languagehat.com

Occasional commenter and full-time beerologist Martyn Cornell, aka Zythophile, has a long post that begins:

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.” The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, “served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.”

Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense.

I can’t do justice to it here, but I’ll quote a few excerpts:
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Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to “Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages” (open access) by Frederic Blum, Ludger Paschen, Robert Forkel, Susanne Fuchs, and Frank Seifart (Nature Human Behaviour [2024]); the abstract:

Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world’s languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a typologically diverse sample of 51 languages. Using Bayesian multilevel regression, we find that on average, word-initial consonants are about 13 ms longer than word-medial consonants. The cross-linguistic distribution of the effect indicates that despite individual differences in the phonology of the sampled languages, the lengthening of word-initial consonants is a widespread strategy to mark the onset of words in the continuous acoustic signal of human speech. These findings may be crucial for a better understanding of the incremental processing of speech and speech segmentation.

It sounds plausible; I wonder what the assembled Hatters think. (Thanks, Dmitry!)

Stephen Akey writes for the Hedgehog Review about life at the telephone reference desk back in the day:

How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.

From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing. […]

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Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly, and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. […] At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

Well, that’s a partial explanation of why there are Hungarians everywhere you look.

Ben Yagoda’s post on nosh makes interesting reading; he begins with his response to an interviewer who “mentioned she is married to a British person, and thus has been exposed to Britishisms like ‘posh’ and ‘nosh’”:

I immediately corrected her, saying that “nosh” is Yiddish.

Well, I was right, but she was right, too.

The word derives from the German naschen, meaning to nibble. It shows up in English as a verb in the late 1800s, and shortly after that as a noun, meaning a snack. I was familiar with both forms in my Jewish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and recall going to a Miami Beach restaurant called La Noshery (“noshery” or “nosherie” is an establishment where one noshes).

But Ngram Viewer reveals that, at least until quite recently, “nosh” was significantly more popular in the U.K. than the U.S. […] There are also specifically British variants, including (along the lines of “fry-up” and “cock-up) the noun “nosh-up”; a line in Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998) is, “I’ll give the auld doll this: she always made a good nosh-up.” And I’ll note that one difference in American and British use of the word is that here, it’s mainly a snack, while there, it can be a full meal.

In addition, Green’s Dictionary of Slang reports, “nosh” in the U.K can refer an act of fellatio. That particular meaning led to a notorious email that restaurant reviewer Giles Coren wrote to his editors at The Times, and what was subsequently leaked to The Guardian.

I urge you to go to the link to read Coren’s anguished e-mail (which ends “You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?”), but what struck me was the ‘fellatio’ sense, of which I had no idea. I might have thought it was exaggerated, but a comment by Nick L. Tipper (reproduced at the Facebook post Ben made about it) says:

The sharp turning point shown in Ben’s Ngram of GB usage of ‘nosh’ appears to be about 2010. At that time, I was heavily criticised – and ridiculed – by a colleague for using ‘nosh’ as a reference to food. In his mind, the word had only one meaning – the oral sex one which ‘gobble’ has acquired – and nosh meaning ‘food’, ‘meal’ or ‘eat’ was an archaic usage.

(Cue rant about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket and people today can only think about sex.)

At the request of Yamnaya fans, herewith a new catchall everything-paleogenetic thread! Have at it, DNA lovers…

Jason Koebler of 404 Media tells a tale of our times (archived):

The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility.

Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project’s GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project “will not be updated anymore.”

“Generative AI has polluted the data,” she wrote. “I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.”

See the link for details and a complaint about “the terrible behavior of generative AI companies”; the piece ends:

“Information that used to be free became expensive,” Speer wrote. She closed the note by saying that she wants no part of the industry anymore. “I don’t want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI,” she wrote. “OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they’re constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves.”

I recently got the Blu-ray of Godard’s Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie) and watched it for the first time in almost forty years, once straight and once with the commentary track (and please allow me to vent my frustration about commentators who spend most of their time on bloviating and generalities rather than focusing on what is happening onscreen). Back when I saw it in the theater I was young and foolish and too proudly rationalist to be able to accept its premise of a virgin birth, not to mention that any Godard movie has to be seen more than once to be appreciated; now, with more Godard under my belt and more intellectual humility, I can enjoy its extraordinary beauty and its intellectual and psychological musings, and those musings bring us to the topic of this post.

Godard is surely the most literary of major directors — not in the sense of making movies out of books, which he rarely does, but in the sense of dealing with ideas in a literary way. Virtually all of his movies have characters quote from books, sometimes in extenso and sometimes reading from the book itself, and he will occasionally break up the action with his own ruminations (as in the famous coffee-cup scene from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle). For this reason, you would think that analyses of the movies would routinely discuss the books he draws from, just as the Annotated Alice or Lolita describe the literary references used in those classics. But alas, the people who write about movies tend to care much more about camera angles and acting techniques than about literature and literary references, so a basic feature of the films goes more or less ignored.

I will provide some examples from Hail Mary, with brief explanations of their relevance to the film, in the hope that someone will pick up the baton and do a Books in Godard parallel to Eric Karpeles’s wonderful Paintings in Proust.
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Jack Morava sent me this delightful link:

Math teacher Ben Orlin writes and draws the (aptly named) blog Math With Drawings and is the author of a new book, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. To mark its publication, he devised this entertaining accompanying quiz.

A sample:

2. If you see someone write “0.33333,” how do you interpret this?

(a) They clearly meant 1/3.

(b) They clearly meant 33,333/100,000.

(c) Looks like a fifth-iteration address in a generalized Cantor set. But I can’t tell the specifics without more context.

(d) It’s a coded message to my android brain. To escape the time loop, we must follow Commander Riker’s plan and decompress the main shuttle bay.

And at the end, you get to see what your results mean, e.g.:

Mostly B’s: Your style is HYPERLITERAL.

You delight in the pedantry of mathematical culture. This is a language of precision, every symbol’s meaning honed to a sharpened point—and you love wielding those sharp points to poke and prod speakers less precise than yourself.

In short, you’re a linguistic troll. Your literary equivalent is David Foster Wallace.

As a former math major, of course I was tickled (I ended up “normcore,” but I refuse to be equated with Dan Brown); I’ll bet the book is a good read. Thanks, Jack!

Wolfgang Mieder’s “«Laissez faire à Georges» and «Let George do it»: A Case of Paremiological Polygenesis” (Paremia 22 [2013]:17-29) is an astonishing example of coincidence, the kind of thing that should be kept at the tip of one’s brain to confute those who take resemblance for proof of origin. The abstract:

While polygenesis appears to be a rare phenomenon with proverbs, the French proverb «Laissez faire à Georges» from the end of the fifteenth century and the American proverb «Let George do it» from the last quarter of the nineteenth century do in fact have two different origins. This is shown by numerous references from French and Anglo-American proverb collections and dictionaries. Even though some paremiographers and lexicographers continue to insist on a monogenetic relationship between the two proverbs, the argument for two separate origins has steadily gained acceptance. The two «Georges» of the proverbs have no relationship to each other, and it would have made little sense for the old French idiom with its relationship to Georges d’Amboise to have been adopted by the Anglo-American world. Clearly the American proverb is based on another George, namely the generic name given to emancipated slaves who were employed as African American porters on the Pullman railroad cars during the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. While the French proverb has long been out of use, the American proverb is still in use today.

Anatoly Vorobey, from whom I got the link, compares the Russian use of Pushkin as the universal doer, and confesses that he only just learned that the English noun saw ‘saying, proverb’ has nothing to do with the homophonous noun meaning ‘tool with a toothed blade’ but is related to the verb say (it is, in fact, a doublet of saga).