languagehat.com

And (spoiler!) not for the better. Kyle Koster of thebiglead reports on a change in the AP Stylebook:

Apparently, the long-standing practice of inserting a hyphen in a compound modifier was re-examined and deemed unnecessary if the modifier is “commonly recognized as one phrase, and if the meaning is clean and unambiguous without the hyphen.” So say goodbye to first-half run and hello to first half run. One looks objectively worse than the other, but apparently the Associated Press is fine with this. […]

This is all probably small potatoes to the reader. But hyphenating words when they need to be hyphenated is a habit that will be impossible for journalists of a certain age to stop doing. And that’s a good thing because the presence or absence of them is one of the clearest indicators of the quality of writing and editing for a given piece.

Via MetaFilter, where amid the inevitable snark there is some good commentary:

IMO hyphens in stock phrases used as modifiers just makes it a little easier to read, because you don’t have to even consider the other ways of grouping things to decide whether it’s ambiguous. So neither “first half-marathon” vs “first-half touchdown” is really ambiguous if you know the subject, but if there’s hyphens you can parse it correctly without having to know or access that information. [posted by aubilenon]

Why? What is the reason they decided this was a thing to do? Were there legions of copyeditors sick of popping in the dropped hyphens of lazy writers? Did the price of ink go up? [posted by Jon_Evil]

It seems to me that the big problem for writers and copy editors here is that before the rule was clear and unambiguous: all compound modifiers get hyphens. Now you have to make a judgment call on each one as to whether a) it’s a commonly recognized phrase and b) whether the meaning is clear and unambiguous. [posted by jahaza]

Seriously, I have no idea what the benefit of this is aside from saving ink, which is mostly electronic these days anyway. I try not to be too curmudgeonly, but I feel obliged to wave my cane. Compound-modifier hyphens forever!

I just finished John Gray’s NYRB review essay on Peter Sloterdijk (October 12, 2017), which did not make me think well of that prolific “philosopher, polemicist, and sometime television host” (see this LH comment for a biting quote), and I have to complain about something that has nothing to do with philosophy. Sloterdijk laments the loss in modern bourgeois culture of what he pretentiously calls “thymos” (Greek θυμός ‘soul; will; desire, etc.’), which “signifies the impulsive center of the proud self, yet at the same time it also delineates the receptive ‘sense.'” The adjectival form based on this is given as “thymotic.” I don’t know whether it’s Sloterdijk’s form (well, presumably thymotisch in the original) or Gray’s, but either way, I hate it. The Greek word is a regular old o-stem, there is no -t- anywhere in its declension, and the adjective would have to be thymic (as seen in the well-formed alexithymic “Affected with alexithymia; of or relating to alexithymia [The inability to recognize one’s own emotions and to express them, esp. in words]” (OED). Furthermore, there is an existing adjective thymotic, defined by the OED as “Of, pertaining to, or derived from thymol”; the etymology is given as “Arbitrarily < Greek θύμον thyme n., or thymol n. + -ic suffix.” Fine, I don’t expect chemists to be up on their Greek morphology, but the fact that there is already an ill-formed thymotic used in a completely different sense is another strike against this one. I realize I’m being prescriptivist about it, but if you can’t be prescriptivist about the classics, what can you be prescriptivist about?

And while I’m grousing: my wife and I recently watched Kieślowski’s Blue/Bleu/Niebieski (neither of us had seen it in a couple of decades, and it was just as sad and wonderful as we remembered), and the subtitles were generally well done, but at one point two characters are looking at a musical score and one says “C’est les violons?” The other responds “Non, les altos.” The subtitles have “Is this the violins?” “No, the altos.” Come on. I know false friends can be hard, and alto can mean ‘alto,’ but here it clearly means ‘viola.’ You’re being paid to do this, you know. Thimk!

Joel of Far Outliers has posted an excerpt from A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa, by Steve Kemper, about the history of Agadez; I’m going to quote the part of linguistic interest:

Like most port towns, Agadez had a mongrel population that reflected all the peoples who passed through it, beginning with the Berber tribes that had founded it. There were Tuaregs, Hausas, Fulanis, Tebus, Kanuris, and Arabs. And also, Barth was puzzled to find, Songhais, a black ethnic group based 600 harsh miles to the west. All this diversity made Agadez a polyglot town where interpreters did good business.

But Agadez also had its own unique language, Emgedesi, spoken nowhere else in the region. To a linguist such as Barth, this was a mystery to pursue. He detected the influences of Hausa, Tamasheq, and Songhai in Emgedesi, but remained puzzled about the dialect’s origins and exclusivity to Agadez. Then came the clue that connected the dots: several Tuaregs who had been to Timbuktu told him that Emgedesi was also spoken there, 800 miles west. Barth was surprised, then thrilled as he realized the implications.

Songhai had been the most extensive empire in Central Africa’s history, greater than Mali or Ghana. It had covered portions of present-day Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Senegal, and Niger. Songhai had conquered Timbuktu, another Sahelian port city of Tuaregs and Arabs. The language of the conquerors mixed with Timbuktu’s other tongues, creating a distinctive language unique to the town.

Then early in the sixteenth century, Askia, Songhai’s king, decided to extend his realm to the east, into central Sudan and Hausaland, and to curb the pesky Tuaregs to the north. He conquered Agadez in 1515 and left an occupying force there before proceeding on a haj through Egypt to Mecca, scattering legendary amounts of gold in his wake.

By the end of the sixteenth century the empire of Songhai had disintegrated. But in Agadez the descendants of the occupying army had melded with the local population. So had their language, and the resulting hybrid dialect evolved along similar linguistic lines as the hybrid language of Timbuktu, like related bird species on separate islands. This link, wrote Barth, “throws a new light over the history and ethnography of this part of the world,” and is “of the highest importance for the whole ethnography of North Africa.” It also gave him his first whiff of the fabled city of Timbuktu, a place he never expected to see.

“Emgedesi” should be Emgedeši, or in Anglicized form Emgedeshi [per Lameen’s comment below, the accepted English spelling is actually Emghedesie]; Maarten Kossmann, in “On relative clauses in Northern Songhay: Tuareg and Songhay components,” lists it as one of the five varieties of Northern Songhay, calling it “Emgedeshi, the now-extinct language of the city of Agadez (Niger), which seems to have been very similar to Tasawaq.” I’m guessing the name is somehow derived from the city name Agadez, but I’d love to know how. As always, I enjoy learning about obscure and forgotten forms of language.

Éanna Ó Caollaí reports for the Irish Times on an excellent lexicographical project:

Manuscripts chronicling medieval Irish history, oral material collected with the earliest recording devices and a 1607 account of the Flight of the Earls are among an extensive range of resources that will be drawn upon to complete the most comprehensive dictionary of Irish material produced over the last 400 years. Work on the project to create ‘Foclóir Stairiúil na Gaeilge’ (Historical Dictionary of Irish) will be funded for the next five years by a €920,000 Government grant. The funding will help complete the dictionary and will be used to strengthen a seven-strong team of lexicographers and researchers already working on the project at the Royal Irish Academy.

One of the most ambitious linguistic research projects to be undertaken in the history of the State, the corpus already consists of over 3,000 texts and 19 million words which are freely accessible online. Dictionary editor Charles Dillon says the funding, announced by Minister of State for the Irish Language Seán Kyne, will help lay a foundation for the next phase of the project which will see the inclusion of audio recordings made in Gaeltacht areas during the first decades of the last century. […] It will chart the morphological, contextual, and semantic development of words which will give a greater insight into Ireland’s language and culture during the period. “The easiest comparison is with the Oxford English Dictionary,” says Dillon. […]

One example he cites is the word ‘nasc’. Irish speakers who use the internet will be familiar with the use of the word which translates into English as ‘hyperlink’. Nasc describes the everyday action online that allows the reader to access material by clicking or tapping. Fewer will be aware of the origin of the word which in the past referred to a collar or necklace worn by warriors to indicate their allegiance in battle. “That is an example of the development of the language over some 2,000 years where it was once used in an ancient context but is now used to describe something very modern.”

Here’s the dictionary website, with links to the corpus and other things. Thanks, Trevor!

A few years ago I posted Spoken Language Quiz; here’s another one from Babbel, which is pretty hard (I only got half right). Try it if you dare! (Hat tip to Bathrobe.)

Avva posts the start of an Esquire interview (in Russian) with Alexander Gavrilov about how reading changes from childhood to adulthood; this is my translation:

As a child I had plenty of favorite books, but Urfin Jus and His Wooden Soldiers is particularly engraved in my memory. I was completely under its spell, I roamed the flower beds of Moscow trying to find animating grass — because if Urfin Jus could find it, then I would easily be able to. I don’t even remember what it was I was going to revive, it was just clear that that’s how all of life should change completely.

And I remember my love for that book especially well because later, when I read Volkov’s many, many volumes to my daughters, I suddenly discovered how monstrously, unimaginably poorly they were written. I simply could not physically say with my mouth what I read on paper; I had to edit the text while reading so as not to spit.

It was at that moment that I grasped the difference between the reading of children and adults. Children are generally much more generous readers. I have the fixed idea that a book is created by its reader almost to a greater extent than by its writer. I have often heard adult readers say something like “There are no really good books left, it’s all crap, it was a lot better before.” At that point the reader is admitting that he no longer has the substance that makes all books magical in childhood.

So true! And although I had been curious about Volkov’s Soviet versions of the Oz books (I posted about them at MetaFilter back in 2005), if I had trouble finishing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone I may have to give these a pass. (I’ve translated вещество чтения as “reading substance,” but I’m not happy about it; вещество can be “matter,” “material,” and “agent” as well as “substance,” but those sound even worse. Does вещество чтения sound normal in Russian?)

Unrelated, but check out this interview with Lisa Hayden, who writes the indispensable blog Lizok’s Bookshelf about Russian literature and has translated eight Russian novels.

A couple of days ago the prolific Michael Gilleland posted Algernon Swinburne’s aggrieved letter to the New York Daily Tribune dated January 30, 1874, complaining about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in an interview had called him “a perfect leper and a mere sodomite.” In the course of his missive (which I recommend reading in full if you like eloquent vituperation) Swinburne refers to the “apt reply […] addressed by the servant of Octavia to the satellites of Nero,” and in a follow-up post Gilleland’s correspondent Eric Thomson explained the reference, quoting first Thomas Denman:

While we were calling our witnesses, and I was at Holland House on Sundays and at home in the evenings, anxiously sifting the minutes of evidence, Dr. Parr was my frequent correspondent, pointing out illustrations of many parts of our case from history and classical literature. He earnestly besought me to look into Bayle, and weave into my summing-up allusions to Judith, Julia, and Octavia. The two first seemed to me inapplicable; the third flashed upon me like lightning. In a moment I resolved to make the unhappy wife of Nero my heroine, and indeed, the parallel was perfect. I was deeply smitten, too, with the honest chambermaid’s Greek, but, trembling as to the effect it might produce, I wrote back to ask Parr whether I could venture to bring it forward. He, in reply, at first suggested a method of periphrasis, but, at length, recurring to it in the postscript to a long letter, he burst out, ‘Oh dear, Mr. Denman, I am for the word itself — don’t be squeamish.’

And then Denman’s biographer Joseph Arnould:

Bayle, article ‘Octavia,’ cites the parallel passages from Tacitus and Xiphilin; Tacitus Ann. xiv., c. 60, Xiphilin p. 176; and see also Dion lii. 13. Neither the Latin nor the Greek can be quoted with decency. Tigellinus was presiding at the examination in which the female attendants of Octavia were being tortured to prove their mistress guilty of adultery with a slave. The imputation cast upon Tigellinus by the ‘honest chambermaid’ was of a nameless impurity, which made him peculiar for infamy even in the infamous court of Nero.

Thomson adds, “The word itself in the honest chambermaid’s Greek that could not be quoted with decency was ‘αἰδοῖον’; in the honest chambermaid’s Latin, ‘muliebria’, squeamishly rendered, – or ‘dextrously softened off’ – by translators Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876) as ‘person’.” He cites Dio Cassius’s Greek (‘καθαρώτερον, ὦ Τιγελλῖνε, τὸ αἰδοῖον ἡ δέσποινά μου τοῦ σοῦ στόματος ἔχει,’ which he translates “My mistress’s privy parts are cleaner, Tigellinus, than your mouth”) and Tacitus’s Latin (“castiora esse muliebria Octaviae respondit quam os eius,” which Church and Brodribb softly rendered “Octavia’s person was purer than his mouth”). Ah, for the days when Britons (of the better sort, needless to say) could bandy such allusions and be understood by everyone who mattered!

While I’m recommending Gilleland, I’ll also send you to today’s post, which quotes Martin Luther on languages:

Truly, if there were no other use for the languages, this alone ought to rejoice and move us, that they are so fine and noble a gift of God, with which He is now richly visiting and endowing us Germans, more richly indeed than any other land.[…]

And let us be sure of this: we shall not long preserve the Gospel without the languages. The languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained; they are the casket in which we carry this jewel; they are the vessel in which we hold this wine; they are the larder in which this food is stored; and as the Gospel itself says, they are the baskets in which we bear these loaves and fishes and fragments. If through our neglect we let the languages go (which may God forbid!), we shall not only lose the Gospel, but come at last to the point where we shall be unable either to speak or write a correct Latin or German.

If we must have peevery, let it be that expansive and eloquent!

Scott McLemee’s review [archived] of Peter Martin’s The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language begins as follows:

The author of a collection of essays “on moral, historical, political and literary subjects” published in Boston in 1790 acknowledged that they were interventions in the American revolutionary process. “Many of them were dictated at the moment, by the impulse of impressions made by important political events, and abound with a correspondent warmth of expression,” he wrote.

“This freedom of language wil be excused by the frends of the revolution and of good guvernment, who wil recollect the sensations they hav experienced, amidst the anarky and distraction which succeeded the cloze of the war. On such occasions a riter wil naturally giv himself up to hiz feelings, and hiz manner of riting wil flow from hiz manner of thinking.”

The plunge here — from the cadence and diction of 18th-century prose into spelling that may look semiliterate even to readers inured to the guesswork orthography of 21st-century social media — is vertiginous. And all the more so for knowing that the author was Noah Webster. At that point, he was not yet working on his dictionary, the first version of which appeared in 1806. But the seeds of it are already there, planted between the lines of his introductory remarks.

“In the essays, ritten within the last year,” he notes, “a considerable change of spelling iz introduced by way of experiment.” That period just so happened to coincide with the adoption of “the Constitution of the American Republic,” to which Webster makes “a Pledge of Attachment.” His phonetic streamlining of the written word is a calculated blow against British cultural authority — a declaration of independence, in effect — while the long decades of work preparing, revising and promoting his American Dictionary of the English Language represented a protracted constitutional convention of sorts.

I had known that Webster promoted simplified spelling, but it’s striking to see an example of it — how silly it looks, and how normal it would seem if he’d won out! The whole review is enjoyable, and it sounds like the book is as well. Thanks, Trevor!

My Kindle announced abruptly that it needed recharging, which will happen when you’re doing all your reading on it, so I plugged it in and wondered what dead-tree material I’d replace it with while it was absorbing its e-nourishment. My eye fell on a review copy of The Grammarians, the new novel by Cathleen Schine that the good people at Farrar, Straus and Giroux were kind enough to send me. All I knew about it was that it featured dictionary-obsessed identical twins, but that was certainly enough to intrigue me, so I decided to give it a try. Now, having spent a couple of days voraciously devouring it, I’m here to urge you to do the same.

Each section is prefaced by an entry from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, the twin sisters are constantly playing language games, there are quotes from English As She Is Spoke, and a major role is played by Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition; if that had been all, dayenu! But there’s also copyediting and alternative newspapers; there’s the East Village and Spain Restaurant; there’s subways and coffee shops and the Mets (there’s even a reference to that bitter parody all Mets fans sing in the bad years: “Meet the Mets, beat the Mets”): dayenu, dayenu, dayenu. And the writing is a sheer delight throughout, with clever allusions tickling your funny bone rather than smiting you about the head and shoulders, e.g.:

Whenever the wind blew outside, Laurel and Daphne could hear it whistling — like a phantom looking for its phantom dog, Laurel said. They named the phantom dog Mariah.

All that would certainly have been enough, but then one of the novel’s heroes turned out to be Charles Fries, that great linguist whom David Foster Wallace treated with such ignorant contempt; when I got to that I was like the horse who saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha! And I was utterly won over.

And there’s so much more. To take one example, there’s a reference to a LRB essay by Richard Rorty (I googled and discovered it’s “The Contingency of Selfhood” from the 8 May 1986 issue); Schine mentions it starts with a Larkin poem, and since you may well be as curious about it as I was, here’s the bit Rorty quotes:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is as clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

Isn’t that nice? And here’s the start of what Rorty has to say about it:
[Read more…]

Thomas Morris (“Making you grateful for modern medicine”) discusses the history of the famous aphorism “First, do no harm,” or, in its Latin guise, primum non nocere:

In this form you will often see it referred to as the Hippocratic injunction, and many people assume that it has its origins in the Hippocratic Corpus, the body of early medical texts attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and his followers. And there is indeed a similar form of words in the Hippocratic Oath, which affirms that ‘I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm’. Elsewhere in the Hippocratic Corpus (in a work entitled the Epidemics) there is the instruction ‘either help or do not harm the patient’.

But is it really Hippocratic? The attribution is far from clear. Firstly, although the sentiment is very similar, the form of words is rather different. And, more obviously, the Hippocratic Corpus and Oath are both in Greek. Where, then, did the Latin phrase come from?

My gold standard for this sort of thing is Robert K. Merton’s On the Shoulders of Giants (see this ancient post), and Morris’s investigation, though of course shorter and less anfractuous, is worthy of that giant’s vision. I will leave you to discover the delightful details at the link, and just quote the concluding paragraph:

Strangely, we have come full circle. I began by attempting to debunk the old chestnut that primum non nocere is Hippocratic. But the debunker has been debunked, since it seems that the old aphorism is indeed Hippocratic, albeit filtered through the mind of an early Christian writer from North Africa, writing in Latin almost 1700 years ago.

Thanks, hat_eater!