It turns out Eskimo doesn’t mean ‘eater of raw meat’:

In spite of the tenacity of the belief, both among Algonquian speakers and in the anthropological and general literature […] that Eskimo means ‘raw-meat eaters’, this explanation fits only the cited Ojibwa forms (containing Proto-Algonquian *ashk- ‘raw’ and *po- ‘eat’) and cannot be correct for the presumed Montagnais source of the word Eskimo itself. […] The Montagnais word awassimew (of which ay- [in ayassimew ‘Micmac’] is a reduplication) and its unreduplicated Attikamek cognate [ashkimew ‘Eskimo’] exactly match Montagnais assimew, Ojibwa ashkime ‘she nets a snowshoe’, and an origin from a form meaning ‘snowshoe-netter’ could be considered if the original Montagnais application (presumably before Montagnais contact with Eskimos) were to Algonquians.

Too late for the reputation of the English word, but good to know. (Thanks to Rusty Brooks for linking to this in his MetaFilter comment.)

Oh, and even if you prefer to avoid Eskimo, you can’t just refer to everyone as Inuit. The situation is complicated. There’s an interesting discussion by Steve Sailer here:

It’s generally assumed among up-to-date English-speakers that an ethnic group should be called by whatever it calls itself, not what outsiders call it.
Yet, practically no one outside of the Anglosphere worries about this principle at all. For example, Inuit Eskimos call French Canadians “Uiuinaat” or “Guiguinaat,” from the French word “oui” for “yes.” Anglophones are known as “Qallunaat.”

Considering how hard it is for English-speakers to correctly pronounce words even from other European languages that share our basic alphabet, asking Americans to accurately transliterate words from radically different phonetic structures would appear close to hopeless.

It’s become common, for instance, for Western journalists to refer to the “Qu’ran” [sic; should be “Qur’an”] instead of the traditional spelling of “Koran,” but virtually no American understands what sound the apostrophe in “Qu’ran” stands for. Nor could many even produce that sound properly.

Beyond the pronunciation difficulties, outsiders’ names are actually often more useful than insiders’ names for themselves.

Outsiders can enjoy a broader perspective that lets them see the similarities among ethnic subdivisions. In contrast, insiders can be so obsessed with small differences between themselves and their kin that they can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s why insiders’ names — like “Inuit” — sometimes discriminate against smaller groups, such as the Yup’ik Eskimos.

Tom Alton, the editor of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks’ Alaska Native Language Center, pointed out, “The name ‘Eskimo’ is considered derogatory in some areas of the North but is still acceptable in Alaska, mainly because Alaska includes Yup’ik people who are closely related culturally and linguistically but are not Inuit. ‘Eskimo’ includes Yup’ik as well as Inuit.”

Further, the word “Eskimo” is less ethnocentric than is “Inuit,” which implicitly draws a distinction between “the people” (the Inuit) and all those non-Inuit. Ironically, the movement to change ethnic names to those used by the groups themselves frequently restores these kind of self-glorifying terms. For example, Comanche Indians are now supposed to called the “Numunuu,” which means “the people.”

Sailer continues with a great discussion of why it’s ridiculous to use “San” for Bushmen, who hate the term: “It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say ‘San’ and I say ‘San,’ then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics.”

This Live Journal features Russian slang words and expressions, with stressed syllables helpfully indicated in red. One useful post [scroll down to Friday, August 5, 2005, 6:58PM – That’s, Like, Totally Bad Russian] reprints a Michele Berdy Moscow Times column about слова-паразиты, literally “parasite words.”

Sometimes they are used as intensifiers, but more often they just seem to appear in your speech all by themselves. Nasty little parasites that they are, you don’t notice them until they have taken over half your utterances. And then ridding your speech of them is virtually impossible.

Like all speakers of Russian in Moscow, I’ve been infected by the parasite как бы. This is a perfectly useful phrase that means “as if.” You can use it legitimately in sentences like, Как бы в шутку он сказал, что хочет жениться. А, может быть, он серьёзно? (As if in jest, he said he wanted to get married. But maybe he’s serious?) According to linguists, как бы as a parasite originated in St. Petersburg, but it has swept through Moscow like a particularly virulent flu. It doesn’t really mean anything and is used the way some people use “like” in English. Он как бы поехал купить хлеб. (He, like, went to buy bread.)

Another parasite is типа, which, like как бы, has a legitimate use: to express a comparison or similarity. Он купил новую машину — она типа Джипа, только меньше размером. (He bought a new car — something like a Jeep, only smaller.) As a parasite it means “kinda, sorta, like.” Я, типа, хотел ей позвонить. (I kinda wanted to give her a call.) It can also be used to indicate a quote: Она, типа, не хочет пойти сегодня в клуб сегодня. (She’s like: I don’t wanna go to the club tonight.) This can be sometimes translated by the equally appalling “go,” used in Valley Girl English to mean “say.” Он, типа, хочет выпить. И ей, типа, всё равно. (He goes: I wanna drink. And she’s like: Whatever.)

She goes on to discuss короче, конкретно, чисто, прикинь, and понимаешь. In the comments to the LJ post, there’s a joke that depends on the word типограф ‘printer’ being pronounced with the stress on the final syllable, so that it can be confused for типа граф ‘like, a count’; I thought it was tipógraf, with the stress on the penultimate, but I guess I’m behind the times as usual. (Via digenis.org.)

People seemed to appreciate my earlier post linking to Chinese texts, so I thought I’d pass along the immense treasurehouse that is the Classical Historiography for Chinese History site compiled by Professor Benjamin A. Elman (艾 爾曼) of Princeton University. The Relevant Electronic Resources page has lists of General Resources, Databases and Electronic Texts, Dictionaries, Maps and Geography, and more; the texts section has the Analects, the I Ching, the Dao De Jing (with translations into many languages), novels, poetry… you name it. And the Reference Guide to Classical Book Titles has got to be extremely useful for sinologists. Explore and enjoy. (I should mention that I found it via an anfractuous Googlepath that began with this No-sword post about a great Kyoto University Digital Library exhibition.)

Update (Oct. 2023). The Princeton site has moved here; I frankly don’t understand why they didn’t take the trouble (like decent human beings) to make sure links redirected to the new site, but it’s too much trouble for me to update all the ones above, so you’ll have to go to the new site and click the links there. At least it still exists…

The latest New Yorker is the Food Issue, featuring Judith Thurman on tofu in Japan, John Seabrook on fruit in Umbria, Malcolm Gladwell on creating the perfect cookie, and other appetizing articles, most of which are not online (including, alas, Adam Gopnik’s “Two Cooks”). But the first one, Calvin Trillin’s “Speaking of Soup,” is, and it describes his quest to learn a little Spanish in Cuenca, Ecuador, while gorging on as many servings of fanesca as he could fit in during Holy Week, the only time the thick (“marginally liquid”) fish-and-grain soup is served.

Being able to say anything I wanted to in Spanish before the moment had passed was what I’d been daydreaming about. I was thinking of the day when my response to a particularly good fanesca (the only kind of fanesca I’ve ever experienced) would no longer be limited to “delicious” or “very tasty, thank you.” I could envision myself pushing back from the table and making a statement to the waiter that was as complex as the dish itself—something like “I can’t take leave of this glorious establishment without saying, in utmost sincerity, that the fanesca I’ve just had the honor of consuming made my heart soar, or at least go pitter-patter, and I want to emphasize that each and every bean had a valiant role to play in what was, when all is said and done, a perfectly blended and modulated work of art.” In that daydream, the waiter is so impressed by my eloquence that he offers me seconds. I decline, with a short speech that reminds him of something he once read in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

As much as I enjoy Trillin’s hearty style, I was most excited about the Gopnik piece, about a British chef who specializes in every kind of meat (“nose to tail”) and a French one who uses no meat whatever (“One day, I found myself regarding a carrot in a different light, and I saw the cuisine végétale ahead of me through an open door”). I can’t link to it, but I can quote my favorite sentence, in which the author shows that his love affair with words is as powerful as Fergus Henderson’s with meat:

[Read more…]

The Germanic Lexicon Project is the new incarnation of what was the Indo-European Language Resources page.

The goal of this project is to create comprehensive online coverage of the lexicons of the early Germanic languages. All of the data is available free of charge and free of copyright or other intellectual property encumbrance…

The Texts page contains numerous copyright-expired dictionaries and grammars of the older Germanic languages. These are in various stages of being digitized. Some are available only as scanned page images. Others are available as online text, sometimes corrected and sometimes not.

The Search page allows you to search some of the texts in the collection.

The Messages board is a message board where you can discuss the early Germanic languages and digitizing historical linguistic materials. You can use it like an ordinary chat board. The message board system has an extra feature: you can make editorial comments “in the margins” of the online dictionaries. If you comment on a dictionary entry, your comment is available when that entry is displayed in the search system.

Cleasby-Vigfusson, Zoëga, Bosworth-Toller, Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language… it’s all here! The internet just keeps getting better and better. (Via the new incarnation of Glosses.net, regarding which I will permit myself a quiet “Calloo, callay!”)

John Latta, poet and proprietor of the apparently now shuttered Hotel Point, has moved to Rue Hazard, where he has been doing some “rough translating” of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Ma Haie: Un privé à Tanger 2. He interrupts the numbered paragraphs of Englished Hocquard to say:

Stray notes, translating. Th’impulse is mostly to avoid the literal: disappointment with the loss of exoticism of the French results in a certain tendency to gussy up th’English. Tant mieux. I’m trying to make a device as thrilling to the tactile tongue of the ear in English as I find even the most maladroit or mundane French original. La camionette est en panne, il me faut marcher. It is an unutterly untenable comme but. I cannot decide if my meretricious English combined with my slaughterhouse French is “up” to the task. That is, if th’execrable is of service.
It is preposterously slow work, even done “messily.” Am I entering into Hocquard’s head? No. I am riffing, rambunctious, one way to begin. Le Commanditaire, and Battman: completely unbeknownst and mystifying. The Pound lines: wolfishly aping filler for Loup qui fait sa cour pour de la nourriture. The Hammett via Marcus: “somebody ought to check that.” Don’t ask, as Philip Levine’d say.

(The “Pound lines” are in paragraph 10: “Then when the grey wolves everychone / Drink of the winds their chill small-beer / And lap o’ the snows food’s gueredon”; they’re from “Villonaud for This Yule.”)
I like his style. And currently at the bottom of the Rue is a quote that speaks to me and shames me:

[Read more…]

This page, maintained by John Cowan, “comprises a list of 736 ‘essentialist explanations’ of the form ‘Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z’.” [N.b.: 1080 as of August 2018.] I think quoting a few samples will give you the idea:

English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.
English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.
Danish is essentially Norwegian spoken with a sore throat.
German is essentially a philosophical cough.

Lots of funny stuff there. (Thanks, Thandi!)

The Yiddish Dictionary Online is just what it says; you can open it in English or Yiddish alphabetical order or use the search box. This will save me having to go over to the bookshelf and pull down my Weinreich, and most people don’t have a Weinreich to pull down, so this is a great thing to know about. (Via Plep.)

Addendum (2010). Another online dictionary is here.

The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua maintains on its website the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos, containing Spanish definitions of words peculiar to Mexico, and the Diccionario geográfico universal, whose entries often give “local pronunciation” and the Spanish adjective derived from the place name (e.g., Acaya ‘Achaea’ has the adjective aqueo ‘Achaean,’ which is logical but might not immediately occur to the inquiring mind; that for Acapulco is acapulqueño). The geographical dictionary gives Latin forms when available (Adour, latín Aturus) but no other etymologies; for Mexican place names, however, the etymology is often available via the adjective’s listing in the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos:

acapulqueño, acapulqueña. (De Acapulco, Acapolco, municipio del estado de Guerrero, del náhuatl Acapulco, literalmente = ‘lugar de grandes cañas’, de acatl ‘caña, carrizo’ + pol, aumentativo, + –co ‘en, lugar de’; la ciudad fue fundada en el siglo XVI.) 1. adj. Perteneciente o relativo a Acapulco. || 2. m. y f. Nativo o habitante de Acapulco.

There’s also a Refranero collecting popular sayings. A valuable site.

Today’s NY Times has an article [archived] by Larry Rohter on a 17th-century language still spoken in a remote corner of Brazil, língua geral or Nheengatú (Ethnologue: Nhengatu).

When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil five centuries ago, they encountered a fundamental problem: the indigenous peoples they conquered spoke more than 700 languages. Rising to the challenge, the Jesuit priests accompanying them concocted a mixture of Indian, Portuguese and African words they called “língua geral,” or the “general language,” and imposed it on their colonial subjects.

Elsewhere in Brazil, língua geral as a living, spoken tongue died off long ago. But in this remote and neglected corner of the Amazon where Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela meet, the language has not only managed to survive, it has made a remarkable comeback in recent years.

“Linguists talk of moribund languages that are going to die, but this is one that is being revitalized by new blood,” said José Ribamar Bessa Freire, author of “River of Babel: A Linguistic History of the Amazon” and a native of the region. “Though it was originally brought to the Amazon to make the colonial process viable, tribes that have lost their own mother tongue are now taking refuge in língua geral and making it an element of their identity,” he said.

Two years ago, in fact, Nheengatú, as the 30,000 or so speakers of língua geral call their language, reached a milestone. By vote of the local council, São Gabriel da Cachoeira became the only municipality in Brazil to recognize a language other than Portuguese as official, conferring that status on língua geral and two local Indian tongues.

As a result, Nheengatú, which is pronounced neen-gah-TOO and means “good talk,” is now a language that is permitted to be taught in local schools, spoken in courts and used in government documents. People who can speak língua geral have seen their value on the job market rise and are now being hired as interpreters, teachers and public health aides.

The article goes on to give more of the history of the language and report on opposition by elements of the military. (I can find no trace of “River of Babel: A Linguistic History of the Amazon,” but maybe that’s a translation of a Portuguese title. And of course “neen-gah-TOO” is a ridiculous attempt at indicating the pronunciation of the first syllable, but you know what? I give up. They can tell people to pronounce it SPIN-ach for all I care.)