languagehat.com

Last December, Philip Oltermann in the Guardian reported on the dialect situation in Germany:

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an invisible border running through Germany continues to resist all efforts to make the country truly whole again. However, this dividing line is not about attitudes to democracy, refugees or Russia, but something more elementary: how to tell the time.

In the northern half of the old West Germany, from Flensburg in the north down to Heidelberg in the south, people use the expression viertel nach zehn (“quarter past ten”) if their clock reads 10.15. Yet in a tract of land that covers the old socialist GDR as well as parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the same time would be described as viertel elf or “quarter eleven”.

With so much potential for failed meet-ups and missed appointments, one would have expected one variant to trump the other over time. But a group of linguists who spent two years analysing a large data set have been surprised to find the opposite is true: not only are some vernacular expressions proving surprisingly sticky, but if anything their use is realigning along the old iron curtain.

For an article in the science journal PLOS ONE, published on Wednesday, Adrian Leeman, Curdin Derungs and Stephan Elspass compared metadata provided by more than 770,000 people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland who had taken part in an online language quiz, with language surveys dating back to the 1970s.

On the one hand they found that German, Europe’s most widely spoken mother tongue and often described as its most diverse, is becoming more standardised, especially north of the River Main. Local expressions for non-professional football playing, such as pöhlen in Westphalia or bäbbeln in Saxony are slowly being replaced by the generic term bolzen, in what linguists call “regional levelling”.

Yet the old east-west border is proving an unexpected bulwark against linguistic change, especially when it comes to food. West of the former Berlin Wall, Germans call a pancake a Pfannkuchen; on the eastern side, they emphatically tuck into Eierkuchen or “egg cakes”. As if to deliberately spread confusion, east Germans use the word Pfannkuchen to describe a doughnut, which is called a Krapfen in the south-west, and a Berliner in the north-west.

More examples, and some striking dialect maps, at the link; here’s the article by Leemann, Derungs, and Elspaß.

Michele A. Berdy of the Moscow Times, occasionally seen around here as mab, writes a column called “The Word’s Worth,” and she’s outdone herself with A Guide to Russian Stance Verbs:

Russian stance verbs – стоять (to stand), лежать (to lie), сидеть (to sit) and висеть (to hang) – are particularly problematic for English speakers.

At first glance, they don’t seem much different than their English equivalents. Стоять describes a vertical position, лежать – a horizontal position, and сидеть is a kind of in-between position. Some things stand and lie just like their English counterparts. If you lean a painting against a wall, you could say in Russian: Картина стоит у стены (the painting is standing up against the wall). But if you lay the painting down on a table, you could say: Картина лежит на столе (the painting is lying on the table). Books placed flat on a desk лежат (lie), while books placed upright on a shelf стоят (stand). Simple, right?

So what’s the problem?

The problem is when you are talking in Russian about inanimate objects or creatures other than humans and pets. In everyday English, we generally just use a form of “to be” to describe location and position: The plate is on the table. The boots were in the hall.

Once when I was getting ready for a party, my friend asked where the plates were. Since plates are flat, I answered: –Тарелки уже лежат на столе (The plates are already on the table). She made a rude noise. I asked what was so funny, and she explained, as if to a child, that in Russian, тарелки стоят (plates stand). It got worse. If little mice were standing on the table, I’d say: Мышки стоят (The mice are standing). More laughter. Мышки сидят (mice sit) even if they are standing. This sounds “logical” to Russian-speakers and totally “illogical” to non-native speakers of Russian.

She goes into detail about which nouns take which verbs in which circumstances, and it’s worth reading even if you’re not a student of Russian; she ends with this intriguing paragraph:

Usage of stance verbs in Russian seems to be acquired by native speakers at an early age. One informant noted that her eight-year-old daughter, who grew up abroad and only spoke Russian at home, used verbs exactly like her parents did – even with animate and inanimate objects she had never described before. There appears to be some internal logic that has not yet been fully described. Discovering that logic – that internal picture of the way objects and creatures are immobile in Russian – would make it possible to develop a more complete and cogent set of usage rules for non-native speakers.

Thanks go to J.W. Brewer for linking to it here and suggesting it deserved a post.

Yesterday’s post reminded me of one of my favorite Basil Bunting poems; it’s the first in his Second Book of Odes:

1

A thrush in the syringa sings.

‘Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things.

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things,
fear, hunger, lust.’

O gay thrush!

(I don’t think I had realized before that “syringa” is lilac, and Bunting used the fancier word for the resonance with “sings.”) More on Bunting here, and more odes here.

Until recently, I did not know there was a word seringa; now I find there are two of them, both, confusingly, referring to plants. OED:

seringa, n.¹

Etymology: < French seringa (1600)< post-classical Latin syringa syringa n.

Any of various white- or cream-flowered shrubs of the genus Philadelphus (family Hydrangeaceae); esp. P. coronarius, native to southern Europe and south-west Asia and cultivated in numerous ornamental varieties and hybrids; also called mock orange. Cf. syringa n.

1740 Countess of Hartford in Countess of Hartford & Countess of Pomfret Corr. (1805) I. 221 Arbours interwoven with lilacs, woodbines, seringas, and laurels.
[…]
2003 W. Taylor et al. Waterberg iv. 87 At sunset the beautifully conformed shapes of seringas make perfect silhouettes.

seringa, n.²

Etymology: Probably < Brazilian Portuguese seringa India rubber (1774 or earlier; the Portuguese word is apparently not attested denoting the rubber plant), apparently an extended use of Portuguese seringa syringe n., apparently so called because syringes were frequently made from natural rubber.
Compare slightly later seringue n.

Any of several South American trees of the genus Hevea (family Euphorbiaceae) which yield latex from which natural rubber is made; esp. the para rubber tree, H. brasiliensis, of the Amazon basin. Also: this rubber itself. Frequently attributive, esp. in seringa rubber, seringa tree.

1847 W. H. Edwards Voy. River Amazon x. 116 Here were numbers of seringa trees, and we passed many habitations of the gum collectors.
[…]
2005 D. S. Hammond in D. S. Hammond Trop. Forests Guiana Shield viii. 422/2 By 1920, more than 60,0000 [sic] people were engaged in the extraction of timber, gold, bauxite, diamonds, balata, seringa rubber and other minor forest products.

Then there’s syringa, mentioned in the first entry and synonymous with it, and seringue, mentioned in the second entry and synonymous with it. Not to mention syringe — but at least that’s not a plant.

Frequent commenter Jongseong Park wrote asking about a comment that never showed up in the thread (I had to rescue it from the spam bin; I encourage everyone suffering from disappearing-comment syndrome to write me — I can usually restore them) and added:

By the way, after seeing the news about the Congolese musician Aurlus Mabélé who passed away recently, I’ve been wondering about the name Aurlus. The name seems to be used across francophone West Africa, including Ivory Coast, Benin, and Cameroon, but doesn’t look like it’s from any local language. In French-language videos, it is pronounced [ɔʁlys] as you would expect it to be pronounced based on the spelling. Aurlus Mabélé’s real name was Aurélien Miatsonama or Miatshonama, and on Facebook there is a certain “Aurelien Tchouab” from Cameroon who also goes by the name Aurlus, so maybe Aurlus is being used as a nickname for Aurélien in these cases. But I can’t figure out where that name could have come from and why it is only apparently used in francophone West Africa. Perhaps your readership can help?

Mabélé by the way comes from the Lingala word for ‘earth’, mabele.

(I hadn’t been familiar with Mabélé’s music, but it’s delightful.) So: anybody know about this intriguing name?

I have written about Herder a number of times, as in this 2009 post where I said he and I “have much more in common than I had thought”; Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has posted a couple of Isaiah Berlin passages about him (from Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas) that poke at one of the most sensitive joints in my sloppily patched-together worldview, the tension between love of particularity and hatred of nationalism:

To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural than that for food or drink or security or procreation. One nation can understand and sympathise with the institutions of another only because it knows how much its own mean to itself. Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself.

[…]

The philosophes proposed to rationalise communication by inventing a universal language free from the irrational survivals, the idiosyncratic twists and turns, the capricious peculiarities of existing tongues; if they were to succeed, this would be disastrous, for it is precisely the individual historical development of a language that belongs to a people that absorbs, enshrines and encapsulates a vast wealth of half-conscious, half-remembered collective experience. What men call superstition and prejudice are but the crust of custom which by sheer survival has shown itself proof against the ravages and vicissitudes of its long life; to lose it is to lose the shield that protects men’s national existence, their spirit, the habits, memories, faith that have made them what they are.

I agree with the praise for “impalpable ties of common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling,” but he (that is, Berlin’s summarized Herder) makes what seems to me a basic logical error (or, less charitably, a nasty prosecutorial trick) when he follows that with “Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself.” To me, cosmopolitanism is not a rejection of particularity but that very understanding and sympathizing with others who do not share one’s particulars which he seems to agree is important. To be cosmopolitan is not to be a citizen of nowhere with no particular language or tradition (how would that even be possible?) but to be sufficiently aware of the languages and traditions of others to realize that one’s own are not God-given and ideal but merely the ones we happen to have grown up with and therefore are comfortable with, just as our family is not actually better than other people’s, it just seems that way because it is ours (assuming, of course, we have a family we love and are comfortable with, which I realize is often not the case). We can at one and the same time love and revere the customs and people we have grown up with and respect, even love, other, very different, people and their customs; indeed (and here comes the tedious moral, sorry about that) we must do so if we are to avoid endless and ever more destructive wars. I sometimes argue with people who insist that nationalism (or “patriotism,” as they often prefer to call it) is a Good Thing for reasons that probably resemble Herder’s, but they can never explain to me how we can indulge ourselves in it while avoiding wars. (Of course, before WWI people frequently thought war was a Good Thing because it revitalized our virility and restored our precious bodily fluids and life essence, but that has mostly fallen out of fashion in respectable discourse.) And the idea that a universal language would solve our problems is so silly I don’t understand how intelligent people have ever entertained it. Human thought is very muddled.

From Giulio Lepschy, “History of the Italian Language,” in Gaetana Marrone, Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, Vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2007):

Frequently collections of Early Italian texts begin with documents for which it is difficult to say if they are in Latin or in Italian, such as the Indovinello veronese (Veronese Riddle), penned at the beginning of the ninth century (or possibly earlier) on a page of a prayer book prepared in the seventh or eighth century and now preserved in the Chapter Library at Verona. The text says: “se pareba boves alba pratalia araba & albo versorio teneba & negro semen seminaba” (He was driving oxen, ploughing white meadows and holding a white plough and sowing black seed. This is one of the many possible interpretations).

The riddle is apparently about oxen and ploughing and sowing, and the solution is the quill used for writing, leaving ink traces on the page. Linguistically, certain features are clearly Latin (b instead of v in the imperfect endings of pareba, araba, teneba, seminaba; the consonant endings in boves and semen; the voiceless t instead of d in pratalia). Others are, equally clearly, vernacular (the dropping of the consonantal endings in the -ba instead of –bat suffixes; the endings in –o instead of –um in albo, versorio, negro; the pronoun se instead of sibi).

Via Laudator Temporis Acti. If you want to read more of Lepschy’s article, here’s the page at Google Books.

Victor Mair at the Log posts about Kobayashi Takashi’s “Linguistic Treasures: The Value of Dialects“; it begins:

Japan has a great number of dialects. One scholar divides the archipelago into 24 areas with distinct regional linguistic forms. Yet, this is a very broad classification, and if one pays attention to variations in grammar and specific words, it is no exaggeration to say that there is a dialect for every city, town, village, and hamlet.

These were once looked down on for their association with uncultured, provincial speakers. In recent years, however, dialects have been increasingly appreciated for the pleasure they can bring to verbal interaction and their ability to draw people from a particular area closer together. This has led increasingly to their use in the names of local products, and their incorporation into plays and TV dramas.

Notably, the 2013 NHK morning drama Ama-chan (Little Diver) brought the expression of surprise jejeje to national attention, which was one element in its success. The phrase je comes from just one part of Kuji in Iwate Prefecture, although ja is in use over a much wider area centered on Iwate. Other unique ways to voice one’s amazement that are found in dialects but not standard Japanese include waiha, sāsa, ūu, and chopped off forms of da and ba. The wide range seen even in this category of utterance demonstrates how rich in dialects the country is.

Where did these differences originally arise? The main source of dialect forms comes through transmission of language from the center to the regions. New words in former capitals like Nara and Kyoto gradually spread through neighboring areas to the wider nation. These successive waves created regional linguistic differences, or dialects.

This means that many dialect words derive from standard terms in more ancient forms of Japanese. For example, the word menkoi in Tōhoku, equivalent to kawaii (cute, adorable), comes from megushi, a word seen in the Man’yōshū poetry collection from the Nara period (710–94). Churasan, an Okinawan word for “beautiful,” is related to kiyora nari, seen in works from the Heian period (794–1185) like The Tale of Genji.

Kobayashi goes on to discuss their role in people’s lives (“They build mutual understanding that goes beyond the use of language as a communication tool, and are essential to creating community ties”) and threatened dialects (“The Center for the Study of Dialectology is working to record conversations showing how dialect is used in everyday life”). Mair ends by mentioning variants of spoken language in China (“following Chinese custom I refer to them as fāngyán 方言”); I’ll end by passing along this beautiful chart of languages and dialects in late tsarist Russia (the Indo-European, Semitic, and Ural-Altaic families have languages, the rest merely нарѣчія ‘dialects’).

Ilya Vinitsky has written an article, Война и мор [War and Pestilence], which has been translated by Emily Wang for the Jordan Russian Center. It’s a very interesting analysis of the opening scene of War and Peace focusing on Anna Pavlova Scherer, who, the narrator tells us, “had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.” I had never given much thought to this, but Vinitsky explains the significance:

The Tolstoy scholar Evelina Zaidenshnur noted long ago that the writer borrowed the motif of the “fashionable” cough from an ironic note in Parisian Fashions published in The Herald of Europe in 1804. (That year’s copy of the journal may be found in Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana library). […] In Zaidenshnur’s opinion, Tolstoy allowed himself to transfer this very same Parisian fashion to Russia in the summer of 1805. Another commentator notes that the everyday historical context of Anna Scherer’s “grippe” was the epidemic that raged in Europe from 1799 to 1805. […]

It must be said that, in the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, this disease went by many different names in different countries and even different provinces: influenza (an Italian word that gained prominence during the epidemics of 1729 and 1732), epidemic catarrh, the catarrh fever, miasmic catarrh, bilious catarrh, the spring epidemic, epidemic fever. As the nineteenth century German physician Edward Martini observed, in Italy this disease was called mazuchi, in Spain cocculucas, in France coqu[e]luche (to relieve headaches, the head was often covered with a hood [in French, “cagoule”]), in Germany Ziep [presumably from the verb “ziepen,” to cause a stinging pain], Schafhusten, Schafkranheit, spanischer Pips. They also called it the northern, Chinese, or Siberian fever, the dog’s disease, the pauper’s disease, and the vagrant’s disease.

But the most common term was a word that had already come into usage in the 1740s, la grippe, which nineteenth-century etymologists linked to both French and German verbs for “to seize,” as well as the Russian verb “хрипеть [to be hoarse]” (in Germany they sometimes called this kind of illness “the Russian disease,” russische Krankheit), as well as with the French name for the insect (la grippe) that superstitious people blamed for the spread of the disease.

According to Trésor de la langue française, the word “grippe” initially meant “caprice, whim.” […]

Historians of Russian literary language confirm that this word indeed seemed new in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first known usage is from 1799, in the youthful diary of the scholar A. Kh. Vostokov; in the fall and winter of 1799, the epidemic, which had originated in Siberia, gripped Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kronstadt and badly infected Emperor Paul I. Later on, the virus progressed to Riga, Vilnius, and Warsaw. It’s worth noting that, for a long time, the Russian version of the word took a feminine ending (for example, “гриппа доканала его [the grippa finished him off]), which also testifies to its French origins. […]

In the era of the Bonaparte Consulate, French culture gave la grippe another popular name, now associated with fashion: “the muslin disease.” It was thought that its first victims were French women of fashion who had been wearing overly revealing dresses made from this light material. […]

There’s a great deal more, including Boris Gasparov’s suggestion that Tolstoy’s comparison of the conversations of Scherer’s salon visitors to the endlessly repeated humming of spinning wheels reveals “the hidden presence of the Fates in Anna Pavlovna’s salon in itself symbolizes the novel’s plot.” Anyone interested in War and Peace should find Vinitsky’s piece eye-opening.

I’ve been reading about ancient Peru and the “Nasca Lines” (yes, that Wikipedia article uses the spelling Nazca, but as far as I can tell the Peruvians use Nasca, and that’s good enough for me), and that inevitably involved mention of the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe who discovered them in 1927, and that stopped me dead in my tracks. What kind of name (I wondered) was Xesspe, and (more importantly) how was it pronounced? SES-pe? KHES-pe? SHES-pe? Naturally I did a video search, but I was frustrated repeatedly by clips that mentioned him in the description but turned out to have nothing but music on the soundtrack (I got very sick very quickly of the sound of panpipes — it seems to be impossible to show images of Peru without assaulting you with them). The culmination was finding a five-minute video all about him (paydirt, I naively thought) which turns out to be a cartoon with all the information given in writing and nothing but music on the soundtrack (reader, I cursed loudly). So I turn to the assembled multitudes: does anyone happen to know how the name is properly pronounced, or at least pronounced by Peruvians?