languagehat.com

Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) has a Facebook post I have to quote in its entirety:

Salish-Ql’ispe has this wonderful structural rule: “Delete everything after the stressed vowel if you want to, but you won’t want to if there’s crucial grammatical information after the stressed vowel.” Thanks to this rule, many nouns are lexicalized in truncated form and no one now remembers the original long form; verbs, not so much, because verbs tend to have a lot of crucial information in suffixes. The elders used to comment occasionally on the shortened words. Pat Pierre, in a eulogy at the memorial event for Clarence Woodcock (1945-1995), urged the people not to cut off their words: If you keep doing that, he said, pretty soon the words will disappear into nothing. And in my continuing effort to wrestle my dictionary files into submission, I just came across this exchange from 2005, with an example of a word shortened drastically even before the stressed vowel:
JMcD: “We try to remember the long forms so our grandkids can learn them.”
JQu: “Kids use REALLY short forms.”
Me: “Any examples?”
JQu: “They just say “kw es” for `you’re a liar, you’re lying!’ It’s short for “esyoqwi”.”
JMcD: “Lotta times we just tell our young people, Just make the sign!” — And she made this sign: Right hand points across the body with index finger and second finger forked. It means `you’re lying’.

I have a very few other examples of similarly drastic shortening — nothing at all regular, unlike the optional “everything after the stressed vowel” rule. Oh, and in that example, es- is an aspect prefix; yoqw is the root for `tell a lie’.

Ql’ispe (also written Ql̓ispé [qəˀlispe]), anglicized as Kalispel, is also known as Pend d’Oreille; it’s a dialect of the Salish–Spokane–Kalispel language. We had an example of the language used in a sports logo back in 2013.

In the FB comments, Bill Poser said “What they fear is kind of like what happened to Latin in Gaul, e.g. augustus -> [u]”; there follows an interesting back-and-forth with Marie-Lucie Tarpent about whether people say [u] or [ut]. Bill found a source that says:

Aujourd’hui, la plupart des dictionnaires donnent deux prononciations possibles : [u] (« ou ») et [ut] (« oute »). Elles sont toutes les deux correctes. Au Canada, c’est la forme [u] qui est la plus utilisée, [ut] ne se dit presque pas. En France et en Suisse, c’est l’inverse : [ut] est majoritaire alors que [u] reste peu employée. En Belgique, c’est également [ut] qui domine, même si [u] s’entend plus qu’en France, notamment dans la bouche de personnes âgées.

(I don’t know why Marie-Lucie has stopped coming around these parts, but I wish she’d return.)

I’ve always been fond of the expression “We wuz robbed” (or, if you’re fond of official spelling, “We was robbed”), and I’m pleased to learn its origin via this post from the New England Historical Society (no author named):

Jack Sharkey not only won the world heavyweight championship but was responsible for the classic sports expression: We wuz robbed. […] He was born Joseph Paul Zukauskas on Oct. 26, 1902, in Binghamton, N.Y., the son of Lithuanian immigrants. As a young boy his family moved to Boston.

He ran away from home as a teenager. […] He took up boxing in the navy, where he won 38 fights. His ship’s home port was Boston, and he fought for pay on liberty in the city. He was told he couldn’t fight under the name Joseph Zukauskas, so he chose the names of his boxing idols: Jack Dempsey and Tom Sharkey. By the time Sharkey was honorably discharged, he was earning write-ups in the Boston newspapers and earning good money for boxing. […]

In 1930 he lost a fight for the vacant heavyweight championship to Max Schmeling on a foul. The referee ruled he hit Schmeling below the belt. Sharkey described Schmeling as ‘a methodical, cruel, terrific puncher.’ Two years later, they faced each other again, and Sharkey was declared the winner though Schmeling seemed to have outboxed him. After the match, Schmeling’s manager, Joe Jacobs, uttered those classic words, “We wuz robbed.”

(“Zukauskas” should, of course, properly be Žukauskas, which is clearly related to Polish Żukowski and Russian Zhukovsky — see the table here.) In retirement, when he pursued his love of fly fishing, he came up with another memorable line:

He and Ted Williams teamed up to promote the sport at sporting shows. He was asked at one show whether he preferred fishing to boxing. “It doesn’t pay as much,” he replied, “but then the fish don’t hit back.”

Thanks, Trevor!

Amy Jeffs has a very interesting LRB review (archived) of From Lived Experience to the Written Word, by Pamela H. Smith; it starts with a vivid description of a traditional craftsman:

Fred Saunders’s​ wheelwright shop in the village of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, stood not far from the forge and next to the paint shop, where his finished waggons were painted in colours declaring their high Cotswold origins. Fred kept the oak spokes of his wheels narrow and light because the waggons were destined for use in the elevated fields, unlike those made in the Severn Valley, which needed to be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the stress of use in the fields. A circle of interconnected ash felloes capped the spokes, forming the circumference of the wheel. The final component was the tyre, made of a loop of iron, half an inch thick. It was placed in the fire until sufficiently expanded, then lifted out with great tongs called tyre-dogs and dropped over the outside of the wheel. Wheel and tyre would then be doused with cold water so that the metal shrank back to its original size, squeezed tightly about the wheel, never to be rattled free by stone or pothole. Fred made haywains, muck-carts and drays, as well as the everyday wooden items required by his neighbours – and their coffins when they died.

But I’m bringing it here for a paragraph that taught me a new word:

The psalter also offers readers an image of a quintessential medieval feast. The manuscript’s patrons, Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife Agnes Sutton and his daughter-in-law Beatrice Scrope, sit with their fellow diners, their hands placed on a long tabletop that rests on decorative, braced trestles (this suggests the top of the table might be lifted off, presumably to make room for dancing). On the facing page is an image of the kitchen, where servants are preparing food and drink, transferring it to dishes and mazers and carrying it across the page gutter to the nobility. Because the kitchen tables are lowly fixtures, and likely to rest on an uneven floor, they are three-legged and simply built: you can see where the top of one leg, the kind rounded off in a lathe or on a shave-horse, pokes through the tabletop.

I hadn’t known mazer, which turns out to be (OED, entry revised 2001) “Maple or other fine-grained hardwood used as a material for making drinking vessels. Obsolete.” or “A bowl, drinking cup, or goblet, usually without a foot, made from a burr or knot of a maple tree and frequently mounted with silver or silver-gilt bands at the lip and base. Also: a similar vessel made of metal or other material. Now archaic and historical.” There’s a nice, detailed etymology:
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1) This post by Anatoly Vorobey (in Russian) describes an interesting detail of Russian morphophonemics: feminine words whose stems end in consonants + НЯ [nʲa] lose the palatalization on n in the genitive plural. Thus песня [ˈpʲesʲnʲə] ‘song’ has genitive singular песни, dative singular песне, and so on, with palatalized [nʲ] throughout, but the genitive plural is песен with unpalatalized final [n]. But! There are four exceptions:

барышня ‘girl of gentry family, miss’ – барышеНЬ
боярышня ‘boyar’s daughter’ – боярышеНЬ
кухня ‘kitchen’ – кухоНЬ
деревня ‘village’ – деревеНЬ

And the pull of these exceptions, with the “expected” palatalization, can attract other words, for example башня ‘tower,’ for which Anatoly uses the “incorrect” genitive plural башень in place of the traditional/”correct” башен in speech, which led him to write it that way in a recent post. And he’s not alone: “поиск в корпусе русского языка находит небольшое, но реальное количество старых книг и авторов, которые предпочитали писать именно “башень”, очевидно потому, что так говорили” [a search in the Russian language corpus finds a small but real number of old books and authors who preferred to write “башень,” obviously because they said it that way]. I love this stuff.

2) The delightful NY Times story “A Monkey Is on the Run in the Scottish Highlands” (archived) explains that the Japanese macaque in question “escaped from an enclosure in the Highland Wildlife Park in Kingussie, Scotland, and fled into the Scottish highlands,” later adding:

Amused residents, who have given the animal the nickname “Kingussie Kong,” have found themselves invested in its fate, and journalists have followed animal keepers as they have swept the hills.

I assumed Kingussie was pronounced kin-GUS-si and thought “Kingussie Kong” was slightly off, but then I looked it up and discovered it’s actually /kɪŋˈjuːsi/ (king-YOO-see), representing Scottish Gaelic Ceann a’ Ghiùthsaich. Now “Kingussie Kong” makes perfect sense, and I thought I’d pass along that unusually unexpected spelling/pronunciation matchup.

No, this isn’t yet another post about “untranslatable” words (e.g.), it’s a new website: “Untranslatable is an online dictionary that allows people to add words and expressions from all over the world.” The “Behind the project” section reads:

My name is Amarens, and I started this project in 2019 after I graduated from my Bachelors in Portuguese and Spanish Linguistics. I have since received an MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and a MSc in Computational Linguistics.

I originally raised money for the project through a Kickstarter campaign, and learned to program from scratch in order to create this website.

Alas, when I click on “Languages” I get taken to this page, which seems to provide access to a list of languages… but when I click on it (in Firefox) nothing happens. Let me know if you have better luck!

I know this is a silly story, but it’s pretty irresistible, and people keep sending it to me, so here’s Issy Ronald’s CNN Travel report:

A British wildlife park has hatched a new plan to rehabilitate its potty-mouthed parrots after they unleashed a tide of expletives.

Back in 2020, five foul-mouthed African gray parrots, donated to Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England, were isolated from the flock in an attempt to improve their language. But, from Tuesday, the team is adopting a different, riskier approach of integrating three newly donated, cuss-happy birds – named Eric, Captain and Sheila – alongside the original five miscreants into the flock.

“When we came to move them, the language that came out of their carrying boxes was phenomenal, really bad. Not normal swear words, these were proper expletives,” the park’s chief executive, Steve Nichols, told CNN. “We’ve put eight really, really offensive, swearing parrots with 92 non-swearing ones,” he said.

If the new strategy works, the eight parrots could learn “all the nice noises like microwaves and vehicles reversing” that the other parrots in the flock favor, Nichols added. But if the other 92 instead pick up the expletives, “it’s going to turn into some adult aviary.” […]

The park has installed large signs warning visitors about the parrots’ language, but Nichols said it hasn’t received a single complaint. In fact, historically, “we did hear a lot more customers swearing at parrots than we did parrots swearing at customers,” Nichols said.

More details at the link if you need them. Thanks, Bonnie, Eric, cuchuflete, and whoever else I may be forgetting!

Addendum. Actually, cuchuflete sent me a different link, to Bill Chappell’s NPR story about the parrots, which has the following memorable ending:

All of this raises a key question: Are the parrots teaching all of these foul words to each other? Or is the profanity coming from humans?

“It’s certainly down to humans,” Nichols said. “And what makes it funnier is that this particular species actually replicates the person’s voice exactly.”

Illustrating his point, he tells the story of the lady who spoke to him about donating her parrot. Her husband had taught the bird all the profane words it knew, she said.

There was just one snag, Nichols said.

“It was quite easy to hear she wasn’t telling the full truth as it swore in her voice.”

Via Rebecca Stanton’s Facebook post, I found the fascinating “preview” of Aaron D. Rubin’s “Hebrew Loanwords in Polynesian Languages” on pp. 12-13 of this pdf, which I thought I’d share here (I have tried to eliminate OCR errors, but there are probably one or two remaining):

In the past, there have been scholars who argued for a genetic relationship between the Semitic languages and the Oceanic family of languages, of which Polynesian is a sub-group (e.g., Macdonald 1907). Such a theory is quite fantastical, of course. A connection of sorts between Hebrew and Polynesian does exist, however, although it is not genetic. Indeed, few Hebraists and Semitists are aware of the fact that a significant number of Hebrew words have been borrowed into several Polynesian languages, including Samoan, Tahitian, and Hawaiian. These Hebrew words made their way to Oceania not through direct contact between speakers of Hebrew and Polynesian, but rather through the efforts of a few 19th-century missionaries.

British missionaries began branching out to the Pacific islands in the 1790s, under the auspices of the Missionary Society (known from 1818–1966 as the London Missionary Society). The first mission was established in Tahiti, and Tahitian is the first Polynesian language into which the Bible was translated. The missionary translators needed many words and concepts not found in Tahitian, and, curiously, they chose to use Hebrew and Greek as sources for these new words. This was, at least in part, because certain Hebrew and Greek words were more easily adaptable to Polynesian phonology (Williams 1837: 528), though certainly religious enthusiasm also played a role. The missionary translators in Samoa and Rarotonga used the Tahitian Bible as a model, and so many Hebrew words were incorporated into the Samoan and Rarotongan Bibles as well.

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I’ve made posts involving the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis many times (the first post dedicated to it was in 2003), but I can’t help responding to this long Aeon piece by James McElvenny, “a linguist and intellectual historian” (which I found at MetaFilter). It starts off:

Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?

The only acceptable answer to that last question is “No, it couldn’t.” But McElvenny — apparently more intellectual historian than linguist — doesn’t see it that way; he wants to teach the controversy, and expends many many paragraphs in going through the relevant history (“The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century”) while slipping in sly digs at the position pretty much universally held by actual linguists. Here, for instance, is a paragraph on Indo-European:
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Anyone who is, like me, nostalgic about old-style bookstores will enjoy Bob Egan’s deep dive into the area of New York City once known as Book Row:

Between roughly 1890 and 1980 there were dozens of used bookstores along Fourth Avenue between Astor Place (8th Street) and Union Square (14th Street) in New York CIty. The area was known as Book Row.

The area was at the eastern edge of Greenwich VIllage where it meets the East Village.

This website shows the major bookstores that made up Book Row during it’s heyday – around 1940. The information was taken primarily from 1940 phone books at the New York Public Library, photographs found in the Municiple Archives of NYC, and the book BOOK ROW: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador (2004/Carroll & Graf, NYC; paperback reprint 2019/Skyhorse, NYC).

Used bookstores like to cluster together so those browsing could go from one store to the next until they found the book they liked.

People came from all over the world to shop here, though many customers were New Yorkers passing through Book Row on their way to work, or shoppers walking between the immense Wanamakers Department store at East 9th street and Union Square.

Most stores had bookcarts outside with books selling for as low as five cents. The reason: when these customers came into the store to buy their bargain purchase, they were often enticed to buy more additional higher priced books.

As you can see, the text is full of typos, but never mind — it’s an indispensable guide to that fabled land (which disappeared shortly before I moved to the city). There are maps, descriptions, and many, many photos; I wish there were more interiors (beyond the still from Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters), but I’m sure if such were available he would have used them. (Incidentally, if anyone knows of online images of the interiors of prerevolutionary Russian bookstores, I’d love to see them.)

Elise Cutts reports for Scientific American on an interesting form of borrowing:

Like the ancient Greek of Homer’s time, the Tsimane’ language has no set word for the parts of the color spectrum English speakers call “blue.” Although Tsimane’ does name a number of more subjective hues (think “aquamarine” or “mauve” in English), its speakers—the Tsimane’ people of Bolivia—reliably agree on just three main color categories: blackish, reddish and whitish.

But bilingualism is reworking the Tsimane’ tricolor rainbow, researchers recently reported in Psychological Science—offering a rare, real-time glimpse into how learning a second language can change how people think about abstract concepts and fuel language evolution. The data show Tsimane’ speakers who also speak Spanish are borrowing the concepts of—but not the Spanish words for—new color categories such as blue, green and yellow.

“You could have imagined that they could have just started calling things amarillo and azul” (the Spanish words for yellow and blue), says lead author Saima Malik-Moraleda, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But instead “they’re repurposing their own Tsimane’ color words.”

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