A comment by Ghil’ad Zuckermann on my post about his views on Israeli (Hebrew) sent me looking for more information about Dola Wittmann, the oldest native Israeli-speaker (in April 2000; I’m afraid she’s probably passed on by now). I found a very interesting column by Sam Orbaum, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, called “Daughter of the mother tongue”:

Dola learned the language from her father [Eliezer Ben-Yehuda], who reinvented it… During my first of numerous chats with Dola, about 15 years ago, our hours-long interview was interjected by occasional “harumphs.” Every time she dipped into another language for a bon mot, her husband Max voiced his displeasure. “You can say that very well in Hebrew too,” he grumbled.

Max, who passed away a few years ago, was actually more stalwart a devotee of Ben-Yehuda than even Dola. Worldly and cosmopolitan, Dola readily spoke other languages as well. Max adamantly refused.

When Max asked for Ben-Yehuda’s permission to marry his daughter, his answer, she recalled, was: “I will grant permission dependent on your answer to two questions: Will you live in Eretz Yisrael, and will you only speak Hebrew?” Max promised to do both—and true yekke that he was, never, ever compromised his promise.

It did not even concern Ben-Yehuda that Max was Christian—and German to boot. He pointedly did not ask Max to convert (he never did). “Speaking Hebrew, and speaking it here, was all that mattered,” Dola explained. “Since then, I never left the country for any reason,” Max said proudly, “and never spoke anything but Hebrew.”

Max devoted his life to the study, advancement and usage of pure Ben-Yehuda Hebrew, and he was certainly one of the world’s top authorities on the subject. Whereas Dola would merge foreign elements into her speech, and adapted, to an extent, to the language’s evolution, Max would not. A telefon was still a sach-rachok, just as Ben-Yehuda decided it should be.

Dola lit up when I asked her if Ben-Yehuda had a sense of humor when he created the modern language. “Oh, yes, definitely! There are many examples of whimsy in his choice of words.” For example? She laughed. “Clitoris. He decided on dagdegan, from the root l’dagdeg, to tickle.”…

Some of Ben-Yehuda’s coinages never became popular, consigned to linguistic curiosity (and to the vocabulary of Max). Only the Ben-Yehuda family ever used the word badura for tomato; milav, for “sport,” was taken from the Arabic, but swiftly became defunct. The oddly foreign-sounding petrozilia prevailed over Ben-Yehuda’s netz halav for parsley. The delightful chen-chen (thank you) was perhaps too genteel for the clamorous nation-in-the-making, but it survived among a few “old-fashioned” speakers, by now winning some popularity as a hip colloquialism—an ironic revival.

Max was able to recount Dola’s childhood just as vividly as she could, because as a member of the Ben-Yehuda “language army,” even as a little girl, she was responsible for helping entrench Hebrew as the local lingo. Dola’s early years, and the language’s, were one and the same.

“Ben-Yehuda would gather the children each evening, and tell them all the new words he had created, or rediscovered. The children were required to pass them on.” Max, a tall, white-haired, coolly Teutonic gentleman, warmed only when speaking about Ben-Yehuda and his language. “Dola was younger, so this was already more established by the time she learned to speak. A child would be sent to the grocer to buy rice. He would ask for orez, and the [Yiddish-speaking] grocer would say ‘vus?’ (what?) The child would then point to the rice and repeat ‘orez‘—that’s how the language, word by word, was first spread.”

A charming story, and I like the fact that the creator of the modern language was unable to impose words the people didn’t want to use.

I don’t agree with shkrobius, who says “human speech is a cacophony of mingled sounds,” but it’s said so vividly I have to pass it along:

The first time I heard English I thought: how can people bark like that? Why can’t they talk in a melodious, cadenced way the Russians do? It took many years of practicing English to appreciate its harmony and beauty. It is not that Germanic languages are different. Other Slavic languages are equally unpleasant on my ears. No amount of persuasion will convince me that, say, the Swedish, Serbian, Zulu, Turkish, or Hungarian are great languages. All human languages equally stink. We are used to those few that we speak or hear regularly. We can no longer recognize how awful they sound. The universal appeal of music is our unconscious acceptance of this brutal truth.

The post goes on to an appreciation of the animal kingdom: “people of all races, tongues, and traditions have the instinctive appreciation of the beauty in animals and plants. A horse, a cow, a bird, a rose—they all look right to us.” And who can argue with that? (Thanks for the link, Tatyana!)

Arnold Zwicky in Language Log discusses the much-condemned phrase “between you and I” in terms of the claim, made by more than one supposed expert, that it “seems to have emerged only in the last twenty or so years.” This is absurd; Shakespeare has Antonio write to Bassanio (in The Merchant of Venice, Act III Scene II) “all debts are cleared between you and I.” William Congreve used it in 1694, Byron in 1805, Mark Twain in 1856; in short, it goes back a long way. Zwicky says:

The facts look complex, but it’s safe to say that the rise of “between you and I” in Late Modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, not 20; earlier uses go back about 400 years. There’s no way it can be blamed on modern education, as John Simon suggested in 1980 (see MWDEU), unless Simon was just playing with different senses of “modern”.
In any case, we have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again—retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc.—the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It’s not just Kids These Days.

He has more examples, and discusses the Frequency Illusion as well (“once you’ve noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot, even ‘all the time'”).

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I can’t improve on Christopher Culver’s description at Безѹмниѥ, where I found this link, so I’ll just quote it:

Cyril Babaev… has written a historical grammar of Lithuanian with some interesting comments on Lithuanian’s evolution from Proto-Indo-European. Babaev’s Indo-European Database contains links to other grammars. It is probably the most useful site ever hosted at a Bizland.com address.

I find by googling that Babaev, who is not a linguist by profession, has also done a similar grammar of Old English. I should add that Bridget in Christopher’s comments says “I’m not sure I trust the IE Database site. I was just looking at Hittite & Lycian and noticed 3 or 4 things that are either just plain wrong or disputed at best.” Since it’s a hobby for Babaev, I guess that’s only to be expected.

Hayden Carruth, as I’ve said before, is one of my favorite American poets, so I’m looking forward to the weekly series on him Joseph Duemer is planning: “For the next year I will discuss a particular poem or essay of Carruth’s, reproducing as much as is practical & legal.” (Via wood s lot.)

A pair of interviews (1, 2, both RealAudio) with Israeli linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann on Jill Kitson’s weekly Radio National show about language, Lingua Franca (previously mentioned here), discuss Zuckermann’s controversial thesis that “Israeli is a hybrid language, both Semitic and Indo-European… Thus, the term Israeli is far more appropriate than ‘Israeli Hebrew’, a fortiori ‘Modern Hebrew’ or ‘Hebrew’ tout court.” The quote is from his paper “A New Vision for ‘Modern Hebrew’: Theoretical, Cultural and Practical Implications of Analysing Israeli as a Semito-European Mixed Language” [pdf file]; it might help to read the paper before listening to the interviews, since that way you’ll be familiar with the details of the argument and can concentrate on the off-the-cuff remarks: that if it had been Moroccan Jews who’d arrived in Palestine and founded modern Israel, the language would be “very Semitic” instead of the hybrid he says it is today; that the Hebrew Bible should be translated into Israeli; that “a language which is a mishmash is nothing to be ashamed of.” I particularly liked his insistence that “a native speaker does not need grammar books.”

Here’s a bit of the paper to get you started:

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I just stumbled on FishBase (German mirror), a website specializing in, well, fish. What makes it of interest here is the attention given to language: not only is the search page available and searchable in many languages, but there is a page dedicated to the issue:

Claiming that the common names of fish are one of their most important attributes is an understatement. In fact, common names are all that most people know about most fish as shown by the fact that most people accessing FishBase on the Internet do so by common name.

Hence, FishBase would not be complete without common names. This fact has been considered very early in the design of FishBase (Froese 1990) and has resulted in the compilation of over 107,000 common names, probably the largest collection of its kind. It has taken us a long time, to realize, however, that each pair of ‘country’ and ‘language’ fields uniquely define a culture, and that a large fraction of what the people belonging to a certain cultue know about fishes (i.e., local knowledge) can therefore be captured through the COMMON NAMES table including these fields…

The most obvious use of the COMMON NAMES table is to identify the scientific name of a fish. Note, however, that non-standardized common names may point to more than one species. Other, less obvious, uses include:

• preserving and making widely accessible ethnoichthyological knowledge from endangered cultures (Palomares and Pauly 1993; Palomares et al. 1993; Pauly et al. 1993);
• testing qualitative or quantitative hypotheses about traditional classification schemes (see e.g., Hunn 1980; Berlin 1992; Palomares and Pauly 1993);
• enabling mutual verification of facts from ethnoichthyology and its scientific counterpart (as in Johannes 1981); and
• following the evolution of the linguistic subset represented by fish names, in space and through history, and test related hypotheses.

They have “over 200 languages in alphabetic order ranging from Adangme to Zande.” My kind of site, even if I don’t like fish.

Addendum. Thanks to Chris Waigl in the comments, I can now add the equally excellent Avibase, for birds.

The World Atlas of Language Structures is a very interesting project which “is in preparation under the editorship of Bernard Comrie, Matthew Dryer, David Gil, and Martin Haspelmath.”

This Atlas will show structural features of languages in much the same way as linguistic data are displayed in dialect atlases. It will, so to speak, show us the isoglosses of the dialects of Human Language. We envisage an Atlas with about 100 structural features, each shown on a two-page global map and accompanied by a two-page description and discussion of the feature. To make areal patterns visible, each feature needs to be mapped for at least 150 languages, and ideally more than 200. In addition to the printed version, we envisage a fully searchable CD-ROM version.

A Guardian article about it doesn’t actually provide much information but does have this amusing quote:

Roland Kriessling, a linguist specialising in African languages, said: “In Namibia, there are many languages which sound completely bizarre to the western ear.

“!Xoop, for example, has different clicking sounds, including the tut, the horse’s hoof sound and the kiss. The phonetic complexity of !Xoop could put it into the Guinness Book of Records.”

Thanks for the link, Pat!

Addendum. One of the contributors to the Atlas wrote me as follows:

Somebody who commented on your post spoke of sparsity of data, and my honest opinion is that that is not a fair assessment. We all got a list of a core sample of 100 languages we were expected to investigate, plus another 100 we were strongly urged to investigate. For the chapters I worked on, I looked at every single of those 200 languages, plus over 100 more. We had access to experts on most of the 200 languages to make up for gaps in written documentation. I have seen a few chapters that indeed fall short of current standards in linguistic typology (there simply were too few languages in the sample), but most chapters are based on sufficient data, in my opinion. Of course you can always say that the picture isn’t nearly complete (it would take a large team and tons of money to investigate anything close to all of the Earth´s languages even for a single feature), but both in terms of topics and languages covered, I don’t think “sparsity” is a valid characterization.

Update (Aug. 2020). The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) now has its own site.

That’s the title of a promising new blog whose proposed ambit is “language, literature, politics, poetry, cinema, music, food, art, heterotopia”; it takes its name from an Adrienne Rich poem, “North American Time,” whose second section I find as memorable as does Elizabeth (the blogger):

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege.

You can read the whole thing here, and if you happen to like lentil soup she has what looks to be a tasty Turkish version.

A MetaFilter post alerted me to the existence of an amazing document written in the early 17th century by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a native speaker of Quechua who had learned Spanish and served as an interpreter; he came to regret his collaboration with the invaders and began trying to support Andean traditions and culture, and as a part of this effort he wrote an immense letter in Quechua-based Spanish, the Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), to King Philip II of Spain, who as far as we know never read it. It turned up at the Royal Library of Copenhagen in 1908 (nobody knows how it got there) and was slowly recognized as the unique source that it is. This introduction by Rolena Adorno, one of the scholars investigating it today, says:

With the discovery of the Nueva coronica, a whole new perspective on Andean culture came into being. Here was a document that offered an indigenous Andean perspective on conquest and colonization and, more importantly, a knowledge of Andean and Inca society that most European chroniclers, and even some famous Peruvian-born writers like El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, could not duplicate. As John V. Murra observed nearly twenty years ago, the Nueva coronica y buen gobierno is a “source of basic information about Andean institutions available nowhere else.”

The Royal Library has made the entire document available online in facsimile and annotated translation; so far it’s only in Spanish, but you can get a few selections in English here (with a brief introduction by David Frye, who explains that “Guaman Poma” represents Quechua Waman Puma, “Hawk Puma”), and there are many English articles in the Royal Library site’s resources page. The document is placed in a cross-cultural perspective by Mary Louise Pratt in her article Arts of the Contact Zone, which says:

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