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Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and they are extraordinarily interesting from a linguistic point of view; I’ll quote excerpts from each.

Becoming an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist:

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, is a test used by the Department of Defense to assess a candidate’s ability to learn a language. This is in direct opposition to testing knowledge of any one specific language, as the military most often aims to teach you a new language, not use whatever random one you happen to already know. To this day, this test is spoken and written of in hushed, fearful tones. When I (and all the others before me) took it, before information about it was readily available on the internet, it was even more fabled. Allegedly, the DLAB is written in Esperanto, or at least derived from Esperanto, a synthetic language invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in the late 1800s. If this sounds confusing and slightly silly, you can imagine how I felt when the recruiter told me some of these details (he mentioned the Esperanto part, but either didn’t know or care to include the eye doctor detail). There are apparently guides and resources to prepare for the test now; Wikipedia goes so far as to say that without using these materials obtaining a passing score would be well-nigh impossible. Unless the test has changed dramatically, I can assure you this isn’t true, as I, and thousands of others that attended language school alongside and before me, didn’t have such materials. We just took the test.

As far as I could tell, a strong grasp of English grammar, or, I suppose, any language’s grammar, would take you pretty far on much of it. While it is specific to language, the test evaluates a much broader skill, that is, the ability to assimilate unfamiliar, seemingly conflicting information and apply it to novel situations. I, characteristically, believed that this test, like all other (non-math) standardized tests before it, would be a cakewalk. It was not. The DLAB, like other tests based on logic, doesn’t have wholly correct answers. Instead, it relies on the test-taker’s ability to determine the most likely, or best available answer. This could be, and indeed was, immensely frustrating for someone who had undergone traditional public education (in rural North Florida no less), where tests are multiple choice and simply have one right answer, and three wrong ones.

At the time, the Air Force required a minimum passing score of 100 (out of 164) to be eligible for language school. Through some combination of luck, exposure to the sound of multiple languages, and unalloyed bookwormishness that had provided me with a decent understanding of English grammar, I received a score of 103. Not great, but good enough.

From Dari at DLI to AFSOC:
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Robbie Armstrong’s The Bell story about magnet fishing in Glasgow’s canals is lively and well worth reading, with plenty of juicy Glaswegian dialogue, but this bit is what brings it here:

“What’s that, a chibber, oan yer first throw an aw?” McGeachin shouts over to Glasgow Magnet Fishing OG, Paul Goody, a hulking joiner with a gentle nature. He wanders over to see. Goody shows him the 1954 military pocketknife. “Finders keepers, this one,” Goody says joyfully, hastening to assure me: “Any big blades we hand it into the police.”

From context, chibber seemed to mean ‘knife,’ but I was unfamiliar with it; the only form in DSL is chib (Gangster slang) “A knife, a dagger; a knife or razor used as a weapon,” which is from Romani chhib, chhiv (to quote the OED, which has entries for both chiv and shiv — I am familiar with the latter). And for a spectacular folk etymology, contemplate the fearsome Mary McChib, “a headmistress in Scotland that took order and punishment very seriously”:

Here she is standing with her Chibber, a cupboard full of different types of spikes that she could add to the top of her cane. Before the belt or standard cane came into play in the 1900s, Mary would punish misbehaviour with the threat of stabbing in the top of the arm, a term that became known as getting “chibbed”.

We’ve discussed translation many times, but it’s a subject I never tire of, and I liked very much Val Vinokur’s take on “translating marked voices,” quoted at this XIX век post:

So here’s one of my insights from having translated Chamoiseau and from having translated skaz in general (which is to say, kind of orally inflected speech). A lot of translators, when they’re confronted with this, go for a super-folksy kind of, you know, Cockney or whatever… you know, like film noir kind of thing. The interesting thing about this kind of orally inflected speech, especially when it’s written but even when it’s oral… The person who gets this right more often is David Milch. The way that he writes dialogue, which sounds totally fanciful, but what he realizes is that people who are effectively self-educated, they will overreach, they will actually make their syntax more complicated, right, or more Biblical, because often the thing that they know is the Bible. So it will often sound more archaic, or some combination of the folksy and the archaic, because they’re reaching for something. So it doesn’t sound, you know, quite like the cliché of something low. So I try to keep that awkwardness, that it sounds both idiomatic and idiosyncratic at the same time, really. And also because, in particular, that’s how Babel’s skaz works, right? His skaz is very much Babel’s skaz. You know, his Cossacks talk like, you know, if Babel were a Cossack. They sound beautiful. And weird. And I feel like this is a mistake that a lot of translators make: they say, “well, I know how regular people sound like, so I’m going to… this is what it means to take license and make this sound folksy.” But there’s no one-to-one equivalence with that, so you have to kind of invent this idiom that shouldn’t sound exactly like something you’ve already heard before.

The way that this came up when we were translating Chamoiseau is, what do we do with the Creole, what do we do with the Creolized French? It’s like, “oh, let’s make them sound like Jamaicans!” And it’s like, “no!” Right? So we drew on, sort of, all of the dialects that we knew—including Yiddish!—to kind of come up with this idea of, what would Creolized French sound like in English, and it has to sound like something you’ve never heard before, because you’ve never heard it before.

That’s from a reading and discussion he gave at NYU in 2018; you can watch the whole thing at the link, and there’s another good quote there from Boris Dralyuk, taking a different point of view. Skaz is defined at Wikipedia and in the second paragraph of this 2009 post; it’s one of my favorite things about Russian fiction.

Back in 2014 we discussed the Norn language; extinct though it has been for a couple of centuries, there are videos in it, as Craig writes me: “Have you seen this person who makes videos of herself speaking Norn? She claims to have learned it as a child from her godparents.” The YouTube page is called Nornfru, and there are 16 videos; I have no basis for judging how good her Norn is (though I have the gravest doubts about learning it from godparents), so I simply offer the link for what it is worth. Thanks, Craig!

Daniel Soar’s LRB review (6 March 2025; archived) of Michael Katz’s new translation of The Brothers Karamazov is one of the best things I’ve read on Dostoevsky in a general-interest publication, and anyone interested in author or novel should read it. Here are some excerpts:

The first English translation of The Brothers Karamazov was by Constance Garnett. It came out in 1912, a good while after the novel first appeared, in serial form, in Russkiy Vestnik (the ‘Russian Herald’), over the course of 1879 and 1880, the year before Dostoevsky died. Garnett worked at great speed – according to one account she turned out five thousand words a day – and didn’t know Russian well: she kept a dictionary by her deckchair and skipped bits she didn’t understand. The (Russian) critic Korney Chukovsky called her translations ‘a safe blandscript: not a volcano … a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner – which is to say a complete distortion of the original’. But the British and American press loved it. The Observer praised Garnett’s ‘careful fidelity’, fully revealing of Dostoevsky’s ‘perfect balance’ and ‘sheer technical skill’.

Except technical skill isn’t really what the prose has to offer. At one level, you can’t disagree with Tolstoy, Chekhov et al [whose criticisms Soar has previously mentioned]: the narration is often awkward, full of little solecisms and redundancies. Presumably, this wasn’t the standard of literary prose Dostoevsky’s contemporaries expected. But there’s a rationale for the ungainliness: the story – or, as the text claims, the history – purports to be written by an unnamed inhabitant of Skotoprigonyevsk, the (fictional) small town somewhere in the provinces where the book is set. This writer is decidedly not urbane, well connected or particularly well educated – a long way from the Petersburg literary elite to which, say, Pushkin and Dostoevsky himself belonged – and he often slips into colloquialism or imprecision or makes the sort of unintended mistake it’s impossible not to laugh at.

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Jerry Friedman writes:

I wonder whether you and the Hatters would be interested in the Danish film Fremmed (Stranger in English), which came out recently. It takes place during the introduction of agriculture to Denmark. The native hunter-gatherers are shown speaking a Siberian language with some additions from Mayan, because reasons, and the foreign farmers are shown speaking a language based on Hattic words and grammar.

This came up at alt.usage.english, with the following quotations:

“There was a guy I knew; he has a PhD in Proto-Indo-European languages. But even those are 2,000 years older than those in our story. We asked him: ‘Can you come up with new ones?’ Tobias [Søborg] took an old Siberian tribal language and merged it with ancient Mayan. Then he did the same thing again, this time using dialects from the area around Turkey. We had a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules. Poor actors. They had to learn so much more than just their lines,” he recalled. “Later, Tobias was also on set, helping with the pronunciations. I think that might have been the single hardest part of making the whole thing work, but we were in it together. It was so amazing to watch it finally come to life.”

Also, from a Danish newspaper:

Tobias Mosbæk Søborg er ph.d. og postdoc ved Københavns Universitet og forsker i gamle indoeuropæiske sprog. Han har til filmen konstrueret to vidt forskellige sprog til henholdsvis jægerfolket og bondefolket, for at filmens dialog kunne fremstå mere autentisk. Til bondefolkets sprog har han især brugt ord og grammatik fra det ældste kendte oldtidssprog fra det nuværende Tyrkiet, hattisk, netop fordi bondekulturen stammer herfra.

“Der er de seneste 10 år sket en revolution i forståelsen af oldtidens kulturmøder. Genetisk og arkæologisk har det været muligt at føre bevis for det, sprogforskere har sagt i 200 år, nemlig at befolkningsgrupper afløste hinanden gennem indvandring,” siger Tobias Mosbæk Søborg.

Google Translate says:

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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?