languagehat.com

Anatoly Vorobei has a post at his Russian blog Avva called тяжелые слова [Difficult words] in which he complains that he can never remember the meaning of “that unpleasant — I might even say stuffy — word erstwhile“:

And when I run across it, I get the vague feeling, quite wrongly, that it means something like ‘respected’ or ‘noble’ (apparently by a vague analogy with earnest and worthwhile). And I’m not the only one who has this problem with the word; I remember reading that native speakers get confused by it sometimes, too. Two or three times already I’ve learned the accurate meaning, and it still slips my mind.

And what are some words, foreign or native, whose meaning you can never manage to remember?

The first commenter mentions explicit and implicit, the second hitherto and flagrant/fragrant; others complain about the Russian words сталактиты ‘stalactites’ and сталагмиты ‘stalagmites’ (equally confusing in English, of course) and смазливый ‘pretty, attractive, cute’ (which I too have trouble remembering).

I myself have never had a problem with erstwhile, for whatever reason (and in fact tend to use it more than I probably should), but as I said here:

The Russian word for ‘nitrogen,’ azot, is hard for me to remember, because it’s so different from the English; of course, it’s straight from French azote, but that’s hard for me to remember too — I guess I didn’t have many dealings with the table of elements when studying French.

JC has linked the Graun’s story in a comment on a nine-year-old post, but I thought it was worth featuring, so here’s Phillip M. Carter’s account at The Conversation — he’s the guy who led the study being reported on:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans. In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance. According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish. […]

[Read more…]

There’s a book called The Cambridge History of Linguistics coming out any day now. I haven’t seen it and know nothing about it aside from the blurbs on that page (e.g., “surveys the fascinating history of the study of language, from its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the diversification of the language sciences in the past half-century”); of course I hope it’s well done, but my burning question is: do they treat Chomsky as hero (revolutionized linguistics, put it on a scientific basis, blah blah) or villain (set linguistics back decades, substituted dogma for facts, etc.)? If anyone knows anything about this impressive-sounding volume, do tell.

The last time I wrote about Victor Pelevin, I said of his Sacred Book of the Werewolf “it’s longer than it needs to be, but it’s fun.” That was my take on most of the Pelevin I’ve read since his glory days of the 1990s, and frankly I’m not sure I would have taken the trouble to read any more if I hadn’t had a copy of his 2017 iPhuck 10 (the title’s in English, sort of, but the book’s in Russian) I got a while back because it was cheap and had gotten good reviews. So I decided I’d give it a try, and if it seemed like more of the same I’d set it aside and go on to something more exciting.

Surprise: this turned out to be the best thing I’d read of his since those ’90s classics. Sure, in a sense it’s more of the same (from that earlier post: “sex, drugs, computer games, corrupt business/power nexus, fancy brand names, plus a dollop of Eastern mysticism”), but Pelevin very cleverly preempts the frequent complaints about repeating himself with this bit of dialogue:

“They reproach you with monotony. Your books, they say, resemble each other.”

“Sweetheart,” I said, “just so you know, there are two kinds of writers: those who spend their lives writing one book — and those who spend their lives writing none. It’s the latter who review the former, not the other way around. And reproach them with monotony. But different parts of one and the same book will always be similar in some way. There are bound to be themes running through them.”

– Упрекают в однообразии. Книги, говорят, похожи друг на друга.

– Милочка, – сказал я, – писатели, чтоб ты знала, бывают двух видов. Те, кто всю жизнь пишет одну книгу – и те, кто всю жизнь пишет ни одной. Именно вторые сочиняют рецензии на первых, а не наоборот. И упрекают их в однообразии. Но разные части одной и той же книги всегда будут чем-то похожи. В них обязательно будут сквозные темы.

[Read more…]

Jeremy Osner’s Facebook post features a French ad for the new Barbie movie with the tagline “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken.” [She can do everything. Him, he’s just Ken.] But I was staggered by Jeremy’s comment:

“Lui, c’est juste Ken” means “as for him, he’s just Ken”. HOWEVER: “Lui, sait juste ken” means “as for him, he only knows how to fuck”

“Shurely shome mishtake,” thought I to myself, but a quick Google produced the page 17 French words that young people use the most, and shure enough, there was the entry:

Ken, it means “to have sex” (to screw). And it’s also verlan. It’s verlan for “n*quer” which has the same meaning.

OK, I can see the derivation from niquer, which I was aware of, but how can you have a French verb, even a slang one, with no endings?

Some other items in that list of “words that young people use the most”: gow ‘girlfriend/lover,’ askip ‘it seems’ (abbreviation of à ce qu’il paraît), en soumsoum ‘in a hidden way, discreetly,’ balec ‘I don’t give a damn’ (from je m’en bats les couilles), and dead ça ‘killed it, nailed it’ (Grâce à toi, on a gagné ! T’as dead ça !). I used to think I had at least a passive awareness of French slang; now I feel utterly out of it.

Via the Log I learn of the existence of “a comprehensive, reliable grammar of Sogdian, which is cause for celebration”:

Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豊 2022. Sogudogo bunpō kōgi ソグド語文法講義
[Lectures on Sogdian Grammar]. Kyoto: Rinsen. iv, 500 pp.
ISBN: 978-4-653-04188-7.

Happily, Adam Alvah Catt has written a three-page review at Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae; a few paragraphs are quoted at the Log, but I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s the conclusion:

Yoshida Yutaka’s new publication is an invaluable contribution in that it combines step-by-step instruction, exercises, a reference grammar, a dictionary, a reader, and a bibliography of research into a single volume. One can only hope for an English version of this book so that it can reach a wider audience.

I join Catt in his hope! Incidentally, Martin Schwartz says in the Log comment thread that the Sogdic component of Yaghnobi “is VERY conservative, much more than the Sogdian varieties of Turfan-Dunhuang, Mt. Mugh, etc.,” and adds that “Ossetic is WAY different from Sogdian (and Yaghnobi), and bears the baggage of Caucasic influence, at least phonologically and lexically.”

This account of a 1998 movie at the California Newsreel site tells a remarkable tale:

The story begins in the early 1930s with Lorenzo Turner, an African American linguist who cataloged more than 3000 names and words of African origin among the Gullah of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. He discovered that some Gullah could recite texts in African languages, including almost certainly the longest, a five-line song he learned from a woman living in a remote Georgia fishing village, Amelia Dawley. Although Amelia did not know the meaning of the syllables in the song, a Sierra Leonean graduate student in the U.S. recognized it as Mende, his native tongue.

These dramatic clues were taken up again in the 1980s by Joseph Opala, an American anthropologist at Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College. Studying Bunce Island, an 18th century British slave castle, Opala discovered that it sent many of its captives to Georgia and South Carolina where American rice planters paid a premium for experienced slaves from Africa’s “Rice Coast.” The comparative coherence of this slave community may account for the high degree of African cultural retention among the Gullah. In 1989 Opala helped organize a gala homecoming for a Gullah delegation to their long-lost African sisters and brothers documented in an earlier California Newsreel release, Family Across the Sea.

[Read more…]

A couple of words for related to young people with unknown or uncertain etymologies (the words, that is, not the people):

1) Gamin, which the OED defines as “A neglected boy who has been left to run about the streets; a street urchin, a guttersnipe; (more generally) a streetwise or impudent child”:

Etymology: < French gamin (1805; 1803 in the more general meaning ‘young boy’; 1765 denoting a glassmaker’s assistant), further etymology uncertain.
A suggestion that the French word is a borrowing (with remodelling after words in -in -ine suffix⁴) < German regional (Alemannic) Gammel uproar, row (or a related word in the same family) is very uncertain.

The TLFi cautiously says “formé peut-être en Lorraine sur le rad. germ. gamm-, cf. alémanique gammel « gaîté, joie bruyante; vaurien »; AHD goes all in with “probably” and a fuller account:

[French, probably of eastern dialectal French origin (Lorraine) : *gamm-, root meaning “good-for-nothing, vagabond” and of German origin (akin to dialectal German (Hesse, the Rhineland) gammeln, to bum around, be idle or unproductive, from Middle High German gamel, game, fun, mirth, variant of gamen, from Old High German gaman; akin to Old English gamen, game) + French -in, diminutive noun suffix.]

2) I recently learned from one of those British cop shows set in Oxford the very specific term scout “At Oxford (also at Yale and Harvard): A college servant.” (The entry is from 1911; I have no idea if anyone still uses this word at Yale and/or Harvard.) Here the etymology is simply “Of unknown origin: identity with scout n.⁴ [“The action of spying out or watching in order to gain information”] has been conjectured, but evidence is wanting.” If you’re curious, this is the sixth and last scout in the OED (the first is “A high overhanging rock”); here are the citations:
[Read more…]

We’ve discussed the notorious Pahlavi script before (e.g., last December), but I’m not sure people realized quite how bad a script it is. Now Ben Joeng has a Twitter thread/rant explaining why:

I often describe Pahlavi as the worst writing system ever invented.

Let’s take a perfectly-serviceable writing system for a completely different language (Aramaic) and adapt it for our language (Middle Persian). We’ll call this new script “Pahlavi”.

Aramaic doesn’t really write all the vowels, only consonants, but that’s OK for Aramaic, because through a quirk of Semitic grammar, consonants carry most of the semantics. But our language, Middle Persian, is Indo-European and *does* carry a lot of semantic weight in vowels.

This is why when Greek (IE) borrowed writing from Phoenician (Sem.), it repurposed a bunch of the consonants that Greek didn’t have to use as vowels.

Pahlavi didn’t do that, though, it just carried on not writing vowels.

[Read more…]

No, not Robert the Bruce, King of Scots; this is a much more recent guy, who (as “R. Bruce”) wrote a book I happen to own, [Teach Yourself] Cantonese. In investigating the mysteriously initialed author, I turned up his 1999 obit in the Independent, which made it clear he was of considerable Hattic interest:

A career of high achievement in the service of one’s country would be enough for most people but in Robert Bruce’s case there was a great deal more. What he attained in diplomacy and scholarship, particularly in relation to the languages and peoples of China, would have set him apart in any case, but the fact that he did so under the burden of virtual blindness throughout much of his life makes his story all the more remarkable.

Bruce was born in 1911 in Fraserburgh on the north-east corner of Aberdeenshire, the second son of Henry George Bruce, who owned the family herring-curing business and to whom Robert declared at the age of 11 that he was an atheist. Such iconoclastic utterances were to be entirely characteristic of him over the following decades but the atheism did not survive the course; he died on his 88th birthday as an Episcopalian.

Having gained a first class honours degree in History and Economics at Aberdeen University, in 1933 he applied to the Colonial Service. His interview consisted merely of being asked to which colony he would like to go. Choosing Malaya, he was sent for training to Wadham College, in Oxford, a city he described as embodying “the tradition of Platonic superiority. It held the guardian class of parliament and India; the aristocratic class.”

[Read more…]