languagehat.com

Steve Lohr, who reports on technology, business and economics for the New York Times, has a nice column in their Bits technology blog called “The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story.” The conclusion is straightforward enough—”The term Big Data, which spans computer science and statistics/econometrics, probably originated in the lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s, in which John Mashey figured prominently”—but getting there is most of the fun, and I recommend reading the whole thing (which prominently features my man Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, the only quote book worth getting). Thanks, Paul!

I have recently (prompted by Anatoly) begun reading shkrobius’s Livejournal, which is about everything under the sun and constantly thought-provoking (and often deliberately provocative). In a recent post called “Why aren’t we Teletubbies? Part 2” (the title is explained in Part 1: “Teletubbies were the exact opposite of humans. Our visual cues are as primitive as their infantile babbling… Why are not we Teletubbies? Wouldn’t flashing images be a superior way of communication?”) he quotes, at considerable length, the even more provocative Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight (who, I am interested to see, got an MPhil in Russian literature the same year I got mine in historical linguistics) on the ever-contentious issue of how language developed; I have no idea how seriously to take any of it, but it makes me think, and that’s more valuable than making me nod my head in sleepy agreement. I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs of Knight (in itals) followed by a couple by shkrobius, and you can decide if it’s interesting enough to follow the link in search of more:

…Suppose that whenever I opened my mouth to begin speaking, I found myself instantly challenged, my audience demanding on-the-spot corroboration of the very first sounds, refusing to listen further until satisfied. Denied the chance to express one transparent fiction, modify it by another, modify that in turn and so on, I could hardly display any skills I might have for handling such sequences. Faced with refusal to suspend disbelief even momentarily, I could hardly venture to refer to phenomena beyond the current context of here-and-now perceptible reality. How could I express a fantasy, elaborate a narrative or specify with precision a complex thought, if listeners demanded literal corroboration of each signal as I emitted it, refusing to wait until the end before deciding on a response? Finally, it is difficult to see how my utterance could display duality of patterning if listeners demanded literal veracity on the syllable-by-syllable level, obscuring and resisting the possibilities of meaning or patterning on any higher level.
…My freedom to speak presupposes that you, the listener, are trusting enough to offer me, at least initially, the benefit of any doubt, demanding and expecting more information before checking out what I have signalled so far. I need you to be willing to internalize literal fictions, evaluating meanings not instantaneously, item by item, but only as I construct larger patterns on a higher, ‘combinatorial’ level. By primate standards, such collusion with my deceits would appear disastrously maladaptive.
People erroneously believe that their insistence on literal truth distinguishes them in intelligence. The exact opposite is true, in things small as much as in things large. No intelligence would have existed among those not willing to believe imaginations of the others, and the willingness to contemplate fabrications is the true hallmark of human reason. You can instantly recognize a fool in someone endlessly demanding definitions, proofs and corroborations of every word and/or idea uttered by any one but himself. There is no fundamental difference between such a person and a chimp, and this person restages the same pattern of behavior that kept us in the company of apes long after we had everything needed to depart. If you want truth and only truth, go and live in the zoo with other strivers for intellectual honesty. A human can see truth shining in even the most unlikely fabrication and recognize a lie in the middle of what appears to be rock solid truth. This is what makes us human.
Our language is not designed for speaking truth, it has no built-in features for trustworthiness and reliability, and it does not even aim at them. It aims at imagining and reimagining worlds.

Not particularly related to language, but definitely related to some of the issues raised by Knight: Oliver Sacks on memory (and how we have no way to tell true from false). Riveting reading, as Sacks so often is.

From Thomas M. Barrett’s “Lines of Uncertainty: The Frontiers of the North Caucasus” (Slavic Review 54[1995]:578-601), p. 593:

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian government expended even more effort luring Armenians to the north Caucasus. The first major land grant was awarded in 1710 to an Armenian from Karabakh, Safar Vasil’ev, for the cultivation of mulberry gardens (for silkworms) in the Kizliar region. In the eighteenth century, large numbers of Armenians from Turkey and Persia resettled in the Terek River basin; others fled there from mountain, Crimean or Nogai captivity. During this period, Kizliar and Mozdok were largely Armenian: in 1796, there were 2,800 Armenians and only 1,000 Russians at Kizliar; in 1789, 55.6 percent of the population of Mozdok was Armenian and Georgian. Nearly 3,500 more Armenians resettled in 1797 along the Caucasus military line from khanates in Dagestan and along the Caspian Sea. Armenians engaged in silk production and viticulture and were the backbone of regional trade in the north Caucasus. Another large group of Armenians moved in 1839 from across the Kuban to settle along the western part of the Cossack line at Armavir, where the residents (even in 1859) spoke a Circassian dialect and resembled the mountain people. Armenian in self-identity, Christian in faith, members of the Russian Empire, surrounded by Cossacks, and Circassian in speech, dress, cuisine and custom-the Armavir Armenians demonstrate how complex this ethnic frontier could be.

Barrett also mentions “Iakov Alpatov of the Cossack village of Naur who twice fled for the mountains, converted to Islam and formed a thieving band of Chechens and Cossacks in the 1850s that robbed farmsteads, stole cattle and took captives, not only from Cossacks but also from Kalmyks and Nogais well into the steppe.” Frontiers are confusing, exciting places!

Rhode Island Public Radio has a six-minute interview with “Brown University and Trinity Rep.’s master of dialects Thom Jones” about how people speak in various parts of Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, ending with the infamous Cranston accent (in which “Cranston” sounds like “Cvanston”). Unfortunately, Jones talks about language in an entirely impressionistic way, using incomprehensible terms like “round” as if they meant something clear and obvious, but it’s still fun to hear him imitate the various dialects. Thanks, Sven!
Unrelated, but does anyone know what happened to Gilliland? I mean, what happened is clear enough—if you go there, there’s a notice “This journal has been deleted. All posts in this journal will be permanently deleted from the server 30 days after the account owner deleted it”—but I’m curious why such a dependably good read was suddenly axed.

A very nice language map at the Guardian:

The 2011 census reveals the main language spoken in 34,753 ‘output areas’ across England and Wales, each of 1,500 people. While only 0.3% of the population cannot speak English, 4m people do not speak it as their main language. This shows the country’s patchwork quilt of languages.

It seems Polish is now the third language of the UK (after English and Welsh). Thanks, Conrad!

As I said here, fish names are a tangle, and Andy Martin, writer, academic, and (according to Wikipedia) “the first surfing correspondent to The Times (London),” quickly had his fill of them when trying to produce a new translation of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, as he reports in an Opinionator post:

Somewhere around page 3 of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” I got this feeling that I was starting to drown in fish. There are an awful lot of fish down there, and there were possibly even more in the middle of the 19th century. Whereas my ichthyological vocabulary, whether in French or English or indeed any other language, was severely limited. The fish (and assorted oceanic mammals), in other words, far outnumbered my linguistic resources. I now know I should just have boned up on fish, the way any decent, respectable translator would have done. […]

Instead I started counting how many pages there were and calculating how much I was getting paid per fish. It didn’t add up. I realize now that I should have switched to “Around the World in Eighty Days” – there are far fewer fish in that one.

He goes on to describe how his Dutch translator simply omitted a metaphor he was mildly proud of, and how a French translator mangled “the classic Groucho Marx joke, which goes (in one of its variants), ‘You’re only as old as the woman you feel.'” Funny stuff; thanks, David and Bonnie!

I’m now reading Mikhail Zagoskin‘s very enjoyable 1829 novel Yury Miloslavsky, an imitation of Walter Scott that was immediately and widely popular, and I’ve gotten to the point where the Cossack hero Kirsha (a diminutive of Kirill) is telling a gaping crowd of provincials about his adventures among the basurmany (Muslims). They ask him if it was far away, and he says “Далеконько… за Хвалынским морем” [Pretty far… beyond the Khvalyn Sea]. Since he goes on to clarify that it was “beyond Astrakhan,” I figured it must be the Caspian, but where was the name from? Vasmer explained: Хвалисское [Khvalisskoe] and its variants Хвалимское [Khvalimkoe], Хвалижское [Khvalizhskoe], and Хвалынское [Khvalynskoe] are from Middle Persian Xvārēzm ‘Khwarezm.’ This gave me one of those joyous bursts of etymological surprise that I can’t resist passing on.

Kirsha goes on to say that although in those far-off lands there is gold and silver aplenty, God has stinted them when it comes to winter [Зимой только бог их обидел]: it doesn’t snow, and the water doesn’t freeze. The bailiff (prikazchik) says “No winter at all! Truly a punishment from God—but they deserve it, the basurmany!” [Вовсе нет зимы! Подлинно божье наказанье! Да поделом им, басурманам!]. Russians do love their winter.

Addendum. A little farther on, Zagoskin describes the terem (women’s quarters) in the house of an unpleasant noble; one of the items he mentions is дорогие монисты из крупных бурмитских зерен ‘expensive necklaces made of large burmitskikh pearls.’ The word бурмицкий [burmitskii] wasn’t in any of my Russian-English dictionaries, but it was in Vasmer, who explains that an earlier form is гурмицкий [gurmitskii] and that it’s from the name of Hormuz—in other words, another Russian word with an unexpected Iranian-place-name etymology!

I was listening to William H. Macy being interviewed about his TV show Shameless, and he said the writers kept finding ways to throw his character off kilter, the actor’s job being to put the character back… and here he paused (giving me a moment of breathless anticipation: how would he finish this?) and said “back on kilter.” I was amused by the tangle he’d gotten himself into, and of course I wondered what a kilter was originally and how the saying developed. Well, it turns out nobody knows; M-W, AHD, and the Concise Oxford all say the etymology is unknown. The OED (in an article unrevised from 1901) doesn’t add any etymological information, or even guesses, but it surprised me by being under the headword kelter | kilter, saying “Widely diffused in English dialect from Northumbria and Cumberland to Cornwall, and occasional in literature. More frequent in U.S. (in form kilter).” However, the Concise Oxford has it under kilter and doesn’t mention a form kelter, so I guess the latter has either disappeared or retreated into deep dialectal cover.
Also, it goes back a lot further than I expected (the first citation has the modern/U.S. spelling, the next few are with -e-):
1628 W. Bradford Hist. Plymouth Plantation in Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc. (1856) 4th Ser. III. 235 Ye very sight of one [sc. a gun] (though out of kilter) was a terrour unto them.
1643 R. Williams Key into Lang. Amer. 177 Their Gunnes they..often sell many a score to the English, when they are a little out of frame or Kelter.
1674 J. Ray S. & E. Countrey Words in Coll. Eng. Words 69 Kelter or Kilter, Frame, order.
a1677 I. Barrow Serm. Several Occasions (1678) 201 If the organs of Prayer are out of kelter, or out of tune, how can we pray?

A very interesting post at Memiyawanzi sketches an ingenious etymology for Greek ἔρως ‘love, desire’ proposed by Michael Weiss in his article “Erotica: On the Prehistory of Greek Desire” (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 [1998]: 31-61; Weiss also etymologizes πόθος and ἵμερος). This basic word has never had a satisfactory etymology; Frisk says “ohne Etymologie” and Chantraine “inconnue,” and “[r]egrettably Weiss’s proposal is also overlooked in the newest (2010) Etymological Dictionary of Greek by Robert Beekes (s.v. ἔραμαι) as well.” Weiss proposes a hypothetical Indo-European root *h₁erh₂– meaning ‘divide,’ represented also by “Hittite arḫāš ‘border’ (Cuneiform Luwian irḫa-, Hieroglyphic Luwian irha-), Latin ōra ’border, brim, edge, margin’, Old Irish or ‘border’ all as nominal reflexes, and Lithuanian ìrti as a primary verb.” Go to Memiyawanzi for more on the semantics (and a long quote from Anne Carson), and of course to Weiss’s article for the details (you know you can get free access to JSTOR now, right?); in my rusty-ex-Indo-Europeanist opinion, the etymology makes sense and is a pleasing step forward in a field that sometimes seems dusty and almost stationary.

Addendum. I completely forgot that I had meant to link to the previous post as well: Cypro-Minoan Birthday Cake!

A Financial Times piece by Michael Skapinker, “Thank America for saving our language” (if that link takes you to a registration page, paste the title into Google and get to it that way), takes a refreshingly unusual tack on the clichéd subject of UK-US linguistic differences: they don’t amount to much. He says “this year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most illuminating [discussions of the relationship] – between Albert Marckwardt of Princeton University and Randolph Quirk of University College London”:

They do not dwell on the differences. Their principal point is how similar the two versions are. The grammars are almost identical. One of the few differences is the American “gotten”, but even that turns out to be only half a difference. Americans use it only when they mean “acquired” – “we’ve gotten a new car” – and use the same form as the British when they mean “possess” or “obliged to” – “I’ve got a pen” or “I’ve got to write a letter”. Occasional differences of vocabulary apart, UK and US English are mutually entirely comprehensible – and the two professors remarked on how extraordinary that was.
The first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, was in 1607, when Shakespeare was still alive. Think how much English has changed. Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice that the quality of mercy “droppeth as the gentle rain”. Both British and Americans altered -eth to -s (“drops”) and spent four centuries making their grammatical and linguistic changes together.
It didn’t have to be that way. The 17th century Dutch settlers in South Africa ended up speaking Afrikaans, a substantially different language.
Noah Webster predicted a similar fate for American English, which would one day be “as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German”.

That didn’t happen, of course, and he concludes: “the US still speaks our language – and we non-American English-speakers should be grateful.” (Thanks, Paul!)