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Since we’re on the topic of myths, here’s Stan Carey’s delightful A to Z of English usage myths:

English usage lore is full of myths and hobgoblins. […] Huge effort is wasted on such trivialities. So, as a quick exercise in myth-busting (and amusing myself), I posted an A to Z of English usage myths on Twitter last week. Reactions were mostly positive, but some items inevitably proved contentious, as we’ll see.

You can click through on this initial tweet for the full A–Z plus supplements on Twitter, or you can read the lightly edited version below, followed by extra notes and quotes now that the 140-character limit doesn’t apply.

It starts with

A is for ALTERNATIVE. Peevers say you can’t have more than two alternatives, because Latin. This is the etymological fallacy.

… and goes all the way to

Z is for ZOOM. Theodore Bernstein said that this term, being from aviation, should only mean ‘upward mobility’. English went ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

He says “A few readers were happily on board until they reached a particular bugbear”; I’m happy to say I was happily on board throughout (though a few items raised a nostalgic smile for my own long-ago peever past, when I complained about things like the “misuse” of transpire). I’m also happy to report that there’s no actual peevery in his comment section, though there are a few cavils. And I agree with John that “learning to say ‘I personally object to what that person is doing, but I accept there’s nothing objectively wrong with it, and no, nobody Ought To Make A Law Against It’ would for many people be a useful and necessary lesson in tolerance outside of the matter of linguistics.”

This Phys.org story reports on a finding that’s surprising if true:

The ‘myth’ of language history: languages do not share a single history but different components evolve along different trajectories and at different rates. A large-scale study of Pacific languages reveals that forces driving grammatical change are different to those driving lexical change. Grammar changes more rapidly and is especially influenced by contact with unrelated languages, while words are more resistant to change.

An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, have discovered that a language’s grammatical structures change more quickly over time than vocabulary, overturning a long-held assumption in the field. The study, published October 2 in PNAS, analyzed 81 Austronesian languages based on a detailed database of grammatical structures and lexicon. By analyzing these languages, all from a single family and geographic region, using sophisticated modelling the researchers were able to determine how quickly different aspects of the languages had changed. Strikingly different processes seemed to be shaping the lexicon and the grammar – the lexicon changed more when new languages were created, while the grammatical structures were more affected by contact with other languages.

The paper is Simon J. Greenhill el al., “Evolutionary dynamics of language systems,” PNAS (2017). As always, I welcome all thoughts on the topic. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Back in 1985, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a review [archived] for the LRB (which sent me the link in celebration of Ishiguro’s Nobel) of Pictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan by John David Morley (a book I have owned for many years but have not gotten around to reading), and since the central portion of the review is language-related, I thought I’d quote it here:

Early on in the book, Morley notes the way the Japanese use the word uchi. This word means ‘house’. But Morley observes how the word is often used as a pronoun in place of ‘I’, whenever a speaker is referring to himself in the context of his household. Indeed, uchi can also be used for ‘we’, ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’ whenever the subject is being referred to in relation to the speaker’s household. If two mothers are discussing their children, each will refer to her own children as uchi rather than ‘they’. If they then begin discussing their husbands, each will refer to her husband as uchi rather than ‘he’. Furthermore, Morley notices this word for ‘house’ being used in respect not only of families but of any strongly bonded grouping – colleagues in a firm, for instance, referring to themselves as uchi. The Japanese mind, Morley argues, is dominated by the concept of uchi, giving it an unusual predisposition to see the world in terms of insiders and outsiders. This observation comes to be the cornerstone of Morley’s thinking about the Japanese, and throughout the book he applies his uchi-analysis to various phenomena he wishes to understand better.

At one stage, for instance, Morley embarks on a fascinating discussion of aimai, the well-known – and, to many Westerners, quite baffling – Japanese manner of communicating in an elegantly elliptical, non-committal way. Not only does aimai tend to characterise any conversation between Japanese whatever their relationship, it manifests itself as a central aesthetic principle in much Japanese art and literature. How did aimai come to ingrain itself so? Morley is unimpressed by the theory offered by those Japanese he consults: that centuries under the Tokugawa dictatorships during which free speech was dangerous obliged the Japanese to develop aimai. (His scepticism is no doubt correct. Japan under the Tokugawas never featured the sophisticated control of everyday life witnessed in modern totalitarian states. Directly subversive political talk would certainly have been dangerous, but ordinary people would otherwise have been free to talk much as they wished. It is unconvincing that a few taboo subjects could cause aimai to infect the whole language.) Instead, Morley attempts his own theory: it is the strength of the uchi concept within Japanese minds which underlies aimai. A heightened sense of the world as being comprised of insiders and outsiders acts against plain-speaking on two fronts. First, there is a keen awareness of the potential for conflict with anyone from an uchi other than one’s own: thus, all outsiders must be addressed in an excessively polite, careful way – above all, taking care not to express any opinion unequivocally, so as to leave plenty of room for retreat in case of offence. Second, amongst members of the same uchi, the need would arise to develop cryptic ways of talking precisely in order to be obscure to outsiders. Morley goes on to suggest – rather fancifully – that the acoustics within a Japanese house, with its literally paper-thin walls, would have facilitated this process, the frequent omissions of the subject from a Japanese clause deriving from a constant fear of eavesdroppers. Morley concludes that the uchi mentality has caused the Japanese to develop their language in such a way as to suppress meaning.

Ishiguro says “There is no doubt that at times Morley goes too far in applying his uchi-theory,” but he seems to find it stimulating; I’m curious to know what my Japanese-speaking readers think of it all.

Back in the early days of LH we had a long thread based on the local pronunciation of New York’s Kosciuszko Bridge; I now present a delightful followup (by John Moy) from the Metropolitan Diary section of the NY Times:

Dear Diary:

The construction of a new Kosciuszko Bridge, the demolition of the old one and coverage of how to pronounce the bridge’s name is of particular interest to certain New Yorkers of Chinese heritage.

Whether it is pronounced “ko-SHCH-OO-SH-ko,” “Kos-kee-OOS-ko” or “Kos-kee-OSS-ko,” the name Kosciuszko, despite being Polish in origin, sounds Japanese to Cantonese-Americans.

Every driver in New York who speaks Cantonese and listens to the radio station WZRC-AM is used to hearing about traffic being backed up from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway “all the way to the Japanese Bridge.”

Ask a driver in New York who speaks Cantonese where the Kosciuszko Bridge is. They won’t know.

Perhaps the traffic reporters should consider calling it the Polish Bridge instead.

Thanks, Eric!

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera of the University of Puerto Rico has a brief but interesting Lingua Franca piece on the national origins of Christopher Columbus:

While conventionally regarded as Genovese, his language had resonances of Catalan.

Columbus signed documents (and was referred to in state records) as “Colom” — a Catalan last name meaning “dove.” There is no record of him writing in the Genoese dialect or Italian, even in letters sent to Genoa. Save one letter in Catalan, his epistles are in Latin or Spanish, some have marginal notes in Hebrew. The conquest chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas noted that Colom “doesn’t grasp the entirety of the words in Castilian” — and much of his Spanish was colored by false cognates, idiomatic interference, and crosslingual appropriations from Catalan […]

Lluís de Yzaguirre, a professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, studied Colom’s Spanish with a forensic linguistics algorithm that applies lexical mistakes to decipher the native language of the writer. He found Colom’s hypercorrections of “b” and “v,” as well as “o” and “u” in Spanish were typical of a Catalan speaker.

Colom’s library had books in Catalan, and he named the island of Montserrat for a monastery near Barcelona.

He was also surrounded by Catalonians. […]

There’s more at the link, including an impressive-looking table of Catalanisms in Columbus’s Spanish writings. I don’t know if this is old hat, but I hadn’t been aware of it.

I don’t normally link to videos, but Saving Turkey’s endangered Laz language is only a bit over three minutes long, and you can not only hear a little of that Caucasian language but see a brief clip of a Laz dictionary. (Laz previously on LH.) Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve finished Veltman’s Воспитанница Сара [The ward Sara] (see this post), and I regret to say that I’m grievously disappointed; it’s the first of his novels that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone except a Veltman completist (like myself). I was hoping for good things because Sara is a classic Veltman heroine: self-willed, impatient, eager to achieve her goals and not particular about how she does so. She’s left as an infant (by a poor mother who can’t take care of her) with a midwife and brought up with another little girl named Vera who has a rich benefactor and thus gets nice clothes and toys; when she’s able to talk, she says imperiously “я не хочу быть Сарой, я хочу быть Вѣрочкой!” [I don’t want to be Sara, I want to be Verochka!]. The midwife winds up keeping the other girl (who’s sickly and lovable) and palming Sara off on a rich family as Vera. She spends the rest of the novel as Vera, and causes no end of trouble.

The problem is that it’s all done sloppily, with cardboard characters and unbelievable contrivances. By the time I reached the end, I realized that it was essentially a rewrite of Salomea (see this post and the earlier posts linked therein), but with all the interest drained away and replaced by bog-standard country-house drama (mom wants her eldest daughter to marry the handsome hussar Lonsky, but he only has eyes for Sara; lots of mazurkas, card-playing, etc.). I’ll translate the relevant section from Saltykov-Shchedrin’s crushing review:
[Read more…]

Occasional commenter speedwell writes:

I have done a bit of calligraphy over the decades and I live in the rural West of [Ireland]. So I notice that the street signs and a lot of the art and all of the old Irish writing is in what my teachers in the Donegal course simply called “the old way they were taught to write Irish in school fifty years ago”. Well, if it was taught in school, there must be some sort of book or practice material or mimeographed handouts. […] The teachers suggested I try Google, which was fruitless. I’ve contacted an Irish calligraphy society, who put me in touch with a man who suggested I copy Irish-language fonts. But the fonts are all different from the old writing I see in old documents.

Could you put the call out to your friends and colleagues who might have information about how to actually form the letters and letter combinations (literally how to move the pen to make the strokes, like they teach five-year-olds to write individual letters in English with a pencil)? Even legible page scans are OK; I need only the information, not the actual book if it’s not convenient for the person to send it to me or make copies of it.

So: any suggestions? (I know nothing about calligraphy, only irregular verbs.)

This is a really clever and delightful site, described in this PR Newswire story:

The tiny Faroe Islands – 18 islands in the North Atlantic, located between the Shetlands, Iceland and Norway – are once again taking on giant Google in a bid to have their unique language included on Google Translate. They have created their very own Faroe Islands Translate.

With a growing tourism market, the Faroe Islands realized that not being included on Google Translate has frustrated visitors who can’t fully immerse in their unique traditional culture by learning a few phrases in Faroese.

Creating their very own version of the online translation service, with the help of locals who will translate live by video, Faroe Islands Translate will provide a free online service for those visiting the destination or, in fact, anyone around the world curious to learn a little of this unusual language.

I discovered it via this MetaFilter post, and in the thread you can find links to, e.g., Hello. I am the Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands. Your translation is as follows: Góðan morgun, as well as SheepView360. What fun!

Gretchen McCulloch (a linguist previously seen at LH here and here) has posted A very long list of linguistics movies, documentaries, and TV show episodes which is exactly as advertised. It starts with “Arrival, 2016” (discussed at LH here) and ends with Whistles in the Mist (“Interesting questions about origin of lg. typology”); lots of intriguing-looking stuff in between, e.g.:

*Het Dak van de Walvis (On Top of the Whale) 1982 Raoul Ruiz. Parody of much of western academia. A group of field linguists set out to study an exotic language which consists only of one single word, which therefore means everything. Very strange, not a crowdpleaser.

Followed immediately by “Being John Malkovich. Also features a single word language.” (The asterisk means it’s available on YouTube.)