I know you’ll all be as excited as I am to learn that the International Phonetic Association has approved the adoption of the first new symbol in twelve years into the International Phonetic Alphabet:

The symbol proposed by SIL represents the labiodental flap, a speech sound found in central and southeastern Africa. The IPA is the organization that sets the standards for the transcription of speech sounds in the world’s languages.

Dr. Kenneth Olson, SIL’s Associate International Linguistics Coordinator, proposed the new labiodental flap symbol, which is technically referred to as “a right hook ‘v’.” After review of Dr Olson’s proposal for the addition of the labiodental flap symbol, the IPA Council voted in favor of the addition. Linguists now have an agreed-upon standard for writing this sound when doing phonetic transcription—a very practical outcome of Olson’s research.

Dr. Olson encountered this speech sound when he was living among the Mono people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo… The labiodental flap sound is produced by drawing the lower lip back into the mouth well behind the upper teeth and then bringing it forward rapidly, striking the upper teeth briefly in passing. A few languages have an alternative pronunciation, called a “bilabial flap”, in which the lower lip strikes the upper lip rather than the upper teeth.

You can see an image of the new symbol on the left side of the linked page. Note, by the way, that the Wikipedia page on Mono refers to a “bilabial flap.” Tsk, tsk. (Via Tenser, said the Tensor.)

Songdog sent me a number of old Fried [Society] comics, and this one demanded to be posted at LH. On the right, we have the coiner of “no-assed”: “Sloppy, indifferent work is called half-assed. Your work, however, was thoughtful and well researched. In other words, it has no ass whatsoever.” On the left: “Half-assed is obviously just a contemporary, vulgarized variation on half-hearted. In this context, more ass is better, just as whole-hearted is better than half-hearted. Dr. Jaffe, let me congratulate you on a full-assed job, a term I just coined.” Read the opposing arguments and decide for yourself!

Ben Zimmer of Language Log has a funny demolition of a Candace Murphy article decrying, yes, “abuses and misuses” of the English language. I’ll let you enjoy the silly stuff over there; here I want to highlight one paragraph about finding new words and usages on the internet:

That’s where [Oxford lexicographer Erin] McKean has found words like farb (not authentic, badly done), nomenklatura (non-literally; by analogy), drabble (a short story of 100 words or fewer), haxie (a hack for the Macintosh operating system) and swancho (a combination poncho/sweater).

Farb, drabble, haxie, and swancho were new to me, and their definitions plausible; nomenklatura was an old friend (being a Russian term for the Soviet system in which the Communist Party would make appointments to government posts), but I just couldn’t see how it could be used to mean ‘non-literally; by analogy’ or how it would get there. “I don’t mean that literally, I mean it nomenklatura, dude!” Nope, didn’t work for me. So I wrote Erin to get some clarification, and she explained that she had been talking about a nonliteral use of the word nomenklatura itself, “that is, one that referred to people that weren’t Russians, but were metaphorically similar to the Russian nomenklatura.” Ah, all was clear! But I fear readers of “Inside Bay Area” may be misled into trying to use it as an adverb, and it will all end in tears and Safire.

Last night my wife raised the question of how old brand names are (I guessed nineteenth-century, but if anyone has any good links on the subject, please share); in the course of looking up the word brand in the OED, I noticed the headword bratticing. When I told my wife it meant ‘the furnishing of the ramparts of a castle with temporary parapets or breastworks,’ she immediately said “Temporary breastworks? That would be a good word for a brassiere.” For the millionth time, I was glad I’d married her.

Today I looked at the definition again and saw the note “From the preceding illiterate Sc. spelling bertisene, Sir Walter Scott appears to have evolved the grandiose BARTIZAN, vaguely used by him for bretising or bratticing, and accepted by later writers as a genuine historical term”; sure enough, the etymology for bartizan is:

[In no dictionary before 1800; not in Todd 1818, nor Craig 1847. Apparently first used by Sir Walter Scott, and due to a misconception of a 17th c. illiterate Sc. spelling, bertisene, for bertising, i.e. bretising, BRATTICING, f. bretasce (BRATTICE), a. OF. bretesche, ‘battlemented parapet, originally of wood and temporary.’ Bartizan is thus merely a spurious ‘modern antique,’ which had no existence in the times to which it is attributed.]

Fie, Sir Walter! But at least his misunderstanding was less embarrassing than poor Browning’s.

Frequent commenter zaelic, whose intimate knowledge of all sorts of byways of Eastern European, Jewish, Romany, and musical lore is the envy of everyone who values such things, especially me, was kind enough to send me a kucsma (pronounced KOOCH-ma) he’d picked up at the Black Lake peasant fair in Romania from a family of Gypsies from Tirgu Mures. What is a kucsma, you ask? Zaelic defines it as a “big furry astrakhan winter hat,” adding “My favorite is the ‘oversized boy scout cap’ design favored by Ceausescu, Karzai, and half of Boro Park.” I asked him about the etymology of the word and he said:

My guess is that it may be from Old Turkish/Chuvah/Bulgar level of loan words from the 6th – 9th century, when the Magyars/Mogurs/Someday-we-will-be-Bashkirs were learning the horse culture from proto-Chuvash types south of the Kama river. The consonant cluster “chma” or “shma” gives it away.

But what I really want to talk about is the CD he included in the package, A Mazeldiker Yid, by his group Di Naye Kapelye, for which he plays violin, mandolin, koboz, cumbus, flutes, and Carpathian drum:

Di Naye Kapelye plays old time Jewish music the way we imagine it was played in eastern Europe both before and after the Holocaust. Learning from Jewish people still living in the region, and from Gypsy musicians who played for them, DNK carries on a living tradition of music.

I was blown away both by the music (my feet wouldn’t keep still) and by the learned and hilarious liner notes, which I’m happy to say you can read in their entirety here. I’m going to quote a bit (adding links) to illustrate the historical and geographical interest:

Northern Romania, in particular the regions of Maramures and the Bukovina, was once home to a large Jewish community unlike any other. Hasidic Jews first settled in the poorer mountain areas of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, in the aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres and the resultant messianic confusion. Led by disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, Hasidism’s pioneering leader, these Jews coalesced into Hasidic “courts” (hoyfn) centered around rabbinic dynasties residing in Szatmár, Vizhnitz, Munkács, Sighet, Sadagora, and Shpinka (Sapinta). Free of the official oppression and pogroms suffered by Jews in the Russian Empire, they lived in a relatively healthy social atmosphere with their neighbors – Romanians, Hungarians, Hutsul Ukrainians, Slovaks, Zipser Germans, and Roma (Gypsies). Reflecting the strongly conservative nature of the region, the Jews of Maramures rejected the “Jewish Enlightenment” offered by the 1868 reorganization of the Hungarian Jewish community, and maintained an existence apart, Yiddish speaking and deeply Hasidic in character, until the Holocaust. After the war this same stubborn independence led to the rebirth of Carpathian Hasidic communities in centers such as Brooklyn, Antwerp, and Bnei Brak, where the culture remains as vibrant and quarrelsome as it did the Romanian mountains.

Isn’t that great stuff? Do read the song annotations; among other things, you won’t want to miss the recipe for matzo balls.

Do you say “in the circumstances” or “under the circumstances”? Never mind, I wouldn’t believe you if you told me—people are notoriously bad at analyzing their own language use. Arnold Zwicky has been investigating the alternatives, and has posted his results, which are surprising and interesting:

In summary: the Google data suggest that “under” is preferred to “in”
(modestly)
with determiners “the” and “these”
(more strongly)
with determiner “which”
(very strongly)
with determiner “what”
(almost categorically)
with quantity determiner “no”
but that “in” is preferred to “under”
(modestly)
with quantity determiners “all” and “some”
(strongly)
with determiner “those” in general
(strongly)
with quantity determiner “many”
(almost categorically)
when “circumstances” means ‘personal situation’
(almost categorically)
with determiner “those” plus certain following relatives
(almost categorically)
with quantity determiner “a few”

See his post for the details (I’ve rearranged the results for clarity); it makes clear both the complexity of usage and the value of the internet for sifting it.

I was reading an H. Allen Orr New Yorker piece on evolution and genetics when I hit the sentence “Similarly, a gene that affects pigmentation in birds like the chicken and the bananaquit also affects pigmentation in mammals like the jaguar and you.” The word bananaquit struck me; I couldn’t find it in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate or the American Heritage Dictionary, but it was in the New Oxford American Dictionary:

bananaquit /bəˈnanəˌkwit/ a small songbird with a curved bill, typically with a white stripe over the eye, a sooty gray back, and yellow underparts. It is common in the West Indies and Central and South America… See QUIT².

The latter entry says “[in combination] used in names of various small songbirds found in the Caribbean area, e.g. bananaquit, grassquit” and adds that the word is “probably imitative.”
So I looked it up in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and found the pronuncation given as [ˈbʌna^.nʌkwɪt] and the definition “a bird about 3 ins long, dark grey in color, with a yellow breast, a white streak over the eye, and known for its love of ripe bananas and grains of sugar, and in some places also for its warbling or making a ‘cheep-cheep’ sound”—gotta give them props for explaining the “banana” part. Other local names: beany bird (Jamaica), honey-creeper (St Vincent, US Virgin Is), see-see bird (Grenada), sikyé-bird (Trinidad), sugar-bird (Barbados, USVI), and yellow-breast (Antigua, Barbados, USVI). You can see some pictures here.

King Alfred, over at The Bitter Scroll, has posted a verse translation of something I didn’t know existed: a Tolkien poem in Gothic called “Bagme Bloma” [‘The Flower of the Trees’]. There’s also a webpage called The Annotated Bagme Bloma, which King Al used in doing the translation. (I have to say, the poem sounds a lot more like Tolkien than like early Germanic poetry to me.)

Addendum (Nov. 2021). The poem and translation are short enough I don’t know why I didn’t just quote them back in 2005; to save readers the trouble of clicking, I’ll do so now:

Brunaim bairiþ bairka bogum
laubans liubans liudandei,
gilwagroni, glitmunjandei,
bagme bloma, blauandei,
fagrafahsa, liþulinþi,
fraujinondei fairguni.

Wopjand windos, wagjand lindos,
lutiþ limam laikandei;
slaihta, raihta, hweitarinda,
razda rodeiþ reirandei,
bandwa bairhta, runa goda,
þiuda meina þiuþjandei.

Andanahti milhmam neipiþ,
liuhteiþ liuhmam lauhmuni;
laubos liubai fliugand lausai,
tulgus, triggwa, standandei.
Bairka baza beidiþ blaika
fraujinondei fairguni.

Flower of the Trees

The birch bears fine leaves on shining boughs, it grows pale green and glittering, the flower of the trees in bloom, fair-haired and supple-limbed, the ruler of the mountain.

The winds call, they shake gently, she bends her boughs low in sport; smooth, straight and
white-barked, trembling she speaks a language, a bright token, a good mystery, blessing my people.

Evening grows dark with clouds, the lightning flashes, the fine leaves fly free, but firm and faithful the white birch stands bare and waits, ruling the mountain.

Forbes has a special section on “Communicating,” with pieces by Arthur C. Clarke (“Join The Planetary Conversation”), Scott Woolley (“The Next 4,000 Days”), David M. Ewalt (“How To Talk To Aliens”), and others, as well as interviews with Jane Goodall, Kurt Vonnegut, Desmond Morris, Steven Pinker, etc.; there’s even an interview with Uncle Noam. Check it out.

[Read more…]

I would like to join my colleague Geoff Pullum in celebrating Jan Freeman’s superb takedown of that mangiest of stuffed owls, Strunk and White’s inescapable The Elements of Style, which has just undergone its latest restuffing, this time with illustrations by Maira Kalman (it’s been taxidermized more often than Lenin’s corpse). A sample:

It was never a seamless creation, to be sure; the 1959 first edition merely sandwiched Strunk’s 1918 handbook for his Cornell students, lightly edited, between White’s introduction and his essay on prose style. But at least you knew Strunk was Strunk, vintage 1918, and White was White, circa 1958. Succeeding revisions, instead of blending the disparate parts, have left ”Elements” a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.
(The illustrated ”Elements” is essentially the 1999 edition, with a couple of small restorations from the 1918 original. Not quite a restoration, alas, in the case of Strunk’s introduction: The proofreaders overlooked one of his ”Words Often Misspelled,” so the opening sentence now promises ”to give in brief space the principle requirements of plain English style.”)
Scanning the recent editions, you sometimes wonder what could possibly have been cut, given the absurdity of what remains. Don’t use claim to mean ”assert”? Mark Twain did it in 1869, the year Strunk was born. Don’t contact anyone? It’s a ”vague and self-important” verb—or so people said in the 1920s, when it was new. Don’t use they to refer to ”a distributive subject” like everybody—unless you’re E.B. White: ”But somebody taught you, didn’t they?” says a character in ”Charlotte’s Web.”

Ouch. I know I can’t talk you Strunk-lovers out of your affection, but can you at least look on the damn book as an affectionate portrait of a crotchety former teacher and not as a guide to English, a task for which it is manifestly unsuited? Let it sit harmlessly on the mantelpiece and glare out at the unruly world with its glassy eyes.