languagehat.com

By popular demand (in this thread), I am discussing the various words for ‘eggplant’ (Solanum melongena, a comestible with a far wider variety of shapes and colors than most of us are aware of—there’s a very nice photograph of “a smorgasboard of eggplants” here). The word eggplant itself is the odd man out here (and odd it is, too, until you see the variety it must originally have referred to: scroll most of the way down this page for a dramatic photograph of what do indeed look exactly like eggs with green stems); the English word that will start us on our voyage is aubergine. This is, as you might guess, borrowed from French; the French word is from Catalan albergínia, which is from Arabic al-bādinjān (with the definite article al-), itself borrowed from Persian bādingān, which is probably from Middle Indo-Aryan *vātiñjana-, vātingana-; most sources attribute the latter form to Sanskrit, but I don’t find it in my dictionaries.

The Arabic word is the source also of Spanish berenjena, which the Italians (assimilating it to mela ‘apple’) borrowed as melanzana, which they then folk-etymologized as mela insana ‘mad apple’; Hobson-Jobson, in its usual discursive fashion, says:

The Ital. mela insana is the most curious of these corruptions, framed by the usual effort after meaning, and connecting itself with the somewhat indigestible reputation of the vegetable as it is eaten in Italy, which is a fact. When cholera is abroad it is considered (e.g. in Sicily) to be an act of folly to eat the melanzana. There is, however, behind this, some notion (exemplified in the quotation from Lane’s Mod. Egypt. below) connecting the badinjān with madness. [Burton, Ar. Nights, iii. 417.] And it would seem that the old Arab medical writers give it a bad character as an article of diet. Thus Avicenna says the badinjān generates melancholy and obstructions. To the N. O. Solanaceae many poisonous plants belong.

This is under the heading brinjaul, a form now spelled brinjal, of which the OED (which classifies it as “Anglo-Indian”) says: “Few names even of plants exemplify so fully the changes to which a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology and form-association… The Malay berinjalā, prob. from Pg., illustrates the Anglo-Indian form… In the West Indies brinjalle has been further corrupted to brown-jolly.” The Portuguese form referred to is spelled beringela in Portugal and berinjela in Brazil; Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) has both berengena and merengena (the former used among the Istanbul Sephardic community according to my dictionary); and the Neapolitans, idiosyncratic as usual, borrowed the Arabic as mulignana.

Greek μελιτζάνα [melitzána] and Slovene melancána are borrowed from Italian, but most other Eastern European words come from Turkish patlıcan (itself an eccentric borrowing from Arabic): Greek Romany patlidžáno (plural patlidzéa), Albanian patëllxhan, Serbo-Croatian patlidžan, Hungarian padlizsán, Polish bakłażan (there’s also oberżyna, presumably from German Aubergine, which is obviously from French), Russian баклажан [baklazhán]. The Yiddish word is patlezhán; perhaps one of my Yiddish-scholar readers can tell me what the immediate source is, but it’s clearly in this group.

Other forms: Swahili bilingani, Malagasy baranjely, Somali birinjal (according to this page) or bidingal (according to my dictionary)… oh, and a local descendent of the Middle Indic forms, Hindi/Urdu bai(n)gan, is the source of the West Indian form baigan (current in Guyana and Trinidad).

You can see still more eggplant words (of all origins) here.

Whew. Let the additions and corrections begin!

I’m sorry, I know we just did this last week, but dammit, I can’t let this stuff go uncorrected. In today’s column he discusses a certain negative prefix:

That got me wondering about ir- words, from irresponsible to irreverent, and irrespective to irrational. There’s no doubt about the meaning of the prefix ir-; it means “not.” Why, then, don’t we use the standard prefixes that turn around a word’s meaning, like in- or un-?
The reason is that language is created to fit the mouth. It is easier to pronounce irresolute than inresolute or unresolute, which is why those clunkier forms never got off the ground. Somewhere in the mist of early mouthings, English speakers found the n uncomfortable before words beginning with r. So – why not scrap the “inr,” with its two separate sounds, and go with a simple “ir-“? In most cases we dropped the n of in-, leaving only the i, pronounced “ih.” Then, because spelling is the handmaiden of pronunciation, when it came to writing down the way the word sounded, we decided to double the r.

I think I’ve already used the phrase “mindbogglingly stupid” to describe a Safire column, and I hate repeating myself, so let me ask him one simple question: if it’s a question of English phonology, how come we say inroads instead of irroads and unresolved instead of urresolved? Answer: because it’s not a question of English phonology, as he could have found out by looking at a dictionary, any dictionary. Let’s try irrational. What does Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate say? Why, it says “Middle English, from Latin irrationalis, from in– + rationalis rational.” So we’re talking about Latin phonology. Yes, Virginia, Latin did have an assimilation rule that changed n+r to rr (and n+l to ll, which is why we say illiberal and illiterate); that’s why only words derived from Latin show this assimilation. Now, was that so hard? Again I ask: does nobody at the Times dare question the man?

A comment by Ran in this thread was so interesting I thought I’d give it its own post. He quotes from Bescherelle: La Conjugaison pour tous, a comprehensive description of French verbal conjugation (I’ll give his translation, slightly emended by me, since the original French is available in his comment):

131 Some remarks on past participle agreement
The subject of past participle agreement involves significant developments that could suggest that it’s one of the most important aspects of the language. To take an accurate measure of the import of the problem, the following remarks should be kept in mind.
– A matter of spelling
Past participle agreement is almost exclusively a matter of spelling. Gender agreement makes itself heard in speech in only a small number of participles: for example, offert. By far the greater number of past participles have masculine forms ending in -é, -i, or -u, and only mark their feminine forms in spelling: -ée, -ie, -ue. As for agreement in number, it never manifests itself in speech, except in the case of liaison, itself rather rare.
– Little-respected rules
Even in those cases where gender agreement is apparent in speech, we often find, in today’s language, that the rules aren’t observed, notably for the agreement of a past participle with a preceding direct object. We very often hear *les règles que nous avons enfreint or *les fautes que nous avons commis instead of the regular enfreintes and commises.
– An artificial rule
The rule of agreement of a past participle with a preceding object is one of the most artificial in the French language. Its introduction can be dated with precision: the poet Clément Marot formulated it in 1538. Marot took as his example Italian, which has since partially abandoned this rule.
– A political matter?
Marot’s rule was nearly abolished politically. In 1900, a courageous minister of public education, Georges Leygues, published an order that “allowed” [tolérait] non-agreement. But the French Academy brought so much pressure to bear that the Minister was forced to replace his order in 1901 with a text that did away with the acceptance of non-agreement except when the participle is followed by an infinitive or a past or present participle: les cochons sauvages que l’on a trouvé or trouvés errant dans les bois.

This little story is a perfect illustration of the idiocy both of imposing artificial rules on a living language and of allowing academies to keep the language from throwing them off. Georges Leygues, je vous salue!

One of the main “characters” in Dixon’s book is Chloe Grant, his main informant for the first language he studies, Dyirbal. She is introduced in Chapter 2 (pp. 24 ff.):

We asked about Chloe Grant. “Oh yes, Chloe’d know a good bit too. Been with the whites a fair amount, but she was brought up by the tribe[…]

…And there was Yabbon: a white-painted wooden house set on blocks about two feet off the ground, with a water-tank and windmill off to the right. The yard was fenced and bare, except for a few clumps of grass and weed among which the dogs—and a goat—ran.

Chloe invited us up to sit on a wooden bench and chairs on the front verandah. We said what a nice house it was.

“Yes,” she agreed, “used to be white people live here until two months ago. But I’m a poor widow since my husband pass away, and I’ve got these three girl to bring up.[…] So old Ormy Butler he let me live here. But now he say he want me to move. I’m not going.” Chloe’s voice moved up an octave as she almost sang the last word. “I’ve got nowhere to go.” Then without any pause and in a matter-of-fact tone: “Yes, what can I do for you?”

I explained, stammered, that I’d come from England to learn something about the original language of Murray Upper and that Les had said Chloe might help us. What I really wanted was stories, just telling a traditional tale, or something about her early life, talking into the microphone for five or ten minutes.

“I don’t think I can help you there.” There was a pause, while Chloe fiddled with her cigarette. “There were two languages on the Murray, not just one.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes. The other side of the river that was Jirrbal and this side was Girramay

“Were they very different?” I asked.

“Oh, long way. Jirrbal call ‘water’ bana but Girramay say gamu. And ‘fire’, that’s buni over there but this side they call yugu.”

It’s the start of a long and productive relationship. Dixon says “Black-haired, bespectacled, of medium height, Chloe exuded a vivacity and intelligence that made it hard for me to keep up.” She reminds me of my late, beloved Aunt Bettie, to whom I was a surrogate son; she even looks like her (there are pictures of many of the informants in this well-designed book). Later on, describing another visit (the year is 1963), he says (pp. 73 ff.):

Although Chloe had had a Girramay mother and an Irish father, she had been brought up in the Jirrbalngan camp at Bellenden. She’d been born about the turn of the century, and tribal life had continued pretty well intact until 1913, when the government had stepped in and taken many of the people away to settlements. After that, aspects of traditional life had continued in secret.

Chloe had a quick and active mind, and had taken note of everything that went on around her, absorbing all that was recounted around the camp-fire of traditional legends and beliefs.[…]

Chloe had the energy of someone half her age. She would be up at six in the morning, get Ernie off to work and the girls to school, clean and tidy the house, and be ready and waiting for us by nine o’clock. At first, when she yielded to our persuasion to tell traditional stories, Chloe apologized for each one, saying it was not true, just silly. This was the legacy from a century of psychological brainwashing by the whites—telling the Aborigines that they had no proper language, and reviling their customs. We assured Chloe that Jirrbal and Girramay myths were similar to many European stories and legends (including much of the Old Testament) which no one took as literally true.

At the beginning, whenever Chloe translated a sentence into Jirrbal she’d apologize that it was “back-to-front”. I had to stress that each language had a distinctive word order, and that there was nothing sacred about the order of English. Jirrbal grammar and means of expression were every bit as valid and proper as those of every other language. Every language is a bit different from every other one, that’s all.

We found the same sentiments all over North Queensland. Because of what white people had said to them, Aborigines were ashamed of their languages and legends, and they were at first wary of talking to us simply because they thought we would laugh at them.[…] It is good to be able to report that things have changed a lot since then. In the late sixties, Aborigines all over Australia had a resurgence of pride in their own heritage, and in their Aboriginality. By and large, they have now stopped trying to become dark-skinned whites.

In a better world, this book would be required reading in all English-language high schools. I can’t think of another book that simultaneously teaches so much about language and basic humanity.

In a previous entry I promised a series of posts with excerpts from Dixon’s Memoirs of a Field Worker, and since three commenters in that thread mentioned the story of the Mbabaram word for ‘dog,’ I think I’ll start with that. Here’s the setup:

When Ken Hale had sent the Jabugay tape, he’d urged me to find a speaker of Barbaram, the apparently aberrant language that Lizzie Simmons [“eighty years old, toothless, and cranky”–p. 54] had declined to speak to us. Certainly Dyirbal and Jabugay had very normal Australian grammar and vocabulary, not radically different from the Western Desert language, almost two thousand miles away. But from the few words that Norman Tindale had published of Barbaram, that language looked really different.

People at Mareeba had mentioned Albert Bennett, at Petford, and early one Sunday morning I set out to try to locate him… Albert was an oldish, square-framed man with curly grey hair. He was sitting stolidly on a bench just outside his open front door. I introduced myself, but he really wasn’t very interested. He didn’t remember any Barbaram language, but who’d want it anyway? What good was it?… Finally he volunteered a word.

“You know what we call ‘dog’?” he asked. I waited anxiously. “We call it dog.” My heart sank… [pp. 105-107]

And here’s the payoff, from his visit the following year:

Barbaram was still a major priority… I met the third and last living member of the Barbaram tribe, Jimmy Taylor, who had walked down from his barracks near the store… We had a good session, getting another seventy-five words and—even more important—bits of grammar… Most exciting of all, I could see a relationship between Barbaram and the other languages I’d studied. “Stomach” is bamba in Dyirbal but mba in Barbaram; “we two” is ngali in Dyirbal and Wagaman but li in Barbaram… Barbaram had simply dropped off the initial vowel and consonant… So Barbaram did seem to be a language of the Australian family, only it had undergone a quite regular change that had produced odd-looking words. Stress probably shifted from first syllable (as in Dyirbal) to second syllable—bámba to bambá. Then the first syllable was gradually dropped off in pronunciation, yielding modern mbá… [Dixon discovers at this point that the name of the language is actually Mbabaram and not Tindale’s “Barbaram.”]

Four years later, when I was spending a year at Harvard and first met Ken Hale, he pointed out that the e and o had developed in Mbabaram in the same sort of way as in some languages he had worked on from further up the Cape York Peninsula. An a in the second syllable of a word had become o if the word had originally begun with g. So from guwa “west”, Mbabaram had derived wo. We were sitting on a bench near Gloucester, Massachusetts one Sunday in September when Ken suddenly saw the etymology for dog “dog”. It came from an original gudaga, which is still the word for dog in Yidin (Dyirbal has shortened it to guda). The initial g would have raised the a in the second syllable to o, the initial gu dropped and so did the final a (another common change in the development of Mbabaram). Ergo, gudaga became dog—a one in a million accidental similarity of form and meaning in two unrelated languages. It was because this was such an interesting coincidence, that Albert Bennett had thought of it as the first word to give me. [pp. 125-129]

For a linguist, that kind of insight is as thrilling and beautiful as a really nice proof for a mathematician (which is what I once intended to be, and I still remember my excitement on understanding Gödel’s proof when I read this excellent book). And now I have another instance to set beside my standard Persian bad ‘bad’ when explaining to people that similar words are not necessarily related.

Mark Liberman has a very interesting Language Log post that takes off from an LSA paper by Alexandra Jaffe about “Transcription in Sociolinguistics: Nonstandard Orthography, Variation and Discourse”:

She started with her own work on the “polynomic” orthography of Corsican, where “variation in spelling is understood to be a systematic representation of coherent linguistic systems (regional dialects of Corsican)”. In contrast, she observed, we Americans most often use respelling to index stigmatized dialects. This effect is especially striking when the respelling represents ubiquitous, pan-dialectal pronunciations, like “wuz” for was, “hist’ry” for history, or “subjecks” for subjects.

Mark then repeats a quote from her handout, which I liked so much I will pass it on in my turn; it’s by the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard (see this post for more by him):

Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that’s no thi way a say it. Nif yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wit hi page covered in letters stuck thigither, nwee dots above hof thi letters, in fact yi end up wi wanna they thingz yi needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be able ti read. But that’s no thi way a think, as if ad took a course in phonetics. A doan’t mean that emdy that’s done phonetics canny think right—it’s no a questiona right or wrong. But ifyi write down “doon” wan minute, nwrite doon “down” thi nixt, people say yir beein inconsistent. But ifyi sayti sumdy, “Whaira yi afti?” nthey say, “Whut?” nyou say “Where are you off to?” they don’t say, “That’s no whutyi said thi furst time.” They’ll probably say sumhm like, “Doon thi road!” anif you say, “What?” they usually say “Down the road!” the second time—though no always. Course, they never really say, “Doon thi road” or “Down the road!” at all. Least, they never say it the way it’s spelt. Coz it izny spelt, when they say it, is it?

Perhaps if I reframe the first sentence as “normal” English, it will help those unfamiliar with the dialect: “You write down a word, and you say to yourself, that’s not the way I say it.” Let’s see, nwee is “and wee” and emdy is “anybody”; let me know if there’s something you can’t figure out.
He then discusses Mark Twain’s famous use of carefully rendered dialects in Huckleberry Finn, and in an update quotes an intriguing suggestion by Ben Zimmer:

[Read more…]

A new comment by MAB in the Pevear-Volokhonsky thread from a few months ago brings up Dead Souls, which I am reading in Russian, and reminds me of a gaffe I recently came across in Andrew MacAndrew’s translation, which I keep around as a backup for difficult passages. I’m on Chapter Seven, perhaps my favorite (it starts with a wonderful passage comparing a writer to a voyager, continues with Chichikov’s speculations on the lives of the dead serfs he’s buying up, and ends with a drunken feast and, in a final flourish, a boot-fetishist lieutenant from Ryazan who can’t make himself pull off his boots and go to bed), and in the course of describing the much-loved police chief who gives the feast, Gogol says: Даже все сидельцы обыкновенно в это время, снявши шапки, с удовольствием посматривали друг на друга и как будто бы хотели сказать: «Алексей Иванович хороший человек!» Which is to say, ‘Even the prisoners shop assistants would usually, in those days, taking off their caps, all look at one another with pleasure as if to say “Alexei Ivanovich is a good man!”‘ But MacAndrew has: “And all those around, their heads uncovered, would exchange glances which meant, ‘Yes, our police chief is a good man.'” He evidently mistook сидельцы sidel’tsy, which is on its face a derivative of сидеть sidet’ ‘to sit,’ for a deverbative meaning ‘the guys sitting around’ or the like. He forgot that ‘to sit’ is a long-standing Russian equivalent for ‘to be in prison’; in Russian, the normal way to say someone served a ten-year sentence is “He sat for ten years.” It’s true that sidel’tsy is not much used in that sense any more, but if you’re translating Gogol, it behooves you to seek out historical meanings. Anyway, if anyone has the P-V translation, could you let me know how they render this? It’s in a long paragraph not far from the end of the chapter.
Addendum. Tatyana has convinced me that sidel’tsy in fact means ‘shop assistants’ here; this does not change the fact that MacAndrews blew it, and I’d still be curious how P&V rendered it.

I’ve been reading, with increasing pleasure, R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, and I find myself unable to wait until I’ve finished it before sharing it with you all. It’s by far the best book I’ve read on what it’s like to be a field linguist, which is what I think of as a “real” linguist—it’s all very well to sit in an office and pore through monographs, but to me (and this is, or used to be in pre-Chomsky days, a typically American point of view) a linguist should be out there engaging with living languages, preferably ones that can use his services for purposes of education or salvage. His mix of linguistic description (carefully explained so that amateurs should be able to follow it) and reportage (he’s properly outraged by the appalling conditions under which Aborigines lived in Queensland in the early ’60s, when he first went to Australia, and he draws vivid word-pictures of his informants and other friends) is exhilarating, and if this book had been available when I was in college I’m pretty sure it would have inspired me to drop Indo-European and head to Australia myself (and I’d probably still be a linguist today).

Rather than trying to select a few paragraphs, an impossible task, I’m going to follow the lead of Joel at Far Outliers, one of my favorite blogs; while he’s reading a book, he posts nice fat chunks of it over the course of a week or so, giving a good idea of what it’s like. So you’ll be seeing a series of Dixon posts here; I’ll start small, with a little anecdote that reminds me of a scene from An American Werewolf in London. Dixon and his wife Alison are driving through North Queensland on his first field trip:

The heat was overwhelming as we parked our caravan on the only available plot… We went across to Lucey’s pub. Alison sat in the lounge while I went through to the bar—into which women were not allowed, by Queensland law—to ask for a coke and a gin and tonic. The weatherbeaten, red faces of the cattlemen sitting on stools around the bar all slowly swivelled and surveyed me. “Pommy!” ejaculated one of them. I was made to feel that no one had ever asked for a gin and tonic in that pub before.

I should point out that Dixon is not, in fact, a Pommy but a Scot who had been doing graduate work at Edinburgh, but it was clearly a distinction without a difference as far as the cattlemen were concerned. Or are Scots in fact Poms? I welcome clarification from Australian readers.

Addendum. I am informed by Claire in the comments that Dixon is in fact a Pom by any definition, being from Gloucester originally. He sure doesn’t advertise it in the book; I guess those surly cattlemen made a deep impression!

An essay by Dr Shadyah A.N. Cole in the Umm Al-Qura University Journal, “The Rise of Prescriptivism in English,” is a 23-page investigation of its subject. The abstract says:

The social milieu of eighteenth-century England gave rise to the middle classes. As their numbers, wealth, and influence grew, they felt the need for an authority on language to settle disputes of usage and variation. An English Language Academy was proposed but came to naught. Instead, dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson’s, and grammars, such as Robert Lowth’s, took the place of a language academy. Together, dictionaries and grammars were felt to have accomplished the three goals that were deemed necessary: to ascertain, refine, and fix the English language once and for all.

And the introduction gives a summary of her approach:

Where do these rules and exceptions to the rule come from? This paper traces the beginnings of the phenomenon of prescriptive grammars in English. Part Two describes the milieu which led to the writing of prescriptive grammars. Part Three details the attitudes toward language itself that prevailed at this time. Part Four discusses the call for an English Language Academy and why it failed. Part Five shows that an English dictionary and an English grammar were found to be adequate substitutes for an English Academy. In Part Six prescriptive grammars are discussed in detail, and Part Seven shows what the results of this prescriptivist movement are today.

Her conclusion is admirably even-handed:

Whatever the grounds on which the decisions were reached about the correct standards, however arbitrary the choice, however faulty the reasoning behind the choice, the work of prescriptivist grammarians has indeed led to the fixing of an amazing number of points of disputed usage.

You can see some further quotes in aldiboronti’s Wordorigin.com post, from which I shamelessly stole the link. I swear, aldi, I’d split the profits from this site with you if there were any.

In the course of investigating Joel Hoffman’s book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, I ran across David Steinberg’s useful web page “History of the Hebrew Language” (which cites Hoffman in the bibliography). It’s got tables of phonetic correspondences and brief descriptions of each phase of the language, with some interesting insights:

It is in semantics that Israeli Hebrew can be said to break radically with the past and semantically and hence culturally become a European language…
The process worked as follows. When reviving Hebrew, the revivers asked the “fatal question” i.e. “what is the Hebrew word for X” with X being a Yiddish, Russian or German (and more recently English) word. He would… select a Hebrew word (verb, adjective, noun etc.) with a historical semantic range that overlapped the particular meaning of the foreign word he was trying to translate. Then, the Hebrew word would come to mirror the semantic range of word X. I.e. it would take the range of meanings of X and lose all of its original meanings not included in the semantic range of X. This is a development with huge cultural implications…
[For example,] Biblical Hebrew taḥana (Israeli Hebrew takhana) was originally a fairly rare word, from a root meaning “bending down” used meaning a stop for camping. It was used for describing the Israelites camping places in the wilderness. The root being similar in meaning to se station[n]er in French, takhana was chosen as the Hebrew calque… of the word “station”. It is now used to translate any English use of station without any connection, any longer, with the root meaning. In fact, since “station” is not used in European languages to denote a camping place, it can no longer be used in its original meaning! Arabic used a more “authentic” approach i.e. the Arabic word for bus stop is related to the word “to stop”; for police station Arabic uses a word meaning center of diffusion. What this means is that Hebrew has accepted an idiosyncratic development of this vocabulary item which stems from internal developments in another, historically unrelated, language.
Similar developments have taken place for sherut to translate all senses of service and tenu’a… for all senses of movement e.g. scout movement!

However, I’m still trying to get a handle on the Hoffman book, which apparently has some controversial theories about how ancient Hebrew sounded (he discounts the entire Masoretic tradition). Anybody have an informed opinion they’d like to share?