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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.

As a follow-up to this recent post, I thought I’d share this quote from an excellent book I copyedited a few years ago (and am now understanding a lot better), The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies by Michael Legaspi; he’s discussing the University of Halle (founded 1694):

More significantly, Halle successfully dispensed with that foundation of medieval learning, the Autoritätsprinzip [principle of authority — LH]. In the view of Münchhausen and his advisors, professors in too many places still accepted the outmoded notion that education consisted of the faithful transmission of authorized knowledge. Halle had been among the first and most notable German universities to reject the Autoritätsprinzip in an open and self-conscious way. As the first of the German Enlightenment universities, Halle exemplified the way that higher education in the period served the aims of “a monarchical court bent on using [the university] to provide the state with a deconfessionalized ruling elite.”

While I’m quoting Legaspi, I also liked his discussion of varying Christian attitudes toward the Masoretic vowel points:

Crises provoked by the Reformation, however, did not only intensify interest and investment in biblical interpretation. They also created the conditions for a stringent textualism that functioned to objectify the Bible, remove it from its larger ecclesial contexts, and turn it into a kind of hermeneutical battleground. A stringent approach to the textuality of the Bible, or rather to its state of textual corruption, became, within only a few generations, a fundamental premise for Catholics and Protestants in their respective theologies of scripture. The nature and extent of this textualization of the Bible in the seventeenth century is illustrated by the remarkable collaboration of Reformed scholar Louis Cappel (1585–1658) and French Oratorian Jean Morin (1591–1659).

Both were involved in the heated controversy over the age and origin of the Masoretic vowel points in the Hebrew Bible. The traditional Jewish view in the sixteenth century was that the consonants and vowel points of the Hebrew text were both part of the original Sinaitic revelation. The reformers and their Roman Catholic opponents, by contrast, asserted that the vowel points were comparatively recent and of human origin. In 1538, Elias Levita (1469–1549), a leading Jewish scholar in his generation, provided a definitive refutation of the antiquity of the vowel points in his Masoret ha-Masoret. In the wake of Levita’s challenge, the earlier Christian consensus evaporated. Roman Catholic theologians, relying on Levita’s scholarship, argued that the vowel points, which were only added later, were necessary to understand the consonantal text. Thus, they reasoned, Protestants committed to sola scriptura and veritas hebraica did not have direct access to the Old Testament. Not only were they reliant upon tradition for their understanding of the Bible, they were reliant upon Jewish tradition. To escape this predicament, many Protestants took sides with Jewish traditionalists and affirmed the antiquity and divine origin of the vowel points. Their great champions in this effort were the Buxtorfs of Basel, Johannes the elder (1564–1629) and Johannes the younger (1599–1664), the most influential and respected Christian Hebraists of their time.

The Buxtorfs’ most famous opponent, though, was not a Catholic polemicist. It was philologist and fellow Protestant Louis Cappel. In 1624, Cappel published anonymously a work entitled Arcanum punctuationis revelatum, or Mystery of the Points Revealed. In it he provided a devastating refutation of the elder Buxtorf. Cappel argued that debates in the Talmud refer not to the pointing activities of the Masoretes but to interpretive problems that arise from working with an unpointed text. Cappel also adduced various historical and philological arguments for the antiquity of the points; for example, that Jerome and the translators of the Septuagint knew nothing of pointed texts, that the names of vowels and accents have Aramaic and not Hebrew names, and that the marginal qere, which show how to pronounce the kethib, are, oddly, never pointed. Cappel argued further that unvocalized Hebrew consonants, contrary to Buxtorf’s opinion, do not permit arbitrary readings. Like Arabic, Hebrew, he argued, is perfectly readable without vowels; its syllabic structure and the occasional use of consonants to stand for vowels (matres lectionis) prevent the consonantal text from being fatally indeterminate. Finally, Cappel showed that the Masoretes developed the system of points in order to fix the tradition of vocalization no earlier than the second half of the first millennium of the Common Era.

The changing Protestant position is a good example of philology following theology.

I can’t resist passing along this footnote from How to Read the Bible (see this post):

Mention here should be made of the proposal by F. Masclef in his Grammaire hébraique (1716) that Hebrew consonants be vocalized according to the first vowel in the name of the letter in question: thus, when the letter bet occurred in a word, it was normally to be vocalized as be, while a gimel should be vocalized as gi and a dalet as da. Thus the word consisting of the letters dalet, bet, and resh should be vocalized as daber. In addition, the letters alef, waw, heh, heth, yod and ‘ayin also sometimes functioned as vowel signs, representing, respectively, the vowels a, e, i, u, ai, and â. The name of Moses, written with the letters mem, waw, shin, and heh, should thus be pronounced: Meshi. This nutty system actually won other adherents, including, prominently, Charles F. Hioubigant [sic; should read Houbigant]…

You can read the second edition (1743) of Masclef’s Grammatica Hebraica a punctis aliisque inventis Massorethicis libera at Google Books: Vol. 1, Vol. 2.

Via Anatoly, I present “Mistresses and Marriage: Or, a Short History of the Mrs” (pdf), a paper by Amy Louise Erickson about the complicated history of the word mistress and its abbreviations Miss and Mrs. Here’s the abstract:

The ubiquitous forms of address for women ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’ are both abbreviations of ‘mistress’. Although mistress is a term with a multiplicity of meanings, in early modern England the mistress most commonly designated the female equivalent of master — that is, a person with capital who directed servants or apprentices. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, there was only Mrs (or Mris, Ms, or other forms of abbreviation), applied to any adult woman who merited the social distinction, without any marital connotation. Miss was reserved for young girls until then. Even when adult single women started to use Miss, Mrs still designated a social or business standing, and not the status of being married, until at least the mid-nineteenth century. This article demonstrates the changes in nomenclature over time, explains why Mrs was never used to accord older single women the same status as a married woman, and argues that the distinctions are important to economic and social historians.

Among other interesting points, the abbreviation Mr. was voiced as “Master” for boys and “Mister” for adult males, and I liked this footnote:

This observation, I discover, long predates me: in a footnote to the first American edition of Samuel Pepys’ Diary, Richard, Lord Braybrooke comments, ‘It is worthy of remark, that the fair sex may justly complain of almost every word in the English language designating a female, having, at some time or another, been used as a term of reproach; for we find Mother, Madam, Mistress and Miss, all denoting women of bad character; and here Pepys adds the title of my Lady to the number, and completes the ungracious catalogue.’

A couple of years ago jamessal gave me a copy of How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James L. Kugel, and I’ve finally gotten around to it (prompted by the fact that he’s now reading it himself); it makes an excellent companion to the Schniedewind book quoted in this post. I’m about halfway through the first chapter, “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship,” and I want to pass along this section, a nice illustration of how language and culture can interact:

To enter the world of scripture’s mysteries was thus a matter for trained professionals; only a priest or a monk schooled in the ways of fourfold interpretation, and especially in the interpretations of his predecessors, could say for sure what this or that verse meant. It would never occur to ordinary people to try their hand at interpretation—to begin with, they did not own their own Bibles, and they could not read. No, the Bible was something that ordinary people experienced in other ways. It was read aloud in public, preached about at church or in open markets; its stories were illustrated on stained glass windows and mosaic floors and the carved capitals of columns; it was recounted in poems, sung in hymns, and retold in passion plays—in these ways the Bible was everywhere, and no one escaped its influence. But its interpretation was not up for discussion; that had been decided a long time ago.

There was a word in medieval Latin for what drove this attitude toward Scripture: auctoritas. This is our word “authority,” but it had a special resonance in Latin. It was what the auctores—meaning both the “authors” and the “authorities”—had established long ago. Their wisdom—set down in the writings of the Church Fathers and later Christian teachers—could never be challenged, nor would anyone ever want to. (In fact, when, as sometimes happened, a later scholar had a new idea, he would usually seek to connect it to something that had been written by an earlier, authoritative figure—“This is what Augustine really meant when he said X or Y.”) Auctoritas was all- powerful and unquestioned: the Bible meant what the authorities had always said it meant. […]

[Auctoritas began to be widely questioned during the Renaissance.]

One contributory factor in the breakdown of auctoritas was the rapidly spreading knowledge of the Hebrew language among Christians. Until the late Renaissance, an astonishingly small number of Christian scholars had any notion of this tongue (although they could easily have learned it from the Jews in their towns). Starting at this time, however, Christians began to learn biblical Hebrew (as well as Greek), soon aided by the availability of little primers on the language’s grammar and vocabulary, written in Latin and printed on the recently invented printing press. Throughout the Middle Ages, the great authority on Hebrew in the Christian world had been the fourth-century scholar Jerome, translator of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. His writings about the Hebrew language in general as well as about specific words were repeated unquestioningly. Now, at first tentatively and later with greater assurance, Christian scholars began to question his authority, until some finally dared utter the words, “Jerome was wrong.” Soon, everything was up for grabs. Careful scholars ought, of course, to consult the writings of their predecessors, but people no longer assumed that the proper understanding of the Bible lay in the translations and commentaries of the past. Now they could read the Bible’s words for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

Ah, the primal thrill of extricating yourself from the swaddling clothes of dependence on Authority and finding yourself able to say “Jerome was wrong”! (For Jerome, of course, substitute Lenin, your father, or whatever might be appropriate.)

I have little patience with “word of the year” hoopla; as I wrote to Paul T. (who agreed), it seems like pure marketing nonsense.  (Needless to say, if people enjoy it, I don’t begrudge them their enjoyment — this is Liberty Hall, and I speak only for myself.)  But Geoff Pullum has an extremely interesting point to make about the American Dialect Society’s choice of because with noun phrase (a phenomenon discussed, among many other places, in Megan Garber’s Atlantic Monthly article “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet“) in his Log post Because syntax, namely that because is a preposition and not, as most dictionaries call it, a conjunction. He begins by going into great detail about why it isn’t a conjunction and then explains why because of isn’t a preposition before giving his own conclusion about because:

Contrary to all the dictionaries, it is a preposition. As its complement (the phrase that follows it to complete the PP) it may take either a clause (as in the PP because he holds ridiculous beliefs) or a PP with of as its head (as in the PP because of our public universities). Some prepositions can occur with no complement (as in We went in), some require an NP (as of does) some require a clause (as although does), and some require a PP (like out in those uses that do not involve exiting from delimited regions of space: notice that They did it out of ignorance is grammatical but *They did it out ignorance is not).

The change that has caught the eye of the American Dialect Society is simply that because has picked up the extra privilege already possessed by prepositions like of: it now allows a noun phrase (NP) as complement (with a subtly different shade of meaning: because money seems to express only a rather vague and non-serious commitment to the idea that the reason is financial).

It’s all good stuff; read the whole thing.

David Skinner has a fascinating article at Slate that begins: “As Washington mopes to the end of a losing NFL season, the controversy over the team’s name appears to have plenty of fight left. To the language hound, however, the most remarkable aspect of this dispute may be its lack of historical context.” Skinner immediately goes on to say, quite correctly, “This fact, it’s important to emphasize, is entirely separate from whether people today, Native Americans especially, rightly find the term offensive.” As an old (if lapsed for the decades I have not been following the game) Redskins fan, I completely support the move to change the name. But Skinner is writing about something else, some largely unknown history:

In 2005, the Indian language scholar Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution published a remarkable and consequential study of redskin‘s early history. His findings shifted the dates for the word’s first appearance in print by more than a century and shed an awkward light on the contemporary debate. Goddard found, in summary, that “the actual origin of the word is entirely benign.”

Redskin, he learned, had not emerged first in English or any European language. The English term, in fact, derived from Native American phrases involving the color red in combination with terms for flesh, skin, and man. These phrases were part of a racial vocabulary that Indians often used to designate themselves in opposition to others whom they (like the Europeans) called black, white, and so on.

But the language into which those terms for Indians were first translated was French. The tribes among whom the proto forms of redskin first appeared lived in the area of the upper Mississippi River called Illinois country. Their extensive contact with French-speaking colonists, before the French pulled out of North America, led to these phrases being translated, in the 1760s, more or less literally as peau-rouge and only then into English as redskin. It bears mentioning that many such translators were mixed-blood Indians.

Based on Goddard’s research, the OED changed their entry, admitting that their alleged 1699 quote was spurious: “The OED now says the quotation was ‘subsequently found to be misattributed; the actual text was written in 1900 by an author claiming, for purposes of historical fiction, to be quoting an earlier letter.'” The whole thing is quite a saga and well worth your while.

I’ve started reading A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period, by William M. Schniedewind (thanks, bulbul!), and I’m already learning new things. Here’s a passage about the name of the language:

Finally, it should be noted that the term Hebrew (עברית /ʿiḇrîṯ/) itself is not a biblical term for the Hebrew language. Although we now call the language of ancient Israel and Judah “Hebrew,” this term first appears for the language in the Mishnah (m. Gittin 9:6, 8; m. Yadayim 4:5), which was edited around 230 C.E. That is, the metalinguistic term Hebrew emerged precisely when the speech community in Palestine was disappearing. Furthermore, it appeared when the traditional linguistic identification of people, language, and land had disappeared with the changed sociopolitical situation of the Jewish community [after the Bar Kokhba revolt and the expulsion of the Jews from Judah/Judea]. This new term also formally recognized the difference between Hebrew and Aramaic as two Jewish languages, in contrast to the New Testament’s use of the Greek word hebraisti (Ἑβραϊστι) to refer to the vernacular Jewish language, without making clear whether this term refers to Hebrew or Aramaic. The term for the Hebrew language that would have been used by the prophet Isaiah in 700 B.C.E or the priest Ezra in 400 B.C.E is Yehudite (יהודית /y^ehûḏîṯ/), which is derived from the word for the territory of Judah (יהודה /y^ehûḏâ/) and is also generally used for the ethnic group Judean/Jew (יהודי /y^ehûḏî/) in postexilic biblical literature, Qumran literature, and rabbinic literature. It is quite typical of languages to be called after territories and ethnicities: thus, German and Germany, English and England, or Chinese and China. This fact actually highlights changes in the Hebrew language as it related to Jewish identity in different periods. The Jews/Judeans who lived in Judah/Judea always spoke the Judean/Jewish language. It is only when the Jews were expelled from Judea that the Judean language ceased to be a living vernacular. In fact, it is only at this time that the Jewish language became “Hebrew.” When the terminology for the language of the Jews is separated from that of the territory, it marks a profound shift in the history of the language itself.

Schniedewind won my heart earlier in the chapter when he wrote: “Here, it is important to recognize that all language classification is shaped by linguistic ideologies. For example, the description of Chinese as one language with several dialects, and of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish as three languages is more a reflex of nationalism and borders than the conclusion of descriptive linguistics.” I’m really looking forward to the rest of the book!

LH reader Christophe Strobbe writes:

In Flanders there have been recurring discussions about the importance of teaching Latin at secondary school. When I started secondary school I had 9 hours per week of Latin in the first year and 6 hours in the second and third years; after that it diminished to four hours per week. (This only applied if you chose to learn Latin, and you could not start learning Ancient Greek in the second year if you hadn’t chosen Latin in the first year.) Currently, Latin is taught only 4 hours per week in the first and second years of secondary school (again, if you choose Latin at all). A recent proposal to replace Latin with 2 hours of “Ancient culture” and 2 hours of a subject that might be translated as “engineering” or “technology” (the Dutch word is “techniek” and sounds vague to me).

One of my former teachers of Latin, Luc Devoldere, who is now chief editor of a cultural magazine called “Ons Erfdeel” (literally “Our Heritage”), responded to this on public radio. (At http://www.radio1.be/programmas/ochtend/luc-devoldere-wil-latijn-behouden-op-school for those who know Dutch.) Luc Devoldere thinks that the current plan is a bad idea. When children start secondary school, it should already be clear whether they can handle learning Latin. If this start is postponed until the third year of secondary school, they won’t achieve much of the main goal, which is reading classic texts in the original language. (Not just Caesar’s De bello gallico, but also Sallust, Tacitus, Cicero, Lucretius and Vergil, which are all authors that “my generation” read at school in the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

This long introduction leads me to my actual question: do other cultures discuss similar questions? I am thinking in particular of learning to read Classical Chinese authors and texts such as Confucius, Laozi, Mengzi, Sima Qian, the Shi Jing etc. at a secondary school level. (Maybe in Taiwan, which did not undergo the infamous Culture Revolution.) I am also thinking of Korea, which created a considerable body of literature in the Chinese writing system, both before and after the invention of hangul. I also wonder to what extent the question applies to Japan, since someone who lived in Japan for five years in the early 1990s told me that many of the oldest Japanese texts can only be read by a few old professors because younger generations have no interest in learning the older stages of the Japanese languages. Would other cultures see the efforts to read Latin authors in secondary school as a kind of rearguard action? I hope you or your readers can shed some light on this.

Me, I don’t think Latin is necessary for any large number of students and I certainly don’t think it should be required (let alone required before you’re allowed to take Greek!), but the larger question is an interesting one: how do different cultures strike a balance between practicality (what’s needed to deal with the world today) and cultural continuity (which requires that people study things that are not “useful,” like ancient languages)?  This is, of course, a hot topic these days, with (in my opinion) excessive emphasis being placed on practicality and too little regard for the arts, history, etc., let alone ancient languages; I’m interested to hear what others have to say.

Hans of Etymolist has a great post, “Thoughts on PIE *bhag–,” resulting from his getting a copy of Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon (a title you pretty much have to be an Indo-Europeanist to find exciting, but for those of us with that particular kink, it’s exciting). He says “I embarked on reading it root-by-root. The first one is *bhag (NIL 1-2), and looking at the evidence for nominal derivations listed, I got a few ideas, which I’ll share below.” His summary is “it is possible to eliminate the root *bhag ‘share’ from the reconstruction of Indo-European, if one assumes that the Slavic and Tocharian cognates are actually loans from Iranian and that the Indo-Iranian and Greek cognates actually continue *bheg ‘break’,” but the fun is in the details, and if you like this kind of thing, well, this is the kind of thing you like, so go enjoy.