A while back Mark Liberman had a series of Language Log posts quoting excerpts from J. Milton Cowan’s “American Linguistics in Peace and at War” about how linguists were mobilized for language instruction in World War II (1, 2); the third post, The Burmese story, had a highly amusing description of how William S. Cornyn, Leonard Bloomfield, and Cowan scoured New York City looking for possible Burmese speakers and found one called Alamon who was willing to come to Yale but needed a higher salary than envisioned because “he had been running a little numbers racket in lower Manhattan,” ending with this tantalizing zinger: “Alamon’s successor, the other Burmese-sounding name on the Roster, gave rise to an embarrassment of the Yale linguists and the University which was as funny to outsiders as it was painful for those involved. But enough for Burmese.” As Mark says, “No, I’m sorry, that’s NOT enough for Burmese — we need to know more about the ’embarrassment of the Yale linguists and the University’ than that it ‘was as funny to outsiders as it was painful for those involved’! I mean, like, what happened?” I suppose it may be too much to hope that anyone will have the answer after 65 years, but hope springs eternal. Maybe a telltale bit of graffiti still lingers in the dusty back rooms of Sterling Memorial Library?
MEH.
The dismissive exclamation meh has been cropping up all over recently (see Ben Zimmer’s Language Log post); it was popularized by The Simpsons, but it goes back before that, and Nathan Bierma has done a Chicago Tribune column on it (here’s an American Dialect Society Mailing List posting of the column in case the first link is inaccessible for any reason). Here’s the heart of it, as far as etymology is concerned:
The Simpsons get credit for helping “meh” go mainstream, but they didn’t invent the word; the show just brought it out from some hidden corner of the culture. As early as 1992, “meh” shows up on a fan discussion board for the show “Melrose Place.” “Is [he] cute?” one fan asks about a character. Another writes back: “Meh .. far too Ken-doll for me.”
That’s one of the earliest available written examples of “meh,” but the word probably existed in speech long before. How long? That stumps etymologists.
But Nathan writes me that after the column appeared, he got an e-mail from a correspondent who said it sounded to him like a variant of the Yiddish “mnyeh,” to which Leo Rosten apparently devoted considerable space in Hooray for Yiddish (which I don’t own), and googling tells me that the suggestion was made over two years ago in this IRC log from 2/28/2005:
21:17:32 <sbp> http://www.langmaker.com/db/eng_meh.htm
21:17:39 <sbp> via http://www.onelook.com/?w=meh&ls=a
21:17:44 <sbp> but again, not easy to use*
21:17:59 <jcowan> Looks like an anglicized form of “mnyeh”.
I think that’s extremely plausible, and I look forward to seeing the results of serious etymological research (which should certainly involve trawling fifty-year-old issues of Mad, where I’m pretty sure I learned about “mnyeh” as a goyish youth).
THE COMPLEXITY OF THE LEVANT.
My recent immersion in multinational Alexandria has turned up some interesting sources; I’ll link to a couple of them here.
Racheline Barda’s “Egyptian Jewry in modern times” (.doc file, HTML cache) begins with a description of the varied origins of the community:
The face of the small indigenous Jewish community of 5-7,000 at the beginning of the 18th century, was therefore dramatically altered by the newcomers’ diverse ethnic backgrounds and was gradually transformed into a multicultural and multilingual mosaic. As a matter of fact, the Jews of Egypt’s main characteristic was their diversity, diversity in culture, ethnic origins, nationalities, rituals and languages.
Thus, on the eve of the 1948 war with Israel, the Jewish community was made up grosso modo of three different ethnic groups, each with their own customs, language and rituals:
1) A core of indigenous Jews with a Judeo-Arabic culture, divided by two different religious traditions, the Rabbanites and the Karaites, belonging mostly to the lower socio-economic strata, apart from a small privileged elite. Their mother tongue was Egyptian Arabic whereas immigrants from the other Arab countries (Syria, Morocco, Irak, Lybia) spoke their own Arabic dialect…
2) The second and largest group: the Sefardim (literally from Spain), included different ethnic clusters. They initially spoke Ladino but were also familiar with French, Italian, Turkish, and Greek depending on which part of the old Ottoman Empire they came from…
3) The third group was the Ashkenazim (about 6000 in the interwar period) originally from Eastern Europe plus a small cluster who came from Germany just before WWII. Spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German…
Apart from these three categories, there were other smaller categories – not strictly Sephardim or Ashkenazim – such as:
* The Italian Jews (8 to 10,000), originally from Leghorn sometimes via Lybia. Spoke Italian. Felt very close to the mother country until Mussolini enacted the Racial Laws in 1938. They were well established in business and financial sector and belonged to the upper and middle class. Some of them had no Ladino or Sephardi tradition. My husband’s family for instance could trace its origins back to Livorno in Tuscany in the early 1800s and had been in Egypt for four generations, and still maintained the use of Italian at home.
* A small group of Greek Jews or Romaniot, who strictly speaking, were not Sephardi. They came from mainland Greece or from the old Ottoman Empire, still maintained the use of Greek. They are believed to be the descendants of Hellenised Jews.
* The Corfiote Jews (from the Greek island of Corfu), who spoke a Ven[e]tian dialect (Corfu had been under Venetian domination for centuries before passing onto French and then British and then Greek domination)…
All these different ethnic groups were mostly educated in French, English or Italian private schools (secular and religious). Those who could not afford private schools sent their children to the Jewish communal schools where the main language of tuition was French apart from Arabic and Hebrew.
So Aciman is, if anything, downplaying the diversity in his memoir, with his references to the different nationalities found in his family!
IN MY LANGUAGE I AM SMART.
Dragan Todorovic is a Serbian journalist and editor who emigrated in 1995 from Yugoslavia to Canada, where he wrote in English and did multimedia work, winning various awards. His latest piece is “In My Language I am Smart (The Immigrant Song),” which is linked from this page of his website; it’s an audio clip a few minutes long consisting of him talking about having to communicate in a new language, mixed with various sounds. It’s very effective; I particularly liked this bit, addressed to a woman he’s trying to make time with: “If we spoke in my language, you would have fallen in love with me three hours ago. Can you just love me now and understand me later?” Oh, and “HMS Concise Oxford comes to my rescue.”
Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to listen to the clip at the moment, read the Notes a bit further down the page:
…Language is acquired with its sound, and the sounds I had picked from records and movies were harsh, aggressive, and presented me in a very different light from who I was and am. Suddenly I realized that somewhere in the process of acquiring the tone of modern English I had lost my identity. It was painful to realize that in my language I was smart, but I sounded stupid in English. Example: while walking with my Canadian friend one day by a church, he started talking about the architecture of that particular building, and while I wanted to say a few things about how I liked the Gothic details on the arch at the entrance, and how I admired the intelligent choice of stones, all I could squeeze out was, “Yeah, it’s cool”.
Acquired meaning is superficial. Sound puts word into context, but the deeper shades of expression are not learned. I responded the way that Clint Eastwood, or some other action hero, would in one of their roles. Back in Serbian language I was connoisseur of arts; in my newly acquired language I was a cop…
(Via wood s lot.)
TWO GREAT TASTES.
It’s time once again for me to renew my genuflection before the wonder that is Polyglot Vegetarian. MMcM doesn’t post often, but considering that each post is the length of a small book and packed with detailed and recondite information, that’s entirely understandable. In the last month he’s made two posts, but each is on a topic so basic to any food lover, treated with such loving attention to history, geography, and relevant literature, that to read the first two paragraphs visible on the main page is automatically to click on the “Read More.” The first is on garlic, and it goes into leek, clove, allium, and many other words from many other languages, not to mention quotes from Horace, Byron, Herodotus, Pliny, and Bram Stoker, along with less famous sources; you can see words in Ancient Egyptian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Nepali, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Konkani, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Badaga, Chinese, Thai, and Japanese, to name only languages in non-Latin scripts that my browser will display. He finishes up with Dracula and nosferatu.
The second is on chili; it begins with the earliest OED citation, from 1662, continues through quotes from Columbus, Alvarez Chanca, de Las Casas, Peter Martyr, Bernardino de Sahagún (in Nahuatl and English), and many others, with a side reference to the Three Stooges, and finishes up with a 1604 antedate the OED will presumably incorporate. I won’t even try to hint at the varied riches therein; I’ll just say nostalgically that I remember the ají de gallina I had at a long-vanished Peruvian restaurant on Houston Street in Manhattan as if it were yesterday.
SUICIDE IN THE DICTIONARY.
No, it’s not a microcosmic tragedy, it’s a Language Log post by Geoff Nunberg about how Merriam-Webster dictionaries wound up with a definition of suicide that includes the phrase “especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind,” which is (as Geoff says) plainly wrong. It’s a fascinating account, written with the usual Nunberg clarity and elegance, of how incautious editing and condensation can create blatant error.
A LANGUAGE OF LOOSENED NECKTIES.
I’ve finished Durrell but am still fascinated with Alexandria, so I’m reading Out of Egypt: A Memoir
To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.
All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greek—that is, better than the Athenians—gliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess [his paternal grandmother] herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. “Spanish, on the other hand, réveille l’âme, lifts up the soul.” And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point…
The Saint’s husband [these are the maternal grandparents], a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. … “Spanish, Spanish,” the Aleppid would mutter as he and his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, “always your damned Spanish,” while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour…
Monsieur Jacques… despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind him—as her father had reminded her to remind him—that Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!
For more on the languages of Sephardic Jewry, see here.
BORN TO KVETCH.
I was ransacking Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch
Yiddish started out as German for blasphemers, as a German in which you could deny Christ without getting yourself killed any more often than necessary. From day one, once they started to speak “German” to one another, the Jews were speaking German aftselakhis, German to spite the Germans, a German that Germans wouldn’t understand—the argot of the unredeemed. Don’t think of Yiddish as a union or melding of German and Semitic elements; think of it as a horror movie. Think of Hebrew as an aristocrat with a funny accent, a mysterious old language no longer used in conversation, the linguistic equivalent of the Undead. It needs body and blood to return to spoken life, the body and blood of a living language that can be taken over and put to use in the service of the Jewish brain.
If you like that, you’ll probably like the book. It’s overwritten, sure, but in much the same way the pastrami sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli are too big to eat; they’re tasty and irresistible anyway. The guy’s both scholarly and funny, a rare combination. And he knows some good curses, like a kazarme zol af dir aynfaln ‘a barracks should collapse on you’; as he says, “Having a building of any kind collapse on top of you is never pleasant, but if that building is a barracks, then you’re probably in the army—the last place any Eastern European Jew wanted to find himself.” And how can you not love a book that quotes Mickey Katz? “You’ll love it in the South Pacific,/ Some enchanted evening with Moyshe Pipik.” Can I get an Oy?
BREMER SPRACHBLOG.
Andreas Ammann and Anatol Stefanowitsch of the University of Bremen started the Bremer Sprachblog back in January and Andreas wrote me about it in February, but I didn’t have time to investigate it then and it got lost in the shuffle. Fortunately, I just ran across his e-mail again and am finally able to wholeheartedly recommend the blog to any German speakers interested in linguistic topics: it’s knowledgeable and fun! I particularly enjoyed their April Fools post, which asked readers to decide, without googling, which of these four “facts” is actually a joke (I’ve abbreviated the items here):
1) The Mapuche Indians of Chile have sued Microsoft for releasing a version of its Windows XP operating system in their language without their authorization.
2) Noam Chomsky believes that children come preprogrammed with the rules for all human languages.
3) The language of the Bhutija of Tibet corresponds so well with the categories of formal logic, with a notable absence of ambiguity, that it is of interest to specialists in computer linguistics.
4) The Belgian linguist Johannes Goropius Becanus announced that Flemish is the oldest language in the world, basing his argument on its simplicity (e.g., short words).
Regular readers of LH should be able to handle this one; the answer is in the extended entry. Anyway, a belated thanks for letting me know about the blog, Andreas, and I’m adding it to the blogroll forthwith.
CALL FOR CURSES.
Attention all cacologists: I am currently copyediting and supplying additional text for a book of international curses and insults, and while I have a goodly store myself, I would be glad of help if any of you happen to know such expressions in the following languages: Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, and Norwegian. Extra points if you can give me an idea of the general place of cursing and insults in the relevant cultural/literary context. (Juicy examples from other languages would also be welcome!) Direct offers of assistance to languagehat at gmail dot com, and thanks in advance. (But do you kiss your mother with that mouth?)
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