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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.

Margaret at Transblawg says in her latest post:

Frau Kohlehydrat has sent me a meme, or as the Germans call it ein Stöckchen, or as the Austrians including Frau Kohlehydrat call it, ein Steckerl: to list the ten books that are gathering dust on my shelves because I bought them but haven’t read them.

I don’t usually do these, but this one seems highly suitable as I have even more than ten unread books. And for years, when I was teaching, I used to buy all sorts of books just to imagine how nice it would be to have time to read them.

She lists her ten books, then says: “I am now supposed to pass this Steckerl on… If they wish then, to: languagehat (but I’m sure Steve has read all his books)…”

Ah ha ha ha ha! I am closing in on 5,000 books (though to be fair the list includes a couple of hundred maps and some other non-book items), and I’m quite sure I haven’t read anywhere near half of them. I long ago came to terms with the fact that I’ll never manage to read all my books, but I love having them anyway, and I never know which one I’ll suddenly decided I have to read. Anyway, I like the idea of listing a few, so below the fold are ten books that I’m really glad I own and I will definitely get around to reading… really!

[Read more…]

The karatekatrix in question is broadcastrix Lynne Russell, and the accent in question is American, as in “ostentatiously from the U.S. rather than Canada.” That’s a spin we don’t often see here in Americacentricland, and Torontonian Joe Clark of fawny.blog has an entertaining post about it, “Lynne Russell Dialect Watch.” He says of Canada “We put people on TV who speak in accents. Yes, of course everybody has an accent, but I mean detectable accents,” and goes on to dissect Russell’s:

♦ Most disturbing is Russell’s mispronunciation of the title of an elected head of a province (and some territories), premier. It’s pronounced exactly one way, “preemyer,” a lesson only some recent U.S. ambassadors to Canada have bothered to learn. It is not pronounced in the various hodgepodges Americans use for that word and the related premiere (“premeer,” “premyare”). Russell pronounces it “primyeer” [ˌprɪmˈjiːr] or “premeer”
♦ Back vowels (chiefly [aː] → [ɑː]), sort of like a Buffalonian…

He finishes up with a striking slip Russell came out with even as he was writing the post: “How’s it gonna play with the American – ‘with the American.’ How’s it gonna play with the Canadian public?”
And now I know how to say “premier.” Thanks, Joe!

Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun’s fires sink.

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saints’ bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind’s wing, and leaves
delight in transience.

    —Basil Bunting, 1975

[Read more…]

I hate to trespass on the New Yorker‘s territory, but I can’t resist passing along the headline to this story [by Steven Wine for the Associated Press] from the Berkshire Eagle:

Few saw rookie weave mound gem

(In case the story gets taken offline or that fastsearch link doesn’t work, the story is about a young Florida Marlins pitcher who threw a no-hitter—the first in the major leagues for two and a half years—before a few thousand people, Florida having pretty much given up on their underachieving team. Oh, and for those who don’t know from baseball: “mound” refers to the pitcher’s mound, the slight elevation from which the pitcher throws the ball to the batter, sixty feet and six inches away. As to how you’re supposed to weave a gem, you’re on your own with that. Ask the headline writer.)

The wonderful German site Lyrikline showcases poets reading their own poetry in many languages: currently Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), Finnish, French, Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-romanic, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Wayuunaiki, and Welsh. I’m afraid the translations offered are mostly in German and French, which won’t help many Anglophones, but even if you don’t understand the words, it’s great to hear the varied voices of the poets. (Via MetaFilter.)

1) A correspondent writes that she was at a Farmers’ Market, where

a Turkish woman in powder-blue hijab came up to my booth and lovingly fingered the tarragon while asking me if I had any “merzhe.” She explained to me that this herb was commonly used in conjunction with rosemary in meat-based dishes in both Turkey and Iraq… I know nothing about it, other than the fact that it looks rather like tarragon… As near as I can tell, it sounded like “merzhe” (MARE-zhe; stress on the first syllable, and the schwa of the second falling off so as to be nearly unheard)… She said that this was the word for the herb in Iraq.

In trying to investigate this I did google up a nice Turkish herb page, but no luck on the merje (which is how it would be written in Turkish if it’s a Turkish word). Can any herbologists out there provide an identification, preferably with Latin binomial?

2) As I approach the end of In Parenthesis, the allusions and difficulties come thick and fast. Here’s one that’s bothering me. On page 161 Jones is describing the motley crew that marched forward with him (or rather his stand-in Pvt. Ball) into German machine-gun fire at the Battle of the Somme, in the insanely slow and formal manner insisted on by the commanding officers:

and two lovers from Ebury Bridge,
Bates and Coldpepper
that men called the Lily-white boys.
Fowler from Harrow and the House who’d lost his way into
this crush who was gotten in a parsonage on a maye.
Dynamite Dawes the old ‘un
and Diamond Phelps his batty,
from Santiago del Estero
and Bulawayo respectively,
both learned in ballistics
      and wasted on a line-mob.

Now, I know Ebury Bridge (that’s EE-bery) is a street in Westminster and the Lily-white boys are from Green Grow the Rushes, O and Santiago del Estero is in Argentina (I’ve been there) and Bulawayo is in Zimbabwe (then, of course, Southern Rhodesia and part of the Empire)… but what is batty? Jones has this note: “Interchangeable with ‘china’ [Cockney rhyming slang for mate]… but more definitely used of a most intimate companion. Jonathan was certainly David’s ‘batty’.” Well, that’s intriguing, but none of my dictionaries, slang or otherwise, sheds light on this. It is, of course, strikingly similar to batty ‘a person’s buttocks; the backside’ and battyman ‘(derogatory and offensive) a homosexual man’ (OED), but those are not only attested significantly later than WWI but of Afro-Caribbean origin—the first citation for batty is:

1935 H. P. JACOBS Coll. Notes Jamaican Lang. (MS) in F. G. Cassidy & R. B. Le Page Dict. Jamaican Eng. (1967) s.v., Wen breeze blow, fowl batty show.

I don’t think this can be the word Jones is using, but I don’t have any other clues. Anybody know? Oh, and while I’m at it, what’s the “House” Fowler’s from?

A nice tidbit I did solve: Jones refers to “rooty and bully,” and while I knew bully was canned (usually corned) beef, I had no idea what “rooty” might be. This time the OED came through; it’s military slang for ‘bread,’ and it’s from (duh!) Hindi-Urdu rōtī ‘bread,’ a word very familiar from Indian restaurants.

1883 SALA in Illustr. Lond. News 7 July 3/3 At least eight years ago I heard of a private soldier complaining.. that he had not had his ‘proper section of rooty’. 1900 KIPLING in J. Ralph War’s Brighter Side (1901) xv. 253 And the ‘umble loaf of ‘rootey’ Costs a tanner, or a bob. 1900 ‘M. THYME’ in Ibid. xx. 316 Bully beef and rooty, and Something’s give me a pain. 1957 M. K. JOSEPH I’ll soldier no More (1960) 14 Hey, Antonio, where’s me rooty? And make it juldy, see? 1959 Listener 5 Mar. 406/1 Eight ounces of ‘rooty’—that is bread.

Regular readers of LH will know that I have a particular interest in Russian swearing, or mat (1, 2), and through a comment by tellurian in a thread at AskMetaFilter I was pointed to a long article by S.A. Smith called “The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia” (originally in Past & Present, August 1998). For those who don’t want to work through all 20 pages (some of which are quite short), here’s the conclusion:

Mat was a key element in the shifting discourse of kul’turnost’ through which educated Russians reflected on the state of society. Though its particular connotations changed, as Russia changed its rulers—from moral degradation of the common people, to sedition, to hooliganism, to political backwardness—neither the late imperial nor the Bolshevik authorities looked on mat as politically neutral. Moreover, those who fought to overthrow the tsarist order, including the ‘conscious’ workers, viewed mat in the same negative way as the educated elites in general. Although peasants and workers might utilize mat to insult their social superiors, revolutionaries showed no inclination to vindicate it as a ‘weapon of the weak’. Towards the end of the Soviet regime, mat did acquire a politically subversive function, as obscene chastushki or anekdoty, puncturing the pretensions of the party-state, grew in popularity. One writer has recently described the use of mat in the post-Stalin era as a ‘rebellion against the semantically ruined, mendacious language of official propaganda’ and a ‘little island of freedom in the kingdom of totalitarianism’. Pointing to the explosion of anecdotes about Lenin, Radio Armenia and the Civil War hero, Chapaev, in the 1960s, V. Gershuni has argued that that decade marked the ‘triumphal march of language that had been in disgrace’ (opal’noi slovesnosti) when the (male) intelligentsia for the first time ‘armed itself’ with mat as weapon of social satire. But that is another story.

But half the fun is in the details. From page 18:

While many cogent reasons were adduced to justify Bolshevik objections to swearing—the need for young people to acquire ‘cultured speech’, the need to combat hooliganism, the unacceptability of male chauvinism, and so forth—at the deepest level much of the distaste may have sprung from a revulsion at the intimate association of mat with what Bakhtin called the ‘grotesque body’. Mat celebrated gross corporeality, the lower physical faculties, fecundity and decay, nature and excess, things that sat uneasily with Bolshevik asceticism and horror of being engulfed by nature. Eric Naiman has drawn attention to a dread of the female body that haunted Bolshevik ideology during NEP, which, he suggests, was a projection of wider fears of loss of political and ideological control. If he is correct, it is possible to see in the efforts to discourage mat a defence mechanism against the disorderly excess of popular speech, the libidinal energies of the body and the elemental forces of nature, which threatened to overwhelm the orderly, rational and controlling will of the party-state.

And from page 8, this odd Dostoevsky quote (from a newspaper article of 1873):

My intention was to prove the chastity of the Russian people, to show that even if the people use foul language when they are in a drunken state (for they swear incomparably less when they are sober), they do this not out love of bad language, not out of the pleasure of swearing, but simply out of nasty habit so that even thoughts and feelings that are quite distant from obscenity become expressed in obscene words. I further argued that to find the principal reason for this habit of foul language one must look to drunkenness. When drunk, one’s tongue moves with difficulty yet one has a powerful desire to speak, and I surmised that one resorts to short, conventional, expressive words. You may make what you will of this conjecture. But that our people is chaste, even when it is swearing, is worth pointing out.

Incidentally, anyone interested in the relations between the workers and the intellectuals who have presumed to lead them should read Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic Of The Russian Intelligensia And Socialism (review), by Marshall S. Shatz. Machajski (1866-1926) was a Polish revolutionary who has long been forgotten (except by Leszek Kolakowski) and who never achieved much in his lifetime aside from annoying tsarists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks alike (though he managed to eke out a living as a copyeditor in Moscow for the last eight years of his life), but the theory he developed in Siberian exile in the late 1890s, known as “Makhaevism” after a Russianized form of his name, is the earliest and perhaps still the most thoroughgoing analysis of the inherent gulf between the intelligentsia (which he defined in practice as anyone with a diploma) and the working class. He had no positive goal in view (except a vague idea that workers should educate themselves so the gap could be eliminated), but his stubborn insistence that knowledge is power and that those with such power can never be trusted to wield it in anyone’s interests but their own is still bracing and retains its ability to discomfit the bien-pensant intellectual.

What is Food for Language? (言語にとって食とはなにか) is a new blog (by Brian of New Haven) that focuses on things Japanese, including Tanizaki on Japanese Orthography, a Tokyo cafe tthat’s a “conceptual mess” but has a great breakfast special, and Japanese approaches to Chinese poetry. The last displays Brian’s nicely judged rhetorical style:

As is well known, Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry” is the single most fantastic, least accurate thing that has been written on the subject…

Of course, the best part about the Japanese school, as others before me have noted, is that Fenollosa’s essay (or at least Pound’s recension of it) contains only one complete poem, and it is Japanese. The poem (which begins 月耀如晴雪) is the first item in the collection of Sugawara no Michizane, who records that he wrote it for a class assignment when he was eleven.

A quick hook to the jaw, and it’s all over. I’d be glad to share a pizza (at Pepe’s, of course) with this guy next time I’m in New Haven, and I thank No-sword for bringing the blog to my attention.

An essay by Karl Young (originally published in Open Letter, Spring, 1984) discusses “how poetry was read in three cultural contexts removed from ours in culture and time” (Mexico, 1500; China, 810; and England, 1620) and goes on to “describe some forms of notation in contemporary poetry and how they can be read.” I’m sure scholars specializing in each of those cultures would shoot down some of his details, but I like this kind of wide-ranging essay, bringing together things one wouldn’t have thought to connect and drawing interesting conclusions. Here’s a portion of what he has to say about Jacobean England:

For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer’s intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation. Written language maintained the fluidity, even volatility, of speech: a phrase or line was something a poet created with his mouth, not an arrangement of fixed parts that could be precisely interchanged. A written poem was essentially a record of spoken verse and a score that could enable a reader to recreate it. The elaborate and inconsistent abbreviations and symbols current in script and print also underscore the oral orientation of writing. When a text is just a form of notation, “&” (a symbol that is still with us) could easily stand for “and,” and “ye” could be an acceptable abbreviation for “the” (the “y” stood for “th” as in “thorn,” not “y” as in “year” as some people now pronounce it in an attempt to sound old fashioned). Punctuation of this period often seems illogical to us for the same reason: we punctuate according to fixed notions of sentence construction, whereas the Jacobean poet punctuated by ear: his punctuation was a form of notation, often indicating a pause where the normal construction of a sentence would not suggest one. A number of conventions, create ambiguities somewhat similar to those in Chinese verse. The use of the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and when Donne used a word like “worlds” he may have primarily meant “world’s,” but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning: multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno’s notion of infinite worlds). Letters like “I” and “J” or “U” and “V” were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious speech.

And here he applies those thoughts to the present (well, the early ’80s):

One of the most positive things contemporary poets have going for them is the total lack of standardization at all levels of notation. In writing about Donne, I pointed out that standardized spelling reduced the sense of fluidity and magic in language. Many poets of the last two centuries have reacted to this on a gut level by simply not learning to spell “correctly”—William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound have been among their company. More recently, poets like bill bissett have completely rejected standardized orthography and have spelled by intuition and their sense of how the words sound, look, and feel. When bissett writes “seek / sum priva see its wintr fr reel now sins ystrday,” notions of correct spelling are completely irrelevant. Though people inured to inflexible orthography cringe at this sort of thing, feeling that some immutable law of the universe has been violated, intuitive spelling returns poetry to its oral base: readers must work out the sounds of words to be able to read the poem at all.

I love it when poets meditate on history. (Via wood s lot.)