Frequent commenter Y sent me Robert H. Lowie’s linguistic memoir “A Case of Bilingualism” (Word 1.3 [1945]: 249-259) saying “This is a fun paper, from a famous figure in American anthropology. I think you’ll like it”; I do indeed, and I think you will too. Here are some choice bits:
I was born in Vienna in 1883. My father was a Hungarian from the vicinity of Stuhlweissenburg, south-west of Budapest. In that section of the country German had remained dominant, so that he learnt Magyar as a foreign tongue. My mother was Viennese, and, accordingly, High German was the language of our household. My father’s was a generalized South German form, my mother’s richly flavored with the racy vernacular locutions which even educated Austrians affect. Typical are such words as Bissgurn ( “termagant”), dalket (“awkward, gauche”), hopatatschet (“supercilious”). She was capable of expressive original creations, such as verhallipanzt (“entangled, confused”), which appears in no Idiotikon Vindobonense I have been able to consult. Again, like many educated Austrians, she was somewhat easy-going on certain points of grammar, substituting the dative for the genitive with während and wegen. On the other hand, her father, a physician, austerely criticised such derelictions when I indulged in them. It was he, too, who urged his daughter to keep up her children’s German in America since we were likely enough to learn English there.
When we left Vienna to join my father in New York, where he had preceded us by three years, I was ten and had just passed the entrance-examination for a Gymnasium, my sister being two and a half years younger. We immediately entered public schools and rapidly acquired fluency in English. My mother, obeying her father’s injunction, maintained German as the sole medium of communication between parents and children, though my sister and I soon came to speak to each other more frequently in English. The family intimates were all Austrians and Germans, and though our morning newspaper was English, in the evening and on Sunday we regularly bought the Staatszeitung. The Sunday edition of that paper had a puzzle-column, over which we pored for hours, winning several prizes in the form of German books. We occasionally went to the two German theatres and in later years visited German societies. We read the classics and the serial modern novels that appeared in our Sunday Staatszeitung.
Nevertheless, our German could not possibly develop as it would have in Austria. The range of topics discussed with our parents and their friends did not coincide with that thrust upon us in the classroom and in association with age-mates. It was not as a matter of course, but through later deliberate effort, that I learnt gleichschenkliges Dreieck, Herrentiere, and Beschleunigung as the equivalents, respectively, of “isosceles triangle,” “primates,” and “acceleration.” Similarly, dealings with storekeepers were largely in English. Important, too, was the fact that there were, of course, no compulsory school-compositions to be scrutinized by the Argus-eyes of a German pedagogue. […]
In point of vocabulary my German, as explained, lagged behind my English in various respects, yet it remained ahead of it in the domain of domestic utensils and the like. “Skilled [sic –LH],” “rolling-pin,” and “saucepan” still click less immediately in my consciousness than Bratpfanne, Nudelwalker, and Reindl (Austrian).
Facility in German composition, of course, implies much more than lexical knowledge; it means, among other things, a control of stereotyped phrases, such as Beziehungen pflegen, Possen reissen, Nachruf auf … This is one respect in which the emigrant is handicapped; he knows them, but they are not always at his beck and call; hence, at a pinch, he falls back on a correct enough, but vaguer, colorless expression which a stay-at-home of equal cultivation would spurn.
Grammar presented difficulties of its own. The Austrian vernacular, for example, tabus the imperfect, which it supplants with the perfect. Hence the correct forms of the preterite were matters to be learnt from reading, not through conversational osmosis. Then there are some regional differences as to gender: no Viennese spontaneously says der Schinken, but die Schinke. Again, perfectly familiar nouns are not likely to be declined often in the ordinary household routine, hence doubts arise concerning weak and strong forms, and den Hirschen may usurp the part of den Hirsch. Thus, eternal vigilance is the cost of maintaining tolerably good German in a foreign country. We achieved the satisfaction of having our German pronounced much better than that of other children among our acquaintances. […]
A still more serious, because subtler, peril than the intrusion of English words lies in the spontaneous, unsuspected transfer of English idioms and the misuse of German words because of English models. I once used nur instead of erst for “only,” and on another occasion spoke of having vermisst (instead of verpasst) a train. Similarly, an Austrian lady wrote about her Rente when she meant Mietzins, and nothing seems more natural than to aufrufen someone on the telephone when usage demands anrufen. Lapses of this order always left me with a sense of shame, even when I myself discovered and corrected them. […]
By the time I graduated from public school my spoken English was superficially not perceptibly different from that of any thirteen-year-old New York boy. Closer inquiry would have established then, as now, the deficiencies already in part alluded to: only a New England wife made me realize the true essence of a “saucepan”; I never encountered the phrase “milling around” until I was on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History; and within the past year I spoke of somebody’s being “the split image” (instead of “the spit and image”) of someone else. When colleagues credit me with an exceptionally wide vocabulary, I therefore feel bound to qualify the comment. I know many long and unusual words, but I am ignorant of common locutions and not sufficiently conversant with everyday words. In lectures and academic discussions I am fluent enough, but in recounting a simple occurrence of daily life I am likely to grope and fumble for the mot juste – say, “running-board” or “dustpan.” I constantly marvel at the racy oral English of monoglot New England narrators of moderate education and feel that their achievement is utterly beyond my reach. Incidentally, interlocutors have often chided me for a certain pomposity in speech. In my opinion, this is largely due to my not having the appropriate colloquialism at the tip of my tongue, so that I am driven to seek refuge in a colorless blanket or bookish term.
In apparent conflict with my admiration for the homely authenticity of English speech as spoken by some Englishmen and Americans stands my linguistic authoritarianism. Intellectually I recognize, of course, that “standard” forms are factitious; emotionally I resent deviations. I automatically rank British above American usage and at times wonder at neologisms such as some scholars freely indulge in – say, Kroeber’s “formulable,” “authenticable.” I am shocked by Sapir’s defence of accusative “who” and outraged by his repeated use of “nuanced” as though there were a verb “to nuance.” Incidentally, a one-time disciple of his calmly speaks of “sciencing.”
Probably because of my bilingualism I do not relish even wholly legitimate latitudinarianism, such as Jespersen prizes as a signal virtue of English. I wish “people” and “committee” were always used with either singular or plural verbs; that a horse were not alternately “it” and “he”; that one could not refer to mankind as “they (Oxford Dictionary) or “it” (common usage) or “he” (Elliot Smith, Rivers).
It’s hard for me to stop quoting, but if you like what you’ve read, you know where to go for more. (It goes without saying that I bristled reflexively at his “linguistic authoritarianism,” but I understand the psychology behind it.) Thanks, Y!
I was a little alarmed to see Lowie say (p. 258, fn. 6), “It is no surprise to me that ‘bilingualism has an adverse effect on achievement in intelligence tests,’” quoting a paper by Otto Klineberg titled “Mental Testing of Racial and National Groups”, within a collection titled Scientific Aspects of the Race Problem (ed. Herbert S. Jennings, here). However, Lowie (and Boas’s students in general), along with Klineberg and Jennings, were dedicated anti-eugenicists, but worked at a time when eugenics and biological racism were still to be debated and disproved, rather than forgotten. That said, intelligence tests were considered cutting-edge science. I’d say that the effects that Klineberg unconvincingly argued for show the flaws of intelligence tests, not that bilingualism is a handicap. It feels like Lowie was swayed by that fashion, though his personal experience contradicts it.
Through reading about Lowie, I learned of a frankly scary guy, Madison Grant, a devoted and influential biological racist (and a very significant conservationist; the two are not unrelated.) In this biography of Grant I see that he called Lowie “a very dangerous anthropological Bolshevist.” I shouldn’t laugh, really I shouldn’t.
Lowie’s “linguistic authoritarianism” passage sounds perfectly reasonable to me. He is observing, as in the rest of the article, and the subject of observation is himself. It’s a perfectly fine descriptive statement to say that, say, 62% of English speakers hate the word moist, or that one personally hates it, while making it clear, as Lowie does, that the word is not objectively “wrong”.
Yes, he’s just describing his own prejudices, while being perfectly clear that they lack any objective basis. He has insight.
I liked his “shock” at Sapir’s defence of accusative “who.”
His point that knowing a language, even a L1, is not an all-or-nothing matter, rings very true. One’s knowledge tends to be domain-oriented. I daresay you could in principle do a medical degree entirely via Welsh … as a sort of bravura proof-of-concept thing. But …
(I gather that you can choose to be interviewed in Welsh when you apply to Cardiff Medical school. I heard from the parent of a child who did just that, who described how said child, a L1 speaker, was thrown off her stroke during the interview by the fact that she had either forgotten, or just never knew, some relevant but comparatively non-technical term in Welsh. Got in anyway …)
This is practically institutionalised in the stable multilingualism I encounted among my colleagues in Ghana. The question of how you say “brake fluid” in Kusaal really doesn’t arise: if you’re discussing car maintenance, you do it in English or Hausa. On the other hand, it would be weird to speak English or Hausa with your family, and there are more L1 Kusaal speakers now than ever before. The exclusion of the language from the domain of motor mechanics seems not to have impaired its vitality one bit.
The anonymous student of Sapir’s would be Leslie A. White. His paper, “Science is Sciencing”, starts,
I feel Lowie’s pain.
as though there were a verb “to nuance.”
Once upon a time I used to read history of science journals, for personal edification as well as professional reasons. I have a vague recollection of the abstract of one paper that said something like “we offer a new reading of Hooke’s laboratory journals*, nuanced by recent reanalysis of the rising public interest in botany in his lifetime**.”
Such desperate attempts to find something new to say squelched whatever modest interest I might have had in becoming an academic historian of science.
*or something of the sort, I really can’t remember
**ditto
madison grant
as well as having his quite extensive sphere of ideological influence, he has a certain lasting literary legacy. he’s understood to be a component (along with his friend lothrop stoddard) of the “goddard” who’s mentioned in The Great Gatsby as author of the white nationalist book tom buchanan is a fan of.
…The only explanation I can find for this claim is rather scary: the stereotypical German tourist’s attempt to discover ham (der Schinken) in a pancake* (die Palatschinke, -e replaced in dialect by the same syllabic [ŋ] Schinken has).
* About halfway between a proper American pancake and a proper crêpe or galette.
Skillet. 🙂
(But the two dialect words presented as ending in -et end, I bet – I don’t actually know them, FWTW –, in -[ɐd̥].)
That’s the word for “pension”, “Social Security check”, “retirement” in Germany. (In Austria that’s Pension.)
In the temporal sense: “it’s only Monday!”
For “committee” I get where he’s coming from; but “people” fulfills the roles of two different German words, Volk sg. and Leute pl.* – is this specifically about cases that look like the former but take plural agreement anyway, like “The American people have spoken, but it’s going to take some time to determine just what they’ve said”?
* Or Menschen pl. in places like Berlin.
The most dread confusion of “it’s an activity” with “it’s a verb”.
A most impressive name.
Skillet.
Fixed, thanks. The copy-and-paste from the pdf was full of OCR errors, and obviously I didn’t catch them all.
“Skilled” wasn’t an OCR error, that’s what it is in the original. Probably just a typo, but since he says the English word was less familiar to him than the German one, maybe he really didn’t know how to spell it?
There is some internet speculation about whether the historical Lothrop Stoddard influenced the name of Thos. Pynchon’s supposedly fictional character Tyrone Slothrop. Although it’s also claimed that TS’s monicker is an anagram for “entropy or sloth.” (Madison Grant makes for a more complicated villain than LS because he also did all sorts of nice progressive-sounding environmentalist things like run the New York Zoo for decades and found the Save the Redwoods League.)
D and T aren’t close enough on the keyboard for that, nor typed with the same finger on different hands, nor anything else I can come up with. I’ve never seen D/T typos.
Even so I’d be surprised if he couldn’t hear the difference (between -d and -t, never mind that the e in skilled is silent).
OK, since it’s in the original I’ve restored it but added a [sic].
Despite my sympathy with many peeves, I’ve never understood the one Lowie applies to “nuanced”. It has a long history, though.
—Samuel Johnson, Life of Gray
There has of late arisen a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the termination of participles;
Which is, historically speaking, backwards – using -to to form adjectives meaning “having X”, like in bearded, Latin barbatus, Russian borodatyj, goes back to PIE and is rather the origin of the use of this ending in participles in those IE languages that use it as a participle.
(Very strictly speaking, the suffix in the case of the “bearded” words is an extended *-eH2-to-, but it goes back to the use of -*-to- forming adjectives, and the parallel formation of “bearded” in those three language families was to good to pass up.)
Well, now I know that “spit and image” is the prescriptive form for what I’ve always known as “spitting image”.
There’s a kind of typo made more with your mind than your fingers – I do it quite often, although I can’t think of an example now (of course). It’s as if I’m silently dictating to myself and write down a representation of the sound I would have made, rather than the letter used in the standard spelling.
Homophone mistakes are the same kind of thing, maybe?
(Of course, there’s also the kind where I aim to write ‘universe’ and end up with ‘university’ because I write it so much more often – the ‘skilled’ one could well be that rather than mixing up representations of ‘d’ and ‘t’ sounds.)
Well, now I know that “spit and image” is the prescriptive form for what I’ve always known as “spitting image”.
Ditto.
Background: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spitting-image.html
Oh. Yes. That. Remembering common movements and repeating them instead of typing something similar. I do that a lot.
I always wrote върховно, until I realized it should be връховно (by middle Bulgarian correspondences), but then I realized, in my late teens, that it had been regularized as върховно by the mid-19th century in modern Bulgarian.
Thank you, Hans. I knew nothing about that PIE connection.
“Herrentiere” meaning primates (humans and other apes): interesting parallel with “Herrenvolk”. Was this only an Austrian usage? Is it still current?
The relevant German wiki-entry begins “Die Primaten (Primates) oder Herrentiere sind …” as if it’s an established synonym not noted as archaic or “problematic.” https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primaten
It’s horribly archaic; hasn’t been in actual use since, well, probably since Herrenvolk hasn’t, assuming it ever was, which I doubt. But it’s still routinely listed as if it were a colloquial equivalent.
Similar German “equivalents” to taxonomic names exist all across the tree of life; most of them are never used and known to very few people, but they still appear in listings like this.
@dm
“Im Frühjahr 1898 erhielt Haeckel die Einladung, auf dem 4. internationalen Zoologenkongress in Cambridge einen Vortrag zu halten. Er sollte dort eine der großen allgemeinen Fragen, wenn nicht gar die „Frage aller Fragen“ (T. H. Huxley) thematisieren. Der Inhalt des Vortrages stellte eine Kompilation seiner Ansichten zur biologischen Anthropologie,
Entwicklungsgeschichte und Zoologie dar (Haeckel 1898).
In späteren Schriften wie Der Kampf um den Entwickelungsgedanken (1905), Das Menschen-Problem und die Herrentiere von Linné (1907) schloss Haeckel dann an seine Ausführungen aus den Jahren 1866 bis 1895 unmittelbar ohne nennenswerte Ergänzungen an.”
From:
Jena, Haeckel und die Frage nach den Menschenrassen oder der Rassismus macht Rassen
Martin S. Fischer, Uwe Hoßfeld, Johannes Krause und Stefan Richter
in ZOOLOGIE 2020, Mitteilungen d.Dtsch.Zool.Ges., pp.7-33
https://www.dzg-ev.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/zoologie2020.pdf
My guess is that Haeckel used the word as a “calque” from Linnaeus’ “primates”. You could ask one of the authors (emails at link).
It was already archaic in the 1970s. The kind of synonym that was always given for the people who, as a matter of principle, didn’t like loanwords (“Fremdwörter”). I have never heard or read anyone actually use this term. Perhaps there were 19th century biologists who used it, but I have my doubts — that was a time when scholars were in love with Latin and Greek terms.
The kind of synonym that was always given for the people who, as a matter of principle, didn’t like loanwords (“Fremdwörter”).
Ah, that makes sense — I was wondering why they kept providing synonyms that nobody used.
I think of Icelandic as unusually hostile to whatever it is that they call Fremdwörter. And indeed their relevant wiki article begins by describing the group-of-critters in question as (using that same Gmc morpheme!) “Fremdardýr eða prímatar.” But that lacks the “master” vibe that might be offputting. But see the wiki article in Nynorsk, which begins “Primatar, eller ‘herredyr.'”,
I’ve never met herredyr in any other context than as a parenthetical alternative in a definition: primater, eller herredyr, …
The Icelandic calque of primatus has managed to catch the “precedence, primacy” sense while avoiding the “master” vibe. Not that that works very well in a less human-centric interpretation of evolution either.
Primas. Hence -tes rather than -ti.
I’m sure Linnaeus named them that (and put them first in his book) because he included himself.
…and such people were already suspicious in the 70s, but 1907 is more likely as a time of actual usage.
FWIW, I don’t recall hearing or reading herredyr in Danish, parenthetical or not. I could check Dr. Lieberkind when I get home (a zoological work in 10 volumes that was sold on subscription WIWAL. I was deeply fascinated and read all the fascicles as they arrived, before my parents sent them off for binding, but it hardly counts as science any more — I remember it had extensive quotes from colonial master hunters instead, though I skipped those. Even at 10, stuff with guns didn’t interest me. It still resides in my mother’s bookcase, unread for forty or so years, though we’ve discussed getting rid of it. The plates are pretty, though, and I suppose the taxonomical information would give DM a few giggles, not least in its conviction to be the ever lasting truth. I wonder where he put dogs and whales. Or fungi, I think I was larnt in school that they were a sort of animals).
(Herredyr‘s not even in the semi-historical ODS, so the Norwegians really only have themselves to blame this time. I’m not going to bother with LIeberkind, then. Though whales…).
Fungi were still firmly plants WIWAL, and so were bacteria. Cell wall, you see. That was half a century out of date, but so were the teacher and the authors of the pretty recent textbook.
Cell wall, you see
Or was that an after-the-fact rationalization for an earlier folk classification, because mushrooms have stalks and are eaten like vegetables?
The ones I had most recently (I think) were actually breaded & fried like Schnitzel… but I’m pretty sure Linnaeus classified mushrooms as plants and all the bacteria he knew as Volvox chaos, where the real Volvox is a bunch of green algae, so an after-the-fact rationalization actually seems quite likely.
Lieberkind has the whales in cohort Mutica, one of four under infraclass Eutheria. He quotes Linnaeus for Sw herredjur, but doesn’t otherwise use the term.
Fungi: I was more thinking of yeast and similar, they behave more like amoeba and other non-chordate animals. Lieberkind only does Chordata (in 7 volumes, he must have gotten tired), but my 1899 encyclopedia has
(Cølenteraternes Række, but I don’t know what taxonomical level that would be).
That appears to be about sponges, still called Porifera, not about what we call fungi. Coelenterata (“having blind guts”, that is, having dead-end digestive systems; wastes come out where food goes in) covered what are now called Cnidaria (jellyfish etc.) and Ctenophora (comb jellies), considered separate phyla (though it seems to me that in the zoology-for-children book or books I read as a child, the coelenterates were just the Cnidaria).
@Y: I think the classification of mushrooms as plants was originally due to their lack of perception of and reaction to stimuli, as far as anybody knew. I’m guessing based on Aristotle’s vegetable, animal, and rational souls.
Porifera (I didn’t even know about the long vowel) are indeed the sponges. Never seen them called Fungi (though the confusion makes sense in various Germanic languages and beyond), and didn’t know the name Mutica at all.
Yeast doesn’t behave. It just lies there. No movement, no pseudopodia.
I didn’t even know about the long vowel
What long vowel?
“Porīfera” with ī in Lars’s comment.
I missed that. But is it right? It’s not a Latin word but a modern “Translingual” one (Wiktionary), and I don’t see any reason why the infixed -i- should be long.
Well, Fungi was my assumption for Da svampe. And as DM says, they get confused with Porīfera in Germanic. (Both are svamp in Danish). So now I looked up Gær in that encyclopedia, and it says that yeast is overordentlig små (1/100 mm.) encellede Svampe; no attempt to make a distinction from Porīfera that I can see, so any reader must assume that yeast is a species under Coelentera.
(The typography is very meticulous, cf. the ī and metric units always in roman cursive with a period. [Running text is in Fraktur, but of course Linnean names aren’t]. No Herredyr there either).
Yeah, but why the ī? I mean, agricola, armiger, cornicen, and carnifex have short -i-; why should this be different?
2nd declension singular genitive, from porus?
So now I looked up Gær in that encyclopedia, and it says that yeast is overordentlig små (1/100 mm.) encellede Svampe; no attempt to make a distinction from Porīfera that I can see, so any reader must assume that yeast is a species under Coelentera.
Hm. that’s weird. The 1911 Britannica knew that sponges were animals, not fungi. As the article on sponges says, “Owing, however, to the permanently fixed character, irregular growth and feeble power of movement in the adult organism, it was not until the advent of microscopical research that it was definitely proved that the sponges are animals and not plants.”
For anyone interested, Lieberkind’s Dyrenes verden is now available in Kindle and undoubtedly other formats.
2nd declension singular genitive, from porus?
But is that how it works? I thought it was just the standard linking vowel. In fact, aurifex has a short -i- even though the genitive of aurum is aurī.
I suspect Lars’s 1899 encyclopedia is using the macron simply to mark where the stress should go. (I’m not a Latinist, but dammit, I know what’s right and proper.)
Why quote aurifex? There’s also aurifer (with a short i, of course).
@Y: Yes, but the first member of compounds in -fer is usually a stem (with a linking vowel -ĭ- originally arising from word-internal open-syllable weakening of any short vowel, at least in principle), not a genitive singular or any other inflected case-form.
I wonder if that is some odd way of indicating that the i should be stressed given that the penultimate is short, but this is just a wild guess.
If Roberto Batisti agrees with me (on both counts), I know I’m right.
@JF, lots probably happened between 1899 and 1911. (And if the 1899 version of the world was what my grandparents had as ready knowledge, I’d not be surprised. That fungi used to be thought of as part of the Animal Kingdom is just one of those things I’ve “always” known, even though I’ve revised my own picture since).
Lieberkind is seriously outdated, so only get it for the pictures.
@RB, it’s definitely a macron on the i, I just copied what I saw, but whether it meant ‘long’ in 1899 is hard to tell. It doesn’t match what I know about Latin, but that’s not much.
Are there any other peculiar macrons in Lieberkind?
Ah, that would make sense.
But are not fungi ET’s? They do look so! Ask an artist to draw a picture of an ET. Tell her this ET shouldn’t be a humanoid, tell her make it truly strange.
Look at the picture. Look at a mushroom. And tell which of two looks truly strange and which must be a fruit of imagination of an Earthling who have never seen an actual ET.
@Lars: I think Lieberkind was already behind the times. This popular article from 1865 traces some history of the debate about where sponges belonged—for a while they were “zoophytes” or “Tierpflanze” along with the Cnidaria and Ctenophora, but the author is in no doubt that they’re animals—and in looking through some of the bibliography at the beginning of this monograph from 1889, I don’t see anything after 1870 or so that classifies them as plants.
@DM, I think I already metioned бетон [bʲɪˈton] for бидон [bʲɪˈdon] “can, churn*” (a German communist lady who married a Caucasian Jew*** and moved to USSR in Hitler times) and ебископ for епископ “Bishop” (her grandson – it was me who told him – then 18 y.o. – that he mispronounces the word with so wonderful obscenity**).
I’m inclined to think that insensitivity to voicedness is a thing for German speakers. (Maybe not ALL German speakers)
(besides, in Russian jokes about Germans they devoice everything)
*spekaing of utensils
** еби “fuck”. Such pronounciation seemed impossible for L1-Russian speaker.
First we don’t confuse p and b. Second I’d expect such a speaker to pay more attention to such an obscene form and notice that she mispronounces it.
*** possibly a Mountain Jew, but my friend is not sure.
@Y note that in your quote he [like you!] connects bilingualism and performance in tests, not bilingualism and intelligence.
The main difference between “voiceless” and “voiced” stops in modern standard German (as spoken in Germany – Austria is weird) is that voiceless stops are aspirated. But al least before vowels, they are differentiated.
I have already quoted somewhere that Goethe complained to Eckermann about actors who trouble differentiating between voiced and voiceless stops, resulting in unintentionally comical mispronunciations. But in general, Goethe found the pronunciation of actors from Northern Germany without fault. Via Siebs’ Bühnenaussprache* (obsolete since the end of WWII) that became the basis of the modern standard pronunciation in Germany, which has spread a lot in the 20th century, especially after the war (Adenauer’s Cologne accent was fully accepted, a generation later people would make fun of Kohl’s mispronunciation of Geschichte.
*…which is different from modern Standard German, prescribing, for example, an apical r instead of the common uvular sound (apparently also used by Siebs when he wasn’t demonstrating his Bühnenaussprache). I have also read somewhere that Siebs wanted actors to differentiate between voiced and voiceless stops even at the end of words.
I was told (by DM, I think) that in German singing you put in aspiration on everything that looks like an unvoiced stop. (I don’t remember if that includes auslautverschärften voiced ones, but why not? It sounds impressive).
FWIW, Danish neutralizes “voicing” of stops in Auslaut (and after /s/) by dropping the aspiration.
My impression (not checked recently) is that in French writing about the war they do the opposite.
But are not fungi ET’s?
Ленин — гриб.
I love ебископ. (Abba Eban!)
Are there any other peculiar macrons in Lieberkind?
The macron was in my old encyclopaedia. (Allers Konversationslexikon, I think, with a caution for the spelling of leksikon as it is now, with a year of 1899 on one of the volumes, either the E-H one with Gær or the seventh one with Svamp, or both. But it’s not like scholarly works where there can be decades between volumes, so 1899 is not far off for either). Lieberkind is a 60’s thing and only covers some of Chordata (Mammals, Birds, Fish). (But no, I didn’t check either for strange macrons).
I think it works like this, from north to south:
– An area where voice and aspiration work pretty much like in most Englishes: fortes are noticeably aspirated, especially when they precede stressed vowels, unless they follow fricative (in which case they may become lenes altogether); lenes are unreliably voiced. The differences to English are syllable-final fortition and the fact that most plosives are released, even prepausally.
– The aspiration-free belt. In Berlin, there’s little to no aspiration of fortes, while the lenes are more reliably voiced, 100% so when they precede liquids or follow nasals and are in the syllable onset. In Cologne, as in neighboring Dutch, there is no aspiration, and /k/ approaches lenis territory.
– Another small northern-like area in the west.
– The large area where the dia- and mesolects have binnendeutsche Konsonantenschwächung, Interior German Consonant Weakening. This is what Goethe was complaining about: the total loss of the fortis/lenis distinction into a single series that lacks both voice and aspiration. The details differ across the large area, but one Upper Saxon feature is often carried over into Standard German: when followed by /l r n/, the outcome of the merger is fortes, so you suddenly get a full-blown [t] in drei for example. Other than this, people from this area strive for a more northern sound system when they speak Standard German. (Success varies.)
– Southeast of that area is Bavaria, which differs in retaining consonant length, lacking final fortition, and exempting /k/- and -/kː/(-) from the merger with /g/. These features are carried over into Standard German, along with various attempts to create a separate /t/ and presumably /p/ as well.
– In Switzerland and surroundings, there is no voice or aspiration either, but all fortes have become long lenes. Even postpausal word-initial ones; the only exceptions are in certain clusters. Many people carry this system over into Standard German, though some adopt an outright northern system.
– In Austria, lack of voice, aspiration and final fortition is standard. Instead, the final lenition of /t/ that most dialects have is carried over; other than that, the fortis-lenis distinction is realized as just that phonetically. Consonant length is maintained.
Stage pronunciation deliberately exaggerates everything: all fortes are aspirated, even finally; all lenes are voiced unless next preceded by a voiceless consonant. It is fully rhotic, too. It completely lacks syllabic consonants, and ei au eu end in closed vowels: [ae̯ ao̯ oø̯]. [ʀ] has been allowed for quite some time now, but [ʁ] still isn’t.
“institutionalised in the stable multilingualism”
@DE, what’s the characteristic time of language shift? Centuries? “Sometimes decades”?
If so, then HOW you can know multilingualism is “stable”?
And are there examples of stable builinguailism, I mean bilingualism that over centuries hasn’t turned into shift? I know some of elitist bilingualism.
“there are more L1 Kusaal speakers”
Can it be the combined effect of 1. [slow] language shift 2. [fast] demographic transition?
This of Belarusian 100 years ago.
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I think most of us here value linguistic diversity, which does make examples of how, where and when people do NOT shift informative, but at the same time I feel unease when something is said to be “stable” without real sceintific basis.
Going back to Lowie’s outrage over nuanced, “as though there were a verb ‘to nuance’ ”, my first thought was that somebody should have asked him if he was also outraged by red-haired, as though there were a verb “to red-hair”? (Sounds like Samuel Johnson would have said yes! And later in Lowie’s article he talks about what a huge fan of Johnson he was as a teenager.)
However, on looking it up, I learned that the verb nuance does exist — that is, it exists now. The OED’s original entry in 1907 included only the noun (marked as a foreignism, and most of the citations were in italics); the verb, adjective nuanced, and noun nuancing were added later. They derive the adjective from the verb, probably because the verb is attested slightly earlier, but still it seems to me that the verb is much rarer than the noun, so a derivation from the noun as in red-haired feels more relevant. (There are other words where they allow both derivations, e.g. stilted from both the noun stilt and the verb.)
Sapir seems to have been fond of the word (maybe that’s what really bothered Lowie?): he has a lot of nuance(s) (noun) in the book as well as nuanced, unnuanced, well-nuanced, and nuancing.
Oh, about final fortition in northern & central German, I should have mentioned there’s been a series of papers that found it’s partial in a really unexpected way: hearers can tell whether speakers intended fortes or lenes about 2/3 of the time – neither 1/2 as expected for a total merger that reduces hearers to random guessing, nor approaching 1 as expected for a maintained phonemic distinction. This has also been found for a bunch of other languages including Russian and casually destroys a whole bundle of theories of phonology.
How this varies geographically within Germany, however, seems not to have been researched, and almost all of the papers didn’t even say where in Germany their test subjects were from.
The final lenition of /t/ I mentioned is postvocalic* word-final (the dialects also have intervocalic lenition, but that is strictly kept out of the standard), not syllable-final, and it is a total merger: one of the papers mentioned above used example sentences like “I said Rad[**], not Rat[***]”, and for me this is plainly absurd, because they’re complete homophones that both end in /d/.
* Also after L, because that’s vocalized in the Central Bavarian dialects, but not after R, because non-rhoticity is much younger. Welt has the same /d/ as Geld, so they rhyme, but Art has a /t/. Well, arguably a /tː/, but those two don’t contrast in this position anyway.
** ‘wheel’; also short for Fahrrad ‘bicycle’
*** ‘counsel’; ‘council’; ‘member of a council’
Can it be the combined effect of 1. [slow] language shift 2. [fast] demographic transition?
Yes, just so. There are a lot more Kusaasi than there were a generation ago, and virtually all Kusaasi normally speak Kusaal among themselves, no matter whether they can also speak Hausa or Twi or Mooré or English or French (or all of the above; though it’s generally either English or French but not both.) And Ghanaian Bisa, of whom there are also a good many, often speak Kusaal as well as Bisa. (Not least because nobody else ever seems to learn Bisa; in Burkina, quite a few Bisa apparently now only speak Mooré, so it’s not like language endangerment is unknown in those parts.)
I was actually quite surprised by the apparent unendangeredness of Kusaal when I first lived in the area, though I have since learnt a lot more about the complexity of the issues regarding language endangerment in Africa, where generalisation is usually unwise and analogies with modern Europe are often misleading. I remember talking about it with Tony Naden, who suggested that the Kusaasi might eventually give up Kusaal for Mampruli; but I think the chance of that is pretty much zero.
Antedating note: nuanced and nuancing were used much earlier than the OED could demonstrate when they did the revision in 2003. Google Books can now find examples in the first half of the 19th century, although they remained very rare until the later 20th century.
Also, pronunciation note: nuance is one of the rare cases where the OED2 revised a pronunciation. In 1907 they gave only the non-naturalized pronunciation /nɥɑ̃s/, with one syllable as in French; the OED2 added the anglicized pronunciation with two syllables; and now, of course, the anglicized pronunciation is the only one. The current entry also has a survey of dictionaries from the early 20th century, showing that the anglicized pronunciation was taking hold by the 1930s.
“I said Rad[**], not Rat[***]”, and for me this is plainly absurd, because they’re complete homophones that both end in /d/.
Is that distinction what we’d call a ‘spelling pronunciation’? Where because sometimes spelling -d is pronounced different to -t, you’re clarifying by in effect spelling the words. I said w-rite, not right, not ri-tə.
[***] as in Rathaus — which is where any tourist heads for on arrival in a city, quite possibly pausing only to hire a Fahrrad.
where any tourist heads for on arrival in a city
In the Good Old Days, when you arrived in a French city, you went to the Syndicat d’Initiative. Except, of course, that you didn’t, because only French speakers had any idea what the hell it was.
It was a dark day for the langue et civilisation françaises when the name was changed merely because foreigners did not understand it. A craven abandonment of the mission civilisatrice, I calls it.
“I said Rad[**], not Rat[***]”, and for me this is plainly absurd, because they’re complete homophones that both end in /d/.
Is that distinction what we’d call a ‘spelling pronunciation’
I would think so. If I would say that, there would be a tiny shadow of a schwa after the /d/ in Rad. In natural speech Rad and Rat aren’t distinguished, but when clarifying spelling, most people I know would be able to maintain the distinction in a manner similar to that I described for myself, so I am a bit puzzled by DM’s puzzlement.
Yes they are: Rad in natural everyday speech has a short vowel; the long vowel is pedantic. Similar to other monosyllables like Tag, Bad (but, for example, not Pfad: the cluster at the beginning is usually simplified to /f/, but the vowel is not shortened).
@ulr: I have short vowels in most of these words*) when talking colloquially because they are a Rhineland feature, and I’m never sure how typical that is for Germans in other areas; I certainly remember that I was told to pronounce them with a long vowel when I went to elementary school in Northern Germany, and I do that when talking to less-familiar people, e.g., at work.
Tag is a special case; when I pronounce it with a final stop, as in the standard pronunciation, the vowel is long; it’s only short when I switch to the pronunciation with final fricative (Tach).
besides, in Russian jokes about Germans they devoice everything)
Also traditionally the case in America. See the Katzenjammer kids for example. E.g. „Iss dot you Chon Silver?“
Or Hogan‘s Heroes: „I ssee nossink!“
Rad has its long vowel from the lengthening of monosyllabic words that end in no more than one consonant; this process has never reached the Low German dialects and is largely absent from the northern-half mesolects as well – Olaf Scholz, from Hamburg, pronouncing Gas as [g̊asː] was very noticeable.
The long vowel in Rat is older, which makes the announcement of the station Rathaus Steglitz on buses in Berlin as a short-voweled Ratthaus quite strange: is somebody subtly implying that the district politicians are rats?
Also Zug?
The first case is final fortition; the second refers to the lack of [d͡ʒ] even in the varieties that have fully voiced [b d g] syllable-initially.
That’s misguided application of final fortition to the spelling. German does have [ŋ]-coalescence, more of it actually than English.
[tsʊχ] or [tsʊx] is perfectly normal; [tsuːk] if you don’t want to be misunderstood. But [tsuːx] sounds eccentric.
As ulr describes; it’s either [tsu:k] (formal / work) or [tsux] (with whatever my exact fricative is) in familiar speech for me.
In some dialect humor, e.g. Yawcob Strauss, stereotypical German accent voices some voiceless consonants, and vice versa (“grazy poy”). I suppose that is just unprincipled confusion because of unaspirated stops on the one hand and fortition on the other.
(Cf. id., ibid., Shonny Schwartz, in contrast to “Chon Silver”, supra.)
George I or II is supposed to have said, “I hate all boets and bainters,” which Y’s explanation probably covers. (If it was George II, he at least liked music, especially Handel.)