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The MIT Press Reader presents excerpts from a new book with a theory of how language evolved (yes, yet another one); here’s the introduction:

In their book “From Signal to Symbol,” Ronald Planer and Kim Sterelny propose a novel theory of language: that modern language is the product of a long series of increasingly rich protolanguages evolving over the last two million years. Arguing that language and cognition coevolved, they give a central role to archaeological evidence and attempt to infer cognitive capacities on the basis of that evidence, which they link in turn to communicative capacities.

If protolanguages began as largely gestural systems, Planer and Sterelny ask in the excerpt from the book featured below, why and how did vocalization become so important? They meet that challenge through the idea of a “firelight niche” — a term adapted from a phrase used by anthropologist Polly Wiessner in a 2014 article analyzing the fireside conversations of the Ju/’hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of South Africa — and the changed social and physical environments that came with the control of fire. In their view, selection for something like wordless singing and laughter led to improved vocal control. These behaviors helped to ease tensions and strengthen affiliative bonds as hominin social life became more complex and intense. With more vocal control available, the vocal channel offered various efficiencies, which were particularly salient at the fireside, in the firelight niche.
–The Editors

The excerpts themselves begin with an excursus on the contrasts between humans and great apes in feeding time (“Chimpanzees and orangutans, it is estimated, spend around 7 hours per day feeding, while gorillas spend some 8.8 hours per day on this activity”), then continues:
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Hester Blum has an OUPBlog piece on the oddness of the language of Moby-Dick:

There are a lot of peculiar phrases in Moby-Dick. My new introduction to the second Oxford World’s Classics edition of Herman Melville’s novel highlights the startling weirdness of the book, both in its literary form and its language. Weirdness extends beyond strangeness: weirdness also invokes enchantment, fate, curiosity, and the supernatural. In other words, when I say that Moby-Dick is weird I mean that in the best imaginable way. The novel’s weirdness does not subvert its monumentalism (nor its monumental reputation!) but serves as a sly sidelight on Moby-Dick’s ambitious attempts to create meaning. […]

In what follows I share some more of the most delightfully weird phrases or descriptors in the novel, in rough categories. First is the playfully, animalistically weird: 

• “It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros [Louis VI] might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season” 
• “anonymous babies”
• “a sort of badger-haired old merman”
• “an eruption of bears”
• “immaculate manliness”
• “the coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs”
• “how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle”
• “that unaccountable cone” [the whale’s penis]

Tnere’s more at the link, including a list of Melville’s “baroque adverbs”: wastingly, suckingly, rivallingly, inspectingly, and the link. I posted on Moby-Dick and its language back in 2016 (1, 2).

I started reading Colm Tóibín’s Jan. 27 TLS review of The Letters of John McGahern (I’ve never read McGahern; any thoughts from those who have?) when I was stopped by a word unknown to me, and apparently to almost everyone:

The first letter​ – five lines written to his father in April 1943 when John McGahern was eight years old – could take an entire book to gloss:

Dear Daddy,
        Thanks very much for the pictures. I had great fun reading them. Come to see us soon. We got two goats. Uncle Pat does not like them. Will you bring over my bicycle please and games. We are all well. I was gugering for Uncle Pat Thursday.
        Goodbye from Sean to Daddy

At the time, McGahern and his siblings were living in Aughawillan, County Leitrim, with their mother. […] ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’

The OED doesn’t have “gugering,” and Google turns up almost nothing — but it does find this entry in the Wannaskan Almanac for June 29, 2022, which includes vital incorrect information on pronunciation:

gugering: /GOO-jə-riNG/ v. IRISH, the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.

Anybody know anything more about this rustic word?

And a merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!

Update. Xerîb points out (in a 3:41 pm comment) that the pronunciation is actually /ɡʊɡərɪn/.

A couple of years ago I posted about Vadim Drozhzhinin, a character in Aksyonov’s novella Surplused Barrelware who prides himself on being an expert in the (imaginary) Latin American country of Haligalia, and wondered about other examples of “total immersion in another country.” Now Joel of Far Outliers has provided a fine example (from A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling, which sounds like a very interesting book):

I met San Sanych’s friend Sergey, the most exotic inhabitant of Abaza. He was an instrument maker. His house was stuffed with self-made didgeridoos and shaman drums, which he sold at Siberian folklore festivals. The business was going well; Sergey had almost enough money saved to realise his life’s dream. He wanted to emigrate. Abaza was not remote enough for him. He was drawn to a tiny island named Sonsorol, located in the middle of the Pacific. It had 23 inhabitants; Sergey wanted to be the 24th. So far he had only seen the island on pictures, but through the Internet he was in contact with two residents who supported his relocation plans. ‘They both know the Governor of the island,’ Sergey said proudly. I wanted to argue that with 23 inhabitants, every second one was presumably related to the Governor, but I bit my tongue. Sergey meant business. He had already filled out the visa form for the Pacific Republic of Palau. Now he was teaching himself the local language. Fascinated, I leafed through his rudimentary Russian-Palauan dictionary:

Mere direi – Babushka [Grandmother]

Haparu ma hatawahi – Spasibo [Thank you]

Hoda buou – Do svidaniya [Goodbye]

Joel adds:

According to the Sonsorol.com/language page, these are genuine words in Sonsorolese, a Chuukic language related to Woleaian and Ulithian in Yap State, which lies to the north of the Republic of Palau. The Palauan language is very different. One of my graduate school classmates did her dissertation on Pulo Anna, a dialect of Sonsorolese.

Does anybody know where the stress goes in the word Sonsorol?

Enrico Denard writes for Gothamist about a fraught and interesting topic:

In New York City, where nearly 200 different languages are spoken, the names people go by aren’t always as common as John, Mary, Jane or Steve. For those with less common monikers, mispronunciations of their names may come as frequently as train delays.

Although this issue can be just a minor nuisance for some, it can also be a chronic strain for people who say they experience additional social barriers because of their names. A person with a name that is easier to pronounce and write in English may not have this issue — unless they’re at Starbucks. But when a name deviates from the norm, mispronunciations can become a daily challenge. And, worse, native English speakers may avoid saying a name or even addressing the person in order to circumvent a challenging or unfamiliar pronunciation. […]

A 2013 research study [by Costanza Biavaschi, Corrado Giulietti, and Zahra Siddique] titled “The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization,” which looked at European and Northern Asian immigrants’ experiences during their naturalization processes from 1919 to 1930, showed that those who Anglicized their names went on to do better financially.

The study stated that, “When comparing the labor market trajectories of two migrants both named Guido at birth, one who Americanizes his name to John and one who keeps his name, John’s occupational-based earning growth is 22% higher than Guido’s occupational-based earning growth.” Today, people of immigrant descent still negotiate with the tension to fit in with an ethnic or uncommon name. WNYC spoke with New Yorkers who maneuver through life with names that affect their sense of place and community.

It’s easy to sympathize with both sides of the assimilate-or-not debate, and I recommend reading the experiences described by the people interviewed. (Even such a standard name as my own, Stephen, is mispronounced with surprising frequency, which is why it’s easier to use Steve at, say, Starbucks.)

Bloggers Karamazov (“The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society”) has an interview with Jeff Mezzocchi about his collection of books related to Crime and Punishment:

Rare book seller and high school teacher Jeff Mezzocchi has spent the past 10 years compiling a Crime and Punishment “bookshelf”—a collection of nineteenth-century works of philosophy, science, and fiction that form the novel’s intellectual backdrop. He has generously agreed to share his catalogue of first editions with our readers. You can access it here!

This week Greta Matzner-Gore sits down with Jeff to discuss his work. […]

GMG: You not only teach Crime and Punishment; you teach its intellectual context as well. In one of our email exchanges, for example, you mentioned that you discuss Feuerbach (!) with your students. What, in your opinion, is the most important philosophical background that students need in order to understand the novel? And how do you introduce this material to students who have little experience with philosophy? 

JM: By far, the most important philosophical background for students is understanding the ideas in Chernyshevsky’s works. I have my students read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for their summer assignment, and then as the year begins, we dive into excerpts from Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? I work with them on understanding some of the basics of philosophy: general distinctions in ontology (materialism and idealism), epistemology (rationalism and empiricism and, later, scientific rationalism), ethics (deontology and teleology). We read some excerpts from Plato’s Republic (the divided line and the allegory of the cave are particularly helpful to get a grasp on the language and distinctions between perspectives). This helps build a working vocabulary as we dig deeper into Chernyshevsky’s emphasis on positivism and rational egoism, his materialism, scientific rationalism, and utilitarianism. I actually have my students complete a project rooted in Chernyshevsky’s philosophy where they identify a problem in our world that creates suffering. Based on rational egoism, they must reshape public policy so that they eliminate the suffering, freeing people to pursue what is advantageous, allowing everyone to move towards happiness. Once they seem fully comfortable engaging with Chernyshevsky and his ideas, we pivot to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. It is a dense few months, but as we build through that sequence of texts, the students grow not only in their understanding but in their confidence. Class discussions become dynamic and engaging, and oftentimes I can sit back and just take notes on what my students say. 

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The Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, has been underway for a few weeks now; my contribution has traditionally been the first in the series, but this year there was a glitch in the transfer from one editor to another and I didn’t get the usual notification, so mine has just now shown up. I discuss Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Nicole Eustace’s Covered with Night, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (still great after all these years!) and Lee Konstantinou’s fine companion to it The Last Samurai Reread, Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country, Lucy Sante’s The Other Paris, Colin MacCabe and Richard Brody’s books on Godard, and the second (2020) edition of Ilya Bernstein’s Mandelstam (see my 2014 review of the first edition, as well as the Update to this post from earlier this year). Too late for Christmas gifts, but not too late to spur your own reading!

The NY Times book review section is running a series of pieces called “Read Your Way Through [City],” in which an author recommends books that will illuminate a traveler’s experience of a city they know well. The latest, by Tana French, is on Dublin, and its opening paragraphs are of Hattic interest:

One of my favorite things about Dublin is its relationship with words. History is embedded deep in language here. A lot of Dublin communities are tight-knit, with roots that go back centuries, so the dialect is sprinkled with words and phrases that have been passed down over the generations, even after they’ve vanished everywhere else. In Dublin, “my girlfriend” is still “me mot,” from the Victorian English “mort” for “woman” — long gone out of use in England, but still alive here. And back in the 16th century, “child” meant specifically a girl child; it’s been gender-neutral almost everywhere for hundreds of years, but within the last decade, when I had my second baby, older Dublin people still asked me “Is it a boy or a child?”

Even with so much ingrained history, Dublin’s language is the opposite of stagnant. Virtuosity and creativity with language aren’t seen as reserved for any kind of elite. They’re everyone’s birthright, and plenty of the most lyrical or wittiest or most original phrases aren’t carefully crafted by authors, but tossed into pub conversations by people who would never consider themselves to be literary types. And that creative eloquence isn’t a rarefied thing, to be treated with reverence; it’s cheerfully mixed in with every flavor of mundanity and vulgarity. If you love words, Dublin is a good place to be.

The OED’s entry for mort ‘girl, woman’ (updated December 2002) says:

Etymology: Origin unknown. See also mot n.³ [‘A promiscuous woman or girl; a harlot, prostitute’], and compare also English regional (Northumberland) moat woman.
With sense 1 perhaps compare mort n.³ [‘a young salmon,’ origin unknown] With sense 2 and mot n.³ perhaps compare Middle Dutch motte, mutte (compare motyhole n. [‘a term of abuse for a woman: a slut, a bitch,’ origin uncertain]). It has also been suggested that the word may be < Romani (1874 in G. Borrow Romano Lavo-Lil, but glossed ‘a cant word’), or an alteration of French amourette flirtation (12th cent. in Old French as amorete).

For child (entry updated December 2013):

Etymology: Cognate with Gothic kilþei womb, inkilþō pregnant woman, probably < the same Indo-European base as (with a different root extension) Gothic kalbo calf n.¹ and classical Latin glēba glebe n. Perhaps compare also Sanskrit jaṭhara belly, womb, although its origin is uncertain and disputed.

And note this interesting passage on “variation in stem vowel”:
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Via Fiasco da Gama’s MeFi post: Auslan, the majority Australian sign language, has a visual dictionary with three recognised signs for ‘holiday’, of which the second is noteworthy. The first comment, by prismatic7:

Oh yeah. […] you think hearing Aussies are sweary, cynical, and irreverent, you’re gonna shit meeting Auslan speakers.

I have a very dear friend whose Auslan name is essentially “short but big tits”, and she has a friend whose name translates as “the guy who put his dick in a vacuum cleaner”.

Auslan is wild.

Sounds like my kind of sign language, and the dictionary is great.

Mike Cummings writes for Yale News about a new exhibit at Sterling Memorial Library; the opening anecdote grabbed me immediately:

In 1940, Vladimir Nabokov moved to New York City from Paris and needed a job. He submitted his curriculum vitae to Yale along with three letters of reference, including one penned by Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivan Bunin.

It seems that Yale didn’t bite.

“I couldn’t find any evidence that the university ever replied,” said Anna Arays, librarian for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies at Yale University Library.

I’ll bet they regretted that! (And jeez, how could they ignore a recommendation from Bunin?) Anyway, it continues:

Nabokov’s CV and Bunin’s endorsement are displayed in “Subjects and Objects: Slavic Collections at Yale, 1896-2022,” an exhibit on view in Sterling Memorial Library’s Hanke Exhibition Gallery through Feb. 5, 2023. The exhibit explores how Yale’s Slavic collections — assembled over more than 125 years and housed across the university’s libraries and museums — chronicle the experiences of those who ruled, inhabited, visited, and fled the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

The exhibit also weaves a narrative of how the collections were built, focusing on materials from the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, which were the dominant powers in the Slavic world from the Early Modern period through the 20th century, and the heavy influence this complex imperial history had on the collections’ development. It also raises questions about how best to expand the collections three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. […]

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