languagehat.com

I’ve been trying to lay off William Safire—we all know his limitations and he’s frequently amusing and occasionally even informative, so why keep thumping him?—but sometimes he says something so mind-bogglingly ridiculous I can’t be satisfied simply muttering at my copy of the newspaper, I have to go public. In today’s On Language column, he begins by quoting an allegedly new usage of the word good (in the reply “I’m good”), then calls it “one of the basic words of the English language – originally used in the place of God to avoid irreverence.” Wha? He seems to be claiming the word good was first (“originally”) used as a substitute for the word God (what, they stuck in the extra -o- to avoid blasphemy?), but surely even he can’t believe that. The OED knows of only one such use (“The Good, that guides And blessed makes this realm which thou dost mount”), and that’s from Cary’s 1814 translation of Dante. The original meaning of good was, not surprisingly, ‘good’—or, to be more specific, “Of things: Having in adequate degree those properties which a thing of the kind ought to have… Of persons, as a term of indefinite commendation.” It’s from a different Indo-European root, *ghedh- ‘to unite, join, fit’ (god is from *gheuH- ‘to call, invoke’); the similarity of sound is rhetorically useful but otherwise irrelevant.
He follows this historical blunder with a religio-semantic one: “Early on, I’m good meant ‘I am without sin,’ but that is now seldom the meaning.” I search the OED entry in vain for any hint of sinlessness; I search my memory of Sunday school for any suggestion that it was possible for human beings (with an exception or two, who didn’t speak English) to be without sin. I can only conclude that our boy William dashed the column off before his first cup of coffee and (as usual) nobody at the Times bothered to even read it over before sending it to the printer.
Incidentally, the last half of the column is devoted to dedication pages in books. Don’t ask me why.

People keep sending me the L.A. Times article “Cantonese Is Losing Its Voice” by David Pierson, so I might as well post it. As John Emerson put it in his e-mail, it’s “a mix of classic stupidities and interesting information.” Among the former: Cantonese is “a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions”; it “is said to be closer than Mandarin to ancient Chinese” and “is also more complicated” (because it has more tones, you see); and (a particular favorite) “it is far more difficult to learn Cantonese than Mandarin because the former does not always adhere to rules and formulas.” But there’s a lot of the latter too:

Popular phrases include the slang for getting a parking ticket, which in Cantonese is “I ate beef jerky,” probably because Chinese beef jerky is thin and rectangular, like a parking ticket. And teo bao (literally “too full”) describes someone who is uber-trendy, so hip he or she is going to explode.
Many sayings are coined by movie stars on screen. Telling someone to chill out, comedian Stephen Chow says: “Drink a cup of tea and eat a bun.”
Then there are the curse words, and what an abundance there is.
A four-syllable obscenity well known in the Cantonese community punctuates the end of many a sentence. […]
Even quintessential Hong Kong-style restaurants, including wonton noodle shops, now have waitresses who speak Mandarin, albeit badly, so they can take orders. Elected officials in Los Angeles County, even native Cantonese, are holding news conferences in Mandarin.
Some Cantonese speakers feel besieged.
Cheryl Li, a 19-year-old Pasadena City College student whose parents are from Hong Kong, is studying to become an occupational therapist and volunteers at the Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, where most of the patients are Chinese.
Recently, she was asking patients, in Mandarin, what they wanted to eat. When one man thought her accent was off, he said, “Stupid second-generation Chinese American doesn’t speak Mandarin.”
Li responded angrily, “No! I was born here. But I understand enough.”
“We’re in the minority,” she added, reflecting on the incident. “I’m scared Cantonese is going to be a lost language.”
Still, Li is studying Mandarin.

I suspect the “four-syllable obscenity” mentioned in the article is diu nei lo mo, cited by the esteemed Jimmy Ho in an enjoyable LH obscenity thread.
Addendum. See also Amida’s irritated response to the article.

I have come across yet another of the internet’s little-known lexicographical resources, Babawilly’s Dictionary of Pidgin English Words and Phrases:

Pidgin English is spoken widely across Nigeria. It is a language made up of elements of the Queen’s English and the local dialects. With Nigeria having about 250 tribes in all, one finds a lot of variation in the type of Pidgin English spoken by the different ethnic groups. In this compilation I have limited myself to what I would call ‘Lagos Pidgin’ as this is what I am familiar with. The three major Nigerian languages namely Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa feature prominently in Pidgin English in general, however with Lagos being historically a Yoruba city ‘Lagos Pidgin’ consists of a disproportionately high number of Yoruba words.

A couple of entries will suggest the flavor:

Dey: 1. Is e.g. wetin dey happun 2. Location e.g. where you dey 3. Stance in the matter e.g. which one you dey sef. 4. In existence 5. Spectacular e.g. dat car dey well-well.

Dey laik Dele: (Dele is a Yoruba name) 1. I am barely surviving e.g Man juss Dey laik Dele. 2. Being idle e.g You juss dey there laik Dele . Also – Standing like Standard Bank, Looking like Lucozade and Dey like you no dey.

I was led to this site by investigating a Lagos term used in teju cole, a temporary blog reporting on a visit home by a Nigerian long resident in the U.S.; it’s full of beauty, sadness, and keen observations on life in Nigeria and in general, and I recommend it to your attention before it vanishes away at the end of the month.

Addendum (June 2008): Correspondent Adim alerts me to Naija Lingo, “a dictionary for people who want definitions to Nigerian words or slang, names and phrases and created by the people (you) who know them. Naija Lingo is an open dictionary where you the user are free to add and edit words as time changes, and as the meaning of words evolve and new words are formed.”

When the occasion arises to discuss the English phrase that once meant what is unambiguously termed petitio principii but is now universally (except by pedants) used to mean “raise the question,” I used to reflexively link to my earlier discussion of the issue (scroll down to final paragraph). Now I have another choice: the latest episode of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics. Many thanks to John Emerson for the prompt heads-up!

Can’t afford a subscription to the online OED? No problem, sort of, for the next few weeks—to promote the new BBC TV series Balderdash and Piffle, they’re providing free access at certain times, as this page explains:

Until 13 February, you can use the OED to look up any word starting with the letters featured in the programmes—or pick a quick link to see one of the words highlighted this week.
Any time until 13 February you can look up any words beginning with this week’s letter, or with any of the previous letters of the week.
PLUS!
For 48 hours after each programme (from 22:00 GMT on Mondays to 22:00 GMT on Wednesdays) you can look up any words, beginning with any letter, in the whole of the OED.

(Emphasis theirs.) Thanks go to Grant Barrett for the tip; be sure to take full advantage of this generous offer!

The indefatigable aldiboronti (in a thread at his usual haunt, Wordorigins.org) has turned up another great resource, the Jewish Language Research Website [archived]:

Throughout the world, wherever Jews have lived, they have spoken and/or written differently from the non-Jews around them. Their languages have differed by as little as a few embedded Hebrew words or by as much as a highly variant grammar. A good deal of research has been devoted to a number of Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Italian, Jewish English, and Jewish Neo-Aramaic. This website displays information about several Jewish languages, as well as about some of the researchers who have written about them.

The list of languages for which they provide contacts, descriptions, and basic bibliographies includes Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, Jewish English, Jewish Malayalam, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Iranian, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Portuguese, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo/Ladino, and Yiddish; other languages for which they provide only Ethnologue links are Israeli Sign Language, Judeo-Alsatian, Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Crimean Tatar/Krimchak, Judeo-Georgian, Judeo-Slavic/Canaanic, Judeo-Tadjik/Bukharan, Judeo-Tat/Juhuric, and Karaim—a tantalizing list!

Here’s a bit from the Jewish Malayalam page:

One of the most notable features of Jewish Malayalam is the presence of fossilized elements from the pre-Malayalam layer. These archaisms exist at several levels, including lexicon, morphology, phonology, and semantics. A semantic example can be found in one of the wedding songs: the bride is described as covering her head with three types of flowers that have NaRRam. The word NaRRam exists in contemporary Tamil, Malayalam, and other local languages with the meaning ‘bad smell’. However, in this case the word is used with its old Tamil sense: ‘good smell’. This is just one example of the many elements of Jewish Malayalam that may seem like contemporary Tamil borrowings but are actually archaic remnants from before Malayalam split off from Tamil.

What with one thing and another, I never reported on LH-related goodies I got for Xmas. On the hat front, my sister-in-law gave me a much-needed beret. I got a couple of novels I’ve been wanting to read, Doctorow’s The March and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, as well as the magnificent Sailor’s Word-Book by Admiral W.H. Smyth (originally published in 1867). A few entries from pages 36-37 will give an idea of the range of items:

AMICABLE NUMBERS are such as are mutually equal to the sum of each other’s aliquot parts.
AMLAGH. A Manx or Gaelic term denoting to manure with sea-weed.
AMNESTY. An act of oblivion, by which, in a professional view, pardon is granted to those who have rebelled or deserted their colours; also to deserters who return to their ships.
AMOK. A term signifying slaughter, but denoting the practice of the Malays, when infuriated to madness with bang (a preparation from a species of hemp), of sallying into the streets, or decks, to murder any whom they may chance to meet, until they are either slain or fall from exhaustion… As in the case of mad dogs, certain death awaited them, for if not killed in being taken, torture and impalement followed.
AMPOTIS. The recess or ebb of the tide.
AMRELL. An archaic orthography for admiral.
AMUSETTE. A kind of gun on a stock, like that of a musket, but mounted as a swivel, carrying a ball from half a pound to two pounds weight.
AMY. A foreigner serving on board, subject to some prince in friendship with us.

Should be a great help in reading Patrick O’Brian.

An interesting story on a study involving the much-discussed influence of language on perception:

University of California researchers tested the hypothesis that language plays a role in perception by carrying out a series of colour tests.
They found that people were able to identify colours faster in their right visual field than in their left.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study said it was because the right field is processed in the brain area responsible for language…
They asked 13 people to identify a colour on a square among a group of other squares all of which were the same colour.
In one test the squares were all shades of blue, with one square being a different shade.
In the second test there was two colours used, blue and green. The participants were quicker in the second test at identifying the different colour square when it was in their right field of vision – to the right of their head.
There was no difference in speed in the first test, suggesting because the colours had a different name in the second test the mind was able to identify the colour more quickly when it was seen in a certain field of vision.

I finally found the abstract of the actual PNAS article, “Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left” (the full article requires a subscription). It’ll be a long time before we know how all this stuff works, but I’m always glad to see experiments that shed a little light. (Thanks for the tip, Anatoly!)
Update. See now Mark Lieberman’s detailed discussion (with illustrations) in Language Log.

Best wishes to all for a good 2006 (surely it has to improve on 2005); here are a couple of goodies I’d like to share:

1) For the Russophones, О космополитической сущности зонненблюменфоллькорнброта: Gusi-Lebedev takes the nonce word zonnenblyumenfoll’kornbrot, used by Pushkin in a charming little ditty he wrote for Anna Kern’s album in 1823 (Мне изюм нейдет на ум, Цукерброт не лезет в рот, Шоколат, рахатлукум, Зонненблюменфоллькорнброт, Пастила не хороша Без тебя, моя душа: basically, ‘nothing tastes good to me without you, my dear, not even chocolate, Turkish delight, or Sonnenblumenvollkornbrot,’ the last-named being a German word for coarse whole wheat bread with sunflower seeds), and writes a learned critical essay treating it as an ancient, if latterly forgotten, element of the Russian vocabulary, rejecting Stalin’s efforts to present it as a Bolshevik innovation and tracing it through history, from ancient Babylon through Omar Khayyam and medieval German student songs to the great Russian poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. Very funny stuff. (Thanks, Tatyana!)

2) For the rest of you, I bring the happy news that Jordan MacVay has gotten Macvaysia its own domain and kicked off the new year with a post on the Gaelic word for ‘curry’ and other matters solved by the new Gaelic Orthographic Conventions 2005; he ends: “Now I know how to say I ate curry in Gaelic: Dh’ith mi coiridh. I haven’t yet had any opportunities (nor reasons) to write about lesbians or giraffes in Gaelic, but surely there’s a first time for everything. You just never know.”

A great anecdote from Geoff Pullum at Language Log makes me nostalgic for New York City and its immense Greek community (I once wandered into a restaurant that was officially closed for a christening party—but was invited in to join the proceedings and share the delicious meal):

I’m in New York for the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meetings, and I’m having breakfast at the Art Cafe on Broadway, at 52nd Street. It’s all bustling efficiency, staff zooming hither and thither. Two eggs up with bacon and wheat toast arrive within a couple of minutes. Suddenly there’s a shattering crash from behind the counter, and the Greek proprietor is looking down mournfully at the coffee cup he dropped on the tile floor to smash into a thousand pieces. Four or five nearby waitresses turn in shock. For two seconds of silence they stare at the scene of the accident. And then one of the waitresses yells excitedly: “Opa!” — the traditional Greek cry of encouragement to dancers and musicians and drinkers at those wild parties where they smash plates on the floor as they dance just to show what a great time is being had. And then the entire staff cracks up, and they all resume working at high speed, but now laughing till tears come to their eyes — the boss included. It’s only breakfast time in New York, but already, thanks to one well-chosen interjection, it’s like a party.

Lift a coffee cup in my direction, Geoff! And if you’re ever in Astoria, try Opa! Tony’s Souvlaki, right under the 30th Ave. station on the N line; the gyros and super-garlicky skordalia are delicious.