languagehat.com

Or so claim Tomasz Stanisz, Stanisław Drożdż, and Jarosław Kwapień, authors of “Universal versus system-specific features of punctuation usage patterns in major Western languages” (Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 168 [March 2023]). A Phys.org account of it attributed to The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences, “Punctuation in literature of major languages is intriguingly mathematical,” says:

To many, punctuation appears as a necessary evil, to be happily ignored whenever possible. Recent analyses of literature written in the world’s current major languages require us to alter this opinion. In fact, the same statistical features of punctuation usage patterns have been observed in several hundred works written in seven, mainly Western, languages.

Punctuation […] turns out to be a universal and indispensable complement to the mathematical perfection of every language studied. Such a remarkable conclusion about the role of mere commas, exclamation marks or full stops comes from an article by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, published in the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. […]

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Bee Wilson, whose LRB reviews have been quoted here before (2009, 2019), had one last year (archived) of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionised Food in America by Mayukh Sen and The Philosophy of Curry by Sejal Sukhadwala. She spends the entire review talking about curry, which probably irritated Mr. Sen, but if you’re interested in the subject it’s well worth reading. Herewith some sections addressing the word and its meaning:

As a child in the early 1980s, I believed that curry was synonymous with Indian food and that Indian food was synonymous with curry […] As a teenager, I started cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s books and saw with a jolt that, for Indian cooks, hearing British people declaring they loved curry could come across as a crass postcolonial misrepresentation. Jaffrey arrived in London from Delhi in 1955 to study at Rada, and taught herself to cook using her mother’s recipes because she disliked English food (except fish and chips). In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term “chop suey” was to China’s,’ Jaffrey wrote in An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973). ‘“Curry” is just a vague, inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us … If “curry” is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine, then “curry powder” attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.’

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Hedvig Skirgård and about six million other authors have a paper in Science Advances (Vol. 9, Issue 16, Apr. 2023) with the title “Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss”; its abstract reads:

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.

I can’t really understand much of the article, which is full of terms like “traditional nonweighted PCA” and “the function prcomp,” but it seems like it might be of interest, and I hope those who can make sense of it will have things to say. Thanks, BB!

I recently ran across the archaic Russian word тиун [tiun] ‘tiun’ (title of various officials in medieval Russia) and discovered from both Vasmer and Wiktionary that it was borrowed from Icelandic þjónn, itself “Ultimately from Proto-Germanic *þewaz, whence also Gothic 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐍃 (þius, “servant”) and Old English þēow.” But if you click on the þewaz link, under “Descendants” it has Proto-Norse: ᚦᛖᚹᚨᛉ (þewaʀ) > Old Norse: -þér, and the latter is “(only in name-compounds) servant, retainer.” What about þjónn? And the OED has for theow | thew ‘slave, bondman, thrall’ (entry from 1912):

Etymology: Old English ðíow, þéow, þéo, strong masculine, = Old High German deo, dio, Old Norse (Runic) þewaʀ, Gothic þius < Old Germanic *þewoᶻ; beside Old English þeow strong feminine, = Old Saxon thiu, thiwi, Old High German, Middle High German diu, Old Norse þý, Gothic þiwi < Old Germanic *þewjô. Also weak nouns þéowa (masculine), þéowe (feminine); compare Old Saxon thiwa. þéowa, -e have the weak inflection of the adjective.

Again, no þjónn. And theow | thew is not to be confused with thew ‘custom, usage; good quality or habit; (plural) physical good qualities, features, or personal endowments; bodily powers or forces of a man (Latin vires), might, strength, vigour’ (entry also from 1912), which is “Old English þéaw = Old Saxon thau usage, custom, habit, Old High German thau (dau) discipline. Not recorded outside West Germanic languages. Ulterior etymology uncertain”; this is where we get phrases like “thew and sinew.” A confusing tangle!

But also, nothing doesn’t survive transcription. So says Allison Parrish in a lecture delivered at Iona University’s Data Science Symposium in April; some excerpts:

My talk today is about transcription—how text comes to be. My goal is to trouble your understanding of what transcriptions are, how transcriptions work, and the stakes of this understanding (with particular reference to large language models). […]

By “transcription” I mean the result of adapting some stretch of language from one medium to another, in such a way that the adapted version is understood to have the same “content” as the “original.” Maybe more precisely: a linguistic artifact A is a transcription of a different linguistic artifact B if B precedes A causally and temporally, and A and B are understood to be identical in meaning, though they differ in material form.

The prototypical example of a transcription is a “transcript”—a written artifact that records the “content” of a stretch of language that was spoken out loud. And indeed, I’ll be talking about transcripts of this kind in more detail later. But I think the term “transcription” usefully applies to adaptations of language between any two modalities. For example, producing a typewritten copy of a handwritten manuscript is a kind of transcription. Taking notes on a lecture is a kind of transcription. Under this definition, even my verbal performance of this talk (reading from my speaker notes) is a variety of transcription. […]

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After I finished Vodolazkin, my Russian reading project continued with Varlamov’s pretentiously cynical Мысленный волк [The spiritual wolf] (I gave up), Buida’s family novel Яд и мед [Poison and honey] (unsatisfying), and Zaionchkovsky’s snarky Тимошина проза [Timosha’s prose] (I gave up); at that point I took a look at my Chronology and saw that the next tempting item was Аппендикс [Appendix], a novel by the poet Aleksandra Petrova, who was born in Leningrad but has lived in Rome for decades. It had won the Andrei Bely prize for 2016, and I’m generally fond of poets’ prose; on the other hand, the damn thing was over 800 pages long, and I didn’t really want to take that much time on a book right now. Still, I thought I’d check it out — for one thing, I wanted to find out what the title meant.

As soon as I started reading it, I was won over. The first chapter, Новая легкость Меркурия [Mercury’s new lightness], is a description of a childhood appendectomy; the narrator says she shouldn’t have eaten so much on her twelfth birthday (“But everybody overate!”), describes her nausea and being rushed to the hospital, and continues:
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Ann K. Brodsky writes for Tablet about “What I learned from teaching English grammar and punctuation to Hasidic adults”:

A makhloykes, for the uninitiated, is Yiddish for “argument” or “dispute”; its modern Hebrew counterpart is makhloket, although the latter seems to lack some of the “oomph” of its European mate. Think of the scene from Fiddler on the Roof: “Horse!” “Mule!” “No, it was a horse!” “I tell you it was a mule!” […]

One would think that makhloykes, so redolent of mamaloshn, and the Oxford comma, with its British pedigree, would never meet in the same paragraph, let alone in a class of Hasidim. But I had a chance to witness these two words—and worlds—collide.

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From yesterday’s ancient Greek we expand by a couple of millennia with the Portal for the Greek language developed by the Centre for the Greek Language. It’s got sections on Modern, Medieval, and Ancient Greek, with Tools, Bibliographies, Studies, and the like under each; I’m particularly struck by Modern Greek Literature (bibliographical guides to literary journals, Modern Greek short stories, literary translations, anthologies of literary texts, selected studies on Modern Greek literature, issues related to the study of translation, etc.) and Medieval Vulgar Greek Language:

This section of the Portal for the Greek Language is structured around the concise electronic version of the first 14 volumes of the Dictionary of Medieval Vulgar Greek Literature by Emm. Kriaras, Professor Emeritus of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. It is the greatest lexicographical accomplishment in Modern Greece and one of the most important works in Medieval Lexicography worldwide. The concise electronic version (Α – παραθήκη) will be completed in stages, in tandem with the completion of the full print version of the Dictionary.

This section has two chief goals. The first is to offer the student of Medieval Greek a useful set of tools for the study of the language (bibliographies, information on Vulgar Greek texts of the period, a list of relevant web pages, etc.). The second, and equally important, goal is to help the secondary school educator teaching the subject by providing an opportunity to present the evolution of the Greek language more comprehensively with the help of the language exercises and the other online dictionaries available through the Portal for the Greek Language.

Terrific resources; thanks, Peter!

Jo Caird writes for JSTOR Daily:

Only thirty-two full-length Greek tragedies have survived into the modern age. Written by just three men, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, these works represent a tiny fraction of those that would have been performed at the grand theater festivals of ancient Athens, beginning in the fifth century BCE. Of the more than 300 known tragedies from that era, the vast majority exist only as fragments, tantalizing glimpses of imaginative worlds that remain frustratingly out of reach.

Or maybe not. Although just half a scene and a handful of broken lines are all that remain of Cresphontes, a revenge tragedy by Euripides, the British theater company Potential Difference has put the play at the heart of its latest work, Fragments. Set in the papyrology department of a fictional university, the play (on tour in the UK until May 13) centers on a trio of papyrology scholars attempting to decipher the drama of Cresphontes from a handful of badly damaged scraps of text. As they do so, the ancient drama comes to life around them through puppetry and song. […]

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A recent Avva post (mostly in Russian) links to an essay by Jaspreet Singh Boparai (who “recently abandoned academia to cultivate the Muses”) about translation between Latin and Greek and between both those classic tongues and English; he has many interesting things to say (“Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day”), finishing up with a piquant anecdote about Reginald Foster (see this LH obit post), and I recommend the whole thing, but I’m going to excerpt the same bit Anatoly did, where he translates “Lorem ipsum” into English:

‘Lorem Ipsum’ is a piece of text that looks like Latin but is in fact gibberish. […] At first glance this has the feel of an authentic Classical text because it is in fact a scrambled version of a passage from De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (1.32–3) in which Cicero discusses the mistaken idea of scorning pleasure whilst extolling pain. A difficult passage even before scrambling, because (as is so often the case with Ciceronian philosophical texts) it is easy to lose the thread of the argument, once you tire of how long the sentences are. This makes it a perfect template for nonsense.

At the time this was sent to me, I had not yet read De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum. This ignorance was a Godsend: it meant that within twenty minutes I was able to produce the following:

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley’s always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien.

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