languagehat.com

I love stories about using multiple languages, and Nicole Chang has one for BBC Future:

I’m standing in line at my local bakery in Paris, apologising to an incredibly confused shopkeeper. He’s just asked how many pastries I would like, and completely inadvertently, I responded in Mandarin instead of French. I’m equally baffled: I’m a dominant English speaker, and haven’t used Mandarin properly in years. And yet, here in this most Parisian of settings, it somehow decided to reassert itself.

Multilinguals commonly juggle the languages they know with ease. But sometimes, accidental slip-ups can occur. And the science behind why this happens is revealing surprising insights into how our brains work.

Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don’t expect them. And interference can manifest itself not just in vocabulary slip-ups, but even on the level of grammar or accent.

She says the speaker “needs to have some sort of language control process”:
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I got curious about the word Negus, “Used formerly as a title for emperors of Ethiopia” (AHD) or, as the more expansive OED entry (updated September 2003) puts it, “(The title of) a king of Ethiopia or of a province or kingdom within Ethiopia; spec. (the title of) the supreme ruler of Ethiopia; the Ethiopian emperor.” The OED has:

Etymology: < Amharic nəgus king < näggäs- to become a king (as the title of the Ethiopian emperor also as nəgusä nägäst, lit. ‘king of kings’). Compare French négus (1556 in Middle French as negus; rare before 18th cent.).

Well, if the Amharic word is nəgus, how come the English pronunciation is /ˈniɡəs/? Happily, the AHD also gives /nɪˈɡuːs/ (in their own idiosyncratic rendering), which suits my sense of things much better, so I am adopting it.

But the AHD etymology says Amharic nəgus is “from Ge’ez nəguś, king, ruler, verbal adjective of nagśa, to rule, become king; see ngś in the Appendix of Semitic roots.” What did this ś represent? Wikipedia, s.v. Śawt (the name of the corresponding Ge’ez letter), says the Proto-Semitic sound was a “voiceless lateral fricative *ś [ɬ], like the Welsh pronunciation of the ll in llwyd,” and Rick Aschmann’s Reflexes of Proto-Semitic sounds in daughter languages says:

2. Proto-Semitic */ś/ was still pronounced as [ɬ] in Biblical Hebrew, but no letter was available in the Phoenician alphabet, so the letter ש did double duty, representing both [ʃ] and [ɬ]. Later on, however, [ɬ] merged with [s], but the old spelling was largely retained, and the two pronunciations of ש were distinguished graphically in Tiberian Hebrew as שׁ [ʃ] vs. שׂ [s] < [ɬ].

But how do they know? Via loan words in other languages?

Furthermore, the Śawt article says “See also Ḍäppa ṣ́ ፀ,” but that Ḍäppa link redirects to Ḍād, and a Google search on Ḍäppa essentially turns up only the Śawt article. What’s going on? Is Ḍäppa a thing? All information gratefully received.

Leanne Ogasawara (a translator from Japanese) describes an amusingly cockamamie proposal:

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, one of the famous novelists of the time, Naoya Shiga, published “National Language Issues” in the periodical Kaizo, in which he proposed that the Japanese language be abolished. And more, he suggested the country adopt French, “the most beautiful language in the world.” This created a huge uproar, given Shiga’s stature as an artist. It also fed into the suspicion the Japanese had at the time that their “exceeding difficult language” could be holding them back in terms of development.

Again and again, Japanese people would tell me how difficult Japanese is. I always thought it was a way to encourage me by saying, “It’s hard for us too!” But it wasn’t just the Chinese characters that Shiga found problematic, otherwise he would just have suggested they start using hiragana to write. This was what happened in Korea, when Hangul was developed in the 15th century. Because it was devised with much study and thought after using the Chinese system for a thousand years, Hangul is an almost perfect phonetic system.

Shiga knew this was a possibility and yet he suggested French because he felt it was not only the characters that was the problem. The defeat in the war had caused much soul-searching in Japan, leading to the idea that the Japanese language was somehow “too ambiguous”—aimai na nihongo. And that this had ultimately caused the country’s downfall.

(Shiga lived from 1883 to 1971 — quite a tumultuous span.)

I was distressed to see that a long-time favorite blogger was thinking of giving it up in favor of a personal website; he mentioned Michael’s Notebook as an ideal to emulate, citing the page How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create? So I took a look and quickly backed away. Nothing against Michael, I’m glad what he’s doing works for him, but it’s the polar opposite of what I’m about, with its overemphasis on the vital importance of “thinking well” and contempt for purportedly lesser beings: “Far better to have one brilliant, knowledgeable person respond strongly and in depth to a piece than to have a hundred thousand respond shallowly.” Ranking people by “brilliance” vs. “shallowness” is morally equivalent to ranking them by skin color, religion, nationality, or anything else; once you accept the principle that some lives are worth more than others, you’re on a bad road. And of course people who rank by brilliance always seem to put themselves near the top of the rankings.

Me, I accept as an axiom that all lives are equally valuable and that there is no such thing as “intelligence” as a single, measurable quantity — different people are intelligent in different ways. I find the idea of wanting to interact with only “brilliant” people both laughable and repugnant. I love blogging because it gives me the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of other people with a wide variety of spheres of knowledge and experience; the more I blog, the more I realize the limitations of my own knowledge and appreciate the truth of Isaac Newton’s famous quote about being like a boy playing on the seashore “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” I intend to keep blogging until the keyboard falls from my cold, stiff fingers, because it keeps me learning and keeps me humble. And I am deeply grateful to all of you who read and respond and chat among yourselves and keep this jalopy on the road.

I recently ran across a comment by Alex Case that ended:

[…] can I just say that this is the first blog I’ve ever come across that’s being going continuously since 2002. Congratulations!

That was in 2008! I certainly wouldn’t have bet money that the blog would still be going in 2022, but I’m glad it is. Thanks again, and forgive the above rant; I figure after all these years I’ve earned the right to shake my cane and grumble a bit.

I’ve quoted Anne Curzan, University of Michigan professor of English, repeatedly at LH (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, etc.); she’s sensible and well informed as well as a writer of wit and charm. Now I learn that she and public radio host Rebecca Kruth have a weekly radio segment called That’s What They Say, and it’s well worth your while — each episode is about five minutes long, and the time flies. Try this one on the pronunciation of “schism” or this one on insipid (apparently now sometimes used to mean simply ‘bad’), cut a check, and the past participle of chide (briefly discussed here in 2011).

Two items, each a tad flimsy to stand on its own:

Spanish estar de Rodrí­guez ‘the state of being left at home alone to work by one’s spouse (wife, typically) and children, while they go on vacation,’ discussed in detail here.

Goofy statements allegedly uttered by Viktor Chernomyrdin; the most famous is “Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда” [We wanted it to be as good as possible, but it turned out the same as always], but many of them gave me a chuckle, like “Нам нет необходимости наступать на те же грабли, что уже были” [We don’t need to step on the same rake that was already there]. If you know Russian, check it out.

I was reading along in Deborah Eisenberg’s NYRB review of Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter (translated from the German Bunte Steine by Isabel Fargo Cole) when I got to “The word that comes irrepressibly to mind regarding Motley Stones is ‘sublime’ in its now rather archaic sense that encompasses vastness and violence as well as extreme beauty.” I confess the word sublime has always made me uneasy; it covers too much ground and carries too heavy a freight of Significance, and I wish writers would pick something more specific and readily understandable. Unless, of course, they’re using or referencing the “now rather archaic sense” that the OED (entry updated June 2012) defines as follows:

9. Of a feature of nature or art: that fills the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; that inspires awe, great reverence, or other high emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur. Cf. sense B. 1b.
a1743 J. Baillie Ess. Sublime (1747) 10 Heavens diversified by numberless Stars, than which I grant nothing can be more Sublime.
1762 Ld. Kames Elements Crit. I. iv. 266 Great and elevated objects considered with relation to the emotions produced by them, are termed grand and sublime.
[…]
1996 D. Sandner Fantastic Sublime iii. x. 116 Such sublime landscapes appear often in Frankenstein.

B. n.
1. With the.
[…]
b. That quality in nature or art which inspires awe, reverence, or other high emotion; the great beauty of grandeur of an object, place, etc. Cf. sense A. 9.
The sublime is an important concept in 18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics, closely linked to the Romantic movement. It is often (following Burke’s theory of aesthetic categories) contrasted with the beautiful (beautiful n. 2) and the picturesque (picturesque n. 1), in the fact that the emotion it evokes in the beholder encompasses an element of terror.
1727 A. Pope et al. Περι Βαθους: Art of Sinking 16 in J. Swift et al. Misc.: Last Vol. The Sublime of Nature is the Sky, the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c.
1757 E. Burke Philos. Enq. Sublime & Beautiful ii. §7. 51 Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime.
[…]
2004 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Dec. 18/3 The sublime—with its connotations of the elemental, the raw, the primitive, the unfathomable and the disturbing—has driven all before it.

Now, I get the “element of terror” bit, and the 2004 TLS quote expands on it acceptably in “its connotations of the elemental, the raw, the primitive, the unfathomable and the disturbing,” but I’m bothered (probably unreasonably) by Eisenberg’s addition of “violence.” That seems to me to push it too far. But I am by no means a specialist in “18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics,” and I wonder how others feel about it.
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We’ve discussed filler words a number of times (2009, 2017, 2021), but Anne Delaney’s JSTOR Daily piece has some things that weren’t in the previous posts, and I thought it was worth bringing to your attention. Some excerpts:

In spoken language, we see that many elements are universal, one being the way speakers listen and take turns in a conversation. These markers or thinking sounds (uh, uh huh, huh, hmm, er, like, right?) may be collections of sounds with meaningless lexical value, yet they pack a pragmatic punch.

They can be perceived with a range of filters, neutral or positive ones such as creating connection, agreement, and unity; or with a more negative view, such as a crutch, tic, parasitic word, or distracting habit. These exist in every language. The French utter eh bien; Portuguese have então, ta, pois; Japanese えーと (“eeto”), and なんか (“nanka”); Spanish – mira, vale, among others.

Understood by several labels, verbal fillers and hesitation markers are some of these universal elements, a type of discourse marker. Interjections and rejoinders also come to mind—words a listener uses to keep the conversation going and show the speaker she understands and even sympathizes with them; for language learners, using them adeptly (with the right syntactic placement, intonation, and timing) may demonstrate further fluency. […]

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Amanda Morris has an excellent NY Times story (archived) about recent changes to American Sign Language:

For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning.

Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens.

Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required.

Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language — there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok — and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.

“These innovations are popping up far more frequently than they were before,” said Emily Shaw, who studies the evolution of ASL at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the leading college for the deaf in America.

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Kensy Cooperrider reports for Aeon on what seems to me a self-evidently absurd theory, but since I am a known fuddy-duddy and since it’s been taken more seriously than I would have guessed and has a surprisingly long history, I thought I’d toss it out there:

Proposals about the origins of language abound. […] Over this long and colourful history, one idea has proven particularly resilient: the notion that language began as gesture. What we now do with tongue, teeth and lips, the proposal goes, we originally did with arms, hands and fingers. For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe longer, our prehistoric forebears commanded a gestural ‘protolanguage’. This idea is evident in some of the earliest writings about language evolution, and is now as popular as ever. […]

Anthropologists of the 19th century widely championed gesture-first theories, citing other intuitive arguments. Garrick Mallery – who saw gesture as a ‘vestige of the prehistoric epoch’ – noted that it is much easier to create new, interpretable signals with one’s hands than with one’s voice. Imagine ‘troglodyte man’, he wrote in 1882. ‘With the voice he could imitate distinctively but the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he could exhibit actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, with their derivatives and analogues.’ In more modern terms, it is easier to create transparent signals with gesture – signals that have a clear relationship to what they mean. This observation has since been borne out in lab experiments, and it remains one of the most compelling arguments for a gestural protolanguage.

In the 20th century, scholars held on to these intuitive arguments for gestural theories, while also introducing new sources of evidence. One thinker in particular, Gordon Hewes, deserves special credit for this advance. An anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Hewes had an encyclopaedic cast of mind and an unusual zeal for questions about language origins. In 1975, he published an 11,000-item bibliography on the topic. But it was his article ‘Primate communication and the gestural origin of language’ (1973) that would initiate a new era of ‘gesture-first’ theorising. […]

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Nathaniel Rich’s NYRB review (October 7, 2021 issue; archived) of They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans by Macon Fry opens with an amusing anecdote, a bit of historical geography, and a word new to me:

I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation to Alabama—my young son and I take a bike path that begins at the corner of Audubon Park and follows the ridge of the levee upriver. The path is part of the Mississippi River Trail, which runs three thousand miles to Lake Itasca in Minnesota, but our destination is only two miles away. There, just past the US Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans headquarters, we reach what my son calls the “crazy houses.” Or as the local newspaper once put it, “A Queer Little City Built on the Batture, Where Society Is Divided, Where Queer Beings Live, and Where the Society for the Protection of Children Has Found Considerable Work to Do.”

All that remains of this bustling city are a dozen houses, half-swallowed by the thickets of willow trees that shadow the riverbank. This row of houses, or camps as they’re locally called, is the Southport colony, named after the bend of the Mississippi on which it is situated. The camps do not appear on Google Street View, because they are not visible from any street. They stand on stilts on the batture (rhymes with catcher), the riverside slope of the levee. When the Mississippi is low, the camps are surrounded by lush gardens, sloping yards, and the occasional kayak or propane tank. When the Mississippi crests, the homes appear to float on it—or in it. My son and I rarely see any of the residents but we always encounter Inky and Dinky, freely roaming the batture. He likes to imagine that they are the Billy Goats Gruff, and that among the willows, hiding beneath one of the rickety catwalks that lead to the shacks, lives a troll.

I offer Rich my deep gratitude for the parenthetical “rhymes with catcher,” because you would never learn that from standard lexicographical sources; OED (entry from 1887) has /baˈtjʊə/ (“A river- or sea-bed elevated to the surface”) and M-W \ba-ˈt(y)u̇r\, both reflecting the word’s origin in French. But New Orleans famously has its own way of saying things, as explained in the site How ta tawk rite: A Lexicon of New Orleans Terminology and Speech (the link, featured in my 2004 post, miraculously still works):

A few words on New Orleansese: in a city whose very name is pronounced in nearly 100 different ways by its citizens, all the way from the filigreed, nearly five-syllable “Nyoo Ahhlyins” to the monosyllabic grunt of “Nawln'”, it takes a very sensitive ear, not to mention years of practice, to pinpoint the incredible binds the native speaker encounters, those specific words where the slow tongue gives up and makes a leap of faith. For those who have never heard it, you must begin by imagining Brooklynese on Quaaludes.

As I said in that post:

I particularly direct your attention to the section “A guide to the pronunciation of local place names” (most of the way down the page), where you will learn the proper pronunciation of the street names Burgundy (bur-GUN-dee), Burthe (BYOOTH), Cadiz (KAY-diz), and the like.

Batture-rhymes-with-catcher fits right in.