As someone with a master’s degree in linguistics, I am easily irritated by popularizing books and articles about language, an irritation that has frequently been on display here over the years. Fortunately, there are good popularizers out there, and one of them is Arika Okrent. Back in 2009 I had good things to say about her first book, In the Land of Invented Languages, and now she’s got a new one, Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language, which the publisher was kind enough to send me. The subtitle gives a good idea of its remit, and she writes as cleverly and informatively as ever. You can get an idea of her approach from her Aeon piece Typos, tricks and misprints:

English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. […] The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing. […]

The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press had arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.

It’s notable that the adoption of a different and related technology several hundred years earlier – the alphabet, in use from the 600s – didn’t have this disorienting effect on English. The Latin alphabet had spread throughout Europe with the diffusion of Christianity from the 4th century onward. A few European vernacular languages had some sort of rudimentary writing system prior to this, but for the most part they had no written form. For the first few hundred years of English using the Latin alphabet, its spelling was pretty consistent and phonetic. Monks and missionaries, beginning around 600 CE translated Latin religious texts into local languages – not necessarily so they could be read by the general population, but so they could at least read aloud to them. Most people were illiterate. The vernacular translations were written to be pronounced, and the spelling was intended to get as close to the pronunciation as possible.

Often the languages these monks and missionaries were trying to transcribe contained sounds that Latin didn’t have, and there was no symbol for the sound they needed. In those cases, they might use an accent mark, or put two letters together, or borrow another symbol. Old English, for example, had a strange, exotic ‘th’ sound, for which they originally borrowed the thorn symbol (þ) from Germanic runes. They later settled on the two-letter combination th. For the most part, they used the Latin alphabet as they knew it, but stretched it by using the letters in new ways when other sounds were required. We still use that sound, with the th spelling, in English today.

There follows a description of the Norman invasion and its destructive effects on English literacy:
[Read more…]

My wife was going through old family papers when she found a letter from 1904 on paper with the letterhead of the Improved Order of Heptasophs. Naturally, she showed it to me, and upon investigation I discovered the organization had its own Wikipedia article, as did the original Order of Heptasophs, “a fraternal organization established in New Orleans, Louisiana in April 1852. The name is derived from Greek roots meaning seven and wise and means the seven wise men.” Well, “is intended to mean” might be more accurate, but never mind — what a great word! The names of fraternal organizations are a wonderfully variegated lot, from the Ancient Order of Druids to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (with its offshoot the Ancient Mystic Order of Samaritans), the Fraternal Order of Owls, and the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, but the Heptasophs need yield to none of them in a contest of splendiferousness. (If you’re curious, the Improved Order broke away in 1878 over the vital issue of death benefits.)

Cónal Thomas has a delightful piece for Dublin Inquirer, Preserving Dockers’ Nicknames, from Rubber Legs to Long Balls and Bendego:

When a docker was known by a nickname, that would be his name until he died, says Paddy Daly. He started at Dublin Port when he was 16, in 1954. “People who worked with a man for years would never know what his Christian name was,” says Daly. There was “Swinger” Bisset and “Snipes” McDonald, “Rubber Legs” Gaffney and “Granny” Farrell, “Terrier” Caulfield and “Crab” Carberry.

Now “Masher” Hutch, “Boxer” Elliot and “Blue Nose” Byrne join these on the list of 180 nicknames Daly has recently compiled, recalled from his days down Dublin Port. […]

“The biggest thing you had going in your favour would be, say, a little bit of infamy,” says John Walsh, who worked down the docks between 1962 and 2009. “If you got a nickname that was sort of funny or self-demeaning it stuck in the foreman’s head.” In Daly’s time on the docks, men like “Eat the Baby” Carras, “Foot and a Half” Curley and “Canadian Joe” Reilly lined up under a wooden scaffold, seeking work in the morning “reads”. The “read” was a selection process. Carried out by the foremen, who stood atop the scaffold. Many foremen knew men only by their nickname, says Daly. […]

Research into dock workers’ nicknames is scant, for now. But they’re a tradition that existed in Ringsend for generations, says Declan Byrne, who helped to found the Dublin Dock Workers Preservation Society in 2011. Byrne reckons that two-thirds of deep-sea dockers in Dublin were from Ringsend or Irishtown. The remainder came from East Wall. […]

Both Byrne and Daly agree that a dock worker’s real name would often only be discovered through his obituary. Last year, Byrne received a Christmas card from George “Bronco” Dennis. “George?” says Byrne. “‘Who’s George?’ I said. It took me ages to figure out that was Bronco’s name!”

Thanks, Trevor!

Making my way through the November 8, 2019, TLS, I found a translation of what is apparently a famous interview; the introduction:

To mark the imminent publication of the French translation of Ada, Bernard Pivot interviewed Vladimir Nabokov for an episode of Apostrophes, the prime-time literary talk show on French television. (The episode was first broadcast on May 30, 1975.) Although Apostrophes was one of the best-loved programmes of its time in France, Nabokov had to be cajoled into participating. All other Apostrophes interviews were impromptu, with a group of critics involved in the discussion. This episode was also broadcast live and before a small audience, and there were other critics present, but Nabokov was allowed to have the questions – only from Pivot himself – sent in advance, and to prepare his answers, which during the programme he read from cards roughly concealed behind a stack of his books. Nabokov was pleased with the result, and although some viewers deplored the absence of the programme’s usual spontaneity, Pivot later re-broadcast the episode twice, and regarded it as one of his finest accomplishments. In 1987 he recalled, for readers of Le Nouvel Observateur: “He [Nabokov] was really anti-TV. I went to see him in Montreux when I was starting to work for [channel] Two. I had to please him, and please Véra … He received me in a large salon [at the Montreux Palace, Nabokov’s residence], where there was a piano. We started talking. The piano tuner came in. He set to work. We moved to another salon, where we hadn’t noticed another piano. Our conversation resumed, and five minutes later, we saw the piano tuner come in. We left for a third salon, without a piano. It was a very Nabokovian scene … To boost his courage [during the live broadcast], he wanted to drink whisky. But he naturally didn’t want to set a bad example for French viewers. We had poured a bottle of whisky into a teapot. Every quarter of an hour, I would ask him: ‘A little more tea, Monsieur Nabokov?’ And he would drink with a broad smile. He was a great comedian, incredible for his joking, his warmth, his humour, his artful dodges, his impudence, and of course his intelligence. In my memory Nabokov is an icon. He spoke for more than an hour. I have an almost religious feeling for that programme”.

Unfortunately, the translation is even more shortened than they indicate by ellipses, as I discovered by watching the video (available here with Spanish subtitles); there’s even a blatant error in translation (vingt ‘twenty’ is rendered “eighteen”). Happily, The Nabokovian (the official website and journal of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society) has put online a transcript of the original French, and it’s a very enlightening interview. I was particularly struck by his response to Pivot’s question “Est-ce que pour vous, Vladimir Nabokov, un roman ce n’est pas d’abord une excellente histoire ?” [Don’t you think, VN, that a novel is first of all an excellent story?]:
[Read more…]

Via Dmitry Pruss on Facebook, an open-access Cell paper, The genomic history of the Middle East by Mohamed A. Almarri, Marc Haber, Reem A. Lootah, Pille Hallast, Saeed Al Turki, Hilary C. Martin, Yali Xue, and Chris Tyler-Smith:

The Middle East region is important to understand human evolution and migrations but is underrepresented in genomic studies. Here, we generated 137 high-coverage physically phased genome sequences from eight Middle Eastern populations using linked-read sequencing. We found no genetic traces of early expansions out-of-Africa in present-day populations but found Arabians have elevated Basal Eurasian ancestry that dilutes their Neanderthal ancestry. Population sizes within the region started diverging 15–20 kya, when Levantines expanded while Arabians maintained smaller populations that derived ancestry from local hunter-gatherers. Arabians suffered a population bottleneck around the aridification of Arabia 6 kya, while Levantines had a distinct bottleneck overlapping the 4.2 kya aridification event. We found an association between movement and admixture of populations in the region and the spread of Semitic languages. Finally, we identify variants that show evidence of selection, including polygenic selection. Our results provide detailed insights into the genomic and selective histories of the Middle East.

Obviously, the bit about the spread of Semitic languages is of prime LH interest; here’s a relevant snippet:

In addition to the local ancestry from Epipaleolithic/Neolithic people, we found an ancestry related to ancient Iranians that is ubiquitous today in all Middle Easterners (orange component in Figure 1B; Table 1). Previous studies showed that this ancestry was not present in the Levant during the Neolithic period but appeared in the Bronze Age where ∼50% of the local ancestry was replaced by a population carrying ancient Iran-related ancestry (Lazaridis et al., 2016). We explored whether this ancestry penetrated both the Levant and Arabia at the same time and found that admixture dates mostly followed a North to South cline, with the oldest admixture occurring in the Levant region between 3,300 and 5,900 ya (Table S2), followed by admixture in Arabia (2,000–3,500 ya) and East Africa (2,100–3,300 ya). These times overlap with the dates for the Bronze Age origin and spread of Semitic languages in the Middle East and East Africa estimated from lexical data (Kitchen et al., 2009; Figure 2). This population potentially introduced the Y chromosome haplogroup J1 into the region (Chiaroni et al., 2010; Lazaridis et al., 2016). The majority of the J1 haplogroup chromosomes in our dataset coalesce around ∼5.6 (95% CI, 4.8–6.5) kya, agreeing with a potential Bronze Age expansion; however, we did find rarer earlier diverged lineages coalescing ∼17 kya (Figure S2). The haplogroup common in Natufians, E1b1b, is also frequent in our dataset, with most lineages coalescing ∼8.3 (7–9.7) kya, though we also found a rare deeply divergent Y chromosome, which coalesces 39 kya (Figure S2).

Figure 2 shows “Spread of Iran-like ancestry and Semitic languages.” All this is way beyond my pay grade, but I expect better-informed Hatters will have useful things to say about it.

From the About page:

The Divergent Association Task is a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking […]. The task involves thinking of 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. For example, the words cat and dog are similar, but the words cat and book are not.

Do the Task — it’s fun! (And if you let them use your answers, you’re helping Science.) On my first try, I got 81.51, “higher than 70.03% of the people who have completed this task.” Via MetaFilter, where you will find much nerdy discussion of the details and how to raise or lower your score (only the first try is used in their research); a commenter there refers to the “Word for Word” segment of BBC radio’s comedy quiz show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, in which “players may say any word as long as it has no connection whatsoever to the previous word” (sample clip).

Matthew Scarborough, who has been producing (off and on) an extraordinarily useful series of bibliographic essays discussing etymological dictionaries for the Indo-European languages (I have posted about them a number of times, beginning here), has now done an Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics and Culture Textbooks for the Perplexed which is perhaps of wider interest, and certainly worth your while if you’ve ever wanted to learn something about the topic. He says:

So, in this post I’m going to give a bibliography / reading list of some of the most useful absolute introductory books you can go to in order to start, followed by a few more reading recommendations on where you can go next. This list is going to be mostly anglocentric, but I’ll also throw in a few French and German recommendations where appropriate.

Just to give you a sample, here are the last two items (from the “Further Reading after the General Stuff” section):

• Gamkrelidze, Tamaz & Vyecheslav Ivanovich Ivanov. 1995. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

This work is a translation of the authors earlier Russian work Индоевропейский Язык и Индоевропецы [Indo-European Language and the Indo-Europeans] (1984, Tblisi University Press). It is essentially broken down into two components: (1) a new reconstruction of Indo-European and (2) a semantic dictionary of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. While many aspects of this work’s reconstruction remain controversial, including an implementation of the authors’ version of the glottalic theory** and a reconstruction of a homeland roughly around modern-day Armenia, there is still a lot of useful material to be found here, especially in its semantic dictionary and its synthesis of Soviet scholarship that has often not been so accessible to American and European scholars. It is a good book to think with.

• Klein, Jared, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz (eds.) 2017-2018. Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics (3 Vols.). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

This is the newest comprehensive reference work on Indo-European and all of its individual branches. It is the closest thing we have to a new Brugmann Grundriß. Clocking in at $400 USD per volume, it is unlikely to be a purchase by anyone but a reference library, but if you have access to such a library or online resources to De Gruyter Online this is the place to go for a very detailed and up-to-date survey of current perspectives in Indo-European reconstruction and the histories of the individual branches.

Thanks for the heads-up, JC!

I have gotten distressing news from WebFaction, which has hosted LH since 2013:

Dear WebFaction customer,

This message is concerning your “languagehat” hosting account.

We emailed you in October 2020 to let you know that the WebFaction platform would be closing down, and where possible all websites and services would be migrated to a new platform. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to successfully migrate your hosting package.

We will be closing down all websites and services on 15th September 2021, at which point your website and email will be offline and no longer accessible. […] You will need to create backups of your website, databases, applications and emails before the closure of the platform, and move your hosting to a new provider.

Songdog, who does the tech support for this site (bless him), says “the most unusual thing is its size — you’ve got a long archive which means more traffic and load when Google et sim come crawling. It would be nice to find a host where that won’t be a barrier, but it might not be easy to tell.” Needless to say, he’s looking for a replacement, but he’s a busy man, and he and I would both welcome suggestions from the Varied Reader. Thanks in advance!

I’m reading Veniamin Kaverin’s 1982 tale Верлиока [Verlioka] (a verlioka, or wyrlook, is a one-eyed giant of East Slavic mythology), in which the young Vasya, created by a clerical error, is drawn to the willful Iva, who falls for the laughably formal Leon but becomes disillusioned by him and decides she and Vasya should get married. They’re too young to do so immediately, but they decide to take a honeymoon trip anyway, in the course of which Iva is abducted by Leon, who turns out to be the demonic Verlioka, who has been jealous ever since Vasya and Iva were lovers named Lorenzo and Giulia in 16th-century Venice. It’s obviously got motifs from Ruslan and Ludmila — there’s even a learned tomcat — and it’s a lot of fun; too bad it doesn’t seem to have been translated into English. At any rate, at one point Vasya is trying to decide how to bury a helpful raven (who wants a memorial mass said for him because he’s a Catholic, “крещен в Ирландии, где до сих пор лучшие из моих братьев сражаются за истинную веру” [baptized in Ireland, where to this day the best of my brethren fight for the true faith]; there are two Old Irish words for ‘raven,’ bran [related to Russian ворон] and fiach); he decides to mark the grave with a гурий [gurii], a pyramid of stones. Naturally, I wondered about the etymology, but Wiktionary didn’t give one.

Fortunately, assiduous googling led me to Sergei Myznikov’s brand new Русский диалектный этимологический словарь [Russian Dialect Etymological Dictionary], which has an entry on it; after providing the various regions where it occurs and its various forms, it says:

Если не связано с игрой слов на исконной почве, возможно связать со словом кекур (см.), которое близко семантически. Вряд ли следует сопоставлять с фин. hura ‘беспорядок, разруха’

If it’s not linked to wordplay on indigenous soil, it could be linked with the word kekur (q.v.), which is close semantically. It can hardly be compared with Fin. hura ‘disorder, ruin’

It says ке́кур ‘tall rock by the seashore, rocky cliff’ may be related to Fin. keko ‘shock, stook (of grain).’ I don’t know how convincing any of those comparisons are (and I don’t know what is meant by “wordplay on indigenous soil”), but I’m glad to have found this new reference; at least I now know гурий doesn’t have an obvious etymology. (There’s another, more common, гурий which is simply the Russian equivalent of English houri.)

As a fan of both sf and languages (and a quondam student of Swahili), I was delighted when Trevor Joyce sent me this interview:

The 6th edition of The Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, suspended last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is back. Founded in 2014, the prize recognises writing in African languages and encourages translation from, between and into African languages. Kiswahili is widely spoken across the east coast of Africa. This year’s prize also offers a special award designed to promote and popularise a Kiswahili vocabulary for technology and digital rights. We spoke to the prize founders – literary academic Lizzy Attree, also of Short Story Day Africa, and literature professor and celebrated author Mukoma Wa Ngugi – on the challenges of growing literature in African languages.

Lizzy Attree: The Nyabola prize gives us the opportunity to work in a new area that is really exciting for us. Nanjala Nyabola, the Kenyan writer and activist, approached us with the idea and the funding to target vocabulary for technology and digital rights. This was particularly interesting to us for two reasons. Firstly, we have long wanted to offer a short story prize, but have stuck with longer works because of the opportunity it gives us to focus on Kiswahili literature as a fully mastered form. But we are aware that a short story prize is a good place to start for those who are only beginning to write. Secondly, Kiswahili is often considered to be steeped in archaic, or historically poetic technical words and forms. These must be updated to accommodate the modern language of science and technology. It has been an interesting adventure to find out which words can be adapted or amended to fit with modern digital and technological advancement.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi: There is also the idea that African languages are social languages, emotive and cannot carry science. Most definitely not true. All languages can convey the most complex ideas but we have to let them. There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.

[Read more…]