languagehat.com

I was recently flipping through my Merriam Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (as one does), and at the top of p. 534 I was thunderstruck by the entry beginning “Ishawooa Pass \ꞌi-shə-wä\” (i.e., /ˈɪʃəwa/). Could that be right? So I did some googling and found this video, where seven seconds in we hear “up the Ishawooa trail” with the final vowel more like a schwa (natural for words of that phonetic shape) but otherwise as advertised. Not a trace of anything that might be represented by the -oo-. Trying to find out more, I did some more googling and found this page, which gives some history:

Town in Big Horn County, Wyoming. An Indian word meaning “much cascara.” (Gannett, 1905) “Ishawooa was named by Capt. Belknap. He wanted something different, and took this Indian name. I do not know what it means. It isn’t ‘Ishawood’ nor ‘Ishawoa,’ but is ‘ISHAW-OOA.’ (Rollinson, 1948)

As incoherent as that is, it’s better than nothing; “cascara” is presumably this. And that page led me to Wyoming Places, which “provides information about locations, histories, and name origins of places in the great state of Wyoming.” I like sites like that (cf. Colorado Place Names from earlier this year); local pronunciations are a longstanding interest of this blog, starting less than six months into its existence.

An amusing quote from Anthony Kenny’s A Path from Rome (1985), via Laudator Temporis Acti:

The Latin spoken by most examinees was halting and incorrect; that of the lecturers and examiners was fluent but far from classical. The accent of an Englishman, an American, a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German differed so much from each other that it took some time to realize that the lecturers were not all speaking different languages. Lecturers did not scruple to translate the idioms of their own tongue literally into Latin, leaving foreigners to make what they could of them. Thus a Frenchman would speak of a far-fetched interpretation of a Scripture text as being ‘ad usum delphini’, while an American would drawl ‘haec theoria non tenet aquam’.

[….]

Though Latin was the official language of communication at the Gregorian, it was hardly ever used for spontaneous conversation between students of different nationalities. The ten-minute breaks between the lectures gave, instead, a great opportunity for would-be linguists (‘spekkers’) to practise foreign languages. But most remained resolutely Anglophone.

“Ad usum Delphini est une locution latine signifiant « à l’usage du Dauphin ». […] Aujourd’hui, cette expression est employée de façon ironique pour désigner un ouvrage expurgé afin de pouvoir être mis entre toutes les mains.”

Back in 2016 we discussed Movies Featuring Linguists, Linguistics and Languages; I’ve just seen a movie that rates a prominent place in any such list, the terrific 1974 Japanese police procedural Castle of Sand (砂の器, Suna no utsuwa). It’s slightly marred by the fact that one of the important characters is a pianist/composer, which means that we spend far too long listening to gloopy wallpaper music of the type moviemakers consider “classical,” but other than that it’s brilliantly done (and can be seen at The Criterion Channel, which [plug!] costs less per month than the price of a movie and will satisfy the cravings of any cinephile). What brings it here, though, is a scene in which our hero, a dogged Tokyo detective, visits the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics to ask a dialect expert about zuzu-ben (rendered in the subtitles as “Z accent”), a classic marker of Tōhoku dialect. The scene features dialogue like “What are phonemes?” and a comparison of the similar speech patterns of widely separated regions. I watched it a couple of times just for the thrill.

One thing that bothers me, though, is the English title. Suna no utsuwa doesn’t mean ‘castle of sand’; suna is ‘sand,’ all right, but utsuwa “literally means ‘vessel’ or ‘container’, and commonly refers to any kind of cup, plate, dish, or pot.” At the start of the movie we see a boy shaping beach sand into a vessel and pouring water into it. There is no castle nor anything castle-like, and I am mystified by the mistranslation — if you don’t like “Vessel of Sand” or the like, why not just call it something entirely different and more suggestive of the kind of movie it is? If Jean-Pierre Melville had made it, it would have been called, say, Le trimard (and been considerably shorter). But I guess both versions of the title are part of the same pseudo-poetic impulse that gave us the gloopy music.

Trevor Joyce recently put an image of this poem on Facebook, and I loved it so much I asked his permission to post it at LH, which he generously gave, so here ’tis:

Neglect in Camera

It is another obscure chamber. The town is trapped in light and shade, and limited to the back wall of the shop. The glasses man and his parrot inhabit an intermediate dimension.

The parrot knows the names of things. Roskyn, he says. Then, shag, cendal, gazzatum, dobby, fleece. An ignorance of grammar does not allow his speech to accumulate meaning. His master draughts the projected image on his scrim. Things he knows, but not their names.

They make an odd pair, this glasses man and his pet. When the bird dies, his master will have him stuffed, he loves him so. Already selected is the corner in which he will perch, steadfast. The figures moving through the inverted silver town are averaged into a poised stasis. They represent the citizens as the bird represents the tropics.

Later, the glasses man will attend with oils to the precise textures of cloth, of hair, of milk pouring, a needle penetrating lace, sunlight on pearl, on skin. His nails are dark from years of grinding colours. His eyes are dark from years. His skin? Gossamer!

[Read more…]

I don’t think I ever thought much about the history of the word ideology, but it turns out to be quite interesting. Wikipedia:

The term ideology originates from French idéologie, itself deriving from combining Greek: idéā (ἰδέα, ‘notion, pattern’; close to the Lockean sense of idea) and -logíā (-λογῐ́ᾱ, ‘the study of’).

The term ideology, and the system of ideas associated with it, was coined in 1796 by Antoine Destutt de Tracy while in prison pending trial during the Reign of Terror, where he read the works of Locke and Condillac. Hoping to form a secure foundation for the moral and political sciences, Tracy devised the term for a “science of ideas,” basing such upon two things:

  1. the sensations that people experience as they interact with the material world; and
  2. the ideas that form in their minds due to those sensations.
[…]

A subsequent early source for the near-original meaning of ideology is Hippolyte Taine’s work on the Ancien Régime, Origins of Contemporary France I. He describes ideology as rather like teaching philosophy via the Socratic method, though without extending the vocabulary beyond what the general reader already possessed, and without the examples from observation that practical science would require. Taine identifies it not just with Destutt De Tracy, but also with his milieu, and includes Condillac as one of its precursors.

[Read more…]

1) I happened to look up Catalan lluny ‘far’ in Wiktionary and realized that it was, of course, identical to French loin, but why couldn’t I think of a Spanish cognate? It turns out that the Spanish equivalent, lueñe, is so obsolete it’s not in any of my dictionaries (though it is in the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española), having been replaced by lejos (from Latin laxius ‘wider’); these forms are all from the Latin adverb longē, and there is a slightly less obsolete Spanish luengo from the adjective longus. It would certainly be interesting to have a look at Yakov Malkiel’s “The Decline of Spanish luengo ‘long’; the Disappearance of Old Spanish lueñ(e) ‘far’” in J. M. D’Heur and Nicoletta Cherubini (eds.), Etudes de philologie romane et d’histoire littéraire offertes à Jules Horrent (Liège: [publisher unknown], 1981: pp. 267–73), but I have no access to that volume.

2) The Northampton Education Foundation’s 21st annual Adult Spelling Bee was won on the word jelerang, unknown to me and most dictionaries (including the OED) but present in the Big Merriam-Webster, which says, disappointingly, “origin unknown.” You can see one on p. 154 of Wood’s Popular Natural History, which also has a pleasingly Victorian description (“The Jelerang is rather common in the countries which it inhabits, and as it is very retiring in its habits, and dreads the proximity of mankind, it is not so mischievous a neighbour as is the case with the greater number of the Squirrels”).
[Read more…]

This Phys.org article describes an important fossil find:

The story of Ekgmowechashala, the final primate to inhabit North America before Homo sapiens or Clovis people, reads like a spaghetti Western: A grizzled and mysterious loner, against the odds, ekes out an existence on the American Plains. Except this tale unfolded about 30 million years ago, just after the Eocene-Oligocene transition during which North America saw great cooling and drying, making the continent less hospitable to warmth-loving primates.

Now, paleontologists from the University of Kansas and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing have published evidence in the Journal of Human Evolution shedding light on the long-standing saga of Ekgmowechashala, based on fossil teeth and jaws found in both Nebraska and China.

To do so, the researchers first had to reconstruct its family tree, a job helped by the discovery of an even more ancient Chinese “sister taxon” of Ekgmowechashala the team has named Palaeohodites (or “ancient wanderer”). The Chinese fossil discovery resolves the mystery of Ekgmowechashala’s presence in North America, showing it was an immigrant rather than the product of local evolution.

This is of considerable interest in a number of ways, but of course what I chose to investigate was the strange-looking name Ekgmowechashala. Wikipedia tells me it’s “Sioux: ‘little cat man’,” but that only goes so far; can anyone provide a lexical/morphological breakdown in Lakota/Dakota, and maybe tell me how it’s pronounced in the original language and/or by English-speaking biologists? (Perhaps Xerîb, who happens to have a copy of the New Lakota Dictionary and was so helpful about “Onhey!”)

Here is a supercut of every time someone says “Star” or “Wars” in any of the Star Wars movies: “there’s barely more than a minute of total screen time across 9 films in which anyone even says the words,” but as rozele, who sent me the link, said, it’s “some kinda child’s garden of non/rhoticity”!

Sarah Ogilvie (who wrote a “Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary” that I reviewed a decade ago) has a delightful LitHub essay on Alexander John Ellis, one of those impressively wide-ranging Victorian scholars:

[…] This morning held a special excitement: also spread out in front of him were Murray’s proof sheets for the first section of the Dictionary (words A to Ant)—all 362 pages of them. Murray had sent them to Ellis for his comment. As Ellis’s eyes skimmed the proofs, he could not help looking for his own name in the Introduction. He felt a sense of profound satisfaction to see “A. J. Ellis, Esq, FRS (Phonology)” listed between Prof. Frederick Pollock (Legal terms) and Dr P. H. Pye-Smith (Medical and Biological words).

Ellis’s passions were pronunciation, music, and mathematics, and his expertise in all of these areas had been sought by Murray who had had difficulty finding British academics to help him (by contrast, American scholars were eager to be involved). He had helped Murray with the very first entry in the Dictionary—A: not only the sound A, “the low-back-wide vowel formed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips,” but also the musical sense of A, “the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major,” and finally the algebraic sense of A, “as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used to express known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown.” Ellis was happy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, including the words air, alert, algebra.

Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”

[Read more…]

My mind recently tossed up the phrase “immanentize the eschaton” and I thought I’d see if the OED had it; it does indeed, and the whole entry (first published 2014) is quite interesting:

Originally Philosophy.

transitive. To make (something which is transcendent) immanent; to render (something abstract) real, actual, or capable of being experienced. Cf. immanent adj. 3.

1926 Gentile has merely immanentised the old transcendent Absolute by identifying it with each moment and act and, at the same time, with the whole process of experience, and has merely transferred to experience the mystery of the origin.
A. Crespi, Contemporary Thought of Italy iv. 185

1952 The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.
E. Voegelin, New Sci. of Politics iv. 120

1992 There we shared an experience the intensity of which immanentizes a certain quality of life aboard the vessel.
W. F. Buckley, WindFall v. 74

2005 The ideal of moral perfection, which in Christianity was rooted in the transcendent, was immanentized due to the parameters established by modern epistemology.
Journal Relig. Ethics vol. 33 71

[Read more…]