It’s time once again to play Is This English? I’ve learned over the years that a usage that seems completely wrong to me may be perfectly OK, or at least marginally acceptable, to other native speakers, and I’ve got one from today’s NY Times I want to get opinions on. The story, by Randal C. Archibold, is about a group of James Dean fans, one of them named Rick Young, who met at the California intersection where Dean was killed in a car crash fifty years ago (the story is datelined Cholame, which is pronounced sho-LAM, like “show Lamb”); the sentence I want to bring to your attention reads as follows: “In Mr. Young’s midst on this parched plain between Los Angeles and San Francisco was Scott Brimigion, a salesman from Valencia, Calif., and a dead ringer for Dean, with his red jacket, white T-shirt, blue jeans, pompadour and pouty look.” I was, shall we say, taken aback by this use of “midst”; to me, the only thing it can mean is that Mr. Brimigion was inside Mr. Young, or at the very least underneath his clothing. I would have written “in Mr. Young’s vicinity.” But the language has been changing faster than I can keep up with it for some time now; is there anyone out there for whom this is a normal, or at least acceptable, phrase?

That’s the title of a new book about Yiddish by Michael Wex; William Grimes’s review in the NY Times [archived] makes it sound like a lot of fun:

…”Born to Kvetch” is much more than a greatest-hits collection of colorful Yiddish expressions. It is a thoughtful inquiry into the religious and cultural substrata of Yiddish, the underlying harmonic structure that allows the language to sing, usually in a mournful minor key.
Yiddish is the language par excellence of complaint. How could it be otherwise? It took root among Jews scattered across Western Europe during the Middle Ages and evolved over centuries of persecution and transience. It is, Mr. Wex writes, “the national language of nowhere,” the medium of expression for a people without a home. “Judaism is defined by exile, and exile without complaint is tourism,” as Mr. Wex neatly puts it…
…The Jews who transmuted German into Yiddish were steeped in Jewish law, whose style and phraseology made their way into the developing language and put down deep roots. Yiddish thrives on argument, hairsplitting and arcane points of law and proper behavior. Half the time, Yiddish itself is the object of dispute, a language, Mr. Wex writes, “in which you can’t open your mouth without finding out that, no matter what you’re saying, you’re saying it wrong.”
When you get it right, it can be a beautiful thing. Or a lethal weapon. Yiddish excels at the fine art of the insult and the curse, or klole, which Mr. Wex, in a chapter titled “You Should Grow Like an Onion,” calls “the kvetch-militant.” Americans generally stick to short, efficient four-letter words when doling out abuse. Yiddish has lots of those, too, and it abounds in terse put-downs like “shtik fleysh mit oygn.” Applied to a stupid person, it means “a piece of meat with eyes.” More often, though, Yiddish speakers, like the Elizabethans, like to exploit the full resources of the language when the occasion requires…
Yiddish is not a “have a nice day” language. “How are you?,” a perfectly innocent question in English, is a provocation in Yiddish, which does not lend itself to happy talk. “How should I be?” is a fairly neutral answer to the question. Theoretically it is possible to say “gants gut” (“real good”), but this is a phrase that the author says he has never heard in his life. “As a response to a Yiddish question, it marks you as someone who knows some Yiddish words but doesn’t really understand the language,” he writes…
Mr. Wex has perfect pitch. He always finds the precise word, the most vivid metaphor, for his juicy Yiddishisms, and he enjoys teasing out complexities. His tour through the vocabulary of traditional punishments meted out to schoolchildren, collectively known as the “matnas yad,” or “gift of the hand,” may be his finest riff, a subtly differentiated taxonomy of pain that starts with the “knip” (“pinch”) and proceeds to the “shnel” (“flick”), the “patsh” (“slap”) the “zets” (“hard slap”) and the “flem” (“resounding smack”).
At the far end lies the “khmal” or “khmalye,” “the all-out murder-one wallop that makes its victims ‘zen kroke mit lemberik.’ ” It’s so hard, in other words, that the student sees Krakow as his head snaps forward and Lemberg (present-day Lviv in Ukraine) on the return trip.

I remember “Such a zets I’ll give you!” from my childhood immersion in the early Mad Magazine; I’m glad to know its exact place in the continuum of smiting.

(Via Language Geek.)

Armeniapedia is “an online encyclopedia about Armenia that anyone can edit.” It has sections on history, society, food, and so on, but of course what particularly interests me is the language section, which includes lessons in Eastern Armenian (the dialect spoken in Armenia, Russia and Iran). Armenian has such a pretty alphabet I’ve always wanted to pick some up; maybe this will give me the impetus. (Via Plep, who I hope is enjoying his holiday!)

I liked floor_mice’s post so much I thought I’d translate it for the non-Russophones among us:

Not long ago we discovered a neighborhood… park? Well, a well-kept area under high-voltage wires, anyway, much like similar places in Russia where dog-lovers and pets walk their leashes. The difference is that throughout the “park” winds an asphalt path, the grass is mowed, the blackberry bushes are thoughtfully trimmed into little round islands so that you can pick the berries just by strolling around, without having to push through the brambles.
As you enter the park there’s a plywood board with simple rules: no alcoholic beverages, no fires, don’t let your dog off the leash, and be sure to pick up the… products of metabolic activity. And there’s a little roll of clean new black plastic bags, and all through the park are placed bins where the bags can be deposited when full.
All this is just setting the stage; the story follows.
So today I’m walking my basset hound; she’s as timid and shy as a gazelle girl from the Smolny Institute, so as soon as we catch sight of another dog with its master, we want to know whether they’re friendly.
Coming towards us is a short, elderly gentleman, in a snow-white, ironed silk shirt, pants with a sharp crease, and Italian shoes. (Those who live in the States will understand why I stress these details of his clothing.) He’s walking a huge, magnificent, almost black Alsatian. Ears – THIS big! Muzzle – THIS big! Tail – Budyonny‘s shaggy saber.
Naturally, I want to find out from a distance whether they are friendly to sausage-dogs and other representatives of the animal kingdom, so I inquire. To which I immediately get the question: “What’s your native language?” Without a moment’s hesitation, I brazenly respond: “Russian, what’s yours?”
“You know,” the gentleman says politely, “I was born in Manchester and my wife is French, and at home we speak only French, so my dog doesn’t understand English words.”
“Oh, how well I understand,” I say. “My dog doesn’t have a clue about English, but in Russian she even gets the intonation.”
“What city in Russia would you be from?”
“I’d be from Leningrad,” I answer.
“Ah, so you too are from Europe!”
“Yes,” I say intelligently, “we’re practically neighbors on the map of Europe.”
“Do you know the word nostalgie?” he suddenly asks me.
“Yes.”
“And do you like America? – you can say what you think, it won’t offend me either way.”
“I’m quite comfortable here, thanks,” I say.
“You know, I don’t care for it. I’ve lived here 45 years. Before it was all right, but now I’m always dreaming about Manchester. Nostalgie…
“Maybe it’s not America? Maybe you’re longing for the time when you were young?”
“You know,” he says, “my children have grown up here and graduated from college, I have a nice house, a beautiful car, money… but my wife speaks French in her dreams… she’s French, you know… and I dream of Manchester, I play children’s games there…”
“Nostalgie,” I say.
“Yes, my dog doesn’t understand a word of English,” he says, and his eyes swim away to Manchester.
“Mine too,” I say.
“Language is our nostalgie,” he says.
He takes my hand and presses it in his weak old-man’s handshake, like the touch of a child, and says something to his dog in French, and they go out by the path along which we’d just arrived.
“Well, let’s go home,” I tell my little sausage in Russian, and we leave the park without looking back.

Thanks to Tatyana for the link and for her help with Russian, and to Bonnie for her help with English.

Update (Dec. 2023). Alas, the linked post was not saved by the Wayback Machine, and the few snapshots of the blog don’t go past April 5th, 2005. I guess the original is unretrievable.

This has been around for almost nine years, but I’d somehow missed it until now.

Third, there is NO evidence that transitional languages ever existed. What use is half a language? A noun without verbs conveys no meaning! Sure, there is middle and old- English. But these are ENGLISH! A complete nontransitional language. We do not deny that micro-linguistics can happen, but this process can create only DIALECTS. There is NO EVIDENCE that a series of random micro-linguistic events can create a WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE. I’ll believe in Macro-linguistics when I see a video tape of a child growing up in an Eskimo village suddenly become fluent in Armenian!

Heh. (Via Taccuino di traduzione [25/09/2005].)

One of my favorite correspondents (thanks, Carol!) has sent me a NY Times story [archived] by Nicholas Wade about “a new way of linking languages, which [linguists] say has allowed them to reconstruct a network of the languages spoken in islands near New Guinea.”

The new method is designed for languages so old that little trace of their common vocabulary remains. It forges connections between languages through grammatical features, which change less quickly than words.

With the new tool, historians may be able to peer considerably further back in time than the 5,000 to 7,000 years or so that many linguists see as the limit beyond which no sure connections can be made between languages. The authors of the new method say the relationships they can construct may be 10,000 years or older.

The researchers, who were led by Michael Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Holland, have published their work in the current issue of Science.

I know nothing about the Papuan languages, so I can’t evaluate the conclusions they come to, but it bothers me that the scientist quoted praising the approach and saying it will be “widely emulated” is a biologist, not a linguist. None of my fellow linguabloggers has discussed the story, so consider this a call for comment: anybody have an informed opinion on whether this is valuable or just another bit of linguistic cold fusion?

People keep e-mailing me articles based on a new book called The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World, by Adam Jacot De Boinod. (The publisher must have one hell of a PR person.) I didn’t really feel like going into the “weird furrin words” thing again, so I’m glad to report that Benjamin Zimmer has done a good job in Language Log. He’s a little too polite for my taste, calling it “unfair to prejudge de Boinod’s book based solely on early press accounts” (if you can’t be unfair about fake language mavens, who can you be unfair about?), but he demolishes the Malay material with gusto. And he provides this delightful anecdote:

As an aside, the reliance on sketchy online dictionaries and wordlists can yield unintentionally humorous results. Take, for instance, the Maserati Kubang. Unveiled in 2003, this “concept car” is supposedly named after “a wind over Java.” (Maserati has a tradition of naming cars after exotic-sounding winds.) Close, but no cigar — the actual word is kumbang, not kubang. Angin kumbang literally means “bumblebee wind” in Javanese and Indonesian, and it refers to a very dry south or southwesterly wind that blows into the port of Cirebon on the north coast of Java. But this got mangled on various websites listing winds of the world…, and kumbang was changed to kubang. What does kubang mean in Indonesian? “Mudhole, mud puddle, quagmire.” Probably not the image Maserati was going for!

The Maserati Mudhole—has a ring to it, doesn’t it?

That’s the title of Volume 2, number 2 (summer 2003) of EnterText, an “interdisciplinary e-journal for cultural and historical studies and creative work” out of Brunel University. The issue has sections on Postcolonial Translation (e.g., John Gilmore on “Parrots, Poets and Philosophers: Language and Empire in the Eighteenth Century“), Transcreation (J. Gill Holland, “Teasing out an English Translation from a Classical Chinese Poem: with a translation from T’ao Ch’ien“; Debjani Chatterjee, “An Introduction to the Ghazal“), and Languages of the Americas (César Itier, “Quechua, Aymara and other Andean Languages: Historical, Linguistic and Socio-linguistic Aspects“; Paul Goulder, “The Languages of Peru: their Past, Present and Future Survival“). Lots of interesting-sounding stuff; I should warn you that the papers themselves are pdf files. (Via wood s lot.)

[Read more…]

Michele Berdy, the Moscow Times language columnist, reviews a new dictionary of Soviet-era jargon:

The dictionary, compiled and newly revised by the linguists Valery Mokiyenko and Tatyana Nikitina, is titled Толковый Словарь Языка Совдепии [Explanatory dictionary of the language of Sovdepia], a name which, like much of the language it contains, is hellishly difficult to translate. Cовдеп was the abbreviation of Cовет депутатов (in full form, the “council of worker, peasant and Red Army deputies”) that came to be shorthand for the Soviet Union. Over time, it came to be used especially in the form Cовдепия as a derogatory phrase for the worst of the old regime. To convey the flavor of the original, it might be translated as “The Dictionary of the Worker’s Paradise.”
For those who have forgotten that world or never visited it, the dictionary is a gold mine of information. It deciphers all those abbreviations that once slid off the tongue and now are frustratingly opaque: КCCР? Казахская Социалистическая Советская Республика (Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic). ПГК? Партийно-государственный контроль (party-state control). БПП? Без права переписки (without the right to correspondence, part of a prison sentence that really meant execution)…
If you read the dictionary the way I did, from start to finish as if it were a novel — and with an old Bulat Okudzhava tape playing in the background — you dissolve into the Soviet past, which visually comes to life with illustrations of posters and billboards. Anyone who wants to read Bulgakov or Ilf and Petrov in the original Russian will find this dictionary indispensable.

Sounds like a useful thing to have, even if “indispensable” may be overstating it in this era when such expressions can presumably be deciphered via the magic of search engines. (My thanks to John McChesney-Young for the heads-up.)

While trying to figure out if Muskogean (the language family to which Choctaw and Chickasaw, among others, belong) is considered to be part of any larger grouping (apparently some people take it for granted it’s part of the “Hokan-Siouxan” group while others treat it as independent, Wikipedia calls Hokan itself “a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California and Mexico” and says “few linguists today expect Hokan as a whole to prove to be valid,” and I’m certainly not qualified to even have a thought about the matter), I ran across an interesting paper (pdf file; abstract here) by Prof. George Aaron Broadwell called “Reconstructing Proto-Muskogean Language and Prehistory: Preliminary results” that’s chock-full of the kind of detailed lexical comparisons and reconstructions I so enjoy. One thing that makes it exotic from the point of view of someone trained in Indo-European (where the inherited vocabulary includes terms for ‘beech,’ ‘birch,’ ‘wolf,’ and ‘salmon’) is the list of “Reconstructable Proto-Muskogean terms,” which includes words for chestnut, chicken snake, chickenhawk, chigger, chinquapin, chipmunk, civet cat (?), clam/spoon, copperhead, corn, cotton, and crawfish, to take only the c‘s (the full list is on pages 15-16 of the paper). But what impelled me to post about it is the point he makes about a common problem in historical linguistics:

How can we reconcile the presence of a word for corn with the generally accepted archaeological position that corn was not present in the southeast until considerably later, ca. A.D. 700?…

A common approach in dismissing linguistic evidence that does not correlate with the archaeological results is to suggest that the reference of the words has changed through time (cf. Renfrew 1988). For example, the word for corn might have originally referred to some other grain. When corn was introduced to the southeast the word for the older grain might have been applied to the new-comer.

However, it seems unlikely that speakers of all the different languages in the family would have coincidentally decided to call the new grain the same thing. Once a language has split into two mutually unintelligable daughter languages, the speakers do not consult with each other about naming new phenomena.

The unlikeliness of this hypothesis increases when we realise that we must also assume that the words for shucking corn and corn riddle originally applied other actions and objects, and that once again widely separated people have coincidentally chosen the same words for actions and objects associated with the new grain.

I therefore conclude that presence of a word for corn in Proto-Muskogean constitutes a genuine conflict between the linguistic and archaeological data.

I wish all historical linguists were so forthright about the difficulties involved in trying to correlate linguistic and archeological evidence.

Oh, and I learned a new word, lamb’s-quarters (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, the copyeditor’s bible, hyphenates it; the AHD does not), the common name for Chenopodium album, a kind of goosefoot that M-W says is “sometimes used as greens” but AHD simply, and unkindly, calls a “weed”; it’s taahwa in Creek and taani’ in Chickasaw. You can get a USDA “plant profile” here, see some more pictures here, and get ideas about collecting and eating it here. I’d still like to know how it got its striking name, though.