Every time I decide to cut William Safire some slack or just let him be, he does something so egregious I have to drag him once again before the bar of justice. His latest “On Language” column is called “Go To!” and is mostly an unobjectionable discussion of the spread of two terms that originated in sports jargon: go-to (as in “go-to guy”) and walk-off (as in “walk-off home run”); he wonders if the latter will undergo the same kind of metaphoric extension as the former. But, being Safire, he’s unable to broach the subject he wants to talk about without a cutesy historical lead-in, and since he knows essentially nothing about the history of language and apparently is not subjected to the humiliation of having his column fact-checked, he regularly perpetrates howlers in his tossed-off intros. This time he begins:

The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, obsessively trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood, is observed by a Doctor of Physic and a horrified Waiting-Gentle-Woman. As Shakespeare’s most famous villainess cries, ”Out, damned spot!” the doctor whispers a warning to his fellow witness: ”Go to, go to; you have known what you should not.”

The meaning of the imperative go to, four centuries ago, was ”beat it,” now ”geddoutahere” or, as those who cherish archaisms still say, ”get thee hence.” In our time, those two short words have fused into a compound adjective with a wholly different meaning, and that modifier is sweeping the language…

Did he even glance at the scene he’s quoting? The Doctor and the Gentlewoman, secretly observing Lady Macbeth, are overcome by horrified compassion and exchange murmured comments to each other after each of her outbursts. When she says “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?—No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting,” the Doctor says, clearly to Lady Macbeth though of course not for her ears, “Go to, go to; you have known what you should not,” and the Gentlewoman agrees: “She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known.” And regardless of the addressee, the phrase simply does not mean what Safire thinks it means, as a glance at the OED would have told him: definition 91b under go is:

go to Used in imp. to express disapprobation, remonstrance, protest, or derisive incredulity; —Come, come!

When Richardson’s Mrs. Jewkes says to Pamela “Go to, go to, naughty, mistrustful Mrs. Pamela; nay, Mrs. Williams […] I may as good call you,” she is not (forsooth) telling her to go away, she is chiding her for her supposed mistrust. (I should mention that at that time the abbreviation Mrs. was read “Mistress” and did not imply married status.)

I beg you, Times, exercise some quality control!

Aldiboronti at Wordorigins has been posting so many fine links lately I thought I’d do a roundup of a few of them. English Slang in the Nineteenth Century “aims to provide a conspectus, if not comprehensive then at least covering a wide range, of nineteenth-century English slang”; as aldi says: “It includes general works such as Hotten’s The Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words by a London Antiquary, 1859, as well as more specialized books.” Dictionaries Published in the United States, 1703-1832 (pdf) is just what the name implies; aldi cites “a few of the more intriguing entries.” You can read Chapter 1 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, here (“From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity—that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident—is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word’s eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century—chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences…”); towards the end of the chapter are two “examples of the use of a kind of private language”:

The first is “Glynnese,” created by William E. Gladstone’s
in-laws, the Glynnes. Writing of Glynnese, Gladstone’s biographer
Philip Magnus says:

The Lytteltons and the Gladstones [Lord Lyttelton and Gladstone married the Glynne sisters] were so numerous and devoted, so quick, eager and vital, that for many purposes they felt themselves to be self-sufficient. They invented a kind of language for themselves, which was formally embodied by Lord Lyttelton in 1857 in a glossary which was privately printed. It was entitled Contributions Toward a Glossary of the Glynne Language by a Student (George William, Lord Lyttelton) . . . Gladstone, who loved to hear Glynnese spoken, did not often use the language himself. But Mrs. Gladstone used it on every possible occasion.[…]

The other family with a language of its own creation was the Barings, and they too were well established as members of the social elite. Sir Edward Marsh, a great friend of Maurice Baring, describes the language in his autobiography: “I have mentioned the Baring language, or to speak more idiomatically, ‘The Expressions.’ It was started, I believe by Maurice’s mother and her sister, Lady Ponsonby, when they were little girls, and in the course of two generations it had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety, putting everyday things in a new light, conveying in nutshells complex situations or states of feeling, cutting at the roots of circumlocution. Those who had mastered the idiom found it almost indispensable.” Among those who had mastered it were high officials in the Foreign Office, members of the literary elite such as Desmond MacCarthy, and many others. In this circle, the “Expressions,” far from being frowned upon, were used as a symbol of unquestioned membership and helped mark off the boundaries of the group.

Finally, there’s the Festus Lexicon Project:

The Lexicon of Festus (de uerborum significatu) is a Latin dictionary compiled in the Roman imperial period which preserves a great deal of priceless information about the history, society, religion and topography of Rome and Italy in earlier centuries… The objectives of this project are:
● to make this mass of information available to researchers in a usable form;
● to stimulate debate on Festus’ own work, on the antiquarian tradition from which he was drawing and on the subsequent history of the text in the Renaissance and thereafter; and
● to enrich and renew studies on the many particular areas of Roman life on which Festus provides such essential information.

Well done, aldi, and keep ’em coming!

This has been niggling at me for years, and now that the guy is back in Lebanon I’m inspired to ask my readers who know Arabic: is General Aoun‘s name, which I gather is عون in Arabic, pronounced the same as the identically spelled word ‘aun ‘help, aid; helper, aide, assistant’? This is one of those times when I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough.

The other night I watched a deeply moving documentary on PBS, “Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness,” about a heroic Japanese consul who saved thousands of Jewish lives during WWII:

As Japan’s consul to Lithuania, Sugihara risked career, disgrace, his life, and the lives of his family defying Tokyo by writing transit visas for refugees desperate to escape persecution. In August 1940, Sugihara spent upwards of sixteen hours a day issuing visas, until Soviet-occupied Lithuania forced the final shutdown of the country’s last remaining consulates. In the end, more than 2,000 Sugihara-stamped passports allowed hundreds of families to flee Europe through Russia to safe havens abroad. Today it is estimated that more than 40,000 people owe their very existence to Sugihara’s heroic acts of humanitarianism.

(You can find many more details, as well as video clips, at the website.)

His full name was Chiune Sugihara, but after the war, when the Japanese government fired him and he was forced to take any job he could get, he wound up working in Moscow under the name Sempo Sugiwara. I wondered about the relationship between the names, and now Bill Poser of Language Log explains what’s going on in a detailed post (hint: the pairs of given names and family names are identical, but in different ways). I’m glad he posted about it, both because it informed me and because it gave me a chance to post on this topic and urge everyone to read about a nearly forgotten man.

Anggarrgoon quotes the following news report by Abantika Ghosh:

NEW DELHI, MAY 2 Four months ago, his tribe’s near-miraculous escape from the devastating tsunami catapulted King Jirake to fame. His interviews describing the disaster, and how his tribe was adjusting in their new quarters in Port Blair, made headlines across the world.

But all that was in stark contrast to the 65-year-old’s quiet and painful death in a Chennai Hospital on April 17—the tribal chief died of brain haemorrhage and consequent paralysis.

And apart from the 49 remaining members of his tribe, including Jirake’s grandson Berebe, who was born days before he died, the only other people mourning his demise were a group of researchers from the School of Languages in Jawaharlal Nehru University.

For, Jirake was the last member of his tribe who knew all the 10 variants of the Great Andamanese language. With his death, the trilingual Great Andamanese-English-Hindi dictionary that Professor Anvita Abbi’s team from JNU is working on, has suffered a setback that it will probably never be able to fully recover from…

(The rest of the article is here.) I thought at first that the “10 variants” were those listed in the Ethnologue family tree for Great Andamanese, but all except A-Pucikwar are said to be extinct.

I had always vaguely wondered about the place name Bikini (after which the famous swimwear was named); now, thanks to an exhaustive investigation by piloklok (Bob Kennedy’s linguistics blog, which has been promoted to the blogroll for this service to etymology), I know that the Marshallese form is Pikinni and that this “is composed of pik ‘surface’ and ni ‘coconut’.” Now I have only two questions: 1) Is the stress, as my Webster’s Geographical Dictionary and the Wikipedia article say, on the first syllable? and 2) What does “piloklok” mean?

(Via Literal-Minded.)

Update. See now Jory Dayne’s extremely informative comment in this Wordorigins thread:

Pik and Ni are glossed as ‘plane surface’ and ‘coconut’ in The Marshallese-English Dictionary—and according to Abo, Bender, Cappele & DeBrum, Pik,Ni is the origin of the place name Pikinni. I guess the real mystery, however, is why the Marshallese opted to single that particular islet out for that specific feature, when nearly all the other islets in the whole of the group share almost identical features: namely, a flat surface where coconuts are growing.

There is another gloss for Pik, and that is to fly, as in the flight of birds, or flapping. Given the tendency to name places for an apparently arbitrary, isolated event, this seems like it could also be a possibility—perhaps in a storm or what have you; that’s pure speculation on on my part, however.

As for stress, I would offer that PIK(ih)NI was probably the original pronunciation—for a couple reasons.

1. I’m willing to bet that the second ‘i’ in Pikinni/bikini is actually just an excrescent vowel… For instance, the Marshallese word for ‘doctor’ is taktõ (dahkduh)—borrowed from English. It is pronounced, however, as DAHK(ih)Duh. A non-loan word, jerbal follows the same pattern. It is pronounced JEHR(ih)bahl.

So you’re probably looking at the name actually being Pikni, with the excrescent vowel inserted between the two parts to help it conform to custom. Other place names also follow this pattern…

2. The ‘N’ in Ni, is a heavier ‘n’—the doubling in the current spelling (Pikinni) is probably to reflect that (although they have recently switched to using a cedilla beneath the heavy consonants to indicate this). So while the stress would be placed on Pik, the weight of the ‘n’ would give that syllable a stress of its own.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that the current pronunciation of Pikinni seems like it has changed to match the one common to English speakers (biKIni). I offer that with the caveat that I have only been in contact with Marshallese who have relocated to the U.S. (although most very, very recently)—so it may just be that group, while native Marshallese are “keepin it real.”

According to a Guardian story by John Ezard:

The Man Booker prize organisation yesterday unveiled a £15,000 special translation award as part of its international fiction prize, whose first winner is due to be announced early next month.
The move has been inspired partly by the judges arriving at a final shortlist in which 10 of the 17 authors wrote in other languages. The winning author would have got £60,000, with nothing, until now, for the translator.
“The judges became increasingly aware of the huge role translators play,” said their chairman, John Carey.
Among those in line for the inaugural prize are the translators of Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Naguib Mahfouz, Tomas Eloy Martínez and Kenzaburo Oe. The winning author decides which translator gets the prize, with discretion to split it among several translators.

About time, say I. But which translator’s picture did they use to illustrate the story? Why, none of them, of course; they ran a photo of Gabriel García Márquez! In fact, they didn’t even name any of the translators. Calling Rodney Dangerfield…
(Via Naked Translations.)

Reading Fred Anderson’s superb Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, with its penetrating insights into every side’s point of view and what really mattered in the end (the Battle of Quebec, in which Wolfe and Montcalm so famously fell, was less important to the fate of Canada than the Battle of Quiberon Bay two months later, which put the French navy out of commission and prevented the resupply and reinforcement of Canada), I noticed a particularly telling misspelling in the following quote from the journal of Captain Samuel Jenks, a Massachusetts blacksmith, in an entry written after the fall of Montreal on September 9, 1760: “I fear we shall be kept [at Crown Point] until ye last of November, for ye command is left to Haverland, & I know he delights to fatigue ye provincials.” (I should point out that ye is a purely graphic alternative for the, due to the similarity of handwritten y and Þ; he would have read it “…until the last of November…” and so on. I will also point out that he was quite correct, and the commander, so solicitous of his regular troops from Britain, kept the provincials “working on the fort and its barracks despite a terrifying outbreak of smallpox, severe weather, and the utter lack of an enemy threat”; Anderson adds that “there was no love to be lost between the provincials and regulars who together had added Canada to the British empire.”)

Now, the commander’s name was Haviland, and Jenks’s spelling Haverland tells me that his dialect was non-rhotic (did not pronounce postvocalic r). I had somehow got it into my head that the loss of the r sound began later, but as this site says:

In the seventeenth century, most of England was rhotic, but non-rhotic speech was common in the southeast, near London. By the eighteenth century this became a prestige variety. In America, areas colonized by higher-class immigrants from southeastern England, such as Tidewater Virginia and the Eastern New England area, maintained non-rhotic speech, which is why the stereotyped Boston accent is r-less–“I pahked my cah by Hahvahd yahd” being a prime example. The r-lessness resulted partly from these speakers being (or being descended from) speakers of r-less dialects in England, and partly from the contact that wealthier speakers from these regions maintained with London at a time when r-lessness was prestigious.

Other regions, such as the mid-Atlantic states, Western New England, and upland areas around Virginia, were chiefly colonized by Scots-Irish or Western English immigrants who spoke r-ful dialects, and did not maintain much contact with upper-class British speech. (New York City, traditionally r-less, is a slightly differerent story; the area was originally r-ful, but r-lessness grew in the mid-nineteenth century through immigration from New England.)

The site also has this nice bit: “a classic joke in the New York area has a student writing ‘A tragic hero is one who falls through the floor in his character.'”

The High Icelandic language centre (Miðstöð háfrónska tungumálsins) is… well, it’s pretty strange. In the words of their manifesto:

The High Icelandic Language movement has its origin in the Icelandic hyperpuristic circles of the nineties. Its members were inspired by the puristic extremities of the nineteenth-century Fjölnismen and the fanatic translation of Goethe’s Faust by Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi. Towards the end of the millennium the movement was nothing more than a few individuals who were unsatisfied with the ‘in their opinion’ moderately puristic endeavours of the Icelandic word-commissions. These men went further where the Fjölnismen had stopped. Lists of purely Icelandic geographical names, Icelandicized proper names and names of chemicals were collected. All these efforts culminated in the foundation of the ‘Language Laundry’ (Nýyrðasmiðja Málþvottahús), which brought hyperpurism into the spotlight…
Languages free of foreignisms don’t exist. From a linguistic point of view, there is no such thing as a ”pure” language. All languages (even High Icelandic) have borrowings. But there is a difference between purity and originality. A word like ‘sinkbróðir’ for ‘cadmium’ contains a loan-word, but the compound as a whole is unique in the world. In a way, this kind of genuineness could be interpreted as a form of purity. Still the High Icelandics aim at reducing as much as possible the foreign words in Icelandic that were borrowed after the first written texts. The exclusion of many words won’t necessarily lead to language impoverishment. In order to avoid that, a large part of obsolete Old Norse vocabulary will be resurrected. The result will be a hyperpure variant of modern Icelandic…

But you needn’t be Icelandic to be High Icelandic:

[Read more…]

OK, first go read Gary Shteyngart’s The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye (from the Spring 2004 Threepenny Review). It’s very funny.

When I return to Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days. The Russian language swaddles me. The trilling r’s tickle the underside of my feet. Every old woman cooing to her grandson is my dead grandmother. Every glum and purposeful man picking up his wife from work in a dusty Volga sedan is my father. Every young man cursing the West with his friends over a late morning beer in the Summer Garden is me. I have fallen off the edges of the known universe, with its Palm Pilots, obnoxious vintage shops, and sleek French-Caribbean Brooklyn bistros, and have returned into a kind of elemental Shteyngart-land, a nightmare where every consonant resonates like a punch against the liver, every rare vowel makes my flanks quiver as if I’m in love…

That was great, right? The man can tell a story. I would have posted the piece for its own sake posted the piece a year ago, but I also want to go on for a bit about this:

Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony sits on the slope of a hill, beneath which lies a small but very prodigious brook, from which my father and I extract enormous catfish and an even larger fish whose English name I have never learned (in Russian it’s called a sig; the Oxford-Russian dictionary tells me, rather obliquely, that it is a “freshwater fish of the salmon family”).

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