languagehat.com

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.

Teo Armus writes for the Washington Post (February 23, archived) about a woman who is trying to preserve Quechua language and culture:

Before she can begin filming her online radio show, María Luz Coca Luján must first transform herself into “K’ancha,” a digital persona dressed like the Indigenous “cholitas” of her native Bolivia. So on one recent afternoon, she hustled back home to swap out her construction attire for that traditional outfit — a colorful, billowing skirt, dangling gold jewelry, a bowler hat atop her neatly braided hair — and then started live-streaming. […]

Soon there were hundreds tuned in — from Madrid, Chile, New York — as the 32-year-old launched into a chatty monologue that rapidly became a vocabulary lesson in Quechua, the Indigenous South American language she has been battling to keep alive. “Tell me all the words that you all use to convey anger,” she told them. “Let’s build our dictionary in Quechua, yeah?”

In Northern Virginia, home to the largest Bolivian population in the United States, this regular broadcast has helped Coca Luján, a.k.a. K’ancha, fashion herself into something between a social media influencer and cultural preservationist for this community of 40,000. […]

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A remarkable project from Bard College, The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography:

In 1897, anthropologist Franz Boas published his major monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, a synthesis of his first decade of research on the Northwest Coast and one of the first holistic ethnographies based on field work. The text brought together data on Kwakwaka’wakw social structure with art and material culture, detailed narratives in the Kwak’wala language, photographs taken in situ in British Columbia and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, transcribed songs, eye-witness description of ceremonial performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s indigenous collaborator George Hunt. Yet the report remained incomplete and fractured, and archival materials relevant to its origins and afterlives are scattered all over the world. This material includes original field notes by Boas and Hunt, museum collections records, original photographic negatives, and wax cylinder recordings of music. The goal of this collaborative project is to produce an annotated, critical digital edition that will reunite the archival material with the original text and with the indigenous families whose cultural heritage is represented. This will be an unprecedented effort within anthropology and the humanities, promising new ways of using digital media to link together disparate archives, museums, textual repositories, and contemporary Native communities in order to produce a critical historiography of the book as well as to recuperate long dormant ethnographic records.

Click through for a “Detailed Project Description”; this is the kind of thing academia should be doing. Y, who sent me the link, adds “One interesting part of this project is interpreting the large and significant body of Boas’s notes in shorthand, as described here.” Thanks, Y!

Tessa Barrett-Walker, Michael J. Plank, Rachael Ka’ai-Mahuta, Daniel Hikuroa, and Alex James have a recent article Kia kaua te reo e rite ki te moa, ka ngaro: do not let the language suffer the same fate as the moa (J. R. Soc. Interface 17 [2020]: 20190526), whose abstract reads:

More than a third of the world’s languages are currently classified as endangered and more than half are expected to go extinct by 2100. Strategies aimed at revitalizing endangered languages have been implemented in numerous countries, with varying degrees of success. Here, we develop a new model regarding language transmission by dividing the population into defined proficiency categories and dynamically quantifying transition rates between categories. The model can predict changes in proficiency levels over time and, ultimately, whether a given endangered language is on a long-term trajectory towards extinction or recovery. We calibrate the model using data from Wales and show that the model predicts that the Welsh language will thrive in the long term. We then apply the model to te reo Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, as a case study. Initial conditions for this model are estimated using New Zealand census data. We modify the model to describe a country, such as New Zealand, where the endangered language is associated with a particular subpopulation representing the indigenous people. We conclude that, with current learning rates, te reo Māori is on a pathway towards extinction, but identify strategies that could help restore it to an upward trajectory.

As JC, who sent me the link, points out: “Makes specific reference to a statistical study predicting that Welsh will be (near)universal in Wales 300 years hence!” Should be music to the ears of a certain Kusaal-oriented Hatter… (Thanks, John!)

Frequent commenter Hans wrote me about Vancouver’s “excellent public transportation system” TransLink:

I’ve subscribed to Translink’s news bulletin. In their last update, they included this link to the list of languages they do customer service in. They claim “over 300” in the bulletin, but the list only has ca. 120, with some double-counting because some are spoken on more than one continent. It also has a “I speak X” entry next to the name of the language, so if you ever need to say “I speak Oromo” in Oromo, you can look that up here.

Needless to say, I approve, and not only do they have pretty obscure languages like Dinka and Oromo, they separate Portuguese from Portuguese (Azores) and even have a language I’d never heard of, Chittagonian (“mutually intelligible with Rohingya and to a lesser extent with Noakhailla”). Good for them!