languagehat.com

It occurred to me to wonder how far back the titular cliché went. Needless to say, I started by googling, and I found a remarkable unanimity among the websites that aimed to assist the eager seeker after truth; this Check English Words page is representative:

“My work here is done” is a popular phrase that originates from a piece of media called The Lone Ranger. There are countless examples of the phrase being used in pop culture, but The Lone Ranger is the earliest example of it being used. The Lone Ranger came out in 1938, and as the years went by, more and more pop culture movies and shows used the phrase.

I even found a site that gave a specific episode that used it, but I won’t bother to try to find it again, because it’s all a lot of hooey. The Lone Ranger used it for the same reason people use it now: it’s a memorable meme. And it started long before the Ranger ever ranged. A Google Books search easily turned up examples like these:

“Oh yes, my work here is done, and well done.” –Fergus Hume, A Traitor in London (1900), p. 158.

“My work here is done; and I am only going at my Father’s summons.” –T.S. Arthur, “The Story-Teller: Deborah Norman,” Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine, Vol. 43 (1875), p. 665.

“But my work here is done.” — George E. Fisher, Declaring all the Counsel of God (1852), p. 16.

“My work here is done. I am going to dwell in a world I am wholly unworthy of.” — David Stowell, Sermon […] (1836), p. 12.

I’m sure I could turn up earlier examples, but I think I’ve proved my point, so my work… well, you know.

This is another of those new developments in English that occasionally pop up to astonish me; Peter Dizikes reports for MIT News:

Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: “The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert.” Relative clauses often feature “who,” “which,” “that,” and so on. Before long a student, Kanoe Evile ’23, raised her hand.

“How does this account for the ‘whom of which’ construction?” Evile asked.

Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before. “I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls.

But to Evile, “whom of which” seems normal, as in, “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.” After the class she talked to Pesetsky. He suggested Evile write a paper about it for the course, 24.902 (Introduction to Syntax).

“He said, ‘I’ve never heard of that, but it might make an interesting topic,’” Evile says. She started hunting for online examples that evening. Some of the material she ultimately found came from social media; one example was in a Connecticut state government document. Among her finds: “Dave, Carter, Stefan, LeRoi, Boyd, and Tim are special people whom of which make special music together.” And: “Our 7th figure in the set is one of the show’s main reoccurring [sic] characters, whom of which we all love to hate.” And: “Oh, that’s me whom which you’re looking for.” (Sometimes “of” is dropped.)

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I don’t do computer games (haven’t touched one since I was bored waiting for someone and played a round of Leisure Suit Larry back in the ’80s), but how can I not post about Chants of Sennaar? To quote the description by Fizz at MetaFilter, where I learned about it:

Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In this retelling, your character makes their way through five floors of a tower, each of which is home to a different community with a different language. Using a pictorial journal, you assign every word you find to a picture, slowly piecing together each language as you go. You use the words you learn to solve other puzzles, navigate the tower, and understand what others are saying. All this is made possible through decoding language — and I can’t overstate how fun the process is.

I’m not actually going to play it, but I celebrate its existence! (Sennaar is the Septuagint’s Σενναάρ, an alternate form of Shinar.)

I know I post a lot about efforts to keep languages alive, but Rhoda Meek’s piece in The National (Glasgow) focuses on an aspect not often discussed (at least at LH) — the psychological barriers to using a fading language, in this case Scots Gaelic:

If Gaelic is to be “saved” in any ­meaningful way, we need a radical change in how we approach it, and that change has to start in the Gaidhealtachd itself – not by creating new speakers – but by inspiring those of us who already speak it. […]

Even as a reasonably confident Gaelic speaker, my opportunities to use Gaelic in Tiree are limited. I use it with some of the more willing older speakers – particularly in the context of crofting and fishing, or at funerals and animal sales. Over the last few years, a few of us “younger” ones have ­taken to proactively speaking to each other in public, or in the shop or pub, starting ­conversations in Gaelic and carrying on – trying to break the discomfort we feel. We’re ignoring the desire to be polite in the company of English speakers, and ­finishing our conversations in Gaelic ­before switching language. […]

The truth is that in a desire to do the right thing, we have “educationalised” Gaelic to the point that everyone is ­suffering. Older, native speakers, with ­beautiful, lyrical, spoken Gaelic, steeped in their ­dialects and with idiomatic turns of phrase I would die for, often think that their Gaelic isn’t good enough because it isn’t “school Gaelic”. They might use it among themselves, but rarely with my generation. The majority of school-age kids don’t regularly hear Gaelic at home or in the community. So how can they possibly ­become confidently fluent?

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I’m reading Boborykin’s best-known novel, the 1882 Китай-город [Kitay-gorod], which is full of detailed descriptions of the central part of Moscow (in those days sometimes simply called город ‘the City’) before the renovations that began in the late 1880s (and of course the massive destruction of Soviet times). In Book I ch. XXXI he’s portraying one of the minor characters, the somewhat feeble-minded Mitrosha, who is sorting the materials used in the family business: “марену, кубовую краску, буру, бакан, кошениль, скипидар, керосин” [madder, indigo paint, borax, crimson lake, cochineal, turpentine, kerosene]. A number of these words are interesting — марена ‘madder’ is from a term of unknown etymology which “terminally ousted the other Slavic word for madder, *broščь, by the end of the Early Modern Age,” and бура ‘borax’ is from Persian بوره‎ bure (and an earlier term tincal has its own complex etymology) — but what I want to focus on is that word бакан (bakán, with final stress as opposed to the more common бакан ‘buoy’). Wiktionary gives no etymology, but elsewhere I found it’s from Ottoman Turkish بقم‎ bak(k)am, from Arabic بَقَّم‎ baqqam, which that Wiktionary entry says is “From Persian بکم‎ (bakam)”… but things appear to be more complicated (“I now see how this name بَقَّم‎ […] came to the Near East, though not when, and I will not be able to write out all forms and make out whether it came from Sanskrit into the Dravidian languages or originally from Dravidian or even from Austronesian”).

And the English word I used in the translation, lake, “a pigment of a reddish hue, originally obtained from lac,” is (per the OED) a “variant or alteration” of lac “a dark red resinous substance produced as a protective coating by certain scale insects”; that latter entry, happily, was revised in 2017 and provides this extensive and complicated etymology:
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Miranda Bryant has an encouraging Guardian story about a Danish dictionary:

The Danish language does not officially carry a male equivalent for the (often pejorative) term “career woman” or a female equivalent for the male-gendered noun “financier”. But after a major review of all keywords ending in -mand (man), -kvinde (woman) and -person (person), soon the terms karrieremand (career man) and finanskvinde (female financier) – as well as many new gender-neutral terms – will officially join the ranks of the Danish spelling dictionary, the Retskrivningsordbogen.

In its first review in 12 years, the Dansk Sprognævn (the Danish Language Council) has embarked on a new edition focusing on gender equality and making words and descriptions more gender neutral and less stereotyped. The council has also analysed the use of he, she, his and hers in the dictionary’s example phrases. The new edition, to be published next year, adds to afholdsmand, the existing word for someone who abstains from drinking alcohol, which has a male-gendered suffix, a female version: afholdskvinde. Financier, finansmand, now also has a female equivalent in the form of finanskvinde. […]

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Memory is a strange thing. I was looking at a loaf of bread when my mind suddenly tossed up a word I hadn’t thought of in decades: skalk. This is what we called the heel (the end slice) in my family when I was growing up, and since once I left home and went off to college I never heard anyone else use it, I must have let it slip to the deepest recesses of my wordhoard… but now there it was, so I googled, and found Maryn Liles’ webpage What Do You Call the End of a Loaf of Bread? Sure enough, after a few paragraphs we get:

The word “skalk” was popular among users from Norway. However, it seemed that this term could be seen as dated, as responders said that skalk was a term their grandparents used.

My mother was Norwegian-American, so that explains that. And Wiktionary has skalk ‘rind, crust,’ though oddly they only have it for Swedish and don’t give an etymology beyond “Doublet of skal and skilja,” which isn’t really satisfactory — it’s a Norwegian word in good standing, and the Norske Akademis ordbok suggests it may be from a Middle Low German word meaning ‘small piece.’

A report from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg:

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient Near East, is involved in investigating the discovery. The new language was discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey. This was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC). […]

Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise: Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

Professor Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede. The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Prof. Schwemer explains: “The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages.” […]

Being written in a newly discovered language the Kalasmaic text is as yet largely incomprehensible. Prof. Schwemer’s colleague, Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg University), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages. According to Rieken, despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian. How closely the language of Kalasma is related to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia will be the subject of further investigation.

Thanks go to Trevor, Dmitry, and Trond, all of whom alerted me to this find.

We’ve discussed it before (e.g., Mole-Rat Dialects, Whale Talk), but animal communication is a perennially interesting topic, and Sonia Shah’s NY Times Magazine article (archived) has plenty of good stuff in it. After an intro about mouse songs, Shah continues:

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called “the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for vocal learning in species other than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and bats. But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated human language from animal communications, most scientists understood the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own — as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the 10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals; an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he said. “Come on, come on!”).

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Every once in a while I find myself trying to disentangle the history of a familiar but complicated word, and this time it’s post — not the long piece of wood but the (“Chiefly British”) term for the mail. What I doubtless once knew but had forgotten is that it originally referred to a person, or to quote the OED (entry updated 2006):

Any of a series of men stationed at suitable places along appointed post-roads, the duty of each being to ride with, or forward speedily to the next stage, the monarch’s (and later also other) letters and dispatches, and to provide fresh horses for express messengers riding through. to lay posts: to establish a chain of such riders and horses along a route for the speedy delivery of dispatches. Obsolete.

These chains were at first laid only temporarily, when occasion demanded direct communication with a distant point, but eventually they were established permanently along certain routes. From the 17th cent. the men were also known as postmasters (see postmaster n.¹ 1b, 2), and were the precursors of the postmasters in charge of local post offices. In the 16th and 17th centuries, they usually had also the exclusive privilege of providing ordinary travellers with post-horses, and of conducting the business of a posting establishment (as a posting-house or inn), which was later separated from that of the Post Office.

It then became “A person who travels express with letters, dispatches, etc., esp. along a fixed route,” “A vehicle or vessel used to carry letters and other postal matter,” “A single collection or delivery of mail,” and finally “A national or regional organization for the collection, transportation, and delivery of letters, parcels, etc. (= post office n.¹).” All clear enough, but what I want to complain about is the etymology. As is usual now that the online status of the dictionary allows near-infinite discursiveness, it is quite full:
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