languagehat.com

Y writes to alert me to this series of tweets by linguist Neil Alexander Walker:

My father speaks Everglades Southern English, & I grew up hearing /ˈædiˌɡɑɡən/ to mean ‘out of kilter’. He just used this word to define what’s to him an obscure dialect word used by his NC-born grandmother: /ˈjijeɪ/. My Q: does anyone know how these words are spelled English?

His maternal grandparents were born in NC in the 1890s & moved to FL in the ’20s. His maternal grandmother, specifically, said /ˈjijeɪ/ & she had other dialectal peculiarities, including /z/ for /s/ in /zɪŋk/ ‘sink’ (& supposedly other words, though he cannot remember which ones)

We have not reconstructed the family line in full, but where we have, all of the NC side seem to go back to the founding of that colony or Virginia before that, so, most likely, the speaker born in the 1890s would not have had an immigrant ancestor more recently than 1700-1750.

Y adds: “These are still fresh as of now (9/8/2024), and he has not yet had a reply. I cursorily tried DARE and ADD, but couldn’t come up with anything. Any ideas?” I join him in his question and direct it to the assembled Hattery.

Carl Zimmer reports for the NY Times (archived) on the meaningful gestures of chimps and other apes:

In the 1960s, Jane Goodall started spending weeks at a time in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania watching chimpanzees. One of her most important discoveries was that the apes regularly made gestures to one another. Male chimpanzees tipped their heads up as a threat, for example, while mothers motioned to their young to climb on their backs for a ride. Generations of primatologists have followed up on Dr. Goodall’s work, discovering over 80 meaningful gestures made by not only chimpanzees, but also bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

Now researchers are using these gestures to peer into the minds of apes. Some even think they offer clues about how our own species evolved full-blown language. “Certainly, gestures played a big role,” said Richard Moore, a philosopher of language at the University of Warwick.

In the 1980s, Michael Tomasello, then a young comparative psychologist, pioneered the first theory about ape gestures based on observations of infant chimpanzees in captivity as they grew into adults. He noticed that the baby apes made gestures to their mothers and, as they matured, developed new gestures directed at other chimpanzees. Based on his observations, Dr. Tomasello argued that gestures develop among apes as simple habits. If a baby repeatedly tries to grab food from its mother’s mouth, for example, the mother may eventually start to give it food while the baby is still stretching out its arm. The baby, in turn, may stop bothering with the full action.

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Back in 2019, Sidney Wood mentioned Tony Harrison’s poem “Them and [uz]” in a comment, but if I clicked through at the time it didn’t stick in my memory; now, having run across it again, I want to make a post of it. Here’s the text:

I

αἰαῖ, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes
gob full of pebbles outshouting seas —
4 words only of mi ‘art aches and … “Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!” He was nicely spoken.
“Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!”

I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth.

“Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
‘s been dubbed by [ʌs] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [ʌs]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.”

“We say [ʌs] not [uz], T.W.!” That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a’s (as in “flat cap”)
my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great
lumps to hawk up and spit out … E-nun-ci-ate!

II

So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy
your lousy leasehold Poetry.

I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones
into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones,
dropped the initials I’d been harried as
and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],
ended sentences with by, with, from,
and spoke the language that I spoke at home.
RIP RP, RIP T.W.
I’m Tony Harrison no longer you!

You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhymes,
[uz] can be loving as well as funny.

My first mention in the Times
automatically made Tony Anthony!

Of course, “mi ‘art aches” = “My heart aches,” the start of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (which everyone studies in school), and “leasehold Poetry” is a pun on “leasehold property”; you can get further annotations at the Genius page. You can hear Harrison reading his own poem here; I especially enjoy it now that my wife and I have been soaking in the Northeast accents on display in Vera (another season coming, but we have to wait until next year). I remember posting a poem by a Scottish woman making a similarly defiant choice to write in Scots, but I can’t seem to find it.

Francis Mollica writes at The Conversation:

Legal language, or “legalese”, is notoriously hard to understand. Legalese contains more difficult linguistic structures and unusual word choices than most other styles of writing, including non-fiction, news media and even complex academic texts.

The convoluted structure of many legal sentences can make it tough to understand and remember legal obligations. Even lawyers don’t like legal language. So why does it work this way?

In a new study with my colleagues Eric Martínez (University of Chicago) and Edward Gibson (MIT), we found that even laypeople resort to legalese when asked to write laws – which suggests the complexity of legal language may be a kind of ritual that helps give the law its power.

He focuses mainly on “centre embedding”:

Centre-embedded sentences are difficult to process because readers have to remember what happened in the outside (bold) sentence while they’re reading the inside sentence. The reading difficulty increases with the distance between the words that depend on each other. […] In our new study, we analysed the 2021 edition of the US legal code, the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force. We then compared the results with other genres in a representative body of writing in English.

We found centre embedding is far more common in these laws than in other kinds of text. […] These results suggest that the difficulty to process linguistic structures in legal text, like centre embedding, serve as a cue to the performative, world-altering, nature of the text.

Dubious but fun — thanks, Bathrobe!

The other day Nelson Goering commented on Facebook as follows (I’ve added italics):

I never quite know what to say when students ask me what something like lāst means in Old English. It means… lāst. It just doesn’t map all that well onto any given PDE word. I should maybe try to think how I can explain more clearly why hunting for the right word in translation is at best a distraction.

(PDE = present-day English.) When I responded that sometimes a gloss can be helpful, he said:

Sure, I also give glosses (and make glossaries) all the time. But sometimes it’s really not effective. To stick with lāst, this properly means “the space someone/something used to occupy, or the after-effects that show where someone/something used to be”. It just isn’t true that “you can often think of it as ‘footstep’ or ‘trace’” — you can *sometimes* think of it that way, but more often that won’t really do, and you can easily end up doing more work trying to figure out how to make your bad gloss fit into the context than it would take to just learn the actual meaning. It’s not actually a very hard word to understand on its own terms, but the hunt for a *gloss* rather than an *explanation* is a problem.

I agreed, of course, and it all led me to look the word up, whereupon I discovered that it’s the ancestor of modern last ‘A model of the foot made of wood, metal, (now) plastic, etc., on which boots and shoes are shaped during making or manufacture’; since the OED entry was revised in 2014, I can give you a nice up-to-date etymology:
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My wife and I decided to return to Trollope in our nightly reading and are well into Barchester Towers, which we last read back in 2015. At that time I marked the following sentence with a marginal arrow, apparently intending to post about it; having neglected to do so then, I remedy the omission now: “Her unfortunate affliction precluded her from all hope of levanting with a lover.” Levanting — what a great word! The OED (entry from 1902) says:

1. intransitive. To steal away, ‘bolt’. Now esp. of a betting man or gamester: To abscond.

1797 She found that the sharps would dish me, and levanted without even bidding me farewell.
M. Robinson, Walsingham vol. IV. xc. 284

[…]

1848 One day we shall hear of one or other levanting.
W. M. Thackeray, Book of Snobs xxxix. 152

1863 The clerk had levanted before his employer returned from America.
M. E. Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory vol. III. xix. 289

[…]

1912 F. had carefully studied Anna Karenina, in a sort of ‘How to be happy though livanted’ spirit.
D. H. Lawrence, Letter c5 November (1962) vol. I. 154

1912 I am the fellow she livanted with.
D. H. Lawrence, Letter c5 November (1962) vol. I. 154

2. † transitive. Only in levant me!, a mild form of imprecation. Obsolete.

1760 Levant me, but he got enough last night to purchase a principality.
S. Foote, Minor i. 31

I note that Lawrence both liked the word and spelled it idiosyncratically; also, I shall have to start saying “Levant me!” The etymology is:

? < Spanish levant-ar to lift (levantar la casa to break up housekeeping, levantar el campo to break up the camp), < levar < Latin levāre to lift.

This sentence in the following paragraph has another savory expression: “She had lived out her heart, such heart as she had ever had, in her early years, at an age when Mr. Slope was thinking of the second book of Euclid and his unpaid bill at the buttery hatch.” OED s.v. buttery hatch (entry revised 2018):
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Back in 2019 I expressed “a combination of irritation and admiration when it comes to John H. McWhorter”; now the admiration has evaporated and the irritation has condensed into something more like rage. As it happens, I wondered about the origin of the given name of Ketanji Brown Jackson; that Wikipedia article doesn’t explain it, but I found a site that quoted her as follows: “When I was born here in Washington, my parents were public school teachers, and to express both pride in their heritage and hope for the future, they gave me an African name; ‘Ketanji Onyika,’ which they were told means ‘lovely one,’ she said.” Fine, but what kind of “African name”? I was stymied until I ran across the 2022 podcast “Where Is the Name Ketanji From?” by John McWhorter. Hey, he has his faults but he knows something about African languages, thought I, and hit Play. I didn’t understand why it would take over 38 minutes to answer the question, but hey, he’s a wordy dude; as long as he tells me, I won’t regret the investment of time! Once he started talking about how people don’t grasp how varied African languages are and began describing some, I sped it up to 150% and skipped chunks where he went on long divagations or played random songs he happened to like. He mentioned that people who speak Twi, Yoruba, and Igbo are said to be particularly good at learning Chinese (and provided a long comparison of Yoruba and Chinese); he said there was an Ijaw-based creole in South America; he explained why Swahili was chosen as the language to learn if you wanted to learn an African language. I got more and more aggravated. Finally, in the last 30 seconds, he said he had called a friend who knew about West African languages and who said that Ketanji “sounds like it might be Atlantic”: maybe Fula? maybe Wolof? That feels right to McW!

So after wasting a ridiculous amount of time I was left as ignorant as before, and I am making this post to let off steam and because hope springs eternal: perhaps some learned Hatter will be able to do better than the loquacious JMcW. Does something like Ketanji Onyika actually mean ‘lovely one’ in some actual language?

Back in 2005 I mentioned the private language of Maurice Baring and his family, which “in the course of two generations […] had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety”; now, thanks to Laudator Temporis Acti, I can provide an example, though it’s not clear to me if these words are from the general family language, “The Expressions,” or from a childish offshoot thereof (the quote is from Baring’s 1923 The Puppet Show of Memory):

We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word “Yes” was a trisyllable, namely: “Sheepartee,” and the word for “No” was even longer and more complicated, namely: “Quiliquinino.” We used to talk this language, which was called “Sheepartee,” and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.

1) Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to The Speakers of Indo-European and their World: With interesting abstracts from most likely upcoming publications, which features “On the Evidence for the Tocharian Second Hypothesis,” “The Indo-European origins of Persephone and the Albanian goddess Premtë,” “Towards New Stories: Bringing Archaeological and Archaeogenetic Information Together to Reconstruct Migrations from the Steppe to Southeastern and Central Europe,” “Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian: Different Worlds?” and “Shining in the distance – PIE colour terms revisited.”

2) Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul) posted on Facebook a link to Code-switching and code-mixing in the conditions of Slavic-Slavic language contact: Vershina – a unique Polish language island in Siberia, by Michał Głuszkowski (open access).

If any of that seems interesting, click on through!

I was reading a New Yorker piece in which “tasseography” was used as if it were a perfectly normal word (no explanation provided); having never seen it before, I doubted that, and did some research. The Wikipedia article begins:

Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy, tassology, or tasseology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.

The terms derive from the French word tasse (cup), which in turn derives from the Arabic loan-word into French tassa, and the respective Greek suffixes -graph (writing), -mancy (divination), and -logy (study of).

OK, in the first place, it’s an ill-formed word: -graphy/-mancy words need Greco-Latin bases, not modern French ones. In the second place, I can’t trace it back beyond the 1970s, which of course isn’t to say it doesn’t occur before then — to have a real idea about that, I’d need to consult an OED entry, but there isn’t one, which is another nail in the coffin. No, I don’t like this alleged word. Why not just say “tea-leaf reading” and “reading coffee grounds,” as our revered ancestors did?

Furthermore, “the Arabic loan-word into French tassa” is a bizarre little handwave at an etymology; Wiktionary tells us:

From Arabic طَاس (ṭās) (a shortening of طَسْت (ṭast)), from Middle Persian tšt’ (tašt), ultimately from the past participle of the Proto-Iranian verb *taš- (“to make, construct; to cut”), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *tā́ćšti, from Proto-Indo-European *tḗtḱ-ti ~ *tétḱ-n̥ti, from *tetḱ- (“to create”).

Much more interesting, if true!