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An amusing 2007 piece by Roger Ebert, “The Ping of Pong: Mystery Solved,” discusses the origins of the term “ping pong,” mainly quoting variously indignant (“I am very sad to see you trapped by your own ignorance”) and would-be scholarly (“As someone who lives in China and has an obsessive need to correct facts, I need to take issue with Nic Hautamaki’s statement that ping pong is derived from Mandarin”) communications from readers. The two most informative are these:

Arsen Azizyan, New Haven CT: “As a Chinese major in college who has spent two years in Beijing, I am compelled to correct Nic Hautamaki’s linguistic note. The term “ping-pong” is, in fact, an onomatope which originated in England, where the sport was invented (a more anemic alternative, now thankfully lapsed, was “whiff-whaff”). The Chinese word “ping-pang” was borrowed from the English, not vice versa – although Mr. Hautamaki’s confusion is understandable, given that the Chinese invented two new characters for the term, both intentional mutations of a pre-existing, phonetically similar character (pronounced “bing”). If any of your readers had doubts as to the practical usefulness of a college education, surely my letter has helped to reinforce them.’

Jake Jacobs, Singapore: “Your correspondent is somewhat misinformed. “Ping pang qiu” came from English, not the other way around. Parker Brothers trademarked the onomatopoetic term back in 1900, and early usage goes back to 1823. The pivot of the Chinese term is “qiu” which means ball, and the “ping pang” is a phonetic copy of “ping-pong.” Your earlier correspondent’s nose was out of joint because a sport (table tennis) which he takes seriously doesn’t get much respect.”

What bothers me is Jacobs’ assertion that “early usage goes back to 1823”; the OED, in an entry updated as recently as June 2006, does not have any citations before 1900 (Daily Chron. 8 May 6/6 “Our correspondent seems to hope that the unclean, playing Ping-Pong with the clean, will become unpleasantly conscious of his uncleanness and reform”). Anybody know anything about the early history of this “imitative or expressive” term?

Also, I learn from the OED that there is another ping-pong: “Also more fully ping-pong drum. A drum which supplies the melody in a Caribbean steel band; a tenor pan (first citation 1948 E. Leaf Isles of Rhythm viii. 196 “This transformation has occurred through the invention of the ping-pong, a percussion steel drum”).

The U.S. Civil War, that is; an interesting bit of history summarized by Livia Gershon at JSTOR Daily:

In the years after the war ended, [Historian Gaines M.] Foster writes, no single term prevailed among southern whites. Some spoke of the “Confederate War for Independence,” or just the “Confederate War.” (The “War of Northern Aggression” was rarely used until it was adopted by neo-Confederates and others opposed to racial integration in the mid-twentieth century.) Gradually, southerners settled on the “War between the States.” Former Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens argued that this reflected the fact that the United States had never been “one Political Society” and that the war had been between states “regularly organized into two separate Federal Republics.”

In the North, meanwhile, a shift was happening. During and immediately after the war, northerners most commonly referred to it as a “rebellion.” But as Reconstruction was quashed and the nation permitted the rise of the Jim Crow terror regime, many white northerners sought to bridge the divide with their southern counterparts by using a neutral term. By the 1890s, “Civil War” was clearly the favorite term used in newspapers. Soon after the turn of the century, Congress officially adopted it over “the rebellion.”

I hadn’t realized the current name took so long to become standard. Thanks, Bathrobe!

The English Language & Usage Stack Exchange had a very interesting thread on the topic Why did Jitney become slang for nickel?. The most thorough response was from David L. Gold:

It may be possible to antedate the word (which has been spelled jetney, gitney, and jitney) to the 1870s:

“Does jitney mean a nickel, or a ride, or a method of transportation, or a state of mind? […] in reading the old files of the Overland Magazine some time ago, dated in the seventies, ]I found that the term jitney is used by one of the characters of a story of San Francisco life, the context of the story shows that this particular ‘jitney’ was a quarter. A further proof that a jitney is not necessarily a nickel is that in early times no coin of less value than a quarter circulated on the coast.

So. Mr. Jitneur, when some opponent upbraids you for not being a true jitney because you may charge more than five cents, read him this article and crush him to earth. A jitney is a small coin, such as the great American public are now paying for trackless transportation.

“Postscript—Alas, for trying to prove anything! We have just received word that a Canadian board of councilmen have decided that a ‘jitney’ is five cents” (unsigned, “What does Jitney Mean?,” The Jitney Bus, vol. 1, no. 4, July 1915, p. 114; the bracketed addition is mine [I have omitted most of the piece; see link for more — LH]).

I say “may be possible to antedate,” because the passage of time (cf. “some time ago”) may play tricks on one’s memory. Issues of The Overland Monthly have to be examined line by line (so far I have been unable to find the word there).

The anonymous writer’s speculation in the rest of the passage is likewise subject to examination. Nothing is to be taken on faith, such as his inference that “the word was in common use because we had learned it there” and his reasoning that the word had been used in California “since the days of ’49 […] because several pioneers have told us it was used.”

Also, since five-cent coins have been minted in the United States since the 1790s, the writer’s ability to know what the situation was “in the days before nickels were invented” is doubtful.

The following articles have more information about the word:

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I found this exchange in an Indo-European Linguistics group I’m a member of interesting enough to post here. The poster said:

There was an interesting Latin word in the designation of the Latin old name of Black sea – Axenum aequor. I understood that axenum from anti-xenium (unfriendly), where Latin xenium (gift given to guests or foreign ambassadors, often of food). Also Greek – ξένῐον (xénion). What is the general etymology and origin of this word? How related to Russian gostinec (gift from a guest, often in the form of food) or siny (dark-blue)?

Our old pal Piotr Gąsiorowski responded:

Latin has nothing to do with it. Latin names on maps only reflect their Greek prototypes: ὁ Ἄξεινος or Ἄξενος ‘the Inhospitable (Sea)’ was one of the Greek names for the Black Sea, then replaced by the euphemism ὁ Εὔξε(ι)νος ‘the Hospitable’. When latinised, they became Axenum, Euxinum etc., with the gender changed to neuter after Latin mare.

Of course both are derived from ξένος, Epic/Ionic ξεῖνος, Doric ξένϝος. Myc. (Linear B) ke-se-nu-wo < *ksenwos 'guest, foreigner'. Nothing to do with any colour words. A relationship to *gostь < *gʰostis is not impossible if both derive from PIE *gʰes- 'eat' (a verb root attested only in Indo-Iranian), assuming *gʰs-en- > *ksen- in Proto-Greek. But the relationship is uncertain and is at best a “root equation”.

There is also an explanation of ὁ Ἄξεινος as a Greek folk etymology of Iranian *axšaina- ‘dark-coloured’. It was popularised by Vasmer, and has become widely believed. The word is authenticalIy Iranian (Av. axšaēna etc.); I don’t, however, know of any evidence the the Iranians actually used it to name the Black Sea.

Thomas Wier added:

Yes, Axenum is direct Latinization of the original Πόντος Ἄξεινος, which is in turn a folk-etymologization of the Persian *Axshayna ‘dark-grey/blue’. The Georgians had a truly separate word for this before they borrowed the Greek root: ზღვა სპერისა zghva Sp’erisa ‘Sea of the Sasperi’ (an Anatolian tribe mentioned by Herodotus and Xenophon). I wrote more on this here.

And Martin Kümmel wrote:

There is indeed no evidence that the Black Sea was called axšaina- by Iranians, see F. de Blois, The name of the Black Sea. In: Maria Macuch, Mauro Maggi, Werner Sundermann (eds.), Iranian languages and texts from Iran and Turan. Ronald E. Emmerick memorial volume, 1-8, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. In the same paper, it is also argued that the Greek evidence rather points to ἄξεινος being secondary vs. εὔξεινος, and both only secondary epithets of the real “name” of the Black sea, i.e. Πόντος (while the normal word for ‘sea’ is ϑάλασσα, ϑάλαττα).

(There is also some discussion about the actual color of the Black Sea.) I will of course be interested in what the Hattery has to add.

Not worth a post of its own, but some people might be interested in this Map of find spots showing all sites where Tocharian texts are known to have been discovered. Alas, the links don’t seem to work yet.

In my recent post on Sasha Sokolov’s great first novel A School for Fools (and I urge everyone intrigued by it to get the new translation by Alexander Boguslawski), I said that he was influenced by Andrei Bitov’s “Life in Windy Weather” and Vasily Aksyonov’s Surplussed Barrelware; as it happens, I had read both, and have been meaning to reread the Aksyonov for years (it made a strong impression on me), but the Bitov had irritated me, so it was with some reluctance that I decided to give it another try. You see, I had gone through something of a Bitov phase a while ago, reading all the early stories and travel memoirs I had access to, and while I could tell he was a good and innovative writer, I soon got fed up with his single-minded solipsism. It seemed like every story was about a boy or young man who had an obsessive love for an older woman who showed him amused tolerance, and had endless scenes of the hero walking around (preferably at night) meditating bitterly on his sufferings. By the time I got to “Life in Windy Weather” I was zooming through it, noting “OK, dude is restless at the dacha with his wife and son, insists on going back to the city even though he’s got no rational reason for it but maybe he’ll meet an interesting woman, then he’s irritated by the arrival of his wife’s family, got it, can we move on?” It turns out this was entirely the wrong way to approach it (and it seems there is such a thing as reading too many things by a single author without a break). When I read it with Sokolov in mind, an entirely different story emerged.

It begins with Sergei, the protagonist, arriving at the dacha belonging to his in-laws in his father’s car (I quote the translation by Richard Luplow and Priscilla Meyer, except that I change their “Alexei” — reflecting another version of the story — to Sergei):

He was as usual struck by how overgrown the garden had become and how the lot itself seemed to have shrunk, and the dacha, hidden by undergrowth, seemed less bulky than it had last year. The trees, recently small, now reached to the windows of the second floor. The dacha, still unfinished, had already begun to get dilapidated, the frame, not yet trimmed, had gotten still blacker, and the entire dacha, which had stuck out so awkwardly and tastelessly before, now seemed to have made itself at home, to have taken root, and for the first time he liked it.

Его привычно поразило, как разросся сад и как сам участок будто уменьшился, и дача, заслоненная зеленью, не показалась ему такой громоздкой, как в прошлом году. Деревья, недавно небольшие, нынче достигали окон второго этажа. Дача, все еще не достроенная, уже начала ветшать, сруб, так и не обшитый, почернел еще больше, и вся она, так нелепо и безвкусно торчавшая раньше, как бы обжилась, вросла и впервые понравилась ему.

After a brief conversation with the father, it continues:

As he accompanied his father to the car, he thought that the dacha, which would probably never be finished, somehow corresponded perfectly to this “limousine,” which would never be a decent car. If his wife’s parents had a sort of country house, then his father had a sort of car. In this way there was established a sort of balance.

Провожая отца до машины, он подумал, что дача, которая, по-видимому, никогда не будет достроена, как-то очень соответствует этой «декавешке», которая никогда не станет приличной машиной. Если у родителей жены был как бы загородный дом, то у его отца была как бы машина. Таким образом, наступало как бы равновесие.

The themes of time, change, family relationships, and emotional attitude will be important throughout, as will the phrase как бы ‘sort of.’ (I should add that I’m not sure how well the translation “limousine” renders Bitov’s декавешка ‘DKW’; I’m not a car person.) The time theme continues on the next page:
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A reader writes:

My wife and I watch Jeopardy religiously, so we suffer through the commercial breaks on the show. About half the commercials, it seems, are for medications for a variety of unusual ailments, and some pretty esoteric drugs are featured. I started noticing that besides the brand name for these drugs, the generic name is also listed, and many of these seem to have endings like “mab,” “lib,” and “fil”. So I got to wondering how the drug companies come up with these names. As far as I can find, it’s not one that has been explored much in linguistic circles.

So it turns out this is a two-fold process. The brand names, or trade names (Advil, for example) are selected for marketing purposes and go through a vetting process with the FDA. There’s a bit of a creative process involved.

He provides Timothy O’Shea’s Pharmacy Times piece “15 Rx Drug Name Origins“:

Naming a new prescription drug is a long and complex process, costing upwards of $2.25 million.

“Coming up with a brand name used to be an afterthought,” said Bill Trombetta, professor of pharmaceutical marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “But today, pharmaceutical companies realize that they need to brand drugs as early as they can and build equity in that brand.” By the time a drug has completed phase I clinical testing in humans, most companies are already working to develop a brand name. To do so, drug manufacturers often work with branding agencies that use large databases to help them generate unique names. The generated names often use linguistic tricks such as plosive letters (P, T, D, K, Q, and hard C) to convey power, or fricative letters (X, F, S, or Z) to imply speed.

But authority over pharmaceutical trade names ultimately rests with the FDA and the US Patent and Trademark Office. The FDA prohibits names that imply efficacy or are associated with the intended indication. As a result, marketers often look for names that subtly and indirectly convey an idea, suggesting improved quality of life. Still, the FDA fully rejects one-third of the hundreds of names proposed annually.

There follows the list of 15 commonly prescribed drugs with the origins of their names. And for the generic name, we have Gail B. Karet’s August 2019 AMA Journal of Ethics article “How Do Drugs Get Named?“; abstract:

Since the 1960s, the United States Adopted Names Program has been assigning generic (nonproprietary) names to all active drug ingredients sold in the United States. Pharmaceutical names are assigned according to a scheme in which specific syllables in the drug name (called stems) convey information about the chemical structure, action, or indication of the drug. The name also includes a prefix that is distinct from other drug names and that is euphonious, memorable, and acceptable to the sponsoring pharmaceutical firm. Drug names are the product of complex, multiparty negotiations in which the needs and desires of various stakeholders (patients, pharmaceutical firms, physicians, pharmacists, other health care professionals, and US and international regulators) must be balanced.

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As I learn from MetaFilter, tomorrow is the first Gray Day, “a celebration of the writer and artist Alasdair Gray, on the 40th anniversary of his masterpiece Lanark”; there will be a free hour-long Gray Day Broadcast that will feature Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Alan Cumming, Denise Mina, Irvine Welsh, and many others, and if you don’t want to wait you can hear the author read the Epilogue to Lanark (n.b.: the Epilogue doesn’t come at the end of the book). Gray is one of those writers I know I’ll like, but I still haven’t gotten around to him; I can, however, add my mite by contributing the etymology of the wonderful place name Unthank, which features in Lanark (as “a strange Glasgow-like city in which there is no daylight and whose disappearing residents suffer from strange diseases”). It is, according to A Dictionary of British Place Names by A. D. Mills, “‘(Land held) without consent’, i.e. ‘a squatter’s holding’. OE. unthanc.” And the OED has an entry (from 1926) for unthank:
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A few times in my life I’ve encountered works that stopped me in my tracks and made me say “Wait, you can do that?” I vividly remember my first experiences of Godard, Ezra Pound, Thomas Pynchon; they completely changed my ideas of movies, poetry, and the novel respectively. The last couple of weeks have been like that. I spent a week and a half reading Sasha Sokolov’s first novel, Школа для дураков (1976), translated (not very well) by Carl Proffer the following year as A School for Fools — I personally think it should be just plain School for Fools, but the articulated title has established itself. (The newer, and presumably better, translation by Alexander Boguslawski keeps the same title; according to this review, it has “an expertly researched collection of endnotes,” which convinced me to order it — with a book like this you need all the help you can get, and I like to support New York Review Books, which has a terrific Russian-lit list.) It’s a short novel but a long read. After I finished the book, I started reading up on it and thinking about it, and I’ll set down a few preliminary thoughts here; I expect to keep turning it over in my head for a long time.

I’m not the only one who felt it was something completely new; a lot of the early response included remarks to that effect. Of course it didn’t come out of nowhere; Russian precursors were Gogol, Dostoevsky (The Double, Notes from Underground), Bely (Petersburg), Nabokov (The Defense), late Kataev (the fictionalized memoirs), Aksyonov (Surplussed Barrelware), and Bitov (Life in Windy Weather — Sokolov twice uses the phrase дачная местность ‘dacha district,’ a nod to Bitov’s subtitle), not to mention the great samizdat books of 1970, Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki and Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Nikolai Nikolaevich; obvious foreign parallels are Joyce and Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury). But Sokolov puts the familiar elements of doubling, madness, and sexual obsession together in a way that is entirely his own. I’ll quote a decent description by Ludmilla L. Litus from her “Intertextuality in Škola dlja durakov Revisited: Sokolov, Gogol, and the Others” (Russian Language Journal/Русский язык, Vol. 52, No. 171/173 [Winter-Spring-Fall 1998], pp. 99-140):

To summarize briefly, Škola is a linguistically self-conscious, complex, metafictional text that takes the form of a disjointed pseudo memoir. The narrative does not follow the traditional contiguous linear line of the realistic novel, but, as in verse, it is developed through associations and metaphoric play. […] The one unifying element in this intricate, disconnected narrative is the voice of the narrator and main character who also functions as both the fictional author of the memoir and the student with whom this fictional author discusses life and the writing of the book. […]

Nymphea is the linguistically perceptive, fictional author/student/double narrator who controls and directs the narrative by calling the reader’s attention to specific phrases, passages, and individual words. Words in Škola are important in themselves, as in verse, for their sound quality, rhythm, and even for their visual appearance. To create special effects and to add emphasis, Sokolov manipulates typography; he introduces typographic разрядка [letter spacing] and spells words backward. […]

Škola is a type of sophisticated modern literary pastiche of “other texts” that includes “fragments” from the Bible, poetry and prose, aphorisms, song fragments, tongue-twisters, and examples of children’s counting rhymes – from Russian/Soviet and world literature, history, and culture. Multiple repetitions in the work help set the tone and help create a sense of repeating, often chaotic, reality.

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Ari Luiro has created a classic webpage, Chess Pieces in Different Languages:

This article presents words for chess, six chess pieces and check in 78 languages in the table. This article is originally written in Finnish. If you know more languages to be added to the table, please send me e-mail. […]

The rook has many meanings in different languages. The rook is a tower in many European languages (eg. Spanish and Portuguese torre, Finnish torni, French tour, Dutch toren), sometimes a large farm (Frisian stins), a ship (Russian lad’ja, transcribed also as ladya), a fortress or castle (Indonesian benteng) or a wagon (Chinese ju, Estonian vanker). […]

Words for chess queen in European languages are generally feminine, with a few exception. But outside Europe the chess queens usually don’t have gender or the piece is masculine. The Arabic firz or firzān (counsellor) was never translated into a European language although it was adopted. For example the Italians call the queen as donna (‘woman’) or more common regina (queen in Italian). A Latin manuscript preserved in the Einsiedeln Monastery in Switzerland (997 AD) contains the first recorded mention of the chess queen (regina). In French usage reine ‘queen’ replaced fierce or fierge (from the Arabic fers) during the 14th century; during the next century reine was replaced by the word dame. […] The queen in Estonian (lipp) is a flag. Arabic (wäziir, firzān), Russian (ferz’), Farsi (vazir, farzin), Uzbek (farzin), Hindi (farzī, wazīr) and Turkish (vezir) among others still use the ancient word of no gender firz for today’s chess queen. […]

There are many ways in different languages to call a bishop. The bishop can be a messenger (Finnish lähetti and Polish goniec), a clergyman (English bishop and Irish easpag ‘bishop’ both from Latin episcopus ‘bishop’), a rifleman (Czech střelec), a runner (German läufer, Romansh currider, Latin cursor), an elephant (Indonesian gajah) or a crazy (French fou, also a jester or a fool). Romanian nebun and Greek trelós mean fool or crazy.

That’s just a few tidbits; there’s much more at the link, and if you scroll down you’ll see a magnificent table with everything from Finnish to Tahitian.

Neapolitan Dialect: Can Catalan, French, Spanish, and Latin speakers understand it?
Ecolinguist posted this video to YouTube, writing:

This video features the Neapolitan Dialect spoken in Abruzzo, Italy. Claudio de Domenico is an Abruzzese speaker and we made this video to see if Catalan, French, Spanish, and Latin speakers can understand the Abruzzese dialect?

The Latin speaker is American; even though he’s of Abruzzese descent, he doesn’t know the dialect (and he speaks Latin in a very pleasing classical pronunciation). It’s pure delight for those of us who enjoy Romance dialects, and it even discusses etymologies! (Via Slavomír Čéplö/bulbul at Facebook.)