languagehat.com

Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, this intriguing news item:

A researcher in the field of ancient Iranian culture and languages announced that a hitherto undocumented trilingual inscription has been discovered on the hillside around the tomb of Darius in Naqshe-Rustam. The discovery of the inscription, which had remained hidden under moss and lichen for over two millennia, is of great importance in the field of ancient Iranian studies and ancient linguistics, said French archaeologist Werther Henkelman. The inscription is written in the Persian, Elamite and Babylonian languages, and is of particular importance to linguists as it adds new verbs to all three ancient languages ​​in which it is inscribed. “It is still hoped that in the area of Naqshe-Rustam, which has been explored continuously for decades, other such valuable inscriptions will be discovered”, added Hansklmann.

There are some nice pictures of the site, but I would rather have been told what the verbs are.

Jason Kottke posts about a nicely done chart:

From Matt Baker of UsefulCharts, this chart traces the evolution of our familiar alphabet from its Proto-Sinaitic roots circa 1850-1550 BC. It’s tough to see how the pictographic forms of the original script evolved into our letters; aside from the T and maybe M & O, there’s little resemblance.

Baker has also done a spectacular-looking Writing Systems of the World. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Tim Parks often has interesting things to say about translation, and I’ve linked to his essays before; here’s a recent one from NYRDaily:

Do the beliefs we hold about literature add up to something consistent and coherent? Or are they little more than random pieties? Take two crucial notions I heard repeatedly last year. First, that in a fine work of literature, every word counts, perfection has been achieved, nothing can be moved—a claim I’ve seen made for writers as prolix (and diverse) as Victor Hugo and Jonathan Franzen. Second, that translators are creative artists in their own right, co-authoring the text they translate, a fine translation being as unique and important as the original work. Mark Polizzotti makes this claim in Sympathy for the Traitor (2018), but any number of scholars in the field of Translation Studies would agree.

Can these two positions be reconciled? Doesn’t translating a work of literature inevitably involve moving things around and altering many of the relations between the words in the original? In which case, either the original’s alleged perfection has been overstated, or the translation is indeed, as pessimists have often supposed, a fine but somewhat flawed copy. Unless, that is, we are going to think of a translation as a quite different work with its own inner logic and inspiration, only casually related to that foreign original. In which case, English readers will be obliged to wonder whether they have ever read Tolstoy, Proust, or Mann, and not, rather, Constance Garnett, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, or Helen Lowe-Porter. Or more recently, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, or Lydia Davis or Michael Henry Heim.

How perplexing. One of the problems in this debate is that most readers are only familiar with translated texts in their own languages. They cannot contemplate the supposed perfection of the foreign original, and when the translation delights them, they rightly thank the translator for it and are happy to suppose that the work “stands shoulder to shoulder with the source text,” as Polizzotti puts it. It makes these readers’ own experience seem more important. Alternatively, when they rejoice over the perfection of Jane Austen, Henry James, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, they do not see what foreign translations have done to the work as it travels around the world.

I too have been vaguely bothered by that “every word counts, perfection has been achieved” claim, so often made and so unlikely if you think about it. He continues with just the kind of thing I like, an analysis of two examples, one from English into Italian and one from Italian into English. I’ll let you read them at the link; here I want to foreground the start of his first example, from Henry James’ story “The Altar of the Dead”: “He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.” I understand this to mean that Stransom didn’t like skimpy celebrations of anniversaries, and liked them even less when they were puffed up into an attempt at grandeur. This is the way the Italian translator understood it (“Lui non le poteva soffrire, povero Stransom le celebrazioni scialbe, e ancor più detestava quelle pretenziose”), but it is not how Parks reads it; he says “The story of the fiancée’s death allows us to realize that ‘lean’ has the sense of unhappy (as in the lean and fat cows of Pharaoh’s dream),” and faults the translator for draining it of its Biblical resonance. I think Parks is simply misreading the text. What say you?

Joseph Norwood cherry-picks the “wonderfully strange” names created by early Puritans; I presume many of us have heard of Praise-God Barebone, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg:

A wide variety of Hebrew names came into common usage beginning in 1560, when the first readily accessible English Bible was published. But by the late 16th century many Puritan communities in Southern Britain saw common names as too worldly, and opted instead to name children after virtues or with religious slogans as a way of setting the community apart from non-Puritan neighbors. Often, Puritan parents chose names that served to remind the child about sin and pain.

Many Puritan names started to die out after 1662, when the newly restored monarch, Charles II, introduced new laws that cracked down on nonconformist religions and consolidated the power of the Anglican Church. Despite this, some of the names have remained in common use in Anglophone countries.

I’ve collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names.

Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar! Continent Walker! Humiliation Hynde! (“Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.”) NoMerit Vynall! Sorry-for-sin Coupard! Kill-sin Pimple!! There’s plenty more where those came from; go visit the link.

QuartzAfrica reports on a surprising linguistic survival:

The Patagonian desert in southern Argentina is a harsh environment. Little seems to thrive on its seemingly endless red plains and parched land. Yet in this unlikely place there is a unique bilingual community. It’s made up of the Afrikaans and Spanish-speaking descendants of the about 650 South African Boers, who came to Patagonia in the first decade of the twentieth century. […]

The first Boer generations in Patagonia eked out an isolated living. But a cultural shift began in the 1950s as the settlers increased contact with nearby communities in Sarmiento and Comodoro Rivadavia. Today, older members of the community—those over 60—still speak Afrikaans, though their dominant language is Spanish. As the younger generations, which only speak Spanish, become fully integrated into Argentine society, the bilingual community is quickly disappearing.

To many, Patagonian Afrikaans is a relic of the past. Against the odds, however, a renaissance has begun.

As part of this, our project at the University of Michigan, entitled “From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement”, is conducting innovative research on the Patagonian Boers and their two languages. The value of studying this extraordinary community is hard to overstate.

The Patagonian Afrikaans dialect, spoken nowhere else, preserves elements of Afrikaans from before 1925, when the South African government recognized it as an official language. It thus provides a unique window onto the history of Afrikaans from a period before its dialectal varieties were reduced through standardization. […]

The community is, in a way, like a time capsule, reflecting pronunciation and syntax from an earlier era. For example, the Afrikaans word for nine—“nege”—is pronounced niəxə in modern South Africa, but with a hard “g,” as niəgə, in Patagonia.

Much more information, and images (including some scrumptious-looking desserts), at the link. Thanks, jack!

Nick Nicholas has posted about Karamanlidika orthography, an absolutely fascinating account of ways in which Turkish words were written in Greek script with greater or lesser degrees of phonetic accuracy. He explains why that was difficult and gives striking examples of how hard the writing system of Greek can be anyway (Greek-speakers pronounce Δάντης ‘Dante’ as /ðandis/ or /ðadis/, and λούμπεν ‘Lumpenproletariat’ as /luben/; compare the uncertainty of Russians about when to pronounce е as ё /yo/). I might not have posted it here, because I just posted yesterday about the return of Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος, and I really shouldn’t turn LH into an affiliate of that fine site. But when I read this passage, about writing [ʃ] with a sigma surmounted by three dots in a triangular pattern (clearly modeled on the Arabic system), I couldn’t resist sharing it:

I’ve asked Peter [Mackridge], and he’s sent me a sample from the satirical comedy Το σαγανάκι της τρέλας. (Not “The frying pan of madness”, let alone “The saganaki of madness”: contemporary Greek σαγανάκι “small frying pan”, and any dish prepared in a small frying pan, like fried cheese, is a diminutive of σαγάνι < Turkish sahan “copper dish”. The Turkish word here is the unrelated sağanak: “The storm of madness”.) The comedy is attributed to Rigas Feraios, and was published in Lia Brad Chisacof. 2001. Ρήγας. Ανέκδοτα κείμενα, Athens. the text is published alongside the manuscript, and he has sent me two instances of the novel diacritic in question […]

Talk about your linguistic coincidences! As a lover of the cheesy wonder that is saganaki, I will never think of that play as anything but The Saganaki of Madness. And have I mentioned how happy I am that Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος is back? I look forward to many more tidbits about Greek linguistic history, and I urge you to add it to your RSS feed or bookmark it or whatever people do these days.

Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος is back! Nick has already posted several times, so before he races too far ahead, I want to quote from his post from a few days ago, Phanariot: an apology for Schleicherian bias. It describes a problem that has long afflicted linguistics, and frankly confesses that he has had to struggle with it himself:

Modern Greek historical linguistics has had some blind spots it’s needed to get past. That you need to understand Kartvelian languages to work out Pontic, for example. Or that Greek borrowed words from other languages even when it isn’t obvious where they did. Or that there is a lot more Puristic in Modern Standard Greek than the ostensive victors of the diglossia wars would like to think.

And a more pervasive bias than that, one I’ve shared, is a Herderian and Schleicherian view of language change, as tied up with the expression of ethnicity, and as paralleling the evolution of lifeforms. There are sophisticated takes on those views which are still current: historical linguistics continues to have a lot to learn from evolutionary biology, and much of sociolinguistics is about the nexus between language and identity.

There are also unsophisticated takes on those views. Not just Herder’s Blood and Soil nationalist romanticism, or Schleicher’s original notion that there are primitive languages for primitive peoples (or even his subtle variation, that there are overcomplicated languages for primitive peoples). Those have been rejected in polite company; but there are lingering romantic notions in thinking about language change that have outlived them. For example, that rural and oral language is the only true object of study of the historical linguist, and that urban and written language is subject to contaminating, artificial influences, and of secondary interest, if of any interest at all. It’s a naturalistic bias, and it’s a puristic bias. You can see how easily it can turn to cultural purism, with the untutored village folk seen as the only true teachers of the language, and with the learnèd influence on the language derogated, if not disavowed; something that gets in the way of forming an accurate picture of how Standard Modern Greek works to this day. […]

[Read more…]

I’m reading Markevich’s 1873 Марина изъ Алаго-Рога (Marina from Aly Rog) and was perplexed by the following passage (young Marina, radicalized by a teacher, is arguing politics with a couple of aristocrats, and has just asked why it was necessary to “save Russia”):

— Вы хотѣли бы… чтобы Россіи не было?…
— Нѣтъ, не то, чтобъ ея совсѣмъ не было, объясняла она пресерьезно,– а для чего быть ей такой огромной… Ѳедорой такой! примолвила она, смѣясь. А чтобъ были все маленькія общины, а главное съ народнымъ правленіемъ, чтобы граждане сами управляли собой…

“You would rather… that Russia didn’t exist?”

“No, I don’t mean that it shouldn’t exist at all,” she explained very seriously, “but why does it need to be so huge… such a Fedora!” she added, laughing. “But that it should consist entirely of small communes, and the main thing is popular rule, so that the citizens would rule themselves…”

Who or what is this Fedora? It’s obviously not the hat, which wasn’t so called for another decade (see this LH post), and I don’t see how the Byzantine empress would fit here. Did the name have a particular connotation in Russia of the 1870s?

A nice little squib from the Academia Canaria de la Lengua describing how guagua ‘bus’ originated in Cuba, probably from English wagon:

Tal vez habría que empezar diciendo que la palabra guagua se usa en la expresión de guagua y como sustantivo, equivalente en este caso a autobús. La expresión de guagua, ‘de balde’, es más antigua y se registra en América y España en el siglo XIX. El cubano Esteban Pichardo (1836) fue el primero en registrarla, según Corominas. En cambio, este autor en su Diccionario Crítico Etimológico no da fecha para la documentación de guagua ‘autobús’, aunque para él dicho término “es cubano desde luego”, y opina que puede ser adaptación del inglés wagon, ‘carruaje’. Los americanos, según nos informa, denominaban así los carruajes de transporte militar y un automóvil mediano empleado para el transporte gratuito de personas. Visto esto, es probable que, después de la guerra por la independencia de Cuba (1898), la inmediata ocupación americana y la posterior dependencia económica, en la isla antillana estuvieran en uso dicho tipo de vehículos.

The second paragraph describes how it showed up later in the Canaries, where it replaced the local term jardinera. Thanks, jack!

Last year I waxed enthusiastic about David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past and described his take on the history of Indo-European. As I read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s cover story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I realized it was shaping up as a takedown of Reich, featuring a group of archeologists who are resentful of his strongarm tactics and the kind of dominance that makes it hard for dissenters to get published. Having seen the kind of linguistics I support suffer a similar fate at the hands of Chomsky, I was sympathetic, but what exactly were the arguments against him? Alas, they turned out to consist mainly of this two-pronged attack: that his migration theories are bad because the Nazis used migration theories and because they contradict traditions about where the locals come from. These points are equally unscientific. I wrote in that earlier post that I was “pleased that the idiotic reluctance to consider migration theories because the Nazis favored them seems to have faded away”; I stand by the sentiment and am sorry that the celebration of fading was premature. As for the traditions, I quote from the Times story: “The ni-Vanuatu, for example, take for granted their eternal ties to the archipelago; their oral traditions ascribe their origins to some nonhuman feature of the landscape, their first ancestors having emerged from a stone, say, or a coconut tree.” And it ends with what Lewis-Kraus presumably considers a killer quote; the context is a visit to see some cave art:

Archaeologists said they were made by men who ate charcoal, chewed it up and spat it back onto the walls. The oldest dated back 2,600 years and looked at once hauntingly archaic and vividly recent. “They’re not Lapita,” Sanhambath said, gesturing at the drawings, which had been dated by radiocarbon to shortly after the Lapita period ended. “But so what?” Besides, as much faith as he had in what the archaeologists said about pottery or bones, he just couldn’t bring himself to believe them when they said these paintings were made by ancient men.

“These paintings,” he said quietly in the cave dark, “were made by the spirits.”

Why exactly are we supposed to take that sort of thing more seriously than the Early Modern insistence that humanity was 4,000 years old? I simply don’t know what to say when confronted with someone who looks at DNA evidence, weighs it against traditions about people coming from stones and/or trees, and awards the palm to the latter. That’s not to say, of course, that Reich must be correct because he studies DNA, simply that stones and spirits have nothing to do with whether he is or not. I am incompetent to discuss that, since I lack the requisite knowledge, but I have commenters who know a lot about it, and I hope they will weigh in.

Incidentally, Lewis-Kraus says Lapita culture is named for “a place called Lapita in New Caledonia”; the Wikipedia article says “The term ‘Lapita’ was coined by archaeologists after mishearing a word in the local Haveke language, xapeta’a, which means ‘to dig a hole’ or ‘the place where one digs’, during the 1952 excavation in New Caledonia.” That supports my sense from a college course that archaeologists aren’t always as careful about language as they might be.