languagehat.com

I thought about saying something about this (“Homer’s great masterpieces, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have been dated to around 762 BCE by new research based on the statistical modelling of language evolution”) back when it was in the news, but frankly it made me tired. Fortunately, Memiyawanzi had a rant about it that expressed what was in my soul:

I really don’t know what to say. Bayesian phylogenetics applied to raw lexical data gives tenuous results at its good, bizarre BBC headlines like ‘English Language originated in Turkey‘ at its bad, and now, can be used as a terrible, terrible replacement for traditional textual criticism and philology at a bar-lowering new ugly for the mindless glottogonic speculation that is increasingly being made in this area by researchers in genetics with little to no actual historical linguistics training.

And as eoforholt says in the comment thread: “It’s worse than the press release makes out. In the article itself, they say that their method on its own actually yields a 95% confidence interval 61-1351 BC, a 1290 year range. It’s only when they weight their model earlier (to take into account Herodotos’ mention of Homer) that they get the range discussed in the press release.” I will, of course, be interested in responses from people who know more about this stuff than I do; my skepticism meter sometimes goes higher than is entirely warranted.

I’ve been interested in West Africa, and specifically the Mali Empire and the Mande culture it helped spread throughout the region, for thirty years now, ever since a dear friend (hi, Lisa!) asked me to study Bambara with her to help her prepare for a trip to Mali (which she didn’t end up making). I also had a friend who went regularly to that part of the world to import beads and who told wonderful stories about his adventures, so between the two of them they got me hooked. But one thing I found confusing was the nomenclature: there’s Mande (also spelled Mandé), Manden, Manding, Mandinka, Maninka, Mandingo, Malinke, and Mali itself, which (as it turns out) is a variant of the same term, as the OED explains:

the place name Mali, probably < French Mali < Arabic Mālī (also in form Māllī (14th cent.)), probably < Soninke *Malli < Manding *Mandeŋ, the name of the traditional Manding homeland (see Mande n. and adj.). Compare Fula Mali (Mɛli, Malel) the Mande people. The older form of the place name, Melli, is probably < Italian Melli (1550 in Leo Africanus) < Arabic Māllī (perhaps via Spanish or Maghribi Arabic *Mēllī).

If we follow their advice and “see Mande n. and adj.,” we find:

< Mande (also Manden), the name of the traditional Manding homeland on the Upper Niger (in Manding dialects Mandeŋ, Mandẽ, or Mandiŋ; the form Mande is of limited distribution). […] For other forms derived from the same Manding root see Mali adj. and n.2, Malinke n. and adj., Manding n. and adj., Mandingo n. and adj., Mandinka n. and adj., and Maninka n.

For some historical info to tie it all together, here’s a passage from George E. Brooks’s Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630:

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As a would-be historical linguist, I’ve always had an interest in the topic of the ultimate origin of language, and I’m very pleased to see that Piotr Gąsiorowski of Language Evolution (“How and why language varies and changes”) has started a series on it. He announces it here, and the first post is up today. The title is “Too Many to Communicate,” and that’s his basic point:

Whether the total number of humans was closer to 30,000 or to 300,000 is open to debate, but in any case they were far too many of them to constitute one speech community, especially if the Out-of-Africa migrants were already a separate sub-population somewhere in the Near East, the Arabian Peninsula, and possibly elsewhere in Eurasia and/or Australia (depending on the exact date of the bottleneck). It’s hard to imagine that the same language was spoken in Paleolithic Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, no matter how strongly the latter was affected by a demographic crash. No single language, then; at any rate not in anatomically modern humans. We have always been multilingual.

I’m very much looking forward to reading further posts on this fascinating subject.

I seem never to have mentioned the Voynich manuscript on LH, which is a little surprising but not very, because I’ve always assumed it to be a hoax, which puts it outside the category “language-related” for me (though I can see how others would disagree). But “Cracking the Voynich Code” by Batya Ungar-Sargon, from Tablet‘s Longform series, is so good I can’t resist passing it on (thanks for the link, Paul!). It describes the history of the manuscript and the many attempts to crack its (supposed) code, and builds so nicely to its conclusion (which I find completely satisfying) that I won’t spoil it for you by summarizing. But I had known nothing about Voynich himself, and his story is so intriguing I’ll quote that paragraph here:

Wilfrid Voynich, born Wilfridas Mykolas Vojničius, had a life filled with instances of the uncanny. A Lithuanian pharmacist, Voynich was imprisoned for his role in revolutionary attempts to free Poland from Russian rule. While serving a two-year prison sentence, Voynich looked out the window of his cell one day and caught sight of a blonde in a black dress. Two years later, after escaping from a Siberian prison and arriving penniless in London (he had to sell his waistcoat and glasses for a third-class ticket and a piece of herring, the story goes), he found that same woman in the home of his contact, another revolutionary. She was Ethel Lillian Boole, daughter of the famous mathematician George Boole, and a revolutionary in her own right. They were married, and Voynich managed to become, quite mysteriously, a recognized antiques dealer in just eight short years.

Adventure! Romance! Herring!

Addendum. See the first comment for a link to Jerry Norman’s Concise Manchu-English Lexicon, if Manchu is your thing.

An amusing Ozwords post features Australia’s national anthem (“Advance Australia Fair”), which includes the line “Our home is girt by sea.” This has attracted criticism “focused on the archaic and obscure word girt – a word that would otherwise be unknown to the majority of the population. The word has attracted much ridicule and calls to replace it, but there is also a recognition that its very peculiarity is part of a shared Australian experience. … Girt has become part of the Australian consciousness – learnt through repetition at school assemblies, reinforced at sporting and national events, and uniting Australians in what can be described as an in-joke.” There are some great quotes, like “Of all the nations on Earth, we alone raise our voices in a past participle that hasn’t been used in common speech since Chaucer was a rug rat.”

Unrelated, but it’s one of those deeply obscure questions that bug me and I have a faint hope that one of my readers might know: West Africa has a Little Scarcies River and a Great Scarcies River; does anybody have any idea what the correct pronunciation of “Scarcies” might be (and, for loads of extra credit, its origin)? I’m tentatively saying /skarsiz/ (SCAR-seez), but I have no confidence in it.

A Wordorigins.org post mentions an NPR correspondent talking about someone on a bicycle “having a looky-loo”:

The show’s host remarked that he believed it was the first time in NPR’s history that the term “looky-loo” had been broadcast. It made me smile. The term is quite common here in Oklahoma where, for example, after a tornado, there is sometimes a problem with traffic from all the “looky-loos”, or people “having a looky-loo” at the damage. I’ve always kind of thought it was a regional term, but perhaps it is more widespread.

One commenter says “I’m familiar with it (born and raised in Southern California). FWIW, I’ve always thought of the term as a bit old-fashioned (in a good way), but not necessarily regional”; Dave Wilton, who runs the site, says “IIRC, DARE, which I don’t have in front of my, says it’s predominantly a Californism.” I checked Jonathon Green’s Cassell Dictionary of Slang (sadly, I no longer have access to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which I wrote about here), and it says “lookie-loo, looky-loo n. [1980s+] (US Black/campus) an inquisitive person, a peeping Tom.” I asked my wife if she knew the term, and she said she’d heard it recently but couldn’t say where, or what it meant; I don’t think I’ve ever heard it myself, though I spent years in Southern California (of course, that was decades ago). So: are you familiar with this term? If you use it yourself, do you use it to refer to the gawker or the act of gawking (“having a looky-loo”)?

I meant to post this a while back but lost track of it; ah well, better late than never. Stan at Sentence first has a post featuring a question from John Cowan directed to native speakers of Hiberno-English: which would you use, and when, of the alternatives “the head of him,” “the head on him,” and “the head to him,” and when (if ever) do you hear them spoken by others? It’s been pretty well established in the thread there that the third (“to”) version doesn’t really exist, but the others are in common use, and the personal accounts are fascinating.

[Apologies to Stan and all who saw the original version of this post, in which the third alternative was “the head at him”; it’s been a long week, and I simply miscopied the sentence in my stupor.]

An idea I tend to harp on is the irreducible messiness and variety of the human world and the importance of dealing with it by digging into the details and using a variety of perspectives rather than by trying to cram it all into a simplistic schema. For that reason I was delighted to read the opening to Chapter Two, “Language Groups and Social Organizations,” of George E. Brooks’s Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630, which I’ve had for years but am only now starting to read:

Scholars studying western Africa are challenged by conundrums involving relationships between languages, social groupings, and cultures. People in western Africa define themselves principally according to kinship and occupational affiliations and only secondarily in linguistic terms. Indeed individuals and families change their languages and modify their social and cultural patterns in ways that are often perplexing to outsiders. Individuals may change their family names to assert their affiliation with elite families (captives once adopted slavemaster names), to express client relationships, apprenticeships, or religious affiliations, and for other reasons […]. In his study of Senegambian oral traditions concerning Mande- and West Atlantic-speaking societies, Donald R. Wright remarked, “Determination of one’s ethnicity seems to have been more a matter of cultural lifestyle than of parentage or ancestry” […].

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New Hawaii language discovered by UH researchers:

“What we didn’t know until very recently is that Hawaiʻi is home to a second, highly endangered, language that is found nowhere else in the world,” said William O’Grady, a linguistics professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. … “Our information on Hawaii Sign Language goes back to 1800s, long before the influence of American Sign Language,” said Barbara Earth, an adjunct assistant professor at the Mānoa Department of Linguistics and one of the research team leaders.
Linda Lambrecht, an American Sign Language instructor at Kapiʻolani Community College, who was also a research team leader, inspired the study. HSL was the first language Lambrecht learned and she spoke it as child before ASL became the dominant sign language in the 1940s and 1950s. … This is the first time since the 1930s, that a previously unknown language, either spoken or signed, has been documented in the United States.

That page links to a press release with more information; anybody know what language was discovered in the ’30s?

I was trying to discover the pronunciation and, if possible, origin of the place name Korhogo (why yes, I am editing an article on West Africa, why do you ask?) when my googling took me to Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande, edited by David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank (Indiana University Press, 1995), and I fell in love. I’ll copy part of the section “The Dieli of Korhogo” (pp. 155 ff.), from Robert Launay’s chapter “The Dieli of Korhogo: Identity and Identification”:

It is certainly ironic that, although the debate hinges in principle on whether the Dieli language is related to Siena-re or to Manding, none of the scholars concerned is a trained linguist, nor has any linguistic evidence been cited in this literature substantiating any of the peremptory identifications which have been proffered with an air of authority. Pierre Boutin, who is a trained linguist familiar with the region, has, on the basis of word lists which he has personally collected as well as on lists collected much earlier by Louis Tauxier, expressed some skepticism about all of these assertions.[…]

There remains one last clue to their identity, a clue every bit as elusive, perhaps, as all the others: their very name, Dieli. The name is homonymous — or one might say identical — with that of the well-known “caste” of Mande bards, the jeli. Might the Dieli of Korhogo actually be descendants of the Mande jeli? Or is the resemblance between these two category labels simply one of those unfortunate linguistic coincidences that seem to breed so much idle speculation? Admittedly, both the Korhogo Dieli and the Mande jeli are among those West African populations often labeled as “castes.” On the other hand, the Mande jeli are usually associated in the scholarly literature with the occupations of music and praise singing […] However, Barbara Frank has demonstrated conclusively that the Mande jeli are, on the contrary, very frequently involved in the activity of leatherworking, and are by no means confined to the occupation of bards.

There follows a detailed discussion of the weight that should be given to patronymics, which are frequently associated with traditional occupations (“Patronymic labels can and do change in the region. Such changes are invariably justified on the grounds that one name is ‘really’ equivalent to another. In particular, Senufo patronyms have roughly standardized Mande equivalents…”). The combination of thorough research and careful detail with an understanding of the importance of linguistics (and of course that wonderful sentence about “those unfortunate linguistic coincidences that seem to breed so much idle speculation”) wowed me. But maybe it was just the one article? I checked the reviews, and Thomas A. Hale’s in Research in African Literatures 27 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 148-150, convinced me: “For anyone who teaches or does research on African literature, the insights found in this volume call for a reexamination of the classic texts from the Mande world.” Oh, and that word nyamakalaw? It’s the plural of nyamakala; the review says:

Nyamakalaw—often translated as “possessors of occult power”—is a very complex term whose origin and meaning are extremely difficult to pin down because of the variations from one region to another and from one speaker and audience to another. Charles Bird, Martha Kendall, and Kalilou Tera explore the diverse origins that could be attributed to the term before concluding that “the meaning of the word nyamakalaw does not equal the sum of the parts” (28). They argue that “to appreciate what a word such as nyamakalaw means, we must closely attend to those who are using the term, how they are using it, and why they use it the way they do” (32).

There is a discussion of the terms used to describe Mande peoples and professions. In short, this is the kind of book I love: full of the details of words, names, and history. Another review complained that it wasn’t theoretical enough and thus didn’t advance scholarly debates about colonialization or some damn thing; in my mind that’s a plus. When I went to Amazon and found it was being sold at the bargain price of $5.98, I ordered it.

And if anyone knows about Korhogo (is the -h- pronounced? the Russian form is Корого [Korogo], so I’m guessing not), I’m all ears.