I’ve made posts involving the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis many times (the first post dedicated to it was in 2003), but I can’t help responding to this long Aeon piece by James McElvenny, “a linguist and intellectual historian” (which I found at MetaFilter). It starts off:
Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?
In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.
There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?
The only acceptable answer to that last question is “No, it couldn’t.” But McElvenny — apparently more intellectual historian than linguist — doesn’t see it that way; he wants to teach the controversy, and expends many many paragraphs in going through the relevant history (“The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century”) while slipping in sly digs at the position pretty much universally held by actual linguists. Here, for instance, is a paragraph on Indo-European:
The hypothetical progenitor of this great family, Proto-Indo-European, has been lost to time, but elements of its vocabulary, grammar and sound system can be reconstructed from the traits of its descendants. Crucially, these are all aspects of the ‘outer form’ of languages – and the linguists who investigated these outer forms preferred to describe the historical transmutations they studied in terms of ‘sound laws’. Sound laws are mere statements of fact, that a sound attested in a certain phonetic environment in a parent language changes into other sounds in its descendants. Such accounts avoid invoking any hidden, underlying explanatory principles. Most comparative-historical grammarians believed that, for linguistics to be considered a serious science, it must limit itself to solid, objectively observable data. Uncovering the inner life of languages, capturing their characters and connections to thought and culture, were at best seen as future tasks for a thoroughly grounded science of language. At worst, they were taken to be nothing more than idle metaphysical speculation.
Note the dismissive “outer form,” the contemptuous “preferred to describe,” the haughty “mere statements of fact,” and the suggestion that “the inner life of languages” is what’s truly important. This is balderdash. All that the remaining linguistic relativists have been able to come up with in terms of verifiable evidence is the kind of thing I mention in this 2010 review of Guy Deutscher (“no matter how you slice it, the effects that our native language may have on how we think are too subtle to be sexy in the way Whorf’s vasty theories were”). The whole piece is an exercise in “I want to believe”; I just hope it doesn’t mislead too many people. (Once again I wish that the basic facts of linguistics were taught in school, so that people wouldn’t be so susceptible to the appeal of snake oil.)
I’m surprised at McElvenny, who I presume is the same bod as does the interviews on the podcasts at hiphilangsci. He always seems quite sensible there,
Actually, I don’t think the article is all that bad, though it seems surprisingly muddled. I don’t see that typology has much to do with Sapir-Whorfery, really, for example.
Yes, and needless to say I have no problem with tracing the history of linguistic ideas, so long as you exhibit some sense of what’s what. “Some say fire comes from phlogiston, some from oxygen…”
It’s true that if you learn a second language then you soon notice differences which can’t be reconciled. Like English speakers have hands at the ends of their arms but speakers of Slavic languages describe this relationship quite differently. And English speakers have the little word “the”; a Polish woman I worked with (who spoke perfectly good English) told me she had given up trying to learn how it worked.
Whether all of these things can be explained by “hidden, underlying explanatory principles” or “the inner life” of a language, well, I would like to see that explanation. Not just hand-waving about it. I don’t mean to say those phrases are obvious bunk, because for example the human body is made up of many random-looking parts but there are underlying biological principles which tend to explain those parts and their relationships.
[My second paragraph seems to have been deleted, probably by me by accident, after Hat replied: I was saying that tracing the history of linguistic ideas is McElvenny’s particular thing.]
@Paul Clapham:
Languages most certainly divide the world up differently; but the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”*, at least in its “strong” version, which is most often what is meant, proposes that languages divide up the world in ways which are forever intrinsically incommensurate. There is no reason to believe this, and a good many reasons not to.
“Language” is perhaps the wrong target of this idea; a better question might be whether different societies work on principles so different that mutual understanding is simply not possible, no matter how much effort is put in. This (I reckon) is either trivially true (I myself have considerable sympathy for Sunni Islam, but I am never going to convert to Islam, so I will never know what is it is actually like to be a Muslim) or evidently false. People are good at building bridges, when sufficiently motivated to do so. (Otherwise the human race would already be extinct.)
* Scare quotes because Sapir didn’t hold it; I don’t think even Whorf did, in the form usually foisted on him.
the linguists who investigated these outer forms preferred to describe the historical transmutations they studied in terms of ‘sound laws’.
1. “-ed”? They still do.
2. Among the linguists who worked on those scare-quote sound laws scare-unquote are one E. Sapir and one B. Whorf, who first rigorously established the historical linguistics of Uto-Aztecan.
3. What does that have to do at all with linguistic relativity?
It is true that the Neogrammarian approach, for all its beauty and rigour, can never capture everything of significance for even historical linguistics, let alone the whole field of linguistics. Not even Bloomfield-style structuralism can be a magic wand to explain the whole of Language. (Of Chomsky, we do not speak.)
But it’s weird to oppose the Neogrammarian stance to so-called Sapir-Whorfism; I think what’s gone wrong with this article is the imposition of an outer/inner dichotomy to structure the whole narrative, which leads to bizarre things like putting Greenbergoid typology on the same side as “Sapir-Whorf” in opposition to Structuralism. I’m pretty certain that McElvenny himself knows better than this: it’s a side effect of a bad choice about how to structure the article for a lay audience.
That’s actually a gross overstatement. One-to-one translation is often possible – often in surprising places. Consider AmEng waste : garbage : trash; this series, with all its stylistic connotations & stuff, corresponds 1 : 1 to the Austrian Standard German series Abfall : Müll : Mist.
And for this particular equivalence there’s not even an explanation in cultural contact or suchlike. For many others there is – Christianity has worked hard to translate body : soul : spirit across the world –, but in this case there’s not.
(This example is also an example of the limits of 1 : 1 translation, however. I’m not at all sure that BrEng rubbish fits into this series at all; and in most of the German-speaking area Mist means exclusively “dung” as far as I’m aware.)
Eh… sound laws are always minimally presented as mere statements of fact, as regular correspondences between observed facts, just like the laws of physics; but it is very common for historical linguists to explicitly propose mechanisms for the historical changes that have caused such correspondences – the ones they’re proposing in the same paper as well as ones that have been known for 200 years – based on what is understood of how the perception and/or production of language work and don’t work.
It does not even seem to have occurred to McElvenny that such mechanisms might have nothing to do with the “characters and connections to thought and culture” that languages have.
Uncovering the inner life of languages, capturing their characters and connections to thought and culture, were at best seen as future tasks for a thoroughly grounded science of language.
Aren’t PIE scholars go on and on about wheels and horses and such-like, connecting them to thought and culture?
Sapir (wise man that he was) said upfront that the causes of sound change are unknown: which is a pretty good place to start. He certainly didn’t link them to culture.
Christianity has worked hard to translate body : soul : spirit across the world
One of my own hobby-horses, of course. I persist in thinking that the Kusaal Bible translators could have learnt something about their own concepts of soul and spirit by trying to refactor the relevant concepts into Kusaasi ideas about what constitutes a person; instead, they lost the opportunity by simply forcing the Kusaal words to be used as calques of the English terms. I must admit that it would have been very difficult to do it properly: but not impossible in principle.
Incidentally, I doubt if your average churchgoer could give any very coherent answer to the question “what exactly is the difference between ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’?” The proper conclusion to be drawn from this is that the question is actually not very important at all …
calques
Following a long tradition. What is a holy “ghost” anyway? And why does it take three wotsits to make one thingummy?
“Ghost” and “spirit” have actually swapped places with one another in English since the seventeenth century. Don’t ask me how that’s even possible: but they have, anyway.
(If you find out how it’s possible, let me know: it may shed light on how the Bugum subgroup of Oti-Volta has contrived to swap high tones for low and vice versa.)
Three wotsits have always made a thingummy. It’s just how wotsits and thingummies are. Speak to the management about it if you have a problem with it. I’m just the messenger here.
@AntC: And why does it take three wotsits to make one thingummy?
You realize you’re going to heck for this, don’t you?
@DM: What is, in your mind, the difference between garbage:trash (and Müll:Mist)? I can’t think of a distinction.
The Arians thought you could have a thingummy for only one and a half whatsits.
Athanasius quite rightly denounced them as cheapskates.
You realize you’re going to heck for this, don’t you?
That was destined from a long time back. The charge-sheet is extensive.
AFAICT penalties don’t apply until The Last Trumpet — by which time I’ll be dead.
Teeth will be provided!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2016/may/10/pray-vicars-jokes-sermons-clergy-humour-church
Was that “Rev. Paisley” Ian Paisley? Because he must have already gnashed through several sets by now.
I presume so.
Though I hold no brief for his views, many of which I deplore, he was a distinctly more interesting and complicated character than the way he was presented in the English media, which liked (as ever) simple stories of goodies and baddies, and shared the characteristic English belief that all history should be forgotten after a couple of weeks (unless it was about the Battle of Britain.)
Few English know that a major impediment to the UK Government’s attempts to mediate was Paisley’s adamant refusal ever to sit down at table with Protestant paramilitaries.
Incidentally, I don’t agree with the Grauniad article. Humour in itself is fine in sermons (though most preachers should indeed be tactfully made aware that it’s not their strong point.)
there’d better be teeth! some of us have to tunnel all the way to jerusalem.
Oh, come on, Grauniad. When are you going to ascribe this quip to Churchill? A more probable story is here. I cannot find a free access to the supposed source “An Amusing Agraphon” (Catholic Biblical Quarterly 12 [1950] 439-449).
Consider AmEng waste : garbage : trash; this series, with all its stylistic connotations & stuff, corresponds 1 : 1 to the Austrian Standard German series Abfall : Müll : Mist.
Maybe if you’re speaking about literal refuse but in a wider context it falls apart., «Trash » has a much wider range of meaning than Mist. « Trash « can mean low brow entertainment, sometimes in a positive way, bad for you but fun. « Garbage TV » is just bad. But I have never heard “Dieses Fernsehen ist Müll”. “trash” can of course also be used as a verb, but most native English speakers will tell you it’s the same word, which in their heads it is, even if grammarians tell us differently. A Sapir-Whorfer would probably claim Americans have a slightly more positive response to “Trash” than “Austrians” do to “Mist”, even ignoring the interference of the Standard German meaning in most educated Austrian’s minds.
But even literally it doesn’t work. For me “taking out the trash” evokes images of putting kitchen refuse into large bins sitting in the garage in an American suburb, or dragging said bins to the sidewalk for weekly pickup , or dumping a black trash bag into a metal New York City garbage can. “Den Mist rausbringen” evokes bringing sorted much smaller bags of garbage down to the red lidded and / or yellow plastic bins in an apartment building.
Of course many native speakers of both languages won’t agree with me entirely- which points to another issue where Sapir-Whorf falls apart. How is it that native speakers will often disagree on shades of meaning? Language meaning seems to me clearly driven by experience and memory, it is a much more flexible and less precise tool than Sapir-Whorf proponents admit.
It doesn’t actually say that everybody, or possibly even anybody, must gnash their own teeth. There will be some teeth, and they will gnash.
Autoteeth.
there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another
DM is, of course, absolutely right that this is an absurd overgeneralisation (though, to be fair, the statement need imply only that there is never a complete one-to-one semantic match between the lexicons of different languages, which is true enough, although hardly surprising.) And there are interesting systematic exceptions, too.
One of the things that struck me in West Africa is how completely genetically unrelated languages often show close semantic matches in lexicon with each other, over against SAE. Not just in the kind of shared-culture realms where you might perhaps expect it, either. For example, Hausa shares the “work”/”send” polysemy characteristic of Volta-Congo from Kusaal to Zulu. I was very struck by this in reading about Shuwa Arabic, which is not (as I once ignorantly supposed) a creole, like Juba Arabic, but a straightforward Arabic dialect: however, striking semantic parallels in Shuwa lexicon and idioms immediately jump out at you if you know any of the nearby languages.
I think Wittgenstein’s ideas about language (unmentioned by McElvenny) are relevant to these questions. Languages live in interaction between people; while it may well be that the form of life of a lion (or a Nagel bat) is so irreduceably different from ours that communication is logically impossible, this can never be so for human beings. We can always invent new language games together.
Even leaving St Ludwig out of it, any discussion of these things is seriously incomplete without at least some nod to what philosophers have said about language and meaning. They haven’t exactly been shy of addressing these issues, and McElvenny must surely know this. But he’d perhaps have ended up writing a book rather than an article if he’d really explored the issues.
Of course many native speakers of both languages won’t agree with me entirely- which points to another issue where Sapir-Whorf falls apart. How is it that native speakers will often disagree on shades of meaning? Language meaning seems to me clearly driven by experience and memory, it is a much more flexible and less precise tool than Sapir-Whorf proponents admit.
An excellent point which I would steal if I had a better memory.
any discussion of these things is seriously incomplete without at least some nod to what philosophers have said about language and meaning.
This, on the other hand, I disagree with, though my disagreement is, well, driven by experience and memory. If I had been exposed to better philosophy, I might sign your petition, but in my experience philosophers who have discussed language have done so on the basis of entire ignorance of what linguists have said about language, which means they have no idea what they’re talking about.
in my experience philosophers who have discussed language have done so on the basis of entire ignorance of what linguists have said about language, which means they have no idea what they’re talking about.
I find it rather difficult to follow what linguists say about language, even at a very general level. “They” apparently say all kinds of mutually contradictory things. For this reason and others, some of those things are contradicted by people on this blog, who themselves do not always agree with each other.
A charitable explanation I find for this is that each linguist may have an idea what he/she is talking about, but only a strict subset of other linguists have the same idea.
A similar explanation serves well in other areas I know something about, such as IT, philosophy and reality.
This may sound detached and “behaviorist”, and so it is. It’s one way to keep your sanity when all about you are squabbling over what’s right and what’s wrong. What I just called “explanation” is for me primarily a description, to which I have added a bit of traditional assumptions about “motives” and what “have an idea” may mean, in order to make the description palatable for others.
@David M. and/or Vanya: In the Austrian variety of German does “Mist” *not* mean dung/merde/poop/etc., or does it have a “trash” sense in addition to that sense which is not found in most other varieties of German?
I echo hat’s dismissiveness re what the philosophers bring to the table – my primary takeaway from the standard-analytic-canon-philosophy-of-language class I took in my last semester as an undergraduate (spring ’87) was that most of these famous-in-the-philosophy-world dudes appeared to know less about the phenomena of natural human language than anyone who had successfully gotten through the basic intro class (Ling 110a w/ Larry Horn) that I’d taken five semesters previously.
More later. For now just:
A very good point.
It does also mean “dung”, but I used to think that was a euphemism. Seriously, it took the Latin root cognates to convince me.
Like… a cattle farmer’s dungheap is called Misthaufen, but so is the entirely excrement-free compost heap in your grandparents’ garden, and they’ll call it that.
@Hat, JWB:
I know what you mean: I was recently re-reading some of Austin’s stuff, and was very struck by the linguistic naivety: specifically, the parochialism of supposing that the analysis of what are simply peculiarities of English semantics (in many cases) could lead to deep philosophical insights. (All the odder, as Austin was himself highly competent in Latin, Greek, French and German at least.)
But this is not really what I had in mind. I was thinking of a more general problem: how does any kind of language connect to the world of facts? How does (any) language mean things at all?
This is a more abstract problem that the semantics which is familiar core part of linguistics, and is not usually addressed by linguists because it really doesn’t have a lot of bearing on what they actually do. For most practical purposes, linguists can happily ignore all this: even linguists with an interest in pragmatics or sociolinguistics.
However, these issues do arise when people start wittering about how language inevitably limits what we can understand about the world – limits the very possibilities of our understanding – as the “strong” form of “linguistic relativism” most certainly does. (Incidentally, Chomsky, tagged in the McElvenny article as a Bad Guy because he’s uninterested in diversity, as opposed the the structuralists, who are interested in the Wrong Kind of diversity – apparently – is a strong proponent of the idea that language imposes a hard limit on our potential understanding of the world: he just holds this doctrine with regard to all human language.)
When you get into this sort of territory, it is the linguists. not the philosophers, who are out of their depth and prone to make foolish errors from sheer ignorance of prior work in the field. (Chomsky is actually a prime specimen of this: the fact that he gets away with it is because so few linguists know enough about the philosophy to call him out on the nonsense he spouts. There are some: Esa Itkonen for example; and Geoffrey Pullum on the logical and set-theoretical side. Conversely, the fact that Chomsky gets the occasional honourable mention as an “Analytical Philosopher”, even by non-cultists, reflects the fact that philosophers who know little about linguistics accept that he is a Great Linguist, and therefore worthy of serious consideration even though he apparently thinks his work is “Cartesian.”)
I second Hat and J.W. Brewer: I have attended a lot of talks by philosophers over the years, belonging to different schools, talking about different matters, and a common thread was a sort of arrogant ignorance of the most elementary, most basic facts about language and linguistics (Forget about a first year University intro class -ALL of these philosophers would have profited greatly from skimming a little through the more introductory Wikipedia articles on the topic). This ignorance made (and still makes) it utterly impossible for me to take any of them seriously. Whether philosophers are as a rule equally clueless about other fields of study relevant to their own (psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology…) is something I have not examined closely, but what little data I have makes me suspect/fear that the answer is yes.
Returning to the core topic of this thread: one thing most studies on the subject seem to have trouble with is the difficulty in establishing a distinction between cultural differences involving two or more different speech communities on the one hand, and on the other demonstrating (or even making a dimly credible case) that said cultural differences are caused by (rather than correlated with) different languages. And as any historical linguist or competent typologist could point out, there are plenty of languages which share various striking similarities with one another, and yet whose speaker communities are poles apart by any culture-measuring metric, something all too many investigators into the language/culture link have either conveniently forgotten or never knew in the first place…
One issue which linguists and other scholars (cognitive scientists, for instance) seem not to have examined in this light is one which I think is fascinating: How great is the overlap between the set of all possible human languages on the one hand, and the set of all the world’s *known* languages on the other? I am thinking of core semantics and morphosyntax here, not of more superficial features such as phonology and vocabulary. I suspect the world’s known languages cover far less of the total range of possible human languages than most scholars, including most linguists, believe. If philosophers cannot understand the issue, so much the worse for philosophy…
Philosophy should theoretically be one of the most difficult of all fields of study, because it should require one to have a decent grasp of every other field of study to provide a basis for one’s musings on how the world works. In practice, philosophers seem to feel that all they need is a grounding in the history of philosophy plus a lot of Deep Thinking.
How great is the overlap between the set of all possible human languages on the one hand, and the set of all the world’s *known* languages on the other?
I think that from a theoretical standpoint this is unanswerable, because of the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of “possible” in this context. We just don’t know what the constraints are anything like well enough to even have a ball-park guess.
The evidence of the languages that have survived the Big Expansions of Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic etc etc and the ongoing major extinctions at least shows plainly enough that what seems like an outright impossibility based on data so far can very easily turn out to be just a chance gap.
(However, I still think that in entertaining the strong form of linguistic relativism, linguists have left the realm of actual linguistics, no matter how verdant it may prove to be, and are trespassing on epistemology, without having undergone the necessary survival training. The fact that they didn’t notice the warning signs at the border will not save them from the Philosophical Jabberwock.)
I think by now every typologist knows that they have a very skewed sample of what is possible, or even of what has existed over the history of human languages. Presumably everyone in the business knows about Pullum, Derbyshire, and object-initial languages.
A further interesting question is why it is so skewed. I’m thinking here of the kind of “universal” which more modestly expresses itself in terms of “nearly always” or even just “much more often than not.”
Admittedly, some of these may again be just an artefact of the sample reflecting sheer historical accidents, but that seems unlikely to explain everything. Why do we have so very few OSV languages? Were they once as common as SOV, and it’s pure chance that most of them have gone? Or have there never been all that many, comparatively? If so, why? Or is there something maladaptive about OSV languages? Do they have a strong tendency to change to other constituent orders over time? Why would that be the case?
These sorts of questions are difficult, but I don’t think they’re intrinsically intractable.
Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?
Notwithstanding the “even”, the second clause actually represents the opposite extreme to the first one. On the former account, a language is the consequence of a way of thinking; on the latter, it is its cause. Most writing on Sapir-Whorf mixes up these two sooner or later, even though the former is obviously somewhat true and the latter obviously mostly false. Conceptual differences are certainly not caused by lexical differences, but are supported by them. Simply hearing the word “phoneme” or “exponential” doesn’t give you any insight into the concept it refers to, which is certainly not innate; but no speech community can maintain such a concept for long without using a fixed word/phrase for it. This should lead us to expect Whorfian-looking differences between individuals to be more important than ones between languages, and there was a beautiful cognitive science paper a few years ago that found just that in the case of colour terms across a sample of English and Persian speakers; wish I could remember the reference.
It doesn’t. Most often, Mist is simply a somewhat milder version of the expletive Scheiße.
I was recently re-reading some of Austin’s stuff, and was very struck by the linguistic naivety
Same here. In particular a paper on “Pretending” by himself and Anscombe. Excruciatingly playful donnish fiddle-faddle.
Oh well, better to be disabused than abused.
Most often, Mist is simply a somewhat milder version of the expletive Scheiße.
Yes.
Anyone who thinks “Teeth will be supplied” refers to dentures holds obviously heretical views on the subject of the resurrection of the body, and can therefore safely be ignored.
I don’t know about that. We are to be raised incorruptible. Incorruptible teeth could easily be dentures. These are deep waters …
Incorruptible teeth could easily be dentures.
Oh dear …
In any case, nobody’s going to be raised with a glass eye.
Probably not. Our sources are silent on the matter.
Maybe we got the zombie apocalypse wrong all that time – the bodies in various states of decay are the resurrected, and the non-zombies are the ones “left behind”… Zombieland is the kingdom of Heaven…
A new heresy is born! (LanguageHat should be credited in the founding documentation …)
What’s the Greek for “zombie”?
When zombies are mentioned, I am contractually obligated to link to the Mekons.
Je suis le grand zombie …
Lameen, is this the article?
A cognitive study of colour terms in Persian and English
Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 32 (2012) 238 – 245
1877-0428 © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the 4th International Conference of Cognitive Science
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.01.035Available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com Procedia
Social and
Behavioral
SciencesProcedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2010) 000–000
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
4th International Conference of Cognitive Science (ICCS 2011)
A cognitive study of colour terms in Persian and English
Mohammad Amouzadeha
, Manouchehr Tavangar a
, Mohammad A. Sorahia,*
[2nd try]
Lameen, is this the article?
A cognitive study of colour terms in Persian and English
Mohammad Amouzadeha
, Manouchehr Tavangar a
, Mohammad A. Sorahia,*
Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 32 (2012) 238 – 245
Neither Sapir nor Whorf believed in unbridgeable gulfs of understanding, the entire aim of their work in linguistics was literally to build those bridges. It is sad that so many “linguists” fail at actually reading what they wrote and try to understand what they meant, preferring to fence against easily dismissable caricatures instead. Too bad McElvenny seemingly chooses to perpetuate that caricature (perhaps for rhetorical purposes) and thereby make an easy foil for pseudo-engagements with the debate.
Stephen: no; the main author was a woman with an Iranian name at a California university, IIRC. I really ought to track it down later.
Magnus: well put. “Unbridgeable” is such a straw man.
a beautiful cognitive science paper a few years ago
Maryam Hasantash and Arash Afraz (2020) “Richer color vocabulary is associated with better color memory but not color perception”?
Xerîb: that’s the one! So it was the editor who was in California, not the author. Thanks!
Magnus Pharao
If it requires academic linguists to bridge the understanding gap, doesn’t that imply that a stronger version of the Sapir/Whorf is correct?
With considerable trepidation (cf ref [25]) I suggest the interest of
Syntax-semantics interface: an algebraic model
Matilde Marcolli, Robert C. Berwick, Noam Chomsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06189
(see for ex Fig 4 p 32). I think it’s fair to say that I think the model proposed there, which may look bizarre to many interested Hatters, is a serious effort toward communication with our Robot-Overlords-To-Be, but I worry that the kind of philosophy/technology behind the model may be so unfamiliar as to make it hard to scry.
[In the paper the underlying model for semantics is (roughly) a Borgesian library of terms organized in terms of planar (not abstract) trees, perhaps reminiscent of the etymologies of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage
program. I am not a linguist; please excuse overreach while grasping for reference points in a very large landscape. At the moment such hypothetical datasets remain to be populated, but the Shoggoths of LLM will surely be able to fill them overnight…]
I looked at the Wikipedia article on Epistemology and encountered this:
Introductory classes to epistemology often start their analysis of knowledge by pointing out three different senses of “knowing” something: “knowing that” (knowing the truth of propositions), “knowing how” (understanding how to perform certain actions), and “knowing by acquaintance” (directly perceiving an object, being familiar with it, or otherwise coming into contact with it).
This was followed by the observation that “While these distinctions are not explicit in English, they are explicitly made in other languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, German and Dutch”, with examples from a number of European languages showing the differences. The fact that the sample is confined to European languages doesn’t invalidate the point, but it certainly betrays an unconscious linguistic parochialism. If they’d thrown in Kusaal I might have sat up and taken more notice…
Actually, Kusaal doesn’t make this distinction. It’s not very idiomatic to say you “know” a person, for example; you’d be more likely to say that you knew who they were, or that they were a friend or neighbour, but you can say that. Kusaal distinguishes “knowing that” and “knowing how” much like English: same verb, followed by different subordinate clause types. It is of course nonsense to say that in either English or Kusaal the distinction is not “explicit”: it’s completely explicit, just not reflected in the choice of verb. No normal L1 speaker has any trouble understanding it at all: it takes a philosopher to find the matter confusing.
Kusaal makes a different distinction, in line with the local norm of verbs being arranged around aspect: “know” as an ongoing state of affairs is mi’ (with a corresponding negative verb zi’ “not know”, because why not?); these verbs have no perfective, for which you have to use baŋ “come to know, find out.”
Eskimo languages have no verb “know”: you have to say the equivalent of “not be ignorant of.”
Negative epistemology!
I have now read the Aeon article. I didn’t find any problem with it, on a quick reading, at least. The section that Hat decried, the description of historical linguistics, is not slipping in sly digs at the position held by linguists at all. It’s merely pointing out that 19th-century linguists were concerned with looking at the facts of language with a scientific eye rather than following romantic Humboldtian concerns like “the genius” of language. And from what little I remember about Gabelentz, he truly was concerned with issues like “manifestations of the national mind”, in a way that reeks of 19th century nationalism and Western colonialism. Typology as it later emerged quite rightly steered clear of this kind of nonsense. Perhaps the article is “muddled”, as DE suggests, but it’s trying to trace in historical terms the idea that languages have a particular “genius” (that word again), that human language is the expression of a particular national (or racial) mindset. Perhaps the problem lies in his tendency to equate this to the idea that there are innately unbridgeable gaps between speakers of different languages (a kind of extreme Sapir-Whorfism that he does not seem to believe), but I find this more interesting than offensive.
As a footnote, I always find it interesting to read 19th century stuff that is the direct predecessor of much modern science and feel its racist Western underpinnings.
Syntax-semantics interface: an algebraic model
Matilde Marcolli, Robert C. Berwick, Noam Chomsky
The mathematics is thoroughly beyond me, but the underlying assumptions about how language can mean seem to be a version of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_theory_of_language
obfuscated in the classic ANC manner by clothing it in mathematics intended to be impenetrable to potential critics from the linguistic side, and appealing to mathematicians with no understanding of the linguistics apart from what the Master has vouchsafed to them; one suspects that his co-authors assume he states the definitive position on all such matters ex cathedra.
As a paid-up acolyte of St Ludwig (after he repented and saw the light), I feel that the entire argument is based on Chomskyite sand. Somewhat discoloured sand, too, but let’s not go there.
This abstract of McElvenny’s article on Georg von der Gabelentz’s typology: Humboldtian linguistics on the threshold of structuralism shows exactly what he’s talking about. Gabelentz was the first to use the term “typology” with regard to linguistics.
The whole book, The Limits of Structuralism: Forgotten Texts in the History of Modern Linguistics, looks rather interesting. (Separate comment to avoid the spam filter.)
Georg von der Gabelentz’ Classical Chinese grammar is a thing of beauty.
(His name always makes me think of Anne of Green Gables …)
@ DE, thanks, I wasn’t aware of this circle of ideas: `the underlying assumptions about how language can seem to be a version of the picture theory of language….’.
I’m pretty sure the MBC model is not concerned with meaning – as opposed, for ex, to efficient parsing, embedding, recursion, etc – по моему it’s a kind of abstract operating system for a Babylon-sized Chinese room. The technical burden is heavy and the math is reasonably avant-garde but its difficulty is not obfuscation or bad faith. The motivating problem is about pinning down what MERGE is supposed to be doing in the first place.
I think the paper is significant, but I bring it up here because I fear its opacity may lead to misinterpretation of its intentions — though others’ intentions, like pictures they have in their heads, are tricky to access. The issue is teaching machines to converse with us, as opposed to hoping they can explain to us how use language, where they are perhaps out of their depth.
@jack: The issue is teaching machines to converse with us, as opposed to hoping they can explain to us how use language, where they are perhaps out of their depth.
I call this the Proleptic Machine Syndrome. Similar to the Stockholm Syndrome, it is an unconscious attempt to forget that you are at the mercy of others, or might be. It works by leveraging sympathy for those who hold you hostage, or who you think might come to do so.
It sounds as if in your case the seed of sympathy is: “the technical burden is heavy and the math is reasonably avant-garde”. What a challenge, things can’t be so bad after all !
Negative epistemology!
A handmaiden of apophatic theology.
its difficulty is not obfuscation or bad faith
Not on the part of the first two authors; the last named, however, has form in this.
I am happy to accept that the paper uses the word “semantics” in a technical (or Pickwickian) sense which does not relate to meaning as we know it.
A handmaiden of apophatic theology
Indeed.
The knowledge that can be known, is not the true knowledge
The theology that can be spoken, is not the true theology
The meaning that is meaningful, is not the true meaning
The bicycle that can be ridden, is not the true bicycle
That reminds me irresistibly of The Language Thing (Or: Heidegger made dense):
#
So, let’s leave aside the question of how the history of language develops. On a smaller scale, Heidegger certainly thinks that language isn’t merely how we experience the world, for he rejects the idea that we start out with two poles: the world and our perception. No, for him the world is what shows itself to us, and it shows itself to us in the as-ness of language. Language is the house of being. It’s also the floorplan of being, and the wallpaper and matching sofa of being.
#
@Stu Clayton: It’s consistently amazing to me how Heidegger could take Husserl’s* ideas, write about them at much greater length, and somehow make them shallower.
* I was going to mention Kant’s ideas here as well, but I’m actually not sure Heidegger was really that much more verbose than Kant, although he was still definitely shallower.
@ Stu, I Am Not A Philosopher, but :
the world is what shows itself to us = what we make of it ? , and it shows itself to us in the as-ness = apt-ness ? of language. Language is the house of being; It’s also the floorplan of being, and the wallpaper and matching sofa of being.
Indeed; and the Unconscious is the WiFi of being, and upon the kitchen table of being the teapot of being distends with nectar.
I prefer to stress the assness of language.
Ukimnyima punda adesi utampugnuziu mashuzi
Google translate doesn’t seem to know how to say donkey fart…
@jack: the Unconscious is the WiFi of being, and upon the kitchen table of being the teapot of being distends with nectar.
Now you’ve got the idea ! But what is nectar doing in the teapot ?
Google translate doesn’t seem to know how to say donkey fart…
I usually take Sparky-the-dog with me when I go to the pizzeria. When I’ve finished eating, I pull him up on my lap for a snooze while I drink up my coffee. That’s how I learned that he thinks we’re at a puzzaria.
The Sicilian cook provided me with the word, but it’s not the one I find in Pons for Furz. Maybe it’s puzza in Sicily ?? The cook doesn’t look the delicate sort, but I have noticed that he sometimes seems a little embarrassed by my discoarse.
But this is Germany, and a pizza place to boot. If I can’t be coarse here, where then ?
@ Stu
the nectar abides
the nectar abides ((in its being) in the teapot)
The grammar is ambiguous:
the nectar abides ((in its) being in the teapot).
Sometimes that is written “being-in-the-teapot” in order to stress the existential modality or state in question.
Is that Kant’s in-Teekanne-sein?
J’ignore pourquoi.
@ Stu
“being-in-the-teapot” : A genuine pancake, a koan for Policeman Mac Cruiskeen and St Ludwig to discuss in that big seminar in the sky…
“being-in-the-teapot”
Dormouse.
The name of the song is called, the nectar in the teapot is being the dormouse; and the tune’s my own invention.
Peter Grubtal: No, it is the job that any translator or bilingual individual does on a daily basis – what Whorf called “calibrating” systems that are incommensurable. The fact that we all know that things can be “lost in translation” demonstrates that there is a degree of linguistic relativity – the semantic and grammatical coordinate systems are not fully commensurable (but can be calibrated by doing extra work). All linguists trying to demonstrate and describe diverse languages must find a way of doing this.
Sapir and Whorf’s work was to show us that we cannot simply use the categories established by European grammarians to describe other systems for organizing meaning. Modern work in typology works to overcome this by creating a metalanguage that incorporates a broader scope of diversity of linguistic systems.
The “strong version” was from the outset a strawman, that no-one in linguistics have seriously argued for (it has had an uptake in pop-science with Stuart Chase, Alfred Korszybski and “Neurolinguistic programming”). Language use channels thought in certain ways, but does not determine it. All of Whorf’s Hopi collaborators were bilingual, and could explain how Hopi dealt with temporality in English – so the systems were obviously commensurable. And having learned Hopi, which has a different way of organizing temporality in grammar than English does, did not render them unable to learn the English way of organizing time. But to express the English categories of time in Hopi, Hopi speakers had to either translate them into their near equivalents or introduce new concepts into their language. (Also do note that it is also a myth that Whorf considered the Hopi to have no concept of time, he literally wrote an entire paper on what he called “tensors” in Hopi – his point was that the system for marking it was *different*)
David Eddyshaw wrote: “No normal L1 speaker has any trouble understanding it at all: it takes a philosopher to find the matter confusing.” Brilliant!
John McWhorter has been doing his part over the years (in his books, and the Lexicon Valley podcast) to dispel strong Sapir-Whorfism to a general audience.
(I was once an avid reader of this site, but had neglected it in the past year, until today when I stumbled on languagehat’s circa-2006 refutation (in a different forum) of the idea — still marring the Online Etymology Dictionary — that “guitar” and “sitar” are related. They are not. Okay, fine — the OED (no, not THAT OED) says they’re “perhaps” related. No, they aren’t.)
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…
It is of course nonsense to say that in either English or Kusaal the distinction is not “explicit”: it’s completely explicit, just not reflected in the choice of verb.
I think the thing to be said is that while in English the verbal constructions are explicitly different, the nominal construction is not: knowledge is ambiguous between Wissen and Kenntnis — the latter of which is itself ambiguous between the verbs kennen and können.
His name always makes me think of Anne of Green Gables
Whereas he always makes me think of the Goblins who will get you if you don’t watch out. Such is the difference between the visual and the auditory aspects of language.
i would read Anne of Green Goblins in an instant! (though i’m not sure i’d trust a filmed version from the CBC/Netflix/Marvel-Disney collaboration that i imagine it would involve)
I may have mentioned this before, but I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when it came out. i gave up when I realized that I was plodding through the zombie apocalypse sections, waiting for them to hurry up and be over, so I could get back to the parts written by Jane Austen.
@ Brett : The movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies_(film)
was better than I expected…
No, it’s specific to kennen. For können you have a choice between, uh, Können and Fähigkeit “ability”.
Well, en.WP gives several definitions of Kenntnis, one of which is ‘knowledge gained through study or practice’.
So ‘mastery’.
So an anglophone thinking about what knowledge means is unlikely to see all by themselves that it is divided into what one kens, what one wist, and what one can (do). (As Kipling doesn’t quite say, “What do they wit of England who only England ken?”). And this is the Sapir-Whorf effect in action: when different meanings are subsumed into a single word, it takes conscious effort to see them as different. (Furthermore, as mentioned further down on that page, Quechua has distinct verbs for ‘ken a person’ and ‘ken a place’, unlike any European language I know of.)
Another example that comes to mind because it used to appear quite a bit in my own life is I’m sorry ‘I sympathize’ vs. I’m sorry ‘I apologize’. When I said the first, Gale would often hear it as the second, and say ‘You have nothing to be sorry for’. Now that it’s too late for further evidence, I wonder if she actually didn’t use I’m sorry in the first sense.
Arrgh. The “</a>” should be after “doesn’t quite say”. This is the nth time lately that I haven’t gotten a post-posting edit window; is anyone else suffering from this problem?
The Hausa gafara (evidently from Arabic, but I’ve never been able to find the exact Arabic form it’s based on) has much the same sort of dual meaning, as does the borrowed Kusaal gaafara. Though it’s more “excuse me, forgive me, pardon” than “I apologise”, I think, which makes the duality even more striking.
Ghanaians speaking English are particularly prone to say just the one word “Sorry!” purely to sympathise, which used to cause me the odd doubletake, for example when I tripped over my own feet and people said “Sorry!”
Wiktionary on Hausa gafara.
That’s what I mean. The actual Arabic root is easy to identify: it’s the precise Arabic word underlying the loan that isn’t.
There is no chance of Hausa /ga:fara:/ being a simple borrowing of the Arabic word /ɣafr/. Wiktionary has no idea.
[Apropos of nothing much, I was just once again noticing that almost all Hausa loanwords in Kusaal must have been borrowed before Agolle Kusaal was affected by a pervasive process of word-internal tone spreading, which is now evident throughout the inherited vocabulary. I wish Urs Niggli’s description of tone in the Toende dialect was better: might give a way of actually dating the tone changes, or at least pinning them down in time a bit.]
divided into what one kens, what one wist, and what one can (do)
and at least sometimes, what one reckons (which i’ll admit has really only become part of my idiolect because of its yiddish cognate – though dovid katz’s grammar only includes “kenen” and “visn” in its semantic note on “know”).
“Know-how”, except more highfalutin’. “Learned skill” in an abstract way.
That happens when the innertubes are clogged; just refresh the page, perhaps after waiting for a minute.
That’s what I mean.
Indeed. If it came over straight (and recently), then it’d be perfect tense, right? Doesn’t one repeat a relevant verse of Ya-Sin (27) to seek forgiveness (from God), too?
As I say, it’s not an obscure root (and even if it were, there are plenty of Hausas whose Arabic is well up to borrowing obscure vocabulary, anyway.)
It’s the long vowel in the first syllable that’s the main problem, and more generally, just what exact form of the root it is drawn from.
Also, on the whole, Hausa words from Arabic are (unsurprisingly) not directly borrowed from finite verb forms, but from derived nominals (with which, of course, Arabic is abundantly provided.)
A startling exception is yarda “agreement”, which is supposed to be from يرضى yarḍá “he is satisfied.” I was just reading something that explained that this comes from a familiar Arabic formula, and I stupidly forgot to bookmark it. I can’t remember what it was now.
However it got from Arabic exactly, the form is found all over now: Kusaal yadda “trust”, Fulfulde yerd- “agree”, Humburi Senni yèddà “agree”, Tondi Songway Kiini yɛ́rrɛ̀ “consent” …
(I should perhaps explain that gafara in Hausa is a feminine singular noun. There is a verb gafarta “pardon, forgive”, but that seems to be straightforwardly derived from the noun by known intra-Hausa methods. It has the long vowel in the first syllable too.)
(What I’m hoping here is that Xerîb or Lameen will swing by and make everything clear …)
I see that Skinner’s Hausa Comparative Dictionary has
Which at least gives a noun with a long vowel, although it doesn’t seem to directly answer your question.
Well, that’s the masculine singular present participle of the basic form of the Arabic verb. I agree, it doesn’t really get you any further.
Skinner’s “<" Is cheeky (and nonsensical.) He doesn’t even try to give a pathway from “man who forgives” to “act of forgiveness.” I suspect he didn’t even see the necessity (any more than he would have seen any need to account for the vowels of the second and third syllables too.)
But Skinner didn't really "get" historical linguistics, despite devoting so much labour to it. Weird. Some people just seem to be etymology-blind.*
https://languagehat.com/tongue-as-metaphor/#comment-4567690
* Unfortunately, not a few such people write etymological dictionaries. Perhaps this is in some way connected with the (alleged) tendency for electricians to be colour-blind.
the (alleged) tendency for electricians to be colour-blind.
I get the joke ! “They get their (color-coded) wires crossed.”
To complicate matters yet further, Heath’s dictionary of Humburi Senni gives yà:fà as the local Arabic loan for “excuse, forgive”; he chastely ascribes it to the Arabic root *ʕfw, but doesn’t say anything about the initial y. (Tondi Songway Kiini has yá:fɛ̀.)
That one surely goes with Hausa yafa /ja:fa:/ “forgive.”
Apart from concluding that evidently nobody in the Western Sudan did any forgiving of anybody at all before Islam came along, I don’t know what to make of this.
[I’ve just remembered that the “Tondi” bit of Tondi Songway Kiini “Mountain Songhay Speech” may actually be a loan into Songhay from Oti-Volta,]
Mysteriously, Wiktionary attributes to what is presumably the very same Arabic root the Arabic عَافِيَة ʕāfiya “health”, which has been even more widely borrowed, e.g. Hausa lafiya. In fact it’s the basis of the usual way to greet people in a whole lot of West African languages:
Kusaal Alaafʋ bɛ! “Hi!”
Can’t see the semantic connexion between “obliterate, pardon, excuse” and “health”, myself. But then, THIS IS ARABIC! (in which, everything is semantically connected.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D9%81%D8%A7#Arabic
Can’t see the semantic connexion
Here is Lane and maybe it’s that God erases former misdeeds / poor health.
It just occurred to me that to do justice to the conceit of the Teach Yourself series, of which some here will have a few volumes, we should be saying things like “I remember teaching myself …” or even “I taught myself …” “… that this is what a woman says when entering (instead of salamu alaikun).”
I must say that the explanation that “health” is so called because it is the result of God “erasing” all diseases strikes me as a desperate attempt to avoid the conclusion that we’re really dealing with two quite different roots which just happen to be homophonous. Mediaeval Arab scholars were no doubt just as prone to this as modern linguists.
On the other hand, the root that certainly originally meant “empty” in Western Oti-Volta (e.g. Kusaal nɛɛr “empty”, nɛɛm “for nothing, for free”) ended up meaning “beautiful” in Mooré (neere); evidently beauty is in the eye of the beholder …
(I think the intermediate step was probably “clear”; in fact, possibly even the underlying original meaning, if Kusaal nɛi “be awake” is from the same root, which is possible from the form, even if difficult semantically. The inchoative derivative nie < *nɛɛgɪ does actually mean both "wake up" and "reveal, bring to light.")
They create a desolation/emptiness and call it "beauty." Or "health", after all, I guess. Very Zen.
Again, maybe the Mossi just find wokeness attractive. I can see that.
And of course English shows the same association working in the opposite sense: “sad”, from Old English sæd “full.”
Another one of the same pattern: Sergio Baldi, “On some loans in Fulfulde”
So careful about the tone and which r. But just an Arabic headword.
Their Dictionary of Arabic Loanwords in the Languages of Central and East Africa goes further in inflecting the Arabic a bit, but without obviously (to me) linking to the loanword under discussion.
Even more WA languages in Dictionnaire des emprunts arabes dans les langues de l’Afrique de l’Ouest.
Yaġfara is actually subjunctive. Shoot the copyeditor!
All these follow the usual Semiticist convention of actually giving the 3rd sg perfective and misleadingly translating it as an infinitive (but I’m sure you knew that.)
In Kusaal, incidentally, you actually don’t use gaafara for asking permission to enter a dwelling [knocking is right out: it’s just for robbers seeing if anyone is in.]
You say (kabir) kabire!, which has to be a loanword on phonological grounds, and is presumably just the Mooré noun kábrè “pardon, excuse.” (Kusaal has back-formed a verb kabir “ask admission” out of it.)
The Mooré itself looks vaguely similar to the gaafara word, but I think that’s just coincidence. The -re is a common noun class suffix, and there are other derivatives from the stem kab- in Mooré, like kabse “ask admission.”
A lot of these polite words seem to be widespread loans. The usual way to ask actual forgiveness in Kusaal is to say (not gaafara but) Dim suguru “Have forbearance!”, where suguru seems to be yet another loan, from Mooré súgrì. Kusaal has back-formed a verb out of that one too.
Just noticed that Urs Niggli’s nice Mooré dictionary actually has yàafá “forgiveness, excuse”, too: the other one of these regionally popular Arabic loans. He attributes it to Hausa: he’s often wrong about the origin of loanwords, but I would think he’s right in this case, in the first instance, anyhow.
No sign of that one in Kusaal, though.
Nice Mooré proverb in the dictionary under sugri:
Sugr n kae tɩ yell sãame.
“It’s when there is no forgiveness that things are screwed up.”
Pretty sure Bisa kabré is from Mooré, and not from the gaafara word at all, despite what the Dictionnaire des emprunts arabes dans les langues de l’Afrique de l’Ouest claims. There are, unsurprisingly, a lot of Mooré loanwords in Bisa.
I doubt (as I said) that Mooré kabre itself belongs, but there are actually a lot of difficulties with the etymologies of both kabre and sugri when you start looking for Oti-Volta cognates, so who knows?
(The fact that there are derivatives from kab- is not conclusive: they could be analogical formations. The Kusaal verbs kabir and sugur are definitely analogical: there is no trace whatever of a verb-deriving -r suffix in Kusaal.)
Incidentally, if any of you Arabist Hatters out there can think of a plausible Arabic source for sugri “forbearance, pardon”, I would be delighted to hear of it!
I am most definitely not an Arabist; that said, could it somehow have come out of šukriyy ‘thankful’?
DE, I didn’t see anything in your book about loanword phonology. Specifically, how are tones assigned to loanwords?
[statistically significant] tendency for electricians to be colour-blind
i can only really speak for the toronto IBEW local, because that’s where my electrician friends are members, but based on the miniscule number of women in that local i’d estimate the colorblindness rate among electricians to be a bit less than double the overall prevalence.
Given the vowel length and quality, Hausa gafara has to be linked to a form 3 or 6 of the verb. The closest relevant form I can find on Classical Arabic is taġāfar- “forgive one another, ask God’s forgiveness for one another”. Algerian Arabic, however, has a slightly wider range of relevant derivations, including the verbal noun mġafra “mutual (asking) forgiveness (especially for Eid)”. This should correspond to a Classical form *muġāfarah, though I can’t find any evidence that the latter actually exists. I’d therefore guess this is borrowed from a comparable Libyan dialect form.
Incidentally, if any of you Arabist Hatters out there can think of a plausible Arabic source for sugri “forbearance, pardon”, I would be delighted to hear of it!
The Songhay languages seem to have suburi, suuri, etc. (Gao Songhay suuri?) for ‘forbearance’. This looks like Arabic صبر ṣabr ‘patience, forbearance’, verbal noun of صبر ṣabara ‘be patient, be forbearing, bear calmly’ (with the first u vowel in Songhay suburi from the emphatic and the labial b?), or another formation from the same root. Can Mooré get a g out of a labial approximate or something here?
(As a desperate measure to obtain the g, perhaps crossing with a reflex of a derivative of the Arabic root ṣġr, the group of صغير ṣaġīr ‘small, trifling’?)
I must say Ya sabır! (roughly, ‘God give me patience’) to myself twenty times a day in Turkey.
Yaġfara is actually subjunctive. Shoot the copyeditor!
Even worse, the imperfect active indicative has an i-vowel in the classical language: يَغْفِرُ yaġfiru.
@de
On another thread you mentioned the Kusaal word for jackal. Would صقر ‘hawk’ fit as source (with semantic drift hawk > scavenger > jackal)?
Can’t see the semantic connexion between “obliterate, pardon, excuse” and “health”, myself.
We can see the outlines of this connexion in hadith, such as Bukhari 5662 and 6974, and Al-Mu’jam al-Ṣaghīr 1009, and especially Al-Adab al-Mufrad 508.
In the European tradition, we can perhaps see the mirror image of ‘sickness as expiation’ in ‘sickness as punishment’ in the development of the word plague ‘pestilence’ from ‘divine punishment’ from ‘blow’ (Vulgate plaga, Greek πληγή), following the development of Hebrew מַגֵּפָה maggēp̄āh ‘plague, pestilence’ from נָגַף nāgap̄ ‘smite’ (a pestilence being conceived of as a blow struck by the divine as punishment).
I would be interested to learn of other semantic parallels.
Mooré súgrì “forbearance, pardon”: long shot, but could this be Tamasheq a-s-uɣəl, the verbal noun of “give back, return”? If so, it would bring to mind the Arabic development of tāba “repent” from Aramaic tāb “return”.
I didn’t see anything in your book about loanword phonology
Actually, I’m just thinking of adding a bit about that …
The reason I didn’t before is that it interacts with issues of the prehistory of the the Agolle Kusaal tone system, which I decided to omit because it leads to a much simpler synchronic account if you just describe the outcome of all these changes in its own terms.
Anyhow:
Historically, M(id) tone represents original H(igh), while a new H arose from Hꜜ (High followed by downstep.)
There has been extensive word-internal tone sandhi in Agolle Kusaal, governed by much the same principles as gave rise to external tone sandhi, naturally enough (which I describe, again in purely synchronic terms, in section 4.2.)
Basically, ML sequences usually became MH; in cases where this was blocked by the segmental shape of the word (usually because the L fell on a lower-prominence mora), the outcome was instead HL (the sequence ML is in fact disallowed everywhere in Kusaal unless there is an intervening pause.)
So you have e,g, Kusaal (“long form”) fūugɔ́ beside Mooré fúugù “shirt.”
The other tone-spreading rule was that stem-internal non-initial M tones which did not become H (i.e. didn’t precede L or downstep) became L after a preceding L, so you have e.g. *dɩ̀gā ‘dwarfs’ becoming dɩ̀gà.
All these rules apply to Hausa loanwords too. Hausa H maps into Kusaal M, and Hausa L into Kusaal L, and then tone spreading takes place as with native vocabulary, so you have, for example, Kusaal tīlás ‘necessity’ from Hausa tíílàs; Kusaal kɛ̀ɛkɛ̀ ‘bicycle’ from Hausa kèèkéé.
In fact, they apply to other loans too, with the exception of those from English, whose prosodic system is just too alien (English stress gets mapped into a H tone which defies the normal tone sandhi rules.) The only English loans which behave themselves are those which have been transmitted via Hausa, like wādá “law” (from “order”, via Hausa óódàà.)
Come to think of it, that probably means that the relevant tone spreading rules must date only from the colonial period. That actually makes sense, as the internal-sandhi parts seem not to apply to Toende Kusaal, which is not as different from Agolle Kusaal as is commonly supposed (and as I used to think myself.) There are some tantalising suggestions in David Spratt’s work from the early 1970’s that the rules had even then not yet quite finished producing the current state of affairs, too.
@Y, Lameen, Xerîb:
Many thanks!
I don’t think there’s any mileage in trying to get sukri from šukriyy: it’s fine as far as the phonology goes, but the Mooré meaning is never anything to do with thanks.
I like Lameen’s suggestion about gaafara. I think the explanation really has to be something along those lines, viz a non-classical local Arabic derivative from the root. It would be nice to have some direct evidence for one, though.
Both Lameen and Xerîb’s ideas about sugri seem well worth thinking about.
I think I had actually come across the Songhay suuri, but assumed that forms like that had lost g rather than b. There is no regular way of getting a Mooré medial g out of a previous b, but loanwords can do their own thing sometimes, and there are, moreover, actually some odd sporadic alternations in native Oti-Volta words along those lines, like Agolle Kusaal lub “swim” beside Toende Kusaal lugu.
The Tamasheq parallel is interesting too. There are some definite words of Berber origin in Mooré and Kusaal, and if the word is ultimately due to Muslim influence (which really does seem to be the case with all these “forgive” words) it would make Berber influence more plausible, I think.
@Plastic:
I don’t think so. Quite apart from the semantic gap, if Kusaal sakarʋg “jackal” went back to the Arabic “hawk” word I’d have expected it to turn up also in some of the neighboring Oti-Volta languages which show more Muslim influence than Kusaal, and it doesn’t, AFAIK. (Dictionaries often miss words like that, though.)
The reason I didn’t before is that it interacts with issues of the prehistory of the the Agolle Kusaal tone system, which I decided to omit because it leads to a much simpler synchronic account if you just describe the outcome of all these changes in its own terms.
Far be it from me to tell an Oti-Voltaist how to Oti-Volta, but I would guess that if you put the diachronic stuff in a separate chapter, those who (like me and I presume most Hatters) like to know about how things developed would use and appreciate it, while those who don’t could skip it.
Yes, I probably will do something like that.
For a long time, I’ve adopted a rather minimalist presentation in my Kusaal grammar, partly because I felt it was better to offload most of the diachronic stuff that was there in earlier versions into the more appropriate home of Le proto-Oti-Volta pour les nuls. I also found it a good discipline to concentrate on synchrony alone without going into potential diachronic aspects which are inevitably going to tend more towards the speculative. Doing that deliberately has often helped me to see where my account was incomplete or wrong or just gratuitously convoluted.
But this business of loanwords is actually a case where you need the diachronic stuff to account for the synchronic stuff, like it or not. Moreover, I understand the historical Oti-Volta stuff a lot better than I did a couple of years ago, and that sheds light on a number of things in contemporary Kusaal that I didn’t understand before (like -g not in fact being a “reversive” derivational suffix, as it is always taken to be in the literature for Western Oti-Volta languages, and the sad fate of the real reversive suffix in WOV: that actually explains the relevant derivational patterns in modern Kusaal.)
So the diachronic stuff is of more value nowadays in a synchronic grammar than it once was, and deserves to be judiciously reintroduced under licence.
Can’t see the semantic connexion between “obliterate, pardon, excuse” and “health”, myself.
We can see the outlines of this connexion in hadith, such as Bukhari 5662 and 6974, and especially Al-Adab al-Mufrad 508.
And also sort of Al-Mu’jam al-Ṣaghīr 1009.
In the European tradition, we can perhaps see the mirror image of ‘sickness as expiation’ in ‘sickness as punishment’ in the development of the word plague ‘pestilence’ from ‘divine punishment’ from ‘blow’ (Vulgate plaga, Greek πληγή), following the development of Hebrew מַגֵּפָה maggēp̄āh ‘plague, pestilence’ from נָגַף nāḡap̄ ‘smite’ (a pestilence being conceived of as a blow struck by the divine as punishment).
I would be interested to learn of other semantic parallels.
I’ve certainly come across languages in which the conventional good reply to “What’s the news?” is “Nothing.”
(Kusaal is a bit more elaborate: the standard formal answer to such questions is Diib ma’aa “Only food!”; once you’ve said that, you can get on to saying what the news actually is …)
Russian. “How’s things?” “Normal.”
I knew something was niggling at my memory …
Ernst Haaf’s Die Kusase, from way back in 1967, recounts the following call-and-response funeral song for a warrior. It’s a pretty impressive achievement of recording given that no actual linguist had yet studied Kusaal in 1967 and there was no orthography for the language. Moreover, his own translation is almost all accurate (though he has forgiveably missed the fact that the ti nam line is a nominalised clause.)
I give it in his own orthography (except he has it in ALL CAPS):
Which, being interpreted, is:
Perfect day, evidently.
(Actually I’ve cheated a bit: ka yɛl pʋ naamm is more accurately “and no trouble came about.” Yɛl “matter, affair” is usually something untoward.)
Haaf actually renders it “und nichts geschah”, which is what made me remember it, but, as I say, that misses the nuances a bit.
I should also own up to the fact that the song is actually about a hunter rather than a warrior, so it’s not quite as bloodthirsty as it may appear.
The bit about sleeping with women is an allusion to the traditional Kusaasi belief, which seems to be shared with a great many cultures, that you need to abstain from sex beforehand if you want to have a successful hunting expedition.
Haaf was evidently a remarkable person, incidentally. He was a doctor at the Presbyterian Hospital in Bawku, where I later worked. He was only there for a few years in the early 1960’s, but collected a huge amount of accurate information about Kusaasi culture, and he presents many Kusaal words and phrases in his account, almost always readily recognisable and correctly translated.
He was still remembered with affection thirty years later.
Is Anaba a personal name, the name of a house or dwelling, or that of a town or district?
It’s a personal name.
Anaba is the name you give to the sole survivor of twins: it’s from na’ab “chief”, which also means “afterbirth” via a sort of kenning (a chief leaves a house after his retinue.)
The A- part marks it as a personal name, so it’s not “Chief Kusase.”
I’m not sure how to construe the Kusase bit in context, though it must surely be Kʋsaas “Kusaasi.” I think it must be part of the name, though. (Haaf capitalises both parts, “Anaba Kusase”, in his German rendering, too, but he doesn’t give any particulars about whose name it is: presumably the deceased.)
Kusaasi personal names all mean something, but it’s often not obvious why they have been given without knowing the background (I think I mentioned the fairly common name Atiga “Tree” already elsewhere. Other popular given names are “Nail”, “Shrine” and “God.”)
it’s from na’ab “chief”, which also means “afterbirth” via a sort of kenning (a chief leaves a house after his retinue.)
Fascinating! Is this colexification common in West Africa?
I am interested in this because of the problematic history/etymology of the character/word 后 (and its possible inversion 司).
(And also in regard to the typology of Hittite ḫaššu- ‘king’ (see the etymology here on page 245, I hope), and of the Germanic family of English king, and similar things.)
Short comment because I am on the road.
Is this colexification common in West Africa?
Good question!
I don’t know. Never thought about it before …
The answer seems to be No, though.
Mooré has it (nàabá) and Farefare and Dagbani too.
It seems to be usual in Western Oti-Volta, but apparently not elsewhere in Oti-Volta.
It isn’t the only word for “placenta”; all these languages have cognates of Mooré zã̀ré too, but that seems only to be used for animals.
The Dagbani dictionary also has yoli for “human placenta”, which may thus represent the “real” WOV word, but I can’t find any other WOV cognates of it.
Buli has zàrī “placenta”, cognate with the WOV; the dictionary says koalima (“luggage”) is preferred for “human placenta.”
Moba has bāl̀ “placenta”, which looks like bál̀ “chieftaincy” but has a different tone, so it’s not the same word used in a metaphorical sense, at any rate. “Chief” in the Gurma family is represented by cognates of Moba bád̀, which is the same stem as “chieftaincy” but with the agent-noun-deriving suffix -l added (*ll -> d is a thing in Moba.)
Nawdm has bɛ̀̀d̀́ pl bɛra “placenta”, which works, tone and all, as an exact cognate of the Moba (POV *bḛ̂r-rɪ̀.) Nawdm for “chief” is bérmá, which works as a (root) cognate of the Gurma words for “chief”, but can’t be of the same POV origin as the “placenta” series: it would be from POV *bér-.
Mbelime has yōǹbù, and the example sentence in the dictionary refers to a woman: that could be cognate with the Dagbani (and possible “real” WOV) word for human placenta. Nothing to do with kpààtɔ̀ “chief” (which looks like a cognate of the WOV words for “rich man” …)
Other Oti-Volta languages seem to go with words meaning “companion” for “placenta.”
Hausa sarki “chief, king” never seems to be used for “placenta.”
Come to think of it, the Gurma and Nawdm “chief” words look rather reminiscent of the Songhay words for “big” (like Timbuktu Songhay beer.)
Kind of word you can imagine being borrowed from the Imperial Songhay.
I don’t think the timescale can work, though. The Gurma languages are pretty divergent from one another, and they’ve all got this word, and in the form you’d expect by regular development from proto-Gurma. Moreover, the stem seems to have had an Oti-Volta derivational suffix already as a part of it in proto-Gurma. And the vowel length is wrong, too. And Nawdm bermgu actually means “big” too, and it’s hard to imagine that as a back-formation from “king.”
Oh well. Coincidence Happens.
RMW Dixon:
“Across the world, many societies—both large and small—are imbued with the notion of ‘competition’. This can relate to races or other sports, or just to prowess in daily activities. One person tries to be better than another, to win. Naturally, there is then an appropriate stock of lexemes: ‘race’, ‘compete’, ‘win’, ‘lose’, ‘victor’, ‘victory’, and so on. In contrast, there many small egalitarian communities—including both Dyirbal and Jarawara—for which ideas of competition, or winning, or triumphing, are totally alien. They simply lack such lexemes.
“This may also have consequences within the grammar. Chapter 26 describes a wide variety of comparative constructions, along the lines of ‘John is cleverer/taller than Felix’. Languages whose speakers indulge in competition are likely to use a grammar which includes a specific comparative construction, be it mono-clausal (§26.2) or bi-clausal (§26.3.1). By and large, languages whose speakers eschew explicit competition are likely to lack a comparative construction and instead employ a strategy such as ‘John is clever, Felix is stupid’ or ‘Felix is clever; John is very clever’ (§26.3.2).
“I am not suggesting that there is a one-to-one connection between notions of competitiveness and having a comparative construction. Like most linguistic generalizations, we have here a tendency.”
Basic Linguistic Theory. Vol 3 p 441.
Strikes me as either unfalsifiable (because of the vagueness and cherry-pickability over what counts as a relevant linguistic or social feature in this matter) or, well, false.
It’s the kind of generalisation that makes you positively itch to point to counterexamples – which are hardly difficult to find.
Kusaal and Mampruli are indistinguishable on this axis grammatically; but Mamprussi society is traditionally essentially feudal, while the archetypal Kusaasi farmer sees no particular reason why anybody at all should think that they can push him around just because of their social position. Or for any other reason, come to that.
Traditional Igbo society is highly competitive, and there is no traditional aristocracy (they’re practically American.) Traditional Yoruba society is quite different. There is no difference in how the languages express comparison at all.
I don’t think this is essentially any different from all those claims about grammatical gender and the social status of women. The grammatical features involved are inherited by huge groups of related languages, spoken by peoples with totally different societies, many of which have also changed hugely over time despite the language features remaining essentially the same.
If there were any correlations at all, it would just be by plain accident.
I would have thought a culture that values carpentry would be more likely to major in linguistic comparative constructions than a highly competitive society, anyway. “That bit’s too big to fit …”
It is of course difficult to get accurate figures (and dangerous to assume that any internet source you find is working with accurate figures), but it is I think commonly asserted that the Nigerian-American community has a notably higher percentage of folks of Igbo background than does the Nigerian population as a whole. (Obviously it is very common for diasporic populations not to be a statistical cross-section, demographically speaking, of the country of origin, but the details will differ quite a lot.)
Of course, the fact that the Insular Celtic languages have an equative form of adjectives is a sign of our societies’ essentially egalitarian nature, unlike those heathen Saeson with their feudal system, whose language means that they cannot even express the concept of equality without tiresome and unnatural circumlocutions. No wonder they all keep voting Tory …
Oy. Well, it’s not the only foolish thing Dixon has ever said. In the previous page (441) he writes, “But trees in the Jarawara’s forest are considerably taller than in Australia”. Are those trees… competitive??
A map of comparative constructions is here; “conjoined comparative constructions” (gray dots) are the ones Dixon waves off as not comparative constructions at all. The distribution is geographical (Americas, Oceania), which accounts for these constructions among such non-competitive people as the speakers of Māori and Lakhota.
Ed.: A more densely (aha!) sampled map here (yellow dots). As expected, the picture is more complex (aha!!), but the areal tendencies hold.
The maps suggest that Dixon may be generalising unwisely from his own fieldwork experience in Australia and Amazonia. Regional patterns …
The broader problem with comparing socio-economic structures and grammatical structures is that the former can change much, and I mean MUCH, more quickly than the latter.
Thus, the English comparative-marking endings (-ER, -EST) can be traced back to (Late?) Proto-Indo-European, where they broadly had the same function. Yet it cannot be said that the average L1 anglophone today is a member of a wholly non-literate pastoral + nomadic economy, where everyone is a polytheist and human sacrifice routine (Maybe this perception is related to the sort of company I keep, mark you…).
And when, within a given language family, you try to correlate the survival of given grammatical structures/morphemes on the one hand and socio-economic structures, well, the results are much more amusing than illuminating. For example, on the basis of the survival, as a productive morpheme, of the Indo-European comparative adjectival marker, you would have to assume that English speakers today are closer in some socio-economic fashion fashion to Russian or to Farsi speakers than to speakers of any (present-day or older) Romance variety.
So: does any hatter have any suggestions? I cannot (off the top of my head) think of a socio-economic difference that unites anglophones, Russian- and Farsi-speakers in opposition to Romance speakers.
P.S. WALS’s data point on Māori is based on an introductory text for Cook Island Māori, not NZ Māori. In any case, it’s coded wrong. Both languages have a ‘than’-type construction.
Yes, there are all the familiar WALS problems.
I notice that pretty much all of West Africa in tagged as using “exceed”, which is fair enough: Kusaal fits the pattern well enough, for example:
Awin gim gat Atiig.
Awini be.short.LINKER pass.IMPERFECTIVE Atiga.*
“Awini is shorter than Atiga.”
West Africa is, of course, well known to be complete monoculture from the Sahara to the sea and from Senegal to Cameroon …
Or is it???
* The verb gaad (of which gat is the imperfective) means “pass by”, and is perfectly usable as a main verb e .g.
Nannanna o gaadya.
“Now he’s gone away.”
It seems to me that the core sense of the verb is what you might call “locational” …
“Exceed” in the sense “be/do too much” is galis. It is not used to render “comparative” constructions in Kusaal …
@Etienne
Tea
@PP
Brilliant!
Superlative!
Are those trees… competitive??
Well, yes. Trees compete for sunlight and (in dry regions) for water.
West Africa is, of course, well known to be complete monoculture from the Sahara to the sea and from Senegal to Cameroon
From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli…
Which lyric, of course, is about emphasizing the diversity of environments in which the Marine Corps can operate.
From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli…
Send in the Marines!
(Actually, don’t. It rarely helps. Also, marines don’t cope well in the Sahara. They were well advised to stop when they got to Tripoli.)
And I’ll see you your US Marines and raise you
https://www.poetry.com/poem/33341/soldier-an'-sailor-too
Tea? As an American anglophone I beg to differ. The majority of us are clearly a coffee culture, as are most Germanic speaking people. Maybe tea is a Celtic substrate?
Yeah, what can you do. There are always little cultural pockets here and there which are exceptions to the rule.
Send in the Marines
evergreen
Mooré has it (nàabá) and Farefare and Dagbani too.
It seems to be usual in Western Oti-Volta, but apparently not elsewhere in Oti-Volta.
Moba has bāl̀ “placenta”, which looks like bál̀ “chieftaincy” but has a different tone, so it’s not the same word used in a metaphorical sense, at any rate.
Thanks for that very full answer. Is the metaphor extended anything else—the chief’s residence as womb, for instance? And is the placenta traditionally given any special treatment after birth in WOV-speaking societies, such as being considered the dead twin of the child and being buried as such?
We are, Vanya, but maybe “cultural significance of tea” still works.
As an adolescent during the bicentennial, I grew up with a strong prejudice against tea.
Is the metaphor extended anything else—the chief’s residence as womb, for instance?
I don’t think so.
And is the placenta traditionally given any special treatment after birth in WOV-speaking societies, such as being considered the dead twin of the child and being buried as such?
The placenta is buried in a pot; that isn’t the normal way to bury a person, though it is done with stillborn children sometimes as am apotropaic measure when a woman has had a string of miscarriages; if she successfully bears a child after that, that child may be called Adʋk “Aruku” (“Pot.”)
The Kusaasi are cool with twins, and don’t regard them as a bad omen or anything like that. I don’t think they do anything special about them.
I just looked up the Kusaasi in Rattray’s splendidly-titled “Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland”, to see if he had anything further on placentas, but he doesn’t. Although, interestingly, he says that the Kusaal word is zar, and specifically says that the word is not limited to animal placentas as it is in Farefare (and he gives the Farefare word for “human placenta” as yala, which is obviously cognate with the Dagbani yoli that I mentioned above, so the word can be projected back to proto-WOV; the Farefare -l- also supports the idea that the word is indeed cognate with Mbelime yonbu (this l::n relationship is regular), so it can probably be reconstructed even to POV. (The Dagbani form alone is equivocal, because Dagbani l also represents proto-WOV *r.)
I liked the last lines of Rattray’s section on the Kusaasi:
He has a footnote to “Kusase” saying that they “do not circumcise, nor do their women practice incision”, which is quite true; unusual, traditionally, in that area (alas.) The Kusaasi actually don’t have any age-related rites of passage at all, and seem never to have had any. The practices may have been customs of the founding group of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms, who are held to have come from the northeast, and then got copied further down the social scale by the peasantry; the Kusaasi have never been really incorporated into these realms. I don’t know about their northern neighbours, the Bisa, who are similarly famous for their general bolshiness. (The Mamprussi capital had to be shifted to its present site south of the Gambaga Escarpment because of a Kusaasi/Bisa uprising in the first generation after the foundation of the kingdom.)
Tea
It is a matter of historical record that the Americans would have been avid tea-drinkers, but they were too cheapskate to pay the (very reasonable) import duty on it.
East Frisia vindicates the Leiden School!
@Xerib: In Scandinavian folklore the expulsed placenta (etterbyrd vel sim.) was the home of a person’s fylgje, its guardian spirit. In old accounts a fylgje could take the shape of an animal and/or be inherited in a family, taking us into totemistic territory. It wouldn’t be a far step to think that the family spirit or totem of a royal family also held power over kingship, and to these ideas being conjoined to one in which the mystical qualities of kingship are bound to a royal newborn as the spirit of the placenta. But I don’t think there’s any actual evidence of this.
I notice that Haaf actually says that the placenta is called “chief” because the word na’ab is always used to refer to things that are important and/or dangerous, but (a) I don’t think that’s actually the case (b) “placenta” doesn’t really suggest “important or dangerous” particularly, compared with everything else going on in childbirth and (c) I was explicitly told otherwise (and the explanation about chiefs leaving after their retainers was given to me spontaneously when I was asking about the personal name Ana’ab “Anaba.”)
It has crossed my mind, though, that it may be that nobody really knows why the placenta is called “chief” and that this is a sort of just-so-story.
It’s interesting that it only seems to be the specific etymon represented by Kusaal na’ab that has this meaning, and this word for “chief” is confined to Western Oti-Volta and Buli/Konni. It can’t be a case of a simple accidental homophony, though: the class suffix is “human plural” used in a singular sense, which is seen otherwise exclusively in words for senior relatives, i.e. it’s a kind of pluralis majestatis, which makes sense for “chief”, but not “placenta.”
It made me wonder about something else, though: although the Gurma and Nawdm “chief” and “placenta” words can’t be derived from the same root as each other, they nevertheless actually are pretty similar. If WOV once had the cognates of both of these, they’d also have been pretty similar, and one can speculate about a scenario where the “chief” word got replaced by the neologism *nà’abá, perhaps as a consequence of the imposition of chiefs by the emergent Mamprussi empire, and the “placenta” word got caught up in in the fallout …
A pretty big stretch, though. And the fact that what is presumably the original (and quite different) word for “human placenta” is still reconstructable for proto-WOV counts against it too.
[There is a precedent for accidental homophony getting elevated to the level of folk etymology and belief with “gall bladder” and “common sense”, though; several dictionaries explicitly say that the homophony (in the languages which have it) is due the the gall bladder being regarded as the seat of common sense, but the words are pretty certainly of two different origins etymologically.]
Plasticpaddy: Not bad at all. The tea/coffee division being found within the anglosphere, however (as was pointed out above), somewhat emphasizes my original point.
Incidentally, I learned this very morning that while Pashto is globally much more morphologically conservative than Persian, the latter language has preserved Indo-European comparative-marking adjectival morphology…but not the former. So: what do Pashto and Romance speakers share to the exclusion of speakers of Germanic, Celtic and Slavic (minus Bulgarian and Macedonian)?
It is a matter of historical record that the Americans would have been avid tea-drinkers
I fear you have misinterpreted the said record: they (or we) were in fact avid tea-drinkers at the time. A single ship, the Dartmouth, bound for a single port, Boston, contained 92,000 lb (approx 41,000 kg) worth £1,305,774 in 2021, or roughly $1,700,000 in today’s money. destroyed in the Boston Tea Party. About ten times as much was prevented from being imported at the same time.
The result of this was a long-term decline in the popularity of tea-drinking among Americans. Half a year later, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:
Is a dish of tea like a plate of soup?
@John Cowan
1. “a Dish of Tea”
Wasn’t there a discussion in LH a while ago on “a bowl ~ dish ~ plate of soup”?
2. Similarly, a discussion of several irregular English verbs? (possibly “sink”)
I fear you have misinterpreted the said record: they (or we) were in fact avid tea-drinkers at the time.
I think you may have misinterpreted DE; I don’t read him as saying we weren’t avid tea-drinkers at the time, but that we would still be today had we not been too cheap to pay the tax. (I don’t think there’s any need to explain the historical details of tax resistance in the 1760s; it was a joke, not a scholarly thesis.)
Is a dish of tea like a plate of soup?
or is it more like a saucer of loneliness? adams seems to hint so.
Mooré súgrì “forbearance, pardon”: long shot, but could this be Tamasheq a-s-uɣəl, the verbal noun of “give back, return”? If so, it would bring to mind the Arabic development of tāba “repent” from Aramaic tāb “return”.
In West Africa, is there any instance of the semantic development ‘giving’ > ‘forgiving’?
As seen for example in the following:
Perhaps LH readers can think of other examples.
In West Africa, is there any instance of the semantic development ‘giving’ > ‘forgiving’?
Dunno: there are hundreds (if not thousands) of West African languages, after all …
It doesn’t seem to be a thing in Oti-Volta. There is the Gulmancema púní sugili “forgive”, where púní itself means “bestow”, but the real content word there is of course the same old etymon as Mooré súgrì. Even that seems to be atypical: in Kusaal (which is typical) “forgive” is di suguru, where di is “eat”, used, as often, in the metaphorical sense “get, receive” (e.g. di pu’a “get a wife”, di na’am “receive a chieftaincy”, di nyan “get disgrace(d)” etc.) “Forgiveness” seems to be conceptualised as an attitude you adopt, not a benefit you bestow on others.
There are various idioms more or less meaning “forgive” scattered through Oti-Volta, like Waama buute “turn one’s back on [literally], forget, forgive”, but nothing very consistent across the family. The equivalents of “forgiving a debt” more often involve “give” verbs, but despite the strong Christian linkage of this idea with forgiveness of offences, that seems to be a rather different semantic field as far as Oti-Volta languages go; there, after all, you are, effectively, giving people something – money.
Comparing the translations of “and forgive us our trespasses” in the two Kusaal dialects:
The Agolle version goes
ka di suguru nɛ ti pɔ’ɔgir zug
and eat forbearance with us failure upon
The Toende version goes
Basɩme tɩ tʋʋm-be’et taal
throw.away.IMPERATIVE our deed-bad offence
This is not actually a dialect difference (Agolle Basimi ti tʋʋmbɛ’ɛd taal is fine too); I think the Toende version is just a bit more idiomatic.
In German, “repent” is usually bereuen, but prophets always say Kehrt um! “Turn around!” instead.
@David Eddyshaw: Is that di na’am, “receive a chieftaincy,” etymologically “eat placenta”?
repent
Most Oti-Volta languages go with “change your heart” in the Bible versions (the heart being the seat of emotion), though I see that the Mooré Bible says “change your intelligence/sense.” Must be the effect of those rationalist French. The Kusaal version has “change of intelligence/sense” in the bit where the Gerasene demoniac is restored to his right mind, which is hardly the same thing.
Both languages just use “change” sometimes, and plain “turn around”, too. The Kusaal verb in question, tiak “change, alter”, is very general: you can use it for changing clothes, altering a contract, anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if its use by itself to mean “repent” started out as a bit of translationese/missionary jargon.
A lot of these terms in West Africa seem to have been calqued on Arabic even when not outright borrowed from Arabic: hardly surprising, as the concept of religious conversion is hardly part of traditional culture. Or the concept of “religion”, come to that (in the sense that monotheists mean it,)
Is that di na’am, “receive a chieftaincy,” etymologically “eat placenta”?
No.
Though na’am “chieftaincy” is indeed derived from na’ab “chief, king.”
Although it looks like the same stem na’a- plonked into the liquids/materials/abstractions noun class with the class suffix -m, which is indeed a productive way of making abstract nouns, there is a giveaway tone change which shows that the stem itself is actually na’am- , with a derivational suffix -m- that you can’t see any more when the class suffix follows it. Kusaal does that.
Di na’ab, on the other hand, means “eat a chief.”
It is important to master these fine grammatical distinctions in order to avoid social embarrassment.
(The Kusaasi do not eat placentas, not being barbarians.)
In German, “repent” is usually bereuen, but prophets always say Kehrt um! “Turn around!” instead.
As discussed here in 2018 (starting with your comment).
Or the concept of “religion”, come to that (in the sense that monotheists mean it,)
I was brought up under “monotheistic” “religion”(s) of various (Christian) ilks. I tend to say I ‘lost’ “religion” rather than that I ‘converted’ to atheism. But that seems a rather feeble way to put it. Does this Kusaal of which you speak so highly have better turns of phrase?
I don’t think there is any traditional “word for it.” Naturally, it’s possible to express the concept with enough ingenuity (though that would entail having a good idea of exactly what the word was supposed to mean in English, which seems a nontrivial task in itself.)
I think the most natural way of putting it in Kusaal without getting into the quagmire of trying to paraphrase foreign concepts would just be to say that you don’t pray to God; though, all things being equal, and assuming that you looked reasonably African, I think that would be most naturally interpreted as you saying that you weren’t a Muslim. (Traditional Kusaasi don’t pray to God either: as the proverb says: “Eat with God, don’t talk with God.”)
I’ve linked before to Tony Naden’s essay warning against unthinkingly importing these Western concepts into places that they don’t really fit at all. I agree with most of it (though I have doubts over some of his specifically linguistic points, they’re not really central to what he’s saying.)
http://lexikos.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1026/542
He’s right that accounts of “African Religion” by actual Africans are not always to be taken as gospel (so to speak) either.
When it comes to transposing Christian concepts into Kusaal, the language has all the resources it needs of course, what with abundant abilities to create new words by derivation and compounding, and also with the usual techniques of calqueing and semantic extension of existing vocabulary. (There are actually a good few loanwords in Kusaal, but outright borrowing is not the go-to technique for coming up with new words.)
As I’ve said before, I think some of the choices that were actually made in this are not ideal, but it’s not my language and I’m not a Kusaasi Christian, so it doesn’t really matter what I think about it. In practice, quite a lot of the terminology piggybacks on terms introduced earlier for Islam, which got to that part of the world a lot earlier than Christianity (though not many Kusaasi are actual Muslims. Or Christians, come to that.)
I love Ostrovsky’s character Karp saying “Живем в лесу, молимся пенью, да и то с ленью” [We live in the forest, we pray to a stump, and that lazily]).
Like Brits, who in religious matters have always distrusted “that very horrid thing, Enthusiasm.”
Sadly, Joseph Butler’s actual comments seem to have been much less mockable:
https://dmbi.online/index.php?do=app.entry&id=945
It’s not playing the game for Anglican bishops to say sensible things. They should realise that they have a responsibility in these matters.
Brits, who in religious matters have always distrusted “that very horrid thing, Enthusiasm.”
… It’s not playing the game for Anglican bishops to say sensible things.
Yeah … casting around in my formative years for role models of non-Christians, I kinda paid attention to Malcolm Muggeridge (cue parallel thread about creaky voice), as somebody willing to say things about “Religion” without being all dour about it. And then he found God and was as enthusiastic (or perhaps I mean contrarian) about it as he had been about agnosticism.
Nail in the coffin was the Monty Python Life of Brian brouhaha featuring an entirely mockable Anglican bishop.
Malcolm Muggeridge
He was a very odd man. Capable of great perception (over Stalin’s Russia, or the grimy persecution of P G Wodehouse) and of scarcely credible wilful denseness (you name it.)
My opinion of him has never really recovered from reading his biography of “Erewhon” Butler, which is really quite extraordinarily gratuitously offensive. The kind of hatchet job that makes you instinctively side with the victim and despise the author.
Deconversion is good at getting across that atheism isn’t another religion. (The German calque is even better because it dispenses with the -con- part: Entkehrung.)
However, “deconversion” seems to imply that you were converted in the first place (as opposed to raised into it.) Or that children raised in a religion were “converted” from prenatal agnosticism, or something. This appears to shade into the somewhat illiberal Sovietoid view of children needimg to be removed from the evil brainwashing efforts of their superstitious parents for their own good.
I think I would go for “emancipation” (were I so inclined,)
“Religion” is such a fuzzy term that it can be made to include atheism practically by definition. Conversely, the adherents of quite a few religions deny that they follow, like, a religion. (This is actually quite common among Protestant Evangelicals.)
I wasn’t joking when I said that saying what “religion” actually means in English is non-trivial.
There is actually something to be said for the Kusaasi focus (as I interpret it, which may be wrong) on how people actually behave as the relevant criterion, rather than what they say they believe (even if they actually do say anything.)
There is actually something to be said for the Kusaasi focus (as I interpret it, which may be wrong) on how people actually behave as the relevant criterion, rather than what they say they believe (even if they actually do say anything.)
That is also the Russian Orthodox focus, which is why what we call in English “Old Believers” are called in Russian старообрядцы ‘those who follow the old rites.’ What was upsetting about them (back in the days when the orthodox Orthodox were upset by them) was that they used two fingers rather than three while making the sign of the cross, not whatever they had to say about salvation or eschatology.
That actually sounds a bit too potentially self-congratulatory to me. “I’m so smart I emancipated myself”… a tad Dawkinsite. 🙂
But yes, postnatal agnosticism is implied. You’re not literally born into a religion, you’re taught it.
You betcha. “It’s not a religion, it’s a personal relationship with Jesus Christ!”
You’re not literally born into a religion, you’re taught it
Indeed (although I only say that so promptly because we actually share a specifically European understanding of the term “religion.”)
However, to describe the teaching of a religion to children (who one assumes previously had no opinion on the matter) as “conversion” invites the question “converted from what?” And if you answer “atheism” (taking this as the prelapsarian natural state of humanity) then you have actually tacitly conceded that atheism is the kind of thing you can be “converted” from, i.e. a religion. I mean, you wouldn’t say that raising children to be good Socialists (as I did, and proud of it) was “converting” them from neoliberalism (or whatever such people imagine is the natural state of humanity.)
I suppose “emancipation” does have a somewhat loaded implication, but I think most people who’ve got to the point of actually describing themselves as atheists (as opposed to mere wet agnostics, say) wouldn’t really object to that. I haven’t come across many proper atheists who would look you in the eye and keep a straight face while they said “oh, if only I could believe the way you do.” The more polite ones go more for the gentle pity at one who evidently didn’t get away.
On the “no true Scotsman” principle, I think I would probably maintain that a self-described atheist who really wasn’t content to be so is probably not a proper atheist at all. (Or perhaps has a rather naive idea of the “comforts” of religion. As some believers also seem to, to be fair …)
I suppose that the obverse is also true: if a Christian (say) describes atheism as a “religion” they are revealing that they actually regard “proper” Religion as the same kind of thing as atheism, just with different axioms*: essentially another kind of philosophical position. This is a view which makes no sense to the participants in the majority of world “religions”: it’s a feature very specific to our own culture – indeed, in many ways (not all), only to our modern post-Enlightenment culture.
When the Romans, even, talked about “atheism” they meant something quite different from us.
* This reminds me of a wonderful Alan Bennett sketch, in which he is an Anglican bishop (naturally) talking about the inclusivity of the Church of England: “While we worship God in his aspect of existence, others worship him in his aspect of nonexistence.”
One of the odder cases is that of Konstantin Leontiev: “He was a rare instance in modern times (the thing was a rule in the Middle Ages) of an essentially unreligious man submitting consciously and obediently to the hard rule of dogmatic and exclusive religion.”
You can still find (in English translation) Russian-origin prayer books which have somewhere in them a polemic about the importance of exactly proper form (including finger-configuration) in crossing oneself. These are sometimes found in the same circles where people also offer polemics against various flavors of Western Christianity for being excessively “legalistic.”
In ordinary English you sometimes hear people talk about having been “converted” from one sort of praxis to another, whether it be how they do their baking, whether they shave before or after showering, or how they otherwise adopted some One Weird Trick that makes some routine life activity simpler or more efficient and their enjoyment of life was thereafter improved. Perhaps this started as a semi-jocular use, but I don’t know that it’s really felt as jocular in current practice.
Maybe “renunciation” is a better word? Many people (as I understand it, never did myself) who at some point were serious about religion either on “belief” or “practice” side and either from upbringing or they own choice (touched by Holy Ghost, if you will) grow detached and unobservant and at some point find themselves somewhere on atheist-non-believer-agnostic spectrum and just accept it, without any act of “deconverting” or whatever other Latinate word is most fitting.
One of the odder cases is that of Konstantin Leontiev
I suppose that if you have that kind of personality, “dogmatic and exclusive” actually is one of the comforts of religion.
To me, that kind of instrumental approach seems frankly blasphemous (people have no business believing something because they think it might be personally or socially useful, let alone pushing that belief on others), but that is probably in fact an Enlightenment take on the matter. (That mindset is so much the water we swim in that we don’t see that it’s still there even when we think we’re repudiating it.)
Also, it’s rather easier to see that kind of motivation in others than in oneself …
@JWB:
Yeah, it’s a question of English usage (not deep philosophy or theology.)
Mind you, the Hattery is good at such questions …
You’re not literally born into a religion, you’re taught it
If you’re born Jewish, you stay Jewish, unless you actively convert to another religion. Being an cheeseburger-eating, Sabbath-defiling atheist doesn’t count.
Even conversion is asterisked. Definitely if you become a Muslim or a Christian you are a converted Jew anymore. But I don’t know if Buddhist Jews count as ex-Jews, mainly because there is no history of adverse relations between the two religions.
(These are what I read as the standard traditional attitudes, Orthodox ones anyway. I’m secular and I don’t care.)
The more I think about it, the more inchoate “Religion” as a concept becomes. I suppose one should just cut the Gordian knot and say: “‘Religion’ is whatever is studied in Departments of Religious Studies.” (A side benefit of this definition would be that it would give academics in such departments carte blanche for empire-building.)
You are not born into Christianity, but neither are you (in what was for many centuries the typical case) taught it — you are baptized into it, whether or not you are old enough to consciously understand what’s going on at the moment of baptism. The modern anti-vaxxer-like heresy of the refusal in certain quarters to baptize infants is indeed a side-effect of thinking of “religion” as something to be taught and understood the way you would understand the terms of a secured loan agreement or some such thing we prevent minors from committing themselves to.
Just re David E.’s encouragement for Rel-Stud-Dep’t empire-building. I was taught New Testament Greek (including the completely lexical/syntactic aspects of it) as a “Religious Studies” course rather than as a “Classics” course. But I think that was less empire-building than salvage – the university’s Classics department was apparently dominated by faculty with what you might call the Swinburnean attitude that this damn Galilean and his followers had ruined a good thing, so they didn’t want to dirty their hands with NT Greek.
JWB: you are baptized into it, whether or not you are old enough to consciously understand what’s going on at the moment of baptism
Unless you are an anabaptist.
Was there ever or is there any sect that claimed heritable Grace? That is, if your parents are Christian, you are so by default?
“Repudiation”, come to think of it, may be better than “emancipation.” Much less loaded, and no automatic implications about the nature of what you’re repudiating. And it implies that you’ve done it on purpose, unlike “lose”, which could be sheer carelessness.
(Also, you don’t usually talk of “losing” something without an implicature that it was somehow unfortunate to do so, which is hardly appropriate for a convinced atheist. I mean you can use it that way, but that’s a marked usage. “And Ed: lose the glasses.”)
To me, that kind of instrumental approach seems frankly blasphemous (people have no business believing something because they think it might be personally or socially useful, let alone pushing that belief on others)
See, you’re assuming that he “believed” something, an assumption that would have made him glare at you scornfully (and perhaps have his servant horsewhip you). Belief is neither here nor there (and neither is morality); he felt that the only course for Russia was strict adherence to the Old Ways, which included submission to the established church, and he acted accordingly.
Hat: and perhaps have his servant horsewhip you
I first read that as “worship you”. Semantic priming.
Was there ever or is there any sect that claimed heritable Grace? That is, if your parents are Christian, you are so by default?
It’s not the same, but the Presbyterian doctrine of (infant) Baptism is a little like this.
The heathen Anglicans actually require godparents, essentially to promise on behalf of the infant baptizee, who can’t participate actively* (you hope.) You don’t need them in a Church of Scotland baptism, because the Covenant potentially extends to the children of believers; you may have “sponsors”, but they are really regarded as representing the whole church in promising to help the parents in raising the child right/brainwashing them properly.
It isn’t the same though: you don’t have to be baptized to be saved, and baptism doesn’t automatically result in salvation.
* This doesn’t seem to have been their original role, which was more along the lines of being character references for adult baptizees.
I first read that as “worship you”
Hey, get up, Trond! I’m not worthy …
You are not born into Christianity, but neither are you (in what was for many centuries the typical case) taught it — you are baptized into it, whether or not you are old enough to consciously understand what’s going on at the moment of baptism.
According to the only Mandaean I’ve ever met, you don’t get consulted about whether you’re going to be Mandaean either.
Come to that, (mutatis mutandis) the same is true of Islam. Part of the fix that Salman Rushdie is in is that in the view of the kind of people who want to harm him, he is an apostate, so what he says about Islam is much worse than if a non-Muslim said exactly the same, and the appropriate penalty much greater. His own views on the matter are irrelevant.
I assume that Anabaptist types have been compelled for practical reasons to develop their own special theories about the special ontological status of the minor children of sect members, to reassure the bereaved that little Sally’s sudden death at age nine from diphtheria or whatever did not result in hellfire and damnation.* But I have not investigated the details. I suspect they might be consistent with the general pattern that once you have committed yourself to an untruth you will need to generate a bunch of ad hoc follow-up untruths to keep your system from falling apart. (Cf. Chomskyanism?)
*Obv. God retains the right and capacity to do whatever the heck he wants with individual cases. I’m not talking about who is or isn’t “saved” or favored with “grace”; I’m talking about who is and isn’t a “Christian”** – and even then there were edge cases recognized from very early on as in the cases of martyrs who were unbaptized (thus the somewhat hand-wavy notion of “baptism of desire”), or catechumens who may have already had a date scheduled for their baptism when death unexpectedly supervened.
**Obviously there’s a rabbithole here because many useful scopes of meaning of “Christian” are broad enough to encompass individuals and groups who may have various non-standard ideas about anything you can think of.
May I recommend P Metcalf’s recent `Anthropology of Religion’ (not about `organized’ religions though):
https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sitefiles/jaso-15-2023-290-291-zeitlyn.pdf
cf eg the Bororo: (spoiler, perhaps misleading: religion is basically the way we do things?), whether articulated or not; IMO for ex fashion/couture, or football in either of its ethnicities, are pretty indistinguishable from religion
In the days of my innocence I once attempted (in genuine curiosity) to get a visiting German anthropologist to give me an idea of the scope of anthropology, with examples (for instance) of things which didn’t come within its remit. I was unsuccessful. The question was evidently without meaning.
Now, if I had only been affiliated with a Department of Religious Studies at the time, I might have been able to hold my own.
Just in time for this discussion Matt Baker posted a video about “atheist denominations”. Didn’t watch it yet, but he wrote a dissertation on the subject (well, on closely linked subject) and is more probably than not talking some sense.
to hairsplit a little bit – or, i suppose, indulge in a bit of pilpul – with Y:
daniel boyarin’s recent Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion makes a pretty convincing argument that jewishness only got procrustean-bed-ed into the european christian category of “religion” fairly recently. i think he’s a bit inclined to minimize how thorough that process has been in all forms of rabbinic practice* but that’s a quibble. but even within religified “judaism”, the basic element of jewishness remains affiliation (conceptualized as lineage, but ratified by community acceptance rather than geneaological documentation), rather than orthodoxy, -praxy, or bloodline descent.
as Y says, though, the exit process (if any) is a lot fuzzier, and to my eye shakes out based on pretty informal assessments of how much affiliation with a particular “religion” contradicts affiliation with jewishness. this may change a lot over the next few decades, though, since on the one hand many zionists seem willing to exclude antizionists from their understanding of jewishness, and on the other people are starting to notice the emergence of very large jewish communities** who don’t see a contradiction between jewishness and beliefs and practices that are distinctively christian (tudor parfitt’s Black Jews in Africa and the Americas describes some of that history, with the igbo jewish sphere being particularly large and significant, if i remember right). it’s all likely to be pretty messy, as well as interesting.
.
* as are most observant folks i’ve heard take up his argument. in particular, i think there’s a tendency to do conceptual backflips to avoid the implications of hasidism’s innovations – for example, the focus on “intention” (“kavone”) as the meaningful part of prayer for everyone (as opposed to just the spiritual virtuosi who are the subjects of the kabalistic tradition that hasidism drew on), which is to my eye a pretty transparent importation of a christian-style “religious” emphasis on belief.
** plenty of people would argue with my phrasing here. i use it because i don’t think jewish communities have anything necessarily in common besides that self-designation (i’m tempted to say “and mutual recognition”, but i don’t think it really holds up if we want a common category to put karaites and rabbinists in).
Matt Baker
It’s certainly true that atheists are very far from being All The Same (even if you ignore all the things not immediately linked to the atheism-an-sich.)
Thomas Nagel is extremely different in his atheism from Richard Dawkins, for example.
Whether “denominations” is more than a cutesy label for this is another matter …
May I recommend P Metcalf’s recent `Anthropology of Religion’
Indeed you may. It looks very interesting.
(I’ve bought a copy, and will blame you if I don’t like it.)
wear it in good health as my mother-in-law would say. I grew up among holy rollers and have handled a snake or two in good will <3
Respect!
[Lack of suitable resources makes this a less viable option in Scotland. Thistles lack a certain pizzazz in this regard. Also, they don’t feature in the relevant Bible passage IIRC.]
good rolling tho I imagine. I was taught that religion is something one doesn’t talk about which made it fascinating. Respeck rite back atcha!
for example, the focus on “intention” (“kavone”) as the meaningful part of prayer for everyone (as opposed to just the spiritual virtuosi who are the subjects of the kabalistic tradition that hasidism drew on), which is to my eye a pretty transparent importation of a christian-style “religious” emphasis on belief.
Interesting. I know little about Hasidism, but a focus on properly formulated intention in prayer wouldn’t have struck me as characteristic of Christianity so much as of Islam (niyya).
jack morava: wear it in good health as my mother-in-law would say
Slit’an! “wear it” (as in “wear and tear) is what kids in Bergen say when you turn up at school with something new. Slit’an med helsen! “wear it with health” is available as elegant variation.
atheist denominations
Reminds me of a scene from a Russian sci-fi short story I’ve read some years ago (I have a strong suspicion which story it was, and could probably try to check) where a modern guy accidentally displaced to the future is trying to do a questionnaire for his new documents.
On the religion question he says “atheist” and is prompted with two denomination names that he doesn’t recognize; he asks for clarification and is told that one of them worships monkeys and the other worships Darwin.
(I was sure that I’ve mentioned this scene on LH before, but Google isn’t finding anything. Perhaps it was on some other blog, or Discord or Twitter.)
…More realistically, of course, “atheist denominations” could refer to agnostics, ignostics, anti-theists, and a few other similarly structured factions I can’t name offhand. There’s a big difference between “I don’t care if there’s a god or not” vs. “I don’t believe in a god and you should too” vs. “the concept ‘god’ is insufficiently defined to tell whether I believe in one” vs. “I guess there might be a god out there but definitely not the one those guys are peddling”.
EDIT: found the story; the exact phrasing I recall did not occur, and there were even more denominations. It was “Flashmob Terror” by Leonid Kaganov.
On the whole God thing I long ago settled on “the concept ‘god’ is insufficiently defined to tell whether I believe in one” — as in ignostic, but I find the whole matter to be irrelevant.
@ Trond Engen,
I assume it’s from Yiddish, like `better than giving it to a doctor’, etc. It feels kind of genial/heimlich to me, with a little dash of остранение?
Definitely no Yiddish influence in Bergen. Low German/Dutch or sailor’s English.
@Trond: Modern Hebrew has a similar expression, תִּתְחַדֵּשׁ / תִּתְחַדְּשִׁי / תִּתְחַדְּשׁוּ titkhadesh / titkhadshi / titkhadshu (m.sg. / f.sg. / pl.), the imperative of the middle voice with the root ḥdš ‘new’. It is usually used for clothing, like when you have just put on a new pair of shoes, but with enough irony it can be extended far beyond.
L’as pagat lou capèu?
Once upon a time an Internet quiz identified my top three tendencies as agnosticism, Buddhism, and paganism (in descending order). My scores for atheism and Satanism (which really means gussied-up Randism) were zero. I felt that this fit (fitted?) me, in spite of the piddlingness of the quiz. I was, to be sure, struck by the sharp difference between agnosticism and atheism, but I had to concur that atheism seems much too definite a position about the Ultimate than I can muster. I suppose the point is that I’m quite definite about what’s unknowable.
Technically, Buddhism is atheist. There are gods, sure, but they’re not god gods ….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81
Satanism (which really means gussied-up Randism)
I’m under the impression that Randism and modern!Satanism are actually on roughly opposite sides of the traditional political spectrum (far-right and medium-far-left respectively). I might be misunderstanding something, though…
Randism is probably more pleasing to yer actual Satan, though. It captures the essential anti-humanity thing well. Modern “Satanists” seem to be rather wobbly on these core principles. Wusses.
P Metcalf’s recent `Anthropology of Religion’
I’ve now read it. It is interesting, though I had not realised that it’s more of a polemic than an introduction, and in my case he’s rather preaching to the choir (as I expect you can imagine.)
It’s nice to have my prejudices validated by an actual professional though. And of course I appreciated his disdain for certain high-profile individuals of whose intellectual coherence I too am doubtful …
(He’s got some odd ideas about modern physics. But he’s hardly alone in that …)
I learnt something of immediate usefulness: I knew (as anybody must who knows anything about it) that “Animism” is not actually a coherent entity, and lumps together quite different worldviews. What I hadn’t appreciated was the origin and highly pejorative connotations of the term. I have duly expunged it from my Kusaal grammar …
Ayn Randism is quite different from James Randism
The beliefs of the latter are properly referred to as Randi’ism, and his disciples as Randi’ites.
@ DE,
I particularly like the parts about Robertson Smith, and about the Bororo. I’m glad you found it interesting.
The worldview of the Bororo makes a lot of sense (at least, as Metcalf presents it. I suppose that presenting exotic worldviews in such a way that they make sense is the key skill of the anthropologist.)
Must read Evans-Pritchard’s book on the Azande one of these days.
I suppose that presenting exotic worldviews in such a way that they make sense is the key skill of the anthropologist.)
It’s the key skill of every aspiring opinion leader. Blavatsky, Steiner, Freud, Chomsky, Trump … All have their day in the sun. Some get more burned than others.
Ah, but an anthropologist would be able to explain the worldview of a Trumpist so that it made sense to a non-fascist. Probably as a form of Animism. Certainly it entails a belief in witches with malign supernatural powers (“radical socialists” in the indigenous language.)
(“Trumpist” because I suspect that T himself has no worldview. No ghost at all in that machine.)
T is perhaps the one person who could be replaced by an LLM without anyone noticing the difference.
The beliefs of the latter are properly referred to as Randi’ism
Or in the New Yorker, Randiïsm.
I’m under the impression that Randism and modern!Satanism are actually on roughly opposite sides of the traditional political spectrum (far-right and medium-far-left respectively).
The beliefs of Mr. Satanist, Anton LaVey, were fill of muddled libertarianism (and muddled everything else). Things may have changed.
Mr. Satanist, Anton LaVey
*looks him up*
…OK, apparently I’m just mixing up the Church of Satan (founded by LaVey) with the much newer but more recently-prominent Satanic Temple (unrelated aside from also involving Satan).
They create a desolation/emptiness and call it “beauty.”
What the Britons said of the Romans.
Russian. “How’s things?” “Normal.”
My family: “How’s things?” “/ɛ/” (We do not have a rule against final lax vowels; cf. /æ/ ‘It may be so.’)
Moreover, the stem seems to have had an Oti-Volta derivational suffix already as a part of it in proto-Gurma.
Then again, that might be analogous to the seeming Proto-Algonquian word for ‘firewater’.
without tiresome and unnatural circumlocutions
Say what? I don’t see a big difference between X-er than and as X as.
accidental homophony getting elevated to the level of folk etymology
Googling for these two NPs produces a lot of examples worldwide, of which this is my favorite (by Marc Caplan in a review):
A couple of years ago I was speaking with an enthusiastically philosemitic friend from Germany, who in her efforts to reclaim a Jewish-German symbiosis attested that the German verb ‘to marry’, heiraten, actually derived from the opening line of the Hebrew wedding liturgy, harey at mikudeyshes li [‘you are consecrated unto me.’] This folk etymology is as charming as it is incorrect: heiraten, even more than the Lithuanian in T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, is echt Deutsch, and in linguistic terms it shares a common source with the English verb to hire rather than any rabbinical connotations with which it shares an accidental homophony.
Sure he does: there’s him, and on the other side there are people who pretend not to recognize his self-evident greatness (and occasionally even act accordingly – SO UNFAIR!) because something’s wrong with them. Your basic eternal struggle.
Back home that means “in accordance with my or your hopes or sarcastic expectations”. /aˈɛɪa/ (four syllables) “oh, good, so it is me, too, after all”.
@various:
yiddish “[verb] mit gezunt / [verb] gezunterhayt” (…in good health) is quite flexible. i wouldn’t be surprised, though, if it was part of a family of such phrasings, as Trond said.
@Lameen:
a focus on properly formulated intention in prayer wouldn’t have struck me as characteristic of Christianity so much as of Islam (niyya).
thanks so much for that! my understandings of islam are spotty, so that hasn’t jumped out to me. i’m glad to know it, and to be able to pursue that thread and see how it interweaves with the christian precedents! hasidism developed very much in the zone of ottoman influence (even on territories that were never under ottoman rule), so it makes good sense to me to see a connection there. it also kinda supports the idea that a lot of what’s innovative in hasidism draws on sabbatean and frankist practice (their populist approach to lurianic kabala certainly does, which is where “kavone” comes into hasidism), which (in different ways) have very direct connections to the ottoman ekumene.
(Arrgh. Reloading the page didn’t help at all.)
atheism seems much too definite a position about the Ultimate than I can muster. I suppose the point is that I’m quite definite about what’s unknowable.
I quite agree. As Larry Niven says, “I don’t know if there is a God and I don’t think you do either.” Omitting the second clause is a kind of skepticism.
I think this is a red herring. The only question that matters (perhaps the only question that is actually answerable), is “what difference does this belief in (whatever kind of) God make in your life in practice?”
(I have always thought this, both now and when I was an atheist myself, which started in my teens as soon as I decided that this question was the touchstone.)
If the answer is “none”, then you are an atheist for all practical purposes. Whether you call yourself an atheist or agnostic (or Christian, for that matter) is ultimately of no great significance, though as with all such self-labelling it may have considerable social consequences. But that is a question for sociologists, not philosophers or theologians.
I dare say that precisely the same logic applies to differentiating between “denominations” of atheism, though. Certainly people’s not-belief can lead to very different practical courses of behaviour, but I don’t think that the differences correlate particularly well with whether people call themselves atheist or agnostic. (You might have expected “agnostics” to be more tolerant of differing views on the matter, but I think this is the etymological fallacy at work. It may correlate better with people’s knowledge of Greek …)
It seems to me it’s likely to make a difference what kind of God you disbelieve in, too. In the modern West, both believers and unbelievers share a huge number of assumptions about what “religion” actually is; assumptions which are actually entirely contingent and parochial.
Even framing the question in terms of “belief” at all is a characteristic of our own particular (and in many ways very unusual) culture. It’s not a question of epistemology, and most human beings in most places and at most times would have been astonished at our “philosophical” take on “religion.”
@JanFoM: Satan is in the public domain – any number of rival groups with incompatible views can claim to be doing his bidding and none can exclude the others from public discourse.
@rozele This is not necessarily inconsistent with influences from the Ottoman world, but I think various scholars have noted the coincidence in time between the rise of Hasidism and the rise of Pietism within parts of Protestant Europe, noted other parallels, and surmised that this is not merely a coincidence, although what direction(s) of causal influence there may have been might be difficult to assess. And presumably a lot of wandering ideas or perspectives could have floated across the fairly permeable boundaries between territories controlled by the Ottomans v. Romanovs v. Hapsburgs v. Hohenzollerns etc.
Parallels between the more exotic Protestant Pietists and the various heterodox Russian sects sometimes collectively known as духовное христианство have also been noted, but I’m not sure how close their parallels (other than via some sort of transitivity) to the Hasidim might be. And those groups tended to affirmatively reject traditional orthopraxis in a way the Hasidim, as I understand it, never did.
Satan is in the public domain
Not like him to miss the opportunity to lobby Congress for helpful repeated extensions to the copyright. Truly, the disciples have now surpassed their master …
Anton LeVay was just a massive bullshitter. He was far less interested in devising a system of beliefs and rituals than in getting attention for himself. His whole shtick—waving snakes around, dressing up like a Malebranche—was such a transparently obvious plot to feed his ego and get himself on television.
That sounds pretty authentic Devil-worship to me. What do you want, integrity?
The only question that matters (perhaps the only question that is actually answerable), is “what difference does this belief in (whatever kind of) God make in your life in practice?”
Previously on LH:
“In addition, as previously discussed, the existence, and/or nonexistence, of some versions of deities is in principle unverifiable and unfalsifiable; in those cases, it is of course very much possible and acceptable to believe, and/or not believe, in such a deity, just as one can believe, and/or not believe, in, say, the continuum hypothesis.
…Perhaps Gardner, with his emotional reasons, would rather have said that one could believe, and/or not believe, in such a deity the same way as one could believe, and/or not believe, in the axiom of choice (with the implication that both are very convenient things to believe in).”
@David Eddyshaw: I confess I had not seen the issue that way previously, but I can’t really argue with what you say.
believe, in such a deity the same way as one could believe, and/or not believe, in the axiom of choice (with the implication that both are very convenient things to believe in).
Or in the principle of Occam’s Razor. In which case:
“what difference does this belief in (whatever kind of) God make in your life in practice?”
AFAICT belief in any of the kinds of God on offer to my generation would make no difference. So I stopped trying. There were more interesting things to do on Sunday morning.
I kept getting promised belief would alight on me. But how would I know when? The enigmatic answer was “oh you’ll know it when it happens” — smug and patronising I call that.
assumptions about what “religion” actually is; assumptions which are actually entirely contingent and parochial.
If there’s a (mono-) God, don’t they determine what “religion” is? And convey it to their followers — by whatever smoke-and-mirrors enlightenment didn’t alight on me. Then all other claimed “religions” are false or simulacrums or pale shadows, etc. Which is why historically Religionists have been so keen to commit genocide against other “religions” — not that genocide is specific to Religionists, I hasten to add.
(And yikes this thread has moved fast since I last commented.)
@JWB: the closeness in time is certainly suggestive, and i certainly wouldn’t rule out influence in either direction, but i’m also fairly skeptical about it. i don’t, however, know a lot about Pietism, so i may be very off-base (and please do correct me!).
part of my skepticism is geographical: my understanding is that Pietism was strongest in northern europe, while hasidism emerged pretty specifically in the southeasternmost parts of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth. part of it is formal: my sense is that Pietism placed a great deal of emphasis on expanding bible-study and direct interpretation of scripture by common believers, which is in strong contrast to hasidism’s development of a framework that validated the spiritual importance of the common jewish man in large part by deemphasizing textual study (and creating a new form of spiritual virtuoso that was also not dependent on textual expertise, at least in theory).
both of those things, i’m realizing as i type, make it seem to me that the more likely places to find connections between Pietism and the jewish world would be the anti-hasidic circles centered in vilna and elsewhere in northeastern yiddishland, where the 19thC musar movement was rooted, and the haskole / enlightener circles in germany. in those places, i can easily imagine either a floating common-sense that christians and jews could draw on or direct connections leading to parallel developments. i find that harder to picture in the southeast; it’s easier for me to see either process happening there between muslims and jews.
i also think (to bring it back to the linguistic side) the ease of terminological slippages between “hasidism” (the populist movement that began in 18thC galicia) and the “hasidei ashkenaz” (the ascetic circles of the 12th-13thC rhineland) and between “piety/pious”, “pietism”, and “Pietism” (all of which are possible translations of either jewish term) don’t help with untangling any of this history.
The enigmatic answer was “oh you’ll know it when it happens” — smug and patronising I call that.
Why? Plenty of things are that way (passionate love is a well-known example), and I’ve read and heard enough accounts of suddenly feeling the presence of God/Christ and having one’s life changed to have no doubt it’s a real thing (regardless of the reality or otherwise of divine beings). You’ve clearly got a chip on your shoulder about religion, but don’t mistake that for some sort of wisdom.
@lh
I took AntC’s comment as applying to the people: family members or lay/religious councillors who did not wish to engage in discussion of the specific arguments he brought forward for his hardening non-belief stance. I suppose he expected comfort or validation, or even some inspiring “lie”, and felt let down that neither emotional support nor intellectual engagement was forthcoming, just “you’ll know it when you see it.” I have come to an understanding, perhaps too late, that people provide the support they can provide, and they need to be asked in a way they feel comfortable with.
Most religious people have little ability to engage in discussion of specific arguments brought forward by budding atheists; what do you expect, that they will magically be able to provide a convincing theodicy on the spur of the moment? “You’ll know it when it happens” is supposed to provide comfort, just as it’s supposed to do so for those who have questions about love and what it’s like. I suspect “smug and patronising” is here in the ear of the behearer.
If there’s a (mono-) God, don’t they determine what “religion” is?
Many people think so, both believers and nonbelievers – in our culture, That is one of the shared, culture-bound beliefs that I meant.
I don’t share this belief, myself. Travel broadens the mind. Sometimes. If you’re lucky.
It does not follow from the assertion that “religion” is a highly culture-bound concept (which it certainly is) that There Is No God; it does mean that people from some cultures will find both that assertion and its opposite incomprehensible, and that even those who find it comprehensible may mean something quite different by it (and by its opposite.)
@rozele: That’s an interesting comment on historical features of Pietism and Hasidism. It might be useful to me some day, so I’ve stored it in a dry place. At the moment I know zero about either movement/tendency. My dog in this fight is “textual study”.
“You’ll know it when it happens” is supposed to provide comfort,
It’s actually all too easy to come over as patronising when you say this, even if that was far from your intention. You are, after all, implying that there is some vital experience which you have and your interlocutor lacks, and that without that experience the poor thing can’t really be expected to understand. It’s the kind of thing that, if it’s said at all (which it probably shouldn’t be), should be said a whole lot more diplomatically than it often is. (I suspect that the tactlessness often results from persistent suggestions from the other party that one’s treasured experience is in fact banal or delusional or both, but that’s not a good excuse. It’s a good reason for concluding that this is really not a fruitful line of argument at all, not for arguing louder.)
I don’t think it’s quite parallel to the True Love scenario: one imagines the interlocutor there as wistfully wondering whether such a wonderful experience is even possible for them, and consequently welcoming this kind of reassurance. The parallel in a Christian context would be something like an already-pious Pentecostal wondering if they will ever speak in tongues, rather than an atheist (or someone edging into atheism) demanding good reasons to accept Christianity (or whatever.)
My first association when I saw “Randism” was also James Randi, and Buddhism is technically atheist, if you look at it in a certain way.
It’s actually all too easy to come over as patronising when you say this, even if that was far from your intention.
True, alas.
My dog in this fight is “textual study”.
a complicated dog! at least three heads, though i can’t say from personal experience whether or not it’s stuck at the door to the underworld.
One head looking in, one looking back, one gnawing on the doorframe.
Hope, regret and obstinacy.
A famous Japanese film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funeral_(1984_film)
made me think Christianity has a well-developed technology for helping with grief, if indeed that’s not one of its founding issues. I don’t want to opine about this, I just wonder about it.
Just ran across this in The Brothers Karamazov (tr. Garnett):
Russian:
That is: “you’ll know.”
There are people who don’t fall in love. Everything has a name now, so they’re called “aromantic”.
(I suspect that the people who say incomprehensible things like “love is a choice” are all aromantic, BTW.)
Sure, but that doesn’t invalidate anything. “You’ll know” doesn’t mean [inevitably], it means [if it happens to you].
I don’t think it’s [religious experience] quite parallel to the True Love scenario:
Yes I’m not convinced by the parallel. Or perhaps what I mean is the parallel needs to be pushed harder. (Quite apart from the theological question of whether worship-of-God-as-other has ‘the same’ spiritual status as romantic love-for-another.)
We can say somebody believes it is True Love, but it turns out it was just infatuation. Or the Beloved turns out to be a bigamist or a confidence trickster; or so desperate to ‘find’ love they’ll abnegate their personality to fake being whatever will attract the other (they believe). Are there parallels to those scenarios with Religious experience?
At these points, the smug patronisers will say “ah, but there were tell-tale signs that it wasn’t True Love”. So when you thought you knew you’d found it, you were blinded/deluded.
I was talking to a friend who’d been brought up Catholic, had always thought she was Catholic, had been a teacher at a Catholic school, and participated in all the Catholic observations. Her teaching had included taking RI classes from time to time, so she’d weathered the sort of doubts adolescent girls raise about nonsense in the scriptures. When she retired, so no longer had to be ‘Catholic on parade’; it slowly dawned on her that a) she didn’t really know what ‘being Catholic’ meant beyond the observations; b) actually, she probably wasn’t Catholic. (She changed her status to ‘agnostic’.)
Does that count as seeming to “know it when it happens” but being deluded? In that case the delusion went on for decades. (Comparable to couples staying together for the sake of the kids or out of habit or because splitting up would be financially ruinous? But in those cases, I think at least one of the couple would own up to their status being ‘agnostic’.)
Well, sure. Plenty of people who “know” they’re in love or they’ve been visited by God later decide they were mistaken. That doesn’t change the fact of the experience. We humans are often (indeed, nearly always) mistaken, but we have powerful experiences nonetheless.
In one of the early seasons of Silent Witness the mother of the family of Irish Protestants tells her daughters that “just because we are Protestants doesn’t mean we {don’t} believe in God”. I didn’t catch whether there was or wasn’t “don’t” in there. I think it works both ways. They all were quite a distance on a long way to Tipperary, if memory serves.
“You’ll know” doesn’t mean [inevitably], it means [if it happens to you].
i may just be repeating DE’s very well-made point, but i don’t know that i’ve heard any variation of this that wasn’t delivered with the very strong implication of inevitability. to my ear, that’s the work that the “when” does in the sentence, so it feels baked into at least that phrasing of it.
It’s actually all too easy to come over as patronising when you say this, even if that was far from your intention. You are, after all, implying that there is some vital experience which you have and your interlocutor lacks, and that without that experience the poor thing can’t really be expected to understand. It’s the kind of thing that, if it’s said at all (which it probably shouldn’t be), should be said a whole lot more diplomatically than it often is. (I suspect that the tactlessness often results from persistent suggestions from the other party that one’s treasured experience is in fact banal or delusional or both, but that’s not a good excuse. It’s a good reason for concluding that this is really not a fruitful line of argument at all, not for arguing louder.
The analogy which comes to mind is a blind-from-birth person who is scheduled for a sight-restoring operation. Such operations can fail either immediately or eventually, but apart from that, it would be legitimate to reply to such a patient who asks “How will I know when I am seeing?” with “You’ll know.” Indeed, the only other response I can imagine is silence.
Or, as Frank Herbert put it in the Orange Catholic Bible:
“Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?”
I have come across the occasional anecdote about people blind from birth who had their sight restored (somehow) as adults who were unable to process the information from the “new” sense at all.
I’ve never looked into real-world cases. I presume that the commonest case would be removal of congenital cataract. There would be no prospect of restoring normal sight, though, because of amblyopia ex anopsia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyopia
With unilateral congenital cataracts there is no benefit in sugery for adults (it’s even questionable in children.) But that’s rather different, of course.
By far the most other causes of blindness from birth remain untreatable; in fact, I’m struggling to think of any other potentally treatable causes.
The specification “born blind” remains pointed even now:
“Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind.”
blind from birth
Is that significantly different from “blind since infancy”? In which case is Molly Sweeney based on an entirely false premiss?
(I found the play laboured — even bombastic, BTW.)
There would be no prospect of restoring normal sight, though, because of amblyopia ex anopsia.
To be sure, there is a big difference between normal and usable. I have amblyopia due to very different acuties (20/40 in the right eye, about 20/400 in the left). I wore a patch when I was about seven and then got glasses, but they always drove me crazy. I eventually had surgery in my forties to correct the amblyopia, which allows me to have depth perception if I force my eyes to converge (but it’s unpleasant). Now I have two pairs, one for the expected presbyopia and one for myopia, but I don’t wear either in most cases now (e.g. I wear the reading glasses when I have to deal with exceptionally small print and I wear the others when I need to read at a distance, like signs in a supermarket.
I read with interest this article about gene therapy for Leber’s congenital amaurosis. Their best guess about the improvement in one young adult patient, which was huge, is that she had developed what they call a “pseudo-fovea”, since there was no measurable at the fovea itself. (I think “neofovea” would be a more appropriate term.) Anyway, it’s not available in practice (US$850,000 per patient in the U.S., max 100 patients per year in the UK on the NHS).
(I hope I haven’t hung myself and are twisting slowly, slowly in the wind here.)
Is that significantly different from “blind since infancy”?
Yes.
There may be a parallel: a revelation will actually only be interpreted as a revelation by the recipient in the light of some cognitive framework that was already there and predisposed to such interpretations.
I once saw a patient who had come (very reasonably) to the casualty department because he had had a vision in the local cathedral.
I mean, parents spend half their time telling kids “You’ll understand when you’re older” about all manner of things. Sure, it comes across as condescending, but it’s also true, and what else are you supposed to say? I realize this is a sign of my having become a grumpy old man (“Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumble bees on them”), but I think the valorization of one’s personal feelings at the expense of everything else has gone too far. The world is not about making each of us personally feel validated.
I do not expect to receive revelation either soon or ever, but many people did and if I wanted to know how it feels, I would read what they felt. After all, there are many life experiences that we know only from conversations or books.
Same here.
Ironically, I’ve formed the impression (from books) that actual practicing mystics across a range of traditions often counsel scepticism about mystical experiences, perhaps in something like the same spirit as a happily married grandparent advising a teenager on whether his first crush means he’s found true love or not.
The church I was attending in Scotland before first going to Ghana had an actual policy of not encouraging those who said they felt called to be missionaries, on rather similar grounds.
I myself have no mystical genes at all, but an elder relative who did (and whom I greatly respected) once gave me a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing, a work which she herself had found very helpful.
I got as far as the author’s solemn warnings about who the book was meant for, took them at their word, and read no more.
parents spend half their time telling kids “You’ll understand when you’re older” about all manner of things
but all kids will (barring the various awfulnesses of the world) become older. it’s precisely the framing of religious belief as that kind of inevitability (whether taking the concrete form of mystical virtuosity* or of everyday faith) that’s the issue to me, not anyone’s feelings about or within this kind of conversation. i’m entirely in agreement with DE that they’re generally cases of the impolitic colliding with the intransigent (with either role available to either position). but that framing has direct, concrete consequences: among them, historically (and currently), defining unbelievers as wilfully perverse for resisting or rejecting the inevitable, which slides with very little pushing into the imperative for forcible correction of the unregenerate. i have ancestors who were kicked out of maine for less, during the period when that approach ruled massachusetts bay colony and its offshoots**.
.
* to be clear, this is an unmixed compliment – that virtuosity is something i deeply appreciate, reading hopkins, or grahn, or bas toyvim (to name poets in three very different traditions).
** at least according to the D.A.R.’s stud book, which told me one of my goyish forebears was expelled from his home downeast for being too nice to quakers.
Fair enough, and I thoroughly agree that any implication of inevitability is a bad idea; I’m just not sure how else one could respond to a question about the ineffable.
means [if it happens to you].
“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to”. In reference to a fictional culture in which about a third of children actually do die at puberty, this spontaneously became “I’ll die if I want to”. Needless to say, the children have little to say about it.
Or the Beloved turns out to be a bigamist or a confidence trickster
That doesn’t seem to me to call for a revision of the denotation: one may have a true love for someone who is entirely false. And of course I believe that an an honest and forthright bigamist may be a true lover, as someone who was extremely close to bigamy (“in all but final oath”, as Penric kin Jurald says about his status as a healer) for a decade and and a half. For that matter, one may be a professional confidence trickster and yet quite faithful in one’s marriage: “It’s just business.”
Then, what deafness may we not all possess?
I retain a great deal more range of high-frequency hearing than many of my contemporaries, though I don’t feel like I’m suddenly Crossing a Line when I hear a 16 kHz sound as opposed to a 10 kHz one (the fact that I hear it at all comes as a surprise to audiometer operators). Similarly, during WWII people who had had cataract operations were used to receive Morse code signals across the Channel in the ultraviolet that were quite invisible to the occupiers, but when asked “What does it look like?” the answer was normally “Purple, only more so”.
actual policy of not encouraging those who said they felt called to be missionaries
“Nolo episcopari.”
to take the ferry cost a nickel
Whereas now it is free, hallelujah!
You held on to those nickels with the pictures of bumblebees, didn’t you, Grampa? I understand they’re worth real money to coin collectors now …
I know they’re around here somewhere, dad gum it…
Wikipedia says all three color receptors absorb about equally strongly in the range that becomes available when the “ultra-yellow” lens is removed, and so what it looks like is pastel violet.
@ John Cowan
say what?:
… during WWII people who had had cataract operations were used to receive Morse code signals across the Channel in the ultraviolet that were quite invisible to the occupiers…
I’m just not sure how else one could respond to a question about the ineffable
all i ask for is an “if”, really!
or an “i statement”, i suppose, which tends to be my approach if i talk about effing the ineffable.
say what?
I’m not sure what was confusing. The sender was equipped with a typical marine lantern vel sim. with a cover that permits morsing (a typical thing to have in a port town) and an ultraviolet bulb (not as usual, but if not labeled as such, not so easy to detect). The receiver needed only her modified eyes (for whatever reasons, most of them were women). I don’t know if the messages were encrypted, but I suppose they were (if messages had a short shelf life, sometimes they were sent en clair for the sake of speed). Is that clear(er)?
You held on to those nickels with the pictures of bumblebees, didn’t you, Grampa? I understand they’re worth real money to coin collectors now …
The other night I was watching Madame Blanc, a fluffy British mystery show set in the south of France, and the local museum’s catalogue of small artifacts included an American buffalo nickel, an artifact I remember well, as it ceased to be made only ten years before I was born.
@ John Cowan
I see by my ultraviolet flashlight that it doesn’t penetrate fog very well and my experience is that bright ultraviolet light isn’t easy to produce (excepting perhaps lasers). The story is intriguing but I wondered if it might be a colorful folk tale…
I’ve read a similar anecdote about a technician in a chemistry lab who had had his lenses (not corneas) removed for some reason, with the result that he could read off the spectrometer in the ultraviolet range without using a photometer, and this made him very popular with the postgrads. The flip side was of course that he had to use glasses with almost spherical lenses to make up for the loss of his natural ones.
I believe the part about the cataracts, it’s the strength of the source that concerns me.