languagehat.com

Some items I’ve run across lately:

1) In Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker piece on “DNA surprises” (archived), she writes: “When I arrived, I was greeted by Hourselt, in a colorful Ankara-print baby-doll dress…” I assumed, naturally, that “Ankara-print” had something to do with the capital of Turkey, but it turns out it’s from West Africa: Ankara “is a bastardised version (by African traders) of the name of Ghana’s capital, Accra.”

2) Watching Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (Edipo re), I was surprised to hear the title character referred to with the stress on the penultimate: /eˈdi.po/. I had always assumed it had initial stress, as in Old Italian (aka Latin), but Wiktionary says “/eˈdi.po/, (traditional) /ˈɛ.di.po/.” Anybody know when and why the traditional usage gave way to the modern one?

3) This MetaFilter post introduced me to Ask A Manager’s “Mortification Week” (“our annual celebration of hilarious ways that we and other humans have mortified ourselves at work”); there are many good stories in the linked posts, some of which are of Hattic relevance. From here:

3. The Latin dictionary

Many years ago, I worked in a bookstore in a mall. A customer came in looking for a Latin dictionary. I was super hungover and in a bad mood generally, and I argued with him that, of course, we didn’t have one because Latin is a dead language. He just stared at me like I was the biggest ignoramus in the entire world and walked out.

After he’d left, I realized how stupid I’d sounded. I still cringe, 30 years later.

From here:

13. The good riddance

For the longest time, I thought “riddance” was derived from “ride” and would cheerfully say “good riddance” when wishing people a safe and pleasant ride home.

And the “bad translation” story that leads off this page is pretty good too.

4) Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years: “The Agency for Cultural Affairs […] is recommending replacing the government’s long-standing Kunrei system with more widely used Hepburn-style spellings.” Bathrobe, who sent me the link, says “I like kunreishiki because it reflects native phonology but for foreigners it’s simply confusing.”

Nelson Goering, last seen here talking about Old English, has a Facebook post about another interest of his, Chinese history; he’s discussing Yuri Pines’ Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography:

One of the neat things about early Chinese literature is that people (sometimes archaeologists, but very often, as in this case, tomb robbers) keep turning up new manuscripts which are either completely new works, or older versions of received texts. This book, which I’ve just finished after way too long reading it in snatches, is on one of the completely new texts, called Xinian (“Linked Years”, though it’s not actually an annalistic text arranged year by year, and Pines is a bit critical of the editorial team for publishing it under this title): a bamboo manuscript bought by Tsinghua University in 2008. Apparently this was very big news, and there have already been a slew of articles and books about this (not terribly long) text.

It’s kind of an oddly structured book: a short monograph (just shy of 150 pages), followed by a heavily annotated edition and translation of the Xinian. It’s not an edition with a long introduction, and the first part is an analysis of history writing in China in, roughly, the -500s and -400s (and very early -300s). Pines covers a number of topics […]

I have no real basis for judging any of Pines’s arguments, but he writes clearly and cogently, and makes the interest of his subject felt. He’s occasionally a bit acerbic in his evaluation of other scholars’ arguments, which was sometimes entertaining (since I have no skin in the game), though I thought he was also too harsh at times. I most enjoyed the parts where he’d sketch out some mystery or discrepancy in the Zuozhuan or Shiji and use a (typically brief) comment in the Xinian to unravel the issue.

One particularly interesting passage involved him critiquing Sima Qian’s account of a duumvirate that supposed briefly ruled the Zhou kingdom in the -800s briefly ruled the Zhou kingdom under the term “Joint Harmony” (共和, gonghe). The Xinian tells a different story, saying that Gonghe actually the personal name of guy who held power during the interregnum in question. Pines gives an account of how Sima Qian, faced with very imperfect sources, came to his reconstruction, and basically portrays him as a pretty conscientious historian doing the best he could with very imperfect sources (in this case, concerning events more than 700 years before he was working). There’s a neat little etymological epilogue to this, since the term “gonghe” is the basis for the modern Japanese and Chinese words for “republic”, a very nerdy neologism based on Sima Qian’s portrayal of the supposed (and per Pines, phantasmal) “Gonghe” period.

The Xinian itself forms the second part of the book. It’s not exactly a gripping document, basically a fairly compact overview of early Zhou history, followed by some of the major interactions (mostly wars) between a few of the major states — especially Chu, of course, as well as its major rival Jin, along with a bunch of the smaller states between them. Pines does a wonderful job of mediating this rather dense material. He gives each section an introduction (usually *much* longer than the section itself), a translation, and notes on particular points (again, often far longer than the translation). I’ve included a picture of one of the shorter entries (there are 23 total), which fits on a two-page spread. Pines also has several detailed maps, which helped me a lot in keeping track of all the places mentioned. I think the text would have been basically meaningless to me without this apparatus, which made it at least basically intelligible. There were also some interesting little details. For instance, I learned from one of Pines’s notes that apparently the “Yellow River” was never called such before the Han Dynasty (roughly -200 to +200), but instead was described as “bright” (as in the Xinian) or similar. Apparently the change in colour can be related to deforestation in the river’s upper stretches, leading to more erosion and silt build up. Still, for me at least, the more interesting part was definitely the monograph portion.

I confess I enjoy scholars who are a bit acerbic in their evaluation of other scholars’ arguments; at any rate, I’m bringing the post here for the interesting information about the name “Yellow River” and especially the history of gònghé — I love that kind of twisty background to unassuming modern words. Oh, and Yuri Pines (Hebrew: יורי פינס; Russian: Юрий Анатольевич Пинес; born 1964) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli sinologist and the Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Time to uphold the hat portion of my mandate! This 2015 post by johankaell begins:

This time we will go slightly of focus for the blog but we just have to put some light on this rather extraordinary well preserved medieval hat.

In 1938 they found an old hat. Its was a ordinary felted hat of 18 cm height and a brim with a 46 cm circumference. The hat emerged when a bog was being diked out. The special conditions of bogs can keep textile, especially wool, in a very good condition for a long time. […] A small piece was cut from the edge of the brim and sent for C14 dating. The test showed that it was from between 1310 and 1440, with a probability peak of around 1400. This makes it one of the best preserved medieval hats in Sweden, Scandinavia and possibly even Europe.

Before we take a look at the hat, lets have a look on where it was found. The north part of the Scandinavian peninsula was at this time not part of any kingdom. Norway claimed some tax rights of the Sami people on the eastern sides. On the Baltic coast Swedish traders, so called birkarlar, where the only ones from Sweden allowed to trade with the Sami, a right they kept for a long time. Traders from Novgorod, the forerunners of the Russian empire, also came from the north to trade. The trade was almost exclusively with furs. Bisshunters (someone that hunts mainly for furs) and furtraders lived and traded here. The trade then moved over Stockholm, as this was a stapletown which all trade in the region had to go through. In Stockholm foreign traders would buy the goods and transport it out to the customers in Europe and the world. The area of Lappvattnet also had trade with the Norwegians, getting English goods from the Norwegian ports. This paints us a picture of a harsh pioneer frontier, but with connections to modern cities and fashion for those of means. The hat probably belonged to either a bisshunter or a furtrader. […]

The hat does not look like a hat most people think of as medieval. But if you imagine it worn a bit different, it suddenly pops out of the sources as not very uncommon at all. Especially around the turn of the century 1300-1400. Most broadbrimmed hats are shown with the brim turned up, sometimes decorated. While most are roundtopped, there are some that have a clear point. Especially Russians in western art are depicted in pointy hats. These hats are somewhat more pointy as a rule, but there are all manners between round and pointy.

The discussion and illustrations are extremely interesting, and as you will have noticed, there are a couple of words in the text that deserve special attention. The “birkarlar” are birkarls, “a small, unofficially organized group that controlled taxation and commerce in central Lappmarken in Sweden from the 13th to the 17th century”: “The name birkarl probably originates from an ancient Scandinavian word birk that has been used in reference to commerce in various contexts.” “Bisshunter” initially baffled me, but some googling got me this thread, which says “bisshunter – hunter of rabbits for fur,” and I eventually found the OED’s 1888 entry for byse (“Origin unknown: possibly French bis dark brown”):
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Yip Wai Yee reports for the Straits Times about the Taiwan Centres For Mandarin Learning:

How do you say “MRT” in Mandarin?

In this particular Chinese language class, the correct answer is “jieyun” – a Taiwan-specific term – and not “ditie”, which is used in mainland China.

Reading comprehension exercises here can be about Taiwan’s night markets, with references to stinky tofu and bubble tea; and writing is done in traditional Chinese characters instead of the simplified characters preferred across the Taiwan Strait. […]

The scenes described above provide a snapshot of what lessons are like at a Taiwan Centre For Mandarin Learning (TCML) – the Taiwan government-funded overseas learning centres which, as they admit, offer Mandarin education with “Taiwanese characteristics”.

Since their introduction in 2021, Taiwan’s Overseas Community Affairs Council has set up 88 centres across Europe and the US, in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Paris, as part of Taiwan’s efforts to use Mandarin to promote cultural diplomacy. […]

Besides the programme, Taiwan also runs a long-running scholarship programme offered to international students, including from Singapore, to travel to Taiwan to study Mandarin.

A long-ago girlfriend of mine studied at the Stanford Center, and they seemed to do a good job (I joined her and taught English and linguistics at Tamkang University, an experience that convinced me I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, although I remember my students there with great fondness). The link was sent me by Bathrobe, who adds “I didn’t know how jiéyùn was written so I looked it up. 捷運”; that, put into Wiktionary, enabled me to find out what “MRT” meant: Mass Rapid Transit. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Another Hattic tidbit from Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love (see this post):

“Poor Linda, she has an intensely romantic character, which is fatal for a woman. Fortunately for them, and for all of us, most women are madly terre à terre, otherwise the world could hardly carry on.”

I had no idea what the italicized phrase could possibly mean; fortunately, the OED has a helpful entry (from 1933):

1. Ballet. Applied to a step or manner of dancing in which the feet remain on or close to the ground.
French terre à terre ‘pas de danse qui s’exécute sans sauter’ Roquefort 1829.

[1728 Terra, a terra,..is also apply’d to Dancers who cut no Capers, nor scarce quit the Ground. Hence it is also figuratively apply’d to Authors, whose Stile and Diction is low and creeping.
E. Chambers, Cyclopædia]

1797 The grander sort of dancing, and terre à terre, is the best adapted to such dancers.
Encyclopædia Britannica vol. V. 668/1
[…]

1961 He regrets that the Bolshoi ballet seemed to pay so little attention to terre à terre dancing.
Times 27 May 6/2

1983 During the next year, 1912, Lydia..danced an extremely difficult terre-à-terre ‘toe dance’.
M. Keynes, Lydia Lopokova 59

2. In extended use: without elevation of style; down-to-earth, realistic, matter-of-fact; pedestrian, unimaginative.

1888 His very matter-of-factness, his terre-à-terre fidelity to his authorities.
Athenæum 6 October 443/3

1898 It is so ‘true’, and yet just removed from that terre-à-terre fact which distinguishes so much portraiture.
Daily News 25 October 2/3

1907 Shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-à-terre naturalism.
W. James, Pragmatism vii. 268
[…]

1930 He was too frank not to admit that his friend and chief was, intellectually, very terre-à-terre.
Time & Tide 18 April 500/2
[…]

1981 She..was ‘a credible girl who suffered from menstrual cramps’… You can’t get more terre à terre than that.
Listener 26 February 284/3

(We discussed the name Lopokova in 2016. The 1930 quote is by Carlo Sforza — you can see the context here, in the middle of p. 342 — and once again I deprecate the OED’s casual attitude towards authorship; furthermore, the book seems to have been first published in 1928.) I am torn between thinking this is a useful (and descriptive, if you know the ballet origin) phrase and thinking it’s impossibly recherché and would make a reader think you were a priggish show-off for using it; is anyone familiar with it?

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (which I plugged back in 2013) has an interesting webpage on the phrase “try and”:

Typically, try can be followed by three kinds of phrases: a noun phrase (1a), an infinitival verb phrase with to (1b), or a verb phrase with -ing (1c).

  1) a. I’ll try the salad.

   b. I’ll try to eat this horrible salad.

   c. I’ll try adding vinegar to the salad, to improve the taste.

However, try can also combine with the conjunction and, followed by a bare verb form:

  2) I’ll try and eat the salad.

This usage is very similar in meaning to try to, if not identical, but is deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320). In the next few sections, we will see that it has a number of interesting properties.

A sample of one of those properties:

Unlike with regular coordination, try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected, which means it must occur in its bare form. Carden & Pesetsky (1977) call this the bare form condition.

(Click through for examples.) Via Avva, who mentions other good YGDP pages, like “come with” (We’re leaving now, do you wanna come with?), “drama SO” (I’m SO not going to study tonight), needs washed (this car needs repaired), and repetition clefts (What he wants is, he wants a good job).

My final post from David Daiches’ Two Worlds (see this post), from chapter 7, is probably the most Hattic of the lot; it’s about Scots Yiddish, which intrigued me in 2014:

The morning slow train from Edinburgh to Dundee used to stop (as I suppose it still does) at many of the Fife coast towns on the way. This is why the train used to be, in the 1920s, the favourite mode of transport of those Edinburgh Jews who made a precarious living as itinerant salesmen, peddling anything from sewing needles to ready-made dresses among the good housewives and fisherfolk of Fife. They were the ‘trebblers’, in their own Scots-Yiddish idiom; they had come as young men from Lithuania or Poland seeking freedom and opportunity but somehow had never got on as they had planned. Those with more push and enterprise had moved westward to Glasgow and often on from there to America; a few had managed to build up flourishing businesses in Edinburgh; but the trebblers were the failures, who spent their days carrying their battered suitcases from door to door in the little grey towns of Fife, to return home in the evening with a pound gained to a shabby but comfortable flat in one of the more run-down districts of Edinburgh. There, in old stone buildings where the gentry and nobility of Scotland had lived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, within a stone’s throw of the ‘Royal Mile’ with its violent and picturesque historical associations, they re-created the atmosphere of the Ghetto and lived a life of self-contained Jewish orthodoxy. Edinburgh, one of the few European capitals with no anti-semitism in its history, accepted them with characteristic cool interest. In its semi-slums they learned such English as they knew, which meant in fact that they grafted the debased Scots of the Edinburgh streets on to their native Yiddish to produce one of the most remarkable dialects ever spoken by man. (Yet not such a comically incredible speech as my American friends seem to imagine: Scots preserves many Germanic words lost in standard English and found, in a similar or even identical form, in Yiddish, as ‘lift’ for air (German Luft), ‘licht’ for light (identical in Scots, German and Yiddish), ‘hoast’ for cough (German husten). Douglas Young has pointed out that Goethe’s last words, ‘mehr licht’, would have been pronounced the same in Scots, ‘mair licht’; and they would be the same in Yiddish.) Their sons and daughters, making full use of the city’s admirable educational facilities, grew up to be doctors and scientists and professors, changing their names from Pinkinsky to Penn, from Finkelstein to Fenton, from Turiansky to Torrence. But they themselves, the Scottish-Jewish pioneers who never quite got where they wanted to go, changed nothing. On Fridays in the winter, when the sun set early, they would be home by the middle of the afternoon, to welcome the sabbath. On Saturday, of course, as well as on all Jewish festivals, there was no ‘trebbling’. And on weekdays in the Dundee train they would chant their morning prayers, strapping their phylacteries on to arm and forehead.

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Ian Austen reports for the NY Times (archived):

When Kristy Findlay moved to Quebec City after her American-born husband accepted a job there, she soon developed a longing. “I would go to parks with my young children, I would hear a little English spoken, and I feel like: Oh my gosh, I’m hungry for it,” said Ms. Findlay, who was raised in Ontario. […]

But even in this Francophone redoubt, Ms. Findlay was ultimately able to find a place where her craving for conversation in her native language could be sated. At a former jail and Presbyterian college standing amid the cobblestone streets of the city’s historic Upper Town, a discreet sign above the entrance, reading simply “Morrin,” gives no hint of the linguistic heterodoxy taking place inside.

The Morrin Cultural Centre acts as a hub for Quebec City’s English speakers much the same way as outposts of the Goethe-Institut do for Germans living abroad. It’s a place for books, education, conversation and, above all, it’s a reminder to English speakers that they aren’t alone.

At its heart is the city’s only English-language library. With its cast iron balcony railings and green leather chairs, it still has a decided 19th-century flavor, even if its wooden shelves are filled with contemporary titles. […]

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LH reader/commenter Martin writes:

Back in 1971, I worked for a few months in a flower bulb packing and shipping operation in New Jersey, alongside a bunch of pretty raunchy women who were fond of the expression “Kiss my taint!” They explained to me the taint is the area between anus and genitals, because “T’aint the one hole and t’aint the other hole.” […]

“Taint” was included in E. E. Landy’s Underground Dictionary (page 181) in 1972, with the same etymology as that supplied by my New Jersey co-workers in 1971.

I responded: “Amazingly, it’s in the OED (entry published 2017 [coarse slang (originally U.S.). The perineum.])… with the same etymology!” To wit:

Representing a colloquial pronunciation of it ain’t < it pron. (compare α forms at it pron., adj., & n.¹) + ain’t at be v. α forms.

For the semantic motivation see quot. 1955. [“My prick was throbbing somewhere around her taint—you know what a woman’s taint is: ‘taint asshole and ‘taint cunt,” ‘W. Baron’, Play this Love with Me v. 62]

As Martin says, a rare case where the folk etymology seems to be right.

Unrelated, but I’ve run across the odd surname Sencindiver, whose origin seems to be unknown; this site says “The family name Sencindiver does not have a known European origin. The meaning of the name is not clear but it is possibly of American or Native American origin.”

Or, if you prefer, controsentences. Matthew Reisz posted in Facebook:

Are there many examples of sentences which can be interpreted in two completely opposite ways? I came across a striking case the other day and thought I’d do a nerdy post about it in the hope of encouraging people to come up with their own.

My wife was very ill during the pandemic, spending several weeks alone in hospital while largely cut off from family or friends. When we were recently discussing how she managed to get through this horrible ordeal, my son said to her: “You never lost your temper.”

Initially, I was pretty startled by this statement, since I certainly remember her lashing out at incompetent or irritating nurses (although she usually apologised afterwards), not to mention the tiresome people who came up with bland platitudes to try and cheer her up.

But then I realised Julian meant something else. Françoise had never “lost her temper” in the different and slightly more unusual sense that she had never lost her capacity to get angry – just as one might say that someone had never lost their sense of humour or their optimism during hard times.

In other words, she demonstrated that she had not lost her temper (in one sense) precisely by losing her temper (in another). Or, to put it the other way round, losing her temper was actually a sign that she had not lost her temper! It would be hard to find a more perfect example of a sentence which meant both one thing and its exact opposite. And that set me wondering how common this is.

He goes on to talk about “words, known as contronyms, which can mean both one thing and something close to its exact opposite,” but those are more common and more familiar; the sentence thing is interesting — though with regard to this particular example, I agree with Kathryn Gray, who commented:

While I get what you mean, and it’s strictly correct, ‘losing your temper’ is so *in* the English language as idiom for ‘becoming angry’ that I would and could never think of it in any other way or assume any other meaning is intended by the speaker than ‘becoming angry’.