languagehat.com

Tracey Teo writes for BBC Travel about a little-known language:

[Cedric] Watson is part of a grass roots resurgence to revive Kouri-Vini, a historical name for the Louisiana Creole language that has been reclaimed to prevent confusion with other things “Creole”, such as ethnicity, musical styles and culinary traditions.

Watson’s next album, slated for release this summer, will be sung mostly in Kouri-Vini. Today, the language has fewer than 6,000 speakers, but at the beginning of the 20th Century, it was spoken by much of the Creole population in the 22-parish region of south-west Louisiana known as Acadiana.

This unique cultural pocket of the US is sometimes called Cajun Country, but long before the arrival of the Francophone Acadians, or Cajuns, from Nova Scotia in 1755, there was a much larger population of French-speaking Creoles – people with roots in Europe and Africa born in Louisiana.

Thanks in large part to a generation of musicians devoted to preserving it, a Kouri-Vini renaissance is underway. Watson, who performs all over the world, considers himself an ambassador of Creole culture and language. […]

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A couple of years ago, I posted about a new and very welcome book, Women in the History of Linguistics, edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson. Now OUPblog posts some thoughts about the book by Ayres-Bennett and Sanson:

Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field. Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures, we need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language structure and function.

Classic histories of linguistics, very rarely, if ever, include women scholars. We set about uncovering the contribution of women linguists—from European and non-European traditions— and their ideas and writings to give them the recognition they deserve. […] We decided to challenge categories and concepts devised for male-dominated accounts and expands our field of enquiry: we turned our attention not only to pioneers and exceptional women, but also to those non-exceptional women who nevertheless quietly moved forward our knowledge of languages, their description, analysis, codification and acquisition. Painstaking research in archives and libraries, looking at manuscripts and printed sources, gradually unearthed rich, fascinating, and often unexpected evidence of women’s contribution.

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I read a rave New Yorker review by Hannah Goldfield (archived) of a Persian restaurant in Brooklyn called Eyval, and of course I wanted to know what the name meant. I checked my Persian dictionaries and couldn’t find it, but a little googling turned up 11 Simple Persian Words That Will Make You Sound More Fluent at Pontia’s site My Persian Corner, and one of the entries there was:

Eyval

Eyval (or eyvallâh, as it’s sometimes said) is an informal word that means “bravo” or “well done”, much like damet garm. In fact, it’s often combined with damet garm, as in [bâbâ] eyval, damet garm!

And eyvallâh was in my Persian-English dictionary (though not the Persian-Russian one), so I added the shorter form in the margin. At any rate, Pontia’s page is delightful and a real help to anyone trying to master the language (which I’d like to make another try at someday); here’s another entry:

Khasteh nabâshid

Literally “don’t be tired,” khasteh nabâshid can be used as a greeting or a goodbye. Typically, when I sit in a taxi, I’ll say salaam, khasteh nabâshid. And between classes, us teachers are always telling each other khasteh nabâshi as we come in and out of the breakroom.

So ubiquitous is this phrase that my students can’t get over the fact that there is no English equivalent.

“So what did your students in the US say to you?” they ask.

“Nothing. At best they said, ‘Thanks, bye.’”

Now, some of my students tell me khasteh nabâshid after class while others tell me “Good job.” I’m not sure where they got that one from, but it’s cute. And who am I to pass up a compliment?

Also, I wish I could visit the restaurant — I do love Persian food.

Jon Pareles’s NY Times obit (archived) for the peerless Huey “Piano” Smith has a paragraph with a quote about the creative process so compact and pungent that I am compelled to post it:

Mr. Smith’s lyrics were full of droll wordplay and irresistible nonsense-syllable choruses. “I use slangs and things like that,” he was quoted as saying in John Wirt’s biography, “Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Rockin’ Pneumonia Blues” (2014), “When you put the music with words and things together, the songs just make themselves. And after you listen at it, it says something its own self, that you hadn’t planned.”

For those not familiar with his work: “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” is pure perfection (as is his daughter’s name, Acquelyn Donsereaux).

Kim Severson writes in the NY Times (archived) about an appetizing new book:

Used judiciously, the snappy tidbits of food etymology in “Romaine Wasn’t Built in a Day,” a new book by the medieval scholar Judith Tschann, could make you a hit at dinner parties.

Say someone shows up in a seersucker suit. You could inform her that the British took the word seersucker from the Hindi sirsakar, which itself came from a Persian word meaning milk and sugar. The smooth stripes are the milk, the bumpy ones the sugar.

Over the Caesar salad, you could casually mention that the English word romaine comes from the medieval French laitue romaine, or Roman lettuce, which possibly arrived in France along with the popes who moved to Avignon from Rome to escape some nasty politics in the early 1300s.

But here’s a pro tip: When sharing food lore at a meal, it’s easy to cross the line. Do your friends dipping into a bowl of guacamole need to know that the word avocado started out as ahuacatl, a Nahuatl term that the Aztecs likely used as slang for testicles? Or that soufflé comes the French word for blown, which stems from the same root as the word flatulent?

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Laudator Temporis Acti posts a striking passage from F.C. Conybeare and St. George Stock, Selections from the Septuagint (Ginn & Company, 1905):

Josephus, it has been asserted, employs only one Hebraism, namely, the use of προστίθεσθαι with another verb in the sense of ‘doing something again’ (see Gram. of Sept. Gk. § 113). For the accuracy of this statement it would be hazardous to vouch, but the possibility of its being made serves to show the broad difference that there is between Hellenistic Greek, even as employed by a Jew, who, we know, had to learn the language, and the Biblical Greek of the Septuagint.

The uncompromising Hebraism of the Septuagint is doubtless due in part to the reverence felt by the translators for the Sacred Text. It was their business to give the very words of the Hebrew Bible to the Greek world, or to those of their own countrymen who lived in it and used its speech; as to the genius of the Greek language, that was entirely ignored. Take for instance Numbers 9¹⁰ — Ἄνθρωπος ἄνθρωπος ὃς ἐὰν γένηται ἀκάθαρτος ἐπὶ ψυχῇ ἀνθρώπου, ἢ ἐν ὁδῷ μακρὰν ὑμῖν ἢ ἐν ταῖς γενεαῖς ὑμῶν, καὶ ποιήσει τὸ πάσχα Κυρίῳ. Does anyone suppose that stuff of that sort was ever spoken at Alexandria? It might as well be maintained that a schoolboy’s translation of Euripides represents English as spoken in America.

One of our difficulties in explaining the meaning of the Greek in the Septuagint is that it is often doubtful whether the Greek had a meaning to those who wrote it. One often cannot be sure that they did not write down, without attaching any significance to them, the Greek words which seemed to be the nearest equivalents to the Hebrew before them. This is especially the case in the poetical passages, of which Deuteronomy 33¹⁰ᵇ will serve for an instance — ἐπιθήσουσιν θυμίαμα ἐν ὀργῇ σου, διὰ παντὸς ἐπὶ τὸ θυσιαστήριόν σου. We can account for this by aid of the original: but what did it mean to the translator?

Another obvious cause of difference between Biblical and Alexandrian Greek is the necessity under which the translators found themselves of inventing terms to express ideas which were wholly foreign to the Greek mind.

The result of these various causes is often such as to cause disgust to the classical student. Indeed a learned Jesuit Father has confessed to us what a shock he received on first making acquaintance with the Greek of the Septuagint.

Few, alas, are those students who can feel such a shock today…

Unrelated, but irresistible: Avva posts a screenshot from the Israeli Ministry of Health that has a Russian-language list of countries including Идти (Idti), between Denmark and Ireland. The puzzle is resolved once you realize идти is a Russian verb meaning ‘to go.’ Computer translation is convenient, but it will betray you at the most unexpected moments!

Thirteen years ago, old-school copy editor John McIntyre had what I called “a delightful hard-boiled detective story celebrating National Grammar Day”; now he’s got a follow-up, Grammar Noir: The Old Editor grilled, which begins:

I was at the bar sipping an afternoon boulevardier when some rando came in and asked, “Are you the Old Editor?” When I owned the soft impeachment, he handed me a piece of paper and said, “You have been served.”

The paper was a summons to testify before the House Subcommittee on Governmental Travesties, chaired by one Representative Browbeat, with regard to challenges to my book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing.

My attorneys at Dewey, Cheatam & Howe assured me that there was no option but to appear, so I selected a dark suit, a somber bow tie, and a humble demeanor, taking my seat in the chamber.

The Old Editor acquits himself nobly, and I learned a new cocktail name (“The boulevardier cocktail is an alcoholic drink composed of whiskey, sweet vermouth, and Campari”). Thanks, John!

I’ve been avoiding the whole hullabaloo about ChatGPT and related topics not because it doesn’t interest me but because I had nothing interesting to say about it — I shake my head at people’s eagerness to believe that such programs are actually communicating with us and may exhibit actual intelligence, I’m not happy about the chaos they’re going to cause in education and other areas, but those responses are very far from original. Now I’m happy to be able to post Elizabeth Weil’s “You Are Not a Parrot” (New York Magazine, Mar. 1; archived), featuring an actual linguist, Emily M. Bender, who says the things that need to be said with eloquence and conviction:

Bender is 49, unpretentious, stylistically practical, and extravagantly nerdy — a woman with two cats named after mathematicians who gets into debates with her husband of 22 years about whether the proper phrasing is “she doesn’t give a fuck” or “she has no fucks left to give.” In the past few years, in addition to running UW’s computational-linguistics master’s program, she has stood on the threshold of our chatbot future, screaming into the deafening techno beat of AI hype. To her ear, the overreach is nonstop: No, you shouldn’t use an LLM to “unredact” the Mueller Report; no, an LLM cannot meaningfully testify in the U.S. Senate; no, chatbots cannot “develop a near-precise understanding of the person on the other end.”

Please do not conflate word form and meaning. Mind your own credulity. These are Bender’s rallying cries. The octopus paper is a fable for our time. The big question underlying it is not about tech. It’s about us. How are we going to handle ourselves around these machines?

We go around assuming ours is a world in which speakers — people, creators of products, the products themselves — mean to say what they say and expect to live with the implications of their words. This is what philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett calls “the intentional stance.” But we’ve altered the world. We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text,” Bender told me when we met this winter. “But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” […]

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Andy Brunning of Compound Interest (“Explorations of everyday chemical compounds”) has a great post called A Periodic Table of Rejected Element Names that gives you the background to element names that wound up falling by the wayside; the first is:

Element 4: Glucinium (Beryllium)

The French chemist, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, examined both emerald and beryl and correctly reported that they contained a new element in 1798. He named this element glucine, with the symbol Gl, but as this name was very similar to that of the amino acid glycine it was criticised. When the first samples of the element were later isolated in 1828, the acceptance of the name beryllium, suggested by another chemist, Martin Henrich Klaproth, became more widespread. However, it wasn’t until 1949 that IUPAC ruled the element should be exclusively called beryllium.

And my two favorites:

Element 94: Extremium (Plutonium)

Extremium was reportedly one of the names considered by US chemists on their discovery of element 94 in 1940. However, the eventually settled on Plutonium (with Seaborg’s little joke of its symbol being Pu instead of Pl) in order to continue the series of planet-based element names.

Element 95: Pandemonium (Americium)

The discovery of elements 95 and 96 in 1945 spurred a host of suggestions for their names. Glenn Seaborg reportedly related that his colleague, Tom Morgan, referred to elements 95 and 96 as pandemonium and delirium. Supposedly, he considered proposing these names to IUPAC’s naming committee. Though a large number of names were suggested, Seaborg eventually plumped for americium for element 95.

If you’re curious about the names actually in use, we covered that in 2004.

John Cowan wrote me as follows:

I found the following sentence in the Kindle edition of a story by Josephine Tey: “To my unbounded relief, however, Lizbeth lapsed suddenly from the borders of hysteria to her normal fwent calm.”

“Fwent”?

Googling the first part of the sentence shows simply “her normal calm” in other editions, so “fwent” is probably not a typo for some other word (and if it were, what word could it be?) Googling for “fwent calm” shows no other instances. Bizarre.

Any guesses what went wrong? My only guess is that it is some kind of markup (not HTML) that infiltrated the text, like the 1805 KJV Bible edition where “to remain” (apparently being used in place of “stet”) wound up being printed in Gal 4:29, making it read “But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit to remain, even so it is now.” It *almost* makes sense.

I for one am baffled, and I’m curious what the assembled Hatters make of it.