languagehat.com

Many years ago I was reading a book about (I think) the Crusades in which there was a footnote mentioning a medieval exclamation of contempt, tprut, that turned up in a number of languages. I recently recalled this and thought I’d investigate; it turns out it’s in the OED:

prut, int. and n.
1. An exclamation of contempt.
c1300 in Langtoft Chron. (MS. Fairfax 22, lf. 4), Tprut! Skot riveling, In unsel timing crope thu out of cage. 1303 R. BRUNNE Handl. Synne 3014 And seyþ ‘prut for þy cursyng, prest!’ a1779 D. GRAHAM Janet Clinker’s Orat. Writ. 1883 II. 150 If they had tell’d me tuts, or prute no, I laid them o’er my knee, and a com’d crack for crack o’er their hurdies. 1870 LUBBOCK Orig. Civiliz. viii. 282 From pr, or prut, indicating contempt.

And the Middle English Dictionary has an entry, with a remarkable variety of spellings: “prut, interj. Also ptrot, tprut, tprot, thprut, trupth, trut. [AL ptrut, phrut & OF trout, trut, tproupt, tropt.] An exclamation of contempt or disapproval; ~ for a fig for (sb. or sth.).” Their first cite is the same as the OED’s (with different punctuation); their next is from Harley’s “The Execution of Sir Simon Fraser” (quoted here): “Tprot, scot, for þi strif!/ hang vp þyn hachet ant þi knyf,” and there are several more. It’s a pity this savory ejaculation has fallen out of use. Anybody have other examples from medieval languages?

While reading David Rieff’s NY Times Magazine article on Mexican politics [archived], I was struck by a couple of names in this passage: “[López Obrador’s] economic team is led by Rogelio Ramírez de la O, a Cambridge-educated economist who is well respected in international business circles. And Carlos Slim, the telecom mogul who is Mexico’s richest man and the third-richest man in the world, has let it be known, without formally endorsing AMLO, that he finds nothing alarming about his candidacy.” Now Slim, while an unusual name for a Mexican, presumably reflects English ancestry [no, it’s of Lebanese origin — see comments], but I can make nothing of de la O. It’s a common surname, but I can find nothing about its origin except a suggestion on this page that it’s from “a place in Spain if I’m not mistaken, Palencia.. the name of the Church there is named after Our Lady… as Nuestra Senora de la O,” which makes no sense to me, and one here that it’s from a French name De l’Eau, which seems unlikely. Anybody have any information?

Update. The name turns out to come from the feast of the Expectation of Our Lady, the “O” coming from the expression of longing said in the office of the Mozarabic liturgy (see comments below); Sister Maria Philomena sent me a link to her post on the subject, which reproduces a poem by James J. Galvin, “Lady of O.” Thanks, Sister Maria!

A story by Pam Belluck in today’s NY Times describes the changing fortunes of the French language in Maine:

Frederick Levesque was just a child in Old Town, Me., when teachers told him to become Fred Bishop, changing his name to its English translation to conceal that he was French-American.
Cleo Ouellette’s school in Frenchville made her write “I will not speak French” over and over if she uttered so much as a “oui” or “non” — and rewarded students with extra recess if they ratted out French-speaking classmates.
And Howard Paradis, a teacher in Madawaska forced to reprimand French-speaking students, made the painful decision not to teach French to his own children. “I wasn’t going to put my kids through that,” Mr. Paradis said. “If you wanted to get ahead you had to speak English.”
That was Maine in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the stigma of being French-American reverberated for decades afterward. But now, le Français fait une rentrée — French is making a comeback…

You can go to the article to read about the comeback; what I want to focus on is the bad old days. I can understand the reaction against the language of the enemy during wartime, against German during both world wars for example; it’s irrational and deplorable, but understandable. But why on earth were people subjecting their neighbors and their neighbors’ children to that kind of harassment in the ’50s and ’60s? It shocks me to learn that during the very years when I was happily learning French, others of my generation were being punished for using it in a supposedly free country. If anyone can explain this to me, please do. I mean, generalized “why can’t they speak English” griping is one thing; forcing people to change their name is quite another.

Incidentally, Benjamin Zimmer discusses this story in Language Log and demolishes the idea that “French-American French, derived from people who left France for Canada centuries ago, resembles the French of Louis XIV more than the modern Parisian variety.”

While I’m on the subject of the Sunday Times, I have to let William Safire have it yet again. His latest column contains the idiotic statement “Most Americans associate the phrase Fur Ball, usually capitalized, with events to raise funds for the Humane Society or A.S.P.C.A.” When I read this, I thought perhaps I, having been raised abroad, was an unrepresentative sample of Americans, so I turned to my wife and said “Say, what do you associate the phrase fur ball with?” She thought for a moment and said she associated it with cats. Wanting to give Safire a fair shake, I said “Are you sure you don’t associate it with events to raise funds for the Humane Society or A.S.P.C.A.?” She looked at me as if I were crazy. Perhaps Safire should have an automatic blinders-checker that would replace the phrase “most Americans” with “the tiny group of insiders I hang out with.” While I’m at it, he calls this a “familiar saying”: “If they want me in on the crash landings, I better damn well be in on the takeoffs.” And he claims it’s bad English to say “Our discussion anchored itself on Article II” because his old pal Rear Adm. Dick West (retired) says “In the Navy we say anchored in… as in ‘anchored in 300 fathoms of water.’ To be more specific, you could say that the anchor is on rock, sand or sediment. When you want to say you’re physically attached to something, you say that you’re moored to it, like moored to the dock.” That’s nice, but it has nothing to do with usage by English speakers outside of the Navy. Come on, Bill, wouldn’t you rather be golfing? If you must write a weekly column, couldn’t you pick a subject you can write sensibly about?

Waggish is reading Finnegans Wake and reporting enticingly on the results. Of the two entries so far posted, the first is a general introduction:

The book is easier than its reputation would have you believe because it exudes purposeful meaning: everything is there for a reason, and usually several reasons. It’s more difficult than its reputation because underneath the surface text, there is no single plot, character, or explanation for what is buried under the opaque verbiage. This becomes most noticeable in most of Book III, where the text tends to be a lot less abstruse than in Book II, but in which the situations being portrayed are even less realistic than before, culiminating in the grandiose fantasia of III.3, in which four senile old men seem to be excavating the mound of history itself, until a litany of betrayals and suffering pour out. I found this section tremendously moving, however little I understood it. Though the book may be impenetrable, Joyce is not the most philosophical of writers: he constantly references the physical and the commonplace, and as much as we all know these things, we can read ourselves into bits and pieces of the Wake.

The second pursues a comparison with John Crowley’s Little, Big, which I haven’t read, but he makes an important point about Joyce’s this-worldliness:

One look at Finnegans Wake and it seems like mysticism. But Joyce is almost devoutly quotidian: the things he repeatedly, obscurely analogizes are the very basics of the world and more importantly, the known: male, female, parents, children, birth, death, day, night, sex, education, work, play. The most realistic scene (in III.4) appears to concern a pub-owner and his family, and the situation as far as I can discern it is hardly anything more unusual than Leopold Bloom’s in Ulysses. If anything, it’s more normal, as there’s far less information given to make these people unique. The pub-owner, named Porter, is a Protestant Irishman and well-respected citizen leading an typical middle-class life. Joyce loads the scene up with the usual allusions and such, and I take from it that this scene is to be put on an equal footing with all the complications and mysteries have gone before. The message: This is it. This is the world for all to see and all that anyone can see.

If you’re at all curious about Joyce’s famously “difficult” final work, this might be just the thing to get you started.

[Read more…]

I have to post about the National Spelling Bee that was broadcast last night; I’m fond of spelling bees in general (I still remember being furious with myself in grade school for blowing the word Christmas), but this one was particularly notable because the winning word was Ursprache ‘protolanguage’—a word dear to the heart of this Indo-Europeanist manqué. (It’s pronounced OOR-shprah-khuh, but the NPR newsreader who announced the result this morning made it rhyme with rake, which annoyed me mightily.) Oddly, the word that eliminated the second-place finisher (Canadian Finola Hackett, who’d lucked out with a string of French-derived words she handled easily) was also pure German (to the point of usually being capitalized): Weltschmerz. (The poor girl, after much agonizing, started off “V…”) Also oddly, several of the other late-round words were language-related as well: tmesis, koine, and tutoyer. Next year look out for laryngeal and aphaeresis!

Joel of Far Outliers has written a long and interesting post about Chamorro and Saipanese and their struggle for survival on the island. A tidbit on Saipan Carolinian to whet your appetite:

The Trukic languages form one long dialect chain, where speakers on neighboring islands can understand each other fine, but speakers from farther apart have increasing difficulty. There is no contrast between l and n in most of the dialects. Where this speaker writes aramasal Seipel ‘people of Saipan’, a speaker of a different dialect might write aramasan Seipen. Similarly, the town of Tanapag, settled by a different group of Carolinians, also goes by the name of Tallabwog.

Unfortunately, Joel is “going to have to concentrate on some high-priority projects with relatively tight deadlines, so posting will be very light” this summer. Work well and come back soon!

First off, an apology. I had meant to write about this Language Log post by Ben Zimmer a couple of months ago; it quotes a comment by “an anonymous professor of China studies” on this amazing and hilarious rahoi.com post explaining how the menu item “Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu” got rendered as “Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk” in the English portion of a restaurant menu. (“Finally: gan si meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as ‘dry silk.’ The problem here is that the word gan means both ‘to dry’ and ‘to do,’ and the latter meaning has come to mean ‘to fuck.'”) It slipped my mind at the time, but fortunately the Loggers have revisited the issue: Victor Mair discusses the ubiquitous translation of gan as “fuck” and says:

I am trying to make sense of how this phenomenon actually came about. It seems that the twenty or so different meanings of the three-stroke calendrical graph that is used to write GAN1/4 (a total of three distinct graphic forms in the traditional script — 乾, 幹, 干 — all reduced to one — 干 — in the simplified script) in Chinglish have all collapsed into the single meaning of “fuck”. Wherever that graph occurs, Chinglish speakers will translate it as “fuck”…

Who’s telling the menu-makers and sign-painters to write “fuck” for GAN1/4? They probably don’t even know English and probably don’t know much Chinglish either. How did this get started? (Perhaps somebody was being intentionally mischievous.) And how did it become such a common phenomenon? That’s the real mystery. How is this horrible mistranslation continuing to spread and not being caught by the tens of millions of Chinese who do speak good English? … You’d think that at least they’d write “do” everywhere, or that people who do know English would tell the proprietors to hurry up and change the offending word so as to avoid further embarrassment!

They don’t have comments at the Log, so share your theories here!

From my days as a Russian major I was familiar with the term субботник, borrowed into English as subbotnik (what do you mean, it’s not English? It’s in the OED!) in the meaning “the practice or an act of working voluntarily on a Saturday, for the benefit of the collective”—that’s how the OED defines it, anyway; for real-world truth substitute “without pay” for “voluntarily” and replace “for the benefit of the collective” with “at the insistence of the Communist Party.” (The Wikipedia article says “The tradition is continued in modern Russia”; can this be true?) I note that the OED also includes an anglicized equivalent Saturdaying that seems to have had some currency in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution:
1920 Manch. Guardian 5 Feb. 9/7 In Moscow it has been found worth while to set up a special bureau for ‘Saturdayings’.
1920 Contemp. Rev. Oct. 504 For members of the Bolshevik party, ‘Saturdaying’ had become compulsory.
In the course of reading The Icon and the Axe, James Billington’s superb (and perennially influential) “interpretive history of Russian culture,” I have run across an earlier sense of the word:

The idea of a new church unifying Christians and Jews was gaining grass roots support in the Orel-Voronezh region with the sudden appearance of the sabbatarian (subbotniki) sect. They added to the usual rejection of Orthodox forms of worship opposition to the doctrine of the trinity, celebration of Saturday as the sabbath, and the rite of circumcision. The sect made its first appearance in the second half of Alexander‘s reign [i.e., in the years around 1820].

It turns out the sect is not only still around, Bill Aldacushion (“a descendant of Subbotniki and Molokan parents in America”) has an admirably thorough website devoted to it.

[Read more…]

Matt of No-sword has posted about a website that purports to give lessons in the reconstructed Japanese of the Jōmon period (or Joumon, as Matt prefers to call it). Apparently there’s controversy over whether the Jomon people even spoke Japanese, but as Matt says, it’s “cool to hear this stuff spoken instead of just read it on a page.” The example sentence Matt gives is 私は赤い着物が好きです。 (aba akaki kOrOmObO kOnOmibumu, ‘I like red clothes’); you can hear it spoken here (mpg file). I expect those of my readers who know about this stuff to tell me about the linguistic issues involved.

Etymologies are usually staid affairs; whether they are long lists of preforms and cognates or simple statements that the origin is unknown, they are devoid of passion, humor, and exclamation marks. Not so that of the OED’s coil² “Noisy disturbance, ‘row’; ‘tumult, turmoil, bustle, stir, hurry, confusion’”:

First in 16th c.: of unknown origin. Prob. a word of colloquial or even slang character, which rose into literary use; many terms of similar meaning have had such an origin; cf. pother, row, rumpus, dirdum, shindy, hubbub, hurly-burly, etc.
The conjectures that coil may be ‘related’ to Gael. coileid (‘koletʃ) ‘stir, movement, noise’, or to goilim (‘golɪm) ‘I boil’, goileadh, ‘boiling’, or to goill (goλ) ‘shield, war, fight’, are mere random ‘shots’, without any justification, phonetic or historical. Coil is unknown in Scotland, and no evidence connects it with Ireland. Gaelic or Irish words do not enter English through the air, with phonetic change on the way!

Somebody was feeling mighty frisky in the Scriptorium that day!

Incidentally, definition 4 b. is “mortal coil: the bustle or turmoil of this mortal life. A Shaksperian expression which has become a current phrase.” Note the quaint spelling “Shaksperian”; in the list of authors he’s Shakespeare as usual. Yup, mighty frisky.

Addendum. Now see this post translated into Latin at Sauvage Noble!

Update (Mar. 2021). The Sauvage Noble link is dead, and the Wayback Machine has not archived it; you can see a post where he announces the translation here (scroll to bottom).