I was reading Roger Angell’s recent New Yorker reminiscence [archived] about his stepfather, E.B. White (known to his intimates as “Andy”), when I came to the following paragraph:

The other sentence-closer in the passage is “death,” and Andy must have ceased in time to be astonished at how often the theme and thought recurred in his writing. It runs all through his sweetly comical piece “Death of a Pig,” in which he tries ineffectually to deal with the crisis of a young pig of his who has stopped eating. Castor oil doesn’t help, nor does his own sense of “personal deterioration,” or the ministrations of Fred [his dachshund], who accompanies him on trips down the woodpath through the orchard to the pigyard, and also makes “many professional calls on his own.” The pig dies, nothing can be done about it, and it is the profusion of detail—his feeling the ears of the ailing pig “as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child,” and the “beautiful hole, five feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep” that is dug for the pig among alders and young hackmatacks, at the foot of an apple tree—that makes its death unsentimental and hard to bear.

The word hackmatacks stopped me cold; from context it apparently referred to some kind of plant, but neither I nor my wife (a New Englander) was familiar with it. When I got home I checked my dictionaries and discovered that both Webster’s and the OED said it was another word for the tamarack (Larix laricina). Case closed, one might think (except for the odd similarity of the two words)—but I checked the AHD just for completeness and found that that excellent dictionary identified it rather with the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), a tree of an entirely different genus. A competitive googling produced 755 hits for “hackmatack, larix” and only 342 for “hackmatack, populus,” but that’s not exactly a scientific way of deciding the matter. It seems odd to me that dictionaries cannot agree on the referent of this uncommon but well-established word; can anyone shed light on this?

A NY Times story by Nicholas Wood describes efforts to “restore” the “Bosnian language” to the Serbian region of Novi Pazar (1911 Britannica article), known in Serbo-Croatian (to use the accurate name of the language everyone in the region speaks) as the Sandžak and traditionally in English as the Sanjak (which is how you pronounce the Serbo-Croatian word). Wood does a suprisingly good job of separating nationalistic claims from reality and puncturing the idea of a separate language:

Since their country fractured, their culture and language has, too. Croatia, Bosnia, and even Montenegro have all sought to reassert traditional differences and distance themselves from Serbo-Croatian, a language some felt was too heavily dominated by Serbian.

What were considered dialects until recently are now regarded as their own language. In fact, three “new” languages – possibly four, if one counts Montenegrin – have appeared, distinguished as much by national pride (and perhaps pronunciation) than any deep distinction in grammar.

Vocabulary differs here and there. The Serbs and Montenegrins also use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Bosnians and Croatians use the Latin alphabet. But many people read both.

Still, before the war, Yugoslavs most everywhere in the country could understand each other. The same holds true through the region today. There is in fact probably less difference in spoken language and accent between and a Sarajevan and a Belgrader than between a Londoner and Glaswegian.

I have highlighted the crucial phrase (though of course “as much” should be “more”). Wood goes on to explain the political background:

Introduction of the classes is seen as a victory for the mountainous region’s Muslim minority, which argues that the local language was eroded by the education system and bureaucracy in Belgrade, which were dominated by Orthodox Serbs who speak a different dialect with its own accent.

“Language defines the identity of a people,” said Zekerija Dugopoljac, the director of education for the Bosnian National Council, the official body that represents Muslim Slavs in Serbia and Montenegro. “Having the Bosnian language brings recognition to a people who have lived in Serbia and Montenegro for centuries.”

The lessons, which have the approval of the Serbian Education Ministry, are intended to comply with European law allowing minorities to be taught their own language. But Serbian nationalists oppose the classes, which they see as a first step toward a separatist movement. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party has called for the education minister to step down.

Such moves are closely watched in this region, one of Serbia’s most ethnically diverse. The Sandzak managed to escape the ethnic conflicts of the 1990’s that took place just across its boundaries in Bosnia and Kosovo. Muslims here say they are keen not to alarm their Serb neighbors. Others appear confused about the need for the classes.

“I speak Serbian,” said Nedzat Zenunovic, a 23-year-old Muslim who works in an Internet cafe. “Bosnians speak Bosnian. We don’t live in Sarajevo, we live here.”

A straw poll in the cafe revealed that several people had difficulty in giving any name to the language they spoke.
“It’s Serbo-Montenegrin!” quipped a young student, smiling. Serbo-Montenegrin is not a recognized language.

Sounds like the locals who are neither politicians nor bureaucrats have a pretty sensible attitude towards the whole thing. To me, it’s as if the mayor of New York mandated classes to teach people “Dutch English” in an attempt to restore the traditional dialect of the city before it was corrupted.

I can’t post about Novi Pazar without quoting one of my favorite bits from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure penance for the previous century of British policy on the Eastern Question, for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe:

Nobody knows-where, it is-on-the-map,
Who’d ever think-it, could start-such-a-flap?
Each Montenegran, and Serbian too,
Waitin’ for some-thing, right outa the blue—oh honey
Pack up my Glad-stone, ‘n’ brush off my suit,
And then light me up my bigfat, cigar—
If ya want my address, it’s
That O-ri-ent Express,
To the san-jak of No-vi Pa-zar!…

It is taking up so much of his time he’s begun to neglect Novi Pazar, and F.O. is worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s plastic surgeons … their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.

Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a croix mystique on the palm of Europe, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm knew just the man…

But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not from World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him.

If only Lord Osmo could have lived to see the quiet reappearance of his obscure area of responsibility into the limelight of the News from Europe!

(Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)

Bruce Byfield has a brilliant analysis of the origins of, and problems with, prescriptivism called “Tech Writers, Grammar, and the Prescriptive Attitude.” I urge anyone interested in the topic to read it; I’ll just quote a bit that I particularly want to emphasize:

Writing well, as George Orwell observes in “Politics and the English Language,” “has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax.” If it did, then two centuries of prescriptive grammar in the classroom should have resulted in higher standards of writing. Yet there is no evidence that the language is used more skillfully in 2001 than in 1750. The truth is that, prescriptive grammar and effective use of English have almost no connection. A passage can meet the highest prescriptive standards and still convey little if its thoughts are not clearly expressed or organized. Conversely, a passage can have several grammatical mistakes per line and still be comprehensible and informative. Prescriptive grammars are interesting as a first attempt to approach the subject of language, but today they are as useless to writers as they are to linguists. So long as writers have a basic competence in English, prescriptive grammar is largely a distraction that keeps them from focusing on the needs of their work.

There’s nothing wrong with following the “rules” if you enjoy playing that game (or if it’s required by the publication you’re writing for), but it has nothing to do with the quality of your writing, which is (or should be) paramount. I also recommend Jean Hollis Weber’s fine piece on the proper focus of editing, “Escape From the Grammar Trap.”

Thanks to aldiboronti of Wordorigins.org for the link to Echo Tan’s blog X Reverie, where I first saw these articles posted, and to suchi in the comments below for the proper attribution.

In the course of a serial savaging of Strunk and White, first Mark Liberman and then Geoff Pullum analyze the prescriptivist pair’s strange insistence that “however” must not come at the beginning of a sentence; Mark then extends the analysis to other adverbs and suggests that there may have been “a large-scale change in adverb-placement fashions at the end of the 19th century.” Most interesting. And the investigation involves an extremely useful link: the Hyper-Concordance of the Victorian Literary Studies Archive, covering a wide range of authors.

My wife brought me the Provider Directory (online search form here) sent us by Health New England, open to the index by languages, which she knew would interest me. (You can consult the “Languages Spoken” pull-down menu on the search form linked above.) I was impressed by the fact that there were doctors listed under such unexpected languages as Armenian, Cebuano, Kannada, and Yoruba, and pleased to see there were two listed as being able to use Sign Language (presumably ASL). Then I started noticing some strange entries. “Ukraine” for Ukrainian was a minor glitch, but what were “Pakistani” and “Indian” supposed to mean? (Ethnologue lists 69 languages for Pakistan, 387 for India.) There were separate entries for “Persian” and “Farsi,” and not just for cross-referencing convenience, either: there were five doctors listed under the latter and only one (a different one) under the former. But the worst was “Hebrew (Yiddish).” What the…? Not only are those completely different languages, it’s unlikely that many doctors are competent in both—certainly here in New England. I suspect most of those listed speak Hebrew, with a few having picked up Yiddish either as mamaloshen at home or as an elective in college; in any case, lumping them together seems completely insane. (Also, I can’t help but wonder how many patients still arrive at the doctor’s expecting to describe their symptoms in Yiddish.)

[Read more…]

It is not given to many men to introduce a new word into the language. He claimed he got it from an editor, but he claimed a lot of things. All I know is that nobody ever wrote like that before, and lots of people have since tried and made fools of themselves, and now it’s all over.

Farewell and mahalo, Hunter.

(A good collection of Hunter Thompson links at Incoming Signals.)

No, that’s not a typo, it means ‘become rich’ in Hittite, and caelestis at Sauvage Noble has a delightful post on why it’s his favorite Hittite word; read the whole thing if you enjoy Indo-European puns.

Anyone who has ever worked in a bookstore will nod ruefully while reading George Orwell’s little reminiscence “Bookshop Memories.” The names of the popular authors have changed since 1936 (as have some aspects of the situation; Orwell thought that “The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman”), but much is immutable. And the sad conclusion is still applicable:

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

(Via wood s lot.)

Back in May of last year, Mark Liberman of Language Log had a post which began by asserting that Abu Ghraib means ‘father of the raven’ (literally speaking, although the abu form in Arabic is so common and multivalent I’d be tempted to go with ‘Place of Ravens’ instead). Then on Monday he posted a correction, saying that Tim Buckwalter had told him it was rather the diminutive of ghariib ‘strange,’ while the dimunitive of ghuraab ‘crow, raven’ ought to be ghurayyib.

Now he has a further discussion of the matter, with more information on the formation of Arabic diminutives than you can shake a small stick at… and yet there’s still no resolution. Frankly, I find it hard to believe Iraqis don’t know whether Abu Ghraib is named after ravens, the west, or strangeness, assuming of course there is some sort of morphological differentiation in the diminutives. Does anybody know any Iraqis they can ask? The uncertainty is killing me, and perhaps Mark as well.

A Washington Post article [archived] by David A. Fahrenthold discusses the slow decline of the Chesapeake Bay way of speaking:

Years ago, before the watermen had to become bus drivers and the crab shanties were replaced by new red-brick houses, everybody on St. George Island knew about the arster, the kitchen and the sun dog.

The arster, of course, was a bivalve—called an “oyster” by some people—often found here at the remote south end of St. Mary’s County. “The kitchen” was a spot in the Chesapeake Bay where arsters were caught. And a “sun dog” was a haze that portended bad weather, a sign it was time to leave the kitchen and head home.

These words were part of the island’s local dialect, one of many distinctive ways of speaking that grew up over the centuries in isolated areas across the bay.

But now, like many of the other dialects, St. George-ese is fading. Many of the watermen who spoke it have left, and in their place are newcomers from the Washington suburbs and elsewhere…

Linguists are careful to stress that there is not one single Chesapeake Bay dialect but rather a vast array of accents and vocabularies.

There are distinctively southern speakers, like Tidewater Virginians who say “kyar” when they mean “car.” Further north are the residents of “Bawlmer, Merlin,” and along the Eastern Shore, in isolated waterman’s communities, people turn “wife” into “wuife.”

But to the west of this cacophony, there is Washington—a demographic behemoth, breaker of dialects.

Almost 50 percent of the region’s residents were born in a state other than the one where they live, which is more than other big cities and close to twice the national average. Linguistically, that means “nobody really has any idea what Washington, D.C., is,” said David Bowie, a linguistics professor at the University of Central Florida…

So far, there’s been no comprehensive linguistic study of the bay’s dialects to see if they’re all facing the same fate as Southern Maryland speech. But changes have been noted by old-timers and local historians across the area.

Northern Neck native W. Tayloe Murphy Jr.—the Virginia secretary of natural resources—said residents used to say they lived “in” the Northern Neck. Now, he said, many say “on,” as outsiders do.

In Delaware, historian Russ McCabe said he’s seen the decline of “among-ye,” which was that state’s rare way of saying “y’all.” One of the few times he’s heard it recently was at a church in Gumboro, in south Delaware.

“This older fella looked at me and [said], ‘Are among-ye going to stay for supper?’ ” said McCabe, who works for the state public archives. “I had a moment there, a twinge of almost sadness, because I hadn’t heard that in 20 years.”…

The most prominent exception to these changes is Smith Island, Md., a marshy place with about 360 residents, reachable only by ferry.

Here, with a brogue that’s been steeped in decades of isolation, Smith Islanders render house as “hace” and brown as “brain.” They use words that are relics of the British English used by American colonists, such as “progging”—which means to poke around the marshes looking for arrowheads.

University researchers were surprised recently to find that young Smith Islanders actually have a stronger accent than their parents. The researchers and islanders said they believe the change was a conscious attempt to assert the island’s culture in the face of declining catches and rising water levels.

I wonder if this reaction has any chance of actually preserving the dialect for a significant amount of time?

(Thanks to Joe Tomei for the link.)