languagehat.com

I vividly remember when Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind came out in 1977, and the rave reviews it got (the bloody thing was nominated for the National Book Award!); I thought then, and continue to think, that it is as prime an example of crackpottery as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which came out a couple of years later to similar acclaim. I was lured into reading Scott Alexander’s review because he started so winningly, saying it has “only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind.” Thus suckered in, I read and enjoyed the whole thing, but wouldn’t have thought of it as LH material except for this excursus:

Jaynes partisans are able to come up with a few anthropological works suggesting that the minds of primitive people are pretty weird, and I believe that, but they don’t seem quite as weird as Jaynes wants them to be. So the question becomes whether we would notice if some people worked in a pre-bicameral and pre-conscious way.

I’m tempted to answer “yes, obviously”, but for the counterargument, see this Reddit thread.

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Simon Romero reports for the NY Times (archived) on a dialect of Spanish that is slipping away:

QUESTA, N.M. — When the old regulars gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s coffee shop in Questa, N.M., a village nestled in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade and gossip in Spanish. Someone from Mexico City or Madrid sitting at the next table could be hard-pressed to follow their rare dialect. But Spanish speakers from four centuries ago might have recognized the unusual verb conjugations — if not the unorthodox pronunciations and words drawn from English and languages indigenous to North America.

For more than 400 years, these mountains have cradled a form of Spanish that today exists nowhere else on earth. Even after the absorption of their lands into the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers somehow kept the dialect alive, through poetry and song and the everyday exchanges on the streets of Hispanic enclaves scattered throughout the region.

Even just a few decades ago, the New Mexican dialect remained at the forefront of Spanish-language media in the United States, featured on television programs like the nationally syndicated 1960s Val de la O variety show. Balladeers like Al Hurricane nurtured the dialect in their songs. But such fixtures, along with the dazzling array of Spanish-language newspapers that once flourished in northern New Mexico, have largely faded. […]

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John Cowan wrote me as follows:

Proto-Semitic and Egyptian is a chapter by John Huehnergard from a forthcoming book Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic, obviously descended from a conference talk. Here’s a money quote:

My frustration in working on Afro-Asiatic was brought into sharp focus one semester, twenty-five or thirty years ago, when my late Harvard colleague Calvert Watkins, the eminent Indo-Europeanist, asked me to present the status quaestionis on AfroAsiatic to his graduate seminar on historical linguistics. At the end of my two- or three-hour presentation, Watkins’s first comment was something like, “So, not really an established family, then.” And I believe he was right, in the sense that there was still a long way to go to elicit significant numbers of plausible cognate sets across the branches and to formulate consistent sound correspondences on the basis of those cognates, the most fundamental goals of the comparative method. And I also believe that is still true today.

What is needed, still, is a reconstruction of the earlier stages of the other branches of Afro-Asiatic besides Egyptian and Semitic. If, for example, the Cushitic languages constitute a family, and if they are related to the Semitic languages, the comparanda must be Proto-Cushitic and Proto-Semitic. It is not acceptable to compare a form in a particular Cushitic language with a possibly similar form in a particular Semitic language; we are dealing with an enormous time depth, and the chance of accidental similarity is simply too great. Likewise, if there is a genetic relationship between Egyptian and Semitic, it must be because they descend, separately, from an ancestor that predates both of them.

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A pleasing obiter dictum from the melancholic and magisterial Samuel Johnson (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

Every man’s opinion, at least his desires, are a little influenced by his favourite studies. My zeal for languages may seem, perhaps, rather over-heated, even to those by whom I desire to be well esteemed. To those who have nothing in their thoughts but trade or policy, present power, or present money, I should not think it necessary to defend my opinions; but with men of letters I would not unwillingly compound, by wishing the continuance of every language, however narrow in its extent, or however incommodious for common purposes, till it is reposited in some version of a known book, that it may be always hereafter examined and compared with other languages, and then permitting its disuse. For this purpose, the translation of the Bible is most to be desired.

Needless to say, I disagree with the idea that once it is reposited a language can be disposed of, but still: a noble sentiment.

Back in 2007 I posted about a radio talk Deborah Tannen gave about “New York Style”; now here’s her early paper on a version of the topic, “New York Jewish Conversational Style” (International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30[1981]:133–149). That link is the paywalled De Gruyter one, but you can read the paper here, and an enjoyable read it is. Some excerpts:

My own findings on New York Jewish conversational style were in a way serendipitous as well. I had begun with the goal of discovering the features that made up the styles of each participant in two-and-a-half hours of naturally occurring conversation at dinner on Thanksgiving 1978. Analysis revealed, however, that three of the participants, all natives of New York of East European Jewish background, shared many stylistic features which could be seen to have a positive effect when used with each other and a negative effect when used with the three others. Moreover, the evening’s interaction was later characterized by three of the participants (independently) as “‘New York Jewish’ or ‘New York’”. Finally, whereas the tapes contained many examples of interchanges between two or three of the New Yorkers, it had no examples of talk among non-New Yorkers in which the New Yorkers did not participate. Thus, what began as a general study of conversational style ended by becoming an analysis of New York Jewish conversational style (Tannen, 1979).
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An eleven-and-a-half-minute video that is accurately summed up by the title. I did better than some of the contestants but worse than others; it was a lot of fun, and I learned a couple of insults. Thanks, Eric!

Some years ago, when I was working in pharmaceutical advertising (and later editing articles for medical journals), I had to get familiar with the AMA Manual of Style, and the more I used it the more I liked its mix of useful guidelines with good sense (not to mention the frontispiece of a fortune cookie split open to show a strip of paper reading “Your great attention to detail is both a blessing and a curse”). Now I learn, from this interview posted at the AMA Style Insider, that the mix is due to the amazingly sensible attitudes of its longtime editor, Cheryl Iverson:

Cheryl Iverson does not peeve about her grammatical peccadilloes as one might imagine of a woman who has spent her career editing, overseeing editing, and serving as the AMA Manual of Style committee chair for the last 3 editions—she continues as co-chair of the 11th edition, a work in progress. Although one might say that she doesn’t have any major pet peeves when it comes to grammar, she does admit, “I still get aggravated at the incorrect use of apostrophes like I – t- apostrophe – s. Those are not things that I would be willing to treat lightly.”

But concerns about splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a proposition, “some of those rules that people learned in grammar classes in grade school 50 years ago,” would be better off forgotten. She speculates that people who no longer understand the reason for the rule will either avoid the use or argue adamantly about using, say, different from rather than different than when in the end it doesn’t matter if meaning is clear. “That’s what I think. It’s good that we’ve gotten away from these old rules without understanding where they came from, which makes it hard for people to know when to bend a rule or when to disregard a rule.”

However, such discretion at the start of her career was discouraged.

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I just watched Alain Resnais’s nouvelle vague classic Muriel (one of whose characters has the improbable name Roland de Smoke), and in one of the extras on the Criterion Blu-ray someone explains that the reason the lyrics the great soprano Rita Streich sings to Hans Werner Henze’s music are inaudible is because Henze set them as though the words were German, completely ignoring French prosody. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

Also, I recently saw the delightful Bill Murray comedy Quick Change, and one of the best things in it is the gibberish Tony Shalhoub (playing a cabbie) speaks, as well as the look of tortured incomprehension with which he accompanies it. Shalhoub said: “They had me invent like a gibberish language because they wanted it to be like an unidentifiable thing. So I just made up my own dialogue, and it was a really crazy movie.” (It’s not just a comic bit, it’s an important plot point.) Highly recommended.

Joel at Far Outliers is quoting from Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu, and this post has a fascinating look at old attempts at reform of Chinese writing:

While working on his alphabet, Wang [Zhao] never strayed from the beliefs he had shared with the emperor back in 1898: China was losing its power because language was failing its people. Their low literacy and divided dialects impeded China’s ability to govern, negotiate with foreign powers, and keep pace with the outside world. China’s success as a nation and an international power hinged on the single issue of an accessible spoken and written language.

There had been others who shared Wang’s analysis of the problem, although they offered different answers to it. Lu Zhuangzhang, a Chinese Christian from Amoy (now Xiamen), developed the first phonetic system for a Chinese language by a Chinese. His 1892 Simple Script used fifty-five symbols, some of which were adapted from Roman letters to Chinese sound rules, to represent the southern dialect spoken in Amoy. Lu nearly went bankrupt in the process. Lu’s children would bemoan how he squandered the family’s livelihood financing his linguistic experiments.

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This Twitter thread starts off with Alex Shams saying:

I’ve seen English font pretending to be Arabic, Persian pretending to be Hebrew, Telugu pretending to be Chinese…

But this was the first time I saw Arabic trying to look like Syriac!

It’s followed by “Persian looking like Hebrew at a rest stop in Iran,” “Telugu as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic,” and other weirdness. Thanks, Y!