languagehat.com

Via Varieties of Unreligious Experience, I learn that the journal Oral Tradition is now online, or as they put it:

On September 15, 2006, Oral Tradition enters a new chapter in its existence as an international and interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of worldwide oral traditions and related forms. As of this date the journal will become available
   ■ electronically at http://journal.oraltradition.org
   ■ free of charge to all readers
   ■ as a series of pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files
   ■ with key-word searching of all online texts
   ■ with multimedia eCompanions embedded

The latest issue covers a wide range of topics; I’m not so interested in the current oral-poetry scene, but there are articles on Homer, medieval Japan, the influence of French Carolingian lore on the Italian chivalric-epic tradition, and Carneades of Cyrene, among others. Well worth your bookmark.

A long article by Vera Ryklina in Русский Newsweek (in Russian, obviously) describes the rapid and probably irreversible decline in the use of the Russian language. Since the collapse of the USSR, it is studied and spoken less and less in the countries that have won their independence; even within the Russian Federation, there are regions where it is less used. Ryklina says Russian is needed by only half of those who now know it, and still less will it be needed by their children. She quotes a number of academics who compare it to the languages of other vanished empires; English, obviously, has been a tremendous success, French less so. I was particularly struck by the comparison to Dutch. Historian Ivan Belenkii is quoted as saying:

But Russia’s situation is more or less like Holland’s. A century later, there will remain not a trace of our presence over half the globe, just as happened with the many colonies of that great maritime empire. People without much education aren’t even aware that Holland had those colonies; the language has remained only in Suriname. And yet only 60 years ago Holland ruled Indonesia, a country with a population greater than that of Russia. Today absolutely nobody there wants to study Dutch.

There is much discussion of causes; the article suggests that Russian might have had a longer shelf life if the USSR had promoted it as an attractive cultural language rather than an administrative tool (the way France has promoted French abroad), but frankly I doubt anything would have changed the desire of the ex-colonials to reject everything having to do with the Soviet regime. Anyway, it’s a good read if you know Russian, and I thank bulbul for the link. (His latest two posts are an interesting discussion of “blue blood,” in which he laments the lack of an etymological dictionary of the Slovak language, and an annotated list of Books He Hasn’t Read, inspired by this.)

All Russian-language publicity materials (like the official website) for the film Trust the Man carry the tagline:

Любовь — это слово из четырех букв. [Lyubov’ — eto slovo iz chetyryokh bukv.]

Which is to say: Любовь is a four-letter word.

(Yes, Lyubov’ means ‘love,’ but something got lost in translation.)

Via Avva.

An article by Stephen Krashen describes the unusual case of a Mexican-American who speaks Hebrew better than English:

A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times (Silverstein, 1999) described the case of Armando, a 29-year-old immigrant from Mexico who has lived in the United States for 12 years. Armando, who attended school in Mexico up to grade nine, has worked in an Israeli restaurant in Los Angeles nearly the entire time he has lived in the United States. While Armando speaks English quite well, he says he speaks Hebrew better…
Thanks to Silverstein, I was able to meet Armando and get more details. First, it must be pointed out that acquisition of Hebrew took time: Armando told me that it was two or three years until he was comfortable in conversation even though he heard Hebrew all day on the job. He said that he never forced or pushed himself with Hebrew, that his approach was relaxed… Armando told me that he had never learned to read Hebrew, never studied Hebrew grammar, had no idea of what the rules of Hebrew grammar were, and certainly did not think about grammar when speaking. He said that he received about five corrections a day, but none of these were aimed at grammar; it was all vocabulary.

This just confirms what we all (I hope) know, that immersion is far and away the best way to learn if what you want is the ability to use the spoken language. It should also give pause to those who think formal study of grammar is necessary to fluency.
I discovered this story via Lingual Bee, the excellent blog of a Chinese guy who came to the U.S. as a grad student who had studied English in China for ten years and could barely speak it. He describes the problem with his education here:

All of my teachers followed the same philosophy that’s as old as the Confucianism: the only way to instill something in student is to drill the same rule over and over until his brain spins.
My English teacher was fond of this in particular, and she did it with an immense zeal. Man, let me tell you, solving a thousand algebra equations was one thing; working on subject and verb agreement a thousand times was totally insane. Yet, she was never tired of it.
Even if I survived the teacher, I had no chance to stay sane with the textbook. Half of the texts were mad repetitions like “This is a sheep. That is a sheep. These are all sheep”, substituting sheep with other animals and starting all over again; another half were filled with such a masterpiece like “How Karl Marx Learns Foreign Languages”.

(He has more to say about more about Dr. Krashen’s theories here.) I admire the hell out of anyone who blogs in a second language; I don’t think I would have the nerve.

I’d never really thought about the oddness of the term deed poll, ‘British: a deed (as to change one’s name) made and executed by only one party,’ until a Wordorigins contributor brought it up. Dave Wilton‘s answer provides one of those surprising and enjoyable bits of linguistic history that got me interested in linguistics in the first place:

Poll originally meant head, and is commonly used in reference to the counting of heads. It’s either from or cognate with the Dutch pol meaning top or summit.

In the case of deed poll, it comes from the verb meaning to shave (the head). Since this type of change to a deed affects only one party—unlike a transfer of ownership—the document edges would be cut straight. For two-party documents, the cut would be jagged so the two halves could be matched. Deed poll dates to the 16th century and is contrasted with deed indented.

So deed poll has the same structure as battle royal or linguist manqué. Who knew?

Anatoly (whose Russian LJ has long been a favorite of mine) has recently begun an English-language blog, Lovest Well (named for the one bit of Pound’s Cantos that just about everybody likes, the end of Canto LXXXI); a few days ago [Thursday, September 14th, 2006] he linked to Eric Korn’s TLS review of the new edition of The Chambers Dictionary and highlighted the following delightful passage:

Chambers never forgets its origins, and Scotticisms are pleasingly many: […] and “snigger”, which last is to do with catching salmon with a weighted hook, apparently an illegality, which caused me once the wildest of surmises, when a newspaper (the Kirkintilloch Bugle, if I’m not mistaken) ran the headline MAN FINED FOR SNIGGERING AT LOCH NESS: I thought it was my first real case of political correctness run mad.

This Scottish sniggering, by the way, is a variant of standard English sniggling; there does not appear to be a Kirkintilloch Bugle (though there is a Kirkintilloch Herald), and if this is some sort of obscure Scottish joke I wish somebody would explain it to me.

[Read more…]

A correspondent asked: “Why is it that there is an ‘oldfangled’ and a ‘newfangled’, but no ‘fangled’?” I did a little research and responded:

Excellent question! Newfangled was originally newfangle, which goes back to the thirteenth century and is based on the archaic verb fang, meaning ‘grasp, seize; take, receive.’ (The original form is still occasionally used: 1993 Vancouver Sun (Nexis) 12 June D14 “Updating ‘Helena’ to a 1925 setting—new signs, fewer horses, more of those newfangle automobiles.”) It originally meant ‘fond of novelty or new things; keen to take up new fashions or ideas; easily carried away by whatever is new’ but came to simply mean ‘Newly or recently invented or existent, novel; gratuitously or objectionably modern or different from what one is used to.’ Oldfangled is much later (first citation: 1797 in Catal. Prints: Polit. & Personal Satires (Brit. Mus.) VII. 354 “We’ll stitch up these old fangled Garments for our beloved brats”) and is simply a play on newfangled.
There is actually a verb (and noun) fangle, though not often used (e.g. 1755 CARTE Hist. Eng. IV. 136 “Such was their zeal for a new religion of their own fangling”); the OED says they “arose from a mistaken analysis of NEWFANGLED, later form of newfangle ‘eager for novelty’. As newfangled was said both of persons and of their actions or productions, it came to be diversely interpreted to mean either ‘characterized by new fashions or crotchets’ or ‘newly fashioned or fabricated’.”

I thought that was interesting enough to share with the assembled multitudes.

Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience has outdone himself with a tripartite History of the Nod (Part I, Part II, Part III) that begins with the story of Cain and Abel and God’s stern judgment on the fratricidal former:

ki ta’avod et-ha’adamah lo-tosef tet-kocha lach na vanad tihyeh va’arets
‘When you work the ground, it will no longer give you of its strength. You will live as fugitive and wanderer on the earth.’ The underlined syllable, nad, denotes wandering. Strong’s Hebrew Bible dictionary gives the following list of senses for the basic root: ‘to nod, i.e. waver; figuratively, to wander, flee, disappear; also (from shaking the head in sympathy), to console, deplore, or (from tossing the head in scorn) taunt:—bemoan, flee, get, mourn, make to move, take pity, remove, shake, skip for joy, be sorry, vagabond, way, wandering.’ The word is echoed again in 4:16:
vayetse kayin milifney yahweh vayeshev be’erets-nod kid’mat-eden
‘Kayin went out from the presence of the Lord, from the east of Eden, and dwelt as a wanderer on the earth’. Here nod is a cognate of nad. (See here for a recent post on the topic by the young Jewish scholar, Simon Holloway.) Jerome (405 AD) renders 4:16 as ‘Egressusque Cain a facie Domini, habitavit profugus in terra ad orientalem plagam Eden.’ The 1370s Vulgate translation supervised by the heretic John Wycliffe offers ‘And Caym, passid out fro the face of the Lord, dwellide fer fugitif in the erthe, at the eest plage of Eden.’ Likewise, the standard Vulgate in English, translated as Catholic propaganda by Gregory Martin in 1609 and now known as the Douai-Rheims Bible, reads ‘And Cain went forth from the face of our Lord, and dwelt as a fugitiue on the earth at the east side of Eden.’
But a different tradition had arisen even before Jerome…

He goes on to explain how “a wanderer on the earth” became “the land of Nod” and the subsequent attempts to derive that factitious name from the English word; in Part II he goes into the history of the English word, the puns made possible by the homophony, and the Eugene Field poem that begins, irresistibly,

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—

and in Part III he discusses the anthropological and cultural significance of the gesture of nodding (“Since ancient times, the nod has been more than simply yes—it has been a powerful political instrument”). It’s all done with his patented mix of scholarship and wit, and he throws in some gorgeous illustrations for free. Go have a look.

I’m reading In War’s Dark Shadow by W. Bruce Lincoln (having been prompted by my Unread books post), and a particular usage is bothering me. Here’s an example: “Among Russian writers and publicists, ignorance about the lives lived by such men and women bred contempt…” Elsewhere he quotes a “French publicist.” Now, to me, this is a completely un-English usage (to me a publicist is exclusively a press agent or other PR type); I’m familiar with it from Russian публицист [publitsist] ‘commentator on current affairs,’ but I always regarded its use in English as a flagrant example of translationese (like “echelon“). Now that I check the OED, I find that it is in fact good English:

2. loosely. A writer on current public topics; a journalist who makes political matters his speciality.
1833 Westm. Rev. Jan. 195 We hear of editors, reporters, writers in newspapers, and sometimes ‘publicists’, a neological term; but the world.. does not assign the definite meanings to these terms. 1863 S. EDWARDS Polish Captivity I. 78 Certain German publicists point with an air of triumph to the fact that Prussia has constructed a railroad from Posen to Breslau. 1874 GREEN Short Hist. x. §2. 752 The hacks of Grub Street were superseded by publicists of a high moral temper and literary excellence.

But the last citation is from 1874, so it’s possible the sense is obsolete. Is it? Or have I simply missed it in my wide reading? As always, I await the multifarious verdict of my Varied Readers.
Incidentally, my apologies if you were unable to comment yesterday (as at least one reader who sent me an e-mail was); the site was having problems, which have since been corrected. (That’s also why there was no post for yesterday.) Thanks much to the good folks at Insider Hosting for their response to my anguished outcry!)

So I was scrolling through the latest OED update, looking up (as is my wont) any words that strike me, and one of them was Pokot. It rang a faint bell, and when I saw “A member of an East African Nilotic people inhabiting parts of western Kenya and eastern central Uganda” I remembered that I had seen the name in language books (sometimes spelled Pökoot). But the etymology (origin unknown, in case you were wondering) included the line “The former name SUK n. and adj. is considered to be derogatory.” So of course I looked up Suk (“a. An East African people who inhabit an area on the Uganda-Kenya border; a member of this people. b. The Nilotic language spoken by the Suk”) and found no etymology at all; I presume they’ll add one, along with a “derogatory” note, when they get around to the su– words in a few years. At any rate, I plan to add this to my arsenal of examples of “correct” and “bad” ethnic names that people cannot reasonably be expected to be aware of (Oromo/Galla being another); I like to bring them up when people get too smug and snippy about correcting other people’s usage (“Surely you’re aware that the people you’re calling X prefer to be called Y, you hegemonic imperialist pig”). I’m all for spreading the word about such things, but it should be done in an ‘umble and kindly manner, with full awareness that one is likely an unwitting sinner oneself.

(Incidentally, the stress in Pokot is on the second syllable: puh-KOHT.)

Update (Dec. 2024). They revised their Suk entry just this year; the definition now reads:

1. An East African Nilotic people inhabiting parts of western Kenya and eastern Uganda; a member of this group; = Pokot n. A.1.

The self-designation Pokot is now preferred in this sense, Suk and its derivatives being regarded by many of the members of this people as derogatory terms reflecting colonial attitudes.
[…]

2. The Southern Nilotic language of this people, belonging to the dialect cluster of Kalenjin within the East Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family; = Pokot n. A.2.

The term Pokot is now preferred (see the note at sense B.1).

And the etymology reads:

Probably < the stem of Masai osúkí (nominative plural isûk) the Pokot people.
Notes
The self-designation of the people is Pokot Pokot (also written Pökot, Pökoot: see Pokot n.).

The “Probably” seems excessively cautious, unless they mean that it might be from a term in another language related to Masai osúkí; it’s hardly likely to be coincidence.