languagehat.com

The Quebec Culture Blog has, sadly, been quiescent since 2016, but in its heyday it did a terrific series of posts on Canadian French accents; here’s the first, with links to the others, and here’s a taste:

Through my growing-up years, my family had moved numerous times within the country. During this period, my education was in French wherever we lived in Canada. As a child, my parents sought to ensure that my French and English were at the same level, and that I was able to identify with Canada’s French language and Francophone culture wherever we lived.

By the time I was 20, I had already lived in four provinces. Since then, I had lived in another two provinces for a total of six provinces. Thus, from a very young age, I became quite familiar with many forms of French accents in numerous provinces. […]

It is a part of Canada which I hold very close to my heart. For me, Canada would not be the same without it’s linguistic and cultural duality (regardless of the province), or the diversity of it’s Francophone nature. I’d like to share some of my own knowledge with you regarding our different accents and realities. […]

I have done my best to provide comprehensive information, but in a manner which doesn’t require an entire book. To keep things interesting, in addition to video links of many accent samples, I will also provide anecdotes with some of my own personal stories and experiences, as well as interesting images throughout this series.

From the second post, on Ontario:
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Via r/MapPorn (“Map Porn, for interesting maps”), Do you pronounce the “r” in “arm”? England, 1950 vs. 2016. It’s just a map (well, two side by side), but it blew my mind — I had no idea the boat had rho’d that far out to sea. (Found at Facebook, but I figured Reddit was accessible to more readers.)

I’ve spent the last three weeks reading two of Andrei Bely’s maddeningly difficult novels, Котик Летаев (1917-18, translated by Gerald Janecek as Kotik Letaev) and its continuation, or sequel if you prefer, Крещеный китаец (1921, translated by Thomas R. Beyer as The Christened Chinaman, available online here). I’ve posted about Bely a number of times, reviewing Серебряный голубь (The Silver Dove), Петербург (Petersburg), Симфония (2-я, драматическая) [Symphony: Second, Dramatic], and a translation of all four Symphonies, and while these are in one sense not like any of the others (they focus on the impressions of a small child and have almost nothing in the way of a plot), in another they’re clearly part of the same web of prose: his musical style gets more so, his love of archaic, dialectal, and invented words becomes stronger, and his overriding sense of a dialectic between East and West is sharpened. Here this is personified in the figure of Professor Letaev, the father of little Kotik (clearly modeled on Bely’s own father, Nikolai Bugaev — Andrei Bely, “Andrew White,” is of course a pseudonym); he is a mathematician, with Western rationality, but also a highly eccentric man who represents the “Scythian” East, whence the ridiculous title “The Christened Chinaman” that Bely gave it on its 1927 book publication. The original journal version was called Преступление Николая Летаева [The crime/transgression of Nikolai Letaev], which is far superior, since such plot as there is focuses on the protagonist’s sense of guilt at causing (he thinks) the rift between his rationalist father and his music-loving mother, who increasingly resented her husband and became violent when he seemed to be influencing their son, at one point beating Kotik for showing signs of “premature development” (and having his father’s “big forehead”). I don’t understand critics who claim that the title was changed because he hadn’t gotten around to describing the crime (the later parts of the novel were apparently lost); it’s explicitly said that his “crime” is what I described above. And I don’t understand critics who separate the two novels, or (like Janecek in his essay on Kotik Letaev for the Reference Guide to Russian Literature) discuss one without mentioning the other — they are clearly parts of a single whole, and I could quote entire paragraphs that only a very diligent Belyologist could identify as coming from one or the other.

All that said, do I recommend these novels? I have no idea. The language is very, very difficult; I had to consult the translations and their annotations with depressing frequency, and even then some usages remained incomprehensible to me. And the unvarying dactylic rhythm (perhaps explained by Bely’s perception of the novels as constituting an epic) maddened some critics (like Gleb Struve), who found it boring and mannered; I enjoy it, possibly because I’ve read so much epic verse the meter feels natural to me and sweeps me along. (Also, it’s useful in showing which syllable Bely stressed in some words.) Of course, if you read them in English these will not be problems for you (neither translator tried to reproduce the rhythm); then all you have to deal with is the emphasis on childish perceptions (which sometimes reminded me uncomfortably of The Family Circus), the lack of plot, and the frequent allusions to the anthroposophical theories of Rudolf Steiner. If those don’t put you off, go for it; these are not classics like Petersburg, but they give a striking child’s-eye view of the world and some glimpses of Moscow in the 1880s.

An interesting word I pluck more or less at random is алтабаз [altabaz], more usually written алтабас [altabas], which is a kind of Persian brocade and is apparently from Turkish altynbäz. If anyone (Xerîb?) knows more about it, do tell.

David Robson, a journalist linked here a number of times before (e.g.), writes about “how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making”:

As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the émigré community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966.

“This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task,” he wrote. “But some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.”

Over the past decade, psychologists have become increasingly interested in using such mental metamorphoses. Besides altering the quality of our memories, switching between languages can influence people’s financial decision-making and their appraisal of moral dilemmas. By speaking a second language, we can even become more rational, more open-minded and better equipped to deal with uncertainty. This phenomenon is known as the “foreign language effect” and the benefits may be an inspiration for anyone who would like to enrich their mind with the words of another tongue. […]

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I recently ran across one of those excitingly unfamiliar words with an interesting etymology, to wit, the OED’s permit n.² (first published 2005):

Any of several deep-bodied carangid fishes of the genus Trachinotus that are found in warm waters of the western Atlantic and the Caribbean; spec. T. falcatus, which is fished for sport and for food.

1884 The African pompano—Trachynotus goreensis… In the Gulf of Mexico it is not unusual, being known at Key West as the ‘Permit’.
G. B. Goode in G. B. Goode et al., Fisheries U.S.: Section I 329

1911 Other species [of pompano] found on our eastern coast are the ‘old-wife’.., the ‘round pompano’, or ‘Indian River permit’; the ‘permit’ or ‘great pompano’.
Rep. Comm. U.S. Bureau Fisheries 1908 314/1
[…]

1994 Most guests come seeking fly fishing’s Grand Slam, hoping to land a bonefish, a permit and a tarpon—the sport’s Big Three.
New York Times 27 November v. 12/2

The etymology:

Irregularly < Spanish palometa any of several species of fish (1526), probably < an unattested Doric variant (with παλ-) of ancient Greek πηλαμύδ-, πηλαμύς young tunny, bonito (see pelamid n.), perhaps via Italian palamita (14th cent.) or Catalan palomida (1300), or perhaps via Mozarabic.

Notes
An alternative etymology derives the Spanish term < paloma dove (see palomino n.) + -eta (< Catalan -eta -et suffix¹). However, in Spanish the term is only attested as the name of a fish, while Catalan palometa has a range of senses, including ‘butterfly’, but is not used to designate a fish except in a small area, where it is probably borrowed from Spanish.

Once again, I must deprecate the OED’s refusal to name authors in periodical citations; that 1994 NYT quote, as you can see here, is by Tessa Melvin. (I would also prefer it if they did not present snippets with factitious majuscules — “Most” does not begin the sentence — but I realize that may be captious carping.)

The Economist’s “Johnson” column (see this 2010 post, in which I greeted its revival) is once again both intriguing and linguistically well-informed to a degree astonishing for a popular periodical in Young Americans are losing the southern accent:

Is the southern accent in decline? A recent study by four researchers from three universities, widely covered in the press, indicates that a prized and unique part of America’s linguistic culture may be under threat. As the Washington Post put it, “The Georgia drawl is fading, y’all.”

Accent shifts often accompany demographic ones. Americans began moving south in larger numbers in the 1960s. Southern cities boomed as a result. Naturally, people took their children along (including a young Johnson, who moved from Nebraska to Atlanta with his Georgian father and Wisconsin-born mother).

The study found that the southern accent is most common among baby-boomers, born from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, before the influx of migrants to the South ramped up. Among Generation X—people born from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s—the prevalence of southern sounds declines, as Georgia-born children socialised with transplants from northern cities like Boston and Chicago. The youngest Georgians, millennials and Generation Z, sound the least southern of all.

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Via Damien Hall’s Facebook post I learn of the new Northumbrian Wordhoard, as reported by Tony Henderson for Cultured North East:

A scene: a courtroom in Gosforth in Newcastle some years ago,

The defendant was asked by the solicitor why he struck another man in a bar. The accused replied: “Coz he was slavering on, like.” Everybody in the room knew exactly what he meant, apart the chairman of the bench, an older, upper middle class Northumbrian lady who halted the proceedings to ask: “Excuse me but what on earth does slavering on mean?”

She would have benefited from a new book compiled by the Northumbrian Language Society, which will be launched at an event on Saturday October 14 in Morpeth Town Hall[.] The book, titled Northumbrian Wordhoard, is the most definitive up-to-date dictionary produced by the society in its 40 year history. It contains both 1,250 of the commonest Northumbrian dialect words with their meanings, and also – a blessing for visitors – a reverse list of Standard English items translated into Northumbrian. […]

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Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a couple of quotes from Edmund Hill’s “Religious Translation” (Blackfriars 37.430 [January 1956]:19-25):

Contrition is an example of those many words whose meaning, though accurate enough, is poor and colourless compared with what they signify in Latin. It is a technical word for sorrow for sin. Many people, perhaps, who could well manage to be really and truly sorry for their sins, find the complicated business of making a perfect act of contrition too much for them. The Latin word means literally crushing or grinding or bruising; but the English ear, taking the metaphorical sense for the proper one, misses the metaphor completely, and metaphor is the very sap of an effective religious language. ‘Make a good act of contrition while I give you absolution’; what would be wrong, except that it would be unfamiliar, with saying, ‘Try and bruise your heart for your sins’ (or simply ‘Be really sorry for your sins’), ‘while I untie you from them’?
[…]

There is a fetish here that needs exorcising, called Dignity of Language. By all means keep it where it is found in the original, as in St Leo’s sermons for example, or the canon of the Mass. But not all, nor yet the greatest, religious works are written in dignified language. To impose elevated diction on St Augustine’s sermons or even on the Gospels is to mistranslate them. ‘Peace, be still’ is a beautiful dignified phrase. But what our Lord actually said to the wind and the sea was literally ‘Be gagged, be quiet’; much nearer the undignified but vigorous shut up of colloquial English. If street smells have invaded the original, do not drive them out with incense from the translation.

The Gilleland post adds the original Greek of Mark 4:39: “σιώπα, πεφίμωσο.”

My wife ran across a reference to “runza” and asked me if I knew what it might be; I didn’t, so I looked it up:

A runza (also called a bierock, krautburger, or kraut pirok) is a yeast dough bread pocket with a filling consisting of beef, cabbage or sauerkraut, onions, and seasonings. Runzas can be baked into various shapes such as a half-moon, a rectangle, a round (bun), a square, or a triangle. The runzas sold by the Runza restaurant chain are rectangular while many of the bierocks sold in Kansas are round buns. […]

The runza sandwich originated from pirog, an Eastern European baked good or more specifically from its small version, known as pirozhok (literally “little pirog”). Volga Germans, ethnic Germans who settled in the Volga River valley in the Russia Empire at the invitation of Catherine the Great in the 18th century, adapted the pirog/pirozhok to create the bierock, a yeast pastry sandwich with similar savory ingredients. When the political climate turned against the Volga Germans, many emigrated to the United States, creating communities across the Great Plains. These immigrants, including the Brening family that settled near Sutton, Nebraska, brought their bierock recipes with them. Sarah “Sally” Everett (née Brening), originally of Sutton, is credited with adapting her family’s bierock recipe into the runza and also inventing the name for the sandwich. In 1949, Everett went into business selling runzas with her brother Alex in Lincoln.

Etymology

Many sources agree that Sally Everett invented the name “runza” although it is likely she adapted it from an existing name for the sandwich; either the krautrunz, an older, different German name for the bierock, or the Low German runsa, meaning “belly”, alluding to the gently rounded shape of the pouch pastry. The modern German ranzen, also meaning satchel, derives from runsa.

Are you familiar with this tasty-sounding item? And does anyone know anything further about krautrunz, runsa, or any other possibly related words?

Alex Foreman has a Facebook post on an interesting issue that hadn’t occurred to me:

Has someone written about the markedness of use or non-use of Hebrew and Arabic plurals on loanwords in Jewish English and Muslim English in the US?

What I mean is that, among a certain subset of Jews, it is common to refer to a religious book in Hebrew or Aramaic using the loan séyfer. For people who do this, there seem to exist two plurals: the loan “sfórim”/”sfarím” and the assimilatory English “seyfers”. I’m wondering if someone has written about what triggers each option and what’s involved. Perhaps done statistical studies based on recorded conversations?

I’d be equally interested in similar work on the same phenomenon in Muslim English. For the loan “masjid” (mosque) both the native English plural “masjids” and the Arabic transfixational plural “masājid” seem to be available to English-speaking Muslims. As is the double-marked “masājids”.

I imagine rozele will have something to say about this…