languagehat.com

Thom Peart posts about a nice story out of Turkey:

Turkish garbage collectors in the country’s capital city of Ankara have opened a public library that is full of books that were originally destined to be put into landfill. The workers began collecting discarded books and opened the new library in the Çankaya district of Ankara. News of the library has spread and now people have begun donating books directly to the library, rather than throwing them away.

As CNN reports, the library was originally created for the use of the employees friends and family but, as it grew in size, the library was officially opened to the public in September of last year. “We started to discuss the idea of creating a library from these books. And when everyone supported it, this project happened,” said Çankaya Mayor Alper Tasdelen, whose local government spearheaded the opening of the library.

The library now has over 6,000 fiction and non-fiction books and includes a children’s section, an area dedicated to scientific research books, and a number of English and French language books for those who are bilingual.

Thanks, Ariel!

Nick Nicholas has a typically detailed, informative, and enjoyable post about an obscure medieval word that’s turned up in various modern Greek dialects as well as a much more unexpected place. I’ll let you discover the facts over at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος; me, I couldn’t resist the following (clears throat, grabs mike):

There’s this word that’s been on my mind
All the time, fu-fu-fufudio oh oh
The dictionaries don’t know its name
But I think it’s a real word just the same
Fu-fu-fufudio oh oh
The Russians got it from the Byzantines
Now they don’t even know what it means
But they called it fofudia back in the day
I feel so good if I just say the word
Fu-fu-fufudio, just say the word
Oh fu-fu-fufudio

Now they use fofudia down in Ukraine
LiveJournalists claim to be Russians in pain
Fu-fu-fufudio oh oh
“They won’t let my daughter wear fofudia at school
How long must I endure their rule?”
Fu-fu-fufudio oh oh
“How long, how long must this go on?”
They sound sincere, but they’re having fun
They make the xenophobes feel scared
But they feel so good if they just say the word
Fu-fu-fufudio, just say the word
Oh fu-fu-fufudio, oh

Sarah Manavis has a nice piece at Prospect about “how immigration keeps old dialects alive”:

Like most children of immigrants, I grew up speaking a half-and-half combination of languages. My Dad was the only immigrant in his family to become fluent in English; aside from him, I had an entirely and only Greek-speaking side. The other side of my family, my mother’s, spoke entirely and only American English.

I, and the other children in my community, spoke these languages interchangeably until we spoke in full sentences, teething our way towards speaking English. I would occasionally accidentally use Greek words with American school friends, not realising I was using a different language.

Another thing I did not realise, in fact only realized in the last 5 years, is what exactly is the kind of Greek I speak. My mother, the American, and my sister and I all adopted the language that we spoke not just with my grandparents and relatives in Greece, but the bizarrely large Greek-immigrant community also nestled in southwestern Ohio.

Until I left my little Greek community, I had been under the impression that I was, of course, speaking modern Greek. […] Yet my mother, sister and I have all been met with the same response from Greeks since leaving the midwestern United States. “You sound like my yiayia,” they all say. You sound like my grandmother. […]

The insulation of a new country and the relatively strict cut-off date from when the last immigrants arrived helps not to cultivate a new language, but to retain a way of speaking lost to time moving on. These slightly outdated forms of formal languages are being preserved in all parts of the world, with some immigrant communities becoming the only lifeline for dialects about to become extinct in their countries of origin. […]

She goes on to talk about Ciociaro (“a distinct, several-centuries-old dialect of formal Italian, borne out of the rural region of Ciociaria in central Italy”), now hardly spoken in Italy but flourishing in “an Italian community in Sarnia, Ontario, a city in the southeast corner of Canada, just north of the US-Canadian border,” and Caribbean Hindustani (“a language predominantly developed out of South Asian slave trade to the Caribbean islands […] influenced by a huge number of languages: Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Dutch, Tamil, and French—to name a few”), and goes into related issues:

This brings us to the major problem in understanding how many of these new and preserved dialects actually exist in the world: tracking them all is near impossible. As of now, there is no country maintaining formal statistics on immigrant dialects, beyond formally tracking how many speakers they have of an already recognised language from particular immigrant groups’ home countries.

It’s a good read; if you get a subscription pop-up, just click on the page or hit refresh and it should go away. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca discusses an interesting phenomenon. To her, as to me, “a couple of” basically means two, but she had a revelation:

While discussing language peeves in my introductory English linguistics course, one student, Katelyn Carroll, volunteered that it drove her nuts when people used the phrase a couple (of) to refer to more than two things. I heartily concurred, along with a few additional students, but a good number of other students in the course felt we were being persnickety — and, perhaps, were just flat-out wrong.

Katelyn ended up doing research on a couple (of) as a quantifier for the class usage guide, and it has changed my copy-editing practices. In a very small survey of undergraduates at the University of Michigan, she discovered that only one third of them believed a couple (of) could refer to only two items, and some of them believed that it always had to be more than two (i.e., equivalent to several, which is typically seen as more than two). Almost all the respondents agreed — as do I — that a couple (of) is informal, whatever it means.

Dictionaries indicate that I am not on solid footing with my restrictive definition. Merriam-Webster online provides the definition “an indefinite small number: FEW” for the word couple, with the example “a couple of days ago.” The online Webster’s New World concurs. The definition in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language online supplies a very similar definition: “Informal A few; several: a couple of days.” American Heritage defines several as more than two or three (but less than many); few is simply a small number. In any case, both dictionaries reflect much more flexibility than I was exhibiting in how many things are encompassed by a couple of things.

This was as much a revelation to me as to her, so I ask the assembled multitudes: what does “a couple” mean to you?

One of the pleasures of my editing work is that it occasionally introduces me to new words, and I’ve just run into one such: kriging. It’s a statistical term, equivalent to Gaussian process regression (whatever that is, and don’t bother trying to explain it to me because even if I understood it at the moment I wouldn’t retain it), and what I want to know, of course, is how it’s pronounced. The Wikipedia article says it’s named after “Danie G. Krige, the pioneering plotter of distance-weighted average gold grades at the Witwatersrand reef complex in South Africa,” and I assume his name would be anglicized as KREE-guh (or, if you prefer, /kri:gə/. But the article goes on to say “The English verb is to krige and the most common noun is kriging; both are often pronounced with a hard ‘g’, following the pronunciation of the name ‘Krige’.” This muddies the waters; the verb form krige would seem to demand a “long i” (/kraɪg/ or /kraɪdʒ/), and “often” implies that it’s (equally? less?) often pronounced with a soft g (/dʒ/). I don’t care either way, and I’m never going to have occasion to say it, but dammit, I want the facts! Any of you know how statisticians actually say this word? (It’s not in the dictionaries — too recent, I presume.)

The last page of the TLS is the cheeky “NB” section, which discusses things like recent used-book purchases and mentions of the TLS in novels, movies, and the like. I generally enjoy it, but this bit from the Feb. 12, 2016 issue made me grind my teeth:

Lesser-used languages of Europe, an occasional series. Niillas Holmberg is the author of The Way Back: Poems in Sámi (Clive Boutle, £9.99). We thought we were ignorant of Northern Sámi, both language and region, but learn that it refers to the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. The old terms, Lapp and Laplander, Mr Holmberg writes, are “now seen as pejorative”. The poems are presented in the original, with facing translations. “In spite of centuries of colonization in Sámiland, many of us still speak the language of nature.” The poet also speaks the language of Zen Buddhism. Here are three lines of “Suomaiduvvan” (Assimilation):

Máid sápmelaš bargá
go meahccái láhppo
dat manná ruoktot

What does a Sámi do
when he gets lost in the wild
he goes home

If we’re not wrong, the translated “Sámi” is “láhppo” in the original. Are the old terms disapproved of in English but not in Sámi itself?

As it happens, you are wrong, you smug twits. I mean, you don’t have to do any extensive research to figure this out, you can just go to the frigging Wikipedia article and read “Sámi refer to themselves as Sámit (the Sámis) or Sápmelaš (of Sámi kin), the word Sámi being inflected into various grammatical forms.” Therefore it is the “sápmelaš” in the first line that is translated “Sámi.” Now, I went the extra mile and consulted an online Northern Sami-English Dictionary to discover that “láhppo” is an inflected form of láhppán ‘lost,’ but that wouldn’t have been necessary in order to prevent the idiotic attempt at a gotcha (“ooh, those do-gooders want you to use some fancy word they probably made up, but look, the quaint reindeer herders use the bad word themselves!”). I checked the next few issues, expecting a mea culpa or a correction in the letters section, but nary a word — I guess it’s just too obscure a topic for TLS readers. So here, two years late, is the rap across the knuckles they deserve.

Stephen Halliwell’s TLS review of Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire, edited by Paweł Janiszewski, Krystyna Stebnicka, and Elzbieta Szabat, starts with two paragraphs explaining the term “sophist” that I thought were useful (and entertaining) enough to post here:

In his extraordinary work On the Death of Peregrinus, which recounts with malicious relish the career of a strange guru-like figure who committed self-immolation after the Olympic Games of 165 AD, the satirist Lucian refers to Christians (of whom Peregrinus was one for part of his life) as a sect which worshipped “the notorious crucified sophist”. In that loaded term “sophist”, Lucian expects his audience to appreciate the sneering suggestion that Christianity’s founder had speciously laid claim to privileged knowledge and had vaunted it through public teaching. Later in the same work, Lucian calls Peregrinus himself, in a devastating phrase, “a sophist with a death-wish”. Although this Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire claims to include all those Greek-speaking figures in the Roman Empire who are called “sophist” in our sources, it does not in fact find a place for Peregrinus. Ironically, however, it does have an entry for Lucian himself, despite his own general use of the term to denote pseudo-intellectuals or charlatans of whom he witheringly disapproves.

The tidy taxonomies of reference works can easily conceal murky problems of historical interpretation. “Sophist” was a Greek word with a long, semantically tangled history. Originally signifying a specialist or expert in various domains, it came to be especially associated, both positively and negatively, with a fluid class of intellectuals who employed, and sometimes taught, a repertoire of flamboyantly rhetorical methods of self-promotion, including an ability to declaim in virtuoso manner on virtually anything under the sun. By around the end of the first century AD, “sophist” could be used semi-technically of rhetoricians engaging in high-profile epideictic or display rhetoric, or those occupying official chairs of rhetoric at Athens, Rome and elsewhere – figures, that is, who supposedly define the era which modern historians, not without awkwardness, call the Second Sophistic. It is clear, though, that the cachet (for some) of “sophist” resisted precise definition. When the otherwise unknown Charidemus of Byzantium died at the age of only twenty, his family put the single word “sophist”, alongside his name and age, on the inscription on his tomb, leaving posterity to ponder its resonance. But as we see from Lucian, “sophist” never ceased to be an ambivalent category: available equally for assertions of prestige and as a marker of suspicion and contempt.

The review is not favorable: “absurdly meagre and evasive statement… spuriously positivist agenda… one of several major issues which this book tends to obscure…” And here’s a beautiful example of damning with faint praise: “The three Polish historians who have compiled this volume deserve credit for their industry in collecting and referencing a great deal of biographical information, even if much of it is readily to hand elsewhere (and even if their scholarship, though mostly serviceable, is far from impeccable: Greek gets garbled, there are frequent misprints, and the translation sometimes lapses).” Ouch!

I’m finally reading Boris Zhitkov‘s Виктор Вавич (Viktor Vavich), and my thoughts on reading the opening paragraphs were as follows, in this order: “No wonder Pasternak liked it; this is a modernist novel; this guy has definitely read Bely.” Here is the opening (my translation, then the Russian):

The sunny day poured across the city. At noon the empty streets were languishing.

In the Vaviches’ courtyard the wind stirs the straw and gives up — too lazy to raise it. A puppy has placed its muzzle between its paws and is whining from boredom. It twitches its leg and raises dust. The dust is too lazy to fly, too lazy to settle, and it hangs in the air like sleepy gold, squinting in the sun.

And it was so quiet at the Vaviches’ that you could hear the horses chewing in the stable — like a car: “hram-hram.”

And all of a sudden, making the porch and his boots creak, the dashing young Vavich strutted into the courtyard. A volunteer of the second rank. With soft little, dark little mustaches. He tightened his belt: for whom, in the empty courtyard? His jackboots were polished — not government-issue but his own, and not foppish but moderate. Ingratiating jackboots. Not government-issue, but no cause for hazing. He held his rifle lightly, like a walking-stick, tilted forward. Impeccably cleaned. The ducks, startled, toddled into a corner, quacking in annoyance. And Viktor Vavich began to stamp out starting with the left foot, from the garden to the fence, at drill step:

“Hut-two!”

[Read more…]

Josh Gabbatiss reports for The Independent on a study, “Hunter-Gatherer Olfaction Is Special” by Asifa Majid and Nicole Kruspe in Current Biology, in which (to quote the subhead) “Scientists use languages of indigenous groups to understand their sensory perception of the world”:

Hunter-gatherers who live off the land in the forests of Malaysia are far more in tune with their sense of smell than less mobile peoples, a new study has found.

Research exploring differences between the languages used by the indigenous peoples showed they used them as a window into their sensory worlds.

The results suggest the reduced importance of smelling – known as “olfaction” – is a recent consequence of humanity becoming more settled. […]

The work builds on a previous study that found the Jahai people of Malaysia have an unusually complex understanding of smells, as demonstrated by the number of words they have for a variety of odours. […]

Professor Majid and her collaborator Dr Nicole Kruspe of Sweden’s Lund University decided to study two other indigenous groups from the Malay Peninsula, the Semaq Beri and the Semelai. […]

Like the Jahai, the hunter-gatherer Semaq Beri were able to name smells with ease in the same way they named colours, whereas the non-hunter-gatherer Semelai struggled to name smells.

These findings are supported by cultural observations of the Semaq Beri, who consider odour to be so important that social spaces are carefully managed to avoid inappropriate mixing of individuals’ personal odours. […]

Professor Majid and Dr Kruspe these findings confirmed that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle brings with it an increased sensory ability, contradicting the idea that the structure of the brain is alone in determining sense of smell.

“For the hunter-gatherer Semaq Beri, odour naming was as easy as colour naming, suggesting that hunter-gatherer olfactory cognition is special,” the scientists wrote.

The scientists now want to establish whether this ability is found universally in hunter-gatherer populations around the world, and whether there are any genetic differences between different groups determining sense of smell.

Fascinating stuff; thanks, Trevor!

The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has put out a press release summarized in the subhead thus: “DNA analysis of present-day populations in the Chachapoyas region of Peru indicates that the original inhabitants were not uprooted en masse by the Inca Empire’s expansion into this area hundreds of years ago.” As you can see, its primary focus is genetics, but it winds up discussing language:

Paul Heggarty, a linguist and senior author of the study, also of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, was first motivated to launch this project after unexpected results from a linguistic fieldwork trip to Chachapoyas. He was able to find a few remaining elderly speakers of an indigenous language that most assumed was already extinct in this region. “Quechua is one of our most direct living links to the people of the New World before Columbus. It still has millions of speakers, more than any other language family of the Americas – but not in Chachapoyas anymore. There are only a dozen or so fluent speakers now, in a few remote villages, so we need to act fast if we’re to work out its real origins here.”

The Chachapoyas form of Quechua has usually been classified as most closely related to the Quechua spoken in Ecuador, but the new DNA results show no close connections between the Quechua-speakers in these two areas. “Linguists need to rethink their traditional view of the family tree of Quechua languages, and the history of how they spread through the Andes,” notes Heggarty. “It seems that Quechua reached Chachapoyas without any big movement of people. This also doesn’t fit with the idea that the Incas forced out the Chachapoyas population wholesale.”

Jairo Valqui, another linguist co-author from the National University of San Marcos in Lima, adds a further perspective on an even earlier language layer. “Once Quechua and Spanish arrived, the local Chachapoyas languages died out. Recovering anything from them is a real puzzle and a challenge for linguists. They left very few traces, but there are some characteristic combinations of sounds, for example, that still survive in people’s surnames and in local placenames, like Kuelap itself.”

Valqui, himself a Chachapoyano, also makes a point of taking these genetic results back to the local population. “For Peruvian society today, this matters. There’s long been an appreciation of the Incas, but often at the cost of sidelining everything else in the archaeological record across Peru, and the diversity in our linguistic and genetic heritage too. As these latest findings remind us: Peru is not just Machu Picchu, and its indigenous people were not just the Incas.”

Thanks, Trevor!