languagehat.com

Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu writes for Quartz Africa about the influence of the Edo language on the creoles of the Gulf of Guinea:

Gulf of Guinea creoles are the main Portuguese creole languages still spoken today. There are a few other portuguese creoles spoken by a few thousand people in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, and Indonesia. Several studies have shown though that the Edo language is the major African component that constitutes the foundation of the creoles of the Gulf of Guinea.

At least one variety of these creoles is spoken in Sao tome and Principe and Equatorial Guinea, with diaspora speakers mainly in Angola and Portugal, according to the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS), a linguistic atlas that provides expert-based information on 130 grammatical and lexical features of 76 pidgin and creole languages from around the world.

The creoles of the Gulf of Guinea were derived from the combination of the Portuguese language, Edo language (including closely related Edoid languages in the Niger delta), and Bantu languages (mainly Kikongo and Kimbundu), according to linguists. The creoles emerged from a first-contact language or pidgin resulting from the contact between the Portuguese colonizers and the slaves from the kingdom of Benin in Sao Tome. The Bantu languages came in contact with the newly formed Portuguese-Edo language in the island some decades later. […]

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I’ve spent the week reading Vladimir Tendryakov’s Покушение на миражи [Trying to kill mirages, or Assassinating mirages] and wondering why Tendryakov isn’t better known. Like Yuri Trifonov and Arkady Strugatsky, he was part of the generation just old enough to have fought in WWII, and like them he was obsessed with the demands of morality and with the gulf between the generation that fought the war and their flighty offspring who aped Western fashions, cared more about love than duty, and didn’t understand the need to subordinate one’s personal preferences to the good of society. (Larisa Shepitko’s Wings is a brilliant movie on that theme, with a bitter female protagonist.) But Trifonov and Strugatsky were, in some sense, predictable; when you opened one of their books, you knew the kind of thing you were getting. Tendryakov kept trying different things and going in new directions, so he didn’t establish the same kind of brand, and people didn’t have as clear an image when they thought of him; furthermore, he never had the kind of blockbuster hit that keeps your name alive. But everything I’ve read by him has gripped me and made me think.

This book (published posthumously in 1987) could be called a novel of ideas; the primary plot line is about physicist Georgy Grebin trying to find the laws of historical development by using a computer to reconstruct how history would have turned out without Jesus, and there are inserted сказания [legends, tales, Bible stories] that illustrate aspects of that history. But there is an actual plot involving the characters’ lives, a slow-burning one that doesn’t burst into the open until the final pages, which are a real coup de théâtre. I won’t spoil that one, but I will tell you about the opening shock, the first сказание, which occurs after only a couple of pages of reflections on the river of time. There’s a boat on the Sea of Galilee with ten or so fishers from Capernaum and a puny fellow sitting at the prow who turns out to be a prophet born in Nazareth and calling himself the Son of Man. Several episodes from the New Testament are described (“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners”; “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”), so it is evident we are dealing with Jesus. The boat goes ashore at Bethsaida, where a rigid stickler for God’s rules named Sadok awaits with his brutal gang of followers. They advance menacingly, Jesus tells his own followers to go back to the boat (which they reluctantly do), and he has a debate with Sadok in which he seems to be getting the upper hand (“You said you were sent by God!” “We are all sent here by God.”). But then Sadok gets impatient, there is a general cry of outrage among his thugs, and… Jesus is stoned to death, three years before he is scheduled to die on the cross. I was very taken aback!

Of course, it turns out that this is the setup for the computer experiment; remove Jesus from the equation, and how does history develop? There is a lot of discussion of the inevitability of slavery once humanity developed the ability to extract more food from the earth than necessary to feed oneself and one’s family, what sense it makes to talk about loving thy neighbor, and the impossibility of being a “good master”; Grebin and his little team (a scientist, a historian, and a computer expert — the computer uses punch cards, which I guess were still a thing around 1980) are trying to make sense of the data they’re getting, and Grebin is hoping his boss at the institute won’t make him an administrator since he seems to be wasting his time on a useless personal project. I imagine many readers would weary of the lack of action, but as an old-line sf reader I loved the whole thing (and was especially pleased to see Tendryakov name-check Ray Bradbury and have a character refer to the butterfly effect). Every night I lay in bed thinking about the day’s reading and how it fit with my own sense of history and Christianity. I just wish someone would translate it so I could recommend it to those who don’t read Russian. And I’m looking forward to reading more Tendryakov.
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Yesterday Songdog updated LH to WordPress 5 and migrated it to a new host (see this thread); the migration itself didn’t take long, but it took a while for everyone’s computers and phones to get pointed to the new site, and in the meantime a lot of people saw only an “Under maintenance” page (I had to wait overnight, which was frustrating). Sorry about that, and hopefully it will be a long time before poor LH has to pack everything up and move again!

Chelsea Brasted has a good NatGeo piece (archived) on Cajun (and other) French:

When Janice Prejean was growing up, if she wanted to speak with her grandparents, she had to do it in French. To crack the code of the private conversations and jokes that flew over the heads of children at family gatherings, she also needed to know the language. “My lifestyle as a child and a young adult was immersed in moving between the Cajun world and les Americains,” she says.

Prejean, who was raised in Ossun, a tiny, unincorporated community in southwest Louisiana, is 64 now. Her story is an echo of the thousands of people in the region with Francophone ancestry. What makes her version a little different, however, is that she learned the language. Many people her age never did. French was a source of shame—Cajuns were often labeled stupid and backward—and parents wanted to shield their children from prejudice.

That started to change during the latter half of the 20th century with the launch of efforts to improve the understanding of Cajun heritage—not to mention attract tourism. Programs popped up to turn the tide on the diminishing use of the French language, including establishing immersion programs in schools and flying in teachers from other Francophone nations.

Yet a generational divide remains. The dialect of aging grandparents and great-grandparents often doesn’t translate to the “standard” French that elementary- and high-school-age children are learning. To bridge that gap, locals established a new French language and literacy school for adults in the tiny town of Arnaudville, which sits at the intersection of two bayous and two Louisiana parishes and has become the unlikely hub for the French revival.

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Jenny Liao has a moving New Yorker piece (archived) about losing a language:

No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my first language. It doesn’t feel like the sudden, sharp pain of losing someone you love, but rather a dull ache that builds slowly until it becomes a part of you. My first language, Cantonese, is the only one I share with my parents, and, as it slips from my memory, I also lose my ability to communicate with them. When I tell people this, their eyes tend to grow wide with disbelief, as if it’s so absurd that I must be joking. “They can’t speak English?” they ask. “So how do you talk to your parents?” I never have a good answer. The truth is, I rely on translation apps and online dictionaries for most of our conversations.

It’s strange when I hear myself say that I have trouble talking to my parents, because I still don’t quite believe it myself. We speak on the phone once a week and the script is the same: “Have you eaten yet?” my father asks in Cantonese. Long pause. “No, not yet. You?” I reply. “Why not? It’s so late,” my mother cuts in. Long pause. “Remember to drink more water and wear a mask outside,” she continues. “O.K. You too.” Longest pause. “We’ll stop bothering you, then.” The conversation is shallow but familiar. Deviating from it puts us (or, if I’m being honest, just me) at risk of discomfort, which I try to avoid at all costs. […]

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The death of the great Jean-Paul Belmondo has inspired all sorts of tributes; my favorite so far is Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul) posting on FB this brilliant two-minute scene from Le Magnifique, a movie I had been unfamiliar with but now desperately want to see. It involves a dying Albanian; they’ve found an Albanian interpreter, but he only speaks Romanian. The Romanian interpreter only speaks Serbian, the Serbian interpreter only Russian, the Russian interpreter only Czech, but fortunately the Czech interpreter speaks French. The lineup of dark-suited interpreters is a hilarious sight gag in itself, and it sounds to me like they all actually speak the appropriate languages (though of course they speak rapidly and talk over each other — the man on the gurney is dying fast). Unfortunately the subtitles are in French, but hopefully you’ll be able to get the gist of it anyway.

The tweeter known as Incunabula has an enjoyable thread on the history of books:

Cheese meant female sheep & cows were usually more valuable than male ones which were accordingly slaughtered young as they were not worth feeding through the winter. The skins of these young animals was used to make vellum, giving us the basic material of the European book. Vellum tends to buckle & ripple, it doesn’t lie absolutely flat like paper. So it was bound between heavy wooden boards to keep it flat – this is the origin of the hardback book, a book format – expensive, hard to make, & prone to damage – almost never seen outside Europe. Ultimately, the hardback book exists because of cheese.

Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I’ll explain why.

Don’t expect a scholarly history, but I learned some stuff. I got it via MeFi, where maxwelton said “Yes, interesting, but seems a bit too much a ‘just so’ story”; the poster responded: “Agree – called it ‘fun’ because it’s like one of those Adam Curtis documentaries that completely overstretches to try to piece together a narrative, but is still entertaining to watch.” Quite so.

I was just reading a book by Vladimir Tendryakov when I was taken aback by the word энеолит [eneolit]. My first thought was that it might be a typo for неолит ‘Neolithic,’ but the book is well copyedited and proofread (the Soviets knew how to do these things, comrade), so that seemed unlikely. I looked it up and discovered in English it’s Eneolithic or Aeneolithic (from Latin aeneus ‘of copper’), and it’s a synonym of Chalcolithic. Is anyone familiar with this term? Who uses it?

This website has a cute concept; the About text says:

A visualization of placename patterns, using data pulled from OpenStreetMap (places), Natural Earth (borders, rivers) and SRTM (elevation).

Originally created to visualize the distribution of places in France ending in -ac, and then the link between German placenames and altitude.

Built at first using SVG, but since this proved too much for Firefox, the visualization now uses canvas (at the expense of nice animations).

Patterns are Javascript-flavour regular expressions, most importantly ‘^’ and ‘$’ represent name beginning and end, respectively, so ‘^ll’ matches all placenames which begin with two L’s (many towns in Wales) and ‘a$’ all placenames which end in A.

Via MetaFilter, where there are further examples (e.g. Poland and Silesia). Enjoy!

John Herrman has a NY Times piece [archived] on a couple of linguistic tics that have spread in recent years; there’s padding about Mark Zuckerberg and the like, but what struck me is that he consulted with actual linguists on the history of the usages:

Linguistic observers have noted for years the apparent rise of “so” in connection with the popularization of certain subjects and modes of speech. In 2010, in The New York Times, Anand Giridharadas announced the arrival of a new species of the unassuming word.

“‘So’ may be the new ‘well,’ ‘um,’ ‘oh’ and ‘like.’ No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning,” he wrote, crediting the journalist Michael Lewis with documenting its use among programmers at Microsoft more than a decade earlier.

In 2015, in a story for “Fresh Air” on NPR, Geoff Nunberg, the program’s longtime linguist, explained this use of “so” as a cue used by “people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the back story,” he said. Hence his name for it: back story “so.”

Syelle Graves, a linguist and the assistant director of the Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote her dissertation on the rise and uses of this particular “so.” Analyzing a sampling of spontaneous, unwritten American speech from 1990 to 2011, she concluded that this usage of “so” had indeed increased significantly, often as a stand-in for “well.”

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