languagehat.com

Via John Cowan, who writes:

I thought the chart at Language Matching might interest you and the Hattics. It gives a list of language pairs, the one you want and the one you can get, and gives you a distance metric between them from 1 (basically no issue) to 80 (maximally distant pair). This is not necessarily about genetic relatedness or mutual intelligibility: for example, the distance from Breton to French is 20, the same as from Catalan to Spanish, because if you want the first you can probably cope with the second, even though the genetic distance is much higher in the first pair than in the second.

I’m not quite sure how it works, but it’s certainly impressive, so take a look.

John Emerson alerted me to the YouTube video for Mdou Moctar’s song “Taliat,” about which Jon Blistein writes for Rolling Stone:

“Taliat” is centered around Moctar’s billowing guitar lines, which twist around steady percussion as the musician sings about love and heartbreak in Tamasheq. In a statement, Moctar said, “‘Taliat’ means woman. In our community, women are queens, they have a lot of power, that’s why I use the term taliat to talk about them. A woman in the Tuareg community has to be protected, but she also has to be treated as equal.”

The track is accompanied by a video that features the song’s lyrics translated into English, as well as footage of Moctar driving around Niamey, Niger, with some additional footage of the musician and his band laid on top.

Yes, there are English subtitles, but what they don’t tell you — and the reason JE sent me the link — is that there are also subtitles in Tifinagh script! Now if only I could get a transcription and explanation of the Tamasheq lyrics; there are only a few of them…

Nicolas Rapold at the NY Times discusses (archived) the issue of what to call foreign-language films in English:

Distributors say the title can be the first impression a movie makes on prospective audiences, and so they give it a great deal of thought. How do you translate the original title? Do you add a word or two to clarify? Or do you leave the Spanish or Korean or French as is?

Titles have been a consideration at least since the influx of foreign films in the 1950s and ’60s. When a title sticks, it has a way of enduring: it’s hard to imagine Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” being translated as simply “The Adventure.” The cryptic title “The 400 Blows” didn’t prevent people enjoying that film’s riches. (It’s a reference to a French idiom “faire les quatre cents coups,” commonly rendered as “to raise hell.”)

The Korean title for “Parasite” was essentially the same word, and more often than not, a straightforward translation makes sense, said Richard Lorber, the president of Kino Lorber, a major distributor of international films.

But occasionally a title is changed for clarity. The French coming-of-age drama “Water Lilies” (2008) had a completely different French title for its romantic story centered on three teenage girls who swim at the same pool. The original name translated as “Birth of the Octopuses.” “It’s a tricky title,” Lorber said. […]

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Matthew Scarborough of Consulting Philologist (regularly linked at LH, e.g. here) has done another in his series on Indo-European etymological dictionaries, this time featuring Baltic. I realize the number of readers interested in that remote and little-visited bailiwick of the IE empire is even more limited than usual, and I might not have posted about it (even though its string of images of different dictionaries dealing with the Baltic word for ‘lake’ is pure catnip for the etymologically curious) except for this:

The most recent etymological dictionary of Lithuanian is the Altlitauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (ALEW) created by a team of scholars at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin under the leadership of Wolfgang Hock. The print version of the dictionary was published in three hefty volumes through Baar Verlag in Hamburg, but not long after the appearance of the print version a lightly revised and corrected version of the dictionary manuscript was published online on Humboldt University’s open access server (ALEW 1.1), and in the following year (2020) an online web version of the dictionary (ALEW 2.0) was launched with additional lemmata and stated plans to make the dictionary more useful for philological investigation of the Old Lithuanian corpus.

An up-to-date online version of an etymological dictionary of Lithuanian is so wonderful I just can’t resist kvelling in public. And for those who read Polish, Wojciech Smoczyński’s Słownik etymologiczny języka litewskiego [Etymological Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language] also exists in “a revised version that is freely available online [pdf, 2,287 pages] which the author continually updates.” What a wonderful world!

But bearing in mind that limited number of readers interested in Baltic, I’ll toss in a couple of English words as lagniappe. The OED entry for woad was updated in December 2016, and the etymology is thorough and interesting, ending in a bio-technological excursus which would never have made it into the print edition:
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The word morose ‘grumpy’ (or, in the more formal words of the OED, ‘sullen, gloomy, sour-tempered, unsocial’) is familiar, but perhaps not so familiar is its derivation; OED (updated December 2002):

Etymology: < classical Latin mōrōsus hard to please, difficult, exacting, pernickety, (of an activity, time of life, etc.) marked by pernicketiness, also as noun denoting a person showing these characteristics < mōr-, mōs manner (see moral adj.) + -ōsus -ose suffix¹. Compare French morose (of a person) gloomy, glum, inclined to dissatisfaction, (of a thing, situation, etc.) dreary, gloomy (1618).

I like very much their use of pernickety (or, as we say on this side of the pond, persnickety). What leads me to post, though, is that I just discovered a far more obscure homonym; OED (updated December 2002):

morose, adj.²
[…]
Etymology: < classical Latin morōsus (late 2nd cent. a.d.) < mora delay (see mora n.¹) + -ōsus -ose suffix¹. With sense 1 compare French délectation morose (1863). With sense 2 compare Italian moroso (1686), Spanish moroso (c1580). Compare earlier morous adj., morosous adj.
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae ii. 1. Question 31. Article 2; Question 74. Article 6) uses morosa delectatio as a term already established, and discusses its meaning, connecting it with mora delay and its derivative immorārī to linger upon. Compare Augustine De Civit. Dei xxii. xxiii, Ne in eo quod male delectat vel visio vel cogitatio remoretur (lest sight or thought dwell too long on some evil thing which gives us pleasure).

1. Theology. Of a thought or feeling: wrongly or sinfully prolonged or dwelt upon. Now rare.
morose delectation n. the habit of dwelling with enjoyment upon evil thoughts.
1645 H. Hammond Pract. Catech. ii. vi. 188 All morose thoughts i.e. dwelling or insisting on that image, or phansying of such uncleane matter with delectation.
1655 W. Nicholson Plain Expos. Catech. ii. 123 In this Commandment are forbidden..All that feeds this sin [sc. adultery], or are incentives to it: as..3. Morose thoughts, that dwell on the phansy with delight.

1970 P. O’Brian Master & Commander (new ed.) viii. 254 Indeed, it is not far from morose delectation.

†2. Roman Law. Chargeable with undue delay in the assertion of a claim, etc. Cf. mora n.¹ 1. Obsolete. rare.
1875 E. Poste tr. Gaius Institutionum Iuris Civilis (ed. 2) iii. 449 If he is Morose (a debtor chargeable with mora).

Of course, technically I ran across the word when I was reading Master & Commander back in 2011, but how was I to know that “morose delectation” contained a completely different word than the one I knew?

A reader writes:

I was trudging through Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down” when the following caught my eye:

“You Englishmen, who have no right in this Kingdom of France,” she writes on a sheet tied to an arrow and shot out of besieged Orleans, “the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, that you quit your fortresses and return into your own country or if not I shall make you such babay that the memory of it will be perpetual.” (May 5, 1429)

“Babay” did not yield its secrets on wiktionary […] Perhaps it was an error in print or translation, so I looked up the source in French:

«Vous, Anglais, qui n’avez aucun droit sur ce royaume de France, le Roi des Cieux vous ordonne et mande par moi, Jeanne la Pucelle, que vous quittiez vos fortresses et retourniez dans votre pays, ou sinon, je vous ferai tel babay dont sera perpétuelle mémoire. Voilà ce que je vous écris pour la troisième et dernière fois, et n’écrirai pas davantage. Signé : Jhesus-Maria, Jeanne la Pucelle» […]

I tried Google’s ngram viewer and the French and English corpora, with not-very-encouraging results. “Babay” was capitalized in most of them, with the few exceptions reverting to the Philippines. A near hapax legomenon?

What else could I do? I tried a few online dictionaries for old French, to no avail, with “0 results” mutely judging me the way only specialized search engines can do.

This is the sort of thing the Hattery is good at, so have at it!

David Eddyshaw has been for some years now praising the work of Kofi Yakpo, e.g., here in 2019:

Talking of English-lexifier Atlantic creoles (we were, you know, you just didn’t notice), a kind person got me Kofi Yakpo’s A Grammar of Pichi for my birthday. [Fernando Po creole.] Best account I’ve yet come across of one of those languages. At 500+ entirely unpadded pages, it’s a sort of counterargument in itself to John McWhorter’s standing views about creole exceptionalism. It’s got lexical tone! It’s got a distinct narrative perfective! What more could you want?

Now, thanks to a Facebook post by Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul), I have learned about his background; it’s quite a story:

Twice in his life, Kofi Yakpo has made a name for himself as a linguist: Once as a rapper in the German hip-hop band, Advanced Chemistry, where his stage name was “Linguist”. The 1992 single “Fremd im eigenen Land” (Foreigner in my own country) made the band famous whilst his academic career only began shortly before his 40th birthday.

Since 2013, Yakpo has been teaching linguistics at the University of Hong Kong und conducting research into Afro-Caribbean Creole languages: languages that develop when two or more languages converge and form a new one. This kind of hybridisation emerged during the colonial era, the linguistics professor explains, often under duress. And although there are nearly 200 million speakers of Creole languages worldwide, unlike European languages, so far, they have often not been studied sufficiently.

The fact that he has this second career as a researcher at all, says Yakpo, is not just a result of his huge interest in languages but also because of his hip-hop outlook. “As hip-hoppers, our attitude was: I am large. We were always brimming with confidence.” At the time of our video conference, Yakpo is in Nairobi, Kenya, where he is exploring the linguistic variants of Swahili.

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I just saw, for the first time in years, Godard’s Weekend, the most repugnant of his pre-Maoist films to bourgeois sensibilities, featuring as it does murder, cannibalism, and other violations of the traditional order, not to mention the famous nearly-eight-minute-long traffic jam (not in fact done in a single tracking shot, but close enough to be impressive) accompanied by nonstop, and very loud, honking. I probably won’t need to see it again for another few years, but it’s got enough enjoyable bits to keep me coming back, including the “musical interlude” with Paul Gégauff as a pianist performing Mozart in a barnyard and lecturing on how the “serious” classical music of today has no audience and it’s the pop music of the Beatles and “les Rolling” that is popular by virtue of its use of Mozartean harmonies. Godard ended the movie with the intertitle FIN DE CONTE/FIN DE CINEMA (you can see the frames here), and indeed he didn’t make another movie in the traditional sense for some years.

But never mind that, I’m here to talk about one of the many other intertitles — the one that reads FAUX RACCORD. The subtitle translates it as JUMP CUT, but that appears not to be accurate; even though the French Wikipedia article Raccord (cinéma) says “Il y a peu de solutions à ce type de faux raccord (jump cut),” I think Mathilde Dioux in the WordReference.com Language Forums (faux-raccord) is correct:

As Wikipedia puts it, a jump cut is: “a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to “jump” position in a discontinuous way.”
That is not what a “faux-raccord” means. A “faux-raccord” is a mistake in the continuity of characters, plot, … in a movie. Typical examples of faux-racords involve changing levels of drinks in glasses or clock hands shifting back and forth in the same scene. (I am not sure I am making myself clear.)
I think the English for “faux-raccord” is “continuity error”. To see examples of both “continuity errors” and “faux-raccords”, just look for videos with these tags… Some people made a hobby from digging continuity errors 🙂

That French Wikipedia article on raccord that I linked above is long and daunting; the supposed English equivalent is Match cut, but that is clearly a much more limited concept. In general, film terminology is extraordinarily hard to grasp if you’re not part of the industry, and the fact that it differs so greatly between languages doesn’t help.
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Richard Hershberger has been making regular Facebook posts about his specialty, early baseball (including a series “150 years ago today in baseball” which is always enjoyable reading), but sometimes he makes posts having nothing to do with the game, and one such is this, presenting a cartoon from the Pittsburg Press of March 4, 1894 (note the old spelling of the city’s name). The caption of the first panel begins “Nothing like a lard bucket for a growler,” and that reminded me of the much-missed Daily Growler (the blog of Mike Greene, aka thegrowlingwolf) and also made me wonder if I’d ever posted about this use, meaning (in the words of Green’s Dictionary of Slang) “a container, usu. a covered pail with a carrying handle, in which beer is purchased at a tavern, then brought home for consumption.” It turns out I hadn’t, so I’m doing so now. Alas, nobody knows its etymology; Green (“All Green[e]s are kin,” Mike used to say) has this roundup of possibilities:

[ety. unknown; ? the growling, grating noise of the can as it slid, full of beer, across the bar, or the ‘growling’ or grumbling of the children who were sent on the errand, or the drunken arguing that ensued among recipients of the liquor; for full discussion see Cohen, Studies in Slang VI (1999) pp.1–20]

His first citation, offering its own hypothesis, is from 1883:

Trenton (NJ) Times 20 June 2/2: The growler is the latest New York institution. It is a beer can, the legitimate outgrowth of the enforcement of the Sunday liquor law. Young men stand on the sidewalk and drink their beer out of a can, which, as fast as emptied, is sent to be refilled where-ever its bearer can find admittance. It is called the growler because it provokes so much trouble in the scramble after beer.

But I expect that can be antedated using all the resources now available. At any rate, it’s an excellent word.
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I was recently reminded of this comment, where I said “I could swear I’d posted about ‘Misirlou,’ but it seems not,” and I thought, “Well, why don’t I?” It’s a perfect LH topic, and not only because of the derivation of the name: Greek Μισιρλού < Turkish Mısırlı ‘Egyptian’ < Arabic مصر Miṣr ‘Egypt’ (to quote the Wikipedia article). No, there’s also the gender issue; as I said at MetaFilter fifteen years ago, quoting the Wikipedia talk page:

[Turkish] Misirli is a gender-neutral word that could refer to any person or object from Egypt. Misirlou [the Greek word, borrowed from Turkish] refers specifically to a Egyptian female person, and even more specifically to a member of the country’s predominant Arab/Muslim population (members of the large Greek/Christian community at the time would never be referred to as ‘Misirlides’ but as ‘Egyptiotes’).

Thus words shift connotation as they wander. As for the song, this is the oldest version I know about (Tetos Dimitriadis, 1927), and this is the rocked-up version (Dick Dale, 1962) that made it famous in America, first when I was a lad and then again when Quentin Tarantino used it in Pulp Fiction (1994). Any way you play it, it’s a great tune.