Christopher Culver has a post with some nice resources for those who love Old Irish (and it’s one of those things, like Laphroaig, that you either love or hate): The Voyage of Bran and Aided Froích (‘The Death of Fróech’), both in Gaelic and English, a timeline showing the development from ogham to Modern Irish and Scots Gaelic using the word for ‘daughter’ as an example, and a photographically reproduced text of Kuno Meyer’s 1909 Irish Metrics.

While looking through my smaller Urdu-English dictionary (a mere 831 pages, as compared with Platts’ 1259), trying to get some hints as to its age and provenance (my edition says only SAPHROGRAPH CORP. Published 1969, but it’s clearly a reprint of an earlier dictionary, which I’m pretty sure is the Ferozsons, for which 1960 is the earliest date I’ve turned up), I happened on the following entry:

lāg (H) n.f. Enmity; rancour; spite; grudge; ill-feeling; cost; expenditure; a secret; spell; ratio; approach; competition; attention; affection; love; attachment; affinity; connection; relevancy; correlation.

I’ve bolded the definitions that struck me (although the whole congeries is somewhat reminiscent of Flann O’Brien’s mock-Dineen’s entry); among the phrases that follow, lāg rakhna means ‘to harbor ill-will, have a grudge against,’ and lāg lagnā means ‘to fall in love, be enamored of.’ Now, that’s what I call polysemy.

(You can see Platts’ even longer list of definitions here.)

Addendum. The title of this post is explained here by Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti.

A MetaFilter thread by OmieWise (whose Proust blog is well worth your time) introduced me to a nice site on Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino; it includes a grammar and some texts, mostly historical and cultural, although there’s also a fragment of a poem (written in Hebrew characters as well as transliteration). Visit the MeFi thread for other good links and information, mostly provided by the learned zaelic.

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?