languagehat.com

Christy DeSmith writes for Phys.org about a new DNA study:

Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought. The analysis, led by a pair of doctoral candidates working with ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.

The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia. […]

Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence. “Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely,” said co-lead author Tian Chen (T.C.) Zeng, who earned his Ph.D. this spring from the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. “We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.”

The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.

I look forward to the reactions of our resident language-and-DNA mavens. Thanks, Stephen!

Callie Holtermann writes for the NY Times (archived) about a linguist who posts online as Etymology Nerd and who was mentioned here last year:

Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their “seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education.”

Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like “cornucopia” for homophobia and “unalive,” a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.

These words roll off the tongue for Mr. Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.
[…]

Mr. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard to explain the spread of terms including “lowkey” and “gyat.” (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)

There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of “rizz” (which we talked about in 2023); I was curious about the odd-looking “gyat” and googled, but I’m not convinced by the etymology given here: “Girl Your Ass Is Thick.”

Soumya Sagar writes for Science about a new decipherment:

Rock faces within the caves and dried riverbeds of Oman’s Dhofar governorate bear nearly 2400-year-old writings that snake across the surface in a mysterious script. For more than a century, these inscriptions—known as the Dhofari script—had defied decipherment. Now, in a study in press at the journal Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux, a linguist says he has deciphered the main subtype of the Dhofari script, and has found evidence that its alphabet didn’t originate in southern Arabia.

The enduring enigma of the Dhofari script had led to many theories over the decades, including the fanciful idea that “these were inscriptions by the people of ʿĀd, a lost Arabian tribe mentioned in the Quran,” says study author Ahmad Al-Jallad, a linguist at Ohio State University. Al-Jallad’s new paper marks “the first ever reliable study on this matter” and “has the potential of writing an entirely new page of the history of Arabia,” says Giuliano Castagna, a linguist at Beijing Normal University who was not involved in the work.

Study of the Dhofari script dates back to 1900, when two British archaeologists mentioned the inscriptions in a book on the southern Arabian Peninsula. Three decades later, Bertram Thomas, the first westerner to cross the Empty Quarter—the vast desert that covers much of the southern Arabian Peninsula—described stone monuments in Dhofar that had been marked with the script. Beyond the hills of Dhofar, researchers also found examples of Dhofari in the neighboring al-Mahrah governorate of Yemen, as well as scraped onto rocks on the island of Socotra.

[Read more…]

Josh Sucher writes:

Last week, my brother and I took in a screening of the 1976 classic Network that just happened to be captioned. As a result, it really struck me how impressive the vocabulary in that movie is. Immane! Oraculate! Auspicatory! So many of what my dad used to call 50¢ words.

So I went home and spent a few hours making this, a list of words found in the dialogue of Network, ranked by their estimated frequency in the English language. I used a Python library called wordfreq (which, sadly, was deprecated last fall, a decision its creator partially attributed to the prevalence of AI slop making it impossible to analyze human word usage after 2022).

I decided to add definitions to my list of esoteric Network words, which turned out to be an interesting challenge. Rare words are… rare! Every dictionary API has some different subset of them. It took a few to flesh out the list.

The wordfreq data was so compelling that I decided to keep pulling the thread on this, and after a few late nights I am very happy to share Lettervoxd. Lettervoxd is a tool that extracts esoteric words from about 25,000 movies from the past century. It lists (nearly) every one-in-a-billion word that can be found in the giant corpus of subtitles I downloaded from Open Subtitles.

More details, as well as links and images, at Josh’s page. When you go to the Lettervoxd site, click on a word to see the movies it’s been used in. What a great thing to create!

A news story introduced me to the word pookila, referring to what apparently is more commonly called the New Holland mouse. Naturally I was curious about the word, but it doesn’t appear to be in any dictionaries, not even Wiktionary. A little googling got me to this Australian government document, which says:

Since circa 1995, the word ‘Pookila’ has been associated with the species. ‘Pookila’ is derived from the Ngarigo word for ‘mouse’ – bugila (Braithwaite et al. 1995; Hercus n.d.), although it deviates from traditional Ngarigo pronunciation (Braithwaite et al. 1995). The assignation of the word Pookila to the species was part of an initiative by the CSIRO to provide ‘Australian names for Australian rodents’ and to avoid the undesirable associations of introduced vermin often attached to the words ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’ that impede the conservation of native rodents due to negative public perception and associated challenges of securing funding for conservation (Braithwaite et al. 1995). However, the species is not known to have occurred on Ngarigo Country, and it is unclear why the language was chosen in Braithwaite et al. (1995) for the species. However, the name has since been associated with the species across its range, and the word is included on the Australian Government’s SPRAT database.

The word ‘tuwaranga’ means ‘mouse’ in palawa kani, the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people (Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, 2023).

The naming strategy implemented by the Recovery Plan that aims to respect all Aboriginal names for the species (where known) will use a local name for local projects if this is identified and preferred by the Aboriginal community. Pookila will be used secondarily in broader communications about the local project to facilitate broader understanding of which species is being discussed.

Setting aside minor mysteries (why is bugila in itals and ‘tuwaranga’ in quotes? why is Pookila spelled with a capital letter?), this is extremely interesting; I certainly approve of trying to provide everyday names for creatures rather than forcing everyone to use Linnaean terminology, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just use bugila rather than a distorted version. (Also, the effort to avoid “mouse” seems silly to me.) Does anyone know anything about how it “deviates from traditional Ngarigo pronunciation”?

Separately, I’m disturbed by “palawa kani, the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.” In the first place, it is not actually a language as normally understood: “Palawa kani is a constructed language created by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre as a composite Tasmanian language, based on reconstructed vocabulary from the limited accounts of the various languages once spoken by the Aboriginal people of what is now Tasmania (palawa kani: Lutruwita).” In other words, it’s a conlang extrapolating from material like “five words, one sentence, and a short song.” It is certainly not “the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.” And why the devil is the name written without capital letters? Are they considered capitalist? All elucidation is welcome.

New Perspectives in Global Latin: Second Conference on Latin as a Vehicle of Cultural Exchange Beyond Europe, edited by Elisa Della Calce, Paola Mocella, and Simone Mollea (de Gruyter, 2025), includes intriguing titles like “Afonso Mendes, the Catholic Patriarch of Ethiopia, and His Debates With Salomon: A Jew From Vienna, at the Court of the King of Ethiopia” by Leonardo Cohen and Paul Rodrigue, “Deities, Demons or Decoration? Asian Religions in Two Jesuit Latin Martyr Epics” by Yasmin Haskell, “From Martini to Prémare: Early analytic Descriptions of Mandarin Chinese in Latin” by Anna Di Toro and Luisa M. Paternicò, “Medical Knowledge in the Latin Language in 18th-Century Korea” by Kukjin Kim, and “Mercury and the Argonauts in Japan: Myths and Martyrs in Jesuit Neo-Latin” by Akihiko Watanabe. Everybody knows about Latin’s ubiquity in Europe, but it’s remarkable to see how far it spread. And the book is open-access!

As I wrote here, one of my birthday presents this year was Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria (and I note with a shudder that that Amazon page says “A Stranger in Olondria: a novel (Olondria, 1)” — please don’t let this be yet another trilogy!); I’ve just finished it, and as so often happens I have conflicting reactions. I’ll start by saying it’s a good novel, very well written, and anyone who enjoys Tolkien-derived fantasy should love it. The problem is that I am not one of those people; it is rare for a person to enjoy sf and fantasy equally, and I was a science fiction fan from the beginning. Yes, I liked Tolkien, but that was a one-off, just as my enjoyment of My Fair Lady does not make me a fan of musicals. Here’s the opening paragraph, which gives an excellent idea of what the book is like:

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call “the breath of angels” and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing. I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards.

This is a poet’s prose, complex and polished and singing, and I can see why the reviews say things like “elegant language,” “the prose […] is glorious,” and “a poetic and elegant style.” The problem for me is that I quickly become impatient with it; like rococo painting and elaborate cocktails, it’s too rich for my taste. It’s not that I want stripped-down, “Hemingwayesque” prose — heaven forfend! But μηδὲν ἄγαν, as they say; if the merchants are delirious with scents and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom, I’m likely to take a hike to a less redolent vicinity. It’s a good example of what Bakhtin called chronotope: a fantasy novel is supposed to have melancholy beaches and light called “the breath of angels,” not to mention places named Bain and Illoun and Fayaleith — that’s how you know you’re in the right kind of novel. But me, I’m a stranger in Olondria; I’d rather be on Mars, even the impossible Mars of Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, which I recently read with as much pleasure as the first time around, half a century ago.

Having gotten that off my chest, I will quickly add that I adjusted to the delirious scents and robed priests and quaint festivals, and eventually found the plot gripping and the resolution moving; I particularly enjoyed the interpolation of stories within the main story, which work well (and are told less ornately). But it’s still not my kind of chronotope. Oh, and one thing that kept irritating me was the impossibility of knowing how all those place names are pronounced. Is Bain /beɪn/ or /baɪn/? Is Tyom monosyllabic /tjom/ or anglicized /ˈtaɪɒm/ or, say, /ˈtyom/, with an ü sound in the first syllable? I guess most readers don’t care about such things, being content to absorb the fantastically foreign-looking names by eye, but dammit, I need to know how to say them. That’s one good thing about Tolkien: he took care to let you know how his various languages worked and how to say their words.

Jen in Edinburgh wrote me to say she’d been wondering “why we say that we’re going to ‘wing’ something […] I have actually looked it up in the OED and found out – but it wasn’t a reason I expected at all, so if it surprised me, maybe it will surprise other commenters!” I looked it up and it surprised me too, so I herewith share it. OED s.v. wing v.:

II.11. Theatrical slang. transitive. To study (a part) in or about the wings, having undertaken it at short notice; also intransitive. Hence in to wing it; now usually in slang use (originally and chiefly U.S.), to improvise; to speak or act without preparation, to make statements on unstudied matters (see also quot. 1950).

1885 ‘To wing’..indicates the capacity to play a rôle without knowing the text, and the word itself came into use from the fact that the artiste frequently received the assistance of a special prompter, who..stood..screened..by a piece of the scenery or a wing.
Stage 21 August 12/2

1886 In the event of an artiste being suddenly called upon to play a part of which he knows nothing..he frequently has to ‘wing’ the part.
Stage Gossip 70

1933 He must give a performance by ‘winging it’—that is, by refreshing his memory for each scene in the wings before he goes on to play it.
P. Godfrey, Back-stage iii. 39

1950 Wing it, vb., to lay off an approximate 90° angle by eye.
American Speech vol. 25 238/1
[…]

1979 Mr. Trudeau came without notes, choosing to wing it, and struggled..unsuccessfully to establish Mr. Leger’s resemblance to an owl.
Globe & Mail (Toronto) 22 January 8/2

It makes sense, but I don’t think I would ever have guessed it. Thanks, Jen!

I just watched the “Japanese historical drama horror film” Kuroneko (lots of fun if you like films with samurai and ghosts; this one features Minamoto no Raikō as a character, not to mention the titular black cat), and was struck when a large city gate was shown with the inscription 羅城門, subtitled RAJOMON GATE. “Is that different from the famous Rashomon?” thought I, and immediately investigated. It turns out the answer is “yes and no”; the gate is the same, but it has different names. As Wikipedia explains:

The gate’s name in modern Japanese is Rajōmon. Rajō (羅城) refers to city walls and mon (門) means “gate,” so Rajōmon signifies the main city gate. Originally, this gate was known as Raseimon or Raiseimon, using alternate readings for the kanji in the name. The name Rashōmon, using the kanji 羅生門 (which can also be read Raseimon), was popularized by a noh play Rashōmon (c.1420) written by Kanze Nobumitsu (1435–1516).

The modern name, Rajōmon, uses the original kanji (羅城門 rather than 羅生門) and employs the more common reading for the second character (jō instead of sei).

And if you continue to the article on the Nobumitsu play, you find: “The title is a pun, which involves the Rajōmon (羅城門) outer castle gate but Kanze changed it by using the kanji shō for ‘life’ rather than the original jō for ‘castle’ (note that 羅城門 was originally read raseimon and 生 can also be read as sei).” Complicated! The odd thing is that although the modern name is used on the gate and in the subtitles, when the characters say it out loud it’s clearly Rashōmon rather than Rajōmon.

I rewatched Bullitt and was gripped once more by what this Wikipedia article calls “the first modern car chase movie.” But that is not a topic for LH; it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what kind of a name Bullitt is, and that makes for a post (a thin one, perhaps, but it’s hot for the umpteenth straight day and my brains are poached). It’s not in my usual surname reference, but happily the information in the Dictionary of American Family Names is online; the Bullitt entry says it’s a variant of Bullett, and that entry says:

Bullett : 1: Altered form of French Boulet reflecting the Canadian and American French practice of sounding the final -t. Compare Bullitt.2: English (Suffolk): of Norman origin probably a nickname for a rotund person from a diminutive of Old French boule ‘round’. The noun bullet is from French boulet a diminutive of boule ‘ball’.3: English (Suffolk): occasionally perhaps a late development of Bulled ‘bull head’.

I don’t know if “the Canadian and American French practice of sounding the final -t” is an accurate generalization or an ad hoc explanation.