Butterflyblue has a great post on Japanese family names. Did you know (to take one startling fact) that Japan has more such a large number of different surnames than any other country in the world (about 120,000)? I’ll let you discover various piquant examples in situ, but I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph:

Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use “Kuso” [‘shit’ — LH] in names, which means just what you think it means. The famous poet “Kinotsurayuki,” who wrote the Tosa Diaries, is a notable example. His birth name was “Ako Kuso,” which means “my child…shit.” Amazing that a man with this kind of name grew up to be successful in life. Nor is he an isolated case. Names like “Kusoko” and “Oguso” were in vogue among the nobility. The book explains that this has to do with the belief in the god of the toilet. Since the toilet god keeps you healthy, it stands to reason he would be helpful in rearing a healthy child. This seems very out of place in the Japan of today, but it persists in a small way in the superstition that a pregnant woman should keep her bathroom clean if she wants to have a beautiful baby.

(Via No-sword.)

Addendum. Mark Liberman points out in the comments, and in more detail in this Language Log post, that the U.S. has far more surnames. Of course, in a sense it’s an unfair comparison, because the U.S. has surnames from just about every ethnic/linguistic group in the world, but butterflyblue’s statement is clearly incorrect as it stands.

In my never-ending quest to bring you the latest, hottest language news, herewith a BBC news story about a new animated television series:

Colin & Cumberland is an introduction to the Irish language through television, radio and online. Launched on Monday, the website is is aimed at giving 18-40 year olds a taster of the Irish language. The television programmes encourage the viewer to learn some key Irish phrases.

Cumberland, an Irish speaking sausage dog, is sidekick to Colin, a DJ on an Irish radio station despite the fact he cannot speak the language…

“The project is aimed primarily at viewers who have found the idea of learning a whole new language a bit daunting before,” said Kieran Hegarty, BBC Northern Ireland Head of Interative & Learning… “This is not a structured language course. The content is elementary – greetings, ordering drinks, asking personal questions and so on.

“The website’s language content is graded and progresses from single words and phrases to more structured patterns.”

They’re going to be doing this for Scots Gaelic and Welsh as well. Sounds like fun, even if it doesn’t bring about a massive language revival.

(Via Mithridates.)

I knew the etymology of this word was disputed (“Hooley’s gang”? the Irish name Hooligan? Houlihan?), but I hadn’t realized how suddenly it sprang on the scene. The OED says “The word first appears in print in daily newspaper police-court reports in the summer of 1898,” and the first few citations are all from that year (the first two being from the Daily News: 26 July 5/1 It is no wonder.. that Hooligan gangs are bred in these vile, miasmatic byways; 8 Aug. 9/3 The constable said the prisoner belonged to a gang of young roughs, calling themselves ‘Hooligans’). Furthermore, the borrowing khuligan first appeared in Russian that very year, “introduced… in 1898 by I. V. Shklovskii [Russian Wikipedia] in one of the monthly columns about life in England that he wrote for Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth) under the pen name Dioneo”; I take this information from Chapter 1 of Joan Neuberger’s Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914, where a footnote adds the exact reference:“Iz Anglii,” Russkoe bogatstvo 9 (September 1898): 128ff. By 1900-01 khuligan was widely used to describe the gangs of young toughs who were frightening respectable citizens all over Russia, and it has never fallen out of favor since.

Update (May 2025). It occurred to me that by now the September 1898 issue of Русское богатство was probably online, and sure enough it is; Dioneo’s “Изъ Англіи” starts on p. 122. Neuberger cites “128ff,” but p. 128 doesn’t seem relevant — the discussion of “гулиганы” (note g-, not kh-) begins on p. 129. Once again I say, God bless the internet!

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.