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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!

As I said recently, Lena Eltang’s novel Каменные клены (Stone Maples) is giving me the pleasure of investigating all sorts of allusions, and one such led me on such an interesting trail I’m sharing it here. She quotes a line in Middle Welsh, A uo penn bit pont, which turns out to mean ‘He who is head, let him be bridge’ and to come from Branwen ferch Llŷr, the second branch of the Mabinogi (a book I happen to own thanks to my grad-school Celtic studies). By googling the Welsh, I turned up an article by Stefan Zimmer, “A uo penn bit pont: Aspects of Leadership in Celtic and Indo-European” (Zeitschrift fur celtische Philologie, 53.1 [2003]: 202–29; Academia.edu), which is full of good stuff. Zimmer starts with this summary of his aim:

The alleged saying in the title of this contribution has never been found attested elsewhere in Celtic literature, except by citation, of course. If it was a fixed expression, or even a proverb when the story became fixed as we have it, it must have had a long history already. The following investigation is an attempt to detect this background by means of historical linguistics and a comparison of IE literary formulas, adducing also archaeological findings.

He explains the context in the Mabinogi: “When Bendigeidvran leads his Welsh army against Ireland in order to avenge and free his unfortunate and maltreated sister Branwen, he comes to the river Llinon i.e. the Liffey.” The Irish have taken down the only bridge, but the Welsh king has a surprising solution:

Nit oes, heb ynteu, namyn a uo penn bit pont. Mi a uydaf pont, heb ef. ‘No, he says, except „He who is head, let him be bridge“. I’ll be the bridge.’ And accordingly, he bows over the river, is covered with fascines, and his whole army crosses over his back to the side where the Irish army stands, looking on and waiting in terror.

He then goes over the grammar of the quote:
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Mount Holyoke College has come up with an excellent idea:

The LCC [Language & Culture Commons] is excited to present six new little free world libraries that have been installed on campus this summer. Based on the concept started by the Little Free Library organization, the LCC student staff collaborated with the Fimbel lab folks (a big thank you to Kris Camp) to design and create the boxes during the 2021-22 academic year. Each little library provides books in one or two different languages and the MHC community is encouraged to “take a book, share (or leave) a book” as written on the little library doors in the language that the box holds. Feel free to borrow and/or donate a book to the box in the language of choice. We hope you thoroughly enjoy these new additions to the campus.

Pratt Hall: Chinese and Vietnamese
Ciruti Language Center: Spanish
Elliot House: Japanese
LITS/Dwight: French and Italian
Prospect Hall: Russian and German
Kendall Sports & Dance Complex: Arabic and Korean

There are pictures at the link. Thanks, Sven!

I’m reading Lena Eltang’s second novel, Каменные клены (Stone Maples, the name of the Welsh inn where most of the story takes place; for my thoughts on her first, see this post), and once again I am having the pleasant task of investigating all sorts of allusions and quotations, some of which are damnably difficult to track down (I think “Было не было, есть только есть” [Was wasn’t, there’s only is] is a distorted version of Faulkner’s “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” but I can’t be sure). There are a great many quotations (probably altered) from at least one old травник (herbal), and one of them reads:

…пурпур бывает античный, из морской улитки по капле выдоенный, и барочный — сок лишайника всего-навсего, выжатая насухо трава оризелло

…purple can be antique, milked from a sea snail drop by drop, or baroque — just the sap of a lichen, orizello grass squeezed dry

That mysterious word orizello sent me on a chase that had such a satisfying ending I had to bring it here. After much googling and comparing I eventually determined it was the same as the English word entered in the OED under orchil (entry updated September 2004), which exhibits this wide range of forms: orchell, orcall, orcheall, orchel, orchall, orchal, orcheal, orcheil, oricelle, orselle, orcella, orchill, orseille, orchil (and that’s not even taking into account the alternate form archil, which has its own entry). It’s pronounced with ch as both /k/ and /tʃ/, which is a bit odd, and means “A red or violet dye prepared from certain lichens, esp. Roccella tinctoria.” The etymology is tangled and interesting:
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