languagehat.com

Tom Stevenson writes in the LRB (archived) about an ongoing project of decipherment:

Decipherments​ of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, grasped something of this fact. Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all seeking connection with a lost past, or the power to make obscure symbols speak. Who wouldn’t want to be woken in the middle of the night, as Simon Kimmins was by his flatmate Ventris, and asked whether they would like to be ‘the second person in four thousand years to read this script’?

In July 2022, the French scholar François Desset and a team of co-authors published what they claimed was proof of a decipherment of Linear Elamite, a writing system used on the Iranian plateau around four thousand years ago. The paper appeared in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, one of the leading Assyriology journals. Linear Elamite had eluded understanding ever since its discovery by archaeologists at the site of Susa in south-west Iran in 1903. It can’t match the significance of cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it is one of the oldest known forms of writing in the world. Decades of sporadic efforts at decipherment had yielded little progress. Scholars had tried and some had contributed important work (Desset’s paper was dedicated to the ‘great pioneers who paved the way’). But before 2018, phonemic values had been proposed for just twelve signs. […]

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Katherine Rosman reports for the NY Times (archived) on a new movie of Hattic interest:

Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend. “I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor who was wearing a shirt that read “I’M SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR” — notably, the message on the shirt lacked punctuation.

The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.

The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life. […]

A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022. […]

The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice. “Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row. “You may,” one of them answered.

Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low. […]

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition. To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

The last bit gives me hope that Ms. Jovin is not just another peddler of prescriptivist myths, despite some of the assholes she attracts (“You may”). She turned up here back in 2018 as the “den mother” of the polyglot community. And I enjoyed the reporter’s bio tagline: “While reporting this story, Katherine Rosman learned the difference between affect and effect. She thinks.” (Thanks, Eric!)

Frequent commenter Catanea writes me (I have added links):

Today, in preparation for an upcoming course, my husband was transliterating a manuscript page, of the Puer natus… bit of a Gradual. That leaf said:
“Puer natus est nobis et filius datus est nobis cuius imperium sup[er] humerum eius et vocabitur nomen eius magni consilij angelus y Cantate domino canticum novum quia miribilia fecit. Gloria. Evo vae R Viderunt om…»
(with music). […] Despite about a century of manuscript study, somehow we had both missed «evo vae» until now. It turns out to be a «mnemonic» [those are scare-quotes. It wouldn’t help me remember] for Saecula saeculorum, or Saeculorum Amen, or…
As «euouae» Wikipedia – or Collins dictionaries – classes it as an English word (useful in scrabble).
But nothing has told us where it came from, how it got there. No etymology. Do you know? Does anyone at the Hattery?

I do not, so I pass it along to the assembled Hatters, adding that it is unknown to the OED. I mention also that the pronunciation, /juː.ˈuː.iː/ yew-OO-ee, is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. Do people actually say that?

My wife and I have been watching The Brokenwood Mysteries, a sort of Midsomer Murders set in New Zealand, which is fun and undemanding, as we prefer with pre-bedtime viewing. The episode we saw last night featured a venomous spider called the katipō, and of course I was curious about the word. Wiktionary has it for English and Afrikaans as “Borrowed from Maori katipo,” but it doesn’t have the Maori word, so that’s no help (and the OED entry, from 1901, simply says “A borrowing from Māori”). The Wikipedia article says:

The common name katipō (singular and plural), often spelled “katipo”, is from the Māori for “night stinger”, derived from the words kakati (to sting) and pō (the night). This name was apparently given to the species owing to the Māori belief that the spiders bite at night.

But I have questions. That etymology is sourced to Anonymous (1872), “The katipo or poisonous spider of New Zealand” (Nature 7 [159]: 29), and frankly I don’t trust it — it smells like folk etymology. Is it likely that kakati would be reduced to kati- in a compound? (I’m not saying it’s not; I simply don’t know.) Leaving aside the plausibility of the etymology and looking up the component parts, the ACD has *gatgat ‘to bite something off, to chew something up; to mince,’ giving Proto-Oceanic *kakat-i ‘to chew or bite off’ (Maori kakati ‘to sting, bite, eat, gnaw’); for the second element, Wiktionary says:

From Proto-Polynesian *poo, from Proto-Central Pacific *boŋi, from Proto-Oceanic *boŋi (compare with Samoan pogi, Hawaiian poni), from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *bəʀŋi (compare with Javanese wengi), from Proto-Austronesian *bəʀŋi.

Which is well and good, but the ACD entry for *boŋi ‘night’ doesn’t show any pō forms (nor is there such an independent entry that I can find). What gives?

I have a friend who occasionally sends me audio clips in foreign languages to try and identify, knowing that I enjoy the challenge, and the last one I ID’d turned out to be the Canción del grumete. There are a couple of interesting words there, both of which I had forgotten (I haven’t actually used Spanish for many years): rizo ‘curl, lock (of hair)’ is from erizo ‘hedgehog,’ from Latin ēricius, but the one that really tickled me is the titular grumete ‘cabin boy,’ which is:

Borrowed from Catalan grumet, from Old French groumet (“valet, servant”), from Middle English grome [i.e., groom]. Cognate of English gourmet.

When I shared that last tidbit with my friend, who likes to eat, he responded “lucky cabin boy.”

Laura Esther Wolfson’s NY Times essay on staying in touch with exes (archived) is delightfully written and, I would say, good life advice, but this is the bit that made me post about it:

There’s another one I can still bring to the brink of ecstasy when he comes to my place. I do it now by reading out snippets of Tolstoy, Chekhov or Babel in the original. I’m a Russian translator, and on our first date, we bonded over our love of Russian literature. Next, I provide an off-the-cuff rendition in English, and then we look at several other translations and compare.

“I’ll never be able to do this with anyone else,” he said tearfully when he broke up with me, gesturing to my shelves of Russian books. It seems that he was right about that, because when the dust settled, we revived our little reading club.

It reminds me of Wanda pleading “Say something in Russian!” in A Fish Called Wanda.

From Phys.org: How many languages can babies learn? Study shows how Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages.

Africa is a multilingual continent and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study by a research team led by the Potsdam psycholinguists Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan and Paul O. Omane now shows that the roots of this multilingualism can be found in infancy: In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. The researchers also showed that the babies heard some languages primarily indirectly—i.e. via radio, television or background conversations—while other languages were used by their caregivers to directly communicate with them. The results of the study have now been published in the journal Cognitive Development.

The study, which examined 121 babies aged three to twelve months in Accra, the capital of Ghana, demonstrates a remarkable variety of language input in the early months of life. The children are regularly exposed to two to six languages. Strikingly, the number of caregivers the children have also ranges between two and six, and babies who have more adults in their daily lives who regularly take care of them also hear more different languages. In Ghana, families often live in so-called “compound buildings,” where many everyday interactions take place in the courtyard, where family, neighbors and other relatives play an important role in the lives of children.

“The idea that a child learns only one particular language from a single caregiver, as is often assumed in Western cultures, does not apply to these communities. Rather, children are surrounded by a rich spectrum of linguistic inputs from the very beginning,” says O. Omane, the first author of the study. […]

A key finding of the study is the distinction between direct and indirect language input. While English is primarily acquired through indirect channels such as television and official communication, children receive most of the local languages (such as Akan, Ga and Ewe) through direct contact with their caregivers. Accordingly, the proportion of direct input is higher in the local languages than in English, which is predominantly present as indirect input. […] As a result of their empirical study, the researchers call for a broader view in language research. The common assumptions do not reflect the diversity and complexity found in other cultural contexts such as Ghana. The study makes it clear that it is not only the number of languages a child hears, but also the diversity of people and the different forms of input that have a decisive influence on language acquisition.

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I’m still loving Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (see this post), and I ran across a word I wasn’t familiar with but like a lot. Here’s the passage; I’ve bolded the word:

Je prétextai des migraines pour justifier ma torpeur. Stanislas, qui s’y connaît (il a du sang polonais), me donna une kyrielle d’astuces pour se remettre d’une gueule de bois.

The narrator complains of a headache, and his roommate offers him “une kyrielle d’astuces” — a bunch of tricks — for curing a hangover. But kyrielle is one of those words that’s not easily explainable in another language; that Wiktionary entry does a terrible job:

1. (dated) rigmarole
2. host, stream (de (“of”))
3. (poetry) kyrielle

The poetic sense is obscure enough it’s not in any of my bilingual dictionaries (though it’s the source of the word: the form has a refrain that recurs like “Kyrie” in the text of the mass); the only sense in general use is 2, and “host, stream” doesn’t do a good job of rendering it. My Collins Robert dictionary says “[injures, réclamations] string, stream; [personnes] crowd, stream; [objets] pile,” which is more helpful, while my giant Larousse doesn’t bother trying to generalize and says:

kyrielle [kirjɛl] une ~ de bambins fam a whole bunch of kids; une ~ d’insultes a string of insults; une ~ de mensonges a pack ᴏᴜ string of lies.

Anyway, I like it. A little later on I learned another good word:
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Joseph Berger reports for the NY Times (archived) on a literary discovery:

Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years.

An editor at a Knopf imprint, she had long wanted to publish an English translation of the last novel by Chaim Grade, one of the leading Yiddish authors of the 20th century. Grade was less well known than the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was held in greater esteem in some literary quarters. He’d written the novel in question through the 1960s and 1970s, and published it in installments in New York’s Yiddish newspapers. But he died in 1982 without publishing a final Yiddish version.

The following year, his mercurial widow, Inna Hecker Grade, signed a contract with Knopf to publish an English-language translation. To do that, Knopf needed the original pages in Yiddish, with Grade’s changes and corrections. But Inna, who held his papers, put up roadblocks. She offered to translate, but then went silent, rebuffing entreaties from two editors over the years and refusing to consent to another translator. Karper took over the project in 2007, with no success.

And then, in 2010, Inna died without any children or a will, leaving behind a morass of 20,000 books, manuscripts, files and correspondence in their cluttered Bronx apartment. The Bronx public administrator turned the papers over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel.

The galleys, if they existed, were somewhere in there.

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I confess I’m not impressed with Jackson Arn’s New Yorker essay on the color red (Feb. 10, 2025; archived); it’s classic thumb-sucking, pseudo-eloquent philosophizing with infinite regard for the writer’s feelings about stuff and minimal interest in, you know, facts. It’s the kind of piece that uses “we” to make the author’s whims seem like universals (“unable to explain our response directly, we are reduced to saying…”). But it did introduce me to an interesting word:

To start with, “Girl with the Red Hat” was not intended to be a portrait of any specific person; it’s an image of a type. Art historians will tell you that this genre, popular in the Dutch Golden Age, is called tronie—you’re supposed to be looking not at an individual old man but at old man-ness, not at a soldier but at soldier-ness, not at a girl but at girl-ness.

I wasn’t familiar with the word “tronie,” and it’s not in the OED; Wiktionary has it, though: “(art) A kind of painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression.” We got it from Dutch, where it means:

1. (informal, Netherlands, slightly derogatory) a face, especially one with an unpleasant or unprepossessing look or expression

2. (art) a depiction of a person’s face with an expressive, often unflattering expression; a tronie.

Etymology
From Middle Dutch troenie, from Middle French trogne, possibly ultimately from a Celtic language, for which a Gaulish *trugna has been proposed (compare Welsh trwyn [‘nose, snout’]).

I’ll probably never have occasion to use the word, but at least I know it.