languagehat.com

The Argus-eyed John Cowan sent me a link to ‘Talent borrows, genius steals’: Asterix, translation and the evolution of language, over at Word Jazz, and it’s an enjoyable read, especially if you enjoy Astérix (which we’ve discussed here at LH more than once: 2004, 2013); there’s a fairly detailed discussion of “the latest film adaptation of Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix and Obelix comic books: ‘Astérix et Obélix: Au Service De Sa Majesté’.” There’s also stuff about the Spanish-speaking community of New York City and the Norman French dialect Guernésiais (mentioned here in 2008).

I should warn readers, however, that the final section, about the alleged language-transforming powers of Aleksandr Pushkin, is complete nonsense. I don’t know where the author got the idea that Pushkin created любомудрие [lyubomudrie], a native equivalent of философия [filosofiya] ‘philosophy,’ and детский сад [detskii sad] ‘kindergarten,’ but the former had been used for a century before him (e.g., Archbishop Feofan in 1716: “Ныне же что храбростию, любомудрием…”) and the latter was not created until after his death.

I’m still reading Schniedewind’s A Social History of Hebrew (see this post), and I just got to a paragraph that makes a nice companion to this discussion:

The influence of Egyptian scribal culture would become quite widespread in early Israel. In addition to learning the practices of accounting (that is, using hieratic numerals) and of writing with ink, the early Israelites borrowed several linguistic terms relating to the scribal profession from Egyptian. To begin with, it is worth noting that the Hebrew word for “scribe” (sōᵽēr) derives from the root spr, which originally meant not “to write” but rather “to count,” reflecting the administrative roots of the scribal profession. We have already mentioned the terms for “ink” and “papyrus,” but other Egyptian (Eg.) loanwords include those for “a scribe’s palette” (Eg. gśty; Heb. qeseṯ), “seal” (Eg. ḫtm; Heb. ḥôṯām), “signet ring” (Eg. ḏbʿt; Heb. ṭaḇaʿaṯ), “ephah” (a certain measurement for grain; Eg. ypt; Heb. ʾêᵽâ), “hin” (a certain liquid measure; Eg. hnw; Heb. hîn), and “zeret” (a span of measurement; Eg. ḏrt; Heb. zereṯ). There are very few Egyptian loanwords in Hebrew, but most are related to the scribal technology and profession, most likely reflecting the continuing work of Egyptian natives or Egyptian-trained locals after the retrenchment following the Twentieth Dynasty.

Schniedewind is annoyingly repetitive and occasionally confusing in his attempts to differentiate between spoken and written language (he’s read the linguists but does not seem to have fully assimilated what they say), but I’m learning enough from him that I’m willing to forgive him his deficiencies. (For a less indulgent response, in Russian, see Anatoly’s review.)

Kathryn Schulz has a post “The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature” which is worth a look; the examples are mostly well known (Nabokov, Eliot…), but it’s nice to see them pointed out in this context. I’m curious about the Dickens one, “Marley was dead: to begin with.” I haven’t read enough Dickens, or Victorian literature in general, to know how anomalous that colon is; would it have struck the 1840s reader as oddly as it does us?

I first wrote about the Philologos column of the Forward back in 2004, and once again they’ve come up with a nice bit of language history worth sharing in Recounting a Tale of Counting and Telling. It takes off from the quoted observation that Hebrew “sefer, ‘writing,’ ‘document,’ ‘book,’ and sofer, ‘scribe,’ ‘enumerator,’ ‘secretary,’ derive from one and the same verbal root s-f-r, meaning ‘to count, ‘to number,’ ‘to report,’ and ‘to recount,’” and goes on to “comment on the interesting fact that a verbal relationship between counting and narrating is not limited to Hebrew”:

Such a linkage exists in English, too — and not only in “count” and “recount,” two words mentioned by Labuschagne. We also find it in the verb “to tell,” which has the second, now archaic meaning of “to count,” as in a phrase like “to tell [the beads on] a rosary.”

Nor is English the only language that resembles Hebrew in this respect. German has zahlen, “to count,” and erzahlen, “to tell”; in Dutch this is tellen and vertellen; in Danish, taelle and fortaelle. All these languages belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family — but a “count-tell” relationship is not restricted to it. In the Romance family of Indo-European, we encounter the same thing. In French, for example, compter is “to count,” and conter is “to tell” or “to relate.” In Italian it’s contare and reccontare. In Spanish a single verb, contar, means both “to count” and “to tell,” so that cuenta is a numerical reckoning or a bill, and cuento is a story.

[…] Let’s start with the Hebrew root s-f-r. “He counted” in Hebrew is “hu safar,” while “he told” is “hu sipper,” using the pi’el construction. Both are related to the Akkadian (old Babylonian) verb shaparu, whose original meaning was “to send,” but which in time came to mean “to send a letter,” and eventually, “to tell” or “to relate,” since this is what letters often do. The root has like meanings in other Semitic languages, but only in Hebrew did it take on the additional meaning of “to count,” which was clearly a later development.

In the Romance languages, on the other hand, the process was reversed. In classical Latin, computare — the source of our English “compute” — originally meant only “to count” or “to do sums.” Not until Late Latin, from which the various Romance languages evolved, did it take on the sense of “to relate.” Yet classical Latin had its own “count” — “tell” pair in enumerare, a verb that derived from numerus, “number” but also had the sense of “to narrate.”

And now for our third case: Old English tellan, the ancestor of our modern “to tell.” Its oldest meaning was “to count,” as it was in other Germanic languages, which later added the meaning of “to relate” with the help of prefixes like German –er and Dutch ver-. In addition, however, tellan in Old English also meant “to put [something] in order.” And that, of course, is the link between counting and telling. To count is to put numbers in their proper order, and to tell a story or relate an incident is to put events in their proper order, first things first and last things last. This is why the two things are associated in so many languages, including Hebrew.

Commenters point out that in Slavic, the root chit– means both ‘count’ (cf. Russian число < *chit-slo ‘number’) and ‘read’ (cf. Russian читать ‘to read’); it’s related to Sanskrit cit– ‘perceive, take note of’ (related to ketas ‘thought’). Thanks for the link, Paul!

Andrew Delbanco is a well-known historian and the author of Melville: His World and Work, a book jamessal thought enough of to give me a copy for Christmas. In short, he’s not the kind of writer I expect to find wantonly misusing words, so I was taken aback by what I thought was such a misuse in this sentence from his NY Times review of Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World: “Grandin’s kaleidoscopic technique gives his book a certain pastiche quality (many years and miles are silently traversed in the breaks between chapters), but through a remarkable feat of research he establishes a strong narrative line that gives the book coherence and momentum.” To me, pastiche means (in the words of Merriam-Webster‘s first definition) “something (such as a piece of writing, music, etc.) that imitates the style of someone or something else,” and that didn’t make any sense here. But having looked it up, I found that the word also has the senses “a piece of writing, music, etc., that is made up of selections from different works” and “a mixture of different things,” so I now understand the sentence. But I’m wondering whether I’m alone in my limited understanding of the word, or whether the “mixture” senses are in fact uncommon. How do you understand and/or use pastiche?

An interesting Science News story (I’ve added italics and a link):

English speakers struggle to name odors. While there are words such as blue or purple to describe colors, nothing comparable exists to name odors. Even with familiar everyday odors, such as coffee, banana, and chocolate, English speakers only correctly name the smells around 50% of the time. This has led to the conclusion that smells defy words. Majid and Burenhult present new evidence that this is not true in all languages.

Majid and Burenhult conducted research with speakers of Jahai, a hunter-gatherer language spoken in the Malay Peninsula. In Jahai there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell. For example, ltpɨt is used to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, bearcat, etc. Cŋɛs, another smell word, is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, etc. These terms refer to different odor qualities and are abstract, in the same way that blue and purple are abstract.

…Majid and Burenhult found that Jahai speakers could name odors with the same conciseness and level of agreement as colors, but English speakers struggled to name odors. Jahai speakers overwhelmingly used abstract Jahai smell words to describe odors, whereas English speakers used mostly source-based descriptions (like a banana) or evaluative descriptions (that’s disgusting).

I don’t know how convincing it is, but it’s certainly suggestive, and it’s the sort of thing I like to see linguists looking into.

Addendum. Charlotte Mandell (see this post) sent me this link to Robert Kelly interviewing poet Anne Gorrick about some long poems she’s written “that seem to have grown from a profound engagement with scents, perfumes, the chemistry of attraction and repulsion”; she says “I think it’s funny that we can all agree on what we see, what we hear, what we taste and feel. But not necessarily on what we smell. It’s as if we don’t have the language yet for the sense of smell, but we’re working on it.” There’s a lot of interesting stuff about how we react to smell. Thanks, Charlotte!

I continue to find thought-provoking nuggets in How to Read the Bible (see this post); this passage in the “Tower of Babel” chapter makes an obvious point that had never occurred to me:

As with the story of Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel narrative has, for modern scholars, certain clearly etiological elements: not only its explanation for the name Babel, but also its accounting for the dispersion of peoples across the Near East and the replacement of an originally single, common language by an array of different, mutually incomprehensible idioms. Behind this latter element, too, modern scholars see a message not about the world as a whole, but something rather more local and specific. Semitic languages all appeared to be related: any native speaker could tell that Babylonian and Assyrian and Aramaic and Hebrew all had common roots and expressions, but a speaker of one tongue would not necessarily understand much of what was being said in the others. It is this reality, rather than the existence of different languages per se, that the story seems out to explain: all the peoples of the ancient Near East did, it says, originally speak the same language, but that unity was destroyed quite intentionally by God.

Of course, once Sumerian had fallen into desuetude, all languages spoken in the area would have been clearly related, and the story makes much more sense.

Slavomír/bulbul sent me a link to Ján Štrasser’s “My Onegin,” a very interesting account of how Štrasser came to translate Pushkin’s poem that includes a history of Slovak poetic translation and some examples comparing his version with others and with the Russian original (and “using Nabokov’s hyperfaithful translation to get as close to the original meaning as possible”). I love this kind of thing, and Slavomír says he enjoyed it too, but with the caveat that “some of the decisions are questionable:

For example in “Dosť života som na zábavy / s pôžitkom vedel premrhať”, the verb “vedel” indicates habituality, which doesn’t go at all with the finality of “dosť života” – there being only one life, one cannot habitualy do something with parts of it. Or when he translates “nahorkastý” as “embittered” and describes it as a colloquialism, he’s totally off: “embittered” (describing a person’s emotional state and attitude) is “zatrpknutý”. “Nahorkastý” is used exclusively in describing taste, whether literally or figuratively. And when he says “the personal pronoun is placed at the very end of the line. This is completely unnatural in Slovak”, he’s also wrong – “mučia ma, zjavujú sa mne” is perfectly cromulant Slovak. You would normally expect a clitic form there, but even the full form is acceptable, especially is there’s focus on the pronoun.

I leave it to Slovak speakers to judge these fine points, but as bulbul says, it’s well worth reading no matter how you feel about line-end pronouns.

I’m a little late getting to this, but check out Stan’s Introducing Indo-European Jones over at Sentence first:

…Jonathon Owen replied that he wished he’d been given a “leather jacket, bullwhip, and fedora” upon graduation, James Callan said he wanted to see an “Indiana Jones pastiche focused on a linguist”, and I felt it was a meme waiting to happen. So without further ado, let me introduce Indo-European Jones (or Indy for short).

It’s a lot of fun (“Nothing shocks me … I’m a linguist!”), and you can add to the meme yourself; he links to the blank image he used.

Mark Liberman at the Log has a very interesting post about the common origin of prepositions (and postpositions), verbal prefixes, and adverbs in the Indo-European languages, quoting Virginia Anne Goetz’s 2006 dissertation, “The development of Proto-Indo-European local adverbs into Germanic prepositions and verbal elements” (O = object; see Mark’s post for other explanations):

In the initial stage of its development, PIE x was a free constituent in a functional language. Its role was to add a place adverb (xv) modality to a sentence. Often it related a case-bearing object to a verb. In the sequence OxV, for example, O ( – village) might be in the locative case and x would provide additional place adverb information to relate O to V (= go):

the village – toward, within, into, through, around, etc. – go.

From this earliest stage, there were innovations which related x to the object or to the verb. Sanskrit and Hittite are considered to be the most conservative in terms of these developments. There are in these languages some recurring expressions in which x appears to have an attachment to a case-bearing object as an O-x, so that Sanskrit and Hittite may be seen to be on the cusp of developing x as a case assigner. […] In these languages, x was mostly xv (a free adverb of place) or part of an OxV. In the latter, the role of x is ambiguous in terms of [verb proclivity] versus [object proclivity].

The most innovative in terms of x development are Latin and Greek. While there is still some relic structure, especially in older Greek, the “classical” stages of these languages have b.xv (bound verbal prefix), x-O (“preposition”) and xv (“adverb”).

The early Germanic languages, and hence reconstructed Proto-Germanic, fall between the extremes of the conservative (Hittite, Sanskrit) and the innovative (Latin, Greek). While Germanic has a group of b.xv’s and sets of x-O, it still retains x’s that are ambiguous.

There’s plenty of other meaty historical stuff there; Mark’s conclusion:

From PIE to the present day, the consistent driver of change in this arena has been re-analysis — typically, syntactic re-interpretation of a functional relationship. Sometimes this is simply re-parsing of an ambiguous sequence, as when O x V was interpreted as O x-V. And sometimes it’s a simplification of a more complex structure, as when by cause that S becomes simply because S.

I don’t have strong opinions about whether the different functional and structural relations involved should be terminologically split or lumped or both — but I think that Geoff [Pullum] makes a good case for seeing the complex usage patterns of words like in, from, and because as variations on a single grammatical theme.

Makes sense to me.