languagehat.com

Back in 2004 I posted about the Northeast Caucasian language Udi; now Patrick Cox of The World in Words (last seen here in 2016 investigating Ainu) has a piece about its current situation and ancient history:

Zinobiani is a village like many others in Georgia’s Kakheti wine region. Nestled beneath the towering Caucasus mountains, its roads are unpaved, its dwellings modest. Most people there are involved in the grape cultivation of grapes.  There is one big difference about Zinobiani: Most of its older inhabitants — mostly people over the age of 40 — speak Udi, a language with a long and rich history that linguists are feverishly documenting while it is still spoken. […]

Many dying languages take their secrets with them. Most are just oral languages, never having been written down. And we may never know much about them. Udi, however, is different. It has its own ancient alphabet and an unlikely grammatical feature that some linguists believe is unique. […]

The Udi language is spoken by as many as 20,000 people today in several communities scattered across Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia. But it’s in Georgia where the language has attracted international attention from linguists and historians.

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Dave Wilton has a Big List post about a kind of car whose US name is well known to me but whose etymology I didn’t know and whose UK name was unfamiliar:

A station wagon, as we know it today, is an automobile that in addition to two (or more) rows of passenger seating, has a large storage area in the back with a rear door for loading and unloading. The name comes from the idea that the car is well suited for transporting people and luggage to and from railway stations. The name is American in origin and predates the automobile, being first applied to horse-drawn carriages used for that purpose.

It’s one of those things that when you’re told it you slap your head and go “Of course!” But I had never connected station wagons with railway stations, and now I feel silly. (There’s much more about the sense development at the link.) The post ends:

In Britain, such cars are labeled as estate cars. That name dates to at least 1937, when it appears in an ad for Renault vehicles in the Daily Telegraph of 7 October […]

But there’s no explanation of the name (nor is there at the OED entry s.v. estate: “estate car n. a light saloon motor car spec. constructed or adapted to carry both passengers and goods”); I can only presume it was meant to carry posh folk to their estates.

The discussion page has much discussion of woodies (with wooden panels), and  Syntinen Laulu writes:

The estate car has features in common with the shooting brake. The horse-drawn brake was a four-wheeled cart adapted to carry both goods and people (a large country house would probably keep a brake with seats to fetch guests and their luggage from the railway station), and a horse-drawn shooting brake had seats for the sportsmen and a sort of box or cage underneath the seats for their gun-dogs. I suspect that both car types were named out of a desire to convey the idea that the roomy space at the back was for elite leisure equipment rather than working tools or groceries.

The shooting brake was entirely new to me; Jared Paul Stern has a discussion with lots of images and the following tidbit:

The term shooting brake derived from a type of horse-drawn carriage called a “brake” that was used by the likes of the Prince of Wales on shooting parties in the 1890s, which subsequently evolved into a motorized vehicle. Originally it was distinguished from the station wagon or “estate” car by having only two doors, a much more rakish profile.

BBC News reports on a new finding about an old text:

A Sanskrit grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th Century BC has been solved by a University of Cambridge PhD student. Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago. […]

Mr Rajpopat said he had “a eureka moment in Cambridge” after spending nine months “getting nowhere”. […]

Panini’s grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences. However, two or more of Panini’s rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in conflicts.

Panini taught a “metarule”, which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning “in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order wins”. However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. […]

His supervisor at Cambridge, professor of Sanskrit Vincenzo Vergiani, said: “He has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for centuries. “This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”

The last quote is ridiculously hyped, of course, but this is genuinely exciting news for anyone interested in Sanskrit. (Assuming, of course, that it’s true…) Thanks, Trevor!

Stan Carey investigates an international phenomenon:

The expressions swear like a trooper and swear like a sailor are so common as to be cliché. But why do we swear ‘like a trooper’ or ‘like a sailor’? And what else do we swear like, idiomatically, in English and other languages?

He explains that swearing has long been identified with the military, especially sailors (and includes the famous Ashley Montagu quote about “Get your ––––ing rifles!”), then says that “dozens of variants also occur, and even the more clichéd forms are often modified to make things more interesting”:

I used wild-card searches to look up the phrases swear like a, swears like a, swearing like a, and swore like a, and the equivalents with curse and cuss, in Mark Davies’s language corpora.

I disregarded examples like swears like a Christian, …French Canadian, …gentleman, …girl twice her age, and …kid that are descriptive rather than emphatic and idiomatic. Swears like an [X] results were sparse and also generally fell into this category. […]

The table shows a clear top three: sailor, trooper, and trucker. But in the historical corpus COHA (1820–2019), trooper has a slight edge and pirate jumps into third place.

There follow lots of graphs, one-off quotes (“a chef who has just burnt his fingers in the soufflé,” “a schooner full of drunken navvies”), and analysis, e.g.:
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OK, this is yer basic clickbait, but I learned some stuff from it and you might too. Danielle Abril of the Washington Post has a quiz (archived) with the following introduction:

With boomers, Generation X, millennials and Generation Z all in one workplace and increasingly communicating online, some of the quirkiness of each generation has come to light. The result: the potential for confusion and misinterpretations of what your colleague is saying, especially as younger workers introduce new lingo and expressions.

Avoiding misinterpretations of text and emojis will only become more important as more young professionals, who grew up communicating digitally, enter the workforce. Gen Z workers — defined as those born between 1997 and 2012 — are expected to more than triple in the United States, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and United Kingdom, accounting for 30 percent of total employment by 2030, according to a study by Oxford Economics.

So let’s put your knowledge to the test. How well do you think you can understand your Gen Z colleagues in the workplace? Here are six questions based on our conversations with Gen Z workers.

I got 5/6 due to sheer luck (the one meaning I know for “out of pocket” is irrelevant here, but I guessed right) plus a bit of knowledge and perhaps overly generous quiz construction (many of the proposed answers are obviously wrong); see how well you do. Thanks, Sven!

Tariq Panja reports for the NY Times (archived) about a man with a difficult job:

There is perhaps no one in the world who has paid closer attention to the diction and pronunciation of the former England soccer captain John Terry over the past month than Lassaad Tounakti, a 52-year-old Tunisian with a gift for languages, a passion for cologne and an accidental television career.

For Tounakti, understanding the minute details of the way Terry speaks is no casual affair. His ability to understand Terry’s every utterance has been a vital part of one of the World Cup’s toughest, and least forgiving, man-to-man assignments: As the main interpreter for beIN Sports, Tounakti has since the start of the tournament served as the voice of Terry and other retired stars hired by BeIN as it has transmitted the tournament night after night to Arabic-speaking viewers across the Middle East and North Africa. […]

Interpreting their words — quickly, precisely and live on the air — requires an extraordinary fluency in not only languages but soccer. For Tounakti, it means translating every word of Arabic into English in the ears of the former soccer stars before flicking a switch — literally and in his mind — and immediately rendering their thoughts, delivered in English, back into Arabic.

Every voice is different. The English diction of Kaká, a World Cup-winning Brazilian, is different from that of the Dutch soccer great Ruud Gullit, and the nuances of their pronunciations are different from those of the former Germany captain Lothar Matthäus.

Because of the sheer volume of coverage it is providing, beIN is employing four staff interpreters and supplementing them with freelancers for the World Cup. Most interpreters work in a rotation, but there are some accents, some ways of speaking, that require just a little bit more expert handling. Terry’s thick East London accent is one of those. […]

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John Cowan writes:

This is a YouTube channel that I’ve been listening to, moderated by Bahador Alast. He gets together two or more people who speak different languages or dialects and has each of them read out words, sentences (sometimes made-up sentences, sometimes literary, sometimes traditional proverbs), or whole paragraphs to see how much the others understand. None of the participants are linguists; they are mostly college students in various subjects. They giggle charmingly a lot.

Sometimes the languages are related genetically (German/Swedish), sometimes the similarities are due to borrowing (Turkish/French), and sometimes both (Romanian/Italian); some are sheer coincidence (Japanese/Kannada/Tamil). Of the “borrowing” pairs, some are shallow like Spanish/Filipino and others are deep like Hindi/Filipino (old Sanskrit borrowings). Usually the interchange is symmetrical: the German-speaker is asked to decipher Yiddish and vice versa, but sometimes it’s asymmetrical: the Norwegian is asked to figure out Icelandic, but it’s plain that the Icelander already understands Norwegian.

A few of the videos are different: there is one in which a couple of Greeks are asked to understand some Aristotle, Plato, and Homer, and another in which a Turk and a Türkmen are given some Old Turkic of various ages to figure out. In all cases modern pronunciation is used.

Bahador is particularly good at digging up speakers of lesser-known languages such as Arbëreshë Albanian (there is a funny bit in this one where the Balkan Albanian says “So your people changed your name to Arbëresh?” and the Italo-Albanian replies, “No, before Skanderbeg’s time all Shqiptar called themselves Arbëresh!”), Neo-Aramaic, Balochi, etc. Each video is 15-30 minutes long, and they are a good distraction for me from my ongoing situation. You only need English to follow what’s going on, and I think the Hattics will enjoy them.

Definite LH material — thanks, JC!

A thought-provoking Facebook post by Michael Rosen:

There are two German words which people who write about literature and culture get very interested in: ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ and ‘unheimlich’. The first one was made popular by Brecht and is mostly translated these days as ‘alienation effect’ and the second was used by Freud and is mostly translated as ‘uncanny’.

They both express ideas of being unfamiliar or ‘distanced’ or ‘alienated’ from the piece of literature or or spectacle (film, play, drama) that you’re watching. In Brecht’s case, he was talking about something he tried to achieve in his plays in which one moment the audience would be ‘involved’ or ‘in’ the drama and the next, reflecting, debating about what they had just seen. He and his ‘dramaturg’ (theatre expert, if you like) Erwin Piscator, discussed how ‘Epic Theatre’ as they called it, did that as with the Chorus in Greek Tragedy or Shakespeare did it with characters discussing the whys and wherefores of their actions, often through soliloquies.

In Freud’s case, ‘unheimlich’ is a feeling that you get in dreams, or in literature – particularly of the ‘horror’ genre, where you feel strange, (literally un-at-home-like). In his essay on the ‘uncanny’ he linked it with other horror features like the ‘labyrinth’, being buried alive.

Now let’s jump to speaking a language that you’ve been taught at school. I’m 76, so languages I was taught at school happened 60 years ago. I speak French pretty fluently and when I’m in France, I find that I can often talk without knowing that I’m talking. Stuff just surfaces and I don’t have to think through phrases, grammar, vocabulary. I just say it. Every now and then, though, of course, I stop and grope in my mind for something. Where do I go? Sometimes, I find myself going to a lesson or even a teacher in my mind for the way of saying a ‘difficult phrase’ like, say, , ‘I should have done that’ or the word for an ash tree.

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An interesting suggestion at Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti:

1 Corinthians 4:6 (Revised Standard Version):

I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another.

ταῦτα δέ, ἀδελφοί, μετεσχημάτισα εἰς ἐμαυτὸν καὶ Ἀπολλῶν δι’ ὑμᾶς, ἵνα ἐν ἡμῖν μάθητε τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται, ἵνα μὴ εἷς ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἑνὸς φυσιοῦσθε κατὰ τοῦ ἑτέρου.

τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται del. Frid. Aug. Bornemann, “De memorabili glossemate, quod locum I Corinth. 4, 6. insedisse videtur,” Biblische Studien von Geistlichen des Königreichs Sachsen 2 (1843) 37-44 (at 37-40).

Bornemann, p. 38 (my translation):

I would like you to recognize in the words τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται nothing but an annotation, by which the scribe wanted to indicate that in the original in front of his eyes, the negative word μή had been written above the final letter of the conjunction ἵνα, in such a way that the scribe doubted whether he should consider it as genuine or not, whether he should put it in the text or omit it.

In verbis τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται nihil nisi adnotamentum velim agnoscas, quo librarius indicaturus erat, in archetypo, quod ipsi ante oculos erat, negationem μή literae ultimae coniunctionis ἵνα superscriptam fuisse, ita ut haesitaret scriba, pro genuina haberet necne, in textisne poneret, an omitteret.

In other words, the scribe meant to note that “μή has been written above α (of ἵνα).”

Gilleland adds this from Joseph A. Fitzmyer ad loc. (3rd of 4 explanations of τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται):
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Paul Celan, «Du darfst mich getrost» (Atemwende, 1967):

Du darfst mich getrost
mit Schnee bewirten:
sooft ich Schulter an Schulter
mit dem Maulbeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer,
schrie sein jüngstes
Blatt.

Scots translation by David Kinloch:

Ye caun traistly
ser me wi snaw:
whenever shouder tae shouder
ah stapit thru simmer wi the mulberry
its smaaest leaf
skreicht

Traistly ‘confidently; assuredly; truly’; ser ‘to be of service or advantage to; to satisfy or content, specif. with food or drink’; stap ‘to step, walk, stroll’; simmer ‘summer’; skreich ‘to shriek, scream, screech, utter a high shrill cry.’ I like the translation a lot; “ser” for “bewirten” ‘to treat, feast, regale, entertain’ is particularly successful. (Snaw previously at LH. In case you’re wondering, mulberry is a perfectly good Scots word; it just happens to be spelled exactly like the English equivalent.)