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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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Back in 2011, I posted The Bilingual Advantage, featuring a NY Times interview about “how bilingualism sharpens the mind”; now it seems that was hooey. Emily S. Nichols, Conor J. Wild, Bobby Stojanoski, Michael E. Battista, and Adrian M. Owen have a new article in Psychological Science (Volume 31, Issue 5; https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976209031) titled “Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages: A Population Study of Executive Function in 11,000 People”) whose abstract says “We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors.” Here are some salient passages from the article:

In this study of 11,041 participants, no reliable differences in executive function were observed between monolinguals and people who reported speaking more than one language. First, when we created matched groups to eliminate confounds that may be masking an executive function advantage in bilinguals, and to ensure that our groups met the criteria for being either monolingual or bilingual, we found no significant group differences. Second, when utilizing the entire (large, though unbalanced) data set, we found that only one task, Digit Span, showed an advantage in performance in bilinguals. Although this result is statistically significant, it is important to put it in perspective: The regression coefficient was 0.05. In real terms, this means that, statistically, speaking a second language is associated with better memory for digits, but that difference is one twentieth of 1 standard deviation. […]

These results demonstrate that, across a broad battery of cognitive tasks of executive function, no systematic differences exist between monolinguals and bilinguals. […]

We conclude by emphasizing, however, that despite the fact that no meaningful relationship was found between bilingualism and executive function, the broader social, employment, and lifestyle benefits that are available to speakers of a second language are clearly numerous.

I’m glad they added that last paragraph to ward off despair!

I won’t say “the tooter the sweeter” is the oddest entry I’ve ever encountered in the OED, since I’ve seen some doozies, but it certainly took me aback:

‘The sooner the better’: used as a comparative of toot sweet adv., typically to intensify a preceding use of the positive form.

1917 Punch 5 Dec. 389 (caption) Tommy (to inquisitive French children): ‘Nah, then, alley toot sweet, an’ the tooter the sweeter.’
1919 H. M. Kramer With Seeing Eyes viii. 143 So when one heard the whistle of a bomb he ‘hit the ground’, to use a soldier expression, ‘toot sweet—and the tooter the sweeter’.
1960 N. E. Jacob Search for Background iv. 54 There’s a message from your dad, to go to Mr Oswald’s office as soon as you get here. As we used to say in the first war—the tooter the sweeter.
2000 Scotsman (Nexis) 2 June 16 Greetings, mine honest tapster..furnish me toot sweet—and the tooter the sweeter—with a pint of your finest industrial-strength sheep dip.

I mean, it’s a jolly phrase, but since when has the OED been including jolly phrases in its lexicon? Why isn’t it s.v. sweet? But I’m glad to know about it, and I thought I’d pass it on.

Ryszard Szopa writes about a fascinating use of the annoyingly ubiquitous ChatGPT:

When I was a kid, I used to invent languages. […] My 9 years old son, Rysio, has inherited the predilection for language creation. However, he has the good fortune of living in a different era. Thanks to YouTube channels like NativLang and LangFocus, he has access to a wealth of linguistic knowledge, which he uses to create more elaborate and creative languages. His latest creation is Kłeti (pronounced “kwety”). His design goal is to create a language whose grammar would not mimic any languages he knows well, like English or Polish. He also strived to use as many sounds as possible. […]

I absolutely love engaging with my son’s creations. Part of me feels like I should become fluent in Kłeti as quickly as possible. However, the language is very different from the Indo-European languages that I am familiar with. For example, Kłeti has a sentence structure that is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb), while all the languages I know have a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence structure. Additionally, Kłeti uses specific connectors to link nouns, verbs, and adjectives together, again: not a feature an Indo-European speaker would be familiar with. Furthermore, Kłeti has a different approach to forming questions, showing possession, and indicating plurality. All of these differences can make it surprising and challenging for someone with an Indo-European language background to learn and use Kłeti. […]

Despite my son’s age-inappropriate impressive linguistic knowledge, properly documenting Kłeti seemed to be beyond his current abilities. As a result, it seemed like the language might only exist in his imagination, along with the glossary and some example sentences he put in a Google Doc.

But here’s the thing: we’re living in a time when things that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago are now at our fingertips. In April 2023, we decided to take advantage of this fact by giving ChatGPT a run for its money. As an afternoon project, we decided to teach it Kłeti. […]

ChatGPT didn’t quite learn to translate from Kłeti to English (it kept making mistakes). In our rather non-scientific test, it scored a hair above 50% (6.5/12). Are we disappointed? Let’s put this into perspective. We gave the model a completely new invented language and no explicit description. The language itself was designed with the goal of being complex, and GPT needed to extract most of the description of the language from a super tiny parallel corpus (a handful of sentences, literally). It got to the point where it was able to do ok translations in one directions, and almost passable translation in the other. All this in a lazy afternoon’s time work (assuming you have a child who has already invented a language for you, of course). That is mindbogglingly amazing (regardless of whether we are talking about a human being or a model).

The details of the attempt are well worth reading. Thanks, Michael! (For an LH discussion of conlangs, see this 2009 post.)

I’m reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2012 novel Лавр in Lisa Hayden’s superb translation as Laurus, and I’ve come across a passage that seemed eminently Hatworthy. Our hero Arseny, a 15th-century village healer, has gotten enough renown for his success that his patients in Belozersk are giving him plenty of money (Christofer is the grandfather who raised him and taught him about healing herbs):

Arseny used the money to buy several small books that he chanced upon: they described the healing properties of herbs and stones. One of them was a doctor book from abroad, and Arseny paid the merchant Afanasy Flea, who had visited German lands, for a translation. Flea’s translation was extremely approximate, which limited opportunities for using the book. Arseny employed the book’s prescriptions only when they coincided with what he knew from Christofer.

By following along as the merchant read the unfamiliar symbols and translated the words they composed, Arseny grew interested in the correlations between languages. Thanks to the story of the confusion of tongues, Arseny knew of the existence of seventy-two world languages, but he had yet, in his whole life, to hear a single one of them beyond Russian. His lips moving, he repeated the unaccustomed combinations of sounds and words to himself, after Flea. When he learned their meanings, it surprised him that familiar things could be expressed in such an unusual and—this was the main thing—awkward way. At the same time, the multitude of opportunities for expression entranced and attracted Arseny. He tried to memorize correlations between Russian and German words, along with Flea’s pronunciation, which probably did not correspond to authentic German pronunciation.

The enterprising Flea quickly noticed Arseny’s interest and offered to give him German lessons. Arseny readily agreed. Essentially, these new lessons were nothing like the usual notions of teaching, because Afanasy Flea was unable to say anything intelligible about language in general. He had never thought about its structure and certainly did not know its rules. At first the lessons consisted of nothing more than the merchant reading more of the doctor book aloud and translating it. These language lessons differed from their previous translation sessions only because at the end of each section, Flea asked Arseny:

Got that?

This allowed the merchant to charge Arseny a double fee: for translation and for lessons. Arseny did not begrudge the money so he did not grumble. He valued Afanasy Flea as the only person in Belozersk familiar to any degree with speech from abroad. Understanding that he would achieve little by merely reading the doctor book, Arseny decided to make use of one of his instructor’s undeniable merits: Flea possessed a good ear and a tenacious memory.

During his time spent on lengthy trips in the land of Germany, Flea had mastered phrases to be uttered in various situations and could repeat those words when asked probing questions. Arseny described these situations for Flea and asked what to say in those cases. The merchant (this is so easy!) waved his hands around, surprised, and reported all the versions he had heard. Arseny wrote down what Flea said. When he was alone, he put his notes in order. He extracted the unfamiliar words from the expressions he heard from Flea and registered them in a special little dictionary.

I presume he will make use of this knowledge later in his travels. The novel is delightfully cavalier about historical accuracy (the author calls it «неисторический роман» — “an unhistorical novel”); there are occasional dips into the future (at one point someone quotes the Little Prince: “For what you have tamed, you become responsible forever”), and the language mingles Ye Olde Church Slavic with modern colloquialisms in a pleasing way which Hayden renders with perfect pitch (her equivalents for “бля” are a master class in themselves). She even comes up with a spectacular equivalent of the pun in “Корова (что в вымени тебе моем?)” (an allusion to the Pushkin poem “Что в имени тебе моём” ‘What is in my name for you,’ with в вымени ‘in udder’ substituted for в имени ‘in name’): “The cow (how shall I udder your name?).” Highly recommended!

The Russian original is below the cut:
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I’m reading Alexander M. Martin’s brilliant Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855 (it’s been on my shelf for several years now, and I’ve been saving it as a treat), and I’ve gotten to this passage on p. 80 (he’s discussing Gerhard Friedrich Müller’s article on Moscow [pp. 182-94] in “Russia’s first geographic dictionary”):

Absent is almost any reference to the people of Moscow. “The people” was no alien topic to Müller. He spoke excellent Russian, and few knew the country as he did. He had traveled vast distances on his decade-long Siberian odyssey, and had written extensively on Siberian ethnography; the very word ethnography originated as a calque of a term, Völker-Beschreibung, that Müller coined in his writings on Siberia.

The etymological claim of course intrigued me, but the OED (entry updated March 2014) just says “after German Ethnographie (1767 or earlier).” Martin references the statement to Han Vermeulen’s “Von der Völker-Beschreibung zur Völkerkunde: ethnologische Ansichten von Gerhard Friedrich Müller und August Friedrich Schlözer,” which is available on academia.edu, but I refuse to give those people my e-mail address. So if anybody is already signed up with them and wants to check what Vermeulen says on the subject, or happens to already know something about the history of the word, I will be grateful for more information.

Peter Tarras has started a blog Membra Dispersa Sinaitica whose first post has the usefully descriptive name A Blog Dedicated to the Dispersed Manuscript Heritage of Saint Catherine’s Monastery:

1. “The history of the Sinai library till the second half of the nineteenth century is mostly a history of its despoiling”. The Soviet Byzantinist Vladimir Beneshevich (1874-1938) made this statement as early as 1911. At that point, scholars were only just beginning to get an idea of the extent of this “despoiling”. Moreover, the manuscripts of the Sinai library were still to be traded in Egypt and also in Europe and North America. St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai incontestably holds one of the world’s most important collections of ancient manuscripts. Only a few days ago, the news went through international media that Grigory Kessel (Austrian Academy of Sciences) has discovered a rare fragment (image 1) of one of the oldest Bible translations whose text (not the manuscript itself) dates back to the third century CE. The fragment originated from St Catherine’s Monastery, but is now kept in the Vatican Library. It is only one of the huge, yet elusive number of manuscripts to which Beneshevich drew attention. These are Sinai’s dispersed manuscripts – membra dispersa sinaitica. This blog is dedicated to their history. […]

3. I came across a Sinaitic fragment outside Sinai for the first time in 2016 in the Bavarian State Library, Munich (MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod.arab. 1071; image 2). It belongs to a Christian Arabic parchment manuscript, probably written in the 9th century CE and containing biblical and theological texts. I got to see its parent codex at St Catherine’s Monastery in March 2017 (MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 155, image 3). When I started researching its provenance, I soon learned that this manuscript’s “biography” (object-life) was connected to a staggering amount of other Sinaitic manuscripts outside Sinai. I also learned that long before me others, including Grigory Kessel, had already dedicated themselves to the painstaking task of reassembling dispersed Sinaitic manuscripts.

4. This work not only consists in joining fragments, but also in uncovering provenance history. A more recent awareness across philological disciplines of just how inseperable issues of provenance are from the meaning of written artefacts stored in modern western institutions has given rise to new approaches towards the study of manuscripts as bearers of text and material entities. These recent developments in manuscript studies, together with the fact that since 2016 I had collected notes on dispersed Sinaitic manuscripts (primarily Arabic ones), their collectors, and their former and present holding institutions, gave rise to the wish to bring this material together somewhere.

Via a FB post by Slavomír Čéplö (aka bulbul). A valuable project — I hope it continues and thrives.

Amory Tillinghast-Raby writes for Scientific American (archived) about an interesting story of numeral creation:

In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm. […]

The Alaskan Inuit language, known as Iñupiaq, uses an oral counting system built around the human body. Quantities are first described in groups of five, 10, and 15 and then in sets of 20. The system “is really the count of your hands and the count of your toes,” says Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock, who taught with the Kaktovik numerals in Utqiagvik, a city 300 miles northwest of where the numerals were invented. For example, she says, tallimat—the Iñupiaq word for 5—comes from the word for arm: taliq. “In your one arm, you have tallimat fingers,” Pollock explains. Iñuiññaq, the word for 20, represents a whole person. In traditional practices, the body also serves as a mathematical multitool. “When my mother made me a parka, she used her thumb and her middle finger to measure how many times she would be able to cut the material,” Pollock says. “Before yardsticks or rulers, [Iñupiat people] used their hands and fingers to calculate or measure.” […]

The Kaktovik numerals started as a class project to adapt the counting system to a written form. The numerals, based on tally marks, “look like” the Iñupiaq words they represent. For example, the Iñupiaq word for 18, “akimiaq piŋasut,” meaning “15-3,” is depicted with three horizontal strokes, representing three groups of 5 (15) above three vertical strokes representing 3.

“In the Iñupiaq language, there wasn’t a word for 0,” says William Clark Bartley, the teacher who helped develop the numerals. “The girl who gave us the symbol for 0, she just crossed her arms above her head like there was nothing.” The class added her suggestion—an X-like mark—to their set of unique numerals for 1 through 19 and invented what mathematicians would call a base 20 positional value system. (Technically, it is a two-dimensional positional value system with a primary base of 20 and a sub-base of 5.) […]

Now support from Silicon Valley is helping to reignite the Kaktovik numerals. Thanks to efforts by linguists working with the Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, the numerals were included in the September 2022 update of Unicode, an international information technology standard that enables the digitization of the world’s written languages. The new release, Unicode 15.0, provides a virtual identifier for each Kaktovik numeral so developers can incorporate them into digital displays. “It really is revolutionary for us,” Judkins says. “Right now we either have to use photos of the numerals or write them by hand.”

There are very useful illustrations at the link, as well as much more about history and use. Thanks, Eduardo!

Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Britain at War with the Asante Nation, 1823–1900: “The White Man’s Grave” by Stephen Manning (Pen & Sword Books, 2021), and the post Foundation of the Asante Nation includes this etymology:

The name Asante seems to have derived from a special red clay the people sent to the dominant tribe, the Denkyira, as a form of payment or tribute of allegiance. The Akans call clay ‘Asan’, therefore the Asantes were differentiated from others with the name ‘Asan-tefo’, or those who dig clay.

Of course this aroused my curiosity, so I googled and discovered there is an alternative version, presented by Wikipedia thus:

The name Asante means “because of war”. The word derives from the Twi words ɔsa meaning “war” and nti meaning “because of”. This name comes from the Asante’s origin as a kingdom created to fight the Denkyira kingdom.

That sounds very much like a folk etymology to me, but of course the same could be true of Manning’s; anybody know more about this? (Wiktionary says “From Twi asànté,” which isn’t much help.)
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