languagehat.com

Reading Jonathan Franzen’s annoyingly self-absorbed “My Bird Problem” [archived] in the latest New Yorker, one reason I kept going was the profusion of wonderful bird names: gadwall, veery, redstart, dunlin… Then I hit “parauque” (at the bottom of the middle column on page 66, if you’re following along at home) and thought I’d better look it up so I’d know whether to mentally pronounce it as if it were French or Spanish. Well, it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, so of course I googled it, and was suprised to find only a few hundred hits—bird names shouldn’t be that rare. Following my usual practice with unfamiliar plants and animals, I googled the Linnean name, in this case Nyctidromus albicollis, and what do you know, every hit gave the English name as “pauraque.” So I googled that, and sure enough, there were over 15,000 hits, and when I looked it up in my massive Webster’s Third New International, there it was (pronounced \pau‘räkā\ in their transcription, like “pow RAH kay”). The New Yorker had allowed a misspelled word into their once famously perfect pages. Once again, the modern world had let me down.

I was a bit consoled, or at least distracted, when I followed the trail left by Webster’s laconic definition (pauraque n [MexSp] : CUIEJO) and looked up cuiejo. I was rewarded with this:

cuiejo \kü‘yāhō\ n [modif. of AmerSp cuyeo] : a tropical American nighthawk (Nyctidromus albicollis) the dried and ground bones of which are highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion — called also pauraque

“Highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion”—why, it’s lexicographical poetry! And the endearingly awkward phrasing “the dried and ground bones of which,” contorted to avoid the perfectly good “whose dried and ground bones,” was the icing on the cake.

Later in the same paragraph Franzen mentions “my first northern beardless tyrannulet”; I liked “tyrannulet” very much but was unable to find it in any dictionaries: not Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, not the big Webster’s, not the OED. And yet it’s an English word in good standing; not only does it get 20,000 Google hits (besides the northern beardless, this page lists dozens of others: Rufous-lored, Cinnamon-faced, Minas Gerais, Oustalet’s, Mottle-cheeked, Rough-legged, Greenish, Tawny-rumped…) [June 2020: the Wayback Machine has no record of that page, but this Wikipedia Category page has quite a few], it’s the subject of an Encyclopædia Britannica article. So why isn’t it in the dictionary, not even the OED? I’m mystified and annoyed; at least the pronunciation is clear, but what if it weren’t? I’d be lost in the sea of words without a compass!

Horatio Hale’s The Iroquois Book of Rites (Gutenberg text of entire book, Sacred Texts version broken up into chapters), originally published in 1883, contains all sorts of historical and cultural information about the Five (later Six) Nations of the Iroquois; its centerpiece is the Ancient Rites of the Condoling Council in both Iroquois and English (preceded by a sketch of The Iroquois Language). Here’s the famous Condolence Hymn chanted at meetings of the League:

Kayanerenh deskenonghweronne;
Kheyadawenh deskenonghweronne;
Oyenkondonh deskenonghweronne;
Wakonnyh deskenonghweronne.
Ronkeghsotah rotirighwane,—
Ronkeghsota jiyathondek.

I come again to greet and thank the League;
I come again to greet and thank the kindred;
I come again to greet and thank the warriors;
I come again to greet and thank the women.
My forefathers,—what they established,
My forefathers,—hearken to them!

The Tensor has a convenient list of English words derived from Latin words with the diminutive -culus suffix; he adds:

The oddest one I found was muscle, which comes from the diminutive of mus ‘mouse’. According to the OED, this bit of oddness comes down to us from Indo-European: “The word for mouse also has the sense ‘muscle’ (esp. of the upper arm) in many Indo-European languages, e.g. Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Icelandic, ancient and Hellenistic Greek, post-classical Latin, and Armenian [woo-hoo!], app. because of the resemblance of a flexing muscle to the movements made by a mouse.”

(The bracketed excitement about Armenian is his, not mine.) He also includes “a few words that I would have guessed contained -culus, but don’t.”

According to an article in Der Standard (seconded by a badly written Moscow News story), the city of Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk, near where Karamzin, the inventor of the letter, was born) is planning to erect a stone monument to honor the letter ё [yo], which has long been ousted from official Russian documents. The Wikipedia article on the letter says “The fact that yo is frequently replaced with ye in print often causes some confusion to non-Russians, as it makes Russian words and names harder to transcribe accurately,” but according to an impassioned plea for its use (by E. Pchelov and V. Chumakov), it confuses Russians too, so that some say Chebyshev for the correct Chebyshov (Чебышёв) and routinely mispronounce foreign names. One statement in their article struck me: is it true that Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” known to Russians these days as Вишнёвый сад [vishnyóvyi sad], should actually be Вишневый сад [víshnyevyi sad]? Perhaps Avva, a proponent and user of the letter, will know. (Thanks for the tip, Adam!)

Update (2010). Thanks to a question from MMcM in this thread, I have investigated and learned that the statue was actually built; it says here that the winner of the competition to design it was Alexander Zinin, a local artist who decided to base his design on the form of the letter as it first appeared in print on page 166 of Karamzin’s almanac Aonidy in 1797 (in the word слёзы ‘tears’), and you can see an image here.

I just got an Amazon package with some books I’ve wanted for a long time (thanks, Prentiss!), including Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems (mentioned here). I already had his Collected Poems, Bunting’s own selection, but this adds forty pages of uncollected work, including such fine poems as his little elegy for Lorine Niedecker:

To abate what swells
use ice for scalpel.
It melts in its wound
and no one can tell
what the surgeon used.
Clear lymph, no scar,
no swathe from a cheek’s bloom.

But what I’m here to discuss is the last of the “Uncollected Odes”:

      Dentdale conversation

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp
nothing to waste but nothing to skimp.
Lambs and gimmers and wethers and ewes
what do you want with political views?
Keep the glass in your windows clear
where nothing whatever’s bitter but beer.

Catchy first line, no? Ponder it for a while and guess what it means; then go below the fold and I’ll tell you.

[Read more…]

A comment by Ghil’ad Zuckermann on my post about his views on Israeli (Hebrew) sent me looking for more information about Dola Wittmann, the oldest native Israeli-speaker (in April 2000; I’m afraid she’s probably passed on by now). I found a very interesting column by Sam Orbaum, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, called “Daughter of the mother tongue”:

Dola learned the language from her father [Eliezer Ben-Yehuda], who reinvented it… During my first of numerous chats with Dola, about 15 years ago, our hours-long interview was interjected by occasional “harumphs.” Every time she dipped into another language for a bon mot, her husband Max voiced his displeasure. “You can say that very well in Hebrew too,” he grumbled.

Max, who passed away a few years ago, was actually more stalwart a devotee of Ben-Yehuda than even Dola. Worldly and cosmopolitan, Dola readily spoke other languages as well. Max adamantly refused.

When Max asked for Ben-Yehuda’s permission to marry his daughter, his answer, she recalled, was: “I will grant permission dependent on your answer to two questions: Will you live in Eretz Yisrael, and will you only speak Hebrew?” Max promised to do both—and true yekke that he was, never, ever compromised his promise.

It did not even concern Ben-Yehuda that Max was Christian—and German to boot. He pointedly did not ask Max to convert (he never did). “Speaking Hebrew, and speaking it here, was all that mattered,” Dola explained. “Since then, I never left the country for any reason,” Max said proudly, “and never spoke anything but Hebrew.”

Max devoted his life to the study, advancement and usage of pure Ben-Yehuda Hebrew, and he was certainly one of the world’s top authorities on the subject. Whereas Dola would merge foreign elements into her speech, and adapted, to an extent, to the language’s evolution, Max would not. A telefon was still a sach-rachok, just as Ben-Yehuda decided it should be.

Dola lit up when I asked her if Ben-Yehuda had a sense of humor when he created the modern language. “Oh, yes, definitely! There are many examples of whimsy in his choice of words.” For example? She laughed. “Clitoris. He decided on dagdegan, from the root l’dagdeg, to tickle.”…

Some of Ben-Yehuda’s coinages never became popular, consigned to linguistic curiosity (and to the vocabulary of Max). Only the Ben-Yehuda family ever used the word badura for tomato; milav, for “sport,” was taken from the Arabic, but swiftly became defunct. The oddly foreign-sounding petrozilia prevailed over Ben-Yehuda’s netz halav for parsley. The delightful chen-chen (thank you) was perhaps too genteel for the clamorous nation-in-the-making, but it survived among a few “old-fashioned” speakers, by now winning some popularity as a hip colloquialism—an ironic revival.

Max was able to recount Dola’s childhood just as vividly as she could, because as a member of the Ben-Yehuda “language army,” even as a little girl, she was responsible for helping entrench Hebrew as the local lingo. Dola’s early years, and the language’s, were one and the same.

“Ben-Yehuda would gather the children each evening, and tell them all the new words he had created, or rediscovered. The children were required to pass them on.” Max, a tall, white-haired, coolly Teutonic gentleman, warmed only when speaking about Ben-Yehuda and his language. “Dola was younger, so this was already more established by the time she learned to speak. A child would be sent to the grocer to buy rice. He would ask for orez, and the [Yiddish-speaking] grocer would say ‘vus?’ (what?) The child would then point to the rice and repeat ‘orez‘—that’s how the language, word by word, was first spread.”

A charming story, and I like the fact that the creator of the modern language was unable to impose words the people didn’t want to use.

I don’t agree with shkrobius, who says “human speech is a cacophony of mingled sounds,” but it’s said so vividly I have to pass it along:

The first time I heard English I thought: how can people bark like that? Why can’t they talk in a melodious, cadenced way the Russians do? It took many years of practicing English to appreciate its harmony and beauty. It is not that Germanic languages are different. Other Slavic languages are equally unpleasant on my ears. No amount of persuasion will convince me that, say, the Swedish, Serbian, Zulu, Turkish, or Hungarian are great languages. All human languages equally stink. We are used to those few that we speak or hear regularly. We can no longer recognize how awful they sound. The universal appeal of music is our unconscious acceptance of this brutal truth.

The post goes on to an appreciation of the animal kingdom: “people of all races, tongues, and traditions have the instinctive appreciation of the beauty in animals and plants. A horse, a cow, a bird, a rose—they all look right to us.” And who can argue with that? (Thanks for the link, Tatyana!)

Arnold Zwicky in Language Log discusses the much-condemned phrase “between you and I” in terms of the claim, made by more than one supposed expert, that it “seems to have emerged only in the last twenty or so years.” This is absurd; Shakespeare has Antonio write to Bassanio (in The Merchant of Venice, Act III Scene II) “all debts are cleared between you and I.” William Congreve used it in 1694, Byron in 1805, Mark Twain in 1856; in short, it goes back a long way. Zwicky says:

The facts look complex, but it’s safe to say that the rise of “between you and I” in Late Modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, not 20; earlier uses go back about 400 years. There’s no way it can be blamed on modern education, as John Simon suggested in 1980 (see MWDEU), unless Simon was just playing with different senses of “modern”.
In any case, we have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again—retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc.—the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It’s not just Kids These Days.

He has more examples, and discusses the Frequency Illusion as well (“once you’ve noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot, even ‘all the time'”).

[Read more…]

I can’t improve on Christopher Culver’s description at Безѹмниѥ, where I found this link, so I’ll just quote it:

Cyril Babaev… has written a historical grammar of Lithuanian with some interesting comments on Lithuanian’s evolution from Proto-Indo-European. Babaev’s Indo-European Database contains links to other grammars. It is probably the most useful site ever hosted at a Bizland.com address.

I find by googling that Babaev, who is not a linguist by profession, has also done a similar grammar of Old English. I should add that Bridget in Christopher’s comments says “I’m not sure I trust the IE Database site. I was just looking at Hittite & Lycian and noticed 3 or 4 things that are either just plain wrong or disputed at best.” Since it’s a hobby for Babaev, I guess that’s only to be expected.

Hayden Carruth, as I’ve said before, is one of my favorite American poets, so I’m looking forward to the weekly series on him Joseph Duemer is planning: “For the next year I will discuss a particular poem or essay of Carruth’s, reproducing as much as is practical & legal.” (Via wood s lot.)