I’ve just run across perhaps the worst result of fear-of-ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition (Präpositionbeendigungangst?) that I have ever seen. In a FB post about the movie Cleopatra, we find the following sentence:

When Twentieth Century Fox decided to salvage the production of this movie following the resignation of original director Rouben Mamoulian, the studio gave Elizabeth Taylor another demand in her contract which no other actor or actress had up until that time: director approval, of which it was unheard.

The normal phrasing would be something like “a demand unheard-of until then,” but whoever wrote that got into a syntactical tangle and found themself staring at the prospect of ending the sentence with “unheard of.” The result is what you see before you. Please, English teachers, think before you subject your helpless students to zombie rules!

A few years ago I posted about the CETI project; now Matteo Wong at the Atlantic interviews Ross Andersen about the current situation (archived):

Ross Andersen: Before attempting to translate the sperm whales’ clicks, Project CETI wants to use a model that is analogous to ChatGPT to generate sequences of them that are hopefully like those that the whales use. Putting aside the fraught and contested question as to whether ChatGPT understands human language, we know that it is quite good at predicting how our words unfold into sentences. Presumably a language model for sperm whales could do the same with the clicks.

It’s possible that these generated sequences alone would tell us something about the structure of sperm whale language. But to translate between languages, models currently need some preexisting translation samples to get going. Project CETI is hoping that they might be able to patch together the first of these required translation samples the old-fashioned way. They have been landing drones on the whales to gently suction-cup sensors onto their skin. The time-matched data that they send back helps the team attribute clicks to individual animals. It also tells them important information about what they’re doing.

The hope is that, with enough observation, they might be able to figure out what a few of the click sequences mean. They could then turn over a crude and spotty Rosetta Stone to a language model and have it fill out at least a little bit of the rest. The scientists would then check whatever it came up with against their observations, and repeat the process, iteratively, until they’ve translated the whales’ entire language.

[Read more…]

To quote Wikipedia: “Seediq, also known as Sediq, Taroko, is an Atayalic language spoken in the mountains of Northern Taiwan by the Seediq and Taroko people.” That article is impressively detailed for such a minor language, and the Phonology section hints (“The stressed syllable is usually the penultimate one, and is pronounced with a high pitch. In the Truku dialect stress is on the final syllable resulting in loss of first vowel…”) at why there are such varying pronunciations here ([seˈʔediq], [səˈdiq], [səˈʔəɟiq]). But the reason I bring it up is that I discovered it via a link to Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale:

Indigenous Cultural Translation is about the process that made it possible to film the 2011 Taiwanese blockbuster Seediq Bale in Seediq, an endangered indigenous language. Seediq Bale celebrates the headhunters who rebelled against or collaborated with the Japanese colonizers at or around a hill station called Musha starting on October 27, 1930, while this book celebrates the grandchildren of headhunters, rebels, and collaborators who translated the Mandarin-language screenplay into Seediq in central Taiwan nearly eighty years later.

As a “thick description” of Seediq Bale, this book describes the translation process in detail, showing how the screenwriter included Mandarin translations of Seediq texts recorded during the Japanese era in his screenplay, and then how the Seediq translators backtranslated these texts into Seediq, changing them significantly. It argues that the translators made significant changes to these texts according to the consensus about traditional Seediq culture they have been building in modern Taiwan, and that this same consensus informs the interpretation of the Musha Incident and of Seediq culture that they articulated in their Mandarin-Seediq translation of the screenplay as a whole. The argument more generally is that in building cultural consensus, indigenous peoples like the Seediq are “translating” their traditions into alternative modernities in settler states around the world.

Wow, does that sound interesting! Had I but world enough and time…

Hannah Sarvasy reported back in 2020 on some suggestive research:

Languages like Japanese, Korean, Turkish and the indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea build sentences in a way that lets them grow to enormous length. Our research shows learning one of these languages may help children create complex sentences that express multiple ideas at a younger age.

Try recounting what you did this morning, or telling a story, and chances are you’ll use a series of several sentences: “This morning, I woke early. I dressed and ate breakfast. I gathered my things, said goodbye to my family, and they waved goodbye to me. Then I drove to work.” In English, the simplest sentence, or “clause,” is just a subject plus a verb (“I dressed”). You can also join two clauses into a sentence using words like “and” or “while,” but it’s unnatural to join more than about three clauses into one English sentence.

But in many languages across Central Asia (from Turkish to Tibetan, Mongolian, Japanese, and Korean), and in many indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea, stories can take the form of one long sentence. These sentences look more like this: “Waking up early this morning, dressing, making breakfast, eating, washing the dishes, gathering my things, saying goodbye to my family, they waving goodbye to me, I drove to work.”

These long sentences are known as “clause chains.” Unlike in English, where most of the clauses in a story would make sense if you spoke them outside the story (“I dressed”), all but the very last clause in a “clause chain” are abbreviated—they can only function in a clause chain. “Dressing” or “making breakfast” sounds unfinished on its own, and only the final verb of the clause chain tells you whether the events are happening in the past, present, or future.

[Read more…]

It suddenly occurred to me that the Russian word кролик ‘rabbit’ looked sort of like a diminutive of король ‘king’; I chuckled at my homemade folk etymology, and then wondered what the actual history was. Lo and behold, it turns out my jokey guess was substantially correct; Vasmer:

(Л. Толстой, Блок и др.), укр. крíлик. Заимств. из польск. królik – то же, которое является калькой (“маленький король”: król; см. коро́ль) с нов.-в.-нем. диал. Künigl, Königshase, ср.-в.-н. küniklîn из лат. cunīculus; см. Мi. ЕW 131; Бернекер 1, 572; Унбегаун, RЕS 12, 20; Брюкнер 269; Карлович 261. Лит. kralìkis происходит из польск.; см. Брюкнер, FW 96, 175.

In other words, the Russian word is borrowed from Polish królik, literally ‘little king,’ which is a calque of MHG küniklîn, which is borrowed from Latin cuniculus ‘rabbit’ but adapted to look like a German diminutive of künik ‘king.’ Fun with etymology! (Oh, and the Latin word is the source of English con(e)y, as in Coney Island.)

Alex Foreman asks an interesting question at FB:

One thing I’m curious about wrt. Hebrew that I haven’t seen much scholarship about: What evidence is there for conversational use of Hebrew among Jews in the Middle Ages?

There’s fairly extensive evidence that learned people from different countries in Latin Christendom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe could and regularly did coverse in Latin. Tunberg has written a pretty amazing monograph about this.

Everything I know tells me the same ought to have been true among Jews who knew Hebrew, even if Hebrew was not the oral medium of higher instruction for Jews the way Latin was in so many contexts in the Middle Ages. Like, suppose that Jacob ben Meir met the Rambam. They’d have lots to talk about. Their only language in common would be Hebrew. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have spoken it to each other. They’d only have needed a little work to get used to each others’ accents.

Has anyone written about this somewhere? They must have.

Seems like they must have; I thought I’d see if the Hattery can come up with anything.

Anthony Grafton’s LRB review (17 November 2022; archived) of The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are, by David M. Henkin, is full of interesting historical tidbits (we’re passing it on to a postmaster acquaintance for the mail-related stuff: “Meanwhile American culture developed a rich epistolary strain, with distinct rules for the brief, matter-of-fact business letter that should not be written on a Sabbath and the long, personal letter that could”), but its appearance here is due to the mention of “Saint Monday,” a phrase I hadn’t seen. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a decent article:

Saint Monday is the tradition of absenteeism on a Monday. […] The tradition of taking Monday off has been common among craft workers since at least the seventeenth century, when the workweek ran from Monday to Saturday as had been the custom and expectation for centuries.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin refers to the practice, saying of his youthful employment in a London printing house, “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master”.

Later writers often ascribed Saint Monday to the organisation and improvement of working class life which occurred with industrialisation. Pay day was typically Saturday, and therefore workers often had spare money on Monday. In other industries, business owners had become accustomed to workers not showing up on Mondays and were prepared to put up with it. Food would commonly be left over from the weekend, thus workers did not need to visit the works canteen, and since many workers were taking the day off, there was often company to be had.

The tradition declined during the nineteenth century, but the provision of entertainments, such as railway excursions, was initially common on Saturday and Monday, and it was not until the middle of the century that workers were able to enjoy a weekend. In part, the decline can be attributed to the adoption of half-day working on Saturdays, which legitimated leisure time for workers.

Saint Monday remained in place longest among the better-off workers, including the self-employed who retained some say in their hours and were not economically compelled to work long hours.

I wish I’d known about that back when I worked in an office; it would have been a useful reference. (Also, workers should go back to grabbing as much time for themselves as they can and stop letting bosses treat them as available around the clock. But I digress.)

This is very niche and very silly, but I can’t resist it (and hey, it taught me about Hermann’s Bridge and Meyer’s First Law); via Laudator Temporis Acti:

   But she bore Chimaera, who breathed invincible fire…

   ἣ δὲ Χίμαιραν ἔτικτε πνέουσαν ἀμαιμάκετον πῦρ…

West in his commentary ad loc.:

This peculiarly ungainly verse is the result of determination to combine the Chimaera’s epithets πῦρ πνείουσα (fr. 43 (a) 87, cf. Il. 6.182, Pi. O. 13.90) and ἀμαιμάκετος (Il. 6.179, 16.329), which has become transferred to πῦρ in the process. Wilamowitz is justified in calling it Hesiod’s worst hexameter (Gr. Verskunst, p. 8, n. 1: it violates Hermann’s Bridge, and it is the only line in early epic to combine such a violation with a final monosyllable; it also violates Meyer’s First Law (p. 95); and it has an un-Homeric correption before a mute and nasal combination (p. 98).

West, Introduction to Greek Metre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 21:

A ‘bridge’ is the converse of a caesura: a place where word-end is avoided. Gottfried Hermann observed in 1805 that it is avoided between the two shorts of the fourth biceps.

West in Ian Morris and Barry Powell, edd., A New Companion to Homer (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 225:

Meyer’s First Law states that words which begin in the first foot do not end between the shorts of the second foot, or at the end of that foot.

Rosemary Hill’s LRB review of Menu Design in Europe: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1800-2000, edited by Jim Heimann (17 November 2022; archived) has a passage near the start containing various items of linguistic interest:

With an equally sweeping approach to geography, Heimann pays little attention to national cuisines within Europe, beyond acknowledging France as ‘the fountainhead’ of culinary distinction. French was the international language of food for centuries and features on menus from Spain to Scandinavia, though nowhere so much or so persistently as in Britain, where it signals a cringing sense of inferiority and the fond hope that anything described as ‘à la’ something else will sound sophisticated. Conversely when a French menu uses English it feels like an implicit snub. If France has no word for ‘pouding’ it is because it does not care to be associated with such a thing. Eighteenth-century England could boast food as good as any on the Continent, but industrialisation and depopulation of the countryside combined to fracture culinary traditions, ushering in the Victorian Age of Indigestion, when quantity had to stand for quality. It was perhaps after the Second World War and on into the early 1960s, when ingredients as well as professional cooks were in short supply, that British food reached its nadir. One sign of better and more cosmopolitan food is the gradual dwindling of menu French over time, though it lingers on in the socially aspirational world of rotary clubs, livery companies and Oxford colleges, giving birth to such chimeras as ‘dim sum de légumes avec daikon et gingembre confit’.

As physical items, menus seem to have taken permanent form only in the mid-19th century, replacing the handwritten list. Heimann has little to offer for the first decades of his period. His earliest example is a lithographed carte from the Hôtel du Commerce in Bruges. A massive baroque frame supporting a hefty cornucopia and looking unhappily like a memorial tablet surrounds the extensive list of dishes on offer for 7 February 1844. It promises to take diners through from turbot to kirsch jelly, but there are no prices. These were a surprisingly late introduction, and the first example here is from May 1906. The Carlton Restaurant in Wiesbaden, which boasted an elegant Wiener Werkstätte-inspired green and cream design, offered an all-inclusive dinner for four marks fifty, with individual plates mostly at two marks fifty, though what this meant in terms of relative expense is hard to know. The food is described in a bewildering concoction of Germano-franglais culminating in ‘Porterhousesteak à la Jardinière’, the elaboration perhaps a reflection of the price, which at eight marks made it the most expensive choice by some way.

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People are sending me this Esther Addley piece in the Guardian (archived) with such frequency that I figure I’d better post it before the roster of acknowledgments grows longer than one of those Nature author listings. It’s about the language normally known as Pontic Greek (“an endangered variety of Modern Greek indigenous to the Pontus region on the southern shores of the Black Sea”) but in the news under the confusing moniker Romeyka (i.e., Ρωμαίικα), which is a general Greek term for the Modern Greek language. It features Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou, who has been studying the language for many years and campaigning for public awareness of it and its speakers; since I posted about her and a previous wave of publicity back in 2011 (and linked to this Hellenisteukontos post debunking the claim that Pontic has an infinitive — a claim that, alas, is still being repeated, as in this Grauniad story), I will focus here on what is new (to me, at least):

With its remaining speakers ageing, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading a University of Cambridge academic to launch a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record its unique linguistic structures before it is too late.

The Crowdsourcing Romeyka project invites native speakers across the world to upload a recording of themselves talking in the language. Ioanna Sitaridou, a professor of Spanish and historical linguistics, said she anticipated that many were likely to be in the US and Australia, as well as spread across Europe.

“There is a very significant diaspora which is separated by religion and national identity [from the communities in Turkey], but still shares so much,” she said.

I hope it does some good. (See also my 2019 post Pontic Greek Dictionary.) Thanks go to Trevor, Peter, Eric, and John Emerson, as well as Steven Green on FB!