languagehat.com

Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian on an interesting-sounding study:

Whether it is news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in a single glance. Prof Liina Pylkkanen, co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume words are understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the whole sentence.

“From this perspective, at-a-glance language processing really shouldn’t work since there’s just not enough time for all the sequential processing of words and their combination into a larger representation,” she said. However, the research offers fresh insights, revealing we can detect certain sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds (ms) – a timeframe similar to the blink of an eye.

Pylkkanen said: “We don’t yet know exactly how this ultrafast structure detection is possible, but the general hypothesis is that when something you perceive fits really well with what you know about – in this case, we’re talking about knowledge of the grammar – this top-down knowledge can help you identify the stimulus really fast.

“So just like your own car is quickly identifiable in a parking lot, certain language structures are quickly identifiable and can then give rise to a rapid effect of syntax in the brain.”

The team say the findings suggest parallels with the way in which we perceive visual scenes, with Pylkkanen noting the results could have practical uses for the designers of digital media, as well as advertisers and designers of road signs. Writing in the journal Science Advances, Pylkkanen and colleagues report how they used a non-invasive scanning device to measure the brain activity of 36 participants.

Further details at the link; thanks, Trevor!

Man, when rarely updated sites decide to update, they do so with a vengeance and come in batches! The other day it was MMcM’s Polyglot Vegetarian, and now it’s Erik McDonald’s XIX век with Translation comparison: Fathers and Sons or Fathers and Children. OK, it’s not as long as MMcM’s five-part series (the War and Peace of blog posts), but it’s pretty damn long, and mighty appetizing for those of us who like comparing translations. It begins:

There are so many translations that I’ll start with a quick overall impression of each, then get into specifics. This is all based only on chapter 10 (I could read that 18 times, but not the whole novel).

   1. Overall impressions of each translation
   2. How Bazarov and Pavel Kirsanov talk
   3. Dialogue as theater
   4. Other voices
   5. The metasociolinguistic eftim passage
   6. 1860s key words
   7. The painting everyone agrees is bad
   8. Micro choices that reveal their/affect our understanding of the characters
   9. A modified idiom to end on
   10. Bibliography

The translations range from Eugene Schuyler (1867: “I think Schuyler must have worked at least partly from Russian”) to Nicholas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater (2022: “The language sounds smooth—modern and informal—and not only because it’s so recent”); here’s a sample of “How Bazarov and Pavel Kirsanov talk”:

Chapter 10 centers on a verbal confrontation between PK and Bazarov, where what they say is no more important than how they say it. PK argues the position of a liberal Anglophile patriotic reformer of the 1840s generation with long speeches, rhetorical flourishes, elaborate examples, and frequent flares of temper. The nihilist Bazarov provides the opening for the argument by stringing together two nouns, and even though his speech gets closer to PK’s debating style as he gets drawn into the argument, he tends to say one thing at a time simply, and by the end he is back to being calm and laconic.

Nearly all the translators did a good job distinguishing PK’s and Bazarov’s speaking styles, but PK was easier to get right.

As with her use of “thou,” Hapgood pushes the limits of how much you can leave unchanged, having PK say “princíples” (85) with a stress mark. Back in chapter 5 the narrator had commented on PK pronouncing the Russian word for “principles” like French, while his nephew Arkady pronounced it in a kind of hyper-Russian way, farther from French than the standard Russian version of the borrowing, and Hapgood tries to carry that into English.

I thought Isaacs captured PK’s tone pretty well with “individuality, my dear sir,—that’s the main thing; individuality must stand as firm as a rock, for it is the foundation which everything is built upon” (67), and again with “first we’re as proud as Lucifer, then we start mocking at everything” (74).

The way Edmonds translated PK’s speeches made me think she must have known people with his particular mix of class attributes: “how you can decline to recognize principles and precepts passes my comprehension” (123) and “the meanest penny-a-liner” (127, for последний пачкун) seemed pitch-perfect, stylistically marked but not over the top.

Oddly, I skipped Отцы и дети (Fathers and Sons) when I was reading my way through the 1860s (back in 2017) — I seem to remember that I decided I had too much Russian literature to get through to take the time to reread it. But it’s an important novel and I should really get back to it (and post about it).

Back in June I saw my first Chadian movie (see this post); now I’ve seen another by the same director, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, called Bye Bye Africa (available at Criterion Channel until the end of October). His first feature film, it was released in 1999 but apparently shot in 1997 (judging from a reference to its being the tenth anniversary of the death of Thomas Sankara); it’s a little rough around the edges (sound and image poorly coordinated, subtitles not ready for prime time when they show up — annoyingly long stretches of both French and Chadian Arabic go untranslated), but it’s thoughtful, vigorous, and interesting throughout, and it’s great to see so much of N’Djamena. (Also, I got to learn the French titles of some popular movies that show up on posters — Contre-attaque is First Strike and Six hommes pour sauver Harry is Let’s Get Harry — and it was satisfying to learn that the plural of Arabic فِلْم film is فْلَام ʔaflām.)

But about those subtitles…. I noticed a number of infelicities, but this one really got my goat. Much of the movie deals with the difficulty of keeping a cinema industry going in Chad, and at one point someone is explaining why it’s hard to get people to theaters: “Il y a tellement de télévisions, de magnétoscopes, de cassettes, et surtout les paraboles.” The subtitle read: “There are so many TV sets, tape recorders, cassettes, and parabolas galore.” Setting aside the misleading “tape recorders” (a magnétoscope is a VCR, which, yes, is literally a tape recorder, but that’s not how we use the phrase) and the ridiculous “galore,” I have to focus on the final item in the list. The word parabole can of course mean ‘parabola,’ but it has another meaning, ‘satellite dish,’ and I think it’s pretty clear which fits this context. I know it’s hard work subtitling movies, and doubtless especially ill-paid in cases like this, but come on, when the error is so blatant even a harried scrivener should realize something is amiss.

Almost a year ago I posted about the revival of Polyglot Vegetarian, which had been dormant since 2012; now MMcM has had another burst of activity, making five consecutive posts about versions of the Lord’s Prayer in many, many languages. The first begins:

A post in the autumn of an election year sixteen years ago covered the chapter mottoes in The Gilded Age. These were supplied to Twain and Warner by James Hammond Trumbull, friend and neighbor of the former. Trumbull has appeared here before and since, most recently in connection with Maize.

Of specific interest to this blog, a paper by Trumbull, published in 1872, with “Notes on Forty Versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Algonkin Languages,” remarked:

Bread was not the staff of life to an Indian, and his little corn-cake, baked in hot ashes, was perhaps about the last thing he would remember to pray for. So, on “daily bread,” translators were left to a large discretion. The diversity of judgment manifested in the selection of a corresponding Indian word is noticeable.

There are several possible high-level approaches.

(I wrote about that epigraphs post here.) The post ends with a long list of polyglot collections of Pater Noster versions and the questions:

What do these collections say about the faith or obsessions of the collectors, or the power of their backers, or about the languages, or the glyphs used to record them, or about the speakers themselves? Is the Lord’s Prayer a particularly good choice for a canonical text to compare?

There follow posts 2, 3, 4, and 5; just scrolling down the posts I quail at the thought of the time and labor that went into them. Pauca sed matura, that’s MMcM’s motto! (And yes, Kusaal shows up, in Post 5.)

Also, John Costello wrote me about the Endangered Alphabets Calligraphy kickstarter, which has only a few days left to run; if you want to help it meet its goal, you know what to do.

Many of the papers in Verbal Aspect in Discourse (1990, ed. Nils B. Thelin) look worth investigating:

In the light of growing insights into the universal temporal-semantic nature of aspectual distinctions, today’s aspectology has broadened its attention from restrictedly event-defining functions of aspect on the sentence level towards its primary perspectival functions on the discourse/situation level. Hereby it attempts to relate these functions to each other in ways that stimulate consistently language processing on a more solid perceptual-conceptual and pragmatic basis. Reflecting in various ways this general tendency. The 13 papers collected in this volume are oriented to four fields of research: (1) Developmental properties of aspect and tense; (2) Ideo-pragmatic and conceptual-semantic correlates of aspect and the perspectival organisation of discourse; (3) Aspect, case and discourse; (4) and Aspect in literary discourse. The editor’s Introduction gives a comprehensive survey of contemporary aspectology and its development towards a proper integration of discourse/situation conditions. Besides cross-linguistic considerations (including English), the languages analyzed specifically are Russian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, French and Finnish.

But I was immediately attracted to “Notes on the ‘Metaphysics’ of Russian Aspect” because it’s by Boris Gasparov, whose book on Ferdinand de Saussure I raved about here; I thought his analysis was interesting enough to quote in extenso, and I hope those of my readers who know Russian (or just have thoughts about aspect) will weigh in. Gasparov begins:

1. The past two decades have been marked by significant progress in the study of the meaning of the aspectual forms of the Russian verb. Throughout several decades, linguists were aiming at finding a common basis by which to unite the infinite variety of concrete meanings taken by the forms of perfective and imperfective aspect (Perf. and Imp.) in various specific cases. Striving for the attainment of this end, linguists have appealed to the ever broader and more abstract semantic categories in order to formulate in a more generalized and more coherent way a strategy which speakers of Russian follow in their use of aspectual forms. Each time, however, that research reached a more generalized level, it appeared that even at this level there existed a variety of relevant factors which had not been previously noticed. Consequently, the picture of the use of aspect at this new level split again into a series of particular cases which, in their turn, suggested the necessity of a new, still more generalized and abstract approach.

He summarizes the history of such attempts (structural studies, functional studies, and the narrative approach), then moves on to his own:
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By request of J.W. Brewer, I hereby open the floor to discussion of the Obotrites, or (as the case may be) Obodrites. Wikipedia:

The Obotrites (Latin: Obotriti, Abodritorum, Abodritos) or Obodrites, also spelled Abodrites (German: Abodriten), were a confederation of medieval West Slavic tribes within the territory of modern Mecklenburg and Holstein in northern Germany (see Polabian Slavs). For decades, they were allies of Charlemagne in his wars against the Germanic Saxons and the Slavic Veleti. […]

The Bavarian Geographer, an anonymous medieval document compiled in Regensburg in 830, contains a list of the tribes in Central Eastern Europe to the east of the Elbe. The list includes the Nortabtrezi (Obotrites) – with 53 civitates. Adam of Bremen referred to them as the Reregi because of their lucrative trade emporium Reric. In common with other Slavic groups, they were often described by Germanic sources as Wends.

The substantially longer Russian article gives the pleasingly Russianized term бо́дричи as well (which makes one think of бодрый ‘cheerful, bright, vigorous’), and there is (oddly) a separate article under that heading. I was hoping Barford would discuss them in his The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe, but although he mentions them fairly often (as Obodrites) it’s just a selection of random facts (battles, conversions, etc.). Nobody seems to venture an etymology (Wiktionary: “Происходит от ??”). Any and all thoughts are welcome!

Once again I need help with a mysterious UK usage, so I turn to the assembled multinational multitude. In Rosamond McKitterick’s LRB review of House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker (archived), she writes:

Firnhaber-Baker’s account of the fifteen kings and their many military campaigns is entertaining, unfailingly lively, occasionally a little rackety; it is in essence a collection of royal portraits, focusing more on individual lives than political processes and the wielding of authority.

I am only glancingly aware of the word rackety, and I would have guessed it meant ‘making a racket’; this is indeed the first sense in the OED (entry revised 2008): “Obtrusively noisy or cacophonous; clattering, rattling; boisterous, rowdy” (1796 One of my cows, that was afflicted sorely with, as he called it, a racketty complaint in her bowels. S. J. Pratt, Gleanings Wales, Holland & Westphalia (ed. 2) xiv. 228), but there is a second sense “Characterized by or inclined to dissipation; disreputable” (1884 Their boys are all jolly, nice young fellows. All have turned out so well, not one of them rackety, you know. American Naturalist vol. 18 109) — Green has it as “of objects, insalubrious; of individuals, characterized as immoral” (1929 [UK] J.B. Booth London Town 106: Rackety young fellow-about-town). Does anybody have a sense of what McKitterick means by it here?
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As I was investigating something else, I discovered Yiddishland:

YIVO is pleased to introduce Yiddishland: Countries, Cities, Towns, Rivers. This is the first attempt to collect and publish all Yiddish place names of Central and Eastern Europe in one book. We have now made available place names found in all the countries of Eastern Europe.

Yiddish place names are both a fascinating topic and something of a sore subject. Because everywhere they have lived, Yiddish speakers have been a minority, and since the language has almost never had government recognition or backing, it is miraculous that standardization has been possible. In the case of place names, standardization has been particularly difficult, as the Yiddish folk designations for cities, towns, rivers, and even city streets have often been ignored by the speakers themselves, not to mention Yiddish journalists and writers who are more familiar with the official names. Thus, a gazetteer of Yiddish place names has been a desideratum for many, many years. In YIVO-bleter VII (1934:229), the editor notes that Saul Chajes’s list of Yiddish place names, which was published in that issue, will be “an important contribution to the Yiddish geographical index that is being prepared by the philological section of YIVO,” which to the best of our knowledge never appeared.

As with so many other projects, the late Mordkhe Schaechter took it upon himself to collect and publish a definitive list of Yiddish place names. Although he did not live to complete the project himself, his extensive card files, with nearly 6,000 Yiddish place names culled both from oral interviews and printed sources, were donated to YIVO. The gazetteer, titled Yiddishland: Countries, Cities, Towns, Rivers, has been compiled in its present form by Paul Glasser, who supplemented Schaechter’s files with more recent published data and with Internet sources, particularly with respect to official names. Although Schaechter collected Yiddish names from around the world, the present work is limited to approximately 3,000 locations in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically present-day Austria, Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine, as well as the European regions of Russia. This includes what Mikhl Herzog (1965:7) designates “Yiddish Language Area (1938),” as well as neighboring countries with at least a few Yiddish place names of long standing.

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A few weeks ago Hippophlebotomist mentioned the “Alarodian hypothesis”; having looked it up, I thought it was intriguing enough to give its own post. Wikipedia:

The Alarodian languages are a proposed language family that encompasses the Northeast Caucasian (Nakh–Dagestanian) languages and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages.

The term Alarodian is derived from Greek Ἀλαρόδιοι (Alarodioi), the name of an ethnic group mentioned by Herodotus which has often been equated with the people of the kingdom of Urartu, although this equation is considered doubtful by modern scholars. A leading Urartologist, Paul Zimansky, rejects a connection between the Urartians and the Alarodians. Nearly nothing is known about the Alarodians except that they “were armed like the Colchians and Saspeires,” according to Herodotus. The Colchians and Saspeires are generally associated with the Kartvelians and/or Scythians, neither of whom spoke a Hurro-Urartian or Northeast Caucasian language

Historically, the term “Alarodian languages” was employed for several language family proposals of various size. Sayce (1880) employed the name for a small group that comprised Urartian (then called “Vannic”) and the Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Laz, Mingrelian, and Svan). In 1884, the German orientalist Fritz Hommel further included all languages of the Caucasus and the ancient Near East which did not belong to the Indo-European, Semitic, and the now obsolete Ural–Altaic language families, e.g. Elamite, Kassite. Later, he extended the Alarodian family to include the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe, e.g. Lemnian, Etruscan, Ligurian. Karel Oštir’s (1921) version of Alarodian included all aforementioned languages, further Basque, Sumerian, Egyptian, the Cushitic and Berber languages. The historical Alarodian proposal – especially Oštir’s maximal extension – was however not well-received by the majority of scholars (“Ce petit livre donne le vertige”—”This little book makes one dizzy”, A. Meillet), and eventually abandoned.

The term “Alarodian languages” was revived by I. M. Diakonoff for the proposed language family that unites the Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian languages. Work by I. M. Diakonoff and Starostin (1986) asserted the connection between “Nakh-Dagestanian” (NE Caucasian) and Hurro-Urartian on the basis of comparison of their reconstruction to Proto-Nakh-Dagestanian, later published in 1994 with Nikolayev.

I like the “vertige” quote — Meillet! thou shouldst be living at this hour: linguistics hath need of thee…

Also, this gives me an opportunity to link to Dravido-Korean languages, a piece of weirdness John Emerson (who used to propagate Dravido-Everything around these parts) shared with me recently. Enjoy!

My wife and I are watching The Crown and are greatly enjoying it, as well as learning quite a bit about British history (don’t worry, after each episode we check on the dramatic license the writers took). We’re now on the fourth season, which brings the advent of Margaret Thatcher as played with frightening accuracy by Gillian Anderson. (Point of Hattic interest: the accents of the English characters seem to be spot-on; those of the would-be Americans are awful — JFK, Jackie, LBJ, the astronauts, none of them are remotely believable.) And suddenly everyone was using the slang term “wet,” which I remembered from the ’80s but had no real sense of other than knowing it was a putdown. So I checked the OED:

15.b. Inept, ineffectual, effete; also as quasi-adv. and in combination wet fish, a wet individual, a ‘drip’. Also spec. in Politics (see quots. 1981, 1983). […]

1916 I’ll give yer a clip ‘longside the ear’ole if you ain’t careful. Don’t act so wet.
‘Taffrail’, Pincher Martin ii. 27
[…]

1924 A man is wet if he isn’t a ‘regular guy’; he is wet if he isn’t ‘smooth’; he is wet if he has intellectual interests..; and he is wet..if he is utterly stupid.
P. Marks, Plastic Age 192
[…]

1969 The Jesus of the Gospels can be a bit of a wet liberal at times.
K. Amis, Green Man iv. 180
[…]

1980 The contrast between the splendid façade and the rather wet interior of the man [sc. Havelock Ellis], who was kind and gentle and distinguished, but also distressingly absent, indifferent and faint.
Times Literary Supplement 28 November 1355/2

1981 The term ‘Wet’ was originally used by Mrs Thatcher, who meant it in the old sense of ‘soppy’, as in ‘What do you mean the unions won’t like it, Jim? Don’t be so wet.’ It meant feeble, liable to take the easy option, lacking intellectual and political hardness. Like so many insults, it was gleefully adopted by its victims, and so came by its present meaning of liberal, leftish, anti-ideological.
Observer 26 July 12/3

1982 In considering the promotion of wet (or wettish) Ministers, she will tell herself that Pope was right.
Listener 23 December 6/3

1983 Britain’s Tory Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, began this vogue terminology by contemptously dismissing dewy-eyed dissenters from her arid Right-wing policies as ‘wet’.
Age (Melbourne) 5 October 13

(I thought “contemptously” in that last citation must be a typo, but it turns out the OED has it as a variant spelling, and a Google Books search finds lots of examples.) So we see that it is in fact associated with Thatcher, but I confess I still have only the vaguest idea of what it means. Oddly, Green has no examples of the Thatcher-adjacent use.