That’s what Laura Spinney asks in the Graun, and Betteridge’s law applies as per usual — of course anything and everything can and will die, including the human species, the Earth, and the universe, but the implication of the question is “in the foreseeable future,” and the question is thus pretty silly. Happily, Spinney knows that, and the piece is for the most part a sensible discussion of more general issues:
The fact is, though, that no language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the Great. “English could of course die, just as Egyptian died,” says linguist Martin Haspelmath, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The more interesting questions are: when and how?
Predicting the future of any language is, most linguists will tell you, an exercise in speculation. The code by which we communicate is subject to so many complex and interacting forces that – until AI helps find patterns in the morass of data – we can’t do much more than guess. It doesn’t help that we can’t look very far back for precedents: Homo sapiens has been nattering for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, but we only thought of recording our pearls of wisdom about 5,000 years ago, when the Sumerians invented writing.
Still, most experts would agree on a few guiding principles. Migration is a major driver of language change, as is technology – though the two can counteract as well as amplify each other. Some predict that international migration will rise as the climate crisis intensifies, and technological renewal is speeding up, but they aren’t the only factors in the mix. Widespread literacy and schooling – both only a few hundred years old – act as brakes on linguistic evolution, by imposing common standards.
As if that wasn’t unhelpful enough, experts judge that the configuration of the linguistic landscape is terribly susceptible to black swan events – those defined by their unpredictability. The Egyptian language survived the arrival of the Greeks, the Romans and Christianity, but not that of Arabic and Islam in the seventh century AD. No one quite knows why. […]
On the other hand, the balance of power between the variants is likely to shift, so that it’s no longer American- or British-English speakers setting the standards (unless the former retain their grip on communication technologies). West African Pidgin, a creole strongly influenced by English, was spoken by a few thousand people two centuries ago, but it’s now the dominant language of west Africa, and linguist Kofi Yakpo of the University of Hong Kong predicts that by 2100 it will have 400 million speakers. It’s mostly a spoken language, so Pidgin speakers revert to English when they write. “It’s very clear that in half a century we’ll have more books written [in English] by Nigerians or Indians than by UK residents,” Yakpo says.
That means that Nigerian and Indian colloquialisms will start entering “standard” English, as those new titans pull the lexical blanket towards them, so to speak. The vocabulary of a language – its words – tends to be its fastest evolving component. Sounds or phonology, the stuff of accents, and grammar are typically more conservative, but change in them is needed to make a language unintelligible to its original speakers – to turn it into a new language, that is. So even though New Yorkers and Londoners might be calling liquor or booze by the Pidgin word for it, ogogoru, within 50 years – they will still probably be speaking Englishes that today’s Londoners and New Yorkers could understand.
I like the term “ogogoru” but the correct spelling seems to be ogogoro; according to Wikipedia: “In Nigeria it is known as Ògógóró (Ogog’), a Yoruba word, usually distilled locally from fermented Raffia palm tree juice, where it is known as the country’s homebrew.” (Thanks, Trevor!)
What we really don’t know about the evolution of important majority languages is how their development will be affected in the long term by populations with near-universal literacy and vast quantities of printed (and more recently digital) text. That could well have a slowing effect on language evolution. We do have past examples, like the Romance, Sinitic, and Arabic languages,* where the existence of a written standard with cultural importance meant that the ancestral form was preserved as a literary or liturgical language, even while the spoken tongues evolved and diverged, but those cases involved mostly illiterate speaker populations.
* There are other ways things can go, of course. Even while speakers of minority religions preserved Hebrew and Coptic** as liturgical languages, Jews and Egyptian Christians migrated to speaking versions of the unrelated languages of the local majorities.
** Coptic did not survive as the majority language in Egypt after the Islamic conquest, but it remained a spoken vernacular for over a thousand years. Into the eighteenth century, there were still plenty of Egyptian Christians who were natively bilingual in Coptic and Arabic.
The code by which we communicate is subject to so many complex and interacting forces that – until AI helps find patterns in the morass of data – we can’t do much more than guess.
EWW!
Whatever shall we poor, helpless creatures do without AI? Carry on with our short and brutish lives as best Providence allows, I suppose. There’s fallen fruit and uncooked carrion to eat in the meantime, until they iron out the details in ChatGPT.
Latin did not die at all: still spoken by millions of people, and not remotely endangered.
The author confuses change with death.
Also has no idea about creoles. “Influenced by English”? Well kinda … hardly the mot juste, though …
If Augustus could not understand any Romance tongue that currently floruit, by the same token neither Alf. the Grt. nor the Ven. Bede could understand any modern tongue labeled as “English,” innit?
That Coptic as a living vernacular tongue survived invasion and political subjugation by Arabic-speakers for at least nine or ten subsequent centuries, but then finally succumbed, is an interesting example that no universal theory of these things is likely to account for particularly convincingly.
I believe contrary to David E. that Latin has in fact in a certain sense died, but actually only in the last century or so (although before I was first taught it in the fall semester of 1980). It is no longer the default spoken L2 at e.g. conclaves of the College of Cardinals as between attendees who lack a common L1. Nor can the pompous English traveler in some remote bit of the Carpathians who knows nothing of any Slavic tongue and finds himself in a village devoid of Anglophones find the local Popish priest and have a simple-yet-functional/productive conversation with him in Latin sufficient to find dinner and a bed for the night.
I’m intrigued by the term “vernacular” and the freight it carries in discussing the passing of Latin. I’m not sure I’ve seen it used with reference to Chinese dialects. Well, perhaps I have, but its use for the post-Latin world seems to be the most fitting and natural one.
It would be nice to imagine West African English having a major influence on British and American English, but the idea that this would simply follow as a consequence of sheer speaker numbers is extraordinarily naive. She evidently has no idea about issues of power and prestige.
(To be fair, this reflects a major blind spot in even quite liberal people’s understanding of the deeply unequal nature of the economics of African interaction with Europe and America. The exploitative neocolonial nature of this relationship is so far from being common knowledge that even alluding to it is likely to attract accusations of Spartism. But the facts pretty much speak for themselves – if people can bestir themselves to seek them out.)
Incidentally, it’s far from clear that Coptic was still anyone’s L1 as late as the eighteenth century. A lot of claims to this effect are really just wishful thinking (or outright confabulation) on the part of contemporary Copts. The issue has got seriously muddied by politics – like so many issues where language is tied up with ethnic identity.
I was only claiming “as late as maybe the sixteenth century” for Coptic, in keeping with my reputation for caution and understatement.
The notion that increasing number of speakers of variety X will inexorably change the percentage of who publishes books also has a very naive minor premise about how book-publishing as an activity will continue into the indefinite future on much the same basis as it operated in the 19th/20th centuries rather than become a weird niche hobbyist activity (maybe a plaything of the rich, or maybe just a plaything of the weird) due to technological and cultural changes.
accusations of Spartism
What is this? The word is so confusingly unknown to internet that the second reference given to me by google is a Wiki page about compulsive decluttering. However much I want to accuse DE for his impertinent mentioning that there might be a sliver on inequality toward African economies from the usual suspects (and not very respectable whining that it is them who are ripping us off), I cannot fathom what decluttering of any kind has to do with it.
I suspect he’s alluding to this, although I too am unfamiliar with his snappy abbreviation. It may be a Welsh thing.
@D.O.: It’s clipped from an assumed “Sparticism” meaning the -ism of modern devotees of the mythologized Spartacus, who turn out in practice to be quite wicked (or perhaps deluded, if you think that’s more charitable) people – generally Trotskyites, who take advantage of the plausible deniability arising from their man not having been in power in the USSR even though he would have probably been as bad as Stalin if he had been.
ETA: Obviously one of the things unsavory radical factions sometimes do, as a tactical matter, is to seize on legitimate grievances that less unsavory people also ought in principle to be concerned with, although then the radicals seizing upon the issue for their own unsavory reasons sometimes has a tendency to drive off more moderate people from actually looking into the issue’s merits.
He would indeed, although with more flair and less of a Caucasian accent.
That’s really a hit for spartanism, anyway. Google pretending to be helpful.
Not that I have any idea what DE meant, except that it must be something bad.
(Irrelevantly, I am in Wales, where everything is Welsh.)
Oh, to be in Wales,
Where everything is Welsh!
Nothing so sophisticated: I was alluding to Dave Spart, esteemed contributor to Private Eye. (My views have, in fact, been likened to this esteemed comrade’s on this very blog. This was my preemptive counterstrike.)
It is I suppose possible that Dave Spart is not a self-conscious or self-identified Trotskyite, having acquired his second-hand radical poses in a context where he did not think to inquire about their intellectual/ideological provenance.
FWIW, my organizational-entity association with the spart- morpheme is not some long ago Weimar-Republic thing but this entity, whose periodicals I subscribed to for a year in the Eighties out of a sense of either open-mindedness or satire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacist_League/U.S. I’m not entirely sure if the wikipedia article’s use of present-tense verbs is accurate.
The OED entered ogogoro in 2004, with doubt that it’s from Yoruba: “< Nigerian Pidgin ògógóró. Notes: Apparently not < Yoruba; it cannot be directly related to Yoruba ọ̀gọ̀rọ̀ palm wine.” Roger Blench’s A Dictionary of Nigerian English (“draft circulated for comment” 2005, there apparently isn’t any later version) also has it with a question mark: “< Yoruba?”.
Wiktionary has ọ̀gọ̀rọ̀ as an alternate spelling of Yoruba ògùrọ̀ ‘any raffia palm tree; a specific type of palm wine’. But it has a completely different origin for ogogoro: Yoruba ògógóró, a toast in celebration, “From ò- (“nominalizing prefix”) + gógóró (‘at the top; the highest’)”, and furthermore gogoro is an ideophone meaning ‘tall; towering’.
Other online sources concur with gogoro meaning ‘tall’ and ògógóró meaning ‘summit’ or ‘climax’, but I don’t see anything else connecting it to the liquor. Anybody know more?
Still another origin is given at the Earthworm Express page linked from the post: in a video, the writer asks a couple of young Yoruba men about it and gets an explanation that o means ‘yes’, gogo is onomatopoeia like “glug-glug”, and ro means ‘pure’. That sounds more like a folk etymology made up on the spot, but what do I know.
I’ve had trouble myself trying to track down the origins of presumably African words in Nigerian Pidgin – not helped by the fact that I know very little Yoruba and practically no Igbo. There are certainly contributions from others among Nigeria’s hundreds of languages too: the Port Harcourt area is the real heartland of Pidgin.
Some of the more vivid loans seem actually to be local Wanderwörte anyway, adding yet further complications.
The Private Eye is Tory at this point and and has been for a while — quite far from Rosa Luxembourg’s _Spartacism_. Not _Spartanism_. Unless I’m misreading the conversation?
Latin is a dead language?
It depends what you mean by “die”, doesn’t it.
I’m with David Eddyshaw.
I hardly know any Italian, but overheard two old guys walking out of the club, one to the other “ti vedo doman”. I respectfully suggest it’s the same language, evolved.
People’s views are coloured by the fact that the fossilized version is still used in rare contests, but that’s a detail.
The Private Eye is Tory at this point and and has been for a while — quite far from Rosa Luxembourg’s _Spartacism
It’s really not. From the beginning, individual contributors have been anything from (quirky) Tories to actual Trotskyites, and this remains the case*, but trying to peg Lord Gnome’s Organ to any single coherent political position is really a category error.
By chance, I was just reading this
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/militant-cynicism-rethinking-private-eye-in-postwar-britain-ca-196080/5E3E9B069168BABF2436A488656A23CE
which, though somewhat ponderous, as befits its genre, seems to me to get this point over very well.
Private Eye has never been remotely Spartacist.
* Not Reform types, though, for whom satire is like garlic to vampires. Fascists can’t do satire: they can only imitate it (badly.)
David: I was talking about the difference between Spartacism and Spartanism and what the supposed difference was.
Well, certainly Private Eye has never really been Laconic.
Proper Michael-Oakeshott-style Tories probably are, though. (Or were. Critically endangered species. More’s the pity. Such loss of biodiversity impoverishes us all.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oakeshott
@David Eddyshaw: Contemporary Coptic Christians often make claims that Coptic survived as a vernacular language well into the nineteenth century—a claim that does seem to be untenable. However, the continued survival of native Coptic speakers into the eighteenth century seems much harder to argue with. Note that if you go back to the early seventeenth century, there is the well documented example of Abu Dhaqn, a native Coptic speaker who was not natively fluent in Arabic. (He certainly knew some Arabic, but the limitations of his Arabic were noted by a number of Arabic-speaking Europeans he interacted with. He was considered a useful source for Egyptian-specific Arabic colloquialisms, however.)
Good. I am myself not at all ill-disposed to the idea of Coptic having survived as long as that. I just like to see actual evidence of such things.
I recently came across Cornish-language enthusiasts claiming that the language survived long enough to pretty much overlap with the modern revival. And of course, the issue of when Hebrew ceased to be anyone’s mother tongue has been highly politicised (we discussed this aforetime, as we seem to have discussed most things, at one time or another.)
I was alluding to Dave Spart, esteemed contributor to Private Eye.
I at least got that reference immediately. Clearly the name assigned in the PE gallery is no accident; but equally clearly (from his rantings) the classical/historical antecedents have gone over the head of Spart himself.
@David Eddyshaw: Well Ian Hissop certainly has a very certain opinion. I get it, he’s your idiot pundit. Idiot as in the classical Greek sense.
Far from it: Private Eye has always been deeply engaged with politics, but in a way that does not lend itself to locating the Organ in a particular spot on the political spectrum.
My impression is that, if anything, it is more likely to appeal to lefty readers, but I think that this is largely a consequence of the fact that the once-sane right has of late been largely supplanted by the batshit-insane right, thus providing more open goals for satire.
Fascists are eminently mockable. Their views are objectively ludicrous, and they are quite unable to reflect on their own fatuity – if they could, they would stop being fascists. A complete absence of insight is indispensible for true fascists. The only kind of humour they are capable of is mocking the weak. This is not an elevated form of humour, and does not lead to insights into the human condition …
As Peter Cook himself memorably pointed out, satirising fascists doesn’t actually achieve anything politically; but when the principle motif of your publication is satire, it would be an act of base ingratitude to pass up the opportunity for derision that these people provide.
I suspect non-Brits sometimes don’t get Private Eye: it is simultaneously ineffably silly and dead serious. (Quite a few Brits don’t get this either.) Over the years, it has frequently broached serious issues of injustice long before they were taken up by other media. This aspect of the paper is not something alien to the stupid-satirical side of the publication: both arise from the same perception that things ought not to be this way.
The paper I linked to associates this with Cynicism, not in the cheap “yeah, they would do that” sense, but in the original Diogenes sense. That’s kind of over the top, but I think there really is a kinship with the man who (in the legend) when he was asked by Alexander, conqueror of the world, what boon he might wish from him, replied “you could shift sideways a bit: you’re blocking the light.”
@V, Dave Spart dates in PE from the Richard Ingrams and (as @DE points out) Peter Cook era. Long before Ian Hislop (sp.).
it is more likely to appeal to lefty readers
It kept me sane during the Thatcher years, but it’s finest hour was probably the APBDU episodes. (Arguably Heath, in the judgment of history, might turn out to have been Britain’s finest Social-Democrat PM in the European/non-Spartish mould.)
I lost touch during the Blair era on account of living the other side of the planet, but I guess satirising Blair (Thatcher and Sons) would continue to appeal to leftys. I see Starmer as eminently satirisable from the left also. YMMV, of course.
DE: What you speak of is known here as ha-ha-only-serious.
Al Franken coined “kidding on the square” in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. He said he would be happy with the book if the only thing it did was get people to start using that phrase, which they did. His BookTV appearance promoting the book, on a panel with Bill O’Reilly, who was one of the liars featured prominently on the cover, was supposedly the most re-run C-SPAN content of all time. (As I recall, the panel with Feynman and the o-ring was pretty popular too, in its time.)
On p. 45 in Fúnmilayọ Ọmọlabakẹ Olúbọ̀dé-Sàwẹ̀, ‘Terminologization in Yorùbá Terminology Development’, pp. 38–58 in B. Ekanjume-Ilongo, A. Hala-Hala and C. Dunton, eds. (2015) Recent Developments in African Linguistics and Literature: A Florilegium for Francina Moloi (available here), the term ògógóró for the distilled spirit is said to come from the name of a town where the spirit was produced. The same explanation is given by Ebenezer Aiku Sheba, Ìkálẹ̀ Masquerade Traditions and Artifacts (Cape Town: Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2002):
The town would seem to be this one here in Ìlàje in Ondo state. Ebenezer Aiku Sheba is apparently himself from Ondo.
But also note the following, for example, from here (boldface added):
Is the metaphor ‘high’ = ‘intoxicated’ commonplace in the languages of this part of Africa? (As in English high, German drauf, druff…) Perhaps a folk etymological association with the notion of ‘high’ helped the term ògógóró along?
Is the metaphor ‘high’ = ‘intoxicated’ commonplace in the languages of this part of Africa?
Not in the languages I’m familiar with (a tiny subset, of course.)
Hausa has bugu, literally “get beaten” (like English “get smashed”, I suppose.) Kusaal has actually borrowed this: M bug nɛ “I’m drunk.” Kusaal has a perfectly good word of its own for “get drunk” (kʋʋl), but I suppose you can never have too many words for “drunk.”
Mooré has sú “get drunk”, which Niggli’s dictionary tags, plausibly enough, as a loan from French soûl; if so, it’s remarkably well integrated morphologically for a verb loanword (imperfective suuda.) French is less remote phonotactically from these Oti-Volta languages than English is, though.
I wondered about a cognate of Kusaal sʋ “take a bath”, but both tone and vowel quality are wrong, and in fact Mooré has the actual cognate sò “take a bath.”
Judging by the dictionaries, most Oti-Volta languages just say “drink too much beer” rather than having a specific verb “get drunk.” Dagbani has kuli, the regular cognate of Kusaal kʋʋl, though. And bug- seems popular, too. To the degree that, if it didn’t look like an obvious Hausa loan, it would be tempting to reconstruct it to proto-Oti-Volta …
Going back to the claim in the bit hat originally block-quoted that “The Egyptian language survived the arrival of the Greeks, the Romans and Christianity, but not that of Arabic and Islam in the seventh century AD” … The language survived that last event by … maybe eight or nine centuries, or maybe ten or eleven? It may have survived in good enough health that it remained the majority L1 among the Egyptian population (albeit not the elites) for … (no one has very good data here) perhaps three, four or even five centuries? The 7th century conquest seems to have been a necessary but not sufficient precondition for its ultimate diminution, and it seems plausible that the pace of language shift to Arabic may have varied considerably as political/social/cultural conditions varied rather than being a steady/linear process that just took a while to get to a predestined end stage. And one can raise the same sort of question from the other side, e.g. why did a similar process of conquest and Islamification not do away with the prior dominant language in e.g. Persia?
I might have thought Oakeshott’s chief
disciple did more to popularize his views than anything he himself wrote.
@JWB:
The difference may have been that Egyptian had already long since lost its place to Greek when it came to elite discourse, administration etc. Coptic literature is overwhelmingly religious and even within that much more restricted by genre than e.g. Syriac. Most of it is simply translations, for the benefit of those who couldn’t read Greek.
And the old prestigious native tradition had been seriously interrupted: nobody could even read hieroglyphic or demotic any more.
Even before the Muslim conquest, Egyptian had long been a low-status language.
Aramaic, though (in its various modern forms) seriously threatened now, is still alive, and was much more robust until comparatively recently. Aramaic languages were the vehicle of high culture, and actually survived as the administrative languages for quite some time after the Muslim conqyests. There are many high-register Aramaic loanwords in Arabic …
Persian, even more so.
Is the metaphor ‘high’ = ‘intoxicated’ commonplace in the languages of this part of Africa? (As in English high, German drauf, druff…)
Is “high” often used in English to described alcohol intoxication ? German er/sie ist drauf nowadays means only one thing – “is a heroin addict”. I’ve never heard “er/sie ist drauf” used to describe someone drunk.
OTOH, “er/sie ist gut drauf” means “in a good mood”, with no suggestion of drug-taking.
@David E.: Maybe another takeaway is that in Egypt the original priority of Arabic for a century or three was to displace/replace Greek from/in the niches/roles it had occupied before turning its attention to promoting language shift away from low-prestige Coptic?
I doubt that there was a conscious effort to promote language shift among the peasantry.
That sort of thing happens via the choices made by the speakers of their own volition in response to their linguistic and socioeconomic environment – as the continuing story of language death shows.
“If you want to be get on socially and prosper financially, learn Arabic” is all that you need.
Deliberate language eradication as a matter of state policy is the child of modern ethnonationalism.
DE is spot on in his description of Private Eye.
I am almost certain that the photo of Dave Spart in the Eye was a spokesman for SocSoc (Socialist Society) at my university, Lancaster, who briefly reached the national press during a spat about 1970.
At the time it seemed that you needed to be a gay Socialist to be in with the in crowd. A Socialist Science society was started, and I attended the first meeting, but left when the speaker asserted that the laws of conservation of momentum and energy were a capitalist conspiracy.
Arguably Heath, in the judgment of history, might turn out to have been Britain’s finest Social-Democrat PM in the European/non-Spartish mould
Agreed. One of those political figures who looks ever better in retrospect in the light of what followed.
All it really means is constant loans from the written form into the spoken form. That, on its own, doesn’t slow anything down.
On very rare occasions, it brings them down. The Ku Klux Klan was bereft of power by mocking its titles and rituals.
That reminds me of my sister. Every word she says – from articles to particles – is half-joking.
Are you sure? I know that only as “saying something utterly horrible, and meaning it, but more or less pretending to be joking”.
Yes – Private Eye’s shtick is not ha-ha-only-serious.
That one is the rightwing practice of speaking blatant racist or sexist crap and pretending it’s a joke when people react appropriately, in order to wrong-foot decent people and to suggest that they are humourless killjoys.
It also blends into the MAGAfascist technique of floating a full-on fascist idea (currently, suspending habeas corpus) to see whether there is likely to be effective pushback or not; not taking such “jokes” seriously is extremely naive. They only get retconned as “jokes” when the fascists decide they won’t be able to get away with it – yet.
When Private Eye mocks, they mean you to understand that what they are mocking really is repellent, not that they covertly agree with the mockee, or in some way don’t really mean the mockery.
Evil is often ridiculous; but the MAGA criminals, like others of their kind, use buffoonery as a deliberate strategy to show that they despise decency. Or “wokeness”, as they call it. They believe that compassion is just weakness.
The Ku Klux Klan was bereft of power by mocking its titles and rituals.
No. To quote Wikipedia:
Mockery only helps mockers feel better; it doesn’t change the world — only actual action does that. (Just look at how today’s meme warriors have brought down the administration…)
Is “high” often used in English to described alcohol intoxication ?
It used to be. Some examples from Green’s:
And the OED:
I don’t know why Green includes these under 1 (“drink”); they seem completely ambiguous:
(It’s an issue because it makes it seem like the alcohol sense is more contemporary than it is.)
I think mockery of Sarah Palin had an impact in 2008 in undercutting John McCain’s image as serious and thoughtful. The impact was mostly among a certain class of people who were already moving from the GOP to Democrats, but it crystallized a feeling that enabled that movement.
This could be a special case of what Hat said — “Mockery only helps mockers feel better”. It was a situation where mockery made some former Republicans feel better about leaving the party, at a moment when it might not have otherwise happened.
I mean this from halfway down the article:
though I didn’t know the preceding paragraph:
So, combine mockery and taxes, and you get somewhere…
I did say “on very rare occasions”.
The addition of “on something” shows that alcohol is, at most, not the only option. Most likely the quote has its current sense: “did you smoke pot or did you take some real hardcore hallucinogens” (as a rhetorical question of course, but still).
I see Starmer as eminently satirisable from the left also
You betcha. For some reason, his recent performance keeps reminding me of C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.
(I’d always lazily supposed that this was said by Talleyrand, but it was actually Boulay de la Meurthe, talking about the execution of the duc d’Enghien. He was proved right, too …)
So, combine mockery and taxes, and you get somewhere…
I wouldn’t lean too hard on “may have contributed” if I were you.
The adjective “high” in the sense of “intoxicated by alcohol but not anything else” is found in the classic-rock-radio warhorse version of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” by my homeboy George Thorogood and his Delaware Destroyers, released in 1977. It does not claim to be an original composition. I’m not sure if the bit about feeling high can be found in Amos Milburn’s 1953 original recording of the number; it may have been added by John Lee Hooker in his 1966 version which was George’s immediate source material.
C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute
I’ve had my eye on that one for some time. It seemed to be nothing more than a wannabe-witty inversion of moral propriety, in the flippant manner of Oscar. Now that I know the circumstances in which it was said, all is clear.
A “crime” is the result of breaking laws. The consequences are clear, and boring. An outrage has been committed, big deal. The spectators have already seen all the episodes.
The consequences of a “mistake”, however, are not necessarily clear. The spectators can look forward with bated breath. They won’t miss a sequel.
Oh yeah, I forgot. I’m told it goes like this:
“When Rishi Sunak jumps off a building, he does it the wrong way. I would do it the right way, the sensible way!”
Because mockery feel good,
Mock magas
OK, it’s not real. It is one of the few decent things ai has done.
There is, of course, a whole major world religion founded by the Woke One:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buddha
As you’d expect, it pushes the perverse and unAmerican Extreme Radical Socialist doctrine of compassion for all sentient beings.
However, its pernicious influence is largely confined to what are now (I believe) formally designated as Shithole Countries under the wise and benevolent leadership of the Chosen One. He will protect God-fearing Americans from the hordes of Buddhist rapists and pet-eaters previously admitted under Sleepy Joe Byddhen, and their millions of comrades even now massing on the Canadian border with their suitcases full of fentanyl.
the Spart[acist]s are alive and well in the u.s., though no more influential than any other second-tier sectarian group. they remain, however, notable for their singular lack of awareness of how their rhetoric sounds. i recall a classic Spart’s more-of-a-comment-than-a-question at an event some years back that repeatedly and rhythmically referred to the need for a “hard, strong, [and presumably throbbing] class struggle”.
I doubt that there was a conscious effort to promote language shift among the peasantry. […] “If you want to be get on socially and prosper financially, learn Arabic” is all that you need.
the other element that seems necessary for that process to work is a sense that social or/and economic advancement is possible to begin with – a sense that’s not in any way evenly distributed across a society. that’s where i could see the relative egalitarianism of early islamic rule indeed coming into play as a reason for the upper strata of egyptian society to increasingly speak the new administrative lect at home, while the peasantry would have no such incentive in that period.
Throbbing Class Struggle never really lived up to the promise of their first two EP’s. IMHO. YMMV. ETC.
@rozele:
Good point.
It’s easy to start thinking in terms of Muslim conquerors “imposing Muslim language”, but I suspect this would be a pretty profound misinterpretation, largely reflecting modern Western notions regarding the relationship between language and culture.
For one thing, I don’t think Muslims regard mere colloquial Arabic as sacred at all; for another, thorough Islamicisation of a society has demonstrably happened repeatedly without wholesale language replacement. Persian, Turkish, Hausa, Swahili …
I imagine a lot of the spread of Arabic can be simply explained by sheer migration of significant numbers of actual Arabic speakers. That’s certainly been the case in North Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banu_Hilal
[…] and their millions of comrades even now massing on the Canadian border with their suitcases full of fentanyl.. Those would be the Yankee consumption side of the market equation, seeking a less jingoistic abode. On the Canadian side, seeking entry into the Divided states of Murka, are the crab poutine bearers, generously offering their southern brethren and sistern lessons in creative use of leftovers.
the other element that seems necessary for that process to work is a sense that social or/and economic advancement is possible to begin with
This is also true of that big social assimilation machine, the Roman Empire.
See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html. it may have been displaced now, but I still say it.
That concept is clearly akin. Perhaps the term needs to be rescued from the fascists who’ve appropriated and essentially inverted it.
Dr. Google gives me references to Milosevic and possibly Hegsethl as destroyed or damaged by mockery.
David Marjanović: All it really means is constant loans from the written form into the spoken form. That, on its own, doesn’t slow anything down.
What? Unless the written form does not represent an earlier spoken version, this is backward borrowing and thus, ipso facto, a slowing of evolution.
I looked up the context for “Are you high on something?” in White Teeth. A hippie called Merlin answers a knock on his door and sees a middle-aged stranger, Archie. First he figures Archie for a salesman or missionary — “Encyclopedias or God?” — and on getting a negative answer, asks, “Erm … are you all right? Is there something I can do for you? Are you high on something?” Then Merlin “pulled on a joint”. So there’s no reason to interpret “high” as meaning alcohol, and no reason to doubt it’s drugs, which Green has as a separate sense, sense 3.
Maybe Green saw the reference to God and classified this as the other half of his sense 1, “poss. religious/spiritual enthusiasm”? But since the character *isn’t* a missionary, that shouldn’t apply. And why is religious enthusiasm classified with alcohol? Green already has separate senses 4 “very enthusiastic about or taken with something; often as high on” and 5 “exhilarated; experiencing the sensation of drugs but without having taken any”; wouldn’t religious enthusiasm fit better with one of those?
Plus, the book’s date of 2000 is misleading since the scene is set on Jan. 1, 1975 — before the author was born! Even though the dialogue is fine for that date, it isn’t a primary source, and it isn’t meant to represent 2000 either. If I were editing a slang dictionary, I’d disqualify this scene as historical fiction, just as Patrick O’Brian isn’t a primary source for naval slang, IMHO. But Green is a one-man show, he does whatever he wants.
Also, as a one-man show dealing with a mountain of data, some non-obvious errors are going to sneak in. Write him and he’ll probably appreciate it.
That sort of thing happens via the choices made by the speakers of their own volition in response to their linguistic and socioeconomic environment
I don’t think it was even a conscious choice in the context of Coptic. We are talking several centuries. Plenty of time for Coptic peasants to slowly absorb more and more vocabulary and syntax from the Arab speaking merchants, overseers, and immigrants over successive generations until eventually they were no longer speaking “Coptic” at all. But it wouldn’t surprise me if illiterate villagers were rarely aware that this was happening. People have always spoken differently than the people from that village over there, and grandparents have always had slightly eccentric ways of talking that young people don’t. Christian peasants probably had already been speaking a vernacular that differed enough from the language in church that they might not have thought of it as a single language the way modern ethnonationalists do. Maintaining the religion was their identity, not the words they used to talk about cooking, the weather or telling dirty jokes.
And this is the context for “I felt so high” in Breakfast on Pluto (1998). The narrator has barely escaped being strangled to death:
No alcohol or drugs involved, and this may be “experiencing the sensation of drugs but without having taken any” but it isn’t exhiliration — it sounds like something out of Oliver Sacks, disturbed sensing of body position, rather than any of the slang senses. Green is just mistaken on this one.
Yes, the job is too big for one man to get it right every time, and yes, I’ve written to him, and he quit answering after the first time — maybe he has a quota, the level of e-mail itself is probably too much for one man.
This, from the OED, does count as a recent, alcoholic “high”:
I probably wouldn’t say that — if asked “how does a martini make you feel”, I probably would say “tipsy”, maybe “buzzed”, but not “high”, and if asked “what makes you feel high”, I wouldn’t say “a martini” — but it’s still understandable.
At r/EnglishLearning, somebody in Argentina asks if “get high” is specifically weed, or also other drugs? Several commenters answer yes, other drugs, but not alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine — with one quoting from the OED’s alcohol sense, but with “originally … according to the OED”, i.e., it’s not his personal sense of the word. I think that’s about right, as advice to a foreign learner. The 1999 quotation is probably not impossible even now, but it would be pretty unusual.
Agreed, and thanks for the spadework!
When does it ever? Maybe Italian nearly gets there in Florence…?
Empirically, language death never happens by imperceptible gradual borrowing from such a distantly related language, and bilinguals never create a homogenous blend of two languages.
David Marjanović: When does it ever?
You have completely lost me here. Are you saying that, for example, Koranic Arabic does not represent the vernacular at the time of Mohammed/Ali/Uthman?
I know that “Empirically, language death never happens by imperceptible gradual borrowing from such a distantly related language, and bilinguals never create a homogenous blend of two languages” Sorry, Brett. I know that for a fact.
Depends what you mean by “represent.” Presumably something much like Koranic Arabic was spoken at the time and place the Koran was composed, but it’s unlikely it reproduced the spoken language precisely.
Also, it wasn’t the entirety of spoken Arabic at the time – there’s some evidence that different dialects already existed, and that the last common ancestor of all known Arabic varieties was spoken (a bit) earlier.