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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 His archive and library were obliterated; presumably many of his unpublished works and translations thus perished.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.”)

In the course of my editing this afternoon I hit the word, or rather non-word, incalcitrant. I thought perhaps it was some arcane medical term, but a little googling convinced me it was simply an error for recalcitrant; furthermore, there was an entire webpage about it (created by Jeffrey K. Parrott, Ph.D. candidate in linguistics, member of Punks in Science and, if that’s actually his picture, a fellow hat-wearer [Update Feb. 2014: Punks in Science is now here but hasn’t been updated since 2009]):

Summarizing, naïve Modern English speakers encounter the opaque recalcitrant, with the meaning ‘stubborn, etc.’ They semantically reanalyze -calcitrant as meaning something like ‘cooperative, etc.’ and replace the semantically unrelated prefix re- with the semantically relevant negating prefix in-. This yields the fully transparent new word incalcitrant, meaning ‘stubborn, etc.,’ literally ‘not cooperative, etc.’ The reanalyzed derivation of incalcitrant seems clear enough, and it should dispel any notion that English speakers are stupid or ignorant. The successful reanalysis of recalcitrant requires sophisticated (unconscious!) knowledge of morpho-lexical semantics, morphological constituency, morphotactics, and morphophonology (this latter because English speakers never mistakenly use the wrong variant of in-, e.g. *ilcalcitrant, *ircalcitrant, *imcalcitrant).

One question remains: why is the less productive prefix in- used instead of the fully productive prefix un-? That is, why don’t we ever see *uncalcitrant (a Google search on this non-word brought back one single result, compared with 193 results for incalcitrant)? The answer is simple, but has a fascinating implication. As noted above, the prefix in- attaches to Latinate vocabulary. Because -calcitrant is a Latin root, it will be negated with ­in- and not un-. But that means that naïve Modern English speakers have unconscious knowledge about the Latinate/non-Latinate distinction in their vocabulary items! They retain this knowledge in spite of the fact that the Latin meaning of ­­-calcitrant is not only lost, but changed in the reanalysis. So speakers of Modern English are much smarter than they are portrayed by prescriptivists and their ilk. The English language is in no danger of decay, whatever that would mean.

Elsewhere on the morphological-analysis front, Erin O’Connor has a post about the English reanalysis of the plural tamales as tamale + -s, creating a new singular tamale to replace Spanish tamal; she compares “those crazy Latin and Greek words like stadium/stadia and octopus/octopodes, which may have English pluralization rules.” As I said in her comment thread:

I used to have the same reaction to “tamale,” but then I relaxed and accepted that it’s the English singular, while tamal is the Spanish singular, and there’s no more point trying to get English speakers to use it than there is trying to get them to say Ciudad de México instead of Mexico City. (Also, note that even the Greeks and Romans often got the declined forms of octopus and other –pous words wrong according to Justin the Mad Latinist.)

And now for something completely different: wobsite! (Thanks to Songdog for the link to Randall Munroe’s xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”)

One of my favorite threads from 2006 was this one, about (among other things) the history of the word Yoruba. Unfortunately, I had to close it, like so many old threads [insert rant against spammers], so a reader named Hugh was unable to add a comment and instead e-mailed me. With his permission, I am reproducing portions of his e-mail here:

In my research, I also came across the following explanation…

“The word ‘Yoruba’ metamorphosed from a derogatory phrase the Igbos had used for the Oyo people. Before Oduduwa and his Obas put the whole Southwest to rout, the Oyos, who thought they were enjoying Oduduwa’s civilisation, would call the Igbos ‘bush people.’ The Igbos, to pay them back their insult, would call them ‘Oyo Oru Oba’ (Oyo, slaves of the Oba). That is how the name Yoruba came about”.

The point of my online research was to find an appropriate equivalent to the American prejorative “Uncle Tom” for a specific application… The phrase “Uncle Tom” exists as a pejorative, intended to describe a certain kind of black man deemed subservient to whites for which the term “ebonekhui” in the Edo language will work.
But another phrase needs to be identified or invented, to describe the black man who is subservient to Arabs and to Muslims. For the long history of Arab Muslim enslavement of black Africans… Perhaps someone knows that such a word or phrase already exists, most likely in Swahili, but possibly in one of the Kwa languages of West Africa, or in Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa. Anyone out there have suggestions for the Muslim equivalent of “Uncle Tom”?

So: can anybody help Hugh out? (No political rants, please!)

I’ve been very impressed by YouTube’s ability to provide musical gems from the past (as in y2karl’s amazing MetaFilter posts: blues (plus Bob Wills, etc.), “cult music” (Jonathan Richmond, Captain Beefheart, Burning Spear, et al), gospel, rockabilly), but Avva has given the most convincing demonstration of its value for linguistics I’ve seen. You can read all the descriptions of the famous Bulgarian head gestures for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ you like, but nothing beats the brief (less than 20 seconds) clip provided here for making it clear exactly how they work. I had assumed the negative nod was like the Greek one, a backward tilt of the head, but no, it’s exactly like our nod for ‘yes.’ Confusing! (There seems to be some doubt, judging by his comment thread, as to how widespread this usage still is; it may be that young/urban/Westernized Bulgarians use the traditional Western gestures.)

OK, I’m going to try not to be too hard-nosed about this, because it’s about babies and mothers, and why be mean? But… well, here’s the story (reported by the New Zealand Herald):

Researcher discovers universal baby language

A newly discovered baby language is helping infants sleep through the night and mothers bond with their babies.
After eight years of research, Australian mother Priscilla Dunstan says she has discovered a universal baby language, comprised of five distinct sounds.
Dunstan says babies produce the different sounds depending on their needs. ‘Neh’ means the child is hungry, while ‘owh’ indicates he or she is tired.
Other sounds include ‘eh’, ‘eairh’ and ‘heh’, which mean the infant needs burping, has wind or is uncomfortable….
Dunstan, who has always had a sharp listening skills, identified the five key sounds after spending hours listening to her own son and other infants.

Well, all I can say is, I’ve achieved a new understanding of what “researcher” can mean. Also: eh, eairh, heh. (Thanks for the link, Simon!)

A long Wikipedia article on West Country dialects (“any of several English dialects or accents used by much of the indigenous population of … Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Bristol, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire”) has some very interesting tidbits, like this:

In the Bristol area, a terminal “a” (realised as [aw], c.f. Albert as “Awbert”, cinema as “cinemaw”) is often perceived to be followed by an intrusive “l”. Hence the old joke about the three Bristolian sisters Evil, Idle and Normal — i.e., Eva, Ida, and Norma. Also the name “Bristol” itself (originally Bridgestowe, variously spelt).

And this:

The West Country accent is probably most identified in American English as “pirate speech” — cartoon-like “Ooh arr, me ‘earties! Sploice the mainbrace!” talk is very similar. This may be a result of the strong seafaring and fisherman tradition of the West Country, both legal and outlaw. Edward Teach (Blackbeard) was a native of Bristol, and privateer and English hero Sir Francis Drake hailed from Tavistock in Devon. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance may also have added to the association. It has also been suggested that Westcountryman Robert Newton’s performance 1950 Disney film Treasure Island may have influenced people’s preconceptions of what accent a pirate “should” have.

Unfortunately, as the Masters of Wiki say in a box at the top of the page, “This does not cite its references or sources,” and I imagine it is not devoid of misstatements; if anybody has corrections to make, please do so (and you can, of course, edit the Wikipedia article yourself).
Thanks for the link, Betsy!

I’m a little late in informing you, but the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society (“Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible — anything that Father Kircher might find cool if he were alive today”) has been having a Language Week, featuring the Chromatographic Writing of the Edo, Victor the Conversational (and Visionary) Budgie, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Alternate Alphabets (check out Betamaze, “which turns every text into a unique maze”), and Speaking Backwards: A Case Study. The last reports on an article of the same title, originally printed in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Volume 67, Issue S1 [1980], p. S94):

A 31-year-old male philosophy professor (Prof. B) who can speak backwards fluently, at a normal rate, was studied. To define Prof. B’s ability, recordings, spectrograms, and phonetic transcriptions were obtained. In an impromptu backwards monologue and in passages, sentences, and isolated words translated into backwards speech from written and spoken input sources in real time, Prof. B maintained the original word order but reversed the order of phonemes within each word. These reversals were not always phonetically complete, e.g., diphthongs were not reversed. Forward intonation was preserved. Although reversals were primarily phonologically based (e.g., silent consonants were rarely pronounced), there was a partial reliance on orthography even with spoken input (e.g., “xerox” was reversed as [ksɔriks], not [skariz])…

They link to an amazing YouTube video of Ari Gorman, “a contemporary master of the esoteric art of backwards speaking,” with subtitles (and played backwards afterward so you can see he’s not cheating). Thanks to John Emerson for the tip!

You all know about Odysseus and the winnowing-fan, right? He comes home, and kills half the people on Ithaka, and finally gets to go to bed with his initially suspicious wife, and he tells her all about his travails in stupefying detail, including how Poseidon said… well, I’ll let Jamie Rieger retell it in his inimitable way:

He said I have to go build him an altar in some foreign land where they’re never seen the sea. And the way I know that is, I walk around with an oar on my shoulder until people stop saying “Nice oar, dumbass!” and start saying “Where are you going with that oddly shaped winnowing fan?” And then I make an altar right then and there. And then I live happily ever after. Not too shabby, eh?

Well, Conrad Roth of Varieties of Unreligious Experience, after an introductory riff, has posted a discussion of the history and attributes of the winnowing fan (which, it turns out, comes in two varieties, the liknon or basket-fan and the ptuon or shovel-fan), with philology and pictures of Francis Darwin’s gardener and a mediaeval capital and citations of Jane Harrison and the Bible and references to a useless art object and the extremely useful pizza peel, all served up with his usual impeccable style and engaging rhetoric. Go, learn, enjoy.