Archives for June 2019

I recently came across a word new to me; I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:

Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other.

The term “stigmergy” was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: “Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved.” It is derived from the Greek words στίγμα stigma “mark, sign” and ἔργον ergon “work, action”, and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions.

Later on, a distinction was made between the stigmergic phenomenon, which is specific to the guidance of additional work, and the more general, non-work specific incitation, for which the term sematectonic communication was coined by E. O. Wilson, from the Greek words σῆμα sema “sign, token”, and τέκτων tecton “craftsman, builder”: “There is a need for a more general, somewhat less clumsy expression to denote the evocation of any form of behavior or physiological change by the evidences of work performed by other animals, including the special case of the guidance of additional work.”

I have several thoughts about this. It’s clearly a useful term, applicable to many kinds of things, so it’s good that Grassé created it (the OED entry, not updated since 1986, has this as its first citation: 1959 tr. P.-P. Grassé in Insectes Sociaux VI. 79   The stimulation of the workers by the very performances they have achieved is a significant one inducing accurate and adaptable response, and has been named stigmergy). It’s an ugly but well-formed word (in terms of its Greek derivation); the perceived ugliness will probably lessen as one sees it more and gets accustomed to it. The term sematectonic, on the other hand, is both ugly and unnecessary — the idea that because the Greek word ἔργον went into the makeup of stigmergy it must involve the concept of work and thus another word must be created for other uses is a typical example of the etymological fallacy, and I shake my fist in the general direction of E. O. Wilson (as I have done at other times for other reasons). At any rate, I will try to remember to make use of it when appropriate.

Miriam Foley writes for BBC Travel about a repository of early Romance texts:

After a short drive uphill from the small village of San Millán de la Cogolla, I found myself standing before the Suso monastery. Founded by the 6th-Century hermit monk St Millán, the monastery feels as if it belongs to another time and place. […]

Claudio García Turza, director of the Department of the Origins of the Spanish Language at the International Centre of Investigation of the Spanish Language (CILENGUA), has dedicated more than 40 years to the investigation and teaching of Spanish at the University of La Rioja. We met at the grandiose Yuso, Suso’s larger and more majestic sister monastery located at the bottom of the hill. Both monasteries earned Unesco World Heritage status in 1997.

García Turza explained that in the 10th Century, one of the monastery’s monks began to translate sermons and prayers – all of which were written and recited in Latin, which by then wasn’t universally understood – into the local Ibero-Romance dialect for his fellow monks to understand. He left notes in the margins of the original texts. Those translation notes, the most famous of which have been compiled in Las Glosas Emilianenses, or the Emilian Glosses, are some of the language’s earliest steps onto the page. “[They] provide a glimpse into how the language was spoken all those centuries ago, in a time when most people were illiterate,” García Turza said as he leaned forward, his voice rising with excitement.

Suso’s role in the development of the Spanish language doesn’t end there. Several centuries later, poet Gonzalo de Berceo resided at the monastery, where he wrote verses that included never-before-seen terms. Recognised as the first Spanish-language poet, de Berceo expanded the Spanish lexicon by more than 2,000 words during his lifetime. […] Other early examples of written Ibero-Romance exist, including the Cartularios de Valpuesta, medieval documents containing words in Ibero-Romance found at the monastery of Santa María de Valpuesta in the neighbouring province of Burgos. […] Yet there is no doubt that the Suso monastery played a crucial role in the development of the Spanish language. García Turza called it “the house of words, but first and foremost, the house of philology”. He explained that the longest of the monk’s notes, known as Glosa 89, constitutes the first comprehensive text written in an Ibero-Romance language, where “a succession of words… are stitched together, interrelated, to convey a message.” It’s the first full text where all linguistic levels of the language are expressed – not only with words, but also grammar and syntax – providing evidence of a greater complexity.

I’m not sure why the BBC capitalizes “Century”; a UK thing, perhaps? (Thanks, Trevor!)

Adam Hermann’s “Sienna Miller talks nailing the Philly accent for ‘American Woman’ on Jimmy Fallon” (Philly Voice, June 15) is interesting:

British actress Sienna Miller has an accent when she talks, but it’s decidedly not something you normally hear from an eastern Pennsylvania resident. For the film “American Woman”, which comes out next week and is set in “a small, blue-collar town in Pennsylvania”, Miller had to figure out what people from around here talk like.

It wasn’t easy, because the Philadelphia accent is so dang weird, but she clearly had some help, because she kind of nailed it. Miller appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show” late this week to talk about the film, and specifically about the accent she uses in the film. “It’s like a Philadelphia, Mason-Dixon-esque accent, from Philly,” Miller explained. “Pennsylvania’s weird, because the closer you get to the Mason-Dixon line, the more like, “-eau” it goes. It sounded initially a bit Southern, but it’s not.”

That’s fair! The “-eau” is definitely a defining characteristic of the Philly accent. To get a better sense of what she’s talking about, you can watch the video below, where Miller shows off her pretty-solid take on the accent […] Last year, linguistics expert Dr. Betsy Sneller talked about the Philly accent on a linguistics podcast, where she explained the Philadelphia A:

People who speak with the Philadelphia English dialect, Sneller explained, use what’s called a “split short-a system,” talking about the sound speakers make when they say a word like “trap.”

[…] Miller said she needed a few words that would help her get into the accent. She used “poster” and “boat”. The way she said these two words was a little dramatic, but we’ll let it slide.

As always, I appreciate it when they quote an actual linguist. (Via Mark Liberman’s Log post; the Philly accent previously at LH.)

My wife and I are continuing to read Dorothy Richardson at night, occasionally baffled by the absence of plot and the unexplained vanishing of characters but enchanted by the prose, and we’ve gotten to Deadlock, the sixth novel in the Pilgrimage series. I was reading along as usual when I was thunderstruck by the following passage (Miriam, the heroine, is giving English lessons to a Russian named Shatov):

“[…] People are, in general, silly. But I must tell you you should not cease to read until you shall have read at least some Russian writers. If you possess sensibility for language you shall find that Russian is most-beautiful; it is perhaps the most beautiful European language; it is, indubitably, the most rich.”

“It can’t be richer than English.”

“Certainly, it is richer than English. I shall prove this to you, even with dictionary. You shall find that it occur, over and over, that where in English is one word, in Russian is six or seven different, all synonyms, but all with most delicate individual shades of nuance …. the abstractive expression is there, as in all civilised European languages, but there is also in Russian the most immense variety of natural expressions, coming forth from the strong feeling of the Russian nature to all these surrounding influences; each word opens to a whole aperçu in this sort …. and what is most significant is, the great richness, in Russia, of the people-language; there is no other people-language similar; there is in no one language so immense a variety of tender diminutives and intimate expressions of all natural things. None is so rich in sound or so marvellously powerfully colourful….. That is Russian. Part of the reason is no doubt to find in the immense paysage; Russia is zo vast; it is inconceivable for any non-Russian. There is also the ethnological explanation, the immense vigour of the people.”

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Another delightful tidbit from the Public Domain Review (see this LH post):

Jé Wilson charts the migration of the Lustucru figure through the French cultural imagination — from misogynistic blacksmith bent on curbing female empowerment, to child-stealing bogeyman, to jolly purveyor of packaged pasta.

It’s an amazing story, but this is the bit of linguistic interest:

His name, Lustucru, comes from a slurring of “L’eusses-tu-cru?”, a stock phrase used in that period by theatrical fools, which meant, “Would you have believed it?” or in this case, “Would you have thought a woman’s head could be fixed?”

Once I have it spelled out for me, I can see the derivation, but I wouldn’t have guessed it, because the imperfect subjunctive of avoir is not uppermost in my consciousness. My question to actual French-speakers is: is it obvious to you that Lustucru = L’eusses-tu-cru? (I am reminded, for some reason, of the Russian phrase andermanir shtuk.)

Today I had the great pleasure of a visit from Slavomír Čéplö, known around Blogovia as bulbul of bulbulistan, who’s in Providence for the Eighth North American Syriac Symposium (program) and thought he’d take advantage of the proximity to visit the Hattery. We all went into Amherst for the Taste of Amherst, where we sampled various restaurant offerings and watched the kung fu exhibition put on by my grandson’s class, then returned here to talk and examine my overloaded bookshelves. I asked him what he was presenting at the symposium, and he told me it was “HUNAYNNET: Greek-Syriac-Arabic corpus of scientific texts”; of course I wanted to see the website, and I was very impressed:

This project aims to facilitate a comprehensive comparison of Syriac and Arabic translations through lexicographical analysis by developing an innovative research tool. Drawing on online lexicography and corpus linguistics, we will produce a parallel corpus of Syriac scientific and philosophical translations to facilitate the analysis and comparison of Syriac scientific terminology and translation techniques both with extant Greek originals and with Arabic versions. The lexicographic database will provide definitive data for the study of Syriac and Arabic translations and the connections between them. It will reveal how the Syriac translations along with underlying methods and tools that were put to use for the first time ever by Syriac Christians eventually formed the bedrock for the prosperity of the Islamic sciences. The open-access database thus creates a new instrument for a study of the history of the transmission of Greek scientific literature in antiquity and the middle ages.

If you click on the Texts link at the top you can choose works by Aristotle, Pseudo-Aristotle, Porphyry, Galen, etc.; click on, say, Categoriae, and you’ll get a Greek text on the left and an empty space on the right which you can fill by clicking on the + sign and choosing Aramaic and/or Arabic, which will appear in parallel columns. Furthermore, if you hold your cursor over one of the sentence numbers in parentheses, the corresponding passage will be highlighted in all the versions, and if you click on a word in any of the languages you’ll be offered your choice of lexica to look it up in. There’s a Syriac Dictionary Lookup from Sedra, which has online libraries, and you can get Syriac words analyzed at ElixirFM Resolve Online (e.g., يقال). What a wonderful world, and what a good job they’ve done of putting this valuable material online!

Also, he told me that Syriac is much less well described than you’d think; he wanted to define classes of words for analysis, but it turned out Nöldeke only had a few prepositions, and when Slavo went through text corpora he found a couple dozen. There’s lots of work to be done, and I look forward to his further discoveries; I also look forward to his next visit, because my wife and I both enjoyed his company tremendously (and were impressed by his astonishing command of vernacular American English). Somebody fund this man for another local conference!

Jacqueline Leung reviews Yoko Tawada’s novel The Emissary for Asymptote; it begins:

The very existence of language—the signified and the signifier, the sender and the recipient—denotes distance. For a writer like Yoko Tawada, who practices her craft in both Japanese and German (the latter picked up in her twenties), the space between reality and what is written or said is where poetry resides. Linguistic play is at the heart of Tawada’s creativity; in The Naked Eye, she wrote one chapter in German and another in Japanese, alternating between the two until the end. Then she decided to translate everything the other way so that she had a German manuscript and a Japanese manuscript for her publishers.

This exophonic maneuver—exophony being a term indicating the practice of writing in a language not your mother tongue (the distinction makes you wonder if there ever was a term for writing in your mother tongue)—is an impossibility in the dystopian Japan depicted in Tawada’s latest novel, The Emissary, translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani. Learning a foreign language is forbidden in the fictionalized Japan that has regressed to closing its borders after irreparable environmental disasters, possibly nuclear, contaminated the archipelago and pulled it away from the Eurasian continent, geographically and politically forcing its isolation. The aftermath is an exacerbated impression of Japan’s current dilemma with its aging population—government statistics released just this April reveal that over a third of its people are 60 and above.

I’m always glad to see novelists dealing with language in interesting ways, and that’s quite a story about the two versions of The Naked Eye. Thanks, Trevor!

The Public Domain Review has a post answering a question that probably never occurred to you: what did alphabet books do about the letter X before X-rays?

Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?

As we see below, in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there’s also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too.

Xerxes was the most common (“X is for Xerxes,/ Who now lives no more”), but Xanthippe was also popular (there’s a marvelous illustration of her emptying a chamber pot over the head of a chuckling Socrates), and there was an entirely unexpected entrant:

We are not sure of the exact history of this figure known as Xany, but he seems to be associated with foolishness — perhaps a convenient mis-spelling of the more common “zany” (which itself refers to “Zanni”, a character type of Commedia dell’arte best known as a trickster).

There are others, including words that don’t actually start with X (“X is Extinct; he thinks everything bad,/ That was not invented, when he was a lad”) or even contain it (“X is for crossroads”) and one book that simply omits the letter, and the illustrations are well worth the visit on their own.

Also, check out the freely downloadable books at the U of Cal Press site; juha linked to it in an earlier thread, mentioning Nile Green (ed.), The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (which I instantly grabbed for my Kindle), and listed a bunch more titles in this comment.

The foreign prince whom Vronsky is forced to escort around Petersburg had hunted “гемз” in Switzerland; while trying to find out what that might be (it turns out to be a russified form of German Gemse ‘chamois’ [Old High German gamiza < Late Latin camox], for which the normal Russian word is серна), I happened on Aleksandr Khavchin’s Перечитывая «Анну Каренину» [Rereading Anna Karenina], a collection of observations he had made on the novel. I love that sort of thing, and I’ll send those who read Russian to the link to enjoy it; for the rest of you, I’ll translate a few tidbits. He mentions some examples of awkward constructions and says (the passage starts “Общеизвестно, что Толстой писал коряво” in the Russian):

It’s generally known that Tolstoy wrote clumsily and awkwardly on purpose: he tried to make sure the reader’s gaze would not glide along but stumble; he wanted to slow down the process of reading and make it more difficult. And up to the last minute, even in the final proofs he would “spoil” the style, adding “which” and “that,” burdening and muddling grammatical constructions. Bunin thought it useful, perhaps as a practice exercise, to go through Tolstoy’s works with a pencil, polishing and cleaning. […]

Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and the Sebastopol Sketches are written in a more correct and clear style than Anna Karenina. Might it be because at Sovremennik they weren’t afraid to correct a young author, whereas at Russkii vestnik they couldn’t bring themselves to correct a venerable, famous, great one? To correct a Tolstoy, you have to be a Bunin at the very least!

After giving examples of what they call “continuity errors” in movies (Kitty is wearing slippers at one point, shoes a bit later), he says (“Если уж сам Толстой”):

If Tolstoy himself committed errors, that means that:
– absolutely everybody needs an editor;
– we, mere mortals, have to be three times as vigilant, because we won’t be forgiven. Accuracy is that quality which even an untalented author is required to have.

He quotes some bits of direct speech which actors find extremely difficult to bring off when staged, and says (“В жизни люди так не говорят!”):

People don’t talk that way in real life! Ordinary people don’t talk in such cumbersome compound sentences! Those poor actors, forced to learn all that by heart!

I don’t mean to say that in Gogol, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov the heroes talk “like real people.” Of course the illusion of conversational language is constructed with the help of artificial techniques. But Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, seems not to go to the trouble of creating simpler forms of speech for his characters, to distinguish them stylistically from authorial speech. In Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, there are parentheses within direct speech — even in school they told us to avoid that!

I did enjoy catching him in an error. He says only Stiva and Anna meet all the rest of the main characters — Levin and Kitty don’t meet Karenin [Левин и Кити не встречаются с Карениным]. Not true: both of them meet Karenin at Oblonsky’s dinner in IV:9!

I’m a little over halfway through, and (of course) I have a complaint. In general the novel is just as great as its reputation; I gobbled up the first three parts feeling I was in the hands of a master. But in Part 4, I started grumbling when (spoiler!) Levin finally wins Kitty’s heart. Up till then, Tolstoy’s handling of the thwarted relationship has been superb: the intrusion of Vronsky, the rejection of the awkward Levin (who’s stayed away for months), the letdown of the ball when she realizes Vronsky doesn’t love her after all, and Levin’s bitter renunciation, apparently forever. Now Tolstoy brings them together at last, and immediately falls into what feels to me like a combination of a romance novel and a young-adult story. Levin, a man in his thirties, suddenly starts acting like a schoolboy; well and good, that can happen. But (I quote Garnett’s translation):
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Eyehawk at Wordorigins.org posted:

I was curious how “litter” evolved from a term used for strewn trash into a group of babies produced by one cat or dog.

Dave Wilton responded:

Litter comes to English from the Anglo-Normans lit(t)ere in the early 14th century. The original sense was a bed or a bed-like carriage hauled by humans. Think of nobles in medieval or classical times being taken around the city in litters.

In French, it could also have the sense of straw or other material that made up a bed, and this sense was also used for straw used as bedding material for animals in stables and barns. This sense appears in English in the early 15th century.

By the mid 15th century, the word was being used to refer to animals born among such straw or material.

Then in the 18th century, litter came to mean odds and ends strewn across the floor, like straw. This is where the trash and rubbish sense comes from.

The stretcher sense goes back to the original sense of a bed-like carriage.

I’ll add that the Anglo-Norman word is from medieval Latin lectāria, derived from Latin lectus ‘bed’ (which of course gives French lit). An interesting semantic range, though Eyehawk’s original question of how it got to mean, in the OED’s words, “The whole number of young brought forth at a birth” (first citation 1486 Bk. St. Albans F vj A Litter of welpis) is not really answered — Dave’s “animals born among such straw or material” is a plausible guess but not immediately convincing.