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David Robson writes for BBC Future (!) about a new analysis of nearly a billion tweets that makes a nice follow-up to yesterday’s post; this one is based on SCIENCE:

The researcher behind the study, Jack Grieve at the University of Birmingham, UK, analysed more than 980 million Tweets in total – consisting of 8.9 billion words – posted between October 2013 and November 2014, and spanning 3,075 of the 3,108 US counties. […] The result was a list of 54 terms […]

Having compiled this new lexicon, Grieve next used Twitter’s geocoded data to track its origins and spread across the USA. Baeless [‘single’], for instance, appeared to crop up in a few different counties across the south, before building in popularity and then spreading north and west.

In total, Grieve identified five hubs driving linguistic change. In order of importance, they were:

[Read more…]

Morgan Baila presents The Viral Words You Need To Know:

Have you always been on top of all the new, viral words young people say?

Great. Of course you have. But even the trendiest among us now struggle to understand how words that definitely have real meanings don’t seem to be used properly anymore. It used to be enough to Google “What are the new slang words?” but slang itself is pretty irrelevant these days.

Are you ready to be relevant AF?

I hope you’re ready to be relevant AF, because she’s going to clue you in on all the new, viral words young people say! Needless to say, I am ever eager to be hep to the jive, so I dove right in. The first entry was cray ‘crazy’; as she says, “But you knew this one, right?” Right. Then comes Gucci, which “in slang means good, fine, or okay.” Cray! I did not know that! Squad goals is a statement of approval, Bible is an assertion of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, turnt means “being really excited for some upcoming event” or “having fun because you’re drunk.” Whoopee! And “You can use ‘snatched’ where you’d use ‘on fleek'”: got it. But I confess I lost some lexicographic respect when I got to “A ‘plug’ is a shameless and blatant endorsement for a product, person, or brand by a celebrity” — come on, “plug” in that sense is decades old (anybody with OED access care to check first attestation?). Anyway, it’s all good fun. Bathrobe, who sent it to me, asked “Do you know anyone who talks like this?” The answer is no, no I don’t.

Unrelated but also good fun: Ads of Yesteryear (“Peppy jingles and catchy tag lines- they just don’t make ads like these anymore!”). Let Speedee take you back to a time when McDonald’s burgers were 15 cents and “crispy, tender, delicious FRENCH FRIES” only 12. And check out the classy guy with the Dr. Pepper. (Thanks, Jon!)

Cara Giaimo writes about a too-little-discussed topic:

Many performance-related professions and avocations have developed an associated “voice”: a set of specific vocal tics or decisions. Taken together, these mannerisms make up a kind of sonic uniform, immediately clueing a listener into who or what they’re listening to. There’s “Newscaster’s Voice,” for example, characterized by a slow cadence and a refusal to drop letters. There is “NPR” or “Podcast Voice”, which the writer Teddy Wayne has diagnosed as a “plague of pregnant pauses and off-kilter pronunciations,” and which radio host Ira Glass once said arose in direct response to those butter-smooth anchors.

And then there’s Poet Voice, scourge of the open mic and the Pulitzer podium alike. Unsurprisingly, poets are the best at describing Poet Voice: Rich Smith, in CityArts, calls it “a precious, lilting cadence,” in which “every other line [ends] on a down note,” and there are “pauses, within sentences, where pauses, need not go.” According to Smith, today’s egregious Poet Voicers include Louise Glück and Natasha Trethewey, whose fantastic poems are obscured, in performance, by this tendency of their authors. “Poet Voice [ruins] everybody’s evening,” he writes. “[It is] a thick cloud of oratorial perfume.”

Marit J. MacArthur has heard her fair share of Poet Voice. As an English professor and scholar, she has been listening to it for years. […] In a new study published in Cultural Analytics, MacArthur and two colleagues, Georgia Zellou and Lee M. Miller, skipped the human middleman and ran various recorded readings through a rigorous sonic analysis. In other words, they tried to use data to nail down Poet Voice.

You can read the results, and ruminations on the implications at the link; I confess I have mixed feelings. Yes, Poet Voice can easily be overdone, and often is, but on the other hand I despise the reading of poetry as if it were either normal conversation (ignoring line breaks and everything else poetic about it) or as if it were high drama (actors, of course, are frequent offenders here, larding every… line… with emphasis!). Lots of poets, like lots of other people, are simply not good at reading poetry; it’s a specialized skill. I’m reminded of the fate of the New Journalism, which started off as a reaction against the boring just-the-facts style of old-school reporting (“those butter-smooth anchors”) and produced spectacular results in the 1960s when applied by people suited to it, but which quickly degenerated into a tiresome set of mannerisms (as Tom Wolfe said, you have to do the research before you can do the writing). There is no one-size-fits-all way to read poetry (or, indeed, to do most things worth doing). Thanks, Trevor!

BBC News reports on a study that’s suggestive even if it relies on an internet poll:

There is a critical cut-off age for learning a language fluently, according to research. If you want to have native-like knowledge of English grammar, for example, you should ideally start before age 10, say the researchers. People remain highly skilled learners until 17 or 18, when ability tails off.

The findings, in the journal Cognition, come from an online grammar test taken by nearly 670,000 people of different ages and nationalities. […]

When the researchers analysed the data using a computer model, the best explanation for the findings was that grammar-learning was strongest in childhood, persists into teenage years and then drops at adulthood. […]

Study co-author Josh Tenenbaum, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, said: “It’s possible that there’s a biological change. It’s also possible that it’s something social or cultural. […]”

Thanks, Eric! And if you’re into TED talks, here‘s one on “How language shapes the way we think” by Lera Boroditsky (previously on LH); Bathrobe, who sent it to me, says “I didn’t realise that German speakers regarded bridges as graceful and beautiful while Spanish speakers describe them as long and strong.”

Jacob Mikanowski’s LARB essay “A Silver Thread: Islam in Eastern Europe” is somewhat scattershot, basically an excuse to tell a bunch of stories (and good stories they are — I particularly recommend the Evliya Çelebi “strange and comical adventure, a wondrous and foolish gaza,” though it’s not for the squeamish), but this passage is obvious LH material:

The world of Islamic Eastern Europe is an undiscovered continent. Exploring its history means spelunking in obscure journals and forgotten offprints. Even with a good research library at your back, it is a struggle. For literature, the situation is even worse. But there are treasures waiting for the enterprising translator. The task will be difficult though, requiring not just a knowledge of languages and scripts, but an understanding of a whole world of cultural referents that have all but disappeared. To read Naim Frashëri requires not only a command of Albanian, but also of classical and modern Greek, French, Italian, and the high Islamic tradition he absorbed through Arabic, Turkish, and Persian verse.

And who will be the first to unlock the world of Balkan aljamiado literature, that is, literature composed in Bosnian and Albanian (and less frequently in Polish and Belarusian) but written in Arabic letters? Also known as Arebica, this is a type of writing that serves as a perfect metaphor for the region: hybrid in form, plural in content, permeable to influence from east and west. A starting point might be Fejzo Softa’s Ašiklijski Elif-ba, that poet’s erotic introduction to the Arabic script, from which our enterprising translator could move on to the work of Umihana Čuvidina, a Bosnian war widow who commemorated her dead in her 79-verse-long epos The Men of Sarajevo March to War Against Serbia.

So much unknown material out there, and yet they keep translating the same warhorses over and over!

It’s kind of amazing that in over fifteen years of blogging about language I have never had a post about one of the most famous examples of linguistic humor (though commenters have mentioned it frequently), so herewith (via Anatoly, who focuses on Slavic versions) Omniglot’s My hovercraft is full of eels in many languages. If you’re not familiar with the Monty Python sketch where it originated, there are links to a video and a transcript; the introduction says:

It’s possibly the most useful phrase there is, and a handy one to have when you’re asked to say something in a language you’re learning.

Click on any of the phrases that are links to hear them spoken. If you can provide recordings, corrections or additional translations, please contact me.

There follows a long, long list, from Afrikaans (“My skeertuig is vol palings”) to Zulu (“Umkhumbi wami ugcwele ngenyoka zemanzini”) as well as auxiliary and constructed languages; there are Albanian versions in both Gheg and Tosk, and Amharic versions with ‘fish’ and ‘snakes,’ with the sad and surprising explanation “(there is no word for eels in Amharic).” And it ends with “some new idioms I came up with based on this phrase,” from “a few eels short of a hovercraft = somewhat stupid / crazy” to “I could eat a hovercraft full of eels = I could eat a horse.” Enjoy!

Georgina Kenyon’s BBC Travel piece on the Yanyuwa language is (inevitably) larded with nonsense about how “Yanyuwa is a beautiful, poetic language” whose “rhythms sound like the sea it so perfectly describes” and “the Yanyuwa language is intertwined with the animal” (!), but this passage is interesting (and backed up by the Wikipedia article linked above):

What’s especially unusual about Yanyuwa is that it’s one of the few languages in the world where men and women speak different dialects. Only three women speak the women’s dialect fluently now, and Friday is one of few males who still speaks the men’s. Aboriginal people in previous decades were forced to speak English, and now there are only a few elderly people left who remember the language.

Friday told me that the women in his family taught him to speak their tongue as a child. Then in early adolescence, he learned the men’s language from his male relatives. While women have a passive understanding of men’s language, they do not speak it, and vice versa for the men. […]

Women’s words for the shark describe its nurturing side, as a bringer of food and life, while men’s words are more akin to ‘creator’ or ‘ancestor’.

You could be punished if you didn’t speak the right dialect at the right time.

“See, there, to those rocks, if you broke the rules, you could be sent there!” Stephen said, as he gestured towards the barren Vanderlin Rocks. […]

But Yanyuwa does not stop at just dialects for men and women – there are yet more for ceremony and respectful language, too. There was also ‘signing language’, according to Bradley, useful for hunting when people needed to be quiet or sometimes to signal when travellers were entering a sacred place, but few people remember many sign words now. Children also learned ‘string language’ – tying straw or string together in specific patterns to represent sea creatures and food.

Preserving the Yanyuwa language is tied to preserving the culture and creatures of the sea. Linguists like Bradley are working with Friday and other Yanyuwa people to preserve this language in written form. Without their language, it will be hard for the Yanyuwa to preserve their deep understanding of the sea and their home.

Thanks, Trevor!

The servicemen in my family have been army and air force, not navy, so I had been unaware of the charming term “gedunk,” which (per HDAS) means both “ice cream or an ice-cream soda; candy or sweets; (broadly) a snack” (first attested 1927) and “a place where gedunk is sold; (hence) a restaurant, esp. on shipboard” (from 1956). I learned about it from this Wordorigins.org thread, where Richard Hershberger says the following about the origin of the word:

It comes from the comic strip “Harold Teen” that ran from 1919 to 1959. Harold spent much of his time at the Sugar Bowl soda shop eating “Gedunk sundaes.” This transferred to ice cream or other sweet snacks, and from there to where you obtained them.

The dictionary leaves open what was the source of “gedunk” in the comic strip. I think it is mock German for “dunk.” The cartoonist was Carl Frank Ludwig Ed and he went to a Lutheran college in Illinois, so I suspect he grew up with German. And then there is a letter to the editor from a reader “Gretchen” (published in the Belleville News Democrat of January 27, 1925, copied from the Chicago Tribune) complaining about the bad grammar of this vogue word and giving the proper forms. I particularly like the headline given the letter: “To Eingetunkt Is One Thing; To Gedunk Is Another.”

Faldage says “When I was in the Navy in the late ‘60s we pronounced it with the emphasis on the first syllable, /’gi: dʌŋk/,” and donkeyhotay concurs:

Same when I was in the Navy in the ‘80s. At Cecil Field, Florida (my squadron’s home port), I had to do my 90-days TAD with base supply. This took me to all the other squadrons delivering and picking up parts, and of course each squadron had their own geedunk. A couple of them were quite well-run. My favorites were the Marines’ at MAG-42 and VS-32 which called theirs “The Hungry Eye”.

So I thought I’d toss it out here and see if any Hatters have anything to say about it.

Sarah Zhang explains the odd divergence of the printed lowercase “g” from the one we write [archived]:

In a recent study delightfully titled “The Devil’s in the ‘g’-Tails,” researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that most people are unaware of the common form of the lowercase “g” that appears in books. […] [T]he letter has two closed loops, distinct from the way “g” is usually written by hand. […]

The double-story “g”—what is now the common printed form—is the original form of the lowercase “g” (the OG … ?), says Paul Shaw, a type designer who teaches at the New School. It originated in the eighth century among monks copying religious texts in Latin. The script they used became known as Carolingian script.

Over time, monks copying by hand introduced variations in their letters. And so, the single-story “g” emerged, most famously in black-letter or Gothic calligraphy. When Johannes Gutenberg started printing books in the mid-15th century, he naturally copied the monks’ Gothic script. The lowercase “g”s of the Gutenberg Bible resemble a single-story “g,” as do the lowercase “g”s of modern Gothic typefaces that imitate this style.

Then, plot twist: the return of the double-story “g.” “In the Renaissance,” says Shaw, “there was an interest in Roman and Greek culture by scholars that led to a revival of the Carolingian script.” Like Gutenberg, later Renaissance type cutters also imitated local scripts, and the Carolingian double-story “g” eventually became popular in print all over Europe. But single-story “g” prevails in handwriting, probably due to how much easier and quicker it is to write.

There are, of course, illustrations, as well as an excursus on the old Google double-story “g,” whose neck is too far to the right:

I called up Ruth Kedar, the designer who created the Google logo in 1999. “The font was chosen in many ways because of that very unusual ‘g,’” she confessed. (The font is Catull.) “This was the ’90s,” she said. “The internet was new, and the people did not really know how to use those things, computers.” Kedar wanted the logo to appear friendly but still convey an old-fashioned authority. This unusual yet familiar double-story “g” helped.

In 2015, with computers firmly entrenched in our lives, Google updated its logo to feature a more modern-looking sans-serif font and a single-story “g.”

I confess I’m still annoyed at the change. (Thanks, jack!)

I wrote about Isaac Casaubon’s linguistic attainments back in 2011, and they are impressively borne out by Olivia Rudgard’s Telegraph article [archived]:

Research by Dr Nicholas Hardy at the University of Birmingham has found that Isaac Casaubon, an eminent French scholar, helped translate the Bible into English.

It is the first time a non-English speaker has been found to have worked on the famous work. […]

Letters unearthed by Dr Hardy show that English translator John Bois exchanged letters with French scholar Casaubon, who was visiting London towards the end of 1610.

Casaubon was at the time regarded as the most accomplished scholar of ancient languages, such as Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, in the world, and is thought to have been brought in to help verify the work of less accomplished English translators. […]

Dr Hardy then travelled to Oxford to check Casaubon’s notebooks, which have been held in the Bodleian Library since the 1670s.

He discovered further records of conversations Casaubon had had with another English translator, Andrew Downes.

These exchanges prove that he did work on part of the New Testament, in Acts 13:18.

The pair discussed the translation of this passage, which says “‘And about the time of fourtie yeeres suffered he [God] their maners in the wildernesse,” referring to the wandering of the Israelites in the desert after the Exodus.

Following a discussion the pair decided to inset a note in the margin about the translation, explaining that changing a single letter in the Greek verb meaning “suffered their maners”, it would become a different verb, meaning “to bear” or “to feed”, “as a nurse beareth or feedeth her childe”.

The note suggests that the passage had been subject to “prolonged discussion and possibly disagreement between the translators”, Dr Hardy said.

Merci, Trevor!