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In the course of a LLog post about an xkcd comic, Mark Liberman has some interesting things to say about the history of chemical nomenclature:

As background for these jokes, it’s worth considering that modern chemical nomenclature was linguistically inspired:

Lavoisier, together with Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Claude-Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy, submitted a new program for the reforms of chemical nomenclature to the academy in 1787, for there was virtually no rational system of chemical nomenclature at this time. […]

The total effect of the new nomenclature can be gauged by comparing the new name “copper sulfate” with the old term “vitriol of Venus.” Lavoisier’s new nomenclature spread throughout Europe and to the United States and became common use in the field of chemistry.

Or the new names “ethanoic acid” or”acetic acid” (or CH3COOH) for the old name “vinegar”…

The full proposal was published in 1787 as Méthode de nomenclature chimique (facsimile on Gallica here, on Google here). It starts with Le Mémoire sur la nécessité de réformer et de perfectionner la nomenclature de la chimie, which was written and read to the Académie by Lavoisier on April 18, 1787, and argues that the chemical nomenclature inherited from the alchemists should be methodically revised to make the names reflect the (recently discovered) components of the named substances.

Lavoisier’s argument is explicitly founded on an argument from Condillac’s Logique about the role of language in developing ideas about the nature of the world.

More details, quotes, and links at the Log post; it’s always interesting to see the history behind terms that we take for granted.

Joel at Far Outliers posted excerpts from Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

(Click through for more on the very interesting Lope Martín.) It makes sense that Basque would have made a good private language.

Louis Menand has a review in last week’s New Yorker (archived) of Zora Neale Hurston’s much-rejected and now finally published novel The Life of Herod the Great; Menand describes her attempts to interest publishers, saying it “was turned down by Hurston’s publisher, Scribner’s, in 1955”:

She continued working on the book. In 1958, it was turned down by another house, David McKay, the publisher of Fodor’s travel guides and Ace Comics. In 1959, she wrote to Harper & Brothers to ask “if you would have any interest in the book I am laboring upon at present—a life of Herod the Great. One reason I approach you is because you will realize that any publisher who offers a life of Herod as it really was, and naturally different from the groundless legends which have been built up around his name has to have courage.” Harper & Brothers was Richard Wright’s publisher—as the reference to “courage” was intended to remind the recipients. But they passed on “Herod.” This was Hurston’s last extant letter.

One is primed to expect a happy ending — guess what, it turns out to be a masterpiece! But alas, Menand agrees with the publishers:

This is the Herod of “Herod,” a superhero of the Levant. He excels at everything, from man-to-man combat to interior design, an impossible combination of rectitude and swagger. When Cleopatra tries to seduce him, he refuses her. He’s a married man! When he has his wife executed, as the real Herod did, his reasoning is unassailable. When Cleopatra’s lover, that dissolute sensualist Mark Antony, sizes him up for a possible same-sex hookup, he can see right away that Herod is not that type. As Hurston describes the moment, “Antony was silently appraising Herod’s masculine perfection, his large, luminous eyes and superb lashes, his muscular limbs well developed by military use. But he did not sense that Herod’s mind would be capable of persuasion.”

The whole book is written like this, in a kind of illustrated-classics prose.

The bandit wheeled and snarled at Herod, exposing his rotting front teeth. He cursed Herod roundly and coarsely, then suddenly gripping his heavy spear, hurled it. But it was a second too late. Herod’s own spear was on the way, it hit Hezekiah fairly in the chest and pinned him to the ground. “Oh, allow me to finish him, Herod,” one of Herod’s young officers begged. “He is finished,” Herod said confidently making his way towards where Hezekiah lay. “I have been practicing that throw since I was ten years old.”

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Grace Dean of BBC News reports on a phenomenon I had vaguely thought was safely in the past:

Before she started university, Beth Beddall had never really thought about her Black Country accent. But when she started attending seminars during her undergraduate course at Durham University in 2022, she began to feel self conscious, and avoided speaking up in front of the other students.

Beth, from Sandwell in the West Midlands, recalls a privately-educated student once telling her: “You don’t sound like you’re from a private school.” When she replied telling him she went to a state school, he said: “You must be intimidated by us and how we speak.”

Like Beth, many university students have high levels of accent-based anxiety, according to a 2022 report on accents and social mobility by sociolinguists for the Sutton Trust. More than a third of over 1,000 university students surveyed said they felt self-conscious about their accent, and 47% said they’d had their accent mocked, criticised or commented on in a social setting. […]

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We’ve discussed recent DNA findings quite a bit in various threads; this post at Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning is an attempt to pull them together into one package. It starts with a potted history of IE studies (“In 1780’s Calcutta, Sir William Jones was a 30-something British polymath with a particular talent for linguistics…”) and eventually gets down to business:

Language’s inherent flexibility kept scholars debating into this century whether Indo-European languages had diffused via memes or genes. But now with a 2024 crop of blockbuster Indo-European papers and preprints, I think it’s fair to say we have answered the biggest questions Jones raised and are in the late stages of settling most of the minor outstanding ones.

We know now that our genes and our words concur. Far more than recent generations of scholars predicted. We actually kind of are what we speak. But ancient DNA has taken us further still. The tree of our demographic history is an often startlingly strong match to historical linguistics’ shadow tree. And now, 2024 has brought a surfeit of results in two high-impact papers, leaving us a stack of refinements and details with which to update our models. […]

In 2015, only five years into the paleogenomic era, two research teams independently published blockbuster findings that in the period just after 3000 BC, right when scholars like archaeologist Marija Gimbutas had long argued for Indo-European languages expanding into the continent, Europe did indeed see a massive demographic turnover. But whereas Gimbutas’ intellectual heirs, like David Anthony, had theorized a mostly elite migration that would have registered at most a modest genetic impact, while wholly overhauling linguistic patterns, genetics told us that actually across much of northern Europe over half of ancestry was replaced. Today, scholars broadly agree that the Pontic steppe’s Yamnaya people, who contributed this new ancestry, both spoke proto-Indo-European, and aggressively expanded all across Eurasia beginning around 5,000 years ago, overnight shouldering aside venerable Neolithic civilizations from Britain to Central Asia. Between 3000 and 2300 BC, the Yamnaya and their descendents substantially replaced the indigenous peoples across the European continent’s width and breadth.

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Maksym Eristavi has a Substack post RC101 movie night: Alim (“a gem of the Ukrainian-Qırımlı indigenous art”) which goes into some cultural history that’s largely forgotten:

Alim (1926) is a gem of an ancient tradition of cultural solidarity between Ukrainian and Qırımlı indigenous artists. A prominent historian of Russian colonialism, whom I endlessly admire, Rory Finnin, has recently written an amazing book about this special cultural bond that Russia worked hard to break and erase.

This movie is the first Ukrainian Western to retell the story of a Crimean Tatar folk hero who stood up to Russian colonial authorities abusing, pillaging, and exploiting the indigenous people of Qırım. Apart from the storyline about Russian colonialism that remains as relevant as ever, the additional value of the movie is its rare aesthetics and the creators behind it. “Alim” shows you the authentic world of Qırım-Crimea, which was unfortunately completely erased by Russia’s 1944 genocide of the Crimean Tatar people and the following aggressive settler colonialism.

“Alim” is based on a play by a legendary Qırımlı writer Ümer İpçi, whom Russians sent to a concentration camp and then imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. In the 20th century, so-called “corrective psychiatry” was widely weaponized by Moscow to eliminate an endless number of indigenous artists and thinkers.

Mykola Bazhan, a genius of Ukrainian modernism, wrote the script based on Ipci’s play. He will later barely survive the Russia-committed genocide of the Ukrainian people, which wiped out the entire intellectual elite, too. But the price for it would be his artistic freedom. Several years ago, some of his earliest works were packaged into an amazing ‘Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul’ volume and published in English.

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My wife asked me about the word vaudeville, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1916):

1. A light popular song, commonly of a satirical or topical nature; spec. a song of this nature sung on the stage.
[…]
2. A play or stage performance of a light and amusing character interspersed with songs; also without article, this species of play or comedy. Now in frequent use in the U.S. to designate variety theatre (variety n. Compounds C.b) or music hall.

The “now” is amusing (and, I would think, embarrassing — can’t they fix things like that even if they’re not doing a full update?), but it’s the etymology that’s of interest:

< French vaudeville, earlier vau (plural vaux) de ville, vau de vire, and in full chanson du Vau de Vire a song of the valley of Vire (in Calvados, Normandy). The name is said to have been first given to songs composed by Olivier Basselin, a fuller of Vire in the 15th cent.

Alas, apparently that’s considered dubious in these sterner times; Wiktionary says “Unclear. Possibly a corruption of voix de ville (‘voice of the city’), or vallée de Vire (‘valley of the (river) Vire’).”

We’ve discussed the Indus/Harappan script before (2009, 2017); I’m happy to report that it can now provide you with big bucks. Soutik Biswas for BBC News:

Every week, Rajesh PN Rao, a computer scientist, gets emails from people claiming they’ve cracked an ancient script that has stumped scholars for generations. These self-proclaimed codebreakers – ranging from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax officers – are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. All of them are convinced they’ve deciphered the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a blend of signs and symbols. “They claim they’ve solved it and that the ‘case is closed’,” says Mr Rao, Hwang Endowed Professor at the University of Washington and author of peer-reviewed studies on the Indus script.

Adding fuel to the race, MK Stalin, the chief minister of southern India’s Tamil Nadu state, recently upped the stakes, announcing a $1m prize for anyone who can crack the code.

[There follows a long account of the script and attempts at decipherment.]

Back in India, it is not entirely clear why Mr Stalin of Tamil Nadu announced a reward for deciphering the script. His announcement followed a new study linking Indus Valley signs to graffiti found in his state. K Rajan and R Sivananthan analysed over 14,000 graffiti-bearing pottery fragments from 140 excavated sites in Tamil Nadu, which included more than 2,000 signs. Many of these signs closely resemble those in the Indus script, with 60% of the signs matching, and over 90% of south Indian graffiti marks having “parallels” with those from the Indus civilisation, the researchers claim. This “suggests a kind of cultural contact” between the Indus Valley and south India, Mr Rajan and Mr Sivananthan say.

Many believe Mr Stalin’s move to announce an award positions him as a staunch champion of Tamil heritage and culture, countering Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules in Delhi. But researchers are confident that there will be no claimants for Mr Stalin’s prize soon. Scholars have compiled complete, updated databases of all known inscribed artefacts – crucial for decipherment. “But what did the Indus people write? I wish we knew,” says Ms Yadav.

We all wish we knew… (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

Elizabeth Weise at USA Today writes about a worthy cause (archived):

If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.

Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.

“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C. She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they’re looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.

Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census. […] To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There’s no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”

So there you are; if you have the increasingly rare skill required (insert rant here) as well as the time and temperament, go for it. (Thanks, Nick!)

And speaking of archives, check out Preservation of Osor’s rare book collection through digitisation (EAP1517):

The target material is the surviving private collection of uniquely rare books in the traditional Mongolian script held by Mr. Bat-Ochir Osor, who was one of the nation’s prominent educators and Mongolian language promoters of mid 20th century modern Mongolia.

His collection comprises exceptionally rare books printed in the traditional Mongolian script in the 1920s through to the 1940s, before Mongolia was forcefully shifted to Russian Cyrillic in the 1940s.

Thanks, Trevor!

I am a bit hesitant to post David J. Lobina’s lengthy 3 Quarks Daily takedown of Inclusion in Linguistics because it could be seen as anti-diversity and anti-inclusion and, well, just plain reactionary, but that kind of thinking leads to intellectual sterility, and it seems to me (not having seen the actual book, mind you) that Lobina’s bile is justified. In any case, it is highly entertaining, and I think that is enough of a basis to present these excerpts to you; he introduces it by saying “this is possibly the worst book I have ever read in my career,” so you have been warned:

The volume Inclusion in Linguistics showcases the work of over 40 authors across 20 chapters on what is perceived to be a lack of inclusion in the field of linguistics, with North America as the main focus of attention (with some exceptions). Edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, this collection of papers is part of a project that includes the volume Decolonizing Linguistics, also published by Oxford University Press. […] The volume itself is divided into 4 thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on intersectional models of inclusion; Part 2 details possible institutional pathways to achieve more inclusion in linguistics; Part 3 is devoted to some of the resources available to teachers and lecturers to build more inclusive classrooms in schools and universities; and Part 4 outlines various examples of inclusive public engagement in the field. […]

What to make of it?

Well, it is hard to believe this book exists at all; or rather, it is hard to believe that Oxford University Press has published this volume under its Oxford Academy section. Inclusion in Linguistics is mostly a product of political advocacy, not of scholarship, and whilst this is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, the problem here is that both the politics and the advocacy on display are incredibly tendentious. The book is populated by myriad claims and denunciations, and even though most of these are rather contentious in nature, they all go largely unargued for (in addition, some material is close to mockery and even slander, and one has to wonder what OUP were thinking; more about this below).

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