languagehat.com

I’m sure many of you have wondered, as I have, what the “correct” pronunciation of Pinochet’s family name is. Well, Eric Bakovic has not only wondered, he’s thoroughly researched it, and this post on Phonoloblog (a follow-up to his earlier Language Log post) has everything you will ever need to know on the subject. Short answer: you can pretty much say it however you like and be correct (in the sense that there are Chileans who say it like that). There are northern dialects in Chile where ch is realized as [š], but more important is the social element; Bakovic quotes a Slate Explainer article by Daniel Engber as follows:

The confusion starts with the ch sound, which can serve as a marker of social class in Chilean Spanish. In educated speech, the Spanish ch is similar to the English pronunciation, as in the word chess. But popular dialect turns the ch into something more like sh. A high-class Chilean would probably pronounce the country’s name as “chee-lay,” while someone with less status might say “shee-lay.” Likewise, the same two people might describe the ex-dictator as “pee-no-chay” and “pee-no-shay.” …

It gets more complicated with the final t. As a general rule, the whole syllable—”chet”—should be spoken aloud. But in casual conversation, Chileans tend to drop the final sound. Someone who pronounced Pinochet as “pee-no-chet” would be correct, but he’d also be speaking in a formal (and perhaps a bit uppity) tone. On the other hand, some Chileans are inclined to use the French pronunciation of Pinochet, since the name is of French Basque origin. In that case, they’d drop the t and go back to “pee-no-shay” or “pee-no-chay.”

Finally, there are those who forgo the other options in favor of the somewhat-derogatory nickname “Pinocho.” When graffiti artists scrawl Pinochet’s name, they sometimes render it as “Pin” alongside the number eight, or “ocho” in Spanish. Thus, “Pinocho.”

Chileans point out that however you say the name, you’re unlikely to be corrected. … It wouldn’t be awkward for two people to have a long discussion about the ex-dictator using two different pronunciations.

How did Pinochet himself say it? Three different sources told the Explainer they knew or remembered how the general or his family pronounced the name. And they gave three conflicting answers. You can hear Pinochet utter his own name two seconds into this video clip from 1980—it sounds a lot like “pee-no-chay.” If you’ve come across another audio or video clip in which Pinochet or a member of his family pronounces the name, please send it to the Explainer.

Bakovic points out that it’s not actually all that clear how he’s saying it in that video because the sound quality is so poor, and also that “Pinochet’s Wikipedia entry says his father was a ‘descendant of Breton immigrants who arrived in Chile during the 18th century’, and Brittany’s quite a way from the Basque country.” Final -t is pronounced in Breton, for what that’s worth, but I’d love to get the actual etymology of the name if anyone knows it.

Bakovich goes on to provide much more information about South American dialects (in particular, my beloved porteño); I recommend the whole post to your attention.

Last year I had a post about the complex system of Malay pronouns; now Jordan F. MacVay of MacVaysia has posted an extensive if not exhaustive list sent him by Nizar Ismail. Here’s the (comparatively short) list of 1st person plural pronouns, just to whet your appetite:

Kami – “we”, plural of “I”, listener excluded.
Kita – “we”, “you + I”, “you all + I”, listener(s) included.
Kema – “kami/kita”, in Perak.
Sēpa – “kami”, in Kedah/Penang.
Iboq – “kami” in Semang (an aborigine tribe in Pahang/Terengganu).
Manira – classical “kami/kita”, probably from Sanskrit.
Kita orang or simply kitorang – informal, broken, very common, daily speech. Not used in Indonesia/Brunei.

The list of 2nd person pronouns is truly mind-boggling; the most common in Malaysia is awak, but Nizar says:

Jordan was right about “awak” being a nasty choice when talking to someone older. It’s most suitable for someone in the same level, husband and wife, friends that are not so close. To the children, you can use “kamu” instead. You won’t have much problem like this in Indonesia, but in Malaysia, I suppose you can try using “pakcik” (uncle) and “makcik” (aunty) when talking to someone old enough to be your parents, or just “abang” or “akak” to someone who is old but not old enough to be your parents. Confused? Heck, me too!

The comments are full of additional information, unfortunately much of it in Malay. But the post is quite enough to try to assimilate. Thanks for posting it and letting me know, Jordan!

Christopher Culver at Безѹмниѥ has a post on a “theory” so terminally silly you’d think it would have to be the invention of a satirist, but apparently it’s real (in the sense that people actually believe it). Chris begins by quoting Brent Brendemoen on “the so-called Güneş Dil Teorisi, the ‘Sun-language Theory’”:

According to this theory of language development, Turkish was the mother of all languages. Thus it was no longer necessary to search for pure Turkish words to replace Arabic and Persian ones, since the ultimate origin of these words and languages was Turkish anyhow.

He goes on to quote Geoffrey L. Lewis in the first issue of Turkic Languages:

The theme was that man first realized his own identity when he conceived the idea of establishing what the external objections surrounding him were. Language first consisted of gestures, to which some significant sounds were then added. Kvergić saw evidence for his view in the Turkish pronouns. M indicates oneself, as in men the ancient form of ben ‘I’, and elim ‘my hand’….

[The theory] saw the beginning of language as the moment when primitive man looked up at the sun and “Aaa!”

That vocable, ağ, was the “first-degree radical of the Turkish language”. It originally meant sun, then sunlight, warmth, fire, height, bigness, power, god, master, motion, time, distance, life, colour, water, earth, voice. As man’s vocal mechanisms developed, other vowels and consonants became available, each with its own shade of meaning. Because the primeval exclamation was shouted, and it is obviously easier to begin a shout with a vowel than with a consonant, any word now beginning with a consonant originally began with a vowel, since abraded. The words yağmur ‘rain’, çamur ‘mud’, and hamur ‘dough’, for example, are compounded of ağmur ‘flowing water’, preceded by ay ‘high’, aç ‘earth’ and ah ‘food’ respectively. (The reader is urged not to waste time searching the dictionary for the last four words.)

… [The reformer] Dilmen began the next day with a lengthy outline of the theory, proving, among other things, the identity of English god, German Gott and Turkish kut ‘luck’. The proof is simple enough: Gott is oğ + ot, god is oğ + od, kut is uk + ut. He avoids explaining the second t of Gott by spelling it with only one t.

I can understand how people could have believed this sort of thing in the 18th century, but two centuries later you’d think even language reformers would have a little more sophistication.

Those of us who make a living correcting other people’s writing have long been familiar with the standard proofreader’s marks; now Eve Corbel has come up with some useful additions. The world has long needed a symbol for “remove permanently from your lexicon.” (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)

Update (2017). The Geist link no longer works, but the comic is now available here. Internet, thy name is linkrot! [Jan. 2025: substituted archived link for the Geist one in the post.]

Last year I did a short post about the allusive Darmok language used on an episode of Star Trek. I should have waited, because the Tensor has done a thorough analysis that will leave you convinced the idea wasn’t even half baked. His conclusion:

It’s not that a language made up entirely out of allusions is unworthy of fictional exploration. Raphael Carter suggests Tamarese is similar to the language of the Ascians in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and I wonder if either of these might have been inspired by the four-character idioms that famously give students of Chinese so much trouble. But stories about such a language-of-allusions just don’t fit into the Star Trek universe because it can’t be squared with the Universal Translator.

See his post for details, which you will enjoy if you (like the Tensor and myself) are an aficionado of both sf and language—speaking of which, see this post at The Millions if you’re interested in my books-of-the-year recommendations, one of which is Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. (Note to self: must read Gene Wolfe’s novels.)

From VeryRussianTochkaNet, a funny account (with pictures) of an AI glitch that had a young man reading his own obituary:

Yandex, the largest Russian search engine, has an AI script that automatically creates media profiles of politicians and other prominent people by analysing news stories which mention them. It’s a great idea, I haven’t heard of something like that existing elsewhere. However, it’s still in beta, and a few days ago, the AI made a spectacular mistake when it listed the youth political activist Ilya Yashin as having committed suicide. Yashin himself was the first to discover that, according to his Yandex media profile, he had died on November 23…
Underneath the date of his “death”, there’s a snippet of a news story that says he and Maria Gaidar hanged themselves under a bridge in Moscow… the mistake wouldn’t have occurred if the reported hadn’t tried to be funny. Puns and twists of meaning in headings and first paragraphs are a common thing in Russian journalism; it often makes news more interesting to read, though it gets annoying when overdone. Saying they hanged themselves, povesilis’, is whimsical, stretching the Russian language for the sake of effect. You can’t explain that to an AI script, of course.

What Yashin and Gaidar were hanging was actually a banner attacking Putin; you can read about it here. (N.b.: puns in headlines are not just a Russian thing.)

My wife took this the way it was intended, so I guess it’s not as bad as I first thought, but when I saw the NY Times headline:
Some Made Men Struggle to Make Ends Meet
I took made as a transitive verb and read it as “Some [people] made [=forced] men struggle to make ends meet”; I assumed it was about exploitative bosses or the like. Turns out it’s about “made men,” i.e. mobsters, having economic problems. Bad headline writer! No biscuit!

I was in the process of disentangling the “Nikolai Nekrasov” entry in the index for Harrison Salisbury’s excellent history of Russia’s revolutions from 1905 to 1917, Black Night, White Snow—understandably but annoyingly, Nikolai (Alekseevich) Nekrasov the 19th-century poet and publisher and Nikolai (Vissarionovich) Nekrasov the 20th-century politician and intriguer were lumped in together (as they are in other history books; revolutionaries had a taste for N.A.’s poetry)—when I discovered there was yet a third Nikolai Nekrasov with a Wikipedia entry, Nikolai Vladimirovich Nekrasov (1900-1938), “a Russian Esperanto writer, translator, and critic.” After learning Esperanto as a teenager, he “was president of the Tutrusia Ligo de junaj esperantistoj (All-Russia League of Young Esperantists) and editor of Juna Mondo (Young world), which he typeset himself in the print room… He was especially concerned with the history and criticism of Esperanto literature… In the early 1930s he actively participated in the compilation and preparation of material on literature for the Enciklopedio de Esperanto. He also published many of Zamenhof’s letters.” Then the hammer came down:

Nekrasov was arrested in 1938, and accused of being “an organizer and leader of a fascist, espionage, terrorist organization of Esperantists”. For this crime he was shot to death on October 4, 1938. His archive and library were obliterated; presumably many of his unpublished works and translations thus perished.

I’m sure you’ll be as happy as I was to learn that he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957. (His “Soneto Pri Esperanto” is online, if you want a sample of his work.)

A very nice visual joke using Chinese characters—don’t worry, you don’t have to know Chinese, everything is explained by John of Sinosplice. (Thanks, Ravin’ Dave!)

Some tidbits from recent Language Log posts I can’t resist sharing:
1) In Ben Zimmer’s post on Apocalypto, he points out that Michael Phillips, in his Chicago Tribune review of the new Mel Gibson movie, says “Gibson and company chose to translate the Greek word ‘apocalypto’ as ‘new beginning,’ which has raised linguistic hackles, since the word is a verb meaning ‘uncover’ or reveal,'” and speculates that Phillips took that from my post about the movie, since it’s the second hit on a Google search. My raised hackles are quivering with pride! (Also, he reports that linguist John Lawler saw the movie last week with the University of Michigan Linguistics Club and suggests: “Read the Popol Vuh and skip the movie.”)
2) Geoff Pullum mentions the little-known fact that some of the royalties from the song “Happy Birthday To You” go to the Linguistic Society of America! I will henceforth sing it with even more gusto.
3) John McWhorter discusses the increasingly sophisticated use of foreign languages in American popular culture; whereas these days they’re generally treated with some degree of plausibility, in the Bad Old Days… well, I’ll let John tell it: in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Foreign Correspondent, “well-travelled peace activist Laraine Day meets a Latvian ambassador at a reception. For one, the ambassador speaks neither English, French, nor German — I see. But then, never fear — Day’s character turns out to know ‘enough Latvian to get by’! For the record, the character is not depicted as having had any particular reason to get her feet wet in Latvian. It’s apparently just that, well, you know — she’s travelled a lot over there, and so she just knows a little of all of ‘those languages,’ even Latvian, and one imagines, Occitan, Sorbian and Friulian when they come in handy.” (Later in the movie, a supposedly local girl speaking Dutch to policemen in Amsterdam “is plainly an American girl reciting the sentences phonetically, with an accent that is pure Cleveland.”)