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Wagiman (or Wageman) is a nearly extinct language of northern Australia; the Wagiman online dictionary is a nicely done site that provides lexical and other information. The Introduction says:

Wagiman is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in Australia’s Northern Territory. At the moment there are about ten people who speak Wagiman, mostly old people. Wagiman belongs to what linguists call the non-Pama-Nyungan language family. Within that family, it appears to fall into the Gunwinyguan language group, but it is not closely related to any other Aboriginal languages.

There are several dialects of Wagiman, with the most prominent distinction being between matjjin no-roh-ma ‘light language’ and matjjin gu-nawutj-jan ‘heavy language’. Helen Liddy and Lenny Liddy speak light language, and Lulu Martin, Paddy Huddlestone and Clara McMahon speak heavy language. There is not all that much difference, and no Wagiman speakers have any trouble understanding one another.

Ten speakers and “several” dialects! Now, that’s what I call stubborn diversity. (Via Plep [28th April].)

Thanks to a comment by ben wolfson, I present you with the preview for a forthcoming linguistic thriller:

“CHOMSKY”
THE MOTION PICTURE

Announcer: The English Language is about to E*X*P*L*O*D*E!
No refuge is safe from linguistic peril!

Mom: Here, I brought up “Gravity’s Rainbow” for a goodnight story.
Kid: Aw, Mom! Why did you bring that book I don’t want to be read to out of up for?
Mom: Aiiiiieeee! My brane is melting!

Announcer: A secret government agency must find a new ally…

MIB: Mr. Chomsky? We need your help with a linguistic crisis.
I’m with intelligence….

Go on, read the whole thing, you know you want to. But don’t blame me, blame Stephen Will Tanner, who is solely responsible. I’d better provide the disclaimer in case you need it before you reach the end:

MOST OF THE JOKES IN THIS POST WERE BOTH OBSCURE AND TENUOUS.
THEREFORE, WE ARE PROVIDING PHONE “HUMOR TECH-SUPPORT”.

((ring))((ring))((ring))((ring))*click*

This is 1-800-KIB-OLUV. If you do not understand an acronym,
press 1 now. If you are having trouble with a running gag, press 2. If you need support on pre-1993 jokes, press 3. Harry Claude Cat’s posts are Not Funny, so if you are calling about them, please hang up now.

Woody Allen: And if I wanted a girl to explain Chomsky to me?
Woman: It’d cost you.

In an effort to find out something about the Isaurians and their language (a vain effort, and if anybody knows anything beyond “warlike” and “unknown” I’d appreciate hearing about it) I ran across Vassil Karloukovski’s Page, with its many Bulgarian-related links; what particularly attracted my attention was the section devoted to The Language of the Huns, Chapter IX of O. Maenchen-Helfen’s The World of the Huns (University of California Press, 1973). I’ll quote the meaty passage on Etymologies:

We must be prepared to meet among the names borne by Huns Germanic, Latin, and (as a result of the long and close contact with the Alans) also Iranian names. Attempts to force all Hunnic names into one linguistic group are a priori doomed to failure.

“Let no one,” warned Jordanes, “who is ignorant cavil at the fact that the tribes of men use many names, the Sarmatians from the Germans and the Goths frequently from the Huns.” Tutizar was a Goth and Ragnaris a Hun, but Tutizar is not a Gothic name and Ragnaris is Germanic. The Byzantine generals who in 493 fought against the Isaurians were Apsikal, a Goth, and Sigizan and Zolban, commanders of the Hun auxiliaries. Apsikal is not a Gothic but a Hunnic name; Sigizan might be Germanic. Mundius, a man of Attilanic descent, had a son by the name of Mauricius; his grandson Theudimundus bore a Germanic name. Patricius, Ardabur, and Herminiricus were not a Roman, an Alan, and a German as the names would indicate, but brothers, the sons of Aspar and his Gothic wife. There are many such cases in the fifth and sixth centuries. Sometimes a man is known under two names, belonging to two different tongues. Or he has a name compounded of elements of two languages. There are instances of what seem to be double names; actually one is the personal name, the other a title. Among the Hun names, some might well be designations of rank. It is, I believe, generally agreed that the titles of the steppe peoples do not reflect the nationality of their bearers. A kan, kagan, or bagatur may be a Mongol, a Turk, a Bulgar; he may be practically anything.

The names of the Danube Bulgars offer an illustration of the pitfalls into which scholars are likely to stumble when they approach the complex problems of the migration period with their eyes fixed on etymologies. In spite of the labor spent on the explanation of Bulgarian names since the thirties of the past century, there is hardly one whose etymology has been definitely established. The name Bulgar itself is an example. What does it mean? Are the Bulgars “the Mixed ones” or “the Rebels?” Pelliot was inclined to the latter interpretation but thought it possible that bulgar meant les trouveurs. The Turkish etymology was challenged by Detschev; he assumed that Bulgar was the name given to the descendants of the Attilanic Huns by the Gepids and Ostrogoths and took it for Germanic, meaning homo pugnax. Still another non-Turkish etymology has been suggested by Keramopoulos. He takes Bulgarii to be burgaroi, Roman mercenaries garrisoned in the burgi along the limes. Without accepting this etymology, I would like to point out that in the second half of the sixth century a group of Huns who had found refuge in the empire were known as fossatisii. Fossatum is the military camp.

In addition to the objective difficulties, subjective ones bedevil some scholars. Turkologists are likely to find Turks everywhere; Germanic scholars discover Germans in unlikely places. Convinced that all proto-Bulgarians spoke Turkish, Németh offered an attractive Turkish etymology of Asparuch; other Turkologists explained the name in a different, perhaps less convincing way. Now it has turned out that Asparuch is an Iranian name. Validi Togan, a scholar of profound erudition but sometimes biased by pan-Turkism, derived shogun, Sino-Japanese for chiang chün, “general,” from the Qarluq title sagun. Pro-Germanic bias led Schönfeld to maintain, in disregard of all chronology, that the Moors took over Vandalic names.

In view of the difficulties concerning the study of Hun names—the inexactness inherent in transcriptions, the morphological changes which many names must have undergone, the ever present possibility that the names were Gothicized, the wide margin of error in the manuscript tradition—in view of all these one cannot help marveling at the boldness with which the problem of the Hunnish language has been and still is being attacked.

I love that “sometimes biased by pan-Turkism”; yeah, I’d say that someone who derives shogun from the Qarluq title sagun may have a teeny little bias somewhere. I’m not sure how far one can trust his “profound erudition.”

(I expect this post to be of particular interest to John Emerson, who has cited Maenchen-Helfen in his post “The Steppe Barbarians in Eurasia.”)

In this week’s New Yorker there’s an article by Elizabeth Kolbert called “The Climate of Man—II.” (It’s not now online [archived], as are Part I [archived] and Part III [archived] of the three-part series.) It’s very interesting, but I had to get over my initial disappointment that it wasn’t about Akkad, since that’s what it begins by talking about. What concerns me here is a phrase in the third sentence of the piece: “Sargon—Sharru–kin, in the language of Akkadian—means ‘true king’; almost certainly, though, he was a usurper.” My initial reaction (aside from a reflexive grumble about falling editorial standards) was that the un-English phrase “the language of Akkadian” was a garden-variety confusion between “the Akkadian language” and “the language of Akkad”: she wrote one, half-changed it to the other, and no editor caught it (mutter, grumble). But it occurred to me that it might be taken as parallel to “the island of Manhattan,” and it also occurred to me that this might be an example of the increasing lag between the state of my own dialect and the ever-changing state of the language as she is spoke. So I’ll ask the Varied Reader: does the phrase “the language of Akkadian” sound acceptable?

Randy Cohen proposes an idea that appeals to me: “a literary map of Manhattan—not of its authors’ haunts but those of their characters.”

I began thinking about this map years ago while reading Don DeLillo’s ”Great Jones Street.” Bucky Wunderlick gazes out the window of his ”small crowded room” at the firehouse across the street. I realized: there’s only one firehouse on that street and few buildings that contain tiny apartments rather than commercial lofts. I know where Bucky Wunderlick lives. Or would live if he existed. He’s got to be at No. 35. Knowing this made walking around the neighborhood like walking through the novel. But I walked without a map. Shouldn’t there be a map of imaginary New Yorkers?
It would be a lush literary landscape—the house on Washington Square where Catherine Sloper waited and yearned, the coffee shops where the characters of Ralph Ellison and Isaac Bashevis Singer quarreled and kibbitzed, the offices where John Cheever’s people spent their days, the clubs where Jay McInerney’s creatures wasted their nights, the East 70’s and Upper West Side avenues where the Glass family bickered (Salinger gives several addresses), downtown where Ishmael wandered the docks.

He gives a number of examples of fictional locations, both exact and vague, and “can imagine maps of Brooklyn, Chicago, London and more.” (There is a certain amount of this in The Atlas of Literature by Malcolm Bradbury, but it covers too many areas and centuries to have much detail on any one place.) He says “Since nobody is widely enough read—I’m not widely enough read—to know the haunts and houses, the offices and bars and subway stops of so diverse a population, I appeal to Book Review readers to send in their favorites”; the address is bookmap@nytimes.com.
Update. The website is up.

For a good summary of the pronunciation of h in classical and ecclesiastical Latin, see Geoff Pullum’s self-flagellating post in yesterday’s Language Log. And don’t miss his touching peroration:

This morning in Language Log Plaza little knots of staff writers are talking to each other in low voices and then breaking off when I come by. When I go into our coffee shop, the Latté Linguistica, people get theirs to go so that they won’t have to talk to me; they rush off, or pretend to be looking down into their coffee cup as if they thought they’d seen a bug drop in there… I’m being ostracized. I made a remark on Language Log without checking it out yesterday. And today I am the lowest form of linguistic slime. I am no better than a BBC science reporter.

I am probably not going to be here very much longer. The call will come to present myself in the Big Office where MYL sits, and I will be introduced to the security guard who will help me carry the things from my desk to the front door. Then they will shut down my email account and scrub the hard disk on my desktop machine in preparation for handing it to the new staffer who will replace me…

The poet Robert Kelly has been quoted on LH before; here are his thoughts on the main focus of this blog:

Sermon on Language
This – I mean whatever comes to mind when you read this – is an organization – from the proto-Greek organ-grindo, “the music swells, the monkey dances”- dedicated to enshrining reality deep in the heart of itself. Its code name is Language, and it was invented a war or two ago – actually during the Second Gobi War, the one that ended the paleolothic – to con- fer on sunlight such blessings as “It is sunning,” or “The sun is raining,” or “Shine happens,” according to the by-laws of your local lodge. For individual languages – like Basque or Xhosa or Cantonese or French – are in fact created and sustained as lodges of the ancient freemasonic society of Speakers, the ones with Language on their side, the so-called humans. All other societies -and every form of society- is subsidiary to this, this elegant and persuasive artifact which self-embeds its rules and by-laws at once in every member who pays the dues of breath – what we call speaking. You do not have to think very long or hard to learn that all mysteries are ensconced in language and extractable from language, and that obedience to the intricacies of language in turn reveals the exact astro-dynamic efflorescent energy of place and circumstance we nickname Truth. The con- juncture. The lock. The habit the heart wears in the market, the song it hums in the bathroom, the text encoded in its midnight snores. Language is astrology indoors, it is the moon in the bed- room and the sun in your pocket, its rules are your rules and there is hardly a rumor – though there is a rumor – of anyone disobedient to its prescriptions. Timid Nietzsche and meek Blake followed its laws like lambs, and Lenin lay down with De Maistre to graze on public language. Only the one – there was one – who woke up to the sleep of named things ever broke the lodge law and got away with it. All the way away. Faint- ing, we follow.
Robert Kelly
20 April 1993.

(Via wood s lot.)

While we wait for La grande rousse to return from hiatus (or, as she puts it, activités carnetières limitées), there is consolation in the form of Les Amoureux du français, a language blog run by Fabienne Couturier, an editor at La Presse, and Paul Roux, “conseiller et chroniqueur linguistique.” This week they discuss “Les mots en «oune»”—a category peculiar to Québec. To whet your appetite, the list starts off with three sexy items:

Bizoune : pénis (se dit aussi « zoune »)
Foufoune : fesse
Noune : vulve

Thanks to Beth of The Cassandra Pages for the tip!

Update (2010). Alas, both La rousse and Les Amoureux are long gone, but the proprietor of Écarts de langage writes to let me know it’s covering similar territory.

Update (2013). Alas, alack: “ecartsdelangage.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site.” For here on the internet have we no continuing city…

Update (Apr. 2013). The Wayback Machine has archived all the sites, so I have replaced the URLs with ones that work.

“Divan” is one of the most complicated words I know. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definitions:

1. A long backless sofa, especially one set with pillows against a wall.
2. a. A counting room, tribunal, or public audience room in Muslim countries.
b. The seat used by an administrator when holding audience.
c. A government bureau or council chamber.
3. A coffeehouse or smoking room.
4. A book of poems, especially one written in Arabic or Persian by a single author.

The OED adds the meaning ‘a room having one side entirely open towards a court, garden, river, or other prospect’ and expands on the fourth sense as follows: “A Persian name for a collection of poems (Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Turkish); spec. a series of poems by one author, the rimes of which usually run through the whole alphabet. [From the original sense ‘collection of written sheets’, perh. influenced by later uses of the word.]” And speaking of “original sense,” check out the etymology:

A word originally Persian, dēvān, now dīwān, in Arabic pronounced dīwān, diwān; in Turkish divān, whence in many European langs., It. divano, Sp., Pg., F. divan. Originally, in early use, a brochure, or fascicle of written leaves or sheets, hence a collection of poems, also a muster-roll or register (of soldiers, persons, accounts, taxes, etc.); a military pay-book, an account-book; an office of accounts, a custom-house; a tribunal of revenue or of justice; a court; a council of state, senate; a council-chamber, a (cushioned) bench. The East Indian form and use of the word is given under DEWAN. Another European form, older than divan, and app. directly from Arabic, is It. dovana, doana, now dogana, F. douane (in 15th c. douwaine), custom-house: see DOUANE.

For a more discursive collection of definitions, with 19th-century stabs at etymology, see the Hobson-Jobson entry. The mix of senses is so confusing that when I asked the proprietors of an excellent Lebanese restaurant in Astoria called Al Dewan (long defunct, I’m afraid) why it was so named, they muttered and fumfered and couldn’t come up with anything convincing. (To my mind, it was clearly named with the ‘poetry collection’ sense in view, since the window displayed a plaster model of an open book with the name inscribed calligraphically, but when I drew their attention to this, they shrugged—I’m guessing whoever named the place and ordered the plaster book was no longer around, and nobody else knew.)

And where does the Persian word come from, you ask? The AHD says:

Persian dīwān, place of assembly, roster, probably from Old Iranian *dipivahanam, document house : Old Persian dip-, writing, document (from Akkadian tuppu, tablet, letter, from Sumerian dub) + Old Persian vahanam, house; see wes-¹ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.

I hope that’s correct, because there aren’t many words in English that go back to Sumerian (tunic and chiton are two more; according to AHD they go back via Akkadian kitû, kita’um, ‘flax, linen’ to Sumerian gada, gida).

The reason I’m telling you all this is to give you the background for appreciating the amusing error made in this article (Google cache; the original story has gone 404) by Ana Keshelashvili:

Revaz Baramidze looked in amazement at the crowd of people gathered in Parnassus, Tbilisi’s newest bookstore. The store’s two rooms were so tightly packed that it was difficult to move around, and more people stood outside waiting to get in.

“What do I see, so many young people and everybody came to buy a book. I can’t predict, but it seems to me that we are turning back to reading literature,” said Baramidze, professor of literature at Tbilisi State University.

That cold but sunny winter afternoon, Vakhushti Kotetishvili was seated at a small desk in the downstairs room, signing copies of his newly published collection “East-West Sofa.”…

Now, you also have to know that a famous collection of Goethe’s was called West-östlicher Divan, translated as West-Eastern Divan. I strongly suspect that Mr. Kotetishvili (described here as “an incredibly dignified translator of persian poetry”) gave his book the same title in Georgian. But Ms. Keshelashvili looked up Georgian დივანი (divani) in her Georgian-English dictionary, found “sofa,” and the rest was history.

I’d feel worse about making public fun of Ms. Keshelashvili if she hadn’t publicly identified me as David Foster Wallace in her master’s thesis, “Patterns of Self-Expression and Impression Management in Blogs” (pdf; Google cache here). Check out #104 in APPENDIX A: LIST OF BLOGS ANALYZED.

Addendum. See now dahween and divan at Balashon, which (among other things) explains the origin of Chicken Divan (mentioned in the thread below).

Update (Mar. 2025). The OED has updated its entry, but not very effectively; see Xerîb’s comment below.

I’m not adding it to the blogroll because I don’t read Chinese, but those of you who do might want to check out Linguistics Paradise, a blog by 冬:

Linguistics Paradise 開淌大吉
對語言學的那種出於本性的熱愛與天賦，是涕淌創辦Linguistics Paradise的原始衝動。我選擇了MSN上的個人空間，是為了能讓更多人有意或無意地來到這裏。在這裏，你們會讀到我在語言學上學習過程的觀察、記錄與思考。涕淌會盡全部能力把這個專欄辦好！也歡迎大家常來捧場或是與我交流。涕淌知道在大多數人眼裏，Linguistics是一門枯燥異常的學科，希望 Linguistics Paradise會改變你們的成見！
To those English speakers who have come to Linguitics Paradise, I express my sincere appreciation. As a college student majoring in geography, I also show great interest in linguistics. That’s why I wanted to originate this blog. Born and brought up in China, I speak poor English compared with my mother tongue. Therefore, most of the articles will be posted in Chinese. However, I will add an English summary to every blog. I hope you like this place: Linguistics Paradise!

Update (Sept. 16, 2006). Well, that’s sad: it’s gone now. 牛冬, if you see this, please let me know if you have a new site and I’ll link it! (Write to languagehat AT gmail DOT com; I’m closing comments on this thread because of spam.)