Archives for September 2019

My wife and I have moved on to Oberland, the next in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series (see this post); our heroine Miriam has gotten away from her somewhat claustrophobic London life and is spending a couple of weeks in the Bernese Oberland. There are a number of other English tourists in the hotel where she’s staying, and this is her reaction to listening to them at the dinner table:

The clipped, slurred words had no longer the charm of a foreign tongue. Though still they rang upon the air the preoccupations of the man at the wheel: the sound of ‘The Services,’ adapted. But clustered in this small space they seemed to be bringing with them another account of their origin, to be showing how they might come about of themselves and vary from group to group, from person to person—with one aim: to avoid disturbing the repose of the features. Expression might be animated or inanimate, but features must remain undisturbed.

Then there is no place for clearly enunciated speech, apart from oratory; platform and pulpit. Anywhere else it is bad form. Bad fawm.

She felt she knew now why perfect speech, delightful in itself, always seemed insincere. Why women with clear musical voices, undulating, and clean enunciation, are always cats; and the corresponding men, ingratiating and charming at first, turn out sooner or later to be charlatans.

The nicest people have bad handwriting and bad delivery.

But all this applied only to English, to Germanics; that was a queer exciting thing, that only these languages had the quality of aggressive disturbance of the speaking face: chin-jerking vowels and aspirates, throat-swelling gutturals … force and strength and richness, qualities innumerable and more various than in any other language.

Quelling an impulse to gaze at the speakers lit by discovery, she gazed instead at imagined faces, representative Englishmen, with eyes and brows serene above rapid slipshod speech.

Here, too, of course, was the explanation of the other spontaneous forms of garbling, the extraordinary pulpit speech of self-conscious and incompletely believing parsons, and the mincing speech of the genteel. It explained ‘nace.’ Nice, correctly spoken, is a convulsion of the lower face—like a dog snapping at a gnat.

It’s not a linguistically sophisticated description, but it’s vivid and evocative. (Compare the “London Essex” described here.)

Rachel Gutman at The Atlantic reports on an interesting study:

In the early 1960s, a doctoral student at Cornell University wanted to figure out whether there was any truth behind the “cultural stereotype” that certain foreigners speak faster than Americans. He recorded 12 of his fellow students—six Japanese speakers and six American English speakers—monologuing about life on campus, analyzed one minute of each man’s speech, and found that the two groups produced sounds at roughly the same speed. He and a co-author concluded that “the hearer judges the speech rate of a foreign language in terms of his linguistic background,” and that humans the world over were all likely to be more or less equally fast talkers.

In the half century since then, more rigorous studies have shown that, prejudice aside, some languages—such as Japanese, Basque, and Italian—really are spoken more quickly than others. But as mathematical methods and computing power have improved, linguists have spent more time studying not just speech rate, but the effort a speaker has to exert to get a message across to a listener. By calculating how much information every syllable in a language conveys, it’s possible to compare the “efficiency” of different languages. And a study published today in Science Advances [“Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche,” by Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino] found that more efficient languages tend to be spoken more slowly. In other words, no matter how quickly speakers chatter, the rate of information they’re transmitting is roughly the same across languages.

The basic problem of “efficiency,” in linguistics, starts with the trade-off between effort and communication. It takes a certain amount of coordination, and burns a certain number of calories, to make noises come out of your mouth in an intelligible way. And those noises can be more or less informative to a listener, based on how predictable they are. […] Informativity in linguistics is usually calculated per syllable, and it’s measured in bits, just like computer files. The concept can be rather slippery when you’re talking about talking, but essentially, a bit of linguistic information is the amount of information that reduces uncertainty by half. In other words, if I utter a syllable, and that utterance narrows down the set of things I could be talking about from everything in the world to only half the things in the world, that syllable carries one bit of information.

In the new study, the authors calculated the average information density—that is, bits per syllable—of a set of 17 Eurasian languages and compared it with the average speech rate, in syllables per second, of 10 speakers for each language. They found that the rate of information transferred stayed constant—at about 39.15 bits per second, to be exact.

François Pellegrino, the senior author of the new study, says linguists aren’t likely to be surprised to learn that there’s a trade-off between speech rate and information density: “It just confirms what the intuition would be.” But what’s special about his and his team’s work is that, for the first time, they were able “to prove that it holds” for this set of languages.

She goes on to discuss the differing reactions of generativists and other linguists to this kind of thing. Thanks, Kobi!

Bathrobe sent me a link to Carly Jaddoa’s webpage featuring audio clips of Harry Potter translations:

Below are native and second-language speakers reading the 1st Paragraph of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in their own language(s). […]

The Authorized Languages of Potter:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, UK English, US English, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, West Frisian, Galician, Georgian, German, Low German, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Marathi, Malay, Malayalam, Mongolian, Montenegrin, Nepali, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scots, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Valencian, Vietnamese, Welsh​

It is, of course, catnip to the likes of me; the only thing that would have made it better would be providing the texts so you could follow along, but you can often google the titles and find Amazon pages with “Look inside the book.” And it’s just plain fun to hear Armenian, Georgian, and the like, even if you can’t see the texts. (Honorable mention goes to the Polish reader, who provided a video of the text — it’s a little blurry, but better than nothing.) As expected, the Brazilian Portuguese was far more intelligible than the European Portuguese. The only thing that made me grumpy was the Ancient Greek version, whose reader not only pronounced it as if it were Modern Greek but clearly did not understand the ancient language, since particles were joined with the wrong word in the reading. But never mind, that’s just a quibble: click through and enjoy!

Jonathon Owen says: “I’ve been thinking a lot about style guides lately, and I decided that what the world really needs right now is the definitive style guide alignment chart.” It’s a lot of fun; most of my professional editing used the Chicago Manual of Style, so here’s his entry on that magisterial work:

A lawful good character “combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly.” And boy howdy, is Chicago relentless—the thing is over 1,100 pages! Even if you use it every day in your job as an editor, there are probably entire chapters that you’ve never looked at. But it’s there with its recommendations just in case.

I assure him, however, that there is not a chapter I haven’t looked at. (I’ve even researched their sample bibliography.) Thanks, Martin!

Trond Engen wrote me:

I thought I should make you aware of the new series “Beforeigners” for HBO Nordic. The basic premise is that people from three distinct eras in the past have turned up in Oslo. The show takes place a few years later.

You don’t read Norwegian, but here’s an interesting interview from the online science magazine Forskning.no with the professional linguists working on the language of each of the three distinct periods of origin.

Here’s an interview in Variety with the show’s “co-creator”, Anne Bjørnstad.

Sounds like fun; I’d love to hear from anyone who’s watched it. (The original title is Fremvandrerne; does that have any cute puns comparable to the English version?) Thanks, Trond!

From John Cowan:

1. La famille de Sara est d’origine italienne.
2. La famiglia di Sara è di origine italiana.
3. La familia de Sara es de origen italiano.
4. A família de Sara é de origem italiana.
5. La famiya de Sara es de orijin italyana.
6. A familia de Sara é de orixe italiana.
7. A familia de Sara ye d’orixen italiano.
8. La família de Sara és d’origen italià.
9. La familha de Sara es d’origina italiana.
10. A famiglia di Sara hè di origine italiana.
11. Sa famìlia de Sara est de orìgine italiana.
12. Familia Sarei este de origine italiană.
13. Familia Sarae originis italicae est.

JC adds: “Some are easy, some quite tough, at least for me.” I got 1-4, 8, and 12-13 at first glance; the rest are tougher.

Added later:

14. La familio de Sara estas de itala origino.
15. La famiglia da Sara è d’origin talian.
16. Familia de Sara esse origine de Italia.

Addendum. It’s probably best to assume there will be spoilers in the comments, if you don’t want any help figuring it out.

Another Laudator Temporis Acti post:

I was surprised to find no entry for ambubaia in Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), but then I read the disclaimer on p. 1:

This approach implies the exclusion of those Latin words which are certainly or probably loanwords from known, non-Italic languages, such as Celtic, Etruscan, Germanic, Greek, and Semitic.

He then quotes J.N. Adams, “Words for Prostitute in Latin” (Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 126.3/4 [1983]):

I mention finally ambubaia, which is sometimes ascribed the sense ‘prostitute’. The word is Syrian (cf. abbub, ‘flute’), and it must have denoted a Syrian flute girl. This is undoubtedly the sense at Hor. Sat. 1.2.1 (‘ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, / mendici, mimae, balatrones, hoc genus omne / maestum ac sollicitum est cantoris morte Tigelli’), and it is consistent with the context at Suet. Nero 27.2 (‘cenitabatque nonnunquam et in publico, naumachia praeclusa uel Martio campo uel circo maximo, inter scortorum totius urbis et ambubaiarum ministeria’). Ambubaia is a term of abuse at Petron. 74.13, but the context is not sexual (‘ambubaia non meminit se de machina? in illam sustuli, hominem inter homines feci’); Trimalchio is suggesting that his wife has forgotten her lowly origins, and hence the sense ‘flute girl’ would be appropriate. The only slight evidence for the meaning ‘prostitute’ comes from the first clause of Porph. Hor. Sat. 1.2.1 (‘ambubaiae . . . sunt mulieres uagae et uiles, quibus nomen hoc causa uanorum et ebrietate balbutientium uerborum uidetur esse inditum. nonnulli tamen ambubaias tibicines Syra lingua putant dici’), but a sexual implication would appear to be ruled out by the next clause. Moreover the second sentence suggests that Porphyrio did not know the word from current usage, and was merely speculating about its meaning. I conclude that there is no evidence that the word meant ‘whore’, either at the time of Horace or of Porphyrio.

(For footnotes, see the link.) Gilleland says: “If you were to read Horace, Satire 1.2 (Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae), in Arthur Palmer’s school edition (1883; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 9-10, you might think that it’s the shortest of Horace’s Satires. That’s because Palmer omits lines 25-134 as ‘scarcely profitable reading’ (p. 132).”

A striking word, and even more striking is that, according to Gaffiot and Georges, there’s another ambubaia, meaning ‘chicory‘!

Nick Paumgarten’s “The Message of Measles” (New Yorker, Sept. 2) is well worth reading for the importance of the subject, but Paumgarten is a lively writer with an eye for a good quote, and I was particularly struck by this:

For public-health officials like Zucker, measles was a clear and present concern on its own, but, more significant, it was a leading indicator of a societal failure. Mark Mulligan, the director of the Vaccine Center at N.Y.U. Langone, said, “This outbreak is the eyes of the hippopotamus.”

The eyes of the hippopotamus! What a great substitute for the hopelessly clichéd “tip of the iceberg”! I reproduce it here in hopes that it will get wider use (and perhaps become a cliché in its own right).

Sharon Arbuthnot, a researcher and editor for the Dictionary of the Irish Language, reports for RTÉ on the revision of eDIL:

Updates to the Oxford English Dictionary deliver a regular batch of new words and phrases. […] In contrast, new additions to a dictionary of medieval language are not novel terms that have appeared recently in speech and writing, but lost words that have been rediscovered. These can include words that have been hidden in centuries-old manuscripts, words in published texts that were not picked up previously by dictionary-makers and words that have been misunderstood in the past. […]

The most authoritative source of medieval Irish is the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) which covers the language from earliest evidence up to around the year 1650. Over the past five years, I have been working as part of a team of researchers from Queen’s University, Belfast, and the University of Cambridge to revise and expand the dictionary’s contents. We have changed definitions, supplied evidence to show that certain words were in circulation at an earlier date than was previously thought and even deleted a few items which proved not to be real words at all!

But when the updated version of the dictionary is launched at the end of this month, it seems likely that the main talking points will be the newly created entries. More than 500 entirely new headwords have been added, many of them testifying to the quirky and colourful language that is so characteristic of medieval Irish. They also provide fascinating titbits of information on all manner of subjects from food to festivals, superstitions to medicine and society to wildlife.

As a taster of what is to come, here are 10 of my favourite new words and phrases, all notable for different reasons and certainly worth looking up as soon as the updated version of the dictionary becomes available online.

How I love this sort of thing! Here’s my personal favorite of the notable newbies:

(7) Ngetal was the early Irish name for the letter-cluster ng, which we still find in Modern Irish expressions such as i nGaillimh for “in Galway”. Though it seems very unusual today to see an Irish word spelt in this way, there are several examples of this term, so it is clear that ngetal not only meant “ng” but also began with ng-.

I use eDIL a lot, and am delighted they’re updating it. Thanks, Trevor!

Cyril Connolly is pretty much forgotten now, which is not a terrible injustice, but this is a nice pungent passage from his 1938 essay “Illusions of Likeness” (courtesy of Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):

The last ten years have witnessed a welcome decay in pedantic snobbery about dead languages. A knowledge of Greek is no longer the hallmark of a powerful intellectual caste, who visit with Housmanly scorn any solecism from the climbers outside it. The dons who jeer at men of letters for getting their accents wrong command no more sympathy than doctors who make fun of psychiatrists or osteopaths; the vast vindictive rages which scholars used to vent on those who knew rather less than themselves seem no longer so admirable, like the contempt which those people who at some time learned how to pronounce Buccleuch and Harewood have for those who are still learning. The don-in-the-manger is no longer formidable. There was a time when most people were ashamed to say that The Oxford Book of Greek Verse required a translation. That time is over. We shall not refer to it again except to say that if people as teachable as ourselves couldn’t be taught enough Greek in ten years to construe any piece unseen, as we can with French, or with any other modern language, then that system by which we were taught should be scrapped, and those stern nincompoops by whom we were instructed should come before us, like the burghers of Calais, in sackcloth and ashes with halters round their necks.

Gilleland quotes it from Connolly’s collection The Condemned Playground. Essays: 1927-1944 (London: Routledge, 1945), which is available online if you want to investigate further. Also, Buccleuch is pronounced /bəˈkluː/ (bə-KLOO) and Harewood /ˈhɑːrwʊd/ (HAR-wood) — at least in Harewood House, which presumably retains the traditional pronunciation; the village it is in, sadly, has succumbed to the obvious /ˈhɛərwʊd/ (HAIR-wood). O tempora, sic transit!