languagehat.com

I’m inured to the standard grounds for complaint about the Decline of the English Language: poor grammar, sloppy punctuation, IM-speak, and the like. I accept that people have an irrational devotion to the forms of what they perceive as “the language” (ignorant as they are of the unavoidable diversity and mutability of all languages), and I have learned to view such jeremiads with a tolerant, if wry, smile. But the recent controversy in the Boston City Council over the spelling of council(l)or floors me. According to a Boston Globe story by Matt Viser, “the question of one L or two is very serious”:

About half of the council’s 13 members say the word should be spelled with two Ls, a British spelling that has been used in city documents for more than a century. Tradition dictates it, they say.
Some, like Council President Michael Flaherty and Councilor John Tobin, defend the position with some ferocity. Boston officialdom appears to support them, with most signs and placards in City Hall spelling it with two Ls, as does the city charter and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Webster’s New World Dictionary prefers the one-L version, however, and newer, younger councilors are using one L as a symbol of breaking from an old, hide-bound kind of politics…
For new members of the board, it is a rite of passage, among the first decisions they make when coming into office and requesting their business cards. Will they accept tradition, or try and chart a new course?…
“Those new young guys, they’ve just got no respect,” said Tobin, whose staff for several years mocked him by giving him the nickname “Double L.”
“I will not be part of the dumbing down of the English language,” he said.

Spelling it councilor is “the dumbing down of the English language”? I truly cannot wrap my head around this concept. Ah well, at least the fact they’re arguing about something so trivial shows they have nothing more serious to worry about.

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The latest post at the-kurdistani discusses what is apparently an accelerating displacement of Kurdish by Turkish in some areas of Turkey:

until the end of 1980s the kurdish language was still preserved, because the kurds were still in their villages, and mountains back then. and they had their own little worlds, most of them would not know one single word turkish and the women, in specific, did not know one single word turkish! even though there are some bad sides to this, such as they were not connected to the outer world in any way or this kind of things, it was still good because the kurdish language was still living and it was being passed to the younger generations by our holy mothers! but at the beginning of 1990s, and since then going on, we have been losing the kurdish language…
all the kurds started to go to school, where they would only speak turkish, and if, in any way someone were to speak kurdish s/he would punished for speaking kurdish and this way it would have a deterring effect on the other children (students) as well! kurdish students were despised and made fun of because of their accent so the families of those kurdish students thought that if they spoke only turkish at home it would help their children and they would be able to speak turkish better, and nobody would be able to fun of them…
they only watched the turkish tv channels! and especially the mothers were very badly affected by this, because they wree the ones who would stay at home and when they did not have anything to do they would watch the tv and improve their turkish, but after a while they started to use turkish words while speaking kurdish…

It’s an old, sad story and probably inevitable, but as Lameen (from whose post I got this link) says, “I had no idea the last decade or two had made such a difference.”

The Little Professor has a fascinating post discussing William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, which argues that “copyright laws have exerted considerable force on the literary canon”:

For the purposes of St. Clair’s project, perhaps the most significant epoch in the history of British intellectual property laws stretches from 1774-1808. St. Clair dubs this the “copyright window”: perpetual copyright was officially disallowed, prompting a sudden spill of older texts onto the market. (The window closes again with a series of laws passed between 1808 and 1842, each lengthening the copyright period.) Once the first window “opened,” publishers began marketing large-scale anthologies of the English (or British) “classics.” In fact, the Scots, operating under a differents set of copyright laws, jumped the gun in 1773 with The British Poets—soon followed by the various anthologies published by John Bell… For St. Clair, this window produces what he calls the “old canon,” which would persist well into the Victorian period [basically, Samuel Butler, Chaucer, Collins, Cowper, Dryden, Falconer, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Spenser, Thomson, and Young; no Drayton, Herrick, Lovelace, Marvell, or Herbert, and no women writers]…
St. Clair uses the phenomenon of the “old canon” to make several points of interest to literary historians. First, he argues that publishers formed and replicated the old canon without much regard at all to critical considerations; to the contrary, the old canon consisted, by and large, of what was out of copyright and easily available. Second, he shows that there was a “generation gap” separating readers in different economic strata. Less well-off readers during the Romantic period had access to the old canon, but not to the now-canonical “Romantics.”…
St. Clair further contributes a number of case studies, some of which correct academic received wisdom. Thus, he shows that below a certain economic range, post-Shakespearean readers didn’t read Shakespeare—because for years there was no affordable Shakespeare for them to read. Along the same lines, far from being a best-seller, Frankenstein was unavailable for much of the nineteenth century; many Romantic and Victorian readers knew the story only from its multitudinous stage adaptations… Ditto the Vindication of the Rights of Woman—most references to Wollstonecraft were made by people who had never seen, nor were likely to be able to see, the rare surviving editions of her work.

She has much more to say, all of it interesting; I urge you not to miss her blackly ironic final paragraph.
Via Avva, who also links to her post on a jaw-dropping book ad:

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A correspondent sent me a story by Jon Stokes from the New Zealand Herald about a project “for the development of a pan-Pacific language”:

[Maori Language] Commission chief executive Haami Piripi said the commission was in discussions with a number of Pacific nations including Hawaii, Rarotonga, Samoa and Niue to develop a language database that would be used to develop a common “Meta-Polynesian” language.
He said the initiative was required to halt the declining use of Polynesian languages driven by the dominance of the English language and high numbers of Pacific peoples settling in other parts of the world.
“There are networks of languages that share a common ancestry, from Fiji across to Tahiti, it is important to chronicle the changes to the language as it spread across the Pacific and to recognise the family of languages that exist.”
He said the end result would be a database that would assist in developing greater uniformity among the various languages, driven by a need to ensure Polynesian languages are maintained.
“There is a merge point, the point where the languages merge will get greater and greater until it becomes a language of its own.”…
However, the proposal has been met with scepticism by senior lecturer in Samoan studies at Victoria University Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin.
He said language and culture were intertwined and strong opposition would follow moves for change, especially from another culture.
“When we talk about language loss it is a very emotional issue. Language is about identity and pride and your culture if you have someone who comes along and says ‘hey let’s use this word’, you are going to have some very healthy debate aren’t you?”
Mr Hunkin applauded moves to compile a database and protect Pacific languages, but said initiatives to ensure the survival of a native tongue had to be driven from within the community and embraced by those at the grass-roots.

I’m afraid I agree with the skeptical Mr. Hunkin (and with Pita Sharples, who said “I support the attempt to proliferate the languages and to share, but Samoan is Samoan and Maori is Maori”), but the database is an excellent idea, and anything that promotes the study of threatened languages is OK with me.

I’m trying to understand World War One at the moment, and I just got to this, on page 484 of Sidney B. Fay’s (excellent) The Origins of the World War; the speaker is Nikola Pašić (then usually spelled Pashitch), prime minister of Serbia, reporting on a meeting with Nicholas II in February 1914 in which the tsar asked him about the ethnographic situation in the Balkans: “I also told him of the Slovenes, that they, too, were gravitating to the Serbo-Croats, and would adopt the Serbo-Croatian language, owing to the fact that their dialect is bad and that they have long lost their national independence.” (Emphasis added.) Nothing like an objective analysis!

Language Log has been on a campaign to redeem the passive voice, investigating the origins of the prejudice against it—”Arnold Zwicky found that the Avoid Passive rule originated in U.S. composition handbooks early in the 20th century (perhaps originally in Strunk’s 1918 Elements of Style), along with a metaphorical association between passive verbs and weakness”—and showing, delightfully, that the very people who have campaigned most vigorously against it, George Orwell and Strunk & White, used it far more frequently than average English prose (“a little over 20 percent” and 21% respectively, versus a maximum of 13% in periodical prose). Now Mark Liberman adds a compilation of Churchill passages (41% passives vs. 38% actives in the paragraphs he quotes from The River War, a book of vigorous accounts of military action) and finishes with a good suggestion:

Perhaps we should start with a lexical make-over. We could try replacing the word passive with a competely new borrowing from a classical language, like the “hyptic voice”. (Greek ὕπτιος meant “laid on one’s back; turned upside down; backwards”, and was also sometimes used to refer to the passive voice of verbs.) This might work—hyptic is a little weird, but there are useful resonances with hip and hypnotic. Or we could try a positive-sounding name based on the value of the passive in focusing different thematic roles—”thematic verbs” or “the focusing voice”. We could say, “use thematic verbs to maintain the velocity of your narrative”. Or, “seize and hold your readers’ attention with the focusing voice”.

I’m not very good at this naming business, so let’s have a Rename the Passive contest. If you’ve got a great idea, let me know. The winner gets a year’s subscription to Language Log, a lifetime supply of by-phrases, and other exciting prizes.

As a sucker for classical terms, I like hyptic myself, but I recognize it’s caviar to the general. “Focusing” is good, conveying an idea of how the form is used while projecting an attractive forcefulness that should send the stigma straight into the dustbin of history. Further suggestions are welcome, as are attempts by anti-passivists to explain the plethora of uses in authors they presumably admire.

Tsotsitaal (Ethnologue’s Camtho) is a mixed language spoken (as a second language) in South African townships, such as Soweto. (If you saw the movie Tsotsi, you heard it used.) Andie (of Andie’s Web) has put online a selection from Louis Molamu’s Tsotsitaal: A dictionary of the language of Sophiatown; the vocabulary shows the usual flair and humor of popular language creation:

florsheims/A popular brand of expensive men’s shoes, the term is used widely to refer to cooked sheep or pigs’ trotters.

Tsotsi itself means ‘(young) thug, criminal’ and is said to be “tied to the ‘zoot suits’ worn by Americans in the early 1940s”—interesting if true.

Update (Oct. 2022). Andie’s post is no longer findable, even via Wayback Machine, but what seems to be the same vocabulary is available here (scroll down).

From the Jon Lee Anderson New Yorker article “Castro’s Last Battle” (July 31 issue, now online): “Many of the police are drawn from Cuba’s rural eastern provinces, where the government has strong support, and are held in contempt by many of the comparatively cosmopolitan habañeros.” OK, listen up, people, I’m only going to say this once: there is no such word as “habañero.” Regardless of the fatal attraction the tilde appears to possess for Anglophones, the Spanish adjective meaning ‘of or pertaining to the city of Havana‘ (said city being La Habana in Spanish) is habanero, pronounced a-va-NEH-ro. No tilde, no -ny- sound. That goes for the pepper as well. And New Yorker, you should be ashamed of yourself. We’ve discussed your slipping standards before, and I know you’re aware of the problem. Hire back those fact-checkers and get some editors who know what they’re doing, stat.

The latest post at Sauvage Noble has me extremely interested in “Mallory, J. P., and D. Q. Adams. 2006 [forthcoming]. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and The Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.” I hope I get a chance to peruse the actual book; in the meantime, Chapter 9 “Indo-European Fauna” is online (pdf; no Google cache available). There’s a fascinating introductory section on the history of the words elk and moose that I wanted to quote, but alas, the Select Text feature doesn’t work (probably for the same reason there’s no cache), so I’ll have to type in some and summarize the rest:

When the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain from their continental homes, they were familiar with both Alces alces (the ‘elk’ of European English and the ‘moose’ of North American English) and Cervus elaphus (the ‘red deer’ of European English and the ‘elk’ of North American English) and applied those designations to members of the same two species which were also present in Great Britain. By about AD 900 Alces alces was extinct in Great Britain [but the word was still used because the English were familiar with the animal in continental Europe]. However, for most speakers the referent was pretty vague, something like ‘large deer’ or the like. By 1600 or so the inherited designation for Cervus elaphus had been replaced by the innovative and descriptive red deer [and around the same time the species pretty much disappeared from southern Britain]. At that point for most speakers of southern British English there were two terms for large deer, ‘elk’, and ‘red deer’, without well-known referents.
When some of these southern British English speakers emigrated to New England at the beginning of the seventeenth century [they found both species there] and they needed names for both. ‘Red deer’ was not suitable for either since neither… was noticeably red. However, ‘elk’ was available and was assigned to the commonest large deer in the new environment, Cervus elaphus, while a borrowing from the local Algonquian language, ‘moose’, was pressed into service for Alces alces.

Of course, that’s relevant to Indo-European only as an example of how semantic shift can operate, but I find it extremely interesting in its own right. I always knew there was something funny going on with moose and elk, but I’d never taken the trouble to get it straight. Now I know.

I posted about a Jabberwocky-translation site over three years ago, but because I know you can’t have too many Jabberwocky translations, here‘s another one (hot off the presses: NEWEST November 1998!). A tip of the Hatlo hat to V. for the link! [N.b.: The site is, or was, run by Keith Lim, and it has parodies and other links under the umbrella title of Jabberwocky Variations.]

Update. Adam Rice has, as promised, posted Japanese translations of “Jabberwocky”; you can read informed commentary on how they’re done at No-sword.