languagehat.com

Amy Jeffs has a very interesting LRB review (archived) of From Lived Experience to the Written Word, by Pamela H. Smith; it starts with a vivid description of a traditional craftsman:

Fred Saunders’s​ wheelwright shop in the village of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, stood not far from the forge and next to the paint shop, where his finished waggons were painted in colours declaring their high Cotswold origins. Fred kept the oak spokes of his wheels narrow and light because the waggons were destined for use in the elevated fields, unlike those made in the Severn Valley, which needed to be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the stress of use in the fields. A circle of interconnected ash felloes capped the spokes, forming the circumference of the wheel. The final component was the tyre, made of a loop of iron, half an inch thick. It was placed in the fire until sufficiently expanded, then lifted out with great tongs called tyre-dogs and dropped over the outside of the wheel. Wheel and tyre would then be doused with cold water so that the metal shrank back to its original size, squeezed tightly about the wheel, never to be rattled free by stone or pothole. Fred made haywains, muck-carts and drays, as well as the everyday wooden items required by his neighbours – and their coffins when they died.

But I’m bringing it here for a paragraph that taught me a new word:

The psalter also offers readers an image of a quintessential medieval feast. The manuscript’s patrons, Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife Agnes Sutton and his daughter-in-law Beatrice Scrope, sit with their fellow diners, their hands placed on a long tabletop that rests on decorative, braced trestles (this suggests the top of the table might be lifted off, presumably to make room for dancing). On the facing page is an image of the kitchen, where servants are preparing food and drink, transferring it to dishes and mazers and carrying it across the page gutter to the nobility. Because the kitchen tables are lowly fixtures, and likely to rest on an uneven floor, they are three-legged and simply built: you can see where the top of one leg, the kind rounded off in a lathe or on a shave-horse, pokes through the tabletop.

I hadn’t known mazer, which turns out to be (OED, entry revised 2001) “Maple or other fine-grained hardwood used as a material for making drinking vessels. Obsolete.” or “A bowl, drinking cup, or goblet, usually without a foot, made from a burr or knot of a maple tree and frequently mounted with silver or silver-gilt bands at the lip and base. Also: a similar vessel made of metal or other material. Now archaic and historical.” There’s a nice, detailed etymology:
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1) This post by Anatoly Vorobey (in Russian) describes an interesting detail of Russian morphophonemics: feminine words whose stems end in consonants + НЯ [nʲa] lose the palatalization on n in the genitive plural. Thus песня [ˈpʲesʲnʲə] ‘song’ has genitive singular песни, dative singular песне, and so on, with palatalized [nʲ] throughout, but the genitive plural is песен with unpalatalized final [n]. But! There are four exceptions:

барышня ‘girl of gentry family, miss’ – барышеНЬ
боярышня ‘boyar’s daughter’ – боярышеНЬ
кухня ‘kitchen’ – кухоНЬ
деревня ‘village’ – деревеНЬ

And the pull of these exceptions, with the “expected” palatalization, can attract other words, for example башня ‘tower,’ for which Anatoly uses the “incorrect” genitive plural башень in place of the traditional/”correct” башен in speech, which led him to write it that way in a recent post. And he’s not alone: “поиск в корпусе русского языка находит небольшое, но реальное количество старых книг и авторов, которые предпочитали писать именно “башень”, очевидно потому, что так говорили” [a search in the Russian language corpus finds a small but real number of old books and authors who preferred to write “башень,” obviously because they said it that way]. I love this stuff.

2) The delightful NY Times story “A Monkey Is on the Run in the Scottish Highlands” (archived) explains that the Japanese macaque in question “escaped from an enclosure in the Highland Wildlife Park in Kingussie, Scotland, and fled into the Scottish highlands,” later adding:

Amused residents, who have given the animal the nickname “Kingussie Kong,” have found themselves invested in its fate, and journalists have followed animal keepers as they have swept the hills.

I assumed Kingussie was pronounced kin-GUS-si and thought “Kingussie Kong” was slightly off, but then I looked it up and discovered it’s actually /kɪŋˈjuːsi/ (king-YOO-see), representing Scottish Gaelic Ceann a’ Ghiùthsaich. Now “Kingussie Kong” makes perfect sense, and I thought I’d pass along that unusually unexpected spelling/pronunciation matchup.

No, this isn’t yet another post about “untranslatable” words (e.g.), it’s a new website: “Untranslatable is an online dictionary that allows people to add words and expressions from all over the world.” The “Behind the project” section reads:

My name is Amarens, and I started this project in 2019 after I graduated from my Bachelors in Portuguese and Spanish Linguistics. I have since received an MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and a MSc in Computational Linguistics.

I originally raised money for the project through a Kickstarter campaign, and learned to program from scratch in order to create this website.

Alas, when I click on “Languages” I get taken to this page, which seems to provide access to a list of languages… but when I click on it (in Firefox) nothing happens. Let me know if you have better luck!

I know this is a silly story, but it’s pretty irresistible, and people keep sending it to me, so here’s Issy Ronald’s CNN Travel report:

A British wildlife park has hatched a new plan to rehabilitate its potty-mouthed parrots after they unleashed a tide of expletives.

Back in 2020, five foul-mouthed African gray parrots, donated to Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England, were isolated from the flock in an attempt to improve their language. But, from Tuesday, the team is adopting a different, riskier approach of integrating three newly donated, cuss-happy birds – named Eric, Captain and Sheila – alongside the original five miscreants into the flock.

“When we came to move them, the language that came out of their carrying boxes was phenomenal, really bad. Not normal swear words, these were proper expletives,” the park’s chief executive, Steve Nichols, told CNN. “We’ve put eight really, really offensive, swearing parrots with 92 non-swearing ones,” he said.

If the new strategy works, the eight parrots could learn “all the nice noises like microwaves and vehicles reversing” that the other parrots in the flock favor, Nichols added. But if the other 92 instead pick up the expletives, “it’s going to turn into some adult aviary.” […]

The park has installed large signs warning visitors about the parrots’ language, but Nichols said it hasn’t received a single complaint. In fact, historically, “we did hear a lot more customers swearing at parrots than we did parrots swearing at customers,” Nichols said.

More details at the link if you need them. Thanks, Bonnie, Eric, cuchuflete, and whoever else I may be forgetting!

Addendum. Actually, cuchuflete sent me a different link, to Bill Chappell’s NPR story about the parrots, which has the following memorable ending:

All of this raises a key question: Are the parrots teaching all of these foul words to each other? Or is the profanity coming from humans?

“It’s certainly down to humans,” Nichols said. “And what makes it funnier is that this particular species actually replicates the person’s voice exactly.”

Illustrating his point, he tells the story of the lady who spoke to him about donating her parrot. Her husband had taught the bird all the profane words it knew, she said.

There was just one snag, Nichols said.

“It was quite easy to hear she wasn’t telling the full truth as it swore in her voice.”

Via Rebecca Stanton’s Facebook post, I found the fascinating “preview” of Aaron D. Rubin’s “Hebrew Loanwords in Polynesian Languages” on pp. 12-13 of this pdf, which I thought I’d share here (I have tried to eliminate OCR errors, but there are probably one or two remaining):

In the past, there have been scholars who argued for a genetic relationship between the Semitic languages and the Oceanic family of languages, of which Polynesian is a sub-group (e.g., Macdonald 1907). Such a theory is quite fantastical, of course. A connection of sorts between Hebrew and Polynesian does exist, however, although it is not genetic. Indeed, few Hebraists and Semitists are aware of the fact that a significant number of Hebrew words have been borrowed into several Polynesian languages, including Samoan, Tahitian, and Hawaiian. These Hebrew words made their way to Oceania not through direct contact between speakers of Hebrew and Polynesian, but rather through the efforts of a few 19th-century missionaries.

British missionaries began branching out to the Pacific islands in the 1790s, under the auspices of the Missionary Society (known from 1818–1966 as the London Missionary Society). The first mission was established in Tahiti, and Tahitian is the first Polynesian language into which the Bible was translated. The missionary translators needed many words and concepts not found in Tahitian, and, curiously, they chose to use Hebrew and Greek as sources for these new words. This was, at least in part, because certain Hebrew and Greek words were more easily adaptable to Polynesian phonology (Williams 1837: 528), though certainly religious enthusiasm also played a role. The missionary translators in Samoa and Rarotonga used the Tahitian Bible as a model, and so many Hebrew words were incorporated into the Samoan and Rarotongan Bibles as well.

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I’ve made posts involving the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis many times (the first post dedicated to it was in 2003), but I can’t help responding to this long Aeon piece by James McElvenny, “a linguist and intellectual historian” (which I found at MetaFilter). It starts off:

Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?

The only acceptable answer to that last question is “No, it couldn’t.” But McElvenny — apparently more intellectual historian than linguist — doesn’t see it that way; he wants to teach the controversy, and expends many many paragraphs in going through the relevant history (“The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century”) while slipping in sly digs at the position pretty much universally held by actual linguists. Here, for instance, is a paragraph on Indo-European:
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Anyone who is, like me, nostalgic about old-style bookstores will enjoy Bob Egan’s deep dive into the area of New York City once known as Book Row:

Between roughly 1890 and 1980 there were dozens of used bookstores along Fourth Avenue between Astor Place (8th Street) and Union Square (14th Street) in New York CIty. The area was known as Book Row.

The area was at the eastern edge of Greenwich VIllage where it meets the East Village.

This website shows the major bookstores that made up Book Row during it’s heyday – around 1940. The information was taken primarily from 1940 phone books at the New York Public Library, photographs found in the Municiple Archives of NYC, and the book BOOK ROW: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador (2004/Carroll & Graf, NYC; paperback reprint 2019/Skyhorse, NYC).

Used bookstores like to cluster together so those browsing could go from one store to the next until they found the book they liked.

People came from all over the world to shop here, though many customers were New Yorkers passing through Book Row on their way to work, or shoppers walking between the immense Wanamakers Department store at East 9th street and Union Square.

Most stores had bookcarts outside with books selling for as low as five cents. The reason: when these customers came into the store to buy their bargain purchase, they were often enticed to buy more additional higher priced books.

As you can see, the text is full of typos, but never mind — it’s an indispensable guide to that fabled land (which disappeared shortly before I moved to the city). There are maps, descriptions, and many, many photos; I wish there were more interiors (beyond the still from Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters), but I’m sure if such were available he would have used them. (Incidentally, if anyone knows of online images of the interiors of prerevolutionary Russian bookstores, I’d love to see them.)

Elise Cutts reports for Scientific American on an interesting form of borrowing:

Like the ancient Greek of Homer’s time, the Tsimane’ language has no set word for the parts of the color spectrum English speakers call “blue.” Although Tsimane’ does name a number of more subjective hues (think “aquamarine” or “mauve” in English), its speakers—the Tsimane’ people of Bolivia—reliably agree on just three main color categories: blackish, reddish and whitish.

But bilingualism is reworking the Tsimane’ tricolor rainbow, researchers recently reported in Psychological Science—offering a rare, real-time glimpse into how learning a second language can change how people think about abstract concepts and fuel language evolution. The data show Tsimane’ speakers who also speak Spanish are borrowing the concepts of—but not the Spanish words for—new color categories such as blue, green and yellow.

“You could have imagined that they could have just started calling things amarillo and azul” (the Spanish words for yellow and blue), says lead author Saima Malik-Moraleda, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But instead “they’re repurposing their own Tsimane’ color words.”

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If you follow Language Log at all, you’ll be aware of the endless ingenuity of the citizens of the PRC in getting around censorship by means of puns, allusions, etc.; this story by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) of Taiwan News shows that the citizens of Taiwan are equally creative, even in the absence of such censorship:

One of the fun aspects of following Taiwanese politics is the unique and colorful vocabulary. Some of it is practical, some profound, and others downright funny. Much of it is distinct to Taiwan. All of it reflects the passionate interest in Taiwanese elections. […] When more than one person is vying to be the party’s candidate, they may “knead tang yuan,” (搓圓仔湯/搓湯圓/挲圓仔湯/煮圓仔湯) or try offer up something to get a candidate to drop out. […] Sometimes politicians look to a “barrel hoop,” (桶箍) which is a neutral or mutually respected person working to bring candidates together as a team. […] Sometimes a barrel hoop will negotiate with another party to get one party’s candidate to not run to avoid splitting the ticket against the opposition, and “politely yield” (禮讓). […]

It is fairly common in Taiwan for politicians to express public disinterest in running for a post, sometimes for genuine reasons but often it is a song and dance show. If a politician already holds a post it would look bad to step down to run for something else, or if a friend or ally is vying for the same position and it would look like betrayal, or even just to look humble, if the party wants the candidate to run they will “make three humble visits to the thatched cottage” (三顧茅廬). […] Once the candidates are chosen, it is time to use my favorite terms, “hen” (母雞) and “chicks” (小雞). The hen is a candidate at the top of the ticket and chicks are the downstream ones, for example, a presidential candidate is a hen, and legislative candidates are chicks, or a mayoral candidate and city council candidates. […] What the hen is providing the chicks is a “watermelon nestle to the big side (西瓜偎大邊), which means to ride on the hen’s coattails.

Great stuff, and there’s much more of it at the link. (See this 2002 post for an illustration of how proverbs and “four-character expressions” can be used to make conversation livelier and less intelligible.)

My wife and I are about halfway through our reading of Shirley Hazzard’s best-known novel, The Transit of Venus, and I thought I’d provide a sample of her splendid way with language and her raptor-like view of human interaction. This is a good chunk of chapter 17 (set sometime around the early 1960s by my guess):

In the government office where Caroline Bell worked there was a young woman called Valda. That she was called Valda was to the point, for she objected to this. None of the other women there objected to being Milly, Pam, or Miranda with their appointed Mr. Smedleys and Mr. Renshaw-Browns. None of the other women objected, for that matter, to being girls.

By that epoch the men themselves were no longer Bates or Barkham to one another, but instant Sam or Jim. Those who had irreducibly formal names, such as Giles or Julian, even seemed to be lagging dangerously and doomed to obscurity. There was one older man in Planning who would say Mister to his subordinates—”Mister Haynes,” “Mister Dandridge”—like the skipper of an old ship with his first mate or boatswain. But he too, among the women, permitted himself an occasional Marge or Marigold; although at home calling his charwoman Mrs. Dodds.

When Caro asked, “If they make a true friend, what will they call him?” Valda told her: “They’re hoping to put true friendship out of business.” […]

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