Language at a Glance.

Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian on an interesting-sounding study:

Whether it is news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in a single glance. Prof Liina Pylkkanen, co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume words are understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the whole sentence.

“From this perspective, at-a-glance language processing really shouldn’t work since there’s just not enough time for all the sequential processing of words and their combination into a larger representation,” she said. However, the research offers fresh insights, revealing we can detect certain sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds (ms) – a timeframe similar to the blink of an eye.

Pylkkanen said: “We don’t yet know exactly how this ultrafast structure detection is possible, but the general hypothesis is that when something you perceive fits really well with what you know about – in this case, we’re talking about knowledge of the grammar – this top-down knowledge can help you identify the stimulus really fast.

“So just like your own car is quickly identifiable in a parking lot, certain language structures are quickly identifiable and can then give rise to a rapid effect of syntax in the brain.”

The team say the findings suggest parallels with the way in which we perceive visual scenes, with Pylkkanen noting the results could have practical uses for the designers of digital media, as well as advertisers and designers of road signs. Writing in the journal Science Advances, Pylkkanen and colleagues report how they used a non-invasive scanning device to measure the brain activity of 36 participants.

Further details at the link; thanks, Trevor!

Comments

  1. It makes perfect sense. This is how we process everything else. I wouldn’t be surprised if spoken language is also processed chunk by chunk, not word by word (by which I mean “small chunk”).

    btw, s/b Pylkkänen (not your fault, the Guar̈dian’s.)

  2. cuchuflete says

    “unpicked”?

    Cambridge Dictionary:

    unpick verb [T] (IDEAS):

    If you unpick a difficult subject, you separate and examine its different parts carefully:
    He expertly unpicks the significant features of each painting.
    If I try to unpick my own motivation, I think mostly I was jealous.

    This is new to me. Is it British English?

  3. J.W. Brewer says

    This “unpick” is also new to me, but seems suggestively similar to what wiktionary gives as sense 3 of “unpack,” i.e. “(figurative, transitive) To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.” And that’s a sense I am familiar with. So is this sense of “unpick” an eggcorn based on a trans-Atlantic mishearing, or sheer coincidence?

  4. J.W. Brewer says

    The verb “unpick” in a literal sense having to do with sewing (deliberately taking out stitches previously made) is of long standing. E.g. (from a novel published in 1898): “She found her huswife and chose the finest scissors, and then gave her attention to the white gown that lay on the bed. She turned the skirt inside out and began to unpick the tucks.”

    But the question is when this extended figurative sense arose. If it arose fairly recently, I still have my eggcorn thesis, because almost everyone in the relevant modern societies in the last few decades who would have occasion to talk about either unpacking or unpicking ideas or concepts has personal experience with unpacking a suitcase but comparatively few with e.g. unpicking the tucks in the skirt of a gown.

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    I used it myself here:

    https://languagehat.com/polyglot-daily-bread/#comment-4618590

    Apologies if USian Hatters were mystified*. I had no idea it was a UKism.
    The things one learns here …

    * An alternative possibility, of course, is that nobody actually reads my comments. Probably wise. You can’t handle the Truth! However, it’s all being fed into the maw of the LLMs. Bwahahaha!

  6. cuchuflete says

    Apologies if USian Hatters were mystified. I had no idea it was a UKism.
    The things one learns here …

    No need for apologies, as context makes the meaning clear. I, too, learned something here today.

    I also thought it might be a typo for unpack, but Collins and Cambridge dictionaries explained the figurative meaning, while Merriam-Webster omitted it. Alas, the trouble one must go to when the British half of the household is out and about.

  7. Possibly related: when I worked at various magazines, I was a pretty good proof reader* and on occasion would see a typo merely by glancing over a column of text, without even beginning to read it. I suppose this is some sort of pattern-recognition thing. The misspelled word would register in my brain, raising an alarm, even though I hadn’t yet taken any meaning from the text.

    The same thing would also happen when (in ye olden tymes) I was reading the newspaper in its ancient print format. I would look at a page and spot a typo halfway down the third column, before I’d made any attempt to read the story.

    *not of my own stuff, natch

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    Presumably this is a purely visual phenomenon, from the very nature of the necessarily-sequential nature of speech.*

    As such, it doesn’t seem very surprising. For example, fluent readers do not read words letter by letter but as whole gestalt chunks. This is just the same phenomenon working over longer chunks.

    After all, pattern recognition is what we do. In fact, we’re so good at it that we can even recognise patterns that aren’t actually there at all …

    *This

    http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Donaldson2021.pdf

    despite its off-putting title, is a nice clear argument for necessarily sequential processing happening with some English constructions even in reading.
    [Snarfed from Geoffrey Pullum’s site, though not by him.]

  9. Nothing if not unpicky, I nevertheless noet several millinery occurrences of unpick* over the years.

  10. After all, pattern recognition is what we do. In fact, we’re so good at it that we can even recognise patterns that aren’t actually there at all …

    Yes, apophenia. Though across the decades I have preferred to see it as paranoia – of which only an excess is unhealthy. Necessary to life as we know it.

  11. “unpick” in a literal sense having to do with sewing (deliberately taking out stitches previously made)

    Yes. Weren’t everybody’s grandmothers engaged in adjusting the kids’ hand-me-downs to distribute around the family? There’s a ‘seam ripper’ for the purpose (and videos on Youtube).

    I’m quite surprised the metaphorical usage is UK-only. What do you say over there for ‘unpick an argument’? (Which typically means to expose flaws in its logic.)

    I see Noetica’s scan has identified several nit-picks.

  12. Figurative “unpack” is something I recall judging as a new pop-psych or corporate buzzword in the early part of this century. Lacking OED access, the earliest use I find is a 1980 article “Unpacking Some Dualities Inherent in a Mind/Brain Dualism”

    Figurative “unpick” had never struck me as odd or new, but perhaps it just crept up on me. New Left Review 1976 has

    To unpick the rhetoric which would induce such a fantasy is a complicated task, but looking back to 1945 one point can be made immediately. ‘Marxist’, in these years, has changed its meaning—or, more strictly, has taken on additional meanings.

  13. Apologies if USian Hatters were mystified.
    Au contraire! Your mystifying comments are often one of the high points of my day!

  14. J.W. Brewer says

    @AntC: I am familiar with the grandmotherly process you describe, but I would not unprompted have come up with “unpick” as the verb to describe it and I frankly don’t know if that’s the first word my grandmothers would have used to describe it. FWIW the first few pages of 20th century hits for the sewing sense of “unpick” that the google books corpus is giving me are all U.K./Commonwealth rather than U.S.

    To AntC’s other question, in idiomatic AmEng one certainly might “pick apart” a shoddy argument made by someone else. That’s sense 2 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pick_apart

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    For me, unpicking an argument is not the same as picking an argument apart.

    With “unpicking”, there’s no implication that it’s necessarily a bad or invalid argument (though your unpicking might eventually reveal it as such); just that it’s an argument whose logic is not immediately obvious but needs some further elucidation.*

    Indeed, you might piously declare in a sermon that you are going to unpick St Paul’s argument for your congregation in some case where his logic is not obvious. If, on the other hand, you declared an intention to pick his argument apart, you might find yourself having to do some explaining to the church elders (transpose as appropriate from the Presbyterian to your preferred church governance idiom.)

    * It also differs from “unpacking” (though there is some overlap.) Unpicking implies some close analysis, but not necessarily lengthy paraphrase; the sermon may yet not expand into a second hour. Unpacking means that we’re in for a twelve-point sermon and lunch will be late.

    “Unpacking” (unlike “unpicking”) also comes across to me as trendy management-speak, probably reflecting some ghastly American influence somehow.

  16. With “unpicking”, there’s no implication that it’s necessarily a bad or invalid argument …

    I defer to m’learned colleague. I did say “_typically_ means to expose flaws in its logic”, not necessarily.

  17. “ analyze – analyse
    transitive verb
    To examine methodically by separating into parts and studying their interrelations.”

    Is that close to the general understanding of unpick?

  18. DE: This sounds close to what I would call picking at an argument. Questioning, but without prejudice. Like those annoying people who take up all of the q&a time after a talk, with a back-and-forth with the speaker.

  19. @cuchuflete: Have you noticed a movement in our country to replace “analyze” with “break down”? And is “break down” a calque?

  20. to me (the phrase is a familiar one, tho i’m on the western side of the pond) “unpicking” is about tracing the threads, not questioning or analyzing exactly – more a philological project than a critical one.

  21. cuchuflete says

    @Jerry F— “ cuchuflete: Have you noticed a movement in our country to replace “analyze” with “break down”? And is “break down” a calque?”

    It may be in sports reporting, but otherwise no. Please bear in mind that most of my working life was spent doing analysis in corporate settings, so we weren’t shy about saying ‘analysis’.

    What might be the source for break down if it is a calque?

  22. cuchuflete says

    @Jerry Friedman

    Aha! Might you be thinking of that fellow whose vehicle I saw broken down—and abandoned?— on the side of the road, a certain M. Jacques Derrida? It was all taken apart and left in pieces.

    Somebody had called Northrup Frye to try to make sense of it all.

  23. I spent hours by that broken-down vehicle trying to make sense of what had happened, but left no wiser than before. I hope Detective Frye was able to figure it out.

  24. @cuchuflete: Was the fellow driving that vehicle a tenor?

    “Break down” in the sense of “analyze” could be a calque of “analyze”.

    Here’s an ngram search. One place I hear it is NPR. Google numbers may not be reliable, but I went to the end of the Google hits for “We break down” at npr.org and got to 249. The first is “We break down the 2024 Oscar nominations.” With the same procedure I see 124 hits on “We analyze”, and at a glance, more of them seem to be from interviewees.

    I also hear “break down” in this sense at work (community college) fairly often, more often, I think, than I did twenty or thirty years ago.

  25. @cuchuflete: Was the fellow driving that vehicle a tenor?

    It remains unclear whether that vehicle had a driver, but if it did, a trajectory was as unlikely as a tenor.

    “Break down” in the sense of “analyze” could be a calque of “analyze”.

    I am lost. My understanding of calque is different from synonym. Please help me understand what you mean.

  26. Sorry, it would be sort of a reverse calque. According to etymonline, “analysis” is ‘from Greek analysis “solution of a problem by analysis,” literally “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing”. So it’s a breaking up (ana-), not breaking down.

  27. J.W. Brewer says

    @Jerry F.: given how poorly prepositions can map from language to language I’m not sure if a tweak there disqualifies something from still being a legitimate calque and in any event even within English the figurative senses of seemingly opposed prepositions are often difficult to distinguish or disentangle in particular idiomatic contexts. See, e.g., https://theonion.com/national-funk-congress-deadlocked-on-get-up-get-down-is-1819565355/

  28. cuchuflete says

    @Jerry,

    Thanks. Got it now. Breaking ______ as a calque of the original Greek word.

    How about thinking of it as breaking apart? That dodges the up, down, or onion dilemma.

  29. I think you just chopped the onion up. (You can’t chop one down.) Or what about breaking information into bits?

    I just learned rather belatedly (for someone interested in etymology) that the -lu- of “solution”, showing up as -lv- in “solve”, is cognate to the -ly- of “analysis”, from PIE *leu-. Makes sense, and maybe there was some influence from Greek at some point, or not.

    On that note, to answer my own question, the OED doesn’t see “break down” meaning “analyze” (originally American, 1924) as inspired by “analyze”.

  30. J.W. Brewer says

    Of course, what you unpack you can repack. The metaphor implies that the component items inside the luggage are not damaged by the process. Stitches removed by unpicking can be replaced by new stitching, but it’s not quite as smooth a reversal of the process. An onion that has been carefully sliced (not chopped) can be reassembled into something that looks like its former self, perhaps as a prelude to some sort of being-set-ablaze stunt, but it will lack the structural integrity of its former self. At least in AmEng “break down” in at some (but not all) contexts implies reversibility and the ability to reassemble the whole in a way that “break up” and “break apart” does not.

  31. cuchuflete says

    At least in AmEng “break down” in at least some contexts implies reversibility and the ability to reassemble the whole in a way that “break up” and “break apart” does not.

    I was about to fully agree with the above when a memory of my little boys—now grown men—popped into my head. They broke apart their Lego house and then reassembled it. Exception that proves the rule? Perhaps you were discussing concepts rather than physical objects.

  32. J.W. Brewer says

    No, I was thinking e.g. of breaking down a tent at the end of a camping trip or breaking down the drum set after the end of a musical performance. The specific and distinctive way in which Legos(tm) are affixed to one another makes “break apart” feel like a better description of the physical process of disassembly there, but I’m not sure if that generalizes because Legos are kind of unusual in that regard. If there’s any literalness to the “down” in the examples I gave (which there may not be) it would be that the assembled whole (before break-down) is taller than the post-break-down assembly of component parts ready to be transported to the next gig/campsite/whatever. Unless you stack up the parts into a pile, I suppose.

  33. Collins and Cambridge dictionaries explained the figurative meaning, while Merriam-Webster omitted it

    Yet the majority of the examples auto-collected on MW’s page are figurative, e.g. “The trial has captivated the U.S. as people tried to unpick its dueling narratives” (Washington Post, 2 July 2024). Every dictionary is always a few steps behind.

    The Google ngram shows all forms of “unpick” shooting up in popularity starting in the 1980s in the UK but not until after 2000, and not as much, in the US. I suspect that’s the figurative use on the increase. Seems like something Yagoda might have covered, but he hasn’t mentioned it at all.

    OED1 (1924) noted that the sewing sense of “unpick” was “Also in fig. context”, but the only example was with an explicit sewing metaphor:

    1842 Was it not enough for Homer that he was turned once, like her own cast imperial mantle, by Apolinarius into a Jewish epic, but that he must be unpicked again by Eudocia for a Christian epic?
    E. B. Barrett, Some Account Greek Christian Poets in Athenæum 12 March 229/3

    No change in the 1989 edition. The full revision of 2014 added the new sense, defined as “transitive. figurative. To undo or take apart (esp. something complex or intricate); to carefully analyse the different elements of (something complex or intricate), esp. in order to find faults”, with an earliest citation from 1948:

    It might not be possible to unpick everything the Socialists had done, and they would have to consider very carefully what must be unpicked, what must be rearranged, and what they could do.
    Times 21 April 2/2

    All their examples are British, but they neglected to make a note like “originally British”.

  34. Trond Engen says

    Jerry F.: Have you noticed a movement in our country to replace “analyze” with “break down”? And is “break down” a calque?

    Isn’t this just (an extension of) the common metaphor for how you approach a complex task or project: breaking it down to simpler tasks and processes that can be managed more or less separately before being reassembled? It could have come to mathematics from programming or project management or maybe military strategy.

  35. Trond: Yes, both “analyze” and “break down” are examples of metaphors of doing something part by part. My question was whether that sense of “break down” was inspired by “analyze” or invented independently. Maybe no one knows.

    The first relevant sense of “break down” in the OED is

    “6.a. 1924– transitive. Originally U.S. To analyse or classify (information, statistics, etc.)

    “1924 Mr. Bankhead. Why did you incorporate that [sc. insurance and administrative expense]..as part of your expense in this statement? Mr. Sheedy. Simply to break down the figures to show what percentage I had to carry. It is explanatory only.

    U.S. Shipping Board & Emergency Fleet Corporation: Hearings Select Comm. Operations: Part 3 (U.S. House of Representatives: 68th Congr., 1st Sess.) 1950″

    Then there’s

    “6.b. 1955– transitive. colloquial. To describe or explain (a concept, situation, etc.), esp. methodically or step by step. Frequently with for.

    Nothing about breaking down a problem or task, though it should be in there.

    Maybe that doesn’t really help with my question. Which is OK—I was just wondering.

  36. I don’t like that 1924 quote. I don’t think it fits sense 6.a, since it is literally about separating different kinds of expenditures.

  37. My question was whether that sense of “break down” was inspired by “analyze” or invented independently. Maybe no one knows.

    No one can definitively prove anything, of course, but the idea that “break down” was inspired by “analyze” seems so unlikely to me I feel comfortable rejecting it out of hand.

  38. @Brett: I’m not sure what you don’t like, but if you’re saying it’s a narrow sense, I agree. Here are the rest of the citations:

    1929
    Many of the agricultural publications do not have all of their circulation broken down by counties.
    P. W. Stewart, Market Data Handbook (U.S. Department Commerce) 11/1

    1948
    The programme account..is not broken down as between the Home, Light, and Third Programmes.
    Hansard Commons vol. CDXLVIII. 1663

    2005
    The Police Department has all these statistics..but they don’t break down the numbers for crime in parks.
    New York Magazine 4 July 50/1

    @Hat: I must admit that when I recognize an English word or phrase as using the same metaphor as an English word of Latin or Greek origin, I wonder whether it’s a calque. In this case, it does seem unlikely, considering the exact sense, the probability that “ana-” would have suggested “up” (pace J. W. Brewer), and the apparent origin in American business in the early 20th century, where I suspect few people knew the origin of “analyze”.

  39. David Eddyshaw says

    the idea that “break down” was inspired by “analyze” seems so unlikely to me I feel comfortable rejecting it out of hand

    It actually seems intuitively quite plausible to me. That, of course, has no bearing at all on whether it’s actually true.

    Probably it simply reflects the kind of contexts in which I’ve mostly enountered “analyse” and “break down” (in that sense.) They tend to evoke Chemistry for me (rather than linguistics – or psychology – for example.)

  40. @Jerry Friedman: Those additional citations are interesting, because I don’t think any of them mean “analyse or classify (information, statistics, etc.).” There is certainly a sense of classification, but it is more specific than just that, since it is particularly about dividing up information into subcategories. The quotes better fit the Merriam Webster definition 2.a: “divide into parts or categories,” with the associated noun meaning: “division into categories, a statistical breakdown of data; also: an account analyzed into categories.”

  41. It actually seems intuitively quite plausible to me.

    Do you know of other examples of good old Anglo-Saxon verbal phrases calqued on the Greco-Roman layer of the language?

  42. David Eddyshaw says

    Agenbite of inwit.

  43. Stu Clayton says

    Collins: “phrase revived by James Joyce (1922) in Ulysses”.

    No-bite of dimwit.

  44. PlasticPaddy says

    Underwrite-subscribe? That one seems to be quite calque-friendly (German Unterschrift, Russian podpis’, unless the Russian is a calque of the German and the German is a calque of the French…).

  45. But underwrite is a learned word, not the kind of “good old Anglo-Saxon verbal phrases” I was requesting (e.g. “eat up,” “come down,” “go back”).

  46. Stu Clayton says

    “Come again ?”

  47. Ah yes, from the Latin iterum venis?

  48. Agenbite of inwit.

    And how dismal that all readers I’ve heard say ˈagen- instead instead of aˈgen-. Do they pronounce “again” like that? Have they no conscience? Next they’ll be going first-syllable on the third word here:

    Whan that Aprill[e] with his shoures soote

    (Ah, but I’ve ranted on that before.)

    It actually seems intuitively quite plausible to me.

    I take it as gospel concerning analysis.

  49. I actually say aˈyen-, equating it with Old English aġean — consider yourself outpedanted! (And as you know, I do go first-syllable on Aprille, and I’m proud of it.)

  50. I actually say aˈyen-

    Of course. So do all good Hatters, and with /biːt/ after it. But we make some concessions for normal readers.

  51. If you’re limiting it to verb-preposition pairs, those are hard to search for and proof is probably harder. I noticed that the first OED citation for “come under the name, head, etc.”] is

    “1577
    Holy things are not only sacrifices, but what things so euer come vnder the name of religion [Latin ueniunt sub religionis censum], from whiche we doe not exclude the lawes them selues, and holy doctrine.

    “H. I., translation of H. Bullinger, 50 Godlie Sermons vol. III. v. iii. sig. Eeee.iijv/2″

    Even if other ones don’t count I’ll mention these in case they’re interesting. Sticking to familiar Anglo-Saxon (though examples of other kinds are commonplace, I see Wikipedia gives

    wisdom tooth (“dēns sapientiae, which in turn calques Arabic aḍrāsu ‘lḥikmi, which calques Greek σωϕρονιστῆρες, used by Hippocrates.”)

    Milky Way (via lactea)

    in a nutshell (in nuce)

    Instead (in loco)

    Then there’s Lord’s Prayer (oratio dominica)

  52. Needless to say, I am not disputing the large number of calques in English. I merely doubt that such calques include the type of phrasal verb in question, which seems to me a deep-rooted and inherently native part of the language. They are not the kind of thing that trickles down to the masses from the clerical class.

  53. Is as well etymologically linked somehow to también (and its Portuguese and Catalan cognates)?

  54. I merely doubt that such calques include the type of phrasal verb in question, which seems to me a deep-rooted and inherently native part of the language.

    If you didn’t think that “come under [the name]” was an example, I don’t understand your criteria. Do you have to be able to get the object between the verb and the preposition, like “break it down”?

  55. PlasticPaddy says

    @hat
    Analyse is not really a bog-standard concept, more like a (semi-)philosophical word. And philosophy has a history of calquing since Cicero. So I would not rule it out. Rather than look for non-philosophical phrasal verbs that have been calqued (perhaps by readers of racy Latin poetry or trashy novels), it might be better to look for other semi-philosophical terms. In German you have übersetzen and übertragen, which correspond in form to Latin transponere and transferre. Aussetzen for exponere is the closest to a non-philosophical one I can think of, but I do not know if this is thought to be a calque. As you say, English has some kind of deprecating (misprising?) vibe with calquing Latin to Saxon for unpolished speech.

  56. jack morava says

    I should note the utility, in quantum metaphysics, of the notion of an `eigenbyte’ of inwit.

  57. David Eddyshaw says

    quantum metaphysics

    An exciting and fertile field. We owe to it the insight (for example) that it is intrinsically impossible to determine at one and the same time whether an action is ethical and whether it is feasible.

  58. Stu Clayton says

    Well, we know that it is impossible to determine even at different times whether an action is ethical and whether it is feasible. Usually the action is performed first, to demonstrate its feasibility. Then doubt sets in as whether it should have been done.

    Then remorse or self-congratulation clears the air, and we move on to the next action.

  59. David Eddyshaw says

    remorse

    This is, of course, what quantum metaphysics captures (more rigorously) with the concept of the eigenbyte.

  60. jack morava says

    My comment is actually kind of serious; it was motivated by conversations with the authors of

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08172

    (on scissors congurence = Hilbert’s third problem \qv) about their example 6.15 (p 26) — the dissection proof of the

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem.

    They (IMO) identify that little click of negative entropy that happens in your brain when the pieces of a puzzle suddenly snaps into place/comes into focus. More precisely, they construct/identify a natural repository (or `value group’) in which various such insights can be compared.

    I think we should be told!

  61. jack morava says

    sorrry: suddenly (snap/come) into focus…

  62. David Eddyshaw says

    This is evidently the conjugate of the so-called “remorse” eigenbyte.

  63. jack morava says

    indeed; they have a variety of polarities,modalities, conjugacies…

  64. jack morava says

    indeed, ;they have a variety of polarities,modalities, conjugacies…

  65. jack morava says

    apologies for the duplicated post. But, re polarities, remorse arguably decreases entropy, \ie it restructures and somehow adds order, and should be counted as insight against noise. Simone Weil says (I’ve been told) that any form of concentrated attention is a kind of prayer…

  66. I was assuming the semicolon you moved to just before “they” had some arcane significance in your dialect.

  67. David Eddyshaw says

    So it does, in the secret speech of the Quantum Metaphysicians;

    but I have said too mu

  68. Alas, poor DE; I knew him before his decoherence…

  69. David Eddyshaw says

    I’m OK now. Somebody looked in the box and I was fine after all.

  70. the concept of the eigenbyte

    You mean these, right?

  71. jack morava says

    The egg is the leading term in the asymptotic expansion of the chicken, \cf

    https://improbable.com/2016/12/17/a-chicken-is-a-dirac-limit-of-a-tyrannosaur/

  72. Stu Clayton says

    I well remember that sentence of yours:

    #
    At this level of vagueness, there is reason to work with codimension than with probability: evolutionary events are highly unlikely, and in reasonable models will have effective probability zero; but in geometry any subspace of positive codimension has measure, and hence probability, zero.
    #

    I like the idea of having wriggle room in a room of measure zero, since it is still a space. There you can have non-zero probabilities again.

    Of course I don’t have a clue what you’re actually talking about. I am a martyr to free association. Do you get fan mail from loonies?

  73. My bet would be on the “analyze” sense being an extension of the “giving details for numbers” sense, and on it coming from business/management language, rather than it being a learnèd calque of the Greek.

  74. jack morava says

    @ Stu

    I spend most of my time in the near Oort and are out of most known loops \eg I didn’t know till v recently that Walter Neumann is gone. Ping me at JHU?

  75. @Hans: If it wasn’t obvious from my early statements, that’s what I suspect as well. I am surprised, however, that the OED does not distinguish between those senses.

  76. Stu Clayton says

    @jack: Done !

  77. Stu Clayton says
  78. It’s good that Cruithne is a Q-type asteroid. It’d be incongruous to classify it as a P-type asteroid.

  79. And how do people who talk about the asteroid say the name? This vital information is missing from the Wikipedia article.

  80. David Eddyshaw says

    The corresponding P-type asteroid should be Prydain.

  81. Stu Clayton says

    And how do people who talk about the asteroid say the name?

    I was hoping someone would clear that up. The German version contains IPA-gibberish and a gesture at Irish new and old:
    (unter Entdeckung)

    Its orbit is a kidney bean that sometimes approaches, and sometimes recedes from, that of Earth. Until the IPA is cleared up, I suggest referring to it as El Frijól.

  82. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Maybe that’s the ‘English’ pronunciation in the sidebar?

  83. Maybe that’s the ‘English’ pronunciation in the sidebar?

    You’re right, I missed that:

    English: /kruˈiːnjə/ kroo-EEN-yə

    Why don’t they have it after the name in the first sentence, as in most articles?

  84. Keith Ivey says

    The English Wikipedia page says “English: /kruˈiːnjə/ kroo-EEN-yə”, and that seems to match what’s on YouGlish (though almost all the occurrences come from two people, one of whom reduces the /u/ to something more like a /w/).

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    Come to think of it, “Cruithne” corresponds to “Pictland” (Prydyn) rather than Prydain (“Britain.”) Both seem to go back to something like “(land of the) painted people”, though. It’s been suggested that that was the autonym of all the Brits before the southerners decided to call themselves Cymry (“fellow-countrymen”) in a sudden access of ethnic solidarity. As opposed to horrid Romans or Anglo-Saxons, presumably …

    I’ve never quite fathomed how Prydain relates to the Latin “Britannia” (which should really be “Brittania” anyhow.) I suppose “Brittania” could just be a mangling by ignernt Romans/Greeks, but then the Welsh Brython “Briton” would have to be a loan back from Latin. (GPC seems open to the possibility.)

  86. Stu Clayton says

    In my Samsung Chrome, there are no sidebars in Wipe articles. That damn “intelligent” formatting is to blame.

  87. @David Eddyshaw: I’ve never seen a suggestion that the development of Prydain, Britannia, and Brython was anything other than what you suggest in your second paragraph.

  88. David Eddyshaw says

    Yet again, I have successfully reinvented the wheel.

    GPC hedges its bets though:

    Brth. *Brittones neu’r Llad. llafar Brittones
    “Brythonic *Brittones or the spoken Latin ‘Brittones'”

    Brython doesn’t have any very obvious Welsh etymology, though. Brythwch means “tumult, brawl” but (a) it seems to be a loan from Irish and (b) We Are A Peaceful People.

  89. David Eddyshaw says

    Welsh brith means “mottled, speckled”, which I suppose might go with the “painted person, Pict” theme, but even if the semantic match was better, I don’t think it can be made to work as a cognate of Brython phonologically. (It’s cognate with Old Irish mrecht.)

  90. PlasticPaddy says

    @de
    According to Matasovich, The P-C and Middle Irish form have a b, not a m (I thought the O.I. form did as well, but you seem to have found mrecht).

  91. David Eddyshaw says

    Got it from GPC. They also cite the Middle Irish with br-.

    Welsh always has *mr > br initially (as in bro “region”, cognate with Latin margo and Old Irish mruig.)

  92. David Eddyshaw says

    It was actually the vowel that made me think that brith and Brython couldn’t be cognate (i doesn’t normally alternate with y), but on reflection, that’s been affected by the following *kt and I’m not sure what would be the expected result in a non-final syllable.

    It could hardly underlie the older Greek forms, but that wouldn’t be relevant if it were an alternative old endonym in Brythonic.

  93. David Eddyshaw says

    No trace of any *k in Latin Britto or borrowings like “Dumbarton”, though. And the assimilation *kt > *tt (> th) is surely too late for it all to work (cf the Latin loan perffaith “perfect.”)

  94. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Is Dumbarton a borrowing or just a leftover?

  95. Cruithne’s orbit is a kidney bean that sometimes approaches, and sometimes recedes from, that of Earth.

    It’s apparently a series of kidney beans—as seen from Earth (to which so many of my readers belong). As seen from the stars, it’s a regular old ellipse. This page may be helpful, though I think the animations would have been more helpful if they’d left out Mercury and Venus, for a start.

    Edit: That page says the first syllable is accented, “CREW-een-ya”.

  96. David Eddyshaw says

    Is Dumbarton a borrowing or just a leftover?

    Good question …

    Well, long /u:/ became /i:/ early enough that it’s happened in Breton and Cornish as well as Welsh, so presumably that was a feature of Allt Clud Cumbric too.

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Celtic/d%C5%ABnom

    And likewise; you’d expect /θ/ rather than /t/ as a reflex of *tt in Brythonic.

    And the place presumably spoke Cumbric up until it was conquered by the Scots in the eleventh century.

    I don’t think it was actually called Din Brython by the locals when it still was a Briton Fort, though I’m not sure. The name certainly looks like one bestowed by a non-Briton.

  97. Relevant to the choices forced upon all us translators, what do Hatters make of Robert Alter’s efforts? I’ve been listening to Audible’s beautifully read offering The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (2018). Impressive, with handy introductory material and notes for non-Hebraicists.

  98. We discussed it briefly in 2016 and 2019, and his earlier The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary twenty years ago. (Not that I have any objection to discussing it further, of course, just mentioning prior art!)

  99. Jen in Edinburgh says

    That’s a fair point, although it does make me wonder who named Earra-Ghaidheal…

  100. Ah yes, Hat. I missed those chats. Among your remarks, quoting Alter in 2016:

    When asked about other translators, he says “The only English translation I honestly admire is the King James Version,” which won my heart, and he adds that modern English versions “have a very shaky sense of English style,” which is exactly right. Rhythm and style are the indispensable foundation of all literary translation (and, for that matter, of all literary writing).

    Hear hear!

  101. J.W. Brewer says

    I have read essays by Alter on Biblical topics with enjoyment and profit, but my general rule of thumb at present (which others need not accept of course) is that because of the nature of the texts and their particular historical/cultural position any one-man translation of the Bible or any substantial portion thereof is inherently hubristic and should not be encouraged, purchased, or read. Competent scholars offering their own translations of specific verses in the middle of an essay or article to which a close reading of the passage is relevant is a different phenomenon and I don’t think it raises the same concerns, and there are some more limited-scope one-man-effort cases, involving only a book or two of the whole, where some prior translation was emended/modified in accordance with a particular fully-disclosed methodology in service of a particular fully-disclosed goal, and those can be okay.

  102. In the last couple of years I’ve gotten a new appreciation as to how much of the language of the Hebrew Bible is unclear. A proper scholarly translation would be flooded with question marks or, at best, footnotes (a few tough nuts like this have come up here at LH, and there are hundreds or thousands more.) A biblical translator for the general reading public is forced to guess, that is, to invent, again and again. There is no way around it.

  103. @J.W. Brewer:

    any one-man translation of the Bible or any substantial portion thereof is inherently hubristic and should not be encouraged, purchased, or read

    Pius labor, sed periculosa praesumptio, iudicare de ceteris ipsum ab omnibus iudicandum, senis mutare linguam et canescentem mundum ad initia retrahere parvulorum. Quis enim doctus pariter vel indoctus, cum in manus volumen adsumpserit et a saliva quam semel inbibit viderit discrepare quod lectitat, non statim erumpat in vocem, me falsarium me clamans esse sacrilegum, qui audeam aliquid in veteribus libris addere, mutare, corrigere?

  104. David Eddyshaw says

    a new appreciation as to how much of the language of the Hebrew Bible is unclear.

    Absolutely. In some ways that is almost the most important thing I have learnt from studying Biblical Hebrew.

    I think many a “Bible-believing” Christian might benefit from this knowledge …

  105. Though many of them would just believe what their clergyperson tells them. I’m reminded of a former student where I teach who told me that in his church, they don’t interpret the Bible, they just do what it says.

  106. J.W. Brewer says

    @E.H.S.: Have you *read* a biography of St. Jerome? He’s really not a counterexample to my hubris theory …

  107. David Eddyshaw says

    He was not modest. Or notably self-effacing …
    Though, to be fair, he had more to be not modest about than most.

    His complaint about the critics of any new Bible translation are also, um, pertinent.

  108. David Eddyshaw says

    I am fond of the KJV myself.

    However, I have noticed a strong (though by no means invariable) correlation between stated preference for the KJV to the exclusion of all other English versions, and not actually believing a word of it.

    I suspect that neither the original authors nor the KJV translators would be too grateful for this particular kind of appreciation.

    However, as there is a modern tradition asserting the Death of the Author, it may be argued (on Barthesian* grounds) that this is quite beside the point.

    * But not Barthian.

  109. Stu Clayton says

    there is a modern tradition asserting the Death of the Author

    Barthes pinched the meme from Le Morte D’Arthur, which is much older.

  110. David Eddyshaw says

    True. Death of the Arthor, in the original Old Welsh.

    The “author” variant first appears in Occitan, and is thought to reflect the bad handwriting of the prima manus of the Red Book of Llantwit.

  111. Genesis 3:1–7, chez Alter:

    Now the serpent was most cunning of all the beasts of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Though God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden—” And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the garden’s trees we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, lest you die.’ ” And the serpent said to the woman, “You shall not be doomed to die. For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will become as gods knowing good and evil.” And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man with her, and he ate. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

    One of Alter’s four notes for this excerpt:

    6. lust to the eyes. There is a long tradition of rendering the first term here, taʾawah, according to English idiom and local biblical context, as “delight” or something similar. But taʾawah means “that which is intensely desired,” “appetite,” and sometimes specifically “lust.” Eyes have just been mentioned in the serpent’s promise that they will be wondrously opened; now they are linked to intense desire. In the event, they will be opened chiefly to see nakedness. Taʾawah is semantically bracketed with the next term attached to the tree, “lovely,” neḥmad, which literally means “that which is desired.”
    to look at. A venerable tradition renders this verb, lehaskil, as “to make one wise.” But Amos Funkenstein has astutely observed to me that there is an internal parallelism in the verse, “lust to the eyes … lovely to look at.” Although the usual sense of lehaskil in the hiphʿil conjugation does involve the exercise of wisdom, Funkenstein’s suggestion leans on the meaning of the same root in the hitpaʿel conjugation in postbiblical Hebrew and Aramaic, “to look.” And in fact, the Aramaic Targums of both Onkelos and Yonatan ben Uziel render this as leʾistakala beih, “to look at.” At least one other biblical occurrence is almost certainly in the sense of “look,” the beginning of Psalm 41: “Happy who maskil to the poor man”—surely, who looks at, has regard for, the poor man. A correlation between verbs of seeing and verbs of knowledge or understanding is common to many languages.

    Interesting indeed, in light of the sexual shame and reproductive tribulations that follow. And illuminating, for those of us who would meet a hiphʿil conjugation on the road as the general are challenged by caviar.

    Harold Bloom was a great admirer of the KJV, and very often preferred to quote it rather than later efforts.

    JWB:

    … but my general rule of thumb at present (which others need not accept of course) is that because of the nature of the texts and their particular historical/cultural position any one-man translation of the Bible or any substantial portion thereof is inherently hubristic and should not be encouraged, purchased, or read.

    Worthy as a general rule of thumb of course, and even as a specific one. But if any labourer in the field has earned the right to venture a three-volume whole-text rendering (OT only, Christians will note), it is Alter after his career of brilliant briefer sorties.

    DE:

    Right, and *Arto-rīg-ios all the rest. The connection with bears is charming – and somehow so apt. (I’ve been listening to an Audible presentation on Arthur, too. Like Samuel Johnson I find reading the actual page more and more of a burden, as I age. Probably in his case the dictionary did that to him; in my case it’s the grind of editing.)

  112. Stu Clayton says

    Speaking of variants: in The ancient books of Wales a certain J.R.R. Tolkein is often referred to. Have you any idea who that might be ?

  113. David Eddyshaw says

    He was a notorious elf.

  114. Stu Clayton says

    Perhaps there is tolerable uncertainty as to how to pronounce “Tolkien” in English. I haven’t heard it said that often by English speakers, so I stick with “tol-keen” for myself, on the German model of -ien.

    There is no uncertainty about the different pronunciations of -ien and -ein in German nowadays. That’s why I noticed “Tolkein”, which would be “tol-kine” as in cows.

    Ah – this is just the “Bernstein”-in-English phenomenon.

  115. Not another fucking elf!

  116. J.W. Brewer says

    The phrase “it was lust to the eyes” is really not idiomatic English of any sort. It sounds like either an incompetent ESLism or a deliberately strange word combination deployed by a poet for aesthetic effect (one can imagine someone like cummings doing that …). Is the Hebrew poetically weird-sounding in Hebrew, or do we actually not know because of the recurrent problem of not having any other works in Biblical Hebrew to serve as a baseline for comparison?

    The supposed semantic softening that Alter seems concerned with was already present in the LXX (καὶ ὅτι ἀρεστὸν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἰδεῖν),* but those LXX translators didn’t even have Ph.D.’s so Alter no doubt is confident he knows better.

    *Glossed plausibly in an online interlinear as “and that [it is] pleasing [to] the eyes to behold.”

    EDITED TO ADD: Maybe a bit of an echo of Yeats’ “Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye”?

  117. David Eddyshaw says

    lust to the eyes

    This sort of thing strikes me as rather like translating σπλαγχνίζομαι as “I’m gutted.”* Etymology is not a reliable guide to meaning, and words mean what they mean in context. As JWB implies, the corpus of Biblical Hebrew is so small that we are often reduced to guessing, and certainly we must be constantly missing nuances intended by the authors, but the notion that the author in this case actually intended the word to have the significance of our “lust” strikes me as simply ludicrous.

    * Actually encountered, alas, in a recent sermon by a preacher eager to overawe the congregation with his imagined knowledge of Greek. This sort of thing is so common that my heart sinks whenever a preacher starts talking about Greek. (Only the truly lacking in self-awareness try it on with Hebrew.)

  118. J.W. Brewer says

    Note that “lust” in this context is not original to Alter. An 1878 edition of “Genesis With Notes” by the Rev. G.V. Garland, M.A. offers “And the woman saw that the tree [was] good for meat, and that it [was an object of] lust for [the] eyes” etc. The words I have bracketed are printed in italics, following a convention in the KJV tradition of thereby indicating that words not directly representing a Hebrew lexeme have been added by the translator because they were necessary to create grammatical/idiomatic English.

    Some versions of 1 Jn 2:16 have “lust of the eyes,” but the choice of preposition is key to getting idiomatic English, and both “for the eyes” and “of the eyes” work in a way that “to the eyes” doesn’t.

    A pre-Alter use of “lust to the eyes” is found in Gershom Scholem’s book _Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah_, in a 1570 warning (against dabbling in kabbalistic studies without appropriate guidance) from R. Moses Isserles. But Scholem had published the book in Hebrew, so this phrasing in English (published 1973) is that of the translator R.J. Zwi Werblowsky. Let it be noted that Werblowsky was not an L1 Anglophone and I adhere to the position that the phrasing is tin-eared and unidiomatic unless intended to create a deliberately-weird aesthetic effect. It might be too simplistic to note that Werblowsky’s L1 was German and that German “Lust” has a rather different semantic scope than English “lust.”

  119. German “Lust” has a rather different semantic scope than English “lust.”

    That was the first thing that came to my mind — the basic sense of Lust is ‘desire; pleasure,’ so anyone aware of that might well let it leak subconsciously into their translation.

  120. David Eddyshaw says

    “Lust” is still used to mean “pleasure” by Shakespeare. The narrowing to its current almost purely sexual sense in English is a later development. And we even now still talk about a “lust for adventure” without necessarily implying that the adventure will take place in Bangkok.

    Young People of Today …

    The appendix to Denis Creissels’ Le malinké de Kita features a long excerpt from the Genesis story as incorporated by a griot into a traditional history of Mali. In this, Eve’s motive for taking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is to find out if Adam is going out with any other women …

  121. The narrowing to its current purely sexual sense in English is a later development.

    And a shocking one at that! Where are the temporis-acti fulminators when you need them? Why does no one cry out against this misuse, and a naughty misuse to boot?

  122. J.W. Brewer says

    If Alter had been trying to translate into the archaic-and-numinous-feeling Shakespeare/KJV register of English, “lust” could have been a more easily defended choice although I still think the preposition is off.

  123. J.W. Brewer says

    Although note in Werblowsky’s favor that after emigrating from the Third Reich he ended up doing his undergraduate studies at the University of London and then later on (after getting his Ph.D. in Geneva and perhaps getting mixed up with Jungians) was a faculty member for a while at some UK universities. He might well have had some perhaps awkward conversations during his UK sojourns that should have made it extremely clear to him that the semantics of “lust” in modern English differed from those of “Lust” in modern German.

  124. I think using lust is a defensible interpretational choice. However, using the pronoun to seems like an outright error.

  125. David Eddyshaw says

    Come to think of it, you can lust for and lust after things unsexily.

    There does seem to be a certain ambiguity in (for example)

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=XaJSOsoEBbk

    but that is to be expected with the Devil’s Music, I suppose.

    (The reference to the Genesis story is clear. The poet, having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, is indeed now turning his eyes “lustfully” toward the Tree of Life.)

  126. Stu Clayton says

    [Werblowski] might well have had some perhaps awkward conversations during his UK sojourns that should have made it extremely clear to him that the semantics of “lust” in modern English differed from those of “Lust” in modern German

    Here’s an infelicitous book title:
    Augenlust und Augenlaster in Venedig.

    Lust and Laster do not contrast in German. Somebody has been contaminated by English moralizing vocab.

    Also, a Laster is a big truck. Only the gender (der) distinguishes it from the kind that gets you into trouble with The Man (das).

  127. Lust and Laster do not contrast in German.

    Huh? Laster means ‘vice,’ oder?

  128. Stu Clayton says

    Yes, but Lust does not mean “virtue”.

    Lust auf Laster is not a contradiction in terms.

  129. I think using lust is a defensible interpretational choice. However, using the pronoun to seems like an outright error.

    What would be a better preposition, maybe “in”? “It was lust in the eye” might not be bad as poetry.

    The problem seems to be that “delight” can mean “something that causes a feeling of delight”, but as far as I can tell, “lust” doesn’t really mean “something that causes a feeling of lust” to us now, and I can’t think of an English noun for that. Among adjectives, I can see “sexy” (in the generalized sense that I think spread from the advertising business), but that’s hardly the register Alter wants. “Attractive” and “desirable” don’t seem as strong (though for all I know, they might be the right strength and “lust” might be too strong). “Provocative” might be closer. Or you could go for something freer with a more specific verb: “It provoked desire in the eye” or “It caused lust in the eye”.

  130. Lust auf Laster is not a contradiction in terms.

    Ah, I see what you mean — I thought by “do not contrast” you meant they were the same.

  131. J.W. Brewer says

    Too clinical a register for Scriptural translation, but wikipedia informs me that ‘Dendrophilia (or less often arborphilia or dendrophily) literally means “love of trees”. The term may sometimes refer to a paraphilia in which people are attracted to or sexually aroused by trees.’

    “Desirable” does seem potentially stronger in modern English than “pleasing” or “attractive” and maybe throwing in some intensifying adverb next to “desirable” is the best way of getting the unbleached intensity of meaning that Alter thinks is present in the Hebrew?

  132. @Stu Clayton: The second syllable of “Tolkien” was certainly “keen”. According to Wikipedia, the first syllable rhymes with “doll”, not “dole”.

  133. Stu Clayton says

    In this, Eve’s motive for taking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is to find out if Adam is going out with any other women …

    Good for her ! We are not told that Adam ever does anything at all apart from donating a rib. He seems to have been a couch sward potato. Possibly he played cards with the chimps while snacking on banana chips direct off the plant.

  134. Stu Clayton says

    @Jerry: According to Wikipedia, the first syllable rhymes with “doll”, not “dole”.

    Thanx, that sounds more elegant. I’ll take it on.

  135. We are not told that Adam ever does anything at all apart from donating a rib.

    Ah, but you’re forgetting about Lilith. It’s quite natural that Eve would worry about the competition.

  136. Stu Clayton says

    It’s quite natural that Eve would worry about the competition.

    I’ve never quite understood that Lilith business. Was she some babe from the big city ? In any case, Adam never does a lick of work. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, so Eve was right to worry.

    On the other hand, she need not have looked farther than the sheep. Is it certain that Lilith was not the name of a prize ewe ? WhitePine Lilith

  137. David Eddyshaw says

    The idea that Genesis 3 is really all about lust does not seem to be borne out by the text. If anything, eating the fruit seems to have had something of a dampening effect on the errant couple. (It is true that overthinking these things can be something of a turn-off.)

    One feels that later hangups may have been retrospectively read into the text.

    Milton (admittedly something of a closet heretic) represents A and E as having Good Sex before the Fall, and Bad Sex immediately afterwards.

  138. David Eddyshaw says

    In the Malinké account that I mentioned, God in fact creates the first dog (Gidimidi) from the flesh of Adam before getting around to Eve.

    Also, the King of the Chimpanzees ruled the world before God became angry with him and decided to create human beings. We’re the backup plan.

    Creissels, for some reason, describes this version as “fort peu orthodoxe.”

  139. Mrs. Snake was created from her husband’s legs. You heard it here first.

  140. the King of the Chimpanzees ruled the world before God became angry with him and decided to create human beings

    Sounds like that griot decided that chimpanzees are a type of jinn. Feels oddly modernistic somehow, like someone learned a bit of Islamic apocrypha and a bit of Darwinism and tried to split the difference.

  141. David Eddyshaw says

    Creissels says of the chimpanzee thing that it’s one of the “motifs probablement issus de traditions autochtonnes plus anciennes”, but unfortunately doesn’t go into any details.

    The griot was Kélémonson Diabaté (born about 1893), whom Creissels calls le célèbre griot, but I can’t find anything else about him. He died in 1977. The recitation was recorded by Radio Mali in the 1960s.

  142. J.W. Brewer says

    Speaking of Milton’s heresies, his supposedly-positive vision of Satan is apparently extolled in a book (introduction by the heretical C.G. Jung!) by the very same fellow I criticized upthread for using the unidiomatic “lust to the eyes” in his English translation of Scholem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer_and_Prometheus

    I myself was first exposed to the concept of Milton being pro-Satan when I was fifteen years old and infatuated with William Blake, who famously described Milton as “a true Poet and [thus] of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Not so infatuated as to then run right out to read Milton, mind you. I doubt Blake would have found Darwinism congenial.

  143. He did, however, like Erasmus Darwin.

  144. David Eddyshaw says

    a true Poet and [thus] of the Devil’s party without knowing it

    It’s a nonsense. Milton merely gives Satan ample space to condemn himself out of his own mouth.

    As CS Lewis points out somewhere, Adam is curious about everything, and never misses an opportunity to pump angels for information or to talk about the wonderful stuff he’s seen.

    Satan just bangs on (majestically) about himself and his many grievances.

  145. J.W. Brewer says

    The phrase “the scientifically acute Swedenborg” in the piece on E. Darwin that hat linked to leads me to suspect that the author may be pulling someone’s leg. But maybe I’m too cynical?

  146. It’s a shame Creissels doesn’t give the text of the chimpanzee passage; he says it’s in the thesis of Mansa-Makan Diabaté, Transcription et analyse de textes de tradition orale malinké, but that doesn’t seem to have been scanned in any easy-to-find way.

  147. David Eddyshaw says

    Yes, I was looking too (also unsuccessfully.)

    @JWB:

    Swedenborg actually did have a surprisingly extensive scientific background. Still, Hilton evidently does love to snark. (Interesting article, but I didn’t find it particularly persuasive.)

  148. You have to like “But anyone, surely, can safely take the pleasure of reading Darwin once.”

  149. Jen in Edinburgh says

    I like the idea of ‘significant minor poetry’. Presumably it can be both?

    Although ‘Significant Minor Poetry 1789-1830… in 128 volumes’ sounds like the lifework of a character in a slightly comical novel.

  150. David Eddyshaw says

    There should be a companion volume: Insignificant Major Poetry, 1830 – 1890. I can think of some candidates … (Idylls of the King, for example …)

  151. JWB:

    A pre-Alter use of “lust to the eyes” …

    There’s precedent also in Donald MacDonald, Creation and the Fall; a defence and exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis, 1856.

    In bringing that sample of Alterity to the Hattery (surely one of the toughest rooms for any translator to work) I was not endorsing all its English. Much is clunky and hard to justify or explain, like that leviathan of heterogeneity and inscrutabilities we call the Hebrew Bible – those mosaic books not least.

    DE:

    Satan just bangs on (majestically) about himself and his many grievances.

    Here was I thinking you essayed an up-to-the minute epitome of US politics; then I spotted your parenthesis.

  152. David Eddyshaw says

    The parallel did occur to me. Satan is a somewhat more sympathetic figure, though.

  153. I have noticed a strong (though by no means invariable) correlation between stated preference for the KJV to the exclusion of all other English versions, and not actually believing a word of it.

    This side the Pond, there are fair number of people who prefer the KJV and believe every word of it. Some believe it’s divinely inspired and literally inerrant, possibly even superior to the known manuscripts in Hebrew and Greek.

    I meant to add, by the way, that despite having the same criticisms of “lust to the eye” that others have, I generally like Alter’s style in that passage.

  154. David Eddyshaw says

    True. I was forgetting about US KJV-worshippers. (Much less of a thing over here.)

    Given the numbers in the US, that probably does indeed invalidate my generalisation. More epicycles will be needed …

    There are USians who venerate the Greek manuscript tradition behind the KJV rather than the exact English text, on account of believing that all textual criticism (even the “lower” kind) is a Satanic deception.* They therefore update the actual language, though not (of course) to the extent of making it “inclusive”, which is, if anything, even more depraved than comparing ancient manuscripts.

    * They do actually have a kind of reason for this: the only clearcut Trinitarian statement in the Greek Testament does not, alas, appear in any but late manuscripts.

  155. J.W. Brewer says

    It’s just a question of who has authority to determine what the canonical text is: the Church or a bunch of weird-beard professors with no evidence of being guided by the Holy Spirit. Not that the particular USians being discussed generally *know* that what they really should be doing is just deferring to the Ecumenical Patriarchate on this matter. (The Church’s text* is not identical to what was floating around Western Europe in the 16th century, but it’s closer to that than it is to what unrooted modern academics and their eclectic theorizing tend to come up with.)

    *Currently, if one wants to be more precise than “Majority Text,” the so-called “Patriarchal Text” published in 1904 with some subsequent light revisions and corrections of typos, which was edited and promulgated in response to the rumors that had reached Constantinople about new-fangled textual criticism and after some consideration of what value that approach might offer.

  156. However, I have noticed a strong (though by no means invariable) correlation between stated preference for the KJV to the exclusion of all other English versions, and not actually believing a word of it.

    I was forgetting about US KJV-worshippers. (Much less of a thing over here [UK].)

    Aww if you’re not going to believe a word of it (or you’re not even going to ask yourself whether you believe any of it), I’da thought you’d have a worshipfully strong preference for a version with the poetry, innit? [Michael Foot] Those C20th translations are so prosaic, like instructions for assembling IKEA furniture.

    I think worshipping the KJV was a significant thing in the UK — at least in my childhood.

    (I did recently in NZ try to pin down a Jehova’s Witness standing in the middle of the city, presumably busy witnessing. Their version of the bible seems to have curiously omitted all the inconvenient bits. I’ll have to ask her about Lilith if I see her again.)

  157. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    FWIW, lyst in Danish has the generic sense ~ ‘feel like’, as in har du lyst til at køre en tur, while lysten does have sexual connotations. You can use lyst to proposition someone, though: Jeg har lyst til dig!. (‘I want you,’ less lewd than ‘I lust for you’). En last is unequivocally ‘a vice,’ though. (Same in Swedish, I believe, except they spell it lust).

    Do not confuse with lyst the neuter of lys = ‘bright’. The vowel is closer. (Swedish ljust with a silent l. Both regular developments from liust where I don’t know if the diphthong was rising or falling, but probably changed in one of the languages).

  158. David Eddyshaw says

    Aww if you’re not going to believe a word of it (or you’re not even going to ask yourself whether you believe any of it), I’da thought you’d have a worshipfully strong preference for a version with the poetry, innit?

    Yes, that’s exactly what I was implying. The common thread between Larkin-Church-Going-style appreciation and worshipping the Bible text itself is reading for form rather than content. (That’s the epicycle I was after.)

    In fact, a uniformly “elevated” style seriously misrepresents the originals, quite apart from issues of overall comprehension. Mark’s Gospel should not read like Isaiah. I don’t think it does in the KJV, but the close association of Early Modern English with elevated/numinous that many evidently feel is likely to cause them to miss this (the more so if the KJV is really the only thing they read from that period, or if everything else they read from that period actually is in elevated style.)

    The comprehension thing should not be underestimated. Even if you’re thoroughly used to sixteenth-seventeenth century English you can be tripped up by semantic shifts that simply hadn’t occurred to you. I like the KJV, but I have several times discovered from reading recent versions that I had actually misunderstood some passages for years.

    I’ve previously recounted the sad tale of the president of the Prayer Book Society, who wrote to the Times (I think it was) defending the wording “Our Father, which art in heaven” on the grounds that it captured the fact that the Father was not a human being. He was simply ignorant of the early modern English he was promoting.

  159. David Eddyshaw says

    ‘I want you,’ less lewd than ‘I lust for you’

    It’s simpler in Kusaal.

    M nɔŋif is “I love you”, while M bɔɔdif “I want you” is the expression you want for propositioning. If you really want to make an impression, you can say M bɔɔdif nɛ, using the particle to focus the verb for added lewdness. Pragmatics!

    (Useful tips for travellers in NE Ghana.)

  160. FWIW, lyst in Danish has the generic sense ~ ‘feel like’, as in har du lyst til at køre en tur, while lysten does have sexual connotations.
    Similar in German, but lüsten and gelüsten are literary and feel somewhat archaic. Lüstern means “lewd”, and some compounds with Lust have a stronger sexual implication than the simplex.

  161. Similar in English, but list (n.) and list (v.) are literary and feel distinctly archaic. Cf listless, listed at the link also.

  162. Stu Clayton says

    Mich gelüstet nach dem Laster,
    Ich gebe mich dem Lästern hin !
    Lüstern bin ich nach dem Lüster
    Und dessen lustvoll-dunklem Sinn.

  163. Stu is swinging from the chandelier tonight 🙂

  164. jack morava says

    One of the reasons I like the work of PKD is that characters like Joe Chip try their best to cope with major Schr\”odinger’s box rents in reality.

  165. David Eddyshaw says

    the work of PKD

    Guaranteed safe when taken as directed.

Speak Your Mind

*