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The admirable Conrad sent me a link to “A Child’s Garden of Curses: A Gender, Historical, and Age-Related Evaluation of the Taboo Lexicon,” by Kristin L. Jay and Timothy B. Jay, and how could I not post it? The abstract:

Child swearing is a largely unexplored topic among language researchers, although assumptions about what children know about taboo language form the basis for language standards in many settings. The purpose of the studies presented here is to provide descriptive data about the emergence of adultlike swearing in children; specifically, we aim to document what words children of different ages know and use. Study 1 presents observational data from adults and children (ages 1-12). Study 2 compares perceptions of the inappropriateness of taboo words between adults and older (ages 9-12) and younger (ages 6-8) children. Collectively these data indicate that by the time children enter school they have the rudiments of adult swearing, although children and adults differ in their assessments of the inappropriateness of mild taboo words. Comparisons of these data with estimates obtained in the 1980s allow us to comment on whether swearing habits are changing over the years. Child swearing data can be applied to contemporary social problems and academic issues.

Now, that’s what I call a research topic. (I certainly knew the basic swear words by the time I entered school, and I remember my parents being upset when some of my knowledge was revealed.)

Bridget Gleeson writes for BBC Travel about a subject close to my heart: the characteristic local slang of Buenos Aires called lunfardo (whose name Wikipedia says is “from the Italian lumbardo or inhabitant of Lombardy in the local dialect”). She says that when the Argentine police first heard it, they assumed that it was “a sort of criminal jargon”:

But according to Oscar Conde, an Argentinian professor who’s written two books on the subject, the cops were wrong.

“The birth of lunfardo is not related with criminality,” Conde writes, “but with European immigration to Argentina between 1880 and the beginning of World War I.” During those years, four million people, mostly Italians and Spaniards, arrived in Buenos Aires. The city became, as Conde puts it, “a real-life Babel”.

In Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th Century, Italian words were quickly adopted into everyday speech, sometimes with slight modifications. The Italian word femmina (woman), for instance, was shortened to mina; fiacco (laziness) became fiaca. Similarly, bacán (of or relating to the good life), biaba (hair dye or perfume) and laburar (to work) all have a basis in Italian.

José Gobello, 20th-Century Argentinian writer and founder of the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo, a non-profit institution dedicated to the study of colloquial speech in Argentina, suggested that pibe (Fermin’s nickname for his friends) comes from the Italian word pivello, meaning ‘youngster’ or ‘novice’, or perhaps from pive, a word in the Genoese dialect that means ‘apprentice’.

Spanish wordplay – particularly vesre, a form of language modification in which the last syllable of a word is moved to the start – also contributed to the development of lunfardo. The word ‘vesre’ itself is a play on the Spanish word revés, meaning reverse. Amigo (friend) became gomía, café (coffee) became feca and leche (milk) became chele.

Gleeson goes on to discuss the history of tango (whose “lyrics were filled with lunfardo”) and provide some great anecdotes; not only the photos but the very word pibe fill me with nostalgia for my years in that great city. Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve finished Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s historical novel Князь Серебряный [Prince Serebryany] (see this comment), and, well, it’s a great Boy’s Own adventure story if that’s the sort of thing you like. Except that it’s Russian, so if the protagonists are lucky they die in battle and if they’re not they get tortured to death in Red Square. Brief summary: Prince S. returns after fighting in Lithuania for five years and finds the oprichniki terrorizing Russia and the woman he loves married to the aged Prince Morozov (who married her so she could escape the attentions of the unwanted suitor Prince Vyazemsky); he offends Ivan the Terrible, is saved from certain death by a gang of good-hearted thieves, and defeats the Tatars, after which he is pardoned by Ivan but suffers further trials and tribulations. I might not have bothered posting about it except for this passage of linguistic interest near the end:

     — То был мой старший брат, Григорий Аникин, — отвечал Семен Строгонов. — Он волею божьею прошлого года умре!
     — Не Аникин, а Аникьевич, — сказал царь с ударением на последнем слоге, — я тогда же велел ему быть выше гостя и полным отчеством называться. И вам всем указываю писаться с вичем и зваться не гостями, а именитыми людьми!

     — That was my older brother, Grigory Anikin, — answered Semyon Strogonov. — By the will of God he died last year!
     — Not Anikin, but Anikievich, — said the tsar, stressing the final syllable, — I ordered him at that very time to be above the gosti and call himself by a full patronymic. And I order all of you to write your names with vich and call yourselves not gosti but persons of distinction!

The word gosti literally means ‘guests,’ but it’s obviously being used in some specialized sense here; anybody know? (I’m also curious about what’s going on with the patronymic business.)

Also, a chapter about a duel on horseback (which soon gets converted into something else entirely) contains this passage: “но Вяземский, из удальства, не спустил стрелы, а напротив, поднял ее посредством щурепца до высоты яхонтового снопа” [but Vyazemsky, because of his daring, did not lower the visor, but instead raised it by means of the shchurepets to the height of the ruby sheaf]. I don’t know what the “ruby sheaf” might be, but at least those are familiar words; the word щурепец [shchurepets] occurs only here in all of Russian literature and isn’t in any dictionary I can access, and I have no idea what it might be. Again, all ideas are welcome.

I just ran across the word dolerite in the excellent science fiction novel Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (thanks, Songdog!), and of course I looked it up and found that it was sort of synonymous with diabase, both meaning ‘a dark, fine-grained igneous rock’ (you can see the gory details at the Wikipedia article: “Diabase is the preferred name in North America, yet dolerite is the preferred name in most of the rest of the world, where sometimes the name diabase is applied to altered dolerites and basalts. Many petrologists prefer the name microgabbro to avoid this confusion”), and since both words have interesting etymologies, I thought I’d post about them.

Dolerite:
[French dolérite, from Greek doleros, deceitful (from its easily being mistaken for diorite), from dolos, trick; see del-² in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

Diabase:
[From French diabase, originally meaning “diorite,” (now “basalt or gabbro lightly modified by metamorphism”), coined by French mineralogist Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847), probably from Greek diabasis, a crossing over (from diabainein, to pass through or over; see DIABETES; the rock being so called because it is often found as intrusive sills and dikes in other rocks), or perhaps an alteration of an intended French *dibase (di-, two, from Greek di-; see DI-¹ + base, basis, from Old French; see BASE¹; the rock being so called in reference to feldspar and amphibole, two important constituent minerals of diorite).]

We talked about Sibe (under the alias Xibe) just last year, but this post by Ying Ding and Alan McLean is worth linking to because along with its basic introduction — “The Sibe (锡伯族; Xibozu) are one of China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, with a populace of nearly 200,000. The Sibe are considered a Tungusic-speaking people, and in essence, the present-day Sibe language is nearly identical to Manchurian, which uses the adapted Mongolian script for writing” — it has samples of the writing, and (what really got me to post) audio samples of the language: four clips, beginning with Geren gucuse, baitakv na? Hosh (i)lahe na? Bi evad gerenofid emudan elhe sian fiansikie [“Hi, everyone, how are you? Greetings from me”]. I love being able to hear snippets of little-known languages. Thanks, Trevor!

Yes, you read it right, that’s “gound.” Justin E. H. Smith’s unsettling… essay? … for The Public Domain Review will explain it. Eventually. It begins (after a brief bit of throat-clearing):

Benno Guerrier von Klopp (1816–1903) was a Baltic German philologist, of French Huguenot origin, who studied at the University of Saint Petersburg and made most of his career as an academician ordinarius, while also spending a good portion of his later career at Jena. Klopp is remembered principally for his contributions to the study of Baltic and Slavic linguistics, not least his 1836 dissertation on the disappearance of the neuter gender in Middle Latvian, and his groundbreaking 1868 study of the morphosyntax of the Old Church Slavonic verbal prefix, vz-.

Significantly less well known is Klopp’s work on the development of the mature philosophical system of Immanuel Kant, a fellow Baltic German who may have been more familiar with the languages and customs of that region than other scholars have detected. In fact, if Klopp is correct, Kant’s first-hand ethnolinguistic researches extend well beyond the Baltic. While Klopp’s 1873 book, Die geheime Sumatrareise Immanuel Kants, is not found in the Library of Congress, or even in the supposedly comprehensive online WorldCat, I have been able to locate a copy of it in at least one place: the library of the faculty of Baltistik at the University of Greifswald in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Don’t miss the footnotes, which include tidbits like “Yakov Brius (also known as Jacob Bruce, 1669-1735), was a Russian statesman and scientist. Like Kant, he was of Scottish ancestry. He conducted astronomical observations from the Sukharev Tower in Moscow. It was rumoured among Muscovites that Brius practiced black magic in the tower.” And hang on to your hat!

There’s all sorts of interesting stuff in Parvathy Raveendran’s report for Scroll.in on a recent translation-centred literary festival in Bangalore, from what is meant by “mother tongue” to invented scripts (“as in the case of Santali in eastern India: the Ol Chiki script was invented in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu to approximate an alphabet which more adequately represented the sounds of the language than the Roman or Devanagari scripts”); I’ll quote a couple of passages that particularly intrigued me and let you discover the rest at the link. The first:

For sociologist, writer and translator Chandan Gowda, the mother tongue is not perforce linked to biological ancestry; rather, it is the language in which you find “the greatest existential ease and pleasure in encountering meaning”. Gowda spoke of the advantages of having been able to learn his native Kannada at the English medium school he went to, not least because he believes reading history, journalism and critical nonfiction in the vernacular gives one a richer sense of immediate contexts and specific pasts, and the literatures (poetry, in particular) one encounters growing up, form the core of one’s ethical and affective self.

Gowda’s formulation of the mother tongue primarily as a source of intellectual pleasure and a multi-pronged way of knowing (inclusive of aesthetic, emotional and moral sense-making) had direct bearing on the discussions that followed, around language and education.

I like that formulation: “the greatest existential ease and pleasure in encountering meaning.” And this, on Tamil:

Dalit scholar and intellectual Stalin Rajangam pointed out there is a similar encoding of the Dalit voice in “classical” Tamil literature. It is a little-known fact that Thiruvalluvar, the philosopher-poet who composed Thirukkural, the monumental Tamil treatise on ethics, was a weaver by profession and a Dalit. So were Avvaiyar, the great woman poet of the Sangam period, and Sekkizhar, the Shaiva saint-poet. Rajangam delved into a fascinating history of subaltern Tamil which goes by the poetic epithet of mozhikkullu mozhi (“language within language”).

It is a history inscribed in the age-old differentiation of spoken and literary Tamil – seri thamizh and senthamizh. The distinction is casteist, rooted in etymologies of purity and pollution: “seri” refers to the slums where Dalit communities live (another early adjective for Dalit speech, kotun, meant “bent, crooked, or twisted”), while the suffix “sen” comes from “cemmai” denoting proportion, elegance and excellence (in other words, a tongue that is straight, clean and beautiful). Rajangam recounted how this binary of the colloquial and the classical was cast in iron by colonial lexicographers in the context of the emergent print culture of Tamil Nadu in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A decisive battle in this regard was the dictionary debate between two missionaries, the Jesuit scholar Joseph Beschi and Lutheran linguist Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg, in the 1700s. With Beschi’s victory, the “High” Tamil he championed became the standard and the Dalit idiom, along with its distinctive lexemes, orthography, rhythms and aesthetic, was excluded from print. The binary persists to this day, Rajangam avers, in forms both obvious and subtle.

I also like the thought of “language within language” very much. Thanks, Trevor!

Another of those intriguing-if-true reports, this one by Natasha Frost for Atlas Obscura:

A limestone slab, 31 yards long, may have related the story of the end of the Bronze Age. An interdisciplinary team of Swiss and Dutch archaeologists have now deciphered the symbols thought to have adorned the frieze, almost 150 years after it was discovered and summarily destroyed. In 1878, villagers in Beyköy, a tiny hamlet in western Turkey, found the large, mysterious artifact in pieces in the ground, and saw that it was engraved with seemingly illegible pictograms and scribbles. It would be 70 years before that language, now known to be millennia-old Luwian, could be read by scholars.

According to Eberhard Zangger, the president of a nonprofit foundation called Luwian Studies, the symbols tell stories of wars, invasions, and battles waged by a great prince, Muksus. Muksus hailed from the kingdom of Mira, which controlled Troy 3,200 years ago. The inscription describes his military advance all the way through the Levant to the borders of Egypt, and how his armies invaded cities and built fortresses as they went. Such invasions from the east are thought to be among the causes of the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. […]

The work has sparked concerns from scholars not involved in the research, who suggest that the frieze and, in turn, stories it is thought to have contained, could be a forgery, reports Live Science. Until records of the inscription are found outside of Mellaart’s notes, some say, it will be hard to confirm the age and authenticity of its contents. That said, an inscription that length (31 yards!) would be near-impossible to forge, say Zangger and Woudhuizen, especially given that Mellaart could neither read nor write the ancient script. In the meantime, this poorly understood corner of ancient history is finally getting a moment in the sun.

Anybody know anything about this?

The man whom I called “perhaps my favorite living poet” is, alas, no longer living. Richard Wilbur is dead at 96. I refer you to that fine NY Times obituary by Daniel Lewis [archived] for details of his life and career (as well as some poetry); I’ll quote a couple of poems here (for more, see the first link as well as this post from 2008). First, “Praise In Summer,” from his first book, The Beautiful Changes (1947):

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

Wilbur took his own suggestion and spent his life playing a tune upon the blue guitar of things exactly as they are. And here is the last stanza of “Mayflies,” from his 2000 collection of the same name (you can read the whole thing, and hear him reading it, here):

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
        In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they —
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
        Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.

Karthik Venkatesh writes about languages and dialects; most of it is standard stuff that’s old hat at the Hattery (the Weinreich quote; the history of standard English, French, and Turkish), but I thought this section was interesting enough to bring to LH:

In similar fashion, in the subcontinent, a Sanskritized Hindi and a Persianized Urdu were “created” from the Hindustani base that was the foundation for both languages. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, “Hindi” was willed into existence by Hindu zealots keen on a language purged of Muslim influences. The Hindustani that was spoken in the bazaars of north India was the vehicle chosen for this dream and was purged of its Arabo-Persian words, which were replaced with Sanskrit equivalents. This new creation was held up as standard Hindi.

Other allied languages like Maithili, Bhojpuri, Braj and many others, many of which were centuries old and had extensive bodies of literature, were then cast as “dialects” of Hindi. The fantastic claim that such a Sanskritized Hindi is likely to have existed in the past before the Muslim invasions was made and the language thus endowed with a history that was nothing more than a purloining of the histories of its “dialects” and more than a dollop of imagination.

Parallely, Urdu was purged of “polluting” Hindu influences. Turkic, Arabic and Persian words were preferred to words from Indian languages and an acceptable Urdu was willed into existence much in the same fashion as an acceptable Hindi was. Both languages jostled for acceptance and legitimacy among their target audience and aspired for “purity” even as the common man continued—and continues to this day—to use what in effect must be rightly termed “Hindustani” (known as Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan). In effect, Sanskritized Hindi claims a history that isn’t really its own while Persianized Urdu, on the other hand, chooses not to dwell on that history much, choosing instead to look to Persian and Arabic as its forerunners.

Anyone interested in learning more should get hold of a copy of A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu by Amrit Rai, which I bought at a Strand table by Central Park for $4 on a beautiful June day in 1992 — they seem to want $279.99 for it now, but hopefully you can get it from a library. Thanks, Bathrobe!