A new book, Word Origins … and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone by Anatoly Liberman, should help dispel some myths about how words arise. Its publisher, Oxford University Press, says:

Word Origins is the only guide to the science and process of etymology for the layperson. This funny, charming, and conversational book not only tells the known origins of hundreds of words, but also shows how their origins were determined. Liberman, an internationall [sic] acclaimed etymologist, takes the reader by the hand and explains the many ways that English words can be made, and the many ways in which etymologists try to unearth the origins of words.

They add “For the past seventeen years, he has been working on a new etymological dictionary of English,” and I certainly look forward to seeing the finished product; meanwhile, I’ll have to check out his book, which Grant Barrett was kind enough to mention in a comment to this entry (he linked to Nathan Bierma’s Chicago Tribune review, apparently part of Bierma’s regular On Language column—I’m glad to know somebody other than Safire has one!

Addendum. Thanks to a comment by The Cataloger, I learn that Bierma has a blog.

Update (Oct. 2009). I regret to report that Bierma’s column ended last year; the last one I can find is dated September 23, 2008.

Matt of No-Sword has posted about the new Nihongogen Daijiten, the ‘Big Dictionary of Japanese Etymology.’ If I knew Japanese, I would definitely want this book, but I’m disappointed by Matt’s description:

The Nihongogen Daijiten is an attempt to solve or at least neutralise [the problem of different etymologies in different dictionaries] by bringing everyone’s ideas together in one place, from the carefully backed-up linguistic arguments to crazy stuff some drunk guy wrote down centuries ago.
So, for example, if you look up “Fuji” (as in the mountain), you can see the commonly heard explanation that it derives from the Ainu word huchi, meaning “God of Fire”, but also these other theories:
* It evolved from ho-de (火出, “fire comes out”)
* It’s a shortened version of kefuri-shigeshi (煙茂し, “smoke grows”)
* It’s a shortened version of fu-ji-na (吹息穴, “hole that breathes out”)
… and it comes down to which source you want to trust the most. (Sometimes the editors add a note weighing in on one side, or proposing an entirely different derivation, but this too is scrupulously identified as editorial comment.)

As I said in Matt’s comments, I consider it an abdication of the responsibility of an etymologist to simply present a bunch of ideas, some clearly wacko, and let the reader sort them out. If you have to give them all, present the one or two you think plausible in regular type and the rest in small type in a separate paragraph. But at least the groundwork has been laid for someone to come along and do it right.

Ray Davis at Pseudopodium has a thought-provoking post about weblogging as conversation:

Writing helps me suspend disbelief in persistent community. Writing helps me prolong the hope of shared pleasure and cooperative knowledge. If the intoxication’s weaker, so is the hangover.
If T. V. and I are right that weblogging can approximate, more closely than any other form, our ideal of written conversation, then we can expect that weblogging will expose, more painfully than any other form, the costs and contradictions of that ideal.

[Read more…]

Among the small library of books on Russian history I’m weaving between like a bee among blossoms is Orlando Figes’s massive A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution : 1891-1924, where on page 81 I found the following passage in a section on enforced Russianization:

But if forbidding [Polish] high-school students to speak in Polish was merely harsh (at least they had learned to speak in Russian), to do the same to railway porters (most of whom had never learned Russian, which as ‘public officials’ they were ordered to speak) was to enter into the cruelly surreal. This was not the only act of bureaucratic madness. In 1907 the medical committee in Kiev Province refused to allow cholera epidemic notices to be published in Ukrainian with the result that many of the peasants, who could not read Russian, died from drinking infected water.

And there are people who want to enforce similar English-only policies in the United States. Forward into the cruelly surreal, comrades!

While reading The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (bless UCal Press and its free online books!), I ran across the following sentence in Chapter 3: “One of Chicherin’s supporters, angry at the refusal of the duma to vote a protest motion after the mayor’s resignation, blamed the petty bourgeois ‘black hundreds’ (that is, reactionaries) of the third curia for this failure”; the footnote attributed the quote to S. A. Muromtsev, “Moskovskaia duma,” Vestnik Evropy (February 1885). This astonished me, because I had never before seen any indication that the term (черносотенцы, chernosotentsy, in Russian) predated the twentieth century. Walter Laqueur, in his book Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, says “A Russian conservative-nationalist party in Russia emerged only around the turn of the last century… [Earlier such groups] did not amount to much… This changed only with the appearance of the ‘Black Hundred’ at the time of tsarism’s acute crisis in 1904-1905.” Does anybody have any information that might explain Muromtsev’s use twenty years earlier?
Addendum. Roman, in the comments below, kindly directed my attention to this article by V.V. Vinogradov, which outlines the history of the phrase. In early Russia one meaning of chernyi ‘black’ was ‘subject to taxation’; hence, for example, a chernaya sloboda was a settlement not exempt from taxation. A sotnya was originally a military group of a hundred men, but the word was later applied to various groups, in this context taxpaying shopkeepers and other small businessmen. By the nineteenth century the term had gone out of use, but it was revived in the latter half of the century as an ironic name for the more conservative of the “petty bourgeois” members of municipal legislatures, who were seen as obstructing progressive measures. From there it was an easy step to apply it to the most reactionary elements, the type who were likely to participate in or support pogroms; this had taken place by the beginning of the twentieth century. Muromtsev, therefore, was using it in the earlier (obstructionist) sense. Thanks, Roman!

The Tensor has a very interesting post illustrating one of the occupational hazards of linguistics: the limited pool of standard examples used to demonstrate linguistic phenomena. If you’ve had any exposure to this sort of thing, think of a language with a very small repertoire of phonemes. Yup, that’s the one. Take his quiz for more:

For each question, your answer should be the first example that pops into your head. I predict that, although our answers won’t agree every time, with much greater than chance frequency, you’ll pick the same language I did. My answer follows each question on the same line in the background color—select the line to see it.

I got 15 of the 23 languages; in this case, that’s not a sign of how knowledgeable I am but of how unimaginative linguistic education is (and how unchanging—my grad classes were 30 years ago). His conclusion:

I can think of a solution, but it’s hard: learn more “exotic” languages, specialize in language families beyond the familiar (I think we’ve got Indo-European covered at this point), and fer chrissake stop using English as a source of examples. Did I say “hard”? Maybe I should have said “unrealistic”—I have to admit that I’m not ready to abandon the use of examples from my native language—but a real effort to stay away from the standard example languages can only lead us to a broader perspective and a better basis for cross-linguistic generalizations.

The remarkable site called POPjisyo.com describes itself as “a web based pop-up dictionary for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and other languages.” I found it via mj klein of Metrolingua (an excellent language-oriented site), who says:

What you do is paste in Japanese words in a text box to look up both the meaning and the correct reading of the word, plus the correct reading of the individual kanji. For instance, if you see a word that contains two or more kanji (such as 国連）but don’t know the correct reading, just type in the kanji, press “Word Lookup” and it will provide the meaning of the word. Plus, when you move the cursor over each kanji, it will give you all the readings and meanings of each one (like a dictionary).
But that’s not all–you can also create your own study list. All you do is double click on the word, and it will add it to your list, and every time you go back to the site, your list is sitting there, waiting for you. And, if that’s not impressive enough, you can email your study list to yourself! I have at least 50 words on my list, which is also sitting in my email inbox.

You can also create a bookmarklet that will allow you to go to, say, a Japanese site and find the meaning of any word by holding the cursor over it. Amazing.

Yoshiko McFarland says on her biography page:

Yoshiko was born in Osaka, Japan on Dec. 7th, 1941 as the 4th child and 2nd daughter of Masatake Mitsuhashi. Her father died as an army doctor before seeing her. Her first impressed memory was the view of burning Osaka at night with the sound of B29 fleets, sirens and bombs, and the ruins of the big town after the fire.
Her birthday was the day before Pearl Harbor Day in the Japanese calendar. But she had not had much chance to think about that deeply, because teachers for her generation avoided talking about the war. Later, when she had her eyes in the US, she realized her birthday was Pearl Harbor Day in the US, and how Americans feel about that day every year.
This shocked her, and it became the big reason to start to create the Earth Language. She agrees with the idea that Japan should never have big weapons nor fight a war for the sake of world peace. But she wondered what Japanese should do instead.
“We need to prepare rational tools instead of emotional weapons for keeping peace. We need to prepare a common background to feel that everybody on the earth is part of a single family” She couldn’t wait to put this idea into a concrete shape.

That concrete shape was Earth Language, a symbolic language with no spoken form. Her about page lists the usual reasons for creating a language for all mankind, and of course this will have no more success than any of the others (sorry, Esperantists), but it’s an interesting attempt and carried out with considerable detail. Anyway, better that people should spend their time constructing languages than blowing things up. You go, Yoshiko!

A Reuters story,”Turkey renames ‘foreign’ animals” (Fri Mar 4, 2005):

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey has renamed some animal species, saying foreign scientists opposed to its territorial integrity had chosen their former names with ill intent, the Environment Ministry has said.
A sheep species previously known as Ovis Armeniana was renamed Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus. A species of red fox was renamed as Vulpes Vulpes rather than Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica.
“Unfortunately there are many other species in Turkey which were named this way with ill intentions. This ill intent is so obvious that even species only found in our country were given names against Turkey’s unity,” the statement said.
The ministry said the animals’ new names had been chosen as result of scientific studies.

(Via Turkish Torque, “the first Turkish blog on the Internet by Ugur Akinci.”)

A year ago I had a post about the OED’s hunt for the earliest citations of words used in science fiction. Now there’s a snazzy new site for it, whose proprietor, Jesse Sheidlower, says:

For those interested: the Oxford English Dictionary Science Fiction project… has been redesigned and relaunched.
The biggest change is that the OED’s database of citations of SF words is now made (mostly) available via the website. The OED does not usually make its work available in this way, but OED has agreed to publicly open up this part of its database to acknowledge the great contribution volunteers have made to this project.
That means that if you contribute a cite, it’s viewable by everyone. Here’s a link with more information about the citations…
We are also adding quite a few new words: there is an internal list of pending words we have been maintaining and over the next few weeks many of those words will be moved to the main pages. This link… takes you to a list of the most recent additions.

I’m surprised that the earliest cite for “hard science fiction” is 1957 (P. Schuyler Miller in the February Astounding Science Fiction), and if I had access to my early-’50s copies of Astounding, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction I’d be tempted to pore through the editorials and book reviews looking for antedates.

[Read more…]