languagehat.com

Sarah Thomason (LH) posted at Facebook about the article of hers that has been reprinted most often, “one of my little papers on linguistic pseudoscience, not one of my more serious/substantial publications”:

The article is Past Tongues Remembered?, published in the Skeptical Inquirer decades ago. It’s about claims that, under hypnosis, people can be age-regressed to earlier lives and speak the languages they spoke in those earlier lives. This paper has been reprinted four times, three of them in other countries (India, Canada, Germany) and two of them in translation (French and German). Nothing else I’ve written has been reprinted more than once.

I’ve added the link, which will take you to the article (open access); here’s the start:

Suppose you want to convince people that you’ve discovered a
genuine case of reincarnation. If you can prove that your subject can
speak the language of an earlier incarnation, that would obviously be
strong evidence in favor of the reincarnation claim—provided, of course, that
the language is not the subject’s present native language and that you can
also show that the subject has had no chance to learn the “past life’s” language
in his or her current lifetime. The reasoning would go like this: Speaking a
language is a skill that requires extensive long-term exposure to the language.
If a person has that skill, but lacks such exposure in his/her current lifetime,
then the skill must have been acquired paranormally—for instance, in a
previous lifetime whose memory lingers on.

There are several published case studies in which reincarnation (or the
related phenomenon of temporary possession of a subject by another per-
sonality) is proposed as the source of a subject’s ability to speak a foreign
language. The most impressive of these case studies are in two books written
by Ian Stevenson (1974; 1984), who is Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the
University of Virginia Medical School. Stevenson has studied two native
English-speaking subjects who, under hypnosis, manifest foreign personalities
and seem to speak—very haltingly—foreign languages, specifically Swedish
and German, respectively. To establish his subjects’ linguistic competence in
these languages, Stevenson arranged sessions in which native speakers of
Swedish and German interviewed the subjects, questioning them about their
past lives; in the second case, Stevenson himself participated in the interviews,
since he knows some German

She demolishes the claims in satisfying fashion; in one sense, it’s hardly worth the trouble — to a rational mind the whole idea is silly, and someone who believes it is not going to be convinced anyway — but it’s still an enjoyable read.

My wife showed me a story about basketball in our local paper and asked “Why do they call assists ‘dimes’?” I (not being a basketball fan) was unfamiliar with the term, and so is the slangmeister Jonathon Green; the OED, however, in its dime entry (revised just this year), has:

6. Sport (chiefly North American). An especially precise or well-timed pass, esp. one resulting in or leading to a scoring opportunity. Cf. Phrases P.5b.

2008 He threw a dime to me, and I just tried to make it happen.
Calgary (Alberta) Herald 2 November f7/2

2015 The 5-foot-8..guard..dished a perfect dime to teammate Brittny Hoover standing under the basket.
Great Falls (Montana) Tribune 20 February s1/2

2023 Rose put in an absolute dime and I got on the end of it. I’m happy for the goal.
Boston Globe 27 July c8/1

Phrases P.5 [to drop a dime] b:
[Read more…]

Two unexpected eponymous etymologies:

1) I just learned that the Japanese puppet theater bunraku (文楽) is named for Uemura Bunrakuken (植村文楽軒, 1751–1810), the puppeteer who established the Bunrakuza theater in Osaka. (The OED, bless its heart, simply says “A borrowing from Japanese” in its 1972 entry.)

2) I recently was confronted with the unexpected Russian verb сникерсну́ть [snikersnut′] ‘to eat Snickers; to speed up [from the advertising slogan “Don’t stop, grab a Snickers!”]’ (apparently used by those perennial culprits, Today’s Youth), and it made me wonder why Snickers are called that. Turns out they’re “named after the favorite horse of the Mars family.”

Once again (cf. 2016, 2019), I was looking something else up in my three-volume New Great Russian-English Dictionary when my eye was caught by an odd entry:

кагуа́н а m zool common cobego (Cynocephalus variegatus).

I had never seen the word кагуан [kaguan], and indeed it does not occur in the Национальный корпус русского языка (Corpus of the Russian Language); I had also never heard of the cobego, common or otherwise, and indeed the OED is unaware of its existence (an advanced search failed to turn it up even in the citations). But Merriam-Webster has it (etymology: “modification of Malay kubong”), defining it as ‘flying lemur’ and saying that the latter is “called also colugo” (which is “perhaps from a language of the Philippines”). Meanwhile, the Russian word is said by Wiktionary to be from Cebuano kagwang.

A Google Books search turned up plenty of hits for cobego (1901: “found that it was a female cobego”; 1905: “Thus the cobego feeds upon leaves”; 1914: “It was that curious animal, the cobego”; etc.), so it surprises me that the OED has managed to ignore it for all these years.

Tamlin Magee writes for the Financial Times (archived) about his quest to understand a German descriptor:

Soon after my friend Andreas moved to Berlin, he sent me a picture of some pine nuts on a supermarket shelf. What made them photoworthy? The descriptor milde in big letters on the label.

People have eaten pine nuts since the Paleolithic Age, with evidence of their consumption found in ancient cave dwellings. And I really, really struggled with the thought that, from 10,000BC to any single time since, anyone anywhere would have flinched at their overbearing zest. Surely, if ever there was a naturally mild food, this was it.

As Andreas continued his new life in Germany, a steady drip of other “mild” foodstuffs arrived in my inbox. First, there were carrots, labelled as crunchy and mild. Then came mild orange juice, mild wine, mild olive oil. Mild chickpeas, mild tofu, mild maple syrup, mild yoghurt, mild bread. As a recent transplant, Andreas had no idea what this was all about. “I have BEGGED Germans to explain to me how carrots are not already a ‘mild’ flavour,” he wrote. But they couldn’t, and so began a shared mystery that would sustain our friendship for more than five years. […]

[Read more…]

We discussed Elfdalian back in 2016; now Dmitry Pruss sends me Miranda Bryant’s Guardian report on it:

It is a distinct language that has survived against the odds for centuries in a tiny pocket of central Sweden, where just 2,500 people speak it today. And yet, despite bearing little resemblance to Swedish, Elfdalian is considered to be only a dialect of the country’s dominant language. Now researchers say they have uncovered groundbreaking information about the roots of Elfdalian that they hope could bolster its standing and help it acquire official recognition as a minority language.

Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries. They believe it was imported to hunter-gatherers in the Swedish region of Dalarna from farmers based in the region of Uppland, which became an international base for trade, who started adopting the language. At the time, the hunter-gatherers of Dalarna spoke a language referred to by linguists as “paleo north Scandinavian”.

Yair Sapir, the co-author of a new book on Elfdalian grammar, the first to be published in English, said: “There is research that compares the distance between Elfdalian vocabulary and it shows the distance is as large [between Swedish and Elfdalian] as between Swedish and Icelandic. So there is higher mutual intelligibility between speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than between Swedish and Elfdalian.”

[Read more…]

I’ve posted a number of times about the Persianate world (e.g., 2013, 2018, 2021); for some reason I’m endlessly fascinated by it, and I now present Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud’s interview with Samuel Hodgkin, author of the new Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism. It’s introduced as follows:

Samuel Hodgkin was studying Central Asian history when his academic plans abruptly changed. In the process of learning Persian to read sources for nomad history, Hodgkin was immersed in Persianate poetry – an experience that turned out to be transformative. “The sense of direct encounter with other minds in distant times was such an exciting shock that I ended up getting completely absorbed in the poetry,” Hodgkin said. “When I went to grad school at Chicago, it was Persian poetry that I wanted to keep reading and thinking about.”

In Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press), Hodgkin explains how Persianate poetry came to be a unifying artform for writers from Soviet Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East. The literature written under communism was profoundly influenced by classical Persianate poetics; in fact, classical Persianate poetry continued to impact non-European poets beyond the end of the Cold War. Hodgkin said that even today, Persian poetry shapes literature as well as popular culture in Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Middle East. But with a few exceptions (Hodgkin mentioned the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet and the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz), these exciting leftist poets remain outside the Western canon of world literature, read outside their own languages only by area studies scholars. In writing Persianate Verse, Hodgkin explained that he hopes to “deprovincialize these poets I cared so much about by returning them to the big wide revolutionary world for which they wrote.”

Hodgkin is asked how Persianate poetry is viewed today (“In the West, where Persian poetry was massively popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its visibility has really receded. In Western China and in India, the persecution of Muslims has been disrupting the transmission of Persianate poetic traditions. But across much of Eurasia, the story is overwhelmingly one of continuity”), then about how the Persianate literary forms keep a shared sense of cultural heritage alive:
[Read more…]

Hazlitt presents excerpts from Eli Burnstein’s Dictionary of Fine Distinctions; here’s “Ethics vs. Morality”:

Ethics refers to intelligible principles of right and wrong.

Code of ethics
Workplace ethics

Morality refers to right and wrong as a felt sense.

Moral compass
Moral fibre

One is rational, explicit, and defined by one’s social or professional community; the other is emotional, deep-seated, and dictated by one’s conscience or god.

That’s why an immoral act sounds graver than an unethical one: One may get you fired, but the other could land you in hell.

The Fine Print

With characteristic sass, usage master H. W. Fowler notes that “The two words, once fully synonymous, & existing together only because English scholars knew both Greek & Latin [ethics being Greek in origin, morality Latin], have so far divided functions that neither is superfluous…ethics is the science of morals, & morals are the practice of ethics.”

While Fowler is here alluding to ethics as a branch of philosophy, the conceptual flavor of the word can be heard in its everyday sense as well: Whether theorized by Aristotle or spelled out in a code of conduct, ethics is morality, as it were, with glasses on.

He also discusses “Tights vs. Leggings vs. Pantyhose vs. Stockings” (“Less common today, stockings are detached undergarments that stop around the thigh”), “Maze vs. Labyrinth” (” A maze has many paths and challenges you to find the exit. A labyrinth has one path and draws you toward its centre.”), “Autocrat vs. Despot vs. Tyrant vs. Dictator” (“Tyrant, meanwhile, originally referred to usurpers but not necessarily bad ones—maybe they deposed a despot”), “First Cousin vs. Once Removed,” and “Modernity vs. Modernism” (“Modernity is a historical period. Modernism is a cultural movement.”). Sounds like a good book to start arguments with.

The Log recently featured the name of an Oregon city called Clatskanie. The Log post forbade anyone to look up the pronunciation and insisted that everyone guess, which seemed both overbearing and silly to me — the interesting thing is how it actually is pronounced, which is (per Wikipedia, and who would make up such a thing?) /ˈklætskɪnaɪ/ (i.e. KLATS-ki-nye), named after the Tlatskanai tribe. And in the comments, Julian provided this wonderful story:

Joke/urban myth:
A young Australian overseas has lost his passport. Goes to the consulate to get a replacement.
The official has to check his bona fides of course.
“Where do you come from, mate?”
“Mungindi.”
“You’re good. Only someone who comes from Mungindi would know how to say that.”

But Julian too (perhaps overawed by the presentation of the post) avoided giving the pronunciation, which (again according to Wikipedia) is /ˈmʌŋɪndaɪ/ (MUNG-in-dye), which is said to mean ‘water hole in the river’ in Gamilaraay. As I’ve said many times, I love unpredictable local pronunciations!

I enjoyed these quotes from R.G.M. Nisbet, “William Smith Watt 1913-2002,” Proceedings of the British Academy 124 (2004) 358-372 (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

In one respect Mods went beyond anything offered at Glasgow: the questions set on some of the prepared books dealt predominantly with textual criticism. Candidates were presented with short extracts or ‘gobbets’ from these authors, and invited to consider the various readings with arguments for and against; to conclude that the crux was insoluble and deserving of the obelus might be taken as a sign of precocious perspicacity. The direction of scholars’ studies depends on early influences more than one likes to admit, and all his life Watt was to be superb at doing gobbets, though as time went on he hit the nail on the head more expeditiously than was thought necessary in Mods.

…he described the Lateinische Grammatik of Hofmann and Szantyr as an exciting book…

Few knew of his love of English as well as Latin poetry: as a young man he had learned by heart the whole of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, much of the anthology of longer poems known as The English Parnassus, and (like Macaulay) all of Paradise Lost, so that fifty years later when given a line he could continue; this was an astonishing achievement even for the days when learning poetry was thought to have more educational value than writing about it. In Latin he knew by heart all of Lucretius and Virgil and much else besides, which he could declaim with an exuberant feeling for the power of rhythm and poetic language; if delayed on a station platform on the way to one of his numerous committees he would recite silently to himself.

I envy him; I get so much pleasure out of my exiguous tatters of memorized poetry (which is indeed useful for mental recitation during boring meetings, or when sleep is fugitive) that I wish I had a great deal more. (But I don’t understand what is meant by “he hit the nail on the head more expeditiously than was thought necessary in Mods”; any ideas?) And if anyone is wondering about the word gobbet, it’s from Middle English gobet, from Old French, diminutive of gobe ‘mouthful’, which is of Celtic origin; the OED (revised 2016) says (s.v. gob):

Probably < Irish gob and Scottish Gaelic gob beak, mouth (Early Irish gop muzzle, snout, beak) < a Celtic base of uncertain, probably expressive, origin.

Notes
It has been suggested that the Celtic base is related to Old Church Slavonic ozobati to consume, to destroy, Lithuanian žėbti to gobble, to covet, but this poses phonological problems.