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A nice NY Times story by Margalit Fox [archived] on an unsung hero of historical linguistics (even though she wasn’t a linguist):

Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in Manhattan on Dec. 23, 1906, the daughter of recent immigrants from Hungary. A brilliant student, she earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Hunter College, and it was there, in a course on early Greek life, that she appears to have encountered Linear B.

Enthralled — and already confident of her own blazing intellect — she announced on her graduation that she would one day decipher the script. She came within a hair’s breadth of doing so before her own untimely death, at 43, just two years before Mr. Ventris cracked the code. […]

It was Dr. Kober who cataloged every word and every character of Linear B on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could find. (During World War II and afterward, paper was scarce, and she scissored her ersatz cards — 180,000 of them — from old greeting cards, church circulars and checkout slips she discreetly pinched from the Brooklyn College library.)

On her cards, she noted statistics about every character of the script — its frequency at the beginnings and ends of words, and its relation to every other character — with the meticulousness of a cryptographer. Sorting the cards night after night, Dr. Kober homed in on patterns of symbols that illuminated the structure of the words on the tablets. For as she, more than any other investigator, understood, it was internal evidence — the repeated configurations of characters that lay hidden within the inscriptions themselves — that would furnish the key to decipherment.

A life well spent, if you ask me.

This is definitely, as they used to say, Best of the Web:

Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2-1608) is one of Elizabethan England’s most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family.
Bess’s letters bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. The letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life as she weaves a web of correspondence that stretches from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.

What really makes it LH material is the Background section, which includes The Material Features of Early Modern Letters: A Reader’s Guide (“What did it mean to be handed a letter tied up with plum-coloured silk ribbon, or sealed with black wax? If a letter was written on a very large piece of paper, or was folded up very small, was your correspondent trying to tell you something?”), The Language of Early Modern Letters: A Reader’s Guide (“How do we read a letter that has no punctuation marks? How can we tell who is being sincere when so many early modern letters sound so fawning? How do we know if a servant has phrased a letter appropriately to a countess? How do we decipher early modern spelling?”), and Tutorial: Reading Early Modern Handwriting, inter alia. And a beautifully designed website to boot.

A Wordorigins.org thread started with the simple question: “The song, Sidewalks of New York has the line Some are up in ‘G,’ meaning, apparently, successful. What might be the origin of this phrase?” An excellent question to which you’d think there would be an answer, but so far all that can be said is that it goes back to the nineteenth century and was originally “way up in G” (13 April 1889, National Police Gazette, pg. 3: “The matinee actor used to be the champion masher in New York, but just now riding master stock appears to be booming in this direction, and by all accounts it is away up in G, too”), and an 1890 quote classifies it as a musical reference: “the veterans were ‘away up in G,’ as musicians say.” As I said in the thread, “There is such a thing as ‘high G’; here, for example, you can hear 14 sopranos try to hit it. But the phrase ‘way up in G’ excludes such an explanation.” So: any ideas?

Michael Quinion of World Wide Words, in his latest newsletter, has a great entry about the phrase Earl Grey tea:

Various stories link it to the second Earl Grey, who was British prime minister between 1830 and 1834 and largely responsible for the Great Reform Act of 1832 as well as removing the monopoly of the East India Company on importing tea from China…. The etymological problem for the OED was that the first example of the term Earl Grey tea it had on record was dated 1929….

The story took a surprising twist when researchers on the Foods of England site found that Charlton and Co had advertised a tea in 1867 as the rather expensive “celebrated Grey mixture”, with no reference to any aristocratic connection, though it did boast of its “most distinguished patronage”. Might the business have added a noble association later on as a marketing ploy, one that was to be copied by others? It could well have done. Victorian advertisers weren’t renowned for their strict adherence to truth.

There’s more, including a discussion of the disreputable adulteration of tea with bergamot. As Quinion says, “at times a search for the provenance of a term turns into an intriguing detective story with an unexpected dénouement.” (Via Etymolist.)

In my salad days, when I still thought of myself as a mathematician-in-training, I would have been fascinated by this (Caroline Chen writes about Shinichi Mochizuki’s alleged proof of “a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades”; nobody has any idea whether it’s correct because it would take months or years to understand it). As things stand, I’m mildly interested, but what really grabs me is the OED’s latest appeal to the public: “A number of quotations in the OED derive from a book with the title Meanderings of Memory. However, we have been unable to trace this title in library catalogues or text databases. All these quotations have a date of 1852, and some cite the author as ‘Nightlark’. The only evidence for this book’s existence that we have yet been able to find is a single entry in a bookseller’s catalogue…” If you’ve ever seen a copy of this book, please let them know! (New Yorker, Guardian, MetaFilter)

Also: Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown! (Warning: May cause uncontrollable laughter.)

A couple of years ago I posted about Barrie England’s blog Real Grammar; it’s now gone, along with its host (though it’s archived), but England has started a new one, Caxton (after this guy), and imported posts from his older blogs. It’s very nicely designed, and the latest post does a good succinct job of describing something I was going to post about, so I’ll just copy his text: “In his latest post, David Crystal gives details of recordings of how a sermon by John Donne might have sounded in the original pronunciation in 1622. Transcripts available here and the recordings here.” So add it to your bookmarks or RSS feed, and may it have a long and prosperous career! (Via Sentence first.)

I do enjoy a good heresy and an eloquent denunciation thereof (see, for instance, here or here), so you can imagine my pleasure when I came upon this passage from The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England: An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles by Thomas Rogers (Cambridge, 1854; p. 202):

Hence detest we both all the old heretics, and their fancies, with the new prophets of Basilides, the manifestation of Marcion, the mysteries of the Manichees, the Jobelæa of the Scythians, the Symbonia of the Archontics, the Cabala of the Jews, the Alcoran of the Turks, and also all new heretics and schismatics, with all their cursed opinions; as first, the Anabaptists, and namely the Libertines, the Davi-Georgians, and Family of Love, and all the co-deified elders thereof; as Henry Nicholas, Eliad, Fidelitas, Christopher Vitel, Theophilus the Exile, and the rest.

I am particularly intrigued by the Jobelæa and the Symbonia; I would guess that the first might have something to do with Jubilee, but if anyone has any knowledge (or an entertaining guess) about either, I will be happy to hear it.

This story about “15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’” has been making the rounds, and I was afraid I would have to mount my spavined old historical-linguistics horse and do battle. In the comment thread of this post, marie-lucie and Piotr Gąsiorowski were scathing about it, and now Sally Thomason at the Log has obviated any need for effort on my part by doing a thorough demolition job. Her conclusions in a nutshell: “garbage in, garbage out” and “you still can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” For details, I happily refer you to her post, and join the many commenters there in thanking her for writing it.

When we left our hero, Baron Brambeus (alter ego of Osip Senkovsky), he was deciding against getting married as a cure for spleen (in the old sense of “melancholy”); now that I’ve read further, I can tell you that he considers hanging himself, but it’s too much trouble (and besides, hanged men look ridiculous), so he goes abroad instead. He sees pyramids and apes, kangaroos and English missionaries (пирамиды и обезьян[…], кенгуру и английских миссионеров), and returns home feeling he has studied people to the full and developed his mind and heart. But when his father is presented with the bill for these adventures, he shakes his head doubtfully and says as far as he knows, there’s nothing in people that’s worth even half that: “I think you were cheated.” His aunt calls him a fool. He goes off in a huff but decides they’re right and he was in fact cheated—he’d learned not about people but about foolishness, and he promises to tell us what he’s learned:

But the voyage is completed, the foolishness is done—which is, of course, a great joy to you all—and for our mutual pleasure I am ready to share with you three fragments of my foolishness. I say “fragments” because you yourselves are clever people and you know that we live in a fragmentary age. The time is past when a person lived a single life for eighty years straight and thought a single long thought in eighteen volumes. Now our life, mind, and heart consist of petty, motley, disconnected fragments—which is far better, more diverse, more pleasant for the eyes, and even cheaper. We think in fragments, exist in fragments, and are dispersed into fragments. For that reason I can put forth my biography in no other fashion; in our time, even foolishness goes forth into the world, as required, only in fragments, though sometimes fairly significant ones. We must walk in procession with the age!

(Russian below the cut.) Which sounds quite modern, no? At any rate, for his first adventure he heads south in search of strong sensations, which he first finds in a fearful Ukrainian storm and then when he arrives in Odessa and his coachman steps off and disappears forever into the mud. He spends some time in Odessa (mentioning the variety of languages, including the Italian I posted about here); having encountered a couple of yokels who came to town to sell wheat and lard and seemed to be having trouble getting rid of the proceeds, he wins all their money at cards and then hides in the quarantine quarter to escape their wrath. There he is informed by his Greek acquaintance Bolvanopoulo that he should go to Constantinople, which is entirely made up of strong sensations, so he takes ship for the Ottoman capital, where he indeed gets into some startling adventures among the even more varied nationalities of that great city (in the neighborhoods of Pera and Galata). And in that section (to come to the point of this divagating post) he used a word that puzzled me: тандур [tandur], described as “a large table with a large brazier underneath, surrounded by sofas and covered with a huge, thick wadded coverlet; in cold weather, women and men sit around it on the sofas, with their legs underneath and pulling the coverlet up to their necks, and, arranged like a wind rose, chat, redden from the brazier’s heat, swell up, and burst with happiness.”
Now, I knew the Persian word tandur ‘(clay) oven,’ which many of us are familiar with from tandoori chicken, but this was a different usage. The OED (in an entry from 1910) had it s.v. tandour (“A heating apparatus consisting of a square table with a brazier under it, round which persons sit for warmth in cold weather in Persia…, Turkey, and adjacent countries”), and on further investigation I found an almost identical description in Anastasius, Or, Memoirs of a Greek: Written at the Close of the 18th Century, by Thomas Hope (3rd ed., J. Murray, 1820, p. 76):

What could the company do, in the uncertain state of the sky, but collect round the tandoor? — that safe refuge against the winter’s rigours, that eastern nondescript, which in the angle of the mitred sofa holds a middle character between the table and the bed, and underneath whose gaudy coverlet all the legs of the snug party coverge round a pot of lighted charcoal, there to stew for the evening. Like the rest, I crept under the bed-clothes.
[footnote:] Tandoor: a square table, placed in the angle of the sofa with a brazier underneath and a rich counterpane over it, under which, in Greek houses, in cold weather, the company creep close to each other.

Sounds very cozy indeed.
At the end of the chapter, he finds himself in the care of a Doctor Skukolini, who converses with him on learned subjects, as a result of which “I became completely obtuse, tedious, and at the same time I felt myself quite learned. And the stupider I grew, the more learned I became! Isn’t that strange? [Я сделался совершенно тупым, скучным и в то же время почувствовал себя весьма ученым. И чем пуще я глупел, тем больше становился ученым!.. Не правда ли, что это странно?]” Reminds me of grad school.

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A worthy project: “Phonemica is a project to record spoken stories in every one of the thousands of varieties of Chinese in order to preserve both stories and language for future generations. […] Our mission: Bringing the richness of oral Chinese to a wider audience, through the words of natural storytellers, from every corner of the world where Chinese is spoken.” You can read more about it here:

We begin by finding storytellers. We interview them – sometimes in the dialect of their home village, sometimes in a variety of standard Mandarin – then put the recording online, transcribe it into Chinese characters, into a Romanized (Latin alphabet) version, and into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Also, we translate each story into English.
All this work is done by Phonemica volunteers, both online and off. If you’re interested, please get involved!

A great idea, and I hope similar things are being done with other languages.