languagehat.com

A guest Log post by Bob Ladd opened my eyes to a language issue I had never noticed:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

He ends up with this:

I have never seen this difference cited as an example of British/American variation, and nor do I know of any prescriptive grumbling about people using the wrong version. In fact, until I received the editorial review last week, I was completely unaware of the existence of this variation. The consistency in my own writing suggests that individual speakers may settle on one form or the other and use it exclusively, but that the choice is essentially random.

Since modern sociolinguistics has made clear that much variation is meaningful, this conclusion is vaguely troubling. Only one observation from Google n-grams suggests something other than randomness: there is a striking diachronic difference that suggests that the choice between the two versions may once have meant something. Over the two centuries of the Google Books corpus, AmEng consistently prefers the version with “interest” in a ratio of about 3:1, while in BrEng there was a marked shift in the second half of the 19th century: over the course of 50 years or so British usage swung from 3:1 in favour of “interest” (as in AmEng) to 3:1 in favour of “interests”. The new British preference for “interests” then remains consistent through the 20th century, and this is what averages out to the 60:40 proportion in 20th century English as a whole. Could there have been a social motivation for the change in British usage?

For what it’s worth, here’s what the OED (entry revised 2024) says:
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Via Andrew Garrett’s Facebook post, I once again learn of a death so recent Wikipedia hasn’t yet included it:

We are all saddened by the death of Prof. Robin Lakoff. Robin came to Berkeley in 1972, the year in which her book Language and Women’s Place created the modern field of language and gender. She was an articulate, passionate, and impactful writer in that field, in Latin linguistics (her book Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation was published in 1968), and in language and politics (Talking Power, 1990; The Language War, 2000). After her retirement in 2012, she shared her memories in an oral-history interview: https://150w.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/lakoff_robin.pdf.

I’ve long admired her, but I don’t seem to have posted about her. That interview is interesting reading; here’s a section about MIT/Chomsky (and the salad days of lingistics as a profession):

Robin Lakoff:
Haj Ross, officially John Robert Ross, was part of our cohort at MIT. This was the mid to late sixties. And Haj was just wonderful. He was a terrific teacher, a brilliant theorist, great syntactician, wonderful in all kinds of ways. And, the way the MIT linguistics department was working then was that if you had the favor of God (aka Chomsky) and they wanted to hire you, you literally were hired to be an Assistant Professor the moment the ink on the title page on your dissertation was dry, and very shortly thereafter you got tenure.

Paula Fass:
Oh my goodness.

Robin Lakoff:
And in general, people got their degrees in a very short time. Linguistics in the mid sixties to mid seventies was extraordinary in the way it worked, very different from anything you see now, anywhere or the way most departments did it back then. So Haj got tenure in about 1968. But a group (of which I was a member) was beginning to invent a form of linguistics that was very different from what Chomsky was doing. We eventually came to call ourselves “generative semantics.” Chomsky, who is an anarchist in his political thought, is an archist in linguistics. He does not brook any argument: it was his way or the highway. Haj was a member of this group and it soon became clear that the work that he was doing wasn’t what Chomsky wanted done, and over the next few years every year he moved further away from MIT into the Boston suburbs and became more and more estranged from MIT. So it was not unreasonable to suppose, by 1971, that he could be tempted away from MIT.

And a bit from later on that gave me pleasure: “Reagan was still governor and of course he was busy firing Clark Kerr, and stuff like that. So maybe there was more freedom for people below him in the chain of command to do unusual things.” I like her style.

Addendum. I won’t make a separate post of this, but Ives Goddard has also died; the Algonquian Conference FB post quotes the obituary from the Smithsonian:

Ives Goddard III (1941-2025) passed away peacefully in his sleep on the evening of August 6. Ives earned his A.B. (1963) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University. Following a stint as a junior professor at Harvard after his Ph.D., in 1975 he came to the Smithsonian to work as a linguist and as the technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians. After he retired in 2007, he continued his research as a curator emeritus.

Ives was a renowned linguist known as a leading expert on Algonquian languages. He wrote his dissertation on Unami (Delaware/Lenape) morphology and has published extensively on the Unami community’s linguistic diversity. Goddard also wrote grammatical studies, dictionaries, and editions of texts in the Meskwaki (Fox) language as well as the Wampanoag (Massachusetts) and Munsee (Delaware/Lenape) languages. He contributed to the methodology of historical linguistics and demonstrated the value of archival materials for language revitalization. He was the Oxford English Dictionary’s chief consultant for all words of Indigenous American origin. And he was the author and editor of 15 books and more than 300 articles and book chapters.

He will be fondly remembered for his dry wit, encyclopedic knowledge of Indigenous languages, generosity to language learners and to other scholars, and passionate support for linguistics and language revitalization.

Back in 2017 I rejoiced that “The Australian National Dictionary has been made available online, free.” Now I learn from the great Jonathon Green that it is no longer being supported:

I approached the story of Australian slang lexicography in my history of the craft, Language! in 2014. Now, with the flimsy but ever-advocated justification of economic tightening, it seems that the Australian National Dictionary, home to all forms of Antipodean coinage and certainly not merely slang, and acknowledged as the jewel in Godzone’s lexical crown, is facing the chop. The literate end of bogan-world is no longer cashed up, the mazuma is no longer on offer for running the lexicon, now working on a third edition, and all the pleas (mine included) in favour of continuing with so vital a resource, are getting the arse.

I don’t imagine that what follows will help mitigate this undeniable tragedy, but for what it may be worth I offer Language’s take on Australia’s first dictionary-maker and the nation-building dictionary he made more than two centuries past.

Go, feast your eyes on the image of the gorgeous Second Edition, read the rest of his account, and if you happen to be Australian you might want to pester the appropriate bastards.

Another Hattic passage from David Daiches’ Two Worlds (see this post):

My father seemed to take for granted that his own vast knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinics and Jewish religious philosophy would somehow filter down to us without too much active effort on his part. His own strenuous youth, in which he absorbed two different streams of education with a completeness that has always astonished me, was part of a world he had put behind him; he did not seem to expect us to emulate his own extraordinary feats of academic endurance. We belonged to the modern western world which he had trained himself to cope with and to which he had so thoroughly adjusted his own religious position without giving up anything material in Jewish orthodoxy. Our Jewish knowledge and traditions we would get as a matter of course, because we were Daicheses and his sons; our secular education we must work for. He thus took great interest in our schooling and would talk to us about our progress in Latin and Greek and mathematics, throwing Greek quotations from the Odyssey at us to see if we could translate them or asking what proposition in Euclid we were working at. True, he gave us Hebrew lessons, and as far as I can remember I was able to read Hebrew before I could read English (I suspect it was my mother who taught me to read both languages): I cannot recollect a time when the reading of Hebrew did not come automatically to me. But his lessons were unsystematic and sporadic, and were sometimes interrupted by urgent telephone calls or unexpected visitors. Every Friday night we sang, in the traditional intonation, the following Saturday’s portion of the law and the prophets, and so learned the synagogue cantillation by a gradual process of familiarisation — we never deliberately sat down to memorise it. From an early age I was able to sing any passage at sight. And I picked up biblical Hebrew by translating hundreds of passages in no sort of order and with no sort of system; I just found myself eventually able to read with understanding almost any part of the Hebrew Bible. To this day, if I am asked (as I occasionally am) how much Hebrew I know, I find it difficult to answer: it has often turned out that I know more than I think I know. Every now and again my father would decide that we did not know enough systematic Hebrew grammar and would bring in from his study a dusty copy of Gesenius’s Hebrew grammar and ask us to memorise the paradigms of verbs. But he would never stay long at this sort of thing. In the same sporadic way he would decide suddenly that it was time Lionel and I learned some Talmud, and he would appear with one of the huge volumes and take us at a galloping pace through Baba Mezia, ‘the Middle Gate’, with its famous opening deciding the proper legal procedure and judgment if two men simultaneously come across and seize upon a lost garment (‘really seize it’, comments Rashi in his commentary on the commentary on the legal core of the passage). Or he would have a spell at mediaeval Hebrew poetry, or at Rashi’s commentary on the Pentateuch (by some odd freak of memory I can still reel off the opening sentences of Rashi on Genesis): and once he thrust on me a Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. He always professed himself surprised that we did not know more than we did, forgetting that as he was our teacher the responsibility was his. Once he suddenly said to me at dinner: ‘If you were hiking in Palestine and wanted to find a place to spend the night, how would you explain yourself in Hebrew to a passer by?’ and he laughed with a mixture of good-nature and reproof when I said ‘hayesh po makom lagur’ (is there here a place to sojourn?) instead of ‘hayesh po makom lalun’ (is there here a place ‘to lodge for the night?).

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Marta Balcewicz has an amusing NY Times piece (archived) on why people have finally stopped butchering her name:

There was a time when I regularly guided people to pronounce my surname like that of David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam. The worst part wasn’t pinning my identity to a serial killer but that our names in fact sound nothing alike, making the whole effort doubly pitiful. Berkowitz, being a person of notoriety, just provided a useful shortcut. He spared me from needing to explain the Polish rules of Bahl-TZEH-veech — the “C” and “W” reading as “Z” and “V,” the stress on the penultimate syllable, the final digraph possessing the gritty “ch-” of “churn” and not the soft one of “cheese,” an exquisitely subtle distinction most English speakers may not even recognize.

I have never gone out of my way to teach people around me how to properly say my name or to correct them when they butcher it; the task always struck me as Sisyphean. So a little while ago, I was startled when a bookseller in Toronto named Kyle got it right on the first try. I thanked him. But what could explain his flawless delivery? As my partner and I walked home debating the question, an epiphany came my way: “Kyle said he was a huge basketball fan!”

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Matt Daniels writes about an amazing use of Street View:

What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets?

First, we’d need to transcribe every business sign, bumper sticker, ad, flyer—anything with text. All these transcribed words are a wealth of information: non-English text could indicate a cultural enclave, like this one in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We can pinpoint the phrases that comprise NYC vernacular. From everyday common words… …to phrases that uniquely blanket the city.

This is possible because media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!). The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in NYC’s streets. It’s limited to what a Google Street View car can capture, so it excludes text in areas such as alleyways and parks, or any writing too small to be read by a moving vehicle.

The scale of the data is immense: over 8 million Google Street View images (from the past 18 years) and 138 million identified snippets of text.

There are sections on Broadway (Matches for “Broadway” identify street signs, of course. The resulting map is oddly satisfying, illuminating each of the five boroughs’ Broadway), Luxury, Beware (There’s a simple answer to why “beware” has such a clear geographic footprint, oddly completely absent from Manhattan), Gold (The map of “gold” depicts Manhattan’s Diamond District, as well as streets lined with “we buy gold” jewelry and pawn shops), and many more, and there’s a list of the most common words in the dataset (“Stop” is the #1 word in the dataset, appearing 1,304,417 times, followed by “One way”), with explanations for many of them (NYC is home to largest Muslim community in the United States, so it’s no surprise to see halal—food prepared according to Islamic dietary law—ranked at #304). It’s impressive and loads of fun. Thanks, Y!

Nelson Goering continues to work on Old English (see this LH post), and in a recent Facebook post he reported the publication of his open-access paper “A sound change that never was: h-loss and vowel lengthening in Old English” (English Language and Linguistics, doi:10.1017/S1360674325000164), which looked interesting enough to post about here; the abstract:

In the 1880s, Sievers proposed that in Old English words such as *feorhes, the loss of the post-consonantal *h caused compensatory lengthening of the vowel: fēores. Since there are no unambiguous traces of this sound change in later English, widespread analogical restitution of the short vowels was assumed (e.g. from feorh). The evidence for this lengthening is largely metrical. I argue that while Sievers is correct that words like <feores> often need to scan with a heavy initial syllable, this need not be explained by a general lengthening in the language at large. Indeed, the distribution of where heavy scansions are required in verse is typical for metrical archaisms: late prehistoric metrical values of words preserved for poetic convenience. Just as wundor ‘marvel’ can continue to be scanned as monosyllabic *wundr, or contracted hēan can scan as disyllabic *hēahan, so can light-syllabled feores continue to scan as heavy *feorhes. The same sets of poems that prefer non-epenthesized or non-contracted forms also prefer the heavy scansions of feores-type words. If heavy scansions of feores-words are seen as a matter of poetic convention, then the hypothesis of compensatory lengthening in the language generally is left without evidence and should be rejected.

In the FB comments, Haukur Þorgeirsson quoted a passage and followed it with his own thoughts:
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My wife and I always enjoy Bill Danielson’s weekly nature columns in our local paper, the Hampshire Gazette; he usually writes about birds, but this week it was an oddly specialized topic and an unusual word I didn’t remember encountering before:

The word was “exuvia” and those of us that heard it were overcome with a mixture of surprise, confusion and skepticism. The person who dished up this scientific morsel was Brian Adams, professor emeritus of environmental science at Greenfield Community College. The setting for such an utterance was a radio studio at WHMP in Northampton, where I was sitting for an interview with Brian, Bill Newman and Buz Eisenberg on their wonderful “Talk-the-Talk” program on July 23.

Our conversation was centered around a photograph in last week’s paper that featured a fragrant water lily with a spreadwing damselfly clinging to one of the petals on the left-hand side of the photo. I then called everyone’s attention to a yellow “smudge” on the inside surface of the very same petal that was supporting the damselfly. This, I explained, was the shed skin of a damselfly nymph that had crawled out of the water, freed itself from its shell and abandoned it in order to start its adult life. Everyone was looking at the photo and then we heard “exuvia” in our earphones. It was Brian who had offered up the term out of nowhere.

As luck would have it, we were right at the point in our segment where it was time for a commercial break. The microphones went dead and every cellphone and computer in the studio was immediately activated for our combined mission to fact-check this spontaneous utterance. Was Brian a genius, or a complete lunatic? In seconds, the answer to our question was settled: Genius! Bill Newman read the search results and the studio (and the first moments of the second half of our segment) erupted with exuberant, triumphant and congratulatory laughter.

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Back in 2014 I posted about Scots Yiddish, saying of David Daiches’ autobiographical Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood “I actually own a copy of Two Worlds, and now I’m even more eager to read it”; over a decade later, I’m finally reading it, and the very first sentence gave me post material. Although the author’s name in itself is good material — Wikipedia says:

His brother was the prominent Edinburgh QC Lionel Henry Daiches. Although Lionel retained the older, traditional pronunciation of their surname as ‘dyke-iz’ /ˈdaɪ χ (or k) ɪz/, David returned from the US with the Americanized ‘day-ches’, /ˈdeɪ tʃɪz/.

Interesting! Does anyone know the origin of the surname?

And that first sentence reads:

A windy Spring day in Edinburgh, with bits of paper blown down the street and two small boys from Sciennes School kicking an empty tin can along the gutter.

Naturally I wanted to know how to say Sciennes, and Wikipedia obliged: it’s /ˈʃiːnz/ (SHEENZ). Which is an odd spelling/pronunciation match, made odder by the etymology: “The name is a corruption of Sienna in Italy, and comes from the Dominican Convent of St Catherine of Scienna.” I can see turning Sienna into Scienna (more impressive-looking), but how did they end up with that pronunciation?

Sarah Gilbert, Eleanor Parmenter, and James Freeman write about “hundreds of medieval medical manuscripts now accessible” (the MetaFilter post where I found the link calls it a “beautifully designed website”; I find it a bit annoying, but I am a creature of text and prefer it laid out simply and legibly):

Over the course of the last three years, and thanks to the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project has been enhancing the discoverability of medieval medical recipes in historic library collections across the University of Cambridge. […]

In total, 190 manuscripts have been conserved, catalogued and digitised. More than 7,000 pages of medieval medical recipes are now freely displayed on the Cambridge Digital Library. The contents of these valuable sources are now available for historians of medicine and health around the world.

To enhance their discoverability, some of these recipes have been transcribed and translated for the first time, bringing to life for modern audiences the voices and ideas of medieval practitioners.

The Medieval Medical Recipes page has clearly laid out links to the manuscripts themselves. If you want to know how to use “dove faeces, fox lungs, salted owl or eel grease,” this is your vade mecum.