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I think every living Hatter who has ever sent me a link has sent me this Science story by Rachel Fritts, and if I wait any longer to post it I may start getting e-mails from beyond the grave, so without further ado:

The bears and Indigenous humans of coastal British Columbia have more in common than meets the eye. The two have lived side by side for millennia in this densely forested region on the west coast of Canada. But it’s the DNA that really stands out: A new analysis has found that the grizzlies here form three distinct genetic groups, and these groups align closely with the region’s three Indigenous language families.

It’s a “mind-blowing” finding that shows how cultural and biological diversity in the region are intertwined, says Jesse Popp, an Indigenous environmental scientist at the University of Guelph who was not involved with the work.

Here’s the Ecology and Society study Fritts is reporting on. John Cowan, one of the many who sent me the link, writes:

This sounded pretty fishy to me, but the underlying paper confirms that there are three distinct lineages of bears in the area that correspond geographically to the regions where the Salishan, Tsimshian, and Wakashan language families were spoken, and that these cannot be accounted for by geographical barriers like mountains, rivers, etc.

Thanks to all who alerted me!

I happened on a Spanish word I was unfamiliar with, malabarismo, and on looking it up discovered it meant ‘juggling.’ An odd word, I thought, and found a Spanish site that gave the background:

…el nombre en español de estos juegos es mucho más reciente: se remonta al siglo XVI en la India, donde los ingleses conocieron los malabarismos practicados con sorprendente destreza por los nativos de la región de Malabar, en la provincia de Kerala, controlada por la British East India Company. El nombre no se conservó en inglés, lengua en la cual los juegos malabares son llamados juggling games, pero la palabra se formó en portugués, en el habla de los navegantes lusitanos que transitaban por el océano Índico y más tarde fue acogida por el castellano.

The Spanish name […] is much more recent: it goes back to the 16th century in India, where the English became acquainted with the juggling practiced with surprising skill by the people of the region of Malabar, in the province of Kerala, controlled by the British East India Company. The name was not preserved in English […]; it was created in Portuguese, in the speech of the Lusitanian sailors who crossed the Indian Ocean, and later was picked up by Spanish.

So then I wondered about Malabar itself, and found an OED entry (updated June 2000):

Etymology: < Portuguese Malabar the Malabar Coast or one of its inhabitants (1512), the Malayalam language (1551) < Arabic Malaybār the Malabar Coast or its inhabitants (13th cent. or earlier; also in forms Manībār (12th cent.), Mulaybār (14th cent.)) < a Dravidian first element (compare Tamil malai, Malayalam mala: see Malayalam n. and adj.) + Persian bār region, country.
The application to the Tamil people and language is after similar use in Portuguese, in which it probably arose from the fact that the Malabar were encountered by the Portuguese earlier than the Tamils, and the name of the language of the one people was hence used also for the closely related language of the other. (For further discussion see H. Yule and A. C. Burnell Hobson-Jobson (1886) at cited word.)

The very full and satisfying Hobson-Jobson entry is here.

This ABC News (Australia) piece by Linton Besser in Ghana is excellent (and infuriating — stop buying too many clothes, wearing them twice, and discarding them, people!), and it has several passages of decided LH interest. First comes “Clothes are spruiked by song and are quickly discounted by day’s end.” “Spruiked” looked so weird I thought it might be a misprint, but no, it’s a normal word Down Under; the OED (updated March 2019) has a thorough entry s.v. spruik:

Pronunciation: Brit. /spruːk/, U.S. /spruk/, Australian English /spruːk/, New Zealand English /spruːk/

Etymology: Either < spruik n. (although first attested earlier), or directly < its etymon German Sprüche (plural noun) patter, sales pitch, spiel (see spruik n.). Slightly earlier currency is probably implied by spruiker n.

Australian and New Zealand slang.

1. intransitive. To speak in public on a particular topic, to ‘hold forth’; spec. to attract custom to a show, shop, etc., by speaking outside the premises; to act as a spruiker.
1894 Clipper (Hobart, Tasmania) 15 Dec. 6/4 When the lamplighter will dislocate his jaw spruking.
1902 Truth (Sydney) 14 Sept. 5/6 ‘Lockie the Spruiker’ that ‘spruiked’ for years at the Gaiety door, Has gone out of the ‘spruiking’ business, and never will ‘spruik’ any more.
[…]
2001 Sunday Mail (Brisbane) 3 June 74/2 Kay McGrath, the honorary compere, gamely spruiked over the table cackle.

2. transitive. To discourse on (a subject) in a public forum; to promote or publicize (something).
1901 Sydney Sportsman 16 Jan. 1/5 How did they ‘sprook’ compliments to each other.
1907 Truth (Sydney) 26 May 1/3 Some of the women spruiking politics and posing as patriots are paid pimps of the Liberal League, and householders should shoo them off the premises.
[…]
2013 Smith Jrnl. Winter 141/1 A clue..can be found on the signs outside Mickey Bourke’s Pub, near the chalkboard spruiking Guinness on tap.

Then comes this:
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As someone with a master’s degree in linguistics, I am easily irritated by popularizing books and articles about language, an irritation that has frequently been on display here over the years. Fortunately, there are good popularizers out there, and one of them is Arika Okrent. Back in 2009 I had good things to say about her first book, In the Land of Invented Languages, and now she’s got a new one, Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language, which the publisher was kind enough to send me. The subtitle gives a good idea of its remit, and she writes as cleverly and informatively as ever. You can get an idea of her approach from her Aeon piece Typos, tricks and misprints:

English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. […] The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing. […]

The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press had arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.

It’s notable that the adoption of a different and related technology several hundred years earlier – the alphabet, in use from the 600s – didn’t have this disorienting effect on English. The Latin alphabet had spread throughout Europe with the diffusion of Christianity from the 4th century onward. A few European vernacular languages had some sort of rudimentary writing system prior to this, but for the most part they had no written form. For the first few hundred years of English using the Latin alphabet, its spelling was pretty consistent and phonetic. Monks and missionaries, beginning around 600 CE translated Latin religious texts into local languages – not necessarily so they could be read by the general population, but so they could at least read aloud to them. Most people were illiterate. The vernacular translations were written to be pronounced, and the spelling was intended to get as close to the pronunciation as possible.

Often the languages these monks and missionaries were trying to transcribe contained sounds that Latin didn’t have, and there was no symbol for the sound they needed. In those cases, they might use an accent mark, or put two letters together, or borrow another symbol. Old English, for example, had a strange, exotic ‘th’ sound, for which they originally borrowed the thorn symbol (þ) from Germanic runes. They later settled on the two-letter combination th. For the most part, they used the Latin alphabet as they knew it, but stretched it by using the letters in new ways when other sounds were required. We still use that sound, with the th spelling, in English today.

There follows a description of the Norman invasion and its destructive effects on English literacy:
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My wife was going through old family papers when she found a letter from 1904 on paper with the letterhead of the Improved Order of Heptasophs. Naturally, she showed it to me, and upon investigation I discovered the organization had its own Wikipedia article, as did the original Order of Heptasophs, “a fraternal organization established in New Orleans, Louisiana in April 1852. The name is derived from Greek roots meaning seven and wise and means the seven wise men.” Well, “is intended to mean” might be more accurate, but never mind — what a great word! The names of fraternal organizations are a wonderfully variegated lot, from the Ancient Order of Druids to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (with its offshoot the Ancient Mystic Order of Samaritans), the Fraternal Order of Owls, and the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, but the Heptasophs need yield to none of them in a contest of splendiferousness. (If you’re curious, the Improved Order broke away in 1878 over the vital issue of death benefits.)

Cónal Thomas has a delightful piece for Dublin Inquirer, Preserving Dockers’ Nicknames, from Rubber Legs to Long Balls and Bendego:

When a docker was known by a nickname, that would be his name until he died, says Paddy Daly. He started at Dublin Port when he was 16, in 1954. “People who worked with a man for years would never know what his Christian name was,” says Daly. There was “Swinger” Bisset and “Snipes” McDonald, “Rubber Legs” Gaffney and “Granny” Farrell, “Terrier” Caulfield and “Crab” Carberry.

Now “Masher” Hutch, “Boxer” Elliot and “Blue Nose” Byrne join these on the list of 180 nicknames Daly has recently compiled, recalled from his days down Dublin Port. […]

“The biggest thing you had going in your favour would be, say, a little bit of infamy,” says John Walsh, who worked down the docks between 1962 and 2009. “If you got a nickname that was sort of funny or self-demeaning it stuck in the foreman’s head.” In Daly’s time on the docks, men like “Eat the Baby” Carras, “Foot and a Half” Curley and “Canadian Joe” Reilly lined up under a wooden scaffold, seeking work in the morning “reads”. The “read” was a selection process. Carried out by the foremen, who stood atop the scaffold. Many foremen knew men only by their nickname, says Daly. […]

Research into dock workers’ nicknames is scant, for now. But they’re a tradition that existed in Ringsend for generations, says Declan Byrne, who helped to found the Dublin Dock Workers Preservation Society in 2011. Byrne reckons that two-thirds of deep-sea dockers in Dublin were from Ringsend or Irishtown. The remainder came from East Wall. […]

Both Byrne and Daly agree that a dock worker’s real name would often only be discovered through his obituary. Last year, Byrne received a Christmas card from George “Bronco” Dennis. “George?” says Byrne. “‘Who’s George?’ I said. It took me ages to figure out that was Bronco’s name!”

Thanks, Trevor!

Making my way through the November 8, 2019, TLS, I found a translation of what is apparently a famous interview; the introduction:

To mark the imminent publication of the French translation of Ada, Bernard Pivot interviewed Vladimir Nabokov for an episode of Apostrophes, the prime-time literary talk show on French television. (The episode was first broadcast on May 30, 1975.) Although Apostrophes was one of the best-loved programmes of its time in France, Nabokov had to be cajoled into participating. All other Apostrophes interviews were impromptu, with a group of critics involved in the discussion. This episode was also broadcast live and before a small audience, and there were other critics present, but Nabokov was allowed to have the questions – only from Pivot himself – sent in advance, and to prepare his answers, which during the programme he read from cards roughly concealed behind a stack of his books. Nabokov was pleased with the result, and although some viewers deplored the absence of the programme’s usual spontaneity, Pivot later re-broadcast the episode twice, and regarded it as one of his finest accomplishments. In 1987 he recalled, for readers of Le Nouvel Observateur: “He [Nabokov] was really anti-TV. I went to see him in Montreux when I was starting to work for [channel] Two. I had to please him, and please Véra … He received me in a large salon [at the Montreux Palace, Nabokov’s residence], where there was a piano. We started talking. The piano tuner came in. He set to work. We moved to another salon, where we hadn’t noticed another piano. Our conversation resumed, and five minutes later, we saw the piano tuner come in. We left for a third salon, without a piano. It was a very Nabokovian scene … To boost his courage [during the live broadcast], he wanted to drink whisky. But he naturally didn’t want to set a bad example for French viewers. We had poured a bottle of whisky into a teapot. Every quarter of an hour, I would ask him: ‘A little more tea, Monsieur Nabokov?’ And he would drink with a broad smile. He was a great comedian, incredible for his joking, his warmth, his humour, his artful dodges, his impudence, and of course his intelligence. In my memory Nabokov is an icon. He spoke for more than an hour. I have an almost religious feeling for that programme”.

Unfortunately, the translation is even more shortened than they indicate by ellipses, as I discovered by watching the video (available here with Spanish subtitles); there’s even a blatant error in translation (vingt ‘twenty’ is rendered “eighteen”). Happily, The Nabokovian (the official website and journal of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society) has put online a transcript of the original French, and it’s a very enlightening interview. I was particularly struck by his response to Pivot’s question “Est-ce que pour vous, Vladimir Nabokov, un roman ce n’est pas d’abord une excellente histoire ?” [Don’t you think, VN, that a novel is first of all an excellent story?]:
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Via Dmitry Pruss on Facebook, an open-access Cell paper, The genomic history of the Middle East by Mohamed A. Almarri, Marc Haber, Reem A. Lootah, Pille Hallast, Saeed Al Turki, Hilary C. Martin, Yali Xue, and Chris Tyler-Smith:

The Middle East region is important to understand human evolution and migrations but is underrepresented in genomic studies. Here, we generated 137 high-coverage physically phased genome sequences from eight Middle Eastern populations using linked-read sequencing. We found no genetic traces of early expansions out-of-Africa in present-day populations but found Arabians have elevated Basal Eurasian ancestry that dilutes their Neanderthal ancestry. Population sizes within the region started diverging 15–20 kya, when Levantines expanded while Arabians maintained smaller populations that derived ancestry from local hunter-gatherers. Arabians suffered a population bottleneck around the aridification of Arabia 6 kya, while Levantines had a distinct bottleneck overlapping the 4.2 kya aridification event. We found an association between movement and admixture of populations in the region and the spread of Semitic languages. Finally, we identify variants that show evidence of selection, including polygenic selection. Our results provide detailed insights into the genomic and selective histories of the Middle East.

Obviously, the bit about the spread of Semitic languages is of prime LH interest; here’s a relevant snippet:

In addition to the local ancestry from Epipaleolithic/Neolithic people, we found an ancestry related to ancient Iranians that is ubiquitous today in all Middle Easterners (orange component in Figure 1B; Table 1). Previous studies showed that this ancestry was not present in the Levant during the Neolithic period but appeared in the Bronze Age where ∼50% of the local ancestry was replaced by a population carrying ancient Iran-related ancestry (Lazaridis et al., 2016). We explored whether this ancestry penetrated both the Levant and Arabia at the same time and found that admixture dates mostly followed a North to South cline, with the oldest admixture occurring in the Levant region between 3,300 and 5,900 ya (Table S2), followed by admixture in Arabia (2,000–3,500 ya) and East Africa (2,100–3,300 ya). These times overlap with the dates for the Bronze Age origin and spread of Semitic languages in the Middle East and East Africa estimated from lexical data (Kitchen et al., 2009; Figure 2). This population potentially introduced the Y chromosome haplogroup J1 into the region (Chiaroni et al., 2010; Lazaridis et al., 2016). The majority of the J1 haplogroup chromosomes in our dataset coalesce around ∼5.6 (95% CI, 4.8–6.5) kya, agreeing with a potential Bronze Age expansion; however, we did find rarer earlier diverged lineages coalescing ∼17 kya (Figure S2). The haplogroup common in Natufians, E1b1b, is also frequent in our dataset, with most lineages coalescing ∼8.3 (7–9.7) kya, though we also found a rare deeply divergent Y chromosome, which coalesces 39 kya (Figure S2).

Figure 2 shows “Spread of Iran-like ancestry and Semitic languages.” All this is way beyond my pay grade, but I expect better-informed Hatters will have useful things to say about it.

From the About page:

The Divergent Association Task is a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking […]. The task involves thinking of 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. For example, the words cat and dog are similar, but the words cat and book are not.

Do the Task — it’s fun! (And if you let them use your answers, you’re helping Science.) On my first try, I got 81.51, “higher than 70.03% of the people who have completed this task.” Via MetaFilter, where you will find much nerdy discussion of the details and how to raise or lower your score (only the first try is used in their research); a commenter there refers to the “Word for Word” segment of BBC radio’s comedy quiz show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, in which “players may say any word as long as it has no connection whatsoever to the previous word” (sample clip).

Matthew Scarborough, who has been producing (off and on) an extraordinarily useful series of bibliographic essays discussing etymological dictionaries for the Indo-European languages (I have posted about them a number of times, beginning here), has now done an Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics and Culture Textbooks for the Perplexed which is perhaps of wider interest, and certainly worth your while if you’ve ever wanted to learn something about the topic. He says:

So, in this post I’m going to give a bibliography / reading list of some of the most useful absolute introductory books you can go to in order to start, followed by a few more reading recommendations on where you can go next. This list is going to be mostly anglocentric, but I’ll also throw in a few French and German recommendations where appropriate.

Just to give you a sample, here are the last two items (from the “Further Reading after the General Stuff” section):

• Gamkrelidze, Tamaz & Vyecheslav Ivanovich Ivanov. 1995. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

This work is a translation of the authors earlier Russian work Индоевропейский Язык и Индоевропецы [Indo-European Language and the Indo-Europeans] (1984, Tblisi University Press). It is essentially broken down into two components: (1) a new reconstruction of Indo-European and (2) a semantic dictionary of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. While many aspects of this work’s reconstruction remain controversial, including an implementation of the authors’ version of the glottalic theory** and a reconstruction of a homeland roughly around modern-day Armenia, there is still a lot of useful material to be found here, especially in its semantic dictionary and its synthesis of Soviet scholarship that has often not been so accessible to American and European scholars. It is a good book to think with.

• Klein, Jared, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz (eds.) 2017-2018. Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics (3 Vols.). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

This is the newest comprehensive reference work on Indo-European and all of its individual branches. It is the closest thing we have to a new Brugmann Grundriß. Clocking in at $400 USD per volume, it is unlikely to be a purchase by anyone but a reference library, but if you have access to such a library or online resources to De Gruyter Online this is the place to go for a very detailed and up-to-date survey of current perspectives in Indo-European reconstruction and the histories of the individual branches.

Thanks for the heads-up, JC!