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Late last year Dagmar Divjak, Hui Sun, and Petar Milin released a Journal of Neurolinguistics paper “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” whose abstract says:

Building on the relation between language cognition and the nervous system, we examine whether Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a cardiovascular measure that indexes Autonomic Nervous System activity, can be used to assess implicit language knowledge. We test the potential of HRV to detect whether individuals possess grammatical knowledge and explore how sensitive the cardiovascular response is.

41 healthy, British English-speaking adults listened to 40 English speech samples, half of which contained grammatical errors. Thought Technology’s 5-channel ProComp 5 encoder tracked heart rate via a BVP-Flex/Pro sensor attached to the middle finger of the non-dominant hand, at a rate of 2048 samples per second. A Generalised Additive Mixed Effects Model confirmed a cardiovascular response to grammatical violations: there is a statistically significant reduction in HRV as indexed by NN50 in response to stimuli that contain errors. The cardiovascular response reflects the extent of the linguistic violations, and NN50 decreases linearly with an increase in the number of errors, up to a certain level, after which HRV remains constant.

Now see what Nick Morgan Ph.D. did with it in the pages of Psychology Today:
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Over at the Log, Victor Mair posted a video by Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot, about how tones work in Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese; it’s almost half an hour long, which would normally put me off, but he’s so enthusiastic and informative that I kept watching till the end. His overall point is “Don’t be afraid of tones!”; Mair says:

Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about. […] It’s long and technical, but if you’re truly interested in tones and tonal languages, I would urge you to have a good look and listen to what Stuart Jay Raj has to say about them. He knows his stuff, so even if you’re not specifically interested in mastering tones and tonal language, but are simply interested in the phonological and phonetic principles behind them, you might well learn something useful from this presentation. For example, he has ideas about how creaky voice interacts with the production of tones.

Mair is impressed by “the accuracy of his tones” and “the precision of his pronunciation”; not knowing the languages, I have to take his word for it, but it sounds convincing. His presentation is sometimes odd, and Mair suggests he’s “pretty much of an autodidact,” so you’ll want to read the comments for corrections, but I think it’s worthwhile viewing. Some bits I jotted down: Burmese today is in the tonal evolutionary stage that Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese were in thousands of years ago (18:09); Burmese writing is “round and bubbly” vs. Khmer because the latter was etched in stone, while Burmese was written on palm leaves; “It’s all about the mechanics of the voice”; “If you want to have your mind blown, go and learn Burmese”; “All of these languages are running on the same tonal engine.” If any of that sounds intriguing, check it out.

Stephen Goranson sent me a link to the new online journal Hieroglyphs:

Hieroglyphs is an internationally peer-reviewed open access e-journal aiming to promote the academic study of hieroglyphs in all their dimensions in Egyptology and with a comparative angle extending to other hieroglyphic traditions and writing systems with a strongly iconic component. The journal provides a dedicated home for studies of hieroglyphs in all their semiotic, linguistic, cognitive, aesthetic, cultural, and material aspects.

The first issue, published at the end of December, includes articles ranging from the general (Dimitri Meeks, “An Egypto-Grammatology: Why and How”) to the very specific (Ben Haring, “The Scribe’s Outfit 𓏟 in the Deir el-Medina Pseudo-script: Shapes and Uses”; Philipp Seyr, “Graphetic Compounding in the First Intermediate Period: The Micro-history of [hiero] ḥtr.wy ‘span’ and the Process of Sign Decomposition”). Thanks, SG!

Joel Christensen of Brandeis has a post Where Did Homeric Book Divisions Come From? that discusses “questions about design and the relationship between the parts of the Iliad and the whole”; I’m just going to reproduce a chunk of the conclusion (follow the link for the bulk of the post). He quotes Bruce Heiden as follows:

The analysis will first consider the placement of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’. It will show that all the scenes that immediately precede a ‘book division’ manifest a common feature, namely that they scarcely affect forthcoming events in the story. All the scenes that follow a book division’ likewise display a common characteristic: these scenes have consequences that are immediately felt and continue to be felt at least 400 lines further into the story. Therefore, all of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’ occur at junctures of low-consequence and high consequence scenes. Moreover, every such juncture in the epic is the site of a ‘book division’.

The second stage of the analysis will examine the textual segments that lie between ‘book divisions’, i.e., the ‘books’ of the Iliad. It will show that in each ‘book’ the last event narrated is caused by the first, as are most of the events narrated in between. But the last event seldom completes a program implied by the first. Thus the ‘books’ of the Iliad display internal coherence, but only up to a point. They do not furnish a strong sense of closure. Instead their outline is marked by a sense of diversion in the narrative at the beginning of each.

Then comes this, from Steve Reece:
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TR, who sent me the link, wrote:

This doesn’t seem to have been mentioned on the blog, but the Linguistics Department at the University of Göttingen has put together what looks like a veritable treasure trove of online lectures digging deep into the grammars and histories of twelve early IE languages, presented by an all-star team of scholars including at least one occasional commenter at the Hattery. I have yet to dive in, but it looks very much worth exploring.

It sure does! Their About section reads:

Indo-European Linguistics has produced a wealth of knowledge about the grammars of Ancient Indo-European languages, which has substantially advanced our understanding of the history of language and the human past in general. Since this knowledge is scattered over thousands of scientific publications of the past two centuries (and ongoing), access to these languages and their fascinating features and histories is reserved to specialists. The aim of this project is to help unearth this treasure and to present it to a wider audience in an easily accessible and up-to-date form. In line with this vision, a team of experts on Indo-European languages from all over the world offers courses introducing twelve of the most important Indo-European languages and their grammars.

The list of topics and lecturers is at the link; Old Albanian, for instance, is presented by Michiel de Vaan and Brian Joseph. Thanks, TR!

Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms has an investigation into the word “wee”:

Someone I know has taken to using the word “wee” meaning to urinate, e.g., “Pretty soon I will need to to wee.” I recognized this as a British replacement for “pee,” along the same lines as “poo” substituting for American “poop,” and I thought it would make for a pretty easy post for this blog.

Well, similar to Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, I misinformed myself. To be sure, “wee” in both the verb form and the noun (“He had a wee”) is indeed British, as well as Irish and Australian. The OED’s first citation for the verb is a 1934 letter from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: “Wee on the sun that he bloody well shines not.” The first noun form is in Richard Clapperton’s 1968 book No News on Monday, with the line, “Wanda is downstairs having a wee.”

The problem was establishing that any American other than my one informant uses it. None of the citations in the OED or in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is American. Nor, as far as I can tell, has “wee” has ever been used to mean urinate in the New York Times.

He goes into more detail about his fruitless search, then continues:

But that still left me with no other American instances of “wee.” Desperate, I turned to Facebook and asked my friends if they had ever encountered it. I got more than a few negative responses, but also some positive ones […] And the distinguished novelist Richard Bausch wrote:

Bobby and I were five or six and our step grandfather Dick Underwood came by in a shiny new Packard convertible, and took us for a ride. We were riding past an army post—Korean War still going on across the world (I remember wondering why we couldn’t hear it). Dick Underwood looked over at us and said, “I’ve gotta wee.” Bobby and I had never heard an adult say anything like that. We laughed like hell, and we never forgot it.

And they say Facebook is a waste of time.

I myself don’t think I’ve ever heard an American use the word.
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Mark Liberman has a Log post about a Nigerian slogan, quoting Toyin Falola, “No Gree for Anybody!” (HeartOfArts 1/12/2024):

I am writing this piece from Lagos. “No Gree” is what you now hear at every moment, every corner. […]

No Gree for Anybody seems to be a personal avowal to not compromise or concede and to maintain unwavering determination against factors and people that could impede one’s aspirations or thwart the pursuit of one’s desires.

He has various relevant links and a video, but what I want to highlight is this excellent comment by JPL:

“No gri foh [“person”]NP”, here an expression from Nigerian Pidgin, is indeed a participant in the West African Creole English continuum, where ‘gri’ is indeed based on the English lexeme ‘agree’, but the sense of “gri foh”, as opposed to “gri” or “gri wit” (where “gri” is a stative verb with the sense of “be in agreement (with)”, e.g., in the context of argumentation), is more like that of the English expressions “go along with”, or “give in to”, and is used to refer to an addressee’s response to coercive pressure to adopt or conform to a course of action that benefits the speaker, and is not necessarily in the best interests of the addressee. So “gri foh” is a dynamic use of this verb, in the same way as the use of the English verb ‘agree’ in, e.g., “I agreed to do it”; but the pattern with a nominal oblique object, as opposed to an infinitival complement, has no English counterpart. (‘foh’ in the English creoles often functions like the infinitival complementizer ‘to’, so this usage is probably extended from that use.)

A typical established use of “gri foh [person]” would be in the context where a man is trying to win a woman’s love (or mainly for sex) by making importunate pleadings or “game-runnings”: if the woman gives in, someone might say, disapprovingly, “i gri for am”.

In the political context this idea has an important role in pushing back at, e.g., attempts by government or social convention to make people/citizens give up expectations that rights will be respected or aspirations acknowledged.

I love that kind of careful analysis of both morphology and semantics. (I have incorporated a minor correction made in a follow-up comment.) A later comment clarified:

In case it’s not evident from context (upon looking at the comment today, it occurred to me that it might not be evident), in the example in the next to last paragraph (“i gri for am”), “i” is a third person singular subj, pronoun, “am” a third person singular obj. pronoun, and “gri” is perfective aspect with past time reference.

Alex Shams at Ajam Media Collective writes about a fascinating bit of cultural history:

In markets across Iran, Tanakura Bazaars can be found dedicated to second-hand clothes, knock-off brand name shoes, and Iranian-made shirts at cut-rate prices. They attract a constant stream of bargain hunters looking for vintage clothes, which are referred to in Persian generally as Tanakura.

If you’re looking for a Persian (or Azeri or Kurdish…) etymology for Tanakura, you’ll come up empty handed. Despite its ubiquity in Iran, Tanakura is originally Japanese. But in Japan, the word is a relatively uncommon family name and the Persian meaning of second-hand clothes is nowhere to be found. So how and why did Tanakura become common in Iran?

The answer lies in a popular Japanese TV show broadcast on Iranian state TV in the 1980s. Oshin tells the story of a girl from rural Japan named Shin Tanokura whose life spans the Meiji period, Japan’s imperial expansion and military defeat during World War II, and the reconstruction and eventual prosperity that followed. The series offers an unflinching depiction of the tragedies and struggles of a working-class woman in Japan. Its harsh realism almost led to the show being passed up before it was broadcast by Japan Broadcasting Corporation in Japan in 1984. […]

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Remember my post a couple of months ago about the Japanese movie Castle of Sand that used the Tōhoku dialect as a plot point? Well, my wife had me read a short story that makes even greater plot use of dialect, and once again it’s Japanese — Haruki Murakami’s “Yesterday” (first in the New Yorker of June 2, 2014 [archived], then reprinted in his collection Men Without Women). Here’s the start of the story:

As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday” (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath.

   Yesterday

   Is two days before tomorrow,

   The day after two days ago.

This is how it began, as I recall, but I haven’t heard it for a long time and I’m not positive that’s how it went. From start to finish, though, Kitaru’s lyrics were almost meaningless, nonsense that had nothing to do with the original words. That familiar lovely, melancholy melody paired with the breezy Kansai dialect—which you might call the opposite of pathos—made for a strange combination, a bold denial of anything constructive. At least, that’s how it sounded to me. At the time, I just listened and shook my head. I was able to laugh it off, but I also read a kind of hidden import in it.

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I know I’ve posted a lot about efforts to keep moribund languages alive, but Natalie Alcoba’s NY Times story (archived) is special. For one thing, it’s set in Argentina, where I went to high school and whose soccer team I still root for. More importantly, it’s a rare case of a language that was long thought extinct but that turned out to have a speaker:

As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. Over yerba mate and torta fritas, his mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue.

The Chaná are an Indigenous people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined with the mighty Paraná River, the second longest in South America. They revered silence, considered birds their guardians and sang their babies lullabies: Utalá tapey-’é, uá utalá dioi — sleep little one, the sun has gone to sleep.

Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later, recently retired and seeking out people with whom he could chat, that he made a startling discovery: No one else seemed to speak Chaná. Scholars had long considered the language extinct.

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