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It has often struck me that the phrase “fight with” is ambiguous and wondered how foreign learners of English cope with it, but I don’t recall seeing such a glaring example of the ambiguity as this line from the (very interesting) NY Times obituary (by Margalit Fox) of a poet I wasn’t familiar with, Emanuel Litvinoff: “Emanuel’s father returned there to fight with the Bolsheviks and was never heard from again.”
I’m guessing they mean “to fight on the Bolshevik side,” since he’d fled czarist pogroms, but an editor should have caught that. Or perhaps I’m wrong about the ambiguity? Do other English-speakers feel it has a clear meaning here?

An interesting passage from The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (see this post):

Mithradates’ dazzling memory and facility with languages were legendary in his own time…. Only one other individual in antiquity had linguistic abilities that even approached those of Mithradates. According to Plutarch, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt “spoke many languages and gave audiences to most foreign ambassadors without the help of interpreters.” Aulus Gellius remarked that “he was thoroughly conversant in the dialects of the 25 nations that he ruled, and spoke each language as if it were his native tongue.” …
Which languages did Mithradates speak or read with ease? These are certain: Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Latin, Aramaic/Hebrew, Parthian, Armenian, Old and New Phrygian, Cappadocian, and the Gaulish dialect of his Galatian lover Adobogiona. Other languages may have included Avestan (Old Iranian, used in Zoroastrian prayers); Sanskrit (Hindu medical texts); Egyptian and Punic; Celtic/Gallic (perhaps Allobrogesean, the language of his bodyguard Bituitus). He knew some Anatolian tongues, such as Carian, Mysian, Isaurian, Lydian, Lycian (and Pisidian), and maybe had a smattering of Syriac, Elamite, and Sumerian (used in religious texts of the Seleucid era). He could have learned Italian dialects, Marsic, Oscan, and Umbrian; Thracian (spoken by many of his cavalry regiments; and Getic (spoken in Tomis on the Danube). Other possibilities include vestig[i]al forms of Assyrian or Hittite and dialects of Colchis, Sarmatia, and Scythia.

There are obviously heaping dollops of speculation in that passage (one somehow doubts the Sumerian), but it’s a useful rundown of the linguistic situation in that part of the world a couple of millennia ago. (One wonders, though: why the parentheses around “and Pisidian”?)

Ben Zimmer has done an exemplary bit of research and reported on it at the Log:

Inspired by Mark Liberman’s post, “Putting the X in AXB,” I spent some time trying to find the origin for this venerable snowclone. A quick check of newspaper databases uncovered “putting the fun in fundamentals” from November 1912, and it turns out that the fall of 1912 was when the snowclone snowballed. It’s a nice example of how, even a century ago, lingua-memes could “go viral” (and go stale).

It seems that the originator of the meme (as far as we can tell a century later) was the cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “TAD” Dorgan Rube Goldberg, who was said to have “coined the gag phrase ‘I’m the guy who…’ around 1910, using it as a stock saying by one of the characters in a comic strip he was drawing.” In the summer of 1912, for whatever reason, it suddenly exploded in popularity; Ben quotes dozens of examples from late June to mid-December, and as he says, “by October 6, according to the Washington Post, the formula had already descended into ‘pale inanities’ from ‘pseudo-humorists.'” It’s a fine example of the way modern searchable databases have made possible a far more detailed investigation of the way linguistic phenomena spread; it’s also striking that this particular one is so productive it’s still popular—Bob LeDrew, in a Log comment, quotes a fine example from The Simpsons in which Homer says: “Mmmmm, Barbra Streisand… puts the she in yeshiva.”

For years, Geoff Pullum has been carrying on a war against the people who carry on a war against the passive voice without having the faintest idea what it is, and this piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education is a beautiful distillation of it. He quotes “a colleague and friend with an American doctoral degree” who read a draft he had written, “cast a disapproving eye on a couple of passive clauses (correctly identified, I should note), and stressed that she herself tried to avoid passives.” He is delighted: “an empirical claim by a self-identified passive avoider! My colleague, you see, has an excellent and well-written book to her name—a record that could be checked.” So check it he did, learning that “26 percent of the transitive verbs in that five-page preface [to her book] are in passive rather than active clauses,” versus an average of about 13 percent passives in newspapers and magazines: “And here we have double that percentage, in the writing of an academic who imagines that she avoids passives!”

But this is where modern American writing instruction has brought us. Totally unmotivated warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who (unwittingly) often use such sentences more than the people they criticize. And the warnings are consumed by people who don’t know enough grammar to evaluate them (which is why the percentage of passives in published prose continues basically unchanged over time). The blind warning the blind about a danger that isn’t there.

The man has a way with words as well as grammar. (Perhaps this would be a good time for me to tout his delightful The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language.)

The first book I bought for my new Kindle was The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, by Adrienne Mayor, and I’m reading it now (in the breaks from my editing work); just as the reviews promised, it’s lively and well written, and provides a look at a familiar subject (the rise of Rome) from an unfamiliar point of view (that of the Asians who resented the corruption and brutality of Roman rule and tried to throw off the yoke). It starts off with the simultaneous massacre of tens of thousands of Romans, men, women, and children—basically, every Roman in Asia—in 88 BC, somehow coordinated across a huge territory.

Ever heard of it? Neither had I, and it was one of the worst instances of genocide in history before modern times. And who knew that Mithridates, famous for his investigations into poisons (“Mithridates, he died old“), was probably inspired by the example of Attalus III, who died around the time he was born? Anyway, if you like ancient history, you’ll probably like the book; here’s a nice list of ancient names for the red earth that helped make the fortune of Sinope, the capital of Pontus in Mithridates’ day (a town situated on a narrow isthmus between the mainland and a rocky peninsula—anybody know of other examples of towns built on an isthmus?): “Cinnabar, zinjifrah, vermilion, Sinopic red earth, ruby sulphur, miltos sinopike, sinople, orpiment, oker, sandaracha, sandyx, lithargyron, zamikh, arsenicum, arhenicum, zirnikhi, sindura, minium, Armenian calche, realgar, dragon’s blood: all were ancient names for the many forms of toxic ores containing mercury, sulphur, and/or arsenic.”

An interesting article from The Economist:

The five boroughs of New York City are reckoned to be home to speakers of around 800 languages, many of them close to extinction.
New York is also home, of course, to a lot of academic linguists, and three of them have got together to create an organisation called the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), which is ferreting out speakers of unusual tongues from the city’s huddled immigrant masses. The ELA, which was set up last year by Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins and Bob Holman, has worked in detail on 12 languages since its inception. It has codified their grammars, their pronunciations and their word-formation patterns, as well as their songs and legends.

There are some nice examples in the article. Ah, to be young and a linguist in NYC!

A depressing but splendidly written quote from the fine essayist Edward Hoagland:

But the survival of wild places and wild things, like the permanence of noteworthy architecture, or the opera, or a multiplicity of languages, or old shade trees in old neighborhoods, is not a priority for most people.

(From “Small Silences: Listening for the Lessons of Nature“, Harper’s, July 2004, reprinted in his new collection Sex and the River Styx.)

Usually, words are either common enough to be used casually, expecting the reader to understand them, or they’re rare enough that authors feel the need to explain them. I don’t recall seeing another word like catchmark, which is exceedingly rare—so rare that it’s not in any dictionary I can find, not even the OED—but is used (on those rare occasions when it is used) with the nonchalance of someone using a well-known locution, so that it is not clear to the uninitiated reader what it actually means. Note that although it has something to do with manuscripts, it is not catchword, a familiar term for a word placed at the foot of a handwritten or printed page that anticipates the first word of the following page. Some representative uses culled from Google Books: “Here a catchmark in the MS.,” “the scribe has marked some of the pages in his prebound blank European book with Armenian catchmarks,” “Unusually, there is no catch-mark for the number within the text,” “Gatherings 6 through 9 have medieval catchmarks.” I cannot find any glossary of terms that has “Catchmark: a [whatever it is].” Naturally, I would appreciate hearing from anyone who is in possession of this bit of strangely esoteric knowledge.
Update. This post at Ante-Bath Notes has images of what would certainly appear to be catchmarks; if so, they are sort of medieval footnote indicators, except pointing to marginal notes. Many thanks, Catanea/catannea!

I enjoyed Звёздный билет (A Starry Ticket; see this post) so much that I decided Aksyonov’s follow-up novel, Апельсины из Марокко (“Oranges from Morocco”—there seems to be a translation in The Steel Bird and Other Stories), would make a good palate-cleanser after Ivan Denisovich, and so it did; I liked it even better, and I imagine I’ll wind up reading just about everything Aksyonov wrote. His combination of stylish, colloquial writing and knowing, sometimes slily subversive cultural references is intoxicating. The book’s plot is basically silly: several young men variously in love with two women, one of the two married to the boss of one of the men. But it’s just a skeleton on which to hang the important things, the language and the setting, the (imaginary) fishing town Taly on the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia’s Far East and the surrounding territory, with its сопки (hills) and распадки (narrow valleys, in which one of the protagonists is drilling for oil with a survey team). The MacGuffin (to use Hitchcock’s term) is a shipment of oranges that has just come into port, a rare and exotic commodity that has everyone for miles around rushing to Taly to stand in line and/or get into trouble. Aksyonov gives a hint of what he’s up to when he has one of the characters look down on Taly from a hill and say it reminds him of Liss, Zurbagan, or Gel-Gyu, three of the invented towns in which Alexander Grin set his adventure stories; like them, this has a combination of apparent insubstantiality and mysterious power. But he also has a character point out that the town is built on the site of a former Gulag camp, a detail with even more resonance when you know that Aksyonov’s parents spent eighteen years each in the Gulag, and as a teenager he joined his mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, in Magadan, the entrance port to the hideous Kolyma camps.

At any rate, here’s a linguistically interesting passage; one of the characters calls another Vasilich (short for Vasilievich, ‘son of Vasily’), whereupon we get the following paragraph (Russian after the cut):

That’s how they call him on the Zyuid [a fishing boat; the name, from Dutch zuid, is the nautical word for ‘south’], because of his age. “Comrade Captain” is awkward; Vladimir Vasilievich is too young for it. You can’t call him Volodya because of his rank, but Vasilich is just right, it’s friendly and you can say it with respect.

(Thanks for the translation help, Dmitry!)

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Exciting news (if you’re the type to get excited about lost languages): an archaeological project at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in Peru in 2008 excavated a paper document (remarkably well preserved in the dry climate) with the names of numbers in an unknown language that may be Quingnam or Pescadora (or both, if, as some think, they’re the same). Here‘s the paper by Jeffrey Quilter, Marc Zender, Karen Spalding, Régulo Franco Jordán, César Gálvez Mora, and Juan Castañeda Murga, “Traces of a Lost Language and Number System Discovered on the North Coast of Peru” (American Anthropologist 112:3, September 2010); you can read a brief press release about the paper from Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and watch a three-minute video in which Quilter discusses it.
The paper starts with a description of the document and its discovery (and some theorizing about how the numbers came to be recorded), proceeds to a discussion of what we know about the indigenous languages of the North Coast of Peru, presents the number list itself, and tries to identify the language. The conclusion says, “We do not definitively state that the number list documents previously unrecorded words from the Quingnam–Pescadora language(s), but we believe that it remains a viable possibility. We can definitively state, however, that this language is not Mochica and that its speakers must have had at least some contact with Quechuan speakers (as revealed in the borrowed vocabulary for several numbers)—albeit of a punctuated, symmetrical, and probably remote nature.” Many thanks to Kattullus for his MetaFilter post, which brought the discovery to my attention!