languagehat.com

As part of my ambitious attempt to understand what happened in Russia in the years before 1917, I’m reading The Years by Vasily V. Shulgin, the memoirs of an aged reactionary looking back on his Duma days from a distance of half a century. I thoroughly disapprove of his principles, but he’s a charming writer and was probably a lot of fun to hang out with. In the chapter “War,” he describes how he heard about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand on June 15(28), 1914; he was interrupted by a telephone call from the newspaper he edited while he was in the middle of a drinking bout at a Kiev cabaret. He had just been having the following interaction with one of the gypsy singers:

Then the gypsy with the high cheekbones, who was awfully nice, a stranger, but already a close friend, would smile broadly and repeat something over and over in the gypsy language.
Ah, in the gypsy language? I’m no worse than she. And I answered her in the gypsy language with the only phrase I knew: “Tu nadzhinəs someə takə norakirava. A mə takə ser-so səu mussel.”
The first words mean: “You, dear friend, do not understand anything.”
The rest is in such an old dialect that many gypsies nowadays do not understand it. And it is better that the reader not understand it. But Ducia, the gypsy with the high cheekbones, understood it, and Niura also. And they, and the others after them, began to carry on so, that I decided I must put an end to it….

I, dear friends, do not understand anything. And you can imagine my frustration. I know it’s a long shot, between the “old dialect” and the octogenarian memory, but can anyone decipher those tantalizing sentences, with their oddly exact-looking schwas?

A correspondent sent me a Prospect Magazine story by Stephen Oppenheimer about the ethnic origins of modern Britons. Now, I’m very suspicious of attempts to apply biology to linguistics, and I’ve bashed Oppenheimer before, but what the hell, I’ll toss an excerpt up and see if anyone has anything useful to add:

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”
The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.
Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.
A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

Oh, and he thinks Brits are really Basques: “But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots.”

Thanks for the link, Paul!

Just dropping by for a quick visit—I’ve managed to get myself stuck with too much work and too little time—but I wanted to call attention to Mark Liberman’s exegesis of the phrase “new wine in old bottles” (and its confusing newer variant “old wine in new bottles”). Just keep the word “goatskins” in mind and your confusion should be minimized.
Also, if you have any interest in science fiction, don’t miss the Tensor’s discussion of Robert Sheckley’s “Shall We Have a Little Talk?”—an early classic of linguistic sf, and funny as hell.

A charming essay by Jay Parini discusses a vicarious pleasure known to many bibliophiles:

In restaurants I always want to eat whatever someone else at the table has ordered, even if it’s not something I would normally consume. Along similar lines, I find myself thoroughly intrigued by other people’s books. I want to borrow them and read them. Sometimes I go so far as to mimic other people’s collections, adding my own copies of their titles to my shelves at home.
I still remember going to visit a friend in Scotland, long ago. He lived in a tiny house in a back alley in St. Andrews, where I spent many years as a university student. He had a pristine row of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, then and now. I often used to go to his house for afternoon tea, and the conversation was absorbing. But it was hard to keep my eyes off that uniform edition: the colorful spines, the remarkable titles (Ada, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). I liked the elegant typeface, and the sense of a complex international life captured in a shelf of books. Decades later, when I got my own house, in Vermont, I went to some trouble to acquire from British booksellers that exact row of Nabokov, recreated volume by volume at considerable expense…

Thanks for the link, Paul!

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat (who has finished his dissertation, hurray!) has a new post about Tamazight (Berber) language activism:

To my mind, this is perhaps the single biggest problem of some branches (certainly not all) of the Tamazight movement: they talk about developing Tamazight, but they talk and write and think in French. Tizi-Ouzou’s walls are covered in aza signs (the Tifinagh letter resembling a man that has become a symbol of Amazigh activism), but its shopfronts and signs are covered in French, even though Arabic signs are regularly vandalised. This gives many other Algerians who would otherwise look more favorably on the idea of developing Tamazight the impression that it’s simply a cover for maintaining or extending the (frankly negative) role of French in public life – an impression that is not always false. Personally, I favour a coherent policy: more use of Algeria’s native languages – Arabic and Tamazight – in all spheres of life, and less use of foreign ones except in dealing with foreigners.

He links to a cartoon showing a guy making a fiery speech about the need to preserve Tamazight; unfortunately, the speech is in French, and the audience can’t understand it.

That’s the title of a blog that’s been going since May, subtitled “Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK.” Plenty of people make such observations, but few are actual linguists, and I’m very happy to find this. Here she discusses acclimate and acclimatize:

Either is acceptable in AmE, but to me, acclimati{s/z}e sounds better with physical rather than figurative climates. A quick look at Google suggests that there’s something to that intuition…
Interestingly, most of the acclimatizes were about adjusting to high altitudes, and many of the acclimates were about adjusting to life at an American university. No wonder it leapt into mind today, as I was almost in the word’s natural environment. (But haven’t acclimated to saying acclimatised.)
Acclimate was originally used in Britain, but, like many other things we’ve discussed, it faded out of use here while hanging around in the US. The OED records acclimate as slightly older (1792 vs. 1836).

Thanks go, once again, to aldiboronti.

Yet another find from that eternal scavenger of the internet, aldiboronti (at Wordorigins): the full story of the creation of the term wiki, in the form of an exchange of letters between Ward Cunningham, coiner of the word; Patrick Taylor, the etymologist for the American Heritage Dictionary; and Catherine Soanes, a lexicographer for Oxford University Press:

I learned the word wiki on my first visit to Hawai’i when I was directed to the airport shuttle, called the Wiki Wiki Bus. I asked for that direction to be repeated three or four times until the airline representative took the time to define the word wiki for me. The next day I picked up a small book about Hawai’ian and learned more interesting things about the language.

I wanted an unusual word to name for what was an unusual technology. I was not trying to duplicate any existing medium, like mail, so I didn’t want a name like electronic mail (email) for my work. The community that formed around my site were willing to explore its capabilities without preconceived notions of how it should work. An example of such a notion is the “timeless now” in which “conversation” takes place.

Apparently he intended the word to be pronounced “weaky” (“My preference would be that the word be pronounced as a Hawai’ian would, and that wick-ey be an acceptable alternative”), but I don’t know anyone who says it that way (and to my ears “Weaky-pedia” sounds particularly ridiculous). Once you set the word free, it’s out of your control!

A wonderful Le Monde interview (in French) introduced me to Alain Rey, the chief editor and lexicographer at Dictionnaires Le Robert (considered the populist alternative to the magisterial Larousse). The article says “il y a aussi, et surtout, le fait qu’il n’ait jamais joué au puriste, qu’il a toujours prêté aux mots une vie propre” [there is also, and above all, the fact that he has never played the purist, that he has always let words have their own lives]; clearly a man after my own heart. Thanks for the link, Paul!
(A minor and very tentative quibble: my French is rusty, but shouldn’t that be “le fait qu’il n’a jamais joué au puriste,” parallel to “qu’il a toujours prêté”? What’s the subjunctive doing there?)

The historian Orlando Figes, in both A People’s Tragedy and Natasha’s Dance, mentions a mythical land which he describes in the former book thus:

And there were equally fabulous tales of a ‘Kingdom of Opona’, somewhere on the edge of the flat earth, where the peasants lived happily, undisturbed by gentry or state. Groups of peasants even set out on expeditions in the far north in the hope of finding this arcadia.

He sources this to Gorky, M., ‘On the Russian Peasantry’, in R.E.F. Smith (ed.), The Russian Peasantry 1920 and 1984, London, 1977, and thanks to the magic of Google Books I can actually see the page where Gorky talks about this; Figes has basically reworded his account in the first sentence, but Gorky says nothing about expeditions. The other source cited is Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, but Amazon’s “Search inside” feature allows me to discover that there is no reference to “Opona” in the book. Stites does talk about an expedition to find a similar utopia, “Belovode” [Беловодье] (“the Kingdom of the White Waters”) in the late 19th century, and mentions “similar arcadias… the City of Ignat, the Land of the River Darya, Nutland, and Kitezh.” So the trail peters out with Gorky’s 1922 book on the peasantry, to which I can find no other reference. I’ve checked the online Russian editions without success; you’d think it would be on this page if it started with О ‘about, on’ in Russian, and you’d think it would be here or here if it was published in 1922. Anyway, I’m fascinated by mythical places like this, I’d like to know more about “Opona” (there’s a word opona ‘covering, curtain’ in Russian, which may or may not be relevant), and if anyone knows more (about Opona or about Ignat, Darya, or Nutland), please share.

I’m back to reading Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy, and on page 73 he says “in Lithuania, which for so long had been dominated by the Poles, a national language was also developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century (just to spite the Poles it was based on the Czech alphabet) and a native literature began to appear.” On first glance this Pole-spiting business looks like one of those wacky linguistic legends—for one thing, the Lithuanian alphabet has ogoneks beneath its nasal vowels, just like Polish (though they call them nosinė)—but it’s true they use hacheks on their consonants like Czech. Anybody know if there’s any truth to this rumor?