languagehat.com

Again via Far Outliers, another quote from Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest (see this post):

The first casualty of the villagers’ increased acquisition of Tok Pisin was their competence in other local languages. Before the arrival of Tok Pisin, Gapuners were a highly multilingual people. No one in the surrounding villages bothered to learn their little language—a situation that suited Gapuners just fine since it meant that they could employ Tayap as a secret code that nobody else understood.

To communicate with people from other villages, men and women in Gapun learned the local vernacular languages that those people spoke. During my first long stay in the village in the 1980s, I listened to old people who had grown up before the Second World War confidently speaking two other local languages that were unrelated to Tayap or to each other, and I also heard those old people responding to one or two other languages, which they clearly understood even if they couldn’t speak them.

In the generation born after the war, when Tok Pisin “came up big,” competence in other village vernaculars plummeted. People no longer needed to learn local languages because, at that point, it was easier to communicate in Tok Pisin. Women lagged behind men, and they continued to learn other vernacular languages for another generation, largely because women in the area generally still did not speak Tok Pisin as easily as men did. By the 1970s, though, even Gapun women’s active competence in other vernaculars was eclipsed by Tok Pisin.

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Particuliterate is a resource I wish I’d had when I was studying Greek; from the About page:

While there is not much information in learning materials on Greek particles, there is a wealth of material elsewhere. In journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and reference sources, one will find a number of fascinating arguments about how to understand the meaning of particular particles. And yet, most students do not know where to look for these, and if they find them, the jargon and background information which the reader is assumed to know pose difficulty to the student just beginning to dip their toes into Greek scholarship.

This website is aimed primarily at that student. Its goal is to aggregate the discussion of particles, which is often spread out and hard to track down, into one place, where the views of various scholars can be summarized in a succinct and understandable manner. Particles entries include extensive hyperlinking to the Glossary page, which includes definitions for common terms and explanations of theories which underlie the arguments being described.

Yet this website is not only aimed at that student. Experienced scholars who wish to follow up on the summaries will find full bibliographies accompanying each entry.

In general, one particle entry will be added to the site each week. A schedule is provided in the Particle Directory page. Occasionally, the schedule may be disrupted by a desire to write a more general post not devoted to a single particle, or be delayed due to my other commitments, but regular updates can be expected starting on Apr 1.

Of course, you can find detailed analysis in Denniston’s The Greek Particles, but that’s over seventy years old now and perhaps a little dense for the average student. (Via Sententiae Antiquae.)

Victor Mair at the Log posts about what sounds like a very stimulating book, Mareshi Saito’s Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature. From the author’s Introduction:

The chief aim of this book is to consider the language space of modern Japan from the perspective of what I am calling kanbunmyaku 漢文脈 in Japanese, translated here as “Literary Sinitic Context.” I use the term “Literary Sinitic” to designate what is often referred to as “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese” in English, wenyan 文言 in Mandarin Chinese, kanbun 漢文 in Japanese (sometimes referred to as “Sino-Japanese” in English), and hanmun 漢文 in Korean. The Context in Literary Sinitic Context translates the -myaku of kanbunmyaku, and usually implies a pulse, vein, flow, or path, but is also the second constituent element of the Sino-Japanese term bunmyaku 文脈 meaning “(textual, literary) context.” I use the term Literary Sinitic Context to encompass both Literary Sinitic proper, as well as orthographic and literary styles (buntai 文体) derived from Literary Sinitic, such as glossed reading (kundoku 訓読) or Literary Japanese (bungobun 文語文), which mix sinographs (kanji 漢字, i.e., “Chinese” characters) and katakana. In addition to styles I also consider Literary Sinitic thought and sensibility at the core of which lie Literary Sinitic poetry (kanshi 漢詩) and prose (kanbun 漢文), collectively termed kanshibun 漢詩文.

From the publisher’s blurb:

Saito Mareshi demonstrates the centrality of Literary Sinitic poetry and prose in the creation of modern literary Japanese. Saito’s new understanding of the role of “kanbunmyaku” in the formation of Japanese literary modernity challenges dominant narratives tied to translations from modern Western literatures and problematizes the antagonism between Literary Sinitic and Japanese in the modern academy. Saito shows how kundoku (vernacular reading) and its rhythms were central to the rise of new inscriptional styles, charts the changing relationship of modern poets and novelists to kanbunmyaku, and concludes that the chronotope of modern Japan was based in a language world supported by the Literary Sinitic Context.

(Minor gripe: I don’t see the point of italicizing kanji and katakana, which are perfectly good English words, when the poor reader is already faced with a slew of genuinely foreign italicized terms.) I’m fascinated by this stuff, and I hope readers who know East Asian literatures and their history will have things to say.

Sharon Avni (an applied linguist at CUNY) writes for the Jerusalem Post:

Before I had even managed to settle down for my first Zoom meeting on Monday morning, I had already received several messages from friends and colleagues alerting me to the clip of Effie Hertzke, an 81-year-old woman being interviewed on Israeli television after receiving her COVID-19 vaccine. Bedecked with large dangling earrings, a shirt with “BADGIRLS” emblazoned across the front, and a full face of makeup, Hertzke chatted — in a mixture of Hebrew and English — with seasoned journalist Rafi Reshef while walking on the treadmill at her local gym in Ramat Gan. […]

Watching this clip from my home in New Jersey, where gym attendance is severely constrained because of the pandemic, I could appreciate Hertzke’s excitement about being back on the treadmill. But as a sociolinguist who studies Americans and their use of modern Hebrew, I was even more struck by the characteristics of the conversation between Hertzke and Reshef, as well as by the outpouring of attention in the Jewish press and in social media that her discourse attracted. When Reshef asks “ve’ech hakosher” (and what kind of shape are you in), and Hertzke responds “Oh my god! Ata rotse lirot et ha muscles sheli?” (Do you want to see my muscles), she is engaged in what linguists call translanguaging.

Coming out of bilingual education scholarship, translanguaging describes the ways that bilinguals, multilinguals and indeed all users of language use all available linguistic resources to communicate effectively with others. Instead of viewing bilingualism as strictly separated languages in the individual’s mind, translanguaging approaches language in a more dynamic way, seeing it as the natural and authentic way in which people move fluidly between languages — sometimes, as with Hertzke, within the same sentence.

What makes Hertzke’s translanguaging particularly noteworthy is that she clearly has strong Hebrew skills. She effortlessly recalls, “Ani avadti ad gil shmonim bishvil maskoret (I worked until the age of 80 for a salary) and then my children said, ‘Ma, maspeek kvar’” (enough already). Hertzke’s translanguaging does not cause a communicative breakdown. In fact, it’s what allows her feisty personality to shine. The banter between the two is seamless, and Reshef responds to Hertzke’s utterances without missing a beat, showing any signs of misunderstanding or feeling the need to translate for his audience.

She goes on to discuss comments have people made about Hertzke’s American accent and points out that “societies assume there is one way of speaking correctly, so when people hear an accent, they not only hear a different form of pronunciation, but may also make judgments about the speaker’s worth and place in society”; I like her conclusion:

Hertzke owns her multilingualism, and her translanguaging celebrates the idiosyncratic beauty of both of her languages, as well as her national identities. Ownership of who we are and how we put it out into the world — now that is a linguistic achievement we should all be proud of.

Thanks, Dmitry!

Zaria Gorvett writes for BBC Future about a fruit I was barely aware of; there are several items of linguistic interest:

The polite, socially acceptable name by which it’s currently known is the medlar. But for the best part of 900 years, the fruit was called the “open-arse” – thought to be a reference to the appearance of its own large “calyx” or bottom. The medlar’s aliases abroad were hardly more flattering. In France, it was variously known as “la partie postérieure de ce quadrupede” (the posterior part of this quadruped), “cu d’singe” (monkey’s bottom), “cu d’ane” (donkey’s bottom), and cul de chien (dog’s bottom)… you get the idea. […]

The fruit are unusual for two reasons. Firstly, they’re harvested in December – making them one of very few sources of sugar that would have been available in medieval winters. Secondly, they only become edible when they’re rotten.

When they’re first picked, medlars are greenish brown and resemble oddly-shaped onions or alien-looking persimmons. If they’re eaten straight away, they can make you violently ill – one 18th Century doctor and botanist said that they cause diarrhoea. But if you put them in a crate of sawdust or straw and forget about them for several weeks, they gradually darken and their hard, astringent flesh softens to the consistency of a baked apple. […] The process is known as “bletting”, a word made-up by a botanist who noticed there wasn’t one in 1839 [sic; see below]. […]

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Via Far Outliers, a passage from A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea, by Don Kulick (Algonquin Books, 2019):

As far back as anyone in Gapun has been able to remember, though, Tayap has never had more than, at most, about 150 speakers: the entire population of Tayap speakers, when the language was at its peak, would have fit into a single New York City subway car. Tiny as that count is, such a small language was not unusual for Papua New Guinea. Most languages spoken in the country have fewer than three thousand speakers. And linguists estimate that about 35 percent of the languages (which means about 350 of them) have never had more than about five hundred speakers.

Contrary to received wisdom, and common sense, this constellation of tiny languages was not the result of isolation; it didn’t arise because villages were separated from one another by mountain barriers or impenetrable jungle walls. Quite the opposite: throughout Papua New Guinea, the areas that have the highest degree of linguistic diversity (that is, the most languages) are the ones where people can get around relatively easily, by paddling a canoe along rivers and creeks, for example. The areas where travel is more difficult, for example in the mountains that run like a jagged spine across the center of the country, is where the largest languages are found (the biggest being a language called Enga, with over two hundred thousand speakers).

The conclusion that linguists have drawn from this counterintuitive distribution of languages is that people in Papua New Guinea have used language as a way of differentiating themselves from one another. Whereas other people throughout the world have come to use religion or food habits or clothing styles to distinguish themselves as a specific group of people in relation to outsiders, Papua New Guineans came to achieve similar results through language. People wanted to be different from their neighbors, and the way they made themselves different was to diverge linguistically.

Large swathes of neighboring groups throughout the mainland share similar traditional beliefs about what happens after one dies; they think related things about sorcery, initiation rituals, and ancestor worship; they have roughly similar myths about how they all originated; and before white colonists started coming to the country in the mid-1800s, they all dressed fairly similarly (and they all do still dress similarly, given the severely limited variety of manufactured clothing available to them today—mostly T-shirts and cloth shorts for men, and for women, baggy, Mother Hubbard–style “meri blouses” introduced by missionaries to promote modesty and cover up brazenly exposed breasts). Neighboring peoples hunt the same pigs and cassowaries that inhabit the rainforest; and they all eat sago, or taro or sweet potato—whichever of those staples their land is capable of growing.

In terms of the languages they speak, though, Papua New Guineans are very different from one another.

We discussed Kulick in 2019.

I’m almost finished reading Jonathan Waterlow’s It’s Only A Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin (1928-1941), and it’s going to feature prominently in my year-end roundup for The Millions — it’s a terrific book that looks at Stalin’s USSR from an unusual perspective, that of the jokes people told (and sometimes got in trouble for). It’s not about the jokes themselves (he doesn’t quote all that many of them), it uses that lens to view a society that’s too often described by scholars who tend to favor their own theories over the lives people lived. Waterlow, while a historian with a PhD from Oxford, is not a professor and has no theoretical ax to grind; he does know a lot about people and how they adjust to the world around them, and his account is refreshing and eye-opening. I’m going to quote a passage from chapter 5 on what he calls “know-how”:

These fragments of ‘wisdom’ and insight [i.e., anekdoty, ‘jokes’] worked as a ‘sense-making device’ — a term which the sociologist Andrea Mayr has used to describe prison argot: it’s an ‘insider’ idiom which grows to enable the powerless to share their own, unofficial understandings of the world they cohabit alongside, and yet apart from, the official.

The argot-like shadow language of acronyms and secret meanings known between people who trusted each other to share them […] was not used solely as a throwaway game to elicit a momentary smile or knowing look, but could also convey significant information about how the Soviet system actually worked. […] I call this body of unofficial understandings and advice ‘know-how‘. […]

He tells a joke about a class of children asked by their teacher to raise their hand if they’re in favor of executing “wreckers” (when two fail to raise their hands, a fellow student explains “They’re new — they don’t know that raising your hand is obligatory”) and another about a teacher who asks “If I buy a case of apples for 25 roubles and sell it for 50 roubles, what do I get?” (“‘Three years in jail,’ chorused the class”), then continues:

More revealing still, these jokes dramatised the fact that people had to learn how to act and what (not) to say under the regime, because it was often far from self-evident. Like children at school, everyone had to be socialised according to the norms of this new society. As Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman have put it [in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside], ‘in linguistic terms, ideology was transformed from a native to an acquired tongue, a language of which there were no native speakers’. But if they were learning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ in the real classrooms, many adults were simultaneously learning to speak sense between one another.

I like the idea of Stalinist ideology as “a language of which there were no native speakers.” (If, like me, you’re curious about it, the surname Waterlow “is a habitational name thought to have been taken on from the since lost place, Wadlow in Toddington, Bedfordshire.”)

Dave Wilton has a thorough and fascinating discussion of the familiar WWII-era “Kilroy was here” and the completely unknown (to this Yank) Mr. Chad, whose face peering over a wall has long been associated with Kilroy. An excerpt on the former:

The phrase probably originated c. 1943 by some anonymous serviceman, but the earliest use in print that I have found is from the Seattle Times of 29 July 1945:

The most notorious character at Fort Lawton these days is a soldier—(or something)—named Kilroy—who isn’t there.

The one-time existence of Kilroy, who has been described as everything from an infantry private, first-class, to a white rat, is resumed from numberless chalked signs, scattered about the fort, which read:
“Kilroy slept here.”
“Kilroy drove this truck.”
“Kilroy got clipped here.” At the barber shop) [sic]
“Kilroy got the needle here.” (At the medical processing center.)

And on Chad:

The drawing was created by British cartoonist and erstwhile drawing instructor Jack Greenall in the mid 1920s, early in his career when he was employed at a technical drawing school, as an exercise for his students in drawing simple forms. The figure first saw print when Greenall included the image in a Useless Eustace cartoon published in London’s Daily Mirror on 11 December 1937. The oft-included caption of “Wot! No ____?” would be added later, as commentary on wartime shortages.

Like Kilroy, the name Mr. Chad would not be documented in print until the very end of the war […]

My wife asked me why the cataracts in eyes are called that, so of course I had to look it up; it turns out Greek καταρ(ρ)άκτης, literally ‘down-rushing,’ could mean both ‘waterfall’ and ‘portcullis,’ both senses were kept in Latin and French (from which we got the word), and the sense ‘an opacity of the crystalline lens of the eye’ (in the OED’s words) is:

[Apparently a figurative use of the sense portcullis. In French, the physician A. Paré (c1550) has ‘cataracte ou coulisse’; and Cotgrave (1611) has coulisse ‘a portcullis.. also a web in the eye’, the notion being that even when the eye is open, the cataract obstructs vision, as the portcullis does a gateway. (But if originally in medieval Latin, it might arise from the sense ‘window-grating’ fenestra clathrata, Du Cange.)]

Mind you, that’s from 1889, but the OnEtDict agrees: “Its alternative sense in Latin of “portcullis” probably passed through French and gave English the meaning “eye disease characterized by opacity of the lens” (early 15c.), on the notion of “obstruction” (to eyesight).”
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Beth Lewis Samuelson and Sarah Warshauer Freedman’s 2010 article “Language policy, multilingual education, and power in Rwanda” (Open Access) has a useful summary of the linguistic situation in Rwanda (as of a dozen years ago, anyway); the Abstract reads:

The evolution of Rwanda’s language policies since 1996 has played and continues to play a critical role in social reconstruction following war and genocide. Rwanda’s new English language policy aims to drop French and install English as the only language of instruction. The policy-makers frame the change as a major factor in the success of social and education reforms aimed at promoting reconciliation and peace and increasing Rwanda’s participation in global economic development. However, in Rwanda, the language one speaks is construed as an indicator of group affiliations and identity. Furthermore, Rwanda has the potential to develop a multilingual educational policy that employs its national language, Kinyarwanda (Ikinyarwanda, Rwanda), to promote mass literacy and a literate, multilingual populace. Rwanda’s situation can serve as a case study for the ongoing roles that language policy plays in the politics of power.

And here’s the initial discussion of the Kinyarwanda language:

In Rwanda today, Kinyarwanda is described as a critical element in the essence of “Rwandan-ness.” Rwandans believe that all Rwandans should speak Kinyarwanda. They will scold Rwandans who do not speak it well, most of whom were displaced by the wars and massacres prior to 1994 and who grew up outside Rwanda (often called the Diaspora). The fact that Rwanda has only one autochthonous language makes it a special case, as most African nations are multilingual. Thus, Kinyarwanda is viewed as a unifier. As high as 99.4% of the population can speak Kinyarwanda (Rosendal2009), and approximately 90% of Rwandans speak only Kinyarwanda (LeClerc2008; Munyankesha2004).

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