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Manchán Magan in the Irish Times, Uncovering Ireland’s lost field names before it’s too late:

Field names can tell us much about our local area how people appreciated the physical landscape, its hills and hollows, streams, and bogs; but also its history and traditions, from holy wells, to fairy forts, old settlements, and estates. An article in The Irish Times Magazine in 2018 explored the insights garnered from 7,000 names collated by the Kilkenny Field Name Recording Project, and 24,700 field names recorded in Co Meath, unveiling some very odd names indeed, including Co Antrim’s townland of Ballypitmave, derived from Baile Phite Méabha (which translates as Queen Maeve’s vulva), Co Tipperary’s Skeheenarinky, from Sceichín an Rince (little thorn bush for dancing), and Co Leitrim’s Faslowart, from Fás Lúghoirt (the deserted herb garden).

Each placename is like a code that can be deciphered to reveal insights into the culture, genealogy, myths, climate, botany, topography, and geology of a region. They are “the essential threads that hold the quilted fabric” of the landscape together, according to Alan Counihan of the Kilkenny Field Name project.

The latest area to have embarked upon such decoding of its landscape is Westmeath, where 725 field names were collected from 64 townlands in 2018, with the same amount again gathered from a further 55 townlands in 2019. Overall, 100 volunteers were involved in the harvesting of this lore and some noteworthy elements arose, such as the fact that in parts of north Westmeath, 10 to 15 per cent of the field names were in Irish, revealing that the language survived in the area far longer than one would imagine. […]

But for every prosaic and practical name rooted in the physical attributes of a place, there are others dealing with the esoteric and the unknowable. They include the many field names linked to fairy forts, and the few that were considered to be potential portals to another dimension, often known as “The Stray Field”. These had the ability to disorientate you and seemingly transport you to somewhere unrecognisable. The Horse Field in Cummerstown, Collinstown, is an example, which was described by a local as being “Noted for the Stray”, meaning that one could get lured to the Otherworld by walking through it.

I’m a sucker for local onomastics (cf. this 2011 post); thanks, Trevor!

A delightful bit of YouTube japery (40 seconds): “Wilford Brimley goes head-to-head with an actual endocrinologist to determine the proper pronunciation of diabetes.” Also, Brimley tweets about it: “Ellie, no. I am the ‘diabeetus’ guy.”

JC sent me this Academia.edu link, adding:

The publisher’s blurb says:

More detail on morphological change including cutting-edge discussions of iconization

Coverage of recent developments in sociolinguistic explanations of variation and change

New case studies focusing on Germanic languages and American and New Zealand English, and updated exercises covering each of the topics within the book

A brand new companion website featuring material for both professors and students, including discussion questions and exercises as well as discussions of the exercises within the book.

The editor, Robert McColl Millar, (a professor of linguistics and Scots at Aberdeen) writes:

It is also important that I pay tribute to Larry Trask, a man I never met, much to my regret. While a considerable part of this book has been formed by me, the general conception is Larry Trask’s. I suspect that I would not have been as capable as he was in producing such an impressive structure while not forgetting the small details so important to its success.

But surely this paragraph (addressed to the teacher) is ur-Trask:

The book is as atheoretical as possible: absolutely no knowledge of contemporary theories of phonology or syntax is presupposed, and such theories are not introduced in the book. Some acquaintance with the notation of classical generative phonology will be helpful for Chapter 3, but is not essential. The only theories introduced here are theories of historical linguistics and of language change.

And there is still plenty of Basque.

(See my 2004 obit post for Trask.) Thanks, John!

Iman Ghosh has posted a very nice infographic showing the world’s major languages as circles, larger for those with more speakers, arranged on family trees; I’ve seen a lot of displays of languages, but this one really stands out for its easy readability and emphasis on language families and subfamilies (Spanish and Portuguese aren’t just Western Romance, they’re Ibero-Romance and West-Iberian). From the text below the image:

Today’s detailed visualization from WordTips illustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from.
[…]
The data comes from the 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population, detailing approximately 7,111 living languages in existence today.

Enjoy!

Romain Seignovert, an editor from the south of France, has created the website EuropeIsNotDead, with the tagline “The world’s smallest continent hosts the greatest abundance of cultural expressions, artistic creations and linguistic inventions. Sadly, these hidden treasures rarely make it beyond their national frontiers and so remain unknown to the majority of European inhabitants. EuropeIsNotDead intends precisely to explore this European heritage.” It is, of course, those “linguistic inventions” that are of LH interest, so without further ado, here are some posts.

Fillers:

Did you know that fillers in Spanish are called muletillas? It means either a pet word, a walking stick or a crutch. The most common mulettilla in spanish is just “e…” [e]. But Spanish people love fillers, and they use words such as “o sea” (which roughly means “I mean” and literally means “it means”), “¿Vale?” (“right?”) or “¿no?”.

Placeholders:

Why do Norwegian placeholders remind us so much of Mary Poppins’ songs? Whenever you can’t remember how to say some noun in Norwegian, just throw the words “dings”, “dingseboms” or “greie” and you’ll make your interlocutor happy! They all mean ‘thingy’, ‘gadget’ and can be really helpful. Norwegians also use the word “duppeditt” to depict a small and sometimes useless object. “Snurrepipperi” (almost always plural) are similar to “duppeditt“, usually something slight weird and fancy. Last, Norwegians also have a placeholder inspired by Germans, the word “Krimskrams” (almost always plural) to designate a random heap of small and cheap items. Mary Poppins, we said…

Swear Words:

Kut in Dutch is the slang word for vagina. It is often used in the Netherlands and Flanders as an equivalent in English to “damn!”. The swear word “kut” is also used to describe something that is not entertaining, such as in the sentence “Nou, dat was kut” (“Well, that sucked”). Dutch people also use another word when they are angry, surprised or when they fail to do something which is “Kanker!“. It means “cancer” and can be used as an imperative form “kanker op, dikzak!” (“fuck off, fatass” or literally “cancer off, fatsack”). It is also used as a superlative such as in “je haar is kankerlekker!” (“your hair is suppa fly!”). Interesting, isnt’it ?

LOL:

The French use the delightful acronym “mdr” when chatting online. It’s an initialism for “mort de rire” which literally means ‘dead of laughter’. When the conversation is worth more than a basic “mdr“, the French do not hesitate to upgrade their laughter with the acronym “ptdr“, the initials of “pété de rire” which means ‘broken with laughter’. It’s approximately equivalent to English ‘PMSL’ (‘pissing myself laughing’). And of course, let’s not forget the evil “mouhaha”

There’s also Surnames, Untranslatable Words (sigh), and much else. No guarantee of accuracy, of course, but it’s fun stuff. (Via MetaFilter.)

Richard Foltz, a professor in the Department of Religions and Cultures of Concordia University, is living in Ossetia researching and writing a book on the place, and he has a blog A Canadian in Ossetia that has lots of information and gorgeous photos. I want to focus here on his post Ossetian Genealogy: From Arya to Alan to Ir, because at the end of this passage he makes a perfectly understandable error I want to correct:

Given centuries of shared existence it is only natural that the Ossetes would have much in common with Georgians, Circassians and Chechens, despite their very different origins. Trying to untangle their mutual connections is hardly a straightforward project, and it has led to much bitterness and even bloodshed. It is one thing to take pride in the glories of one’s ancestors, but too often this leads to exaggeration, exclusivism, and counter-productive hostilities. I will attempt here to briefly characterize the validity of prevalent Ossetian notions regarding their own past in relation to that of their neighbours.

The Ossetes speak an Iranic language which is directly descended from that of the Scythians, diverse tribes of often warlike pastoral nomads who occupied the steppes from eastern Europe all the way to Mongolia during the first century BCE. They were known to the Greeks, the Persian and the Chinese, who all feared their military might as mounted archers. They were also known for producing magnificent gold jewelry, which was especially prized by the Greeks with whom they traded in settlements around the Black Sea.

The Sarmatians were a Scythian group who interacted with the Romans, often fighting them but sometimes being coopted as cavalry into the Roman army. A Sarmatian contingent was settled by the Romans in Britain during the first century, and the Arthurian legends have been connected with them. A century later the Sarmatians come to be referred to in Latin sources as Alans, which is a phonetic transformation of the ethnonym “Aryan”, meaning “noble”, by which the diverse Iranic tribes referred to themselves. The Ossetes today call themselves “Ir” (adjectival form iron), and their country Iryston, which is etymologically identical with “Iran”: both mean “Land of the Aryans”.

That is the traditional etymology of ir, and you will still find it in a lot of sources, but as I say in my 2008 post on Ossetia:

[…] it used to be thought that Ir was derived from *arya- ‘Aryan’ and thus related to Iran, but Ronald Kim denies this in “On the Historical Phonology of Ossetic: The Origin of the Oblique Case Suffix,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 123 (Jan.– Mar. 2003), pp. 43-72 (JSTOR); the relevant discussion is on p. 60, fn. 42. Kim says it may be from a Caucasian language, or it may be descended from PIE *wiro- ‘man.’

Wiktionary says “From Proto-Iranian *wiHráh (“man”), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *wiHrás, from Proto-Indo-European *wiHrós. The traditional etymology from Proto-Indo-Iranian *áryas, the self-denominator of speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, is erroneous”; I don’t know if they’re not mentioning the Caucasian possibility to keep it simple or whether they reject it for some reason. At any rate, there it is; remember, kiddies, Ossetians may be virile, but they’re not Aryan!

I don’t think I’ve ever had the classic Provençal stew called daube or boeuf en daube, but it sounds mouth-watering. I probably first came across it in To the Lighthouse (see this 2012 post), but — never having had it and being more focused on literary effects than the menu — I’d forgotten it; now I am reminded by Tom’s splendid post at Wuthering Expectations:

The long dinner chapter of To the Lighthouse (1928), Chapter XVII of “The Window,” what a masterpiece. It does so much. […] Mrs. Ramsay thinks of celebration but also death, that love “bear[s] in its bosom the seeds of death.” Then the outside intrudes on her and the dinner guests praise the dish, a boeuf en daube, and mock English cooking as “an abomination (they agreed).” […]

The stew is first mentioned about twenty pages earlier, in Ch. XVI. Mrs. Ramsay is nervous about her big dinner:

… and they were having Mildred’s masterpiece – Boeuf en Daube. Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bay leaf, and the wine – all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question… things had to be kept hot; the Boeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt. (80)

When I last read To the Lighthouse, maybe twenty-five years ago, I suppose I nodded along, sympathizing with Mrs. Ramsay’s anxiety. This time, though – do you cook? – you saw it, right? “The bay leaf must be done to a turn”? The bay leaf!

Please visit the link for Tom’s vivid explanation of how the dish is made and what poor Mrs. Ramsay does not understand; once again, he has deepened my understanding of a novel I thought I knew, and made me want to go back and reread it. And, since this is LH, you’ll want to know the origin of daube: “Borrowed from obsolete Italian dobba (“marinade”), perhaps from Catalan adobar (“to marinate”).” Wiktionary adds, beside the stew meaning, the slang sense “crap; crappiness (something of low quality)”; I guess its former use to mean ‘clap, gonorrhea’ is lost in temps perdu.

Oscar Schwartz writes for the Guardian about the problems that arise when the language-learning app Duolingo tries to add endangered languages:

In October last year, Meena Viswanath, a 31-year-old civil engineer from Berkeley, California, joined a small team of volunteers who were developing a Yiddish course on Duolingo, the free language learning app with over 300 million users. Having grown up in the only Yiddish-speaking family in a majority English-speaking New Jersey neighborhood, the prospect of broadcasting her mother tongue to a global network of students was exciting.

Throughout October, Viswanath and three other contributors regularly met to discuss the curriculum over a shared Slack channel. They had a target to get the course up and running towards the end of 2020, and to begin, progress was solid. But then they hit a roadblock.

Yiddish, which combines elements of German, Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic, is a language of many dialects corresponding to the different regions of Europe where they emerged. The differences in pronunciation and grammar between these dialects are subtle, but for a native speaker they carry meaningful information about identity, culture and religious affiliation.

If you hear someone speaking Central European Yiddish, Viswanath explained to me, it would be a relatively safe bet that they are from a Hassidic community in Brooklyn. Whereas a speaker of Northern European Yiddish is more likely to have been taught at a secular university or school. So whose dialect was going to be digitally archived as the Yiddish dialect?

Uncertain how to navigate this impasse, the team drafted a poll and posted it online, inviting others to vote. It triggered a community-wide debate: some felt that the Northern dialect, which closely matches the written form, was most appropriate. Others argued that Central Yiddish, which is most widely spoken, made more sense. This was further heightened by a fraught history. There were 13 million Yiddish speakers before the Holocaust; today the number hovers at around half a million. Teaching a dialect, therefore, is seen by many as a defiant homage to what was lost.

“People felt like this was not just a question about a dialect, but a political, socio-cultural question,” Viswanath said. “And we realized that we were going to make a lot of people angry, no matter what we picked.”

The piece goes on to discuss Scottish Gaelic, Hawaiian, and Navajo; as Schwartz writes:

But languages do not become endangered peacefully, and the diminution of native speakers is often embedded in histories of colonialism and suppression. For many communities who speak their tongue within a dominant culture, linguistic education is thus tied up with political resistance. And when Duolingo adds endangered languages to its platform, the company inevitably becomes entangled in this historical context.

Thought-provoking stuff; thanks, Kobi! (If anyone’s interested in Ms. Viswanath, here’s an oral history: “Meena Lifshe Viswanath, engineer, native Yiddish speaker, and granddaughter of Mordkhe Schaechter, was interviewed by Christa Whitney on August 18, 2017 at Yidish-Vokh in Copake, New York.”)

Jonathan Morse has a meditation on a Brooklyn Daily Eagle story from November 13, 1919: “Bodies of 111 U.S. Soldier and Sailor Dead Brought Home. Gallant Michigan Boys Gave Lives in Northern Russia — Impressive Ceremonies at Pier.” There are thoughts about “the failed campaign of the American Expeditionary Force, North Russia, between 1918 and 1919 […] where the 111 men of rainy Hoboken met their deaths” and some striking photographs (a war monument in the form of a polar bear!), but the LH material is represented by the end of the Eagle excerpt: “[…] between ranks of spectators standing with hats off along the curbstones.” We have hats and we have that term “curbstones”: “As of 1919, curbs actually were made of stone,” Jonathan points out. Nowadays we just say “the curb.”

No, not an interpreter of parasites, but Darcy Paquet, the guy who did the English-language subtitles for Bong Joon-ho’s movie Parasite, this year’s surprise Oscar winner; Lee Hana had a nice interview with him last year for Korea.net, and I’ll quote the most linguistically interesting bits here:

– For “Parasite,” you and Bong jointly revised the final version of the subtitles. What was that process like?

I typed up the subtitles for about a week and half. We sent some emails back and forth. Afterwards, there were two days of long meetings with the director, the producer, me and several people from the distribution company. They all spoke English and offered suggestions. It was helpful to have a group of us thinking together about the challenging parts of the translation.

– In one scene, a woman calls a dish “jjapaguri” but the subtitle says “ramdon.” Is it true that “jjapaguri” was the hardest to translate?

I was embarrassed because I made up this word “ramdon.” I thought people would laugh at me for it, but it works in the film. The word is first used during a phone conversation. Later, as one character prepares the food, we see the packages on the screen and I wrote “ramyeon” and “udon” over them to show how “ramdon” came about. I did actually Google “ramdon” before writing it and nothing came up. It appears to not be a word in any language at all.

– Couldn’t you have written in “jjapaguri” so that foreign audiences could look it up later?

There are always debates like that. In that case, if you put the original Korean word, people can search it up later. There are other examples, like “Seoul National University” (SNU) being translated to “Oxford.” The first time I did the translation, I did write out SNU but we ultimately decided to change it because it’s a very funny line, and in order for humor to work, people need to understand it immediately. With an unfamiliar word, the humor is lost.

– Was there a reason you went with Oxford rather than Harvard?

I think Bong likes England a lot. I’ve been joking about this as well, but when I was a high school student, I applied to Harvard and didn’t get in. Jokes aside, I think Harvard is too obvious a choice. It’s more memorable when you say Oxford.

He describes how he got the job and offers advice for people wanting to break into subtitle translation. Thanks, Bathrobe!