languagehat.com

Carl Zimmer (brother of lexicographer Ben Zimmer, as J.W. Brewer points out in a comment on the Log post about this) has a story in the NY Times (archived) that starts with a potted history of Indo-European and then continues:

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

The linked study is “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans” by Iosif Lazaridis et al., and the abstract reads:

The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 ʙᴄ across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 ʙᴄ it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines. A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river. Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk. The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 ʙᴄ and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 ʙᴄ. The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite. We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 ʙᴄ and 4000 ʙᴄ.

There are more details at both the Times article and the Log post linked at the start of this one; I suppose I could have added this to one of the earlier Yamnaya-related LH posts, but those threads are getting long and people have been sending this to me, so I thought I’d give it its own post. Thanks, Eric and Jack!

I was reading Miranda Seymour’s NYRB review (November 23, 2023 issue; archived) of Antonia Fraser’s new biography of Lady Caroline Lamb (which makes for very lively reading) when I hit the following paragraph:

Initially, and on some level irrevocably, Byron adored Caroline, addressing her, in the first flush of delight, as “the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” But the born outsider also wanted a place in the Regency’s ton, the exclusive London circle presided over by the lady patronesses of Almack’s, the city’s most fashionable club. Caroline’s grand pedigree swept her lover across that threshold. Lady Melbourne, a charming but treacherous woman with whom Byron initiated a flirtatious relationship while seeking (but seldom heeding) advice on how best to handle her reckless daughter-in-law, did the rest.

I knew, of course, that ton was a borrowing from French and in general meant (to quote the OED) “The fashion, the vogue, the mode; fashionable air or style,” but I didn’t understand its use here. For that I had to scroll down to “b. transferred. People of fashion; fashionable society; the fashionable world”:

c1770 Miss P…D…will only..take engagements from billiard table gentlemen, gentlemen of the ton, and young shop~men.
in L. de Vries & P. Fryer, Venus Unmasked (1967) 33

1815 All the ‘Ton’s’ a stage, And Fashion’s motley votaries are but play’rs.
Sporting Magazine vol. 46 93

1855 The princess, the nobles, and all the ton had disappeared.
J. S. C. Abbott, History of Napoleon vol. I. xiv. 255

1969 A waste, when all the ton will flock here for this event.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 99

1969 The ton are here in force.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 103

Odd to give two cites from Hebe Elsna (Dorothy Phoebe Ansle), an obscure romance novelist who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page — surely one would have sufficed to document its (presumably marginal) late-20th-century use? At any rate, it’s an interesting extension of meaning that I hadn’t been familiar with, so I pass it along.
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Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, writes for The Conversation about a great project:

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother? Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.

Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.

The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University. Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.

While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt. […] In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.

More details at the link, along with an audio clip that allows you to compare the sound before and after restoration (the difference is really remarkable). Thanks, Bathrobe!

Via Adam’s Notes for January 30, I bring you this cacalicious quote from Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century:

Girardo Cagapisto is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit’. The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily, although an excellent recent article by François Menant finally lists the names and discusses their etymologies; but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. (Similar names exist in other Italian cities too—Menant stresses Cremona in particular—but they are not usually so prominent.) Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means ‘shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means ‘shit-in-your-pants’. Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, ‘shit-slowly’, the Cacainbasilica, ‘shit-in-the-church’, the Cacarana, ‘shit-a-frog’, the Cagatosici, ‘toxic-shit’, and there were many more. The twelfth century was a period when nicknames became surnames or even first names in Italy; there was a vogue for Mala- names, boasting of evil, among the aristocracy, for example (as with the Milanese aristocratic consul Malastreva, ‘evil-stirrup’), whereas in more clerical Rome, alongside some Caca- names, many names were formed from Deus-. But what would, say, the German court have thought, full of snobbish aristocrats from old families as it was, to find an authoritative representative from northern Italy’s biggest city called Shit-pesto? In fact, we can tell; for one of them, Otto of Freising, when he narrates with some schadenfreude the travails of Girardo in 1154, calls him Girardo Niger, ‘the black’, a name never attested in Milan, which Otto must have invented as a politer alternative. This may have also been in the historian’s mind when, just before, he wrote his famous trope about how awful it was that Italians allowed ‘youths of inferior condition’ and even ‘workers in the contemptible mechanical arts’ to assume the miliciae cingulum, that is to say public office. Not that it is likely that any of the people we have just looked at were also artisans, as Otto implies, but there is no reason to take that statement too seriously—anyway, for Otto, a medium landowner called Shit-pesto with a leading civic role would have been quite as bad as a rude mechanical. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750–1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side. But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the ‘civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.

Supercacafragilisticexpialidocious!

Not worth a separate post, but it has been brought to my attention that there is a word tetraplegia that is synonymous with quadriplegia and that, according to the OED (entry from 1986), has been around, if not in general use (it’s not in my print M-W or AHD), since 1911. Why?? I realize that quadri- is Latin and ‑plegia is ultimately from Greek (though we got it from Latin), but so what? Does that justify creating a pointless alternative term just to confuse people? What’s next, teleorasis for television?

Saleem Vaillancourtaz writes in LRB blog about a movie I’d definitely like to see:

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent screening of his movie Universal Language. I come from both countries, but it’s the furniture gag that struck home. Written by Rankin, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, the film is set in a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian. Buildings are covered with Persian signs (one says ‘Robert H. Smith School’); carts sell cooked beets, an old Iranian staple.

When I spoke with Rankin and Nemati after the screening, they said the movie is neither Iranian nor Canadian (though it’s Canada’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars). Nemati, who plays a tour guide showing visitors around Winnipeg (‘this is one of the first residential structures in the historic beige district’), recalled the praise offered by one ‘Iranian grandma’ at a Toronto screening. ‘She wasn’t a cinephile, but she said she just felt the film,’ that it connected people during a time of ‘distance’. Universal Language is not didactic, Rankin said, but ‘the experience of watching it does propose a way of looking at the world, and I think that’s what people respond to.’[…]

‘I liked that there was this strange echo on the other side of the world,’ he said, between his family’s history and Iranian cinema. I suggested that Universal Language speaks to the strand in Iranian culture that uses the particular to speak to the universal. The ‘Iranian-ness’ in the film ‘is not really Iranian-ness’, Nemati replied. He mentioned the Saadi poem at the entrance to the United Nations building in New York. ‘Persian poetry became universal because it wasn’t Iranian any more,’ he said. ‘Winnipeg, in Persian, loses itself and finds itself again.’

According to Rankin, the film inhabits ‘this new third space … at the confluence of different stories and experiences and understandings and baggage, and that’s what’s fun about the movie. It doesn’t belong in one Tupperware container that is sealed off from all other Tupperware containers.’

An Iranianized version of Canada — what a great concept for a movie!

Syntinen Laulu wrote in this Wordorigins thread, in response to a comment about Theodoric:

When I was young I was greatly puzzled by his moniker in German legend being Dietrich von Bern. What had he to do with Berne, I wondered? I don’t know how long it took me to find out that that was (still is, for all I know) the German name for Verona.

I responded:

No, they call it Verona just like us; that German Wikipedia article doesn’t even mention the “Bern” form except in a brief reference to Theodoric:

Aus dem Sagenkreis um Dietrich von Bern stammt auch der alte Name der Stadt: „Dietrichsbern“. Weiterhin war in alter Zeit die Bezeichnung „Welsch-Bern“ gebräuchlich (zimbrisch: Bearn)

[The old name of the city also comes from the legends surrounding Dietrich von Bern: “Dietrichsbern”. Furthermore, the name “Welsch-Bern” was used in ancient times (Cimbrian: Bearn).]

So I began to wonder about it, and googled up Dietrich von Bern und Karl der Große by Wim S. W. Rass, who says on p. 37:

Doch ist „Dittrichs-Bern“ eine Ortsbezeichnung für Verona, die es in dieser Form erst seit dem Spätmittelalter gibt […]. Mir ist sie noch nirgendwo sonst begegnet. Man beachte aber, dass hier nicht Dietrich nach dem Ort („von Bern“) benannt ist, sondern der Ort nach Dittrich benannt wurde (also gewissermaßen das „Bern des Dietrich“). Und es dürfte sich außerdem um eine germanische, vielleicht eine „deutsche“ Bezeichnung handeln, aber wohl kaum um eine lateinische / gotische / langobardische / italienische.

He goes on to discuss the issue at some length, but I have no idea how seriously to take him, and I wonder if “Bern” for Verona exists outside of the Dietrich story. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Trevor Joyce has a poem called “The Turlough,” part of his 1995 collection stone floods (reprinted in With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold — see this post), that starts:

It is raining elsewhere

Vertical rivers reverse
stone floods
the karst domain
each sink turns source

and ends:

There is thunder now elsewhere

Under an incandescent sky
flash floods
spread out this lake
is on no map

The end note begins:

The turloughs or winter lakes of western Ireland occur in areas of karstic limestone. Rain falling on this land drains away through swallow-holes or sinks, but precipitation anywhere within the watershed may cause the water table to rise again above the valley floor, whereupon streams issue through the crevices by which they had previously drained away.

Of course I was curious about the word, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1915), which in lieu of a definition says “(See quots.)”:
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Robyn Creswell, who teaches comparative literature at Brown and is poetry editor of the Paris Review, has an essay in the February 13 NYRB (archived) that is ostensibly a review of two new versions of the Qur’an but spends much of its time on a useful summary of the history of such attempts. It begins:

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph and conqueror of Jerusalem, was initially one of the prophet Muhammad’s fiercest enemies. According to early Muslim historians, ‘Umar was an exemplary pagan Arab: physically imposing, short-tempered, and somewhat sentimental, he was a lover of gambling, wine, and poetry. His conversion occurred in 616, three years after Muhammad began preaching to the polytheists of Mecca. One night, the story goes, ‘Umar was looking for drinking companions when he came across the prophet at prayer near the square shrine of the Kaaba (then a site of pagan pilgrimage). ‘Umar slipped under the great cube’s black covering and listened. Hearing the words of the Qur’an for the first time, he later reported, “My heart softened, I wept, and then Islam entered me.”

‘Umar’s experience was, it seems, typical. Early biographies of the prophet include stories of poets—the tribunes of pagan culture and Muhammad’s political rivals—who immediately renounced their art upon hearing the prophet’s revelations. Other stories recount the conversion of Abyssinian and Byzantine Christians who accepted the Qur’anic message even though they didn’t understand a word of Arabic. In the most extreme cases, hearing Qur’anic verses caused fainting, terror, ecstasy, and even death. In the eleventh century, Abu Ishaq al-Tha‘labi published a collection of such tales, The Blessed Book of Those Slain by the Noble Qur’an, Who Listened to the Qur’an and Subsequently Perished of Their Listening. Al-Tha‘labi wrote that people who died in this fashion were “the most virtuous of martyrs.”

Creswell points out that “Many Islamic authorities—and indeed many translators—believe that the Qur’an, as the word of God spoken to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, is strictly speaking untranslatable” and continues:

Leaving theology aside, the Qur’an isn’t a book Muslims have historically encountered through reading. Instead it is recited, memorized, and used in devotional practices. ‘Umar converted after hearing the prophet recite the Qur’an; al-Tha‘labi’s martyrs were listeners, not readers. And this is only the beginning of the translator’s difficulties.

He goes on to discuss Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin version, Ludovico Marracci’s 1698 translation (also Latin), George Sale’s 1734 translation (“the most popular in English for some two hundred years”), Muhammad Ali’s 1917 The Holy Qur’an: Containing the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary (adopted by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam), Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s 1930 The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (still widely used), Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation, and Commentary (1934-37), Arthur J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (1955), and Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’án (1999) before getting to the books under review. For many of them, he provides their versions of Surah 100, al-‘Adiyat, which is a convenient way to compare their qualities. (I wish he’d included my own go-to edition, Muhammad Asad’s The Message of The Quran with its superb commentary, but you can’t have everything.) Here’s a sample passage on M.A.R. Habib and Bruce Lawrence’s new The Qur’an: A Verse Translation:
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I recently ran across a reference to someone’s “battel” at Oxford, and of course went straight to the OED, where I found an entry (from 1885; not yet revised) so redolent of posh Victorian England I had to share it:

1. † A prebend. Obsolete.
[…]

2. In Univ. of Oxford: (a) college accounts for board and provisions supplied from the kitchen and buttery; (b) (in looser use) the whole college accounts for board and lodgings, rates, tuition, and contribution to various funds, as ‘My last term’s battels came to £40’; also attributive, as battel-bills.
The word has apparently undergone progressive extensions of application, owing partly to changes in the internal economy of the colleges. Some Oxford men of a previous generation state that it was understood by them to apply to the buttery accounts alone, or even to the provisions ordered from the buttery, as distinct from the ‘commons’ supplied from the kitchen: but this latter use is disavowed by others. See the quotations, and cf. those under battel v. and batteler n., which bear that battels applied in 17–18th centuries to provisions supplied to members of the college individually at their own order and cost, i.e. to battelers, who had no commons, but were charged their ‘battels’ only, and to commoners as extras ‘above the ordinary stint of their appointed commons’: but whether the battels were originally the provisions themselves, or the sums due on account of them, must at present be left undecided.

[1557
Ad solvendum debita seu batillos sociorum.
Reg. Exeter Coll. 41]
[…]
1706
For sometime kept a name in yᵉ Buttery Book; at wᶜʰ time Dr. Charlett was sponsor for discharge of his Battles.
T. Hearne, Remarks & Collections (1885) vol. I. 220
1792 The word battel, which..signifies to account, and battels the College accounts in general.
Gentleman’s Magazine August 716
1842 Their authority might be exerted to compel payment to tradesmen with nearly the same regularity as they exact their own battells.
T. Arnold in Life & Correspondence (1844) vol. II. x. 305
[…]
1882 Receipts..in respect of battels, room rent and tuition fees.
Spectator 18 March 352

3. Elsewhere: (see quots.).

1805 Battel—(a term used at Eton for the small portion of food which, in addition to the College allowance, the collegers receive from their Dames,).
J. H. Tooke, Επεα Πτεροεντα (ed. 2) vol. II. iv. 123
[…]
[a1883 Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money, which we called battels [This is an error of the author: the Winchester term is battlings], and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the second master.
A. Trollope, Autobiography (1883) vol. I. 13]

A brisk rap on the knuckles for poor Trollope! (But let’s face it, he attended Harrow as a day pupil who didn’t pay fees before haring off to Winchester; what can you expect?) And the etymology is equally chatty and supercilious:
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Nick Nicholas has been traveling through Greece and Albania and is now in Cyprus, and he’s been posting lots of observations (and photos) on Facebook; I thought this one was interesting enough to reproduce here (in its entirety, so those of you without FB access aren’t missing anything but a couple of menu images):

Burger, transliterated as berker in Cypriot Greek, instead of bernger. Cypriot Greek has a 3-way contrast of kk, k, ng: k is actually the closest the dialect phonology has to a g, whereas Greece Greek increasingly is dropping the n in ng, and has always used NG anyway. Same for nd vs t and mb vs p.

Yes, that is a double tt at the start of ttavas. It’s aspirated word-initially: t(h)avas. Here they make it with rice: in the Nicosia region where my aunt and uncle are from, they use onion instead, so Lefkara ttavas weirds them out. It’s unfamiliar to me, so I’m in.

Ttavas is the Cypriot for tava, the Indian through to Turkish pan that it is prepared in. (Metal in India, clay here.) Turkish t ends up in Cypriot as tt. Hence also eg Turkish kele “head” > Cypriot Greek kkele.

(I’ve added itals and links ad libitum.)