I was excited to discover that the Centre for Expanded Poetics has an Archive section that presents the complete runs of Caterpillar (1967-1973), Sulfur (1981-2000), and transition (1927-1938). I don’t remember being aware of the first (which you can read about here: “Caterpillar was started by Clayton Eshleman as a series of chapbooks by such writers as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Paul Blackburn, and Louis Zukofsky”), but the other two are very familiar; I was excited when Sulfur first came out (I’ve probably got the first few issues kicking around somewhere), and of course transition is known to every aficionado of English-language modernism. What a gift to the online world!
For those who don’t care about defunct little magazines, try sengi, which is really two different words, one meaning ‘elephant shrew’ (from Swahili sengi, probably from another Bantu language) and the other the name of a former monetary unit of Zaire, one hundredth of a likuta and one ten-thousandth of a zaire — you might think it was named after the little mammal, but no, it’s from Kongo sengi, senki, from French cinq (in the sense of five sous). The second is in the OED but not, so far, the first.
I wonder why they think Swahili sengi is borrowed? Neither of the links there provides any reason for thinking so, and of course the Giryama word could be cognate rather than the source of a loan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240512044937/http://afrotheria.net/Afrotherian_Conservation_4.pdf
The only relevant bit goes
Yeah, and English names for animals often are derived from Indo-European …
I suspect that Galen Rathbun and Jonathan Kingdon may not be linguists (or have talked to any.)
(Swahili simba “lion” and fisi “hyena” are simply inherited from proto-Bantu. Dunno about kongoni “hartebeest”, but I see no reason to think otherwise. I suspect that Rathbun and Kingdon are not actually aware that Swahili is a “Bantu tongue” and/or have no idea that languages can be genetically related to one another by common descent from a protolanguage, so that they imagine all vocabulary resemblances must be due to borrowing.)
transition #1 includes my favourite bit of what was going to be Finnegans Wake (the conversation between the Mute and the Jute. Or whatever it is … “conversation” may not be quite the word I’m looking for …)
There is also Gertrude Stein doing Gertrude Stein as only she could (it’s harder than it looks.)
We’ve had Afrotheria here before (“tenrec” was itching somewhere at the back of my mind):
https://languagehat.com/tenrec/#comment-4490589
“Tenrec” would be a good title for a modernist poem.
I was thinking that one ten-thousandth of a zaire sounded like a ridiculously tiny amount. But then I did my research and found that, although a zaire was initially valued at 2 US dollars, they subsequently had hyperinflation.
The Ghanaian cedi was initially introduced as a decimal pound, i.e. 8/4, which is 100 pence. When Nkrumah was overthrown, it was replaced by a New Cedi equivalent to 12 shillings, i.e. half a pound.
By 2007 there were about 10,000 to the US dollar, and the New New Cedi knocked four zeroes off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghanaian_cedi
I used to be paid (into my bank account) in pre-2007 New Cedis to the last pesewa (1/100 cedi.) The smallest actual coin in circulation at that point was 10 cedis.
In Kusaal, yɔlʋg “sack” means £100, i.e. 200 cedis. Most of the time, only a rather small sack would have been needed.
(It’s a kind of calque of Hausa jaka “bag, sack”, which at one point also meant £100. It may still do, for all I know.)
In Francophone West Africa, however, people who are not actually phoning Franco count in multiples of five (CFA) francs, this being apparently on account of the Maria Theresa dollar being the only coin (as opposed to cowries) that anyone (except foreigners) thought looked like actual money.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Theresa_thaler
Not sure quite how it got to be equated to five francs specifically. But it did, everywhere. In Mooré, for example, a 100-franc coin is a pisi “twenty.”
* They were not wrong. If you’d hung onto your cowries and refused to exchange them for colonial currencies throughout the colonial era, you’d have made a real financial killing. West Africa should never have gone off the Cowrie Standard.
Not sure quite how it got to be equated to five francs specifically.
Latin Monetary Union.
5 francs was the French “crown sized” silver coin (25 grams of .900 silver), the size approximating the historical thaler* (and in some periods, by far the most actively issued silver denomination).
This got all screwed up post-WWI, but I’m guessing that the equivalence had already been established by then.
AFAIK there are only two countries in the world still using a nominally-nondecimal monetary system, Madagascar (where it’s mostly irrelevant) and Mauritania (where IIRC the most recent reform got rid of the subunit name); in both of them, the main unit historically used to be a MTT, with the subunit being 1/5 of it and corresponding to a franc.
*) Of course the historical French crown-sized coin was not called a “thaler” but something else; I forgot what. (I want to say “ecu” but very not confident.)
The term “crown-sized” of course assumes that the representative example is the English/British crown of 5 shillings.
Thaler sizes varied historically, but specifically the MTT had 23.386 grams of silver; this is actually slightly more than a 5 franc coin of 25*0.900=22.5 grams silver.
The equivalent of the MT dollar in the 19th-century Far East was the Mexican silver dollar, and when the French started taking over Indochina they apparently could not convince the locals that their metric-system 5-franc pieces were good enough to take seriously, so they coined for local use the “piastre de commerce” which initially had identical silver content to the Mexican dollar although things apparently drifted later on. The claimed etymology is that “piastre” is apparently what happens when French people try to pronounce “peso,” although I haven’t fact-checked that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Indochinese_piastre
The Brits similarly produced “trade dollars” of the same silver content for Hong Kong and Singapore as well as trade with post-Opium-War China more generally, rather than try to convince the locals to understand what silver coins from their metropole should be valued at, and even the U.S. briefly got into the “trade dollar” business for the export market in the 1870’s, since a standard domestic U.S. silver dollar had about 2% less silver than the Mexican standard and that was enough of a difference to be box-office poison in the Far East.
The claimed etymology is that “piastre” is apparently what happens when French people try to pronounce “peso,” although I haven’t fact-checked that.
But surely you suspected it was hogwash, which of course it is; OED (revised 2006):
First citation:
I should have used a more heavily-hedged adverb than “apparently”!