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At the end of last year I posted about Patrick the etymologist’s blog odamaki; he went silent for a while, but now he’s back and celebrating Nowruz (the Iranian New Year) with a new post about the etymology of risk:

One of the more interesting etymologies which I researched for the fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary was for the word risk. The fourth edition of the dictionary had simply said from [French risque, from Italian risco, rischio.] I found the lack of a further etymology for the Italian very irritating. The OED3 had not yet put its new etymological discussion for risk online at the time, so I went to the Zanichelli etymological dictionary of Italian and found that the word wasn’t a dead end—many interesting proposal had been made about the origin of the Italian word.

He traces it back to Syriac ruziqā, of Middle Iranian origin: “the first element, rōz-, is the Middle Persian word for ‘day.’ The reflex of the same word in the modern Persian of western Iran is ruz روز ‘day’— as in nowruz!” It’s a wonderful account of an amazing peregrination, and I urge you to read the details. He concludes:

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Back in 2003 I had a brief post linking to a site I said had Collins bilingual dictionaries; it doesn’t seem to any more, but the good folks at Collins sent me a link to their new site, which not only has their French, German, and Spanish dictionaries, it has translations into a bunch of other languages. Go to the page for crack, for instance; below the definitions of the verb and noun, the etymology (“Old English cracian; related to Old High German krahhōn, Dutch kraken, Sanskrit gárjati he roars”), and the synonyms, there are equivalents in Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Croatian, etc.—and best of all, each one is accompanied by an audio file! This is something I’ve always hoped for, and it’s great to have it for so many languages. I couldn’t help but notice that the audio for the Vietnamese translation, vết nứt, was for an entirely different word (it sounds like “hey ho”), but the site is still in beta, and I expect the kinks will be worked out. Give it a try!

Like many English-speakers, I hesitate when faced with the necessity of discussing a single one of those dotted things that usually come in pairs; I say “die,” but I feel funny about it. Jonathon at Arrant Pedantry has a nice post on the topic, explaining how the plural -s went from voiceless to voiced but “remained voiceless in dice. Why?”

Well, apparently because people had stopped thinking of it as a plural and started thinking of it as a mass noun, much like corn and rice, so they stopped seeing the s sound on the end as the plural marker and started perceiving it as simply part of the word. Singular dice can be found back to the late 1300s, and when the sound change came along in the 1500s and voiced most plural –s endings, dice was left behind, with its spelling altered to show that it was unequivocally voiceless.

He discusses truce, bodice, pence, and other words, and in the comment thread John Cowan quotes a great Ambrose Bierce definition. Check it out. (Via Stan Carey’s Link love: language (41), which links to lots of other great stuff as well.)

I was aware of Chukchi jokes, and I was aware that (to quote that Wikipedia article) “A propensity for constantly saying ‘odnako‘ — equivalent to ‘however’ depending on context — is a staple of Chukcha jokes,” but I was surprised to read this at the end of Asya Pereltsvaig’s post on Chukchis and their history:

Curiously, these Russian jokes fairly accurately reflect certain linguistic peculiarities of the Chukchi language, such as its reliance on evidential particles (cf. Aikhenvald & Dixon, Studies in evidentiality, p. 300). Such particles indicate whether something is known via direct visual evidence, via hearsay, or via indirect inference. This peculiarity of the Chukchi language translates into the jokelore Chukchi’s overuse of the Russian word odnako, meaning literally ‘however’, but used in contexts where this Russian word makes no sense as such.

It is not evident to me how a word meaning ‘however’ could represent evidential particles; does anyone know more about this? (The Aikhenvald & Dixon reference just says “Evidentiality is in general expressed by particles in Chukchi”; it sheds no light on the jokes.)

Dennis King wrote me about the Three Monks Project, which is right up my alley, involving as it does Old Irish, humor, and translations into many languages. This page tells the history of the joke, which was printed in English translation in 1892, long before the original Irish turned up, and provides a line-by-line analysis; this one lists all the languages it’s been translated into, and if you click on the link in the fifth (“Ainm an Scéil”) column you’ll be able to read (and, if there’s the appropriate loudspeaker symbol, hear) the translation. Another Good Thing on the Internet! And if you are able to translate the short anecdote into a language they haven’t already got, they’d be pleased as punch about it.

I just read Elizabeth Lowry’s LRB review of One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina, which sounds absolutely wonderful (Alexandra Fuller raved about it in the NY Times last year), and I wanted to quote this section for obvious reasons:

Although Wainaina’s Kenyan father was a Gikuyu, his mother’s family originated in Rwanda and later emigrated to Uganda. The name Binyavanga was given to Wainaina in honour of his maternal grandfather. In Kenya its obvious foreignness sets him apart as being exotic; he confesses that ‘an imaginary Ugandan of some kind resides in me, one who lets me withhold myself from claiming, or being admitted into, without hesitation, an unquestioning Gikuyu belonging.’ Despite having lived most of her adult life in Kenya, Wainaina’s mother, too, is depicted in his memoir as remaining somehow outside her adopted country, able to slip fluidly from one identity to another. The Wainaina family gets by in a mixture of languages: Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Gikuyu, English and Kiswahili, and the children all have English as well as African first names (Binyavanga’s is Kenneth, and to his embarrassment his mother insists on calling him KenKen). …

There are other languages and places, other possible selves, circulating in Wainaina’s childhood. The national catchphrase, exhorting Kenyans to overlook their tribal differences, is harambee or ‘pulling together’, but ‘Ki-may’ is the cheeky name Wainaina invents as a boy for those indigenous languages which are incomprehensible to him: ‘Ki-may is any language that I cannot speak, but I hear every day in Nakuru: Ki-kuyu, Ki-Kamba, Ki-Ganda, Ki-sii, Gujarati, Ki-Nyarwanda, (Ki) Ru-fumbira. Ki-May. There are so many, I get dizzy.’ The young Binyavanga is a fan of Billy Ocean, the Jackson Five and The Six Million Dollar Man, and the early chapters are full of ebullient Americanisms. He even invents a verb, ‘wreng wreng’, to describe the nasal way he speaks when he is in Six Million Dollar Man mode: ‘“Steve. Austin. A me-aan brrely alive,” I wreng wreng Americanly. “Gennlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the tek-nalagee. We can build the world’s frrrrst bi-anic man.”’

His family sends him to South Africa to study business, but: “He spends his days in bed with the door locked and the curtains drawn, eating pilchards from the tin while reading Saul Bellow and Nadine Gordimer, restocking addictively on books at a second-hand bookshop.” I think many of us can identify with that.

Unrelated, but I can’t resist: the previous article in that issue of the LRB, Rosemary Hill’s Shaving-Pot in Waiting, is ostensibly a review of two books, Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy by Helen Rappaport and Albert by Jules Stewart, but she spends three pages talking about the first (well, mainly about Victoria and Albert themselves, but that’s par for the course with review essays). In the last half of the final paragraph, she finally gets around to poor Jules Stewart, eviscerating him as efficiently as a lioness: “There have since been a number of biographical reassessments to which Jules Stewart’s lame effort adds nothing. A book on which every expense has been spared from the thinness of the research to the awkwardness of the typesetting, it overestimates Albert’s influence as much as earlier generations underestimated it[…]. Albert’s trials, it seems, are never-ending.”

The mail carrier recently delivered an Amazon package containing a gift from jamessal, a copy of The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst. I set it aside till I had finished my latest copyediting slog, as a reward, and now that I’ve started it I can immediately see why Jim called Hollinghurst “a world-class writer” and wanted to share the book with me. Here are the first two paragraphs (virtually the entire first page):

She’d been lying in the hammock reading poetry for over an hour. It wasn’t easy: she was thinking all the while about George coming back with Cecil, and she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was in a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face. Now the light was going, and the words began to hide among themselves on the page. She wanted to get a look at Cecil, to drink him in for a minute before he saw her, and was introduced, and asked her what she was reading. But he must have missed his train, or at least his connection: she saw him pacing the long platform at Harrow and Wealdstone, and rather regretting he’d come. Five minutes later, as the sunset sky turned pink above the rockery, it began to seem possible that something worse had happened. With sudden grave excitement she pictured the arrival of a telegram, and the news being passed round; imagined weeping pretty wildly; then saw herself describing the occasion to someone, many years later, though still without quite deciding what the news had been.

In the sitting-room the lamps were being lit, and through the open window she could hear her mother talking to Mrs. Kalbeck, who had come to tea, and who tended to stay, having no one to get back for. The glow across the path made the garden suddenly lonelier. Daphne slipped out of the hammock, put on her shoes, and forgot about her books. She started towards the house, but something in the time of day held her, with its hint of a mystery she had so far overlooked: it drew her down the lawn, past the rockery, where the pond that reflected the trees in silhouette had grown as deep as the white sky. It was the long still moment when the hedges and borders turned dusky and vague, but anything she looked at closely, a rose, a begonia, a glossy laurel leaf, seemed to give itself back to the day with a secret throb of colour.

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Arika Okrent (LH’s favorite invented-language maven) alerted me to the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, whose theme is “Means of Communication.” Not only does it have her own piece, “Body Language” (“From the wave to the shrug to the digitus impudicus, Arika Okrent breaks down the history and the subtleties of the ways we gesture”), which I urge you to read, but there’s plenty more (including Ben Zimmer’s “Word for Word” on Roget’s thesaurus and, alas, the egregious Simon Winchester on the Dictionary of Regional American English); Maria Popova, at her blog Brain Pickings, has excerpted a couple of nice bits from the printed version, How Famous Words Originated, According to the Historical Oxford English Dictionary and Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Illuminated Manuscripts. Enjoy!

Back in 2004 I posted about the bizarre-looking hatmaking device called a conformateur; most of the links are now dead, and they weren’t that informative anyway, so I am now linking to Oh Joy! My Conformateur, by hatter Tricia Roush, explaining how she got hold of “something that’s been on my ‘fantasy hat making’ list for a long time- a conformateur set. … They’re quite rare to find, and almost never seen with more than one piece of a set together.” She provides all the pictures, diagrams, and explanations you could possibly want, including the all-important formillon, which uses a paper pattern to recreate the customer’s head shape. If only I had a a pattern with my name on it at a hat store!

And if that doesn’t sate your hunger for hat-related links, here’s a Guide to Buying a Top Hat by Charles Henry Wolfenbloode, explaining and illustrating all the main types. (Don’t allow yourself to be suckered into getting a non-collapsible shiny fabric shell hat, “a pale imitation of a collapsible topper” that “should be avoided at all costs.”) There’s an extensive glossary at the end (coodle: a shellac based paste used in the process of making goss; goss: linen, cotton calico or chessecloth that has been soaked in coodle and left to cure for a few months on a frame; used to make the shell of top hats). Thanks, LobsterMitten!

I’m betting few readers under, say, fifty know anything about diagramming sentences, but my generation had to do it a lot in elementary school; it was one of the basic ways we were taught to understand our own language, and compared to a lot of the claptrap people are taught under that rubric, it was surprisingly useful. Perhaps also surprisingly, for me, my wife, and apparently quite a few other people, it was actually fun. This NY Times blog entry by Kitty Burns Florey tells the story of how it was created in 1847, which was new to me:

The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. … Stephen Watkins Clark was the principal at the Cortland Academy, where he also taught English. Like many schoolmasters, he was frustrated trying to beat proper grammar into the heads of his students by means of parsing. Mr. Clark was not the first reformer to identify its problems, but he was the first to solve them by arranging the parts of a sentence into diagrams. He didn’t consider the idea particularly radical. As he notes in his preface, making the abstract rules of language into pictures was like using maps in a geography book or graphs in geometry.

Read Florey’s post to discover the horrors of parsing and see the evolution of diagramming from Clark’s awkward bubbles to the simple and pleasing branching lines we codgers came to know and love. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Update. Mark Liberman has posted on this at the Log; a number of commenters there have fond memories of the practice, and Arika Okrent wrote: “Measuring emotional response to sentence diagramming tasks in children would be a good diagnostic tool for identifying future linguists.” Andrew Dalke said he had learned sentence diagramming in Miami in 1983/4:

The teacher loved the concept, and she talked about an ex-student who after becoming a lawyer came back to tell her that sentence diagrams really helped her understand some of the complicated sentences she was reading.

I, on the other hand, could make no sense of the rules. It didn’t help that the first sentence of a test was “Have you ever seen a pilot fish?” The rest of the sentences were about pilot fish and sharks, but as my uncle, the United Airlines pilot, also fishes, I diagrammed a rather different structure than the teacher expected, and I thought they were just random sentences.

That’s an astoundingly bad sentence to put on a test, but it makes for a great story.