languagehat.com

We discussed the new Grambank database a few months ago; now the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports at Phys.org on a study they’ve done using it:

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. […] This grammatical distinction in the case system, along with many others, sets Icelandic apart from its closely related sister languages. “One prominent hypothesis about why some languages show more complex grammar than others links grammatical complexity to the social environments in which these languages are used,” says first author Olena Shcherbakova from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

For example, Icelandic is primarily learned and used by the local population of over 350,000 people. Such relatively small isolated communities are also called “societies of intimates.” In contrast, the other Scandinavian countries, located in close proximity to their neighbors, have larger populations with substantial proportions of non-native speakers.

Such communities are known as “societies of strangers.” Many linguists have claimed that languages with more non-native speakers tend to simplify their grammars, as unlike children, adult learners struggle to acquire complex grammatical rules to master the intricacies of their new language.

But is this Icelandic example representative of the striking linguistic diversity worldwide? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology wanted to find out if the grammars of languages tend to evolve simpler when spoken by larger societies of strangers with many non-native speakers.

[Read more…]

I gave up on my dream of being a mathematician around 1970, but I still enjoy occasionally taking a gander at the field from afar, even if I can no longer follow the details. In recent years I’ve run into something called p-adic numbers that were so unintuitive I cracked my brains trying to understand them without result (the Wikipedia page, like all their math pages, was singularly unhelpful); now, via this MetaFilter post, I have come as close to real understanding as I am likely to thanks to Derek Muller’s Veritasium video (33 min.). I normally prefer to absorb information by reading, but even a well-written piece like this one by Kelsey Houston-Edwards only made sense to me after watching the video.

But this isn’t MathHat, and I’m bringing it here because of the odd term “p-adic.” The “p” stands for prime, but why “-adic”? It was apparently first used in James Pierpont’s Lectures on the Theory of Functions of Real Variables (1905), p. 92: “When m is used as base, the numbers a are said to be expressed in an m-adic system.” But he’s just said “When m=10, we have the decimal system”; why would you go from “decimal” to “-adic”? Anybody know the history of this terminology?

The end of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s LRB review of a biography of Zwingli by Bruce Gordon is amusing and instructive:

There is little to criticise in Gordon’s assured account. I wish that he had assisted his readers by commenting on some of the surnames that litter his pages, because among them are a number of scholarly clerics who adopted a fancy cod Latin or cod Greek name for themselves. This was a common practice in the 16th century and it was not just pretension (though there was a bit of that too). These surnames were symbols of the international nature of European scholarship, at a time when anyone with an education could travel and make themselves understood in Latin anywhere from Cork to Copenhagen or Córdoba. The Reformation would have been impossible without this common Latin culture. Take the Protestant scholar Theodor Bibliander, who ended his days in Bullinger’s Zurich in 1564 (slightly under a cloud, after an unfortunate row about predestination). He was a German-speaking Swiss, like Zwingli and Bullinger, and it doesn’t require too much knowledge of Greek to turn Bibliander into ‘book-man’, revealing that Theodor’s original surname was Buchmann. We really ought to have been given the reason for the especially intimidating surname of a man who figures a great deal in Gordon’s book: Johannes Oecolampadius, a great friend and theological colleague of Zwingli’s – indeed, such a close friend that the terrible news from the battlefield at Kappel seems to have brought on his own death. Oecolampadius started life in western Germany as Johann Hussgen. Casting around for a more academically resonant name, he decided that Hussgen could just as well be spelled ‘Hausschein’ – domestic lamp. While ‘John Houselamp’ doesn’t have much of a ring to it in either English or German, turn it into sort-of Greek with a dusting of academic Latin and behold: Johannes Oecolampadius.

Interestingly (as Gordon does point out), Zwingli took his own Christian name in an opposite direction, into a deeper vernacular. Named Ulrich after his father, he exploited the local Swiss dialect to refashion himself as ‘Huldrych’, meaning ‘rich in grace’, once he embarked on his clerical career. It was a fitting linguistic turn for the man who, among other things, can take the credit for masterminding the first complete Reformation Bible in German, using Swiss German rather than the Hochdeutsch of Luther’s Saxon translation. Zwingli did draw on Luther’s work for his own project, which is why he and his scholarly team in Zurich were able to complete their version first. Another reason for Luther to be cross with him.

My own onomastic question is about the origin of the surname Zwingli — anybody know?

Mike Michael, of the University of Exeter, has an open-access paper in Public Understanding of Science called Lay metrology and metroscoping: Towards the study of lay units; here’s the abstract:

This exploratory article provides groundwork towards a tentative framework for exploring how lay measures and units – what is here called ‘lay metrology’ – intersect with formal metrology, and its various mediations. This article concerns itself with the role that everyday ‘units’ – grounded in part in the material culture of bodies and experience – play in relation to a metrological landscape, or ‘metroscape’ that is also inhabited by standardised units routinely popularised through various media. After a brief overview of the relevant literature on metrology, examples of lay metrology are provided that examine the relation of everyday units of, for example, length and area, to particular forms of bodily experience, social identity and sensorial capacities. This article draws on elements from science communication and affect theory to develop the notion of ‘metroscoping’ and to articulate a series of orienting questions for engaging with lay metrological processes.

It begins with a memorable novelty item:

Let us consider the ‘Vague Ruler’. This artefact, produced by designer Matty Benedetto, is one of ‘30 New Inventions That Solve Nonexistent Problems In Your Life’, as the webpage puts it. The Vague Ruler is made up of a flat wooden ‘paddle’ (that incorporates a handle); onto this is inscribed a regularised scale that, rather than numbers, is marked by such seemingly arbitrary objects as forearm, beer bottle, remote, soda can and chapstick. In a humorous twist, it also includes ‘ruler’ and ‘2 feet or so’. In one photo, the Vague Ruler is held alongside a tape measure. On one reading, it is an ironic enactment of the idea of metrology – the institutionally sanctioned standardisation of the measures that undergird the infrastructures of late capitalist societies.

Here’s an example of his style of analysis:

Popularising depictions of environmental devastation are routinely compared in units of area which seem familiar, but which might be less than tangible. An example that is common in the UK is the unit of ‘the size of Wales’, also rendered as ‘X number of Waleses’. Even a cursory on-line survey reveals that ‘the size of Wales’ has been used to measure the area of destruction visited by an asteroid or a nuclear explosion, and to convey areas lost from the Antarctic ice shelf or the Amazon rainforest.

While another such popular unit of area – ‘the size of football pitch’ – can be more or less readily comprehended not least visually, this does not apply so obviously to ‘the size of Wales’. What makes ‘the size of Wales’ intriguing is that, while it is cartographically graspable, it cannot be experienced in a ‘direct’ sense. In this respect, there is something ridiculous about this measure: it has, in other words, become a cypher or an analogy for ‘a very big area’ that can nevertheless be collectively shared (at least in the United Kingdom).

He brings up the notorious fatberg: “This being a London phenomenon it was invariably described in local currency: at 820 feet, the fatberg was ‘longer than Tower Bridge’ or ‘twice as long as Wembley Stadium’ and ‘the weight of 11 double-decker buses’.” And yes, the Smoot makes an appearance (as it does in this LH post from a few years ago). Enjoy!

There are a number of fells in English — a verb, several nouns, and an adjective; it is the last that concerns us here. I’m finally reading Woolf’s The Waves (I’m glad I didn’t try to do so earlier, because I would have gotten impatient and given up before figuring out what she was up to), and I’ve come to a very simple sentence that I’m having trouble interpreting. I’ll give you the whole paragraph for context and bold the sentence in question; the speaker is Susan, one of the six protagonists:

‘But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. Yet now, leaning here till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing. Not sighs and laughter, not circling and ingenious phrases; not Rhoda’s strange communications when she looks past us, over our shoulders; nor Jinny’s pirouetting, all of a piece, limbs and body. What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with other people. I like best the stare of shepherds met in the road; the stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch suckling their children as I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot midday when the bees hum round the hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall give him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons; men with pitchforks; a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs to warm in baskets, where the hams hang and the onions glisten. I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.

Here are Wiktionary’s definitions for fell:

1. Of a strong and cruel nature; eager and unsparing; grim; fierce; ruthless; savage.
2. (UK dialectal, Scotland) Strong and fiery; biting; keen; sharp; pungent
3. (UK dialectal, Scotland) Very large; huge.
4. (obsolete) Eager; earnest; intent.

(I’d consult the OED, but at the moment it’s telling me “The page isn’t redirecting properly.” I hate the new OED format with a burning hatred.) We can probably rule out the dialectal 2 and 3; 4 might make sense in this context, but I’ve never seen that usage, and depending on how obsolete it is it too is probably unlikely. But how to make sense of cruelty and grimness among these images of hollyhocks and love? All ideas welcome, as always.

(I note, looking further down the Wiktionary page, that Albanian fell is said to mean ‘deep, shallow.’ Say what??)

The following message was sent by Tim Stewart to members of the Dictionary Society of North America:

I am pleased to announce a video interview with Igor Mel’čuk. The interview was done by Ian Mackenzie. Ian has published papers with Professor Mel’čuk, and he is also a professional film maker (see rimba.com). The film is copyrighted by Ian and can only be used for non-commercial purposes. It is a little over two hours long, and it is unedited. Ian and I both agree that the interview works well as is. The first hour is on lexicology, and the second is about Igor’s personal history. It describes his experiences growing up in Stalin’s Russia, and working as a translator years later for Andrei Sakharov.

I haven’t finished watching it, but the material on lexicography is so interesting I thought I’d go ahead and post it. Some random notes I took as I watched: Mel’čuk started by working on machine translation. He noticed the word “heavy” was one of the most difficult to translate into Russian — how should you distinguish between senses? He realized it depended on the modified noun — losses, rain, etc. Similarly, “take” could be rendered according to its object (walk, shower, etc.). He called these “lexical functions”; this got him started working on dictionaries. Is Russian коса ‘braid,’ ‘peninsula in river,’ or ‘scythe’? Look for the lexical context (hair, field, etc.). The key to a language is in its dictionary, not grammar; “being a linguist, you have to be a lexicographer.” He worked on an explanatory combinatory dictionary; primary rule: never use vicious circles (select = choose, choose = select), which can be OK for people, but not machines. He has never consulted a Russ.-Russ. dictionary, just (e.g.) French-Russ. and Russ-French. In an Eng.-Eng. dictionary, nobody looks up the hardest words to define, like “I.” (When he talks about the OED he says “Cambridge” when he means Oxford, but hey, the dude is 90.) When you define words, you need a predicate: authority of X among people Y in domain Z. Anna Wierzbicka invented semantic primes and insists definitions must be written using only them, but this is impossible. In English you say “Congratulations!” but in Russian you have to say “Поздравляю тебя!” (“you cannot say ‘Поздравления,’ it sounds stupid.”). There’s no word for ‘privacy’ in Russian — the concept doesn’t exist. He shows a definition (“lexical network”) of “kiss” that a computer can read easily but a human needs special training for. (At 45:24 you can see the screen showing the entry for авторитет ‘authority, prestige.’) He discusses problems associated with the Russian word рука ‘hand, arm’: you can’t define a single one, you have to define the pair (and then define the single object as one of the pair). The same goes for anything that occurs in pairs (shoes, skis, etc.). Idioms have separate entries in his dictionary; he says English lexicography is the best in the world in this regard. Thanks for sharing it with me, Parry!

No, not the movie but a much older hit I’d never heard of, and you probably haven’t either. I’m reading Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power by Richard Stites (an always dependable writer), and on p. 146 I was taken aback by “Her [Alexandra Asenkova’s] debut in the popular Shakespeare in Love, alongside the famous Yakovlev as the bard, ushered this lower-class orphan not only into a career but into a state-owned apartment and into the high-toned society of the salons.” A little research showed that this must refer to Alexandre Duval’s 1804 Shakespeare amoureux, ou La pièce à l’étude, and the description I found in Paul Franssen’s Shakespeare in Love, 1804 ; or, Conquering the Continent with William (Cahiers Charles V 45 [2008]: 211-230) was so interesting (and funny) I thought it worth sharing. The abstract says:

In traditional accounts of Shakespeare’s reception on the European continent, Germany is usually seen as the great champion of authentic Shakespeare, whereas the French supposedly only wrote adverse criticism of his work, or otherwise butchered his texts in their neoclassical adaptations. In one respect, however, France did make a positive contribution to the international reception of Shakespeare : Alexandre Duval’s short comedy entitled Shakespeare Amoureux (1804), which was staged all over the Continent and translated into a dozen languages, introduced Europeans to the icon of Shakespeare as a man of flesh and blood. The article traces this play from its genesis to its reception, and investigates some of the various ways in which Duval’s portrayal of Shakespeare may have carried political overtones, from the original context in revolutionary France to its reception all over the Continent, sometimes many decades later.

Here’s the plot summary:
[Read more…]

As I said a few years ago, Tocharian is one of the Indo-European languages I’ve found most intriguing; now Ali Jones at Phys.org writes about a very promising project called TheTocharianTrek:

The research is helping to pin down where the Tocharians were located in the period between 3,500 BC, when they may have left their ancestral home, and their first written history in 400 AD. In sum, the initiative is mapping the migration route from the PIE homeland all the way to China.

Through the journey, the Tocharians brought their dialect of PIE into contact with people speaking different languages. This influenced and changed the way the Tocharians spoke until finally their recorded languages evolved. Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the Tocharians first moved to southern Siberia.

[Professor Michaël] Peyrot and his research colleagues have sought to provide a linguistic assessment of this route. Their work reveals that, indeed, some of the quirkiest features of the language fit very well with tongues spoken in southern Siberia.

“Languages preserve precious information about their prehistory through the effects of language contact,” said Peyrot. “Observing the effects of language contact, such as borrowed words, enables us to draw conclusions about the proximity of the speakers of different languages and at which point in time the contact took place.” As an example of a borrowed word, he cited a term for sword in a language strand known as Tocharian B: “kertte” was taken from “karta” in Old Iranian.

The research team has concluded that the Tocharians arrived in the Tarim Basin in around 1,000 BC—later than was previously thought. As result, their window of influence in the Tarim Basin has narrowed and the Tocharians are being assigned a more muted role in the prehistory of the area than they have traditionally been given.

Instead, the project has found a strengthened role for Iranian languages and peoples in the area, especially Khotanese, its relative Tumshuqese and Niya Prakrit. All influenced Tocharian.

The project is also piecing together which languages left the PIE community first and when. As their work enters its final phase, the researchers agree with the theory that the Tocharians may well have left the PIE family second and certainly well after the Anatolians, a group of ancient languages once spoken in present-day Turkey.

The piece goes on to discuss weather terminology and says:

The ultimate goal is to create an atlas that maps where the words were used and when. The completed atlas is due to be available on the university’s website beginning in late 2023.

Exciting stuff — thanks, Dmitry!

Alan Rusbridger writes for Prospect about what must now, alas, be considered a rara avis:

Forget your Iron Age settlements and your crumbling monasteries. I have an urgent nomination for a Unesco World Heritage Site listing. You will find it in an unprepossessing street not far from Marylebone Station in central London. […] Every town used to have at least one rambling bookshop like Archive Books on Bell Street—a haphazard emporium of the treasured, the rare, the tatty, the forgotten, the never-read and the waiting-to-be-discovered. They were—before business rates and the internet combined to snuff them out—little oases of musty calm away from the unforgiving high streets and identikit chains outside. […]

At Archive Books, the curator—it feels a little vulgar to call him a mere bookseller—is Tim Meaker, 71. He is a benign, lived-in figure who should be played by Bill Nighy if Stephen Frears ever makes a film about a picaresque second-hand bookshop. Tim took over the business nearly 45 years ago and, in the event that Unesco agree to list Archive Books, should be part of that deal.

When the Unesco inspectors arrive they will find Tim and/or his longstanding assistant Jeffrey in an uncomfortably full room that feels as though it has been artfully constructed as a set for a Dickensian period drama. In addition to the floor-to-ceiling books, two broken wooden tennis rackets adorn a shelf-end. Buffalo horns dangle from the ceiling, along with a bit of a whale, assorted puppets (“they represent the Luddites”), a boomerang and what could be a wire wastepaper bin.

When Tim and his wife Michèle, a bookbinder, first took over the shop in 1979, they sat at a table in front of the rare books section. But the table long ago disappeared under a haphazard avalanche of books, packaging, papers and music. Fetching a rare book now involves a hazardous climb over this teetering mountain without ropes or oxygen. “It’s a bit tidier than it was,” notes Tim in a distracted way.

[Read more…]

Via Joel at Far Outliers, a nice quote from Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham:

Tam, a musician my age, introduces himself. Solely on his salutation, I know we will be friends. This is easy because the Vietnamese form of address allows two people to assess each other and extend overtures of friendship. It has several tiers, each indicating the nature of acquaintance (informal, formal, business, friends, intimate) as well as the hierarchy. Just by pronouns used, one can discern the type of relationship between two people. For instance, if Tam refers to himself as toi (I) and calls me anh (big brother, or, in this context, you), then the relationship is formal and equal, with neither having the upper hand despite age; however, if Tam is in fact younger than me, then unless there is something else—social, economic status—to normalize the age difference, Tam is being disrespectful by not referring to himself as em (little brother). And if I were, say, fifteen years older than he, Tam should use chu (uncle) and chau (nephew). There are many forms, including regional variations.

Tam calls me ban: friend.

I like him instantly. He reminds me of an old childhood friend from my days at the French Catholic school in Saigon, who used his own name, in the third person, instead of “I” and called me “friend” rather than “you.” Tam invites me to one of his regular gigs at a hotel disco.

This stuff fascinates me, but I’m glad I don’t have to navigate it in daily life.