languagehat.com

An interesting quote (via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti) from Robert A. Hall, Jr., A Life for Language: A Biographical Memoir of Leonard Bloomfield (John Benjamins, 1990):

Part of the strong condemnation expressed in the last sentence quoted above was an outgrowth of Bloomfield’s disgust with the inexactitude and inaccuracy of the folklore taught in our schools as “grammar” (e.g., “a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing”). He used to say that it would be better for school children to remain totally ignorant of grammar than to be taught such traditional but false doctrines. On more than one occasion, I argued with him about this opinion of his, and tried to point out that, if a child is to recognize the desirability of analysing language at all, this must be demonstrated to him at an age when he is interested in such matters. Even if what the child learns is wrong, he can unlearn it later. But, once he has passed beyond the stage of acquiring his native language (normally wholly outside of awareness), he no longer sees any need for discussing or analysing it. I wish I had known the mediaeval Latin aphorism Melius invenitur veritas ex errore quam ex ignorantia ‘it is easier to get at the truth starting from a wrong notion than from no notion at all’, so as to quote it to Bloomfield.

I can understand both points of view; I think I would have firmly agreed with Bloomfield as a fervent young linguist, but now I incline toward Hall’s attitude. (The aphorism is apparently from Francis Bacon, Novum Organum 2.20: citius emergit veritas ex errore quam ex confusione.)

I can’t resist quoting another Laudator post, an excerpt from Alexander Langlands, Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (2017):

The local potter couldn’t specialise and expect to survive. Instead, they had to turn their hand to a huge range of vessels from pie dishes, pancheons, cream-making pans, bread crocks, butter pots, stew dishes, casseroles, cauldrons, fish dishes and bakers, to storage vessels, ham pans, salt kits, jelly moulds, jugs, plates, bowls and chamber pots. I could go on. In fact, I will: costrels, spittoons, alembics, paint pots, chicken feeders, hog pots, pitchers, fuddling cups, stinkpots, Long Toms, lading pots, bussas, chafing dishes, bed pans, benisons, barm pots, cloughs, clouts, piggins, posset pots, wash pans, whistles and widebottoms.

But wait, there’s more…

I just finished a book I never really expected to read, Yuri Rytkheu’s 1969 Сон в начале тумана [Dream at the beginning of fog]. I knew Rytkheu was “the father of Chukchi literature,” but frankly I had no interest in Chukchi literature, and I expected his novels to be a mashup of ethnographic detail and standard socialist-realist tropes. I do enjoy a good tale of Arctic adventure, so that was alluring, but I had also read that the hero tries to teach the Chukchi literacy and bring them into the modern world, which was exactly the sort of thing that made me tired just to think about. What pushed me over the edge was learning that Chingiz Aitmatov (see this post) was accused of plagiarism by people who claimed that his famous И дольше века длится день (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years) was “substantially similar” to the Rytkheu novel. OK, that does it, I thought, I have to read it and see what it’s all about. So I did, and I’m glad of it.

Mind you, it’s not a Great Novel in either the Flaubert/Nabokov or Tolstoy/Dostoevsky sense; it’s just a good story well told, and anyone who likes accounts of protagonists overcoming apparently fatal handicaps and thriving in difficult circumstances will enjoy it, especially if they have a fondness for tales of the frozen North. And I’m happy to say that the business about teaching literacy and bringing the Chukchi into the modern world is a complete lie — there’s nothing like that in the novel I read, which is the exact opposite (the hero adopts and defends Chukchi culture), and I suspect it may describe the sequel, Иней на пороге [Frost on the threshold], which came out the following year. It wouldn’t surprise me if Soviet officialdom said “Look, pal, it’s all very well to praise the local way of life when the alternative was tsarist oppression, but you’d better make it clear that Soviet life was a necessary improvement.” But somebody will have to tell me if that’s so, because I’m not about to read it.

At any rate, the story is about John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor on an ice-bound ship in the Arctic Ocean in 1910, who is badly injured and left with the natives; at first appalled by his situation, he adapts to it, marries and has kids, learns to value the local worldview above the one he grew up with, and defends it against attempts by rapacious merchants to encroach on it. The final scene (somewhat mawkish, unlike the rest of the book) makes it clear he insists on staying — he has chosen his people. That scene is set in 1918: the locals are aware the Bolsheviks have taken control in far-off Russia, but nobody knows what that means, and there is no propaganda inserted to explain what a glorious event it is. The book is largely taken up with John’s struggle to learn the Chukchi methods of survival and convincing descriptions of the harsh environment they have to contend with; you end by deeply respecting the people who make their living there, as you are meant to. And since Rytkheu was Chukchi himself, you never have that queasy feeling you do when reading even the best-informed and best-intentioned fiction by outsiders trying to put you and themselves into the minds of “primitive” peoples; everyone here is absolutely convincing, even if there isn’t much psychological depth.

Oh, and the title: “Son” is the Chukchi attempt to pronounce “John,” and the name of the woman he marries, Pylmau, means ‘beginning of fog’; furthermore, “dream at the beginning of fog” is said to be an expression meaning a dream you barely remember when it’s over, so it’s multivalent. I should add that the book has been translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse as A Dream in Polar Fog (Archipelago Books, 2006), so you don’t have to read Russian to take the ride.

For anyone who doesn’t care about Arctic fiction but does care about the factuality of published books: Fact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing. Why Do So Many Publishers Refuse to Do It?, by Emma Copley Eisenberg. Read it and weep (though there are some encouraging signs). When I was a copyeditor, I routinely checked facts and quotes that I felt like checking, but of course that’s a very different thing from being paid to go through a text with a fine-toothed comb, checking every single thing — I have infinite respect for the people who do that well.

Alex Foreman has a very interesting Facebook post summed up by the title, and I wanted to rescue the first (and for me the more interesting) part from the memory pit of FB:

There are really two questions in this single one. What language might the Jesus of the Gospels speak, and what language might the historical Jesus have spoken.

A strong argument can be made that the Jesus of the Gospels — given all the linguistic behavior he engages in, and all the non-supernatural things he does — would have to be trilingual in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

In the time of Jesus, Hebrew was actively spoken and written, alongside Aramaic, by many Palestinian Jews — both as a learned language and as an L1. The view that Hebrew was, at this period, a dead language in any sense is out of date. Generally nowadays people posit the final death of L1-Hebrew in the 2nd or 3rd century CE. Perhaps later still among Samaritans. The Qumran texts are formulated mostly in Hebrew not because the writers wanted to imitate the Bible, but because Hebrew was the community’s language (and their dialect was clearly quite unlike Biblical Hebrew — a fact which is obvious even when they are consciously modeling their writing on Biblical precedents).
Biblical Hebrew had indeed become a language that needed to be learned but post-biblical Hebrew dialects were widely spoken.

Jesus would probably have used Hebrew in his discussion with the Pharisees on the washing of hands, for example (Mark 7:1-25). Only Hebrew was regularly used at this period in discussions touching on Jewish law. But he would have spoken Aramaic to the non-Jewish Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was possessed.

And anyone in Judea able to communicate with a guy like Pontius Pilate, would have known either Greek or Latin. Someone like Jesus would be unlikely to have learned Latin, but could easily have picked up Greek. Contrary to what Mel Gibson would have us believe, it was not normal for high-ranking soldiers to learn anything other than Greek when stationed in the east. In fact, we have very little evidence of anyone learning any other language other than Greek and Latin in the Roman Army, apart from one account in Apollonius Sidonius (describing Syagrius’ learning to speak Germanic) which suggests that such an activity was weird and unusual among cultivated Romans.

So the Jesus of the Gospels appears to be trilingual.

The post ends “The Lord’s prayer though, I think could not possibly have been produced outside of a Jewish milieu and is one of a number of places in the Gospels where an Aramaic linguistic background is pretty palpable”; I confess I don’t understand that part.

Two Australia-related items:

1) This is one of the stupidest language stories I’ve seen in a long time, and I can only assume it was a slow news day Down Under: Ee-moo?! NPR’s ‘absurd’ pronunciation starts new emu war in Australia.

The first shot was fired by National Public Radio in the US when it ruled on Friday that ee-moo was a correct and acceptable pronunciation of the name Australia’s national bird. […] This decision came as Stu Rushfield, a reporter and the technical director of the NPR weekend edition published his first story for the program about an escaped Maryland emu named Winston Featherbill.

The issue of pronunciation was brought to NRP’s Research, Archives & Data team who ruled (incorrectly) that ee-moo was acceptable to put to air. Rushfield said the team based their decision on previous on-air pronunciations, as well as how the bird’s (American) owner said the species’ name. But, one can only assume, failed to ask any one of the 24.9 million Australians who are an authority on the matter in the process.

Apparently Australians — at least those who chose to express performative outrage — say /ˈiːmjuː/, with a “yoo” after the /m/. I can’t for the life of me imagine why this should be an issue, considering the vast number of other pronunciation differences Aussies and Yanks encounter when dealing with each other, but as I say, it was probably a slow news day and someone decided to gin up some Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells activity. Anyway, to state the obvious, /ˈiːmjuː/ and /ˈiːmuː/ are both perfectly acceptable, and if you want to get really picky, the ancient OED entry says “The form emu is now [1891] more common in popular writing, and has latterly been adopted in the transactions of the Zoological Society. Prof. Newton, however, and some other eminent authorities prefer the older form emeu,” so if you’re sticking to your ancient guns you should write it emeu. And since it was borrowed from Portuguese ema (which may itself be borrowed from Arabic), both final vowels are “incorrect” in the first place. Stu Rushfield’s abashed account of the turmoil his pronunciation caused is here (audio should be available later today).

2) We Are What We Steal is a wonderful project:

Crimes are a reflection of the period and society in which they occur. What happened, the objects and people involved, the location, how it was recorded – or even if it was recorded – all tell us something about the values, attitudes, and power structures of the day.

This data visualisation looks at the almost 20 million words that were written in the New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime from the beginning of 1860 up until the end of 1900* [*The gazette was printed up until 1930, but this project only looks at the period from 1860 up until federation.] to see what it shows about how the people, places, and things, changed in NSW over that period. But this is not a law-and-order piece, as it’s not so much interested in the crimes themselves, but rather the data in aggregate, and what else is documented in the process of recording them. Changing fashions, new technologies, new modes of transport, the establishment of new towns, increasing wealth, all this is recorded in the gazette – along with the racism of the day – as a by-product of reporting the crimes (and other police matters) that occurred. […]

For example, below you can see the popularity of the moustache throughout the 1880s and early 90s, how the town of Gulgong flourished during the gold rush years, and how the cabbagetree hat – one of the first distinctively Australian hats – became less popular over time […]

Just look at those wonderful graphs! And cabbagetree hat is not some kind of metaphor; it was actually made from the leaves of the cabbage-tree palm.

LH reader Mike Chisholm is a student of Russian, and he sent me a link to RussianGram.com (“Add stress marks to Russian text”), saying he didn’t know “how accurate or reliable it is”; I wrote back:

It looks good! I inserted a chunk of text from the Rytkheu novel I happened to have open in another tab:

— Что я тебе скажу? — задумчиво проговорил Орво. — Чайки живут с чайками, вороны с воронами, моржи с моржами. Так положено природой. Правда, человек не зверь… Но тебе будет нелегко. Тебе ведь надо будет стать таким же, как мы. Не только стрелять, рыбачить, одеваться и говорить, как мы… А зачем ты меня спросил об этом?

[“What shall I tell you?” said Orvo thoughtfully. “Seagulls live with seagulls, crows/ravens with crows/ravens, walruses with walruses. That is what nature ordains. It is true that a person is not a beast… But it will not be easy for you [to live with the Chukchi]. You will have to become like us. Not just to shoot, fish, dress, and speak like us… But why do you ask me about it?]

and it correctly added the stresses; furthermore, when it came to “Чайки живут с чайками,” it wasn’t sure whether the noun forms were from чайка ‘seagull’ or чаёк ‘(a bit of) tea’ so it provided alternate stresses, a far better solution than picking the most likely, which might not be the one needed. [The same is true of “вороны с воронами” — if the stress is on the first o, it’s ‘crowsravens’; if on the second, ‘ravenscrows.’]

So I thought I’d pass it along for those who might find it useful. Also, in chapter 17 of the Rytkheu I came across a perfect illustration of the fact (not easy to assimilate at first) that the Russian phrase на улице, literally ‘in the street,’ can also mean generally ‘outside, outdoors’: “Джон вышел на улицу” [John went outside]. John is living in a Chukchi encampment of yarangas; there isn’t a literal street for hundreds of miles around.

Cedric Lizotte at The Airship writes about a subject dear to my heart:

Mastery of a second language (or third or fourth) is rather difficult, so writing a masterpiece in a language that is not one’s first is remarkable — and doing it repeatedly is even more astonishing. Yet there are quite a few famous novelists who wrote and continue to write in a language that is not their mother tongue. Joseph Conrad, who was raised speaking Polish, became known for his novels written in English and is perhaps the best known of these prolific polyglots, but there are many others. The list is long and, at times, truly surprising […]

Of course, most of the list will not surprise anyone who’s ever taken an interest in the topic: Brodsky, Nabokov, and Beckett all make their foreordained appearances, and Eva Hoffman and Agota Kristof have been in the cultural news a fair amount. I did not know, however, that Romain Gary “wrote many novels directly in English,” or that Jack Kerouac began On the Road in French, “then started over in English.” Needless to say, it is not an exhaustive list; the name that immediately occurred to me was that of Elsa Triolet (né Ella Yurievna Kagan), who wrote her first few novels in Russian, then switched to French (and was awarded the Prix Goncourt). Thanks, Trevor!

From the end of chapter 6 of Yuri Rytkheu’s Сон в начале тумана, translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse as A Dream in Polar Fog (see my complaint about her version here):

Странно, те заклинания, которые до сих пор знал Орво, чаще всего были набором непонятных слов, похожих то на корякские, то на эскимосские и даже на эвенские… Обычный человек не мог понимать их, даже если эти заклинания принадлежали ему и были получены в полную собственность от какого-нибудь шамана. А тут шаманка говорит обыкновенными словами […]

Strange — the charms that Orvo had known up to now were mostly a collection of incomprehensible words, sometimes like Koryak, sometimes like Eskimo or even like Even… An ordinary person couldn’t understand them, even if the charms belonged to him and had been received as personal property from some shaman. But this shaman was speaking in ordinary [Chukchi] words […]

Incidentally, Rytkheu tells a good tale; I had thought it might be one of those ethnographic novels whose primary purpose is to introduce the reader to the life of some far-off people, with endless descriptions of how they build their dwellings and dress their meat, but I’m caught up in the story and will definitely finish it.

Ultach has posted at Reddit about an appalling situation:

The Scots language version of Wikipedia is legendarily bad. People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language, and if it was an accurate representation, they’d probably be right. It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots. I’ve been broadly aware of this over the years and I’ve just chalked it up to inexperienced amateurs. But I’ve recently discovered it’s more or less all the work of one person. I happened onto a Scots Wikipedia page while googling for something and it was the usual fare – poorly spelled English with the odd Scots word thrown in haphazardly. I checked the edit history to see if anyone had ever tried to correct it, but it had only ever been edited by one person. Out of curiosity I clicked on their user page, and found that they had created and edited tens of thousands of other articles, and this on a Wiki with only 60,000 or so articles total! Every page they’d created was the same. Identical to the English version of the article but with some modified spelling here and there, and if you were really lucky maybe one Scots word thrown into the middle of it.

Even though their Wikipedia user page is public I don’t want to be accused of doxxing. I’ve included a redacted version of their profile here just so you know I’m telling the truth I’ll just say that if you click on the edit history of pretty much any article on the Scots version of Wikipedia, this person will probably have created it and have been the majority of the edits, and you’ll be able to view their user page from there. They are insanely prolific. They stopped updating their milestones in 2018 but at that time they had written 20,000 articles and made 200,000 edits. That is over a third of all the content currently on the Scots Wikipedia directly attributable to them, and I expect it’d be much more than that if they had updated their milestones, as they continued to make edits and create articles between 2018 and 2020. If they had done this properly it would’ve been an incredible achievement. They’d been at this for nearly a decade, averaging about 9 articles a day. And on top of all that, they were the main administrator for the Scots language Wikipedia itself, and had been for about 7 years. All articles were written according to their standards.

The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. They misuse common elements of Scots that are even regularly found in Scots English like “syne” and “an aw”, they invent words which look like phonetically written English words spoken in a Scottish accent like “knaw” (an actual Middle Scots word to be fair, thanks u/lauchteuch9) instead of “ken”, “saive” instead of “hain” and “moost” instead of “maun”, sometimes they just sometimes leave entire English phrases and sentences in the articles without even making an attempt at Scottifying them, nevermind using the appropriate Scots words. Scots words that aren’t also found in an alternate form in English are barely ever used, and never used correctly. Scots grammar is simply not used, there are only Scots words inserted at random into English sentences. […]

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own, all because they were exposed to a mangled rendering of English being called Scots by this person and by this person alone. They wrote such a massive volume of this pretend Scots that anyone writing in genuine Scots would have their work drowned out by rubbish. Or, even worse, edited to be more in line with said rubbish.

Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as wanting to properly learn it.

The conclusion is over-the-top — Scots is spoken by lots of people and will survive a bad Wikipedia site — but the situation is genuinely lousy, and someone at Wikipedia should step in. There is more discussion at this MeFi post, where I got the link.

Update. I am pleased to report that the situation is being addressed; see this discussion, with contributions from the editor being complained about, who has realized the error of his ways:

Honestly, I don’t mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, and ban me from the wiki for good. I’ve already found out that my “contributions” have angered countless people, and to me that’s all the devastation I can be given, after years of my thinking I was doing good (and yes, obsessively editing, I have OCD). I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older.

And here’s a thoughtful comment from the MetaFilter thread I linked to above:

I can see how this kind of thing starts, given his age back then. Up until I was 12 or so I assumed languages were like my (basic) understanding of secret codes – all the letters are swapped around, so you just need to know which letters to replace with which other letters and you can translate into another language. People who could speak fluently were just able to do that really, really quickly.

When I then started learning a foreign language I realised it was different, but initially I assumed it was whole words, not individual letters, that were different – you’d just swap each English word for the foreign language equivalent and there was your translation. A few lessons in and I realised there was a bit more to it.

So I can see how someone young could start off “translating” things, with the back up of an online dictionary, and assume they’re doing a good job. And then if no one tells them otherwise, they continue. And continue, and continue. By the time they get some occasional criticism it’s outweighed by the thousands and thousands of edits they’ve made that haven’t been criticised, so it’s probably seen as a minor issue – they’ve done all this “successful” work on something as high profile as Wikipedia, so they must be doing something right!

I’d hope the doubts would appear before doing quite so much work, but I can see how it gets going.

posted by fabius at 5:12 AM on August 26

I posted about Wikitongues back in 2013, but it was pretty new then, and I wasn’t especially impressed. Seven years later, it’s clearly a going concern and has a much wider variety of videos and speakers, and I’m considerably more impressed. Their About page says “Around the world, people from hundreds of cultures are finding ways to amplify their voices, defying the assumption that globalization can’t be inclusive”; you can start digging into their videos here — the Texas German one sounds mighty Texan! (Via misteraitch’s MeFi post.)

Also, Victor Mair at the Log posted an eight-minute video by “Josh” (apparently Joshua Rudder) on how we know (some of) what what he calls Middle Chinese and Mair calls Middle Sinitic sounded like — nothing especially new to anyone who knows anything about the subject, but it’s fun to see the old rhyme tables and have the various elements explained. There’s more in the comments, where David Marjanović links to Wikipedia’s useful Reconstructions of Old Chinese article.

Occasionally I pull a book at random from my shelves and open it to a random page just for the hell of it; today it was my paperback copy of Sologub’s Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon; see this post), and when I opened it my eye fell on the word дряква [dryakva]. I couldn’t remember what it meant, so I looked it up, and it turned out to mean ‘cyclamen.’ The normal Russian word for that pleasant plant is цикламен [tsiklamen], and in fact дряква is so rare it only turns up in three entries in the Национальный корпус русского языка (National Corpus of the Russian Language) — I found a 2013 blog post by plantarum that regrets its desuetude:

Но до чего же русское название этого растения мне нравится. Дряква. Прелесть, да?
Повторять и повторять. Дряква… дряква… Ну что ж ты дряква у меня такая…

But the Russian name of this plant truly pleases me. Dryakva. Delightful, isn’t it?
You can say it over and over. Dryakva… dryakva… You’re my sweet dryakva…

At any rate, I wondered where it came from, so I looked it up in Vasmer, and found:

дря́ква, дрия́ква – растение “Cyclamen europaeum, цикламен”. Заимств. через польск. dryakiew, род. п. -kwi “териак”, перенесено также на лекарственные растения из ср.-лат. thēriacum, греч. θηριακὸν (ἀντίδοτον), буквально “противоядие, средство против звериного яда”; см. Бернекер 1, 232; Лопацинский, PF 4, 765; Брюкнер 99.

So it’s from an obsolete Polish word dryakiew meaning ‘theriac, antidote to poison.’ Which means it’s etymologically the same word as English treacle. Talk about semantic divergence!