I just watched the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which effectively intertwines jazz music and musicians (Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and many others) with the tragic history of the Congo in 1960, culminating in the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, one of my early memories as an assiduous reader of international news (it’s filed with the Plain of Jars and Quemoy and Matsu in a dusty cupboard way at the back of my brain). There is also plenty of Congolese music, including a song “Satchmo Okuka Lokole” performed by Joseph Kakasele, “le Grand Kallé”, and his band African Jazz. Naturally, I wanted to know what “Okuka Lokole” meant; I first came across a Louis Armstrong House page making the absurd claim that it means “jungle wizard, the man who charm beasts,” but happily I then found José Nzolani’s detailed PAM article with the following convincing account:
The song is sung in Lingala. But “Okuka lokole” is from Tetela, a Bantu language spoken by the Batetela. This ethnic race of the Anamongo group is located east of Kasai, on land irrigated by the Lomami and Sankuru rivers. The singer Papa Wemba and Patrice Emery Lumuma, the separatist leader, are famous figures of this ethnic group.
The lokole is a long section of hollowed-out tree trunk and carved with a narrow slot. This type of drum is used as a musical instrument or for sending messages. The idiophone instrument produces sounds by being struck on both sides of the slot with wooden sticks. Widespread among the Bantu peoples, the lokole is often compared to morse code. For the Batetela, this large drum plays a special role. “Okuka” in their language is a resistant tree ideal for fabricating lokole drums. It is also one of their surnames.
You can see a lokole at the Wikipedia article, and there are more photos here. As for the Batetela, check out the tangled tale at Wikipedia, beginning:
“Batetela” as a clan or tribe did not exist. Only between 1885 and 1887 are the first public geographical journals, notes and books reporting a people named “Batetela”. Missionaries were reporting all people speaking languages akin to today’s “Kitetela” or culturally similar people as “Batetela” despite the name “Batetela” evolving from the term “Watetera” in reference to bilingual communities from the 1870s Barua lands(Baluba lands in Maniema).
This term “Batetela” was either a corruption or mistranslation off the mid- to late 19th-century term known as “Watetera” which was used to describe the people from this region which Arab slave traders termed “Utotera”.
It goes on in that vein for many paragraphs.
I have to mention also that during the performance of the song the subtitle read “[man singing in Zulu]” (!), and at one point a subtitle reads “from Kobongo towards Kabala” when the towns involved are actually named Kabongo and Kabalo. Africa in general, and the Congo in particular, are treated with remarkable casualness (and I don’t mean just in this movie).
For previous Congo-related onomastic inquiry, see this 2012 post (quickly derailed onto a discussion of TV shows, but I did get a good answer from, of course, MMcM).
“Okuka” in their language is a resistant tree ideal for fabricating lokole drums.
Reminds me of the Oti-Volta words for “mahogany tree”, e.g. Mooré kʋ́kà pl kʋgse; Buli kok pl koksa; Nawdm kúg̈b́; Gulimancema kōgībū etc. Proto-Oti-Volta *kʊk-bʊ.
It would do fine as a cognate formally, but it’s all too easy to find lookalikes between pairs of arbitrary tree species names (cf Hausa kuka “baobab.”)
Just saying “the Congo” was of course fatally ambiguous back then, with 1960 being extra-tricky because you had to shift from disambiguating as Belgian Congo v. French Congo to disambiguating as C.-Leopoldville v. C.-Brazzaville. The twists and turns of political life across the river in Brazzaville did not attract the same level of international media coverage, to be sure. Indeed, the first post-independence leader made it all the way until 1963 until he (Fulbert Youlou, quite a colorful character in his own way) was overthrown and eventually made his way into exile instead of getting killed. (Attempts to settle down in France were reportedly complicated by Madame de Gaulle’s dislike for him and he eventually spent his last years in Spain, where Franco’s wife apparently had no strong opinion.)
When I was a boy I read a biography-aimed-at-boy-readers of Pierre de Brazza, presenting him as a heroic explorer rather than exploitative imperialist. I found it on the shelf in some fairly normal library but maybe not too many other kids checked it out, because in hindsight I suspect that 99% of my generational cohort has never heard of him. OTOH, wikipedia tells me that in 2006 his remains were dug up from their resting place in Algiers and re-interred with ceremony in a new mausoleum in Brazzaville, where the government (with the support of the then-President of Gabon, in whose history Brazza had also figured) found it politic on balance to praise Brazza for having advocated for better treatment of Africans than was typical for Europeans of his time.
Brazza does seem to have been Above Average. Compares favourably with the ghastly Stanley*, anyhow. But that’s a low bar.
* “His contemporary image in Britain also suffered from the perception that he was American”, says WP. However, Stanley Holloway, than whom no-one could be Englisher, was apparently named after him.
Just saying “the Congo” was of course fatally ambiguous back then
Ambiguous sí, fatally no. Absolutely nobody back then (or now, for that matter) talked about Congo-Brazzaville.
Ah well, a generation of conformists and sheep. Allowing the Authorities* to dictate which African countries you did and didn’t talk about.
*For a variety of feuding-among-themselves values of “Authorities,” to be sure.
The first rule of Congo-Brazzaville is that you don’t talk about Congo-Brazzaville.
Just wondered about the actual parsing of okuka lokole. All the Bantu languages I know much about have head-modifier order in NPs, so presumably Satchmo is the tree you make the drums from.
(In Swahili or Lingala you’d need a particle between the two nouns to make it grammatical, but of Tetela I know nothing. In quite a lot of languages the relevant linker is just tonal.)
I have sometimes thought it is the Bielefeld of Africa.
Guinea(-Conakry) is, similarly, chiefly known for not being Guinea-Bissau. (Or Equatorial Guinea either.)
It is unfortunate that not all African leaders have had the onomastic creativity of a Kwame Nkrumah or a Thomas Sankara. (Or of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, come to that.)
Conakry is perhaps not so much paid attention to in more recent decades but I think back in the day Ahmed Sekou Toure had a higher profile in Western media than the median African dictator of his generation. He won the Lenin Peace Prize and everything (while also playing off the Soviets against the West adroitly enough that he was an honored guest at the White House during multiple different U.S. presidencies).
True.
When Mobutu renamed the river to Zaïre, the Brazzaville People’s Republic still called it the Congo, leading to a Gulf-of-Mexican standoff.
Hm: lokolé actually is Lingala. “Tronc creusé employé comme tambour”, says Guthrie’s dictionary. It could just happen to be identical in both languages, though, I imagine. Or even a borrowing in Lingala, especially given the kind of language that Lingala is.
Guthrie also has mokɔkɔ “tronc d’arbre tombé”, but that’s presumably just an accidental sorta-lookalike to okuka.
The all-too-brief stub on Tetela
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetela_language
does suffice to confirm that the Bleek-Meinhof class 3 sg prefix, corresponding to Lingala mo- and Swahili m-, is o-. That is indeed the Bantu class for trees, among other things. (The Oti-Volta cognate class is for “long narrow things”; trees have a separate class of their own, because Oti-Volta is Just Better.)
There’s a bit about Tetela here and there in the first edition of Nurse and Philippson’s The Bantu Languages, though nothing about NP syntax, alas.
It does mention the absence of the initial m- in noun-class prefixes, which is found in some neighbouring languages too. Apparently it’s at least partly echt-morphological, as opposed to a phonological attrition. That’s interesting, because the cognate class affixes outside Bantu don’t have the m- either; but I suspect all that’s happened is that the class prefixes on nouns have been affected in Tetela and its neighbours by the analogy of the corresponding verb subject prefixes, which don’t have that additional m- anyway, even in Bantu.
I’d like to suppose that even those with no interest in history or geography know Brazzaville from the final scene of Casablanca, but I’m probably kidding myself.
I’m afraid you are. I’ve seen it any number of times, but like everyone else I only remember the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Brazzaville is one of those things people think about, but don’t talk about often.
I’m serious:)
The WP tale of Batetela needs to be reworked into either a song or a WP article.
Too few WP articles are in saga form.
Speaking of politically-unstable former French colonies … It was the September 2021 coup d’etat in Guinea-Conakry that led me to investigate national mottos. By which I mean that quite a lot of African former-French-colonies have mottos that follow the Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite pattern of having three-French-words-for-abstract-qualities. But the ones used vary. Note in particular the presence of some from the rival “Vichy triad” of 1940 (viz. Travail, Famille, Patrie).
The relevant inventory as it then stood – I haven’t checked for any subsequent changes:
Benin: “Fraternité, Justice, Travail”
Burkina Faso: “Unité–Progrès–Justice”
Cameroon: “Paix – Travail – Patrie”
Central African Republic: “Unité, Dignité, Travail”
Chad: “Unité, Travail, Progrès”
Comoros: “Unité – Solidarité – Développement”
Congo (Brazzaville): “Unité, Travail, Progrès”
Côte d’Ivoire: ‘Union – Discipline – Travail”
Djibouti: “Unité, Égalité, Paix”
Gabon: “Union, Travail, Justice”
Guinea (Conakry): “Travail, Justice, Solidarité”
Madagascar: “Amour, Patrie, Progrès”
NIger: “Fraternité, Travail, Progrès”
Togo: “Travail, Liberté, Patrie”
“Unity”, in various guises, is notably popular. Unsurprising, once you start thinking about it.
@David Eddyshaw
It’s funny how little these pseudo-countries live up to their mottos.
Ivory Coast lol. Union, Discipline, Work. It’s like their lofty dream is to be a prison farm. For god, for country and for jail.
Liberty is not real popular in former French Africa, at least among those who set the mottos.
For god, for country and for jail.
🙂
Note FWIW that the only two that use two of the Vichy three are also the two that had formerly been German colonies, i.e. Kamerun und Togoland. Probably just a coincidence.
The idea of having a national motto is already an obvious borrowing; might as well borrow the form as well as the category while you’re at it. At least, I’m not aware of any precolonial precedent for the idea.
Morocco’s is also based on this template: “God, Homeland, King” (Allāh, al-Waṭan, al-Malik). Looks nice and traditional – until you realise that a couple of centuries ago no one would have dreamed of calling the Sulṭān a malik (a term traditionally more often used for God and for non-Muslim kings), or of reducing his sultanate to a mere waṭan (which usually referred to a small tribal territory or a non-political geographical unit.)
The King of Spain, in precolonial Moroccan diplomatic correspondence, was neither Sulṭān nor Malik, but al-Rāy.
“Unity” seems to be a pretty common theme in national mottoes all over. Including Germany and the US.
God gets invoked a fair bit (again, including the US.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_mottos
I have to say that Botswana’s is easily the best. It would do nicely for Wales, too.
Botswana’s motto does fit in the common tradition of listing aspirations rather than reality.
Morocco and Oman have the same motto, but WP’s English translations are different. Because the Moroccan one has been through French, or just random choices?
[Edit: No, they haven’t, and neither does Kuwait. The titles are different. But the question still applies to the Middle word.]
No, I was right, but it’s not Morocco and Oman, it’s Morocco and Jordan. Oman and Kuwait are similar but different. Now I’m most curious about the sequence of the Kuwaiti motto.
Jordan: God, Homeland, King (Jordanian Arabic: الله، الوطن، الملك; Allāh, Al-Waṭan, Al-Malīk).
Kuwait: God, The Nation, The Emir (Arabic: الله, الوطن, الأمير).
Morocco: God, the Country, the King (Arabic: الله، الوطن، الملك; Allāh, Al-Waṭan, Al-Malīk).
Oman: God, The Nation, The Sultan (Arabic: الله، الوطن، السلطان).
Kenya’s motto is “all put together,” presumably a reference to their greatly celebrated sartorial style.
My original investigation of patterns in this regard was so focused on formerly-French-African-colonies that I didn’t even look at the former Belgian colonies, which tend to have French mottos due to regrettable historical oppression of the Flemish-speakers, who no doubt would have been no worse (if no better) at bearing the supposed White Man’s Burden. It also looks like some-but-not-all of the formerly-Portuguese-African-colonies have mottos that fit the same French-example pattern.
I’ve linked to my favorite saga before (it’s not on WP, but kind of should be).
Germany doesn’t have one; the WP article says “de facto”, but even that is quite the exaggeration – Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit is the beginning of the federal anthem, and hardly even quoted otherwise.
Now I think about it, at least one medieval Arabic-speaking state definitely did have a motto – perhaps more dynastic than national as such, but still. Granada under the Nasrids picked Lā ghāliba illā Allāh – “There is no victor but God” – as can be seen in the Alhambra in practically every room. But they were already part of a broader European set of state norms – they even had a coat of arms.
As mottos go, it’s a retrospectively unfortunate choice; the usual Algerian expression for “what can you do?”, “it can’t be helped”, etc. is Allāh ghālib “God is victorious”.
Trond: waṭan covers all those meanings more or less, but “homeland” is perhaps closest; I wrote about it a bit on my blog a few years ago, for what it’s worth.
Those are such lame/banal modern words to set to a fine inherited melody from Haydn. As has been previously discussed in other threads, you should be singing “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” and you know it.
Most European Republics have no official motto. Italy doesn’t have one, nor does Austria.
The Habsburg domains did have a motto: „A.E.I.O.U“, which I suppose implies „unity“ without using the word.
I have to say that Botswana’s is easily the best.
Huh. I would have thought it was “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
It’s the third stanza of a drinking song by national-liberal students, what did you expect. 😐 (The second stanza, not sung by anybody in a long time, ends in deutsche Frauen, deutscher Wein.)
The Federal Republic’s non-banal modern words are in the constitution, BTW.
In its present, elaborate form, yes, but I posted in another thread just a few days ago where he took it from.
En, amor electis, iniustis ordinor ultor.
Sic Fridericus ego mea iura rego.
The first “unity” interpretation apparently goes back to a protonotary, because all threads are one. For yet more fun interpretations (and a very long presentation of the research on the elegiac distichon), see the German article.
[Comment deleted. CJ, please go away; you’ve outstayed your welcome. I’m sure there are many other venues in this wide-ranging internet where your persona will be welcome. –LH]
I thought we’d sprayed recently.
Resistant strain?
Edward MacLysaght proposed adding to the arms of Ireland the motto Do chum glóire Dé a’s onóra na hÉireann (“to the glory of God & the honour of Ireland” from the Annals of the Four Masters) . He was Chief Herald at the time but it seems he never filed the paperwork.
I just realised: all these interchangeable Arab monarchy mottos are basically identical to the Carlist motto of 19th century Spain: “Dios, Patria, Rey”. I would love to know the exact history of how it spread…
Oh, and apparently it was also basically the motto of the Masonic lodge of Saint Jean d’Écosse in Marseille (1751-1815): Pro Deo, regi, et patriae fidelitas. That should give the conspiracy theorists something to play with.
Malta’s is Virtute et constantia, from a different lineage I suppose.
Most theorists of Masonic conspiracies were quite dubious that the Masons really were reliably loyal to the three objects-of-loyalty specified in the motto Lameen quoted. They would probably have treated the motto as disinformation/camouflage.
Maharashtra’s doesn’t bother with mush-mouthed blandness: (in translation) “The glory of Maharashtra will grow like the first day moon. It will be worshipped by the world and will shine only for the well being of people.”
Note that Liechtenstein also has that same concept as the Carlists and their Arabic successors: Für Gott, Fürst und Vaterland. For high-level classical background, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendiatris
Each of the United States has a state motto (or two), but only two or three fit the three-abstract-nouns-in-a-row pattern, viz. Georgia (“Wisdom, Justice, Moderation”) and Louisiana (“Union*, Justice, Confidence”) and, if conjunctions are permitted, Pennsylvania (“Virtue, Liberty, and Independence”). The other 47 certainly fit no single general pattern.
*In the context of the U.S. rather than that of Francophone Africa, “union” refers to the federal union rather than the internal unity of the given state, and is thus in the context of Louisiana an implied pledge to absolutely definitely not try to secede from the Union again.
Putting the Fürst before the Vaterland seems not unreasonable for Liechtenstein, given that the place basically wouldn’t exist as a “state” if it hadn’t been bought by the family as a political dodge; none of them actually got round to visiting it until over a century later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Liechtenstein#Early_modern_era
In other cases, it’s just asking for trouble. Aux armes, citoyens!
Für Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland was a whole thing once.
“The glory of Maharashtra will grow like the first day moon. It will be worshipped by the world and will shine only for the well being of people.”
I correctly guessed that this was originally in Vedic-style verse:
Pratipaccandralēkhēva
vardhiṣṇurviśva vanditā
mahārāṣṭrasya rājyasya
mudrā bhadrāya rājatē
(For some reason, I can never remember where Maharashtra is.)
Lameen: I just realised: all these interchangeable Arab monarchy mottos are basically identical to the Carlist motto of 19th century Spain: “Dios, Patria, Rey”. I would love to know the exact history of how it spread…
Me too now. Also, it seems obvious that the form is related to the revolutionary French motto, but which is a conscious challenge to which?
Hat: (For some reason, I can never remember where Maharashtra is.)
Next to Kshudrarashtra.
The TVTropes page on “Slogans” really needs a “Countries” section:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Slogans
I mean, they’re all granfalloons too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon
I once suggested that the joint oculoplastics clinic should adopt the motto “Removing tumours, preserving eyelid skin” on its letterhead, but I was brutally rebuffed. Some STEM types just don’t appreciate Art.
You’d need to figure out whether the “Carlist” one actually dates back far enough to have preceded awareness of the French-republican L**** E**** F****. Carlism-as-such was to a considerable extent a self-conscious reaction to wacky French ideas from the 1790’s although its adherents of course would say it was just a continuation of what Normal People had un-self-consciously believed pre-1789 before the weirdos had started stirring up trouble. But if that slogan didn’t start being used in Spain until the 1820’s or whenever you would say that “liberalismo” was a thing that at least intermittently had actual political power, then it seems highly likely to itself be a self-conscious and reactive alternative. (One amusing thing about partisan Spanish historiography is the use of the label Decada Ominosa (ominous decade) for the period 1823-33 when los Liberales were temporarily out of power.)
Farther to the East, the regime of Czar Nicholas I came up with an official slogan in the 1830’s (possibly wordsmithed by S.S. Uvarov, who was the education minister of the day) which was pretty obviously a self-conscious alternative to L**** E**** F****, viz. Правосла́вие, самодержа́вие, наро́дность. Which wikipedia Englishes as “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” although I think the last word is probably not a good idiomatic English rendering of the relevant sense of the Russian word. I recall hearing claims that circles around Metternich (or someone like that) had their own self-conscious alternative,* which would in English be something like Legitimacy Orthodoxy** Reaction. But now google is not confirming that for me, so either I’ve seriously misremembered the actual words or it was not a reliable anecdote.
*possibly used primarily in semi-jocular social contexts as e.g. words proposing a toast rather than words carved in stone on a monument
**the small-o sort
the last word is probably not a good idiomatic English rendering of the relevant sense of the Russian word
True, but there is no better alternative. (And to be fair, even Russians were unclear about what it was supposed to mean.)
One can infer from a relevant wikipedia article that the best English translation of наро́дность may indeed be the loanword naradnost. Which wiktionary doesn’t acknowledge as an English lexeme* but does acknowledge (modulo a diacritical mark or two) as a Czech word and a Serbo-Croatian word. Whether in either of those languages it comes with the same mystical baggage as in Russian is not known to me. FWIW I would have gone with “Nationhood” if limited to well-established English lexemes beginning natio-. “Nationalism” is sort of closer but for that reason perhaps more likely to be affirmatively confusing? Although it feels like it some contexts the mystical overtones of народ would be better evoked in English by The Peepul. With the definite article.
*As a possible parallel, you can find some dictionaries acknowledging the loanword sobornost as the best English translation of собо́рность. Which is probably useful because the best attempts I’ve seen to try to calque the word into English come out with things like “conciliarity” which lack the required mystical vibe. Wikipedia’s attempts to calque the literal/etymological sense as “gathering-ness” or “assembly-ness” are likewise deficient.
I wonder if ambiguity between conservative and more progressive concepts was intended in the Russian slogan.
~ Truth, Independence, People-ness
The tsar is leading Russia to progress.
Thought I’d do some due diligence here and search the Shamela corpus for historical examples of “Allāh, al-watan, al-Malik” in Arabic. What comes up is:
– A fatwa dated 1423 AH (2002) stating that this slogan constitutes lesser shirk (a bad thing), insofar as it puts God on a level with the other two – but diplomatically adding that the hypothetical slogan “God, Country, and Revolution” would too, presumably to avoid being accused of partisanship in the monarchist-republican debate.
– A similar Saudi fatwa (undated?), prompted by a doubly objectionable Boy Scout oath: “I swear on my honour to do my best to do my duty for God, homeland and king”.
– A flowery article in issue 513 of al-Risāla (1943), called “O Nile!”, where the author imagines himself transported to ancient Egypt, hearing the people praying in the temple and saying “We love God, the homeland and the king; we love dear life, and we love sincere work for the sake of God, the homeland and the king. God, homeland and king everywhere, not just in the temple!”
I won’t pretend this is likely to be anything like exhaustive, but I think that still gives you a fair sample of just how deeply rooted this slogan isn’t in Arabic.
This Britannica article stub
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Orthodoxy-Autocracy-and-Nationality
suggests that ambiguity of народность was actually exploited by those in favour of eradication of minority cultures, apparently not altogether in line with the aspirations of the Autocracy.
I suppose that if you’re a proper Emperor, ruling over an Empire where allegiance to you and your family is really the only ultimate common thread (as with the Habsburgs), you may well be wary of ethnonationalism, quite reasonably seeing it as an ideological threat, even when it prioritises your own ethnos.)
@Lameen:
Thanks. I was actually wondering about the Islamic orthodoxy, or otherwise, of these slogans. It occurred to me that putting the ruler before the country might also be problematic, but the Arabic examples don’t seem to do that.
@David E.: the standard phrase on British military recruiting posters of the early/mid 20th century was in the order “For King and Country,” innit? Of course you could have said the King was operating at a higher level of generality, since e.g. George V was also king of “the British Dominions beyond the Seas.” Although I guess you didn’t really have to treat him like an emperor if you weren’t Indian.
I was just thinking about that. I think the idea was indeed that the King is being represented as an old-style emperor, trumping mere ethnonationalist concepts of statehood, even within the UK. There’s also the fact that you do in fact swear allegiance* to the monarch in the UK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_(United_Kingdom)
Happily, the monarch is not the de facto ruler of the country, of course. I’ve often felt that lefty republicans don’t quite see the safeguards in all this.
It’s connected with the “British” thing, as opposed to “English.” Non-separatist peripheral people like me are happy to describe ourselves as British, but gently correct those who call us English (unless they are Foreign, and can’t realistically be expected to know any better.)
When I were a lad, black people born and raised in England tended to call themselves “British” too, but “English” has become usual nowadays. This has led to furious pushback from the numerous racists freshly emboldened by the transatlantic political calamity.
* Personally, I never swear any oaths at all, on account of being a weirdo religious nutter, but people like me are granted exemptions these days (won for us at least partly by atheists, who are by no means Always Wrong.) So I can join the army if I want.
You can find the other order (as pro Patria et Rege) in the motto of a cavalry regiment. But it’s an Italian cavalry regiment.
For a different sort of neither-Celt-nor-Saxon UK population, the google ngram viewer shows “British Jews” consistently more common than “English Jews” over the last century-and-a-bit, with the lead of “British” if anything slightly expanding in the last four decades.
Interesting. I wonder if that is actually driven by fear of melting away as a distinct group by not being distinctive enough? (My own family has contributed to this melting process.) Or it might just reflect cultural conservatism. Or just be yet further evidence that Construction Grammar is the True Path.
Simpler yet, it may just reflect the fact than pan-UK references turn up more often in the data than specific references to the Jewish populations of the constituent bits of the UK.
France’s previous unofficial three-decker was Une foi, une loi, un roi, not necessarily in that order.
Franco had ¡Una, grande, y libre!
Consider also the order (if deemed meaningful rather than random) in Shakespeare’s “Cry God for Harry, England and St. George.”
Well, Harry was actually leading the army at the time. Unlike St George, who was a no-show IIRC.
In Massachusetts, at least, atheists have Quakers, rather than someone like Bradlaugh, to thank for being able to affirm (under penalty of perjury) rather than swear an oath. In practice, though, judges (and their helpers) did not seem inclined to ask (potential) jurors if any needed this exemption.
Mine is “ni dieu ni maître,” thus ensuring the enmity of nearly everyone.
I think Quakers set the pattern throughout the U.S., because they got the no-swear alternative into the federal constitution at its beginning and that then set an example for parts of the country that never had any material number of actual Quakers. In however many witnesses giving formal oral testimony I’ve dealt with over the course of a legal career I can recall exactly one who asked to affirm rather than be sworn, although maybe there were others I’ve forgotten and that one was memorable because I was still very new at questioning sworn-or-otherwise-appropriately-validated witnesses. For written testimony to be submitted to a court, it is a very convenient thing when witnesses are allowed to affirm rather than swear because that means you don’t need to deal with the logistics of having a notary public on hand. So we encourage that regardless of the religious views of the witness.
Historical trivia buffs will know that the hapless/feckless Franklin Pierce is to date the only President to have not actually taken the “oath” of office because he chose the affirm-rather-than-swear option.
It looks like Egypt might be patient zero for this slogan in the Arab world, curiously enough (or perhaps not so surprisingly, given the key role of Egypt in Arab intellectual circles at that period). It turns out the long-extinct Young Egypt political party, founded by Ahmad Husayn in the early 1930s, adopted as its slogan “Allāh, al-waṭan, al-Malik”. The founder was apparently a quite incoherently eclectic politician – inspired by Mazzini in his declarations and his choice of name, by Mussolini and Hitler in making them “green shirts”, claiming to be a socialist, attempting to crowd-fund public factory building, dreaming of a renewal of ancient Egypt and a reconquest of the Sudan and a broader Arab alliance…
Did he campaign to bring back Ancient Egyptian? If so, he has my vote!
As a witness (several times) and as a juror (once), I’ve had to specifically ask to affirm rather than swear every time, rather than having the option presented automatically. Nobody has ever made a fuss about it when I did, though.
(The only other juror who affirmed when I did was a Muslim.)
I often come across the notion that doctors swear the Hippocratic oath. Not in the UK they don’t, at any rate. Nor any other oath. (As I read the original, the main concern seems to be not divulging trade secrets to muggles. I can see that …)
I’m not aware of atheists having problems swearing oaths. Adding “So help me God” is an issue, but that doesn’t seem to be legally required anywhere these days.
(…I guess in the Vatican…)
I vaguely remember Herbert Wehner making a point of never swearing on a bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bradlaugh
I would have thought a proper atheist (my soulmate*) should indignantly refuse to swear an oath. Of course, many self-described “atheists” are in reality mere milquetoast agnostics.
“I swear”, at least in English, does imply some kind of religious dimension, whether you add “so help me God” or not.
In fact “so help me God” is the sort of thing I would add after making a promise (like the marriage vows) that I don’t think I could necessarily fulfil under my own steam (and I think that’s usually the original intent, rather than “strike me dead if I don’t comply.”)
* Always been proud of my sister for outright refusing to get married in church, on the grounds of her atheism (as opposed to just not liking the idea particularly.)
The history of Celtic swearing has occasioned substantial scholarly disagreement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongu_do_dia_toinges_mo_th%C3%BAath
Actually, the cross-cultural implications of “swearing” must vary quite a bit. Never really thought about it.
Kusaal pɔ is consistently used for “swear” in the Bible translations, and it has cognates right across Oti-Volta which are glossed “swear”, “jurer”, “faire serment” or whatever. I don’t actually know how it fits into traditional “religion”, though, or what happens if you break an oath, apart from everyone concluding that you’re unreliable. Win, the Creator, does not intervene in everyday moral matters. Pɔ could well really mean something more like “solemnly affirm.”
The derived noun pɔɔr, and its Farefare cognate, actually mean “part of the genealogy of one’s clan”; I do know that it’s called that because you recite it in solemn affirmations/oaths/whatever. Maybe the idea is that you let not only yourself down but the whole
schoolclan down if you break an oath.Muslim influence goes back centuries in this area, too, including among groups like the Kusaasi who are mostly not themselves Muslim; the Jewish/Christian/Muslim concept of swearing an oath may well have got grafted onto other notions of solemn affirmation quite a while ago.
The anthropologists must have been all over this question (though probably not in these particular cultures.)
“I swear”, at least in English, does imply some kind of religious dimension
I quite agree.
I would have thought a proper atheist (my soulmate*) should indignantly refuse to swear an oath.
I’m surprised that, in my limited experience, more Christian jurors aren’t non-jurors, given that Jesus is reported to have been explicit on the subject.
“I swear”, at least in English, does imply some kind of religious dimension, whether you add “so help me God” or not.
To me it’s just like “I promise”, maybe with even more commitment, if possible.
In fact “so help me God” is the sort of thing I would add after making a promise (like the marriage vows) that I don’t think I could necessarily fulfil under my own steam (and I think that’s usually the original intent, rather than “strike me dead if I don’t comply.”)
I thought it was the same thing as Shakespeare’s “So thrive I and mine”—not as strong as “May God strike me dead”, but invoking a penalty nonetheless.
“Non-juror” may not mean what I thought it means.
I’ve also had a few rounds as a witness (in civil cases) and one as a juror (in a criminal case). I don’t think swearing an oath is even an option in Norway.
The first time I was a witness, I was asked if I had been a witness before. Since I said no, I was told to confirm that I understood my responsibilities, which I did. The next time I was a witness, I could say that I had been a witness before. The judge then asked if I needed a repetition of the responsibilities, which I didn’t, and no more was made of it.
I don’t really remember the initial formalities of the criminal case — it was a long time ago and I was stressed out when it started — for reasons that were all my own fault. (I had been caught up in some urgent task at work, lost track of time, and ended up being phoned up by the judge and coming too late to the trial — a sad family story with people who obviously had it hard enough without me adding to the burden. (I probably got blacklisted, for I haven’t been called again. (It strikes me that this must have been before the alarm clock on my phone and the Ourlook calendar on my job computer had become the structuring elements of my life.)))
Rattray’s fascinating Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland actually has a brief passage about oaths among the Farefare. Some of his examples do involve invoking supernatural vengeance on one’s head if one breaks the oath; interestingly, not just from Yini (= Kusaal Win) but also kyima, which corresponds to Kusaal kpi’imnam “the dead”, meaning one’s own dead forebears, who are also invoked for supernatural assistance. (The husband who foolishly forgets his witch-wife’s warning and comes close to losing his siig “life force” does this at a crisis point in their story.)
Rattray also mentions invoking some historical calamity that actually did fall on a forebear in oaths (“if a stranger used the same words, it would mean war”, he says.) Rattray (who spoke Twi and knew a lot about Ashanti culture) says this is common in Ashanti, and called ntam; apparently it had formal legal status.
It all helps a bit in understanding where the clan genealogy comes into it all, anyhow.
@Jerry F.: Whether you find it convincing or not, here’s one formal 16th-century statement (historically considered explicitly authoritative by one subset of Anglophone Protestants and congruent with the teaching of many other subsets) on the topic:
Of a Christian Man’s Oath. As we confess that vain and rash swearing is forbidden Christian men by our Lord Jesus Christ, and James his Apostle, so we judge, that Christian Religion doth not prohibit, but that a man may swear when the Magistrate requireth, in a cause of faith and charity, so it be done according to the Prophet’s teaching in justice, judgement, and truth.
Disappointingly, Spencer Trimingham’s Islam in West Africa only has a few brief remarks on oaths, and they’re all about Islamic practices (he says that swearing falsely on the Qur’an is held to invoke its own automatic punishment; swearing on the tomb of a saint is virtually unknown, except in places like Timbuktu with strong links with North Africa; and that ignorant qadis in northern Nigeria would demand oaths on the Qur’an from pagans, who then felt entirely relaxed about lying away freely.)
This has managed to escape me completely. One would think I’d have picked it up fifteen years ago, but nope.
@DE I would have thought a proper atheist (my soulmate*) should indignantly refuse to swear an oath. Of course, many self-described “atheists” are in reality mere milquetoast agnostics.
“I swear”, at least in English, does imply some kind of religious dimension, whether you add “so help me God” or not.
This is news to me. ‘Effing and blinding’ is also described as ‘swearing’, yet invokes only bodily functions, no God.
As (I hope) a proper atheist, I do refuse to invoke God in any form. For jury service I chose the ‘affirmation’, no God. NZ Min of Justice counts this as ‘swearing’
(For the record, I wouldn’t and didn’t get married in a Church.)
Never the less it’s tricky: God is mentioned heavily in the National Anthem. Also the Queen/King [**]. So I hum those bits. Does that make me milquetoast?
I’m pretty sure I remember our host declaring in a past thread that ‘Oh my God’ (or ‘Gawd’) uttered by an atheist is thereby null and void/so shouldn’t offend believers.
[**] IIRC, when I became a NZ Citizen I was required to swear. No God in it, but I was supposed to avow allegiance to “the Queen and all her heirs”. I could just about acknowledge QEII’s service, but Charles and the rest of the rabble !!
As (I hope) a proper atheist, I do refuse to invoke God in any form. For jury service I chose the ‘affirmation’, no God.
(For the record, I wouldn’t and didn’t get married in a Church.)
I approve. (While maintaining that the NZMofJ has miscategorised it.)
So I mouth those bits. Does that make me milquetoast?
You can appeal to the sound Biblical precedent of Naaman the Syrian (mutatis mutandis, a bit):
Exegesis: Rimmon = God; the Lord = atheism. The application is surely evident. Nobody called Naaman the Syrian “milquetoast.” Nobody.
I’m pretty sure I remember our host declaring in a past thread that ‘Oh my God’ (or ‘Gawd’) uttered by an atheist is thereby null and void/so shouldn’t offend believers
I think that was actually me. Cussing, effing and blinding, etc has nothing to do with oaths of the kind we’re talking about. If “God” has no actual referent for the person saying the word, objecting to them saying it is as valid as objecting to them saying “plorch.”*
“Taking the name of the Lord in vain” is claiming to speak for God when you don’t. Like saying “God told me to vote for Donald Trump” or “God hates faggots.” Or mandating placing a list of the commandments in schoolrooms, an interesting case of self-referential blasphemy.
* A horrid word. Perfectly horrid.
CA Civ Pro Code § 2094. No indication of God being optional in (a) (1), unless the court takes alternative (b). No literal swearing, though. Just God vs perjury.
@DM:
For clarity, “swearing” is certainly used for “effing and blinding”, as is “oath.” I agree entirely with AntC (if not more so) that this has no religious dimension at all. (Except, I suppose, in the marginal sense that saying “fuck” in front of people who may be genuinely taken aback is not the kind of behaviour recommended by most world religions.)
I was talking entirely about “swearing an oath” in the solemn-declaration sense. I persist in maintaining that this implies some sort of potential religious sanction, even for people who don’t actually believe in the reality of such consequences.
As such penalties are usually conceived, I can’t say that I do myself. The idea strikes me as more superstitious than religious: rather like Spencer Trimingham’s undertrained qadi expecting swearing on the Qur’an to result in pagans telling the truth because of the magical properties of the book rather than any actual belief in it.)*
Usage may be changing, though, as people forget the original cultural background: for such people, “swear” may just be a synonym of “solemnly assert.” Hasn’t happened in my idiolect, though: and the very existence of an “affirm” alternative in official contexts suggests I’m not alone.
* Thinking about this more, I think the Kusaasi and Farefare are onto something. The real sanctions are social (for them, the relevant society includes dead relatives. Details …)
If you’re being sworn in to testify in court, and you are asked whether you will tell the truth, the whole truth*, and nothing but the truth, and you respond, “Fuck, Yeah!”, would that suffice?
*I’ve always thought this business about telling the whole truth is a bit dodgy. Lawyers ask you questions to elicit your answer on a certain point, but if you say, “well, it’s more complicated than your question implies” and start to elaborate, you will get cut off. So your ability to tell the whole truth, as you see it, is circumscribed. (Caveat: My understanding of court proceedings comes entirely from watching law dramas on TV).
@j.W.: One of the conditions does not apply in the U.S. and apparently in the UK, namely that the Magistrate requireth an oath. I find it odd that most (it seems) Christians here, given a free choice, choose the option that Jesus at least discouraged. But that’s OK; lots of Christians would find me odd.
Also, what does “in a cause of faith and charity” mean?
This is actually based on a fairly complete notion of the relationship of the Magistrate (i.e. secular authority in general) to the believer: it appears again in Article XXXVII
https://anglicansonline.org/basics/thirty-nine_articles.html
Much of this is aimed at dodgy extremists prone to take the plain texts a bit too literally, for example by being pacifists … (the horror …)
Said dodgy extremists duly accused the C of E of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Erastus#Erastianism
I feel a proprietary interest in this question, as my grandfather’s MA thesis was all about how Thomas Erastus was not, in fact, an Erastian …
Completely irrelevant, apart from containing “sworn” in a not terribly religious context and being one of my favourites among Bill’s Steamy Sonnets:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56227/sonnet-147-my-love-is-as-a-fever-longing-still
I think, in my single contact with the US judicial system that required formal statement of my good intentions, I was asked “Do you swear or confirm…?” outright without any prompting.
Atheism, not being a religion or belief system, doesn’t require from adherents to avoid any religious formulas, not getting married in church, or never saying “Merry Christmas”. If it is easier just to say “yes” and make people happy, why not? Of course, there are atheists who like to be out and proud, they can protest their atheism wherever, but there is no requirement.
From Prussian army (ca. beginning of 20c.):
Feldwebel: Mr. Mueller, I put you down as a Protestant, why weren’t you at the church service?
Mueller: I am a dissenter.
Feldwebel: You know, Mueller, I think you are Mason. If you won’t give me a legitimate denomination, I’ll put you down as a Jew!
For me, noun “oath” has a (defeasible) presupposition of religion but verb “swear” has none and is indeed ‘more or less a synonym of “solemnly assert”‘ — although I doubt anyone just yet can solemnly assert an oath.
I was trying to come up with examples of oathbreaking in the Bible, to see what consequences ensued, and realised that I can’t actually think of any.
Jephthah brings about a catastrophe by keeping an oath.
CA Civ Pro Code § 2094. … Just God vs perjury.
Curious. IANAL but (a)(1) seems to carry no penalty — except what ensues with your God. Whereas (2) affirmers are under penalty of perjury.
Or does (b)’s “under penalty of perjury” apply for both? In which case I’d’a thought the best way to “awaken” that understanding is for (1) also to require uttering the “penalty of perjury” formula. So help you God be damned.
Are God-followers habituated to mumbling formulaic words (as I do with the National Anthem) without it passing through their minds? I’m thinking of the Credo or the Lord’s Prayer.
@de
Zachariah 5
—
3
Then he said to me, “This is the curse that goes out over the face of the whole earth: ‘Every thief shall be expelled,’ according to this side of the scroll; and, ‘Every perjurer shall be expelled,’ according to that side of it.”
4
“I will send out the curse,” says the Lord of hosts;
“It shall enter the house of the thief
And the house of the one who swears falsely by My name.
It shall remain in the midst of his house
And consume it, with its timber and stones.”
—
So the punishment seems to be banishment with concomitant destruction of property. I am surprised that confiscation of ready money, stores and livestock was not included, but maybe this was so obvious to the divinely inspired author that they left it out.
Are God-followers habituated to mumbling formulaic words (as I do with the National Anthem) without it passing through their minds?
Yup. The circles I move in, I would think those who mutter the credo in fact do believe it, but people often seem to sing hymns without focussing much on the words. Which are sometimes pretty iffy, especially the more modern ones.
Being a Hatter, I naturally do focus on the words. Which can lead to deliberately not singing them.
My father-in-law always refused to sing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Vow_to_Thee,_My_Country
Doesn’t come up much, happily, except on Remembrance Day. Second verse is OK.
He also pointed out the Docetic heresy implicit in the second verse of “Away in a Manger”, but the chief objections to that regrettable work are, of course, aesthetic rather than doctrinal.
I naturally have to point out that the Welsh national anthem has much better lyrics than the
EnglishBritish one.* A low bar, however. But then, not every country is blessed with a full-throated bloodthirsty Marseillaise. That one’s a real banger.* Also, now I think of it, no God.
Heh. “Away in a Manger” is a pseudoepigraphic work. Anathema!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_in_a_Manger
I did not know this. My hereticdar is evidently working well.
Found quite by chance just now in Ducroz and Charles’ L’homme songhay tel qu’il se dit:
Zé ǹd dóngá wó, bòr m̀ kâ k̀ à té, yáad yáadí bôŋ wínd lâ, wàl yáad yáadí bôŋ, ní ḿ kâ k̀ à tè hû là. Hèy nô kâŋ, à nàŋ sí ǹd síkkà, îr káadèy wó kêy dô, hál ní ń á té kêy! à m̀ jáŋ k̀ kâŋ wíndó lâ, wàlà à m̀ jáŋ k̀ kâŋ húó lâ, à sí ǹd síkkà. Wó dín sê nô, bòr kúl kâŋ nàŋ gó k̀ à zé wínd lâ, wàl bòr kúl kâŋ nàŋ gó k̀ à zé hû là, îr káadèy, à sí kâan ì sê cìmèy cìmà, ì ǵ nê: “sí múréy k̀ zé ǹd dóngá, é wón húó lâ, sí múréy k̀ zé ǹd à, îr wón wíndó lâ, kóy táréy k̀ à tê”.
“Swearing by Lightning (Dongo), (suppose) one does it in vain in a compound, or one does it in vain in a house. There is something of which there is no doubt, among us Kaado: if you do it, then he (Lightning) will fall upon the compound, or fall upon the house, there is no doubt about it. For this reason, anyone who starts swearing in a compound, or anyone who starts swearing in a house, we Kaado truly don’t like it, we say: “Mind you don’t swear by Lightning in our house, mind you don’t swear by him in our compound; go outside and do it!”
Words to live by!
I imagine that in languages with a rich enough verbal morphology to allow for lots of different moods there could be some considerable variation in which mood is utilized for various sorts of oath-taking and there might be an interesting cross-linguistic article to be written on that if it hasn’t been written already.
Re David E.’s discovery of pseudoephigraphy: it’s a sad day when you can’t trust the reliability of “the anti-Masonic journal _The Christian Cynosure_” when it comes to proper authorial attribution.
@Lameen:
Interesting.
Rattray gives among his Farefare oath formulae Sa tase mam, which he translates “May the lightning strike me.”
It looks like Saaga tãsɛ mam “(May) the sky rebuke me.”
(I don’t have great lexical materials for Farefare.) However, in Kusaal, saa tansid, literally “the sky/rain shouts” is the standard idiom for “it thunders.” “There’s lightning” is saa ian’ad “the sky/rain jumps.”
So Rattray’s rendering is plausible, though I would have expected the meaning “thunder” rather than “lightning.”
Being struck by lightning is actually quite a real risk in the largely flat open savanna around there. (A couple of people were killed by lightning in the fields behind our house in Ghana. Whether they were oathbreakers, I do not know …)
the Bielefeld of Africa
i don’t have a lot of contexts where i can report that i recently managed to spend several days with a friend’s mother who represents herself as living in the original bielefeld without making a single reference to SIE. but here, i know you know (and, of course, you-know-who know we know).
—
[quakers, courts, etc]
what i’ve heard most regularly in (mostly new york city) courtrooms is phrasings like “do you swear or affirm [whatever]?”, which neatly avoid asking which one a particular person is doing.
and it makes a lot of sense to me that quakers would be the precipitating element in the option being available; i’m not sure any other group in the 13 colonies spanned quite the same range of relationships to state power (from near-establishment to capitally-punishable).
i do see (anglophone) oath-taking or swearing as basically religious unless something else is specifically invoked – as, for example (though in a different language), in ansky’s Di Shvue | The Oath, which offers a range of things to swear by*:
הימל און ערד װועט אונדז אױסהערן
עדות װעלן זײַן די ליכטיקע שטערן
אַ שבֿועה פֿון בלוט און אַ שבֿועה פֿון טרערן
מיר שװערן, מיר שװערן, מיר שװערן
himl un erd vet undz oyshern / eydes veln zayn di likhtike shtern / a shvue fun blut un a shvue fun trern / mir shvern, mir shvern, mir shvern!
[heaven and earth will hear us / our witnesses will be the bright stars / an oath of blood and an oath of tears / we swear, we swear, we swear]
i assume that the sonic similarity of שבֿועה and שװערן is fundamentally coincidental, since they’re from different components of the language, but it is a sweet synchronicity.
.
* i think the song is best parsed as an oath by the red flag (appearing in the previous verse), made from blood and tears, witnessed by the stars, and observed by heaven and earth, but a few other combinations are certainly arguable.
Actually, the cross-cultural implications of “swearing” must vary quite a bit
In German, schwören has only the meaning “affirm solemnly / invoke a deity or similar entity”. The meaning “say bad words” is covered by fluchen “curse”.
say bad words
There don’t seem to be any specific verbs for that in Oti-Volta languages, although there are plenty of verbs meaning “insult.”
Even the various words marked “vulgar” in the more strait-laced dictionaries seem to turn up in proverbs and the like. They don’t seem to have any standalone shock value. Of course, it may be that the really Bad Words just haven’t made it into the dictionaries compiled by nicely brought up linguists (not a few of whom are associated with SIL.)
It’s actually interesting how English “oath”, “swear” and “curse” have come down in the world, to the point of just referring to saying bad words.
The Kusaal Bible uses nɔpɔɔr for both “oath” and “curse” (in the full “solemn promise” and “malediction” senses, respectively.) Positive and negative aspects of the same concept.
In my native variety of English, the non-rhotic “cuss” alternative to “curse” pretty much only refers to bad words, and is thus usefully different from “curse” which also still bears the “supernatural difficulty/obstacle” and “imprecation that harm may befall someone” senses. I was older than I should have been before I actually noticed that cuss was in fact a doublet of curse, a la bust to burst.
Or even schimpfen “scold” – “bad words/swearwords” are Schimpfwörter.
(More later.)
Kusaal nɔpɔɔr “oath”, “curse” made me think about what it is exactly that these ideas have in common; the overlap is, after all, not confined to Kusaal, but appears in the English watered-down usages too.
In Kusaal, although the verb pɔ can appear alone as “swear”, it usually actually turns up in the collocation pɔ nɔɔr, where nɔɔr is literally “mouth”, but is common in the metaphorical sense “command”: with tis “give” you get tis nɔɔr, the usual idiom for “give a command”, and the compound nɔdi’es “command-receiver” is the standard term for a chief’s “linguist” or herald, who speaks on the chief’s behalf on all formal occasions.
So swearing an oath (or cursing someone) is conceived of as something like a command, but the use of pɔ instead of tis “give” must add some other nuance.
In SAE terms, I’d say that it adds a supernatural mechanism of some kind, though in Western Oti-Volta cultures I’d also say that using the term “supernatural” is superimposing our concepts onto a culture where their use is somewhat questionable. In particular, the swearer’s dead kin often seem to be involved, and the conception of these is really not like our idea of the spirits of the dead:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tony-Naden/publication/314891276_Ancestor_Non-worship_in_Mampruli/links/58cadd48a6fdccdf531a4f91/Ancestor-Non-worship-in-Mampruli.pdf
It seems to be more: OK, you’re dead, but you’re still family.
Be that as it may, I think all this aligns (to some extent) with JWB’s point about verb mood above; after all: “Die!” is just an imperative, but “May you die!” is a curse, even without any explicit invocation of whether the proposed mechanism is a helpful deity, an impersonal fate or blind chance. (Or ones’ friends and relations, whether currently alive or not.)
In other words, it’s a kind of ontological modal thing. (And modal realism is a pretty supernatural notion … “I would prefer a universe in which you were dead.”)
Optatives don’t necessarily presuppose theism, but they do seem to presuppose some kind of belief that your words and your wishes can affect reality through means other than the straightforwardly physical – a belief that it is actually possible to bless and to curse. Without that, an optative just boils down to a sort of impotent hope, which is not quite the same thing. What makes oaths a serious business is the (often implicit) optative penalty clause.
(I suppose an ill-defined belief in psychosomatic effects, or even just in the psychological effects of words, would suffice to render some optatives coherent. That would be a pretty weak reed to lean on for oaths, though.)
Obviously there are plenty of human cultures that conceptualize (actual or alleged/perceived) phenomena modern Western cultures would call “supernatural” as just another ordinary part of “nature.” I don’t know if there’s another adjective that would usefully distinguish that particular sort of “natural” phenomena without that baggage, but maybe such a label would be useful?
Alternatively, it’s interesting to consider what the “by” in “swears by” conveys exactly. It often seems to bring in a witness or guarantor, as opposed to “swear on“, where the preposition may bring in a stake: “I swear on my life.” Sometimes a kind of credential.
Naden’s Agolle Kusaal dictionary has just one example of pɔ which is not drawn from the Bible translation:
ba wʋsa zi’enid nɛ bʋnnwɛ’ɛda la ka ba pɔ pɔɔr n fʋʋs taaba
“they all stand with the drummers and proclaim clan-dirges in competition with each other”
“Dirge” is probably a bit of editorialising; as I said, pɔɔr is really a clan genealogy. But it suggests that the primary sense of pɔ may be to declare one’s trustworthiness as being part of a wider network of obligations, whether social or “religious.” A validation mechanism …
After all, what exactly does “I solemnly affirm that” add to “I tell you that …”? Is it no more than “I really mean this?” That doesn’t seem an adequate account.
@JWB:
The late Wayne Suttles wrote an interesting essay on what I suppose you might call “cryptozoology” in Salishan cultures. One of his central points is that the speakers did not distinguish in any way between “ordinary” fauna and creatures like the “seelthkey”, which if I remember right, was a sort of two-headed river monster. At most, they might say that Europeans didn’t seem able to identify them. Describing the creature as “mythological” is evidently to project our own categories onto the Salish. (I’m not saying that there is no place for doing exactly that. We need our categories. But it’s hopeless as an analysis of the actual Salishan culture.)
It often seems to bring in a witness or guarantor, as opposed to “swear on“, where the preposition may bring in a stake: “I swear on my life.”
Or an enforcer?
Not sure what it’s doing in the Objectivist (ḥāšākum) credo: “I swear by my life and my love of it…” Maybe we can chalk that up to L2 issues, though.
Classical Arabic has no less than three oath particles translated in English with “by”: wa-, ta-, and bi-. Bi- is just the usual instrumental (and sometimes locative) preposition; wa- looks like “and”, but, unlike “and”, assigns case; ta- has no other function. In Algerian Arabic you sometimes find ḥəqq used in this function – literally “right (of)” (in Classical ḥaqq also means “truth”, but in Algerian Arabic that sense has generally been replaced by ṣəḥ̣ḥ.)
Sometimes a kind of credential.
“I swear by my PhD that Greek doulos is not the source of Chinese nuli!” Doesn’t work for me (I think the technical term is “infelicitous”), but it would be pretty funny.
Judging from the German bei that’s used there, it’s “by” as in “by my side”, not as in “by means of”.
No, of course not – unless it’s in a legal context where perjury is actionable.
Like and assigning nominative case in (some versions of) “between you and I”?
…very guttural languages the…
“I tell you that X” no doubt generally has some implicature that X is true or at least that the speaker genuinely believes X to be true. But that’s the sort of implicature that’s a default presumption not an absolute guarantee. So additional language is useful in explicitly excluding the possibility that this is an utterance to which the default presumption doesn’t apply. (Unless the additional language is added in bad faith, of course.)
Consider the use of phrasing like “frankly, X” or “to tell you the truth, X.” These both suggest something (perhaps weakly in many actual uses) like “this is a context in which it would have been perfectly polite and socially acceptable to shy away from telling you the actual truth but please take note that I’m gonna tell you the actual truth anyway.”
ḥāšākum
The source of Swahili ashakum ‘pardon the expression.’
I am a man upon the land, but I am a seelthkey in the river.
It’s often been noted (truly) that e.g.
“I really will.”
actually inspires less confidence than
“I will.”
Classical Arabic has no less than three oath particles translated in English with “by”: wa-, ta-, and bi-.
Kusaal is the other way: it only has nɛ “with” for all the English prepositions used after “swear.”
m pɔ nɛ Na’ab Faaro yʋ’ʋr ye
I swear with King Pharaoh name that
“I swear in Pharaoh’s name that …”
It’s presumably to be taken as instrumental, just like “with a spoon.” But nɛ is a kind of Swiss-army-knife preposition anyway: Kusaal has only got two home-grown prepositions altogether.
I am a man upon the land, but I am a seelthkey in the river.
The Great Selkie/Silkie of Sule Skerry; I don’t know any versions with “river” instead of “sea.” Are you thinking of a particular performance? Joan Baez, for instance, doesn’t seem to have anything that could be interpreted as a “th” sound (at 1:31). Or is “seelthkey” a jokey reference to something earlier in the thread that I have already forgotten?
Or is “seelthkey” a jokey reference to something earlier in the thread that I have already forgotten?
There was I, thinking that my most casual asides were treasured by a grateful public … (many a time, besotted fans have stolen my rubbish bin, hoping to find some discarded scrap of paper with a scribbled aperçu, discarded by me as unworthy but piercingly illuminating to lesser intellects) …
https://languagehat.com/okuka-lokole/#comment-4673708
Hmm. Where does “I swear I will” fall on the confidence-inspiring scale? Obviously for these sorts of future-looking statements it’s sometimes not so much that the added verbiage is assumed to be in bad faith but that it reflects an empirically dubious-in-context wish that hope will indeed triumph over experience.
Where does “I swear I will” fall on the confidence-inspiring scale?
Below “I will” if there are only two of us present; above “I will” if there are others about whose opinions are significant to us both, for whatever reason (or if we both genuinely think there are such others present, to cover the “religious” aspect.)
If there are just the two of us, the “I swear” has no real content, and my including it would have to be taken as a (mere) piece of rhetoric.
I think that even with only two relevant people (believed to be) present, “I swear I will” or “I promise I will” implies more commitment than plain “I will”—maybe a higher priority, a way of helping oneself remember. (Not having the will/shall distinction, I’ll add that this applies only to things within the speaker’s control.)
I suppose some people let their “I will” be “I will” and their “I won’t”, “I won’t”, in which case “swear” and “promise” don’t add anything.
In the two-person-only scenario, why is the promiser saying “I swear”? Surely a reasonable assumption is that on previous occasions when they’ve said just “I will”, the promisee has been disappointed. Or that the promisee has some other reason, known to both, to doubt the commitment.
Nobody says “I swear I will do the washing up tonight” if they have an unblemished record of washing-up-doing.
Grice’s maxims strike again.
There was I, thinking that my most casual asides were treasured by a grateful public
You know, all I had to do was ctrl-F for “seelthkey” — but no, I couldn’t be bothered. Apologies to RC and DE; at least I learned some stuff about the song…
Re “I swear I will…”, for me this is (1) a parent speaking to a child, where the action is rather hypothetical, (2) a child speaking to a parent, where the action is likely to occur, especially if it will result in public embarassment for a parent, (3) a boy (or drunken man) speaking to another boy (or drunken man), where the action will only happen with great reluctance, if there is no other option (e.g., passing out).
why is the promiser saying “I swear”?
In Algeria, wəḷḷah “by God” has grammaticalised to the point that I’ve heard people use it with imperatives, saying things like wəḷḷah ɣir ṛuḥ triyyəḥ “seriously, go and rest!” Many religious Algerians very reasonably object to this sort of trivialisation of oaths, but that’s the way people talk.
Re “I swear I will…”, for me this is
You’ve omitted what seems to me the most likely case, that of a man speaking to his significant other and swearing that he will perform some task that has been presented to him as urgent, whether it’s “clean out the garage” or “stop drinking” or something in between.
I suppose that in the two-person case, one might save my “swearing requires an audience” hypothesis, not simply by declaring that it’s not “proper” swearing at all, but by saying that the swearer is coopting the swearee as the relevant audience. In effect, saying: “I hearby specifically agree that you may draw adverse conclusions about my character, if I fail to make good on the following statement.”
a kind of credential. / “I swear by my PhD that Greek doulos is not the source of Chinese nuli!”
i think that more than credentialing, there’s a sort of analogy/comparison function here, and also in the Bundist example i brought in:
“my commitment to this organization and the struggles it engages in is as deep / as important to me as my commitment to the ideals signified by the red flag”
“my conviction that doulos =/=> nuli is as firm as my university’s conviction that i deserve a doctorate”
or, for that matter
“my commitment to actually doing the dishes this time is as important to me as [caring for] my mother’s grave”*
there is still, i think, an invocation of an external arbiter/witness/guarantor/enforcer, but in these cases not a beyond-this-world-ly one, as there is without a specified thing being sworn by.
.
* nb: always visit the invoked gravesite before forming a firm opinion about what the sink will look like next week.
@hat
I suppose this is after the man has exhausted other possibilities such as “when the game is over”, “when I have time”, “first thing tomorrow”, “when it stops raining” (this is really good in Ireland), and less firm affirmations like “I promise” (significant others have an amazing memory for promises and are likely to respond with “But you promised me you would do this yesterday/last year/before we got married”, using unfair non-verbal inducements that throw the man into a state of confused perplexity).
It’s much more widespread. I’m not sure what exactly it means in the 2nd-generation-immigrant sociolect of German here in Berlin, but it’s common, despite the fact that it introduces not one but two one-word phonemes (the [w] is kept somehow, even though Turkish doesn’t have it either).
This brings me to what religion is doing in swearing in the first place. I think swearing by things originated – or originates over and over again – as a comparison: “as it is, obviously, true that [obvious fact], so [the matter under discussion] is true”. What an obvious fact is is ever-so-slightly culturally influenced: “as certainly as I have balls*, so certainly is the accused innocent”; “as certainly as I have honor, so certainly is the accused innocent”; “as certainly as God keeps day & night going, so certainly is the accused innocent”. Swearing by God is a claim that the subject of the oath is as certain as God’s existence. That becomes rather embarrassing if the oath turns out to be false after all, hence the religious objection to doing that; but this very embarrassment also serves as an extra incentive to tell the truth, and that’s my understanding of the practice of beginning public speeches with “bismiḷḷāh”, for example.
* testes, testiculi…
And that passage is widely taught to children, entirely unlike the story of Jephthah for example (which I only learned about when I saw a statue referencing it in a museum). The whole “I really mean it this time, on penalty of perjury or whatever” business isn’t necessary if you don’t lie in the first place, so it ought not to be necessary…
Yet, few Christians other than Quakers seem to have taken this really seriously. German-speaking Quakers are thin on the ground; that’s probably why I’m not aware of any “swear or affirm” formula in German. That said, German does offer a bit more lexical diversity in another way. You can do other things with an oath than swearing it: einen Eid schwören is perfectly cromulent, but there’s also einen Eid ablegen* and einen Eid leisten**; a court-certified expert who is automatically under oath when on duty*** is simply beeidet… and for certain particularly performative oaths, you don’t say ich schwöre but ich gelobe, notably when joining the Austrian army or when taking part in the entirely optional ceremony for your MSc degree. (In the likewise entirely optional ceremony for the doctorate you use the Latin original: spondeo.)
The actually legally valid act of receiving an academic degree instead involves signing an oath. No speaking at all.
* “lay down” in an abstract sense… докласть?
** …”perform”…?
*** If I’ve correctly understood what it means. IANAL in any jurisdiction.
@David: the more non-mainstream post-Reformation German sects that would have aligned with the Quakers on that issue mostly emigrated to Pennsylvania to find a place to live that tolerated them better than any German regime of the day did. Some ended up in other places; there are now ultimately-German-descended Mennonites in places ranging from Russia to Bolivia. If the legal systems in German speaking countries show no trace of historical attempts to accommodate Mennonites etc. that’s presumably a result of the systems historically having been uninterested in offering any such accommodation.
Yes. Cujus regio, ejus religio is fine so long as you can find a qui who shares your own religio. Otherwise, not so much.
Fair enough, though the current legal systems are younger than that (they’re all based on the Code Napoléon in one way or another).
Wallah has entered the SAE ideophone inventory to stay. Inchallah too, probably.
¡Olé!
Looks like it.
Ojalá doesn’t seem to be spreading. Just walla and yalla.
I somehow forgot about yallah,
Did they have oaths in pre-Columbian America, I wonder? I don’t remember coming across any examples.
@Lameen
https://alegatos.azc.uam.mx/index.php/ra/article/download/437/425
“El derecho maya prehispánico, un acercamiento a su fundamentación socio-política”
Antonio Salcedo Flores
—
Para compurgarse, o afirmar alguna cosa, no usaban de juramento, pero en su lugar echaban maldiciones al que presumían mentiroso, y se creía (que) no mentían por el temor de ellas.
—
citing for this:
López Cogolludo, fray Diego. Valiéndose de la Relación de Gaspar Antonio Xiu (Indígena Intérprete por
el Rey en el Juzgado Mayor de Yucatán), y siguiendo a Pedro Sánchez de Aguilar. Libro Cuarto, CapítuloIV. pp. 180-182.
So no proleptic conditional self-cursing, but only cursing by others after the event in the case of presumed transgression.
According to Sapir, pre-Columbian America didn’t have proverbs. I don’t know if this observation has stood up to the test of time, but at any rate he must have noticed some profound difference.
Interesting that some cultural features that you might have thought would be human-universal in fact seem to have spread right across Eurasia and Africa in the time since the Americas were settled.
Thanks PlasticPaddy – good find. Ni jurons, ni proverbes !
It is kind of mind-blowing to think that astrology (which the Classical Maya did have) might in a certain sense be a more universal human behaviour than oaths. Wonder what it was like in Australia?
It’s funny (well, grimly amusing) how long it’s taking us (“us” in the sense of “educated bearers of Western Culture™) to dig ourselves out of the assumption that everything that seems normal/natural to us is Universal Human Behavior. How much better are we, really, than Freud, who generalized from a tiny set of middle-class Viennese patients in the early years of the twentieth century to all of humanity forever? (Didn’t he try to psychoanalyze Moses?)
Well, I don’t know: proverbs and oaths at least seem rather better candidates for human universals than Oedipus complexes and suchlike.
And some non-trivial non-biological things really do seem to be universal. Apart from the obvious example of Language, there’s telling imaginary stories, for example. I’ve never heard of a culture where that’s absent.
It’s certainly true that one can only discover potential universals by observation, though, preferably incuding groups as disparate as possible. Not by sitting down and thinking about it, or generalising from the groups closest to oneself. That way lies only Chomskyanism …
And some supposed universals look as if they’re based on overhasty identification of some aspect of the culture in question with a possibly quite different aspect of our own culture: for example, the idea that all cultures include a “religious” component.
I’m not saying there are no universals, just that we’re awfully ready to generalize to them.
Plus I never pass up a chance to take a whack at Freud.
Fair.
DE, do you remember the source of the Sapir quote?
It seems to me that the difference between a phrase-length striking metaphor (presumed universal) and a sentence-length “proverb” is merely one of degree. That, plus the (not presumed universal) practice of presenting a proverb as an entity to be displayed, which makes the ethnographer notice it more readily.
I suspect that with some minor flexibilty in definition, yes, one would find proverb-like expressions are universal or close to such.
Note the equal but opposite problems of uncritically extending a label from our own culture (e.g. “religion”) to something in a given culture that’s somewhat different and in declining to extend a label from our own culture (e.g. “proverb”) to another something in a given culture that’s somewhat different, even with an asterisk or something added to the label.
do you remember the source of the Sapir quote?
Unfortunately, no, though I’m pretty sure of the attribution.
I’ve got quite a lot of Sapiriana here and there. I might have a look in due course.
@JWB:
African proverbs, at least as they appear in Oti-Volta languages and in Hausa, do indeed differ in their social and discourse roles from the SAE type (though the similarities are strong enough that “proverb” still seems a reasonable term.)
Kusaal proverbs often have a riddle-like vibe, and they can have different meanings in different contexts. Their frequent ambiguity, which seems frustrating to a European, is a feature rather than a bug: they can be used to make a point obliquely and deniably, so that the meaning gets across without anybody having to lose face themselves or having to outright contradict a senior person to their face.* Using proverbs effectively is a valued social skill.
Chapter 14 of Ruth Finnegan’s
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345762818_Oral_Literature_in_Africa
suggests that all this is pretty typical for Africa. Proverbs don’t just sit there being Wisdom Literature: they’re a tool for everyday use in discourse. It’s constructions all the way down!
* A bit like Nathan’s parable of the ewe lamb that he recites to David in 2 Samuel 12, except that Nathan has to spell it out for the king after trapping him into condemning himself out of his own mouth.
So proverbs are kind of in between metaphors and parables.
I guess. Also, jokes.
It’s interesting (well, to me, anyhow) that while the verbs are, as you might expect, usually in the imperfective aspect, corresponding to an English timeless present:
Ku’om zɔt nɛ bian’ar zug.
water run.IMPERFECTIVE FOCUS mud head
“Water flows over mud.”
you get some where the verb is perfective, and even marked as past tense, so they’re like micro-anecdotes:
Kʋkɔma da zab taaba asɔn’e bi’ela yɛla.
lepers FAR.PAST fight each.other PERSONIFIER.surpass slightly about
“Some lepers once fought about who was a little better.”
@de
The leper one sounds like a great idea for a reality TV programme, with the profits going to a UN leprosy charity. Working title: “Give me a hand”.
Well, it would make a change from Love Island.
You’ve omitted what seems to me the most likely case, that of a man speaking to his significant other and swearing that he will perform some task that has been presented to him as urgent, whether it’s “clean out the garage” or “stop drinking” or something in between.
Just happened on an excellent example. The recent revival of this thread inspired me to a rewatch of the film, and around the 1:10 mark, as Belmondo is trying to get his former girlfriend Fabienne to betray her current boyfriend Nuttheccio (Michel Piccoli), he says “Après, nous partirons ensemble, je te jure.”
I’ve read somewhere (JWB might put me straight) that at some point in English law it was forbidden for the accused to testify in their own defense. Presumably, it was done because in the court of law one should give a sworn testimony and if the accused is put under oath and is in fact guilty they will have no choice but confess or forfeit their immortal soul, which the courts were not ready to accept.
In Biblical Hebrew, general-purpose verb for taking an oath is שָׁבַע but usually comes in niphal stem/binyan, which is passive/reflexive. With the explanation that a person swearing an oath takes themselves under oath so to say. Which might be true, or might be an example of linguification. Because the word for fighting (לָחַם) is also usually comes in niphal with the explanation that one doesn’t as much fights one’s enemy but puts oneself in the fighting state. Which makes about as much sense as tying velcro on running shoes.
the word for fighting (לָחַם) is also usually comes in niphal
Greek μάχομαι “I fight” is a middle deponent, similarly.
“Mom, he!!! He is quarreling!!!”
– my sister about the other brother, often
A plausible (to me) list of cultural universals due to George Murdock. Wikipedia has a longer list that’s apparently excerpted from an even longer one due to Donald Brown. It also used to contain a long criticism of Brown’s list, with many citations, but somebody deleted it as not neutral!
the word for fighting (לָחַם) is also usually comes in niphal
Se battre (contre) in French, too.
Kusaal zab “fight” means “hurt” (of a body part, etc) in intransitive use. M zug la zabidnɛ “My head hurts.”
This seems to be an idiosyncrasy of this one Western Oti-Volta erymon rather than a general areal semantic overlap, though.
A plausible (to me) list of cultural universals
AFAIK, the Kusaasi have no “eschatology”, and they definitely have no puberty rites for either sex (admittedly, unusually for the region.) They have puberty, sure, but counting that as “culture” without further ado looks like cheating to me.
Some of these “universals” seem vague enough to be universal by definition, without any actual substantive content. Others seem … implausible. Is “having no eschatology” a kind of “null eschatology”? What’s a “population policy”?
@D.O.: I don’t know the history all that well but the peculiarity you refer to was a consequence of a broader pattern in which e.g. neither the plaintiff nor defendant could give sworn evidence in an ordinary civil dispute, because both had an obvious bias arising from their personal stake in the outcome of the dispute. Eventually the policy shifted in both civil and criminal cases to allowing the testimony of the obviously-interested parties, with the jury permitted to decide how much to discount what they had to say in light of their obvious bias. That bias, we would now say, may go to the weight the jury chooses to give to the testimony, not to its admissibility. The change was generally accomplished via statutory reform in the U.S. and other English-speaking jurisdictions at various dates over the course of the second half of the 19th century, so even the most elderly lawyers I encountered when I was a very young lawyer had no practical or even second-hand-report exposure to the older way of doing things that now seems so counterintuitive.
I agree with DE as to the plausibility of the purported universals; “eschatology” in particular struck me as crying out for debunking.
@DE: Come to think of it, I don’t think the majority in the U.S. have puberty customs either, unless you count giving girls sanitary products at menarche. Maybe having a talk about sexual matters? (Being a member of a minority, I had a bar mitzvah, which is sometimes called a puberty rite.) Did British cultures ever have puberty customs?
population policy
It may happen that all pre-industrial societies have some cultural population control mechanisms. But it clearly not what is happening in all countries suffering (or enjoying, your choice) the second demographic transition. They are usually trying to raise the birthrates. Which, I guess, also is a sort of “population policy”. Not that it looks very universal, when I put it like that.
puberty customs
Proms?
@JF:
If so, I missed mine …
Dan Everett would doubtless have a grand old time with these universals, come to think of it …
The list is so weird that I wonder if Thackera has in fact misunderstood Murdock’s book. I mean, things like age cohorts are a staple of ethnography, and a formal feature of many cultures, but describing them as cultural “universals” seems daft. They just aren’t.
You could make it work by including things like legal drinking ages in the US, perhaps. Or pretending that natural physiological changes (like puberty) were ipso facto part of “culture” even if not actually formally noted in any way. But you end up emptying the supposed “universal” of any real content.
The WP list does just say “common” in the preamble, which many of the items surely are. But then to call them “universals” is a plain abuse of language.
I note that the list there actually includes oaths. And proverbs.
All these lists seem to slyly include what are almost certainly innate features due to human biology as cultural “universals”, and some don’t even seem to understand the need to separate the concepts.
Admittedly, it might be the case that there are no cultural universals other than those that we all owe to our human physiology: but if so, that would actually constitute a contingent fact about humanity: essentially, it would mean that there are no “cultural” universals, properly so called, at all – only biological universals.
I suspect that in some cases there is an attempt to present what is actually sociobiology as if it were neutral ethnographic description, by selecting as “cultural universals” all and only those features that sociobiological ideology would predict.
This needn’t be done in bad faith, exactly: when you are lucky enough to be in possession of the Ultimate Theory, it is natural to want to confirm that the facts align with it.
(A kind of parallel to Chomskyan determination to prove that Pirahã does too have recursion. ANC himself at that point seems to have been more relaxed about this, feeling that it was enough to say that the Pirahã could have used recursion, but clearly just didn’t feel like it. Not too far from Everett’s own view that this was all due to the effect of the distinctive Pirahã culture on the language …)
@de
Re “age cohorts”, Gangs including gang warfare and attacks on non-gang members are a universal, and this is not even restricted to humans.
I was actually thinking of something more specific. Societies that do go big on rites of passage often have groups that went through the rite in question at the same time, and such groups often have additional social roles. Ethnographic literature is full of examples.
Sure, teen gangs are a bit like that, but equating them is exactly the kind of basic methodological error that I was moaning about about re “religion” (but even more so.) The problems with saying just what a “proverb” is, that Y and JWB flagged up, are a more subtle example.
You can’t make a meaningful “universal” just by cobbling together things which strike the investigator as being a bit similar. As a bare minimum, you’d need to establish that the things you were equating had genuinely parallel functions within their respective cultures.
I think that there are a lot of parallels with linguistic universals. In particular, there is the same dichotomy between Greenberg-style investigators who collect actual data, look for common patterns, and tend to talk of strong tendencies or conditional universals, and Chomskyite types who deduce how things must be from introspection or cherry-picked pet examples, and then interpret all other data in terms of their preset categories, which they imagine to be absolute universals.
In fact, if I may be so Hegelian, I think the answer is a synthesis. You have to have a theory, or your research will just be blind groping and you won’t even know what you’re looking at in the data; but the data are paramount, and if the theory can’t cope with them, you have to look for a better one (maybe a tweak, maybe a radical rethink.) You won’t be able to do that if you think your theory can already explain everything: you’ll just start explaining away the data, without even realising what you’re really doing. No such theories actually exist; people who think they do are not scientists.
(Like my hero said, All grammars leak. So do all ethnographies.)
@DE: Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get access to any of Murdock’s writings on this. (Apparently there are slightly different lists.) His essay “The Common Denominator of Cultures” is available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5973218 but for some JSTOR says my institution doesn’t have access.
Charles Hockett, citing Murdock (1945), says on p. 453 at this JSTOR line that I do have access to, “Anthropologists tell us that the tendency for the members of a community to fall into various subgroups on the basis of similar age, with differentiation of economic function, ceremonial activity, and so on, is a universal phenomenon; this phenomenon is termed AGE-GRADING.” Rites of passage don’t seem to be required, and youth gangs might in fact qualify. If that really is found in all cultures (which of course I don’t know), I think it would be interesting even if the functions of the subgroups aren’t parallel.
Your suspicion about preconceived sociobiological ideas matches an uncited comment in the part of the Wikiparticle that was deleted: “Brown chose to ignore this data and instead cobble together a narrative which seems to fit with his sociobiological presuppositions, selectively citing authors who agreed with him and ignoring those (such as Gwen J. Broude) who did not.” Murdock’s list was way before sociobiology, though I don’t know what other preconceptions he might have had.
A Google Books snippet from Murdock’s Outline of Cultural Materials says, “Population Policy — theories and attitudes relating to the control of population ; measures designed to stimulate or limit population growth ; concepts of optimum population ; etc. * * * For specific data on cannibalism see 266, on castration see 304 […]” Something else I found but can’t find again mentions infanticide during food shortage, and emigration of young unmarried men, as part of population policy in Murdock’s sense. I suppose that in the modern North it would include immigration law and patterns of enforcement. (Do you suppose that a conditional universal is that every culture that has laws has inconsistent enforcement?)
Yes, Murdock might have taken some items off his list if he’d lived to read and decided to believe Everett about the Pirahã.
Murdock’s list has other problems. For instance, “magic” could cover a lot of the other items, such as divination, luck superstitions, and weather control. But what good possibilities do you see on it? I like a lot of the leisure-time ones—games, music, poetry, decoration, etc.
ETA: Yes, I agree about theories and data.
Murdock seems to have had an agenda of his own (apart from informing on colleagues for the FBI during the McCarthy era.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Murdock
He seems to have had a partucular animus against the Boas school. (Boas is a particular hate figure on the far right; though no doubt you can be anti-Boas without actually being a fascist.)
He seems to have been exactly the kind of person who would not consider it either necessary or desirable to interpret a culture on its own terms.
I agree that “playing” is a good candidate (though you could possibly maintain a biological basis there.)
The more I look at Murdock’s list, the less persuasive it looks. Weaving? As a universal?
The ones relating to “magic”, “weather control”, “propitiating spiritual beings” etc are indeed problematic. Apart from not being logically independent, as you say, they blatantly incorporate interpretational biases. They beg the question.
I think what’s going on here is that Murdock’s “universals” were actually a standardised checklist of things he looked for in cultures, so he’d start with something like “propitiating spiritual entities” and see what he could put in the box for that culture.
I think there can be a place for that kind of thing. But it has precious little to do with anything reasonably called “universals.”
A linguistic analogy would be the old Croom Helm series of grammars, based on the Lingua language questionnaire. Languages all have to be described within this Procrustean bed approach; the individual grammars can be extremely frustrating to use. Some of the WALS stuff has similar drawbacks. As I say, there is a place for such top-down classificatory study. But it’s a big mistake to confuse it with discovering universals.
An approach that classifies both “castration” and “cannibalism” as instances of a proposed Universal called “Population Control”, seems to me to have little to contribute to the understanding of human culture.
From Edward Sapir’s WP page:
From Wissler’s WP page:
Just noticed that Thackera in fact does not cite Murdock directly, but has got this from E O Wilson’s Consilience. I’ve not read that, but given that Wilson was the fons et origo of Sociobiology, I suspect that this list of “universals” is intended to support or illustrate his doctrines.
I’m not clear whether Murdock himself actually regarded his classificatory categories as “universals” in the sense of “found in all cultures” – and the very nature of some of them suggests otherwise, I’d have thought. So that may be a sociobiology-induced misreading of his work. Murdock may just have meant that his taxonomies were universally applicable across cultures, which is not quite the same thing. (Though still a somewhat bold claim …)
Chomskyite types who deduce how things must be from introspection or cherry-picked pet examples, and then interpret all other data in terms of their preset categories, which they imagine to be absolute universals.
I’ve written before about my Intro. to Linguistics course at Indiana U in 1972. One day the instructor gave an example of a linguistic universal secundum Chomsky via Koutsoudas. Someone in the class immediately cited a counterexample, at which point the instructor said to the effect, I swear, “Well, some things are universal to some languages but not to others.”
I agree that “playing” is a good candidate (though you could possibly maintain a biological basis there.)
I haven’t seen a claim that these things don’t have a biological basis. In fact, at least one sociobiologist has claimed that they must have a genetic basis. But the more interesting ones are the ones like music, games, and divination that don’t have an obvious biological basis.
The more I look at Murdock’s list, the less persuasive it looks. Weaving? As a universal?
Presumably including baskets and nets, and maybe other things such as wattle fences. Are there cultures that don’t have any of those? But we don’t know exactly what he meant, since we haven’t looked at what he wrote.
An approach that classifies both “castration” and “cannibalism” as instances of a proposed Universal called “Population Control”, seems to me to have little to contribute to the understanding of human culture.
The index entry doesn’t say that castration is always part of Population Policy rather than Music Policy or Harem Policy. If he knew of even one culture where it was explicitly or (in his understanding) implicitly used in Population Policy, it would be mentioned in the index entry. Likewise for cannibalism.
I think what’s going on here is that Murdock’s “universals” were actually a standardised checklist of things he looked for in cultures, so he’d start with something like “propitiating spiritual entities” and see what he could put in the box for that culture.
Seems unlikely to me, since some things to look for are conspicuously absent. Why list personal names but not place names, visiting but not gossiping, ethnobotany but not ethnozoology? I’d say a strong possibility that he had reason to believe those missing items, however common, were not found in all cultures. Again you’d need to know what he really wrote. Why greetings and not farewells, or did his “greetings” include farewells?
Of course he and the anthropologists he was relying on may have misinterpreted some things because of their preconceptions and for other reasons, but I don’t think his list is a taxonomy of things to look for.
What I really want, by the way, is an actual list of phenomena that are found in all cultures, partly for my interest and partly because Someone Is Wrong Elsewhere On The Internet, but I can’t find a reliable one. You’ve convinced me that this list is less reliable than I hoped, but I’d still like one.
I think the WALS analogy may be a good one, since one legacy of Murdock’s late-career work is the roughly-analogous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Cross-Cultural_Sample. This is not the sort of approach of someone who already has a Grand Explanatory Universal Theory – it’s the approach of someone who thinks you first need to assemble a good dataset within which to look for patterns and connections that you won’t have thought of until you find them, which will then enable broader (maybe even universal, it will be hoped) explanatory theories to be developed. But you can’t have a good dataset for that purpose unless you have a fairly standardized descriptive approach to cataloging the distinctive features of each individual culture. But of course that standardized approach, whatever it is, will already have its own implicit taxonomy and assumptions as to what to look for and take notes on. Which is a problem but I don’t know how to get around it.
JWB, it’s just the scientific method in action. If one’s starting with something reasonable and maintains an open mind, then the next iteration is, at least one hopes, going to be better. The problem is, the number of cultures/languages is not that large and after a few rounds there is a good chance of overfitting.
I haven’t seen a claim that these things don’t have a biological basis
You can make the claim vacuously true by treating all local variation as fundamentally trivial – the Chomsky method. Given that we actually are animals, the claim that all culture is biological can be made into a virtual tautology. This is the ever-popular technique of solving problems by denying that they exist. But in reality, the variation is exactly what makes these things worth studying at all.
Language is overwhelmingly the most important human cultural artefact, and is very complex. So searching for genuine human cultural universals should look to language first.
Things that seem good candidates for linguistic universals to me include (among much else) personal names and place names. But there are a lot of differences in detail, even in these apparently simple domains: indigenous Kusaal personal names, for example, are all meaningful in Kusaal itself; Yimas has individual proper names for almost all small pieces of land within its traditional territory.
Semilinguistic: I have never heard of a culture without fictional stories. Or jokes. Or lies.
Outside language, the same pattern recurs: certainly biological needs and drives underpin most everyday activities, but the modes by which they are met vary enormously.
Kin groups, for example, are obviously biologically based, but work very differently in different cultures.
Games, along with singing and dancing, may well reflect our biology (young mamnals play); it’s hardly necessary to say that they take very different forms in different cultures. (Kayardild singing involves whispering while lying on one’s side, and Kayardild dancing involves repetitive rhythmical stomping, always accompanied by the same meaningless “word.”)
Another universal would be tool use. Obviously there is huge variation in the details. I don’t think it’s actually certain that all human cultures have fire, even. I’ve read about groups that are supposed to have lost it.
This shades into the whole field of how people feed themselves, protect themselves from the environment etc. The need to do that is obviously biological; the methods used vary enormously by culture.
Something like “food preparation techniques” is not a meaningful “cultural universal.” It’s “universal” to exactly the extent that cultures without anything at all that could be labelled as “food preparation techniques” (peel me a banana) have all rapidly starved to death.
There is also a vast range of culture that cannot be simply attributed to basic biological needs or drives, except by ludicrous sub-Freudian claims that of the kind that make poetry out to be just a way of attracting sexual partners. Sociobiology is a systematisation of such Just-So-Stories.
Charles Hockett (though a highly estimable linguist) was of course himself given to this kind of listicle-making:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_features
@JWB:
That was very much the idea behind the Croom Helm descriptive grammar series: they all have the exact same framework, reflecting the very detailed and sophisticated Lingua questionnaire. The idea was explicitly to enable cross-linguistic comparison (a very good thing.)
The trouble is that no single language actually fits the framework. You continually get sections that consist just of “feature X does not exist in this language”, and (in the better volumes) extensive appendixes for all the stuff which is vital to a proper description of the language but doesn’t fit anywhere in the framework.
A much worse problem is that the framework tends to force particular interpretations of the data. An illustration of the kind of thing I mean would be Kusaal
O kpiya.
“He’s died.”
M bɔɔd ye o kpi.
I want that he die
“I want him to die.”
OK. So is kpi “die” in the second sentence “subjunctive”? Is the -ya in kpiya an “indicative” flexion? A perfect marker?
In fact the language doesn’t work like that at all, and the answer to all these questions is “no.” But if I was filling in a questionnaire about whether Kusaal has a subjunctive I might well be tempted to put examples like these in, hopefully with an explanation of how it only looks like a subjunctive, rather than lamely put “Kusaal does not have a subjunctive.” Particularly if the actual Kusaal mechanisms aren’t mentioned anywhere in the questionnaire, and this seems to be the logical place to shoehorn them in.
I see a lot of this kind of thing in WALS, whenever it draws data from lesser-known languages that I actually know about myself. It’s really just a (much) more sophisticated version of the traditional practice of writing all grammars using the categories of Latin.
That doesn’t make enterprises like WALS bad or pointless; but it does mean that people need to be a lot more careful in drawing sweeping typological conclusions from such things. Unfortunately its very convenience tends to make ill-thought-out uses all too easy.
I think you should write a Kusaal grammar using the categories of Latin. In Latin.
Faciam, mehercle!
Declensio Prima:
Numerus Singularis
Casus Nominativus: nid “homo”
Vocativus: nida “O homo!”
Accusativus: nid “hominem”
Genitivus: nid “hominis”
Dativus: nid “homini”
Ablativus: nid “homine”
Locativus: nidin “coram homine”
Pluralis
Nominativus: nidib “homines”
Vocativus: nidiba. “O homines!”
Accusativus: nidib “homines”
Genitivus: nidib “hominum”
Dativus: nidib “hominibus”
Ablativus: nidib “hominibus”
Locativus: nidibin “coram hominibus”
…
A promising start. Nihil obstat. Finish the manuscript quickly so (with the long lead times endemic to academic publishing …) Brill can be selling it for a perfectly reasonable $266 per copy by sometime in 2028.
Writing a Latin grammar in Kusaal might be easier …
There’s a quite good Kusaal WP page on phonetics, presumably by someone from the Ghana Institute of Linguistics (both people credited have Kusaasi names):
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%E2%86%84n%CE%B5tiks
What does the parenthetical a in Takim(a) indicate?
Plural, formally. Singular takim, plural takima “hard palate”; it can appear as a plural form with singular meaning, hence the variation.
Most Kusaal body-part nouns belong to that noun-class pairing/”gender”, though with the notable exceptions of “head”, “hand”, “belly”, “eye” and, for some speakers, “heart.”
“Head” did belong in that “gender” in proto-Oti-Volta, but for some reason changed in the “Outer Oti-Volta” branch; “hand/arm” belonged to a “long narrow things” gender which is defunct in Western Oti-Volta; “belly” is just odd; “eye” belongs to a “small round things” gender, which also includes all words for seeds.
Women, fire and dangerous things …
Cultures spoken in very disparate settlements (in the Amazon rainforest or the Ob snowforest) sometimes lack personal names altogether. People use kinship terms instead – they know few enough people that this is feasible.
Baboons lie. No language required.
That’s about making fire, not having it – and even that seems to be exaggerated: contrary to a widespread claim, the aboriginal Tasmanians did make fire, they just couldn’t do it in the rain, and it rains nearly all the time in Tasmania, so carrying fire around (in a very sophisticated way!) was the preferred solution.
…highly dispersed, rather. Very low population density, so all people you know are your relatives or at least your spouse’s relatives.
Cultures spoken in very disparate settlements (in the Amazon rainforest or the Ob snowforest) sometimes lack personal names altogether
I’m astonished. And I’ve crossed another one off the list.
…highly dispersed, rather.
Could be both. Settlements in the Amazon basin are probably quite different from those in the Ob basin.
The Pirahã (of course) do have personal names, but the way they use them can be quite different from what we might expect.
@DE: Thanks for the suggested universals!
Something like “food preparation techniques” is not a meaningful “cultural universal.” It’s “universal” to exactly the extent that cultures without anything at all that could be labelled as “food preparation techniques” (peel me a banana) have all rapidly starved to death.
I took Murdock’s “cooking” to mean the use of fire or similar heat sources. (I admit I was considering “inhaling” and “exhaling” for a less serious list of cultural universals.)
I suspect that the real human cultural universals would be a lot more obvious to a Martian than to us. We can’t see them properly. Too close to them.
Whether such features simply arise from our biology is probably unanswerable: I think you could make the argument that the impossibility of separating nature from nurture is the most distinctive feature of human beings among other animals. It’s in our nature to be artificial.
@David E. It is in the nature of beavers to construct dams. Doesn’t mean dams aren’t “artificial.” Maybe some of our artifices are less tangible, but that’s a different line.
As the Proverbs of Hell puts it: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Large parts of our personalities are external.
kóy táréy k̀ à tê
go outside and do it!
Lameen, thanks for that! A nice addition to the dossier of data on sky-gods who oversee oaths that I use in comparative mythology courses. Cf. for example, Varro De lingua latina 5.65–66 (p. 62–63 here):
And similarly, Nonius Marcellus, p.793 here, under the archaic form rituis (quoting a lost treatise by Varro on the education of youth), mentions that according to the Roman custom, someone who wished to swear by the god Dius Fidius while at home went out into the open area of the compluvium (where the inward-sloping roofs collected rainwater).
The Kusaasi say
Win nyɛ ka sin.
“God has seen and is silent.”
meaning that the Creator is not concerned with human transgressions. Though I suppose that the proverb does have a somewhat menacing undertone …
On sky gods: the words for “God” and “sun” are identical in most Oti-Volta languages, but not in Western Oti-Volta: for example, the Kusaal for “sun” is winnig /wìnnɪ̀g/, beside Win /wɪ̄n/ “God”, with different root vowels and different tones. It’s the cognate of Win “God” that does double-duty for “sun” as well in most of Oti-Volta.
I think Western Oti-Volta most likely preserves the original state of affairs. The win word refers not only to the Creator, but to the spiritual individuality of anything; the win of a human being is the nearest equivalent to our “soul”; it corresponds to Latin genius much more closely than deus. It seems unlikely to me that a word primarily meaning “sun” would have extended its meaning that far.
Moreover, nobody actually seems to worship the sun.
I have, however, come across accounts of Oti-Volta beliefs that the wina of people originated from the sun and return to the sun at death. This is difficult to square with the Kusaasi concept that the wina of dead kin are still around and protecting the family. I suspect that the idea began as a kind of pun (perhaps rather like the English Christian hymn-writers’ “Son/Sun.”)
There’s a precedent for that kind of pun-taken-seriously in the belief that the location of common sense is in the gall bladder: the relevent words for “gall bladder” and “intelligence” must be of different origins, but have fallen together by regular sound changes in many Oti-Volta languages. But the words are also identical in some languages where you’d have expected them to have remained distinct: diffused beliefs have presumably overridden the regular developments.
Kusaal nɔpɔɔr “oath”, “curse” made me think about what it is exactly that these ideas have in common; the overlap is, after all, not confined to Kusaal, but appears in the English watered-down usages too.
In this regard, note the root śap- in Vedic and Sanskrit (leaving some complications out for the sake of brevity and clarity): The Vedic active śápati is ‘he curses’ (or ‘she curses’, etc.; 3sg present active indicative), with the thing cursed in the accusative. The middle śápate is ‘he swears an oath’, lit. ‘curses himself’, if the what he swears or the oath he takes turns out to be false, with the thing sworn by in the instrumental. That is, a swearer brings down a curse or punishment on himself if what he swears is false. This root śap- ‘curse, swear’ continues on even to Romani (e.g. Welsh Romani, p. 336 in Sampson’s The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales here). The Indic root śap- has a secure cognate in Sogdian psyp ‘slander’, but beyond that it is uncertain.
And also note OCS клѧти klęti ‘to curse’ beside клѧти сѧ klęti sę ‘to swear’ (< *‘curse oneself (if what one says is not true)’), also reflected in Russian клясть ‘to curse’ vs. клясться ‘to swear, vow’, etc.; see Vasmer under кляну and Trubachyov here under klęti, vol. 10, p. 37f.
Laud. Temp. Ac. has an interesting post about how a particular work by Aristophanes has dozens of occurrences where the dialogue literally says “by Zeus” but one particular translator has rendered them all with non-divine, non-oath-like English like “certainly” or “I’ll bet.” Perhaps this is based on an accurate view that the Greek was so bleached of its etymological meaning that a more literal translation would be misleading?
https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2025/10/by-zeus-in-aristophanes-wealth.html
I’d call it an inaccurate view, myself. Zeus may not have been front and center, but I don’t think he could have been completely bleached out — it’s not like спасибо ‘thanks’ hiding бог ‘god,’ which is certainly bleached.
Would you translate it “by Zeus”? That would be intrusive for me in a way that I doubt it was for an ancient reader/listener. “By god” might have the right ratio of cliche for me.
Is there a particular myth that gave Zeus the epithet quoted at Laudator, “Zeus the savior”? Or just the open possibility that he might answer your prayer rather than that of your antagonist? Where adding the epithet is more hopeful than descriptive – Please be my savior, not that other guy’s.
Would you translate it “by Zeus”?
Certainly. Surely anyone who is likely to read Aristophanes is aware of expressions like that; why would it be intrusive? (Would you also want references to the Agora changed to something more modern — Times Square, say?) Especially if, like Jeffery Henderson, you’re going to render one occurrence “By Zeus the Savior…”
A notable intervention by Zeus Soter occurs occurs in Xenophon, Anabasis 3.2. But I really have to go to sleep now, so I’ll just post a link to an LH comment on the topic here.
LTA has another post with the same complaint about a translation of Lysistrata. I checked this translation:
http://www.faenumpublishing.com/uploads/2/3/9/8/23987979/aristophanes_lysistrata_a_dual_language_edition_-_johnston.pdf
Mostly “by God” is used, except where a God X other than Zeus is named; there “by X” is used. Exceptions are
-several uses of (Oh)(my) god
-by Zeus (lines 1033, 1188, 1241)
-Come on (lines 95, 452)
-Yes, that’s right (line 559)
-omitted (line 990)
Maybe LTA would prefer this. I would say that it is hard to defend the coupling of emphasis with genuine reverence for Gods , especially considering the variety of Gods invoked and the context in which they are invoked. The emphasis seems rather to serve a comic (or maybe even metrical?) purpose, The omission at line 990 would seem to be because the author uses a double emphasis for comic effect, for Irish readers you could translate “I haven’t got one, so I haven’t”
I suppose the (presumably Low Church Prod) translator that offended LTA did not have emphasis using God’s name in his own idiolect or felt he was “improving” the text by replacing a formulaic expression with an idiomatic equivalent.
>why would it be intrusive?
I meant something like what you had written — “Zeus may not have been front and center, but I don’t think he could have been completely bleached out.”
For me, “by Zeus” puts Zeus front and center. But I admit that “by God” leaves him completely out, while maybe translating the spirit of the exclamation.
I wasn’t saying either way is wrong, just wondering how you’d translate it.
Beginning of Aristophanes’ Frogs (which has something for everyone):
XANTHIAS
Look, master, an audience! Shouldn’t I say something?
Tell them one of those jokes they always fall for?
DIONYSUS
O, all right—say what you like. Only no jokes
about how you’re dying to piss. I can’t stand those—
they’re all so stale.
(continues in this vein for some time …)
“O, all right” in the original is νὴ τὸν Δία “yes, by Zeus.” I don’t think Dionysus is thinking of his dad particularly at this point.
Which may have been the first joke of the play (subtler than jokes about dying to piss)…
Exactly.
I suppose “stale” is an obscure pun in the translation.
Yeah, that’s the translator’s invention: the original is a double entendre on πιέζομαι “I’m squeezed” (At this point, Xanthus is carrying all the luggage while sitting on a donkey.)
Dionysus goes on to list various other off-colour remarks that Xanthus is not allowed to make because of their offensiveness.