Having studied both Old and Modern Irish (the later with the amazing Micheal O’Siadhail, poet and scholar) and visited the Gaeltacht of Connemara, I am very interested in the fate of the language, and was glad to see a brief but authoritative report in Language Log by Jim McCloskey of UC Santa Cruz, “one of the foremost experts in the world on the modern Irish language,” courtesy of Geoff Pullum:

I think that talk of a ‘rebound’ for the language is misplaced, but I do not equate that position with pessimism. The situation is a complex and fluid one, but largely it seems to me that things are on the same trajectory that they have been on for several decades (with a couple of interesting changes). By which I mean that the traditional Irish-using communities (the Gaeltachtai/) continue to shrink and the language continues to retreat in those communities. Nobody that I know who is involved in those communities is optimistic about their future as Irish-speaking communities (though lots of other good things are happening to them and in them).

The observers I trust most (friends and colleagues engaged in intense fieldwork in Gaeltacht communities) maintain that the process of normal acquisition (for Irish) ceased in most areas in the middle 70’s, and it is now increasingly difficult to find people younger than about 30 who control traditional Gaeltacht Irish. If you walk along a road in a Gaeltacht area and try to listen for the language being used by groups of teenagers and children by themselves, it is always (in my recent experience) English. Someone I know who is the principal of a primary school in the Donegal Gaeltacht reported that of the 22 children who entered his school at the beginning of the current year, only two had, in his judgment, sufficient Irish.

So traditional Gaeltacht Irish will almost certainly cease to exist in the next 30 years or so.

But what is unique in the Irish situation, I think, has been the creation of a second language community now many times larger than the traditional Gaeltacht communities (I think that 100,000 is a reasonable estimate for the size of this community). And being a part of that community is a lively and engaging business…

There is a great range of varieties called `Irish’ in use in this community. People like me speak a close approximation of traditional Gaeltacht Irish and there are people who speak new urban calques, heavily influenced by English in every way. For the communities of children growing up around Irish-medium schools in urban centres it may be right to speak of pidginization and creolization (along with a lot of clever inter-language play like the recent ‘cad-ever’). Many teenagers are thoroughly bidialectal, switching easily from the version of Gaeltacht Irish they have from their parents to the new urban varieties in use among their peers.

It will be interesting to see what happens to these varieties when the model of Gaeltacht Irish becomes a memory, but one thing that is clear is that this community is not going to fade away just because the Gaeltacht fades away.

It will be sad to return to the Aran Islands (if I ever do) and no longer hear the easy chatter in Irish all around me, with never a word of English, but I’m glad to learn the language is unlikely to die out.

David Boyk’s vivid webpage Bollywood for the Skeptical presents a CD’s worth of Indian movie-pop hits (and if you think you don’t like Indian pop music, check out the rockin’ “Ina Meena Dika” [mp3] from the 1957 movie Aasha) along with a brief introduction to the genre, but what brings it to LH is the section on language:

Before Independence in 1947, a lot [of] people in the North actually spoke a related dialect called Hindustani, which was written in Arabic script regardless of religious community. Incidentally, a common mistake is for people to refer to Hindi as “Indian,” implying that there’s only one Indian language, but “Hindustani” really just means “Indian” – “Hindustan” and “Bharat” being the most common names for the country, other than “India.” Since Independence, though, most Muslims speak Urdu, which is written with the Arabic alphabet in a slanting style called Nastaliq. Urdu speakers are proud of Nastaliq, since they feel that Urdu is one of the most beautiful languages in the world and this way of writing is more beautiful than the flat way they write in the Middle East. I think they’re right, too – it’s one of the most graceful writing styles…

Urdu and Hindi, though, aren’t that different. In theory, Urdu is more Persianized and Hindi is more Sanskritized, and literary Urdu definitely is that way, and the government and media speak Sanskritized Hindi. But really, most people speak Hindi that’s more or less Persified depending on their community and fairly heavily influenced by English, but never as Sanskritized as Hindi on the TV news. There are differences in dialect, like how Urdu speakers will say “sar” for the English “head” and Hindi speakers will say “sir,” but most people will prefer to say “university” instead of “vishwavidhyalya,” which is what you’re supposed to say in “real” Hindi. And there are regional dialects, too. Northerners will often pronounce “vegetables” as “sabzi,” which is the way you say it in Farsi and Urdu, and Southerners will usually say “sabji,” because “z” is one of the sounds that Hindi doesn’t have. Given that it’s not always obvious what the difference is between Urdu and Hindi, it’s actually more accurate to say that Bollywood movies are in Urdu, mostly because it’s considered more beautiful than Hindi. Religion, which is the ostensible difference between the dialects, is a tricky thing in movies, because nowadays, moviemakers often try not to offend anyone – although other times, they’re complete demagogues. Sometimes people seem to switch religions during the course of a movie, but even when a character is obviously Hindu, she’ll often speak Urdu, or especially sing it, for beauty. Also, my friend Daniel, who helped me with this page, told me that after Independence, when the film industry was starting, “Muslims were those who wrote poetry and songs and went to courtesans, and these courtly cultured people shifted to film after the nawaabs lost money. And the langauge of education was Urdu, so the screenwriters all spoke and had their entire education in Urdu. Therefore, it was only natural for them to write in Urdu. Also, a ‘respectable’ Hindu would not act in a film.”

Obviously a highly simplified discussion, but a useful basic orientation (here’s a little more on Hindi/Urdu, and here’s the Omniglot page on the Urdu writing system), and I hadn’t known about the Muslim/Urdu influence on the film industry. (Thanks to Songdog for the link!)

You’ve probably seen many references to “tsunamis, often incorrectly referred to as ‘tidal waves.'” Claire at Anggarrgoon points out that this is an odd thing to be persnickety about:

I’m not sure why people eschew opacity in this particular compound; there are plenty of phrases and compounds with tenuous relationships to their components. Bowl and board, for instance, has little to do with planks of wood (but was less opaque when “board” meant “table”), bridegrooms have nothing to do with horses, and never have done, koala bears aren’t bears but try telling a marketing manager that, etc etc.

(But what is “bowl and board”?)
Addendum. I just heard an expert interviewed on NPR refer to “the tidal wave.”

Dinesh sent me a link to an online version of Poul Anderson‘s essay “Uncleftish Beholding,” a discussion of atomic theory that “shows what English would look like if it were purged of its non-Germanic words, and used German-style compounds instead of borrowings to express new concepts.” It begins:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

I’m pretty sure I’d seen it before, in my sf-fan days, but it was great to have it available, and I was even more delighted when I found it posted by José Beltrán Escavy, this time paired with a pair of short speeches by professor Xenophon Zolotas at meetings of the International Bank using only words of Greek origin (apart from the necessary connectives):

I eulogize the archons of the Panethnic Numismatic Thesaurus and the Ecumenical Trapeza for the orthodoxy of their axioms, methods and policies, although there is an episode of cacophony of the Trapeza with Hellas.

With enthusiasm we dialogue and synagonize at the synods of our didymous Organizations in which polymorphous economic ideas and dogmas are analyzed and synthesized.

Our critical problems such as the numismatic plethora generate some agony and melancholy. This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch…

The other languages one could use as a basis for such texts are Latin and French, and I imagine someone has done so.

Geoff Nunberg has a post at Language Log on the word gingerly: a NY Times story on Falluja included the statement “it was a gingerly first step,” which pleased him by its proper use of gingerly as an adjective [thanks to Tim May for catching my original misstatement!]; then he had second thoughts about his idea of proper use:

Maybe I should throw in the towel on this one, I thought, but then began to wonder whether there was ever actually a towel for me to be holding in the first place.
In defense of the usage, gingerly began its life as an adverb. It was formed from the adjective ginger, “dainty or delicate,” and the OED gives citations of its use as an adverb right up to the end of the 19th century — the adjectival use appeared in the 16th century. And unlike most other adjectives in –ly, like friendly or portly, gingerly has an adverbial meaning, so that it can only apply to nominals denoting actions (like “step” in Ekholm and Schmidt’s article); otherwise it requires a clumsy periphrasis like “in a gingerly way.” Moreover, Merriam-Webster’s exhaustive Dictionary of English Usage gives no indication that anybody has ever objected to the use of the word as an adverb.

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Since I frequently have occasion to lambast the NY Times here, I take pleasure in patting them on the back when they do something right: in this case, gracing their year-end Week in Review section with essays by Languagehat’s house lexicographer, Grant Barrett (“Glossary“), and one of my favorite linguists, Geoff Nunberg (“Faith“). The whole issue is focused on words and has a lot of interesting items, but I particularly recommend those two.

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I got a number of excellent things for Christmas (including a Boris Barnet double feature I can’t wait to see), but the one I want to babble about here is a gift from my lovely and generous wife: Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs, assembled, translated, and annotated by John Colarusso. I recently posted about the Narts, and apparently the enthusiasm with which I discussed them at that time convinced her that the book would be greatly appreciated, as indeed it is. Not only does it have 92 stories from among those of the peoples mentioned in the title, it has an appendix with specimen texts in Kabardian East Circassian, Bzhedukh West Circassian (Adyghey), Ubykh, Abaza (Tapanta Dialect) (“Northern Abkhaz”), and Bzyb Abkhaz. Each text is preceded by a complete phonemic inventory of the language and a page or so of linguistic description; each line of the text is given first in a broader transcription, then in a word-by-word phonemic transcription that separates and translates each morpheme, then a complete translation is given (more literal than the one in the body of the book). I’ll obviously have to work through Colarusso’s A Grammar of the Kabardian Language; in the meantime I’ll have fun playing with the detailed analysis here. I’m already very pleased by a bit of information from the Abaza section:

Abaza and Abkhaz questions are very unusual in that they choose rightward question movement; that is, the interrogative pronoun appears at the end of the verb, and since the verb is usually the last word of the phrase, these wh-words, as they are called, appear phrase finally. Most linguists do not believe that such question formation exists, but lines 15, 16, and 103 offer clear examples.

I’m all in favor of anything that discomfits proponents of alleged universals.

Colarusso does a lot of comparison, both mythological and linguistic. Some of his etymologies seem plausible: Georgian tamada ‘toastmaster’ from Circassian t^haamáta, perhaps originally ‘father of the gods’; the name of General Ermolov (who conquered part of the Caucasus for Tsar Alexander I) from Circassian yarmáhl ‘Armenian’ (though I’ll have to check Unbegaun to see if there’s a more convincing etymology). Others seem pretty dubious: Greek Maeotis ‘Azov Sea’ from Circassian miwit^ha (I’ve replaced Colarusso’s schwas with is for ease of transcription). But it’s all food for thought, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Incidentally, I discovered while looking at the Amazon entry for the book that Amazon now has a citation page that list all the items in a book’s bibliography for which they have listings; if you click on any of the links, you can find other books that list that item in their bibliography. Interesting and potentially useful.

Addendum. Some Ossetian versions here (courtesy of Mithridates).

A number of readers responded favorably to the Basil Bunting poem I reproduced recently, so I thought I’d pass along the word that his Complete Poems has been published by New Directions; it was edited by the late Richard Caddel, whom I memorialized here. I guarantee that no poetry lover will regret the purchase of a volume of Bunting.

A Los Angeles Times story by Christopher Bodeen describes the efforts of the Chinese government to suppress the so-called “dialects” (actually separate languages spoken by millions of people: Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, &c) in a surprising context: Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Dubbed into regional Chinese dialects, the warring cat and mouse have been huge TV hits — and a good way to pass home-grown culture down to the younger generation, programmers say.
Not so fast, says the central government up north in Beijing, which for decades has promoted standard Mandarin as the only Chinese language worthy of the airwaves. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ordered an end to broadcasting in dialect, saying kids should be raised in a “favorable linguistic environment.”
The move has put Tom and Jerry — or “Cat and Mouse,” as the show is called here — at the center of a long-running debate about how to maintain national cohesion amid a linguistic sea of highly distinct regional accents, dialects and wholly separate language groups.
“As an artist, I think dialect should be preserved as a part of local culture,” said Zhang Dingguo, deputy director of the Shanghai People’s Comedy Troupe, which does Tom and Jerry in Shanghainese.
“Schools don’t allow Shanghainese to be spoken, and now TV doesn’t either. It looks like Shanghai comedy will be dying out,” he added…
Promotion of Mandarin — known here as “putonghua,” or “common tongue” — began in the 1920s and became policy in 1955, six years after the communists seized power. Its use has been encouraged through an unending series of social campaigns, including the current one featuring TV presenter Wang Xiaoya on billboards exhorting Shanghainese to “speak Mandarin … be a modern person.”
In the latest campaign, Shanghai city officials are being required to attend classes on perfecting their pronunciation, schools are nominating contestants in citywide Mandarin speech contests, and foreigners are being invited to Mandarin classes.
Totally distinct from Chinese, the languages of minority groups such as Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians are officially recognized and taught in schools. Important documents are translated into major minority tongues and four of them — Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and Zhuang — appear on Chinese bank notes….
In places like Guangzhou and Shanghai, prevalence of the local dialect helps exclude outsiders from social networks that are key to securing good jobs and entry to better schools. Outsiders say it smacks of bigotry.
“If you want to find a good job and be a success in Shanghai, you have to speak Shanghainese. Even if you do, they can pick you out by your accent and discriminate against you,” said Steven Li, an accounting student flying home to the western city of Chongqing.
Preservation, not exclusion, was the purpose of Tom and Jerry in dialect, said Zhang, the producer.
“You’ve got Shanghainese kids who can’t even speak Shanghainese,” he said. “I have friends who’ve moved to Shanghai and want to learn the language to better integrate into local society.
“Isn’t watching TV easier than studying textbooks?”
Zhang cites semi-legal Shanghainese broadcasting that pops up on local radio as evidence of continued demand for dialect programming. For now, Tom and Jerry will continue in Shanghainese on video, along with other versions in close to a dozen dialects.
Oddy enough, Tom and Jerry didn’t speak in the original cartoons, so the dialect versions give them voices they never had.

Any regular reader of LH will be unsurprised to hear that I deplore the efforts at suppression and the Jacobin arrogance that produces them. Everyone should be able to speak, write, and watch cartoons in their native language without let or hindrance.

(Thanks for the link, Andrew!)

Incidentally, in looking for a link on “Jacobin,” I found a page from a Chinese site with an English essay on federalism in which parts of quoted French words are occasionally replaced by Chinese characters, eg “Du principe f閐閞atif” and “De la D閙ocracie en Amerique.” Very odd!

A New York Times story by Richard Bernstein describes the confusing mixture of English and German in today’s Germany:

Not long ago, Lufthansa, the airline, made a bit of news when it changed its slogan from “There’s No Better Way to Fly,” in English, to the German, “Alles für diesen Moment,” or “Everything for This Moment.”

What was the German national airline doing with an English slogan aimed at its German clientele in the first place? Who knows really? But whatever it was doing, many companies in Germany have used English, or some mishmash of German and English – the not very beautiful term for this is Denglish, a combination of Deutsch and English – to appeal to their German customers.

Now, as the Lufthansa example illustrates, there are some signs of a reversal, or, at least, the German press has reported on a few other companies reverting to the language that the population of this country actually speaks. The chain of perfume shops called Douglas (a German company, pronounced DOO-glahss) went from “Come in and find out,” to “Douglas macht das Leben schöner,” or “Douglas makes life more beautiful.”…

A private company in Hanover, Satelliten Media Design, in conjunction with Hanover University, keeps track of one key aspect of the entire mixed language phenomenon, annually tabulating the 100 words most used in German advertising. In the 1980’s, only one English word made the list. The word, a bit improbably, was “fit.” By 2004, there were 23 English words on the chart.

The first four words are still German – wir (meaning we), Sie (you), mehr (more) and Leben (life). In fifth place is the English “your,” followed farther down the list by world, life, business, with, power, people, better, more, solutions and 13 more.

The article has lots more examples, along with some speculation as to why English words are so popular (“English is hipper and quicker in general”). Thanks to Douglas for the link!

For more on Denglish, see Transblawg (also here and here).