An article by Howard W. French in today’s NY Times does a surprisingly good job at describing the complex linguistic situation in China:

DATIAN, China – As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town’s open-air market, the conversation turned quickly from the price of dried fish and fresh fruit to how many dialects people here could muster.
Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.
What was the third dialect? someone asked. “Putonghua,” the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues…

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I got another birthday present today (I like these birthdays that stretch on and on): Alan Davidson’s magisterial Penguin Companion to Food (available in hardcover as The Oxford Companion to Food). I have been keenly interested in this book ever since I learned about Davidson, but I didn’t think I’d actually get my hands on it except at a library. Now I can play with it to my heart’s content; my first of what will doubtless be many quotes from the book is the entry “Laksa” (by Charles Perry, “the leading authority on early Arabic cookery”), which will give an idea of the interest the book has for me as a lover of languages:

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Lepcha is a language of the Indian state of Sikkim and nearby regions; it’s a Sino-Tibetan language, but its exact relationship to the others is apparently in dispute. It’s spoken by the Lepcha people (self-designation: Róng), and it has its own script dating to the 17th century. Now there’s a proposal for encoding the rather complex script; you can read all about it at abecedaria.
Addendum. Since the discussion in the comments is almost entirely about morae (or, if you prefer, moras), I’ve added “mora” to the entry title. The discussion is over my head but very interesting: thanks, Tim and Suzanne!

Still reading Mason & Dixon, and I’ve run hard aground on the following passage:

Summer takes hold, manifold sweet odors of the Fields, and presently the Forest, become routine, and one night the Surveyors sit in their Tent, in the Dark, and watch Fire-flies, millions of them blinking ev’rywhere,—Dixon engineering plans for lighting the Camp-site with them[…] Jeremiah will lead the Fire-flies to stream continuously through the Tent in a narrow band, here and there to gather in glass Globes, concentrating their light to the Yellow of a new-risen Moon.
“And when we move to where there are none of these tiny Linkmen?”
“We take ’em with huz…? Lifetime Employment!”
“But how long do they live?”
“Ensign Cheer.”

I’ve racked my brains but can come up with no interpretation of “Ensign Cheer” that makes sense. Can anyone come up with an idea? Perhaps a translated version might shed some light?
Update. David A. Heal explains it perfectly in the comments: it’s not a direct answer to the question, it’s a commentary on the question: “My, what a cheerful fellow!” Once again, the LH readership comes through.

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The poet Lorenzo Thomas, whose speech on “Poetry and the Vernacular” I blogged last year, has died.

Thomas was born in Panama in 1944. Four years later the family immigrated to New York City, where Thomas grew up. Spanish was his first language, and he strove to master English to escape getting beaten up by other kids for “talking funny.”

“Never forgot it,” he once said. “Went way, way, way away out of my way to become extra fluent in English.”…

References to American popular culture — music especially — abound in Thomas’ work. He cited as influences such blues legends as Robert Johnson, Houston native Lightnin’ Hopkins and the Houston poet-singer Juke Boy Bonner, whom Thomas eulogized in the journal Callaloo. Thomas helped organize Juneteenth Blues Festivals in Houston and other Texas cities.

“I write poems because I can’t sing,” he once said.

The sad news comes via wood s lot, where his poem “Back in the Day” is quoted; it begins:

When we were boys
We called each other “Man”
With a long n
Pronounced as if a promise

We wore felt hats
That took a month to buy
In small installments…

That’s the title of a book I was given for my birthday, and a lot of fun it is. Unlike books that list unusual words and simply give definitions, this one makes snide comments about them (“a ridiculous word” is a favorite) and provides suggested uses (“‘Calefacient, anyone?’ you inquire as you pass around the cognac”). But—and I hate to say this—it badly needed fact-checking and editing. When a headword is misspelled, things have come to a pretty pass:

EPHETIC a. Habitually suspending judgment, given to skepticism. Like aporia (q.v.) an exceptionally Superior word. The fact that ephecticism generally engenders ineffectualness should enable you to develop one or two phonically pleasing sentences. Alternatively, cultivate its use in the same sentence as eclectic (wide-ranging in acceptance of doctrines, opinions, etc.).

As you can see from the abstract noun employed in the second sentence, it should be ephectic (a fine word, I must say, deserving of better citations than the anodyne ones provided by the OED: 1693 Urquhart, “The Schools of the Pyrronian.. Sceptick, and Ephectick Sects”; 1883 Saintsbury, “Montaigne’s attitude was ephectic”). Also, the definition of codger as ‘mean old fellow’ is simply wrong for normal use; the OED classifies the sense ‘mean, stingy, or miserly (old) fellow’ as dialectal (1880 W. Cornwall Glossary, “Codger, cadger, a tramp; a mean pedlar; a term of contempt”) and gives the primary definition as ‘an elderly man, usually with a grotesque or whimsical implication… In more general application: Fellow, chap.’ Ah well, let it serve as a reminder that one should always get a second opinion.

I was never a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation (I’m a Deep Space Nine man myself), so I hadn’t heard of the invented language that was used in the episode “Darmok” until now; you can find out what little there is to know about it here. The salient aspect is that it seems to be made up entirely of allusions, and while this may be impractical, it’s original and thought-provoking. As Kathleen Van Horn says on the Possible Precedents page, “there is a similarity between Tamarian and the highly allusive speech of the characters in Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji,” but this takes allusiveness to an entirely new level. Too bad they didn’t do more with it after putting all that work into it. (The linked site has an exiguous appendix on “Other unusual languages in science fiction” that would be extremely useful if expanded.)

Via MonkeyFilter.

I was looking up a different word in my Oxford Russian-English dictionary when I happened to notice the phrase sonnaya arteriya, defined as ‘carotid artery.’ Now, sonnyy means ‘sleepy,’ so sonnaya arteriya literally means ‘sleepy artery,’ and this suggested that carotid (a word whose etymology I don’t think I’d ever investigated) had something to do with sleepiness. Sure enough, it turns out it’s “ad. Gr. καρωτίδ-ες, f. καρούν ‘to plunge into deep sleep, to stupefy’, because compression of these arteries is said to produce carus or stupor. (Galen.)” (OED). The AHD takes it back to Indo-European *ker- ‘head’ (“to feel heavy-headed”), but that may be pushing it. At any rate, I like the plain-spoken Russian phrase better than the opaque English one.

Arnold Zwicky of Language Log has reported on a long-needed investigation into the history of the cliché (or, to a Language Logger, “snowclone”) What is this X of which you speak? I’m astonished to learn it was already being bandied about in Usenet in 1983:

There has been a lot of net discussion about “toilet paper” recently. Just what is this “toilet paper” of which you speak? Where can I find it? (from net.misc, 24 August 1983 (link))

But there doesn’t seem to be an actual, identifiable original from which the parodies were derived: “The origin seems to be in the collective memory of big-screen and small-screen science fiction from the ’50s and ’60s.” There is also discussion of the spurious quotation “Kiss”? What is “kiss”?. Now if only the Loggers would get to work on alternative negations.

Update (August 2015). Commenter charlieO has found a superb antedate from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796): “Father, you amaze me! What is this love of which you speak?” The novel was wildly popular in its day, and it seems reasonable to assume that parodies of Gothic novels (such parodies were also wildly popular) regularly featured this template, which survived to make it into Douglas Adams and a new generation of snarky youth. I note that according to Wikipedia the novel was “written in ten weeks, before [Lewis] turned 20”; he probably would have enjoyed Douglas Adams himself.

Avva posts a question that I have occasionally wondered about: under what conditions are the negations it isn’t and it’s not used? There must have been studies done on this; speakers’ intuition is clearly useless here. The only distinction that occurs to me is that the former is more emphatic, requiring a separation of syllables and at least a minuscule stress on it (we no longer say ’tisn’t as our forefathers did), whereas it’s not can be reduced to a single syllable and muttered if need be (“T’s not fair!”).

Update (March 2010): There’s a paper (pdf) on this topic, “It’s not or isn’t it? Using large corpora to determine the influences on contraction strategies” (Language Variation and Change, 14 (2002), 79–118) by Malcah Yaeger-Dror, Lauren Hall-Lew, and Sharon Deckert. The abstract:

In analyzing not-negation variation in English it becomes clear that specific strategies are used for prosodic emphasis and reduction of not in different social situations, and that contraction strategies vary independently of prosodic reduction. This article focuses on the factors influencing contraction strategies that are clearly dialect related and attempts to tease out those factors that are related to register and speaker stance. First, we review background information critical to an adequate analysis of not-negation and not-contraction. We then describe the corpora chosen for the present study, the research methods employed in the analysis, and the results of the analysis. The variable under analysis is the choice between uncontracted and not-contracted forms and between not-contracted and Aux-contracted forms in well-formed declarative sentences, for verbs which permit both. We end with some suggestions for corpus composition that will enable meaningful comparisons between social situations and between speakers, or characters, within one corpus. As researchers we can assure that future corpora will permit increasingly inclusive and interesting comparative studies; we close with some suggestions for those who wish to carry out studies.

Thanks, Doug!