languagehat.com

JC sent me a link to Raymond Hickey’s Dictionary of Varieties of English, saying “This is far more than the title suggests: it not only contains sketches of various Englishes, but is at the same time an actual lexicon of terms that are relevant to the study of English variation, like æ-tensing. I’m only about 10% through it, but it’s great and a fun read to boot.” Thanks, John!

Ofer Aderet reports for Haaretz (cached) on the progress made in Haifa University’s program to decipher ancient manuscripts:

“Hasten to the Shoko,” urged the computer. “The mouth asked to smoke,” it mused another time. Then it declared, “Jesus God to rejoice.” The cryptic phrases brought both smiles and satisfaction to the managers of the digital humanities laboratory at the University of Haifa. One is a Talmud and Midrash teacher and the other a professor of information systems.

The platform, called Kraken, is taking its tentative first steps in attempting to decipher ancient Hebrew. The hope is that in the not-too-distant future, after completing its studies, Kraken will be able to read any Hebrew text, even if the manuscript is distorted, illegible or hard to decipher. It’s part of a discipline called digital humanities, which uses advanced technology to enhance studies in history, the Bible and literature.

Like children encountering Hebrew religious texts in elementary school for the first time, Kraken also needs practice to become familiar with the material. The “shoko” was supposed to be “shoket” – trough. The mouth wanted to “deal with the Torah,” not to smoke, while Jesus, heaven forbid, has nothing to do with the third phrase, which was originally “the Lord will again rejoice.”

Moshe Lavee, a Military Intelligence veteran, a senior lecturer in Talmud and Midrash in the university’s department of Jewish history in the University of Haifa. He is the director and founder of eLijah-Lab, Kraken’s home and one of the two researchers heading the lab. This week he spoke with contagious enthusiasm about the digital revolution, which is destined to save several research fields from oblivion. […]

On a monitor he showed a scanned section from Midrash Tanhuma, three collections of Pentateuch aggadot (homilies) from the end of the ancient history. The script is difficult to read, but the computer doesn’t give up. Kraken – developed by Prof. Daniel Stoekel Ben-Ezra of Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris – succeeds in reading it, and later presents it to the researcher as a simple text file. This opens new research possibilities that ignite the imagination, first and foremost searching and analyzing information in large scopes and kinds of texts that until now even the most skilled researcher couldn’t carry out alone. “Our vision is to make all the Hebraic scripts accessible,” says Lavee. “We’ll turn Jewish and Hebraic legacy into texts accessible to computer search and study and save a huge treasure trove of knowledge and Jewish traditions.” […]

The revolution was enabled by Handwritten Text Recognition technology, which enables a computer to read tens of thousands of pages – like novels and poetry from the 19th century, diaries and letters from WWII and ancient philosophical and religious texts, including intelligible handwritten input. Lavee says “the computer is taught to read the texts automatically, based on practice, so it acquires contextual knowledge about the language and uses it to reach better results.” […]

At this stage the computer still needs the researchers’ help. They are teaching it to read and “understand” the ancient Hebraic texts it encounters for the first time. “We show the computer many pictures from manuscripts, alongside their correct transcription,” says Lavee. “The computer itself finds the leading mathematical formula from the visual data for the text, and develops the ability to decipher even the written manuscript, whose transcript it hasn’t been shown before.” Dror Elovits, the lab’s technology manager and a graduate student in history, believes “the day is not far when we won’t need the human factor anymore, the texts will digitize themselves.”

(For a similar story about the Vatican Archives, see this 2018 LH post.) Thanks, Kobi!

Via the always interesting Laudator Temporis Acti:

Allan Ramsay, A Collection of Scots Proverbs (Edinburgh: J. Wood, 1776), p. 33 (Chap. XIV, Number 130):

        He snites his nose in his neighbour’s dish to get the brose to himsell.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. snite, v., sense 2.a:

        transitive. To clean or clear (the nose) from mucus, esp. by means of the thumb and finger only; to blow.

Id., s.v. brose, n:

        A dish made by pouring boiling water (or milk) on oatmeal (or oat-cake) seasoned with salt and butter.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who adds:

How can southron English have retained snout and snot and yet let their cousin ‘snite’ fall by the wayside? As so often, Scots is the last bastion, a vernacular that Hume and Boswell were brought up speaking but were forced to renege, and now Scots itself has more or less fallen by the wayside. The curmudgeon’s chosen path must always be backwards, to rescue everything senselessly tossed aside.

I don’t know where I ran across the verb snite, but it was many years ago, and it was so obviously convenient and pleasurable that I’ve used it ever since — mainly to myself, since I imagine hardly anyone else in the US knows it, but I hope to spread awareness of it with this post.

I was discussing the pronunciation of livery with a friend (who thought it had a long i, as in alive, having only seen it written) and I thought I’d check the etymology in case it might help, which it does. OED (updated September 2009):

Etymology: < Anglo-Norman leveré, liveré, livereye, livré, lyveré, lyveree, lyvereye, Anglo-Norman and Middle French liveree, livree, Middle French livrée (French livrée) allowance or ration of food (late 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman), delivery, act of handing over (1283 or earlier in Anglo-Norman in general sense; second half of the 14th cent. or earlier in Anglo-Norman in spec. use with reference to the legal delivery of real property into a person’s possession, in faire liveré de), distinctive dress or uniform worn by an official, retainer, or servant (and given to him or her by the employer) (c1290 in Old French; now historical), liveried retainers collectively (1354; rare before late 17th cent.; now historical), assignment (14th cent. or earlier in Anglo-Norman), disbursement (1355 or earlier in Anglo-Norman), lodging, quarters of an army (a1400 or earlier), surrender (1438 in an apparently isolated attestation), distinctive guise or appearance of a thing (although this is apparently first attested later: c1450 with reference to the distinctive colours of an object; a1675 in more general sense), company, party (c1460 (in the passage translated in quot. 1477 at sense 12a) or earlier), stipendiary allowance granted to a canon (1549), in Anglo-Norman also denoting a City of London company (1386 or earlier), use as noun of feminine past participle of liverer, livrer liver v. (compare -y suffix5). Compare post-classical Latin liberata allowance, payment, provision (of food, clothing, etc.) to retainers or servants (frequently from 12th cent. in British sources), badge, uniform (frequently from late 14th cent. in British sources), lodging, quartering (14th cent.), allowance of provender for horses (15th cent. in a British source as liberatum), academic stipend (15th cent. in British sources), and also Spanish librea (end of the 15th cent.), Italian livrea (1424), Middle Dutch livereye, livreye, levereye (Dutch livrei), Middle Low German (rare) lēverīe, liberīe, German Livree (c1600; earlier as †liebrey, †liberey, etc. (15th cent.)), all earliest in sense 11b, all < French.
[…]

I. Senses relating to delivering or handing over.
†1. The action or an act of handing over or conveying to another; the release of a person from imprisonment, etc.; (also) the delivery of goods (money, a writ, etc.). Obsolete.
[…]
II. Senses relating to the provision of food, etc.
5. a. The food, provisions, or clothing dispensed to or supplied for retainers, servants, or others; an allowance or ration of food served out. Now historical.
[…]
III. Senses relating to clothing or other uniform which serves as a distinguishing characteristic.
10. Something assumed or bestowed as a distinguishing feature; a characteristic garb or covering; a distinctive guise, marking, or outward appearance.
This sense should probably be regarded as a figurative development of sense 11, though it is recorded earlier.
[…]
11. a. The distinctive dress worn by the liverymen of a Guild or City of London livery company (see Compounds 2); (also) an item of this dress.
[…]
b. More generally: the distinctive dress or uniform provided for and worn by an official, retainer, or employee (in early use esp. a single item such as a collar, hood, or gown, but more generally a suit of clothes or uniform); spec. the characteristic uniform or insignia worn by a household’s retainers or servants (in later use largely restricted to footmen and other manservants), typically distinguished by colour and design; the dress, uniform, or insignia (e.g. king’s livery, riding livery), by which a family, etc., may be identified. Also as a count noun: a set of such clothes, a uniform. Cf. colour n.1 19a. Now chiefly historical.

So you can remember the pronunciation by keeping in mind that it’s just delivery without the prefix.

Mark Liberman has a Log post about a recent paper, Jialu Li and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson’s “A Comparable Phone Set for the TIMIT Dataset Discovered in Clustering of Listen, Attend and Spell” (pdf). The abstract reads:

Listen, Attend and Spell (LAS) maps a sequence of acoustic spectra directly to a sequence of graphemes, with no explicit internal representation of phones. This paper asks whether LAS can be used as a scientific tool, to discover the phone set of a language whose phone set may be controversial or unknown. Phonemes have a precise linguistic definition, but phones may be defined in any manner that is convenient for speech technology: we propose that a practical phone set is one that can be inferred from speech following certain procedures, but that is also highly predictive of the word sequence. We demonstrate that such a phone set can be inferred by clustering the hidden nodes activation vectors of an LAS model during training, thus encouraging the model to learn a hidden representation characterized by acoustically compact clusters that are nevertheless predictive of the word sequence. We further define a metric for the quality of a phone set (the sum of conditional entropy of the graphemes given the phone set and the phones given the acoustics), and demonstrate that according to this metric, the clustered LAS phone set is comparable to the original TIMIT phone set. Specifically, the clustered-LAS phone set is closer to the acoustics; the original TIMIT phone set is closer to the text.

Mark says:

As exemplified above, the TIMIT phonetic transcriptions often reflect expectations from the formal dictionary-based pronunciation standard, which is influenced by the spelling even before any continuous-speech reductions set in — so matching TIMIT’s performance on this paper’s “metric for the quality of a phone set (the sum of conditional entropy of the graphemes given the phone set and the phones given the acoustics)” should not be all that difficult. Still, no one has ever done it before, so this research is an important contribution.

The relationship between phonetic variation and lexically-stable phonological categories remains an open theoretical question, in my opinion, but work like this is one very useful direction of inquiry.

This sounds like it must be important, but it’s been so long since I had anything to do with that kind of linguistics that I’m only vaguely aware of how it works. But it sounds like a useful alternative to the usual transcriptions.

I posted about Nüshu, a form of writing developed by women in Hunan province, back in 2004, but a) that was a long time ago and b) the links are dead, so it might not be amiss to present Lauren Young’s Atlas Obscura piece on the subject:

In 1988, Yi Nianhua, a woman in her 80s, spent many evenings scribbling elegant characters at a table in her kitchen in a small rice-farming village in Shangjiangxu, China. With only a blunt writing brush, the elongated script came out fat and blotchy on the newsprint she used for paper. But Cathy Silber, a professor at Skidmore College in New York, worked alongside Yi in her kitchen, diligently deciphering and studying the written language.

“Out of the thousands of scripts that are gender-specific to men, here we have one that we know is gender-specific to women,” says Silber, who has been researching Nüshu since 1985. Yi was one of the last remaining writers of Nüshu, a fading script that only women knew how to write and read.

Stemming from the southwestern Hunan Province county of Jiangyong, a small group of women in the 19th and 20th centuries practiced this special script that no man could read or write. The writing system allowed these women to keep autobiographies, write poetry and stories, and communicate with “sworn sisters,” bonds between women who were not biologically related. The tradition of Nüshu is slowly vanishing, but at one time gave the women of Shanjiangxu freedom to express themselves.

In the middle of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for Chinese women of higher socioeconomic classes to write songs, ballads, complaints, or stories, as Wilt Idema details in the book Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women’s Script. However, it was extremely rare to find such intimate texts from peasant women. As of 2012, there were approximately 500 known texts written in Nüshu, ranging from four-line poems to long autobiographical narratives. Today, the texts that have survived give researchers such as Silber the opportunity to peer into the daily lives of Chinese women throughout this period of history. […]

It’s an interesting story, and there are some striking images; apparently the last woman who really knew Nüshu died in 2004, the year of my earlier post. Thanks, Jack!

Lars Mathiesen wrote me: “I admit that I never thought about the number declension in Archaea (bacteria), but somebody did (second graf).” The graf in question (by Hannah Devlin in the Graun):

Then, the theory goes, a rogue archaeon gobbled up a bacterium to create an entirely new type of cell that would go on to form the basis of all complex life on Earth, from plants to humans.

One of those words that makes you go “Huh”; the OED says:

Etymology: < scientific Latin Archaeon (see quot. 1990), singular form corresponding to Archaea Archaea n.

A member of the Archaea; an archaebacterium.
The plural form is usually supplied by Archaea n.

1990 Proc. National Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 87 5788 (title) HMf, a DNA-binding protein isolated from the hyperthermophilic archaeon Methanothermus fervidus, is most closely related to histones.
[…]
2001 FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 196 129 M[ethanobrevibacter] oralis was found to be the predominant archaeon in the subgingival dental plaque.

I have to admit I didn’t realize the taxon was so new; first cite for Archaea:

1990 C. R. Woese et al. in Proc. National Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 87 4576 We propose that a formal system of organisms be established in which above the level of kingdom there exists a new taxon called a ‘domain’. Life on this planet would then be seen as comprising three domains, the Bacteria, the Archaea, and the Eucarya, each containing two or more kingdoms.

And why do they give the author for that last quote but not for the 1990 cite for archaeon, from the same article? Sometimes the OED baffles me.

Like most Americans, I’ve always had only a hazy idea of what is meant by “aristocracy,” “nobility,” and the like (“dukes and earls,” as my friend Mike used to say), but I’m starting to think hardly anyone understands it, since the closer you look the more impenetrable it gets. I’m reading Irina Reyfman’s excellent How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks, and on pp. 5-6 she writes:

The term “nobility” requires a brief elucidation. Students of Russian history and culture of the Imperial period face a difficulty when choosing the appropriate term for this group. Not only are all of the possible translations of dvoriane or the collective term dvorianstvo into English (“aristocracy,” “nobility,” “gentry”) misleading to various degrees (as Marc Raeff argues in his seminal study of the eighteenth-century Russian nobility), but even in Russian the term competes with other designations, such as aristokratiia (aristocracy) or znat’ (notables). For this reason, many contemporary historians prefer to use, often alongside dvorianstvo, the neutral terms “elite” and “elites” (elita and elity), as neither existed at the time discussed and are therefore “unburdened” by contemporary connotations. However, these terms are too vague to be used without a qualifier, such as “service,” “cultural,” “intellectual,” or “economic,” all of which intersect only partially with the terms dvoriane and dvorianstvo, with the degree of intersection changing over time. The more traditional if imperfect terms “nobles” and “nobility” are thus preferable.

This linguistic uncertainty reflects an uncertainty about the composition of the group itself. For all practical purposes, the post-Petrine shliakhetstvo (or dvorianstvo, as it came to be called later in the eighteenth century) was a newly formed estate. The eighteenth-century dvorianstvo incorporated not only all kinds of pre-Petrine elite groups (such as the upper echelons of Muscovite nobility—boyars—as well as both middle and upper serving classes, deti boiarskie and dvoriane) but also commoners who were able to enter the noble class thanks either to successful service or to sluchái, imperial favor. The boundaries of the group, particularly in the early eighteenth century, were thus uncertain and shifting.

And right after reading that I ran into this in Tobias Gregory’s LRB review of Philippe Desan’s Montaigne: A Life:

The 16th-century French nobility was a heterogeneous and expanding class. In theory you were noble or you weren’t; in practice there were ambiguities and gradations. The old or upper nobility, the noblesse d’épée, was a small hereditary class containing descendants of the medieval knightly families who had provided military service to the crown in exchange for landed estates. Montaigne belonged to the larger and more permeable class of lower nobility, claiming a place in two ways: by inheriting his father’s seigneurial estate, and by becoming a magistrate, which made him a member of the noblesse de robe, or a robin. A magistrate’s office conferred noble status, according to the official explanation, because the king’s justice was royal and therefore should be administered by nobles. The real reason was that the crown sold the offices, and the title was an incentive. Montaigne’s uncle purchased himself a seat in the Bordeaux parlement in 1535, and Pierre Eyquem bought his eldest son a seat in a new tax court established in Périgueux in 1556. This court was dissolved after two years, and its officers, including the 25-year-old Montaigne, were transferred by royal command into the parlement of Bordeaux, where they were unwelcome and treated badly by the incumbent magistrates, because this expansion diluted their authority and income. Places in the magistracy were not sinecures; as a junior member of the Bordeaux parlement Montaigne worked hard at the routine business of writing up case reports. To their purchasers they conveyed an income and a career path, as well as the prestige of the title. A robin might be promoted within the regional magistracy; he might, with connections and talent, rise to an administrative position at court, which had use for capable new men. But to be perceived as noble in a fuller sense, it was not enough to hold a magistrate’s office or own a seigneurial estate. Your family had to be known to have ‘lived nobly’ on its estate for at least a hundred years: that is, to reside principally there, and to derive its main income from land rather than from commerce. Here Montaigne’s claim was tenuous. In 1571 the family had owned the estate for almost a hundred years, but Pierre had been the first Eyquem to make an effort to live nobly at Montaigne, and even he spent considerable time in the city. Montaigne’s retirement inscription declared not only his literary ambitions but his intent to live on his lands in a manner in keeping with the title he had recently inherited. Unsurprisingly he does not dwell on his family’s bourgeois origins. In describing his château as the ‘sweet retreat of his ancestors’ he gives the impression that they had been at Montaigne for time out of mind.

It reminds me of the self-important bickering among Proust’s aristocratic set, and I’m glad that’s one nest of vipers I’ll never have to step into.

From Futility Closet, “A dry footnote from Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, regarding the Porteous Riots of 1736, in which a guard captain was lynched in Edinburgh”:

The Magistrates were closely interrogated before the House of Peers, concerning the particulars of the Mob, and the patois in which these functionaries made their answers, sounded strange in the ears of the Southern nobles. The Duke of Newcastle having demanded to know with what kind of shot the guard which Porteous commanded had loaded their muskets, was answered naively, ‘Ow, just sic as ane shoots dukes and fools with.’ This reply was considered as a contempt of the House of Lords, and the Provost would have suffered accordingly, but that the Duke of Argyle explained, that the expression, properly rendered into English, meant ducks and waterfowl.

Thanks, JC! And from Jamie Fisher’s LRB review (8 March 2018) of The Chinese Typewriter: A History, by Thomas S. Mullaney:

The first machine marketed as a ‘Chinese typewriter’ was invented in 1888 by the American missionary Devello Sheffield, his goal less to create a typewriter than to replace the missionary’s intermediary, the opinionated Chinese clerk. ‘They usually talk to their writer,’ Sheffield wrote, ‘and he takes down with a pen what has been said, and later puts their work into Chinese literary style … The finished product will be found to have lost in this process no slight proportion of what the writer wished to say, and to have taken on quite as large a proportion of what the Chinese assistant contributed to the thought.’

Courtesy of bulbul, this historico-linguistic story by Albert Galea:

Maltese is known for its expressions and synonyms, and perhaps one of the best known of these is the saying ‘qishom id-di u d-do’. It is an expression which in reality has no direct translation, but which is used to refer to two people who are always seen together.

The origin of this expression is an unlikely source: two British gunboats built in the nineteenth century which spent much of their lives moored next to each other in Kalkara Creek. HMS Dee and HMS Don were both Medina-class gunboats, being two out of 12 such ships which were built by the Palmers Shipbuilding & Iron Company between 1876 and 1877. The two ships were launched within 10 days of other – the Dee was launched on 4 April 1877 and the Don on 14 April of the same year. […]

Visit the link for further details; here’s a bit from a passage on Henry Casingena, who enlisted with the Royal Navy in 1882:

Also interesting to note is the variety of spelling inputted by the British for the surname Casingena: it is written as ‘Casincena’, ‘Casencena’, ‘Caningena’, and ‘Cancencena’ on different occasions. This befuddlement at how to spell Maltese surnames on the part of the British is not uncommon, and can be observed on war records from the time.

And for lagniappe, an unexpected etymology I recently learned: proxy is a contraction of procuracy.