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David Farrier’s Guardian piece on AI and animal communication is a classic thumb-sucker — take some half-understood and poorly digested scientific news and mix it with wild speculation ad libitum — but the idea at its center is of some interest:

The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.

Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.

The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals’ interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another’s native vocabulary.

The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic “conversation” with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as “whup/throp” with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U.

It goes on to reference the impressively mustachioed Jakob Johann von Uexküll and his notion of Umwelt; does anyone know the derivation of his surname? At any rate, I suspect that, as usual, whatever sounds exciting is wrong or misunderstood, and whatever is accurate is not that interesting (I can well believe that scientists exchanged “whup/throp” with a whale for twenty minutes; did the whale get bored, or did they?). I’m quite sure none of these animals use anything comparable to human language. But still, if the complex calls can be analyzed in any fruitful way, well, that’s a result. Thanks, Trevor!

Addendum. When this was posted, everyone had forgotten our 2017 discussion of Uexküll, beginning here.

My wife asked me why the surname Patel was so common; of course I hit Wikipedia, which told me:

Patel is an Indian surname or title, predominantly found in the state of Gujarat, representing the community of land-owning farmers and later (with the British East India Company) businessmen, agriculturalists and merchants. Traditionally the title is a status name referring to the village chieftains during medieval times, and was later retained as successive generations stemmed out into communities of landowners. Circa 2015 there are roughly 500,000 Patels outside India, including about 150,000 in the United Kingdom and about 150,000 in the United States. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, nearly 1 in 10 people of Indian origin in the US is a Patel.

The etymology is interesting: “The Gujarati term paṭel, along with its cognate Marathi terms pāṭel and pāṭīl, are derived from the Prakrit word paṭṭaïl(l)a- ‘village headman’, itself derived from the Sanskrit word paṭṭakila ‘tenant of royal land’, a term first appearing in the Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā.” But I confess what made me unable to resist posting it was the final sentence of the article:

With those who immigrated to Germany during British colonial rule in India, Gujaratis used the variation “Pätel”, with an umlaut, to better integrate with German society.

1) Rivka Galchen’s New Yorker article (archived) on pain and attempts to control it is well worth your while, but it shows up at LH because of a word in its first sentence: “Pain might flicker, flash, prickle, drill, lancinate, pinch, cramp, tug, scald, sear, or itch.” Lancinate! I don’t remember seeing it before, but I like it; it sounds like a word that means what it means, which is (in the words of M-W) ‘pierce, stab, lacerate.’ It’s from “Latin lancinatus, past participle of lancinare to lacerate; akin to lacer mangled.” The OED (entry from 1901) has these citations:

1603 Blacke hel-mettal..to excoriat and lancinate a deuil.
S. Harsnett, Declaration of Popish Impostures 91

1623 Lancinate, to thrust through.
H. Cockeram, English Dictionarie

1876 How had she lancinated the wound, already, as she could see, quick and bleeding!
Overmatched vol. I. vii. 117

Once again I have to chide the OED for leaving the author of a novel unmentioned; in this case there’s some excuse for it, since Overmatched was published anonymously, but with the aid of the internet it’s the work of an instant to discover it’s by Herman Ludolph Prior. If they didn’t know that in 1901, couldn’t they have at least said it was by Anonymous?

2) I recently ran across the word esemplastic and realized I’d seen it off and on throughout my life and could never remember its meaning, so I’m posting it in the hope that that will fix it in my mind. M-W defines it as “shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole” and adds this note:
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Adam Rogers writes for Alta (archived) about a subject some think doesn’t exist:

Penelope Eckert was, like, mad? A now-retired sociolinguist at Stanford University, Eckert studied accents and how they change—particularly the accents of California. This was around 2010, and what was gnawing at her was that a bunch of influential East Coast linguists were insisting that there was in fact no such thing as a “California dialect.” However Californians might fold and squish their vowel sounds was actually—you know, I almost can’t bear to say this—Canadian.

That’s right. The judgment of the East was that if Californians had an accent at all, it was a minor variant of a whole other country. Eckert’s team of linguists wasn’t having it. “We were getting pretty pissed off,” she tells me. Eckert had been researching accents in San Jose and was toh-duhlly sure that she was seeing something unique.

But they needed proof. The scant research that existed on cities like San Francisco wasn’t enough, and it didn’t really answer whether San Franciscans sounded different from Angelenos—much less people from anywhere else. “We thought, Well, if we don’t do it, no one will,” Eckert says.

That realization turned into a project called Voices of California and nearly a decade of fieldwork. Eckert and a dozen graduate students trooped out to Central California—Merced, to be precise—and, eventually, Redding, Humboldt, Sacramento, Shasta, and so on. They’d ensconce themselves in each city for a couple of weeks, interviewing everyone they could, canvassing the local historical association, the library, and museums for volunteers. “Mostly we would just go downtown, walk into stores, and ask people if they’d be willing to participate,” Eckert says. “We’d go to malls and harass people.”

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I’ve been investigating Zamyatin’s early novels (or novellas, if you prefer), and right now I’m reading his 1914 На куличках [The back of beyond], translated by Walker Foard as A Godforsaken Hole (Ardis, 1988), in which Andrei Ivanych Polovets escapes the provincial tedium of Tambov to serve as an officer in a Pacific port (apparently Vladivostok, since Ланцепупы gets a mention), where he encounters drunkenness and debauchery; its publication resulted in judicial proceedings against Zamyatin for antimilitarism. What spurs me to post is a perfect example of something that’s impossible to translate unless you have the appropriate literary/cultural, not just linguistic, background. Here’s the passage (from ch. 9):

Впрочем, протрезвившись, Тихмень костил себя олухом и карасем с неменьшим рвением, чем своих ближних, и исполнялся еще большею ненавистью к той субстанции, что играет такие шутки с людьми, и что люди легкомысленно величают индейкой.

Год тому назад… да, это так: уже почти год прошел с того дня, как ироническая индейка так подло посмеялась над Тихменем.

I decided to check out Foard’s translation because I had a strong suspicion that he’d get it wrong, and sure enough:

However, after sobering up, Tikhmen would curse himself as an idiot and a sucker with no less fervor than he had his neighbors, and he infused himself with still more hatred for that substance that plays such games with people and that they so flippantly nickname “spirits.”

A year ago … yes, that’s right: it’s already been almost a year to the day since those ironic “spirits” had so cruelly made fun of Tikhmen.

Rendering карась, literally ‘crucian carp (Carassius carassius),’ as “sucker” is OK (it has a number of slang senses, and that works for several of them), but “spirits” is flat wrong. The word индейка means ‘turkey,’ which clearly made no sense to Foard; he made the reasonable guess from context that it had to do with booze and rendered it “spirits.” What he didn’t know is that Russians have, for unknown reasons and for at least two centuries (it occurs in Gogol’s The Inspector General [Не судьба, батюшка, судьба — индейка] and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time [Пусть теперь решат философы: или судьба индейка, или человек индюк]), said that fate is a turkey: судьба — индейка. With this in mind, we see that what Tikhmen hates is fate, and what comes to my mind as a possible English equivalent is the fickle finger of fate, which was made famous by the 1966 Broadway musical Sweet Charity but which preexisted it — Eric Partridge in his useful if unreliable Dictionary of Catch Phrases (Google Books) dates “fucked by the fickle finger of fate” (“often in the shortened or allusive form the fickle finger of fate”) to c. 1930, “Adopted in UK by 1960 at latest.” So I would propose “and he was filled with even greater hatred for that substance that plays such tricks on people, and to which people frivolously attribute a fickle finger.” You could then render the second occurrence as “It’s been almost a year since the day when Tikhmen got so meanly fucked by the ironic fickle finger,” but that might be a tad too strong for Zamyatin.

Darren Freebury-Jones’ TLS review of Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare, by Rory Loughnane and Willy Maley, includes the following paragraph:

Shakespeare was an innovator among dramatists of the period in attempting to write Welsh accents, although frankly roles such as Fluellen in Henry V and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor often read as though they have lisps, with “beds” spelt “peds”, for instance. Bound up in Shakespeare’s approximation of archipelagic names and accents are stereotypes of the period. The jealous Frank Ford says that he would sooner trust “Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese”, or “an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle”, than his own wife. Welsh people really loved cheese, apparently.

To me, lisp means (in the words of the OED) “To speak with that defect of utterance which consists in substituting for /s/ and /z/ sounds approaching /θ/ and /ð/ ; either by reason of a defect in the organs of speech or as an affectation.” They add “Also, loosely, to speak with child-like utterance, falteringly or imperfectly,” but to me this is a general sort of thing, as in Pope’s “I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came”; I could never use lisp to mean specifically ‘substituting a voiceless consonant for a voiced one.’ But as I have painfully learned over the decades, my English is by no means normative, so I thought I’d check with the assembled Hatters: does this work for you?

Oh, and if you’re wondering about “Archipelagic Shakespeare”: “Loughnane and Maley focus on the Atlantic archipelago: they consider Irish, Scottish and Welsh characters and places in Shakespeare’s plays, and how he named and spelt them.” Seems like a dumb and confusing usage to me, but what do I know.

Pragati K.B. (an interestingly odd byline) writes for the NY Times (archived) about the latest International Booker winner:

Banu Mushtaq’s book “Heart Lamp” last week became the first story collection to win the International Booker Prize. It was also the first work translated from Kannada, a southern Indian language, to receive the award. But “Heart Lamp” is unusual for another reason. It is not a translation of an existing book. Instead, Ms. Mushtaq’s translator, Deepa Bhasthi, selected the stories that make up “Heart Lamp” from among Ms. Mushtaq’s oeuvre of more than 60 stories written over three decades and first published in Kannada-language journals.

The collaboration that won the two women the world’s most prestigious award for fiction translated into English represents an extraordinary empowerment of Ms. Bhasthi in the author-translator relationship. […] Ms. Bhasthi, in a brief separate interview, said that she had chosen the stories in “Heart Lamp” for their varied themes and because they were the ones she “enjoyed reading and knew would work well in English.”

Ms. Mushtaq said she had given Ms. Bhasthi “a free hand and never meddled with her translation.” But consultation was sometimes necessary, Ms. Mushtaq said, because she had used colloquial words and phrases that “people in my community used every day while talking.”

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This is another in my occasional series of posts about people I think should be more widely known. I learned about this remarkable woman via Boris Dralyuk’s post:

Viktoria Yankovskaya (1909-1996) was born in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East, to the family of famed Machurian tiger hunter and, later, Korean resort owner, Yuri Yankovsky (1879-1956). Like his father, the Polish naturalist Michał Jankowski (1841-1912), Yuri had an ambivalent attitude towards Russia, speaking the language but never fully identifying with the culture. The family first settled in the Far East involuntarily. Michał had been imprisoned in Siberia for taking part in the January Uprising of 1863, which sought to free part of Poland from Russian rule, but his love of the flora and fauna of the region inspired him to put down roots first in Irkutsk, then farther east in Primorye. After the death of his first wife, he married a Buryat woman, with whom he had five children, including Yuri.

The younger Yankovsky was practically born on horseback with a rifle in his hands. After returning from his studies of agricultural practices in Texas and Illinois, he took over the management of the family estate, marrying the daughter of an important shipbuilder and fathering five children, including Viktoria. During the Civil War, the family fled to northern Korea. They established a resort for émigrés, where Yul Brynner—then a little boy—spent his summers. When Soviet troops entered Korea in 1945, Yuri was arrested for having supplied meat to the Japanese army. He died in the camps.

Yuri’s son Valery (1911-2010) was also arrested and sentenced to a twenty-year term in the camps, but he survived and was released in 1957. Viktoria too was detained by the NKVD, but since she had only recently given birth to her son, she was spared. Instead of being sent to the camps, she was ordered to organize a collective farm. She did as she was commanded and continued to work on the farm until 1953, when she was able to escape to Hong Kong and, from there, to Chile. In 1961, she immigrated to California, settling near the Russian River, where she lived out the rest of her days.

Viktoria’s collection of stories of life in the wild, titled It Happened in Korea [«Это было в Корее»], appeared to critical acclaim in 1935. Although she had written poems from early childhood, she only gathered a handful for publication in 1978, titling the collection Across the Lands of Dispersal. This volume was reprinted, with additional poems and a selection of stories, in Vladivostok in 1993.

Boris translates (with his usual stylishness) her poem Завещание (Will and Testament); you should click through to his post for that and for a couple of photos of the much-traveled heroine looking so fierce you would definitely want her on your side in a bar fight. And at this Russian page there are more poems, as well as an introduction from which we learn that the fine poet Konstantin Balmont considered her descriptions of the Far East in «Это было в Корее» to be as good as anything Mikhail Prishvin wrote, which is high praise. (By the way, although the book claims to have been published in Korea, it seems clear it was actually printed in Harbin, the center of Russian emigré life in China until Shanghai took over that position.)

This NY Times story by Andrew Higgins (archived) is a depressingly unsurprising tale of how right-wing jerks have glommed onto something popular — in this case, “an item of clothing traditionally worn by villagers” in Romania — and used it as a symbol of their regressive views, so that normal people who just liked wearing it are shying away from it. But the element of Hattic interest is the name of the garment:

Diana Sosoaca, a far-right firebrand, has made the blouse — known in Romanian as “ie,” pronounced “ee-yeh” — a central part of her political brand. She rarely appears in public dressed in anything else.

I was, of course, struck by the minimalist name; it isn’t in my (fairly minimalist) Romanian-English dictionary, but Wiktionary came to my rescue:

ie f (plural ii)

traditional Romanian embroidered blouse

The etymology is (like the appropriation) unsurprising, but it’s quite pleasing:

Inherited from Latin (vestis) līnea (“linen garment”). Compare Old Spanish linia (“a kind of garment”). Doublet of linie (“line”), a later borrowing.

Like French eau < aqua, it has managed to hang onto its inherited form despite severe consonantal erosion. And another interesting thing is its homonym:
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Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org has a Strong Language post about a notable development in sweary singing:

It wouldn’t be the annual Eurovision Song Contest without some sort of controversy. Most years the controversy is political in nature. The 2025 contest was no different in this regard, but in addition to the usual political rhubarb, this year’s contest saw a dispute over a certain four-letter word in lyrics of one of the entries.

The song in question was Malta’s entry in the contest: “Serving,” originally titled “Kant,” performed by Maltese singer Miriana Conte and written by Conte, Benjamin “BNJI” Schmid, Sarah Evelyn Fuller, and Matthew “Muxu” Mercieca. The song was released in January 2025.

The chorus features the phrase “Serving kant,” and Dave explains:

Kant, the only Maltese word in the otherwise English-language song, means singing in Maltese, and the word is descended from the Latin cantus, meaning song. The aural similarity to the the English word cunt is obvious, and the phrase serving cunt is ball culture slang meaning to be simultaneously bold, confident, and feminine, a quality that Conte exudes in her performances. (Ball culture is an African-American and LatinX LGBTQ+ subculture with antecedents that date back to nineteenth-century drag balls.)

The song is an anthem of feminine power, and the pun is quite clearly intentional.

Sadly, Mrs. Grundy intervened:

After complaints from the BBC Radio, which by UK regulations could not broadcast the word cunt before 9 pm, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) required the lyrics be changed. Conte reluctantly complied, changing the title of the song and replacing the lyric kant with aahh.

At any rate, I’m glad to have learned a pungent new phrase.