languagehat.com

First off, I want to thank everyone who left informative comments on my Hiatus post. (I should add that wolfangel was quite correct that people would often switch to English when they heard I wasn’t a native speaker, but I got a fair amount of French conversation in anyway.) I learned the word dépanneur ‘convenience store’; I heard the affricated d and t; I did not notice the tense/lax vowels or the –tu questions; I did notice the contractions (chais &c) and a feature nobody mentioned in the comments, the raising of nasalized vowels: vent sounded almost like vin (with /æ/ as in hat), and vin had a high [e] and sounded diphthongized ([veiN]) — in fact, one guy said matin so that it struck my ears as [matiN]. In general, men spoke with heavier dialect than women, and some of them were virtually incomprehensible.

We spent our time mostly in the francophone area north and east of our hotel, so we dealt with a lot of French-speakers, but all of them were willing to accommodate my non-francophone wife except for one Metro ticket-seller who answered her “Do you speak English?” with a brusque “Non.” People seemed by and large bilingual; a striking example of this occurred during our dinner at the (very good) Bistro Côté Soleil on rue St-Denis, when we sat next to two women, the younger probably a grad student in art and the older perhaps her faculty advisor. The younger spoke almost entirely in French and the older almost entirely in English, but they clearly understood each other perfectly and occasionally dropped into the other’s language (both had fairly heavy accents). Other people switched back and forth in the course of a few sentences. I’ve been in many multilingual cities and some with a very widespread minority language (often Spanish in the US), but never one where two languages met on such equal terms. Whatever contortions Québec has had to go through to get where it is today, I’m impressed with the result.

I’m too tired to get into the linguistic aspects of my visit, but I want to thank Beth and J. for welcoming us, pouring good wine into us, and making such good conversation that we hated to leave; I also hated to have to make such a short appearance at the Yulblog meeting of Montreal bloggers, particularly since the first person I met there was Zénon and I would have loved to have the chance to talk more with him. He’s as interesting in person as his blog, which presents all manner of things: philosophy, art, poetry, and (yes) language (Mots français d’origine gauloise). In general, we found Montreal a wonderful city and hope to be able to spend much more time there. More details to follow.

Just a quick note to say I’m back after an action-packed vacation; I feel as if I’d been away for two weeks rather than five and a half days. I’ll be writing at some length about my visits to Montreal and Amherst, but first I have to despam my poor abused blog. Sorry about the infestation (though it seems to have amused some of you — it’s an ill wind, &c &c).

I know, I know, I just took a week off, but I’m going to do it again. I have some vacation time to use up, and the Republican convention seemed an excellent time to get out of town. So I’m going to Montreal tomorrow, spurred by Beth‘s mouth-watering reports on her visits there. I may visit an internet cafe, but don’t expect to hear from me until next weekend. Explore the blogroll and archives and talk amongst yourselves while I see whether my rusty Parisian French is up to the challenge of québécois. A bientôt!

Grant Barrett, known to LH readers not only for Double-Tongued Word Wrester but for the splendid language puzzle he recently provided, has come out with a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in politics, Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. It has up-to-the-minute terms like belligerati ‘any belligerent person or group; (hence) as a group, pro-war commentators’ (first used, apparently, by “Gordon” on Usenet on Mar. 16, 2000 with the quirky spelling belligeratti; it has since, inevitably, become the name of a blog), but also lovingly chronicles long-forgotten terms like blue-light ‘a New England Federalist opposed to the War of 1812’ and leg treasurer ‘one who flees with stolen government funds’:

1839 Ohio Repository (Canton) (Aug. 29) 2: Another Leg Treasurer, Owen Hamlin, entrusted by Mr. Dixon, Rail Road Commissioner, with a check for $11,600 on the State bank of Illinois, collected the money and Swartwouted.

Then there are words that go back into what (for these United States) can be considered the mists of antiquity and are still in circulation, such as war hawk, used in a high-Tory London periodical called The Rehearsal in 1708 and by Thomas Jefferson in a 1798 letter to Madison (“At present, the war hawks talk of septembrizing…”) and still going strong in 1999 (“the policy wonk who would become the administration’s fierce war hawk”). Furthermore, it has tasty and informative introductory essays on “Inside Baseball,” “The –Gate to Scandal” (which ends with a list of dozens of such formations, from Abdulgate to Zippergate), “The Blogistan Lexicon,” and other word-spawning phenomena.

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“We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason.”

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Peter Riis, proprietor of The New Companion and a “shameless and hardened belletrist,” noticed the recent renaissance of hat-related posts here and sent me a link to a glorious advertisement he had posted a couple of years ago:

THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP.
“P ray observe me,” quoth Brummel, while sipping his wine,
“E ver banish that horrible skullcap of thine.
R eform altogether that villainous Tile,
R esembling a bread-pan in fashion and style.
I must cut ye, egad! tho’ feel hurt and all that–
N ever know any man in an infamous hat,
G et a chapeau of PERRING and place on thy sconce,
S uch a hat as can rivet my friendship at once.

“H e alone can supply, since old Dolman is dead,
A covering fit for a gentleman’s head.”
T hen repair to the Strand, only PERRING can show
S uch perfection of fashion, with prices so low.

8 to one are long odds, but I’ll bet it that I
5 hundred new shapes can from PERRING supply.

S uiting contour and feature, complexion and height,
T he young and adult, the stout and the slight,
R emember his Hats, though resisting the weather,
A re as light as the Plume of an eider-down feather,
N o where else can ONE GUINEA such Beavers command,
D on’t forget, PERRING’s HATS, then, of 85, STRAND.

–From Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, July 2, 1834.

Next time I am in London, I shall make sure to visit number 85, Strand, to acquire a chapeau for my sconce. If I am to be a Regency buck, I must endeavour to look the part.

If you’ve ever wondered how name taboos (refusing to say the name, or a word used in the name, of a deceased person) work in practice, read the illuminating post by Claire of Angargoon on the subject.

For Bardi people, the taboo is purely a respect issue and the length of time the name is tabooed depends on how close the relative was and how much respect. For example, when I was there in 2001 an old person died. The people I was working with didn’t like her very much, and they were saying her name even before the funeral, in private. On the other hand, NI’s brother had died in 1990 and she still wouldn’t say his name, likewise her younger son who’d died in a car accident in 1994. The son’s name was Douglas and at the time we were working on materials recorded by the missionary Wilf Douglas in the 1940s. I forgot to call him “Wilf the missionary” at one point and used his full name and NI looked like she’d been hit…

Following up on the controversy discussed here, Geoff Pullum has posted (at Language Log) an extremely interesting letter he received from Dan Everett, who wrote the first full description of the Pirahã language (published in 1986). Geoff asked him to respond to “recent suggestions to the effect that Pirahã is just too strange to be true”; Everett says “It took me 27 years to work up the courage to say these things and I am still called a ‘Borgesian fantasist’ (and have been called much simpler things, like ‘stupid’)” and adds that linguists who were initially very skeptical came to agree with him after studying the language and people. His letter ends:

My own view then is that the case of Pirahã illustrates, perhaps as well as any example ever discussed in the literature, the kind of bi-directional causal relationship between language and culture that Boas and Sapir would have expected us to find.
There is a problem for universal grammar in all this, though. That is the non-trivial one of setting the boundary between culture, grammar, and cognition in light of examples like this where previous boundary lines have been shown to be potentially illusory.
I just left the Pirahãs a few days ago. They are oblivious to all of this attention, yet doing well as a people. However, I have heard the very disturbing news that an electric power company is thinking of using their river, the Maici, to generate power in some way. If any outside company enters their reserve (which I helped demarcate, with support from Cultural Survival, 20 years ago), this could be the end of the Pirahã people. So I hope that this attention on them right now can be used to generate some support for their survival. Examples like Pirahã illustrate very clearly the loss inherent to knowledge of our species, if such a language were to cease to exist without having been studied. It also shows, I hope, that some studies take a LONG time, perhaps the length of an entire career.

There are also links to drawings and a map.

ArmenianHouse.org has a page on Armenian poetry: “Armenian Poetry and Armenian poets — works and biographies. Foreign poets about Armenia and Armenians.” Unfortunately, most of the poems are only in Russian and sometimes Armenian, but there is a link to a page of Armenian poetry in translation. (Thanks to P. Kerim Friedman for the link.)