The good people at Metropolitan Books sent me a copy of Guy Deutscher’s new book, The Unfolding of Language; I’m only a little over halfway through it, but I’ve accumulated enough things I want to talk about I thought I’d better start now, and leave the summing up for when I finish it. I will say that it’s a great pleasure to read a book on historical linguistics written for the layperson by an actual linguist, and I hope lots of people read it and get a better idea of how languages change, so they can understand how pointless are all the demands for preservation, warnings of doom, and nostalgic looks back at an imagined time of linguistic perfection from which we’ve supposedly degenerated. (On this subject, read the excerpt from Chapter 3 here to be convinced that “the English of today is not what it used to be, but then again, it never was.”)

To the details, then! The first thing that made me want to start blogging was a picture on page 117; it’s in black and white in the book, but you can see it in glorious color towards the end of the excerpts page. It shows a Greek moving van blazoned with the word ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΕΣ [metaforés], which is the normal Greek word for ‘moves, removals’; as Deutscher says, “meta-phora is Greek for ‘carry across’ (meta = ‘across’, phor = ‘carry’). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.” I used to see such signs in Astoria (the heavily Greek part of Queens where I used to live), and I’d point them out to whoever I was walking with and explain that “metaphor” is a basic everyday word in Greek; I’m delighted to be able to send everyone to this picture (and get a nostalgic thrill myself).

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I wasn’t sure if I should post The Internet Chinese Text Archive, a huge collection of texts in Chinese (which I found at Plep [scroll down to 19th July]), since anyone who can make use of it probably already knows about it, but when googling it I ran across A Brief History of Asian Studies Online (through 2003) by T. Matthew Ciolek, so I figured I’d post both and see if anyone’s interested. The “Brief History” has this under 1991:

sometime in 1991: Ulysses Li establishes “The Internet Chinese Text Archive” [now at www.ibiblio.org/ chinese-text] the first Chinese text archive on the Internet. It was formerly known to web surfers as “Xiaoyu’s Collection” or “Carp Temple.” This collection had once been served by the server of Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (IFCSS) Chinese Community Information Center (CCIC).

I dialetti italiani: Language and Dialect on the Italian Peninsula (via Plep [19th July]) is a potentially useful site, with all sorts of interesting-sounding links. Unfortunately, none of the external ones work (“Last Modified: 12/27/96”), but there’s still a short essay and a map hosted on the site, so I figure it’s worth mentioning. There are functioning links on Italian dialects here and here and relevant Wikipedia pages here and here (and I vote with those who think those pages should be merged).

We’ve discussed Spanish and Russian swearing, and had a brief go at Chinese; now, courtesy of Dinesh Rao, I direct your attention to a more detailed post on the latter over at From a Singapore Angle, wherein a Chinese article by Lin Siyun, “Inquiry into the Chinese and Foreign Philosophies of Swearing,” is discussed and in part translated. Some very interesting stuff:

When a person does something wrong, the usual way in other countries is to swear at the culprit himself; the Chinese way is not to abuse the culprit directly, but to swear at his mother and ancestors. Foreigners found this peculiar way of doing things very hard to understand: This person did wrong, what’s it to do with his mother or ancestors? Anglo-Americans will say “F— you”, but usually not “F— your mother”; the Japanese will say “You bakaro“, but normally not “Your ancestors bakaro.” (bakaro = 馬鹿野郎 or ばかやろう; roughly, “dumbass”.)
And when the Chinese swear, they seldom use terms that displays racial discrimination (unlike the case of the Anglo-Americans), and in any case, such terms are rare in the Chinese vocabulary. Take the often encountered waiguo guizi (外國鬼子; i.e., “foreign devil”): if we were to think it through, we’ll realize that it actually contains an element of “respect”. It seems that the Chinese would only call those foreigners who had been able to bully or invade them “devils”—such as meiguo guizi (美國鬼子; i.e., “American devil”) or riben guizi (日本鬼子; i.e., “Japanese devil”). China fought wars with India and Vietnam before, but they don’t usually say yindu guizi (印度鬼子; i.e., “Indian devil”) or yuenan guizi (越南鬼子; i.e., “Vietnamese devil”)—it is as if these are not good enough to be guizi.

I don’t agree with everything the author has to say about English swearing, but I’m glad to know about the distinction in deviltry.

It’s a pleasure to be able to offer unalloyed praise for a NY Times story about linguistics, Michael Erard’s “How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages.” I’ve been using Ethnologue in print form since I was in college (its availability online at no cost is one of the best things about the internet), and it was interesting to learn that it started as far back as 1951. There are some great quotes in the piece:

“I occasionally note in my comments to the press,” said Nicholas Ostler, the president of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, “the irony that Ethnologue’s total count of known languages keeps going up with each four-yearly edition, even as we solemnly intone the factoid that a language dies out every two weeks.”

This dissonance points to a more basic problem. “There’s no actual number of languages,” said Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist at Stanford whose own count is “around” 4,580. “It kind of depends on how one defines dialects and languages.”

The linguists behind the Ethnologue agree that the distinctions can be indistinct. “We tend to see languages as basically marbles, and we’re trying to get all the marbles in our bag and count how many marbles we have,” said M. Paul Lewis, a linguist who manages the Ethnologue database (www.ethnologue.com) and will edit the 16th edition. “Language is a lot more like oatmeal, where there are some clearly defined units but it’s very fuzzy around the edges.”

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich once famously said, “A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot” (or “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”). To Ethnologue, and to the language research organization that produces it, S.I.L. International, a language is a dialect that needs its literature, including a Bible.

I love the fact that he worked a Yiddish quote into a piece about a Christian organization, and remember, folks, you heard it here first! (I was wondering why I chose the spelling “diyalekt” in that entry, but it seems I picked it up from here; in any case, Erard’s version is indisputably better.)

Update. See now UJG‘s post, with an actual image of Weinreich’s original Yiddish.

When I wrote this entry, I lazily took Scipio’s word for it that there were no other blogs in Latin; had I given it a moment’s thought, I would have realized that couldn’t be the case (there are a couple of blogs in Klingon, after all), and miram in the comments kindly directed me to three others: DEVS EX CRAPVLA, colloquia in lingua latina, and Diarium latinum. Furthermore, Justin of The Mad Latinist’s Journal mentions that he will be posting only in Latin from July 29th to August 6th; he also links to a list of a half-dozen other blogs in Latin. Me paenitet offendisse!

Zackary Sholem Berger posts about how he combines his medical studies with his interest in languages:

Like every other medical student, I have a command of several different kinds of medical terminology: the mind-numbing jargon of the scientific literature, the half-macho talk of rounds and last but certainly not least important, the normal words people use to talk in English about whatever’s the matter with them.
It’s this last kind of vocabulary that I lack in Spanish. I can talk a blue streak about genetic predispositions and infectious agents, about endoscopies and anesthesia — these are international terms, much the same in Spanish, English and many other languages. But lay language is different. I’ve already experienced a certain kind of linguistic blockage more than once. I’ve started a conversation with a Spanish-speaking patient, we’ve built up something of a rapport, she’s complimented my Spanish, I’ve figured out why she’s come to the hospital. Then, all of a sudden, I need to ask a specific question to narrow down the field of possible diagnoses. I use what I think is the right word, and one of two expressions appears on the patient’s face: either outright incomprehension, or a polite glazed-over look that means, “I’m going to keep my mouth shut until I can figure out what the heck this nice doctor is saying.” It’s then that I have to search my dusty old neurons for a Spanish word I learned once, many years ago, or for a synonym that’s used in the home country of this particular patient. During one memorable conversation, a patient and I sat through a long, awkward pause before she figured out that I was asking about her period.

He points out that a lot of people would think he should be concentrating on the medical stuff, but says “I’m a person who doesn’t mind sacrificing a little efficiency (or even a lot) to get a good conversation going with the person sitting in front of me. Will that make me a better doctor? Beats me, but I know I’ll have more fun this way.” I personally think it will make him a better doctor, and in fact one reason my wife and I like our current doctor so much is that he actually converses with us as well as treating us. It is possible to be (in the words of his clever title) a medicine mensch.

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Scipio Scripsit is the blog of someone who, frustrated that [he had found] blogs about Latin but none in Latin (or, as he puts it, “Plurimi de latina, sed nullos in ipsa latina”), decided to remedy the deficiency. [Note: I should have checked before taking his word for it that there were no others; see next entry.] (He’s a real blogger, too—in his second post he has a picture of his dog Bomilcar.) Gaudete omnes! (Via Classics in Contemporary Culture.)
Update. Aug. 2006: Blog appears to be defunct, or, as the blogger would have put it, defunctus.

Eurolang “is a specialist niche news agency covering topics related to lesser-used languages, linguistic diversity and national minorities within the European Union.”

It provides an expanding on-line daily service across Europe, to language NGOs, the media, European, State and local government, academia, researchers and the general public.
The purpose of Eurolang is to provide, on a daily basis, relevant and current news about lesser-used language communities to the general public and to national and regional media (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, internet media) in Europe and worldwide.

Thanks for the link, Rick!

Via Incoming Signals I discovered an archive of scripts for the British sketch comedy show “A Bit of Fry and Laurie.” As an aficionado of the Higher Lower British Humor, I was delighted, but didn’t expect it to be LH material—until my wife drew my attention to “Gordon and Stuart eat Greek.” If you have some acquaintance with Greek, either Ancient or Modern, you will enjoy this little scene.

If you don’t know Ancient Greek, the bit about the word “genoymeen” will zip right past you, so I’ll explain that it’s an old-style Brit pronunciation of γενοιμην, an optative form meaning ‘may I be’ or ‘that I might be’ that was so familiar to those who partook of an old-school classical education that Rupert Brooke could insert it into an English poem, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” which is online in many places but apparently only here with the Greek bit in actual Greek:

ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester!