languagehat.com

A few useful phrases if you happen to find yourself in a situation where they are called for:

HANDS UP — IRFAA IDAK (“EAR-FAH EE-DAHK”)
HALT — QIFF (“KIF”)
I AM AN AMERICAN SOLDIER — ANA JUNDI AMRIKI (“AHNA JOOM-DEE AHM-REE-KEE”)
LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS — ILQI SLAAHAK (“ILL-KEE SLAH-HAHK”)
STAY THERE — QIFF HINAK (“KIF HEE-NAHK”)
YOU ARE A PRISONER — INTA SAJEEN (“IN-TAH SAH-JEAN”)

(Courtesy of the amazingly multilingual Bob “zaelic” Cohen.)

In the Strand today I saw a book by Carol Myers-Scotton called Contact Linguistics. The book is written in a rebarbative theoretical jargon that (for instance) replaces “clause” with CP, which stands for some gobbledygook phrase that thankfully eludes my memory, but it includes brief sections on three “mixed languages” that I had been unaware of and that sound fascinating.

The first is Michif, described in this online article as follows:

The Michif language is spoken by Metis, the descendants of European fur traders (often French Canadians) and Cree-speaking Amerindian women. It is spoken in scattered Metis communities in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada and in North Dakota and Montana in the United States…. It is spoken outside the French-speaking part of Canada and the Cree-speaking areas of North America…. Michif is a rather peculiar language. It is half Cree (an Amerindian language) and half French. It is a mixed language, drawing its nouns from a European language and its verbs [and grammatical structure—LH] from an Amerindian language.

The second is Medny Aleut (also called Copper Island Aleut), probably now extinct or close to it, which has Aleut lexical items embedded in Russian grammar; the third, and best known, is Mbugu (also called Ma’a), which has Cushitic vocabulary and Bantu grammar. More such languages are dealt with in this 1994 collection of papers.

These languages pose a problem for historical linguists, who tend to like neat “family trees” (as in this amazing page, which also has beautiful maps) showing languages splitting neatly into daughter languages in such a way that each language is traceable (in theory) back through a single lineage; fortunately, these mixtures are rare enough not to disturb the general picture too much, and they don’t destroy the usefulness of the traditional model any more than the existence of people who cannot be clearly defined as “male” or “female” nullifies the concept of gender. (If you think it does, you may have wandered into this blog by mistake; I suggest you flee back here.)

A comprehensive listing of the phonetic renderings used in Japanese comics (manga) to represent not only sounds but various other… states of being, shall we say? For instance, ‘sticky, gummy’ (beto beto), ‘tongue hanging out’ (biron), ‘a head being shaken violently in the negative’ (buru). More recondite is bon ‘sound of magical transformation or appearance, often seen with a puff of smoke’; I think my favorite is uttori ‘enraptured by beauty.’ (Via No-sword.)

The Queen Bee called my attention to a language I had never heard of, called Polari. It’s actually more of an argot, being standard English with replacements (mostly Italian, but also Romanes, Yiddish, and Cockney slang) for many words; it has passed from theatrical usage into the (English) gay community, and some words have entered more general speech (ponce, a pimp; savvy, to know, understand; scarper, to run away). Fortunately, I didn’t have to go far to learn more about it, since the always interesting Desbladet recently did a post on the subject, linking to a detailed World Wide Words article, the scripts from the “Julian and Sandy” skits on Kenneth Horne’s Round The Horne show from the ’60s, and (this is truly remarkable) a Polari version of the King James Bible:

1 In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the nanti lucoddy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
3 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.
4 And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria divided the sparkle from the munge.
5 And Gloria screeched the sparkle Day, and the munge he screeched nochy. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the una day.

Amazing stuff. So thanks, qB, it’s fantabulosa!

Addendum. Joseph Steelman has brought to my attention another good Polari link, Chris Denning’s page.

Translating Astérix, with pictures (and mouseovers). Via Open Brackets.

Update. The link does not work as of April 4, 2005, but the main website carries the following message: “The site is currently under reconstruction and will be relaunched with a brand new design, improved layout, new features and updated resources pages in Spring 2005.” So hopefully the article will be back online soon.

Update (July 2019). The original link still didn’t work, so I’ve replaced it with an archived link.

The library of Case Western Reserve University has put online “full-text, complete page images of books from the regular circulating collection that have become too fragile or brittle to allow normal circulation.” The wood s lot entry on this wonderful find leads off with a link to A Concise Dictionary of Middle English by Mayhew and Skeat (1888), which is an excellent thing to have available. My eye was drawn to Street Names of Cleveland by Walter August Peters, with a copy of Spafford’s “Original plan of the town and village of Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1796,” and Syrian Home Life by “Rev. Henry Harris Jessup, D.D. of Beirut, Syria,” published in 1874, with chapters on The House, The Dress, The Food, The Priests (headings “Ignorance.—Vice.—The Ordained Cameleer…”), The Druzes, The Nusairiyeh, The Christians, The Civil War (Lebanon had been through a particularly vicious religious war in 1860), etc. (The term “Syria” then encompassed what is now Lebanon.) But your taste may run to Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! (1886) or Umbrellas and Their History (c. 1871). There should be something here for everyone.

Update (July 2019). The original links no longer work; I’ve replaced the “online” link with an archived one from which you can get to the various mentioned texts.

Juliet‘s back. She promises poetry and art. We need them.

Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

The names of the planets in dozens of languages, including Maltese, Old Czech, and Uzbek (which gets the prize for Most Bizarre-Looking Planetary Names in a Modern Language: Quyosh, Utorid, Zuhra, Yer, Oy, Mirrikh, Mushtarij, Zuhal; Oy is the moon, in case you were wondering). Deep thanks to Where Threads Come Loose Incoming Signals [3/17/03]!

The NY Times has a very silly article today [archived] suggesting that the click languages of southern Africa “still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans.” Let me establish right off the bat why this is silly. Languages change at a rate that, while not constant, is in a broad sense predictable; over the course of centuries sounds inexorably alter, so that without written records we can peer back only a few millennia by comparing modern languages and seeing what the common ancestor must have been like. Written records, of course, go back only five thousand years or so. Beyond that, all is conjecture; people who claim to reconstruct “Nostratic” and similar alleged ancestors of all languages are snake-oil salesmen. The very idea that we can find remnants of a language spoken 50,000 years ago (or “112,000 years, plus or minus 42,000 years,” depending on who you listen to) is ludicrous.

So why are they saying otherwise? Well, click consonants sound funny to speakers of languages that don’t have them, so they appear to demand explanation (unlike our “normal” consonants), and it happens that they’re found almost exclusively in the languages of southern Africa (they also occur in Damin, an Australian language, but nobody speaks it anymore, so we can ignore it), and Africa is the earliest home of mankind (and of course frequently thought of as strange and primitive), so… it all fits together. The specific hook the article is based on is the discovery that the speakers of two of these languages are genetically divergent: “The Stanford team compared them with other extremely ancient groups like the Mbuti of Zaire and the Biaka pygmies of Central African Republic and found the divergence between the Hadzabe and the Ju|’hoansi might be the oldest known split in the human family tree…. (“Ju|’hoansi” is pronounced like “ju-twansi” except that the “tw” is a click sound like the “tsk, tsk” of disapproval.)” Why then it follows as the night the day that the clicks are inherited from our earliest ancestors, if you ignore inconvenient facts like the inevitability of language change, the irrelevance of genetics to linguistics, and the propensity of language communities to borrow sounds from each other (the Bantu languages of the region, for instance, have borrowed clicks from the languages that were there when they arrived). In the whole article, only one sensible person is quoted, well after the point when most readers will have turned the page:

Dr. Bonnie Sands [sic; her name is spelled Bonny], a linguist at Northern Arizona University, said click sounds were not particularly hard to make. All children can make them. Dr. Sands saw no reason why clicks could not have been invented independently many times and, perhaps, lost in all areas of the world except Africa.

“There is nothing to be gained by assuming that clicks must have been invented only once,” she said, “or in presuming that certain types of phonological systems are more primordial than others.”

I don’t want to suggest that the localized occurrence of clicks isn’t an interesting question. Olle Engstrand of Stockholm University suggests that “the reason for the areal skewness of clicks lies in the African phonetic-typological environment rather than in production or perception constraints”; in other words, the languages of the region happened to develop phonetic structures that made the production of clicks likely. I have no idea whether this is correct, but it’s a scientific argument. Genetic mumbo-jumbo is not.

[Thanks for calling my attention to this article go to a Bonnie who does spell her name that way.]