languagehat.com

I was stopped in my tracks by the second sentence in Chandni Singh’s “Spring Never Came to India This Year” (NYT, May 24, 2022):

I am no stranger to heat. I know the stifling breath of “loo,” the hot and dry summer winds that blow over North India and Pakistan.

I immediately turned to the OED, which has it s.v. loo, n.³ (entry from 1976):

Etymology: Hindi, < Sanskrit ulkā flame.

The name given in Bihar and the Punjab to a hot dust-laden wind.

1888 R. Kipling Phantom ‘Rickshaw 78 The loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees.
a1936 R. Kipling Something of Myself (1937) iv. 98 A hot wind, like the loo of the Punjab.
1954 O. H. K. Spate India & Pakistan ii. 55 In the NW hot weather depressions generally take the form of violent dust-storms… Such dust-storms are distinct from the loo, a very hot dust-laden wind which may blow for days on end.
1965 E. Ahmad Bihar iv. 45 The hot scorching ‘loo’ winds of the Bihar plains during late April and May have an average velocity of 5–10 miles per hour.
1974 M. Peissel Great Himalayan Passage xi. 175 The Loo is caused by the hot expanding air of the Indian plains rushing into the cool hills.

Looking up Sanskrit ulkā (उल्का) I find it defined as “A fiery phenomenon in the sky, a meteor; A fire-brand, torch; Fire, flame”; Wiktionary says it “is related to Sanskrit वर्चस्- (várcas-, ‘luster’), from a root Proto-Indo-Iranian *waRč-.”
[Read more…]

In 2019 Richard Janko published a long article “Amber inscribed in Linear B from Bernstorf in Bavaria: New Light on the Mycenaean Kingdom of Pylos” in Bavarian Studies in History and Culture; here’s the abstract:

In 2000 the extensive fortified citadel of Bernstorf near Munich in Germany, which burned down in or after c. 1320 BC and had already yielded some gold regalia of rather Aegean appearance, produced two amber objects seemingly inscribed in Linear B. The authenticity of these objects has been questioned, on grounds that are as yet insufficient. A new reading suggests links with a place called *Ti-nwa-to, the existence of which is attested by the Mycenaean archives at Pylos and possibly at Knossos. Women from this place worked at both palatial centers as weavers, but it also had a wealthy ‘governor’. An analysis of the Pylos tablets suggests that this place was in western Arcadia. This material sheds light on long-distance connections in Mycenaean times.

It starts with a lengthy description of the finds and their authenticity, continues with “Reactions to the discoveries” (“the finds at Bernstorf were too outlandish and remote for them to have attracted much notice from scholars of the Aegean Bronze Age, a field which has seen some notorious forgeries and hoaxes”), and proceeds to Janko’s own “fresh approach,” which involves interpreting the inscription “??? pa-nwa-ti” as ti-nwa-to, comparing it to other forms attested in the Linear B tablets, and concluding that it represents a place in the Western Peloponnese. There follows a detailed discussion of possible locations and implications, with “some hypotheses”:

If the amber from Bernstorf was incised with Linear B in the western Peloponnese, how did it reach Upper Bavaria, and why? Even in the Middle Bronze Age, valuable artifacts could travel vast distances. One can only offer hypotheses, since it is not clear on what basis we could decide between them, but at least only a limited number of them are available; considering them will shed light on several aspects of Mycenaean long-distance relations. If these objects are genuinely from Mycenaean Greece, they must either have been traded by Mycenaeans, taken from them by force, or paid by them for services of some kind, the most obvious of which is service in a force of mercenaries. They could then of course have been traded great distances, as far as Bernstorf, by other intermediaries. […] The whole story may never be known, but the discovery of Linear B in Upper Bavaria opens a surprising new window onto the Mycenaeans and their far-flung connections.

This kind of thing is extraordinarily interesting in theory, but I can’t help but feel that it’s an awful lot to make of a few scratches on a piece of amber. I’ll be curious to see what others think.

Erik McDonald has posted about the Russian word несессер ‘special container (bag, box, case, etc.) for small items’; as you might guess, this is from French nécessaire ‘box, case, briefcase, kit containing various necessary or convenient objects (for an occupation, an activity)’. The French word was also borrowed into English, and the OED entry (s.v. nécessaire) was updated in June 2003:

A small case, sometimes ornamental, for personal articles such as pencils, scissors, tweezers, cosmetics, etc.

1800 E. Hervey Mourtray Family III. ix. 177 A chance of his travelling necessaire, and all the apparatus of his toilet, being burned.
1854 W. M. Thackeray Newcomes I. xxviii. 266 Gousset empty, tiroirs empty, nécessaire parted for Strasbourg!
1876 ‘G. Eliot’ Daniel Deronda I. i. ii. 29 Gwendolen..thrust necklace, cambric..and all into her nécessaire.
[…]
1960 Times 16 Feb. 20/7 An old English gold and agate necessaire.
1967 V. Nabokov Speak, Memory (rev. ed.) xiii. 253 The handful of jewels which Natasha, a farsighted old chambermaid,..had swept off a dresser into a nécessaire.
[…]
1989 Antiques Trade Gaz. 4 Mar. 50/2 (advt.) A small collection of objects of vertu including snuff boxes, etuis, necessaires, etc.

The presence or absence of italics and of the accent aigu seem quite haphazard. I wonder to what extent the word is used today. (Compare my 2019 post Indispensable.)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Joshua T. Katz, “What Linguists Are Good For” (Classical World 100.2 [2007]: 99-112):

To most administrators and to all too many of our own colleagues, linguists are covered in nineteenth-century dust, which is, as we all know, a far dustier dust, being tainted with old methodology, than what classical archaeologists encounter in the Roman Forum. Or, alternatively, we are interested in so-called modern linguistic techniques, but these have the stench of social science, which some of our colleagues think smells less good than the Roman sewers’ humanities. Either way, we linguists are narrowly focused misfits with a humorless eye for grammar and no interest in, much less imagination for, wider cultural questions. Such is our stereotype, but I have never met a good linguist who fit the bill (certainly none of my teachers did), and all of us must do what we can to combat it, in our scholarship and, even more important, in our teaching. Linguistics is a broad, vibrant, and result-driven discipline, not the recherché domain of fuddy-duddies, and it really shouldn’t be very difficult to persuade our students and colleagues that this is so.

It’s heartening to see an important point made so eloquently. (Of course, it applies to real linguists, not the Chomskyan kind who were so prevalent until recently. The phrase “broad, vibrant, and result-driven” is the tell-tale one.)

I was saddened to hear of Roger Angell’s death — though not surprised, since he was 101 years old. He was the greatest baseball writer who ever lived (and he only got into the Hall of Fame by the skin of his teeth, since the sportswriters who do the voting didn’t have time for a magazine guy who wasn’t there day in, day out like they were); an annual highlight of my life as a fan was buying the copy of the New Yorker with his essay on the season just past, and I’ll never forget the palindromic title of the 1986 installment that culminated in the long-drawn-out, agonizing defeat of the seemingly eternally cursed Red Sox by my long-hapless, suddenly triumphant Mets: NOT SO, BOSTON. I am smuggling him into the hallowed halls of the Hattery by quoting a paragraph with an unusual verb usage, from his brilliant 1980 piece on Bob Gibson (the article link should work at the moment even for nonsubscribers, and anyone who loves the game should read the whole thing):

On another day, Omaha slowly came to a broil under a glazy white sun while Gibson and I ran some early-morning errands in his car—a visit to his bank, a stop at the drive-in window of another bank, where he picked up the payroll checks for Gibby’s—and wound up at the restaurant, where the daytime help greeted the boss cheerfully. Gibson seemed in an easy frame of mind, and he looked younger than ever. I recalled that many of his teammates had told me what good company he was in the dugout and on road trips—on days when he wasn’t pitching. He was a comical, shrill-voiced bench jockey, and a grouchy but lighthearted clubhouse agitator, who was sometimes known to bang a bat repeatedly and horribly on the metal locker of a teammate who was seen to be suffering the aftereffects of too many ice-cream sodas the previous evening. While he drove, Gibson, with a little urging, recalled how he had pitched to some of the prime hitters of his day—inside fastballs to Willie Mays (who feasted on breaking pitches), belt-high inside deliveries to Eddie Mathews, low and away to Roberto Clemente, and so on. He said that Frank Robinson used to deceive pitchers with his plate-crowding (Robinson was a right-handed slugger of fearsome power, whose customary stance at the plate was that of an impatient subway traveller leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train), because they took it to mean that he was eager for an inside pitch. “Besides,” he said, “they’d be afraid of hitting him and putting him on base. So they’d work him outside, and he’d hit the shit out of the ball. I always tried him inside, and I got him out there—sometimes. He was like Willie Mays—if you got the ball outside to Willie at all, he’d just kill you. The same with Clemente. I could throw him a fastball knee-high on the outside corner seventeen times in a row, but if I ever got it two inches up, he’d hit it out of sight. That’s the mark of a good hitter—the tiniest mistake and he’ll punish you. Other batters—well, somebody like Joe Adcock was just a guess hitter. You’d pitch him up and in, and he’d swing and miss every time. He just didn’t give a damn. I don’t know what’s the matter with so many hitters—it’s like their brains small up.” He shook his head and laughed softly. “Me, too. I got beat by Tommy Davis twice the same way. In one game, I’d struck him out three times on sliders away. But I saw that he’d been inching up and inching up toward that part of the plate, so I decided to fool him and come inside, and he hit a homer and beat me, one-oh. And then, in another game, I did exactly the same thing. I tried to outthink him, and he hit the inside pitch for a homer, and it was one-oh all over again. So I could get dumb, too.”

(I read aloud much of that paragraph, like so much else in the essay, to my wife, lingering with especial delight on “whose customary stance at the plate was that of an impatient subway traveller leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train.”) I was struck by Gibson’s “it’s like their brains small up”; the OED has an entry for the unusual verb to small (1. transitive. To make thin or small; to lessen, reduce. Also with down. […] 2. intransitive. To become thin or small; to diminish, grow less. Also with down, off), but no examples of it with up. Here are a couple of recent citations:

1999 National Geographic Dec. 47/2 The deer adapted to their environment by smalling down and enjoying having Big Pine to themselves.
2002 S. Burke Deadwater viii. 75 Her voice smalled off so pathetically that he might have hugged her but that she was responding too well.

Maybe now Gibby will make it in to the OED on Angell’s wings.
[Read more…]

Gavin Francis has a review of two books on switching languages (archived):

A few weeks ago I was invited to the book festival in Trieste, in northeast Italy, a city of divided loyalties and complicated history. […] For my trip to Trieste I had packed perhaps the most appropriate reading material possible for someone living and moving between two languages—Memory Speaks by the academic psycholinguist Julie Sedivy and Alfabet/Alphabet by the poet Sadiqa de Meijer. Both writers moved to Canada as children, and though their books are very different, both examine their complicated relationship with their adopted language: the gifts of bilingualism, but also the visceral sense of unmooring they experienced as each lost touch with what Ghita El Khayat called the “milk language”—the language of lullabies and nursery rhymes.

I’ve written about Sedivy a number of times, most recently in 2018 (with a discussion of the Czech original of her surname, Šedivá, and a link in a comment to a “thorough and enticing review” of her new book at Sentence first), so I’ll confine myself here to quoting sections on the other book under review:

For de Meijer, to speak English every day is to live in a state of chronic abstraction—though she is fluent in the language, Dutch has remained much more dominant in her thought and speech. She agrees with the Polish Canadian writer Jowita Bydlowska that her second language is an “exoskeleton”—a tough hide of words that shield her from feeling. The poet in her is shocked by the incongruity between the associations her two languages evoke. One of her poems, written originally in English, contains the word harbour, which “conjures a generic image; there are ships, docks, and gulls, but it is nowhere that I can name.” Translating the poem herself, she substitutes the Dutch haven, and effects a magical transformation:

I saw our former river harbour, a charmless place of silos and concrete piers…a bicycle ride on an overcast afternoon, during which my youngest brother sat in a seat on my father’s handlebars. I was being somewhat reckless, biking in a slalom between the moorings, near the sheer drop to the water.

[Read more…]

I saw a news story recently about the sale of a rare Eid Mar aureus; you can read all about such coins here:

Marcus Brutus had declared to Cassius that “On the Ides of March I gave my own life to my country, and since then, for her sake, I have lived another life of liberty and glory” (Plutarch, Life of Brutus, XL.8). Fittingly, therefore, on the reverse of the denarius above is the embossed legend EID MAR (Eidibus Martiis), which abbreviates the Ides of March, the day that Caesar had been assassinated in 44 BC. […]

My question, of course, was “Why Eid rather than Id?” Fortunately, that question was asked on Quora and answered by Will Scathlocke:

Eidus is just an older way of spelling idus. A living language evolves, and what had initially been the diphthong /ei/, by the first century B.C. had been monophthongised to /i/ and most people had updated their spelling accordingly. When Brutus struck his coin, eidibus martiis, “on the Ides of March”, was just old-fashioned spelling. After all, there are still a few people left today, who write “cocoanut” while you no doubt, who have moved with the times, spell it “coconut”. As for me, who am behind the times, I still write “cocoanut” because that is how my teachers, who themselves were behind the times, taught me to spell it. As to the abbreviation itself, the Romans seem to have abbreviated words in slightly arbitrary fashion instead of by inflexible rule. (E)id was just how they abbreviated the word.

The OED updated its entry in November 2010:

Etymology: < classical Latin Īdūs, feminine plural noun ( < the same Italic base as Oscan eiduis (dative/ablative plural), further etymology unknown (perhaps an Etruscan loanword)); subsequently reinforced by its reflex Anglo-Norman and Middle French ides, Middle French ydes (French ides) (c1119 in Anglo-Norman; in Anglo-Norman and Old French also in singular ide). Compare Italian idi, plural noun (14th cent.).

A correspondent and occasional commenter writes:

I was catching up on some back issues of the TLS this morning and in the issue of March 4 I found the following sentence in a review by Blair Worden, Emeritus Fellow of St. Edmunds Hall at Oxford, of a book on the English civil war: “Keay (a former curator of Historic Royal Palaces and English Heritage, and now Director of the Landmark Trust) afforces her graphic and shrewdly observed characterizations with a range of expertise in the physical texture of the past.”

What caught me eye, as you can probably guess, is the verb “afforce.” Like you, I have worked as a copyeditor for many years, and I read a lot in general, and although it’s possible that I’ve encountered this word before, I can’t remember doing so. The meaning is obvious from the context, but I (and I suspect most people) would probably have written “reinforces” instead. So I looked up afforce in the OED, and it has a curious history. The basic sense (apply force to) is clear from the roots, and from the 14th to the 16th century it was used with a variety of now obsolete meanings: to exert oneself, to compel, to rape. The meaning in the sentence above, to strengthen or reinforce (sense 3 in the OED) is illustrated by examples from the 15th and 16th centuries, but then there is a gap until the end of the 19th century, and the OED editors have added a note: “Apparently unattested between the mid 16th and late 19th centuries. Later examples should probably be regarded as extended uses of sense 4.” That sense 4 is a technical legal sense, “to reinforce or strengthen a deliberative body; esp. to add a member or members to a jury when the original jurors cannot agree on a majority verdict.” In this sense, it is apparently a borrowing from Anglo-Norman and unattested in English until the late 18th century, when it begins to show up in the works of historians writing about legal practice in late mediaeval Britain.

[Read more…]

Njideka Agbo and Oreoritse Tariemi write about some unusual writing systems of Nigeria, starting with Nsibidi (which I posted briefly about here):

Conceived by the Ekoi (Ejagham) people of Cross River state in Nigeria, and used by exclusive societies for men of power and authority including the Ekpe Leopard Secret Society, before extending to other regions of Eastern Nigeria, Nsibidi’s ideograms share similarities with the hieroglyphs.

This exclusive form of writing fascinated the colonialists such that Author P.A Talbot described it as “a kind of primitive secret writing” which was communicated on “cut or painted on split palm stems”.

Despite its popularity, Nsibidi began to dwindle from 1900 until the final adoption of the Onwu Alphabet in 1961.

They go on to talk about Ajami (see this LH post) and Ńdébé (see this post), and then a new one:

[Chief Tolúlàṣẹ] Ògúntósìn has designed what he calls the Odùduwà alphabet (the talking alphabet). Speaking to Global Voices, he said that he was inspired to write the 25 alphabet script after he visited his ancestral shrine in Badagry, a historic town in Lagos, Nigeria. Soon after this journey, he began to have constant dreams where he visited the sun and was “shown the alphabet in the form of lightning.”

They end with this utopian suggestion:

[Kọ́lá] Túbọ̀sún is of the opinion that only a pan-african script that can transcend all Nigerian languages will effectively work.

“The biggest problem I see with most of the scripts including Ńdébé is that they are dealing with the tone…because Yoruba, Igbo and some of these languages are tonal, every script will fail if it doesn’t find a way to deal with the tonal properties of these languages. If you are thinking of a pan-Nigerian language, then we have to make sure it is a language that can be adopted all round the country.”

There are a number of interesting illustrations. Thanks, Trevor!

Recently Stan Carey wrote me: “This thread by Emily Wilson is a treat, if you haven’t seen it.” When I said I wished there were a threadreader version, he kindly provided me with one, and here it is; it starts:

A classic translator’s dilemma, which presumably applies for any language pair: what to do about the fact that languages individuate the world differently. One language makes a distinction where another makes none.

One area where this often happens is family relationships. Many languages distinguish between different types of cousin (father’s side/ mother’s side) or different types of in-law (a sister’s husband, versus a wife’s brother). Others, like English, don’t.

Often, these distinctions matter, in the context of the original culture or text — but there is no way to convey both register or degree of marked-ness (“this is the normal term”) as well as referent (“husband’s brother’s wife” is generally not idiomatic English).

A small instance of this vast area that I wrestle with all the time in the Iliad is the clear, common distinction between striking an enemy with a projectile missile (βάλλω) or striking with weapon still held in the attacker’s hand (τύπτω). Homer frequently uses phrases that express both distinct possibilities, as alternatives: these are the two ways you can kill or be killed in battle. But there is no pair of English verbs (let alone, two syllable English verbs) that expresses precisely this distinction.

She goes on to describe various ways of trying to handle the distinction; this is the kind of thing I love to read. Thanks, Stan!