Another pair of unrelated links:
1) The Roguish Chrestomath q_pheevr has posted a brilliant essay related to certain ongoing manifestations of know-nothingism; it begins:

Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether “Wrathful Dispersion Theory,” as it is called, should be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary theories of historical linguistics. It is an emotionally charged question, for linguistics is widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum—a hard science, but not a difficult one to do in the classroom; an area of study that teaches students the essentials of scientific reasoning, but that at the same time touches on the spiritual essence of what it means to be human, for it is of course language that separates us from our cousins the apes.
The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom…

Go, read, enjoy. (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)
2) Richard Nunley, for many years professor of English at Berkshire Community College and now retired to Portland, Oregon, has a nice piece in my local paper, the Berkshire Eagle, on the expression “There you go”; he begins by describing a conversation with a man “shoveling nice black mulch into a wheelbarrow”:

Between shovelfuls he gave me a friendly nod as I passed by.
“That’s a good way to work off the pumpkin pie,” it emboldened me to reply.
“There you go!” he said with a chuckle.
There you go.
I have been ruminating ever since on that idiom of genial agreement. It is one of those useful phrases that oil social conversation. I am intrigued by its difference from “There you go.” That means something different — “all done,” “all set,” “transaction completed,” “be on your way now.”
“There you go” is one of a family of phrases — “Right you are,” “You said it,” “You’ve got it,” “You’re telling me” — all meaning some shade of “You’re right,” “I agree.” Each phrase, though, is slightly different in what it conveys — an echo of an earlier decade or level of gentility.
To a sensitive ear, they are not interchangeable. “Tell me about it,” though superficially expressing agreement, gives voice to a decidedly different mood. It carries a weary sense of grievance, a flavor of bitterness — “Why presume to tell me what I already know more about than you do?”
And though the words were almost the same, Ronald Reagan’s famous “There you go again” in one of the presidential debates, meant something entirely different from what the mulcher meant…

He ends with the following rumination:

[Read more…]

Two things that have nothing to do with one another; I figure those who don’t know Russian can enjoy the strange bird name.

1) I visited OEDILF (The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, previously discussed here), and the Random Limerick happened to feature the word aberdevine:

When naming the aberdevine,
It’s siskin that birders assign.
I think the word finch
Might suffice in a pinch,
And I’ve heard even bird would be fine.

(The excellent limerick is by Tim Alborn, who’s done over a thousand of them.) Of course I looked it up in the OED, and found that the etymology was “unascertained,” which is annoying but unsurprising. What struck me was the definition: “A bird-fanciers’ name of the siskin.” Why don’t bird-fanciers call the siskin a siskin? But it does sound grander, and perhaps this citation gives a clue:
1768 PENNANT Brit. Zool. II. 310 It [the siskin] is to be met with in the bird shops in London, and.. sells at a higher price than the merit of its song deserves: it is known there by the name of the Aberdavine.

2) I just started reading Nabokov’s 1938 story Истребление тиранов [Istreblenie tiranov, “Tyrants destroyed”], and one of the first words that sent me to the dictionaries was застречка in “и уже нельзя было представить себе… что под эту губу можно залезть пальцем, чтобы выковырнуть застречку пищи из-за гнилого резца” [‘and you could no longer imagine… the possibility of a finger’s slipping beneath that lip to winkle out a zastrechka of food from behind a rotting incisor’]. It’s not actually in the dictionaries, but it’s an obvious diminutive of it could be related to zastrékha, which Oxford defines as a dialect form of стреха [strekhá] ‘eaves.’ So far, so good (a very Nabokovian image, a bit of food envisioned as a tiny eaves projecting from the roof of a tooth), but out of habit I looked up eaves in the English-Russian volume, where I found it defined as карниз [karniz], which means ‘cornice’! I checked Katzner, who gave стреха as the definition, and sighed with satisfaction. But then I made the fatal decision to look it up in a third source, the Penguin Russian Dictionary, which defined it as свес крыши [sves kryshi], ‘overhang of a roof’! I can only assume that strekhá is not in common use (Ozhegov says it’s used of a wooden house or izba), and that the normal way to talk about that part of a roof is as Penguin says. But, as always, I’d appreciate input from actual Russian speakers.

Addendum. In the comments, artm says the word sounds weird but might mean ‘something that is stuck’ (застряло [zastryalo]). Also, I realized that the diminutive of застреха should be застрешка (which is in fact in Dahl). But Dahl has застрека [zástreka] in the sense of ‘gutter (under the eaves),’ whose diminutive would be застречка… but the sense doesn’t work here. If anyone has the Collected Stories, could you please check the translation there? And while you’re at it, what’s the translation of плесницах in the first sentence of part 3: “When the gods took earthly form and… walked with muscular legs in not yet dusty плесницах [plesnitsakh]”? It seems to be some sort of ecclesiastical footwear, but I’d dearly love to know what Nabokov had in mind, and I presume he supervised the translation pretty closely.

As part of his online Grammar of the Polish Language, Grzegorz Jagodziński has a list of Polish etymologies, a table of numerals in some of the main IE languages, and a detailed discussion of the etymology of the Polish (and other IE) numerals, the last-named perhaps the most interesting; here’s one of the shorter sections:

Pięć (5)

PS †pętь;, originally a numeral substantive *penkʷtis (Skr. paŋktiṣ; ‘the number five’) from the proper numeral *penkʷe (Slavic languages have preserved only the numerals 1-4, cf. Gr. pénte, dial. pémpe, Lat. quīnque < *kʷenkʷe with assimilation; the contrary assimilation can be observed in Goth. fimf < *pempe, and surely in Gr. pémptos < *penkʷtos, because *kʷ before a consonant developed into k in this language under normal conditions). In the collective form pięcioro the formant –er– is present. If it is transferred from czworo, it must have happened as early as in Balto-Slavic, cf. Lith. penkerì.

The numeral pięć is connected to the substantive pięść < †pęstь;, cf. Germ. Faust, Engl. fist < †funxsti– < *pn̥kʷ-sti- (originally ‘hand’; the Slavic form can, even if need not, come from the root with full vocalism), cf. also Engl. finger < *pn̥kʷ-r-. From the same stem, piądź, piędź < *penkʷ-dhi- ‘span, inch of ground’ seems to originate, or we can have the related stem *pendh- here. Connections with Gr. pygmḗ; and Lat. pugnus ‘fist’ (<*pug– < ? *pogʷ-) would also be possible, at least in the distant past.

An interesting problem is caused by Lith. kùmštis, Prus. kuntis ‘fist’ < *kumpstis < *punkstis (metathesis) < *pn̥kʷ-sti-. However we can see further connection also to Ltv. kàmpt ‘grab, catch’, and yet further to Lat. capere ‘catch’ (probably from there Engl. keep) and PG †xabē– (cf. Engl. have). Perhaps the same stem, but with irregular phonetic changes, is present in Lat. habēre ‘have’ < *ghəbh– ~ *kəp-, cf. also modern Pol. nagabywać ‘to ply, to molest, to importune’ and OPol. gabać ‘to attack’, Lith. góbti ‘to take possession of sth.’ < *ghōbh-. An obstacle for a reconstruction of Proto-IE stems of different words meaning ‘5’, ‘hand’, ‘catch’, ‘take’ and ‘have’ is the difference of the velar kʷ ~ k (gh). We must not forget, however, that we may talk about a very distant relationship only, and during thousands of years many irregular changes might have occurred.

Lots of fun for anyone interested in Slavic and Indo-European. (The numeral etymology page via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

A few weeks ago I posted Silesians, linking to an article on the history and current situation of that minority and their dialect; I have just gotten an e-mail from Tomasz Kamusella, the author of the article, linking to his paper on “The Szlonzoks and their Language: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian Nationalism” (pdf, accessible from this page) and his “small book on the political underpinnings of the triple classification of the Slavic languages” (pdf, accessible from here). There’s a lot of interesting material there, and I was particularly struck by the fact that he had a hard time getting his dissertation accepted because it “presented an incorrect picture of the Upper Silesian past”: being a Pole, he “should have emphasized ‘the continual and primordial Polishness of Upper Silesia.'” Oh, how I hate that kind of proudly ignorant nationalism! At any rate, he writes:

I am finishing my Habilitationsschrift (a kind of 2nd PhD dissertation, like dokotorskaia in Russia) on language politics and nationalisms in Central Europe during the 19th and 20th cc. It focuses on Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak nationalisms and languages. And I need help most with this work, namely some specialist to read through the chapters to see if I did not commit some glaring errors, plus help with streamling my non-native English usage. To let you or some other person who might see if she/he could help, what my work is about I could send you one or two chapters… I will be correcting the manuscript at least until mid-2006 before proposing it to some publishers.

If anyone’s interested in helping further what sounds like a worthy project, write Tomasz at tomek672 @ poczta.onet.pl — I’m sure he’ll put you in the acknowledgments!

Lameen Souag of Jabal al-Lughat doesn’t post freqently, but when he does, it’s always interesting. His latest entry discusses “the oldest dictionary of an African language.” He rejects the claim of Carradori’s Dictionary of 17th Century Kenzi Nubian, and says:

The oldest arguable dictionary of an African language that I am aware of so far is the Greek-Coptic Glossary of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, which apparently dates back to the 6th century. Ibn al-‘Assal’s Arabic-Coptic sullam muqaffa, written in the 1200s, can quite unhesitatingly be described as a dictionary; following a then-current Arabic tradition, it was arranged alphabetically from the last letter of the word backwards (so, for instance, “apple” would be close to “people” but far from “apricot”.) This arrangement was meant to aid in the composition of rhymed prose and verse…
After Coptic, the next oldest is an Arabic-Berber lexicon written in 1145, containing some two thousand words… What other African dictionaries predate Carradori’s? I don’t know, but I can hazard some guesses—Geez, Swahili, Kanuri, and Nubian itself would certainly be worth checking.

Anybody have any contributions?

A few months ago I issued a preliminary report on Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language; prompted by a request from C. Max Magee of The Millions to name my favorite language books of the year (he’s posted them here), I decided it was high time I gave a final assessment. I enjoyed the book a great deal and hope a lot of people read it; it gives a good sense of how language changes and what it is historical linguists study, and it’s written very engagingly, with digressions and interpolated dialogues à la Hofstadter.
But I have one major gripe with it, which is that the latter part of the book is increasingly taken up with Deutscher’s own theories about the origin of the Semitic verbal system, with its fixed grid of consonants and changing vowel patterns. It’s a very interesting topic to a linguist, but to include it in a book for the general reader is a bad idea: the reader is not in a position to judge the theory, and is likely to accept it simply because the book is enjoyable and the rest of the information seems reliable. It’s like sticking an untried medicine in with the Halloween candy. I would have advised Deutscher to save the Semitic verbs for a specialized journal and use the space saved with more examples of undoubted linguistic facts to dazzle and educate the lay reader.
But that’s water under the bridge. The book is as it is, and it’s a fine read anyway. Go forth, Unfolding, and spread enlightenment!

A new blog, amidaworld, focuses on Japanese and life in Japan, and there’s already a lot of interesting material; a couple of entries particularly relevant here:

New Japanese Word describes his discovery of the Wikipedia page for Mt. Fuji, “where I learned a great new Japanese phrase: ‘Fujiyama geisha,’ the Japan that is misunderstood by the West. I never heard it used in Japan, though there were many instances where it could have been: ‘Kill Bill? That movie was so full of Fujiyama geisha nonsense!'” (As the Wiki page makes clear, the Japanese phrase 富士山 is read Fuji-san, not “Fujiyama,” by native speakers.)

Lost in Translation in Translation quotes a Confucius saying so gnomic nobody’s known what it means for the last couple of millennia:

The Analects of Confucius Book 3 number 5:
子曰：夷狄之有君，不如諸夏之亡也
D.C. Lau’s translation:
“The Master said, ‘Barbarian tribes with their rulers are inferior to Chinese states without them.'”
Arthur Waley’s translation of the same passage:
“The Master said, ‘The barbarians of the East and North have retained their princes. They are not in such a state of decay as we in China.'”
So which is it—is China better or are the barbarians? We don’t need to feel bad. Looking at commentaries from the Han Dynasty onward, we can see Chinese people of different eras were just as lost as we are, and also needed a “translation.” They had to explain the text in more understandable language.
Many commentators read 亡 (Waley’s “decay”) as being 無 (Lau’s “without”), and then there’s the matter of what you want to do with the 不如, “not like.” Both Lau- and Waley-style interpretations can be found.

Amida’s proposed translation: “The Master said, ‘The Yi and the Di with rulers are not like the states of Xia without them,'” accompanied by “a big fat footnote,” which seems to me the ideal solution. The comment thread has a fascinating discussion of whether the impossibility of knowing the author’s intent in such cases is a good or a bad thing. (In my younger days I would have felt the same frustration as Azuma, but I’ve come to terms with the unknowability of the past and can now share Amida’s pleasure in the fact that “the openness of the text has created space for all sorts of readings.”

There’s a follow-up post by Matt of No-sword comparing translations of an almost equally difficult passage (傳不習乎 in Analects 1:4), “which character-by-character is ‘transmit not practise (question)'”; in the comments, Amida provides an even more cryptic example:

Maybe you know the example of Confucius’ summarizing the entire Shijing with one line from it, 思無邪. That’s often thought of as meaning “Think no evil,” but in the days of the Shijing 思 was just an exclamatory particle, and 邪 meant straying or deviating from a line (as in a team of horses pulling something) so it should be “Ah—no straying.” What did Confucius mean? Was he playing on words? Did everybody get him wrong? Who knows—but it makes for good debate in commentaries.

John Ross presses the claims of disappearing languages in When a Language Dies:

Because just a few people speak most of the world’s languages—4% of the world’s people speak 96% of its languages—most linguistic systems are extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life and death.

Linguistic diversity flourishes in the south—half of the world’s languages are concentrated in just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Australia, India, Nigeria, Cameroon, Brazil, and Mexico. Mexico’s Oaxaca state, smaller than Portugal, is host to 16 distinct ethnic groups and speaks more languages than all of Europe.

“Cuando muere una lengua
todo lo que hay en el mundo,
mares y rios,
animales y plantas,
ni se piensen, ni se pronuncian
con atisbos, con sonidos,
que no existan ya.”
“When a language dies,
all that there is in this world,
oceans and rivers,
animals and plants,
do not think of them,
do not pronounce their names,
they do not exist now.”

If each language was a room than Mexico would be a great mansion of 62 rooms, linguist/poet/historian Carlos Montemayor reflected at a recent presentation of a newly translated volume of Mexican indigenous poetry. “These languages are not dialects but rather complete linguistic systems. Purepecha is as complete as Greek, Maya as complete as Italian. There are no superior language systems. All have grammar and syntax and vocabulary and etymology. It is an expression of cultural racism to consider indigenous languages to be dialects.”

Of course it’s not necessarily a huge tragedy every time a language dies, but it is a shame if you enjoy diversity, and if it can be prevented or delayed by helping people record and pass on their own languages, I’m all for it. And I do enjoy rants on the subject. People should be passionate about language! (Yes, even the people who are wrong-headedly passionate about changes in English; I deplore their ignorance but admire their passion.)

Via wood s lot.

The Classical Language Instruction Project “contains samples of Greek and Latin prose and poetry texts, read by various scholars and in different styles. It is designed to help students of the classical languages to acquaint themselves with the sound of Greek and Latin and to practice their own reading skills.” (Via wood s lot.)

Update (Dec. 2021). The Classical Language Instruction Project website is dead, and the Internet Archive’s many alleged captures go to blank pages (e.g.). Sic transit.

This is fun for those of us who spend our time poring over books like Compendium of the World’s Languages: list all the living languages you can without looking them up. I’ve come up with 242 (I had provisionally put down my pencil when it suddenly occurred to me I’d completely forgotten about Balto-Slavic); as I said in the post at Tenser, said the Tensor, where I found this pastime (you probably shouldn’t click on the “post” link if you’re going to try it yourself, since he provides his own list therein), “it’s very frustrating when you know there’s a language in a particular spot but you can’t remember the name. (For instance, I could only remember three of the four main Dravidian languages, and there’s two Siberian languages with very similar names that are staying stubbornly on the tip of my tongue…).”