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This is a very silly story, but how can I resist a story that involves Russian vowels? According to this Atlantic story by Farangis Najbullah, the ever-controversial Vladimir Zhirinovsky “has now targeted a letter in the Russian alphabet”:

The letter in question is the vowel “ы”—a difficult-to-pronounce sound for non-native Russian speakers that is usually transliterated simply as “y” in English. Zhirinovsky says he wants the letter removed from the Russian alphabet, calling it a “nasty Asiatic” import. The vowel came to the Russian language from the Mongols, Zhirinovsky was quoted as telling the State Duma on March 12.

“Only animals make this sound, ‘ы-ы,'” he said, adding that the regular ‘и’ (‘i’) is enough for the Russian alphabet. ‘Ы’ doesn’t exist in any other European language, argued Zhirinovsky. “This primitive, Asiatic sound is the reason people don’t like us in Europe,” he told lawmakers.

The politician seemed to have a longstanding issue with the “guttural” letter, which he claimed his son wasn’t able to pronounce as a child. “He once told me, ‘Dad, dad, look, there’s a ‘мишка’,” the Russian word for ‘bear.’ “I thought ‘What ‘мишка’? A bear? But he meant ‘мышка’,” the word for “mouse.”

There’s not much to say other than “what an ignoranimus!,” but it’s amusing, so I thought I’d pass it on. (Thanks for the link, Adam!)

Even in my sixties, even as an inveterate logophile, I still on occasion discover I have been mispronouncing a word (or rather pronouncing it in a way that turns out to be unhistorical) and have to retrain myself. This just happened, for instance, with duodenum, which I have all my life pronounced /dyu-ˈä-də-nəm/ (dyoo-AH-dənəm) but which has the traditional pronunciation /ˌdü-ə-ˈdē-nəm/ (dyoo-ə-DEE-nəm), based on the Latin duodēnum digitōrum “of twelve digits, inches, or finger’s breadths” (to quote the OED; note that the Russian equivalent of duodenum is двенадцатиперстная кишка ‘twelve-finger gut’); the Latin long ē makes the syllable stressed in English, and since I like to preserve such bits of linguistic history, I choose to say it the traditional way despite the fact that my previous pronunciation is listed as an alternate in both Merriam-Webster and AHD.

But what am I to do about secretory (which I have been encountering in my editing work)? I’ve never actually said the word, as far as I know, and I had no strong intuitions about how to say it, so naturally I turned to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate which is always at my elbow and found “\ˈsē-krə-ˌtȯr-ē, especially British si-ˈkrē-t(ə-)rē\.” Fine, I thought, Americans say SEE-krətoree, I’m an American, I’ll say SEE-krətoree. But then I opened AHD and found only sĭ-krē′-tə-rē (si-KREE-təree)! Well, dammit, let me check the New Oxford American Dictionary (3rd ed.). Same story: only si-KREE-təree. So I turn to the Varied Reader and ask: if you are familiar with this word, how do you say it? And if you happen to know how American doctors and others who use the word professionally say it, that would be especially appreciated. I hate not knowing how to pronounce things.

Aramaist Edward Cook has fun with recent pop-culture uses of Aramaic in his post “You Won’t Believe These Unbelievable Aramaic Expressions!!” (Great title, as is the name of his blog, Ralph the Sacred River.) He gives a noogie to Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, which purports to quote an actual sentence:

I’m not sure if Quentin recited the text from right-to-left, in which case the sentence runs backward (although the words are not backwards), or left-to-right (in which case the words are backwards, but the sentence gives the correct word order). Maybe it’s a Unicode thing, or just a magic thing.

Then he gets into the series Spartacus on the Starz network:

I’ve not found out who did the Aramaic, but I infer from the scripts (which are available here) that the language consultant employed mainly Talmudic Aramaic…

Also interesting are the “four-letter words” (obscene language). We don’t have any obscene language from ancient Aramaic — as far as I know — and it therefore presents a vexing problem in back-translation. I’m not going to go through all of them, lest I arouse distaste in some of my readers. However, the four-letter word par excellence, the F-word, gets a thorough workout in the scripts, and the back-translation is interesting, if not historically valid.

The whole thing is well worth it just for the philological exegesis of “Hare mezayyne. [Fucking shits.]” (Thanks, Paul!)

I started off this post: “I started off this post: ‘The NY Times has another language story […] and if you’re an aficionado of these things you will have guessed that 1) the story is by the muddled but ever plucky Nicholas Wade…'” And yes, the Times has another story by the muddled but ever plucky Nicholas Wade. This time it’s about “a recent proposal that the ancestors of Native Americans were marooned for some 15,000 years on a now sunken plain before they reached North America”:

This idea, known as the Beringian standstill hypothesis, has been developed by geneticists and archaeologists over the last seven years. It holds that the ancestors of Native Americans did not trek directly across the land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska until the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. Rather, geneticists say, these ancestors must have lived in isolation for some 15,000 years to accumulate the amount of DNA mutations now seen specifically in Native Americans. […]

Linguists have until now been unable to contribute to this synthesis of genetic and archaeological data. The first migrations to North America occurred between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, but most linguists have long believed that language trees cannot be reconstructed back further than 8,500 years. Vocabulary changes so fast that the signal of relationship between two languages is soon swamped by the noise of borrowed words and fortuitous resemblances.

But in 2008, Edward Vajda, a linguist at Western Washington University, said he had documented a relationship between Yeniseian, a group of mostly extinct languages spoken along the Yenisei River in central Siberia, and Na-Dene. […]

Building on Dr. Vajda’s success, two linguists, Mark A. Sicoli of Georgetown University and Gary Holton of the University of Alaska, have assessed the relationship of the two language families based on shared grammatical features, rather than vocabulary.

In a paper published in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday, they report their surprising finding that Na-Dene is not a descendant of Yeniseian, as would be expected if the Yeniseian speakers in Siberia were the source population of the Na-Dene migration. Rather, they say, both language families are descendants of some lost mother tongue. Their explanation is that this lost language was spoken in Beringia, and that its speakers migrated both east and west. The eastward group reached North America and became the Na-Dene speakers, while the westward group returned to Siberia and settled along the Yenisei River.

Now, I’m suspicious of this on all sorts of grounds, but everything I know about Na-Dene and Yeniseian I’ve learned from commenters here, and I’m hoping some of them will weigh in on the proto-Beringian theory. (Thanks, Eric!)

A very nice Guardian article by David Shariatmadari, a rare journalist who writes with actual understanding of language (which suggests he may have taken a linguistics course or two at some point). He starts with an anecdote about “a very senior academic” who “has been pronouncing ‘awry’ wrong all through her long, glittering career,” and continues thus:

We’ve all been there. I still lapse into mis-CHEE-vous if I’m not concentrating. This week some PR whizzes working for a railway station with an unusual name unveiled the results of a survey into frequently garbled words. The station itself is routinely confused with an endocrine gland about the size of a carrot (you can see why they hired PRs). Researchers also found that 340 of the 1000 surveyed said ex-cetera instead of etcetera, while 260 ordered ex-pressos instead of espressos. Prescription came out as perscription or proscription 20% of the time.

The point is malapropisms and mispronunciations are fairly common. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary lists 171,476 words as being in common [actually “current”—LH] use. But the average person’s vocabulary is tens of thousands smaller, and the number of words they use every day smaller still. There are bound to be things we’ve read or are vaguely familiar with, but not able to pronounce as we are supposed to.

The term “supposed” opens up a whole different debate, of course. Error is the engine of language change, and today’s mistake could be tomorrow’s vigorously defended norm. There are lots of wonderful examples of alternative pronunciations or missteps that have become standard usage. Here are some of my favourites, complete with fancy technical names.

Music to my ears! And there are indeed lots of good examples, like adder from nadder and bird from brid; it’s a fun read. (Thanks, Eric!)

Those of you who are following events in and around Ukraine may find this map as interesting as I do; it shows the distribution of languages by locality (if you click on it, you can see a much larger version). The legend is in Ukrainian; from top to bottom, the languages are Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian/Moldavian, Crimean Tatar, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Polish, and Albanian.

Update. Here‘s an English version of the map (thanks, Christopher!).

A couple of videos for those who have always wondered how to make those wonderful click sounds and what they sound like in sentences:
Xhosa Lesson 2. How to say “click” sounds.
Xhosa Tongue Twister Lesson in South Africa.
Thanks, Songdog!

I tend to ignore Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage, a beautifully produced and widely used and respected book with whose prejudices and general approach I utterly disagree, but recently I wanted to see what he had to say about something and found myself instead looking at his long list of “Denizen Labels” — what are usually called demonyms. Now, I’m very fond of demonyms myself, though I’ve only devoted one post to them (and there are lots of great examples in that thread); my copies of Daniel Santano y León’s Diccionario de gentilicios y topónimos and A.M. Babkin and E.A. Levashov’s Словарь названий жителей СССР [Dictionary of names of inhabitants of the USSR] are treasured possessions. I therefore dropped what I was doing and pored over the list, quickly concluding that it showed the same combination of random choices, poor decisions, and sloppy thinking that irritates me so much about the rest of the book.

An example of random choices: why does he include Dublin (Dubliner) but not Cork (Corkonian)? It’s certainly not because Cork isn’t the capital; he has lots of fairly insignificant places, like Metz (Messin), Saint-Cloud (Clodoaldien), and Trois-Rivières (Trifluvien) — he even has Dundee (Dundonian), to which Cork (Corkonian) would make a nice companion. Poor decisions: for Budapest he gives “Budapestiek,” which is a capitalized version of the Hungarian plural for budapesti ‘inhabitant of Budapest.’ If you’re too ignorant of a language to distinguish singular from plural, you shouldn’t be trying to provide a demonym from that language. And that brings us to the third issue, sloppy thinking: who are these terms intended for, and what use does he envisage? He seems to have extrapolated from French demonyms, which he clearly loves and which in fact are often used in English, the idea that one should use native terms wherever possible, but he’s inconsistent about this: he gives (besides that stupid Hungarian plural) Istanbullu for Istanbul, but for Helsinki he gives Helsinkian, not helsinkiläinen (or, as he would write it, Helsinkiläinen). No English-speaker is going to use “Istanbullu” unless they live in Turkey and are immersed in Turkish culture; he’s just showing off. The Wikipedia entry linked above, though not complete (they don’t have Helsinki, for example), is more sensible; for Istanbul they give Istanbulite, for example. And again he’s inconsistent: for Dijon he gives Dijonese, not Dijonnais, the French term. For Shanghai he gives Shanghailander, which sounds archaic to me; Wikipedia gives Shanghainese, which is what I would say myself. In short, his list, like his book, is an impressive-looking but antiquated and incoherent piece of work.

Update (March 2016). Having gotten a review copy of the new Fourth Edition of this book, I naturally turned to the “Denizen Labels” and found that Garner has added Cork (Corkonian), changed “Budapestiek” to “Budapesti” (which at least is singular), added Istanbulite to Istanbullu, and added Dijonnais to Dijonese. Hey, maybe he read this post!

Robert Irwin has an interesting TLS review of Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950, by Marwa Elshakry, about the reception of Darwinism in the Arab world (thanks for the link, Paul!). [Aug. 2025: The link is dead and there’s no archived version, but much of the review is quoted here.] Most of it is not of particular LH interest, but I was struck by this:

For a long time, the reception of Darwinism was bedevilled by the need to find either neologisms or new twists to old words. As Marwa Elshakry points out, there was at first no specific word in Arabic for “species”, distinct from “variety” or “kind”. “Natural selection” might appear in Arabic with the sense “nature’s elect”. When Hasan Husayn published a translation of Haeckel, he found no word for evolution and so he invented one. Tawra means to advance or develop further. Extrapolating from this verbal root, he created altatawwur, to mean “evolution”.

Who cares if there’s a “specific word in Arabic for ‘species'” (an infelicitous phrase, it seems to me)? Russian, for example, gets along without one perfectly well: вид [vid] means ‘species’ and род [rod] means ‘genus,’ and both are ordinary words meaning ‘kind, sort.’ Context, as always, is all. I note that English does not have a “specific word” for family (the rank above genus); we make do with an ordinary word for a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, and nobody seems the worse for it.

Incidentally, Darwinism was popularized quite early in Russia, in an 1864 article by the radical critic Pisarev, Прогресс в мире животных и растений [Progress in the world of animals and plants]. (By “popularized” I mean “introduced into the tiny world of the intelligentsia”; relatively few Russians would have heard of Darwin’s theories for decades, and most of those who did disapproved of them, just as in other countries.)

Update. It has been brought to my attention that the struck-out statement is simply not true; a well-informed correspondent writes:

Darwin was widely publicized and very popular in Russia (which already had a well-developed pre-Darwin evolutionary tradition). Leftists liked him for the obvious reasons, and even liberals and conservatives almost all praised his scientific theory (even Dostoevsky accepted the part about evolution). What Russians did not like was the Malthusian elements of Darwin’s theory — the notion of constant population pressures upon limited resources and of individualist struggle. This they often saw as a transparent projection of British cultural values upon nature.

Live and learn!

This Project Gutenberg eBook for English As We Speak It in Ireland, by P. W. Joyce (London: Longmans, Green & Co., Dublin, M.H. Gill & Son, Ltd, 1910), was recently linked on MetaFilter, and I would be remiss if I did not pass it on to my own readership. It’s chock full of delights, from the Preface (“My own memory is a storehouse both of idiom and vocabulary; for the good reason that from childhood to early manhood I spoke—like those among whom I lived—the rich dialect of Limerick and Cork”) to the chapter on affirming, assenting, and saluting (“The Irish ní’l lá fós é [neel law fo-say: it isn’t day yet] is often used for emphasis in asseveration, even when persons are speaking English; but in this case the saying is often turned into English. ‘If the master didn’t give Tim a tongue-dressing, ’tisn’t day yet‘ (which would be said either by day or by night): meaning he gave him a very severe scolding”) to the chapter on swearing, which begins:

The general run of our people do not swear much; and those that do commonly limit themselves to the name of the devil either straight out or in some of its various disguised forms, or to some harmless imitation of a curse. You do indeed come across persons who go higher, but they are rare. Yet while keeping themselves generally within safe bounds, it must be confessed that many of the people have a sort of sneaking admiration—lurking secretly and seldom expressed in words—for a good well-balanced curse, so long as it does not shock by its profanity. I once knew a doctor—not in Dublin—who, it might be said, was a genius in this line. He could, on the spur of the moment, roll out a magnificent curse that might vie with a passage of the Iliad in the mouth of Homer. ‘Oh sir’—as I heard a fellow say—”tis grand to listen to him when he’s in a rage.’ He was known as a skilled physician, and a good fellow in every way, and his splendid swearing crowned his popularity. He had discretion however, and knew when to swear and when not; but ultimately he swore his way into an extensive and lucrative practice, which lasted during his whole life—a long and honourable one.

If you don’t find hours of entertainment in it, ’tisn’t day yet.