languagehat.com

Via Ionuț Zamfir’s Facebook post, I present “A comparative wordlist for investigating distant relations among languages in Lowland South America,” by Frederic Blum, Carlos Barrientos, Roberto Zariquiey, and Johann-Mattis List (Scientific Data 11:92 [2024], open access):

Abstract

The history of the language families in Lowland South America remains an understudied area of historical linguistics. Panoan and Tacanan, two language families from this area, have frequently been proposed to descend from the same ancestor. Despite ample evidence in favor of this hypothesis, not all scholars accept it as proven beyond doubt. We compiled a new lexical questionnaire with 501 basic concepts to investigate the genetic relation between Panoan and Tacanan languages. The dataset includes data from twelve Panoan, five Tacanan, and four other languages which have previously been suggested to be related to Pano-Tacanan. Through the transparent annotation of grammatical morphemes and partial cognates, our dataset provides the basis for testing language relationships both qualitatively and quantitatively. The data is not only relevant for the investigation of the ancestry of Panoan and Tacanan languages. Reflecting the state of the art in computer-assisted approaches for historical language comparison, it can serve as a role model for linguistic studies in other areas of the world.

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Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dónall Ó Braonáin write for Raidió Teilifís Éireann about Irish names for food:

Languages are a window into different cosmologies, a way of looking at the world differently. This especially applies to Irish food history and much can be learnt from the Irish language about our ancestors’ cattle-based economy and transhumance traditions, influenced by Ireland’s temperate climate, where regular rain meant grass grew nearly all year round. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’—cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little herder, the suffix ‘ín’ denoting the diminutive. […]

In his iconic book Cladaí Chonamara, Seamus Mac an Iomaire gave Irish names and descriptions for 43 different types of seaweed from his native west Galway. Extending this descriptive profusion, rabharta means a spring tide (which provides an abundance of cast-up seaweed), and the word garbhshíon or scairbhín na gCuach (rough weather of the Cuckoos) refers to a particular time between late April and early May when rough or harsh weather throws up seaweed on the coastline, which is also gathered for fertilising potato beds. […]

The triad ‘Turscar, Prátaí, Páistí’ (cast-up seaweed, potatoes, children) reinforces the historical interconnectedness between the weather, cast-up seaweed / wrack, potatoes, and population growth in coastal parts on this island. The adoption of the potato as a staple food directly influenced the dramatic population growth in Ireland from one million in 1590 (roughly coinciding with the introduction of the potato) to 8.4 million in the 1840s. […]

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Thomas Jones’s LRB review (6 December 2018; archived) of Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn Tempest has lots of biographical and historical details, but this is the tidbit I couldn’t resist:

When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, ‘he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall.’ Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites ‘an important article’ by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked’. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not ‘the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son’ but more along the lines of ‘See you in hell, punk.’

I sure hope that’s plausible to classicists, because I want to believe!

Jesse Will writes about a promising use for what I suppose we must call AI, annoying as that name is:

Indigenous languages are facing a steep decline: 90% are at risk of not being passed on to younger generations, while 70% are spoken by only a handful of individuals, predominantly elders. “Essentially, we’re racing against time. Within five to 10 years, we risk losing a significant part of the cultural and linguistic heritage in the United States,” explains Michael Running Wolf, a software engineer with roots in the Cheyenne community.

Running Wolf is one of a small but growing number of researchers who believe AI has the potential to safeguard endangered languages by simplifying the learning and practice process for speakers. As a co-founder of the First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR) Initiative at Mila Artificial Intelligence Institute, he is at the forefront of efforts to update the way indigenous languages are taught and preserved. “The ideal outcome is that we reverse this pendulum of language loss,” says Running Wolf. We discussed his Cheyenne roots and how his work experience as an engineer in AI speech recognition blossomed into a bigger calling.
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Via Alex Foreman’s Facebook post, I discovered Tania Notarius (who studies ancient Northwest Semitic verbal syntax) and her paper “Lexical Isoglosses of Archaic Hebrew” (Hebrew Studies 58 [2017]: 81-98), which represents the kind of philological study (based on historical linguistics) I love. It focuses on Archaic Biblical Hebrew, which she describes as “a stage of the linguistic development that chronologically precedes the Biblical Hebrew of the formative period (Classical / Standard or Early Biblical Hebrew); in this sense it can be called proto-Hebrew.” After a couple of introductory sections, she says “In what follows, I will deal with words that belonged to Classical Biblical Hebrew vocabulary, but in a meaning different from their archaic usage,” and turns to פְּלִילִים in Deut 32:31:

The verse has a long history of interpretation. The LXX translates it as “lacking in understanding” (ανόητοι). Targum Onkelos translates “judges, arbiters” […] However, the interpretation of פְּלִילִים as “judges” is doubtful even for Exod 21:22. Speiser made a strong case for the meaning “estimate, considerations” in both cases: Exod 21:22—“according to estimate (of the miscarriage harm)”; Deut 32:31—“even in our enemies’ estimation.” His interpretation of the latter case, however, looks forced (why should the speaker care about the enemies’ estimation?), as was noticed by Tigay.

The etymology of the root pll, however, has not been systematically considered in this respect. The root pll belongs to the oldest layer of the Semitic lexicon and is attested in all the branches of Semitic, but with broad semantic scope, disclosing the depth of semantic splits.

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My wife and I are fans of the Morse/Lewis/Endeavour cop shows, and we’ve been going back to Season 3 of the latter (which is, frankly, a disappointment compared with the earlier and later ones). In the episode “Prey” (featuring an escaped tiger as a particularly absurd plot point) Fred Thursday, young Morse’s superior, says “You want something to mither [/ˈmaɪ.ðər/] about with that brain of yours,” which of course intrigued me, and after the show I looked it up, discovering (scroll down to mither²) that it’s a Northern English dialect verb (“of unknown origin”) meaning ‘to fuss over or moan about something.’ A site search revealed that AntC brought it up a couple of years ago, but confused the issue by yoking it to this mither, meaning ‘take care of, act as a mother to,’ which of course is just the Scots form of mother and has a short i. The verb in question here has a long i, and happily the OED added it in 2002:
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Stefan Fatsis (seen here repeatedly, e.g. in 2015 and last year) writes for Defector about an amazing guy:

In competitive Scrabble, there’s Nigel Richards and everyone else. The 57-year-old New Zealander has won 11 North American and world championships combined; no one else has won more than three. He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words. He crafts strategic sequences that outperform the best bots. He’s a gentle, mild-mannered, private, witty, unflappable enigma—the undisputed Scrabble GOAT, and one of the most dominant players of any game ever.

Nigel—one name, like Serena or Michelangelo—went viral in 2015 after winning the French world championship even though he didn’t speak French. He inhaled some large chunk of the 386,000 words on the Francophone list, and did it in a mind-boggling nine weeks. That same year, he won a tournament in Bangalore, India, with a 30-3 record. In one of those games, Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS (the plural of a Latin American dance). In another, he threaded ASAFETIDA (a resin used in Indian cooking) through the F and the D. Those words likely had never been played in Scrabble before, and likely won’t be again.

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Manvir Singh recently had a piece in the New Yorker (archived) that takes the new Dune sequel as its hook (it both invites and has attracted tedious controversy about supposed suppression of Arabic in the Fremen language) but has a lot of other material of interest, which I will excerpt:

A trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” features the boy prophet Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, yelling something foreign and uninterpretable to a horde of desert people. […] Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel). […]

Hollywood’s current obsession with constructed languages arguably started with “The Lord of the Rings” film adaptations of the early two-thousands. J. R. R. Tolkien was a professor of Old English at Oxford and a lifelong conlanger, and he famously created the tongues of Middle-earth long before writing the books. “The invention of languages is the foundation,” he once wrote. “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.” The trilogy’s success showed the power of conlangs to create engrossing alternate realities, inspiring filmmakers to seek out skilled language creators.

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We were recently discussing the academic prowess of the regrettable politician Enoch Powell, and little did I expect that I would be presented so soon with an example. Courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti (where you will find a grudgingly admiring response from Peter Richardson), this quote from Powell’s The Evolution of the Gospel: A New Translation of the First Gospel with Commentary and Introductory Essay, discussing Matthew 6:28-30:

The words ‘card not’ οὐ ξαίνουσι—the process preliminary to spinning (as ‘sow’ above is preliminary to ‘reap’)—generated, by a slight misreading, the corruption αὐξάνουσι ‘they grow’, which is manifestly wrong, because it is not growing that is at issue but being fed and clothed. In addition, οὐ ξαίνουσι ‘card not’ has been replaced by οὐ κοπιῶσι ‘toil not’, which, as generic, cannot be paired or contrasted with the specific ‘spin’ (e.g. ‘no money and no shillings’). Thus the wording we have is the product of a (wrong) variant αὐξάνουσι in the margin and a (wrong) interlinear gloss κοπιῶσι in the text.

The antithesis to ‘fowls of the air’ is not ‘lilies of the field’ but ‘beasts of the field’. The beasts are indeed ‘clad’ without industry or artifice on their part. To say that ‘flowers’ or, even more, flowers of one particular sort are ‘clothed’ is absurd: beautiful they may be, clothed they are not.

The alteration of ‘beasts’ into ‘lilies’ may be a corruption. Confusion between ‘beasts’ … and ‘lilies’ … is difficult in Hebrew, whereas in Greek that between ΤΑΘΗΡΙΑ, ‘the beasts’, and ΤΑΛΕΙΡΙΑ, ‘the lilies’, is not. Corruption would then have taken place in Greek in two stages—(1) θηρία, ‘beasts’, changed to λείρια, ‘lilies’, and (2) λείρια glossed with its synonym κρίνα. On the other hand, the rhetorical piece about ‘Solomon’ and the ‘oven’ may be an insertion prompted by objection to being clothed as ‘the beasts’ are clothed, viz. in skin and fur, and this may have suggested ‘lilies’. Elaboration is betrayed by (1) ‘lilies’, for which ‘grass’, χόρτος, has later to be substituted (ovens are not fuelled with lilies) and (2) the absurdity of ‘clothing’ lilies or grass.

I have no opinion on the plausibility of all this (though of course I prefer the traditional and beautiful “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow”), but I do not know any other politician of any prominence who could pull off such a commentary. Color me impressed.

Somehow I got pointed to the Wikipedia article Place names considered unusual, which besides the usual suspects (e.g., Fucking, Austria) has all manner of amusing names: Germany alone has Affendorf (“Monkey Village”), Bösgesäß (“Bad-ass” or “Evil-Buttock”), Faulebutter (“Rancid Butter”), Fickmühlen (“Fuck Mills”), Katzenhirn (“Cat Brain”), Lederhose (Lederhosen, leather trousers), and Warzen (“Warts”), among others. But I was particularly struck by “Rednaxela Terrace in Hong Kong, which is believed to be the name Alexander but erroneously written right-to-left (the normal practice for writing Chinese in the past)”; that link has a more detailed origin story:

Although there are no official conclusions to the origin of the name, it is believed that the road was part of the property owned by a Mr. Alexander, and Rednaxela is an understandable transposition of the English name Alexander, since the Chinese language was typically written right-to-left at the time. Most of the naming errors in Hong Kong are a result of incorrect transliterations. Another explanation is that the name is linked to abolitionist Robert Alexander Young, who was known to have used the name Rednaxela in his 1829 work Ethiopian Manifesto. Chinese transliteration followed suit and was adopted by the neighbourhood, and the government never made any further alterations.

There’s something very pleasing about “Rednaxela.”