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Over at The Conversation, Charles Kemp, Temuulen Khishigsuren, Ekaterina Vylomova, and Terry Regier discuss a much-discussed topic: Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages:

Languages are windows into the worlds of the people who speak them – reflecting what they value and experience daily. So perhaps it’s no surprise different languages highlight different areas of vocabulary. Scholars have noted that Mongolian has many horse-related words, that Maori has many words for ferns, and Japanese has many words related to taste.

Some links are unsurprising, such as German having many words related to beer, or Fijian having many words for fish. The linguist Paul Zinsli wrote an entire book on Swiss-German words related to mountains. In our recently-published study we took a broad approach towards understanding the links between different languages and concepts. Using computational methods, we identified areas of vocabulary that are characteristic of specific languages, to provide insight into linguistic and cultural variation. […]

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I have just learned a splendid word. OED (entry revised 2011):

ɴᴏᴜɴ
1. More fully †rouncival pease, rouncival pea. A large variety of garden or field pea. Also (in plural): peas of this variety. Now chiefly historical.

1570 Set (as as [sic] a deintie) thy runcyfall pease.
T. Tusser, Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry (new edition) f. 15
[…]
1622 The Rouncefall, great Beanes, and early ripening Peason.
M. Drayton, 2nd Part Poly-olbion xx. 12
[…]
1997 Dubbed rouncivals, the sweet-tasting green peas had become all the rage by the 17th century.
San Diego Union-Tribune (Nexis) 16 December h19
2005 It’s a special fork, not a spoon at all. Used..for eating so-called rouncival peas.
J. Miller, Murder’s out of Tune 21

That “not a spoon at all” made me think of Lear’s “runcible spoon”; OED s.v. runcible:

Origin uncertain. Perhaps an entirely arbitrary formation, or perhaps an arbitrary alteration of rouncival adj. or rouncival n.

At any rate, here are the rest of the definitions for rouncival:
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Alan Yuhas writes for the NY Times (archived) about a very cool find:

Torn, folded and stitched, rare tales of Merlin shapeshifting into King Arthur’s court and Sir Gawain gaining power from the sun were bound into a book of property records from the 1500s. They went unnoticed for centuries, stacked among the records of an English manor and then among the millions of volumes of a university library. At least until an archivist took another look, setting off a yearslong project to identify and then reassemble the medieval manuscript, which someone in Tudor England had taken apart and used to help hold together a ledger.

The manuscript turned out to be a priceless find: extremely rare stories of Arthurian romance, copied by a scribe between 1275 and 1315, and part of the “Suite Vulgate du Merlin,” an Old French sequel to the start of the Arthur legend. Cambridge University researchers announced their findings this week and published a digitized version of the manuscript online.

There are fewer than 40 copies of the Suite Vulgate sequel known to exist, and no two are exactly the same. “Each manuscript copy of a medieval text, handwritten by a scribe, is going to be changed little by little,” said Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, the French specialist at the university library. “As the copies come along, each scribe imposes his own taste.” […]

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Jim Bisso’s The Morphology of Peevology Facebook post says (I’ve added links):

Language Jones does a good job of explaining unaccusative verbs (as opposed to unergative ones). What’s that? Per the article in Wikipedia: “In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb’s subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice.”

For example, in English “the tree fell”, “the window broke”, &c. It is related to the reason why some verbs in, e.g., French or German use “to be” as the auxiliary verb in past tenses, instead of “to have”: “je suis tombé” (I have fallen) versus “j’ai travaillé” (I have worked). (It was first described, in 1978, by David Perlmutter.)

Unaccusative verbs have been mentioned a few times at LH, at length in this 2012 comment by Wimbrel:

In linguistics this distinction is encapsulated in the contrast between unergative and unaccusative verbs, i.e., intransitive verbs whose subject is, from a semantic perspective, the doer (agent) or the experiencer (patient) of the action. In Romance and Germanic languages (like French, Italian, German, and Dutch) that have two different auxiliaries for forming the perfective past (preterite), unergative verbs take “to have” (avere/avoir/haben/etc.) as the auxiliary and unaccusative verbs take “to be” (essere/être/sein/etc.). Vestiges of the unergative/unaccusative distinction seem to have survived as late as Early Modern English (hence “the Lord is come”). Radford’s Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction gives some examples from Shakespeare, like “How chance thou art returned so soon?” (Comedy of Errors, I.ii) “She is fallen into a pit of ink.” (Much Ado About Nothing, IV.i)

The Wikipedia article provides the history of the concept and gives examples in English and other languages, notably Russian: “Unlike the subtle evidence for unaccusatives in English, Russian provides strong tests to determine unaccusativity.” I’m hoping making a separate post of it will help the concept (which was invented just as I was dropping out of grad school) stick in my head. Oh, and that Language Jones video is indeed good; it ends up showing how such verbs are reflected in brain scans, aphasia, and child speech.

Peter E. Gordon, reviewing Paul Reitter’s Englishing of Capital in the LRB (3 April 2025; archived), provides one of those analyses of translations that give me so much pleasure and that I can’t resist passing along. After describing Engels’ irritation with the first English excerpts (“Mr Broadhouse is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx”) and his hard work on the first complete version, Gordon proceeds to general considerations:

The German word for translation, übertragen, implies that we can simply ‘carry over’ meaning from one language to another. But no two meanings are wholly alike; the act of translation seems, inevitably, to be an act of infidelity. Perhaps this is true of the translation of any text. But among scholars of Capital the question of what Marx meant is burdened with added importance: a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works. In this respect Engels’s comparison to the Bible was apt. When Saint Jerome produced the Vulgate, he obeyed the principle of ad fontes: he went back to the Hebrew original as the spring from which revelation flows. When Marxists wrestle over a term or phrase in Capital they honour the same philological method, treating the original as the privileged source of instruction.

Yet no translation can be definitive, for the obvious reason that language changes over time. A translation that once seemed to hit the mark will later seem stale or imprecise. What’s more, in this case, there isn’t even agreement on what should count as the original text. Marxists continue to debate whether Le Capital in the first French edition should be seen as a welcome improvement on the German edition of Das Kapital (published in Hamburg in 1867) or an unfortunate simplification.

The frontispiece of the French translation reads: ‘Traduction de M. J. Roy, entièrement révisée par l’auteur.’ In a letter to Nikolai Danielson (who translated the first volume of Capital into Russian), Marx confessed that he had felt it necessary to ‘smooth out’ (aplatir) the French version. […]

Then he gets down to business:
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Via Edwin Battistella’s Facebook post, I was alerted to Volume 100, Issue 1 of American Speech. I don’t have access to it, but I enjoy just reading the table of contents:

Louise Pound, H. L. Mencken, and the Founding of American Speech: In Memory of Ron Butters
Connie C. Eble

The Politics of Prescriptivism: One Style Manual, One Century
Kristin VanEyk; Anne Curzan

DARE, Literature, and Enregistered Regional Identities
Michael Adams

Algae, Fungi, Binomial Nomenclature, and the Search for “Correct” Pronunciations
Dale F. Coye

The Representation of Earlier African American Vernacular English By Charles W. Chesnutt
Irene Kimbara

Describing 400 Years of American English Can be Like Comforting, Super Interesting, and Literally Challenging
David Johnson

Discovering the Many Englishes of North America
Samantha M. Litty

And at least we can read the first page of each! (In the VanEyk/Curzan piece, the manual in question is the New York Times style guide: “By tracing the changing prescriptions over the decades, this study highlights the complicated but important nature of the politics of prescriptivism.”)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s New Yorker piece on Catullus (archived) begins arrestingly “Was it something to do with blow jobs?” He’s reminiscing about a collegiate struggle with a poem:

In class that morning, I’d been called on to sight-translate a handful of lines by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the first-century-B.C.E. poet who, the professor had warned us, was among the most erudite and sophisticated, the most doctus, of all Roman writers. In the poem at hand, Catullus ruefully recalls having served on the staff of a provincial governor, bitterly referring to him—because he didn’t let his subordinates enrich themselves at the expense of the locals—as an irrumator. When I stumbled across the unfamiliar noun, I hazarded a guess: “Cheapskate?” Professor Stocker, who’d got his Ph.D. before the Second World War and liked to wear bow ties, pursed his lips, made a face, and declared, a little too loudly, “You may render that word as ‘bastard.’ ”

So I did. But something about his discomfiture had made me curious. That evening, in the library, I took down a Latin dictionary from the shelf and flipped to the “I”s. Within moments, I saw why he’d hurried me past the word.

He goes on to talk about the two Catulluses, the “impetuous, often swaggering young writer” who tossed obscene insults around and “the doctus poeta, the refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions”:

This Catullus produced a handful of longer works that include a baroquely structured mini-epic about the marriage of Achilles’ parents and a gender-bending showstopper that the University of Virginia classicist Jenny Strauss Clay has called “the strangest poem in Latin”: a breathless narrative, cast in an extremely rare and agonizingly complex meter, about an Athenian youth named Attis, who, in a frenzy of devotion to the cult of the Eastern goddess Cybele, castrates himself. Much of the poem takes the form of an anguished monologue the young man delivers after he wakes up the next day, short on body parts and long on regrets.

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Nicola Davis at the Graun sez Bonobos may combine words in ways previously thought unique to humans:

Bonobos use a combination of calls to encourage peace with their partner during mating rituals, research suggests. The discovery is part of a study that suggests our close evolutionary cousins can string together vocalisations to produce phrases with meanings that go beyond the sum of their parts – something often considered unique to human language. “Human language is not as unique as we thought,” said Dr Mélissa Berthet, the first author of the research from the University of Zürich.

Writing in the journal Science, Berthet and colleagues said that in the human language, words were often combined to produce phrases that either had a meaning that was simply the sum of its parts, or a meaning that was related to, but differed from, those of the constituent words. “‘Blond dancer’ – it’s a person that is both blond and a dancer, you just have to add the meanings. But a ‘bad dancer’ is not a person that is bad and a dancer,” said Berthet. “So bad is really modifying the meaning of dancer here.” It was previously thought animals such as birds and chimpanzees were only able to produce the former type of combination, but scientists have found bonobos can create both.

The team recorded 700 vocalisations from 30 adult bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, checking the context of each against a list of 300 possible situations or descriptions. The results reveal bonobos have seven different types of call, used in 19 different combinations. Of these, 15 require further analysis, but four appear to follow the rules of human sentences. Yelps – thought to mean “let’s do that” – followed by grunts – thought to mean “look at what I am doing”, were combined to make “yelp-grunt”, which appeared to mean “let’s do what I’m doing”. The combination, the team said, reflected the sum of its parts and was used by bonobos to encourage others to build their night nests.

The other three combinations had a meaning apparently related to, but different from, their constituent calls. For example, the team found a peep – which roughly means “I would like to …” – followed by a whistle – appeared to mean “let’s stay together” – could be combined to create “peep-whistle”. This combination was used to smooth over tense social situations, such as during mating or displays of prowess. The team speculated its meaning was akin to “let’s find peace”.

The team said the findings in bonobos, together with the previous work in chimps, had implications for the evolution of language in humans, given all three species showed the ability to combine words or vocalisations to create phrases.

As the faithful reader may suspect, I am extremely dubious about all this, but hey, I report, you decide. Thanks, Trevor!

Jonathon Green has published another of his quarterly updates for Green’s Dictionary of Slang, in which he focuses mainly on one of those obscure language folk who I think should be better known:

The work of the independent Australian scholar Dr Gary Simes (1950-2017) has already been sampled for GDoS. Aside from a variety of general publications, often on gay themes, his Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang, featuring two hitherto little-known glossaries of criminal jargon, was published in 1993, and a major discussion of early gay speech, ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’, was featured in the specialist journal Dictionaries volume 26 (2005). When he died in 2017 he was at work on his magnum opus, the Dictionary of the Language of Sex and Sexuality in Modern English. Like the OED and my own lexicon of slang, it is prepared ‘on historical principles’, i.e. underpinning each headword and its senses with a chronological list of citations of usage.

It would, undoubtedly, have been a major contribution to lexicography in general and that of (gay) sexuality in particular. Nonetheless, even though the project could not be finished, and absent substantial funding will never be so,² Dr Simes had typed up a manuscript from the many file cards which – he was no fan of computers – held his research. The ms is far from complete, but a substantial amount exists and much of the research, especially as regards slang, has never so far been included in a dictionary.

It is thus a text that deserves wider circulation. To that end, and thanks to the trustees of Dr Simes’ estate and GDoS contributing editor James Lambert, who is responsible for safeguarding and overseeing the use of the physical materials, we have been allowed to see the ms, and to extract from it for GDoS use such slang-based material as seems valuable. This is a lengthy task and will doubtless consume many months work. Extracted text will appear under the tag Simes:DLSS and new tranches will become available as the regular 90-day updates continue.

I am in equal parts charmed and annoyed by scholars who refuse to use computers; thank goodness his work won’t disappear due to the good offices and hard work of both Lambert and Green, and I look forward to Green’s essay on the decline of reference publishing.

I’ve been putting off Maxim Gorky’s most famous play, The Lower Depths (Russian, English) — probably the most famous thing he ever wrote — for decades; it’s one of the few Famous Works of Russian Literature I had never read, even in translation. I didn’t have high regard for Gorky as a writer, and I was afraid it would just be a slush of socially significant characters saying socially significant things, and who needs that (except the Party, comrade)? But I noticed that Criterion Channel had filmed versions by two of my favorite directors, Jean Renoir (Les Bas-fonds) and Akira Kurosawa (どん底, Donzoko), and I didn’t want to see them without first becoming acquainted with the source material, so I plunged in.

As those of you familiar with the play will have expected, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, it’s chock full of social significance, but it’s also got well-drawn characters and good meaty language, so I enjoyed it; one of the characters, Satin, is fond of randomly spouting impressive words he ran across (Органон [organon]… Сикамбр [one of the Sicambri]… Макробиотика [macrobiotics]… транс-сцедентальный [transcendental]…), which of course gave me extra pleasure. (Incidentally, I hadn’t realized that macrobiotic goes back to the 18th century in the now obsolete sense “Inclined or tending to prolong life; relating to the prolongation of life”: 1797 “Hence arises a particular science, the Macrobiotic, or the Art of prolonging it [sc. life], which forms the subject of the present work… The object of the medical art is health; that of the macrobiotic, long life.”) You can read a clumsy but reasonably accurate plot summary at the Wikipedia page; what I want to focus on here is the argument that goes on throughout much of the play about lies and truth, a theme that’s come up here more than once (in Crime and Punishment, in The Devils, in Rasputin’s Downstream). I’ll quote the (archaic but online) 1922 English version by Jenny Covan (from the introduction: “Here for the first time, the vigor, the virility, the humanity and the humor of the original survive the transfer from the Russian tongue to our own, without mysterious and vaguely symbolic ‘meanings’ gratuitously appended”) and provide a bit of the Russian for those who want to search the above-linked text for the original.
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