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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.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat is back from Algeria and posting again (hurray!), and has some interesting things to say about Algerian Arabic examples of “polysemy (different meanings with a shared conceptual core) and … homonymy (different meanings coincidentally identical in phonetic shape).” I agree with his analysis and think people should be more careful about separating the two concepts.

A couple of commenters in the previous thread alerted me to the fact that it’s been four years since I turned the crank on this jalopy and got it running for the first time. Since then it’s sputtered and emitted billows of steam and suffered the occasional flat, but it’s still running, and the thanks for that goes to all of you who comment with such persistence, humor, and knowledge—I’ve probably learned as much from you by now as I did from any of my college courses.
The thing I regret most is the fact that I have to keep closing comments on old posts to keep the spam level down to a dull roar; some of the oldest have some of the liveliest comment threads (for instance, my assault on David Foster Wallace’s pretensions to language expertise, written less than two weeks into the existence of LH). I try to keep the most interesting ones open in the hopes that people will discover them and leave new comments. Blogs without comments are like artificial flowers, if you ask me: they can be pretty but they don’t hold the interest.
Four years is a long time in BlogWorld, but I still find this an invigorating ride and will keep motorvating until I run out of gas.

There’s no end to the idiocy of would-be language purifiers; the latest egregious example has cropped up in Iran, where President Ahmadinejad has decreed that “official documents, schoolbooks and newspapers should follow the rulings of the Farhangestan” (the official body that tries to rein in the natural development of Persian/Farsi) and use its absurd substitutes for loan words: helicopters are decreed to be “rotating wings,” pizzas “elastic loaves,” and the like. You can read more details in Mark Liberman’s Language Log post. I hope we as a species outgrow both the desire to control how everyone else uses language and the apparent need to kill each other off in large numbers, but I’m not holding my breath.

My wife discovered that the local library, the Athenaeum, was having a sale this weekend, and being the kindly soul she is, she not only told me about it, she dropped me off there on her way to the grocery store. I spent a very pleasant hour and wound up with ten books (for ten dollars); among them were classic works of history (Dumas Malone on Jefferson, the Parkman Reader), well-known biographies (Catherine Drinker Bowen on Coke, Troyat on Tolstoy), and a couple of books on language that might have been from different planets for all they have to do with each other: the original 1958 Channel Press paperback of Theodore Bernstein’s Watch Your Language and the revised MIT translation of Lev Vygotsky’s 1934 Thought and Language. But the book that most excited me, and that I’ve been poring over since I got back, is a drab little 1936 hardback (sans dust jacket) called What’s the Name, Please? by Charles Earle Funk. In case the title sounds like it might belong to a charming autobiography, the subtitle is “A Guide to the Correct Pronunciation of Current Prominent Names.” Needless to say, the Current Prominent Names of seventy years ago have largely vanished from the memory of man; opening at random to page 21, I see a “noted crime investigator,” a British educator, a journalist, a Brigadier-General (retired), an economist, an author, the president of Trinity College Oxford, an ex-president of the Cotton Cooperative Association, a minister from Haiti, an archeologist, and a baron, and the only one I’d ever heard of was the archeologist (Carl Blegen: “Seeking the pagan is Doctor Blegen“). But that doesn’t matter to me; I love correct pronunciations for their own sake, and these (which originally appeared in a regular column in The Literary Digest) were obtained by contacting the people in question. Furthermore, in the magazine “space could not permit the full publication of the choice bits of history, genealogy, wit, and humor that ever and anon popped up in response to a stereotyped request for information. Those bits are presented here, tho sometimes slightly condensed, for the enjoyment of others, and as aids to memory.” So for the president of Trinity College we find:

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