languagehat.com

As mentioned in the thread that wouldn’t die (where even as we speak le Cimentier Martien is leading a dubious group of revelers in some sort of catered affair), I am reading Proust to my wife in the evenings, and we recently hit the following in our passage through Mme. Swann’s house (also frequently the scene of dubious gatherings):

But at the same time, to these animated dresses the complication of their trimmings, none of which had any practical utility or served any visible purpose, added something detached, pensive, secret, in harmony with the melancholy which Mme Swann still retained, at least in the shadows under her eyes and the drooping arches of her hands. Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains and topaz chestnuts there would be on the dress itself some design carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin buttons which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the jewels, gave the impression—having otherwise no possible justification—of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition, commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or a philopena.

(It says something about Proust that that is the minimum amount of context needed to understand how he was using the last word. The original French is in the extended entry.) We had no idea what philopena might mean; fortunately, I keep the Cassell Concise Dictionary by the bed, so I was able to learn at once that it was “a game in which two people share the double kernel of a nut, the first being entitled to a forfeit, under certain conditions, on the next meeting with the other sharer; the kernel so shared; the forfeit.” The etymology given was “corr[uption] of G[erman] Vielliebchen, dim[inutive] of viellieb (viel, much, lieb dear).” The next day, I checked with the OED and discovered both the sense and the etymology were more complicated:

[Immediate origin unknown. Cf. French philippine (1869 in the phrase Bonjour, Philippine! (see note below), 1898 denoting the game, c1900 denoting an almond or nut with a double kernel), Dutch filippien (1883 or earlier denoting the game; also in sense ‘nut with a double kernel’; now usu. filippine), Danish filippine (1851 as philipine denoting the game, a1883 in sense ‘nut with a double kernel’; also as philippine (1868-73 or earlier)), Swedish filipin (1881 denoting the game, 1920 in sense ‘almond or nut with a double kernel’), and German Vielliebchen (1822 denoting the game, also denoting an almond or nut with a double kernel; also as Filipchen, Philippinchen (now regional; cf. German regional (Rhineland) Filipche, Filipke, Philippche, etc., (Luxemburg) Philippchen)). The relationship between these words is unclear (see note). Later forms in -paene, -pena, -poena app. show folk-etymological alteration after PHILO- comb. form and POENA n. or its etymon classical Latin poena.
   Both the French and German words app. represent folk-etymological alterations, but it is unclear whether the French word was borrowed from the German or vice versa. Luxemburger Wörterbuch (1950) I. 370, s.v. Philippchen, suggests that the German word is ult. < VALENTINE n., via French valentin or its corresponding feminine valentine, which was altered to philippine and thence borrowed into Mosel Franconian dialects of German, and etymological dictionaries of French and German have largely accepted this view. However, there are serious difficulties: the motive for folk-etymological alteration within French is unknown (and without folk-etymological influence, the development of French valentin or valentine into philippine is impossible), and only the sense ‘sweetheart’ or ‘suitor’, not ‘Valentine’s Day present’, appears to be recorded for valentin and valentine in French.
   The traditional greeting in the German game (see sense 1) is Guten Morgen, Vielliebchen!; in the French game it is Bon jour, Philippine!]
    1. A game or custom, originating in Germany, in which a gift or forfeit may be claimed by the first of two people who have shared a nut with two kernels to say ‘philopena’ at their next meeting; an occasion on which this is done; a gift or forfeit claimed in this way. Also: a nut with a double kernel, or a kernel from such a nut.

Now, that’s some hardcore etymology. A rather prim look at the game is displayed in a century-old Sears Roebuck catalog (quoted in David Lewis Cohn’s The Good Old Days: History of American Morals and Manners as Seen through the Sears Roebuck Catalogs), which says:

Another and highly reprehensible way of extorting a gift is to have what is called a philopena with a gentleman. This very silly joke is when a young lady, in cracking almonds, chances to find two kernels in one shell; she shares them with a beau; and whichever calls out ‘philopena’ on their next meeting, is entitled to receive a present from the other; and she is to remind him of it till he remembers to comply. . . .
There is a great want of delicacy and self-respect in philopenaism, and no lady who has a proper sense of her dignity as a lady will engage in anything of the sort.

And Frank R. Stockton’s story “The Philopena” begins by describing a particularly drastic forfeit:

There were once a Prince and a Princess who, when quite young, ate a philopena together. They agreed that the one who, at any hour after sunrise the next day, should accept any thing from the other—the giver at the same time saying “Philopena!”—should be the loser, and that the loser should marry the other.

[Read more…]

From Far Outliers, a news report on the establishment of a Kanak language academy:

NOUMEA, February 27 (Oceania Flash) – New Caledonia’s government has officially appointed late last week its Vice-President, Déwé Gorodey, to the position of Chairman of the newly-created indigenous Kanak language academy.
The cabinet decision follows the inception, late January, by New Caledonia’s legislative assembly, the Congress, of the French territory’s first indigenous Kanak languages Academy.
The main aim of the Kanak languages Academy is to preserve New Caledonia’s rich cultural indigenous heritage of up to 40 indigenous known languages and dialects…

It’s nice to see such recognition for indigenous languages, though I hope the Academy doesn’t emulate the French version.

A couple of successive posts at the always worthwhile Jabal al-Lughat [‘mountain of languages’] make for an interesting contrast. Arabic threatened in Qatar? says “an educationalist is warning that Arabic is threatened in Qatar”:

Qatari children’s exposure to English often begins soon after birth, with the hiring of a nanny who is unlikely to speak much if any Arabic, and certain not to speak the Gulf dialect… It continues at school, where about two-thirds of their fellow students are non-Qatari…; English is a mandatory subject from first grade up, and the many American universities opening campuses in Qatar are commonly English-medium (for instance, CMU.) In short, it’s easy to lead a fairly full life in Qatar with little Arabic, and easy to envision Qatari kids of this generation acquiring English natively.

However, apart from other issues like not giving any statistics or details, the article suffers from the common conflation of classical and colloquial Arabic. “In addition, parents would rather talk to their children in the dialect of their country of origin rather than in classical Arabic, a factor which is also contributing to a general decline in the understanding of the classical language” – as if parents have ever talked to their children in classical Arabic for the past millennium, or as if it were desirable that the children should grow up not speaking their own dialects!

Then Destroying Harsusi quotes a call from Al Watan to eradicate “one of the more endangered South Arabian languages,” Harsusi, in favor of “correct Arabic.”

Scott Esposito, a writer and editor, runs a fine online journal called The Quarterly Conversation. There are a lot of internet sites that discuss books, but I don’t know of any that has such consistently interesting and readable essays. Yes, readable, no matter how long they are (and some of them are quite long); Esposito is clearly not of the school that believes intelligible discourse is a capitalist/colonialist plot and must be subverted out the wazoo to achieve ideological respectability. On the front page at the moment are links to, among other things, an interview with Zak Smith, the guy who made a pen-and-ink drawing for every page of Gravity’s Rainbow; an essay by Elizabeth Wadell on rereading Catch-22; and a review by Scott Bryan Wilson of Amulet, the translation of a novel by Roberto Bolaño, whom I had never heard of but now want to read:

Bolaño’s voice is more distinct here, more undeniably and specifically Bolaño. Whether this is due to my having read four of his books in a short period of time, and finally “hearing” Bolaño’s voice, or because translator Chris Andrews is becoming more and more comfortable with Bolaño’s prose (and hearing the author’s voice in a different way), or because it’s just a wonderful book I can’t say. But, as with any great work of literature, Amulet continues to haunt, puzzle, and nag at me.

Indeed, much of the material on the site makes me want to go read something, which is what such a journal should aim for (rather than showing off the critical chops of the reviewers: “I’ve read Derrida and now I’m going to make you suffer for it”). I’m not sure what the doubled letters in the “Suggested Reads” list are about (Boldttyype, BookkFForum, TThhe Guardian Book Review, The Neeww York Review of Books, The NNew Yorker, The Raaiin Taxi Review of Books…), but what the hell, they’ve earned their eccentricities. A tip o’ the hat, as so often, to wood s lot.

1) From xkcd (“The blag of the webcomic”), Washington’s Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech:

I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his second term — is important… Having never read the whole thing, I thought it would be interesting to go through and try to transcribe it into some sort of casual modern speech. I wouldn’t try to recreate the prose and would probably miss out on subtleties and shades of meaning (and no doubt occasionally miss the point completely), but at least I’d get the idea of what he was talking about.

It’s perhaps a little more casual than it needed to be (“Sup” is not a promising beginning), but on the whole it’s a good read, and let’s face it, the original can be a slog. (Via Mark Liberman’s Language Log post.)

2) The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) has put out the CLIWOC multilingual meteorological dictionary, An English-Spanish-Dutch-French dictionary of wind force terms used by mariners from 1750-1850 (abstract; here‘s the pdf file of the whole book):

This dictionary is the first attempt to express the wealth of archaic logbook wind force terms in a form that is comprehensible to the modern-day reader. Oliver and Kington (1970) and Lamb (1982) have drawn attention to the importance of logbooks in climatic studies, and Lamb (1991) offered a conversion scale for early eighteenth century English wind force terms, but no studies have thus far pursued the matter to any greater depth. This text attempts to make good this deficiency, and is derived from the research undertaken by the CLIWOC project1 in which British, Dutch, French and Spanish naval and merchant logbooks from the period 1750 to 1850 were used to derive a global database of climatic information.

It’s one of those insanely specific projects that warms my heart even if I’ll never have any actual use for it, and I love the first entry in the English section: “baffling airs” (which “refers to winds of changeable direction”). (Thanks, Charles!)

3. Nizo’s Blog is “The musings of a Palestinian living in Montréal” who writes entries in English, Arabic, French, German, and Hebrew. I’m awed; I can read a number of languages, but I’d never dare blog in anything but English. I particularly call your attention to his entry “Naughty Grandma Expressions,” which describes how he infuriated his grandmother by inadvertently sitting on “un-baked manakeesh, pizza-like pastries topped with olive oil, zaatar, cheese, peppers,” eliciting an angry “koom! koss immak!” [Get up! your mother’s vagina!], and ends with a list of the “colorful and uncouth” idioms he’s heard from his grandparents over the years, such as:

“As (small as) a scorpion’s vagina” Ad Koss el Akrabeh
Used when complaining about a tight space such as a small room.
Illustration: “Get out of my kitchen; can’t you see it’s as small as a scorpion’s vagina?”

(Thanks, Kobi!)

“The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.” From the About page:

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers…

All of the linguistic analyses of the accents are available for public scrutiny. We welcome comments on the accuracy of our transcriptions and analyses.

They include “a phonetic transcription of the sample, a set of the speaker’s phonological generalizations, a link to a map showing the speaker’s place of birth, and a link to the Ethnologue language database,” as well as a set of native language phonetic inventories. The archive is a project of the Program in Linguistics, the Technology across the Curriculum Program, and the Center for History and New Media of George Mason University. (Thanks for the heads-up, Bonnie!)

Addendum. KanTalk, a “space to practice spoken English or any other languages,” has a collection of recordings (currently 248) of the “Please call Stella” paragraph read by people from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds; you can record your own version if you like.

The Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative is located in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University; it’s a treasure trove of texts, recordings, and who knows what all. The first dip I took into it got me an article by H.B. Paksoy on “Literature in Central Asia”; the main archives include 73 volumes of oral narratives, and there’s a music section as well. I look forward to exploring it further. (Via wood s lot.)

My wife and I often do crossword puzzles in the evening, and recently we ran across the clue “chuddar.” We thought it might be a misprint, but I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary (which happened to be handiest), and there it was:

chuddar (chŭd’ər) 1. A chador. 2. A cotton shawl traditionally worn in India by men and women. [Urdu chaddar, cloth, from Sanskrit chattram, screen, parasol, from chadati, he covers, protects.]

There are several problems here. To dispose of the minor ones: it seems arbitrary to call chaddar “Urdu” when it is common Hindustani (the OED, equally arbitrarily, calls it “Hindi”), and there is no Sanskrit verb “chadati” except in dictionaries—the present tense of the root chad- ‘cover’ is chādayati. With that out of the way, my main concern is the relations between (or, if you prefer, among) this Hindi/Urdu word, the alleged Sanskrit etymon, and the Persian word چادر chādor ‘chador.’ (Another complicating factor is that Steingass’s Persian-English Dictionary has an entry chaddar ‘A sheet; a table-cloth; a veil’ which I assume is borrowed from Urdu—it is not in any of my Persian dictionaries—and Platt’s Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English has ćādar ‘A sheet; a table-cloth; a covering; [etc.],’ but that is marked as a borrowing from Persian.)

It seems extremely unlikely that chādor and chaddar are unrelated, but it also seems unlikely that one is directly derived from the other, or that the Persian word is from Sanskrit. The Platts entry for ćaddar marks it with “H” for Hindi but adds “(P[ersian] ćādar, ćadar; prob. akin to S[anskrit] छद्),” which seems to hedge all bets, and the Steingass entry for chādar (sic; modern dictionaries give chādor) gives no indication that it is anything but native Persian. The OED’s etymology for chuddar says simply “Hindi chadar a square piece of cloth,” with no attempt at deriving the Hindi word from Sanskrit or anything else. Vasmer’s entry for the Russian word чадра [chadra] ‘veil’ says it’s borrowed from Turkic and suggests that we compare шатер [shatyor] ‘tent,’ which he says is an ancient borrowing from Turkic, adding “Первоисточником является перс. čаtr ‘заслон, палатка’, др.-инд. chattram ‘заслон’ [the original source is Pers. čаtr ‘screen, tent’, Skt. chattram ‘screen’],” muddying the waters even further. If anybody has any information that would help in clearing up this etymological morass, please share it.

Update. See this 2012 post for more on the topic.

Update (Feb. 2025). See now ktschwarz’s February 24, 2025, comment.

Yesterday’s post was on the jokey side, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it elicited a lot of “pet peeve” comments; people do love to complain about language use. As Mark Liberman points out in that Language Log post I just linked, “millions of people are intensely interested in speech and language, but have no outlet for their interest except for prescriptivist complaints, and no model for linguistic analysis other than the display of invented ‘rules’ by popular language mavens.” I’m going to get more serious for a moment, and explain what I think is wrong with those complaints, and why I’m trying to get past my own versions of them to the extent I can.

It seems to me there are two basic reasons for the loud griping against misspelling, “bad grammar,” and the like. One is that the gripers have expended a great deal of time and effort in learning the “rules,” and they are (not unreasonably) proud of having done so; furthermore, such mastery is of considerable value in getting ahead in the world—and, of course, to admit that the “rules” frequently are unnecessary or wrong would be to devalue their own education. The pride is natural and, up to a point, harmless; the problem comes when it spills over into a contempt for those who have not mastered the rules, which brings us to the second, less attractive, reason: the need to feel superior, to set oneself apart from the “lesser breeds without the Law.” I can be wrily amused when people simply gripe about the evils of misused apostrophes, but I can’t take it lightly when they go on to say (as they frequently do) “I would never date/befriend/hire anyone who said/wrote [insert pet peeve here].” This is blatant elitism, exactly parallel to Victorians who sniffed “not our sort, dear” of anyone who wore the wrong sort of coat to dinner or spoke with too much enthusiasm or the hint of an accent. And of course it carries with it the perpetual fear of going wrong oneself; when, as so frequently happens, someone commits a faux pas in the very act of mocking another’s “error” and has it pointed out to them, the facade of superiority collapses and the mocker becomes abjectly apologetic—not for mocking, of course, but for having failed to clear the high bar of utter perfection of speech and writing.

The claim, of course, is that it is not simple elitism at work, that “bad grammar” reveals incoherent thought, impedes communication, and degrades the language. All of this is nonsense. I have never had the slightest problem understanding someone who split infinitives, used “hopefully” as a sentence modifier, or perpetrated any of the million other alleged crimes against English that fill the books (and the wallets) of the language mavens, and I don’t believe the gripers have either. When I have had problems understanding pieces of writing, and have had to go back and reread to figure out what is being said, it’s because the writers have expressed themselves badly in standard English. There is such a thing as bad writing, but it has nothing to do with split infinitives. And there is such a thing as a grammatical mistake, but such mistakes are made by children or foreigners who have not fully mastered the language. “That man bad” is bad (Standard) English; “to boldly go” is not only good English, it’s good writing (as proved by the fact that the Star Trek motto is instantly memorized by everyone who hears it).

As for degrading the language, it should suffice to reflect on the fact that a universally acknowledged high point in the written history of English was the period of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, at which time there was no such thing as spelling and grammar (in the maven sense). People slung words around as the spirit moved them, inventing them, jamming them together in unheard-of ways, verbing nouns and nouning verbs with enthusiasm, and generally wreaking havoc. But since there were as yet no mavens to tell them they couldn’t do that, they simply went on creating masterpieces. If anything, the list of rules and infractions that began growing in the 18th century has worked to stifle creativity, and the best writers have always been willing to break the rules. Of course, when you point out in grammar school that Shakespeare or Twain or whoever violated some commandment, you’re told that they’re allowed to do what they want because they’re great. You, on the other hand, are just a foot soldier on the muddy battlefield of language and had better keep your head down and do as you’re told. Fie, I say! Speak as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and damn the cramp rays!

I have more than once had occasion to point out that being a descriptivist does not exempt me from having feelings about language, and knowing that language inevitably changes does not keep me from resenting some of those changes. I’m human, all too human. But the absurdity of repeatedly feeling the same outrage at usages that are becoming more and more prevalent, the embarrassment of knowing myself to be repeating the idiocies of those who in days gone by objected to the house is being built (see this entry from the late lamented Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey) or thought the word decimate should be restricted to meaning ‘reduce by a tenth,’ have led me to make a conscious effort to conquer my aversion to some of these developments, just as I have conquered my aversion to certain foods (olives, say, or goat cheese). Now, there are some that I will never accept, any more than I will ever enjoy seafood; “may have” for “might have” is one of these. But I hope to make progress with others, and in the last couple of days I have heard examples of two mistakes innovations that have annoyed me all my life but that I think I can convince myself to get used to (though I have no intention of using them myself). One is the pronunciation of processes with the final syllable -eez, as though it were the plural of a Latin noun processis (on the model of analysis, analyses). Ahistorical? Sure, but so is half of English. It’s just good old reanalysis at work, and I have no problem with that in theory, so it’s time to practice what I preach. The other is to no end used for the traditional phrase no end ‘exceedingly’ (see the last section of the Merriam-Webster entry for end). I will allow myself a grim smile when I see someone using it in the very act of complaining about the errors of others (as Jeff Martin here: “Misspellings bug me to no end”), but otherwise I will tell myself “It’s only language change at work… it’s only language change….”