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Cratylic names (I have just learned) are what I thought of as “speaking names” (from the German term sprechende Namen); they are so called from Plato’s dialogues with Cratylus about the truthfulness of names, and you can read Erin Somers’ post about them here. I have found the most amazing collection I have seen of such names in the first paragraph of Thomas Keymer’s LRB review (8 February 2018) of two books by Thomas Love Peacock:

Marilyn Butler​, whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend and patron, who joked in 1820 about ‘the Pavonian Psyche’ (pavo: peacock), as though Peacock himself had the kind of name that he specialised in giving to his characters. In the seven novels he produced between Headlong Hall (1815) and Gryll Grange (1860), names are rarely hard to decode. Anyside Antijack is a time-serving Tory politician; Cephalis Cranium, a phrenologist’s brainy daughter; the Revd Mr Grovelgrub, a sycophantic tutor; Dr Harry Killquick, a hit-or-miss physician; Sir Bonus MacScrip, venal member for the borough of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance of a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 confirmed his apostasy from radical politics. Other names aim at several targets, or are simply generalised types. Occasionally Peacock adds a twist. In his third and now best-known novel, Nightmare Abbey (1818), Mr Glowry, the ‘atrabilarious’ patriarch of the estate, employs only servants who reflect his melancholy by means of ‘a long face or a dismal name’: Raven, Crow, Skellet, Mattocks, Graves. When in need of a new footman, Glowry jumps at the opportunity to hire Diggory Deathshead. But Deathshead turns out to be ruddy-cheeked and cheerful, and is promptly fired.

Cephalis Cranium! Diggory Deathshead! I don’t know if I want to actually read the novels, but I’m deeply impressed.

Bee Wilson’s 2018 LRB review of The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England by Christopher Hilliard (Oxford, June 2017) is full of all sorts of interesting things, as obviously is the book, but I want to quote some bits about language:

Edith Swan, a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was accused of sending a letter to a sanitary inspector called Charles Gardner that contained words of ‘an indecent, obscene and grossly offensive character’. […]

The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, ‘demanded more from the police and the lawyers than most murders’.

This is a book about morality and class, about the uses and abuses of literacy and about the tremendous dislocations in British society after the First World War, which extended far beyond those who had suffered the direct trauma of battle. Hilliard uses these poison pen letters – written in language that was as eccentric as it was obscene – to ‘catch the accents of the past’. The Littlehampton Libels is about a battle between two women who were members of only the second generation in Britain to benefit from compulsory elementary education, women for whom the written word was a new and exhilarating weapon.

Hilliard asks what it was like to live in a society where ‘nice’ women had to pretend that they were ignorant of all profanity. Melissa Mohr claims in her excellent book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (2013) that the British started to swear more during and after the First World War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used for emphasis, but Brophy and Partridge found that obscenity was so over-used among the military in the Great War that if a soldier wanted to express emotion he wouldn’t swear. ‘Thus if a sergeant said, “Get your —ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.’

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Independent.ie reviews what sounds like an interesting book, Irish Speakers, Interpreters and the Courts 1754-1921 by Mary Phelan, which describes the wretched history of the suppression of Irish:

In 1737 (shortly before a famine that killed at least 300,000 people), the British-controlled parliament on Dublin’s College Green took a key step towards making Irish speakers feel like foreigners in their own country. The Administration of Justice (Language) Act decreed that from then on, all court proceedings would be carried out in English and English only. Gaeilgeoirs were entitled to an interpreter, but only if they could prove to the judge’s satisfaction that they did not have more than a few words of the ‘correct’ tongue.

What did this mean in practice? Phelan answers that question with extensive reference to jury records, newspaper reports and Dublin Castle correspondence. Her narrative may be a little for academic for general readers, but it certainly proves the truth of an astute observation by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “A language is worth what those who speak it are worth.”

Some of the stories Phelan has dug up are surprisingly comical. In one case at Limerick assizes, a man was accused of assault with a “cleith ailpín”, which the judge misheard as a “clean napkin”. He praised the prisoner’s “humane tenderness” and told the jury to acquit, whereupon the courtroom erupted in laughter. One of the lawyers had to explain that a “cleith ailpín” was in fact a shillelagh or cudgel and “would have felled an ox”.

Mostly, however, the 1737 Act operated as a blunt instrument of power that almost certainly led to many miscarriages of justice. There was no proper training for interpreters and no written code of ethics to guide them on how the law should work. Any Irish-speaking witness suspected of being really bilingual, Phelan writes, “faced a hostile environment where they could be intimidated, bullied, threatened that they would not be allowed expenses, charged with perjury and even imprisoned for contempt of court”.

Sure enough, Foras na Gaeilge defines cleith ailpín as “club, cudgel, knobstick”; cleith is ‘pole,’ but I’m not sure what ailpín means.

That review comes courtesy of Trevor Joyce, who also sent me a link to The Snowman – Cork Style, a five-minute video full of fine dialect and lots of cursing (I plan to start using “Fuckin’ hell, it’s Baltic!” myself). Go raibh maith agat, a Threvor!

I’ve started reading Merezhkovsky’s «Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи» (translated as The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci [text]), and since it’s set in Renaissance Florence of course I’m reading up on that city and its history, which led me to bring up from the cellar a book I probably haven’t looked at in two decades, Florence: A Travellers’ Companion (part of the excellent Travellers’ Companion series — the focus is too posh and anglophile for my taste, but they have well-chosen excerpts from historical descriptions and lots of images), and my eye was drawn for obvious reasons to this entry:

[30] A Welshman introduces the word ‘cupola’ into the English language in 1549; from William Thomas’s Historie of Italie . . .

(William Thomas (c. 1507-1554) was a hot-blooded Welsh humanist who fled to Venice after stealing from his Catholic patron. He stayed in Italy for four years, and then returned home to become Clerk to the Privy Council and personal adviser to Edward VI. He was executed for treasonable opposition to the marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain.)

Within the citee are manie goodlie temples and other edefices, amongest the whiche the cathedrall churche [the Duomo] is an excellent faire buildyng. For the walles without are all covered with fine white and blacke marble, wonderfullie well wrought, and over the quere is an whole vaulte called Cupola, faceioned [fashioned] like the halfe of an egge, risyng betwene.iii. iles and the body of the churche: so artificially made, that almost it semeth a miracle. For it is so high, that the pomell on the toppe beyng able to conteigne .vii. persons, seemeth a verie small thyng to theim that stande by lowe. And the compasse of it by the base, is about .160. paces. Besides that the floore vnder this vaulte rounde aboute the quiere is laide with fine marble of diuers colours so faire, that it yeldeth a delite to theim that walke vpon it.

The steple standyng besides the churche, is likewyse of fine marble a verie faire and square tower, equall in height to the circute of the base, with diuers stories and thynges grauen in it, so artificiall and costlie, that it deserueth singuler praise.

I checked the OED, and sure enough, that’s the first citation (as of the 1893 entry): “1549 W. Thomas Hist. Italie f. 137v Ouer the queere is an whole vaulte called Cupola, facioned like the halfe of an egge.” The etymology is “< Latin cūpula little cask, small vault, diminutive of cūpa cask, tun.” Thomas was a lively writer (and also wrote an Italian grammar); I’m sorry he came to such a hard end.

Recently posted by bulbul on Facebook: The Most Common Last Name in Every Country, by Barbara Davidson. Fun, but bear in mind these caveats from the FB post:

Slavomír Čéplö
Fun, but fishy. Just looking at our neck of the woods, I have doubts and they are confirmed when looking at their methodology section:
“To determine the most common last name in every country, NetCredit analyzed surname data from genealogy portal Forebears.io, various country censuses and other sources. ”
So the data set is heavily biased and thus GIGO / the grain of salt rule applies. Plus the data has not even been processed properly; this is immediately obvious when you look at the data for the Czech Republic: the form they give – Nováková – is feminine, thus it is clear that they did not do any normalization. The Slovak data then clearly shows the bias: the surname Varga is of Hungarian origin and thus predominantly found in the parts of the country with large Hungarian populations, i.e. mostly the South and especially South-East; fun fact: that’s where I’m from and Uncle Varga is our next door neighbor :).

Scott Martens
I wouldn’t treat this as very definitive either. On the other hand… what important, meaningful decision is anyone going to make after seeing this infographic? A lazy author making up a fictional character from a Slavic country will screw up standard gender suffixes (“Yuri Ivanova always wanted to be a cosmonaut…”)? Fail to recognize that a Peruvian named “Quispe” is probably going to consider themselves indigenous more than Hispanic? Name an exile from Togo “Lawson” without realizing that “Lawson” is the name of the royal family of Aneho, and anyone with that last name is connected to the royal family and that has political implications?

Besides, the most common family names in Canada have been “Li” (李) and “Singh” (ਸਿੰਘ) for eons, and it was “Tremblay” before that.

And while we’re on the subject of Slavo/bulbul, here’s his paper on diachronic Maltese (as second author; to appear in C. Lucas & S. Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced language change: A handbook), courtesy of John Cowan, who says “Good stuff!”

I was reading the section on Pasternak’s 1922 Detstvo Lyuvers [The Childhood of Luvers] in the magnificent Reference Guide to Russian Literature (Neil Cornwell, ed.) when I was brought up short by this passage:

While there is little plot, the prosaic details encountered on this everyday journey stimulate the girl’s imagination into an endless process of recreating reality. The only logical chain linking the digressions, omissis and unrelated switches from which the story is woven lies in Zhenia’s life experience.

Now, I’m a widely read fellow, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered the word omissis before except in Latin (where it is the dative/ablative plural of omissus ‘neglected, omitted,’ a passive participle of omittō). Wiktionary tells me it is also an Italian word (masculine, invariable) meaning “omission (deliberate),” though it is not in any Italian dictionary I have access to, so I presume it is rare; Dizy gives the following sample sentences:

Nell’ordinanza di rinvio a giudizio, gli omissis erano così numerosi da renderne incomprensibili i motivi.
I partecipanti alla riunione hanno chiesto, per alcuni documenti, una versione in cui figurassero meno omissis.
Rileggendo gli atti, i suoi “omissis” ad alcune domande mi hanno molto contrariato.

What I can say with some confidence is that it is not an English word (and I say that as someone who is notoriously lax about welcoming marginal items into the word-hoard); it is not in the OED (except in a Latin title: A. Boate, Observationes medicæ, de affectibus omissis, 1649) or any other dictionary I have access to, and Google Books gives only Latin hits, apart from a passage in David Ward’s Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism:

And in relating what he had occasion to read in the secret files, and in order to further cloud the air of mystery, Genna makes ample use of the term OMISSIS, always in upper case, to indicate when information has been deemed too sensitive for the general public’s eyes and ears and is excised from a document.

The section was written by Daša Šilhánková Di Simplicio, who has written books in Italian and thus is presumably more at home in it than in English (though her first two names are Czech and/or Slovak, Šilhánková being the feminine form of Šilhánek), so I assume she used “omissis” as a term familiar from that language, perhaps not being sure what the English equivalent was (though you’d think “omissions” would do well enough — I note that while the Italian word is both singular and plural, here it is clearly plural in context, which might lead the innocent reader to suspect a singular “omissi”). I don’t blame her for its appearance in the final text, I blame the editorial staff at Fitzroy Dearborn, who should be able to differentiate between obscure but defensible scholarly terms and straight-up foreign words that will simply bewilder the hapless reader. (Of course, it may be that I am wrong and it is in fact used by some English-speaking scholarly community, in which case I welcome correction, as always.)

Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, Ulrike Mosel’s Grammaticography: The art and craft of writing grammars (pdf) [from the book Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing]. It’s an interesting overview of the topic; I’ll quote some salient bits:

Probably every grammarian has had the experience that collecting and analyzing language data and writing a grammar are two different things: you think your analysis is perfect, you know how the language works, you might even speak it fluently, but when it comes to writing up the grammar you are faced with unforeseen problems. How are you ever going to get all you know about the language into a single book? […]

Although collecting data, grammatical analysis, and writing up the chapters of a grammar are different tasks, they cannot be entirely separated, because once you start writing, you will discover gaps or inconsistencies so that you need to collect and analyze additional data. I often questioned my capacity as a fieldworker when I realized that my data were not sufficient. But now I think that the reason also lies in the very nature of writing, because – at least to some extent – the process of writing shapes and reshapes your thoughts which inevitably leads to changes in your analysis. […]

The low prestige of text editions (if they were more highly valued, linguists would no doubt publish more) can be attributed to several factors:
1. the politics of mainstream linguistics departments, some of which do not even recognize descriptive grammars as Ph.D. theses;
2. the fact that linguistic typology concentrates on the investigation of grammatical phenomena which manifest themselves in single sentences;
3. the fact that many typologists work with large samples of languages which does not allow the time consuming in-depth study of texts.

For scientific reasons, however, this relegation of texts to marginal appendices is not justifiable. […]

In a world where specialists – and linguists are no exception – know more and more about less and less, it becomes increasingly important to develop methodologies of making specialized knowledge accessible to non-specialists. Only the identification, analysis and description of the essentials of the structure of languages will enable us to connect specialized knowledge of various linguistic areas and advance our understanding of language. For this very reason the old tradition of grammar writing is gaining more importance than ever.

Makes sense to me.

Another goodie from last year I’m just getting around to: Corinne Purtill analyzes The difference between a snafu, a shitshow, and a clusterfuck.

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck. […] To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:

A fuck-up. “A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition.

A SNAFU. While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable; one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy) probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.

A shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced it than its outcome.

You’ll have to visit the link to discover the “three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck.” But it’s a good thing there’s an “allegedly” in “The ‘cluster’ part of the word allegedly refers to officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia”; it does no such thing. OED:
[Read more…]

Last year Karen Schousboe had a very lively review at Medieval Histories of what sounds like a controversial book, Beowulfkvädet. Den nordiska bakgrunden [The lay of Beowulf: The Nordic background], by Bo Gräslund. It begins:

In the 1980s a scandal broke out in Toronto. No longer a venerated poem of the Dark Ages, Beowulf was dated to the turn of the millennium and characterised as a very late Anglo-Saxon pastiche. Although metrical, linguistic, and palaeographic evidence was brought forward to staunch the postmodern erudition flowing from the medievalists – who had drunk from the poisoned chalice of Derrida, Baudelaire, and Kristeva – the standard bearers from Toronto nevertheless succeeded in banning the use of the text by historians and archaeologists. Under pain of shunning, students might no longer “use” the beautiful verses to illuminate the murky mead-hall.

Later, hard-core linguists were luckily able to turn the tide and reclaim the poem from this literary evisceration. Nevertheless, challenges have continued to mar the understanding of the epos and the cultural crucible, in which it was forged. Finally, this summer, a magisterial and erudite analysis by the archaeologist, Bo Gräslund, was published in Sweden outlining the material world and a probable background for the text.

Let it be said initially. Bo Gräslund is the grand old man of Swedish Archaeology. He has worked at the National Museum in Stockholm as well as taught as a professor at the University in Uppsala. Apart from this, he has served as head of the Royal Academy of History and Antiquity, the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Uppsala and several other august academies. To this should be added a very long list of publications. In his later years he has been occupied with outlining the events in the 6th century leading up to and following the climatic crisis AD 536 – 550. It is as part of this project, the study of Beowulf has been undertaken. Thus, Gräslund is not a perky young fellow with a fixed idea running wild on the fringes of the academic scene. He arrives at the scene with a solid ballast.

Further, the book is softly written, courteously and mildly. Yet, it delivers a decisive blow to the last 200 years debate and adds some well-argued propositions and hypotheses as to the what, where, when, and how of the Beowulf.

While I greatly enjoy that kind of take-no-prisoners review, I have to admit I trust it less than I would a boring, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other analysis; does anybody know enough about this to provide another perspective? At any rate, here’s a bit of linguistic argument:

In the second part of the book, Gräslund discusses the ethnonyms in the poem and argues that the main group, to which Beowulf belongs – the Geats – in all likelihood came from Gotland. Seafaring islanders, known also as wederas, the latter epithet has been consistently translated as wind, weather, or storm. However, much more likely, writes Gräslund convincingly, the prefix in weder-geatas refers to Proto-Germanic wedrą, meaning ram – Old English weder, Old High German wetar, Old Norse veðr etc. It so happens, that rams were significant symbols of the people from Gotland, as witnessed in documents, sagas, and in the official seal.

Gräslund concludes that “the poem was composed in a volatile and dangerous situation in the mid-sixth century.” (Incidentally, we discussed its first word back in 2013.) Thanks, Trevor!

I don’t usually link to either Twitter or single visual jokes, but I couldn’t resist this (sent me by Michael Hendry), tweeted by Amro Ali (@amroali) and labeled “The ‘happy’ Arabic language family and that one rebellious son (via Moroccan nat. memes, fb)”. Do your homework and straighten up, Darija!