languagehat.com

Kory Stamper has a great post called “In Defense of Talking Funny” that starts with a friend, or “friend,” interrupting her in “a crowded, chichi restaurant” to say “You’re saying that wrong.”

“What?”

“‘Towards’. You’re saying it oddly– ‘TOE-wards’. It’s ‘TWARDS’.”

I blinked and dropped a forkful of frisée-glacé-reduction-foofaraw down my shirt. “It is?”

He looked unnerved: the English language is supposed to be my area of expertise. “It’s pronounced ‘TWARDS’. I mean, right? Here, we’ll ask the waiter.”

My stomach hit my shoes. “No, no, I’ll take your word for it.” And we attempted to go back to the conversation we had before I started talking about the videos. I say “attempted”: we did, in fact, have more conversation, though I don’t recall much of what was said. I was just trying to avoid saying the word “towards.”

In the first place, can you imagine having the gall to “correct” a lexicographer on her pronunciation? (I know a lot of people don’t like the word, but it’s a classic example of “mansplaining.”) Anyway, she goes on to say “Dialects are a funny thing: everyone speaks one, but we only notice them when they’ve been dislocated,” and explains:

To get technical, dialects are varieties of a language that have their own set of speakers with their own vocabulary, grammatical rules, and accent, and they can be regional, socioeconomic, ethnic, tonal, and even a combination thereof. American English has eight major dialects–or 24, or hundreds, depending on who you ask and what they define as a “dialect.” Most of us don’t just speak a dialect, but switch between several depending on where, why, and how we are. And this is frustrating for the people who think that language shouldn’t be bound by culture, era, or region: that one kind of English (usually theirs) is good enough for every single English speaker in the world, all the time.

And then she says, “I get het up about dialect not just because I want dialects to flourish, but because, like most of us, I learned at one point that the dialects I spoke were regarded as uneducated or wrong”:

I’ve lived the code-switching life. My parents spoke a combination of Western American English and Inland Northern American English; I went to school in a primarily Mexican and African-American neighborhood, where Chicano and AAVE were the primary dialects. But this is knowledge gained in hindsight: back then, I was a kid, dumb and free and trying to fit in. On the playground, I learned double-dutch and dozens; I’d use the quick, clipped up-talk of my Latin friends, then switch to the swingy, low-voweled cadence of my black friends. I called people “chica” and “homes”; I “-g”-dropped and /z/-swapped and had not a linguistic care in the world.

One day I was telling my mother about the school day when she cut me off. “Can you queet talkin’ like deese, because we don’t talk like deese? Drives me crazy.”

I was flummoxed. “I’m just talking,” I said.

“You sound Mexican,” she said, “and you’re not. If you’re not careful, your friends are going to think that you’re making fun of them.” It was my first introduction to sociolinguistics and the politics of dialect.

And then she goes on to tell how she did the exact same thing to her own daughter, despite her professional knowledge and her best intentions. It’s a wonderful essay and a stirring call for acceptance: “After all, we all sound funny and uneducated to someone out there.” Read the whole thing!

Diarmaid MacCulloch has an extremely interesting LRB review of Forgery and Counter-Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics, by Bart Ehrman, that makes a nice follow-up to the Bible reading I’ve been doing recently; in fact, he includes a brief plug for a book I recently read (but don’t seem to have posted about), When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible, by Timothy Michael Law:

Another fresh perspective is Timothy Michael Law’s When God Spoke Greek, a study of the Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture or Old Testament.​ Law has much to say that will be news even to many students of church history, if their specialism is in a later period. He points out that the Septuagint became the authoritative Bible which Mediterranean Christians used once they cut their links with Judaism, and often this is traceable in New Testament quotations from Hebrew scripture which seem ‘wrong’ in comparison with the Hebrew. They are wrong because they are earlier: the long accepted Hebrew Bible which Jews and Christians have commonly referred to is actually a redaction of variant earlier texts, as has become apparent from the mass of earlier scriptural fragments known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it postdates most of the New Testament by perhaps half a century. When, in the 16th century, Protestant scholars excitedly returned to the Hebrew Bible, to expose popish error in understanding God’s word, they were unwittingly consulting a text later than the Greek Septuagint which lay behind the Latin Vulgate version of the Old Testament. Law thus brilliantly turns accepted wisdom about the nature of biblical text on its head. This trio – Ehrman, Moss and Law – kicks away the supports of both conservative Protestant and Roman Catholic scholarship, and leaves some old-fashioned liberal biblical scholars looking a little uncomfortable. All three are aware that good history is a solvent for lazy and often harmful promulgations of traditional ecclesiastical authority; they all write with an implicit moral purpose.

But what drove me to post was a reference to “the mysterious sixth-century Miaphysite Syrian Christian who pretended to be Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian friend of Paul of Tarsus in the first century.” Miaphysite? That appeared to mean ‘one nature,’ but surely that was monophysitism? Had MacCulloch or Ehrman or somebody decided that since physis was a feminine noun it should have the feminine mia?? Confused, I turned to Wikipedia, where I found a whole article about miaphysitism, “sometimes called henophysitism,” which “holds that in the one person of Jesus Christ, Divinity and Humanity are united in one or single nature (‘physis’), the two being united without separation, without confusion, and without alteration. Historically, Chalcedonian Christians have considered Miaphysitism in general to be amenable to an orthodox interpretation, but they have nevertheless perceived the Miaphysitism of the non-Chalcedonians to be a form of Monophysitism. The Oriental Orthodox Churches themselves reject this characterization.” Now, I like a subtle distinction as well as the next man, but my brain refuses even to attempt to parse the difference between the single-nature miaphysite and the single-nature monophysite. If anyone can provide an explanation in terms suitable for an ignorant observer, I will welcome it; otherwise I’ll just bear in mind that there is such a thing as a miaphysite and go about my way.

This wonderful quiz, originally from Walter Penney in the August 1969 issue of Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics and now presented online by Futility Closet, is as simple as can be: “Below are five groups of English words. Each group appears also in a foreign language. What are the languages?” I got 3 and 5 instantly, 1 and 4 after some thought, and was stumped by 2. I suspect there will be spoilers in the comments [Update: there are definitely spoilers], so if you want to try, you should do so before clicking through to the thread. Thanks, John and Breffni!

Clarification (since some people misunderstood the way it worked): the words are not etymologically connected, they are words that happen to be spelled the same way in English and another language; e.g. (to take a language that isn’t in the quiz), more and my are Russian words (for ‘sea’ and ‘we’ respectively) as well as English ones.

Another quote from Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia (see this post), this time from Mariia Cherniak’s chapter “Russian Romantic Fiction”; in the course of explaining that unlike other genres, “romantic fiction was an entirely new arrival in post-Soviet Russia,” she points out that prerevolutionary prejudices about women’s writing “were shared by the masters of Soviet culture, who also had a whole set of reasons of their own to object to romance and melodrama”:

It was not quite the case that love had no place in publicly disseminated Soviet culture. In the socialist realist novel, girls met boys as well as tractors. Soviet cinema, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, served up a few emotionally fulfilling love stories. But the kind of romantic women’s culture that almost invariably accompanied modernity in Western Europe was absent — at least in the public domain. This is not to say that Soviet women did not feel the romantic urge. When Western-style romances finally hit the bookstalls in the early 1990s, they met a huge pent-up demand. In the absence of published romantic fiction, Soviet teenage girls from the late 1950s onwards had made do with home-made love stories. These were a little-known form of Soviet samizdat that circulated very widely in the subculture of young females. The handwritten stories of the 1960s and 1970s ranged from the romantic to the erotic, their endings might be tragic or happy, but they tended to fit a first-love narrative formula. They changed hands frequently and were taken down by their latest readers; at each new copying new details (ranging from the weather to names of characters) might be added. These stories met cathartic and educational needs that were not catered for adequately in Soviet culture. Girls had no other authoritative way to learn how to fall in love and how to behave with the opposite sex.

[The paragraph is footnoted to Sergei Borisov’s “Прозаические жанры девичьих альбомов” (Новое литературное обозрение, 1996, № 22. pp. 362-366).]

I continue to be amazed and impressed by the lengths to which people will go for their favored entertainment if driven to it; compare the factory workers who learned Polish so they could read detective novels mentioned in the post linked above.

A Washington Post column by Chris Cillizza shows and discusses a remarkable chart that “details how the 17 most common non-English languages in 1980 have fared over the past 30 years” in the US; Cillizza summarizes it thus:

In 1980, the five most common non-English languages spoken in the United States were (in order): Spanish, Italian, German, French and Polish. Thirty years later, the top five are (in order): Spanish, Chinese, French, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

He points out that “Yiddish, which was the 11th most common non-English language in the U.S. in 1980, has fallen to last over the last two decades” and “Russian … started at 14th in 1980 but has soared to the eighth most common language in 2010,” and has other interesting observations. Thanks, Kobi!

A passage of linguistic interest from Orlando Figes’s The Crimean War: A History, which I’ve just started:

Encouraged by victory against Turkey, Catherine also pursued a policy of collaboration with the Greeks, whose religious interests she claimed Russia had a treaty right and obligation to protect. Catherine sent military agents into Greece, trained Greek officers in her military schools, invited Greek traders and seamen to settle in her new towns on the Black Sea coast, and encouraged Greeks in their belief that Russia would support their movement for national liberation from the Turks. More than any other Russian ruler, Catherine identified with the Greek cause. Under the growing influence of her most senior military commander, statesman and court favourite Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine even dreamed of re-creating the old Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Ottoman. The French philosopher Voltaire, with whom the Empress corresponded, addressed her as ‘votre majesté impériale de l’église grecque’, while Baron Friedrich Grimm, her favourite German correspondent, referred to her as ‘l’Impératrice des Grecs’. Catherine conceived this Hellenic empire as a vast Orthodox imperium protected by Russia, whose Slavonic tongue had once been the lingua franca of the Byzantine Empire, according (erroneously) to the first great historian of Russia, Vasily Tatishchev. The Empress gave the name of Constantine – after both the first and the final emperor of Byzantium – to her second grandson. To commemorate his birth in 1779, she had minted special silver coins with the image of the great St Sophia church (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, cruelly converted into a mosque since the Ottoman conquest. Instead of a minaret, the coin showed an Orthodox cross on the cupola of the former Byzantine basilica. To educate her grandson to become the ruler of this resurrected Eastern Empire, the Russian Empress brought nurses from Naxos to teach him Greek, a language which he spoke with great facility as an adult.

I knew Russia supported the Greeks at that period, but I had no idea it went so deep.

The always enjoyable website bradshaw of the future specializes in showing how two words you wouldn’t suspect of being related in fact are, but the latest post is the reverse:

sorry and sorrow
are not related! Not etymologically related anyway. They were associated with each other phonologically and semantically in Middle English.

sorry and sore are from PIE *seh₂i– “suffering” (Old English sār “painful” and sārig “distressed, sad” (cognate with West Frisian searich “sore, spotty, scabby”)).

sorrow is from PIE *swergh– “worry, be sick” (Old English sorg “anxiety, sorrow”).

In a similar vein, my wife asked me this morning if the two senses of meal were related, and I explained that they are not: meal ‘ground seeds of a cereal grass or pulse’ is from PIE *mel(ə)- ‘crush, grind’ (and is cognate with German Mehl, Dutch meel, and Old Norse mjǫl and related to Latin molere ‘to grind’), while meal ‘the food served and eaten on a particular occasion’ is from PIE *mē– ‘measure’ (and is cognate with German Mal ‘time,’ Mahl ‘meal,’ Old Norse māl, and Gothic mēl ‘time, hour’ and more distantly with moon, month, and meter). (The semantic transition is from ‘measure’ to ‘marked out or appointed time’ to ‘time for eating’; there’s an obsolete phrase sorry meal meaning ‘an untoward, terrible, or unhappy occasion or occurrence.’)

Another great footnote from Marina Koreneva’s chapter on “Russian Detective Fiction” in Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia (see this post), in the context of the increasing publicity given to authors’ biographies in the mid-1990s:

The question of the reliability of the information presented by the publishers will not be discussed here, although it deserves attention. It is well known that many authors, especially at the dawn of the new Russian detective fiction, wrote under a pseudonym — some of them to avoid embarrassment (as in the case of graduates of the Literary Institute), others to avoid confusing their main profession with this ‘sideline’, still others under pressure from the publishers. One result of this has been situations where an author for one reason or another breaks a contract with a publishing house, but his name — like a brand name — remains in the possession of the publishers. So as not to lose the name they have worked to establish, publishers hire another, usually completely unknown writer, who continues to produce novels under the name of the already famous author. If the ‘real’ author continues to publish books under the same pseudonym and the publishers dig their heels in, then literary twins begin to operate on the book market (as was the case, for example, with Anna Malysheva and Viktoriia Platova, both of whom existed in two manifestations).

I imagine this sort of thing happens elsewhere as well.

I’m reading Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective, edited by Stephen Lovell and Birgit Menzel (Sagner, 2005; strangely, it doesn’t seem to have an Amazon listing), and I (admittedly not the average reader) am finding it enthralling. Lovell’s introductory essays are instructive and well written, but the real prize is Marina Koreneva’s chapter on “Russian Detective Fiction.” Koreneva goes all the way back to folk tales like Bova Korolevich and Shemyaka’s Judgment and the wildly popular tales of the real-life thief Vanka Kain (see the section on Matvei Komarov in this post), and she has an extraordinary depth and breadth of knowledge of the field. When she gets to Soviet times, she explains that the conventional view that the 1930s and ’40s were a “detective-free time” is mistaken: even though the genre was officially suppressed, such works appeared in “the series, or ‘libraries,’ of thin brochure-type books that the publishing houses put out for the benefit of various groups of Soviet readers” (e.g., the Library of the Red Army Man, the Library of the Village Correspondent, etc.), and in the 1930s alone “there were dozens of such series.”

But what drives me to post is footnote 36. She’s been talking about how publishing houses after Khrushchev’s reforms were “self-financing enterprises,” meaning they were supposed to support themselves rather than relying on state subsidies, and yet they were only allowed to publish a certain number of adventure novels (which actually turned a profit) each year; to get around this, they camouflaged such works in all sorts of places (series, supplements to journals, almanacs with titles like “Heroism,” etc.), which “placed the readers themselves in the position of a detective: in order to find the desired text, it was necessary not only to expend energy … but also to work out where to start looking for it.” And to show the lengths to which people were willing to go, she has the following footnote:

Some detective lovers learned foreign languages specially so as to be able to read foreign novels in the original and get round Soviet publishing. The Ekaterinburg writer Viktor Miasnikov recalled that at the end of the seventies he worked at a factory with its own Polish language society. The workers were learning Polish purely to be able to read the detective novels that were available in the ‘bookshops of socialist literature’. Especially popular were the pocket editions of the Polish series ‘Labyrinth‘ and ‘The Silver Key‘, which included not only Polish but also American, French and English detective novels.

My hat is off to those determined genre fans! And I’m reminded of this passage from Gladkov’s Cement (see this post): “Comrades, we have a wonderful library, whose books have been confiscated and nationalised from the bourgeoisie and the capitalists — but they’re all of German origin. Now, according to proletarian discipline we must read them, because we must remember that, as workers, we belong to the international masses and therefore, must command every language.”

Following up on my recent request for information about Toronto/tkaronto (and my much earlier query about Wampanoag), I have a question arising from this very interesting half-hour talk in which Amy King, Julia Bloch, and Tom Pickard discuss Basil Bunting’s reading of Whitman’s great “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (they only play a few bits, but the whole thing is available [mp3]). I note with pleasure that Bunting stresses the middle syllable of Paumanok, as I have always done myself; it seems the only reading that fits the rhythm of Whitman’s lines. But I got curious about that native name for Long Island, and I find that Whitman says, in a footnote to Specimen Days, “Paumanok, (or Paumanake, or Paumanack, the Indian name of Long Island,” and the 1846 Proceedings of the New York Historical Society (p. 126) says “The following variety of names occur, either as referring to the Island, or its inhabitants, as well before, as at the period of its settlement by the white people, namely — Paumanake, Matanwake, Metoacs, Meitowax, Metanwack, and Sewanhack, or Sewan-hacky. The first of these is most frequently met with in old deeds…. It would therefore seem that this was the more favorite and general designation, while at the same time the natives themselves were called Metoacs.” Do any of my Americanist readers have any further information about this old toponym?

Addendum. I found this in Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York, by Evan T. Pritchard (Council Oak Books, 2002):

In ancient times, Long Island was called Matouac by some, Paumanok by others. Matouac means a “young man,” or “the young warriors,” referring to the younger tribes of the western half of the island. Paumanok is a term in the Renneiu language indicating “land of tribute,” in reference to Long Island’s role as a main source for the quohog and conch shells used in the manufacture of sewan or wampum, often used to pay tribute or taxes to another tribe.

Elsewhere in the book, Pritchard says “The Matinecock language was the new Matouac-type, what I call the Renneiu language, rather than the older, more traditional Munsee as spoken in Manhattan.”