languagehat.com

Language Log reports on a striking discovery, quoting Ariel David in Haaretz:

Around 1,400 years ago, or even earlier, somebody scribbled on the wall of a Jewish cemetery in Beit She’arim, in today’s northern Israel. The graffito was first spotted during excavations at this sprawling ancient necropolis in the 1950s, but experts could not make head or tail of it. Now for the first time, the key to unraveling the mystery has been found after two experts in Iranian history saw the text.

They were the first to realize it was written using Pahlavi script, an ancient alphabet developed for the administration, coinage and royal inscriptions of the once mighty Sassanid Persian Empire. Plus some isolated Hebrew or Aramaic letters. But there was more to the mystery.

“When I saw it I immediately thought it was Pahlavi, but then as I kept reading I realized that while the alphabet was Middle Persian, the language was not,” says Domenico Agostini, a professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University. “I was stunned.”

He also wondered what a Middle Persian graffito was doing at Beit She’arim in the first place. So, it turns out that the seven lines of text were written in Aramaic transliterated into the alphabet that was normally used to write Middle Persian, the form of Persian common at the time of the Sassanid dynasty (3rd-7th century C.E.).

More at the link; it actually surprises me that there aren’t other examples, since Aramaic was the lingua franca of the day.

Dave Wilton has made a Big List post about the phrase politically correct (often abbreviated as PC), giving a useful account of its history in English, starting with its occurrence as “a collocation of words rather than a fixed lexical item” (as in a 1793 US Supreme Court opinion by Justice James Wilson) and proceeding to the current meaning “conforming to a body of liberal or radical opinion, esp. on social matters”; here’s the first example he finds of the latter (from the Christian Science Monitor of 4 September 1919):

Mr. Svarc charged that just as the Magyars would allow no priest to serve in Slovakia unless he were “politically correct,” in being which he had to become a traitor to those of his own blood and a slave to the Magyars, so the Magyar Government had issued orders to the bishops to cooperate with Austro-Hungarian consuls in this country to get “right conditions” in the United States.

He says “there is no doubt that politically correct had become a term of art in Marxist circles by the middle of the 1920s […] By the mid 1930s, politically correct was appearing in non-Marxist writing, but in reference to restrictions on speech in the Soviet Union, and it is here that the term starts to acquire its negative valence. […] In the 1970s, progressive—not necessarily Marxist—movements in the United States picked up the term. In the process, the term softens from hardline Marxist dogma to a call for inclusion and being mindful and respectful of voices and views that had traditionally been suppressed or ignored.” Which is well and good, but as I said in the comment thread:

I’m surprised you’re treating this as a purely English-language phrase, with no consideration that it might be a calque. Your 1919 quote implies that there was an equivalent Hungarian (or perhaps German) phrase that was being so translated, and a Russian corpus search found this from a 1930 collection by Yuri Pisarenko: “Политическая корректность режиссера не делает театр современным” [The political correctness of the director does not make the theater contemporary] — at that time it is highly unlikely it would be a calque from English. It is certainly an interesting phrase, and it deserves an international investigation, however that might be provided (you’d need scholars familiar with the major European languages and their histories).

And then it occurred to me that I could make a start on that investigation by posting it at LH and seeing what the collective knowledge of the Hattery turns up. (While as you know I don’t try to keep threads “on topic,” I do hope we can avoid the tiresome issue of whether PC is a Good or Bad Thing and focus on the history of the phrase.)

I don’t remember when I first encountered the mysterious phrase “tace is Latin for (a) candle,” but it must have been long ago, since it’s kept in a very dusty attic of my memory; on the other hand, because it’s now so obscure I’ve very rarely run into it since. Here’s the OED entry (from 1910; note that tace is pronounced the good old anglicizing way, to rhyme with Stacey):

tace, v.
Pronunciation: /ˈteɪsiː/
Etymology: < Latin tacē, imperative of tacēre to be silent.

The Latin for ‘Be silent’. tace is Latin for a candle, a humorously veiled hint to any one to keep silent about something.

[Cf. 1605 W. Camden Remaines i. 162 Edmund of Langley..asked..his sonnes..what was Latine for a fetter-locke: Whereat when the yong gentleman studied, the father said,..I will tell you, Hic hæc hoc taceatis, as advising them to be silent and quiet.]
1697 W. Dampier New Voy. around World xiii. 356 Trust none of them, for they are all Thieves, but Tace is Latin for a Candle.
1752 H. Fielding Amelia I. i. x. 85 ‘Tace, Madam,’ answered Murphy, ‘is Latin for a Candle: I commend your Prudence.’
1821 W. Scott Let. 24 Feb. (1934) VI. 364 Tace shall be hereafter with me Latin for a candle.

Note that there is no attempt to account for what is on its face a nonsensical saying; note also that they classify tace as an English verb because it’s a verb in Latin, which seems to me utter idiocy. But where does the expression come from? Nobody knows! Pascal Tréguer has a good post about it at word histories (the whole site is well worth your attention); after a detailed account of the history of usage, he says:
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Hiphilangsci, which I posted about last year, has an interview with Andrew Garrett about Alfred Kroeber (link goes to both a podcast and, blessedly, a transcript), and if you’re fuzzy on Kroeber’s contributions and on the recent controversy involving him, it’s a good place to start. He’s remembered mostly as an anthropologist, but he made contributions to linguistics as well; some excerpts:

Kroeber was born in 1876 in the U.S. His grandparents were all born in Germany. His father came to the US as a young child, and his mother’s parents were born in Germany, so German was not only his family background but actually his household language. His first language was German. The first book that he read, apparently, was a German translation of Robinson Crusoe. He grew up in New York in a kind of, I guess, humanistic German-Jewish environment and went to Columbia College in Columbia University in the late 1800s as a student of literature. He got an undergraduate degree in comparative literature, and that would have been his trajectory, except that he encountered Franz Boas. He took a seminar from Franz Boas which he described later as transformational and as having adjusted his trajectory towards anthropology. That seminar was oriented towards text explication, and Kroeber described it afterwards as very similar to what the classical philologists will do with Greek or Latin texts, except these were texts with Native American languages, and Kroeber just loved figuring out language, so he got into anthropology through linguistics and text work. The first text documentation that he actually did was in New York working with the Inuktun language recording linguistic materials and texts. […]

You asked about his accomplishments, and it’s very complex, I think, because he was in an anthropology department for his whole career, he’s known today by most people as an anthropologist, but at the time that he started, anthropology and linguistics were not so separated as they are now, and I think many people saw at least some parts of linguistics as being part of anthropology. That was certainly how he was trained. In the first decade or 15 years of his career at Berkeley, most of the work that he did was linguistic in nature. It was work that we would now call language documentation, recording as many languages as possible in California, transcribing texts, publishing text material, and doing all of that with the with the goal of trying to understand the linguistic landscape of California. California has more linguistic diversity in it per square mile, I guess, than any place in the Western Hemisphere, and there are about 98 languages, Indigenous languages, and they belong to 20 or 21 unrelated language families. So the map is very messy, the relationships of the languages are… were unclear, and part of his interest, like the interests of many people at the time, was to try and understand history through linguistic relationships, and so figuring out, kind of doing the primary documentation of languages and figuring out their linguistic relationships was a major goal. And some of his most important publications in the first decade of the 20th century were identifying language families and proposing relationships and subgrouping within language families kind of with that in mind. He also, in the last decade of his life, after he retired, kind of returned to that primary, again, what we would call language documentation – basically, working with the material that he had collected early and had languished and trying to prepare it for publication and so on.

So his career is very much sandwiched by linguistic work. He was actually a president of the Linguistics Society of America at one point. He did quantitative historical linguistic work before lexicostatistics and glottochronology. So he’s kind of underrecognized for his linguistic contributions partly because of the substance of his anthropological contributions.

As for the “denaming” of Kroeber Hall at UC Berkeley, I personally think it’s stupid (Garrett, who supported it, admits Kroeber is basically paying for the sins of early 20th century anthropology in general), but who cares? I have no skin in the game, and I say let Berkeley do what it wants with its buildings. (For the record, I was unqualifiedly in favor of the renaming of Calhoun College at Yale; John C. Calhoun really was a vile bastard.) At any rate, you can find out more about all this at the link; thanks, Y! (N.b.: There’s discussion of the Berkeley renaming in this thread, and I see TR added the podcast link to it while I was composing this post.)

I’m finally getting to watch The Wire, frequently cited as the best television show ever (yes, I know there are other contenders, and I wish jamessal were still around to discuss the matter); I’m six episodes in and completely gripped — the only way I can keep from binging is by reading discussions of each episode after I see it to decompress. I find I have surprisingly little trouble with the various accents, but speaking of accents, I have seen various people complaining that Dominic West, an Englishperson who in general does a good job playing Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty, screws up by saying /ˈnaːko/ for what the complainants assume should be narco ‘narcotics officer’ (i.e., he’s inexplicably reverting to his native non-rhotic accent for that one word). But this is nonsense: he’s using the separate (and less well known) term knocko ‘(US black) a police officer, esp. a member of the drugs squad,’ from (as Green nicely puts it) “the knocking at one’s door or on one’s skull.” Here are Green’s citations, including one from the second episode of the show:

1950 [US] Goldin et al. DAUL 119/1: Knock-man. A policeman; an informer; a complaining witness in criminal proceedings.
1992 [US] R. Price Clockers 4: The white guy […] looked too twitchy and scared to be a knocko.
1997 [US] Simon & Burns Corner (1998) 16: Plainclothesmen. Knockers. Six police jump out of two unmarked Chevrolets.
2002 [US] Simon & Burns ‘The Detail’ Wire ser. 1 ep. 2 [TV script] Western [Baltimore] knockos come around here, picking shit up off the ground.
2021 [US] J. Fenton We Own This City 4: [T]he officers most likely to make up the plainclothes units known around town as ‘knockers’ or ‘jumpout boys,’ a reference to their aggressive tactics.

So now you know.

Cecily Hilleary writes for VOA about the “rez accent”:

In 1960, linguists predicted that compulsory education, mass media, foreign immigration and the “mobility of restless Americans” would ultimately standardize English, and in only a few generations, regional accents would disappear. Today, some scholars such as University of Pennsylvania sociolinguist William Labov note that while some accents are fading, others are growing stronger.

One example, according to Kalina Newmark, is Native American English, more commonly referred to as the “rez accent,” found among many Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. Rez is the shortened word for reservation. Newmark, who is Dene and Metis from the Sahtu region of Canada’s Northwest Territories, attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a school well-known for its diverse, Indigenous student body. […]

At Dartmouth, Newmark met Indigenous students from across North America and noticed an interesting phenomenon: Despite their different linguistic backgrounds, their English shared some distinctive features, especially when gathering socially. She found this was the case even with students who had never learned their heritage languages.

When assigned a project studying a non-English language, she and fellow Dartmouth student Nacole Walker, a Lakota from the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota, decided to investigate the rez accent, which had never been studied before.

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Laudator Temporis Acti posts a wonderful little inscription from Sardinia (Meana Sardo, 2nd century AD, Iscrizioni latine della Sardegna I 183):

[vides d]uas berpas
[ego sum] tertius qui
lego

You see two pricks.
I, the one reading this, am the third.

berpas = verpas. On verpa see J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; rpt. 1993), pp. 12-14.

The confusion between b- and v- is interesting, and I should really get a copy of Adams. For verpa, see Wiktionary:

Etymology
Possibly borrowed from a Germanic language, related to Proto-Germanic *werpaną (“to throw”). More likely from Proto-Italic source for “to turn round, to roll” (as in ‘unfurl, peel back, or retract foreskin’) via Proto-Indo-European *welw-, *wel- (“to turn, wind, round”).
[…]

1. (vulgar) a penis with the foreskin retracted, especially when erect
2. (vulgar) an erection, a hard-on

My wife was celebrating the diminishing amount remaining on our mortgage, and she asked me if the mort- part of the word meant ‘dead,’ and if so why. I said yes it did, but I didn’t know why; I’ve looked it up a number of times because it’s so opaque, but I can never remember the answer. So I turned to the OED, which updated the entry in December 2002, but the etymology is surprisingly unsatisfactory from the semantic point of view:

< Anglo-Norman and Middle French mortgage, mort gage (1283 in Old French; also as gage mort (1267); French mort-gage (now archaic)) < mort mort adj. + gage gage n.¹, after post-classical Latin mortuum vadium (from 12th cent. in British sources) < mortuum, accusative of mortuus dead (see mort adj.) + vadium pledge (see invadiate v.). Middle French mort gage > post-classical Latin morgagium (from 14th cent. in British sources), mortgagium (a1564 in a British source).

Yes, yes, but why is it called a ‘dead pledge’? (They later quote in small type “the etymological meaning of the term current among 17th-cent. lawyers,” but they clearly consider that merely a historical curiosity.) Fortunately, the AHD comes to the rescue:

Word History: In early Anglo-Norman law, property pledged as security for a loan was normally held by the creditor until the debt was repaid. Under this arrangement, the profits or benefits that accrued to the holder of the property could either be applied to the discharge of the principal or taken by the creditor as a form of interest. In his Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae (1189), Ranulf de Glanville explains that this latter type of pledge, in which the fruits of the property were taken by the creditor without reduction in the debt, was known by the term mort gage, which in Old French means “dead pledge.” Because of Christian prohibitions on profiting from money lending, however, the mortgage was considered a species of usury. The preferred type of pledge, in which the property’s profits went to paying off the debt and thus continued to benefit the borrower, was known in Old French by the term vif gage, “living pledge.” By the time of the great English jurist Thomas Littleton’s Treatise on Tenures (1481), however, the mortgage had evolved into its modern form—a conditional pledge in which the property (and its profits) remain in possession of the debtor during the loan’s repayment. This led Littleton and his followers, such as the influential jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), to explain the mort in mortgage in terms of the permanent loss of the property in the event the borrower fails to repay, rather than of the loss of the profits from the property over the duration of the loan.

I certainly won’t remember the details, but at least I can now refer to this entry when curiosity strikes again.

Back in 2009 I reported that Manx was not extinct; now Megan Specia in the NY Times has an encouraging piece (archived) on the progress it’s making:

The squeals of laughter echoing from the playground sound like any other elementary school in its first week back in session. Listen closely, though, and there’s something rare in the children’s chatter: the Manx language, an ancient tongue once feared forgotten.

But thanks in part to these students at Bunscoill Ghaelgagh, a school on the Isle of Man, the language that was deeply intertwined in hundreds of years of local history is now becoming a part of the island’s future.

It was a little over a decade ago when UNESCO declared the language extinct, and students then studying at the school took strong exception. To make their case that the language was anything but dead, they wrote a letter to the U.N. body — in Manx.

“It sort of was on the brink, but we’ve brought it back to life again,” said Julie Matthews, the head teacher of the school, who noted that her students’ determined effort prompted a new UNESCO categorization of Manx as a “revitalized” language. […]

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I follow a guy named Ivan Ivanovich Puzyrkov on Facebook, and I liked this post so much I thought I’d bring it here (my translation — ironically, GT doesn’t do a very good job):

Nov. 20, 2022, a beautiful sunny day. MEANWHILE, the future has arrived, and Google fucking Translate already translates so well that sometimes you can’t tell the difference. Man is lazy; why waste energy, which isn’t there anyway, on wading through foreign texts when it’s more convenient to speed-read them in your own language? (Just don’t tell the students.) Besides, I’m probably not going to learn, for example, Hungarian in this lifetime, and now just look at the prospects that open up, as long as there’s a pdf with the text.

I’ve gotten addicted to it lately; I put whole little libraries into it, and zippity bop, you have another monograph translated into the language of our native aspens and you can read to your heart’s content. You keep the original at hand, of course, but on the whole, it’s a normal translation, normal. That’s when the card, as they say, burst into my hand.

That gives rise to another problem: more and more often I catch myself thinking “I think I’ll put this text into the translator, it’s really complicated,” I start looking for the button, and then I realize, oh, it’s already in Russian! So it seems that Google still has a lot of work to do.

Some notes (I always pick up bits of culture and language from his exuberant posts):
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