languagehat.com

My wife and I happened to catch Sullivan’s Travels on television (a wonderful movie which I’ve seen several times before—like Preston Sturges’s other movies of the early 1940s, it never gets old) and I noticed in the credits that Harry Rosenthal was billed as “The Trombenick.” Naturally, I wanted to know what that odd-sounding word meant, and thanks to Google I quickly learned that it’s a Yiddish word (usually transliterated trombenik), according to this site meaning either “lazy person, ne’er-do-well” or “boastful loudmouth, bullshitter” and according to this one “faker; bum; ne’er-do-well.” What I’m still wondering is why Rosenthal’s character is so designated; does anybody know? And of course any further information about the Yiddish word will be appreciated.

A very nice visualization of the language communities of London, as revealed by Twitter:

English tweets (grey) dominate (unsurprisingly) and they provide crisp outlines to roads and train lines as people tweet on the move. Towards the north, more Turkish tweets (blue) appear, Arabic tweets (green) are most common around Edgware Road and there are pockets of Russian tweets (pink) in parts of central London. The geography of the French tweets (red) is perhaps most surprising as they appear to exist in high density pockets around the centre and don’t stand out in South Kensington (an area with the Institut Francais, a French High School and the French Embassy). It may be that as a proportion of tweeters in this area they are small so they don’t stand out, or it could be that there are prolific tweeters (or bots) in the highly concentrated areas.

And don’t miss Eric Fischer’s map (at the end of the post) similarly visualising the language communities of the entire world.

Peter Mountford discovered that his novel was being translated into Russian by an ill-informed and completely unauthorized party; his Atlantic account of what he found and what he did about it is interesting and very funny:

Though I was impressed by AlexanderIII’s dedication, his numerous message-board queries did not inspire much confidence in his translation abilities. At one point, he indicated that he was struggling with “white-liberal guilt.” (Me too!, I wanted to chime in.) He postulated that white liberal guilt meant: “the guilt for consuming white substance (cocaine).”

The story was also on NPR; along with an audio file, that link has a transcript, with the usual inaccuracies (“soothed” for Mountford’s “zooted”; “towing the party line”) but with some additional examples.

I’ve seen a lot of attempts to explain why it’s a bad idea to expect purity, consistency, and logic of English, but I don’t think I’ve seen a fresher or funnier one than Kory Stamper’s:

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

Everything we’ve done to and for English is for its own good, we tell it (angrily, as it slouches in its chair and writes “irregardless” all over itself in ballpoint pen). This is to help you grow into a language people will respect! Are you listening to me? Why aren’t you listening to me??

Like well-adjusted children eventually do, English lives its own life. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like one of the Classical languages (I bet Latin doesn’t sneak German in through its bedroom window, does it?). We can threaten, cajole, wheedle, beg, yell, throw tantrums, and start learning French instead. But no matter what we do, we will never really be the boss of it. And that, frankly, is what makes it so beautiful.

This is in the context of explaining to a correspondent why objecting to “irregardless” is futile; read the whole post for maximum enjoyment. (I assume many of you will agree with marc leavitt, who commented on her post to say “Of all the ill-advised concatenations conflated into words, ‘irregardless’ drives me mad, makes me maunder mindlessly at the moon, creates a crescendo of contumely, climaxing in a desire to depart from civil discourse. In a word, I despise the word, though word it is”; like Kory, I will defend to the death your right to despise that or any other word, but I hope you can bring yourself to recognize that your feelings have to do with you and not any inherent evil in the word, which is just out there frolicking and being a word. It can’t help it.)

Two more terms from Gene Wolfe’s Peace (see this post), each from one of the many stories-within-the-story (I’m a sucker for books with stories-within-the-story):

1) From a tale involving a circus, a woman with hands but no arms explains to the narrator that it’s a much easier life being a “special person” in a circus: “When you’re a special person, everybody respects you; when you’re not—I’ve seen it—you’ve got to work all the time, hustle and brag all the time, to make people see you’re not just a Monday Man, to show you’re pulling your weight with the outfit.” What’s a Monday Man? A circus glossary explains:

Monday Man ~ You would see him when you needed a change of clothes. He would provide you with clothing that was stolen off the local townsfolk’s clotheslines on wash day, which was usually Monday.

2) An imitation of a tale from the Arabian Nights begins: “Prince of fishermen, it hath come to my ears that there was once a marid, Naranj hight, who had a man to serve him. This man’s name was ben Yahya, and the marid kept him to his toil by day and by night, with never a moment without its task.” What’s a marid? At first I confused it with murid, but the OED enlightened me: “In Arabian stories and Muslim mythology: a very powerful wicked genie.” It’s from Arabic mārid, active participle of marada to rebel: “The word occurs once in the Qur’an with the sense ‘rebel’, but in later tradition denotes a fantastic being of a particular type, being represented in the popular tales as more powerful than the ʿifrīt.” The citations range from 1839 (E. W. Lane tr. Thousand & One Nights I. 72 “When the Márid heard these words of the fisherman, he said, There is no deity but God!”) to 1986 (I. Hassan Out of Egypt ii. 42 “Ginns, afrits, and marids still haunt these sites at night, calling for blood”).

I have long known, and enjoyed, the classic American slang term horsefeathers (meaning ‘nonsense,’ a euphemism for horseshit), but Gene Wolfe (see this post) has taught me another meaning, unrecorded in any of my dictionaries (including Webster’s Third New International and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang). He writes about farmhouses “with walls of logs, covered now by clapboards or horsefeathers,” and Google Books turned up plenty of hits that elucidated the sense: “Beveled wood strips called ‘horsefeathers’ are used to level up the surface” (Ernest H. Cirou, Practical Carpentry, Goodheart-Willcox, 1953, p. 148); “Feathering strips, called horsefeathers, can be used to level cedar-shingle roof” (Popular Mechanics, April 1978, p. 160); “Beveled wood strips, commonly called ‘horsefeathers,’ are obtainable — and these can be applied to even up the wall surfaces” (American Lumberman & Building Products Merchandiser, 1957, p. 302). I pass on the fruits of my research as a public service; I hope the OED will get around to covering it so we can find out how far back it goes. (They do have the sense ‘nonsense, rubbish, balderdash,’ first citation from 1928: Amer. Speech 4 98 “Mr. William De Beck, the comic-strip comedian..assumes credit for the first actual use of the word horsefeathers.”)

A couple of people have sent me this BBC News story by Sean Coughlan about a research project led by Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster; they have a device that “is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken” of ancient clay tablets”:

It’s being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.

And the Oxford team think that they could be on the brink of understanding this last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world.

That last sentence is typical journalistic heavy-breathing bullshit insofar as it implies the researchers, or anyone else, are going to “understand” proto-Elamite (which, by the way, probably has nothing to do with either Linear Elamite or the Elamite language). To quote Andrew Robinson’s wonderful Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts:

Decipherment of proto-Elamite has been hampered by various factors. As already remarked, there is effectively no help available from the underlying language since we know nothing about it (unlike that of proto-cuneiform); neither are there any bilinguals. Then there is the content of the tablets—self-evidently lists and calculations as in proto-cuneiform—which warns us that the correlation between the script and the spoken language may not be an exact one (how much could we learn of a modern spoken language working only from a series of supermarket till receipts?). Furthermore, there are no lexical lists, only lists of people and objects, so far as we can tell. […] The various attempts at compiling a proto-Elamite sign list have therefore relied mainly on internal analysis of the characters.

The most that’s going to happen is that they’ll find some plausible meanings for a few more characters. But that doesn’t make for an exciting headline.

However, I did find this section of the BBC story quite interesting:

But why has this writing proved so difficult to interpret?

Dr Dahl suspects he might have part of the answer. He’s discovered that the original texts seem to contain many mistakes – and this makes it extremely tricky for anyone trying to find consistent patterns.

He believes this was not just a case of the scribes having a bad day at the office. There seems to have been an unusual absence of scholarship, with no evidence of any lists of symbols or learning exercises for scribes to preserve the accuracy of the writing.

This first case of educational underinvestment proved fatal for the writing system, which was corrupted and then completely disappeared after only a couple of hundred years. “It’s an early example of a technology being lost,” he says.

“The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless.”

Intriguing to think about, whether it’s actually true in this case or not. (Thanks, Eric and Stan!)

I’ve started Gene Wolfe’s Peace (recommended by Christopher Culver in this thread), and on the very first page he used a phrase unfamiliar to me: “I took the cruiser ax and went out…” (It’s not at all unusual to have to look things up when reading Wolfe; he has an extensive vocabulary and is not reluctant to deploy it.) There is definitely such a thing (here’s one for sale: “2 1/2 lb. Double bit axe head 28″ Hickory handle. Overall length approximately 28″. Weight 3.63 lbs.”), but it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, and I wanted to know where the name came from. Google Books told me it was sometimes called a cruiser’s ax (“And don’t forget to bring a light ax—a cruiser’s ax. Where you’re going, you could freeze to death without an ax and matches”—John Dalmas, The Reality Matrix, 1986), but that didn’t help much, since no definition of “cruiser” seemed appropriate… until I heaved my ancient and well-used Webster’s Third New International up from its honored place on my dictionary shelf and found definition 4a, “one who estimates the volume and value of marketable timber on a tract of land and maps it out for logging.” I’d still be interested to know exactly why and how that particular job description got matched with that particular ax, but the general idea is clear, and I am satisfied.

Mark Liberman had a post at the Log quoting a correspondent as follows:

I read your article on the alphabet olympics yesterday and followed one of the links, and then one of its links, and so on. I was merrily traipsing thru the internet when I came upon a page that threw me: “The Rules and Misrules of English Spelling“.

The note on “th” (note (f)) gives a list of words with the “this” sound (what I’d call “voiced th” — ð rather than θ) that includes the word “with”. I was surprised — I have always used unvoiced as the pronunciation of that word, and had never noticed anyone doing otherwise. Sure, voicing gets *added* sometimes due to context, but surely unvoiced is the target — right? Apparently wrong. My Pocket Oxford gives only the voiced pronunciation, and my Houghton Mifflin Canadian gives the voiced version first, as does my New Lexicon Websters. The two pronunciation sites I found online also gave voiced pronunciations.

I asked my wife to pronounce the word slowly and carefully, and she likewise gave an unvoiced pronunciation, and was surprised that anyone aimed for the other (tho’ she did point out that Bono has a buzzy version when he sings “with or without you”). (I grew up in Nova Scotia, and my wife grew up in southern Ontario.) OK, so I’ve got a non-standard (or less standard) pronunciation — it’s not the only one I have. I’m interested in what the distribution of this variant is, but I’m having a hard time finding it online.

I thought “Yes, I’ve heard people use a voiceless final in that word”; I checked with my own wife, and what do you know, she had a voiceless final herself. Well, today Mark posted a followup citing John Wells’s phonetic blog to the effect that 84% of Americans use a voiceless final (/wɪθ/), only 16% sharing my voiced /wɪð/. (In the UK, the proportions are reversed: /wɪð/ 85%, /wɪθ/ 15%—though /wɪθ/ is heavily favored in Scotland.) Eighty-four percent! Rarely have I been so astonished to find myself in a small minority (though I’m used to that situation in general).

Incidentally, John Wells is annoyed that people aren’t using his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, but the damn thing costs $42.57. As Mark says, wouldn’t it be nice if Pearson made it available online? But they may feel that not enough people would pay a fee to use it to make it worth the trouble.

1) Google input tools: “These tools enable you to type in the language and keyboard layout you’re accustomed to, making it easy to keep in touch with family, friends and coworkers from any computer. You can even switch between languages with one click.” You just click on the Settings gearwheel at the upper right of the Gmail screen, check the box next to “Enable input tools” under Language, and add however many languages you want. Then when you open a message box you’ll see the Input Tools icon next to the Settings button in your toolbar, and you can turn it on and off from there. When I enable Russian, I just start typing in transliteration and it gives me a dropdown menu of the Russian words I might want. Very nice indeed. (Thanks, Sven!)
2) Hypocrite Reader “is a monthly magazine published exclusively on the internet. A new issue goes up on the fifteenth of each month. Each issue is built around a theme. The Hypocrite Reader neither makes nor disburses money.” Looks well worth checking out. (Thanks, Caroline!)