Thanks to a MetaFilter comment by xueexueg, I’ve discovered the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini, which, as xueexueg says, will be the OED of older Italian. It’s only up to the letter D (and is only “quasi complete” for A and B) and uses only texts from before 1375, but it’s extremely comprehensive and fun to consult. Looking up amore (naturalmente!), we find first a full list of spellings (ammore, amò, amô, amor, amor’, âmor, amore, ämore, amori, amorre, amors, amur, amure, amuri, amurj, mor, ‘mor, ‘more), a list of collocations it occurs in (amare per amore, amor falso, amore fraterno, amore paterno, amor fino…), a set of definitions, and finally the heart of the entry, a list of citations illustrating each of the senses:

1 Sentimento di chi desidera o intrattiene un rapporto intimo ed esclusivo, spirituale o fisico, con un’altra persona; affetto intenso, passione.
[1] Raimb. de Vaqueiras, Contrasto, c. 1190 (gen.), 53, pag. 165: Si per m’amor ve chevei, / oguano morrei de frei: / tropo son de mala lei / li Provenzal.
[2] Giacomo da Lentini, c. 1230/50 (tosc.), 19c.1, pag. 275: Amor è un[o] desio che ven da core / per abondanza di gran piacimento…
[3] Pamphilus volg., c. 1250 (venez.), [Panfilo], pag. 47.20: E chascun amore lo qual non è pasudo, çoè saciado de çogi e de solaci, sì è debele et enfermo.
[4] Andrea da Grosseto (ed. Selmi), 1268 (tosc.), L. 3, cap. 19, pag. 256.5: Et sappi, che a l’amor perfetto fa fine ‘l tempo et non l’animo; perciò che, nonn- è in podestà dell’animo del lasciare e di rimanersi de l’amore.
[5] Giovanni, 1286 (prat.), 8, pag. 22: Dialtuccia piace(n)te i(n) aspecto, / suo viso rispre(n)de i(n) dilecto: / alchuno no(n) fue sì in p(er)fecto / amore. […]

A splendid project; I hope it’s well funded and perseveres to the end of the alphabet.

I have received a welcome shipment from Language Log Plaza: a copy of Far from the Madding Gerund, a collection of posts by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum from Language Log. Now, you might think: “Why should I pay for a book the entirety of whose contents is available online gratis?” But except to those frighteningly nouveau-siècle types who think books are a relic of the past, like clay tablets and slide rules, the experience of reading is much enhanced by being able to see the words in nice crisp type on a page that can be carried around, read while walking down the street, and (if inspiration strikes and one is not part of the books-are-sacred-objects crowd) annotated by hand. And this is a beautifully produced book (my hat is off to the publisher, William, James & Company): handsome, nicely laid out (with URLs and annotations in smaller-type sidebars), well indexed; hell, it even smells good. And it’s actually been proofread, which seems to be viewed as an unnecessary expense by most publishers these days; the only thing I’ve found to raise an eyebrow at so far is the failure to change quotes-within-quotes to single quotes in this (from page 25): “A grammatical, usage or pronunciation mistake made by “correcting” something that’s right to begin with. For example, use of the pronoun whom in ‘Whom shall I say is calling?'” But that’s extremely small potatoes.
And all of that is beside the real point, which is that this is a tremendous pleasure to read. I’ve read just about everything in it already, but I find myself inexorably drawn to read it all again. The first selection is one of my all-time favorite posts, last year’s The disappearing modal: for those who’ll believe anything, which contains this immortal exchange:

Q: Is James Cochran, then, nothing but a mendacious pontificating old windbag?
A: Yes, it would appear that he is an utter fraud.

I read that several times over when it appeared online (once, out loud, to my wife), and I’ve reread it again now with undiminished joy. The selection after that is They are a prophet, which promotes one of my favorite causes, singular they. Then comes The blowing of Strunk and White’s rules off, an attack on one of my favorite targets, and after that a demolition job on the Chicago Manual of Style‘s sadly deficient new grammar section (“They commissioned a tired rehash of traditional grammar repeating centuries-old errors of analysis instead of trying to obtain a more up-to-date presentation. A real lost opportunity that has lessened the authority of a wonderful reference book, one that on topics from punctuation to citation to indexing to editing can really be trusted”)… Well, it’s all good stuff, is what I’m trying to say.

[Read more…]

As an American, I’ve never actually had any experience with Bovril (and I can’t say I have any desire to), but I certainly know the word. Imagine my surprise when I was leafing through the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and encountered the following in the article on LYTTON, FIRST BARON (better known to me, and I presume you, as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose name lives on in the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing):

His sf novel is The Coming Race (1871[…]), a utopia set in an underground lost world inhabited by an evolved form of Homo sapiens, larger and wiser than surface dwellers. This race derives its moral and physical virtue from vril, an electromagnetic form of energy of universal utility which fuels flying machines and automata, and even makes telepathy possible. (The UK beef-tea Bovril took its name from vril.)

This is no urban myth; the official website of the company that makes the stuff says “The name Bovril comes from an unusual word Johnston found in a book. ‘Vril’ was ‘an electric fluid’ which ‘cured diseases and established equilibrium of natural powers.’ He combined it with the first two letters of the Latin word for beef ‘Bos’.” But the OED’s etymology (yes, they have an entry for Bovril—they’re Brits, aren’t they?) says simply “f. L. bōs, bovis, ox, cow.” Were they ashamed to cite a trashy popular novel? If so, they’d gotten over it by the time the Visor-Vywer fascicle appeared in 1920; it includes the entry:

vril
[Invented by Lytton.]
A mysterious force imagined as having been discovered by the people described in one of Lytton’s novels.
1871 LYTTON Coming Race vii. 47 These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers.

The last citation is from 1888 (Pall Mall G. 27 Dec. 4/1 If so,.. we are within hailing distance of the discovery of vril); I think it should be brought back into circulation. Use the vril, Luke!

Darija “is the term used by speakers of Maghreb Arabic to name the varieties they speak” (it’s also called darja); Lucy Melbourne, an American professor and creative writer who teaches English and American literature at Mohammed V University in Rabat, has an interesting discussion of it in the Morocco Times:

Darija, what the participants at the Salon du Livre clearly recognized as the real deal, is the spoken vernacular Arabic of Morocco and, aside from a few songs, has rarely been written down. Hence it is a kind of fluid, oral medium in which people swim in common but never see themselves in the fixed reflection of individual reading.

Animated by the rhythms of Morocco’s hypnotic storytellers and stinging with the barbs of village gossip, Darija reaches deep into the Moroccan soul, shaping its psyche and its often irreverent wit. The written language, on the other hand, is in its turn rarely spoken: the sinuous curves dotted and dashed of classical Arabic are reserved for the print media—and the Koran.

When spoken, classical Arabic, like most languages cut off from their umbilical in sound, is pontificated as sermon or filtered through the sterilized, hot potato equivalent of a BBC announcer anxious to disguise his class origins.

In short, Moroccans are linguistic schizophrenics: if literate—and only 51% are—they must leap a thousand times a day the chasm between body and mind, between the organic timbre and gestures of their mother tongue and the patriarchal reverberations of a silently echoing script.

She describes the attempts of some Moroccans to write books in dialect, and the opposition evoked (reminiscent of the language controversy in Greece, which saw riots break out over a vernacular translation of the Gospels). A fascinating read, and I thank Liosliath for bringing it to my attention.

Incidentally, I learned about darja from Lameen Souag, whose Grammar of Algerian Darja is no longer available at its former Geocities site. Lameen says, “I hope to reestablish my website sometime soon – can anyone recommend a good free/very cheap website hosting service other than Geocities?” Anyone who can help him out will be doing a service both for linguistics and for me: I need to update my links!

My wife asked me about the surname Aiuvalasit, which she had just encountered in a list, and I drew a complete blank. Googling has [wrongly, apparently] convinced me that it’s a Jewish name, but that’s as far as I can get. Any further information (pronunciation, alternate spellings, and of course etymology) will be much appreciated!
Update. It seems Ajovalasit is a much more common spelling, and it’s apparently a Sicilianized Greek name; I’m still hoping for more details.

I just found (via wood s lot) a wonderful interview with one of my favorite novelists, Richard Powers, but when I realized the interview was from 1999 I thought “I must have linked to it before and just forgotten about it.” When I checked, though, I discovered to my horror that I’ve never even mentioned Powers on LH. So it’s high time I informed you all that the man’s combination of intelligence, wide knowledge, and brilliant writing is unparalleled, and you should all run out and start reading him right away. The book that made me a believer was Galatea 2.2 (which begins “It was like so, but wasn’t”), but you could perfectly well start with his first, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Here’s a quote from the interview to give you an idea of his approach to writing:

My idea is that successful writing advances as its own, complex, living hierarchy, one that mirrors the kind of complex hierarchy that we living beings are. We exist at the cellular level or even the nucleic or chemical level, at the level of organs and systems, at the level of the complete organism, and at the social level. All of these different levels have their analogies in a good story, levels from diction on up to meaning, and in a good story, all these levels advance simultaneously, in concert. We may not even be aware of these phenomena as we read, but in great fiction, all the parts and subassemblies of creation are integral and mutually supporting. You could look at a sentence of a well-made story and see it as a fractal microcosm of the entire workings of the story. You can hear in the syntax, or in the diction of a sentence, the sensibility that drives voice, and the voice that drives character, and the character that drives drama. Again, a good story exemplifies a continuum, both discrete and continuous, and it works because all of its levels participate in a negotiated conversation with one another….

The novelist’s job is to say what it means to be alive. I don’t think there are any wrong ways of doing that; I think there are wrong ways of not doing that, of avoiding it, but I think there’s nothing that you could throw into that hopper that would be irrelevant. The more you can treat—providing you can continue to synthesize it into something that’s both intellectually and emotionally engaging—the better. Right now a lot of fiction restricts itself totally to dramatic revelation, raising a lot of proscriptions about the way that fiction can and can’t function. The direct introduction of discursive material has been considered anathema for a long time. I’ve been trying in different ways to violate that prohibition from my first book on. True, you can get more emotive power over your reader by dramatic revelation than by discursive narrative. But you can get more connection with discursive narrative! The real secret is to triangulate between these two modes, getting to places that neither technique could reach in isolation. Because that’s how the human organism works. We employ all sorts of intelligences, from low-level bodily intuitions to high-level, syllogistic rationalism. It’s not a question of which way of knowing the world is the right one.

I was struck by the fact that Powers, like myself, spent time in Thailand as a kid, though he was there a decade later and thus saw Bangkok as “a capital for American servicemen on R & R” rather than the quiet little city laced with canals that I remember.

Incidentally, wood s lot is full of good stuff today, including various links celebrating May and Giuseppe Ungaretti (“Translating Ungaretti“) and a new online magazine called Otoliths that looks worth investigating.

Tiago Tresoldi, a Brazilian blogger, is reposting entries from here and Language Log in Portuguese on his site Ars Rhetorica. I’d like to thank him for taking the trouble; may his efforts help jump-start a renaissance of linguistic understanding in the home of o jogo bonito! Here’s the start of his version of my Bakhtin post, Smoking your own:

Fumando tudo
Esta é uma história terrível com toques de humor negro em si. Mikhail Bakhtin passou os últimos anos da década de 1930 trabalhando naquilo que muitos consideram sua obra-prima, um estudo sobre o romance alemão do século XVIII (em especial, o Bildungsroman). Vou citar o restante da história a partir de dois livros publicados, já que há muito material impreciso rodando pela internet (por exemplo, algumas pessoas situam o fato durante o cerco a Leningrado, mas pelo que sei Bakhtin vivia nas cercanias de Moscou durante a guerra). O primeiro é a p. xiii da introdução de Michael Holquist à coleção de Bakhtin Speech Genres and Other Late Essays…

As lagniappe, here’s a piquant bit from Beckett’s short monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, courtesy of wood s lot:

(reading from dictionary). State—or condition—of being—or remaining—a widow—or widower. (Looks up. Puzzled.) Being—or remaining?… (Pause. He peers again at dictionary. Reading.) “Deep weeds of viduity”… Also of an animal, especially a bird… the vidua or weaver bird… Black plumage of male… (He looks up. With relish.) The vidua-bird!

I recently bought Deez to Blues, the new album by the wonderful bassist Mario Pavone, and was struck by some of the song titles, in particular “Deez,” “Xapo,” and “Ocbo.” Google is no help with the first and last because of competing acronyms and hip respelling respectively, but xapo gets some good linguistic information… too much, in fact. It’s evidently a word in Basque, Uzbek, and Portuguese, though it’s not in my dictionaries, so I don’t know what it means in any of them. In Nahuatl it means ‘perforated, pierced.’ It’s part of a couple of compound verbs in Pirahã. In New Caledonia, u xapo means ‘spirit of him.’ It’s the name of a hill tribe in Vietnam. And it’s doubtless other things as well. But what it means to Mario Pavone, I have no idea. All I can tell you is that the album is a delight, a marriage of tradition and modernity, adventurous without ear assault, melodious without moldy-figgery. As Troy Collins says in a rave review for All About Jazz, “Deez to Blues is a high water mark in a consistently exceptional discography.”

There’s been a lot of talk about a new study that claims “European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar.” I’m not competent to evaluate it (and have an admitted prejudice against the whole talking-animal thing), so I’ll send you to Mark Liberman for a thorough discussion of the merits of the study. Me, I’m just going to quote Yreka Bakery in the highly respected Speculative Grammarian:

An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our correspondent visited was affected by has appeared. Those affected our correspondent a local grad student called could hardly understand apparently still speak fluently. The cause experts the LSA sent investigate remains elusive. Frighteningly, linguists linguists linguists sent examined are highly contagious. Physicians neurologists psychologists other linguists called for help called for help called for help didn’t help either. The disorder experts reporters SpecGram sent consulted investigated apparently is a case of pathological center embedding.

All I have to say is, starlings linguists language loggers readers follow commented on the work of studied are damn smart!

I just finished Jane Stevenson’s The Winter Queen, which considerably disappointed me: Elizabeth Stuart had a long and interesting life, intimately tied up with the maddeningly complex Thirty Years’ War (which began with her husband‘s election as King of Bohemia, making war with the Habsburgs inevitable, and one strand of which was the couple’s long struggle, from their Dutch exile, to recover the Palatinate), but the book (despite the promise of the title) focuses almost entirely on an invented character, a prince of the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo who after spending years as a slave in the Dutch East Indies is freed and sent to Leiden to study theology. The plot is absurd, but my main complaint is that by forcing together two utterly different histories and cultures, each complex and obscure enough to deserve (and require) its own book to establish its reality in the reader’s mind, the novel fails to do justice to either, tossing in a few facts about each more as exotic ornaments than as parts of a coherent pattern. (Contrast, say, Mary Renault, who brilliantly brings an alien time and culture to vivid life in her novels about Ancient Greece.) Furthermore, though this is a minor irritation, it’s written in standard Historical Novelese, with solemn avoidance of contractions and use of musty words and turns of phrase: “I cannot tell. Charles has no money to pay mercenaries and is not like to get any. I do not think that the war will go beyond the seas, since I cannot see that anyone will aid my brother. In any case, Parliament blockades the sea…”

However, I did learn some interesting words. For instance, did you know that spagyric is an old word meaning ‘alchemy,’ ‘alchemist,’ or ‘alchemical’? (1593 G. HARVEY Pierce’s Super. 29 Yet who such monarches for Phisique, Chirurgery, Spagirique,.. as some of these arrant impostors?; 1613 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN Cypress Grove Wks. 127 Can the spagyrick by his art restore, for a Space, to the dry and withered Rose, the natural Purple and Blush; c1643 LD. HERBERT Autobiog. 49 As for the Chymic or Spagyric Medicines, I cannot commend them to the use of my posterity.) And in investigating the Palatinate I learned that “In the Golden Bull of 1356, the Palatinate was made one of the secular electorates, and given the hereditary offices of Archsteward (Erztruchseß) of the Empire and Imperial Vicar (Reichsverweser) of the western half of Germany. From this time forth, the Count Palatine of the Rhine was usually known as the Elector Palatine (Kurfürst von der Pfalz)”—I’m always on the lookout for impressive titles.

But what brought me up short was discovering that the word Yoruba is a recent creation; the page on Oyo linked above says it originated “during the nineteenth century, applied not by the Yoruba themselves but by outsiders to describe a series of city-states where variations of the same language were spoken.” Andrew Dalby’s Dictionary of Languages agrees: “Yoruba was originally an outsiders’ name for the language and people, but it has long been widely accepted.” The OED just says “Native name”; does anybody have any further information on the origin of the word?

By the way, if you have any interest in the most famous Yoruba writer, Wole Soyinka, please read the long and thoughtful comment by “St Antonym” in this Cassandra Pages thread.