtaʊˈriːkeɪ/ (rhymes with “Louis CK”), but you shouldn’t have to do research to figure out both the meaning and the pronunciation of a word used casually in running text. What would have been lost by simply saying “a three-dimensional arabesque”? Another is Crescaders, which he uses as a section title; it occurs in the text thus: “For Urban, Jerusalem was, like Mecca, ‘the navel of the world’, and the riches of that world were to be reaped by Crusaders as they had been won before by Crescaders.” This one is even worse, since if you do a Google Books search you get only this book; apparently it’s a nonce formation substituting the cresc– of crescent for the crus– = cross of crusader. I’m sorry, but it’s a stupid word and one with the potential to muddle people’s notion of history. Tim, you’re a clever fellow, but rein it in.

Here’s an interesting passage on the Arabic language:

’Arabiyyah, the high language, ‘is regarded by most Arabs as the most significant unifying factor of the Arab world’. The trouble is, even if people write in it (or try to, and fall far short), nobody actually speaks it; nobody ever has spoken it as their mother tongue, not since the mists of time when it began to be constructed. High Arabic is an imagined bond, but also a bind – an unattainable ideal that constricts free expression. The reality is dialect, and disunity. Arabs have never been united in speech, or in any other way, only in speeches; never in real words in the real world, only on paper.

High Arabic is shared by more than 400 million people as the idealized literary form of their spoken language (not to mention another 1.4 billion Muslims as their liturgical language). On the ground the situation is different. Even in quite a small country like Tunisia, with eleven million inhabitants, there are four different dialect words for ‘I’ (in high Arabic, ’anā): anī, ’anī, nā and nāy. Another more extreme case is that of the small island state of Bahrain (with an area of 660 square kilometres), where the ruled Shi’i majority – the ‘Baharnah’, or (native) Bahrainis – speak a ‘settled’ dialect, and the ruling Sunni majority – the ‘Arabs’, as they are still called, who took over in a raid in 1783 – a ‘bedouin’ one. Sectarianism apart, what hope is there for unity, even in a kingdom smaller than the Isle of Mull, when its inhabitants speak two different tongues?

That last bit reminded me of David Eddyshaw’s discussion here of the diversity of the similarly tiny Kusaal-speaking area.

Edward Fox writes for Al-Fanar Media:

I used to think that Arabic was the only language native to the Arabian Peninsula. As a student of Arabic, I learned how the ancient grammarians built the rules of standard Arabic from the speech of the desert Arabs. I thought the language of the Qur’an and of classical Arabic literature was an only child: I knew it had ancestors, but I didn’t know it had any living relatives.

I learned that the story was not that simple many years later in Oman, when I travelled from Muscat to the sultanate’s southern province of Dhofar, a region separated from the capital by 1,000 kilometers of mostly featureless flat land. There I met a young man who told me he spoke a local language that was not Arabic. When I asked to know more, he obligingly, and to my astonishment, spoke a sample of a language called Shahri, a linguistic rarity spoken by a few thousand people in this part of Arabia. It sounded nothing like Arabic. He seemed delighted by my surprise, and proud of his ability. […]

Shahri, also known as Jibbali, is language that is spoken mainly in a remote mountainous region of Dhofar province. (The name Jibbali is derived from the Arabic word for mountain.) It is one of a handful of related languages spoken in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula that are distinct from Arabic, and are mostly unintelligible to speakers of the majority language.

The Unesco Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger identifies Shahri as one of six languages in this group. The others are Bathari, Harsusi, Hobyot, Mehri and Socotri (spoken on the island of Socotra). It’s unclear how many people speak these languages, since Oman, like many countries in the region, has never conducted a census, but experts estimate the total numbers of speakers of these languages in the tens of thousands. One of these languages—Bathari—is believed to be spoken by only 11 people.

Collectively, these languages are called the Modern South Arabian languages. Aaron Rubin, a professor of linguistics at Penn State University in the United States and the author of a grammar of Shahri/Jibbali, explains that the Modern South Arabian languages are a branch of the Semitic languages group that includes Arabic and Hebrew.

“If you look at the Semitic languages as a family tree, you will see that the Modern South Arabian languages diverged from the rest of the Semitic languages a long time ago,” he said in an interview. “Structurally, Jibbali has straightforward similarities to other Semitic languages. But the vocabulary is very different.” […] “There are sounds in Shahri that we think existed in an ancestor language called proto-Semitic, but which have been lost in Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic (a language of Ethiopia),” says Aaron Rubin, of Penn state.

There’s more on the South Arabian languages at the link, as well as two clips of Shahri being spoken. And I’m glad to be introduced to the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Thanks, Trevor!

My wife and I have discovered another divergence in our understanding of an English word (cf. sleet); this time it’s woozy. It turns out she understands this to mean a slight feeling of nausea (for her, it’s synonymous with queasy); for me, it means ‘dizzy.’ I turned to AHD to see what lexicography had to say, and discovered, to my horror, the following:

1. Dazed or confused.
2. Dizzy or queasy.

“Dizzy or queasy”? What the hell kind of definition is that? You might as well define a word as “Cat or bedspread.” When I’m dizzy, I’m not queasy, and vice versa; I can imagine having both conditions at once, just as a cat can on occasion serve as a sort of bedspread, but come on. So I tried M-W:

1 : mentally unclear or hazy // seems a little woozy, not quite knowing what to say— J. A. Lukacs
2 : affected with dizziness, mild nausea, or weakness
3 : having a soft, indistinct, or unfocused quality : vague, fuzzy

That’s even worse: “dizziness, mild nausea, or weakness” (“a cat, a bedspread, or a napkin”). Finally, the OED (not fully updated since 1928) has:

1. Dizzy or unsteady as when fuddled with drink; muzzy; ‘dotty’.
1897 Voice (N.Y.) 22 Apr. 3/2 In the woozy lexicon of the voting church there is no such word as power. […]
2. Representing or marked by muddled thinking or unclear expression; lacking rigour or discipline; sloppy.
1941 W. H. Auden New Year Let. ii. 37 All vague idealistic art..Is up his alley, and his pigeon The woozier species of religion. […]

I don’t often say this sort of thing, but woozy seems like a completely useless word, since it’s impossible to know what it means. At any rate, I turn to the assembled Hatters: what does woozy mean to you?

Earlier this month I posted about Libyans in Egypt and their effect on the language (“As a result, official inscriptions of the Libyan Period show a marked preference for spoken forms, workaday grammar, and simple vocabulary, in contrast to the more refined formulations of the ruling class”); now I’ve reached the point in Wilkinson’s book where he talks about the later Kushite rulers, who had the opposite effect:

In another important respect, too, the Kushite monarchy represented a return to the past. With piety to Amun a central tenet of their claim to legitimacy, Piankhi and his successors set out to champion other indigenous Egyptian traditions that had been neglected or overturned by the country’s recent Libyan rulers. The Kushites saw it as their holy mission to restore Egypt’s cultural purity, just as they had saved the cult of Amun from foreign contamination. With active royal encouragement, therefore, priests and artists looked to earlier periods for inspiration, reviving and reinventing models from the classic periods of pharaonic history. An obsession with the past soon influenced every sphere of cultural endeavor.

Shabaqo gave a lead by adopting the throne name of Pepi II, to recall the glories of the Pyramid Age. His successor went one better, dusting off the titulary last used by the Fifth Dynasty king Isesi more than sixteen centuries earlier. High-ranking officials followed suit, adopting long-obsolete and often meaningless titles, just for the sake of their antiquity. The written language was deliberately “purified,” taking it back to the archaic form of the Old Kingdom, and scribes were trained to compose new texts in an antiquated idiom. A fine example was the Memphite Theology, a theological treatise on the role of the Memphite god Ptah. Commissioned by Shabaqo himself, the treatise was said to have been copied from an ancient worm-eaten papyrus, preserved in the temple archives for millennia. The authentically archaic language certainly fooled most scholars when the piece was first discovered. But, like much of the Kushite renaissance, the Memphite Theology was a product of the seventh century, cunningly designed to look like a relic of the past—an imagined past of cultural purity that existed only in the minds of the Kushite zealots.

I love stories like that, of artificially primitive writings that fooled later scholars.

I ran across a reference to “St. Marx Cemetery” in Vienna and assumed it must be a typo, but googling soon showed that that’s its name (Sankt Marxer Friedhof in German). So I thought “Was there a St. Marx?”… but no, Wikipedia says it “was named after a nearby almshouse whose chapel had been consecrated to St Mark.” So how the devil do you get Marx as an official spelling of (what I assume should be) Marks? (I note that Russian Wikipedia calls it Кладбище Святого Марка, ‘Cemetery of Saint Mark.’)

Miranda France discusses literary translation for Prospect:

Here’s a translator’s tale: it’s early morning and I’m working on a scene from an Argentinian thriller. A woman has discovered her husband’s infidelity and leaves him a chilling message on the mirror written in rouge. In rouge. That doesn’t sound right. Although I’ve never tried it, I think it would be hard to write on glass with a cream rouge and impossible with a powdered one. Surely you’d use lipstick? I turn to WordReference, the online oracle for linguists, and ask the other forum users if rouge can ever mean lipstick in Latin America. Someone from Spain immediately says no. Lipstick would be pintalabios. Another poster from Mexico agrees, although he says that lipstick there is lápiz labial. Then the southern hemisphere starts waking up. A commenter says that rouge does indeed mean lipstick in Chile. And finally someone from Argentina agrees. Her mother always uses this word.

While writing is famously solitary, translating thrives on connection and collaboration. If I’m writing a book I tend to secrecy, but when I’m translating one I’ll rope in anyone useful. My plumber provided diagrams when I was working on a short story about a piece of jewellery lost in an S-bend. An architect friend explained how the foundations are laid for a tower block, for a novel in which a body is buried in wet cement. Various lawyers have helped unpick the workings of different judiciaries. The book club at the Argentine Embassy has been helping me with some Lunfardo, a language derived from Lombardy, honed in the prisons of Buenos Aires and as unique to that city as Cockney rhyming slang is to London. Sometimes translating feels like detective work and sometimes it’s like solving puzzles. So it was gratifying to learn that the renowned translator Anthea Bell, who died in October, and worked on the Asterix stories among other works, was also daughter of the first compiler of the Times’s cryptic crossword.

I love the Argentine references (I lived in Buenos Aires for some years), and of course I like anecdotes of translation in general. But this puzzled me:

Alberto Manguel and I argued once in my kitchen about a novel in which he appeared as a character himself. I had translated one line as “Alberto Manguel is an arsehole.” “But I would definitely call myself ‘an asshole!’” he protested. It seemed rude to disagree.

Is there any difference between an arsehole and an asshole? Surely one’s UK and one’s US, and which you use depends on the general dialect choice of the translation?