languagehat.com

David Marjanović mentioned the archaic verb mote ‘may/might,’ (obsolete) ‘must,’ and when I went to that Wiktionary page I saw “Related to empty,” which surprised me. The etymology at that last link read:

From Middle English emty, amty, from Old English ǣmtiġ, ǣmettiġ (“vacant, empty, free, idle, unmarried”, literally “without must or obligation, leisurely”), from Proto-Germanic *uz- (“out”) + Proto-Germanic *mōtijô, *mōtô (“must, obligation, need”), *mōtiþô (“ability, accommodation”), from Proto-Indo-European *med- (“measure; to acquire, possess, be in command”). Related to Old English ġeǣmtigian (“to empty”), ǣmetta (“leisure”), mōtan (“can, to be allowed”). More at mote, meet.

The odd thing is that that Proto-Indo-European link does not, so far as I can see, provide any way to get to empty. AHD says “Middle English, from Old English ǣmtig, vacant, unoccupied, from ǣmetta, leisure; see med- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots”; the appendix entry, under “7. Possibly lengthened o-grade form *mōd‑,” has:

2. empty, from Old English ǣmetta, rest, leisure, from Germanic compound *ē-mōt-ja‑ (prefix *ē‑, meaning uncertain, from Indo-European *ē, *ō, to). Both a and b from Germanic *mōt‑, ability, leisure.

The OED (entry revised 2014) has:

< Old English ǣmetta (also ǣmta) leisure, freedom (to do something), opportunity (< the Germanic base of e- prefix¹ + the Germanic base of mote v.¹ + a Germanic (dental) suffix causing i-mutation (compare -th suffix¹)) + -y suffix¹.

It all sounds a little handwavy to me, and I wonder how firmly established the etymology is.

I thought sure the headline of Cindy Blanco’s Duolingo post — “Are any words the same in all languages?” — would be another victim of Betteridge’s law, but I have to admit I can’t think of examples that disprove the answers she comes up with. After the obligatory disclaimer (“I wasn’t able to research all 7000+ languages”), she provides a few near misses (tea, pineapple, orange, taxi, tomato), then gives the winners (I’ll put them below the cut in case you want to think about it):
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The Gentle Author posts about a once inescapable urban phenomenon:

The dispossessed and those with no other income were always able to cry their wares for sale in London. By turning their presence into performance with their Cries, they claimed the streets as their theatre – winning the lasting affections of generations of Londoners and embodying the soul of the city in the popular imagination. Thus, through time, the culture of the capital’s street Cries became integral to the distinctive identity of London.

Undertaking interviews with stallholders in Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Columbia Road and other East End markets in recent years led me to consider the cultural legacy of urban street trading. While this phenomenon might appear transitory and fleeting, I discovered a venerable tradition in the Cries of London. Yet even this genre of popular illustrated prints, which began in the seventeenth century, was itself preceded by verse such as London Lackpenny attributed to the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate that drew upon an earlier oral culture of hawkers’ Cries. From medieval times, the great number of Cries in London became recognised by travellers throughout Europe as indicative of the infinite variety of life in the British capital.

Given the former ubiquity of the Cries of London, the sophistication of many of the images, their significance as social history, and their existence as almost the only portraits of working people in London through four centuries, it astonishes me that there has been little attention paid to this subject and so I have set out to reclaim this devalued cultural tradition. […]

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In connection with reading Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, I dug out my dusty copy of Glasgow Observed, edited by Simon Berry‎ and Hamish Whyte, which is a useful collection of snippets of city descriptions from the late 18th century to the late 20th. Under 1782 there is an excerpt introduced thus: “An anonymous manuscript journal in French of a tour in Scotland is now thought to be by the French naturalist Pierre Auguste Broussonet (1761-1807).” Here’s the relevant bit:

Tuesday 11th. I went to the college and handed in a letter to Professor Anderson who showed me the library etc. He has a very nice collection of machines, among which I saw a pneumatic machine used by Newton. He has a machine which collects water on his roof which flows down a tube into his room. On the menu planche he has a thermometer, barometer and wind indicator. I gave a letter to Dr Stevenson who is one of the leading practitioners here, the brother-in-law of Dr Hope, another to Dr Hamilton teacher of anatomy who is a young man—I saw Dr Irvine, teacher of Chemistry. They collect the lichen omphabrily and rupertris here and by a secret they colour especially curtains with it, which have a lovely colour as of sorrel. This manufactory collects all the urine in the town and distils it in an alembic which contains more than 2000 gallons. It is reduced to powder, which is used for printed calico. […]

Journal of a Frenchman (unpublished manuscript in The Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Translation by Norman Bett).

Naturally my attention was caught by the italicized words (thus in the original). I’m fairly confident rupertris is an error for rupestris; compare, from Gardener’s Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser (Vol. 29, 1887, p. 30):

A correspondent kindly notes that in the article on “Abelia rupertris” at p. 323, there is a typographical error, rupestris having been three times repeated rupertris.

But Google Books can find omphabrily only here; any guesses as to what it might be? (Note that it could be an error on the part of the original writer, the translator, or the printer.)

Colm Tóibín’s review (LRB, Sept. 7; archived) of Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner is chock-full of good things and is of course catnip to any lover of Joyce. This is the most obviously Hattic passage:

Although this invaluable book is designed to be consulted rather than enjoyed, there are many useful ways in which the annotations can be read page by page. For anyone interested in the way Joyce’s Italian infused Ulysses, for example, we note the word ‘intestated’ as he uses it – from the Italian intestare, meaning to declare someone a beneficiary – does not have the same meaning as the English word ‘intestate’. ‘Incuneated’, from the Italian incuneare, ‘to wedge in’, has no entry in the OED. ‘Arruginated’, meaning ‘rusty’, from the Italian arrugginire, is also a Joycean neologism.

The immediately following paragraph is hilarious:

For students of tone, it’s interesting to see how long the editors can keep a straight face as, soberly and diligently, they write entry after entry, using a printed source for each and acknowledging the help of many named Joyceans. At times, you can almost hear a sigh or muffled laughter. In the Cyclops episode, there is a long, long list of saints, the majority only too real, that includes ‘S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous’. The annotation tells us: ‘Not actually saints.’ An annotation for ‘Doctor O’Gargle’ in the Oxen of the Sun episode reads: ‘Not a real doctor.’ The one for Father Cantekissem is: ‘Not a real priest.’

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In an essay from 2010, John Yau wrote about the poet Christopher Middleton, asking “Why isn’t Middleton’s work more widely read or, barring that, more widely praised, however little impact that might have on sales and reputation? Why has this poet glided gracefully under the radar for his entire career?” I confess that though the name was familiar to me, I couldn’t have told you anything about Middleton’s poetry; Yau writes:

Again, Kleinzahler’s observations are helpful: “The poetry of Middleton is not easy to characterize, not least of all because no one Middleton poem truly resembles another, much less one book resembling another in style and subject matter.” In other words, there is no carry-over, nothing that might, after you’ve read one of his poems, help you read the next. You always have to start all over again. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting from 1948—a so-called drip painting done during the period after he made his first breakthrough to abstraction in 1947—whatever you glean from it (method, all-overness, accretion) will help you look at another done by Pollock a year or two later. This is less the case with Middleton.

One might think that shouldn’t matter, but obviously it does; I think similar situations have caused problems for Russian writers I admire, from Veltman to Buida. If people don’t have a hook to hang you on, you may wind up forgotten on the floor of the closet.

Thomas Kole’s Tenochtitlan site is a thing of beauty and something I wish could be done for every city with a suitable history. But this isn’t UrbanHat, and what enables me to bring it here is the fact that it’s presented in three languages, English, Spanish, and Nahuatl. The first paragraph in each:

The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world.

Es el año 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, que alguna vez fue un modesto asentamiento en el Lago de Texcoco, es hoy una bulliciosa metrópoli, capital de un imperio que gobierna y recibe tributos de más de 5 millones de personas. Tenochtitlan alberga a 200,000 habitantes dedicados a la agricultura, el arte, el comercio, la guerra, el sacerdocio y el gobierno. Es una de las ciudades más grandes de su tiempo a nivel mundial.

Ipan xihuitl 13 Tochtli (1518), Mexico-Tenochtitlan huehcapan altepetl. Ye huecauh, zan altepetontli nepan Tetzcoco atezcatl. Inin ialtepenanyo in Excan Tlahtoloyan, ye tlahtoani, ye cecentlalia miec in centzonxiquipilli tlatlaca intlalcalaquil. Ompa chantiah cempohualli huan macuilxiquipilli miltecah, tlamatilizmatinimeh, pochtecah, yaoquizqueh, tlamacazqueh ihuan pipiltin. Zan cana huey altepetl yuhquin Tenochtitlan.

I’m curious about why “a portrait of” is rendered as “In ixtli, in yollotl in”; does Nahuatl require two words to convey the idea? (Via MetaFilter.)

Back in 2015 our beloved Martian, Siganus Sutor, told a story about a boy who dreamed that he was taught an unknown language, which eventually turned out to be spoken on a faraway island of Polynesia; now Y sends me a couple of related links. Gautier Demouveaux writes for Crumpe:

For years, this Frenchman dreamed in a language he did not know. After much research, Marc Liblin will end up finding the origin of this unknown language, spoken by a handful of inhabitants on a small Polynesian island in the Pacific. His story is told in a book by Éric Viennot, published by Michel Lafon, which will be released in bookstores this Thursday, April 6, 2023. […]

Éric Viennot fell in love with this fascinating story and first tried to verify its veracity, by looking for people from his family, via social networks. Marie Liblin never met Marc, but she remembers that, in her childhood, her grandfather spoke to her about him, simply mentioning a rather whimsical cousin, misunderstood by the rest of the family, who had left wife and children to live on the other side of the world. “It was only in 1998, shortly after Marc’s death, that I discovered this incredible story, remembers Marie Liblin, who was then 14 years old. A friend of my father sent us an article published in the magazine Tahiti-Pacific which recounted his life in broad strokes…”

In 1981, Marc Liblin, then 33 years old, lived in Luxeuil-les-Bains, in Haute-Saône. Married with two children, he works in the family foundry. But the man feels bad about himself, the fault of a recurring dream, in which an old character teaches him physics and especially an obscure language, which he gradually learns to speak fluently. These dreams obsess him and, while his marriage is failing, he decides to drop everything to try to find answers on this language that he seems to be the only one to speak.

He eventually meets Meretuini Make, “a woman from Rapa Iti, a very small island in French Polynesia lost in the middle of the Pacific”:
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The New Yorker has published one of its occasional archival issues (I can never decide whether I’m more pleased by the chance to read classic articles or irritated by the penny-pinching at the expense of writers who aren’t dead and could be contributing), and Emily Hahn’s 1987 Talk of the Town piece about the renovation of the Central Park zoo included the sentence “We’re also going to put in colobus monkeys, those beautiful black-and-white animals, and tamarins and squirrel monkeys.” I wasn’t familiar with the word colobus and couldn’t proceed until I had looked it up and knew how to pronounce it; Merriam-Webster says “ˈkä-lə-bəs” (and provides an audio file) and the OED agrees (British English /ˈkɒləbəs/ KOL-uh-buhss, U.S. English /ˈkɑləbəs/ KAH-luh-buhss), but AHD also provides an alternative with penultimate stress (kə-lō′-bəs). (Oddly, both M-W and AHD have it entered under the collocation “colobus monkey” even though it occurs by itself: the OED has citations like “is doubtless a Colobus” and “the red colobus occupies the upper storey [of forest], the black colobus the middle and the olive colobus the main closed canopy storey.”) But the etymology, to quote the OED, is “modern Latin (J. K. W. Illiger Prodromus systematis mammalium et avium (1811) 69), < Greek κολοβός docked”; in other words, the penultimate vowel is short, and the stress should (by the traditional rules) be on the first syllable. I can only hope that the innovative (and wrong, dammit) version recorded by AHD is but a blip and will vanish from (hypothetical and, alas, unlikely) future editions. It could, of course, spread and triumph in the (hypothetical and unlikely) event that English speakers start talking en masse about such monkeys, and in that case I would have to grit my teeth and accept it as I have been forced to accept so many other innovations that go against my personal Sprachgefühl, but I will carry on stressing the first syllable as God and J. K. W. Illiger intended.

(It also strikes me as odd that Illiger et al. felt the need to create a Latinate name rather than borrowing one from a local language of Gabon, Angola, or wherever, but I guess that’s the nineteenth century for you.)

A very silly and pointless article:

The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area? […] Language comes in different forms—including speech, gestures and writing—which don’t all leave conclusive evidence behind. And experts use different approaches to determine a language’s age.

Tracing the oldest language is “a deceptively complicated task,” says Danny Hieber, a linguist who studies endangered languages. One way to identify a language’s origins is to find the point at which a single tongue with different dialects became two entirely distinct languages, such that people speaking those dialects could no longer understand each other. “For example, how far back in history would you need to go for English speakers to understand German speakers?” he says. That point in time would mark the origins of English and German as distinct languages, branching off from a common proto-Germanic language.

Alternatively, if we assume that most languages can be traced back to an original, universal human language, all languages are equally old. “You know that your parents spoke a language, and their parents spoke a language, and so forth. So intuitively, you’d imagine that all languages were born from a single origin,” Hieber says.

But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world. Accordingly, some linguists argue that the designation of the “oldest language” should belong to one with a well-established written record.

So we get a roundup of Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian (“the oldest languages with a clear written record”), Hebrew and Arabic (“both belong to the Afroasiatic language family, whose roots trace back to 18,000 to 8,000 B.C.E. […] contemporary linguists widely accept Afroasiatic as the oldest language family”), Chinese (“The language likely emerged from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, which is also an ancestor to Burmese and the Tibetan languages, around 4,500 years ago, although the exact date is disputed”), Sanskrit (“‘In my view, Sanskrit is the oldest continuous language tradition, meaning it’s still producing literature and people speak it, although it’s not a first language in the modern era,’ Patel says”), and Tamil (“Tamil [speakers] have been especially [enthusiastic] in trying to separate the language as uniquely ancient”). The conclusion:

Disagreements about the age of Sanskrit and Tamil illustrate the broader issues in pinpointing the world’s oldest language. “To answer this question, we’ve seen people create new histories, which are as much political as they are scientific,” Patel says. “There are bragging rights associated with being the oldest and still evolving language.”

The curious reader will learn pretty much nothing from all this, which seems pure clickbait. As Craig, who sent me the link, says: “Disappointing from Scientific American.”