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An excerpt from The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor, quoted today by Joel of Far Outliers (there’s a very interesting profile of him here):

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name [Knipper] at this moment of pitiless struggle [as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow]. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova’s father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova’s friend replied that the description ‘German’ was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments ‘from Leningrad to the Far East’ began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched [presumably because Vova’s cousin Lev Knipper worked for the NKVD].
Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called ‘Moscow emigration’ of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf’s two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carré’s novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany’s academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. ‘People sitting around us,’ wrote Vova, ‘turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy’s language.’

One of the things that depresses me about humanity is the automatic lumping-together of people who speak different languages or have different physical features or share some other superficial category, so that if “we” are at war with Germany we must be nasty to those among us with German names or backgrounds (as happened in the U.S. during World War One as well).

Back at the start of the year, the OED temporarily allowed free access to the site (see here); now they’re doing it again in conjunction with a follow-up to the TV series Balderdash and Piffle. Look ’em up while they’re there! (Thanks for the tip, Pat.)

I recently ran across an excellent old insult, the word courtnoll: “A contemptuous or familiar name for a courtier” (OED). We don’t have much occasion to insult courtiers these days, but courtnoll is based on noll “The top or crown of the head; the head itself. In later use freq. with the epithet drunken.” A sample of citations with the freq. epithet:
1577 W. HARRISON Descr. Eng. II. vi. I. 161 He carrieth off a drie dronken noll to bed with him.
1600 P. HOLLAND tr. Livy Rom. Hist. XXXIII. xlviii. 851 When.. they awoke and roused themselues, with their drunken and drousie nols.
1626 N. BRETON Fantasticks in Wks. II. 14/2 The nappy Ale makes many a drunken Noll.
And a fine one without it:
1825 Blackwood’s Mag. Jan. 113 I’ll split thy pruriginious nowl.
I’ll leave the construction of suitable imprecations to the inventive reader.

A specialized subject to be sure, but if you’re interested in sources for Scots pronunciation in the eighteenth century you’ll definitely want to read Charles Jones’s “Sources for Scots pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century“—and even if the reconstruction of historical pronunciation isn’t your thing, you might be interested in the copious quotes from schoolbooks of the period:

Leonora was a little girl of quick parts and vivacity. At only six years old, she could both work and handle her scissars [sic] with much dexterity, and her mamma’s pincushions and huswifes were all of her making. She could read, with ease and readiness, any book that was put into her hand; She could also write very prettily, and she never put large letters in the middle of a word, nor scrawled all awry, from corner to corner of her paper. Neither were her strokes so sprawling, that five or six words would fill a whole sheet from the top to the bottom; as I have known to be the case with some other little girls of the same age.

And here’s a recommendation to cure nonstandard pronunciation at the earliest possible age:

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One of Languagehat’s favorite lexicographers, Erin McKean, has a delightful post at the PowellsBooks blog explaining how words get into dictionaries and what that means:

Lots of people (and by “lots” I mean roughly 99% of everyone I’ve ever spoken to) believe that the dictionary is a Who’s Who of words. That it’s like Ivy League college admissions. That only the really good words, the ones that have eaten all their spinach and who play the oboe and who get high scores on the SAT, make it into the dictionary. That the words that make it into the dictionary are somehow “realler” than the words that don’t.

Well, that’s not exactly true. It does take a bit of work to get a word into the dictionary, but inclusion in the dictionary is not an honor. The dictionary words are not more real than the words not in the dictionary. What they are is more USEFUL.

Think of the dictionary as less of a Social Register for words and more like a word general store. I am the manager of the word general store. Do I stock only words in my size? Only in the flavors I like? Only the words I wish people would use? No — I provide a wide selection of words for the use of all my customers. And because my customers are such a wide group (basically, all adult readers and writers) I have to make sure to include the words that will serve their needs.

As I said in the Wordorigins.org thread where I found the link, she has a real gift for explaining lexicography in ways that the ordinary person can understand. And she ends with some good advice:

So, if you want to get a word into the dictionary…, show me that people are using it. Lots of people, in lots of different places (not just online, not just in one narrow field of reference). Send me examples in context. Show me that it’s important, that people need to know it to live their lives…

Of course, a commenter has already asked “Can the creator of a word grease some palms to get it in?” (Slip me a few bucks, pal, and I’ll see what I can do.)

Bonnie Franz has created a knitted jacket “in blue and white cotton with bands of stranded knitting with the word for ‘peace’ in as many languages as I could fit. (There are 98 to be exact!)” It’s a handsome garment, and needless to say I like the multilingual idea (scroll down on the page for the list of words); I hope Ms. Franz will take the following caveats in the helpful spirit that inspired them—they are meant not as complaints but as suggestions for a revised, more accurate product.

The first and most glaring problem is the alleged Romanian “piersica” (which should really be piersică, but diacritics are ignored throughout, presumably for easier knitting). This word does not mean ‘peace’ but ‘peach.’ The word for ‘peace’ is pace, just as in Italian (so the correct form is already on the sweater). I would suggest that the word be replaced on the sweater with (Mandarin) Chinese heping; the language with the greatest number of speakers should surely be represented.

Other problems: rahat is Turkish for ‘comfort, ease,’ not ‘peace’ (oddly, the correct word, barış, is also represented, though without the hook on the s which lets you know it’s pronounced /sh/ rather than /s/); the Icelandic should be friður, not fridur (it’s a different letter, pronounced like th in the); the Cambodian (Khmer) word is sante’phiap, (or santeqphiap, though using q for the glottal stop is misleading), not santekphep (which shows exactly how misleading that q can be); the Slovak word is mier, not miers; the Filipino/Tagalog word pasensiya (stress on the last syllable, by the way) means ‘patience, willingness to forgive’ (the correct word kapayapaan is also on the list); the Basque word is bake, not bakea. I’d quibble about Kurdish “ashti”—my dictionary gives hashiti and ashiti, among others, but no forms without the first i—but there’s no official form of Kurdish and the listed form probably represents one of the dialects, so I’ll let it go. Also, shulam represents some sort of dialect version a common pronunciation of the Yiddish word normally rendered sholem; since the latter is far more widespread, I don’t see why the variant is used even though the -u- version is widespread, I’d think the “official” form would be preferable—though Hebrew lettering would be best of all (see below)!

A totally different quibble is the fact that everything but Greek and Hebrew is given in transcription; if you’re going to take the trouble to give those in the original alphabet (instead of irini and shalom), why not others? For instance, 和平would represent both Chinese and Japanese, and 평화 looks much nicer than pyoung-hwa. The Arabic سلام would represent other languages that use the Arabic alphabet. And of course Yiddish is normally written in Hebrew letters, so I’m not sure why the transliterated form is even there; the Hebrew could stand for both.

Incidentally, for longer ‘peace’ lists (though words are displayed without diacritics) see here and here.

Thanks, Leslie!

Angelo of Sauvage Noble has translated Hamlet’s soliloquy into Proto-Indo-European, as “H₃regs suhnus gʷʰn̥ntosyo” (The Slain King’s Son). It begins:

eg̑oh₂ h₁esoh₂? way! ne h₁esoh₂? h₁r̥h₁yoh₂er:
upo de melyos teh₂ smereses bʰeroh₂
mn̥teyi Hih₁tleh₂ dusmeneses smr̥tos,
kʷoynoybʰos wē toybʰos tl̥neh₂oh₂ h₁r̥meh₂,
h₂enti yeh₂ stisth₂ents peh₂woyh₁m̥?

Or, in what he aptly calls Old High Translationese:

Should I be? Alas! Should I not? I ask myself:
shall I, having been allotted, better suffer in (my) mind
those missiles of ill-disposed fate?
or should I raise arms to those troubles
which, standing against them, I might stop?

Very enjoyable for this Indo-Europeanist manqué!

Tip for easier reading: just ignore the various hs, which represent the laryngeals (nobody knows how to pronounce them anyway): “Eg̑o eso? way! ne eso? r̥yoer…”

Bill Poser at Language Log has an extremely useful post in which he goes “beyond the Ethnologue” (the best quick reference for language families) and cites books that give reliable information about language relationships for Africa, the Americas, Australia (I’m delighted to see Claire Bowern namechecked!), and New Guinea. This is the sort of service the Log should be providing (alongside its vigilant search for snowclones); who better than linguists to point people to accurate information about languages? Perhaps someone will weigh in here on similarly reliable books that cover other areas, for instance East Asia.
Addendum. See now Bill’s follow-up on exactly why Merrit Ruhlen’s approach to classifying languages is worthless.

Safire’s latest “On Language” column is a fairly pointless trudge through various phrases used to describe the current conflict in Iraq; what caught my attention was the end of the first paragraph: “…others who see it as more political than religious call it an insurgency or an internecine (in-ter-NEE-sin) struggle.” (I have added the italics from the printed article, and it strikes me as bizarre in the extreme that the Times doesn’t bother to carry over the italics in the online version, since they are necessary in separating words presented as words from words used in the normal way as referents; if I were Safire, I would force them to remedy this. I note that the Houston Chronicle manages to preserve the italics when they reprint the column.)

It truly surprises me that Safire passed up a chance to expatiate upon the word internecine; he could have written an entire column on that alone. I’ll start by quoting Fowler‘s entry (first edition, of course; there’s no point reading diluted Fowler):

internecine has suffered an odd fate; being mainly a literary or educated man’s word, it is yet neither pronounced in the scholarly way nor allowed its Latin meaning. It should be called ĭnter’nĭsĭn, & is called ĭnternē’sīn; see False quantity. And the sense has had the Kilkenny-cat notion imported into it because mutuality is the idea conveyed by inter- in English; the Latin word meant merely of or to extermination (cf. intereo perish, intercido slay, interimo destroy) without implying that of both parties. The imported notion, however, is what gives the word its only value, since there are plenty of substitutes for it in its true sense—destructive, slaughterous, murderous, bloody, sanguinary, mortal, & so forth. The scholar may therefore use or abstain from the word as he chooses, but it will be vain for him to attempt correcting other people’s conception of the meaning.

The American Heritage Dictionary shares his sensible approach and adds some interesting detail about where exactly the change in meaning came from:

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Last year I posted about an early statement of comparative linguistics by Ibn Quraysh quoted in Lameen Souag’s Jabal al-Lughat; now Lameen cites an even better one in this entry:

Ibn Hazm (994-1064) was a polymathic intellectual of Cordoba, equally well-known for his poetry and his religious commentary. Less well-known are his opinions on Semitic linguistics, which turn out to have been rather impressive. In the quote below, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the process of historical change than Ibn Quraysh, who seems to have seen the mutual similarities as as resulting as much or more from intermixture than from common ancestry, although both ultimately succumb to the temptation of explaining linguistic family trees in terms of religiously given genealogies. As near as I can translate it off the cuff, he said:

…What we have settled on and determined to be certain is that Syriac and Hebrew and Arabic – that is the language of Mudar and Rabia (ie Arabic as we know it), not the language of Himyar (ie Old South Arabian) – are one language that changed with the migrations of its people, so that it was ground up… For, when a town’s people live near another people, their language changes in a manner clear to anyone who considers the issue, and we find that the masses have changed the pronunciation of Arabic significantly, to the point that it is so distant from the original as to be like a different language, so we find them saying `iinab for `inab (grape), and ‘asTuuT for sawT (whip), and thalathdaa for thalaathatu danaaniir (three dinars), and when a Berber becomes Arabized and wants to say shajarah (tree) he says sajarah, and when a Galician becomes Arabized he replaces `ayn and Haa with haa, so he says muhammad when he means to say muHammad, and such things are frequent. So whoever ponders on Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac will become certain that their difference is of the type we have described, through changes in people’s pronunciation through the passage of time and the difference of countries and the bordering of other nations, and that they are in origin a single language. Having established that, Syriac is the ancestor of both Arabic and Hebrew, and to be more precise, the first to speak this Arabic was Ishmael, upon him be peace, for it is the language of his sons, and Hebrew is the language of Isaac and his sons, and Syriac is without doubt the language of Abraham, blessings upon him peace and upon our prophet and peace.

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