Archives for April 2020

A.Z. Foreman (to quote his blog profile) “is a translator and poet who has been obsessed with languages and literature since childhood”; you should check out his translation blog, with lots of poems accompanied by his translations (and sometimes audio files of him reading the original) in languages from Arabic to Yiddish. But right now I want to feature a post from his other blog, The bLogicarian (“essays, translations of prose, original poems and so forth”) — Six Degrees of Deuteronomy: the phonological journey of Biblical Hebrew. He takes Deuteronomy 32:1-6 and gives versions of it in six stages of Hebrew: Pre-Exilic, Roman Empire, Late Amoraic, Late Ge’onic, Babylonian, and Medieval Andalusi (ancestral to “every modern Hebrew liturgical dialect in current use outside of Yemen”). For each he gives a phonetic transcription and an audio file, along with a paragraph of explanation. As an example, for Popular Reading of Jews in the Roman Empire he writes:

Fast forward through the Exile and the Second Temple period to the 3rd century. Hebrew has ceased being anybody’s native language, though pretty recently. There are many people who can remember remember hearing Hebrew spoken by their grandparents. What you have here is the pronunciation recorded in Origen’s Hexapla except with even more reduction. The lingering nasal-weakening of /m/ after long vowels seemed like a proper touch, and supported by the transcriptions. Like a residual trace of Hebrew’s last stage as a native vernacular. Aramaic influence is pervasive, from phonology to morphology. Begedkefath spirantization has long ago kicked in. There is heavy vowel reduction, and the native speakers of Palestinian Aramaic using this pronunciation use a dorsal /r/. I went out on a limb to posit that the tetragrammaton in this type of reading gets realized with the Aramaicism /jahoː(h)/. Note that spirantization is a completely synchronic rule. The resyllabification caused by proclitic ו in ופתלתל ends up despirantizing the first ת.

I absolutely love this kind of thing, and listened to all the stages.

Back in 2017, we discussed Michael Gavin’s attempt to answer the questions: “Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?” At that time he and his coworkers were investigating language diversity patterns in Australia; last year there was an update by Gavin and Marco Túlio Pacheco Coelho, “Why are so many languages spoken in some places and so few in others?”

Our research team has been tackling this longstanding question by exploring language diversity patterns on the continent of North America. Prior to European contact, North America was home to speakers of around 400 languages, unevenly spread across the landscape. Some places, such as the West Coast from present-day Vancouver to southern California, had far more languages; other areas, such as northern Canada and the Mississippi delta region, appear to have had fewer languages. We drew on methods from ecology originally developed to study patterns of species diversity to investigate these patterns of language diversity. […]

Recently, our interdisciplinary research group tried to untangle which factors had the most influence on language diversity in different places. Combining ideas from linguists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists and geographers, we took a unique approach. We used statistical techniques to estimate how the effects of environmental and sociocultural factors on language diversity changed from one location to another. In our study, each location was represented by a 300 km² grid cell, as is visible in all our maps.

We found that the most important variables associated with language diversity varied from one part of North America to another.

For example, on the West Coast, we found that variability in temperature over time is a key driver linked to language diversity. This result provides some support for the idea that in areas with more stable environmental conditions, human social networks can be smaller and more languages may exist. However, in the eastern part of the continent, potential population density tends to be the factor most strongly linked to language diversity.

We also found that in some places, such as the high-language-diversity regions on the West Coast, our model could predict the number of languages present very accurately, whereas in other areas, such as the Gulf Coast of the U.S., we have limited understanding of what drove language diversification.

Maps and further details at the link; thanks, jack!

I was looking up Chalcedon (now a district of Istanbul called Kadıköy, but famous as the site of the Fourth Ecumenical Council) in Wikipedia when my eye fell on the following statement: “The Greek name of the ancient town is from its Phoenician name qart-ħadaʃt, meaning ‘New Town’, whence Karkhēd(ōn),[3] as similarly is the name of Carthage. The mineral chalcedony is named after the city.[4]” I wondered what the Phoenician origin was based on, so I checked the footnotes; the first, the entry for chalcedony from the Online Etymology Dictionary, says:

semi-precious stone, a cloudy white variety of quartz, c. 1300, from Latin calcedonius, a Vulgate rendering of Greek khalkedon in Revelations xxi.19; found nowhere else. “The word is of very complicated history” [OED]. Connection with Chalcedon in Asia Minor “is very doubtful” [OED].

This says nothing about Phoenician origins, though it does directly contradict the next statement that “The mineral chalcedony is named after the city” (cited to Erika Zwierlein-Diehl’s Antike Gemmen und ihr Nachleben). Googling around, I can’t find anything scholarly about the etymology of Chalcedon. Anybody know anything? (For a description of today’s Chalcedon/Kadıköy, see Aidan Kehoe’s comment from an interesting five-year-old thread.)

I finally checked out frequent commenter Fancua’s blog, also called Fancua (“Languages, Linguistics, and Translation”), and it has lots of good stuff. The first post I saw was Why Does the Word “Mosquito” Come from Spanish?, which investigates the history of the word “mosquito”:

Looking up the etymology of the word, I found that “mosquito” was in fact a post-Columbian borrowing from Spanish, with the earliest occurrence of the word in English being from the 1580s (although the website does not specify if the borrowing occurred in the Americas or Europe). But were mosquitoes present in Europe before colonization, and if so, what were they called in English?

Recently, I decided to dig deeper. Mosquitoes apparently did exist in Europe before Columbus, being a thorn in the side of the Byzantines, Ancient Greeks, and Romans. Given that mosquitoes were present in pre-Columbian Britain and that the English word “mosquito” is of post-Columbian origin, the original word for the animal must have been something else. I found a page on the Maryland Department of Agriculture website stating the English word for “mosquito” was originally “gnat”, but it cites no sources. Nevertheless, coming across that page led me to look up “gnat” in the Historical Thesaurus of English, and as a result, I found that the word has indeed been used since Old English times to refer to mosquitoes, though only to certain genera (I assume the genera present in Britain during that period). The first word to be used to refer to the entire Culicidae family was “mosquito” in about 1583.

But the fact that the word “mosquito” is used throughout the English-speaking world rather than only in North America puzzled me. There is nothing unusual in North American anglophones in close contact with Spanish speakers borrowing Spanish equivalents for existing words, but for British English to do so strikes me as odd. Why would British English borrow a term for an animal already existing in Europe from Spanish (presumably Latin American Spanish via North American English) rather than French or Latin, which are geographically and culturally closer and its usual sources of loanwords?

Given that “gnat” originally referred to a specific subset of mosquitoes, I assume that English speakers felt the need to refer to the mosquitoes they encountered in the Americas as “mosquitoes” rather than “gnats” because they were different from European “gnats” in some noticeable way, with this semantic difference thus providing a reason for the adoption of the word in British English. In what way specifically these species might have differed, I don’t know, as I neither am a biologist nor know the historical differences between European and American mosquitoes. If anyone has more information, please let me know.

A good question that hadn’t occurred to me. And if you’re wondering about the word “fancua” itself, here’s what his About page says:

In Oscan, an extinct Italic language closely related to Latin, fancua means “tongues” and is related to the Latin word lingua, meaning “tongue” or “language”.

However, according to Matthew Dillon and ‎Lynda Garland, Ancient Rome (p. 163), “The meaning of fancua is unknown.” Clearly, further research is needed.

Look at the scholar, he has still not gone to bed,
Raking the dictionaries, darting at locked presses,
Hunting for keys. He stacks the books to his oxter,
Walks across the room as stiff as a shelf.

His nightwork, to make the price of his release:
Two words, as opposite as his and hers
Which yet must be as close
As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard
Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note
On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle —
As close as the grain in the polished wood, as the finger
Bitten by the string, as the hairs of the bow
Bent by the repeated note —
             Two words
Closer to the bone than the ones I was so proud of,
Embrace and strict to describe the twining of bone and flesh.

The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.

        –Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin

[Read more…]

Ankhtuya reports on the latest linguistic developments in Mongolia:

Mongolia has announced plans to restore the use of its traditional alphabet by 2025, replacing the Cyrillic script adopted under the Soviet period as it moves away from Russian influence. It will take transitional measures to prepare for the “comprehensive restoration” of the traditional alphabet, which is written in vertical lines, said a representative of the ministry of education, culture, science and sports.

The ministry has ordered the department of information and communication technology to adopt traditional Mongolian to the “electronic environment”. Scientific, literary and state registry offices have been asked to establish a system for Mongolian names. Media are required to publish in both scripts until 2024, and schools must increase learning time to study the traditional vertical script. Cultural centres must study and promote the Mongolian written heritage, according to an official statement.

Mongolia, which is between Russia and China, adopted the Cyrillic alphabet in the 1940s as Moscow sought to control it as a buffer against Beijing. For many years Mongolia was seen as the “16th Soviet republic”. The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed Mongolia has been returning to its linguistic roots. A generation has grown up without learning Russian, and in 2003 it was replaced by English as the mandatory foreign language in schools.

A tip o’ the Languagehat hat to Garrigus Carraig.

I discovered that Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story was published by Eveleigh Nash in 1914, and Pankhurst being the most notorious of suffragettes, I wondered if Eveleigh Nash was a woman. No, it turns out he was a he (and married Mrs. Alice Gibson Smith in 1930), so then I wondered about the unusual name Eveleigh; it was originally a surname, and this site provides the origin:

Recorded in several spelling forms including Everleigh, Eveleigh, Everley, Eversley, and Everly, this is an English locational surname. It originates from either of the villages called Everley, in Wiltshire and Yorkshire, or Eversley parish in Hampshire, or possibly for some nameholders from a now ‘lost’ medieval village believed to have been in the West of England. The name is believed to translate as ‘boars wood’ from the Olde English pre 7th century ‘eofor’ meaning a boar, and ‘leah’, an enclosure in a forest used for agriculture. Like most locational surnames, this is a ‘from’ name. That is to say that the name was given as easy identification to people after they left their original homes and moved elsewhere. It is also a reason why most locational surnames are to be found recorded in several spellings. The first recording of the surname in any form is that of John de Eversele of Kent in the year 1273, whilst recordings from surviving church registers include: Anne Everlaye, on October 1st 1580 at St Olaves church, Hart Street, Marie Everlie at St Brides church, Fleet Street, and John Everlegh on June 10th 1753 at St Lukes, Old Street, all city of London.

Which is well and good, but really all of this is just an excuse to post this 1906 photograph of William Tufnell Le Queux and Eveleigh Nash. What a pair of names! A charming image, too; one wouldn’t have minded having a glass of port and a chat about the literary scene with that pair.

I just opened Randall Jarrell’s The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969) and my eye fell on his introduction, which I don’t remember having read before. I was struck by this passage:

I have read these poems many times to audiences of different sorts, and all the audiences liked listening to them better, and found them easier, if I said beforehand something about what a ball turret was, or a B-24, or Tatyana Larina — and said it in “plain American that cats and dogs can read.” Not that my poems aren’t in plain American, but there it’s verse, not prose. Prose helps; it helps just by being prose. In the old days, when readers could take or leave prose, poets sometimes gave them a good deal of it: there are hundreds of pages of notes and prefaces and reminiscences in Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s Collected Poems. But nowadays, unless you’re reading Marianne Moore or Empson or The Waste Land, you rarely get any prose to go along with the poems.

The war — the Second World War — has been over for a long time; there are names and events people knew they would never forget which, by now, they have forgotten they ever knew. Some of these poems depend upon, or are helped by, the reader’s remembering such names and events; other poems are helped by the reader’s being reminded of some particular story or happening or expression — something you remember if you have lived in the South, or been in the Air Force, or gone to Der Rosenkavalier, or memorized some verse of the Bible. I’ve put into this introduction some prose sentences about a few of these things. But they are here for the reader only if he wants them — if you like poems without prose, or see after a few sentences that I am telling you very familiar things, just turn past this introduction.

That’s both a helpful attitude and an odd thing for a poet to say; since the days of Wordsworth and Tennyson, poets have generally felt that their poems should speak for themselves (and it’s generally thought that Eliot’s ostentatious notes for The Waste Land were not a good idea). And some of Jarrell’s really are very familiar things: “A blind date is an unknown someone you accompany to something: if he promises to come for you and doesn’t, he has stood you up,” forsooth. Mind you, there’s a lot of useful information there, things you wouldn’t have known: “In ‘A Pilot From The Carrier,’ genius is another form of the word jinnee.” But I have to say, it does nothing to dissuade me from the sense that Jarrell’s gift was for prose (he was a fine critic); when I flip through the poems, none of them speak to me very distinctly and there are few lines that make me want to say them out loud or that sink into my memory. The exception, of course, is “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” of which that Wikipedia article says “Jarrell came to fear that his reputation would come to rest on it alone.” I fear his fear was not unjustified.

Another thing that struck me: when he wrote “The war […] has been over for a long time,” it had only been ten years!

From Gian Biagio Conte, Ope Ingenii: Experiences of Textual Criticism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013):

The mishap that befell Abbot Martin, according to a burlesque French tradition of the XV century, is well known: this devout figure had thought of embellishing the entry to his monastery with a sign saying:

Porta patens esto. Nulli claudatur honesto

Let the door remain wide open. Let it not be closed to any honest man.

But the stonemason who was given the task of engraving this inscription got the punctuation wrong:

Porta patens esto nulli. Claudatur honesto

Let not the door be opened to anybody. Let it be closed to the honest man.

What should have been a warm welcome, inspired by Christian charity, was turned into a curt message of rejection. The end of the story relates that, as a punishment for this, Martin was deprived of his ecclesiastical rank.

[…]

It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of punctuation for the textual critic. Editors do not always devote the necessary attention to this aspect of their work; often, indeed, in their effort to choose the authentic reading among those transmitted, and to correct verbal corruptions or crypto-corruptions, they end up by accepting texts which require a more careful distinctio. This kind of intervention, too, can produce quite remarkable results for the restoration of a corrupt text. The rule will always be one, and one alone: try to translate the text you are reading literally; it is only in this way that, as you try to find a precise equivalent for the single words, you discover all the obstacles that a reading of the text as a whole overcomes and simplifies.

Via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti. (Note that, whatever the punctuation, the Latin line is a hexameter.)

Jim Holt’s NYRB review (July 19, 2018 [archived]) of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, translated by Pamela Mensch, starts off in Holt’s usual lively fashion:

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen supposedly said. Well, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers showed up. And by dint of that, its author has become what Nietzsche called “the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.”

What made this fellow so lucky? It’s not hard to explain why certain works survive. We still have Plato’s dialogues because they were diligently preserved by the Academy. Aristotle too founded a school, and his treatises were widely copied and studied. (Still, the nineteen or so dialogues Aristotle composed—esteemed for their literary quality by Cicero as “a river of flowing gold”—were somehow mislaid by Western civilization.) But Diogenes Laertius didn’t have a school, as far as anyone knows. In fact, almost nothing is known about the man. Even his slightly absurd Greco-Roman name is a puzzle—was “Laertius” some kind of nickname? Judging from the historical references in Lives (which stop just short of the Neoplatonists), he probably lived early in the third century CE. There is a hint in his text that he might have been a native of the eastern city of Nicea. Beyond that he is a cipher. That his work should endure, when the vast majority of the philosophical writings he drew on perished, may simply have been a “quirk of fate”—so guesses James Miller, the editor of this welcome new translation.

I don’t remember noticing the Greco-Roman nature of his name before. [That’s because it’s not Greco-Roman; Λαέρτιος is perfectly good Greek. See comments below.] And here’s a great passage from later in the review:

An especially complete portrait is given of Diogenes of Sinope, the most prominent of the Cynics. And this is not the only Diogenes in play. There is also an entry for the less famous Diogenes of Apollonia, whom Diogenes Laertius, in an embarrassment of Diogeneses, manages to confuse with Diogenes of Smyrna. (It should be noted that Diogenes Laertius lived five or six centuries later than the multiple Diogeneses he writes about.)

Shades of Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich…