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Len Pennie is a Scottish poet who “became known on social media in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland for her ‘Scots word of the day’ and poem videos”; she also has longer Instagram videos such as Scottish people might not know about Scots, and theres a reason! and Quite a long, rambly explanation of what’s going on! There’s probably nothing that would surprise the average Hatter, but they’re delightful and would be good introductions to the topics for your curious friends.

Similarly, Elizabeth Harris (YouTube channel) has charming videos about sign language, e.g. “What happens if you lose your arm? Like, your whole arm?”

Thanks, Sven!

I had barely started Andrew O’Hagan’s LRB review (archived) of Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (ed. Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley) when I was pulled up short by a word in the second paragraph (my bolding):

Growing up, I worried I didn’t have the requisite gear with which to launch myself as a leader of tomorrow’s people. I set great store by the small things I did have – a tape recorder, a digital watch – though I worried that Kafka probably didn’t have a gonk pencil-topper with crazy hands jiggling under his chin when he was writing The Castle.

What was “gonk”? A quick googling produced the Wikipedia article, which described them as “novelty toys and collectibles originating from the United Kingdom in the 1960s” and said their “signature features include a small, spherical body, a furry texture and two googly eyes.” Then I tried the OED, and their entry (from 1972) had such splendid citations I had to post them:

Etymology: Arbitrary formation.

The proprietary name of an egg-shaped doll. Also attributive.

[…]
1964 Spectator 29 May 726/1 Those neckless dolls called—I think—gonks, which witless adults are said to give to other adults.
1964 Daily Mail 2 Sept. 4/3 Gonks..are those nasty, expensive, fat balls of felt and rag that are squatting all over our houses and toy shops.
1964 Daily Tel. 11 Sept. 17/3 The principal of a technical college said.. ‘..We had one with what I believe is a “gonk” cut. His ears were invisible and you could just see his eyes and nose peeping out from under shoulder~length hair.’
[…]
1969 A. E. Lindop Sight Unseen xiv. 120 Her hair had degenerated into a gonk style.

I’m pretty sure I’d never seen or heard the term; apparently it’s one of those UK things that didn’t cross the pond. (Are gonks still a thing?)

Beth of The Cassandra Pages (which recently passed its 20-year mark — congratulations!) has posted about an unusual opera:

Saturday night we drove out to Pierrefonds, a western suburb that is still on the island of Montreal, to see Albertine en cinq temps, an opera adapted from Michel Trembley’s 1984 play of the same name, with music by Catherine Major, and is a production conceived, created, and carried out entirely by women. It tells the story of a Montreal woman, Albertine, who has had a difficult life, and at age 70 is spending her first night in a nursing home. She talks with her earlier selves — Albertine at 30, 40, 50, and 60 – as well as her sister, Madeline – and the story of her life is revealed through their conversations. Albertine’s history mirrors the history of many Quebec women who were unable to find much freedom in their lives, and were deeply affected by patriarchal and religious attitudes. Interestingly, too, the story of her life takes place on rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine, the exact part of the city where we used to live ourselves.

Albertine en cinq temps is also the first opera ever produced in Quebec to be written and performed in Joual. This is a Quebec dialect of French that was spoken mainly by the working class and is now a source of Quebec identity; many of its words have entered the main language as Quebec slang, but for those of us who didn’t grow up hearing or speaking it, it can be really hard to understand. One of my close friends, Catherine St-Arnaud, who I sang with in the cathedral choir, sings the role of Albertine at 30 and has been part of the production team bringing this opera to life. She sent us a bilingual libretto to read beforehand, in French and English, and there were projected sur-titles, but because the French was all in dialect, it was a little tricky, as well as being fascinating to a word nerd like me.

And check out her gorgeous art at the link! The libretto has vanished from the ATMA site, but if you’re lucky you can read the cached version here; if not, you can try this page, where it’s inextricably mingled with a Czech translation. (We’ve discussed joual a number of times, e.g. in 2016.)

Johnson’s Economist column A new language textbook in Mexico has caused a brouhaha (Apr 12, 2023; archived) is delightfully sensible:

One letter does not normally cause controversy, yet a single squiggle has set the Spanish-speaking chattering classes to nattering. A new textbook issued in Mexico seemed to bless a non-standard ending on second-person singular verbs in the past tense: dijistes (you said), with an extra “s”, rather than the standard dijiste, and so on with other verbs. The squabble is instructive, and well beyond the Hispanophone world.

For critics, the sin was twofold. First, the textbook “approved” a usage that, though widespread, is not the official form, which is to say approved by the Royal Spanish Academy and observed by most Spanish-speakers (especially in writing). The second misdeed was that Mexico’s education authorities, by acting alone, threatened the unity of the Spanish-speaking world.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reacted with his own hauteur, saying that critics were trying to tell ordinary people to “speak physics” rather than in their natural way. He even played, as is his wont, an indigenous-versus-European card, saying that the Spanish spoken in Mexico “has to do with the roots of ancient cultures”.

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Carina Chocano writes for the New Yorker (archived) about Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo; for a longish article about a language-teaching company, there’s surprisingly little about language, but here are some relevant bits:

Von Ahn briefly considered retirement. “But only for a second,” he told me. “I get really bored.” Instead, he began a new project, Duolingo, which is now the most frequently downloaded education app in the world. Originally, he envisioned it as another Janus-faced project—a Web site that would help people learn foreign languages while simultaneously using their work to translate online texts. It evolved into something else, a smartphone app that offers language lessons as a series of bright, colorful, addictive games. But it remains, under the hood, an exercise in human computation. Like all of the work von Ahn is known for, it is an investigation into not only what we can learn from machines but also into what machines can learn from us. […]

Von Ahn grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Guatemala City with his mother and his grandmother. His mother, Norma, was the youngest of twelve children, and also one of the first women in Guatemala to earn a medical degree. […] When Luis arrived, Norma continued with her program of optimization. “I spoke to him from the time he was born,” she told me. “I think people don’t realize how important this is, but that’s how they acquire language.” By the age of two, she said, Luis spoke perfect Spanish, so she started to speak to him in English. She sent him to a Montessori school. His teachers told Norma that Luis liked to walk around the classroom explaining things to other kids. […]

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I not only enjoyed this 1915 quote from Basil Gildersleeve (courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti) for its own sake, I learned a flamboyant and possibly useful word from it:

To come back to my Tauchnitz Aischylos. Like all men of my time, I own a number of these old Tauchnitz editions; and some of them are a joy to me, notably the Aristophanes, by reason of their faulty texts, showing as they do the advance of textual criticism just as the old Variorum editions give evidence of the progress achieved in exegesis. Both may be made to serve as adminicles to the work of the Greek Seminary. The veriest novice can be taught by these old Tauchnitz editions to restore the readings of the best MSS., to correct the false spellings, the bad forms, the abnormal syntax—an encouraging exercise in the art of handling texts.

OED (entry updated December 2011):
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Alexander Wells writes for the European Review of Books:

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS. […]

Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German. Knowing the contours of this dialect is no small part of my editing work. Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier.

The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German. The other day my friend S., an American Berliner, said that he had noticed his English-language social circle starting to use the word « spontaneously » wrong. When Germans say they’ll organise a social event spontan, they mean they’ll work out the details at short notice. To socialise spontaneously, in English, means something rather different. But S. and I and our Neukölln friends have started using it in the sense of spontan. « OK cool text me Sunday and we’ll choose a place spontaneously. » This error is becoming part of our little language, our ultra-local dialect, just among us.

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Medical Xpress has a report (no author named) on how “Speech rhythm and pitch are fundamental in babies’ language acquisition”:

Language acquisition is a complex process that requires different neural and cognitive skills since early childhood. One of children’s big challenges in language learning is to distinguish the words that are grammatically linked to each other, even though they hear one word after the other.

We can easily understand that in the sentence “She, who never drinks coffee, sleeps more,” “she” is the subject to the verb “sleep,” just like in the—easier—sentence “She sleeps well,” although the first sentence has many words in between the subject and the verb. However, how does a child’s brain cope with having to find regularities between the words that are separated from one another in a sentence? Since there are many words that could go together, it seems impossible to keep track of them all.

To date, it was thought that babies could not recognize these distant regularities in speech signal until their first year of life. Now, a study published in the journal Science Advances reveals that 9-month-old babies are sensitive to non-adjacent grammatical regularities contained in language components. The conclusions of the study highlight the importance of prosody—rhythm, melodic stress, pitch, pauses, etc.—that eases the babies’ language learning process.

The study is led by Ruth de Diego Balaguer and Ferran Pons, lecturers at the Faculty of Psychology and the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBneuro). Researchers Anna Martínez Álvarez and Judit Gervain, from the University of Padova (Italy), participated in the study as well.

The study itself is here; I find this stuff fascinating, and I look forward to follow-ups. Thanks, Bonnie!

Miranda Wollen writes for the Yale Daily News about a welcome new course offering:

Yale has informally offered Indigenous languages as part of the University’s curriculum for over seven years through the Native American Cultural Center and the Directed Independent Language Study program, but this fall marks the first time that studying one will fulfill the language distributional requirement. Patrick DelPercio, a Cherokee language instructor at the University of Oklahoma, will join the University’s faculty to teach a lecture course focusing on Cherokee language and culture.

“Other home speakers can take heritage language classes at Yale, but not Indigenous students,” Director of Undergraduate Studies of Linguistics Claire Bowern told the News. “Particularly for Indigenous students, it seemed very out of place that one can do one’s language requirement by studying languages from all around the world… except the Indigenous languages of the Americas.” […]

Bowern noted that the limited documentation and archival material which exists on Native peoples is often held within the walls of the very institutions which have historically excluded those communities. She pointed to the Belonging at Yale Initiative’s emphasis on curricular reform. “We don’t want to lock things up in archives and make it difficult for the communities whose cultural heritage they are to have access to those materials,” she explained.

I once wanted to learn Cherokee; it’s probably too late for me, but I’m glad Yale is now offering it (and I’m pleased to feature Claire Bowern, once a fellow linguablogger, at LH again).

Unrelated, but this is driving me crazy and I’m hoping some learned Hatter can help: I’m trying to find the Greek original of the Chrysostom prayer that includes this passage in the Church Slavic version: “и да не на мнозе удаляяйся общения Твоего, от мысленнаго волка звероуловлен буду.” I’m citing it from Последование к Святому Причащению, under “Молитва иная, иже во святых отца нашего Иоанна Златоустаго, 2.” It’s translated here as “lest I stray far away from Thy flock, O Master, and become caught by the wolf of souls” and here as “that I may not by long abstaining from Thy communion become a prey to the spiritual wolf.” But even though his Opera Omnia from Migne’s Patrologia Graeca are online, I have failed to locate anything that corresponds to ‘second prayer for communion/Eucharist’ (I tried googling [Χρυσόστομος προσευχές για τη θεία κοινωνία]). Any assistance gratefully received!

Update. Xerîb has found the Greek original, which can be seen (with parallel English translation) here under ΕΥΧΗ Γʹ (Ἰωάννου τοῦ Χρυσοστόμου) [THIRD PRAYER of Saint John Chrysostom]: καὶ ἵνα μή, ἐπὶ πολὺ ἀφιστάμενος τῆς κοινωνίας σου, θηριάλωτος ὑπὸ τοῦ νοητοῦ λύκου γένωμαι. Excellent detective work!

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti posts this inspiring quote from Toynbee’s A Study of History, Vol. X:

Professor H.W. Bailey (natus A.D. 1899), a philologist of world-wide renown who in A.D. 1952 was the Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, had awoken to consciousness as a child on a farm in Western Australia; and it would be hard to think of a more unpromising environment than this for producing a savant in the field of Oriental languages. The virgin soil of a recently colonized terra nullius exhaled no folk-lore to play the part of those local legends that had put Heinrich Schliemann, in his Varangian village, on the track of buried treasure; but the local human environment in Western Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era did provide Harold Walter Bailey with the equivalent of the Universal History that had given the decisive turn to Heinrich Schliemann’s life when it had come into Schliemann’s hands on Christmas Day, 1829. The books that descended from Heaven upon the boy on the West Australian farm were ‘a set of seven volumes of an encyclopaedia (eagerly devoured) and four other volumes with lessons in French, Latin, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Later came Arabic and Persian, out of which Persian took the lead (joined later to Sanskrit)’.

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