languagehat.com

Sharon Arbuthnot, a researcher and editor for the Dictionary of the Irish Language, reports for RTÉ on the revision of eDIL:

Updates to the Oxford English Dictionary deliver a regular batch of new words and phrases. […] In contrast, new additions to a dictionary of medieval language are not novel terms that have appeared recently in speech and writing, but lost words that have been rediscovered. These can include words that have been hidden in centuries-old manuscripts, words in published texts that were not picked up previously by dictionary-makers and words that have been misunderstood in the past. […]

The most authoritative source of medieval Irish is the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) which covers the language from earliest evidence up to around the year 1650. Over the past five years, I have been working as part of a team of researchers from Queen’s University, Belfast, and the University of Cambridge to revise and expand the dictionary’s contents. We have changed definitions, supplied evidence to show that certain words were in circulation at an earlier date than was previously thought and even deleted a few items which proved not to be real words at all!

But when the updated version of the dictionary is launched at the end of this month, it seems likely that the main talking points will be the newly created entries. More than 500 entirely new headwords have been added, many of them testifying to the quirky and colourful language that is so characteristic of medieval Irish. They also provide fascinating titbits of information on all manner of subjects from food to festivals, superstitions to medicine and society to wildlife.

As a taster of what is to come, here are 10 of my favourite new words and phrases, all notable for different reasons and certainly worth looking up as soon as the updated version of the dictionary becomes available online.

How I love this sort of thing! Here’s my personal favorite of the notable newbies:

(7) Ngetal was the early Irish name for the letter-cluster ng, which we still find in Modern Irish expressions such as i nGaillimh for “in Galway”. Though it seems very unusual today to see an Irish word spelt in this way, there are several examples of this term, so it is clear that ngetal not only meant “ng” but also began with ng-.

I use eDIL a lot, and am delighted they’re updating it. Thanks, Trevor!

Cyril Connolly is pretty much forgotten now, which is not a terrible injustice, but this is a nice pungent passage from his 1938 essay “Illusions of Likeness” (courtesy of Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):

The last ten years have witnessed a welcome decay in pedantic snobbery about dead languages. A knowledge of Greek is no longer the hallmark of a powerful intellectual caste, who visit with Housmanly scorn any solecism from the climbers outside it. The dons who jeer at men of letters for getting their accents wrong command no more sympathy than doctors who make fun of psychiatrists or osteopaths; the vast vindictive rages which scholars used to vent on those who knew rather less than themselves seem no longer so admirable, like the contempt which those people who at some time learned how to pronounce Buccleuch and Harewood have for those who are still learning. The don-in-the-manger is no longer formidable. There was a time when most people were ashamed to say that The Oxford Book of Greek Verse required a translation. That time is over. We shall not refer to it again except to say that if people as teachable as ourselves couldn’t be taught enough Greek in ten years to construe any piece unseen, as we can with French, or with any other modern language, then that system by which we were taught should be scrapped, and those stern nincompoops by whom we were instructed should come before us, like the burghers of Calais, in sackcloth and ashes with halters round their necks.

Gilleland quotes it from Connolly’s collection The Condemned Playground. Essays: 1927-1944 (London: Routledge, 1945), which is available online if you want to investigate further. Also, Buccleuch is pronounced /bəˈkluː/ (bə-KLOO) and Harewood /ˈhɑːrwʊd/ (HAR-wood) — at least in Harewood House, which presumably retains the traditional pronunciation; the village it is in, sadly, has succumbed to the obvious /ˈhɛərwʊd/ (HAIR-wood). O tempora, sic transit!

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!