languagehat.com

Via JHarris’s MetaFilter post:

AIT, the Agency for Instructional Television (WIKIPEDIA), was one of a number of organizations who made programs that PBS stations would air midday, for teachers to record for later use. One of these was the inexplicable Wordsmith, that explored the roots of words. Host Bob Smith, standing on a gameshow-like set with his 70s attire and mustache, takes foam balls with syllables on them out of a machine, opens them up to show inside is printed their meaning, then puts them back into the machine, which makes a sci-fi noise. Then Sesame Street-like short clips demonstrate its meaning. While it moves slow, it’s still kind of interesting! A number of episodes survive, as well as some other programs from AIT, in the Indiana University Moving Image Archive.

It is really as ’70s as it is possible to be, and it does indeed move slow, but it’s a great idea and presented in an enjoyable way. The first episode I tried was Body I, where Bob started with a ball reading HAND; he says “Its meaning isn’t hidden: “hand” means ‘hand’!” and opens the ball to reveal “hand” inside. Then he has his sidekick slice open the MANU ball to show that it too means ‘hand’; he gives examples of words using that “word cell,” including manufacture, manual, and manuscript (accompanied by images and potted histories). Of course, I got stuck on wondering where hand comes from; the OED (updated June 2013) says:

Etymology: Cognate with Old Frisian hand, hond (West Frisian hân), Old Dutch hant (Middle Dutch hant, Dutch hand), Old Saxon hand (Middle Low German hant), Old High German hant (Middle High German hant, German Hand), Old Icelandic hǫnd, Old Swedish, Swedish hand, Old Danish hand (Danish hånd), Gothic handus, Crimean Gothic handa; further etymology uncertain and disputed.
Further etymology.

Perhaps ultimately < the same Germanic base as the strong verb reflected by Gothic -hinþan (in frahinþan to take captive, ushinþan to make a prisoner of war), Old Swedish hinna to reach, arrive at (Swedish hinna), and the related words Gothic hunþs body of captives and Old English hūð plunder, booty, Old High German hunda plunder, booty; further etymology uncertain.

Bathrobe wrote me as follows:

My understanding is that Russian has three kinds of construction equivalent to a relative clause:

1. Subordinate clause using the relative pronoun который. I assume that this is what is referred to by the term определительное предложение.

2. Constructions using the following: кто, что, какой, чей, сколько, and насколько.

3. Subordinate clauses using participles (причастие), which are much more versatile than English participles and are actually tensed.

Which of the above is actually referred to as a “relative clause” (определительное предложение)? Is there a specific name for the other structures, in particular the participial structures? Or are they all covered by определительное предложение?

This is rather important because one early Russian grammar of Mongolian, that of Бобровников 1849, referred to Mongolian relative clause constructions as определительное предложение. However, an earlier grammar by Ковалевский (1835) called the verb forms used in relative clauses причастие.

Do these represent opposing views of the nature of relative clauses in Mongolian, or are they completely compatible? If use of the term определительное предложение is restricted to clauses using который, then the analysis of the verb forms as причастие would imply a different analysis on the part of Ковалевский. If, on the other hand, clauses containing причастие are normally regarded in Russian as one variety of определительное предложение, then the two views would be completely compatible.

My knowledge of official Russian grammar is too limited to be of any help, so I’m throwing the questions out there for more knowledgeable folks to deal with. Bathrobe and I thank you for any light you can shed!

I wondered where Russian ниц ‘face down, prone’ came from, so I looked it up in Vasmer and found the Slavic root was compared to various other IE forms, including OE niowol, nihol ‘prone.’ I then wondered if that was included in the OED, and sure enough it was, barely (the last citation is from c1300), in the unexpected form nuel (entry updated December 2003):

Etymology: Cognate with Middle Dutch niel, Middle Low German nǖle, nǖl, nugel, nigel prone, prostrate (compare also Middle Dutch vernielen (Dutch vernielen), Middle Low German vornēlen, vornielen (German regional (Low German: East Friesland) fernêlen, fernûlen), all in sense ‘to destroy, bring low’), probably < the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit nīc- keeping low, facing down, nīcā below, down, downwards, Old Church Slavonic nicĭ bent forward, prone, representing an extended form (labiovelar extension) of the Indo-European base of nether adv.¹

Obsolete.

Prone, prostrate.

eOE Épinal Gloss. (1974) 42 Pronus, nihol.
OE Ælfric Old Eng. Hexateuch: Josh. (Claud.) vii. 10 Aris nu, Iosue; hwi list ðu neowel on eorðan?
OE Paris Psalter (1932) clxviii. 10 Nifle nædran cynn.
lOE King Ælfred tr. Boethius De Consol. Philos. (Bodl.) i. 8 He gefeoll niwol ofdune on þa flor.
c1300 (▸?a1200) Laȝamon Brut (Otho) 16777 Octa..nuel feol to grunde bi-vore þis kinges fote.

I’m tempted to say “let’s bring it back,” but I guess we don’t really need a synonym for prone. I note with amusement (having thought about homonyms) that besides newel ‘central pillar forming the axis of a spiral or winding staircase’ there is another newel ‘a piece of news; a novelty’ (alteration of novel after new):
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Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRB essay on the Kalevala is full of interesting stuff (I didn’t realize Lönnrot played quite such an authorial role: “He felt free to rename characters, fuse unrelated stories, and interpolate linking passages of his own composition”), but I’m bringing it here for the final two paragraphs:

Of the many things brought into existence in the course of the poem, none is more mysteriously powerful than the Sampo. When Väinämöinen, adrift on the water, is rescued by Louhi of Pohjola, she promises to get him back to his home country if he will make her a Sampo out of the tip of a swan’s feather, the milk of a barren cow, a barleycorn, and the wool of a ewe; he says he cannot, but will send her the smith Ilmarinen, who will have no trouble since he hammered out the vault of the sky. And what is the Sampo? It has a “lid of many colors” (or in Friberg’s version, a “ciphered cover”), but aside from that its nature and origin remain obscure: according to various commentators it is “a mysterious talisman,” “a miraculous mill,” “a deeply coveted object of mysterious power and provenance.” For Peter O’Leary the “great roots it extends deep into the earth” suggest something organic in nature, like a mushroom, perhaps. It brings happiness to those who have it, producing grain and salt and money; it stirs up strife between the southern lands and Pohjola as it is successively forged, locked away, stolen, and smashed into pieces, and its fragments, washed ashore, continue “to grow, increase and flourish.”

That the Kalevala should have at its heart the mysterious Sampo seems appropriate, since the poem itself can be conceived as a vehicle for transmitting a cargo both precious and only partly knowable. Even the singers who provided Lönnrot with his materials only partially understood their songs’ implications, and however sensitively he assembled those materials, to read the work is to be aware of the underlying presence of earlier intentions. Those origin stories tug irresistibly in a reverse direction, toward an original enunciation persisting through accumulated layers of mishearing and melding. Its vitality is somehow preserved like the buried Vipunen, uttering “strands of magic verse” for which Lönnrot’s Kalevala would be only a way station for a text never really final: a voyaging cluster continually eliciting further variant strands emanating from “the deepest origins/From the very birth of time.” What and where the “real poem” might be—and where and in what form it might end up—is finally as imponderable as the nature of the Sampo.

An epic MacGuffin! According to Wiktionary, the word is “Probably equivalent to sammas [(Finnish mythology) cosmic pillar that supported the sky] +‎ -o.” Someday I should really get around to reading the Kalevala.

Over at Wordorigins.org, Dave Wilton discusses one of the odder idioms:

To escape by the skin of one’s teeth is to narrowly avoid some hazard. It’s an idiom, which by definition makes no literal sense; teeth, of course, don’t have skin. It’s an example of what happens when one attempts to translate an idiom word for word from one language to another.

Unlike many other idioms, however, we know its origin and how it became a fixture in the English language. The phrase is the result of overly literal Biblical translation. It first appears in the 1560 Geneva Bible in Job 19:20. This verse appears in the midst of a passage where Job is complaining about his trials and tribulations:

My bone cleaueth to my skin & to my flesh, and I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe.

The phrasing was repeated, with one minor change, in the 1611 Authorized or King James Version […] Its place in this translation is what secured its place as an idiom.

But, as I said, it is an overly literal translation. The original Hebrew is בְּעוֹר שִׁנָּי (bĕʿōr šinnāi, with the skin of my teeth). The exact meaning of this Hebrew passage has been subject to much commentary and debate, but most scholars agree that it has nothing to do with escaping or avoiding hazards. The Latin Vulgate gives a different translation, which, regardless of whether or not it is an accurate rendition of the original Hebrew meaning, has the virtues of making sense and being internally consistent with the rest of the passage. Job 19:20 in that translation reads:

pelli meae consumptis carnibus adhesit os meum et derelicta sunt tantummodo labia circa dentes meos

(The flesh being consumed, my bone has adhered to my skin, and nothing but lips are left about my teeth)

Translators seem to feel free to play around with this to their own satisfaction; the New English Bible has “I gnaw my under-lip with my teeth,” and the Church Slavic (Elizavetinskaya) bible has “кѡ́сти же моѧ҄ въ зѹбѣ́хъ содержа́тсѧ” [my bones are held in my teeth]. I welcome all thoughts about what the Hebrew might mean.

Rebecca Coffey at Forbes reviews Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater’s book The Language Game, which deals with the question of why humans are the only animals with advanced language skills:

Christiansen is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and a professor in cognitive science of language at Aarhus University in Denmark. Chater is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick University. Together, they are engaging storytellers relating how philosophers, historians, naturalists, linguists, anthropologists, and even mathematicians and computer scientists have tried to disentangle the mysteries of language. In telling their tales, the authors plunge down a warren-full of rabbit holes. Do all modern people speak some evolved variation of a primal, “Adamist” (as in “Adam and Eve”) language? Looking for clues to answers, the authors turn to the book of Genesis, the work of St. Augustine, the ideas of the early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the code written by Navajos working with the United States military in World War II. […] They […] suggest that a more interesting question than “How did the human brain become so well adapted to language?” might be “How did language become so well adapted to the human brain?”

This is because language, according to Christiansen and Chaten, is not so much an invention as an improvisation, a “community-wide game of charades, where each new game builds on those that have gone before.” It is constantly re-contrived generation after generation. Children acquire words and phrases not by assimilating rules or by vocalizing according to patterns they were somehow born to express but by jumping into the game and extemporizing freely.

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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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