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Lexicographer Erin McKean is a senior editor at OUP as well as editor of Verbatim, “the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson.” Yesterday on Public Radio International’s show “The Next Big Thing” she said she wanted to bring three obscure words into use (and tried to bribe John Linnell of the group “They Might Be Giants” into using all three in liner notes so she could cite them); the words were contrecoup, craniosophic, and limerent. The first means ‘The effect of a blow, as an injury, fracture, produced exactly opposite, or at some distance from, the part actually struck’ (OED), and there is a gap of over a century in citations, between 1882 (Syd. Soc. Lex., “Contre-coup.. is often very severe in the skull, for instance, the bone may be fractured on the opposite side to the seat of injury”) and a rash of uses in 2003; the second, meaning ‘learned in skulls,’ has been used only once, in 1819 (in a phrenological context); and the third is the adjective from the noun limerence—the noun, meaning ‘The state of being romantically infatuated or obsessed with another person,’ is common enough, but Erin wants more citations for the adjective (the latest edition of the OED has three, the latest being from 1998: V. C. DE MUNCK Romantic Love & Sexual Behavior iii. 80 If limerent, she would not have been able to stop thinking about Rhett”). What’s particularly interesting about limerence is its etymology, or lack thereof, as explained in this quote from Dorothy Tennov [Wikipedia], the word’s inventor:

1977 Observer 11 Sept. 3/9, I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’… It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever.

The feisty Scottish poet Liz Lochhead promptly used it in The Grimm Sisters (1981): “From limerance and venery/ She flinched as at fire,” which would seem to give the word a certain literary cachet. So let’s get limerent!

(Thanks to Songdog for alerting me to the show.)

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Mark Liberman has a most interesting Language Log post about two forms of encoded language, Vietnamese nói lái and French contrepets. The latter is a form of potential punning that depends on imagined malapropism; as Mark puts it:

These are exemplified by phrases like “que votre Verbe soit en joie”, which literally means “may your Word be in joy”, but which expresses a less spiritual message if the indicated sounds (not letters!) are swapped: “que votre verge soit en bois” = “may your staff be of wood”.

The Vietnamese form is (to me, anyway) more interesting:

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Or, to be more precise, Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowland Scotch. The Project Gutenberg folks have put online this 1900 work by George Tobias Flom, a fine example of old-style philology, with plenty of examples and appendices and no attempt to appeal to the casual browser. From the Preface:

This work aims primarily at giving a list of Scandinavian loanwords found in Scottish literature. The publications of the Scottish Text Society and Scotch works published by the Early English Text Society have been examined… Norse elements in the Northern dialects of Lowland Scotch, those of Caithness and Insular Scotland, are not represented in this work. My list of loanwords is probably far from complete. A few early Scottish texts I have not been able to examine. These as well as the large number of vernacular writings of the last 150 years will have to be examined before anything like completeness can be arrived at.

I have adopted certain tests of form, meaning, and distribution. With regard to the test of the form of a word great care must be exercised. Old Norse and Old Northumbrian have a great many characteristics in common, and some of these are the very ones in which Old Northumbrian differs from West Saxon. It has, consequently, in not a few cases, been difficult to decide whether a word is a loanword or not…

And here’s his admirable explanation of his use of language names:

There has been considerable confusion in the use of the terms Norse and Danish. Either has been used to include the other, or, again, in a still wider sense, as synonymous with Scandinavian; as, for instance, when we speak of the Danish kingdoms in Dublin, or Norse elements in Anglo-Saxon. Danish is the language of Denmark, Norse the language of Norway. When I use the term Old Danish I mean that dialect of Old Scandinavian, or Old Northern, that developed on Danish soil. By Old Norse I mean the old language of Norway. The one is East Scandinavian, the other West Scandinavian. The term Scandinavian, being rather political than linguistic, is not a good one, but it has the advantage of being clear, and I have used it where the better one, Northern, might lead to confusion with Northern Scotch.

An example from his long list of loan words:

Beck, sb. a rivulet, a brook. Jamieson. O. N. bekkr, O. Sw. bäkker, Norse bekk, O. Dan. bæk, Sw. bäck, a rivulet. In place-names a test of Scand. settlements.

He also has a list of Some Words that are not Scandinavian Loanwords. A very thorough job, if doubtless superseded by later works not available for free on this wonderful internet we call home. (Via wood s lot [01.06.2005].)

Frequent commenter Map sent me a link to a Russian story she thought I’d enjoy, Р.В.С. by Arkadii Gaidar; she added that the author was the grandfather of Yegor Gaidar, briefly prime minister of Russia in 1992. I’d never heard of the author (which shocks Russians, who all read him in school), but I loved the story (about two young boys trying to save a wounded soldier during the Russian Civil War). Then I got some further background: Gaidar, whose real name was Golikov, was commander of a special unit of the Red Army, notorious for the brutal murder of deserters and civilian hostages (Russian links 1, 2). This, while distressing to learn, is not exactly LH material, but his pseudonym is. It seems Golikov’s unit served in Khakassia (a small region northwest of Tuva; the Turkic Khakass are now a small minority of the population), and the locals were so terrified of their depredations they were constantly asking “Khaidar Golikov?”: ‘where’s Golikov headed?’ (khaidar meaning ‘to where’). Golikov thought “Khaidar” was some sort of honorific and adopted it as his pseudonym. OK, that story sounds suspiciously like urban legend; I tried to check it out at the Introduction to the Khakas Vocabulary, but they haven’t added the words beginning with x (kh). In the unlikely event someone out there can confirm or deny the Khakass meaning, be my guest; otherwise I’ll regard it as not proven.

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One segment of last night’s PBS broadcast on American English particularly struck me: the one devoted to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, prominent in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo (surprisingly, it seems to be spreading in St. Louis). You can get a description (with chart) here (scroll down to “The Northern Cities Shift”) and hear samples here; it’s one thing to read about it, but you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a recording of someone saying (what clearly sounds like) “boss” and discovered that what she was actually saying was “bus.” According to the Wikipedia article:

The shift is more notable in Caucasian speakers and those who identify themselves with the region in which the vowel shift is occurring. Speakers of African American Vernacular English show little to no evidence of adopting the Northern Cities Shift. The NCS also is not being used by Canadian speakers despite the geographic proximity of speakers in the United States and Canada about the Great Lakes region.

Paul Meier Dialect Services has a webpage with interactive charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) designed by Eric Armstrong of York University, Toronto, and voiced by Paul Meier, of the University of Kansas.

If you… want to hear one of the “signature sounds” in isolation, or in comparison with other sounds, you may do so using the charts here. Vowels, consonants, ingressives, suprasegmentals, intonation, diacritics, ejectives, implosives, diphthongs, and clicks are demonstrated. Clicking one of the charts below will link you to a Flash animation… Some of the files are quite large and may take some time to load with a dial-up connection, while others are smaller and will load more quickly.
The latest version of the IPA Alphabet was published in 1993 (updated in 1996) by the International Phonetic Association.
In addition to the official IPA charts, we have also provided a chart demonstrating the diphthongs and triphthongs of Received Pronunciation (Standard British English,) and General American (GenAm.)

Kudos for this wonderful link go to CellarFloor‘s MonkeyFilter post.
Update. See related MetaFilter post.

PBS has a program called Do You Speak American? that looks to be a well-informed investigation of issues like dialect and neologisms, with actual linguists aboard. It’s being broadcast at 8 PM tonight here in New York; if you live in the US, check their local schedule page for your local time. The website is well worth investigating for its own sake; here’s a snippet on Chicano English from this section by Carmen Fought (an associate professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, California):

In Los Angeles’ Mexican-American communities, the Spanish spoken is distinct from the Spanish spoken in Mexico. For example, speakers say Te llamo para trás, a literal translation of the English phrase I’ll call you back — a phrase not used by speakers in monolingual Spanish-speaking communities (in Mexico or elsewhere). The English of L.A.’s Mexican-American communities is also different. It includes a variety called Chicano English that reveals just how thoroughly social context can affect language structure. When recent groups of Mexican immigrants arrived in Los Angeles, they learned English as a second language. Most of us know someone who immigrated to this country as an adult and speaks English with a noticeable “foreign accent.” Like other adult second-language learners, the early Mexican immigrants spoke an “accented” variety of English that included phonological and other patterns from their first language, Spanish. The children of these immigrants, however, generally grew up using both Spanish and English. They used the “learner English” of the community as a basis for developing a new, native dialect of English. Of course, the kids didn’t sit down and say to themselves “We need a better dialect of English than our parents have!” So what did happen, exactly? The way that Chicano English developed tells us something about language, cognition and the human brain.

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The very first LH post was about the “My language is the original language” phenomenon, and here we have a sterling example of it. For non-Russian-speaking readers: Valerii A. Chudinov, professor of, um, culturology and management at ГУУ (the State University of Management, founded in 1919 as Московский промышленно-экономический практический институт [Moscow Engineering-Economic Institute], in case you were thinking it was some ’90s fly-by-night creation), although his graduate studies were in physics, has an abiding interest in Slavic mythology and paleography, and when he talks about Slavic paleography he doesn’t mean medieval runes—he means “что славянская письменность и прежде всего русская письменность существуют, по крайней мере, несколько десятков тысяч лет” [‘that Slavic writing, and above all Russian writing, has existed for at least several tens of thousands of years’]. He has found Slavic runes not only on Byzantine icons of the fifth to tenth centuries, but on Greek vases from the second to sixth centuries BC—not to mention the prehistoric cave paintings of France:

And when you begin to work on them [obrabatyvat’ ‘treat, process; refine, polish’] skillfully, because otherwise the inscriptions are not visible, it turns out that on the mammoth is written mamont [‘mammoth’], and on the horse is written dil! This is where the Russian word korkodil [apparently 16th-century Russian chronicles refer to water-dwelling beasts called “korkodily”] comes from. Because the plan of word formation is identical – korkovyi dil – horse from korka [‘crust/rind’], and korka is ‘scale.’ So we don’t have a distortion of an English or Latin word, but rather the reverse: the Latin word is a distortion of the Russian: it was korkodil, and it became krokodil [‘crocodile’].

Mind you, he’s not a dogmatist—he admits that Chinese may possibly be as ancient as Russian (“I haven’t touched on southern Asia”)—but he’s quite sure that all of northern Asia, from Britain to Alaska, “in the Stone Age was entirely Russian.”

I’m quoting from the amused summary at i_crust’s Live Journal page; those wanting to read the full interview (or just see a couple of photographs of the impressively bearded professor) should go here. And if you’re truly interested in his theories, he’s got a new book out.

(Many thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana for the link, which made my day!)

Iain Higgins’ contribution to History and Archives: Sextet, a collective editorial in Issue 178 of Canadian Literature (“Iain, who came on board in 1995 as poetry editor, has overseen special issues on ‘Poetry and Poetics’ and on ‘Nature/Culture.’ He wrote editorials in which the creative and the scholarly were inseparable companions, and he was a proof-reader non-pareil”):

Language, said Heidegger, is the house of being, and he may be right, but whatever the case, it is certainly true to call language a house of memory, which is to say a house of oblivion, a house in which things of every sort can be called to mind or allowed to lapse into nothingness. Language is, in other words, an archive, a word as well as a concept that English borrowed from French, which borrowed it from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek, where it originally referred to the public building that housed records and documents. Words in use never stay still, and in a typical metonymic shift—reinforced by a telling grammatical drift into the plural—the word archive has come to refer also to the building’s contents. Archives, that is, are both the container and the contained; like languages, they are the houses of what we recall and what we forget, and the things themselves. What they do not hold, or cannot, is no less important than what they do or can hold. If possession is nine points of the law, then forgetting is nine points of the archive.

We cannot live except by forgetting, any more than we can sense some stimuli except by ignoring others; just imagine if you could sense every thing in its own thisness all the time, from the smallest flutter in your lungs to every single point of light entering your eyes. History—a word whose journey into English followed the same path as archive, only earlier, and which originally meant inquiry—works like our perceptual apparatus, whose seeing is enabled by our blindnesses, by focussing on one thing or set of things to the exclusion of others. That is why there can be no one history, only histories, and these can never be complete, ever.

Between getting it all in and leaving it all out, the possibilities are endless.

(Via wood s lot.)

“Bone, Beak, and Apples,” a poem by Higgins with a fine rhythmic flow, is online here.

An article by Simon Romero in today’s New York Times [archived] describes the dispute over how to pronounce Texas placenames of Spanish origin that have long since become anglicized:

JACINTO CITY, Tex. —

Forget the Alamo. It is the letter “J” that is under siege in Texas, at least to Mike Jackson, the mayor of this town near the old shipyards and oil refineries of Houston. Nearly everyday, Mr. Jackson told The Houston Chronicle, he corrects people who he thinks are mispronouncing the word “Jacinto.”

To Mr. Jackson, who grew up here, it is “Juh-SIN-tuh.” To others, including many newcomers who are part of the city’s Hispanic population, which now constitutes nearly 80 percent of the total, it is “Ha-SEEN-to.” Jacinto, after all, was originally a Spanish word, so why not pronounce it properly in the language of Cervantes?

The pronunciation of place names is one of those quiet conflicts that are played out everyday throughout the Southwest as the numbers of Hispanics in areas originally colonized by Spain and Mexico continue to grow – and in some cases nudge Anglos into the minority.

Texas is full of place names whose pronunciations confound Hispanics but sound natural to others. Palacios is pronounced “Puh-LAY-shus” instead of “Pa-LA-see-os.” Manchaca is “MAN-shack” instead of “Man-CHA-ka.” Pedernales is “PER-dan-al-is” instead of “Peh-der-NA-les” and so on. Even Texas should be “TEH-jas,” according to some traditionalists…

Linguists studying the evolution of English and Spanish in the Southwest say that [insistence on anglicized pronunciation] is fading. Maryellen Garcia [sic; a Google search convinces me her given name is MaryEllen], a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, noted that many newscasters in Texas now pronounce Hispanic names in the Spanish manner, a habit, she said, that was growing in prestige.

“It’s a bit puzzling,” Dr. Garcia said. “Even as the Hispanic middle class uses less Spanish, the rest of society is not as threatened by Spanish, perhaps because of the very emergence and recognition of that middle class.”

No one knows exactly where the intermingling of Spanish and English in the Southwest will lead. Some young Hispanics in Texas pronounce place names in the Spanish way among themselves, but use the Texan pronunciation when speaking with Anglos. That may be one model.

I’m sympathetic to both sides in this dispute and will be interested to see how it plays out, but I have to say I don’t believe for a minute that anyone anywhere pronounces the name of the state “TEH-jas.”