Or so said Rory Tingle in the Daily Fail last year (archived link if you don’t want to give them your clicks, and quite right too):
Northerners will pronounce words the same as Southerners within just 45 years, experts predicted today. Scientists say northern English will become lost within that timeframe as south-eastern pronunciations take over the UK. As an example, words like ‘strut’ – which currently rhyme with ‘foot’ in northern English – are increasingly being said with a southern pronunciation.
Similarly, dialect words used outside the south-east are in danger of dying out, with the northern term ‘backend’ for autumn and ‘shiver’ – a Norfolk and Lincolnshire word for splinter – among those that are already no longer used. The research released today [28 July 2021] comes after experts from the Universities of Cambridge and Portsmouth built a physics model to determine the future of the English language in England.
The model showed the south eastern pronunciation of words has been slowly overtaking northern pronunciations for decades now. As a result, it will continue to do so and within 45 years south eastern English pronunciations will dominate the UK. South western pronunciations will die out too, experts claim, as the pirate ‘arrr’ sound in ‘farm’ will disappear from the region. However, certain north-south differences are set to remain as we will continue to disagree about how to say ‘bath’.
The groundbreaking research by the two British institutes has been published in The Journal of Physics: Complexity. To examine the pronunciation shift, researchers examined data from a 1950s study of dialect by The Survey of English dialects (SED) and compared it with a 2016 study of 50,000 English speakers carried out by the English dialect app (EDA).
Dr James Burridge, from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Mathematics and Physics, explained how the study was carried out. He said: ‘We found that comparing the two [studies] was a viable way of exploring language change in 20th Century English. […] Dr Burridge added: ‘In about 1900, almost everybody said ‘thawing’ pronounced ‘thaw-wing’, but the majority of people now pronounce the word ‘thawing’ with an intrusive ‘r’, which means it sounds like ‘thaw-ring’.
‘Our model predicts this change happened over about 25 years. We found the word has changed because it was tricky to pronounce and children are more likely to pick up the easier pronunciation. This then becomes the norm. However, it hasn’t changed everywhere yet because some major cities like Leeds and Manchester have rejected the change.’ […]
This follows the decline of words to describe snail, such as ‘dod-man’, ‘hodmedod’, ‘hoddy-dod’, ‘hoddy-doddy’, which faded from English language over the last century.
No, I don’t trust linguistics research published in The Journal of Physics: Complexity (never mind the Fail), but I enjoyed the examples; thanks, JC!
What is that “UK” of which you speak?
the northern term ‘backend’ for autumn
is alive and well in Yorkshire, thank you. Also ‘backendish’ for the weather turning colder/damper.
‘shiver’ – a Norfolk and Lincolnshire word for splinter
I heard on a Youtube video only last week, wrt some critical function in a canal boat (which was in the Northamptonshire Levels at the time).
These Physicists need to get out a bit more; and observe that the Complexity is richer.
This seems to be the physics-journal article in question: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2632-072X/abfa82
Thanks, I was too lazy to look it up. (Tamsin Blaxter is quite an imposing name.)
Were a lot of pirates from Norfolk or Lincolnshire? Because “shiver me timbers” is familiar pirate speech, and the verb makes more sense in this context if it means that the timbers “splinter” (from being hit by a cannonball or hitting a rock) rather than “shake” or “shudder”.
said to be? I suppose anyone in East Anglia is now so self-conscious about it, that an observer couldn’t tell if they were genuinely using it or spoofing. When I hired a sailing yacht (with actual sails) on the Narrfok Broads, there were some wonderful words and pronunciations to explain the rigging. I suppose the ‘Physicists’ are going to allege ‘Quant pole’ has gone out of use.
So ‘shiver’ for splinter would have been anywhere there were seafarers. Running into rocks is the traditional way to turn your timbers into shivers; no particular need for pirates.
My algorithm for predicting whether you should believe anything whatsoever in the pages of the Daily Mail has once again proved its accuracy.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/18/every-word/
(I appreciate the sanitised link, btw.)
If the physicists are to be believed, my nephews (well, my wife’s nephews, to be precise…) from Manchester will no longer offer me their morning greeting, “Yawright, Cock?”. That would signal a serious degradation of British regional English.
And what will happen to the sneering tone East Midlanders use to adorn the expression, “That London”? I’m having trouble imagining what it would sound like in Estuary English.
The Daily Mail claims that the new king was proclaimed from the Meerkat Cross in Edinburgh. The Grauniad merely claims that the proclamation was attended by a sturgeon.
(Not that either of these things would have done the proclamation any harm, although it was quite impressive as it was.)
The physicists, I must say, are hardly to be blamed if the data is dirty, as I suspect it is.
I wouldn’t call either of the authors a physicist, really. Tamsin* Blaxter is a linguist, and James Burridge’s work is essentially all in applications of statistical mechanics to problems outside of physics.
For historical reasons, statistical mechanics now often refers to a toolkit of likelihood-based methods that may be applied to problems that have nothing to do with mechanics (as a physicist would understand that topic). On the other hand, statistical mechanics is still largely treated as a sub-field of physics,** even when the methods are being applied to fields like biology, history, or game theory, and papers using those methods can still be published in physics journals, regardless of what the specific application is.
* Tamsin is one of those fairly ordinary British names that practically don’t exist in America.
** At MIT, the undergraduate courses on the topic were titled “Statistical Physics I–II,” while the graduate versions were “Statistical Mechanics I–II.”
The physicists, I must say, are hardly to be blamed if the data is dirty, as I suspect it is.
On the contrary, that suspicion belongs to the standard cognitive toolkit of anyone competent to deal with data.
Could someone please define (the hydronyms?) Narrfok Broads and Northamptonshire Levels?
I wouldn’t call either of the authors a physicist, really. Tamsin* Blaxter is a linguist, and James Burridge’s work is essentially all in applications of statistical mechanics to problems outside of physics.
Then Tamsin[*] should know better; for a non(alleged)-Physicist, it looks suspiciously like the statistics is applying entropy to language change — something that would occur only to a Physicist.
We found the word has changed because it was tricky to pronounce and children are more likely to pick up the easier pronunciation.
Yeah, one of those kids-these-days-are-too-lazy explanations. How did Hittite kids get their mouths round all those (Af)fricat(iv)es?
Then we appear to be lacking any narrative for how yoof culture is the engine of language innovation, constantly injecting slang garnered from other languages with – exactly – tricky pronunciations, as a sign of in-groupness, chur!
[*] Yes Tamsin is an unexceptional name.
How did Hittite kids get their mouths round all those (Af)fricat(iv)es?
Then we appear to be lacking any narrative for how yoof culture is the engine of language innovation, constantly injecting slang garnered from other languages with – exactly – tricky pronunciations
Hittite was invented by the inmates of the Old Assyrian Home For Difficult Yoof.
I have no previous familiarity with the name “Tamsin,” although wikipedia assures me that it has been borne by numerous actual human beings of sufficient notability to have wikipedia pages devoted to them. On a quick skim, the only American one seems to be (with a variant spelling) Tamsen Donner (1801-1847), wife of George Donner of Donner Party notoriety who like her husband did not survive the episode. The etymological allegation is that Tams*n is a shortened form of “Thomasina,” which is a name I have never encountered outside of a Beatrix Potter book.
I have known an American named Tasnim, a name I always think of when I see Tamsin.
Could someone please define (the hydronyms?) Narrfok Broads and Northamptonshire Levels?
Both those areas are essentially flat silted-up outwash from the higher ranges forming the spine of England. Subsequently affected by sea-level rise after Roman times. That’s why there’s windmills all over the place — to try to keep the rich arable soil drained enough to stand a cow on.
There’s two different hydrological phenomena going on with the Narrfok Broads: the Southern Broads are formed from oxbow lakes from the meandering of the River Bure. The Northern Broads (Hickling, Horsey Mere, Barton) are former peat diggings that got flooded as river levels rose. The very narrow bridge at Potter Heigham holds back a significant amount of outflow — as I can tell you from trying to ‘shoot’ it on a falling tide.
Lincolnshire/Northamptonshire/Cambridgeshire Levels are formed (starting C16th) from canalising the rivers, and digging drainage ditches — that doubled as canals for transporting farm produce. Essentially you couldn’t build roads: too swampy. For example, the Isle of Ely (a long way inland) is an Isle because it was surrounded by fens, with only a seasonably-available causeway to get on to it. As wp says, Following the Norman Conquest, the Isle became a refuge for Anglo-Saxon forces ….
The Levels drain eventually into The Wash. Cue (probably apocryphal) tale of King John losing the Jewels.
Those Levels are so swampy, you can’t even build footing for a towpath. Hence the quant poles. water reed was rarely used for thatching outside of East Anglia. says wp, but boy! a lot of reed grows in those Levels. Here’s a flavour.
I just read that the familiar terms rig or big rig, for what elsewhere in the US is called a semi or an 18-wheeler, are restricted to California, and only in the LA, Sacramento, and the Bay Areas. Very counter-intuitive, if you think of truckers spreading whatever term they use far and wide.
Tamsin shortened form of Thomasina. Also shortened to Tammi/Tammy — familiar enough across the pond.
And here I was assuming Tammy must be Tamara or something.
It never occurred to me that these homonyms are related! Let alone that they explain arrr, shiver me timbers.
@AntC. Many thanks for your detailed explanation.
@Y: to me, “big rig” is as familiar as the other two you mention, and i’ve never lived west of the hudson. but “tractor-trailer” is my core term for those trucks.
Yeah, big rig is pretty ordinary everywhere I’ve lived, and it didn’t seem any more common on the West Coast than anywhere else. However, I lived hundreds of miles north of the Bay Area. Maybe California is the only place where it is the most common term for for a tractor trailer though.
Semi is only the cab part of the truck* (which is why it’s called that), with the front ten wheels. I remember correcting at least one of my kids on this point (as well as teaching them the difference between a box truck and a trailer truck).
* Articulated lorry to the British, precisely because it is made up of two pieces.
Hm. The map I saw was in Josh Katz’s Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: a Visual Guide, which came out of the NYT dialect quiz, which in turn was based on the Harvard dialect survey. Maybe they asked for the primary term in usage?
Me, I would call it a big truck if I saw it on the road, but radio traffic reports here usually call it a big rig.
In case it wasn’t obvious I feel it ought to be pointed out that Narrfok is AntC’s personal dialect respelling of Norfolk.
Truck is edging lorry out of my vocabulary. Box trucks and pickup trucks I could never call lorries. Larger trucks I could but rarely do.
BTW, to be fair to the researchers, the eyewash about children are more likely to pick up the easier pronunciation. is the Daily Fail’s fabrication. The paper says only that learners might ‘accommodate’ their pronunciation to one more frequently heard from outside their immediate family/village/suburb.
Then I find it weird the paper doesn’t take into account the significant difference in language transmission that’s occurred over the period they survey — as compared with pre-C20th: mass media — cinema then radio then TV.
Also how can a statistician interpolate/extrapolate when their data comes from only two time-points? Has there been a constant rate of change/loss of dialects? What it they’d taken time-points around the Great Vowel Shift?
It’s still junk science, the Daily Fail’s contribution is to make it junkier. (They’re doylems — to use another Northern word that’s alive and well.)
The Scots word doichle or dochle, meaning about the same thing, seems to be a possible source for doilem. The similar / corresponding modern (and older: https://dil.ie/17343) Irish word doicheall means “grudging, inhospitable, niggardly”. There are a lot of final m type forms like mixum gatherum or thingummy, so this would not seem to be a problem.
They’re doylems
You are unfair to the Mêloyds. They show a malignant contempt for the very concept of objective truth, combined with an active hatred of common human decency. But they are not stupid.
(More to the point, this is unfair to honest doylems.)
>I have known an American named Tasnim, a name I always think of when I see Tamsin.
There’s also the English violinist Tasmin Little (an error for Tamsin, or a combination of it with Yasmin?).
There’s nothing new about the intrusive ‘r’ in ‘thawing’. I remember seeing a cartoon from pre-WW1 in which a servant girl refers to the ‘droring room’.
It may be that back then it was confined to the lower classes and has since spread.
The two Tamsins that immediately come to mind to me are Tamsyn Muir, the NZ writer, and Tamsin Greig, the English actress.
From my limited exposure to British popular culture I got the impression that Tamsin as a name has a certain aspirational flair, associated with people who want to look posh but aren’t. Is that impression correct or perhaps just based on my limited sample of fictional characters bearing that name in TV shows and similar products of pop culture?
The only Tamsin I know socially is certainly posh enough to be going on with, and needs no aspiring.
My wife has a cousin called Tamsin, but then she has a cousin called Nigel too. Her family is less plebeian than mine. Too few coal miners and sheep farmers and too many university professors.
It’s true enough that “Tamsin” doesn’t come across as a Waynetta name.
The name always reminds me of Tasmin [sic] Archer, the singer.
The closest I can think of an American coming to “Tamsin” is Thomasin Franken, daughter of the comedian and former senator.
I was thinking of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), but her Wikipedia article doesn’t say if her as-it-turns-out-middle name is short for anything.
@David Marjanović: It’s not short for anything. Wikipedia would give her full legal name if it were. The other Senator Tammy is also just Tammy Baldwin.
Overall, Tammy on its own seems more popular than Tamara (the usual American form of the Biblical name, mediated through East Slavic) these days, although both seem old fashioned, and neither apparently cracked the top 1000 baby girls’ names last year. The only famous Tammy I can think of who was actually a Tamara (or a Tamar) was Tammy Faye Bakker
“Tammy” was a quite popular freestanding name for American girls born in the ’60’s and ’70’s although it has fallen from favor among more recent birth cohorts. I daresay many who bear it (and many of their parents who gave it to them) don’t/didn’t think of it as a nickname for any other name in particular.
“Tammy” was a quite popular freestanding name for American girls born in the ’60’s and ’70’s
Because of this wretched song. (Like, I suspect, most people, I had no idea it was ever short for Tamara.)
I just noticed that Richard Crawley used shiver in his translation of Thucydides:
I don’t know Greek, so I cannot tell what this corresponded to in the original Attic.
Since I can’t edit my previous comment more than once for some reason, I’ll add another that I just remembered:
The Tammy in that song, created by Cid Ricketts Sumner in Tammy Out of Time and played by Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee in subsequent films, was actually named “Tambrey,” which is a name hardly used at all. (Perhaps that was supposed to be thematic in the original novel, in which she apparently sometimes talks like Chaucer.) Girls’ names like Tambrey, Tambre, and other spellings are documented, but it seems uncertain whether they are related to the tambourine group or actually to the Biblical Tamar after all.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D11
Thucydides “Peloponnesian War”, 4.11.
The word is katagnúnai for which the definition (of κατάγνυμι) in Liddell is:
I. to break in pieces, shatter, shiver, crack, Hom., attic
2. to break up, weaken, enervate, Eur., Plat.
etymology:
κατα- (kata-) + ἄγνυμι (ágnumi)
@Brett: the part that corresponds to “but must shiver their vessels and force a landing” is:
ἀλλὰ τάς τε σφετέρας ναῦς βιαζομένους τὴν ἀπόβασιν καταγνύναι ἐκέλευε (Book 4 chapter 11.4).
So the Greek term is κατάγνυμι “break into pieces, shatter”, which isn’t a specifically nautical term.
Edit: Ninja’d by PP, I see…
Shiver is certainly not the only idiosyncrasy of diction in Crawley’s translation. Another is that he has a tendency to starting the summing up of arguments with, “In fine,…,” which is not so common today (and “now somewhat formal,” as the OED puts it), but not risible.
Three times, he describes internecine conflicts (an important theme in Thucydides) as “intestine,” a usage I didn’t remember seeing elsewhere (although I must have, since it appears in Henry IV, part 1: “The intestine shocke And furious close of ciuill butcherie”). Moreover, “Internal with regard to a country or people; domestic, civil: usually said of war, feuds, or troubles, also of enemies,” is actually the oldest adjective sense of intestine, attested from 1535 and so essentially as old as the anatomical noun intestine. However, the OED entry for adjective intestine looks like it has never been meaningfully updated. There are only three post-1800 attestation, two concerned with a different subsense relating to fluid movement and one, ironically, dealing with the same region* as Crawley:
Crawley also uses “malversators,” which seems to be pretty uncommon in that form. A Google search for that word brings up several Web versions of Crawley’s translation of The History of the Peloponnesian War right on the first page. The noun malversation (“corrupt behaviour in a commission, office, employment, or position of trust; an instance of this”) shows up reasonably often, as people reach for synonyms for “official corruption,” but the the noun form malversator appears to be genuinely rare.
* However, the quote from Rawlinson’s universal history, actually concerns the state of Greece during the rise of Roman power:
The rest of the paragraph gets creepy:
Rawlinson’s phrase “intestine division” struck me as a possible typo/OCR mistake because it sounded so weird, but it turns out it’s merely an archaism. Gibbon used it, as e.g. “The degenerate Parthians, broken by intestine discord, fled before his [i.e., Trajan’s] arms.”
Another Tammy that I remember was Tammy Wynette, who was born Virginia Wynette Pugh, initially sang as Wynette Bird (her first husband, whom she married at 17, was Euple(!) Byrd), and became Tammy Wynette because her first agent told her “You look like a Tammy to me.”
Everything about that is great. Euple!
From the Itawamba County Times:
Euple Dozier visits her mother Miranda Dozier the night before her swearing in as the first female U.S. Attorney in Mississippi history. [1961]
I’ve found two women called Euple, only one man. There’s also Euplemia !?
I wonder, is it pronounced Oople or Yoople? The latter, I would guess.
Gotta be the latter.
her first husband
She doesn’t seem to have stood by her men. I’m shocked…
Jessica Chastain, who ironically says she hates singing, has recently played both
Tammy Faye Bakker and Tammy Wynette.
So it turns out that NYC nightlife personality Tammy Faye Starlite (well-known for impersonating the likes of Nico, Marianne Faithful, and Mick Jagger, as well as a semi-generic fictitious Nashville-chick-singer sort of character) is actually named Tamar* in real life. Maybe that influenced her choice of stage name above and beyond the obvious reference to Tammy Faye Bakker?
*She is of Ashkenazic ancestry/upbringing. I think Tamar would be a pretty unusual name for a gentile U.S. woman my age although Tammy-as-such definitely would not be.
That actually seems to make more sense as a good old figurative gut-punch. But of course that doesn’t work for any of the other examples.
+ 1
“Tamar” always makes me think of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamar_of_Georgia
I’m just that Caucasian. Bagration, yes!
I had forgotten that since the start of the pandemic Tammy Faye Starlite has rolled out a new fictitious persona (which I have personally not yet seen in a live-performance context) as mononymic “Tamar,” an Israeli Europop singer who has won the (apparently fictional?) Giorgio award for “best spoken word disco performance by a non-Belarusian female solo.” Ms. Starlite claims to have created the character before/without remembering that her own non-stage legal name was actually Tamar. More details here: https://www.njarts.net/tammy-faye-starlite-explores-europop-with-new-character-tamar/
Ms. Starlite claims to have created the character before/without remembering that her own non-stage legal name was actually Tamar.
Uh-huh.
I can actually believe that. I’ve met people who didn’t react to their full names because they were only used to their nicknames – which were transparent abbreviations of their full names, and unambiguous unlike in this case.
I can believe that, but not that you would actually forget your real name to the point that you could create an identical stage name without realizing it. Nope, that’s a bridge too far. Even if drugs are involved.
I’ve met people who didn’t react to their full names because they were only used to their nicknames
I am myself such a person …
Hat, you choose not to believe that. Or is it that you can’t help disbelieving it ?
I’m reminded of David M once saying he finds the expression “choose to believe” to be meaningless. I understood him to be saying that, for him, belief is not a choice. Scientists believe only par provision.
I think that was in a context of what is called “religious belief”. Perhaps he takes credo quia absurdum to be wishful thinking, or a diversionary gambit.
I call on David Eddyshaw for clarification. Are we merely talking Bedingungen der Möglichkeit here, or is there more matter?
I call on David Eddyshaw for clarification
For what? Has all my work here been in vain?
Perhaps a teeny tiny conspectus of belief? Some of us have memories like sieves. Even Pilgrim had to be reminded.
I have now moved on from my Blue Period view of the matter, to a position where I now hold that the issue is ineffable. Radically ineffable.
Well, that’s a relief. My sentiment entirely.
I go further: there’s far too little ineffability going down, of all kinds.
I couldn’t say.
Even Pilgrim had to be reminded.
So it goes …
I couldn’t say
Just so.
I have no insight into the actual truth of Ms. Starlite’s claim and it is of course not impossible that she was pulling the interviewer’s leg and/or conveying with tone of voice etc. that the claim should not be taken at face value.
Where there is will, there is wriggle room.
@J.W. Brewer: Historically, Tamar was a Biblical name that was not used much by Jews. The fact that both scriptural Tamar characters are involved in pretty sordid stories (the first Tamar was the one Onan would not impregnate, and the second was King David’s daughter who was raped by her own half-brother, the crown prince Amnon) probably has something to do with that. However, Israeli Jews have readopted a lot of old names from the Tanakh that had previously fallen out of use (Ehud, for example, basically did not exist as a given name until the twentieth century, but it is now quite popular), and Tamar was among them.
Previously, the name Tamar was (as David Eddyshaw points out) strongly associated with Georgian Christians. Tamar was also a local theonym before the Christianization of the country (initiated by Saint Nino), which probably contributed to its enduring popularity. That the reign of Queen Tamar coincided with the height of Georgia’s power as an independent state made her a major cultural figure and further contributed to the popularity of the name.
I also just discovered that the youngest of Toni Braxton’s sisters/backup singers is named Tamar. All five sisters have names starting with T, and their parents may have been stretching to find a fifth T-name that they really liked.
Yes, I was going to say that from a Biblical point of view, “Tamar” is a bit of a nomen infaustum.
Though I gather that “Anat” is quite popular as a girl’s name in Israel, and she was even infausterer, what with being Baal’s S.O. (sister/lover/whatever.)
Ehud seems to have been memorable mainly for killing people in the lavatory, but I imagine that might be seen as a good thing. The moral is, never trust anybody who is left-handed.
That lavatory event stimulates strange fantasies. I found a claim, supposedly backed up by bible verses, that at the instant Eglon was stabbed he lost it, i.e. his stool:
# Der Text erwähnt im unmittelbaren Anschluss daran ein merkwürdiges Detail, das wohl darauf schließen lässt, dass Eglon im Moment des blitzartig eintretenden Todes seinen Stuhlgang verliert (Ri 3,21-22). #
The verses linked there say nothing of the kind. That “wohl” is doing some heavy lifting. Fact is, stool always leaves when death arrives. It’s protocol.
I wonder if there is any real pattern to which names got resurrected in the twentieth century; maybe it has to do with which ones had the most interesting stories. While some names from Judges, like Ehud and Yael (the names of two of Moshe Dayan’s children) have become fairly popular, others, like Shamgar (killed six hundred Philistines with his ox goad*) or Othniel (who was apparently considered important enough to have his story repeated twice, a relative rarity in Judges) are still basically nonexistent.
* The killing of large numbers of Philistines with an improvised weapon, of course, shows up again later in Judges, with the first of the three(ish) Samson characters, who used the jawbone of an ass (of unknown haplotype, unfortunately).
תָּמָר tāmār is the date palm or its fruit. That nice association is probably why the name is popular. It is cognate with Arabic تَمْر tamr, whence tamarind ‘India date’.
The story of Amnon and Tamar, like other stories of sexual violence in the Bible, is grim and unvarnished. And yet the cultivated pansy is commonly called amnon vetamar ‘Amnon and Tamar’. That name, Hebrew Wp tells me, was given to the flower by the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, after the Russian Иван-да-марья, based on a tale of an ill-fated love where the couple don’t know they are siblings. The names Amnon and Tamar were also used for the romantic couple (loving and not siblings) at the center of Mapu’s אַהֲבַת צִיּוֹן Ahavat Tsiyon ‘The Love of Zion’, the first Hebrew novel. To which I say, people are weird.
While we are on cheerful subjects, there’s also Tamora in Titus Andronicus. I wonder where that name came from.
@Y: Apparently, Tomrys, a queen of the Massagetean Scythians, who according to Herodotus killed Cyrus the Great,* has been suggested as an origin for the name Tamora.
* Book I, 214:
There are several other contradictory accounts of Cyrus’s death, however. It is not even certain that he died in warfare.
Is Herodotus (indirectly maybe) a likely historical source for Shakespeare?
No, I take it as irrelevant to that topic. “Nobody would make this up, so it’s most likely true” is a perfectly fine argument. It’s a form of “once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”…
“Nobody would make this up, so it’s most likely true” is a perfectly fine argument
Though looking at what people have made up throughout history, not an argument I would want to rely on.
It’s so crazy it might just work!
“Nobody would make this up, so it’s most likely true” is a perfectly fine argument. It’s a form of “once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”…
I second Hans’s response to the first, in even stronger terms, and the Holmes quote, while striking and memorable, is manifestly absurd.
Oh, me, too – and not even just “made up” in the “lied for fun & profit” sense, but even in the “seemed perfectly logical at the time” sense.
Why? Because “impossible” in practice usually means “improbable” rather than “physically impossible”? That just reduces it to Ockham’s Razor.
Given enough billions of people on the planet, statements/actions/events/interactions that would seem ex ante highly improbable when considered in a vacuum do in fact occur on a daily basis.
statements/actions/events/interactions that would seem ex ante highly improbable when considered in a vacuum do in fact occur on a daily basis.
I doubt that any of those could be considered in a vacuum. He who would consider them thus would be dead.
Why? Because “impossible” in practice usually means “improbable” rather than “physically impossible”?
Because “once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” presupposes there are, say, three alternatives: A, B, or C might have happened, and since A and B are impossible, C must be the truth. This makes sense and is appealing to, say, a ten-year-old, but in fact there are an infinite number of alternatives and few if any of them are “impossible” (anything truly impossible wouldn’t have been taken into account in the first place, of course). It’s just a profound-sounding bit of nonsense, like most simple rules for living.
We strict Brouwerites indignantly repudiate your tertium non datur.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/
Rampant Platonism, I calls it!
Conan-Doyle was clearly not a stupid man, but he was pretty inept at critical thinking in real life. So it is rather peculiar that he should be best known for creating Holmes, one of the most famously observant and logical characters in literature. Because of his creator’s shortcomings, when Holmes explains his reasoning, it often ends up being incoherent, for the reasons languagehat mentions, among others.
@Y:* Shakespeare appears to have comparatively little knowledge of Greek matters. Most of his plays with Greek settings have plots that can be traced to well-known English-language antecedents: “The Two Noble Kinsmen” and “Troilus and Cressida” are from Chaucer, and their plots are medieval, not ancient Greek; “Timon of Athens” comes from The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter, from 1566; and the story of “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is derived from the Confessio Amantis (1393) by John Gower, and possibly its sixteenth-century prose adaptation The Pattern of Painful Adventures by Lawrence Twine. Moreover, three of those plays (all except “Troilus and Cressida”) were probably collaborations, and Shakespeare’s coauthors may have been more interested in the Greek settings that he was. In particular, George Wilkins, who probably cowrote “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” also later produced a prose version of the story, The Painful Adventures of Pericles. The last Greek play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” is nominally set in and around Athens, but it there is nothing whatsoever Greek about the story, and Shakespeare commits the solecism of making Theseus Duke of Athens, an obviously medieval title.
* Responding to above comments in reverse order, I am.
…yeah, that. I keep misundreshtmating my post-COVID fatigue.
infinite number of alternatives — what would I substitute if I were ridden by the bugbear of alternatives being always two in number? (Each the other’s alter, as it were). other possibilities has some promise, but I’m not absolutely sure it’s sufficient.
Semi is only the cab part of the truck*
I thought the front part was the “prime mover”.
Otherwise, “semi-trailer” is a term for the whole truck, is it not?
But I’m not really up on these things.
PS: From Wikipedia:
A tractor unit (also known as a truck unit, prime mover, ten-wheeler, semi-tractor, semi-truck, tractor cab, truck cab, tractor rig, truck rig or big rig or simply a tractor, truck or rig) is a characteristically heavy-duty towing engine that provides motive power for hauling a towed or trailered load.
And this:
A semi-trailer is a trailer without a front axle. In the United States, the term is also used to refer to the combination of a truck and a semi-trailer; a tractor-trailer…… A road tractor coupled to a semi-trailer is often called a semi-trailer truck or “semi” in North America and Australia, and an articulated lorry or “artic” in the UK.
Sorry I looked.
two alternatives: It just struck me that others, and even more transparently Danish andre, are actually plurals of the synonymous PIE root. (Da den anden = ‘the second one’). But no peevers are seen complaining about those.
(So why are there two PIE roots, and is it just a coincidence that *h₂en- and *h₂el- each give rise to words for ‘other/second’ in separate branches? [The alternative would be an {incomplete} Pre-PIE sound change]. *h₂el- also lies under E all, it seems; a semantic shift from ‘the others’ to ‘all of them’ would not be that strange).
@lars, maybe you could also have dialect doublets? Here are some pairs:
glew = to ball up, clump
gnewH = to press
gwelH = to throw, reach, pierce
gwhen = to strike, slay, kill
h2ley = smear
h3neyd = insult
welh1 = to choose, want
wenh1 = to love
lek = to jump, scuttle along
nek = to perish, disappear
lew = to wash
new = new
@PP, yes indeed. I suppose that the diachronic stage that we call PIE was already in the process of dialect breakup, so that new forms with new senses could spread back to all of the dialects/branches. Has anybody ever ventured a guess about how many speakers “PIE” had?
Probably, but I can’t remember seeing one. I just browsed through both James Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans and David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language without luck.
One more oddity of terminology in Richard Crawley’s translation (which may or may not reflect something in Thucydides’ original) is the words he uses for javelineers. In fact, while he uses “javelin[s]” seven times, he never used “javelineer[s].” Instead, he refers to them as “darters” (which sounds a bit affected) twenty-three times and “targeteer[s]” (decidedly peculiar, to my ear) sixteen times. His choice of terms is not random either. There are stretches in the book in which Crawley uses one word exclusively, or almost exclusively.
A javelineer was normally also a targeteer; that is, he was equipped with one or more javelins and a small shield, or target. A third term was peltast, from the Greek for target in this sense.
A darter, however, was armed with darts, which are essentially fletched arrows meant to be thrown rather than shot from a bow. As such, they are much longer and heavier than standard arrows, though shorter than javelins (which in turn were shorter than spears, which were thrust rather than thrown). So this may have been a different group altogether.
My impression was that Crawley did not distinguish a dart from a javelin, and looking just now, the first appearance of “javelins” in combat bears that out:
Nor is there any mention of “targeteers” and “darters” side by side and distinct, although there are, for example, “darters,… slingers, and archers.” On the other hand, the “targeteers”* are once described as “swordsmen”:
* Modern English has preserved the Scottish form targe for a small circular shield, but not target in that sense.
It’s embarrassing, but it never struck me that there’s an obvious need to differentiate between javelins for throwing and spears for thrusting. For me they’re all spyd. Neither did it strike me that there was a military use for darts, and that fact has a similar linguistic correlate To me arrows for shooting and darts for throwing are all piler.
Well, you’re never gonna make centurion until you learn the difference, boy!
It’s the same everywhere. To get out of here you have to show the skills you need to stay here.
Or you can be such a liability that they promote you to get rid of you. I’m told that this is not unheard of in the military …
It’s embarrassing, but it never struck me that there’s an obvious need to differentiate between javelins for throwing and spears for thrusting. For me they’re all spyd.
…TIL that javelins are supposed to be thrown. I think I just assumed that “javelin” was a fancy term for a spear.
For the most part I only know of javelin (or spear) throwing as the Olympic discipline, and that in Russian gets the “spear” word: метание копья.
I think there’s a separate Russian word for the shorter throwing weapons but I can’t seem to recall what it is. (The thing that a crossbow shoots is a болт, which is a borrowing from English, I think.)
…looking it up, the word is дротик, which is comfortingly familiar, so at least I didn’t make it up that there was a word.
In the video game Dragon Wars, I was surprised that the “Flame Spear” weapon was actually a single-use thrown item. A few battles after acquiring it and equipping a character with it, I noticed that he had switched to fighting bare-handed. So I reloaded my game and went back to see what had happened. In the first battle we faced, the weapon was hurled at an enemy and lost. You might think that a (unique, as almost all magical items in that game are) single-use weapon would be particularly powerful, but it wasn’t even that. I wonder if there was a miscommunication between the main programmer and one of her* assistants—that it may have been intended as a melee spear but was marked as a missile weapon by someone working on the item database.
* It feels pragmatically weird to me to use this pronoun here, since at the time the game was being produced, the lead programmer was male.
In Danish, a javelin can be called a kastespyd, but the track and field discipline is just spydkast. (Obviously, if you throw a spear it’s a javelin). Spyd covers both javelins and melee spears, though I don’t know if spears were used much in hand-to-hand combat here. (Continental massed footmen with three ranks of spearmen against cavalry is another matter).
* It feels pragmatically weird to me to use this pronoun here, since at the time the game was being produced, the lead programmer was male.
Well, you’re free not to do so.
These are heights of proleptic conciliation previously unknown to me. A superselfconscious elaboration of “Don’t blame me, I’m doing the best I can”. Does it actually work, or – what I would expect – do you get heat from some quarter or other no matter what you say ? As this comment demonstrates ?
I myself try to avoid putting accusations into someone’s mouth and then removing them, before they have a chance to open it.
Rereading “Carmilla” by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (the best vampire story prior to the publication of Dracula), I happened upon another instance of shivers:
@Brett:
Perhaps a more productive approach might be to think that at the time the game was being produced, the lead programmer was using male pronouns. This makes dealing with the change analogous to any other cases of people changing their names (or other terms of address/reference, like honorifics).
Would you feel weird saying, for example, that Ali won his first world heavyweight championship against Liston in 1964?
It seems to be standard in biographies to use people’s names at the time of the events discussed. The Wikipedia articles on Muhammad Ali and Hillary Clinton use “Clay” and “Rodham” when talking about their earlier years. However, Chelsea Manning’s WP bio uses “she” throughout.
FWIW. Style guides aside, gender is intrinsic in a way a surname is not, as Alon indicates.
@Brett, Alon: I happened to talk to one of my transgender friends the other week about something a common acquaintance of ours did before she transitioned. I started out by using male pronouns because that person was male at the time (and my memories are of a male person) but then I had an attack of common sense and asked what the convention was. Which turns out to be to use people’s current preferred pronouns (and name[s]) and just cope with any unexpected facts (like “Jack got pregnant” or “Lisa’s beard turned grey”).
That’s my understanding, and it makes sense — it just takes getting used to.
Precisely. I was using the individual’s current pronouns, but pointing out that it felt a bit peculiar. Part of reason it felt weird was that individual in question had a certain brand associated with her birth name: “Burger Bill.” (The siblings who formerly billed themselves as the “Wachowski Brothers” are similarly situated but better known example of this phenomenon.)
@Y:
that may be your view, and it’s a respectable one.
But what I was suggesting is that, in dealing with people who do not share that view, it can be more productive to treat gender markers just like names, surnames or honorifics. A pragmatic choice, rather than a point of principle.
Wikipedia has an extensive style guide, which includes a section on gender-related name changes. The short version is: respect the person’s preferences, whatever those may be.
@Brett:
I’ve never been that much of a gamer, but didn’t Becky go by simply ”Burger” back in the day?
@Alon Lischinsky: My understanding is that Heineman would answer to the name “Burger,” but I didn’t know that until long after I played her games. She was variously credited as “‘Burger’ Bill Heineman” or “‘Burger Bill’ Heineman” on different products, and the latter is the version I remembered. (Does she go by “Becky” now? I don’t know.)
@Brett: indeed she does.
I suppose a good analogy might be Wendy Carlos, who released an album that actually included her deadname in the title, though these days it’s been reissued as A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score.
From the linked Becky page:
In 1983, I’ve helped found Interplay Productions and was with the company when it was just four people on a porch all the way to a 600+ employee publicly traded company.
To me, that’s ungrammatical, and I assume she originally started the sentence “I’ve helped…,” decided to add the year, and didn’t notice she then needed to change the verb to “I helped.”
The OED has excellent entries for deadname, including both the noun and verb senses—e. g. for the noun:
The earliest cites are from 2010. I suspect that they could be found a bit earlier; the earliest current one is from a Twitter hashtag, suggesting that it was already a familiar term in relevant circles. However, I assume that it is indeed a relatively recent neologism, which made me notice a clear deficiency of the OED‘s system. The (I assume, at least partially automated based on some corpus) word frequency calculation assigns both the noun and verb deadname to their frequency band 1, which the site describes thus:
And that’s clearly not the situation for deadname.
abaptiston, abaxile, grithbreach, gurhofite, zarnich, zeagonite
Warning – reading these words out loud will summon an eldritch abomination from the void between dimensions.
I just looked up grithbreach in the OED (it means “Breach of the peace” or “The penalty for breach of the peace”), and it seems to make a habit of dragging other eldritch words into its immediate vicinity; the first four cites under sense 2:
A good source for words like this is the following ancient poem (published by Sellar and Yateman):
Whan Cnut Cyng the Witan wold enfeoff
Of infangthief and outfangthief
Wonderlich were they enwraged
And wordwar waged
Sware Cnut great scot and lot
Swinge wold ich this illbegotten lot.
Wroth was Cnut and wrothword spake.
Well wold he win at wopantake.
Fain wold he brake frith and cracke heads
And than they shold worshippe his redes.
Swinged Cnut Cyng with swung sword
Howled Witane helle but hearkened his word
Murie sang Quit Cyng
Outfangthief is Damgudthyng.
I found that poem interesting – seemingly falling between Chaucer (fairly easy to read if you’re an intelligent English speaker) and Beowulf (nearly unapproachable without some grounding in Germanic, though most of it sounds familiar.) So googling, I find this:
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/beoleopard-or-witans-whail
… with a first comment:
>Oh, for heaven’s sake, this poem isn’t by “Anonymous”; it is a parody of Anglo-Saxon poetry, written in the 20th century by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman for their satirical book on English history
I guess if I’d really been paying attention, I’d have known. I hadn’t made it to Damgudthyng, which gives the game away.
“Sware Cnut great scot” gives the game away. 🙂
I was still in suspended disbelief at that point, wondering something else was meant than the modern words.
Using the currently preferred pronouns of a person who has “transitioned” in reference to pre-transition events (when they were generally referred to with different pronouns) is one thing, but using the post-transition gender-marked first name may not quite be the same thing, at least not in all cases. Even if one accepts that in some ontological sense the person was always female although not publicly recognized as such, it does not follow that unbeknownst to the wider world they bore a particular marked-as-female given name.
Now in the case of W. Carlos, “Wendy” was a name that was in actual use for newborn girls in 1939, although not nearly as common on the baby-girl side as “Walter” was on the baby-boy side that year.* But by contrast when it comes to The Celebrity Formerly Known As Bruce Jenner, there were essentially no U.S.-born baby girls in 1949 named “Caitlyn” (or “Caitlin” or any other such spelling variation). An author who gave that name to a fictional character (socially recognized as female from birth, at least) supposedly born that year would be guilty of anachronism. There were no recognized-as-female athletes on the 1976 U.S. Olympic team with Jenner with any variant of that name, and some quick internet research suggests that Kaitlin Sandeno, a swimmer who won a bronze medal at age 17 at the 2000 Olympics, may have been the first female U.S. Olympian to bear any variant of that name, reflecting its popularity among a generational cohort significantly younger than Jenner.
This makes me idly curious as to whether there’s ever been any sort of statistical study of newly-publicly-assumed given names among people who have publicly transitioned M-to-F as adults to see what percentage of the newly-announced names (which may in some instances have been used in some sort of internal monologue sort of way for some considerable time before public transition?)** are or are not plausible as names-given-at-birth on a generational-cohort basis.
*The conservation-of-first-initial approach of W. Carlos is I think a reasonably common pattern but I have no idea how common in percentage terms. W-initial names for 1939-born American females that were more common than “Wendy” include FWIW “Wanda,” “Wilma,” and “Winifred,” but Wendy boomed for girls born in the Fifties and Sixties while those others declined, although Wanda held up longer than the others mentioned.
**There are other possibilities — in the era before it was technologically feasible to assess the sex of fetuses in utero, most expectant parents selected two potential names and I expect plenty of people (including e.g. me and my brother) know the unused other-sex name, which almost by definition is one that would be appropriate for the generational cohort, that had been so selected. But again I have no sense of the extent to which persons who publicly transition as adults use this as a source for the new-in-public given name.
And long after, just to make sure.
That would actually surprise me. I don’t know mine. I was involved in choosing both sets of names for what turned out to be my sisters, and can’t remember the male names at all; I’m sure they were never told either, and I’d be surprised if anyone else remembers.
Yes to David M. as to (for some folks) “long after,” not least because there are still people (like me, with respect to 4 out of my 5 kids) who deliberately avoid actually learning the sex prior to birth, which in the current U.S. is a minority/contrarian approach but one you can generally still get people to honor. (Child #5 arrived unexpectedly early, and we only had one name rather than two selected, with the one we already had turning out in the event to be the “wrong” one, so my wife and I decided on the actual name through a series of discussions during the first maybe 36 hours post-partum.)
I don’t know what sort of differences there are or have been across lines of nationality/culture/class etc. in terms of the kids at some point being told or not being told what the “back up” name had been. My parents are not by temperament the sort of folks you would have expected to disclose more than typical American parents of their class/regional/etc. background would have, but David’s parents were obviously not Americans of my parents’ generation.
We knew the sex of our daughter early enough that we never really plumped for one final option for a male name, but we also had two close runners-up for the final choice of the name she ended up with, which we shared with her at some point (I don’t remember when exactly, she was in the pre-teens or early teens). She didn’t like any of them.
That OED definition of deadname strikes me as far too inclusive. Are we to say that Eric Marlon Bishop, Idrissa Akuna Elba, Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra, and Margarita Ibrahimoff are deadnames?
Did you actually read the definition? It says “esp. a transgender person” and “Typically used with reference to transgender people who have changed their names to more accurately reflect their identities.” You can’t expect them to go farther than that, since people extend the use of words frequently and wantonly.
Yes, well, it’s precisely those adverbs that trouble me. Typically/especially mean ‘in the usual case, but (crucially) not always’. What would you say if I defined horse as ‘typically/usually, a member of Equus caballus‘? And it’s no use saying “Well, someday people might extend deadname to such cases”, any more than it’s any use saying that horse might eventually be extended to include zebras.
Are you absolutely sure that no one has ever used “deadname” for anyone but transgender people? Ever? Because I submit to you that the good people at OED have spent more time poring over the evidence than you have.
I think it depends on how narrowly you understand “transgender”. In my experience, non-binary, genderfluid, genderqueer people will often select new names if their birth name was strongly marked for gender, but maybe they aren’t as easily triggered by hearing the latter so deadname is less relevant. (However, I don’t know any NB people personally, only online and on second/third hand — some of them probably have gender dysphoria that can be triggered. Better safe than sorry).
On the other hand, some transgender people are less affected by the issue. My best friend is a trans woman, and obviously it was a great relief for her to get Danish and Spanish ID papers with her new name and gender. But she hasn’t gone through all her online accounts and changed the names, so sometimes her original name pops up on screen, and that’s OK with her. (And then there’s her Mexican passport and driver’s licence. I think she just gets her tickets in the old name when visiting, she wouldn’t feel safe being openly transgender there).
One of OED’s quotes for the noun is “I grew up knowing him only as Muhammad Ali and I never needed to know his dead name to have respect for him” (2016).
There you go.
Since it isn’t revealed in the quote on my blog, I am now curious about what other commenters think about the likely gender of the transgender student named Leviathan. Male of female—which seems more probable?
If you have to think about it, that’s probably the point.
I would assume that if the bearer of the name did intend a gender, they researched it. The word is masculine in Hebrew.
(My friend has taken the name of a minor Egyptian goddess, but is using a shorter form in daily life. I haven’t told her that the gender marking is in the syllable she is leaving out — I may well be the only person she knows who can recognize it, anyway).
the likely gender of the transgender student named Leviathan.
The frontispiece illustration in Hobbes’ book is clearly Male. And quotes Job “Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei.” — which might be only masculine-by-default. Nevertheless I’d expect male.
Naturally I don’t make presumptions until getting ‘preferred pronouns’ etc from the actual person. You asked for “likely”.
After Robert Silverberg looked at the entire corpus (up to that date) of James Tiptree Jr.’s work and announced that it was absurd to suppose (as some people had) that Tiptree was female, only to backtrack in embarrassment when Tiptree outed herself as Alice Sheldon, I wouldn’t trust anyone to make such interpretations. What is more, such guesses are essentialist: there is no behavioral test that can distinguish Diana the transwoman from Duke the (male) cross-dresser. By the same token, Chip Delaney complains that students of black American literature systematically exclude his work because it is “not Black enough”; if Delaney is a black American writer (he is), a fortiori what he writes is black American literature, however atypical, and therefore should be included.
“Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei.” — which might be only masculine-by-default
Maybe I misunderstood what you’re trying to say here, but ei says nothing about Leviathan’s gender, as is, ea, id, like many Latin pronouns, doesn’t distinguish gender in the genitive and dative singular (gen. eius, dat. ei for all genders.)
But in other verses the Leviathan is referred to with the male accusative eum, and the Septuagint also uses male forms of autos.
By the same token, Chip Delaney complains that students of black American literature systematically exclude his work because it is “not Black enough”; if Delaney is a black American writer (he is), a fortiori what he writes is black American literature, however atypical, and therefore should be included.
The same has happened to Anthony Braxton in the world of jazz. I despise that kind of thinking (this links in to my dislike of nationalism and all its offshoots).
Well, okay, but Braxton explicitly calls himself “transidiomatic”, a concept not (as far as I can see) paralleled in Delaney’s criticism of his own work. (I sometimes think Delaney went into lit crit in order that there be at least one critic who recognized his work for what it is.)
I wouldn’t trust anyone
“(still less myself)”
Eighty-two Tamsins whose bodies are buried in the United States are listed here https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=Tamsin&middlename=&lastname=&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=United+States+of+America&locationId=country_4&memorialid=&mcid=&linkedToName=&datefilter=&orderby=r&plot=&page=1#sr-143884685.
Not all of them, though, may have been born there.
One baby girl named Tamsina who was born and died in the United States is listed here: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=Tamsina&middlename=&lastname=&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=United+States+of+America&locationId=country_4&memorialid=&mcid=&linkedToName=&datefilter=&orderby=r&plot=
@M: I can’t tell whether or not you are trying to argue with my “practically don’t exist in America” or not. My point was that an American can easily go through life without encountering the name, while it is fairly ordinary in Britain. From the grave counts, Tamsin is about four nepers less common than Tamara and about four more common than Tambrey.
I’m Bulgarian and I know a Tamsin and a Tamara. The Tamara is Bulgarian. The Tamsin is English.
Chip Delaney is a friend of a friend.
I was in the same room with him at Baycon way back in ’68 but was way too overawed to approach him.
I was like that at first also, but we sometimes even chat on Facebook now. I’ve read practically everything he ever wrote. And yes, including Dhalgren. Except for Though the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.
Re: deadnames: I have an ex whose deadname I don’t even know. And a genderfluid friend who has another name but it’s also male despite them being assigned male at birth. I also know an intersex person who picked a gender-neutral name that is also a pun.
IIRC they were were operated on at birth to assign them as female. My intersex acquaintance. And paraded around to medical students as a child. That was apparently standard practice in the ’70s. They did surgery on a newborn’s genitals to make them look like a certain standard.
That was standard practice until very recently.
Did they stop yet? The Danish Health Authority did issue guidelines in 2017 or so stating that “gender corrective surgery” on newborns should only happen if there was an immediate risk of medical complications, but whether the obstetric consultants are following it and not pressuring parents into consenting to surgery in other cases, is hard to find out. (And actually asking the parents before doing it seems to be very recent as well).
Germany and Switzerland seem to have taken it a bit more seriously, and a few years earlier. (But 5 years ago, according to one article, Malta was the only nation that would issue a birth certificate with “other” as the gender. The pandemic seems to have sidelined the issue completely, no newspaper articles since 2019).
Having X (rather than F or M) as a gender designation on international passports has been available at least since the mid ’90s, but has not been used much. When I was looking at the permanent residency papers for Austria, it was just F and M. In the application form, I mean.
Germany allows X on its passports; it wouldn’t surprise me if Austria still doesn’t.
Passports, yes. But birth certificates? Or passports for minors? (I know one Austrian who got his F changed to an M, but he was not a minor).
I was considering whether it would more advantageous to be able to vote (or run) for the Bulgarian or Austrian Green party at local elections. People were trying to convince me to run in Bulgaria for city councillor some years ago.
You can only vote in local elections in the EU if your current address is in that particular municipal unit, and can vote in your country of citizenship’s parliamentary election no matter where you reside in the Union — or, for that matter, outside of it).
Well, up to a limit. Danish citizens cannot vote for Parliament if they live in another country, EU or not. (Except exceptions). On the other hand, Sweden allows you to vote while living abroad, EU or not. I don’t think that is regulated by the EU. (I have dual citizenship and live in Denmark, so I vote for both Parliaments).
(On the other hand, you can vote in Danish local elections if you’ve had a registered address there for 4 years, regardless of citizenship [or residency status, it seems]. This may be a specific Danish rule. But EU rules allow EU citizens to vote as soon as they register an address. [Or a week after, to allow for processing time]).
In Germany you can vote from abroad, independent of whether it’s in the EU or not. But while many countries organize voting at embassies and consulates (at least for national-level elections), Germany has an arduous procedure – after receiving your vote notification (which the election office sends to your last registered residence in Germany), you need to order postal vote documents from your German home municipality (by snail mail), which it will send you also by snail mail, fill them in, and send them back (by snail mail again). For most overseas locations, the whole process takes so long that your vote will normally arrive after the election date, thus it’s not counted. Hardly anyone bothers.
@hans
I know of cases where the French consul or ambassador in Germany sends accredited officials to particular towns or even workplaces to carry out on-site voter registration or voting for documented French nationals in French national elections. It sounds like the German procedure would not permit this option.
@Paddy: Exactly. In my experience, German embassies and consulates are not involved in the election process at all. France embassies and consulates, OTOH, organize polling stations during at least national level elections; from my time in Lebanon I remember Lebanese colleagues with French passports telling me about visiting the embassy to vote in the French presidential elections.
@Paddy: Exactly. In my experience, German embassies and consulates are not involved in the election process at all. French embassies and consulates, OTOH, organize polling stations during at least national level elections; from my time in Lebanon I remember Lebanese colleagues with French passports telling me about visiting the embassy to vote in the French presidential elections.
Sweden does keep track of my Danish address, and sends me mail-in ballots well in advance. (So early, in fact, that it has BIG BOLDFACE instructions to not sign and mail them before absentee voting officially opens. [You put the ballot in one envelope and sign that, then put that in another anonymized envelope).
But I’d need to rustle up two witnesses to sign the inner envelope with me (and pay postage) so instead I usually go to the advance polling place that the embassy arranges. (Not necessarily at the embassy itself, though it has been there two out of three times. Last time it was at the Swedish Church. A few larger towns also have consulates that accept ballots). And then they ship the ballots to Sweden for counting on election night.
@Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his): I really hope that you have it backwards—that you are supposed to sign the outer envelope and leave the inner one anonymous.
In general, you can vote in European Parliament elections if you are an EU citizen. You can also vote in local elections if your current address is somewhere in the EU and you are an EU citizen. Whether you can vote for the parliament of the country that you are a citizen of’s parliament, and where, that’s where it gets complicated.
@Brett. “I can’t tell whether or not you are trying to argue with my “practically don’t exist in America” or not.”
I was speaking neither for nor against your statement. My intention was just to present the information available at “Find a Grave.”
In general, you can vote in European Parliament elections if you are an EU citizen.
True. But the details of organising European elections are left to the member states, so if I want to participate in European elections from outside the EU, I have to go through the same rigmarole as when voting in German elections and can’t simply march into the French embassy. I don’t know how EU citizens who live in the EU outside their home states are treated for EU elections, e.g. whether I could vote in France in EU elections as a German citizen living in France.
Hans: it’s usually you can vote in local elections where you live and national elections in the nation you are a citizen of, but with some idiosyncracy.
@V: yes, I know that; I was unsure about elections to the EU parliament, but I guess they are treated like national elections.
Every EU citizen has the right to to vote for their local municipality representative; when it comes to their countries of citizenship’s parliaments, that’s up to their countries. They are entitled to representation in the EU parliament, however.
In Sweden before I had dual citizenship, I voted in the elections for the EU parliament the same way as for local elections, and I think it’s the same here in Denmark for my friend who only has Spanish citizenship. Now living outside the EU is another matter, I never did that. And there will probably be a difference between less-than-six-months-and-keeping-a-registered-address, up-to-two-years-and-planning-to-come-back and “real” emigrated status. (It looks like you simply can’t vote unless your “fixed abode” is in a EU member state). But EU citizens can also vote by mail in their home countries instead of where they live, (if they prefer those candidates, for instance) so German obstructionism will come into play in that case.
I have never tried to find out if I could actually vote for a Swedish candidate to the EU Parliament, but I might want to next time. There are some people there who are pretty sharp on human rights and minorities, in the anti-xenophobic way.
@Lars: ok, so it seems if I lived in another EU member state, I would be able to vote their local candidates for the EU parliament. Outside of Germany, I ever only lived in non-EU countries long enough that the issue came up.
Lars: I think you can only vote for candidates for the EU parliament that share citizenship with them. Not a problem in your case, though.
@V, that is not what the Danish Ministry of the Interior writes on the relevant web page. Any EU citizen living in Denmark can stand for election as a Danish MEP, and vote for any candidate in the election. Not that I’ve heard of anybody standing that wasn’t a Danish citizen.
(With votes being secret, it would be difficult to enforce that German citizens, for instance, could only vote for the candidate(s) with the same citizenship. [I say German because the German minority in Southern Jutland might actually get on the ballot, at least in theory; though most members of that minority are probably Danish citizens, it’s only been 6-7 years since Denmark started allowing dual citizenship and some might have elected to stay Germans]).
Yes. I voted in the last two EU parliamentary elections here in Berlin.
Their national parties, rather. The only part of the EU where you have a chance to vote for a single person is the German-speaking part of Belgium.
(Bizarrely, you still can’t vote for EU-wide parties, even though most of the national parties are organized in EU-wide groupings in the EU Parliament.)
With votes being secret, it would be difficult to enforce that German citizens, for instance, could only vote for the candidate(s) with the same citizenship.
Actually it would be easy. Presumably you have to prove your EU citizenship before voting, and at that point you could be given the “German citizen candidates only” ballot without compromising the secret ballot. It would be embarrassing, to be sure, if there was only one such candidate (though there remains the choice of returning it blank or not), and it would be hard on (e.g.) Maltese voters in Denmark, who would be unlikely to find even one candidate.
Americans[*] abroad can vote in federal elections as if they were residents of the last state in which they resided, or (in many states) their parents/guardians resided if they never have never resided in the U.S. at all. Michael Everson and Andrew “Minix” Tanenbaum are known to have voted in U.S. presidential elections. Unfortunately, not all of our approximately one zillion electoral districts are equally efficient at mailing blank ballots in a timely manner to (say) Afghanistan, where it can take up to 45 days for the so-called postal service to get them back to the U.S.
[*] “That is the endonym of my people, Sir! You will not disrespect it!” —me, parodying a certain notorious Star Trek Classic episode
@JC, it would probably not be a problem for the Ministry of the Interior to produce such ballots, but since ballots are tallied by voting districts on the order of a few thousand voters, and those tallies are eventually made public, there would have to be some thought and possibly extra procedures invested in making it hard to pinpoint which resident non-citizen voted for which other non-citizen. And the staff at the polling places are not experts, any extra procedures will easily lead to extra errors.
(All vote tallying is manual, the computers only get in on the game later).