languagehat.com

A reader writes:

I am asking for your help in finding the proper definition for the term, “dialect singing.” Last night, I rewatched The Prestige as a soporific without the desired effect and set to perusing write-ups of the film. The neurotransmitter cascade from rapid, casual trivia consumption flowed smoothly until it was blocked by “dialect singing,” a skill listed in the repertoire of a few vaudevillian era performers. I found it on the wiki page for the American magician, Chung Ling Soo.

It could have a very simple and obvious definition: the performer sings with an exaggerated regional accent. I’m not entirely convinced. After reading your post Singing in Nonsense, I feel like dialect singing is more closely related to Grammelot.

Anybody know anything about this vaudevillian skill?

From a very long and gassy NY Times “Guest Essay” by Anand Giridharadas (bold added):

They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.

I have no idea what “the guttural” is meant to mean; Nick Jainschigg, who sent me the link (thanks, Nick!), says “it sounds like it refers to the gutter,” and I guess that’s as good a guess as any. (The word in more standard uses, not that they’re necessarily apt, has featured here more than once, e.g. “The politician seemed to have a longstanding issue with the ‘guttural‘ letter” [ы!] and “Avar … with its guttural pops and creaks,” not to mention the classic Flann O’Brien “People do say that the German language and the Irish language is very guttural tongues.”)

Back in 2016 I posted on a “gibberish language” called Grammelot, with a reference to “the invented penguin language Pingu”; now Gabriel Rom has a nice piece in the NY Times (archived) about the latter:

In the unreal early days of the pandemic, when it seemed foolish to try to comprehend the enormity of what we were collectively living through, a clay penguin reacquainted me with the clarifying power of gibberish. “Pingu” is a stop-​motion children’s television show about the titular character, a penguin tyke who lives with his family in a little igloo village at the South Pole. Initially, the episodes appear to be light five-minute affairs about the small dramas of toddler penguinhood: Pingu spits his veggies into the toilet; a municipal penguin employee turns Pingu’s play area into a parking spot. But with a balance of farce and sentiment, the show also gestures toward some of early life’s more complicated realities — sibling rivalries, parental punishment and the loneliness of childhood. Created by the German animator Otmar Gutmann, “Pingu” premiered in Europe in the early 1990s and became a worldwide phenomenon; but unlike other global cultural crazes, the show did not need to be dubbed or subtitled. Nothing could be lost in translation because there was nothing to translate. Every “Pingu” character speaks the language of Penguinese, which sounds like Thai, Indonesian, Italian, something in between or something else entirely. Yet, despite the lingo’s seeming inscrutability, it is mysteriously — hilariously — comprehensible. […]

My first brush with “Pingu” came when my Canadian cousin, a more cultured toddler than I, once brought a VHS tape of the series with her during a visit. I dimly remember watching an episode on a Sunday morning, while squeezed together in bed with my family. The show was a revelation. “Pingu” did not speak two languages, one to children, another to adults. There was no hierarchy of comprehension, no winking jokes meant to soar over young heads to keep the adults in the room vaguely interested.

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TCM is showing the 1949 Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Shinshaku Yotsuya kaidan, 新釈四谷怪談) directed by Keisuke Kinoshita tomorrow night, and I’m going to record it because it’s said to be a great filmed version of Yotsuya Kaidan, “arguably the most famous Japanese ghost story of all time.” Of course, most Western aficionados will associate the term kaidan ‘ghost story’ with the Lafcadio Hearn book and the 1964 Masaki Kobayashi film based on it, both called Kwaidan in English (kwa is a historical form of the syllable now pronounced, and transliterated, ka) and both of which I enthusiastically recommend. But what brings me to post is the word Yotsuya (四谷), which of course I was curious about.

It turns out to be the name of the Tokyo neighborhood where the story takes place, though the name of the heroine’s father is Yotsuya Samon (I presume it’s the same Japanese word). The Japanese Wikipedia article on the neighborhood says, in Google’s translation:

Origin of name

There are two major theories, but neither of them has become an established theory.

First of all, there are four teahouses, Umeya, Kiya (Kuboya), Chaya, and Nunoya, so there is a theory that it became ‘Yotsuya’ (Yotsuya), but it was not until the Genna era that these four teahouses came together. Therefore, it is difficult to explain why it was called ‘Yotsuya’ before the Edo period.

Another theory is that it comes from the four valleys of Sennichiya, Myogadani, Sendagaya, and Oouedani (there is another theory that the four valleys are Momijigawa Valley , Samegawa Valley, Shibuyagawa Valley, and Kanigawa Valley). There is no reason to extract only the four valleys, and doubts have already been issued since the Edo period.

Well, I don’t know much Japanese, but I do know that yotsu (四) is ‘four’; what’s ya? My trusty Essential Kanji has it as “KOKU, tani valley” — no ya. So I went to jisho.org, which found 82 words, starting with tani ‘valley’ and going on for pages… but no ya. I presume it’s one of those readings that occurs only in one term as a specialized and unpredictable use, and the only way to know it is to know it. Japanese isn’t for amateurs.

Michel DeGraff, a professor of linguistics at MIT and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy, writes for the NY Times (archived link) about his native language:

As a schoolchild in Haiti in the 1970s, I was forbidden to speak my mother tongue, Haitian Creole, which we Haitians call Kreyòl. If I disobeyed, a teacher would remind me with the sharp smack of a ruler across my hand. Kreyòl, which emerged from the contact among French and African languages on colonial plantations, is the only language spoken by all Haitians. But the nation’s education system discriminates against it in favor of French, which is spoken by at most a tenth of the population. Kreyòl-speaking children are subjected to myriad classroom humiliations, including in at least one school a sign that says, “I have to always express myself in French. Otherwise, I am the gorilla of the class.” […]

When I was a schoolchild at the prestigious Institution Saint-Louis de Gonzague in Port-au-Prince, my teacher of French and Haitian literature, a French Catholic brother, had us memorize texts that taught us to despise Kreyòl as a worthless language. I was also made to write hundreds of lines saying “I will never speak Kreyòl again.” Some parents and teachers even make children scrub their tongues with soap, lemon and vinegar to metaphorically wash away the Kreyòl.

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Youssef Rakha, an Egyptian novelist, poet, and essayist, writes for New Lines about the less decorous aspects of modern Egyptian literature; some excerpts:

The Arabic word for literature, “adab” also means decorum — implying that good language and good manners are ultimately the same thing. But, aside from the delicate feelings and refined tastes so abundant in [Salah] Jahin’s work, the Arabic literary canon has always had another strand, rich in profane scenes and blasphemous references. That kind of writing tears away the veil of propriety and derives its power from obscenity. In modern times it became a truer expression of fraught reality than decent, respectable literature ever could be. And there is no better example of that than the short, tragic life of [Naguib] Surour whose poetry shocked Egyptians through the 1960s and 1970s.

Surour was a lifelong dissident, repeatedly arrested and tortured for his views. […] Misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, he was beaten and “treated” with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It was six months before his friends could locate him.

Up to this point Surour had been flamboyant and outspoken but not especially foul-mouthed. When his marital crisis came to a head, though, he started writing a series of “rubaiyat” (quatrains) — simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking — that flaunted the worst swear words in Egyptian Arabic […] He continued adding verses until 1974, by which time it had turned into a 6,000-word tirade with the offensive title “Kuss Ummiyyat” — combining “umm,” the Arabic word for mother, and “kuss,” a vernacular term for vagina (which the poem used repeatedly).

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My wife asked me where the phrase mixed bag came from, and even as I was racing for the dictionaries she called out “I’ll bet it’s from hunting.” Unsurprisingly, she was right (though it wouldn’t have occurred to me); OED (entry updated September 2002):

a. An assortment of game killed while hunting. Cf. bag n. 9.

1867 S. W. Baker Nile Tributaries Abyssinia xvi. 417 There was an immense quantity of large game, and I made a mixed bag of elephants, hippopotami, buffaloes, rhinoceros, giraffes, and great numbers of the large antelopes.
1895 Littell’s Living Age 24 Aug. 500/1 The chance of a small mixed bag, perhaps including some of the rarer wild fowl.
2002 Woodcock Scent in uk.rec.shooting.game (Usenet newsgroup) 30 Jan. We had a mixed bag of woodcock and snipe during the day and widgeon during the evening flight.

b. A diverse or heterogeneous assortment of people or things. Also figurative.

1919 F. M. Duncan Insect Pests iii. 48 It will be with quite a mixed ‘bag’ of foes that the enthusiastic hunter [sc. a gardener] will return.
1925 Econ. Jrnl. 35 617 It is a mixed bag: ephemeral narratives.., short essays [etc.].
[…]
1989 Dirty Linen Spring 12/2 The musicians on this recording are a mixed bag of English and Indian players.
1994 Denver Post 8 Feb. a1/2 President Clinton’s 1995 budget plan delivered a mixed bag of gains and pains to Colorado yesterday.

Interesting (though not surprising) that the hunting sense is still in use; though they only take the figurative sense back to 1919, a quick Google Books search found William Senior’s Mixed Bag: A Medley of Angling Stories and Sketches (1895), which certainly suggests it wasn’t only in literal use then.

Via Alex Foreman’s Facebook post, a YouTube clip (less than a minute long) of native Irish speaker Peig Sayers speaking English. Alex says:

This puts into perspective what I really mean when I tell people that Indian English (which now does have full native speakers) is just as much a part of English as Irish or Welsh English, and is similar to them in having substrate effects from other languages.

This is a recording of Peig Sayers speaking somewhat broken English. Sayers was not only a native Irish speaker but part of a generation which still contained Irish speakers who spoke English imperfectly (believe it or not the last documented monolingual Irish-speaker who spoke no English only died in 1998.)

You can tell that much from her syntax. But listen to her accent. It is not native Hiberno-English phonology of any kind, but it has enough in common with heavily Irish-influenced varieties of Hiberno-English that, if I heard somebody speaking with this *accent* today using native-like syntax, I doubt I would take them for a non-native English speaker. English spoken with a heavy non-native accent by an Irish speaker can still, pronunciation-wise, fall within my sense of “what English-speakers can sound like”.

There may come a time in a few centuries where a lot of the distinctive features of Indian English have been naturalized in the same way, so that phonological transfer from Indian languages (which now strikes Americans or Britons as signs of imperfect English learning) sounds to them like nothing more than deep regionalism.

It’s a wonderful sound, and I wish the clip lasted longer.

Back in 2005 I said “Second-guessing the Swedish Academy’s often bizarre choices and omissions for the Nobel Prize in literature is a time-honored game,” and one of the prime examples of omission is Leo Tolstoy, who lived for a decade after the institution of the prize and was never awarded it. I confess I’ve always enjoyed rubbing their nose in that myself (from a distance, that is; I’ve never actually met the Academy). Now I learn, from Dmitry Bykov (whose thoughts on the subject can be read here, in Russian) that it was his own choice. I’ll quote the English-language account by Kristin Masters here:

[…] In 1902, Tolstoy was again passed over for the prize; the Nobel committee awarded it to Theodor Momms[e]n. Losing out on the prize didn’t seem to bother Tolstoy much. In fact, he said “it saved me the painful necessity of dealing in some way with the money…generally regarded as very necessary and useful, but which I regard as the source of every kind of evil.” Despite Tolstoy’s own conciliatory reaction, the furor continued. A Swedish newspaper published an editorial in 1902 calling the the Nobel committee “unfair craftsmen and literature amateurs.”

Three years later Tolstoy published Great Sin [the long essay «Великий грех», supporting the theories of Henry George about the “sin” of landed property]. […] The Russian Academy of Sciences decided that the work truly enhanced Tolstoy’s standing as a writer, so they decided to nominate him again for the Nobel Prize. The nomination letter was approved by all of Russia’s outstanding academic institutions and was accompanied by a copy of Great Sin.

But Tolstoy still genuinely wanted nothing to do with the prize. The moment he learned of the nomination, he took up a pen for himself. Tolstoy wrote to his friend Arvid Jarnefelt, a Finnish writer. He entreated Jarnefelt, “If it was meant to happen, then it would be very unpleasant for me to refuse from it. That is why, I have a favor to ask. If you have any links in Sweden (I think you have), please try to make it so I would not be awarded with the prize. Please, try to do the best you can to avoid the award of the prize to me.” Whether Jarnefelt intervened or the committee had designs of its own, Tolstoy didn’t win the prize. Giosuè Carducci did.

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My wife and I watched It Happened One Night in the Criterion edition (a gift from my brother) and enjoyed it as much as we had when we saw it many years earlier — it fully deserved its sweep of the top Oscars and its reputation as one of the greatest of all rom-coms. But what brings it to LH is something I don’t remember noticing before. When the hero and heroine are making their leisurely way north, at one point they put up for the night at a sort of proto-motel called an “auto park.” I wasn’t familiar with this phrase, and it’s unknown to the OED (“No results found for ‘auto park’”), but it clearly had some currency — a Google Books search turned up ads using the term as well as this quote from Pamela J. Brink’s Only by the Grace of God, describing a road trip c. 1936: “The best thing about our trip was staying in new lodging called an auto park or motel.” Does anybody know anything about the history of this quaint expression?