Back in February I posted about Ross Perlin’s attempt to document endangered languages in and around New York City; now Ian Frazier, perhaps my favorite New Yorker writer, reviews [in the New York Review of Books] Perlin’s book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (archived). I’ll quote some bits and urge you to read the whole thing:
Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. The word “bodega” itself reveals a linguistic nest. It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store), as well as to the French boutique, the Russian and Polish apteka, and the Italian bottega. Perlin writes that “in today’s New York, boutiques and bodegas sit side by side.”
[…] Kichwa, a language descended from that of the ancient Incas, is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in New York. As the Inca Empire spread across parts of South America in pre-Columbian times, it drove out other languages. Now Kichwa qualifies as endangered, although 8,000 to 10,000 New Yorkers may speak it; but in a new country, parents are rarely able to pass along much of their mother tongue to their children. (I asked my dentist, who’s from Ecuador, if he spoke Kichwa or knew any Kichwa speakers. He said that when he was growing up outside Quito, he knew people who spoke only Kichwa, but in the US he seldom hears it. He remembered a few words, like chompa, which means “sweater.” I realized that unconsciously I had always pictured the ancient Incas wearing llama-wool sweaters. “Llama” is a word that comes from Quechua, a language category that includes Kichwa. There are speakers of other forms of Quechua in New York as well.) […]
Looking at the city from a linguistic point of view reveals facts you might otherwise not have stumbled on, such as: when Andy Warhol (née Andrew Warhola) met Pope John Paul II in 1980, he spoke to him in Ruthenian, a language of southern Poland and Slovakia, the region where the Pope and Warhol’s parents came from. Sojourner Truth, the antislavery heroine, grew up speaking Dutch; she was born in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, when it still had a Dutch presence. Yitta Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor and member of a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community in Brooklyn, left maybe two thousand living descendants when she died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. […]
Or other facts, such as: some Indigenous Ecuadorians who come to New York refer to the city as yoni, pronounced “I-OH-nee,” a word they improvised by sounding out the “I ♥ NY” slogan and reading the heart as an O. In the Philippines, 172 different languages (including Tagalog) are spoken, which may explain why about 60 percent of the national missions to the UN employ Filipino receptionists. Most Sherpas have the last name “Sherpa”; the Sherpa who set the world record for the fastest ascent of Mount Everest works at a Whole Foods in Manhattan. (Perlin doesn’t say which one.) Scholars in Brooklyn who read a page of the Talmud every day need to know Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, a descendant of the language Jesus spoke. At that rate, they finish in about seven and a half years, then celebrate with other scholars in a mass gathering at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. In a mosque on East 169th Street in the Bronx, instructors teach N’ko, a writing system for African languages that may have been revealed to its inventor in a dream in 1949. According to one African creation story, the word N’ko, which means “I say” in all Manding languages, was the first word spoken on Earth.
Perlin begins the book, “Don’t ask a linguist how many languages they speak.” My guess is he speaks about a dozen. He grew up in New York City and went to Stanford, where he “tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic,” “threw [him]self into Mandarin,” and then spent six months in China speaking only that language. His graduate schools included Cambridge and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in London. He became interested in Trung, an endangered language of China that is spoken in a remote part of Yunnan province on the border with Tibet. For his Ph.D. in linguistics, he went to Yunnan and spent three years learning Trung, recording it, transcribing it, and making a dictionary. He says, “I have never done anything harder.” […]
In all these linguistic quests a mournfulness and sense of loss creep in. Perlin’s second subject, Husniya, is a young woman from the part of Central Asia where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China meet. She grew up speaking X̌ik, also called Wakhi, a language mentioned by Marco Polo. Today Wakhi is down to 40,000 speakers. Growing up in Tajikistan she also learned Tajik, Kyrgyz, Persian, and Russian. After immigrating to New York she got her master’s degree in early childhood education, for which she needed her ninth language, English. She is sad that today she speaks with an accent in all her languages, even Wakhi. On another hard trip, Perlin accompanies her to Tajikistan, travels the country by jeep, risks attack from ISIS on unfrequented roads, and interviews native speakers of a dozen different endangered languages. […]
Lenape, the language of the people who occupied the New York archipelago before anybody, closes out Perlin’s six searches. His guide is Karen, a woman whose Lenape name, Waapeetkwuchukahkuyaxkweew, means “White Buffalo Woman.” (I had to check my spelling of the Lenape letter by letter, like a URL.) Karen is a cheerful and indefatigable teacher who also happens to be a national women’s weight lifting champion. At the end of the chapter she unexpectedly dies, defeating that attempt to bring back the language. Perlin goes up to a Lenape reserve in Canada hoping to meet Dianne Snake, an old woman who is the last native speaker. After some searching he finds her house, but she is so unwelcoming that he becomes flustered and can’t remember the Lenape he learned from Karen. They talk briefly in English before he makes his exit. Dianne Snake’s daughter tells him, “You lasted longer than the last guy…. He ended up in the pool.” […]
The book needs an index. In the accumulation of names of languages, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart or remember which have been mentioned already. Comprehensive indexing would have been possible because although many of the words are in alphabets other than English (Cyrillic, Greek, N’ko, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese characters), the author transliterates them to English when they first appear. What a wild, abundant list that index could have been! […]
I’m with the author as he notes the different kinds of Tatar languages in Brooklyn (where Lipka Tatars from Poland and Belarus built the first mosque in the city, on Powers Street), and I follow along as he describes parts of Queens where “every [language] group has its clubs,” such as the Val di Non Club, some of whose members speak Nones, “a Romance language which sits somewhere between Ladin, Lombard, and Venetian,” or Gottscheer Hall, “the last outpost of Gottscheerish,” a Germanic language originally from what is now Slovenia. I enjoy knowing that, in another neck of the borough, “retired Gurkha soldiers shoot hoops every Sunday morning…calling for the ball in Nepali, a lingua franca for these native speakers of different dialects of Gurung and Tamang.” And I’m with him as he talks about the mosque in the Bronx attended by the Macedonian Roma, whose language, Kalderash Vlax, is only one of several Romani languages in the city. But I have to take a breather when I learn that Ladino, a language spoken by descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492, sometimes also known as Judeo-Spanish, has more than seventy other names. […]
He quotes a nineteenth-century Yiddish speaker who entered the US through Ellis Island and later recalled that the new arrivals were first put in lines according to language, and then each line was sent to the table where officials spoke that language. The Yiddish speaker says, “A big, strange country recognized my language that I had brought here with me from abroad as an official language. In Russia and Germany, I did not receive any such privilege.” The Ellis Island staff could interpret in the twenty most common European languages, as well as in Chinese and Arabic. That was how Babel worked back then. […]
Even for us nonpolyglots it’s exciting to be a part of the mix. Once I was on a 6 train in the Bronx. The afternoon was hot, the AC underwhelming, and the car packed with people going home after work: guys carrying hard hats, women in nurses’ scrubs with plastic-covered IDs on lanyards. The train got to the last stop, Pelham Bay Park. Everybody stood up, eager to get off at last, but the doors didn’t open. We waited, knowing that sometimes they don’t open for fifteen seconds or so. Thirty seconds—still didn’t open. More time went by. It got hotter. The breezy El platform was just a few feet away.
More seconds, maybe a minute, and the doors still didn’t open. Then a woman standing in the middle of the car, right next to a door and facing it, yelled, “Abre la FUCKING puerta!” and all the doors sprang open instantly, as if in obedient surprise. Everybody in the car laughed. That’s only the second time in my life that I’ve heard somebody make an entire subway-carful of people laugh. I know just a few words of Spanish, but I learned a whole unforgettable hybrid sentence that day. All of us riders, now for just one moment on the exact same page linguistically, stepped out onto the platform and continued down the stairs, still laughing. A passionate rush of New York City patriotism surged in me.
In me as well, Ian. N’ko!
Took me a a second or two to realise that by “Kichwa” he means Quechua (which is a language family rather than a single language, but OK.)
Is the Spanish spelling now considered unacceptable?
I was taken aback by that too; I presume it’s Perlin’s choice, which Frazier understandably copied.
Kichwa is the Ecuadorean variety of Quechua (specifically of Quechua II-B).
Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with
Tagalog unexpected? Tagalog ranks fourth among languages spoken in the home in the US, ahead of Vietnamese by around 200,000 speakers. I don’t know how the data look when one does not count Cantonese, Taishanese, Hokkien, and Mandarin as the same language.
Took me a a second or two to realise that by “Kichwa” he means Quechua (which is a language family rather than a language, but OK.)
Actually it looks like he’s using “Quechua” for the family and “Kichwa” for a particular language in it, though not literally in these terms:
“Llama” is a word that comes from Quechua, a language category that includes Kichwa. There are speakers of other forms of Quechua in New York as well.
Israel (my experience is mainly from Karmiel, though many other areas are similar) has a lot of languages these days, though of course not that many; on a typical street I can hear Russian, English, Arabic, and not infrequently Spanish, in addition to the usual Hebrew, plus probably a few more languages I can’t as easily recognize.
Bookcrossing places at bus stops have far more variety in the books, with Dutch and Romanian being common features, but of course that could be an artifact of the book-collecting habits of specific inhabitants. I’ve seen a Hungarian-French dictionary on one of those shelves recently.
On a daily basis, even outside tourist areas, Vienna may be one of the most polyglot cities in Europe. On a typical day between public transport, cafes, and shopping I hear variants of B-C-S-M, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Polish, English, Slovak, and Romanian. Often Italian, Spanish, French and Mandarin as well. Occasionally Hungarian, although less often than you might think. Plus a few languages I don’t recognize, although probably Kurdish. I know a number of Bulgarians, Armenians and Georgians who are also permanent residents. Sometimes you even hear people speaking German.
@Xerib: Like virtually all languages other than English, Tagalog is not evenly distributed geographically within the U.S. and NYC does not have nearly as much of a concentration of its speakers as various other places, especially on or near the Pacific Coast. For example, per some slightly out of date Census Bureau numbers, New York state has materially fewer “Filipino-Americans” (obviously not a perfect proxy for Tagalog speakers, but not bad) than Nevada does, even though New York’s total state population is about 6.5x that of Nevada. The New York City public school website has on its “front” page links to info in nine non-English languages, which I’m guessing are the nine someone thinks most likely to be spoken by LEP parents, and Tagalog isn’t one of them.
Separately, one standard reference source gives what I would have thought the pretty uncontroversial etymology of the NYC-English word “bodega” as ‘Borrowed from Spanish bodega, from Latin apothēca (“storehouse”), from Ancient Greek ἀποθήκη (apothḗkē, “storehouse”).’ What the FUCK (as they reportedly say on the 6 train) does Frazier think he means by “It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store)”? “Related to” would be a very weird way to express “via,” IMHO.
It’s a similar Babel in the human genomes. A recent paper clustered NYC participants of genomic programs into a bewildering array of distinct groups (the published report skipped multiple small groups for fears that they were too small to keep genetic privacy of the participants protected, but still included several American populations of African ancestry, several distinct Romani/Sinti groups, and several Jewish groups). On the clinical side of things, I was impressed by their discovery of a frequent heritable cardiovascular problem of the Bukhari Jews, an insular population which has never been characterized in medical genomic studies until a large number of them cropped up in the NYC analysis.
By “an insular population” I take it that Dmitry P. means that having abandoned the former USSR they now mostly live on Long Island.
LOL I see the word “insular” in population genomics papers from time, not just referring to island populations, but also to highlanders and other relatively endogamous populations. But I don’t know if it is still proper to apply it to the ethno-cultural groups separated from the neighbors by religion and custom. And the key to identifying the Bukharis was in the observation that their population separation was incomplete and that they partially intermixed with the Ashkenazi Jews.
Not just any Island!
LOL I see the word “insular” in population genomics papers from time, not just referring to island populations, but also to highlanders and other relatively endogamous populations. But I don’t know if it is still proper to apply it to the ethno-cultural groups separated from the neighbors by religion and custom. And actually the key to identifying the Bukharis was in the observation that their population separation was incomplete and that they partially intermixed with the Ashkenazi Jews.
Vanya: … I hear variants of B-C-S-M….
Are you new here?
What the FUCK (as they reportedly say on the 6 train) does Frazier think he means by “It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store)”? “Related to” would be a very weird way to express “via,” IMHO.
Frazier is not a linguist; cut him some slack.
Actually it looks like he’s using “Quechua” for the family and “Kichwa” for a particular language in it, though not literally in these terms
Fair enough.
Somehow I doubt Warhol would speak Ruthenian to the Pope. Likely some form of Rusyn. The church he attended used Church Slavonic at the time.
I certainly don’t mean to suggest that a historical claim is true just because it can be sourced to the New York Times (in authoritative third-person-author voice rather than as an attributed quote), but FWIW the NYT did assert that “Warhol’s parents both spoke Ruthenian, and the artist understood it enough to use it in 1980, when he met Pope John Paul II, who knew the language from his upbringing in southern Poland.” Obviously the language variety in question is also sometimes given labels other than “Ruthenian” in various quarters, including but not limited to Rusyn. https://web.archive.org/web/20190202202818/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/europe/andy-warhol-slovakia-mikova-medzilaborce.html
Old Drellic.
“ Somehow I doubt Warhol would speak Ruthenian to the Pope. Likely some form of Rusyn. The church he attended used Church Slavonic at the time.”
I assumed that by “Ruthenian” the writer meant Rusyn. I know that at one time the word had a broader meaning but by this time in the USA, among Catholics, Ruthenian meant Rusyn and Ruthenian Catholic meant Rusyn Catholic and didn’t normally include, for example, Ukrainian Greek Catholics. The Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church (an autonomous Catholic church separate from the Latin AKA Roman Catholic Church) is now known in the USA as the Byzantine Catholic Church.
“The Latin Church … is also known as the Western Church (Latin: Ecclesia Occidentalis). … the Roman Church (Latin: Ecclesia Romana),[4][5] the Latin Catholic Church,[6][7] and in some contexts as the Roman Catholic Church (though this name can also refer to the Catholic Church as a whole).”
It seems Warhol’s meeting with John Paul was not a private audience, just a handshake snatched among a throng in St Peters Square. They can’t have exchanged more than a few words in any language.
I assumed that by “Ruthenian” the writer meant Rusyn.
Same here.
Yes, broad meanings for the term “Ruthenian”, which in my youth was also sometimes used by people with various ancestries from that area as a kind of shibboleth signifying certain political attitudes.
But sloppy writing in general: I give it a C+.
Ook, as I wrote before I know that the word has had broader meanings in the past but among Catholics like Andy Warhol Ruthenian has been synonymous with Rusyn for decades and still is. I write as a (Roman) Catholic myself who has participated in online forums with Ruthenian (Rusyn) Catholics. I remember that whenever they referred to something or someone of theirs they called it or him nash ( or something like that.)
Kichwa/Quechua: trivia question — I feel there are some other examples like this, where a language and its family are the same word spelled differently, but I can’t think of any offhand.
I am hardly a Warhol biographical trivia buff, but the usual story is that during his NYC years he most frequently attended Mass (often low attendance weekday Masses) at St. Vincent Ferrer, a prominent and “regular” Latin-rite parish in the posh Upper East Side neighborhood he lived in, with any attendance at Manhattan’s only “Ruthenian” option in league with the Pope (viz. St. Mary’s Byzantine Catholic), which is about 50 blocks further south, being much more occasional at best even though that would have been the style of service he had been raised with in Pittsburgh.
Wikipedia claims that when he would attend Mass at St. VF (sitting inconspicuously in the back and not taking the Sacrament) he would cross himself in the Eastern fashion he had been taught as a boy (and thus “backwards” from the POV of the barbarous Franks and Latins), which if true is rather sweet. It would almost certainly have been harder to be inconspicuous at St. Mary’s, so apart from the location factor sticking with St. VF makes sense if one accepts the premise that he wanted to maintain some sort of sense of spiritual connection however conflicted or fraught without having to risk actually getting stuck talking to anyone as a consequence of going to church. (Perhaps the folks at St. Mary’s were honest and hardworking Slavic-immigrant types who wouldn’t have recognized him as a recherche celebrity but he would still have gotten stuck talking to chatty and inquisitive old ladies who would have reminded him of his aunts, which just may not have been what he was after.)
@Ook: From my acquaintances among western East Slavs in America (like the core characters in The Deer Hunter but a generation younger), it seemed more that they considered distinguishing “Rusyn” from “Ruthenian” to be a sibboleth.
(I expected that to be erroneously autocorrected, but it wasn’t.)
same word spelled differently
How about Hmong? In the same way as Quechua might be a specific one as well, the language group always (as far as I know) has the h, but individual languages do and do not. Also similar is that which seems to depend on the majority language in the region.
@Brett – I‘ve been here a lot longer than you. What‘s your point?
John Paul II probably wouldn’t have made a distinction between „Ruthenian“ or „Rusyn“, since in Polish „Rusyn“ occupies the semantic space of both „Ruthenian“ and „Rusyn“ in English.
It’s also possible that John Paul thought he was speaking „gwara łemkowska“ to Warhol, not Rusyn at all.
Calling „Gottscheerisch” a „Germanic language” is also an interesting choice. The Gottscheer themselves considered themselves German, at least as long as they were still living in Upper Hungary, and in the German speaking world their language is a „dialect”. It’s a dialect descended from Bavarian that would be very opaque to most speakers of standard German, but that’s true of a lot of German „dialects”.
Tagalog unexpected? Tagalog ranks fourth among languages spoken in the home in the US, ahead of Vietnamese by around 200,000 speakers.
I balked at the Tagalog reference too. Not so much because it’s described as unexpected, but rather because the author gives the reader the impression that it is an obscure, endangered language, perhaps spoken only by some tiny tribe somewhere in the Philippine jungle.
His first mention of it is preceded by the sentence “Perlin’s book also looks at endangered languages from the perspective of social justice because the New Yorkers who speak them tend to be in precarious circumstances themselves” and followed by “At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal”.”
Then, later in the text, comes the second mention: “In the Philippines, 172 different languages (including Tagalog) are spoken”.
The reader would never conclude that it is in fact the national language of the Philippines, spoken by some 83 million people (according to Wikipedia).
I’ve been waiting for a fellow Brit to refer to the venerable expression “stick it up yer chompa” but they have all probably thought better of it. I can respect that.
In another venerable expression, I’ll get me coat…
@Vanya: I was just joking about you not following the Hattic practice of calling the language “FYLOSC.”
But sloppy writing in general: I give it a C+.
By “writing” you apparently mean “adherence to my politico-cultural shibboleths”; Frazier is a superb writer, but that seems to be a matter of indifference to you.
I don’t know why hat feels obligated to defend Frazier without qualification when Frazier is not writing comical pieces but discussing things that have a certain empirical truth/falsity to them and being sloppy about the factual details. Perhaps we can agree to blame it on the decline of the once legendary New Yorker fact-checking infrastructure? That traditionally enabled writers with a generally agile and entertaining, perhaps even superb, prose style (like Frazier) to write about potentially complex subject matters they had no prior expertise in without – by the time the article actually got published – evidence of sloppy misunderstandings of the subject matter. Perhaps sloppy misunderstandings that are perfectly understandable in an outsider but the New Yorker brand was supposed to be about saving its writers from them via the editing process.
I feel there are some other examples like this, where a language and its family are the same word spelled differently, but I can’t think of any offhand.
With a loose enough interpretation of “same word spelled differently”, Slavic vs. Slovak may qualify.
Re language name v. family name, at least some folks out there seem to use “Algonquin” as the spelling of a specific member of the “Algonquian” languages.
Mon/Hmong/Hmoob is the closest so far. Otherwise, Slavic/Slovak, Algonquian/Algonquin, Romance/Romagnol are too easy.
If we loosen the sense of “family,” then Creole ⊃ {Creole, Crioulo, Kreol, Kreyol, Krio, Kriol, Kriolu, Kriyol} might work.
Mongghul, Mongghuor, and Mangghuer as subdivisions of the Mongolic language (or group of related languages) Monguor may merit a mention. Moghol or Mogholi is another Mongolic language.
That Sojourner Truth grew up speaking Dutch is one of my favourite pieces of trivia but I have never had any occasion to bring it up.
Edit: To Romance and Romagnol I may add Romansh, which can be natively romontsch, rumantsch, rumauntsch, or rumàntsch according to the variety.
Most sources will tell you that Dutch was no longer really a living language in Manhattan by the 1790’s but still very much a living language in various regions up the Hudson Valley and into the Mohawk Valley. No doubt lots of Upstate-raised folks the same approximate age as Sojourner Truth had Dutch as their L1 and like her subsequently moved to Manhattan for some portion of their adult life, with Sojourner Truth being seemingly noteworthy among them only for her skin color, I guess combined with her eventual celebrity status. Although I suppose the article’s assumed reader might not know one or more of:
A. That Dutch was still a living language in parts of the Hudson Valley back then;
B. That the population of many rural parts of the Hudson Valley back then was racially mixed (mostly because of slavery*); and/or
C. That it is highly unsurprising for black children (whether enslaved or free) to grow up with the same L1 as white children in the same place.
I accept that it’s reasonable for the article to have assumed a readership that doesn’t know all three of those pieces and thus finds the factoid noteworthy, although it still seems a bit uncomfortably close to patronizing/exoticizing.
*Not least because the quite extensive history of slavery in New York has been downplayed by northern whites desirous of painting the Peculiar Institution as an exclusively Southern phenomenon.
EDITED TO ADD: AFAIK my ethnic-Dutch great-great-grandfather who was born up in the Catskills in 1842 had no Dutch, or at least if he had any scraps he did not pass them on to the next generation. I don’t know for sure if his father (born 1810) had any facility in Dutch, including but not limited to the passive ability to understand what grownups were saying even if he couldn’t quite chime in fluently but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he did. I would be affirmatively surprised if that guys father (born 177? – don’t have details immediately at hand) lacked any meaningful fluency in Dutch.
I don’t know why hat feels obligated to defend Frazier without qualification when Frazier is not writing comical pieces but discussing things that have a certain empirical truth/falsity to them and being sloppy about the factual details.
Because to me “writing” has nothing to do with “empirical truth/falsity.” Bruce Chatwin, for example, is notoriously unreliable on facts but is a good writer nonetheless. And I deplore the too-common tendency to look for insufficient facticity as an excuse to dismiss writers and thinkers. Life and art are not about facts.
There are lots of different genres of writing, and facticity is important for some of them but not others. By now I think most readers are aware that the first-person-travel-memoir genre Chatwin worked in is one, even if conventionally labeled as non-fiction, where no one should be particularly surprised by the presence of an unreliable narrator. But there are lots of genres traditionally published in the New Yorker, like whatever the heck you want to call the stuff John McPhee would always do where he would go off into some semi-obscure niche of the American economy and talk to folks who worked there and then explain what it was they did, where I think the genre conventions entitle the reader to expect a reliable narrator, whose reliability if need be was backed up by a good editing process involving diligent fact-checkers. Maybe we have different takes on what genre Frazier is working in here?
Martin van Buren was born in upstate New York about fifteen years before than Sojourner Truth, and he is notable as the only American president who did not have English as a cradle language.* Both he and his wife were native Dutch speakers, and I believe their children were raised completely bilingual, although his grandchildren (mostly?) were not.
* David Lloyd George holds the analogous distinction among English and British prime ministers.
I don’t think Chatwin is quite parallel. He confabulates, whereas the writer here is doing his best, but is let down by knowing less about languages than yer average Hatter (not an unusual thing in a writer, even a very good one.)
No amount of fact-checkers would have made Chatwin reliable. I imagine that Frazier would positively welcome corrections of fact; Chatwin would have been quite indifferent to such things.
From a description of Pres. Van Buren’s late-18th-century childhood: “The Van Burens were a struggling family with six children in the household, Martin being the fourth oldest. His mother had been widowed with three children before marrying his father. Not rich by any means, the Van Burens did own six slaves, which was not unusual for a family in Kinderhook.” One imagines the slaves were all reasonably fluent in Dutch. I don’t know if history records what became of them after slavery ended in N.Y., whether they stayed in the area or went elsewhere, whether they transmitted knowledge of Dutch to their own children, etc.
I was in the Wakhan Valley for several weeks last summer. Tajikistan Wakhi seemed to be doing just fine with intergenerational transmission – all the children I heard playing in the street or at my homestays spoke it – and though the review writes that it is “down to 40,000 speakers”, I’m not sure it ever had much more: the valley is narrow and can’t support a large population.
I left feeling that Wakhi is healthier than Shughni, which in spite of historically being the lingua franca of the region, is quickly losing ground to Tajik and I never heard any children actively speaking it.
Vanya: in Linz I only heard German and English on the tram. But the was some Albanian and Kazakh around also. That’s the ones I noticed — I’m sure there were other languages spoken around me that didn’t register as unusual.
When I was in Vienna OTOH, I expected it to be a place where the person eating sushi next to you might be Hmong, so I did not even pay any attention
having abandoned the former USSR they now mostly live on Long Island
for sure: queens. rego park, in particular, which is hattically notable for being named for the REal GOod Construction Company, which built it. i had a gig at a senior center there, where one of the challenges was bridging the separation between the different language groups, who tended to be on entirely different activity tracks: the sinitic-speakers mainly in folkdance (and a vicious mahjong coterie, whose space was inviolate), the russian-speakers (as usual in nyc, mainly jews and rarely from russia; here including bukharans) mainly in weightlifting, the romance-speakers (various latin american castellanos, brazilian portuguese) and english/anglocreole-speakers mainly in zumba.
i highly recommend the neighborhood to visiting hatters: the food is amazing! while working there i would cycle between empanadas, balkan savory pastries, and whatever caught my eye at a turkish or caucasus place for takeout lunch, and occasionally stick around for a sit-down dinner at a bukharan or georgian spot – without venturing more than a block from queens boulevard.
Also “lap” in Vedic Sanskrit, which is very cute. (It’s what comes next after Praga mater urbium.)
…In Classical Sanskrit, though, it’s a very, very specific part of the lap…
That’s likely. It hasn’t been spoken back home in Kočevje since 1945.
Similarly, there are several Aramaic languages that are probably spoken exclusively in Sweden nowadays.
I can believe that.
Maybe we have different takes on what genre Frazier is working in here?
Frazier is reviewing a book he’s excited about. He can hardly be expected to have a competency in all the languages discussed therein. If that’s what you want, you should read a review in a linguistics journal, if there are any such reviews.
I imagine that Frazier would positively welcome corrections of fact
Exactly.
Also Dari and Pashto. And there’s a Bulgarian food store on the 11 line.
I’m not aware of any Hmong presence, though – or Vietnamese even.
Last week in Frankfurt I took a taxi from the Finanzinformatik to the train station. I made some remark that the driver did not repond to. (I’m used to that from Frankfurt taxi drivers, they may be uninterested in random humor, or simply don’t speak German that well). Then he took a phone call and spoke what sounded sorta like Arabic (I know nothing about Arabic). He looked like he could be from northern Africa (about which I know nothing).
So I cooked up another remark: “That wasn’t Arabic, was it Berber?” (I know nothing about Berber, I just heard some sounds that didn’t sound Arabishy). The driver was suddenly wreathed in smiles, saying “Ja, das war Berber!” and then started to tell me about his life in Germany, just as we arrived at the station and I had to get out.
A little learning is a great thing. Thanks to Lameen !
I love that kind of experience! You’re making me miss the Big City.
On the bright side, the geographical setting of the “abre la FUCKING puerta” anecdote checks out because if you take the 6 train as far into the Bronx as you can the very last stop is indeed Pelham Bay Park. Of course, maybe that’s the sort of thing where if it got botched in the author’s draft the New Yorker fact-checkers still might, even after budget cuts or whatnot, have managed to notice the problem and fix it before publication. Chatwin by contrast might have had the 6 train taking you to New Jersey or perhaps Patagonia.
Here’s Warhol’s full diary account of his meeting with the pope. I guess that Fred [Hughes] knew no Rusyn and spoke English to the pope, in which case it’s extra unlikely Warhol then spoke Rusyn.
The review is from the New York Review of Books (September 19), not the New Yorker.
“… he knew people who spoke only Kichwa, but in the US he seldom hears it. He remembered a few words, like chompa, which means ‘sweater.’ ”
Mike C:
I’ve been waiting for a fellow Brit to refer to the venerable expression “stick it up yer chompa” but they have all probably thought better of it. I can respect that.
Well, it seems that Spanish (not Kichwa/Quechua) chompa actually comes from jumper – itself of obscure origin. That’s an understandable Spanish approximation to the sounds of “jumper”. See also here.
@CuConnacht: Thanks for the clarification. I had drawn an incorrect inference from hat’s reference to Frazier as a “New Yorker writer.” I guess he has not bound himself not to publish elsewhere.
@CuConnacht: Thanks for the clarification.
I thank you as well; I should have made that clear in the post, and I have added a bracketed remark to do so.
Frazier loves a good story. I am not as fond of his pure humor works, but his books about America are very enjoyable. He likes telling amusing or unusual stories, even if they likely aren’t true. However, like Herodotus he usually tells his readers if a something he recounts is of dubious veracity.
@Vanya: I was just joking about you not following the Hattic practice of calling the language “FYLOSC.”
In Austria I tend to see “BKMS” and think that way. I thought you were commenting on my political faux pas by putting the Montenegrins at the end instead of sticking to neutral alphabetical order. Maybe I subconsciously conflated BCMS with BDSM…
For what it’s worth, I didn’t even blink at “B-C-S-M” — I knew what you meant and it seemed natural, even though I stubbornly continue to think of it as Serbo-Croatian (in the same way that I accept “LGBQT+,” or whatever the latest iteration of it is, from others while continuing to use “gay” or “queer” in my head).
John Cowan at LH in 2020:
I reckon BCSM is still ahead of FYLOSC here in 2024
Is not joke! Is serious proposal for standardized descriptive linguistics jargon of future! (We apparently still need to get hat to use FYLOSC in his head.)
We should just call it Shtokavian, as God intended.
She grew up speaking X̌ik, also called Wakhi, a language mentioned by Marco Polo.
I was interested in this and looked it up. For LH readers who are curious, here is the 1320 ‘Franco-Venetian’ version of Marco Polo’s account of Wakhan:
See the manuscript here. It’s the first column on the left. Henry Yule’s old translation:
What bout this title Non, ‘count’? See Yule’s note on page p. 183 here. The work Yule references is here, p. 352. The further reference to Moorcroft is here, p. 248.
(For modern Wakhi, the only thing close to non, nona, that I could find in I.M. Steblin-Kamensky (1999) Этимологический словарь ваханского языка, which I have at hand, is the following:
ишк. is Ishkashmi. I poked around in glossaries of the other Iranian languages of the region but did not hit on anything. Maybe more later if I get around to looking in glossaries of Tibetic languages.)
I’d transcribe it uocan; v and u are written the same, and presumably the sound is [w], not [v].
Yule’s “peculiar language” is of course ‘their own particular language’, not ‘an odd language’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_People
They should have stuck with the old name. Wimps. Proud to be Peculiar!
One of the finest old-timey ales still being produced in England is Old Peculier, brewed under the auspices of the Theakston family in Masham, Yorkshire. They get bonus points for being so particularistic as to reject the more common-these-days spelling of “peculiar.”
Is Northeast represented by “grec sor”? Would that literally be Greek South? Or what is the more direct translation?
Good question — I googled but could find no explanation.
I went to a talk/reading with the excellent Croatian novelist Robert Perišić today. The moderator talked about his reputation in the “BKS Länder” so maybe we are dropping the “M” these days. I don’t think she meant to imply that no one reads him in Montenegro.
Even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!
афг., BTW, is Pashto, because for a few years it was the only official language of Afghanistan and was officially called “Afghan”.
I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t there yet; I guess we’re looking at a fossil.
Grec is the NE wind, or gregale. Sor is sur, cf. do for modern du. So what is “grec sor”? S. of NE, i.e. ENE? Would a land traveller be that precise when describing an existing path?
The Dictionnaire du Moyen Français says for grec, “[P. oppos. au sirocco, au vent du sud-est] “Vent du nord-est”: Les autres .iiij. [vents] qui ne sont naturelz, le premier est appelléz siroc, et c’est cellui qui va aprés le vent, et son contraire est nomméz grec. (THOM. SALUCES, Chev. errant W., 1394, 635).”
We discussed French wind directions before, here, here, here, and here.
(Comment infested with links, held for observation.)
For what it’s worth, I didn’t even blink at “B-C-S-M” — I knew what you meant and it seemed natural
Same here – and this is the order that feels more familiar for this acronym. (Though I tend to see it without the hyphens.) I recall someone mentioning, previously on LH, that it’s a pity that Croatia isn’t called Dalmatia any more…
I think I default to “Yugoslav(ian)” but have mostly internalized FYLOSC; “Serbo-Croat(ian)” had always been an awkward combination to me.
That said, there are enough differences between Serbian and Croatian in the kind of contexts where I usually encountered them that it was convenient for me to count them separately. (By which I mean the approximate equivalent of having to separately look up texts referring to “football” vs. “soccer”.)
With a loose enough interpretation of “same word spelled differently”, Slavic vs. Slovak may qualify.
Slovak and Slovene both.
I do like the suggestion of Romance/Romansch. I’m not sure if Algonquian/Algonquin would qualify – it feels like the same kind of thing as Germanic/German, where the family was named after a particular language in it.
I think the Creole example is closest to what’s going on in the Quechua/Kichwa case, though.
Germanic/German
I propose “Kusaalic” for The Phylum Formerly Known as Niger-Congo.
Mende is a Mande language … (confusingly, Mandaic is not.)
These two are separately named after ancient peoples (Germanic is germanisch in German, too), but now I’m wondering if they gave rise to the pattern in English.
Alongside Romance>Romansch are Latin>Ladin|Ladino
Albanian / Arvanitika.
Thai is one of the Tai languages, which in turn is part of the Kra-Dai language family. The ethnonym is reconstructed as something like Dai for the common ancestor of the Tai languages, which use the unaspirated form Tai except for Thai and Lao which use the aspirated form Thai.
@David Marjanović
Last time I was in Vienna I also heard quite a lot of an “Afghan” language, but I cannot tell apart Dari from Pastho so I don’t know which one I was hearing. I also heard for the first time Chechen. Really distinctive language, I knew how it sounds but still it surprised me.
X̌ik, also called Wakhi, a language mentioned by Marco Polo
Non on seingnor que vaut a dir en langue françois cuenz
nono is the title given to a younger brother
Something much more satisfactory! Paul Pelliot interpreted Marco Polo’s non as Mongol ᠨᠤᠶᠠᠨ ноён ‘noyan’, as he explains here, Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. 797, note no. 303. His suggestion was apparently taken up by Ricci and Ross, The Travels of Marco Polo, but just in their index here. Pelliot’s reference to Lentz goes here. Pelliot’s reference to Barthold in Minaev’s Книга Марко Поло goes here (page 269, note 3, in the notes to chapter 50, page 76).
More satisfactory indeed!