languagehat.com

Trevor Joyce has introduced me to John Taylor (1578 – 1653), who dubbed himself the Water Poet: “He spent much of his life as a Thames waterman, a member of the guild of boatmen that ferried passengers across the River Thames in London, in the days when the London Bridge was the only passage between the banks. His occupation was his gateway into the literary society of London, as he ferried patrons, actors, and playwrights across the Thames to the Bankside theatres.” In his e-mail, Trevor quoted this impressive passage from “his 1621 work Taylor’s Motto, which included a list of then-current card games and diversions”:

The prodigall’s estate, like to a flux,
The Mercer, Draper, and the Silkman sucks:
The Tailor, Millainer, Dogs, Drabs and Dice,
Trey-trip, or Passage, or The most-at-thrice.
At Irish, Tick tack, Doublets, Draughts or Chesse,
He flings his money free with carelessnesse:
At Novum, Mainchance, Mischance (chuse ye which),
At One and thirty, or at Poor and rich,
Ruffe, slam, Trump, whisk, hole, Sant, New-cut.
Unto the keeping of foure Knaves he’le put
His whole estate, at Loadum, or at Gleeke,
At Tickle-me-quickly, he’s a merry Greeke;
At Primefisto, Post and payre, Primero,
Maw, Whip-her-ginny, he’s a lib’rall Hero;
At My-sow-pigg’d, and (reader never doubt ye)
He’s skill’d in all games, except Looke about ye.
Bowles, shove-groat, tennis, no game comes amis,
His purse a nurse for any body is;
Caroches, Coaches, and Tobacconists,
All sorts of people freely from his fists
His vaine expenses daily sucke and soake,
And he himselfe sucks only drinke and smoake.
And thus the Prodigall, himselfe alone,
Gives sucke to thousands, and himselfe sucks none.

Click through to the Wikipedia article I linked to for explanations of many of these, e.g. Primifisto: “Primo visto, Primavista, Prima-vista, Primi-vist, Primiuiste, Primofistula, or even Primefisto, is a 16th-century gambling card game fashionable c. 1530–1640. Very little is known about this game, but judging by the etymology of the words used to describe the many local variants of the game, it appears to be one of Italian origin.” As for the connotations of “suck” in his day, further affiant sayeth naught. Thanks, Trevor!

Again Anatoly Vorobey has an Avva post (in Russian) that tickles my linguistic fancy. It concerns the Hebrew word for ‘testicle,’ אשך, which according to Anatoly is pronounced a-SHAKH (אָשָׁךְ) by practically all speakers of Modern Hebrew but which all reference works claim is E-shekh (אֶשֶׁךְ), which is indeed given in my dictionaries and at Wiktionary. As he says, the origin is obvious: since the word is generally used in the plural, asha-KHIM (אֲשָׁכִים), the singular came to conform with it. He finishes his post thus:

Why there isn’t a single normal/decent Hebrew dictionary that describes the language the way people actually use it (I repeat once again – this isn’t about colloquialisms or slang! even in a “lofty” context, people only know and use the word ashakh!) remains a mystery to me. And that’s annoying.

It reminds me of my puzzlement as to why нарды (nardy), the normal Russian word for ‘backgammon,’ isn’t in the dictionaries.

Incidentally, the post is called “ашах! как много в этом слове” [ashakh! how much is in that word], a takeoff on a famous Pushkin passage (from Eugene Onegin) that goes “Москва… как много в этом звуке Для сердца русского слилось!” [Moscow… how much is blended in that sound for the heart of a Russian!].

A couple of recent posts from Joel at Far Outliers; both of them start “My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to several observations by Janusz R. Kowalczyk about linguistic variation within Poland.”

Kashubian vs. Polish:

There are two official languages ​​in our country: Polish and Kashubian. In addition, we have dialects: Masovian, Lesser Poland dialect, Greater Poland dialect, Silesian, mixed ones in the east of the country and new mixed dialects in the west and north. These are divided into several dozen regionalisms; some of them occur in only a few towns, so they even more so deserve tender care.

…

In the north of Poland, students learn Kashubian in school. They can take the secondary school exit exam in this language. Official signs of the region’s institutions and local information have versions in the two languages.

Why did Kashubians specifically get the privilege of having their speech recognized as a separate language? Mainly because it is much less understandable than others. Hardworking Kashubians have created a grammar of their language, published literary works as well as textbooks and dictionaries in it.

(More details and examples at link.)

Silesian Polish:

An excellent example of the Silesian dialect can be found in Stanisław Ligoń’s ‘Gowa. Łozmyślania filozoficzne’ (The Head: Philosophical Musings), included in his Bery i bojki śląskie (Silesian Jokes and Fairy Tales), published by Śląsk Publishers, Katowice, 1980.

[There follows a quote with translation and glossary.]

As any Polish speaker can see, the Silesian dialect (or, according to a growing group of researchers, the Silesian language) has many expressions that differ from Polish vocabulary. The beginning of the formation of the Silesian dialect dates back to the period of district division, which took place approximately 800 years ago.

Like any language, it has undergone transformations over time. It has split into many local varieties. Nowadays, there are four main Silesian dialects, in at least several dozen specific regionalisms. Silesian is to a large degree an Old Polish language. It contains words and phrases that were used in the past throughout Poland but are now generally forgotten.

The indefatigable Trevor Joyce sent me Steven Morris’s Guardian story about laudable lexicography:

It is not likely to be a hefty volume because the vast majority of the material has been lost in the mists of time. But the remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being billed as the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic. The dictionary will not be huge because relatively few words survive, but experts from Aberystwyth University say they expect they will end up with more than 1,000 words.

Sources for the dictionary will range from Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of parts of northern Europe to ancient memorial stones. It will include words from about 325BC up to AD500. Dr Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth, said it was exciting to be involved in compiling the first dictionary of its kind.

He said: “These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands at the dawn of the historical period. The picture of the linguistic landscape of Britain and Ireland will be of interest not only to linguists but to historians, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists.” […]

[Read more…]

A Facebook post by our old pal Slavomír Čéplö/bulbul pointed me to Ahmad Al-Jallad’s All lines lead to Proto-Arabic: a review article on Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies [2025], 1–16), in which Al-Jallad (seen here in 2018 and 2022) does a thorough demolition job on Owens’ book, which sounds like a classic case of an expert in a limited field trying to extend his expertise too widely (cf. John McWhorter). It begins (I omit the footnotes):

The past century or so has witnessed what one might call a “documentary turn” in the study of Arabic’s history. The full range of modern Arabic’s dialectal diversity came into focus as linguists began to produce descriptions of peripheral dialects, spanning from Central Asia to the Yemeni highlands and from Cypress to Chad. Sociolinguistic approaches to the dialects have advanced our understanding of language change and dialect formation in real time. The epigraphic exploration of Arabia revealed a “Jāhiliyyah” with stunning linguistic diversity, even when compared to the rich materials compiled by the Arabic Grammarians. Contrary to the commonly held belief, Arabic was not alone in Arabia, but was rather a part of a rich linguistic landscape, lost to history until recently. The discovery and study of papyri from the early Islamic period afford a unique view into the written register of Arabic before the rise of the grammatical tradition, and both pre-modern Christian and Jewish Arabic materials attest to writing traditions that existed parallel to normative Classical Arabic, and shed valuable light on the pre-modern dialectal landscape. The combination of these new sources of data and approaches have rendered the traditional view of Arabic’s past obsolete, and so the time is ripe to synthesize this material into the writing of new linguistic histories of Arabic.

The work under review is the latest monograph by Professor Jonathan Owens, a renowned authority on the Arabic dialects of Nigeria, Libya, and Chad, who has made significant contributions to the field of Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology at large. Owens should be congratulated for the great effort put into this work, which spans over 500 pages. In this book, he builds on the case made in Owens (2006/9) that the field of Arabic historical linguistics has been fundamentally misguided, giving undue weight to older attested stages of the language when it comes to reconstruction. Here, he attempts to build a new, “non-linear” paradigm with a focus on the history of the modern Arabic vernaculars, but draws also on other sources such as epigraphy and papyri. […]

[Read more…]

Way back in 2013 I told the world about my discovery of a lost masterpiece, Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], and last year I posted about Stephen Bruce’s forthcoming translation, originally inspired by that post. Now it has come forth and the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Northwestern University Press has sent me a copy, and it is every bit as good as I hoped and expected, from the gorgeous cover (featuring Karl Bryullov’s Portrait of V. A. Perovsky on Column Capitals) to the fifty pages of detailed end notes. Reading through it, I quickly gave up comparing it with the Russian (Bruce’s translation is thoroughly reliable) and simply enjoyed the ride; the fact is, I didn’t feel any great loss, because Veltman is not a stylist like Bunin or Nabokov (though his prose is thoroughly enjoyable), he is a raconteur, and his rambling storytelling can be enjoyed in any language. As a matter of fact (and I feel bad about even saying this — sorry, Alexandr Fomich!), I actually enjoy the many poems more in translation; in Russian they annoy me slightly by their tossed-off salon-verse style, but Bruce has made them sound fluent and charming in English, with natural-sounding rhyme and meter, which must have taken a lot of work to pull off.

And reading it consecutively in my native language, without stopping to look things up or figure out a complicated Russian construction, I find myself enjoying it in a different way, and making what feels like an important discovery: the ground theme of the novel is freedom. He starts by saying that with determination and imagination “we shall be everywhere and learn everything,” and in the context of the Russian Empire, where nobody was allowed to go anywhere the autocracy didn’t want them to go (Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which came out around the same time, in the early 1830s, is about this), that was a daring idea. He says that using the flying carpet of imagination we can go anywhere we want, and no one can stop us. I suspect it’s only his jolly style and his neverending divagations into inoffensive topics like wine, women, and song that kept him out of trouble. In any event, it’s a charming and invigorating read, not like anything else in Russian literature, and I am pleased as punch that it has made its appearance in English; I devoutly hope it is just the start of a series of Veltman translations. If it is, Veltman is in good hands with Bruce and NUP, and I hope I can report on future volumes. If you want to be an early adopter and help promote the Veltmanic future, you can order it at the publisher’s page (hint: Christmas is just around the corner), and a little bird tells me that if you enter the code WANDERER at checkout you get 30% off through the end of February.

I can’t resist quoting the start of the acknowledgments:

This translation began over a decade ago as a hobby, a welcome distraction from the rigors of graduate school, rather than a project with a clear path to publication. I owe my initial discovery of Veltman and The Wanderer to Stephen Dodson, whose blog Language Hat introduced me to this fascinating work. His continued interest, along with insightful suggestions from his readers, has helped clarify some of the book’s more obscure references.

So you, the Varied Reader, have gotten your due as well!

Simon Akam in the New Yorker has one of the best essays I’ve read (archived) about the struggle to standardize a language. Here’s the start:

Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters—the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that “professor” was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid’s wife served Rüeblitorte, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi.

Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland’s least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major “idioms,” not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid’s authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: “Jeu engraziel cordialmein per Vies interess e Vossa attenziun per quest problem.” Translation: “I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem.”

Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn’t grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the “Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun,” a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion. But the depth of his expertise was formidable. By the time Cathomas knocked on his door, Schmid had already sketched a plan for standardizing Romansh: a “majority principle” in which the most widely shared spellings across the idioms would win out.

“He really already had everything,” Cathomas recalled. “He had worked it all out in his head.”

What Cathomas hadn’t reckoned with was how quickly the tidy scheme, once loosed into the valleys, would ignite quarrels that engulfed Swiss classrooms, newspapers, and eventually cantonal politics—a parable of how an attempt to secure a language’s survival can feel, to those being standardized, like an assault on what makes them distinct.

I hope that lead-in entices you to read the rest; it’s gripping, sad, and funny, with sympathy for all sides. (And specially for J.W. Brewer, I cite the band name Liricas Analas ‘Anal Lyrics.’) Here’s a bit near the end:

The Lia Rumantscha is also asking the International Organization for Standardization to classify each idiom as a separate language. Some people doubt that this hyperlocalism will pay off. One member of the Zurich team told me about a Swiss firm that sold a G.P.S. device with directions spoken in Swiss German. “No one bought it,” he noted. “People said, ‘That’s not my Swiss German.’ ” You can give the machine a voice, he suggested, but people still want it to sound like their cousin.

I might add that I am the proud owner of a Lia Rumantscha publication, the Dicziunari rumantsch ladin-tudais-ch. Thanks for the link go to my dear old friend Dave, to whom I tip all my hats.

Trinity College Dublin reports World’s first film in ancient Sumerian released by Trinity filmmakers:

The world’s first film shot entirely in the ancient Sumerian language is today available to audiences worldwide to view on YouTube [4th December, 2025].

Dumuzi’s Dream and Dumuzi’s Demons, performed by Trinity students entirely in the dead language of Sumerian, tells the story of how Dumuzi, a Sumerian shepherd god, repeatedly escapes from underworld demons, until they finally catch him for good. The short film is a dramatization of the mythological poem known today as Dumuzi’s Dream. The script of the film follows, word for word, the text of this poem, which is preserved on cuneiform clay tablets excavated in modern-day Iraq and housed in Museums all over the world.

The 20-minute film stars Trinity students Olivia Romao (4th year Music) and Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys (4th year English/Classics) and was directed and produced by Professor Martin Worthington (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies). The film is now freely available on YouTube with subtitles in over twenty languages, including Irish, Arabic, Mandarin and Hungarian. […]

Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys, who played Dumuzi, said: “Viewers don’t need to feel too sorry for Dumuzi being led to the underworld. There is another Sumerian story where he gets to escape for part of every year—we might do that one next time! And people interested in the history of religion may be interested to learn that Sumerian culture included a god who died and came back to life.”

Now that’s what I call a movie! You can watch it at the link, and I hope ə de vivre will show up with a critique. (Via MetaFilter.)

Josie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:

Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.

Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.

And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.

[Read more…]

Ella Archibald-Binge reports for the Guardian on an encouraging development in Australia:

There are several words for “morning” in the Gumbaynggirr language but bambuuda is Anne-Marie Briggs’ favourite. Drawn from bamburr, meaning soft and gentle, it speaks to the quiet moments before sunrise, literally translating as “in the softness”. “Doesn’t it just melt your heart?” says Anne-Marie, sitting at the kitchen table of the Coffs Harbour home she shares with her 12-year-old son, Darruy.

The pair have found an easy morning routine since moving to Coffs three years ago. On a bright spring day Darruy wolfs down his Weet-Bix before strolling across the road to the small independent school that has been making headlines for its unique approach to education on the New South Wales mid-north coast.

When the bell rings, the students converge on a shady sandpit. They stomp bare feet to the click of clapsticks, singing and dancing as the sun gathers warmth. By 9.30am, barely a word of English has been spoken. This is how each day begins at the Gumbaynggirr Giingana Freedom school, the state’s first Aboriginal bilingual school. GGFS opened three years ago amid a broader push to breathe new life into the critically endangered Gumbaynggirr language.

As Indigenous languages decline, Gumbaynggirr is experiencing a resurgence. What began with a handful of elders pooling their pensions to record a few words in the 1980s has led to its revival, to the point where it is once again being spoken in homes and learned by babies.

[Read more…]