languagehat.com

The About page says:

In this third EF EPI report, we have used test data from the 750,000 adults who took our English tests in 2012 to create the global country rankings, while at the same time analyzing the English proficiency trends that have emerged over the past six years (2007 to 2012), using test data from nearly five million adults.

I have no idea how reliable the data is (and I confess the slickly commercial look of the site puts me off, perhaps unfairly), but for what it’s worth, here are the results. Who knew they spoke better English in Slovenia than in Slovakia? (If, of course, they do.)

Michael Erard is a longtime LH favorite (I wrote about his book Um. . . in 2007 and Babel No More in 2011), and he’s now trying to make a good idea happen, a general-interest magazine about language issues. I’m not quite sure why he decided to call it “Schwa Fire” (vague resemblance to “Safire”?), but what’s in a name? Anyway, here’s the website, here’s Ben Zimmer’s Log post on it (where Erard addresses various issues in the comment thread), and here’s the Kickstarter page if you’d like to help make it a reality (there’s about a month to go in the campaign).

Update (Feb. 2020). Not sure what happened to Schwa Fire; there’s a Facebook page, but it hasn’t updated since 2015.

It suddenly occurred to me to wonder how, why, and when the mighty Biblical cherub was reduced to a synonym of the silly little putto. I still don’t know the answer to that, because when I checked the OED (1889 entry) I was distracted by the long and complicated history of the word and its confusion of forms:

Old English and Middle English cherubin, Middle English and modern cherub; derived (through French, Latin, Greek) from the Hebrew of the Old Testament, where k’rūb, plural k’rūbīm, are used as explained below. […] From Hebrew the word was adopted without translation by the LXX as χερούβ, χερουβίμ (-ίν, -είν), also in the N.T., Hebrews ix. 5, and by the Vulgate as cherūb, cherūbīn, cherūbīm (the latter in the Clementine text). As the plural was popularly much better known than the sing. (e.g. in the Te Deum), the Romanic forms were all fashioned on cherubin, viz. Italian cherubino, plural –i, Spanish querubin, -es, Portuguese querubin, cherubin, French cherubin, plural –s.

The earliest English instances are of cerubin, cherubin, taken over from ecclesiastical Latin apparently as a foreign word, and treated implicitly as a singular, sometimes as a proper name, at other times as a collective. From the Middle English period, the popular forms were, as in French, cherubin singular, cherubins plural. Cherubin survived in popular use to the 18th cent.; but in the Bible translations, cherub was introduced from the Vulgate by Wyclif, was kept up by the 16th cent. translators, and gradually drove cherubin into the position of an illiterate form. In the plural, cherubins is found from the 13th cent.; and although in MSS. of the earlier Wyclifite version, cherubyn is more frequent (after the Vulgate), the later version has always cherubins; this was retained in ordinary use till the 17th cent. But in the 16th cent., acquaintance with the Hebrew led Bible translators to substitute cherubims: this occurs only once in Coverdale, but always in the Bishops’ Bible and version of 1611. From the beginning of the 17th cent., cherubim began to be preferred by scholars (e.g. Milton) to cherubims, and has gradually taken its place; the Revised Version of 1881–5 has adopted it. A native plural cherubs arose early in the 16th cent.; in Tyndale, Coverdale and later versions (but not in that of 1611) it occurs beside cherubins, -ims; it is now the ordinary individual plural, the Biblical cherubim being more or less collective.

Briefly then, cherubin, cherubins are the original English forms, as still in French. But, in the process of Biblical translation, cherubin has been supplanted by cherub; and cherubins has been ‘improved’ successively to cherubims, cherubim; while, concurrently, cherub has been popularly fitted with a new plural cherubs.

The foreign form of the plural, coupled with the vagueness of the meaning in many passages, led to curious grammatical treatment even in MSS. of the LXX: here the Hebrew singular and plural are normally reproduced as χερούβ, χερουβίμ (the latter taken in Gen. iii. 24 as a neuter plural, as it is in Hebrew ix. 5), yet in Ps. xviii. 10 […] and in 2 Chron. iii. 11, the Hebrew singular k’rūb (of the Masoretic text) is represented by χερουβίμ, treated as a neuter singular (ἐπὶ τῷ χερουβίμ, τοῦ χερουβὶμ τοῦ ἑτέρου). In the former case the Vulgate follows the LXX with cherubim. Since, in the Latin, there is, in many passages, nothing to show the number of cherubin, it is no cause of surprise that readers often took it as singular, and it is actually used as a singular (masculine or neuter) in many mediæval Latin hymns and litanies.

The history of the sense, or notion attached to the word, lies outside English, though English use reflects all its varieties. In the Old Testament the cherubim are ‘living creatures’ with two or four wings, but the accounts of their form are not consistent: cf. the earlier notices with those of Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. i, x). They first appear in Genesis iii. 24, as guardians of the tree of life. This name was also given to the two images overlaid with gold placed with wings expanded over the mercy-seat in the Jewish tabernacle and temple, over which the shekinah or symbol of the divine presence was manifested. A frequent expression for the Divine Being was ‘he that dwelleth (or sitteth) between (or on) the cherubim’. Psalm xviii. 10 (also contained in 2 Sam. xxii. 11) says of Jehovah ‘He rode upon a cherub (LXX. cherubim), and did fly’. It is in connection with this class of passages that the word first appears in English, and it is difficult to know exactly how the word was construed or used. The inclusion of the cherubim among angels appears to belong to Christian Mysticism. According to the 4th cent. work attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the heavenly beings are divided into three hierarchies, each containing three orders or choirs, viz. (according to the received order) seraphim, cherubim, thrones; dominions, virtues (δυνάμεις), powers; principalities, archangels, angels. Cherubim were thus made the second of the nine orders, having the special attribute of knowledge and contemplation of divine things. Their angelic character is that which chiefly prevails in later notions and in Christian art.

What a mess!

In Byron’s wonderful 1821 dramatic poem Cain, Cain’s sister-wife Adah nicely distinguishes the orders thus: “I have heard it said/ The seraphs love most—cherubim know most—/ And this [Lucifer] should be a cherub—since he loves not.” Does anyone still read Cain, which was so popular in the nineteenth century? They should; it reminds me of the novels of Olaf Stapledon in its exhilarating sweep of ideas and vision of the universe. This passage is pure science fiction, with Lucifer’s response reminiscent of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (Lucifer is carrying Cain through space, farther and farther from Earth):

Lucifer.       Point me out the site
Of Paradise.
Cain.    How should I? As we move
Like sunbeams onward, it grows small and smaller.
And as it waxes little, and then less,
Gathers a halo round it, like the light
Which shone the roundest of the stars, when I
Beheld them from the skirts of Paradise;
Methinks they both as we recede from them,
Appear to join the innumerable stars
Which are around us; and as we move on
Increase their myriads.
Lucifer.       And if there should be
Worlds greater than thine own, inhabited
By greater things, and they themselves far more
In number than the dust of thy dull earth,
Though multiplied to animated atoms,
All living, and all doom’d to death, and wretched,
What wouldst thou think?

I’ve known for a long time that sycophant comes from Ancient Greek σῡκοϕάντης ‘(professional) informer, someone who says bad things about public figures for pay’ (literally ‘fig-shower’: σῦκον ‘fig’ + ϕαν-, root of ϕαίνειν ‘to show’—nobody knows how the sense developed, though there are many theories); what I didn’t realize until now is that French preserves the original sense of ‘informer,’ and that the word originally had this sense in English as well (the OED, in an entry that hasn’t been updated since 1919, traces both “informer, tale-bearer, malicious accuser” and “mean, servile, cringing, or abject flatterer” back to the 16th century, but the first sense died out pretty early, after the 17th century turning up only in phrasing like “the informers, or sycophants as they were called at Athens”). I discovered this via a ТЕТРАДКИ post (in Russian) by Alexander Anichkin, or Sashura as he calls himself around these parts, which discusses a recent contretemps in which one Russian journalist made fun of another for using the word сикофант [sikofant] in the English sense of ‘self-seeking flatterer’ when the Russian word (which is rare enough it’s not included in the Oxford dictionary) has the French sense of ‘informer.’ Sashura points out that the journalist being mocked has English as a primary foreign language, while the mocker knows French. An interesting run-in, and I wonder if the Russian word will develop a confusing double sense because English is now so widely known.

Incidentally, my New Great Russian-English Dictionary (which I made fun of here) has the unhelpful definition “сикофант m sycophant, informer,” and my Kettridge’s French/English English/French Dictionary has the even less helpful entry “sycophante m, sycophant.” Dudes, get your heads out of the seventeenth century!

There have been a lot of controversies about sports teams with putatively racist nicknames, mascots, and traditions, most notably ever-louder calls for the Washington Redskins to change their name. Here’s an unusually happy outcome of one such situation:

In the 2006 offseason, the [Spokane] Indians began a process to redesign their logo and uniforms. As per tradition, they began by avoiding the use of any American Indian imagery, but early in the process of redesign, the Spokane Nation contacted the team about officially supporting the team. In the process, the tribe gave permission to the team to adopt subtle and tasteful imagery, in order to pay homage to the team’s history and new connection with the tribe. The cooperation, called “historic” by the team, included the creation of a secondary logo written in Salish, the traditional language of the tribe.

Classy logo, too!

A decade ago we briefly discussed the famous first word of Beowulf, “Hwaet,” and the various ways translators have dealt with it. Now it seems all previous discussions may have been rendered obsolete by a paper (pdf) by George Walkden, “The status of hwæt in Old English” (English Language and Linguistics 17.3: 465–488); Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a good discussion in which he says:

Walkden makes a compelling, but by no means ironclad, case that hwæt is not an interjection or an adverb, rather it has no independent meaning from the clause it appears in. It combines with the remainder of the clause to produce an exclamatory effect. In this way it is similar to the modern English how, as in “how you’ve changed!” According to Walkden’s conclusion, the opening line of Beowulf would read:

How we have heard of the glory…

[…]The core of Walkden’s argument is a syntactic analysis of the use of hwæt and its Old Saxon cognate huat. He finds that in clauses beginning with hwæt/huat, the verb tends to appear in a later position than would normally be the case for a root clause. Instead, hwæt-clauses follow the pattern expected of a dependent clause. If hwæt were an interjection independent of the clause, it should not influence word order.

As I said in the Wordorigins thread, on a first reading it’s pretty convincing.

Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat writes:

Any readers interested in pidgins, creoles, or mixed languages (one of those things is not like the others!) will want to know that the data for the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Languages, APiCS, is finally online and publicly browsable. Think of it as WALS for pidgins and creoles, basically – lots of pretty maps, with the nice bonus that language-internal variation in features like word order can be represented proportionally by a pie graph instead of having to choose a single value per language.

And Stan at Sentence first writes:

Wikitongues has been on the go since 2012, but I heard about it just recently. It’s a project aimed at documenting linguistic diversity and exploring identity, in the form of short videos of people speaking different languages and dialects – about 50 at the time of writing.

Nice idea, but at least when I visited the site many of the videos were by non-native speakers or people who learned the language as kids but mainly speak English now, and frankly if I go to a site like that I’m looking for videos made by native speakers, not people who want to show off a language they don’t know perfectly. Also, as Stan says, “Complete multilingual transcripts (or subtitles) would be a welcome addition.”

I’ve finally started Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank, very generously given me by Noetica back in 2010; part of the reason for my chronological progress through Russian literature has been to build up a background for reading Dostoevsky in Russian, and now that I’ve gotten up to the 1840s I’ve begun Frank’s magisterial bio. One of the things I’ve learned so far is that unlike every other major nineteenth-century Russian writer, Dostoevsky grew up with a traditional Orthodox religious education (most aristocrats by then “had long since ceased to be concerned about Orthodox Christianity, even though they continued to baptize their children in the state religion and to structure their lives in accordance with its rituals”), and along with the Gospels and lives of the saints, he particularly loved the book of Job (“Years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the book of Job once again, he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of ‘unhealthy rapture’ that he almost cried. ‘It’s a strange thing, Anya, this book is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me; I was then still almost a child'”). Fortunately, the Church Slavonic Bible he would have known is online, so I’ve been reading Job (pdf) alongside my modern Russian Bible (since my Church Slavonic is rusty).

Job has always been one of my favorites, too, and it’s been a pleasure to reacquaint myself with it in its Slavonic guise. But when I got to one of the most famous lines in the Bible, “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7), I did a double take. The Slavonic has “но человѣкъ раждаетсѧ на троудъ, птенцы же соупѡвы высокѡ парѧтъ”: ‘but man is born to trouble; the vulture birds soar high’ (I don’t know how to render же here, so I’m going with a vague semicolon). Vulture birds?? I checked my modern version, which had the expected “но человек рождается на страдание, как искры, чтоб устремляться вверх,” with искры ‘sparks.’ How did those birds get there? The ancient but easily accessible Barnes’ Notes on the Bible (Job 5) says:

As the sparks fly upward – The Hebrew expression here is very beautiful – “as רשׁף בני benēy reshep – the sons of flame fly.” The word used (רשׁף reshep) means flame, lightning; the sons, or children of the flame, are that which it produces; that is, sparks. Gesenius strangely renders it, “sons of the lightning; that is, birds of prey which fly as swift as the lightning.” So Dr. Good, “As the bird-tribes are made to fly upwards.” So Umbreit renders it, Gleichwie die Brut des Raubgeflugels sich hoch in Fluge hebt – “as a flock of birds of prey elevate themselves on the wing.” Noyes adopts the construction of Gesenius; partly on the principle that man would be more likely to be compared to birds, living creatures, than to sparks. There is considerable variety in the interpretation of the passage. The Septuagint renders it, νεοσσοι δε γυπος neossoi de gupos – the young of the vulture. The Chaldee, מזיקי בני benēy mezēyqēy – the sons of demons. Syriac Sons of birds. Jerome, Man is born to labor, and the bird to flight – et avis ad volatum. Schultens renders it, “glittering javelins,” and Arius Montanus, “sons of the live coal.”

That’s considerable variety, all right; can we get a better explanation of what’s going on? The most detailed commentary I could find was in C. L. Seow’s Job 1 – 21: Interpretation and Commentary, which renders the phrase “the offspring of pestilence” (!) and explains:

[Read more…]

Eric Jankiewicz has a Nautilus interview with Gary Klivans, a former corrections officer who became an expert in the codes used by gangs:

Codes are substitutes for the letters in our English alphabet. They could be anything—in addition to numbers, they use ornate symbols, a Chinese pictogram, or Mayan or Aztec symbols. Or they create their own symbols. And the languages vary widely. There is no one Blood or Crip gang code or Black Gangster Disciples code that all the members use. The codes are all local. So if you’re a law enforcement officer in Los Angeles or Chicago, you can travel 10 miles away and you’ll find a different code.

His account of how he learned to decipher them is quite interesting. (Thanks, Bob!)

Via this Log post by Victor Mair about a 2004 Chinese novel called Yīnggélìshì 英格力士 (the title is a Chinese rendering of “English”; it’s about a guy named Love Liu who grows up in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, studies English, and “becomes enamored of this new language and attracted to his teacher”), I discovered Bruce Humes’s blog Altaic Storytelling: Tales from Istanbul to Heilongjiang, which is well worth checking out. Humes is now in Istanbul studying Turkish:

The goal would be to get enough modern Turkish under my belt so I could move onto Ottoman Turkish. Eventually, I’d like to be able to carry out research into the history of translation between Turkic languages and Chinese, or even better, re: the current topic of my newly christened blog: Altaic storytelling, particularly the role of itinerant aşık. I don’t know much about it, but it really appeals. The older I get, the more interested I am in oral transmission as opposed to written literature.

A post that particularly intrigued me is about “Evenki Place Names behind the Hànzì” in Chi Zijian’s novel Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸).