Back in 2013 I posted about the New Linguistic Survey of India and its founder, Ganesh Devy; now the New Yorker has run a feature article about him and his work by Samanth Subramanian (archived), and it’s a good read. (Trigger warning: the author is not a linguist, so some statements about language may be upsetting to those of excessively scientific sensibilities.) Some excerpts:
In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.
For more than forty years, the distance between these two words has preoccupied the literary scholar Ganesh Devy. He knows precisely when it all began. In 1979, as he was completing his Ph.D. in English literature at Shivaji University, in the Indian city of Kolhapur, he found in the library a commentary on India’s censuses. The 1961 census had identified sixteen hundred and fifty-two “mother tongues”—many of them, like Betuli or Khawathlang, with speakers numbering in the single digits. But the 1971 census listed only a hundred and eight; the hundred-and-ninth entry was “all others.” That made Devy wonder: What had happened to the other fifteen-hundred-odd languages, the various boli deemed too unimportant to name? “The ‘all others’ intrigued me, then it bothered me, and then I got obsessed with it,” Devy said. “Literature is a product of language, so at some point I thought, When I know that so many other languages have been masked, do I not have any responsibility toward them?” […]
Over the years, Devy has taught literature, won the Sahitya Akademi award—perhaps India’s highest literary honor—for a work of literary criticism, crusaded for the rights of India’s Indigenous communities, and founded a tribal academy in a forest two hours outside Vadodara. But the capstone of his career is the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (P.L.S.I.), which has enlisted more than three thousand volunteers to map India’s motley splurge of languages for the first time in a century. The exercise began in 2010, and the results have been published in state-specific volumes bearing olive-green dust jackets, with names like “The Languages of Tripura Part 1” and “The Languages of Kerala and Lakshadweep.” In April, Devy, the chief editor of the project, will submit the manuscripts for five additional volumes before beginning the last book of the series: his diagnosis of the health of India’s languages.
Sometimes a language withers because of customs we consider normal, and even desirable: intermarriage, migration, participation in the global economy. But Devy believes that any progress incapable of giving people the means to keep their language is no progress at all. […] In India, the politics of language have always been especially overt: in the constitution’s aversion to designating a national language; in the north’s leverage over the south; in the demarcation of states along linguistic lines. Invariably, Devy said, the people who speak many of the languages grouped under “all others” in the 1971 census also live on India’s economic margins. In 2010, the death of Boa Sr, a woman in her eighties who was the last known speaker of Bo, a language of the Andaman Islands, marked the extinction of a tribe that had been forcibly resettled around the archipelago and subjugated by the mainland. Bo might have been outlived by another Great Andamanese language, which in turn may feel menaced by Bengali, which itself feels the encroachment of Hindi—languages turning turtle all the way down. […]
Devy and his wife, Surekha, a retired chemistry professor, live in the town of Dharwad, in a small, neat house surrounded by guava and coconut trees. Their shelves are lined with books that have survived repeated cullings of their library. Devy now holds an academic post at a Mumbai university, and he lectures constantly around India; when he’s home, his living room hosts impromptu symposia. One afternoon, some friends dropped in for a chat: an archeologist, a lawyer, a literary scholar, an activist, a college principal. Each took or declined a cup of tea, then waited for the talk to ebb before speaking up, like a pedestrian dashing through a break in traffic. I counted four languages: Hindi, Kannada, English, and Marathi. Devy is in his element in these conversations—so immersed that, on occasion, he will talk over others saying their piece. “I still work four or five hours a day on the P.L.S.I.,” Devy told me. “The rest of the day, I philander in this way.”
Among the books on Devy’s shelves are the maroon volumes of the original Linguistic Survey of India, conducted by an Irishman named George Grierson between 1896 and 1928. Grierson held a string of roles in the British Raj, but he’d long been an ardent linguist, so coming to India must have felt like being a botanist who was dropped into the Amazon. With the help of district officials and schoolteachers, Grierson collected “specimens” of each language: a standard list of two hundred and forty-one words and test sentences, a passage of text, and a translation of the Biblical passage about the prodigal son. In all, Grierson identified a hundred and seventy-nine languages and five hundred and forty-four dialects—the distinction between language and dialect being entirely his own. The experience moved him. At journey’s end, he wrote breathlessly, “I have been granted a vision of a magnificent literature enshrining the thoughts of great men from generation to generation through three thousand years.”
The survey was an imperfect enterprise. Grierson gathered plenty of material in northern India, where people speak languages from the Indo-European family, and from the east’s Sino-Tibetan tongues. But he got almost nothing in the south, so Dravidian languages barely figure in the survey. For several languages, he never received a complete set of specimens. Nevertheless, Ayesha Kidwai, a linguist at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, admires Grierson’s work for its openness to linguistic variations (or “shades,” as he calls them), its grammatical scrutiny, and its care in laying a base for further scholarship—on how Indian languages ought to be grouped into families, or how linguistic traits have diffused and converged across these families. […] Since Grierson, though, there has been no similar linguistic survey in India—or indeed, Kidwai says, in comparably polyglot countries like Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia. Around 2005, the Indian government briefly proposed an update to Grierson, but then lost interest. At which point Devy thought, Why wait for the government to initiate the survey? Why should ordinary Indians not step in instead? […]
Devy’s project has its critics, both mild and severe. Since neither he nor many of his surveyors are professional linguists, the entries aren’t academically rigorous, as those in Grierson’s survey were. “I wouldn’t necessarily make this criticism,” Peter Austin, the former director of the endangered-languages program at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told me. “But some people might say, ‘This is just a bunch of waffle about this language, and that’s a bunch of waffle about that. We can’t compare the two.’ ” Kidwai finds the collections of lore and songs, and also the grammars, inconsistent, and sometimes entirely absent. But she also thinks that the very idea of the classic linguistics survey is defunct. In India and other developing countries, she said, there are few monolingual speakers: “No language lives alone in a person.” Equally, she added, every language exists on a spectrum; Hindi comes in several flavors, a variation the P.L.S.I. fails to capture.
Devy acknowledges these shortcomings. He describes the survey as “more ethnographic than scientific,” arguing that it reveals not so much the structure of language as the structure of Indian society. And it gives hope to communities worried about the future of their language. “If they want to lead a movement to preserve it, they have something to start with now,” he said. […]
Like many Indians, Devy grew up effortlessly multilingual. He spent his childhood in Bhor, a small town a few hours southeast of Mumbai, where his father serially set up and bankrupted businesses: a grocery store, a milk co-op, a timber depot. At home, the family spoke Gujarati, the language of their ancestors. On the streets and in school, Devy spoke Marathi, the language of the state in which Bhor lies. A mile away from his house was a small library, holding abridged Western classics in Marathi translation. Devy would check out a book—“Tarzan,” or Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare”—finish it by the time he reached home, and return for another. When his family moved to Sangli, a bigger town nearby, he picked up Hindi in movie theatres, and in his early teens he heard English frequently for the first time, words like “city bus” and “milk booth.” In school, he learned not only Sanskrit but also, from his classmates, the dialect spoken by a community of stone-crushers called Wadars. “These children were so full of colorful words of abuse—it was the greatest fun,” Devy told me. “It unfolded a vast cosmos before me of how the human body’s intimate spaces could be described.” […]
When Devy was thirteen, his father abandoned the family. They moved to a shack with a tin roof, and Devy occasionally worked after school, as a street vender or a furniture porter. Twice he started undergraduate studies but left after a year; the second time, he moved to Goa, working in a bauxite mine by day and then cycling to a library to read English books with a dictionary by his side. He felt that English met his curiosity about the world in a way that Marathi literature did not. “I thought English was a condition of modernity—of having a social condition beyond caste and religion,” he said. […]
For Devy, the third time around, university stuck: he got a B.A. in English literature, then went to Kolhapur for a Ph.D. He resolved to burn through the Western canon at the rate of three hundred pages daily, often spending entire nights in the library. One day, he spotted a young woman studying and went up to talk to her. “Before I even knew her name, I’d asked her to marry me,” Devy said. Surekha remembers the episode the same way, but she noted, with a laugh, “I’d studied in Marathi and wasn’t very conversant with English. When he started speaking in English, I probably didn’t understand what he said.” Kolhapur was just an hour north of where Surekha had grown up, but her version of Marathi was so different from Devy’s that when he first visited her family, he told me, “I made them laugh. They’d look at my lips when they moved!” The papaya has a feminine gender in Devy’s Marathi and a masculine gender in Surekha’s. “Even today, when we go to the market to buy fruit, we try to correct each other,” he said. […]
Like Devy, Austin believes that the modern erasure of languages is not an organic, irreversible process. He has witnessed resurrections—of Gamilraay, for example, an Australian Aboriginal language that he researched in the seventies. Gamilraay was in such a parlous state, he said, “that the most any individual would know was about two hundred words—very common words like ‘hand’ and ‘meat’ and ‘shit.’ ” Today, the language is taught in schools and universities, thanks to Austin’s success in documenting it, in addition to remarkable grassroots organizing. It’s the kind of comeback that Devy hopes the P.L.S.I. will facilitate. “For a long time, I thought this was literary and cultural work,” Devy said. After a conversation with a sociologist friend, he realized that he “was saying things with great political implications—that to talk culture and challenge culture is deep politics.” […]
The P.L.S.I. has identified seven hundred and eighty languages in India, in every conceivable state of health. (Devy thinks he may have missed a hundred or so.) Nandkumar More, a professor of Marathi, wrote about Chandgadhi, which he spoke while growing up, in a village near Maharashtra’s border with Goa. Chandgadhi is shaped by Konkani and Kannada, but dusted with English and Portuguese, vestiges of the community’s mercantile past. In the language, More found imprints of the local geography: there was a tool called the hendor, forged to break up the region’s sedimentary rocks, and another called the gorab, a bamboo-leaf umbrella that shelters women while they work in the fields during the monsoon. These words were old, and the implements had fallen out of use, but many people still hauled them out of their houses to tell More about them.
In the northeastern state of Sikkim, on the other hand, the social linguist Balaram Pandey had to help write about Majhi, a language he didn’t know, because he could find only one living speaker—an old man who once ferried boats for a living, and who died soon after Pandey interviewed him. “He told me, ‘Nobody understands my language, so I go down to the river and speak to the stones,’ ” Pandey said. Another of Sikkim’s sixteen languages, Bhujel, was once thought nearly extinct, but in the past decade scholars have developed a script, a dictionary, a digital font, and textbooks for it. In 2022, the Sikkim government added Bhujel to the list of the state’s official languages—a triumph that Pandey ascribes to its inclusion in the P.L.S.I.
Every resuscitated language is a victory, Devy says: “If it’s possible for people to make their livelihoods in their own languages, that’s all that matters. Everything else becomes academic.” Linguistic plurality, by itself, is no guarantor of peace or prosperity—and it may even devolve into a fetish for numbers, Sharma said. But he reads Devy’s enterprise as a democratic one—as a way to steel the spines of people who endeavor to resist. When many languages thrive, Sharma told me, there is the possibility that “the smallest language, the most innocuous dialect, might contain the potential of saying that all-important word: ‘No.’ ”
I love that ending; needless to say, there’s much more at the link.
Just a very side point. Russian (a literary language with an old history of standardization) allows a few words that can be in either masc. or fem. I am not sure whether an exhaustive list exists, but this has a nice collection. Of course, a good many words have a variable gender one of which is a “mistake”. Frinstance, where I am from (sonbitches think it’s a good target to demonstrate their medium-range missiles, cholera on them) абрикос (apricot), a fruit, not a tree, often appears in feminine gender (абрикоса).
The flip side is Modi’s ambition to privilege Hindi throughout India, a more moderate version of Xi’s ambition for Mandarin. That is not a popular idea everywhere, especially in the South.
BTW The chief minister of Tamil Nadu is named M. K. Stalin.
So does Spanish, most famously in mar ‘sea‘, which is masculine in pretty much all contexts but feminine to sailors and poets.
But in most cases speakers have extremely strongly opinions about The One Right Way. My Bolivian or Peruvian friends for whom calor ‘heat‘ is feminine usually get a lot of mockery elsewhere, and urban Spaniards love to dump on rural speakers who have masculine sartén ‘pan‘.
I was at a performance of Verdi’s Requiem yesterday, and just noticed that dies is feminine in the Dies irae: Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla. Maybe it’s for the rhyme. Apparently it is feminine sometimes in classical Latin, though. If I ever knew that, I’d forgotten.
The words “dies irae, dies illa” come from the Vulgate version of Zephaniah.
I heard feminine dies is either Very Much Post-Classical (like saec’lum) or classically has meanings more like “deadline” than literal “day”. Or both.
German has very few words of variable gender in the standard, but, as expected from a language without gender marking on the nouns themselves, quite a few more outside the standard, and the number increases by an order of magnitude if you include the phenomenon of gender reassignment surgery: the same word can have a final -e and be feminine, or either lack it and be masculine or sometimes neuter, or in some cases have a final -en and be masculine, with the whole spectrum of how standard and how widespread the versions are.
I suppose the Dies Irae pretty much is a deadline … deadline to end all deadlines, even.
Volta-Congo languages often use gender alternations very productively as a derivational strategy, exploiting the fact that although the match between gender and meaning is very variable, you can still often identify a prototypical meaning (or sometimes more than one*) for a particular gender (though it’s never anything to do with sex.)
* For example, the Kusaal sg/pl class-suffix pair gɔ/dɛ (which doesn’t function as an agreement gender any more, but still has derivational uses) is associated with (a) fruits (b) places and (c) nasty animals and contemptible people. Go figure …
@de
That one seems OK to me: “wild/untamed”.
Can’t see it myself. The “place” sense turns up in some underived nouns, but as a derivational thing it makes place names from ethnonyms, like Kʋsaʋg “Kusaasiland.” And the fruit names don’t have any limitation to wild fruits. I don’t know quite what’s going on with the pejorative-animates sense, but I suspect it’s just contrastive: nice animals and people are associated with other genders, so it’s kind of like saying “not that, so not nice.” A sort of deliberate perversion. The human-reference ones are not so much “wild”: they include e.g. “coward”, “fool” and “slave.”
Sometimes the fact that a single gender has more than one core meaning reflects a falling together of two originally separate genders. That’s the reason why the Kusaal fɔ/ii class pairing/gender comprises both animals and seeds: the “animal” sg suffix in proto-Oti-Volta was *wʊ and only the “seed” sg was *fʊ. In most of the Gurma languages, the “animal” sg has fallen together instead with “human” sg *wa, but the plural suffix remains different from the “human” pl *ba.
There’s been a good bit of falling together: Kusaal noun morphology continues seven genders (and they don’t function as agreement genders any more), but proto-Oti-Volta had something like fourteen.
There’s been a good bit of falling together
Coincidence. Or decadence.
Indeed. We must have no truck with historical determinism in linguistics. That way lies arrant Marrism. Or marrant arrism.
(J’en ai Marr.)
Subramaniam is just one of those random writer/journalist types with no obvious subject-matter expertise in anything in particular, yet has per wikipedia previously written long-form articles about fairly technical subject matters, ranging from land-reclamation in Singapore to potential attempts by cutting-edge nuclear experimenters to synthesize the hitherto unattested elements with atomic numbers 119 and 120. Do we think he and his editors took [more care / less care / the same degree of care] in trying not to screw up the accuracy of technical descriptions in those articles than he/they did in the technical descriptions of linguistic matters in this article?
I suspect that this reflects the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Scientific linguistics is so far outside the mainstream of what educated people (and editors of Nature) regard as general knowledge that even quite sophisticated writers actually have no idea at all how ignorant they are (whereas they know very well that they don’t understand physics and will spontaneously seek expert help on it.)
In extenuation, much of what has passed for scientific linguistics over past decades is so hopelessly introverted and impractical that intelligent people can hardly be blamed too much for supposing that they have nothing to learn from academic linguistics at all. And when Steven Pinker is the best the field can produce for a high-profile populariser …
Subramaniam is just one of those random writer/journalist types with no obvious subject-matter expertise in anything in particular
In my (happily very limited) experience of interacting with high-powered barristers, I have been impressed by their ability to get to the heart of technical issues that they were unfamiliar with by finding out just who to ask and what to ask them. Some have had a quite uncanny knack for this, presumably honed by a great deal of practice to the point that it looks effortless to an outsider. (They also have their own perspective, of course: I’ve sometimes been surprised when they pick up on what I thought was a peripheral issue, when it turns out to be crucial from a legal point of view. Educational …)
I imagine very good journalists develop a similar skill set. (Whether this particular journalist has, I do not know. But it can be done: and was done more often when more journalists worked in an environment that actually valued such expertise and gave them time to use it.)
I am not a high-powered barrister, if only because the fact that the U.S. legal profession does not use the b-word as a label means that any inquiry into my high-poweredness v. low-poweredness is irrelevant. But yeah over 30+ years of practice I have time and again needed to quickly be able to at least feign expertise in some highly-specialized subject matter and talk confidently as if I understood it w/o easily being caught out by people incentivized to catch me out. This of course in a context where I am not merely a generalist with a certain intellectual curiosity or open-mindedness but have specific financial incentives to be a quick study in whatever random specialized subject-matter is currently advantageous for me to be quick study in.
So that certainly could happen in journalism if the right sort of people are going into journalism and then being given the right financial incentives to be that sort of quick study. Those are both empirical questions as to which I’m not suggesting an answer.
German has very few words of variable gender in the standard, but, as expected from a language without gender marking on the nouns themselves, quite a few more outside the standard
Most famously, Joghurt, for which all three genders are possible (The Duden has female Joghurt as “Eastern Austrian”, but it’s what I grew up with, and that was at the other end of the German language continuum from Eastern Austria.
Subramaniam is just one of those random writer/journalist types with no obvious subject-matter expertise in anything in particular, yet has per wikipedia previously written long-form articles about fairly technical subject matters, ranging from land-reclamation in Singapore to potential attempts by cutting-edge nuclear experimenters to synthesize the hitherto unattested elements with atomic numbers 119 and 120.
This is what journalists do. Is this news to you? If they had specialist knowledge in some particular field, they would probably be specialists, not journalists. A reporter covering a person, city, country, or field of knowledge is inevitably going to disappoint and/or piss off the person, inhabitant, or specialist as the case may be. It is a good idea to accustom oneself to this inevitability and not react as if the pope had turned out to be a pagan.
Hat is responding only to the first half of that comment. It’s not simply a question of where journalists or other generalists start (i.e. ignorance about the details of the matter at hand), it’s a question of what they then do or don’t do to overcome their lack of prior expertise in a given technical subject matter and what factors make the amount of effort they do or don’t put in in that regard vary from situation to situation.
I learned that dies is feminine when it refers to a specific date or occasion, though it’s never been completely clear to me exactly what that means. A recent question on Latin Stack Exchange points out that the Vulgate translation of Luke open-mindedly uses both genders in an identical context within the span of seven verses.
I didn’t know feminine yoghurt at all; didn’t encounter it in Vienna.
Presumably it’s also possible (even in practice, definitely in theory) for barristers and journalists to be specialists to a greater or lesser degree, and to deal with things where they at least have some idea of where to start. Land reclamation and new elements might still both fall within the remit of a dedicated science correspondent, though.
Kusaal has two words for “day, 24-hour period”, daar and dabisir. The distinction doesn’t seem to align with the Latin m/f dies very well, though I suppose there’s a bit of conceptual similarity.
Daar seems to be used in time NPs when they are construed adverbially; for example, Zephaniah 1:15 (the “dies irae” bit) goes
Dabiskan la na anɛ sʋnpɛɛn dabisir,
day.that the IRREALIS be.FOCUS anger day
“That day will be a day of anger” (that’s the kind of day it’ll be)
sʋnsa’aŋ nɛ ɛndʋg na bɛɛ li daar.
sorrow with anguish IRREALIS exist its day
“There will be sorrow and anguish on that day.” (that’s when it’ll happen; bɛ “exist” is intransitive; li “its” refers back to dabiskan la “that day”)
yiddish: טאָג / tog is “day”, in roughly the same sunlight-hours-centered ambiguity as in english, and מעת-לעת / mesles is “24 hour period”, centered on the loshn-koydesh-medium ritual usage.
The Romance languages show results both of the male and female gender of dies; some have the outcome of (dies) domenicus for “Sunday” (e.g., Spanish domingo), some of (dies) domenica (French dimanche).
@rozele: Russian also distinguishes den’ with the “sunlight-hours centered ambiguity” and sutki “24-hours-period”.
Kusaal “day as opposed to night” is a different word altogether: nintaŋ. (That’s the one you use in greetings, too: it would be odd to ask someone how their dabisir/daar “twenty-four hours” was going.)
@de
Are you sure nintang does not begin with a “Y”?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=33-fVsL5Kdc
Different dialect (Gun rather than Gur.)
Polish, too: dzień, doba.
So does Swedish:dag ‘daytime’ vs dygn ’24-hour period, nycthemere’
And Danish dag, døgn which won’t surprise the Swedes. Except for the pronunciation. Nycthemere is a fun word, but not much use in conversation. Also it doesn’t seem to default to starting at midnight, unlike the Danish and Swedish words. (At need you can specify a døgn from a specific hour and 24 hours forward; public transport time table “dates” tend to go from 5am to 5am here, but when I was in Hamburg I noticed that they put bus departures after midnight on the next date). I regularly find myself wanting to express the same thing in English, but it gets wordier at best and I don’t know what the “most default” way of saying it is.
@Alon Lischinsky: Thanks for “nycthemeron”. “Nycthemere” seems to be the “usual” form, though “nycthemeron” just about caught up for some decades in the late 20th century at Google ngrams.
Polish, too: dzień, doba
Doba is clearly from Kusaal daba “days.”
Oti-Volta 24-hour-days start at dawn, as God intended. Seems to be the usual pattern in Bantu, as well, though apparently some do divide between days at sunset. (This comes up more often than you might think in Volta-Congo, because so many of the languages have specifically hodiernal and hesternal pasts.)
Hausa does that: daren yau “night of today” is “last night”, not “tonight.” I’ve always supposed that that’s due to Islam, but it could be a more widespread Chadic thing for all I know. I don’t even know if all the Semitic languages do that, come to think of it. I wonder what Akkadian did? Seems the kind of thing that might not be too stable over time.
Dividing at midnight is really weird, once you start thinking about it. I wonder how long that’s being going on for?
I thought Russell Schuh’s splendid grammar of Miya might shed some light on non-Muslim Chadic, but unfortunately he cites no expressions for “tonight” or ‘last night”, and the language doesn’t divide past tenses by days.
Zygmunt Frajzyngier’s grammar of Mupun contains absolutely zero information about the speakers, but other sources suggest that they are now mostly “Protestant”, which suggests to me that they are unlikely ever to have been Muslim. It’s a disappointing grammar in many ways, and it gives no expressions for either “tonight” or “last night”, but “tomorrow” seems to be n par, glossed as “PREP-night”, which is interesting. Kusaal for “tomorrow”, by way of contrast, is bɛog, while “morning” is bɛogʋn, which is the same word but with a following locative postposition. (So it’s like “tomorrow”, “demain” and “morgen”, all related to the corresponding words for “morning.”)
So maybe day-starts-at-sunset is a Chadic thing, regardless of Islam, based on a sample of one and some creative overinterpretation.
I’m hoping that Lameen will swoop in at this point and reveal the right answer …
Dividing at midnight makes sense to me. Since it happens when (decent) people are asleep, you’re always sure what day it is and you don’t have to worry about whether you’re a minute too early or too late.
However, if there are rituals at the start of a calendar day, it’s inconvenient. It seems to work one to three times a year in various Christian denominations, but having it at the start of every Jewish Sabbath might be too much.
Birgit Hellwig’s excellent Goemai grammar does not specifically answer this question, but some example sentences do suggest day-begins-at-sunrise.
However, although Goemai is quite close to Mupun genetically, it has evidently been subject to a lot of Volta-Congo areal influence (Hellwig is very good on this.) So that may not mean much.
Very few grammars actually do seem to say explicitly when the 24-hour day starts, even when it actually has consequences for the tense system, as often in Volta-Congo. You can generally deduce it from Bible translations in languages where tense works that way, though.
I think there may be an aspect of what Jerry Friedman suggests, though: decent farming folk don’t actually do anything at night anyway, so it’s all a bit academic.
It’s not WEIRD weird. It just puts the change where you don’t notice it, like putting the date line in the middle of the Pacific.
I read a library book about medieval science (not at all a contradiction) earlier in the year, and I think it talked about the start of the day, but I can’t remember now what it said. (It did teach me why the days are in the order they are, which was fun.)
The naval day still started at noon in the early 19th century (I’m not actually sure which noon), but that WAS weird. It presumably let you make sure you were starting your day at the right time, though.
That’s why the True Solar Day, a rather obsolete concept in physics that we were briefly taught in school, is from noon to noon… wait… what do you mean by “which noon”? Does “noon” have other meanings than “midday”?
“Noon” is of course, three o’clock in the afternoon. as you’d expect, given that the day begins at sunrise …
Hence the name. Etymology always reveals true meaning (as the word itself demonstrates. QED.)
The OED’s ship time explains, “when the sun crosses the meridian.”
I’ve at least read that Druid and Etruscan days began at noon. This is practical if you need to do something at the exact start of the day. I believe that the Etruscan words tiv ‘day’, thesan ‘dawn’, and uslane ‘noon’ < usil are also the names of gods.
Apparently attempts were made to determine when the Zapotec day began based on eclipse records. But these seem to have variously come up with dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight. (I’m no doubt being unfair to the subtlety of the results.)
The noon before the midnight, or the noon after the midnight. Would it be the 25th or the 26th that I’m nearly 12 hours into now?
The starting point of the day seems to have been variable well into the era of modern clockmaking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_six-hour_clock
East African clocks used to be (or still are) six hours ahead of (or behind) the European system, so that noon (in the modern sense) is at six o’clock. I don’t know if this is still the case, but Joan Maw’s Swahili teaching grammar Twende describes it as still the norm in Kenya as of 1985. I don’t remember this from my one visit in the 1990’s, but I spent it in airports and international hotels, so I wouldn’t have, anyway.
The beginning at midnight/midday thing seems to have been linked historically with the development of 12-hour mechanical clocks; apparently 24-hour clocks are older, and used to count from sunset.
In Faroese and Icelandic “nón” (cognate* to English “noon”) still means 3 in the afternoon. The usual explanation for why “noon” became mid-day in English is that medieval monks were habitually in a hurry and wanted to check off the box for having observed the ninth-hour service set in their daily office (“nonae” in the relevant version of Latin) without actually waiting until the ninth hour after sunrise to do so. Perhaps the monks in the Faroes and Iceland were not trying to accelerate their daily obligations in the same way, or perhaps monastic practice in this regard did not affect secular language in the same way.
*Okay if “cognate” isn’t technically the right word because there isn’t a proto-Germanic etymon, what’s the right word to describe what different modern European languages have done with lexemes that all evolved from the same Latin-origin loanword?
Re “which noon?”
Also Sprach WIkipedia:
‘Up to late 1805 the Royal Navy used three days: nautical, civil (or “natural”), and astronomical. For example, a nautical day of 10 July, would commence at noon on 9 July civil reckoning and end noon on 10 July civil reckoning, with pm coming before am. The astronomical day of 10 July, would commence at noon of 10 July civil reckoning and ended at noon on 11 July. The astronomical day was brought into use following the introduction of The Nautical Almanac in 1767, and the British Admiralty issued an order ending the use of the nautical day on 11 October 1805. The US did not follow suit until 1848, while many foreign vessels carried on using it until the 1880s.’
Nychthemeron, surely, since νυκθήμερον is completely unpronounceable.
I had no idea of Italian six-hour clocks…
What seems to have happened (though I can’t find a definitive statement) is that when 12-hour mechanical clocks became the norm, it was easiest to synchronise them by using midday (the most accurate time for sundial-reading) as the reference point, so that became zero/twelve. The midnight-zero then became a reasonable place to divide nychthemera. Unless you were in the navy, of course.
Evidently the midday-is-six-o’clock system remains alive and well in East Africa:
https://www.omniglot.com/language/time/swahili.htm
I should have thought to search on “Swahili time.” It’s evidently not just Swahili, though.
Various sites suggest that this is because the time of dawn is less variable in those latitudes; true enough, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s an ex post facto rationalisation. What was the traditional Arabic system? Seems to be just like the European now, but I imagine that it wasn’t necessarily so when Swahili was first getting Arabicised.
I’ve never heard of this in West Africa, though I suppose much of that is farther from the equator than where Swahili is spoken. All of it is comfortably in the northern hemisphere (like India.)
This got me wondering whether the French Revolutionary decimal time proponents considered when to start as well, and yes, they did, even if they stuck with «minuit à minuit» in the end.
Dividing at midnight makes sense to me. Since it happens when (decent) people are asleep, …
Aww, at 01:00 makes more sense. Even indecent people will be dozing off to the Shipping Forecast.
BTW six-hour clocks are mechanically simpler: no need for a minute hand spinning with its axle inside the hour hand, because the hour marks are sufficiently far apart you can estimate the quarters — which is quite as punctual as any sensible person needs.
Re the “when (decent) people are asleep” point, all sorts of bad things can happen (even sometimes to decent people) in the dead of night, and the necessarily-arbitrary convention of changing the date partway through the night can lead to confusion.
Example One: Chris Gueffroy (1968-1989) holds the melancholy distinction of being the very last person to have been shot to death by the Communists while trying to cross from East Berlin into West Berlin without official permission. And no one could have known at the time that he would be the last, of course.* But sources vary as to whether he was killed on Feb. 5 or Feb. 6, presumably because it was very close to midnight and even if the DDR border guards had logged the time of the fatal shot fairly precisely the lag time between the shot and the actual death from loss of blood etc. might have been enough to create ambiguity.
Example Two: In the M*A*S*H* episode originally aired (the internet tells me) on 12/15/80,** Christmas Day in Korea is interrupted by the arrival of a badly-wounded soldier whose condition is, the doctors determine, hopeless. But Honeycutt sets himself the task of delaying the inevitable until after midnight so the guy’s wife and kids back home in the States won’t forever after associate Christmas with the day of death. Despite best efforts, the fellow eventually dies and the clock on the wall seems to indicate it’s 11:25 p.m. until Pierce walks over and tampers with the hands of the clock until it instead seems to indicate 12:05 a.m. (on December 26) and everyone tells Honeycutt to get over any stupid qualms about making an arguably “false” entry on the death certificate.
*Presumably if he’d known he only needed to grit his teeth and put up with the status quo for another nine months he would not have run the risk.
**Also the episode with the B plot that humanizes Winchester by showing the noblesse oblige side of his snooty WASP persona to balance out the more typically-emphasized pompous side of that persona.
If Russian Wikipedia to be believed there is a special “meteorological day” with the starting/ending times at 4 points during any 24-hour period, such that the beginning of the local count is within 6 hours from the local midnight. I didn’t try to find English language reference. As a substitute, here’s DeepL translation of wiki-wisdom:
The World Meteorological Organization uses the term “meteorological day”. In order to coordinate the activities of national meteorological services, the starting time of meteorological days in UTC for different time zones has been established:
0 hours: 19-24 time zones;
6 hours: 13-18 time zones;
12 hours: 7-12 time zones;
18 hours: 1-6 time zones.
Thus, for example, in European countries meteorological day begins at 18:00 (UTC) – at this time the results of the day are summarized, average and extreme values of air temperature and other meteorological parameters are calculated. If the 1st time zone in the presented list is UTC+1, then we get that meteorological day in a particular place can start in the interval from 19:00 to 24:00 official local time. In Russia, several time zones are used, so each region has its own boundary of meteorological days (according to UTC time).
But Honeycutt sets himself the task of delaying the inevitable until after midnight so the guy’s wife and kids back home in the States won’t forever after associate Christmas with the day of death.
Wouldn’t have helped in Germany, where Christmas isn’t over till the 27th…
the clock on the wall seems to indicate it’s 11:25 p.m. until Pierce walks over and tampers with the hands of the clock until it instead seems to indicate 12:05 a.m.
Presumably, Victory Day was celebrated in USSR on 9 May because the official end of the war was fixed as 23:01 CET 8 May, which was already past midnight in Moscow. Presumably, a time around midnight 25/26 December in Korea was midday on Christmas day in the US regardless.
all sorts of bad things can happen (even sometimes to decent people) in the dead of night
Early in my career the firm I was working at brought in a „security consultant“ to give us all tips on how to stay safe while working and traveling, and how to stay in the same state of exhausting hyperawareness of his surroundings that he claimed to be in. His rule number one was that being out late at night is reckless, and anyone who would voluntarily be out and about after midnight without a good reason was an idiot and deserved what happened to them.
Needless to say, we did not heed his advice and none of us ever suffered adverse consequences that I am aware of.
Wouldn’t have helped in Germany, where Christmas isn’t over till the 27th…
Most Americans consider Christmas over and done by the evening of the 25th and will take the decorations down and even throw their Christmas trees away the next day, which I always found odd. For a „conservative Christian nation“ Americans are often pretty cavalier towards older Christian traditions.
This may actually be (Protestant) conservative, in fact.
Scotland, despite being distinctly piouser than heathen England, used to make very little of Christmas when I was a kid. A generation before that this was even more marked: when my mother-in-law suffered Catastrophic Washing-Machine Failure on Christmas Eve, the repairman quite happliy turned up to repair it next day as a matter of course.
My grandfather who died before I was born used to work on Christmas Day when my mum was a child, although possibly only the morning.
(I’m not sure about the other one, although he was variously a bus driver and a barman and other things which might work part of Christmas Day anyway.)
The public holiday on January 2nd is the remnant of that preference for New Year as a holiday, although I suppose DE lives where that’s just a working day.
Sadly, yes.
the necessarily-arbitrary convention of changing the date partway through the night can lead to confusion
Teresa of Avila died during the night of 4 to 15 October 1582, during the Gregorian changeover. Her feast day is the 15th.
Things like the V-E Day dating issue are an artifact of modern communications technology causing near-instantaneous dissemination* of certain sorts of very important news in a way that makes “when you heard it per your local dating” potentially more relevant than “the local date at the relevant location.” But whatever the U.S. protocol during the Korean War was for informing the back-home survivors of a dead soldier of the death, it was not instantaneous or probably even same-day even if the relevant day wasn’t a holiday in the relevant U.S. time zone.
The U.S. forces in Korea were part of a broad multi-national coalition assembled against the Communists (somewhat hilariously under the theoretical auspices of the United Nations), and men from such varied places of origin as Colombia, Ethiopia, and Luxembourg fought and died alongside the Americans. But for some obscure historical reason no one had invited the brand-new Bundesrepublik Deutschland to participate.
*Radio as mass-broadcast technology was probably the key here, because the telegraph could get news from point A to *someone* at point B very quickly but then the news still needed to be disseminated to the general populace of point B via older, slower techniques. Case in point: the Armistice of 11/11/1918 occurred at 5 a.m. New York time but it was four or five hours before it became widely known among the general population of NYC, who had in the meantime mostly gotten up and gone to work or school. My maternal grandfather (age 15) was at his high school in Upper Manhattan and when the news got there after they were already in class the students were offended that the school administration was so unpatriotic as to not immediately declare a celebratory holiday so they just got up and walked out.
Wikipedia Remembrance Day says “The common British, Canadian, South African, and ANZAC tradition includes a one or two-minute silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month (11:00 am, 11 November), as that marks the time (in the United Kingdom) when the armistice became effective.” but I believe it was 10am in UK, 11am in France and Germany.
But for some obscure historical reason no one had invited the brand-new Bundesrepublik Deutschland to participate
… the reason being that the BRD did not join the United Nations until 1952 as an observer and 1973 as a full member?
This may actually be (Protestant) conservative, in fact.
No kidding. It didn’t get any more Protestant conservative than the Puritans, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law called Penalty for Keeping Christmas:
That said, this is (as far as I can tell) untrue:
Most Americans consider Christmas over and done by the evening of the 25th and will take the decorations down and even throw their Christmas trees away the next day
I’ve never known anyone who did that; most Americans that I know keep their trees for at least a week, and often until Epiphany.
The twelve days of Christmas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallikantzaros
@mollymooly: Perhaps more immediately relevant is that at the time of the Korean War the BRD had no military forces whatsoever to potentially contribute, having for some obscure historical reason been temporarily blocked from exercising that incident of sovereignty by various external Great Powers. Although the conflict in Korea was apparently part of the impetus for the discussions that eventually led to the formation of the Bundeswehr after the Americans and British applied enough pressure to the French that the latter grudgingly went along with the idea.
And of course for many years even after 1973 Bundeswehr troops were not deployed to strife-torn parts of the world even in a “UN peacekeeping” context because for some reason the mere idea of German troops abroad still gave a lot of folks the willies.
Back in 1914 there was reportedly regional variation in whether the informal/unauthorized “Christmas Truce” (Weihnachtsfrieden) observed in parts of the Western Front extended through December 26 or even later.
Re the “when (decent) people are asleep” point, all sorts of bad things can happen (even sometimes to decent people) in the dead of night, and the necessarily-arbitrary convention of changing the date partway through the night can lead to confusion.
The context was the origin of the convention that the day starts at midnight. I didn’t mean that all decent people even then were asleep at midnight even then, much less now, any more than you meant that the reason West Germany didn’t send troops to the Korean War was obscure.
Any choice of an instant when the date changes will lead to the kind of confusion you’re talking about. An Israeli equivalent to that episode of M*A*S*H might have had a character declaring that the sun had or hadn’t set. In ancient times, the choice of midnight would have minimized such problems, I feel sure, and maybe it still does.
the B plot that humanizes Winchester by showing the noblesse oblige side of his snooty WASP persona to balance out the more typically-emphasized pompous side of that persona.
A good decision, imo, and maybe it would have been a good one if they’d done something similar for Frank Burns.
Does anyone agree that the golden age of M*A*S*H was the time when the two best actors, David Ogden Stiers as Winchester and Gary Burghoff as Radar, were both on the show? Apparently that was just seasons 6, 7, and 8.
There’s one conservative American Christian I know personally who is sola scriptura enough to be a bit grudging about celebrating Christmas (I don’t know whether he’d identify himself as Protestant), but none I know personally who don’t celebrate it.
The Church of Scotland banned Christmas celebrations in 1640, and the Puritans in Parliament banned them in 1645. Details at https://www.cromwellmuseum.org/cromwell/did-oliver-cromwell-ban-christmas
I agree that my “most Americans” who put up Christmas decorations leave them up for quite a while, in many cases well beyond Epiphany. However, we need not go by subjective impressions, as there’s scientific data on this important matter. In a survey of Americans in 2021, “65 percent of the respondents said that they take down their Christmas tree after New Year’s.”
Dividing at midnight makes sense to me. Since it happens when (decent) people are asleep, you’re always sure what day it is and you don’t have to worry about whether you’re a minute too early or too late.
It’s not WEIRD weird. It just puts the change where you don’t notice it, like putting the date line in the middle of the Pacific.
For basically this reason, TV program listings (in most places I’ve seen them, at least for channels that do still have some programmes going on late at night) tend to put the date change around 5am – that being the time when people who stay up late would realistically go asleep anyway, and the people who wake up early would realistically not be awake yet.
(I think we’ve discussed this on LH before but it would be pretty hard to find where.)
Even America’s remaining self-identified Calvinists are far departed from the rigor of the 17th century. But the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in celebrating Christmas and I expect there are other sects with the same perspective, or at least who reach the same conclusion via a perhaps different rationale. The Seventh-Day Adventists apparently believe that the celebration or non-celebration of Christmas is a matter of individual conscience or family custom but do not have any sort of corporate worship service for the occasion.
I have no objection to people celebrating the birthday of the Unconquered Sun if it cheers them up in midwinter, so long as no human sacrifices are involved.
#notAllCalvinists
J. W. Brewer
Which recalls the scene in Edmund Gosse’s “Father and Son”. His father being a member of the Plymouth Brethren who also abhorred Christmas, becoming aware that the servants had prepared a plum pudding for the day and given a piece to his son, seized the “idolatrous confection” and threw it in the fire.
There’s someone putting together of a book of memes, I guess they are, over time from newspaper archives (e.g., the evergreen kids nowadays) and they include the War on Christmas anchored by the Pilgrims.
Interesting thread. The promulgators of the notion that there really is a nasty cultural-Marxist “War on Christmas” seem to be overwhelmingly the Jerry Falwell epigoni and similar-but-even-worserer Trumpodule types. I suppose it’s appropriate that they conflate the annual great festival of Mammon with the celebration of the birth of Christ, in view of their syncretism regarding the two figures.
Their confusion is probably quite genuine, and should be respected as a manifestation of their archetypally American new religion.
@J.W. Brewer: Thanks, I think I knew that the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate Christmas, but forgot. (It’s still true that no Christian I know personally doesn’t celebrate Christmas, as far as I know, since I don’t know of any Jehovah’s Witnesses that I know. I know a Seventh Day Adventist, but we’ve never discussed Christmas.)
See
https://languagehat.com/hubris-hybris/#comment-4613423
re `An old-fashioned bird Christmas’
(if that’s not too reflexive/entangled)?
65 percent of the respondents said that they take down their Christmas tree after New Year’s.
Fine, retracted. I suppose I overreacted based on Facebook and people from boasting how efficient they were being. New Year’s actually makes sense. In any case I don’t think Epiphany plays much of a role. In my experience people often think the 12 days of Christmas are the days leading up to the 25th, if they think about it at all.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere (not on LH, I believe) that I couldn’t find a good answer in the usual polls because in my family the tradition (for a few years in the 2010s, at least) seemed to have been to take down the tree circa December 28th… before putting it back on December 31st, because it was, after all, a New Year tree in the first place.
In the last few years before the great military inconvenience of 2022, though, we ended up skipping taking it down and just leaving it up all year.
In Germany, it’s usual to keep the tree until Epiphany, and some people keep it longer. Our local waste management company does two rounds of collecting Christmas trees, one closely after Epiphany and another one about two weeks after.
Obligatory reminder that one person we know was born on Dec. 25th (…old calendar…) is Isaac Newton.
“Nature and nature’s law
lay hid in night.
God said: ‘Let Newton be!’
And all was light –”
– Alexander Pope (…!)
The twelve nights of Christmas are absolutely stuffed with unholy phenomena. Possibly there’s the Germanic pantheon in there.
I thought the Nazis surrendered only on the western front on 8 May, being under delusions that they were obviously going to be allowed, indeed encouraged, to keep fighting the evil commies, and reality only caught up with them the next day?
Aw. Kurisumasu is the quite secular Japanese celebration of love and rampant consumerism.
To David M.’s last point, it was 50 years ago when I was living as a boy in Tokyo when this quite astonishing bit of syncretism first got up and running: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/12/21/KFC-Colonel-Sanders-Japanese-Santa/
Now that’s just wrong.
…I did not know that part.
DM, Jodl surrendered in Reims on 7 May, but Soviets were not happy and Keitel surrendered in Berlin on 8 May, but in both instances the war’s end was specified as 8 May 23:01 CET.
Keitel and representatives of the navy and air force present in Berlin signed the surrender declaration to the Soviets on May 9th, at 0:16 AM local time, with the surrender coming into force per May 8th, 11:01 PM.
@DM: At that point no-one in the German army command had any illusions anymore that the Western allies would allow the German army to switch sides and fight the Russians on their side; the main reason Dönitz and Cie wanted a separate capitulation to the Western allies was in order to allow as many as possible troops to surrender to them in order to avoid them becoming PoWs of the Soviets.
I Sweden it is custom to keep the tree until January 13 (tjugondag Knut after Knut Lavard who suppressed the Obotrites. Lavard is of course the cognate of lord). It seems that the Swedish Lutheran Church wanted a longer Christmas period, so some time around 1700 they changed Knut’s name day from January 7 (when he actually died) to January 13. Most other Christian churches seem to have Epiphany (helligtrekonger) as the (ecclesiastical) last day of Christmas, though for mostly-secular Danes it’s only the 24th to the 26th that count. (Followed by end-of-year sales and the New Year).
Saint Canute’s Day in Spain.
I wonder what Akkadian did?
In ancient Mesopotamia of the time of cuneiform culture, the day was measured from sunset to sunset, for official purposes at least. As in Islam, the beginning of the month was determined by observation (even after the advance of mathematical and astronomical knowledge might have made this unnecessary), so we can see this conception of the 24-hour day in action: at the end of the month, if the priests went out at sunset and observed the first sliver of the crescent of the waxing moon, then that 24-hour day (the one beginning at that sunset) would be the first day of the new month, not the last day of the previous month. As I understand it, if dust or clouds prevented observation during that evening, and then on next evening, they observed that the waxing moon looked as big as it usually did on the second day, then retroactively the previous day (the one with the dusty or cloudy evening) was declared the first day of the month.
24-hour-days start at dawn, as God intended.
Genesis 1:5 on this question:
(Translation JPS 1985, which actually offers ‘a first day’ for yôm ʾeḥāḏ in the running text, ‘one day’ in a note.) The light (sunrise to sunset) is yôm, but then also the 24-hour period (sunset to sunset) is yôm…
It makes sense to interpret ʾeḥāḏ as an ordinal, ‘first’, and it fits with the enumeration of the rest of the days of the week in the chapter. However, I don’t know if there is any Semitic language where the ordinal ‘first’ is cognate with the cardinal ‘one’.
There is a possible exact parallel to yôm ʾeḥāḏ in an Ugaritic text, but it seems even harder to interpret.
Akkadian does then make me wonder how far the day-beginning point actually is stable over time linguistically, as it does support the idea that this may indeed be pan-Semitic. (I don’t suppose anyone knows about Ethiopic?)
If Chadic really was sunset-beginning before the advent of Islam, that makes you wonder if the thing could even be projected back to Afro-Asiatic.
And Oti-Volta seems to agree with most of Bantu in being sunrise-beginning. Volta-Congo can scarcely approach the breathtaking time depth of Afro-Asiatic (though Niger-Congo would, if it was real); still, it’s likely a fair bit deeper than Indo-European (I think there is some reason to think that Oti-Volta and Bantu are more closely related to one another than some of the other Volta-Congo groups are to either.)
Areal effects would screw up the picture a good bit, though, I imagine.
And there seems (as we’ve just been discovering) to have actually been rather a lot of change even in Western Europe alone over just a few centuries in this area.
It’s also not a straightforward thing to investigate from already-published materials. It’s really only the happy conjunction of day-based tense systems and accessible Bible translations that allows me to generalise about Oti-Volta, even. (And the Bible translations themselves may have been affected by translationese effects in an area like this.)
but then also the 24-hour period (sunset to sunset) is yôm
Everyone knows that for Hebrews it is sunset to sunset, but I always found Genesis 1 is not very definitive on this point. It can be read (and that would be a natural reading for me if I didn’t know how things turned out) that Elohim created light, made sure it was good, and separated light from darkness at which moment the first daylight began. He also called light and darkness “day” and “night” respectively and then after all these labors there was evening and then there was morning at which moment the first day (or day 1) ended.
I don’t suppose anyone knows about Ethiopic?
I imagine you mean pre-Christian, but modern Ethiopian popular time is distinctive.
it seems like in the biblical account, the thing that matters is the end of the day, and sunset becomes the beginning of the next day by default. the lights get turned on, and it’s clear that they work, and only after that is there a first mesles – what came before doesn’t count, since there hadn’t been a previous period of light whose ending could mark a day’s beginning.
modern Ethiopian popular time is distinctive
Same as East African, then. Although that is actually compatible with both sunrise-beginning and sunset-beginning as far as the 24-hour cycle is concerned.
Ah. According to Wolf Leslau, Amharic zare lelit (zare “today”) means “last night” with a verb in the perfect, but “tonight” with a verb in the imperfect. So you pays your money and you takes your choice …
On the other hand, təlantənna lelit (təlantənna “yesterday”) is just “last night” (not “the night before last.”)
Zare lelit is not the only past/future agnostic expression: there’s also yäzare sammənt, which is “a week ago” with the perfect, “a week from today” with the imperfect.
Kusaal does this sort of thing a bit: the adverb daar is “two days ago” or “two days hence”, and the preverbal tense markers include daa (mid tone) “before yesterday” beside daa (low tone) “day after tomorrow”, along with sa “yesterday” beside saa “tomorrow.” Aspect makes no difference to tense in Kusaal, though.
The standardized story of the seven days of creation are a relatively late contribution to the corpus that became the Torah. It post-dates the services in the Jerusalem temple, so it would presumably have been written to accord with practices already in existence, such as counting a seven-day week ending with a Sabbath that was celebrated starting at sundown (or first starshine).
Among a few other German food maps, this shows masculine Paprika in ± eastern Austria, feminine elsewhere.
What interesting maps!
Too neat to be true. One thing I can say is wrong is the restriction of Fleischkrapferl to South Tyrol – it’s the only form I know from Linz; -laberl is Viennese to me.
I’m also rather stunned by the claim that der Palatschinken is real, but admittedly I’m not familiar with the area in question…
Well, der is the natural article to be used by the clueless non-Austrian German who thinks that it’s a compound with Schinken “ham / bacon” as the last element.
Yes, and indeed I’ve heard Germans do that, but the area in question is western Upper Austria.
That’s almost Bavaria 🙂
I’ve never known anyone who did that; most Americans that I know keep their trees for at least a week, and often until Epiphany.
Saw a quote in the Grauniad today that suggests I am not completely crazy. The context is an American expat visiting her partner’s family in New York to celebrate Christmas, and being bemused how foreign she suddenly finds her old homeland:
I used to love the Pillsbury Doughboy, like I used to love everything about American food: bubblegum and spray-on cheese and breakfast cereals in lurid packaging. But now the dough tasted like chemicals. Where are the mince pies and the bread sauce, I thought. And why was everyone talking about getting rid of the Christmas tree the next day?
Maybe it’s a New York thing. Even if it’s just a minority of Americans who toss their trees right after Christmas, it’s a significant enough number to catch the attention of Europeans who wouldn’t dream of doing that.