languagehat.com

Deb Roy, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, gives a talk on how he’s wired his house for video and recorded everything said around his infant son for three years, giving him the ability to analyze (for instance) exactly what enabled him to learn the word water. Then he explains how he used similar techniques to analyze the relationship between everything available on TV and what people say in social media. It’s pretty mind-boggling stuff, and if you have twenty minutes to spare it’s well worth your while. (Thanks, Sven!)

I just discovered this 2007 post at the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Poemas del río Wang and had to share it; it’s a paean to the hidden international society of lovers of the Russian language:

In Persia one can more or less get by with English. With Persian one can settle more difficult cases as well. But hearts can be really opened only with Russian.
From Tehran through Isfahan to Shiraz we were asked in the most unexpected sites: Po-russki govoritye? (And you speak in Russian too?) Each time they asked it like a child who reveals a secret treasure, a rare and precious stamp, desirous to see the other appreciating it. The positive answer was greeted with a shining smile, and then a long, warm conversation followed in Russian. The people who asked it of us were Armenians and Azeris who are just as numerous in Iran as in the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan….

[Read more…]

I’m about halfway through Любимов [Lyubimov] by Andrei Sinyavsky writing as Abram Tertz in 1963, translated by Manya Harari as The Makepeace Experiment; it’s a very funny book that strikes me as to some extent a combination of Platonov’s Chevengur (with Lyubimov as the autonomous city leaping into the future of communist fulfillment, menaced by approaching forces from the surrounding Soviet Union; I wrote about Platonov’s novel here and here) and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (with Leonid Ivanovich Tikhomirov, called Makepeace by Harari, in the role of the wish-fulfilling magician)—neither of those novels would be published for some years after 1963, but Sinyavsky very likely read them in samizdat or at least knew a fair amount about them. At any rate, I just hit the bit where a Soviet agent sneaks into town in the guise of an American reporter and interrogates the great leader Tikhomirov in a hilarious mix of German and bad Russian (original after the cut):

“I have the honor to be introducing myself, Herr Tikhomirov,” he pronounced, scandalously mangling the wonderful Russian language. “Ich bin Harry Jackson, nicknamed ‘The Old Gangster,’ a correspondent of the bourgeois newspaper Perdit Intrigan vrot okh Amerika. My transoceanic masters vants to have from you a leetle interfew.”

(For some reason, Harari omits the nickname: “‘Allow me to introduce myself, Herr Makepeace,’ he godlessly mispronounced our beautiful language.’ Ich bin Harry Jackson, correspondent of the bourgeois paper Perdit Intriguer Och Aus America.'”) The name of the paper starts off with a good (if vulgar) mini-sentence in Russian, “Пердит интриган в рот” [Perdít intrigán v rot], ‘The/an intriguer farts into the/a mouth’; it continues with the mock-German “ох Америка.” Compare the “French” title of the essay sent to the Revue de Paris by Venichka, the hero of Venedikt Erofeev’s great Moskva-Petushki: “Шик и блеск иммер елегант” [Shik i blesk immer elegant], ‘Chic and brilliance immer elegant,’ which also ends with a bit of German. German is historically the great Other to Russians, who have encountered it in contexts ranging from philosophy to war; in the old days, немец [némets] ‘German’ was used for any foreigner, and clearly any foreign language can be transmuted into German for comedic purposes.

[Read more…]

Earlier this year I posted about the completion of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Now I learn (via frequent commenter Paul) that a major contributor to that dictionary, W. G. Lambert, has died; here’s the Birmingham Post obituary, and I’ll provide a bit from the Times (London) obit, which is not online but which Paul quoted in his e-mail:

Lambert’s standard publications, insights and uncounted references from unpublished cuneiform sources bedeck almost every page of the 21-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, initiated in 1921 and completed — with resounding acknowledgement from the Humanities — only this year. Less apparent is what lay behind, for over the decades Lambert corrected dictionary galleys with red-inked remarks such as “NO! See me after class!” or “Kindergarten stuff!” that were quite familiar to his long-suffering students.

Marshall Hodgson changed the way I view the world more than any other historian I have read. Before I read his monumental The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, my head was filled with all sorts of musty ideas and prejudices inherited from the Victorian era and before, passed down through generation after generation of unthinking repetition; it was as though he pried open a window in my skull and let the breeze of his insights blow all that crap out and provide me with a fresh start. The amazing thing is that although a first version was published a half-century ago and the book in its current state almost thirty years ago, it has made so little impact on the world at large; widely respected scholars like Bernard Lewis, not to mention the media and the public at large, continue to repeat the same claptrap about unchanging, universal Islam and brave but primitive desert Arabs and, well, you know the story. That Wikipedia article on Hodgson has a decent summary of his achievement:

In The Venture of Islam Hodgson reimagined the terminology and focus of Islamic history and religion: He critiqued terms like tradition for ḥadith and Islamic Law for sharīʿah. The focus on the Arab world that had characterized the Euro-American study of Islam was also rethought by Hodgson who argued that it was the Persianate world (his coinage) that was the locus of the most influential Muslim thought and practice from the Middle Period onwards. Most importantly he distinguished between Islamic (properly religious) and Islamicate phenomena, which were the products of regions in which Muslims were culturally dominant, but were not, properly speaking religious. Thus wine poetry was certainly Islamicate, but not Islamic.

Hodgson’s writings were a precursor to the modern world history approach. His initial motivation in writing a world history was his desire to place Islamic history in a wider context and his dissatisfaction with the prevailing Eurocentrism of his day. Hodgson painted a global picture of world history, in which the ‘Rise of Europe’ was the end-product of millennia-long evolutionary developments in Eurasian society; modernity could conceivably have originated somewhere else.

When I say I read the book, however, I should qualify. I bought and read Volume 1 and Volume 2 twenty years ago, but for some reason I didn’t pick up the third volume—perhaps the store was out of stock—and by the time I finished the first two and wanted more, the third was either unavailable or outrageously expensive. At any rate, my excellent sister-in-law got me a copy for my birthday, and I’m now reading it with great pleasure. I’ll reproduce here one linguistic nugget from the first chapter, “The Safavî Empire”:

Writers used to cite it as a paradox that Ismâ’îl, ruler of ‘Persia’, wrote his verse in Turkic, while his rival, Selîm, ruler of ‘Turkey’, wrote his verse in Persian. The paradox springs only from a misuse of the term ‘Persia’ for the Safavî empire, which included Persians, Turks, and Arabs equally, and the term ‘Turkey’ for the Ottoman empire, an even more unfortunate misnomer. In itself there is nothing paradoxical in the leader of a tribal grouping writing in the popular tongue, Turkic, while the head of an established state writes in the cultivated tongue, Persian.

I have myself taken pleasure in disseminating that paradox, and will doubtless continue to do so because it’s such fun, but his brisk demolition of it is typical of his clear-headed approach to things.

A couple of tidbits related to things Islamicate:

1) Peter Brown, in his NYRB review [archived] of Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Treasures of Islamic Manuscript Painting from the Morgan, refers to “the great poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī of Konya” and then consistently as “Rūmī,” complete with macrons. This is idiotic. While I approve in general of reproducing foreign diacritics, which should be a simple matter in this age of computer typesetting, there are no macrons in his name as written in the languages relevant to his milieu, which is جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى. In English, he is known as Rumi, or in fuller form as (e.g.) Jalaluddin Rumi, and adding diacritics that will benefit no one is simple ostentation. Hodgson refers to him as Jalâluddîn Rûmî, but that’s because he indicates all long vowels with diacritics throughout, as is appropriate in a scholarly publication. If Brown wanted to go that route for whatever reason, he would have had to refer to Nizāmī rather than Nizami, Sūfī rather than Sufi, etc. But again, what’s the point in an NYRB review?

2) Looking up something else in Vasmer, I ran across the entry магомет (the Russian equivalent of Mahomet):

“ругательство” (Чехов). Вероятно, заимств. с Запада, причем западноевроп. слова восходят к араб. Мuḥammad “Магомет” […]. Отсюда прилаг. магомета́нский, др.-русск. Бохмитъ (Лаврентьевск. летоп.); народн. Мухое́д, мухоеда́ньская ве́ра – от му́ха и есть; см. Савинов, РФВ 21, 45.

I like very much both the Old Russian form Бохмитъ [Bokhmit] (clearly influenced by Бог [Bog] ‘God’) and the popular variant Мухоед [Mukhoed] (looks like ‘fly-eater’).

Back in 2009 I posted about Michael Erard’s Babel No More project (“a book about language superlearners and the upper limits of the human ability to learn and speak languages”); now the book is out (well, it’s not actually available until January), and since the publisher sent me a copy of the galleys, I’m able to report on it. (You can visit the book’s website for more.)

The bottom line is that if you’re interested in the topic of hyperpolyglots, you’ll want to read this book. Erard has scoured the world to find such people, present and past; the first one he talks about, and the presiding spirit of the book, is Cardinal Mezzofanti, whose archives in Bologna he excavates with contagious enthusiasm. (How many languages did Mezzofanti know? Well, lots, but the difficulty of giving a more precise answer is what the book’s about.) He discusses other polyglots, some of whom he meets and spends time with, and analyzes their motives and methods as best he can. (Most of them are resistant, understandably but frustratingly, to being tested on their competence in their various languages.) He discovers that there was a “Polyglot of Flanders” contest in 1987 and talks with the winner (one of the few of his polyglots whose abilities have been reliably tested). At the end he gives some tips for would-be polyglots based on what he learned from his researches. It’s fun and educational too!

It’s also, perhaps, a bit too long; an editor should have suggested he cut some of his day-to-day experiences in the course of his quest and his own momentary reactions (“Silence in the room. Maybe the rain was coming down, but I’d stopped hearing it….”). But in these days of first-person journalism, that’s par for the course, and it doesn’t detract from the inherent interest of the subject. Here, for example, is a passage from chapter 10 that starts with a quote from another LH favorite, Victor Mair (see here and here):

“Throughout Chinese history,” said Victor Mair, a Sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “practically the only Chinese who learned Sanskrit were a few monks who actually traveled to India and stayed there for an extended period of time. Merchants and others (e.g., some officials who traveled widely within China) learned several Sinitic languages (so-called ‘dialects’) in the various places where they went. There was no interest in learning other languages out of sheer intellectual or linguistic curiosity.” Steven Owen, a Harvard professor of Chinese literature, added that some of the Chinese population learned Manchu when the Qing ruled China (from 1644 to 1911), but that they were specialists working for the emperor.

“As an intellectual endeavor,” Owen said, “meaning learning languages that are not proximate or needed, with an attendant interest in the culture—I don’t know of any cases among the educated [Chinese] elite before modern times.”

One reason was most certainly cultural. In the West, polyglottery had its earliest roots in Christianity, which was, from the start, an evangelical religion with no single language […] and whose central text was propagated in many languages. Polyglottery also stemmed from European exploration, colonization, and empire-building. By contrast, in China, the main pursuit of the intellectual class for thousands of years had been either trying to join or rise up in the civil service. This required such extensive literacy […] that there was little time left to do much else. Moreover, the one writing system itself linked intellectual cultures across time and space in a way that, in the West, required fluency in many languages. Perhaps most significantly, the Chinese perceived themselves to be the center of the world, so they could hardly be expected to learn barbarian languages.

And on a more down-to-earth level, a quote from Zainab Bawa, “an urban studies graduate student who learns languages for her research by hanging out and being with families. ‘The best way to learn a language is to sit with four-year-olds,’ she said, because they don’t talk about very complicated things, and they don’t have high expectations of your time together.”

Reader BWA sent me a delightful series of links, which I (being the kindly soul I am) will share with you. I have long been a fan of Laurel and Hardy, but I had no idea they were hugely popular in Italy, nor that their dubbed voices were so distinctive and well loved. This page (by Jeff Matthews) tells the story of how it came about:

Perhaps the strangest sidelight in this whole matter is that dubbed voices can become part and parcel of another culture, evoking allusions and inside jokes just as do the original voices in their own culture. The Italian voices of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are the best example of this. When talkies came in, Laurel and Hardy had already achieved world-wide fame on the basis of their short silent movies. There was such a new demand for them speaking, however, that for a time they actually reshot their scenes hurriedly in other languages, pronouncing their lines from scripts written in phonetic English. These scenes would then be sent abroad to be spliced into the rest of the film, which had been remade in the target language using local actors. That soon proved impractical, especially for longer feature films. Consequently, for the Italian market the decision was made to dub the films of Laurel and Hardy in American studios using Italian-American actors, who, presumably, thought they were speaking standard Italian. Their own Italian, however, had been maimed by at least one generation of nasal semi-vowels, unrolled r’s and Wrigley’s Spearmint.

When the studios in Rome reviewed the first dubbed-in-America Laurel & Hardy film to see what they had, the American English accented voices were so hilarious, that someone came up with the idea of redubbing everyone else into normal Italian, but leaving Stan and Ollie with accents. There followed a nation-wide contest to find the voices of Laurel and Hardy in Italian. One winner was the now famous Italian comic, Alberto Sordi, whose career started as the voice of Oliver Hardy. His anglicized Italian as ‘Ollie’ has become so much a part of Italian popular culture that an Italian, today, can do Oliver Hardy by saying, with a broad English language accent, ‘stuPIdo’ (accenting the second, instead of the first, syllable, in imitation of Sordi’s version of Oliver Hardy) and have it recognized as instantly as an English-speaker would recognize, “Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!” Indeed, Italian mimics still regularly pay tribute to Laurel and Hardy, imitating the dubbed voices. (The Italian voice of Stan Laurel was Mauro Zambuto, who, after WW II, moved to the United States and became a professor of Electrical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.)

So, without taking anything away from the universal nature of the humor of Laurel and Hardy, it is fair to say that in Italy, much of their popularity was—and still is—due to the spectacularly successful way they are dubbed. There is no Italian comic (not even the great Totò) who, by voice alone, is as recognizable as are Laurel and Hardy in Italian.

You can see clips of Alberto Sordi, including a shot of the actual dubbing back in the day and a final, touching reunion with Zambuto, here, and an example of their work here (the first part of the deservedly famous The Music Box, from 1932). Enjoy!

Marc Tracy has a very sad piece in the Tablet apologizing for having used the word brouhaha “freely and frequently.” What’s wrong with it, you ask? I’ll let him tell it:

I received a lovely email recently from one Bonny Fetterman. “I wonder if you are aware of the etymology of the word ‘brouhaha’ because if you were, you probably wouldn’t have used it in this title,” she wrote (I had typed it in reference to, of all things, the ADL). She continued, citing her high school teacher: “It was an anti-Semitic term in France, based on the words of Hebrew prayer, ‘Baruch atah … ’ which sounded like a confused mess to Frenchmen passing synagogues and came to signify a loud, confused mess.” Wait, really?

His initial response was a healthy one; unfortunately, his cursory online research having turned up the information that the word was from French, “said by Gamillscheg to have been, in medieval theater, ‘the cry of the devil disguised as clergy.’ Perhaps from Heb. barukh habba‘ ‘blessed be the one who comes,’” he decided that because Ms. Fetterman wrote “I bristle every time I hear the term,” “out of respect to her and other linguists among our readers, we will try to refrain from using it.”

In the first place, Ms. Fetterman is not a linguist, she’s just someone who heard a vague story from her high school teacher (!) and has been carrying a grudge ever since against a perfectly good word. Of course, people carry grudges against perfectly good words all the time, and that’s their prerogative, but there’s no reason anyone else need take account of it. Furthermore, the offending etymology is dubious in the extreme; note that the two versions given above conflict as to which Hebrew phrase is supposedly being imitated, and the American Heritage Dictionary just says “French, of imitative origin.” I deplore this drive to seek out inoffensive words, dig up alleged dirt about their origins, and then go around trying to get other people to stop using them. Does anyone think there is the slightest tinge of antisemitism in the use of the word brouhaha in English? No? Then for heaven’s sake find something more productive to focus your energy on. (Thanks for the link, Derryl!)

I’m astonished that in close to a decade of LH posts I’ve never written about the titular topic, but such appears to be the case. I’m guessing that many of you know that the Québécois use religious terms in their profanity; if you’re not au courant, Wikipedia will catch you up. Some of the best-known sacres are câlice (calice, literally “chalice”), crisse (Christ), ostie (hostie, “host”), and tabarnac (tabernacle, “tabernacle”). At any rate, Jordan of Macvaysia sent me a link to If you profane something no one holds sacred, does it make a swear? (archived), from The Economist‘s “Johnson” language blog, and it makes some interesting points, discussing “an exhibition at the Musée des religions du monde (Museum of World Religions) in Nicolet near Montreal called Tabarnak: l’expo qui jure (Tabernacle: The exposition that curses)” and pointing out that this fine old tradition is in decline:

With the Roman Catholic church much less of a presence in the daily lives of Quebeckers, the religious words are losing their punch. Swear words disappear not through censorship, but when they no longer offend, according to the exhibit. The tamer ones—esprit (spirit), sacrament and baptême (baptism)—have already disappeared from daily discourse, it notes, and the others may soon follow. Olivier Bauer, a professor in Université de Montréal’s faculty of theology and author of “L’hostie, une passion québécoise”, believes even the impact of ostie, once the most popular swear word in Quebec, is weakening.

I disagree, though, with the cited theory that such swearing “was a form of rebelling against the Roman Catholic church”; though that may have been a factor for some people, it’s simply inevitable that swearing will draw from the most powerful psychological forces, and “hostie!” need not be a revolt against the church any more than “shit!” is a revolt against digestion.

I was reading Patrick Wright’s LRB review of Hamish Henderson: A Biography, by Timothy Neat (a two-volume biography of a modern poet! ah, Scotland!) when I was struck by this sentence: “He became a passionate song hunter whose research tools included a Rudge 500cc motorbike, a tent, innumerable bottles and a habit of testing the ‘human will’ of his compatriots by ‘doing a Henderson’: a method of sponging that prompted one victim into reviving an obsolete Scots word – ‘to sorn’ was ‘to come for supper and lodge for a month’.” What an excellent word, thought I, and consulted the Dictionary of the Scots Language, where I found more:

I. v. 1. intr. To exact free board and lodging by force or threats, to act as a masterful beggar, to beg importunately (Sc. 1808 Jam.). Now hist. Freq. in phr. to thig and sorn, id. See Thig, v., 4. (1). Vbl.n. sorning, the act or process of exacting free lodging …. Deriv. sor(o)ner, a masterful beggar, a begging vagrant ….
   *Bnff. 1700 S.C. Misc. (1846) III. 178:
   The Sheriff Deput finds the libell relevant, as declairing them to be holdin, known, and reput to be Egyptians, soroners and vagabonds.
   *Lnk. 1718 Minutes J.P.s (S.H.S.) 226:
   Robert Scot and John Ker, passing under the name of tinkers was found sorning in the high country.
   *Arg. 1721 Stent Bk. Islay (1890) 274:
   The frequent Thigging and Sorning of many people both from the Main land Countrey and also the Inhabitants of this Isle.
   *Sc. c.1750 T. Somerville Life (1861) 369:
   “Sorners”, who, though the name survives, have no modern representatives — persons destitute of a fixed home, and possessing slender means of subsistence, who used to lodge by turns, and for many days, or even weeks, at a time, at the houses of their acquaintances, and were treated with as much attention and generosity as if they had been capable of making a return in kind.
    . . .
   2. tr. with (up)on or absol.: to scrounge or wheedle free quarters (from), to sponge, abuse or trespass on one’s hospitality, to get a meal out of someone, to act the parasite, to batten on …. Derivs. sorner, a sponger, a self-invited guest, a parasite (Ib.), jocularly: a young scamp, rascal, ¶sornee, one who is looked to for hospitality, sorning, wheedling, sponging.
    *Sc. 1725 Ramsay Gentle Shep. iii. iv.:
   He gangs about sornan frae place to place.
   *Mry. 1740 Elchies Letters (MacWilliam) 123:
   Giving both Mrs Grant and you trouble enough without going to sorn upon you.
   *Sc. 1797 Scott Letters (Cent. Ed.) I. 86:
   As from being a sorner I am becoming a sornee, it is proper to acquaint you that my dwelling is No. 50 Georges Street.
    . . .
   *Bwk. 1862 J. G. Smith Poems 83:
   There were crumpy farles o’ cake an’ souple scones to spare For a’ the gaberlunzies, wha often sornit there.
   . . .
   *Kcb. 1911 G. M. Gordon Auld Clay Biggin’ 90:

   Keepin’ open hoose, aye fillin’ it wi’ quality folk wha sorned upo’ him.
   *Sc. 1947 Scots Review (May) 25:
   The temptation to sorn on America is almost too strong to be resisted.
   3. To scrounge (food), to forage. to feed on (Cai., Ags. 1971).
   *Ayr. 1824 A. Crawford Tales of My Grandmother 275:
[He] brak’ into the kail-yard, an’ sorned there for the maist feck o’ twa hours, to the utter destruction o’ the fruit on my three airn-gray groset busses.
   *Sc. 1879 P. H. Waddell Isaiah lxi. 6:
   Ye sal sorn on the walth o’ the hethen.
   *Ayr. 1913 J. Service Memorables 24:
   They had either to tether the beasts or let them sorn for their meat.
    . . .
   [O.Sc. sorryn, night’s lodging, 1365, sorn, = 1., c.1460, = 2., 1575, sorner, 1449, an adaptation of the now only hist. sorren, the service of hospitality required of vassals towards their superiors in Ireland and Scotland, Ir. †sorthan, free quarters, living at free expense.]

I like the word itself a lot, and I like the phrase “to thig and sorn” even more. And once again I am struck with what a great language Scots is for translating; “Ye sal sorn on the walth o’ the hethen” is so much more expressive than “ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles.”