Y writes: “From Lameen’s Bluesky I learned of this paper. There was some discussion (or several?) at the blog of the subject of language naming, but this is so extensive and detailed, I thought you might want to have a post on it, rather than just a comment.” I agree, so here’s the post. The paper is “Towards a typology of language names” by Pun Ho Lui; the abstract:
Although language names (i.e. glottonyms) are often mentioned in descriptions of individual languages, the general patterns underlying them are understudied. To narrow the research gap, this study explores four aspects of glottonyms. First, the definition and linguistic properties of endonyms and exonyms are examined. Morphemes meaning ‘our’ and ‘true’ are commonly found in endonyms, while some exonyms have a negative connotation. Second, language markers—items signifying a glottonym—are categorized into lexical and grammatical language markers. Lexical language markers are subsequently classified based on their meanings. Third, glottonyms are classified into 19 types based on their meanings. Some types are further categorized into subtypes. Fourth, the naming motivations of glottonyms are explored, e.g. some glottonyms are used for disambiguating the glottonym meaning from other meanings. Finally, the challenges faced in constructing this typology are discussed.
You can see a more detailed list, with discussion, at Lameen’s post. Here’s a bit I found interesting:
A derogatory exonym may undergo amelioration, i.e. the connotation becomes less negative. Lepcha is derived from the Nepali word(s) lɑ̄pce or lɑ̄pca ‘inarticulate speech’ with a derogatory connotation, but now Lepcha is used without this connotation (Plaisier 2007). There is no known glottonym in which the connotation has undergone pejoration, i.e. the connotations have become (more) negative.
Y adds:
In other news, this paper [Idan Dershowitz and Na’ama Pat-El, “The Forgotten Meaning of אוֹת”] offers a new interpretation of the Biblical Hebrew word אוֹת ʾôt, usually interpreted as ‘(physical) sign’ or ‘supernatural sign’. Among their conclusions is that the mark of Cain wasn’t a mark, and that the supposed virgin birth in Isaiah is not a virgin birth or any sort of supernatural sign.
Their summary:
In this work, we analyze the semantics of the word אוֹת in biblical and extra-biblical Hebrew. We suggest that the word has two distinct semantic families: its better-known definitions relating to “sign” and an additional cluster of meanings surrounding “proclamation.” We discuss several biblical passages where “sign” is inapt, and in all these examples, our proposed semantics resolve the exegetical difficulties. We offer comparative evidence from cognate languages to further support our hypothesis.
Y calls it “thought-provoking” but says “I am not entirely convinced by it.”
Interesting. Kind of like how a privileged speaker of French may use the word patois even today with connotations that are frankly appalling, while certain speakers of non-standard varieties or French creoles might use the same word to describe their own language with only positive connotations.
Mayali speakers (the name being literally “thought, idea, concept”) evidently have a Chomskyan view of Language.
I suspect that many groups who call their language “our language” or “true language” or just “language” also call themselves “our people”, “the true people” or “the people.”
A “greeting” glottonym not in the paper is “Farefare.” This started life as an exonym, but has been adopted by the Bolgatanga Gurense/Farefare people, alongside Gurenne, formed from the ethnonym in the usual Oti-Volta fashion.
Oti-Volta languages generally use “speech” as the lexical term; “mouth” does appear, but in WOV, at any rate, “mouth” as a metaphor means “command”, not “language.” Otherwise, they all do the common Volta-Congo thing of making the language name from the community name by adding a suitable noun class affix to the stem (though there are actually two different suffixes used for this in Oti-Volta, with the distribution cutting across the major subgroups in a rather puzzling way.) “Tongue” never means “language” in Oti-Volta.
My favorite example of that neutral-to-positive-valence-from-pejorative-origins thing is “Broken” as one of the endonyms for the English-lexifier creole that is the dominant language of Nigeria.
Dunno where “Twi” comes from. Purely a language name. Not an ethnic group, not a place.
Or indeed “Rotten English”, the language Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote Sozaboy in.
I think “Broken” still has a negative implication. Nigerian Pidgin doesn’t get the respect it deserves as one of (if not the) most widely spoken of all Nigerian languages, and the notion that it’s really just substandard English remains very much alive. People are certainly trying to change that (for example, by – quite rightly – objecting to the name “Broken”), but the preconceptions remain. I don’t think “Broken” has done the “Quakers” thing. Maybe it will – or maybe people will just stop calling the language that.
I am not sure this counts, but Volapük has grown to mean gobbledygook in Russian. Also “албанский язык” was made into something else. In both of those cases the name of the language in pejorative form doesn’t mean the same language, but used metaphorically.
Interesting suggestion in the Dershowitz/Patel paper as to why the LXX has a παρθένος in Isaiah 7:14: viz, that the translators misunderstood אוֹת. We actually discussed this verse, in a thread in which I remember learning that the actual Greek word significantly changed its semantic range over time, in a way which may well be relevant. Seems more likely than this very speculative explanation, anyhow.
It’s a great idea in principle to bsse our understanding of BH words on context and use rather than etymology (the New English Bible was notoriously overfond of putative Arabic cognates for hapax legomena: but if you can’t find a potential Classical Arabic cognate for anything, you probably just haven’t looked hard enough.)
Trouble is, the material is so limited and the precise sense so often unclear that carrying this through in practice is likely to be very difficult. And “successes” all too likely to be question-begging.
“Sign” pleasantly reminded me of the word used to translate this in the Kusaal Bible: zanbin “tattoo.” I think this word had already broadened its semantic range a bit before the learned translators seized upon it …
(Pretty certainly, in fact. “Tattoo” used for “sign” turns up with other etyma in Oti-Volta: in Waama, the verb “tattoo/make tribal facial scars” is used for “write”, even. Seems to be a natural semantic extension for the locals.)
[I actually only know the (undoubtedly) primary meaning of Kusaal zanbin and the underlying verb zanbil from my own language consultants. It is absent from the dictionary, in which every text example cited for these words is from the Bible translations.]
Pat-El, sorry. Not that Patel is not a perfectly good name too. It’s just not her name.
Isaiah 7:14 says that the Κύριος will provide a σημεῖον, viz. that ἡ παρθένος will give birth to Ἐμμανουήλ. These authors appear uninterested in the semantics of σημεῖον, although their theory would seem to suggest that it was a mistranslation. This is, they say, just proof that everyone back then misunderstood Hebrew, not having the benefit of Extremely Clever modern scholarship. It is not hard to imagine what the Prophets would have had to say about such Extremely Clever authors.
I can’t actually see the the precise sense of אוֹת makes any difference at all to the extremely well-worn arguments around this. Whether the word in itself implies a miracle or a mere promise has no evident bearing on why Isaiah thought that a woman giving birth (not an unheard-of event) was significant enough to figure in a prophecy which the context plainly tells us is intended to rebuke the king’s unwillingness to declare his trust in God. You still need to ask all the familiar questions as to why this particular birth actually mattered – why it could function as a rebuke to Ahaz at all.
I suspect that this is just a kind of superior academic clickbait. (Which does not mean that the entire paper is; just that this part is included in order to provide an intriguing trailer for the movie.)
There doesn’t have to be a sharp semantic difference between “sign” and “solemn declaration/promise”. For example, English pledge covers both senses (with some difficulty, to be sure). My word is my bond and all that.
When a prophet or a divinator shows signs they confirm that they are speaking for the divinity or a spirit or some such. Presumably, when God is speaking for himself, there is no need for any extra signs and it is not surprising that one is sometimes not supplied (though sometimes it is, like with Noah and the rainbow).
I was just off at church reading a bunch of psalms by candlelight in the middle of the night, as one sometimes does (especially this time of year), and my eye was caught by a bit of language in Ps. 73/74: “they have set up their own signs for signs.” This translation was working off the LXX: ἔθεντο τὰ σημεῖα αὐτῶν σημεῖα. In the MT, the two “sign” words are not identical although they are differently inflected versions of the same lemma. The KJV has “they set up their ensigns for signs” and other translators from the MT have “standards for signs” or “banners for signs” or “emblems as signs,” although some recent attempts (like the ESV) have “signs [for/as] signs.” All seem to assume that at least the first set of “signs” are not inherently supernatural/miraculous, any more than a stop sign would be.
but if you can’t find a potential Classical Arabic cognate for anything, you probably just haven’t looked hard enough.
And you will probably come to the conclusion that Isajah was talking about camel husbandry.
Would the British term „double Dutch“ meaning gibberish count as pejorative towards the Dutch?
To Vanya’s question: someone else can check the archives but I think I have had occasion to previously allude at the Hattery to the old interview (early Nineties?) with the late Steve Albini (1962-2024) in which he says:
‘I met a writer for the Dutch music magazine Oor (Ear), who always wore a glove on his right hand, which was always balled-up in a fist. I found out why when the conversation turned to fireworks, and he demonstrated (by sticking a thumbtack in it) that his hand was wooden. He had blown it off with fireworks as a boy. He asked me why Americans have such a low opinion of the Dutch. I told him that Americans seldom even thought of the Dutch, except for their elm disease, which we thought highly of. He gave as evidence the expressions “being in Dutch,” “Dutch courage,” and worst of all, “Dutch treat– why that’s no treat of all!” I told him that they were all puns.’
Not everyone in the Netherlands is enamoured with Dutch referring to their people and language, one reason being that in Dutch itself Duits means German. Years ago the Netherlands/Dutch government was considering requesting international bodies that The Netherlands Language is used in English language documents. I think they graciously didn’t press the matter.
John Cowan listed a number of (at least originally) pejorative terms involving “Dutch” “Dutch [X]” tends to mean, something that is not really a [X]; common examples of [X] are door, oven, courage, and treat.
Old Irish Goidelg and its “Gaelic” descendants is another de-pejorativised one: it seems to be a loan from a Brythonic form which is etymologically “of the bushmen.” (Gŵydd “wild, untamed, savage; untilled, uncultivated, woody, overgrown, desolate, desert.”
“they have set up their own signs for signs.”
The Russian version has “поставили знаки свои вместо знамений наших,” with different words, but the Church Slavic one has “положиша знамєнїѧ своѧ знамєнїѧ, и нє познаша.”
@LH, oh, wow.
“Banners” made me think of the pair (Russian meanigns)
– знамена “banners”
– знамения “omens”
zna-men is plain IE. The root is “to know”, as Greek gno- English know. *ǵneh₃
It is from a small group of Slavic words derived with -men- (as Russian semen-, Latin semen) with a strange paradigm: NOM znamʲa < znamę.
It meant “sign”. As for znamenije “sign”, I have no idea how this suffix affected its meaning*, but Russian meanings of “banner” and “omen” would work oh so well in those translations that translate the first occurence of the Hebrew word as “banners”
*platŭ “cloth” platĭje “clothing” (Russian plat (usually platok) “kerchief”, platʲje “dress”). :/
“have no idea how this suffix affected [the] meaning” – is it a hifalutiniser*?
*hifalutiniser
CVCVCVCVCVCVC!
“From Lameen’s Bluesky”
Yahoo! It works in Russia!
Бог милостив!
Read the ot paper. (What a relief to be able to use that label for a linguistics paper without it referring to Optimality Theory!) Unusual for a Pat-El paper to propose a perfectly normal and straightforward semantic shift rather than something carefully calculated to challenge grammaticalization theory, but I have to say it looks like a strong case (not that I’d dream of arguing Biblical Hebrew with her in any event.) If it holds up, though, it would definitely suggest that the history of the Arabic cognate āyah needs to be reexamined (rather than, as here, airily dismissed towards the end of the paper.) A shift from “proclamation” to “sign” after the emergence of writing is plausible, but makes the standard assumption of a nearly perfect reverse shift of “sign” to “verse of the Qur’an” seem much less so.
Of course, to a linguist all words are signs anyhow, innit?
(And yes, the assumption is explicitly that the change of meaning was complete not just before the Septuagint but before much of the text of the Hebrew Bible had even been written. Having met Arabic speakers who honestly believed that dharrah in the Qur’an meant “atom” in the sense of modern physics, I have no trouble imagining such a scenario…)
Getting back to the proposed typology of language names, it is something of a disappointment to be a native speaker of a language whose endonym/exonym is from one of the boringly-obvious typical sources rather than getting to have a glottonym that fits into the MAGIC POTION OR BARK category.
Note btw that the Gospels use σημεῖον at least once with no supernatural/miraculous vibe: ὁ δὲ παραδιδοὺς αὐτὸν ἔδωκεν αὐτοῖς σημεῖον λέγων· ὃν ἂν φιλήσω, αὐτός ἐστι· κρατήσατε αὐτόν. The KJV has that as “Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.” Some modern translations use “signal” instead of “sign,” but “sign” remains common.
OTOH, when the KJV translators used “signs” in Luke 1:62 (“And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called.”), they are rendering what looks to be an entirely unrelated verb (ἐννεύω in lemma form, glossed as “to nod, to signal, to make a sign” or “beckon or communicate by gesture”).
@David Eddyshaw: I can’t read the name “Pat-El” without imagining a relative of Superman.
MAGIC POTION OR BARK
From Melanie Helen Viljoen (2013) A grammatical description of the Buwal language:
So wouldn’t this just fit in the category PLACE ?
Perhaps this gadal is specifically Caralluma dalzielii ? See p. 153, no. 36 here. This article also gives several other plants with gadal in the name (see the index here).
First of all, I should have written ʾôṯ, not ʾôt. Final t never takes a dagesh, but it’s a good convention to mark the fricative explicitly.
I think that D&P make a good case for the original sense of the word. They acknowledge that a later sense did develop, that of a supernatural demonstration of divine power. However, I think they argue that the transition between the two meanings is evident in the OT itself, that is, that the ‘miracle’ sense is rare or absent in its earlier strata, and I am not convinced by that.
There is a very strong association between אוֹת ʾôṯ and מוֹפֵת môp̄ēṯ, the two traditionally translated in English as ‘signs and wonders’. ʾôṯ occurs 79 times, môp̄ēṯ occurs 36 times, and of those, 18 verses include both, usually as a conjoined pair. As such, môp̄ēṯ should receive proper attention as a strong clue to the meaning of ʾôṯ. But D&P give it short shrift, as fn. 73, beginning with “While a comprehensive treatment of מוֹפֵת is beyond the scope of this article, it appears to share both of אוֹת’s families of meanings.” They give two examples of a môp̄ēṯ being “said”, both from one passage in Kings 1, 13, but make no mention of the rest, in Exodus and Deuteronomy and Psalms and elsewhere, which clearly refer to something that is “done” or “seen” or both, and clearly refer to miraculous demonstrations. It looks like D&P are unfortunately selective in their evidence.
It seems to me that both the ‘statement’ and ‘miraculous sign’ senses of ʾôṯ existed side by side by the time the earliest materials of the OT were written. I do think D&P are right in the specific cases of Cain and of the Isaiah prophecy, but that is not by excluding the traditional interpretations, ‘physical mark’ and ‘miraculous demonstration’, but by offering the new sense, which then fits the narratives better than the old senses.
I don’t know where the surname Pat-El comes from. I thought it was to distinguish it from the Gujarati one, but she and a few other hyphenate it in Hebrew too, פת-אל. Perhaps it is a Hebraization of the Iraqi-Jewish פתאל Fattal.
Final t never takes a dagesh
Ahem. 2sg feminine pronoun “you”, corresponding perfective verb endings …
I was thinking קשט “truth” too, but that’s tet not tav, and thus Doesn’t Count. And doesn’t have a dagesh. But apart from that …
Waddya mean, pedant?
Both Kusaal versions, and the Mooré too, at Luke 1:62 just say “asked with their hands.” No tattoos involved.
At Matthew 28:48 both Kusaal versions just say “the one who was going to betray Jesus had previously told them”, but the Mooré version actually does say that he gave them a bãnde, rendered “sign, mark, label, miracle” in Niggli’s dictionary. The “miracle” sense must (of course) be a calque.
Bãnde must be from the same root as the verb bãnge “know, come to know, understand, realise.” (-g is a very common inceptive suffix.) Interesting. I hadn’t noticed that root used outside that verb before.
2sg feminine pronoun “you”, corresponding perfective verb endings
Right you are. Those are spelled with a dagesh and a shwa, so I couldn’t visualize them…
bãnde
But Farefare has a bãnnɛ glossed as an adjective “étonnant; extraordinaire; mystérieux” in Niggli’s dictionary, which confuses the issue. But it looks as if he’s extracted this sense from the compound bõn-bãnnɛ “miracle; signe miraculeux”, which must inevitably be a bit of translationese for French “signe”, and which probably really just means “informing thing.”
I see that Mooré has a tʋʋm-bãnde, glossed “miracle”, where the first component is “work, deed.” Quite neat as a translation for “miracle”: signifying deed.” Could make a sermon out of it …
Kusaal just goes for compounds with nyalʋŋ “wonderful, astonishing”, like tʋʋm nyalʋŋ, which seems a bit of a missed opportunity now my attention has been drawn to it. Score one to the French.
Encouraging discovery checking nyalʋŋ in Naden’s Kusaal dictionary:
I was beginning to worry (on behalf of the Kusaasi) about the absence from my data of the expected Kusaal reflex nyɛb of the fine reconstructable-all-the-way-to-proto-Oti-Volta verb “fuck.”
However, Naden records nyamis, glossed “sexual immorality.”
As
zɔlimis “stupidity” is to zɔlʋg “fool” (stem zɔl-)
so
nyamis “sexual immorality” is to … (hint: *bm -> m(m) is a known internal sandhi rule in Kusaal.)
Honour is satisfied.
(It’s not the usual word in the Bible translation, though it occurs twice in Ezekiel. Figures.)
I learned from WP that Dahalo is an insulting exonym, meaning ‘stupid, worthless’ in Aweer. Dahalo, a Cushitic language of coastal Kenya, is famous for having clicks, and its name is unrelated to that of Dahalik, a Semitic language of the Dahlak islands off the coast of Eritrea.
Perhaps it is a Hebraization of the Iraqi-Jewish פתאל Fattal
Makes as much sense as anything. I was wondering about the name myself. I mean, I’m all for theophoric names, but “Morsel of God”?
There are a couple of -פת words in the Bible, which seem to be loans from Persian.
It doesn’t have to make any sense, as long as the two words are legit. There is a בגדדוב Bagdadov family (Bukhari, maybe) that Hebraized their name to בגד דוב Beged Dov ‘bear clothing’.
(Accordingly, my mom had a super warm fake-fur coat, that she bought very cheap and that lasted many years, which she named Mr. Bagdadov. Still, I just went and verified that Beged Dovs still do exist.)
The KJV approach to the first bit of Mt 26:48 is a bit potentially confusing because of the ambiguity of “give”: a clearer approach (although maybe clearer than the Greek, which could in principle be a problem …) is, e.g., “Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them.” This verse is about telling them what the sign is going to be – “giving” them the information they needed to recognize the sign subsequently. It’s the next verse when Judas actually gives the sign by kissing Jesus, and then the verse after that when his co-conspirators then seize the person whom Judas has kissed, showing that they understood the sign-as-given.
@Y, wow.
Bag(h)dad (the city) sounds a bit funny for a Russian ear. I think both the name and that it is the fairy-tale city of Harun al-Rashid. Bagdadov sounds very funny. But making Beged Dov out of it… And its meaning too.
@JWB:
The Mooré version does just the same as the KJV there.
Ned ning sẽn zãmbd a Zeezi wã rag n kõo nebã bãnd n yeele …
person certain who betray.IPF a-Jésus the TENSE give people.the sign LINKER say …
Pretty literal direct rendering of “Celui qui le livrait leur avait donné ce signe:” in fact. I suspect kõo X bãnde “give X a sign” is not very idiomatic, but I have much less feel for creaky translationese in Mooré than in Kusaal.
In fact, the Kusaal translators, for all my occasional nitpicking about their individual word choices* seem to have been really good at going for a truly idiomatic version, especially in the 2016 Old Testament, where there was no older version to constrain them. I’m still coming across idiosyncratic idioms there that I hadn’t encountered before. (Just today I encountered “cut X’s tendons” = “discourage X.” I imagine it would …)
* And, to be fair, most of the most objectionable, they were pretty much stuck with. because of the choices made by the pioneer missionaries in a less linguistically and ethnographically sophisticated age of missionary work. Unfortunately, things seem to be regressing on this front, judging by Roger Blench’s rant on the subject that I linked to not long sgo.
LH, which somehow made me wonder if Elon Musk is a lover of X-COM (several games, in the first of which the evil aliens are raiding Earth from their base on Mars).
He won’t be happy until all our base are belong to him.
“signs and wonders”
This made me think of the People stories by Zenna Henderson, in which the eponymous group came to Earth as refugees from their home planet around 1890. They have various psi powers which they refer to as “Signs and Persuasions”; Dr. Google doesn’t have any hits for this phrase outside the People context, but it has a distinctly biblical resonance to me. Anyone have an idea?
There was, back in the day, a character in Jerusalem named Goliat Plishti, lit. ‘Goliath Philistine’. The account I heard was that he Hebraized his last name from Filshtinsky to the nearest Biblical word that came to mind, and having done that, he figured he might as well add the Goliath. I just looked him up and found some comments from his grandchildren on FB. He was supposedly a big guy, too, and ran a gravel crushing business. A collection of prescripitivist essays we had when I was small harrumphed at that name as an example of how the language, and Jewish everything, are shamefully declining.
Or rather, Flishtinsky.
Reminds me that some US regime apparatchik was recently threatening Canada that in resisting US bullying they were “taking on Goliath.”
As various people gleefully pointed out, it is interesting (if unsurprising) that a religiose American of that type had never read the story far enough to find out how it ends.
Speaking of Jewish names, I would be happy to read a guide for names of what Jews speak. Say, rozele uses “haketia” (and WP informs me that it is pronounced with Arabic [ħ]). Who came up with this name? What are local names for it (in Moroccan cities)?
I mean each group of Jews deals with (a) what they speak (b) Hebrew (c) what the Jewish groups they deal with speak (d) what those locals who aren’t Jews speak.
I’m sure, each such group uses many names….
(c) In Morocco Spanish and Arabic and Berber, everywhere it is travellers.
(d) think of Dagestan:)
it is interesting (if unsurprising) that a religiose American of that type had never read the story far enough to find out how it ends.
I expect many people unfamiliar with bible stories are satisfied with the trailer: Goliath was a big motherfucker, David was a wimp. I mean, I can picture that already – no need for a sequel, I see where this is going. And if it goes differently, I don’t wanna know, probably some wishful woke thinking.
There are many tropes for dopes where the punch line has gone missing, the sting in the tail. One off the top of my head is “A little learning is a dangerous thing”. These help people over the pauses in conversation when nobody knows what to say, and are too embarassed to be, like, “um ….”
I wonder whether ideas and stories tend to erode to the minimum that can be remembered. You can’t take it with you, after all. Look at 1 Sam. 17. Goliath makes his appearance in 4-7, but it’s not until 49 that David finally gets around to doing something. So much stage business in between.
Who still knows how Love Story* ends ? I don’t, and I’m not even sure I watched it all the way through.
*Not the Taylor Swift song
So much stage business in between
Hey, it’s called building suspense.
Bear in mind that somebody, somewhere is reading the story for the first time. Probably a Republican. When they get to the blatantly DEI-pushing conclusion, I imagine that their head will explode.
Who still knows how Love Story* ends ?
SPOILER:
She dies. But not nearly soon enough.
When they get to the blatantly DEI-pushing conclusion, I imagine that their head will explode.
Everybody send a Republican a David and Goliath comic !
She dies. But not nearly soon enough.
Wow, I had forgotten I saw the movie, but somehow that brought it all back.
Also there is a problem. Say, “Uzbek” is a name of one of groups in Khiva khanate, Bukhara emirate and Kokand khanate, given to everyone.
Of course Uzbeks are taught in school that they speak “Uzbek”.
I mean, it is good, of course, to know the etymology of a name, but it is also good to know the context where the name was given and adopted.
Some more thoughts:
1. everyone knows Slavic nemets “a Germanic speaker, a European”.
“Mute”, the root, with a nominaling suffix. The derivation is simple, both the root and the suffix are widely used in Russian, but in Russian (and not only) the word means “a German” and we do not think about the literal meaning.
At all (that is, we read or hear “do you know that it means ‘a mute’?” and then we realise that it does). Despite simplicity of its derivation, lexicalisation has built a barrier for mechanical extraction of the “literal” meaning. The word for a mute is nemoj.
So I wonder if fixation of the sense “the only word for speech of a specific people” is enough to trigger this lexicalisation (and “amelioration”).
2. Again, “derogatory”: there are metaphorical names with the logic of “it’s all Greek to me”.
sūri “Syrian” in colloqial Tunisian means “foreign”. Sometimes “French”. (but I don’t know whether it is derogatory). In literary Arabic (and not only in Arabic) there are several words for “foreign” and specifically “European”. And when you deal with foreigners from a specific country you use them to refer to this group or to what they speak. Spanish is “Spanish” when you go to a Europeanised school, but not in 17 century (think of refugees from Spain in Africa).
P.S. “castellano” is a metaphor.
I’m reading the paper. I believe, if names weren’t treated as nouns par excellence, that would have improved the grammatical part.
I only know “Love Story” from the Mad Magazine treatment. I remember the heroine dies of “Old Movie Disease”, an unidentified ailment that causes the sufferer to somehow become more beautiful and radiant in every scene she appears in right up until she dies.
@drasvi: Here’s a table with a number of expressions similar to “It’s Greek to me” from around Eurasia, plus Afrikaans and Egyptian Arabic. It says Russians say, “Это для меня китайская грамота.” (For anyone here who doesn’t know Russian, the site translates it as “That’s Chinese writing to me.”)
@Stu: There are many tropes for dopes where the punch line has gone missing, the sting in the tail.
At my former place of employment, there were several times when I heard students say, “‘I see,’ said the blind man.” Sometimes I asked, and no one ever knew “as he picked up the hammer and saw.”
One off the top of my head is “A little learning is a dangerous thing”. These help people over the pauses in conversation when nobody knows what to say, and are too embarassed to be, like, “um ….”
If I remember correctly, every time I’ve heard that in conversation it was misquoted with “knowledge”.
As more than one of us have noted previously, not everyone knows what comes after, “If wishes were horses,” even if they know what the expression means.
@drasvi: the Jewish Language Project’s page on haketia disappointingly doesn’t give a clear sense of its endonyms, but does claim the name “probably comes from the Arabic root حكي (ḤKY) meaning ‘speech’ or ‘chitchat,’ as it is an oral variant that borrows many words from the local Maghrebian dialects.”
i hope as the JLP carries on its work it will have more answers to more of these kinds of questions – it’s a great resource as it is*, but i certainly want Even More!
.
* i just looked it its page on papiamentu, which, as well as talking about the specifically jewish variety, gives a nice overview of the current state of thinking about the sefardi role in the development of papiamentu overall (not so much in the initial portuguese-lexified phase, it seems, but likely quite significant in the reorientation towards spanish, and in its spread to non-afrodescendiente ABC-islanders).
https://archive.org/details/diccionario-judeo-espanol-de-los-sefardies-del-norte-de-marruecos-jaquetia-tradi/page/XXXIV/
About the history of the term in…hm. In books.
José Benoliel’s original treatment ‘Dialecto judeo-hispano-marroquí o hakitia’ (1926) here, pp. 209ff, with the rejection of the etymology from ʾIsḥāq. (Paul Bénichou’s defense of the etymology from ʾIsḥāq from 1982 here. I liked this remark—Bénichou was born in 1908: ‘…el nombre Ḥaquito no está tan mal elegido, me parece, si me refiero a mis recuerdos de infancia: había en Orán en aquellos tiempos varios Ḥaquitos muy notorios y, por así decir, proverbiales en la comunidad.’)
His “con la h en bastardilla” revealed to me the typographer’s term for ‘italics’; as Wikipedia says:
(Transthreadulation.)
@Jerry, thanks, funny, how in translations of both Yiddish and Syrian Arabic phrases they have Aramaic (Syriac).
They haven’t screwed up the Russian example (this happens in Internet lists). Though it is one of those sayings which people do not use, but love or find funny enough to tell about it.
Strangely, the linked dictionary has ẖakear and Ḥakito, but not ẖaketia or ḥaketia.
(h is not pronounced,
ẖ is [h], “English h” and “Arabic ه”
ḥ is [x] or [X], “the voiceless velar fricative sound of Hebrew ח (het) and Arabic ح”
:/
Confusing:-) ḥ is all pronunciations of ח: [x], [χ] and [ħ]. There is nothing velar about ح…)
Thank you for reading my paper!
I have not uploaded the supplementary material–it will be available in the Italian Journal of Linguistics but currently I am a bit occupied.
The discussions on ‘yes’-glottonyms are not entirely accurate–there should be more than three of them. I will correct it on the final/published version.
Some comment higher up made me realize that the French (former) Province of Languedoc (Lengadoc in, well, Lengadoc) is named for the endonym of its majority language, and not the other way around as is so often the case. (And part of it was actually a sovereign territory at one point, but under the name Conté de Toulouse). I don’t know of any other unambiguous examples like that. (The named-for-no ones in Australia seem to be exonyms, with the speakers themselves calling it something else. “Human speech,” most likely).
The named-for-no ones in Australia seem to be exonyms, with the speakers themselves calling it something else.
Source? Last time this came up, the cited sources indicated that these names at least weren’t invented by Europeans; there were clusters of neighboring languages already calling themselves “‘no’-having” or the like.
I probably misread what was quoted here, I have no deeper knowledge of the matter.
I did not expect the accurate hair color.
Velar & uvular are confused a lot. Also, whole generations of Americanists called them “palatal” & “velar”, respectively.
But ح is [ħ] (a sound which takes lots of practice from a European* who wants to pronounce it and is replaced wih [x~χ] in Hebrew of European speakers. Also [x~χ] for [ħ] is used in Arab jokes about Europeans)
[χ] is خ
The Arabic word which gave “haketia” (if it’s this name’s real etymology…) or at least the verb hakear has a [ħ] and WP says “haketia” is pronounceed with [ħ].
* and whether Moroccan Spanish Jews adopted it is an interesting question:)
As the author (Pun Ho Lui) is here, I think it is a good idea to expand on my indistinct grumbling (about names and nouns) above.
The author is not the target of the grumbly part of gramling: it is understood the article is about semantics of glottonyms and was not meant to be exhaustive in the notes about marking. It is also understood that as far as we’re concerned with etymology, we don’t care what part of speech we extract our stems from.
What I meant is, in brief, that I believe some the primary means of discussing languages in some languages is adverbs. I think DE said this about some language(s) of West Africa – I don’t remember which one.
Even if I am mistaken, I think it is also true for my native Russian.
Kusaal and its kindred; though the line between nouns and adverbs is in any case somewhat vague in those languages, and indeed in Volta-Congo generally (think Bantu, with its locative “genders.”)
Hausa regularly makes language names with the suffix -(an)ci, described by Jaggar as “deriving abstract nouns denoting behavioural characteristics and practices”:
birnanci “urbane behaviour” (birni “city”)
kanikanci “mechanics” (makanike “mechanic”)
Buzanci “Tamasheq” (Buzu “Tuareg”)
Turanci “English” (Bature “European”)
Also Eskimo languages, which use the equative case, as in Greenlandic
Kalaallisut oqaluppoq.
“She speaks Greenlandic.” (“Like a Greenlander.”)
Latin:
Latine loquor.
“I speak Latin(ly.)”
In fact, I think this is pretty common cross-linguistically. Reifying languages is probably a fairly recent development historically.
Reifying languages is probably a fairly recent development historically.
Was deifying languages ever a thing ?
“Worships language and forgives…”
Maybe the reification came from the deification. There are plenty of “sacred languages” about …