languagehat.com

Another example of the wonders of the internet: the Metathesis website, whose centerpiece is the Metathesis Database [run by Beth Hume].

What is metathesis? Metathesis is the phenomenon whereby two sounds that appear in a particular order in one form of a word occur in the reverse order in a related form of the word. […] The goal of this research project is two-fold. The first is to provide a more solid empirical basis for the study of metathesis. To achieve this, we are developing a database of reported cases of metathesis. […] (Note that not all reported cases of metathesis are actual cases of metathesis, as noted in some of the language listings.) The second aim of this project is to come to a clearer understanding of the nature of metathesis and, with this knowledge, develop a constrained and predictive theory of metathesis.

What a treasure for linguists! (Hat tip to Paul for the link.)

Update (Sept. 2023). The last snapshot preserved by the Internet Archive is Sept. 4, 2014. Sic tarnsit…

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum had a post in Lingua Franca in which he quoted a wonderful passage by Herbert Feigl:

The attempt to know, to grasp an order, to adjust ourselves to the world in which we are embedded, is just as genuine as, indeed, is identical with, the attempt to live. Confronted with a totally different universe, we would nonetheless try again and again to generalize from the known to the unknown. Only if extended and strenuous efforts led invariably to complete failure, would we abandon the hope of finding order. And even that would be an induction.

(From “The Logical Character of the Principle of Induction,” Philosophy of Science 1.1 (Jan. 1934): 20-29.) As Geoff says, “the attempt to know the regularities and constraints of sentence structure, to grasp a linguistic order, […] is just as genuine as, indeed, is identical with, the attempt to speak and understand,” and if we were confronted with “a totally different linguistic experience, where no grammatical rules were followed and speech was just a chaotic jumble of words, we would nonetheless try again and again to generalize from the known to the unknown.” We humans are not built to deal with chaos.

Real Latinists will already know about this, but for all us dilettantes hanging around the fringes, Arachne has some good news:

The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) is a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin inscriptions from all corners of the Roman Empire. Public and personal inscriptions throw light on all aspects of Roman life and history. The Corpus continues to be updated with new editions and supplements by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.[…] This digitized version of the CIL will initially comprise of the more than 50 parts (of vols. I-XVI + auctaria and of v. I (edition altera)) published before 1940. Available funding covers the digitization of the volumes with an imperfect OCR searching capability. The goal is to eventually create a keyword searchable database to contain also future volumes of the CIL as they fall outside of copyright restrictions and to eventually do the same for the Inscriptiones Graecae.

The online site is here. Explore and enjoy!
Incidentally, I’ve finished Karamzin’s «Бедная Лиза» (see this post); I don’t have much to say about it except that it’s an enjoyable Russian adaptation of a literary trope that goes back to the ancients (poor but honest peasant girl falls for slumming aristo, suffers; Karamzin set it in the vicinity of the Simonov Monastery, then on the outskirts of Moscow and disused, and the action reminisced about by the narrator takes place towards the end of the Seven Years’ War—in fact, at almost exactly the time Sterne set off for France), and the “sentimental” fripperies with which the narration is adorned make clear how badly Pushkin’s stringent prose style was needed. I’m looking forward to rereading the Tales of Belkin.

I started off this post: “The NY Times has another language story […] and if you’re an aficionado of these things you will have guessed that 1) the story is by the muddled but ever plucky Nicholas Wade…” Well, The NY Times has another language story, “Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say,” and once again it’s by the muddled but ever plucky Nicholas Wade. Fortunately, all you really need to read is the headline. Biologists have no business pronouncing on historical linguistics. And yet they keep doing it!
Caveat. The above grumbling is based on my longstanding annoyance with non-linguists thinking they can do better than linguists at linguistics (and with bad reporting, of course); it has nothing to do with this specific paper, some of whose writers do have linguistic training, and should not be taken as a reflection on the authors. I intend to read the paper, but have not yet done so.
Update. There is a good discussion of this going on at the Log; I agree with the serious doubts expressed by many of the commenters there.

I’m getting close to the end of A Sentimental Journey, and it continues to educate me about English words. In the chapter “The Supper,” his horse loses a couple of shoes in “the ascent of mount Taurira” (anybody have any idea what that might be? there’s a village called Tarare in the general vicinity, but a village isn’t a mountain and Tarare isn’t Taurira) and the narrator decides to go to a nearby farmhouse: “It was about eight in the evening when I got to the house—so I left the postilion to manage his point as he could—and for mine, I walk’d directly into the house.” I didn’t understand the use of “point” here, but the OED soon enlightened me: “7. a. A condition, state, situation, or plight. Freq. with modifying word specifying the type of situation or plight (as good, evil, etc.). Now hist.” A couple of representative quotations: 1733 Pope Ess. Man i. 277 “Know thy own Point..this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee.” 1896 Dict. National Biogr. at Robert II, “Robert, perhaps really averse to war,..retired to the highlands, ‘because he was not,’ says Froissart, ‘in good point to ride in warfare.’” (I suspect that by 1896 the phrase “in good point” had become fossilized, and nobody but antiquarians would have been able to explain the original sense.)

Addendum. When Sterne writes, a bit later, “The peasants had been all day at work in removing a fragment of this kind between St. Michael and Madane,” the places in question are clearly Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne and Modane. The latter is a particularly annoying error, so I thought I’d share the fruits of my research for fellow geography hounds.

Addendum the Last. I have finished the book, and the only complaint I have about it is the dreadful “wink wink, nudge nudge” approach to everything having to do with what Sterne inevitably refers to as “the fair sex.” I understand that it reflects the state of gender relations in his day, but my, it becomes tiresome. “There was but one point forgot in this treaty, and that was the manner in which the lady and myself should be obliged to undress and get to bed; – there was but one way of doing it, and that I leave to the reader to devise; protesting as I do it, that if it is not the most delicate in nature, ’tis the fault of his own imagination…” Fie, sir. Fie, I say.

Still reading A Sentimental Journey, I found myself completely flummoxed by this passage:

THE BIDET.
Having settled all these little matters, I got into my post-chaise with more ease than ever I got into a post-chaise in my life; and La Fleur having got one large jack-boot on the far side of a little bidet, and another on this (for I count nothing of his legs) – he canter’d away before me as happy and as perpendicular as a prince.

Like many Americans, I have had my own moments of confusion when confronted by a French bidet, but I had never had one canter away before me. A look at the OED enlightened me:

[a. French bidet pony; of unknown origin: cf. Old French bider (Godefroy) to trot. In 16th cent. the F. word meant also some small kind of dagger. (The Celtic comparisons made by Diez and Littré are rejected by Thurneysen.)]
1. A small horse.
1630 B. Jonson Chlorid. Wks. (1838) 656, I will returne to myself, mount my bidet, in a dance; and curvet upon my curtal. 1828 I. D’Israeli Chas. I, I. ii. Then there are thanks for two bidets which Henry sends him. 1863 Sala Capt. Dangerous II. vi. 202, I trotted behind on a little Bidet.
2. ‘A vessel on a low, narrow stand, which can be bestridden’ (Syd. Soc. Lex.) for bathing purposes.

I quote my old dead-tree Compact Edition because my computer was off when this occurred. The online edition, while substantially the same, has added a few quotes for the newer sense; the first is from Tobias Smollett’s 1766 Travels through France and Italy I. v. 64: “Will custom exempt from the imputation of gross indecency a French lady, who shifts her frousy smock in presence of a male visitant, and talks to him of her lavement, her medecine, and her bidet!” It was Smollett whom Sterne satirized as the “learned Smelfungus,” who “set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted. – He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.”

I’ve been reading A Sentimental Journey (see this post) with pleasure and profit; not only is Sterne’s style a constant joy, but I’m seeing where later authors got their material (Radishchev’s anecdote about giving his platok [kerchief] to the beggar who wouldn’t accept his banknote is clearly derived from Sterne’s tale of giving his snuffbox to the mendicant monk he’d refused alms to), and I’m learning some new words and phrases. He starts off the book by deciding to go to France after being challenged by an interlocutor (“They order, said I, this matter better in France. – You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me, with the most civil triumph in the world”) and immediately makes reference to the droit d’aubaine, which turns out to be something for which prerevolutionary France was notorious: any foreigner who died within the country had his goods seized by the French crown, and his heirs got nothing.

After he goes to Calais and stiffs the monk, he goes out into the coach-yard of the inn where he’s staying and sees “an old désobligeant in the furthest corner of the court”; the OED soon informed me that this pleasing word refers to “A chaise so called in France from its holding but one person.” (The OED marks the stress on the second syllable, implying an anglicized pronunciation /dezˈɒblɪdʒənt/, but Sterne’s spelling, with italics and an accent aigu, implies at least an attempt at a French version; a pity we don’t have a recording by the author.) He later tells his landlord he wants to buy a coach to continue his journey, and “we walk’d together towards his Remise, to take a view of his magazine of chaises.” (Note the use of magazine in its original sense, ‘a place where goods are kept in store; a warehouse or depot’; it’s from Arabic maḵzan or maḵzin ‘storehouse,’ which is also the source of Spanish almacén.) A remise (also given with anglicized pronunciation, /rᵻˈmʌɪz/ ri-MIZE) turns out to be “A building providing shelter for a carriage; a coach house (Chiefly in French contexts),” and the specific sense is somehow from French remise ‘action of replacing, (in law) pardon, reduction of a penalty, adjournment, lessening of the severity of a disease or symptom, renunciation of a debt, action of restoring, re-establishing, action of handing over to someone.’

Not of linguistic relevance, but it strikes me forcibly that Sterne’s 1765 journey took place only two years after the end of the long and brutal Seven Years’ War, in which France and England were enemies, and yet so far there’s been only one passing mention of it; I don’t know whether Sterne is simply choosing not to write about it (don’t mention the war!) or whether it really wouldn’t have come up much, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have been comparable to visiting France in, say, 1947.

Last night my wife asked me (in the course of our O’Brian reading) where the word admiral comes from, and I gave her an off-the-cuff answer that was correct in essence (Arabic amir) but wrong on the details, as I discovered when I looked it up in the OED today. What astonished me was the length of the etymology: 1,341 words, with separate mini-etymologies for five different historical forms of the word and excursuses on “A further development in Latin,” “Further comments regarding Arabic models” (“It has been suggested that the presence of the final –al was caused or reinforced by Arabic al, the definite article which is also used in genitive constructions, but this is not borne out by the textual evidence in either Arabic or the Western languages”), “History of the title,” “Development of phrases,” “Development of secondary senses,” and “Development of forms”! I briefly wondered whether this was the longest etymology in the OED, but then I realized that was foolishness, and upon checking the Guide to the Third Edition of the OED discovered that (unsurprisingly) “The longest etymology section in the dictionary is the revised one at the verb to be.” So of course I went to that entry and discovered the etymology is a mind-boggling 9,672 words long, so long that it has its own table of contents, running from “1. General overview” to “3.7. Omission of auxiliary have in periphrastic tenses.” And there are 1,765 words (considerably more than the entire admiral etymology) before the table of contents! Here are the first few sentences:

The paradigm of the verb ‘to be’ in West Germanic languages in general shows forms derived from three unrelated Indo-European bases, in English itself perhaps forms derived from four Indo-European bases. These occur in sometimes overlapping, but generally distinct functions within the paradigm (see below), although there have been significant changes in these functions over time and in different varieties of English. The following notation is used in this entry to distinguish the different forms: (i) am/is-group: α (am), β (is), γ (Old English sind), δ (Old English sīe), ε (art), ζ (are); (ii) be-group: η (be); (iii) was-group: θ (was), ι (were). The present tense and non-finite forms are chiefly derived from two distinct bases.[…]

God bless and keep the OED!

[Read more…]

I’ve finished Radishchev’s Journey (see this post), and the final chapter, on Lomonosov, was actually reasonably interesting. In the course of discussing Lomonosov’s thirst for learning, acquired in part through mastery of foreign languages, Radishchev writes (I quote the Leo Weiner translation, published by Harvard University Press, 1958):

Thus the student, upon approaching an unknown language, is confused by strange sounds. His throat is exhausted by the unfamiliar rustling of air escaping from it, and his tongue, compelled to wag in a new way, grows lame. The mind grows stiff, reason is weakened by inactivity, imagination loses its wings; memory alone is wide awake and ever keener, filling all its convolutions and openings with hitherto unknown sounds. In learning languages, at first everything is repulsive and burdensome. If one were not encouraged by the hope that, after having accustomed his ear to the unusual sounds and having mastered the strange pronunciation, most delightful ways would be opened up to him, it is doubtful that one would want to enter upon so arduous a path. But when these obstacles are surmounted, how generous is the reward for perseverance in overcoming hardships! New aspects of nature, and a new chain of ideas then present themselves. By acquiring a foreign language we become citizens of the region where it is spoken, we converse with those who lived many thousand years ago, we adopt their ideas; and we unite and co-ordinate the inventions and the thought of all peoples and all times.

And, approaching the end of Slezkine’s wonderful Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (see this post), I’ve run into the following striking quote from the Nanai author Petr Kile (born 1936; I assume “Kile” has the stress on the second syllable—anybody know?):

There is no point in writing in my native language because out of eight thousand Nanai living in this world, if anybody reads poetry, they read it in Russian. There is no need to translate Pushkin into Nanai. I love Pushkin in the element of Russian speech and I cannot reject it. In any case, writing poetry in any other language strikes me as strange. And who knows to what extent Russian has become my native language?

This is from Идти вечно [To always go/walk] (1972), which Slezkine calls Kile’s “remarkably fresh memoir.”

This Wordorigins thread about names for dictators wound up discussing the impressive moniker Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga, the last part of which is variously translated as “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake” and “the rooster that watches over all the hens.” Apparently some Wikipedia editor said on the talk page, “That’s the Tshiluba translation of his name. The Ngbandi translation is the one stated in the article. Both are correct.” Which is idiotic on the face of it. I had always wondered what language it was and what an accurate translation would be, and now my curiosity has reached a crisis point and I am impelled to ask the Varied Reader: do any of you know enough about Congolese languages to be able to speak with authority on this matter?

Unrelated, but we’re all jamessal fans here, so I know you’ll want to see his inaugural post as a GQ television critic. In the course of it, he calls Justified “the best show currently on television,” and he makes me want to see it.