languagehat.com

Or so say the authors of the study described by Michelle Starr:

Our Neanderthal cousins had the capacity to both hear and produce the speech sounds of modern humans, a study published in 2021 found. Based on a detailed analysis and digital reconstruction of the structure of the bones in their skulls, the study settled one aspect of a decades-long debate over the linguistic capabilities of Neanderthals. “This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career,” said palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University back in 2021.

“The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology.”

The notion that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalis [sic: should be neanderthalensis) were much more primitive than modern humans (Homo sapiens) is outdated, and in recent years a growing body of evidence demonstrates that they were much more intelligent than we once assumed. They developed technology, crafted tools, created art and held funerals for their dead. Whether they actually spoke with each other, however, has remained a mystery. Their complex behaviors seem to suggest that they would have had to be able to communicate, but some scientists have contended that only modern humans have ever had the mental capacity for complex linguistic processes.

Whether that’s the case is going to be very difficult to prove one way or another, but the first step would be to determine if Neanderthals could produce and perceive sounds in the optimal range for speech-based communication. So, using a bunch of really old bones, this is what a team led by palaeoanthropologist Mercedes Conde-Valverde of the University of Alcalá in Spain set out to do. […]

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My wife and I were talking about Wallace and Gromit, of which we are fans, and she asked why Gromit was called that. A quick googling turned up this: “Gromit, meanwhile, got his name after Nick heard his brother, an electrician, talking about ‘grommets’ – rings, or washers, used in the trade.” So that was settled, but then we discussed what exactly a grommet was. AHD says:

1. a. A reinforced eyelet, as in cloth or leather, through which a fastener may be passed.
b. A small metal or plastic ring used to reinforce such an eyelet.
2. Nautical A loop of rope or metal used for securing the edge of a sail to its stay.
[Probably from obsolete French gromette, gormette, chain joining the ends of a bit, from Old French, from gourmer, to bridle.]

Interestingly, the ancient OED entry (anno 1900) has it s.v. grummet, with grommet as an alternative spelling; the first sense is the nautical one (1626 “Grummets and staples for all yeards”), and the washer sense dates only to 1942 (“The power cord should have been threaded through that grommet first”).

On a completely different note, we were listening to a piece by Frank Bridge on the radio, and I took a look at his extensive list of compositions, which turns out to feature an excessive number of entries that sound made for Madeline Bassett: Rising When the Dawn Still Faint Is, Mid of the Night, Music When Soft Voices Die, Harebell and Pansy, Lean Close Thy Cheek against My Cheek, Fair Daffodils… I’ve only gotten up to 1905 and I can’t go on, you’ll have to seek out more yourself. But the cake is taken by a 1916 work called The Graceful Swaying Wattle (“for 2-part chorus and piano or string orchestra”), set to this appalling poem by Veronica Mason, which would have set the golden-tressed Bassett all a-quiver. A sample quatrain:

It seems to be a fairy tree
It dances to a melody,
and sings a little song to me,
the graceful swaying wattle.

If you really want, you can hear it sung here, but I will not be responsible for any medical complications that result.

Back in 2015 I started reading Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (see this post), and I seem to have abandoned it almost immediately for reasons I no longer recall. I got a poke in the ribs about this from Michael Gilleland’s brief post at Laudator Temporis Acti quoting Curtius’s Essays on European Literature:

For previous ages the exempla maiorum were a confirma­tion; for us they are a confrontation, and tradition is reversed into a corrective. We are so far removed from tradition that it appears new to us.

But what are exempla maiorum? Googling finds the phrase translated as “examples from our ancestors” or “the exemplary moral behaviour of the ancestors,” and it is sometimes treated as equivalent to mos maiorum, “the unwritten code from which the ancient Romans derived their social norms” — e.g., in V. Henry T. Nguyen’s Christian Identity in Corinth, p. 75: “Augustus himself recognised the imitative value of the mos maiorum, ‘By the passage of new laws I restored many traditions of our ancestors (exempla maiorum) which were then falling into disuse […]’” — but Claudia Rapp, in her “Old Testament Models for Emperors in Early Byzantium,” explains at length the significance of the exemplum, including the Augustus quote (p. 177):
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Our local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, recently had a story “Old playbill keys concert revival” that describes a concert inspired by “a tattered but still readable playbill from a concert apparently staged at the property in 1873”; about halfway through, we get:

The thematic link to the past could extend to performers appearing in period costume, while publicity for the shows might include the dated writing style and unorthodox spelling and capitalization that appears on the 1873 playbill.

For instance, the playbill notes that a certain “Goodman Stone,” the proprietor of “ye Big Tavern on ye main road to Williamsburgh, will supply all ye people who may be Hungerie with Pork & Beans, Rhyneinjun Bread also Good Cider.”

What on earth was “Rhyneinjun Bread”? My first thought involved the Rhine, but a little googling revealed that it was an odd spelling of “Rye & Injun Bread”: “The name comes from the rye flour and cornmeal (Indian meal) used.” So now all is clear, and you can see a picture of the thing itself at that last link.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it today; my wife and I are off to her sister’s for the traditional excessive meal, so I won’t be around to rescue comments from moderation (and provide occasional acerbic rejoinders) until sometime this evening. Don’t break the furniture!

Geoff Lindsey, a British writer, director, and pronunciation coach with degrees in linguistics, has a very interesting YouTube video (26:42) in which he discusses changes in pronunciation in the younger generation, as compared with what dictionaries prescribe. (There are a couple of minutes of plug for the sponsor near the beginning, which you can skip using the handy chapter listings underneath.) I liked his saying he has to check “indispensable” to make sure he’s spelled it correctly, and needless to say I identified with his plaint “All too often I’ve found out that my own pronunciation is no longer the majority one.” Some things I learned: harass with initial stress (HA-rass) has been obsolete for many years in the UK, aeon is now AY-on (EE-on is “very old-fashioned”), cure is now /kyo:/ (given as an alternative by Daniel Jones back in 1917!), “mischievious” can be found in print going back at least to 1867, and “gotten” has pretty much taken over from “got” in the UK (Lindsey says “I don’t have that word at all — for me it’s completely American”). There’s a discussion of tr, dr and their apparently universal pronunciation as chr, jr; one of the discussants said “When I was a kid I always wondered why my name, A/j/rian, had a d in it.”

One thing that bothered me was his account of the history of garage — Lindsey thinks the American quasi-French pronunciation with final stress is new, but the 1911 Century has it as the first pronunciation (p. 2454). But he’s focused on the present, of course, and the website he runs (and plugs), CUBE (Current British English searchable transcriptions), seems to be quite up to date. (Just for fun, I put in the most obscure unpronounceable word I know, congeries, and it gave /k ɔ n ʤ ɪ́ː r ɪj z/, with stress on the second syllable; the video clip it coughed up as illustration, however, had a guy saying /ˈk ɔ n ʤ ɪ r ɪj z/, with initial stress. Still a few bugs in the system! As I wrote here, “I may be the only living English speaker who uses the four-syllable pronunciation /kənˈdʒɪəɹɪˌiːz/.”) Thanks, Bathrobe!

Tiger Webb wrote for ABC Radio National about a mysterious Australian idiom:

Rank parochialism it may be, but I’ve always felt Australian idioms to be particularly inscrutable. Blessed with a father whose affinity for rhyming slang and ockerisms knows no mortal bounds, as a youth I was routinely confused by words that made no sense to me yet seemed widely understood by everyone else in this wide brown land.

As our family boiled in a beach car park waiting for a spot to be vacated, I was surprised to learn that the places was not full, but chockers. Dressing for my first day of school, my sisters kindly informed me that being as flash as a rat with a gold tooth did not, in fact, mean that I resembled a rodent.

My childhood was also haunted by an unusually well-meaning spectre: that of Larry, as in as happy as. Everyone in Australia seemed to have met this Larry character, and had all independently found him to be an extraordinarily upbeat fellow. As I met Lawrences and Laurents in primary school—all of whom seemed quite dour—I began to idly wonder whether I’d ever meet this ur-Larry, ever come to behold his beaming visage.

You can imagine my surprise when I learnt that there was no Larry. ‘Why on earth,’ I began, presumably petulantly, ‘do you all say it, then?’ […]

The phrase first pops up in New Zealand in 1875, where Harry Orsman, editor of the New Zealand Dictionary of English spotted it in the writings of one George Llewellyn Meredith. Meredith, a prominent Launcestonian who spent time in Auckland engaging principally in agricultural pursuits, is reported to have written the words ‘we would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats.’

Orsman, the dictionary editor, supposed that Larry was a stand-in for one of two other words: larrie, a word of Clydesdale origin meaning a joke, or larrikin, a well-known Australian term for a cad. We can probably safely rule out the latter: as Melissa Bellanta notes in her history of larrikinism, the term was pejorative through much of the 19th century. Larrikins, then, were not particularly happy—on account of being frequently incarcerated.

There are more theories at the link, including an eponymous source: “Larry Foley, a man described by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as a ‘pugilist and contractor’, and in one obituary as ‘a popular citizen and old-time champion boxer’.” I like this kind of well-researched dive into origins, even if there can be no definitive answer; thanks, Maidhc!

This is one of those posts that satisfies both halves of the blog name. Trevor Joyce called my attention to Malachi O’Doherty’s recent Belfast Telegraph column “Hats off to those who make the right choice in headwear,” quoted in full at his Facebook post, knowing I would appreciate this section:

If you look at old pictures of Belfast, or any other city, you notice that everyone is wearing a hat.
There are the boaters of the dandies, the dunchers of the working men, the caps on the boys, the bonnets on the ladies. Caps were still a standard part of a school uniform up to the 1960s.
At church, the women were obliged to cover their heads and the men to uncover theirs, the implication perhaps being that a woman looks more like a sinner without a hat whereas a man looks more dashing and daring with one.
The hat, more than any other garment, was a badge of class, from the top hat of the arrogant to the pork pie of the humble.
I wear a duncher, perhaps more commonly called ‘a cloth cap’. It keeps my head warm since I don’t have enough hair to do that for me.
Mine are all made with Donegal tweed so they suggest ethnicity. They were also regarded as the hat of the working classes though they seem popular among horse breeders.
A fuller, larger duncher than mine is called the newsboy, presumably because it was worn by the boys who sold newspapers on the streets, without whom journalism wouldn’t have functioned. With their folded bundles of papers under one arm, they shouted ‘Sixth Tele!’ and ‘Ulster!’, and they could peel off and fold a paper for you with one hand while counting and pocketing your coins with the other.
I see the duncher as unaffected. At least, I wear it to affect the impression that I am unaffected.

Trevor had never come across the term “duncher” before, and no more had I; the OED (entry revised 2018) has:

1. A cow or sheep that is given to butting. Also (Irish English (northern)): a hornless cow. […]

2. Irish English (northern). A cloth cap with a peak; a flat cap. Also more fully duncher cap.

1914 A grey cap with a flat peak. The wee lad said it was a duncher.
St. J. G. Ervine, Mrs. Martin’s Man xvi. 205 […]

It gives the etymology as “< dunch v. [‘To deliver a short, sharp blow to; Of a cow, sheep, etc.: to butt (someone or something) with the head’] + -er suffix¹” with the note “In sense 2 apparently so called on account of its resemblance to the flat head of a hornless cow.” Is anybody familiar with this striking word?

Having read Nabokov’s 1930 novella Соглядатай, translated by his son Dmitri as The Eye, I don’t have much to say about it except that it’s the weirdest thing he’d written up till then and has surprisingly many resonances with Dostoevsky for an author who claimed to despise him (it’s been compared, with reason, to The Double, Notes from Underground, and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” which I wrote about here). What I do have something to say about is the title, which is an obsolete Russian word for ‘spy.’ As I wrote Lizok:

I’m also wondering how one might translate соглядатай if one didn’t want to go with “The Eye.” I checked the Oxford Historical Thesaurus and found a couple of comparably obsolete words for ‘spy’: explorator “A person employed to collect information, esp. with regard to an enemy, or an enemy’s country; a scout; a spy” and otacust “A listener; an eavesdropper; a spy.” I just know that VVN would have used one of those if he’d been translating Pushkin!

I might add that since the Russian word is made up of the prefix со- ‘with, co(n)-‘ and the verbal root гляд- ‘to look,’ one could repurpose the rare Latin word conspector ‘one who looks at, overseer’ (which never seems to have been borrowed into English); Tertullian says “Deus conspector est cordis.” Expand the wordhoard!

My wife asked me how many languages use the word for ‘tongue’ to mean ‘language’ — as do, for instance, the Romance languages — and furthermore, why ‘tongue’? Obviously the tongue is involved in speech, but so are various other parts of the mouth, and ‘mouth’ itself might seem a more obvious metonym. I gave her the easy answer, which is that a lot of modern languages do so because Greek and Latin did, but that just pushes the problem back (and did Latin imitate Greek, or is it an Indo-European thing?), so I thought I’d toss it out there for consideration by the Hattery.

Back in 2011 I wrote “I don’t play Scrabble much any more, though I’ve always enjoyed it (very amateurishly), so my reaction to the expansion of official vocabulary is muted,” and I don’t think I’ve played it since then, but I admit I’m taken aback by the new expansion described by Stefan Fatsis for Slate:

The linguistic tumult began in September, when NASPA Games, the organization that maintains the word list used in club and tournament Scrabble, published a draft of its update. The NASPA list includes all of the words in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, the go-to source for living-room and app players in North America, plus a lot more. Although the seventh edition of the OSPD, which I wrote about last year, ushered in more than 500 newbies, NASPA added more than 4,700. […]

When players, including me, started combing the list of additions of words up to 15 letters long—the OSPD stops at eight—they found a bunch of head-scratching stuff, mostly involving the inflected forms of words, with the plural endings -s and -es and the comparative and superlative endings -er, -est, -ier, and -iest.

Inflections can be tricky. Dictionaries have rarely listed every inflected form of root words—in the print age, for reasons of space and expense; now, online, because of convention. So [NASPA chief executive John] Chew and his colleagues on NASPA’s dictionary committee did what Scrabble players have done since the first OSPD was published by Merriam-Webster Inc. 45 years ago: They tried to apply rules enumerated by dictionaries to guide decisions on the validity of a word.

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