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Taylor Jones, known around the internet as Language Jones, has a twenty-minute YouTube video thoughtfully called “Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??” If I were modeling my style on his, I might have called this post “LINGUISTICS INFLUENCER is TOO WOKE — and WRONG about NAMES!!” But instead I went with the modest title he himself might have used if he weren’t so hungry for clicks and likes. Don’t get me wrong, I basically enjoyed the video, even though I dislike the snark-filled, overemphatic influencer style; Jones studied with the great William Labov (LH obit post), for whom he expresses great affection and respect, and clearly knows his subject. Still, I think he’s wrong about some stuff.

First off, and trivially, he says the name of Michael Lisicky wrong — he gives it initial stress, but Lisicky himself uses penultimate stress (as you can hear in the first few seconds of this video). No biggie, but I would hope that a linguist would take the trouble to get it right.

Now to the meat of the video. He discusses Labov’s famous paper “The Social Stratification of (r) in New York Department Stores,” and his basic claim is that it is fatally flawed because it does not take race into account: in 1962, when the study was carried out, the Great Migration of blacks to the north was going on, and whites were increasingly differentiating themselves from black speech — he cites Gerard Van Herk’s paper “Fear of a Black Phonology: The Northern Cities Shift as Linguistic White Flight.” Very true, of course, but the problem is that Van Herk is talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, whereas Jones is talking about rhotic versus nonrhotic speech, and the fatal flaw in his argument is that nonrhotic speech is not a distinctive characteristic of New York Black English; to quote the very thorough Wikipedia article African-American Vernacular English, “The level of AAVE rhoticity is likely somewhat correlated with the rhoticity of White speakers in a given region; in 1960s research, AAVE accents tended to be mostly non-rhotic in Detroit, whose White speakers are rhotic, but completely non-rhotic in New York City, whose White speakers are also often non-rhotic.” Indeed, nonrhoticity is a notorious feature of old-fashioned white New Yorker speech, which means that the idea Jones is pushing, that the workers Labov interviewed were pronouncing r’s to show they were white, is absurd.

It is, of course, true that Labov’s very short (less than ten pages) paper does not prove some of the things it has been claimed to prove — it is more of a discussion-starter than a thesis — but it holds up better than Jones thinks, and I suspect there is a certain amount of slaying-the-elders going on. That said, Jones makes some good points, and it’s always good to be reminded of Labov’s work. (I should add that Craig, who sent me the link — thanks, Craig! — points out that Jones is an AAVE expert, so he would doubtless nitpick my nitpicking. As always, I welcome correction.)

Étienne de La Vaissière’s Acta Orientalia article “A Military Origin for New Persian?” (open access) attracted my attention because of my long-standing interest in Persian and its history. The abstract:

The question of the transition from Middle Persian to New Persian has been hotly debated. This article attempts to answer two questions: who spoke New Persian before it was put into writing in the middle of the 9th c.? This social group is identified with the soldiers of the armies of Abū Muslim, i.e. peasants from Marw and their descendants. They came during one century to the forefront of Abbasid political and administrative life and imposed their specific dialect as a political language, in the shadow of Arabic. The second question is: what could have been the origins of the spoken language in the Marw oasis of the first half of the 8th c.? The article tries to demonstrate, on a much more tentative basis, that the demographic history of an oasis twice manned by soldiers from the South, first Middle Persian-speaking ones and then Arabic ones, both groups added to the local, Parthian-speaking population, is well reflected in the unique combination of Middle Persian, Arabic and Parthian characteristic of Early New Persian. Early New Persian is the language of 8th c. Marw, or more generally Outer Khurāsān. This Marw hypothesis, based on the presence of Parthian vocabulary, is however very cautious, as nothing is known of the grammar of spoken late Middle Persian and many of the linguistic differences between Middle and New Persian might have evolved separately in different historical processes.

Ignorant as I am, I find the idea plausible, and I like his modesty:

For the time being, the argument must rely primarily on historical analysis. The grammar and phonology of spoken Middle Persian are not known, as its written forms are largely archaizing—this represents a major limitation. With regard to vocabulary, I had hoped that a sociolinguistic analysis of Early New Persian, particularly of its distinctive Parthian layer, might yield results. Unfortunately, very little research has been conducted in this area.

The final paragraph:

In the absence of more data, especially from earlier texts, many complex scenarios remain possible for the linguistic situation in early 8th-century Marw. More comprehensive studies of Early New Persian vocabulary—or new textual discoveries—are needed to confirm or refute this plausible hypothesis.

But the details he provides are intriguing and help fill out my picture of the situation in that time of rapid change.

You’d think I would have learned long ago to associate Northwestern University Press with daring, off-the-beaten-path publications that are often right up my alley, considering that they put out translations of Veltman’s Selected Stories (translated by James J. Gebhard, 1988) and Andrei Bely’s Kotik Letaev (translated by Gerald J. Janecek, 1999; I wrote about the novel here). Not for them the umpteenth version of Anna Karenina or yet another Reader’s Companion to Dostoevsky! As I wrote last year, they are publishing Stephen Bruce’s translation of Veltman’s Странник, The Wanderer (scheduled for November), and to thank me for my assistance with the translation (not to mention having inspired it in the first place), they are sending me not only a copy of it but a number of other books from their imprint, several of which have already arrived (thanks, Charlotte!). I have just finished the first of these, Benjamin Paloff’s brand-new Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, and I’m here to tell you about it.

I have long had an interest in Bakhtin, and back in 2018 I worked my way through Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson; I learned a lot from it, but it’s so fat and comprehensive that I wound up skimming a fair amount and forgetting much of what I learned. Paloff’s book is very short (93 pages of text and 27 pages of endnotes) and focused on a single aspect of Bakhtin’s thought, his concept of “adventure” as it applies to both life and literature. Paloff’s basic point is that Bakhtin is not primarily a literary critic or philologist, as we tend to think of him (because of his famous works on Dostoevsky and Rabelais) — he is obsessed with the question of how to lead an ethical life, which for him means treating other people as having the same freedom we feel ourselves to have, and his basic insight is that we can and do treat people much as we treat characters in novels, constructing a whole (inevitably incomplete and misunderstood) from whatever random selection of qualities have become apparent to us (or have been provided by the author). As Paloff puts it: “Following Bakhtin, I refer to stories that preserve the hero’s freedom not to mean anything as ‘adventure,’ and I regard this adventure not only as the essential intersection of Bakhtin’s early reflections on language and literature and his later writings on behavior, but more fundamentally as the precondition for imagining the lives of others ethically.” He goes into this from various angles and usefully brings in analogies from movies like The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski (as a result of which I rewatched the first two for the first time since the ’90s and saw the last for the first time ever, so that I finally have a context for all the memes). There’s fascinating stuff on Bakhtin’s relationship with Lukács (he was so “electrified” by The Theory of the Novel that he wanted to translate it, but Lukács refused permission, telling him sternly that he no longer liked the book) and many other topics; if you have any interest in Bakhtin, I heartily recommend this book, which not only has plenty of helpful illustrations but, amazingly, no typos that I noticed, not even in the many quotes in the original. Well done, NUP!

In this recent comment by ktschwarz, the word quandary struck me, not only because it had undergone a change of stress but because I realized I didn’t know where it was from. Turns out nobody else does either, and the OED’s etymology section (entry revised 2007) is so interesting I thought I’d share it:

Origin unknown. Various etymologies have been suggested, all of them implausible. Perhaps compare conundrum n.

Notes
A recurrent suggestion is that the word is an alteration of some post-classical Latin term, arising (perhaps humorously) in scholastic or university use. This is not impossible (compare conundrum n., which also appears to show Latin influence, although both its etymology and its relationship with quandary n. are unclear), but no convincing concrete Latin etymons have yet been suggested. However, the following quot. shows that the word was at least apprehended as Latin at an early date:

1582 In Latin words, or of a Latin form, where theie be vsed English like, as, certiorare, quandare, where e, soundeth full and brode after the originall Latin.
R. Mulcaster, 1st Part of Elementarie xvii. 111

Some of the more fanciful suggestions are: that the word derives < French qu’en dirai-je ‘what shall I say of it?’; that it is an alteration of wandreth n. [‘Misery, distress, hardship; adversity, poverty’] or its Scandinavian etymon [Old Norse vandrǽði neuter ‘difficulty, trouble’]; or that it is shortened < hypochondry at hypochondria n. α forms. All of these present obvious difficulties, whether semantically, phonologically, or chronologically, not the least of which is the fact that that the word was originally stressed on the second syllable (see below).

A further ingenious suggestion was made by L. Spitzer in various articles, notably in Jrnl. Eng. & Germanic Philol. (1948) vol. 42 405–9 and Mod. Lang. Notes (1949) vol. 64 502–4, where he argued for a French origin of the word, proposing an (unattested) earlier form of calambredaine (colloquial) nonsense, twaddle, balderdash (1798; of uncertain origin) as common etymon of both quandary n. and conundrum n., and perhaps even of kankedort n. [‘? A state of suspense; a critical position; an awkward affair’] (which is attested much earlier [c1374 “Was Troylus nought in a kankedort”]).

New English Dictionary (OED first edition) (1908) also indicates a former pronunciation (kwǫ̆·ndări) /kwənˈdɛərɪ/ with stress on the second syllable. This pronunciation is illustrated by quots. 1652 and a1720, and is also recommended by such late 18th-cent. and early 19th-cent. lexicographers as Sheridan, Walker, Perry, and Smart. However, the stress gradually shifted to the first syllable of the word (it has been suggested that the stress shift took place in the 18th cent., though the existence of the spelling quandery as early as the 17th cent. perhaps suggests earlier currency of this stress pattern). ˈQuandary is given as the usual pronunciation of the word by as early a source as Johnson (1755). Subsequently, many 19th-cent. and early 20th-cent. dictionaries record both possibilities; it is only in the later 20th cent. that the first-syllable stress came to predominate (the shift in attitudes is clearly seen in the various editions of H. W. Fowler Mod. Eng. Usage). The nonstandard spelling quandry shows elision of the unstressed vowel.

As for the “ingenious suggestion” made by Leo Spitzer, I’ll quote the lively version of it in his Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 5-6:
[Read more…]

Remember when I recently announced the publication of Paul Postal’s new book attacking Chomsky and generative grammar? Well, Slavo/bulbul has been reading it and getting increasingly grumpy, and Slavo’s grumpiness produces such eloquence I have no recourse but to quote his Facebook posts in extenso (I have added itals and blockquotes for clarity and fixed some OCR errors). From here:

Aaaand we are at a point where I am reminded that while Postal broke with Chomsky a long time ago and his criticism of Chomsky’s bullshit is 109% valid, Postal himself is a student of Chomsky and thus wholly compromised. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his discussion of NLs as generative systems and the type/token distinction. Postal (2025: 63) argues that

That renders use of NL sentences for communication impossible unless mental tokens of NL sentences are somehow connected to physical things perceptually available to others. It is the function of Expression systems to facilitate this connection. There are different types of known Expression system, the fundamental one evidently being that which links Core elements to the output of vocal tract behavior, that is, to pronunciations. This clearly has biological primacy in humans.

Suddenly we are dealing with Core and Expression systems, but ok, I can dig.

My view then is that while there is an inherent biological connection between the Cores of known NLs and human sound-producing vocal tract gestures, there is no inherent logical connection. I take the existence of the gesture Expression systems of the NLs of the deaf and orthographical Expression systems to justify that conclusion.

Minus five points for the misuse of ‘logical’, but ok. You get the point – the abstract NL can be instantiated as concrete/physical speech, writing or sign language. So far so good. But then:

While I will not be able to address these issues seriously, many linguistic works appear to treat spoken and written expressions as involving separate languages. For instance, De Swart 2010 makes the distinction throughout.

What is it that De Swart is talking about? The fact that spoken French now gets by with pas as the sole verbal negator while in written French, ne is still used!

This is the kind if bullshit this sort of theorizing will led you to. No discussion of the primacy of spoken language, not a syllable on writing as technology, not a beep about where this sort of thinking leads, since the quote from De Swart closes out the section.

From here:
[Read more…]

This is another of those words that are kind of words, being in the dictionary, but also kind of not, since they’re not actually used or understood by anyone (except the very occasional person who decides to deploy them). I’m reading a very interesting book about Bakhtin that has the admirable quality of providing all quotes in the original in footnotes, so the reader who possesses Russian can see what the man actually wrote (I’ll be posting about the book when I finish it), and at one point he’s quoted as saying “hagiography, just like icon painting, avoids any transgredient moments which delimit a human being and render him overly concrete, because they invariably diminish authoritativeness.” I blinked several times on seeing the collection of letters “transgredient” and wondered what the hell Bakhtin’s word was. Thanks to the admirable quality noted above, I just turned to the Russian and found “агиография, как и иконопись, избегает ограничивающей и излишне конкретизующей трансгредиентности, ибо эти моменты всегда понижают авторитетность” (it’s from this text). So OK, there was apparently a word трансгредиентность… except that the only person who’s ever used it appears to be Bakhtin, so how the hell did he expect any readers to understand it?

Well, what about English? It turns out, to my surprise, that the OED has an entry transgredient (“First published 1914; not fully revised”); it’s labeled “rare” and has two senses:

1. Violating a law or obligation.

1837 To paint the other branches of the Church as such slippery transgredient mortals.
S. Smith, Works (1850) 608

2. Passing beyond subjective limits; objective.

1904 Pragmatism..guarantees no objective or social certainty. Its standards are lacking in the essential character of a standard—transgredient reference and verifiability.
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology & Scientific Methods vol. 1 426

Is the second sense what Bakhtin meant? Who knows? What’s odd is that he usually wrote in reasonably clear Russian, sometimes distorted by his translators into indigestible mouthfuls (see my complaints here); if he used разноречие instead of *гетероглоссия for the concept annoyingly translated as “heteroglossia,” why didn’t he find a more transparent way to express what he wanted to say here? Well, it was an early work, and maybe he was still under the spell of Kant…

Drew Johnson’s “The Eloquent Vindicator in the Electric Room” is a thought-provoking piece about the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds in 1868 (and if you’re thinking “Who?”… well, that’s his point); what brings it here is this paragraph:

His wife ran a rummage sale posing as an antique store. She and I spoke for just a few minutes but couldn’t figure out just what variety of cousins we were. Then, unbidden, she began to talk about the moment when emancipation and the end of the war freed the people enslaved by the Greears. The family, she said, told the people they had owned that they were no longer bound to them or to the land they had known. Some stayed, some left. That was all she told me, but her voice was sepia-toned, possessed by nostalgia for something she’d never known. Anemoia. A word all Americans ought to know.

I wasn’t familiar with the word, but that’s because it’s not a word at all in the traditional sense; it’s one of the ones coined by John Koenig for his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — see the end of this post from last year, where I say “I recently discovered the term occhiolism, ‘The awareness of the small scope of one’s own perspective and the way it limits one’s ability to fully understand the world’ […] I’m not normally a fan of invented words, but I like this one, which represents a concept important to me.” The same goes for this one, so (as I said then) good for Koenig! Wiktionary tells us it’s “Constructed from Ancient Greek ἄνεμος (ánemos, ‘wind’) + νόος (nóos, ‘mind’), with reference to anemosis, the warping of a tree by high wind ‘until it seems to bend backward’”; it really should be anemonoia, but it sounds better as is, so (*bangs gavel*) I’ll allow it. (As for anemosis, it’s not in the OED, but it is in M-W, so it probably is an actual word, though as far as I can tell from Google Books it occurs almost entirely in lexicons.)

It’s a lot spiffier than this antiquated relic of the 2000s, but it covers a congruent mix of language-related topics. The About page features a Chekhov quote and a list of beliefs (Dogs are the best people; All English is Good English; No such thing as a wrong pronunciation); topics include phrasal verbs, No Irish in the House of Commons, The Irish and the definite article, I goes to work: subject-verb agreement, and many more, some of them listed at Kattullus’ MeFi post, from where I got the link (e.g. Shetland or Zetland ?, featuring yogh [Ȝ]). I learned something about my adopted region from this one:

It is almost a rite of passage, for those trained in the English language of New England, to confuse an outsider by using the phrase “downcellar”. This is a phrase that means both generally “downstairs” and also “in the basement”, and can be used regardless of what floor the speakers are on, or whether they are even indoors.

The phrase “down cellar” is not a recent evolution or an informal term, being attested as far back as the 1700s. Rather it is a product of an older and broader use of the preposition “down” which meant “towards”, evolving through the common directional construct “downtown”.

And though the term is not exclusive to New England, being reported by speakers in surrounding regions as well, it dovetails with a broader New England English proclivity for the direction “down.” New Englanders use it as a catch-all for generalized motion towards, saying things like “down the store”, “down the beach” and “down Quincy Market”.

Regardless of where we are geographically, the direction of travel is “down east” or “down town”, with “uptown” being decidedly too fancy a place to go. We even go “down the Cape”, from Western Massachusetts and Rhode Island, though the phrase “down Cape” has a more specific meaning: to the better beaches past Hyannis!

As an old-style blogger, I wish the entries were dated and there were archives (at least, I can’t find any), but never mind the nitpicking, it’s a good find.

My wife asked me why matrimony meant marriage whereas patrimony meant something entirely different, and I had no answer for her, so I googled around. Wiktionary is no help:

From Old French matremoine, from Latin mātrimōnium (“marriage, wedlock”), from mātri(s) (“mother”) + -mōnium (“obligation”). By surface analysis, matri- +‎ -mony. Compare patrimony.

So I tried the OED (entry revised 2001) and found:

< Anglo-Norman matermoine, matremoine, matrimoigne, matrimone, matrimonie and Middle French matremoine, matrimoigne (14th cent.; c1155 in Old French in sense ‘property inherited from one’s mother’: compare 1a) < classical Latin mātrimōnium state of being married < mātri-, māter mother (see matri- comb. form) + ‑mōnium ‑mony comb. form.

Which is also no help. I recognize that marriage tends to lead to motherhood, but can anyone explain the Latin formation more effectively? Does it have to do with Roman society, or is it just one of those things?

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones was one of my birthday presents this year, and I just got through reading it. If you want the plot laid out, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Parul Sehgal’s NY Times review (archived). Me, I don’t read books for plot, and all I can tell you is that the novel’s architecture and its prose are perfectly fitted to the story being told; I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs, and if you like them you will certainly like the novel:

My mama’s mother, Mother Lizbeth, and her daddy, Papa Joseph, originally owned all this land: around fifteen acres in all. It was Papa Joseph nicknamed it all the Pit, Papa Joseph who let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry lake, making it into a pond, and then Papa Joseph thought the earth would give under the water, that the pond would spread and gobble up the property and make it a swamp, so he stopped selling earth for money. He died soon after from mouth cancer, or at least that’s what Mother Lizbeth used to tell us when we were little. She always talked to us like grown-ups, cussed us like grown-ups. She died in her sleep after praying the rosary, when she was in her seventies, and two years later, Mama, the only baby still living out of the eight that Mother Lizbeth had borne, died when having Junior. Since it’s just us and Daddy here now with China, the chickens, and a pig when Daddy can afford one, the fields Papa Joseph used to plant around the Pit are overgrown with shrubs, with saw palmetto, with pine trees reaching up like the bristles on a brush.

[…]

Mama taught me how to find eggs; I followed her around the yard. It was never clean. Even when she was alive, it was full of empty cars with their hoods open, the engines stripped, and the bodies sitting there like picked-over animal bones. We only had around ten hens then. Now we have around twenty-five or thirty because we can’t find all the eggs; the hens hide them well. I can’t remember exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue, no banana yellow. Maybe she bought her shirts and pants bright and they faded with wear so that it seemed she always wore olive and black and nut brown, so that when she bent to pry an egg from a hidden nest, I could hardly see her, and she moved and it looked like the woods moved, like a wind was running past the trees. So I followed behind her by touch, not by sight, my hand tugging at her pants, her skirt, and that’s how we walked in the room made by the oaks, looking for eggs. I like looking for eggs. I can wander off by myself, move as slow as I want, stare at nothing. Ignore Daddy and Junior. Feel like the quiet and the wind. I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.

The young narrator, Esch, is a reader, and she is currently absorbed in Greek myth, the Medea story in particular; it is used not for precious parallels but for salutary jolts. And one linguistic point: when I came to a mention of Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, of course I wanted to know how “Buras” was pronounced (anyone who presumes anything about Louisiana place names is a fool — case in point, Natchitoches (/ˈnækətəʃ/). Since the Wikipedia article didn’t tell me, I had to trawl through a number of videos to be sure that the locals say /ˈbjurəs/ (BYOO-rəs), and since I can’t find that corroborated in a printed source that will satisfy the Korinthenkacker at Wikipedia and thus can’t add it to the article, I’m sharing it here. (I did find a video of a woman teaching viewers how to pronounce some of the more opaque Louisiana place names by first parading the wrong versions, often more than once, before triumphantly producing the correct one. Apparently she has no idea that what that does is hammer the wrong forms into your head; when she says “I hear people say X, X, X, X, X, when actually it’s Y!” you’re not going to come away with anything but X. Bah.)