languagehat.com

I’ve almost finished Filloy’s Caterva (see this post), and I’ll be reviewing it soon, but at the moment I’m focused on a word that was new to me and that I originally thought must be a misprint. On p. 368 of my paperback edition I read the sentence “Death is an epiphonema” and thought “epiphenomenon” must be intended (the book is far from free of typos), but on investigation I discovered that it’s a real word. Wiktionary defines it as “(rhetoric) An exclamation or reflection used to summarise or round off an argument or discourse” and says it’s “From Latin epiphonema, from Ancient Greek ἐπιφώνημα (epiphṓnēma), from ἐπιφωνείν (epiphōneín, ‘call to’)”; the pronunciation is, as one would expect, /ˌɛpɪfəˈniːmə/. The OED (entry from 1891) has the following first and last cites:

1579 Such end, is an Epiphonema, or rather the moral of the whole tale.
E. K. in E. Spenser, Shepheardes Calender May 304 Gloss.
[…]
1870 The epiphonema to the daughters of Jerusalem has a subordinate significance as a refrain.
W. H. Green, translation of O. Zöckler, Song of Solomon 75/2 in P. Schaff et al., translation of J. P. Lange et al. Comm. Holy Script.: O. T. vol. X

Is anyone familiar with this recondite word?

At some point this morning — I’ve already forgotten the context (it’s hot!) — I muttered “Close enough for government work,” and it occurred to me (not for the first time) that I have three such phrases in my quiver, identical in meaning and equivalent in usage (in other words, the choice on any given occasion is essentially random): “close enough for government work,” “close enough for jazz,” and “close enough for rock & roll.” That’s very odd, it seems to me; idioms may have variants, but a given person usually adopts and uses only one. Of course, I may simply not be remembering other similar cases (it’s hot). Wiktionary has close enough for government work and good enough for jazz (a variant I don’t think I’ve heard and wouldn’t use — to me, it sounds more contemptuous than “close enough”); in this Sax on the Web thread, the question is about where the saying “close enough for jazz” comes from, and 1saxman responds:

I never heard it that way before. I know it as ‘Close enough for rock & roll’. And in my ‘day’ career, it was ‘Close enough for government work’. You see, every field of endeavor has it’s own version. As to where the original version started, I have no idea, but it probably was involved with the Army. OTOH, the ‘government work’ version might be the original.

So there you have the result of my languid researches; all thoughts are, as ever, welcome. I’m going to go make some iced tea.

Yes, this is silly stuff, and it’s four decades old to boot, but it’s hot and muggy for the umpteenth day in a row and I can’t come up with anything serious, so enjoy Jack Smith’s “‘Pullet Surprise’: Years later, student’s coincidence is still, uh, malapropriate” (L.A. Times, Feb. 18, 1985; archived):

I have been troubled by an Associated Press story out of Orange Park, Fla., reporting what seems to me an incredible coincidence. I wasn’t going to take note of it here, but several clippings of it have been sent to me, from various newspapers, and I feel obliged to comment.

The story said that Jim Mattson, an English teacher at Orange Park High School, had been collecting his students’ malapropisms over a period of four years–both at Orange Park and during his previous assignment in Exeter, N.H., and it gave some examples. […] What troubled me, though, was a student’s malapropism that Mattson gave as one of his favorites: “In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won the Pullet Surprise.”

“I literally fell out of my chair laughing,” he said. “I was laughing so hard I was crying. I showed it to my wife and tears came down her cheeks.”

Alas, a dedicated schoolteacher named Amsel Greene, years before, and way out in Helena, Wyo., had had pretty much the same reaction when the same sentence turned up in one of her students’ papers: “In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise” (the only difference being an a instead of a the). Like Mattson, Miss Greene was fascinated by these strangely logical errors, and had been collecting them with the idea that someday she would publish them in a book. But what to call it?

“Here was the term,” Amsel Greene wrote in her preface, “for which I had been groping. I had jotted down hundreds of classroom misinterpretations for which I had found no name. The terms boners, bloopers and booboos imply stupidity or inadvertence, whereas student errors are often marvels of ingenuity and logic. But Pullet Surprises sparked a Eureka response. Its rightness had the impact of revelation!”

See the link for more examples and the rest of Smith’s story; I generally roll my eyes at such lists, as I wrote here:

[…] bullshit forms reminiscent of those “Kids say the darndest things!” pseudo-mistakes some people e-mail lists of (Old-timer’s disease, a blessing in the skies, Carpool tunnel syndrome—this is the title of a book, and it’s a deliberate pun, for Chrissake!, Heineken remover—which they as good as admit is bullshit, &c &c)

But I have to admit, “Pullet Surprise” made me laugh. Thanks, Trevor!

Their About page says:

Why share untranslatable words?

They’re fun! They shed light on other cultures, reveal different patterns of thought, and spark our curiosity. Sometimes, they influence how we analyze and classify the world around us.

When they compiled their dictionary of Nootka, Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh need not have included šiˑšaˑwiɬtaqyo “powered by a monstrous supernatural porcupine-like creature” because its meaning is predictable from its parts. But we think Sapir and Swadesh knew what they were doing as lexicographers, and that they chose to include this word because its meaning is so comical to westerners, and because it teaches us that “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” (Sapir, 1929, The status of linguistics as a science, p209). So, following the example of Sapir and Swadesh, the linguists contributing to this site want to share more of these `untranslatable’ words, and in the process, show why these small languages are distinctive, valuable, and powerful, each one a treasure for all the world.

After a couple of quotes about “Shamelessly exoticising others,” they say: “We walk a fine line: we celebrate popular interest in the exotic and while challenging the racism that lies behind it. This fascination with the exotic is the hook. We go further and invite visitors to this site to learn about real words, and the careful scholarship of the linguists who work so tirelessly to collect them.” The blog itself is here, and it’s very well done. The top entry at the moment is warr! [wa:] ‘an exclamation of surprise, to draw attention to something,’ from palawa kani, “the revived language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people,” and it includes a succinct description of how the language came to be and the history of the word. It’s nice to see someone doing something interesting with the tired concept of untranslatability; thanks, Y!

A generous Hatter was kind enough to send me a birthday gift that arrived today and immediately demanded to be posted: a copy of War Words: Recommended Pronunciations (Pub. for the Columbia Broadcasting System by Columbia University Press, 1943), by W. Cabell Greet. You can see a HathiTrust copy of this first edition here (read-only) and an Internet Archive copy of the greatly expanded 1944 second edition here (Full text). It’s a kind of reference work I dearly love, done by a single person with care and a vigorous, sometimes cantankerous, style. From the Introduction: “The boldness and good humor of Australian pronunciations will please most Americans.” (The NY Times review gives as an example: “Their town of Wagga Wagga is to them simply Wogga.”) Under “The English Pronunciation of Foreign Names”:

Just as the names of the older countries and the principal regions of Europe have English variants — as Germany, Italy, and Spain for Deutschland, Italia, and España — many European cities, provinces, and rivers have, during the centuries, acquired English pronunciations and even English spellings, which are commonly preferred in English contexts. But of course for the most formal occasions and for musical programs, and also in the case of foreign speakers, the nuance of foreign pronunciations may be desirable. Announcers should know both.

Although the English forms are stable, there is here, as in all other aspects of language, the possibility of change. Nowadays the “French” pronunciations of Marseille and Lyon are probably better American usage than the Anglicized Marseilles and Lyons. We now pronounce Prague in the French style, ignoring the time-honored English variant, as well as the Czech and the German. One sign of the falling off of classical studies is a general ignorance of the English pronunciation of Greek place names. The press reports usually give English spellings which don’t quite make sense if they are pronounced as modern Greek, as, for example, Piraeus and Athens. If the classical traditions grow even weaker, such forms may be displaced. Piraeus, especially, gives trouble now.

News announcers when faced with the necessity of choosing between English and foreign pronunciations should of course use the pronunciations commonly employed in the comfortable English of educated people acquainted with the place and the subject. Names that are not on these lists probably have no English pronunciation, and they should be pronounced in foreign style. We cannot be so conservative (or so radical?) as the English family who, according to Mr. Calmer, spoke of happy holidays in Brittany and pronounced Saint Michel as if it were English Saint Mitchell.

One does not, of course, go to an eighty-year-old guide for help with current usage, but it’s an endless source of fascination if you want to know how things were said in earlier days, and Greet’s obiter dicta make great reading. Some examples:
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The Pittsburgh second person pronoun yinz has come up here before (e.g., in this 2005 thread); now Ed Simon has a whole LitHub essay about it (apparently an excerpt from his The Soul of Pittsburgh: Essays on Life, Community, and History), tying it to the Glaswegian yins:

The city center of Glasgow, Scotland—that iron-and-glass-forged, cobblestoned fortress of a hilly, rainy, foggy metropolis—is bisected by the dueling high streets of Buchanan and Sauchiehall. There are any number of landmarks to draw your attention if ambling down either of these bustling thoroughfares as the last squibs of Caledonian light fight their losing battle of attrition during a brisk November afternoon.

For six months in 2006, Glasgow was my home across the Atlantic, and I often spent those glum Scottish afternoons in precisely this sort of aimless wandering […] Glasgow, I thought, is kind of like Pittsburgh. And then, walking through Glasgow again, I hear it: “There was a couple other of yins as well.” What? […]

There is more than a spiritual congruence between Glasgow and Pittsburgh, as Kelman’s “yins” would indicate, the s that ends that word so perilously close a sibilant to the z in yinz and the words so nearly used identically. For those unfamiliar with yinz—though I imagine if you’re currently reading this book, you most likely know what it means, albeit it’s becoming increasingly rare in usage—it’s simply the Western Pennsylvania second-person plural, the Pittsburgh equivalent of y’all down South or youse in Jersey and New York.

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Alex Foreman, in a Facebook post, linked to Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov’s “Beginning of Romani literature: The case of Alexander Germano” (Romani Studies 5, 30.2 [2020]: 135-61), and said:

This is the article in which I learned that Alexander Germano, the famous Russian Romani poet, was not a Rom. […] Not only was he not a Rom but the Roma around him apparently didn’t care and were completely unbothered by him participating in Romani literary and cultural life as a non-Rom. Even the one private negative remark from Pankov that Marushiakova and Popov found seems like it could just as easily be a negative assessment of his writing rather than his choice to write in Romani. He seems to have just felt no need to claim such an identity. It was a non-issue. A Rom identity was constructed for him after his death. […]

The situation with Romani in the early Soviet Union reminds me a bit of Yiddish in the US today in that there are prominent non-Jews who do things like perform in Yiddish theater, and no Yiddish-speaking Jew seems to have a problem with it. There was a level of security and self-confidence that Roma enjoyed in the early Soviet Union (complete with using Romani as a vehicle of primary education) whose attempt to incorporate them while respecting their difference was briefly pretty successful. Such a thing has simply never happened anywhere else, at least not on that scale. I think Macedonia may get there though.

I think one legacy of this brief period is the fact that the traditional exonym for the Roma, Tsygan, is generally not considered offensive in Russian, and is the term typically preferred by Russian-speaking Roma in Russian. Even attempts to use the terms “Rom” and “Romskiy” in Russian may be mocked. Lera Yanysheva has a very funny satirical poem “The Activist” where her Russian-language self-translation puts the term “Romskiy” in a guy’s mouth to make him sound ridiculous.

On the “briefly pretty successful” attempt to incorporate them while respecting their difference, see this 2010 post describing the brief heyday of linguistic korenizatsiia; Alex expanded on his feelings about the Romani situation in a comment:
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A few years ago Céline Carayon’s book Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (UNC Press page; Amazon) was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press; the publisher’s blurb says:

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Celine Carayon’s close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions.

That certainly sounds interesting, and Thomas Wien’s review (Early American Literature 57.1 [2022]: 313-20; JSTOR) provides a helpful summary on pp. 314-15:

Eloquence Embodied is an exercise in rehabilitation. From the begin-
ning: in the two initial, scene-setting chapters, Carayon presents Native
American and European paralinguistic practices before contact, finding
them equally complex—and equally effective. In the face of the traditional
devaluation of the nonverbal and its emerging association among educated
Europeans with the “uncivilized” at home and abroad, she discerns a basic
symmetry that would make possible the colonial connection to come.
Chapter 1 sketches out traditional Native multimedia communication
technologies, moving back and forth between early European visitors’ ob-
servations and current knowledge on kinetic communication in general.
Taking “multimedia” seriously, Carayon explores the ties of Indigenous
conventional or nonconventional sign languages—unequally distributed
among the peoples encountering the French—to oratorical traditions and
pictographic writing. Chapter 2 cobbles together a nonverbal tradition à
la française out of monastic sign language, rediscovered gestures of clas-
sical oratory, Jesuit theater, (non-Jesuit) street performance, and emerging
naval signals. While they were far from congruent, the cultures of other-
than-verbal communication that had taken form on the two continents
were equally sophisticated, predisposing the members of both parties
to the American encounter toward reading bodies and their signs. They
offered “remarkable platforms for mutually meaningful cross-cultural ex-
changes” (156)—the possibility of a gestural middle ground, so to speak.

The remaining four chapters rescue from obscurity the nonverbal in
Franco-Indigenous relations. Communication without words, Carayon in-
sists, remained crucial throughout the two centuries under study; it was
just as indispensable once increasing numbers of French and Indigenous
people engaged in often halting verbal conversation, as during the early
phase of gesticulating on the beach that comes spontaneously to mind.
The nonverbal even gained in importance over time: “The more the groups
became acquainted with each other over the next two centuries, the more
manual and kinetic communication came to define their relations, both
friendly and violent” (158).

Wien concludes:
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I just ran across an article that combined so many of my interests (e.g., Russian history, translation comparisons, bad scholarship, proofreading) that I wanted to share it here: Donald Ostrowski’s “What Makes a Translation Bad? Gripes of an End User” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 15.3/4 [December 1991]: 429-446; JSTOR), which compares reviews of the five volumes of Serge A. Zenkovsky’s The Nikonian Chronicle. I’ll excerpt some good bits, but anyone sufficiently intrigued will want to read the whole thing:

One would expect that such a major contribution and increase in the amount of Rus’ian material translated into English would be welcomed by the English-speaking scholarly community. As instructors, we are, after all, always looking for materials that can be used for introductory courses in early East Slavic history. Instead, the review literature indicates a rather chilly and negative reception to this translation of the Nikon Chronicle. Why? What are the criticisms? Is this chilly reception deserved? And, if so, can we learn from the criticisms to produce better translations, especially those that are on a similarly large scale?

First, let us take at look at the review literature. I will be using seven reviews of the Zenkovskys’ translation. […]

Of the reviewers, Michael Flier finds the most to praise. […] However, he does question a number of editorial decisions involving the translation. He notes that the Zenkovskys did not translate all the text, that they excluded “certain stories and theological discussions of Byzantine or South Slavic origin with no information on Russia per se.” […] Flier goes on to point out some inconsistencies in the rendering of proper names, a number of apparent typographical errors, as well as errors of information, and the infelicitous pluralizing of the names of certain Rus’ tribes: the Krivichs, Polovetss, and Ants (instead of Krivichi, Polovtsi, and Antes).

I love “Krivichs, Polovetss, and Ants”!
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I recently heard a splendid Magnificat by Tomás Luis de Victoria that was said to be in “octavi toni”; I had heard similar phrases (such as “primi toni”) before, and this time I decided to get to the bottom of it. So I did some googling and wound up at Stack Exchange. The questioner asked:

In XVI century, there was a composer called Girolamo Cavazzoni. He wrote (amongst other pieces) a couple of Magnificats – in primi toni, quarti toni, sexti toni and octavi toni. [details and speculation omitted — LH] However, if the assumption above is correct, the octavi toni would end up in Ionian mode. Hence my question – could someone shed some light on the naming conventions of these times, and how is octavi toni different from primi toni?

A long and detailed answer began:

As you’ve probably deduced, the assumption is incorrect. In fact, this question is based on a couple of incorrect assumptions. The first is the identity of the first mode, which is Dorian, not Ionian. Ionian didn’t even exist when the modes were initially numbered and named.

The second is the relationship of the numbering scheme to the tonic notes. There are two modes per tonic, not one. This is possible because each of the modern modes corresponds to an authentic and a plagal mode. The authentic and plagal modes come in pairs that have the same tonic, but they have different ranges and different reciting tones (or “dominants”). In particular, the authentic reciting tone is a fifth above the tonic (sometimes a sixth in Phrygian), while the plagal reciting tone is a third above (sometimes a fourth in Hypophrygian and Hypomixolydian).

Now my attention was diverted to that word plagal, which I was sure I’d seen before, but (unsurprisingly, since I am not a musicologist) whose meaning I could not keep in my head. (For one thing, it reminds me of the Latin verb plangere ‘to strike; to bewail, lament,’ which turns out to be entirely irrelevant.) So I turned to AHD, where I found:

Music

Of or being a medieval mode having a range from the fourth below to the fifth above its final tone.

[Medieval Latin plagālis, from plaga, plagal mode, from plagius, plagal, from Medieval Greek plagios (ēkhos), plagal (mode), from Greek, oblique, from plagos, side; see plāk-¹ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

The definition is basically gibberish to me, but the etymology is interesting, especially when you go to the Appendix and discover that the Greek etymon also gives rise to French plage and Spanish playa ‘beach’! Maybe it will help if I think of the plagal modes as beach music.