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Almost a decade ago I did a post about language in movies; now I’ll use Stan Carey’s “Films of linguistic interest” as the springboard for another. Stan mentions the experimental French film Themroc, the Canadian film Pontypool, the Greek film Dogtooth (Kynodontas), Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the ’40s screwball comedy Ball of Fire (which I’ve seen and can recommend), My Fair Lady, The Princess Bride, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China, and The Grammar of Happiness, and concludes: “If you have any more suggestions, or thoughts on the films I’ve mentioned, please add them in a comment, with spoiler warnings if necessary. I’ll update if I think of more.” Feel free to discuss here and/or there, where there are already many suggestions in the comments (someone mentioned the first movie I thought of, Avatar).

I recently finished Odoevsky‘s novella Княжна Зизи [Princess Zizi], to be distinguished from his earlier Княжна Мими [Princess Mimi] (see this LH post); written in 1836 (just in time for Pushkin to be enthusiastic about it) but not published until 1839, it’s a complex story in which the narrator’s friend tells him about the sensitive, intelligent Zizi, who was hopelessly in love with her foolish sister’s husband and ended up fighting both a villain and social disapproval. Though its structure is perhaps overcomplicated and the villain is on the mustache-twirling melodramatic side, it’s well written and gripping, and as close as nineteenth-century Russian literature got to feminism—Zizi’s struggles with the paternalistic legal and social order are devastatingly portrayed.

But I’m going to focus here on a minor section of linguistic interest. Towards the end, a new character is introduced who has just returned from Paris and tends to express himself in French; this gives rise to the following reflection (Russian below the cut):

A friend of mine made a profound observation, namely that there are people who are very clever when they speak French but become indescribably trite and foolish as soon as they begin speaking Russian. This is somewhat strange, but true and understandable. We don’t learn a language, we only memorize a few thousand sentences said in the language by clever people; speaking French well means repeating these few thousand prepared sentences; these sentences both impede thinking and spare one from having to come up with one’s own; you listen and it seems that someone’s mind is emerging from the chatter, but you are deceived: it seems like sense, but when you translate it into Russian it’s vacuous, neither here nor there.

That’s exaggerated, of course, but there’s something to it; it’s easy to give the impression of having something to say by repeating well-chosen quotes. I confess, though, that what drove me to post is an example of the character’s conversation: “Comment donc! nous lui ferons rendre, gorge mordicus!” That’s the way it’s punctuated in every edition Google Books shows me, and the Russian annotation renders it “И как еще! мы у него все вырвем обратно, чорт побери!” [Indeed! we’ll get everything back from him, dammit!] Both the editorial staff and the annotator are clearly ignorant of both the French idiom rendre gorge ‘to restitute ill-gotten gains’ (the English word disgorge is helpful for the semantics here) and the Latin adverb mordicus ‘by biting, with the teeth; doggedly’ (from the verb mordere ‘to bite’), which has been taken into French (Trésor de la langue française informatisé: “Obstinément, avec entêtement. Maintenir mordicus son point de vue; nier qqc. mordicus. Elle lui dit qu’il lui a changé son Watteau. Le Hon nie, la femme soutient mordicus [GONCOURT, Journal, 1856, p.297]”). Oh foolish translator, thinking you could just slip an incomprehensible phrase under the rug and nobody would notice! I must say, though, “gorge mordicus!” does have the air of a Rabelaisian curse.

I will also take the occasion to point out the early-nineteenth-century use of пошлый [poshlyi] to mean ‘common, banal, trivial,’ without the implication of philistinism that became attached to it later; see this LH post for the history of the word. Earlier in the story, one of the narrators says “я, как пошлый любовник, бродил под окнами моей красавицы” [I, like a poshlyi lover, roamed around beneath the windows of my beautiful beloved], and when reading Veltman’s Сердце и думка [Heart and head] (see this LH post) I jotted down a couple of uses: “Всё стало в глазах её обыкновенно, недостойно внимания; все люди, казалось, поглупели в ее понятиях: слова их стали для нее пошлы” [Everything became in her eyes ordinary, unworthy of attention; she thought of everyone, it seemed, as stupid: their words had become poshlyi for her]; Когда научились ловко двигаться, классические танцы стали пошлы [When they had learned to move adroitly/cleverly, classical dances became poshlyi].

The original Russian:

Один мой приятель сделал очень глубокомысленное замечание, а именно: что есть люди, которые очень умны, когда говорят по-французски, и делаются невыразимо пошлы и глупы, как скоро заговорят по-русски. Это довольно странно, но справедливо и понятно. Мы учимся не языку, но только заучиваем тысячи фраз, сказанных на этом языке умными людьми; говорить хорошо по-французски — значит повторять эти тысячи готовых фраз; эти фразы и мешают мыслям и избавляют от своих собственных; вы слушаете, чужой ум выглядывает из болтовни, обманывает вас: кажется — дело, переведите по-русски — пустошь, ни к селу ни к городу.

Claire Bowern of Anggarrgoon has a post at Crikey’s very own language blog describing an archival find she made some time back, and a very lively read it is; here’s a sample paragraph:

The recordings had been made outside, and there was a lot of wind noise. I was feeling a bit seasick at this point; the tapes were stereo and the microphone hadn’t been held too steadily, so there was a lot of rocking back and forth. Stick a pair of headphones on and slide the balance meter back and forth to get a sense of what this feels like. I’d been listening to tapes for many hours, including some German drinking songs, and was just about ready to call it quits for the day. One more tape, I thought. I stuck the reel* on the machine and cued it up. I heard Peile ask “What’s the name of that language? Nindi nindi?” The speaker replied, “Nyindinyindi.” Hmmm, I thought. That’s a new name on me. So I did what all good academics do when they come across something new – googled it. Nothing.** Then the speaker started telling a story in the language, and I could understand most of it. It was close to Bardi, the language I did my PhD on (and can speak pretty well). I went back to the audition sheets for that tape, and I saw it had been listed as recorded at “Tinder Bay.” There’s no Tinder Bay in the right area, but there is “Pender Bay.” A few years later I was able to play the tape to Bardi speakers. No one knew the name “Nyindinyindi,” but they confirmed that the language on the tape was similar to Bardi.

Go to her post for the footnotes, and for the rest of the story. Makes me want to go get my hands dusty!

Ralph Keyes has a fine survey of English word coinage in The American Scholar; he starts off with Thomas Jefferson (“‘Necessity,’ he concluded, ‘obliges us to neologize.’ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Jefferson is the first person known to have used the term neologize, in an 1813 letter”) and the reaction to his innovations in the motherland:

Once they caught wind of all the new words being coined across the Atlantic, self-appointed guardians of the King’s English were rather cross. When Jefferson used the new word belittle in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, a British critic exclaimed, “It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson!” Undaunted, the third president proceeded to coin Anglophobia.

He goes on to Elbridge Gerry (he of the very first gerrymander), Gelett Burgess (coiner of blurb and goop), would-be innovator Thomas Friedman (“Friedman has succeeded only with flat world, and even that success proved fleeting”), and Maury Maverick (who added gobbledygook to the language), among others. One paragraph traces global warming back to 1952, another describes Fred Hoyle’s dismay that his term big bang caught on. I got a kick out of the section on meritocracy:

In 1958 British sociologist Michael Young published a dystopian novel called The Rise of the Meritocracy. His intent was to satirize the assessment of “merit” by credentials rather than by performance. In his book’s initial edition the author wrote of meritocracy, “The origin of this unpleasant term … is still obscure. It seems to have been first generally used in the sixties of the last century in small-circulation journals attached to the Labour Party, and gained wide currency much later on.” But in his introduction to a 1994 reprint, Young admitted that he’d coined meritocracy himself. Why had he been so cagey originally? Because when he was coming up with his book’s title, a classicist had warned him that mixing Greek and Latin roots would break the rules of good usage and subject him to ridicule. As it turned out, even though the book itself was controversial, its title wasn’t (“rather the opposite I would say”). Therefore Young now felt free to step forward and claim authorship of meritocracy. “The twentieth century had room for the word,” he realized, even one its coiner meant to be pejorative.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Thanks, Paul!

Frequent commenter Paul sent me this quote from Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, a book he recommends at least as heartily as Rob Nixon in the Times (“lively, luminous… gorgeous”):

It’s true that once you being to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways—shadowing the modern-day road network, or meeting it at a slant or perpendicular.
Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets—say the names of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite—holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths.

It’s hard to resist an author with that kind of feel for words.

My eye happened to fall on the entry couch grass in Merriam-Webster and the first definition was quack grass. I found that amusing; then I noticed the etymology said “alteration of quitch.” Intrigued, I went to the American Heritage and found that they actually had an entry for quitch grass, whose etymology read “[Middle English quich, from Old English cwice; see gwei- in Indo-European roots].” (The PIE root gwei- means ‘to live’ and gives us the native quick as well as the borrowed Latin viv- and Greek bio- and zo(o)- words.) And it said couch grass was “Also called quack grass, witch grass.” I found that an interesting cluster of forms, and I thought I’d pass it along.
Today, by the way, is [a month from] Jelly Roll Morton‘s birthday. He may not have invented jazz, as he used to claim, but he sure helped get it off on the right track. Happy birthday, Doctor Jazz! [Oops: I took the birthday info from another site without checking; it’s actually Oct. 20, as a commenter points out. Let this be a lesson to me. Oh well, any day is a good day to listen to Jelly Roll!]

Having finished Lermontov’s unfinished novel Княгина Лиговская [Princess Ligovskaya], written 1836-37—and it’s too bad he didn’t finish it, because a main character, the chinovnik Krasinsky, is a remarkably early instance of the “poor folks” theme that was to become prominent a decade or so later, and it would be nice to know where he was going with it—I’m now starting Odoevsky‘s 4338-й год (The Year 4338; new online translation here) and am looking forward to this early sf novel in which a somnambulist sees via Mesmeric self-magnetism a future in which Russia is the cultural center of a world about to be destroyed by a comet. But just a few pages into the introduction I’m taken aback to discover that the comet involved is not Halley’s, as I had been informed by authoritative scholarly sources, but Biela’s, which was as terrifying in the 1830s (to people who like to be terrified by such things, of course) as the 2012 phenomenon was in recent memory. As Wikipedia says, “the fact that Biela’s Comet was the only comet known to intersect the Earth’s orbit was to make it of particular interest, both to astronomers and the public, during the 19th century,” but the fact that it broke up and turned into a meteor shower later in the century means that it’s forgotten today, and I guess people just automatically substitute Halley’s in their minds. Still, I direct a click of the tongue at those who perpetrate the lazy error.

Update. Well, for Pete’s sake. Later on, there’s a reference to the threat of Halley’s comet. Did Odoevsky not understand that they were two different things, or did he change his mind and not bother to make the text consistent? Bah.

Addendum. Not worth making a separate post of, but I can’t resist passing on the best typo I’ve seen this month (and probably the best since “melted down into Ottoman canons“). On page 340, fn. 8, of Catriona Kelly’s A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820-1992, we find: “Stalin’s best-known personal intervention was in the field of linguistics, in which he published a volume in 1950 refuting the doctrines of Marx, which he had earlier supported…” For Marx, read Marr.

Victor Mair has an intriguing post at the Log, “Sayable but not writable,” about Chinese expressions that most Chinese don’t know how to write. Here’s the last couple of paragraphs:

I was also surprised that only a couple of the students from China had ever heard of, much less were able to write, the words gūlu 軲轆 (“wheel”) and gūlù 轂轆 (“reel”). These are old colloquial terms that seem to have survived mostly in the oral realm and are related to some form of the Indo-European word for “cycle; wheel”. See Robert S. Bauer, “Sino-Tibetan *kolo ‘Wheel’,” Sino-Platonic Papers 47 (Aug. 1994), 1-11.
I always tell the students in my classes that the sounds of the words in Chinese languages are much more important than the characters that might be used to write them — even in Classical Chinese — where there are often variant written forms for the same term. I demonstrated that for my students in the case of lāta 邋遢 (“slovenly; dirty; dowdy; sloppy; slobby; shaggy; unkempt; ill-groomed; sluttery; slipshod; untidy”) by putting on the board more than two dozen different topolectal variants of this colloquial term. I read aloud the pronunciations of each of the variants and pointed out that the second and subsequent characters of these variants were mostly arbitrary transcriptions of the sounds of the local variants and that the surface signification of the characters used to write these syllables was essentially irrelevant. The fact that many terms in Chinese — even in ancient texts — have a variety of different written forms, e.g., wěiyǐ 委迤 / wēiyí 委蛇 / wēiyí 逶迤 / etc. (“winding; meandering; twisting”) confirms the primacy of sound over symbol.

I was irresistibly reminded of a great anecdote in Jack Seward’s Japanese in Action about his going to considerable pains to learn the complicated Japanese character for ringo ‘apple’ to impress Japanese acquaintances only to discover that none of them knew it.

Geoff Pullum has a Lingua Franca piece about an odd phenomenon he’s run across: people who get offended if you try to converse in their own language. Only two examples, mind you—an English-speaking American, fluent in German, whose German university colleagues don’t want him to speak German with them and a native speaker of English who “has learned Korean really well,” but encounters hostility when he uses it to talk to students and colleagues, who “seem to think it is distasteful that he should do such a thing”—but he’s not claiming it’s representative, just surprising:

I had of course seen this kind of reluctance to let outsiders join the speech community with languages of very low prestige, for instance creole languages. Efforts at learning Jamaican Creole are typically met with anger rather than pleasure in Jamaica: Jamaicans, especially if middle-class or college-educated, want to be regarded as English speakers. They tend to despise the creole that is in fact the primary medium of oral communication across the country.

But discouragement from learning prestigious national languages like Berlin German and Seoul Korean? It amazed me.

The comment thread is worth reading as well.

Elizabeth Weingarten has a piece in Future Tense (“a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate” that “explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture”) on Google’s Ngram Viewer; it doesn’t break any new ground, but it links to some good stuff and presents nice tidbits:

“There are hundreds of little mysteries that one can resolve with the Ngram Viewer,” says Erez Lieberman Aiden, a founding father of the Viewer and the field of Culturomics (which studies human culture and history through the lens of massive datasets) and fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Take the mystery of donuts vs. doughnuts. When did the spelling change? Before the Ngram Viewer, “it would’ve taken a very long time to determine when that spelling transition took place,” Aiden explains. But according to the Viewer, the donut spelling starts to take off in early 1950s, right around the time Dunkin’ Donuts opened its first store. Of course, it doesn’t prove that Dunkin’ Donuts alone changed the spelling—but it does add a compelling dimension to the story.

I do have to take issue with this: “The Viewer also helps corroborate larger, semantic debates—like, do words actually evolve in the Darwinian sense? … [Researchers] discovered that the verbs did undergo a kind of evolutionary process. ‘The less frequent the verb, the more rapidly it becomes irregular,’ Aiden explains.” Yeah, no. It is impossible for words, or anything non-biological, to evolve in the Darwinian sense. If you insist on using evolution as a metaphor, best to just slip it in there quietly and not try to pin it down as “Darwinian.” Because that just looks silly.