Courtesy of Stu Clayton, a brief and enjoyable video clip in which two guys try to guess the ten most spoken languages in the world (lumping together first- and second-language speakers). Stu says “Being ignorant, I was surprised by nr 10”; I wasn’t surprised, but I did enjoy the ride, as I hope will you.
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Their Arabic listing was Modern Standard Arabic. It’s possible to debate if this should be included in the list of spoken languages as it’s mainly “spoken” in official contexts and news broadcasts, as well as being a popular written form. If one looks at languages that are spoken in normal conversation, probably Egyptian Arabic would be in the top 10 but not number three.
Presumably the thing with with Mod Sp Ar is that those hundreds of millions of supposed L2 “speakers” can understand the news broadcasts, formal political speeches, etc. reasonably well even if they don’t typically yell back at the television in the same “language.” I don’t think “spoken” is attentive to that asymmetry, but if one said “most widely understood” the issue would vanish and maybe it’s useful to think of “spoken” as an imprecise synonym for that that shouldn’t be read overliterally. There are probably other languages (including English) where a similar asymmetry is present but perhaps glossed over in giving numerical estimates like these, although the Arabic situation is probably an extreme case.
For purely oral/aural “spoken” statistics, should Hindi & Urdu be split or lumped?
I agree with JWB’s implication: separating Hindi and Urdu is a bit of a cheat, especially given the Arabic lumpery. Though pursuing that just leads to the ever-fruitless language-versus-dialect thing.
Slightly surprised (and then not) to find R M W Dixon (no less) subscribing to the view that SIL wickedly oversubdivide languages for some arcane ideological reason.
SIL actually used to put quite a lot of effort into investigating degrees of mutual comprehensibility, though I hear disquieting rumours that what you might broadly call the anthropological side of their work is poorly supported these days.
Very different figures when you look at total users versus L1 speakers sometimes. Hausa is the clear winner among “Subsaharan” African languages for L1s, unsurprisingly. But Nigerian Pidgin is the champion for total users. Beats Swahili.
I agree with JWB’s implication: separating Hindi and Urdu is a bit of a cheat, especially given the Arabic lumpery.
Yes, I had the same reaction.
How about splitting the Malay varieties? But even with that split, sources on the Web seem to indicate that Bahasa Indonesia has more fluent speakers that Russian—97% of the population of Indonesia, according to the Indonesian census, according to Wikipedia, which would be about 272 million.
Pittsburgh is called the Three Rivers City. The idea is that it exists at the confluence of three rivers: the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio, which is formed by the other two coming together. Astute counters of rivers will realize that the number of rivers present is two. There is a confluence of two rivers, which then proceed as one, for a grand total of two rivers. Everyone knows this. It is intuitively obvious to every person who has built a diorama about the water cycle in primary school. But we all, as a society, have agreed to just let Pittsburgh pretend that it has three rivers. A glance at government websites for tourists, blogs by historical societies, even geography worksheets for young children, will rack up countless examples of Pittsburghians earnestly insisting that there are three rivers in Pittsburgh.
If we can let Pittsburgh pretend that it has three rivers, we can let the Pakistanis pretend that they don’t speak Hindi.
Let’s pretend that pretense is preferable to peevery !
If you had a bottle of oil, a bottle of vinegar, and a bottle of salad dressing, how many substances would you ‘earnestly insist’ that you had?
(Not that I can see what this has to do with languages, anyway!)
@Madeline Kalvis: Another example of an obvious fiction that is accepted, just because, is the franchise history of the Cleveland Browns football team. They were founded in 1946 and played in Cleveland through 1995. Then they moved to Baltimore, changing their name to the Ravens. In 1999 an expansion team was granted to Cleveland, the new team adopting the old name of the Browns.
The preceding paragraph is a straightforward account of the historical facts. This fact pattern is far from unique, without raising eyebrows. The same pattern has occurred multiple times in the history of American professional sports. The twist is the legal fiction that the Browns did not leave Cleveland in 1995, but rather suspended operations until 1999. In this scheme all the franchise records carry over, while the Ravens have nothing to do with it.
This is obvious bollocks, but generally accepted with doe-eyed innocence. As whoppers go, Urdu and Hindi (or Serbian and Croatian) being distinct languages is nothing.
This is obvious bollocks, but generally accepted with doe-eyed innocence. As whoppers go, Urdu and Hindi (or Serbian and Croatian) being distinct languages is nothing.
Shall we add catalá and valenciano to the list?
We have the same “three rivers” thing in Columbia, South Carolina (this trail system, for example). The Congaree River is formed by the confluence of the Saluda and Broad Rivers.
For hydronyms you could compare the formation of the Ohio at Pgh. from the confluence of two “other” named rivers to e.g. the formation of the Delaware at Hancock (N.Y.) from the confluence of two “other” rivers that happen to conventionally be called the West Branch of the Delaware and the East Branch of the Delaware. Or the formation of the Susquehanna at Northumberland (Pa.) from the confluence of two “other” rivers that are likewise conventionally named as branches of the Susquehanna. (Although in the latter case some may be more eager to claim that one of those branches is the upper course of the “main” river and the other a tributary.)
Or consider this re the conventional naming upstream from a famous confluence at Cairo (Illinois): “At the confluence the the Ohio river is considerably bigger than the Mississippi (volume flow rate 7,960 m³/s vs 5,897 m³/s), indeed it appears as the larger river. This evidence led us to the first question: why is the river called Mississippi even though the Ohio tributary has a larger outflow at the confluence? Despite being the mass/volume flow rate one of the criteria that could be used to define a main stream and a tributary in this case the Mississippi is longer than the Ohio river at the confluence (2,000 km vs 1,579 km), so this is probably one of the reason why the main river is still considered the Mississippi. The river length is indeed one of the main criteria used to define a main steam, together with the drainage basin area.” [I assume “steam” is a typo, FWIW …]
But then: “Anyway, going upstream the Mississippi flow, we face the reverse situation reaching another critical point of this river system: the confluence with the Missouri river in St Louis (Missouri State). Indeed in the animated gif below the Mississippi (the northern stream) flows into the Missouri river: Mississippi looks bigger in terms of flow rate (5,796 m³/s vs 2,445 m³/s) whereas the Missouri is longer than the Mississippi itself (3,767 km vs almost 2000 km). That’s the opposite of the Cairo’s case where the Ohio played the part of the richer but shorter river.”
ETA: the “Mississippi” name was originally picked up by the French from an indigenous name (in Ojibwa or something related) upstream from Cairo. The question is why it was then decided to use that name for the combined flow south of Cairo – it wasn’t like they started with the Mississippi name down near New Orleans and then decided to trace “that river” upstream to its source.
It’s a fun video. But I wonder how it would go with a random selection of “people on the street.” These two guys are obviously pretty well educated and knowledgable about the world. I don’t think the average American would come up with Bengali.
Very true, but if you used an average American it would just be another video mocking the ignorance of the average American, and I don’t think that would be as enjoyable.
I doubt the average German knows the word “Bengali”. The average citizen of any country don’t know shit. Let us now look down our noses at all of them. At least I can make attitude stand in for knowledge.
The average citizen of any country don’t know shit. Let us now look down our noses at all of them..
As they look down at us for knowing lots of shit about shit that don’t matter to them…
Cosmic balance? Mutually assured ignorance?
Just ignore me. Am back in hospital and grumpy
dup
dup yourself!
FWIW, I don’t know the source of the list they were using, but it’s not clear that it was necessarily using a “lumper” approach to “Arabic,” although it might have been. The top 10 from this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Ethnologue_(2026) is pretty close to theirs (although elevating Bahasa Indonesia and downgrading Russian – but note that these guys had actually guessed the former but were told they were wrong), but it splits “Arabic” into multiple “languages.” It’s just the case that one of those (Modern Standard) has zero L1 speakers but a huge number of L2 speakers (or “speakers” as addressed above), whereas the Arabics like Egyptian, Levantine, etc. with lots of L1 speakers don’t individually have enough to make the top 10 for L1/L2 combined.
How about splitting the Malay varieties? But even with that split, sources on the Web seem to indicate that Bahasa Indonesia has more fluent speakers that Russian—97% of the population of Indonesia, according to the Indonesian census, according to Wikipedia, which would be about 272 million.
I think Jerry Friedman is right – even notwithstanding counting Indonesian and Malay as separate languages or any Hindi/Urdu split, Indonesian should still have more speakers than Russian. I could imagine the Indonesian census exaggerates the percent of Indonesian speakers, but according to the language’s Wikipedias Indonesian has 252 million total speakers and Russian only 210. And just anecdotally I will say that even in rural Sumatra the vast, vast majority of people I encountered spoke perfectly acceptable Indonesian, which is not really the case for Russian in Kyrgyzstan, for example.
It’s a fun video. But I wonder how it would go with a random selection of “people on the street.” These two guys are obviously pretty well educated and knowledgable about the world. I don’t think the average American would come up with Bengali.
Yeah, these guys did exceptionally well for random folks off the street. I’m not sure I would have chosen Russian or thought of Bengali. Pleased to see a video of this style that wasn’t just finding the dumbest possible answers for everyone to jeer at.
@JWB
I hadn’t checked the Ethnologue list, makes these guys look even better. Their two misses were 11 and 12!
FWIW, the wiki piece I linked also includes a rival top 10 list with Russian at #9 and no Indonesian (meaning #11 at best, after Urdu), sourced to the CIA. So if you can’t trust the CIA …
Merging Hindi and Urdu would enable both Indonesian and Russian to be in the top 10, so everyone could be happy except those committed to the distinctness of the two standardized varieties of Hindustani …
BTW, poor Indonesian seems to be the most numerously-known language not to be catered to by the UN’s website. Russian, to be fair, is whatever its numerical ranking an “official language” of the UN, on account of the organization having been co-founded by Stalin if nothing else, and the other five current official languages (“Arabic,” “Chinese,” English, French and Spanish) all make the current top 10 on everyone’s view. The UN has in the last decade or so “unofficially” added the other top 10 contenders (Portuguese, Hindi, and Urdu) to at least some website extent, as well as the lower-ranking (in purely numerical terms) Swahili. See https://news.un.org/sw/ It’s just blatant anti-Austronesianism. Or did the Indonesians inherit from their Dutch former colonial masters a relaxed attitude about foreigners not bothering to learn their language or pay it symbolic respect?
You could also get Standard Malay/Standard Indonesian in by combining the two, if one is inclined to lumping. That would shoot it all the way up to 5th on the Ethnologue list.
Or did the Indonesians inherit from their Dutch former colonial masters a relaxed attitude about foreigners not bothering to learn their language or pay it symbolic respect?
This was mostly my experience. A little bit goes a long way in terms of appreciation and fascination. But I’ve found that true everywhere except for Western Europe. I would also say a relaxed attitude in general is pretty typical of the parts of Indonesia I’ve been to.
Mutually assured ignorance?
I like that one.
The twist is the legal fiction that the Browns did not leave Cleveland in 1995, but rather suspended operations until 1999. In this scheme all the franchise records carry over, while the Ravens have nothing to do with it.
Straightforward phoenix club setup. It perfectly mirrors the situation of AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons.
There are a few cases elsewhere (I think Romania has multiple?) where it’s a lot more messy than that and in fact several different clubs claim to be the continuation of the original.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_club_(sports) doesn’t seem like a lexeme that’s really part of the AmEng lexicon, although one infers from this that Foreigners may understand it. In any event, the history of the Cleveland Browns is explicitly mentioned as a counterexample of sorts.
One onamastically-intriguing thing you get from geographically-mobile professional sports teams in the U.S. is that sometimes they keep their “mascot” name even though it makes no literal sense in the new location, because it has some numinous brand value worth retaining. The best examples that come to mind are both from professional basketball: the Utah Jazz (formerly the New Orleans Jazz) and the Los Angeles Lakers (formerly the Minneapolis Lakers). (To step on the punchline for the benefit of non-Americans, Los Angeles is not known for its lakes any more than Utah is known for its jazz musicians.)
You’ll commonly hear that there’s not a natural lake in Los Angeles County (probably true?) and that Jazz is illegal in Utah (not true, but funny).
I’m not sure if it was the case with the Browns, but the City of Seattle formally retained the rights to the SuperSonics name, branding, and history. It appears to be a sure thing that the NBA will be coming back to Seattle in the next few years, so they will presumably immediately become the Sonics again. They moved to OKC and became the Thunder in 08, so definitely a pleasant fiction that the new expansion team is the same team (especially since there’s still a player in the NBA who played his rookie year with the old Sonics).
@J.W.B.: The onomastic thing is a noticeable difference between the Wimbledon Dons’ move and the Cleveland Browns’
crimeabominationmove.The professional sports leagues seem to have gotten smarter about that, so the Tennessee NFL team is the Titans, not the Oilers as they were in Houston, in addition to JH’s observation about Oklahoma City.
@JH: I’m not sure if it was the case with the Browns, but the City of Seattle formally retained the rights to the SuperSonics name, branding, and history.
It was the case with the Browns. That was part of the settlement of the city of Cleveland’s lawsuit against the team for breaking their lease on the stadium. I suspect that football fans in Baltimore, though they might have liked the history, weren’t interested in the name or the colors, and I suspect that helped.
I always thought it was funny that the Seattle SuperSonics were named after an aircraft development project (the Boeing 2707) that was canceled in 1971, only four years after the team debuted.
When the Browns left Cleveland in 1996, I remember wondering whether Baltimore fans would have preferred the team coming to their city to take the old name, the Colts, if it had been available—as it had been only thirteen years since the previous Baltimore Colts had left. Obviously, however, this was not a possibility, since the Colts had taken the team name with them when they move to Indianapolis in 1983. Like most animal names used for sports teams,* there was nothing specifically coltish** in either of the Colts’ home cities that added a local significance to the name (although the Colts founded in 1953 were actually the second incarnation of the Baltimore Colts).
* There are exceptions, of course—like the New Orleans Pelicans and arguably the Charlotte Hornets that preceded them.
** That’s not what coltish normally means, but you get the idea.
Thread convergence: “Move stadium” exists, as in this BBC headline about Maidenhead United’s plan to move to a different stadium.
J1M: There are a few cases elsewhere (I think Romania has multiple?) where it’s a lot more messy than that and in fact several different clubs claim to be the continuation of the original.
Of course, this can be seen unfolding in Ukraine. Not particularly messy, though. Yet.
@JWB: I have always thought that if a team had to move from New Orleans to Salt Lake City, it should have been the Saints.
@Brett: nonnative Baltimorean here. When the Colts left, Baltimore would have loved to get the deal that Cleveland got when the Browns left: a promise of the next expansion team and that that team would keep the Browns’ name and history.
The connection of colts to Baltimore is Pimlico race track, home of the Preakness. OK, so those are three-year-olds, perhaps not exactly colts, but horses mean a lot to Baltimore and to Maryland generally. I do prefer the connection to the name of the Ravens, the only NFL team named after a poem.
I grew up reasonably close to Baltimore, albeit in a neighboring state, and FWIW I did not grow up thinking of either the Preakness in particular or horses in general as particularly constitutive of Baltimorean identity. Certainly not on the same level with crabs, or Fort McHenry, or even that great German restaurant stuffed with old furniture and paintings which is now sadly defunct.* I certainly never thought of the Colts name as more non-arbitrarily tied to Baltimore than the Eagles name was to Philadelphia, which isn’t to say that the contingent historical tie between either team name and its traditional host city was or is to be severed lightly.
*I always have to google for the name, but wikipedia has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussner%27s_Restaurant Is German food Baltimorean? Mencken was ethnically German and ditto local boy Babe Ruth …
Oh, speaking of thread convergence… the lyrics of the anthem of Shakhtar Donetsk are: Путин хуйло. There’s a glorious YouTube video somewhere.
(familially-obligatory snarl at the los angeles Dodgers, from over here in the (former) land of threatening trolleys*)
Or did the Indonesians inherit from their Dutch former colonial masters a relaxed attitude about foreigners not bothering to learn their language or pay it symbolic respect?
or does it have to do with the proportion of the population who have another language they think of as primary, making the status of the lingua franca not a matter of personal concern?
.
* i suppose LA had them too, but as far as i know never made a demonym about it (i wonder whether the great trolley strike of 1895 played a role in that in brooklyn).
NY also has Metropolitans. LA, whatever it may be, is no metropolis.
The was also a Brooklyn Dodgers football team in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of NFL teams took the names of existing baseball teams in their cities. The New York Giants football team has stayed in New York for decades following the departure of their baseball namesakes.
Today I learned that some people are extremely defensive about Pittsburgh’s claim to having three rivers. To be clear, I don’t begrudge them their fantasy. Whatever definition we come up with for “river,” the happenstance of naming rights will never line up with it perfectly. This is why I compared it to Hindi-Urdu; if people are invested in the idea that having a different religion means that they speak a different language, who am I to insist that they behave any differently? But accepting that the relationship between signifier and signified is subject to convention does not mean we have to throw up our hands and declare that rivers are not meaningfully different from salad dressing. We can still have a scientific idea of what is and is not a language, even if we know it can never be applied in every situation. As others have pointed out, the idea of a “top ten list” of languages lumping L1 and L2 is already a project only suited to light-hearted fun.
1
: the chief or capital city of a country, state, or region
2
: the city or state of origin of a colony (as of ancient Greece)
3
a
: a city regarded as a center of a specified activity
an industrial metropolis
a cattle metropolis
b
: a large important city
one of Europe’s great metropolises
source: Merriam Webster
————————
“ LA, whatever it may be, is no metropolis.”
source: Mr Hat.
Mr. Hat was speaking metaphorically I trust. If so, of course he spoke truth. That leaves me to wonder if LA is merely an egregious urban sprawl or something else worthy of Nathanial West’s
pyromania.*
In Maine. “LA” is Lewiston-Auburn.
@jwb 01/06:16.48
Re Haussner’s
https://collections.digitalmaryland.org/digital/collection/p17340coll1/id/47
Veal hunter style — I suppose this is Jägerschnitzel, maybe you could ask for spätzle or potatoes instead of egg noodles (unless they mean Butternudeln).
Smoked loin of pork–probably Kassler
Vienna meatloaf–is this Leberkäse served with Onion gravy (Bratensosse)? The tomato sauce would be for when it is served in a roll.
Chicken Walter style = Halbhendl
Seafood is on another page and without obvious German influence (except maybe the presence of flounder). No matjes with boiled potatoes.
As a kid I was a fan of Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry, and I feel that Baltimore’s football team should always be the Colts. And I grew up on the other side of the US.
I used to start the first class of Introduction to Linguistics by asking the students how many languages they thought there were in the world, and then what the ten most widely spoken were. Maybe later they would have done as well as the two guys in the video.
As far as I am concerned the current Cleveland Browns are just as authentically „the Browns“ as the New England Patriots are the Patriots. Neither team has any ownership continuity with the 1980s, neither team plays in the same stadium they used in the 1990s, no players remain on either team from the 1990s. All American professional sports teams are essentially just brands.
Not the most written language just yet: The social life of Turkish keysmash.
Why would it be? Leberkäse isn’t a meatloaf, doesn’t look like one, doesn’t taste like one. Also, bonne viande, courte sauce.
what
Leberkässemmel is streetfood you hold in your hand. You don’t want some nonsense dripping out of it.
Leberkässemmel is streetfood you hold in your hand. You don’t want some nonsense dripping out of it.
Certainly not !
Veal hunter style — I suppose this is Jägerschnitzel, maybe you could ask for spätzle or potatoes instead of egg noodles (unless they mean Butternudeln).
“unless” ? Anyway, Butternudeln is ambiguous. When it refers to pasta at all, it doesn’t mean pasta made with butter (instead of/in addition to egg or oil etc) There is no such thing as pasta made with butter, not here anyway. Butternudeln is simply pasta with melted butter and maybe other stuff on top.
There’s also a sweet Bavarian thing, not pasta at all, called Butternudel.
I don’t think Haussner’s was trying for any sort of consistently puristic conception of German cuisine – that would have made no sociological sense given its customer base – so things on the menu were Americanized or in some cases simply American to varying extents. I assume the old-country Teutonic mind would have been unable to comprehend the very idea of “Smithfield Ham bits in a Jumbo Lump Crab Cake,” zum Beispiel, much less Schrod New Orleans. (Although “schrod” as a spelling variant of “scrod” does look more Teutonic!) Also, dig the Americanized plural form “spaetzles”!
During the first Gulf War we had a student from Morocco. I asked her if she could understand Saddam Hussein’s speeches. She yes, because he gave them in standard Arabic, but that if he spoke typical Iraqi Arabic she wouldn’t understand a word. Even Moroccans and Tunisians can’t always understand one another. I know that Maltese isn’t usually regarded as Arabic, but there is some degree of mutual intelllgibility. We had a Maltese colleague who worked in a department with significant numbers of Libyan students: she said that she couldn’t follow their conversations, but she could usually tell what they were talking about (something they would probably not have been very happy about if they had known).
Does Oxford have three rivers — the Thames, the Isis and the Cherwell? Maybe you will object that the first two are the same river: after all, it’s called the Thames when it flows into Oxford, where it becomes the Isis, only to go back to being the Thames when it flows out.
@dm, stu
Thanks. I still have no idea what Vienna meatloaf was, maybe it was Fleischlaberl or maybe it was an American dish that Haussners added Vienna to because it was fried in breadcrumbs?
@Madeline Kalvis: Hmph! Up here in Québec, Canada, we have an actual city which officially is -and always has been, since its founding in 1634- CALLED Trois-rivières*, despite its also being at the meeting point of a mere TWO rivers (in this case the Saint-Maurice and the Saint Lawrence).
(So, fellow Hatters, the next time you hear someone saying that Americans are ignorant of geography, you will have an excellent example to point to indicating that at least one country is even more ignorant of geography!)
On the topic of this thread: splitting Hindi and Urdu -but not Serbian and Croatian- seems acceptable if we define fluency in a language as including reading ability. My understanding (anyone with better knowledge of that part of the world than I: Feel free to jump in and correct me!) is that in Serbia both Cyrillic and Latin script are in active use, with most literate Serbians having -minimally- a reading ability in Latin script, making it easy if not unproblematic for them to read anything written in “Croatian”. By contrast, the bulk of literate Urdu and Hindi speakers are each unfamiliar with the script in which the “other” language is written.
(A related question for Hatters more familiar with South Asia than I am: how many people could claim to be Hindi-Urdu “bilinguals”, i.e. how many people are there who are biliterate in Hindi and Urdu?)
*Which I believe was once brought up here at the Hattery on account of its inhabitants being referred to as “trifluviens”.
@PP
The ‘net tells me that the American expression “Vienna meatloaf” can refer either to Leberkäs or Hackbraten. Their only similarity is that both are usually baked in a rectangular form.
Hackbraten is just “meatloaf” to me. Leberkäs is, as regards consistency, more like hotdog meat, cut into thick fried squares instead of stuffed into tubes then steamed.
From the most recent MM romance I read, I learned that at American baseball games up east you can buy not just hotdogs, but also “brats”. I guess that means a kind of Bratwurst.
I agree with Etienne’s general point but this gets us back to whether “most spoken” is to be taken literally (and thus exclude reading/writing competence) or should simply be treated as an imprecise synonym for most-known, where full credit for “knowing” a given “language” requires fluency in all four of speaking, writing, aural comprehension, and reading comprehension.
For FYLOSC, the question is whether there’s an asymmetry – what percentage of younger products of the Croatian school system can fluently read Cyrillic texts? Doesn’t it seem likely that it’s rather lower than the percentage of younger products of the Serbian & Montenegrin school systems who can fluently read Latin texts?
Yup, and it’s pronounced to rhyme with “hots,” not “rats.”
Thx. I didn’t dare ask ! Thought it would seem peevish or pretentious.
@J.W.B.: I always assumed the Philadelphia Eagles were so named because the Bald Eagle is our national bird and Philadelphia was “the cradle of independence”.
@Cuconnacht: In addition to the reasons I suggested for Cleveland getting a better deal than Baltimore when the football team left, there was room for a lot more criticism of the Baltimore city government and the Maryland state government, especially from the point of view of the NFL. As Wikipedia reminds me, the state legislature was in the process of giving the city the power to seize the team by eminent domain.
On a language note, I believe three-year-old racehorses are commonly called colts and fillies. For instance, from ESPN, “Napoleon Solo reemerged as a colt to watch with a victory in the Preakness Stakes.”
A somewhat recent academic article on Urdu-in-Devanagari is available here.
Regarding brats, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was extremely German during its heyday. In addition to brats (rhymes with hots, as Hat noted) we also commonly eat “metts”, which is technically short for Mettwurst but as far as I know bear no real resemblance to each other. And to make matters worse what we call brats are completely different to e.g. Johnsonville Brats or the standard Wisconsin brat, which are closer to what we call metts. But grilling brats and metts is a very standard summer fare in Cincinnati.
Next time we can talk about goetta (a Cincy-only breakfast meat) or Cincinnati-style chili.
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Bratwursts became a US baseball stadium staple in 1954, when Bill Sperling, an employee at Milwaukee County Stadium, introduced them during a game.
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So they’ve been around for some time. I never picked up on that back when I lived in El Paso and Austin. Never even heard the word “brats”.
we also commonly eat “metts”, which is technically short for Mettwurst but as far as I know bear no real resemblance to each other.
Mettenden (Mett + Enden). These are for cooking in hot water. There’s also just plain Mett, which is ground uncooked pork. Yummy.
When she was a teenager, my ex-wife worked as a coat check girl at the Cincinnati Donauschwaben. German stuff is big in Cincinnati, but it’s not the origin of the chili, which was invented by a Greek.
I’d always heard the Lambrinides’s were actually Macedonian, not Greek, but it looks like the patriarch was indeed from a town in Modern Greece. I think you’d be hard-pressed to say Cincinnati isn’t the origin of the chili though, since it was first sold and created there, albeit by an immigrant based on an old-world meat sauce.
@Stu Clayton: Thanks, that’s exactly what metts are based on. Talking to Germans, I think we were always confusing each other because we do call them metts, so the Germans would (logically) tell me that’s raw pork. I assumed it was like a pate of some kind and never got the connection.
Goetta came up here before.
From the “Flour Power” essay linked in the following comment there, by Reuven Chaim Klein:
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What theOmer and Sotah offerings have in common is that both are brought from barley, while all other meal-offerings are brought from wheat.
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Does “brought from” mean “based on” ? I’m guessing the writer is unwittingly channeling an expression from another language, from the context possibly BH or Ivrit.
Correction: I wrote that Mettenden are “for cooking in hot water”. I meant that they are in that pre-cooked state when sold in supermarkets. They’re not merely Mett in skins. Also they contain spices. Mett contains no spices – you add salt and pepper and slices of raw onion, and that’s it.
You can cook Mettenden further in a stew, or fry them as shown (and serve with mustard!!!). Or fry them and then cook them further in a stew etc.
the current Cleveland Browns are just as authentically „the Browns“ as the New England Patriots are the Patriots.—many human organisations have only a Ship-of-Theseus continuity. Rock groups have often changed their membership, split up, and reformed. Fans may disagree over whether a late version is still the band they learned to love. But if a split band were to putatively reform with no previous members I doubt many fans would agree. See also the Sinn Féin Funds case.
I discovered late in life that “Cosmos” in “New York Cosmos” was short for “Cosmpolitans” rather than being Carl Sagan’s thing. (Compare LA Galaxy.)
The word “goetta” is from Low German (western) Götte, Görte, according to the OED at the linked comment. This word seems to have been difficult for earlier lexicographers to find: the Dictionary of American Regional English has it as “[Etym unknown]”, probably following their earliest source, the 1983 Cincinnati Recipe Treasury, which says “The word goetta doesn’t appear in either German or Gaelic dictionaries” (i.e., not Standard German?).
The OED has it labeled “U.S. regional (Ohio and Kentucky)”, and tagged with “U.S. English (northern)” and “U.S. English (northern)”. I think that’s wrong, it should be labeled more specifically as “U.S. regional (Cincinnati)” (as in DARE) and tagged as midlands, not northern or southern — JH, would you agree?
brought from
in yinglish varieties close to yeshivish, one “brings” an argument, explanation, or proof, so i’d assume it’s from talmudic hebrew or aramaic. yiddish ברענג | breng has a lot of uses*, though neither make/prepare/grind nor explain/demonstrate/prove are among them, but that polysemy could also be from loshn-koydesh bleed-through.
“goetta” is from Low German (western) Götte, Görte
and here i was hoping for goetic sausage…
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* (from refoyl’s dictionary) zikh oysbrengen – to squander; firbrengen – to suggest; farbrengen – to pass time enjoyably; umbrengen – to kill; oyfbrengen – to educate (via to elicit); etc.
many human organisations have only a Ship-of-Theseus continuity. Rock groups have often changed their membership, split up, and reformed.
Sports teams turn over their players, coaching staff and GMs on a regular basis, often measured in years rather than decades. Making the illusion of continuity even more Ship-of-Theseus like than other human organizations.
@JH: I meant that, unlike a lot of the other local specialties, the chili didn’t come from German roots, not that it didn’t originate in Cincinnati.
@ktschwarz: Great find on the previous goetta discussion. I always learned as a kid that it was a common German food in the mid-19th century and earlier, brought over by immigrants and no longer eaten in Germany. As far as I can tell that’s entirely untrue though.
I agree completely that labeling it Ohio/Kentucky regional is too broad. It’s almost exclusive to Greater Cincinnati, which includes plenty of Northern Kentucky. But I don’t think goetta would be known in Lexington, KY or Cleveland, OH. I’m regrettably unfamiliar with the OED US region categories, but Midlands isn’t a word we use. Midwestern is probably most apt, but again it really is just Cincinnati. If pressed I guess it’s more Northern than Southern.
@Brett: Oh yeah, I see now how you meant that. Agreed in that case, although I’ve definitely heard some debate about the Greek vs. Slavic origin of the meat sauce Cincinnati chili is based on.
For FYLOSC, the question is whether there’s an asymmetry – what percentage of younger products of the Croatian school system can fluently read Cyrillic texts? Doesn’t it seem likely that it’s rather lower than the percentage of younger products of the Serbian & Montenegrin school systems who can fluently read Latin texts?
Yes, because 100% of literate Serbs can and do read Latin texts fluently. We‘ve addressed this previously. Almost any thing „hip“ and „modern“ in Serbian tends to use the Latin alphabet. Government, Church, nationalistic texts and 19th century reprints are more likely to be in Cyrillic. To a native Serbian the distinction is somewhat like the Fraktur/Antiqua distinction in pre-NSDAP Germany.
JH, thanks! “Midland” is a linguistics term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_American_English
but it’s true that people in the region probably call it “midwest” rather than “midlands”.
The Dictionary of American Regional English has three entries labeled as Cincinnati: goetta, pony keg (“A store selling beer, wine, ice, picnic and party supplies, and occas convenience items”), and three-way (chili), which is “orig Cincinnati Ohio, now more widely known”.
From the descriptions goetta just sounds like a somewhat deviant regional variation on scrapple, which (to try to link things together) is a vaguely-Germanic staple of Baltimore-area cuisine although it was not literally imported thither from Germany – rather, it was innovated in North America by the Pennsylvania Dutch and then spread a bit to the south.
Separately, the “brought from” that Stu queried does sound a little ESLish, but I think it’s from the most literal sense of “bring” that you see in e.g. “Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest.” You (classically, in olden times) physically bring the offering with you from your own farm to the Temple. The other uses rozele references seem like extended ones where “bring” would not be the obvious verb in English.
@ktschwarz: Ah, the midlands dialect. Almost certainly more accurate than Northern for a Cincinnati dialect. I always believed Cincinnati has a fairly distinct accent even from other “midlands” cities, and that appears to be accurate, though not unique. Wikipedia cites Labov’s The Atlas of American English quite extensively, which (assuming they’re correct citations) seems to say that. And Cincinnati generally pops on things like that NYT accent survey that does the rounds every few years. I’m a complete amateur though and I’m sure everything I’ve said is completely basic for anyone with any kind of American dialect study. As for the DARM Cincinnati words, all seem accurate to me! Personally I grew up calling pony kegs “drive throughs” but was of course familiar with the term. I think the main reason 3-way has spread is because of the little bit of naughty connotations it carries outside of Cincinnati. There are a couple others that could maybe be added; I’ve heard “gym shoes” meaning any kind of athletic shoe is a Cincinnati dialect thing, as well as “Please?” meaning “I didn’t hear you, can you repeat that?” I’m sure there are more I could come up with if I had lived there in the past 20 years.
@JWB: I always thought scrapple was a Philadelphia thing originally. Never tried it myself, but I’ve heard it’s quite similar to goetta. I have a vague memory that one is made with steel-cut oats and one with regular. I like the association with deviancy though!
Re regional variation in Ohio I was recently talking to someone whose family was trying to figure out what to do with an elderly parent suffering from dementia who needs to be placed into some sort of appropriate institutional setting. One idea was a place near Cincinnati, which would be logistically convenient because that’s where one of the adult children lives. But others are concerned because the aged mother has lived her entire 90+ years in one small part of northeastern Ohio, and if you put her someplace at the southwest corner of the state it will mean that most of the locally-hired staff are going to speak with unfamiliar/alien accents which the patient, however impaired, may predictably find odd and thus an obstacle to feeling comfortable and at home in a new setting.
@JH: there are a lot of commonalities between Philadelphia and Baltimore and that’s one of ’em. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t also differences.
Now-vintage tv commercial for “brats” (with the LOT vowel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H_2mzLVa2o
The term three-way refers to the basic serving of chili one would order at Skyline: spaghetti, topped with the chili, topped with shredded cheddar. However, you can also order a four-way (with added onions or beans, the basic chili being beanless) or a five-way (with both). Not caring so much for beans, I would usually get a three-way or a four-way with onions. They also serve the chili in all the standard formats: as a bowl, on a hot dog, or over a baked potato.
@J.W.B.: In my recent experience, there will probably be a fair number of AAVE accents, African accents, and “General American” accents (which are of course based on pre-vowel-shift northeastern Ohio) at any such residence, along with the local accents.
@JH: All the examples of Cincinnati dialect mentioned so far are unfamiliar to me as a former Clevelander, except that I’ve heard of “three-way chili” as a Cincinnati thing, and “gym shoe” shared the territory with “tennis shoe” and “sneaker” in my childhood.
@JH again: This article says that typical Cincinnati chili was invented by two Macedonian brothers, Tom and John Kiradjieff, in 1922, whereas Nicholas Lambrinides opened the first Skyline Chili restaurant in 1949. The article also provides a link to a recipe, for those who are wondering what this stuff is.
Is Brett implying that “over a baked potato” is a “standard format” for chili consumption outside the Cincinnati region?
@Brett: Of course I should have thought to give a brief description of what a 3-way is in a chili parlor. All absolutely correct. Skyline is the largest chain restaurant for chili in Cincinnati, contrasted with Gold Star. Plenty of smaller chains and traditional parlors still exist. Skyline is so popular it has become the generic term for Cincinnati-style chili, like Kleenex or Thermos. The comparison to “chili” as it’s understood in the US at large (southwestern chili con carne) really throws people off, and you would never conflate the two in Cincinnati itself. “I’m going to have skyline for dinner” is entirely different from “I’m going to have chili for dinner”. It’s essentially never eaten as a bowl, although I suppose it’s possible – it would be very thin. By far the most popular ways to eat it are as a 3/4/5-way or as cheese coneys, with chili and cheese over a hot dog (with everything including mustard and diced onion). Other less popular preparations are the chilito (chili-burrito) or the chili cheese sandwich (coney without the hot dog). I prefer either coneys or a 5-way or 4-way onion. The last time I was at Skyline the price increase from a 3-way seemed extreme for some diced onions and/or beans, so I may be a 3-way man these days.
@Jerry Friedman: Interesting that gym shoe is not apparently a Cincinnati dialect feature. Maybe that’s a midlands accent thing. I seem to recall getting mostly confused looks when I first moved west and mentioned needing gym shoes to play basketball or something like that, rather than specifically wear at the gym.
Thanks for the link re: the origin of cincinnati-style chili. Glad to see I got the Macedonian vs. Greek distinction from somewhere.
@J.W.B. I think chili con carne on a baked potato is more standard than skyline on a baked potato! It appears they do sell it, but I’ve never heard of anyone eating one.
I grew up there in the 90s and 2000s. The old-timers definitely had stronger, more unique accents than my generation. I suspect they’re even more similar to General American now.
I think to eat Cincy chili in a bowl, you have to dump in a lot of the oyster crackers that come along with any kind of chili order. I have seen people order it that way occasionally, but I don’t remember that much detail. As to chili on baked potatoes, it’s hardly the most common topping (not like the basic butter, sour cream, with maybe onions, cheese, and bacon, or the classic melted cheddar and broccoli), but I’ve seen in on the menu in lots of different places.
Mettenden / Mettwurst
They don’t need to be cooked or fried, one can safely eat them raw as bought from the butcher. Frying also not something I wouldn’t do; you cook them together with other vegetables or slice them into a soup or stew. The classic is eating them with green cabbage; I usually add them to the top of the pot for the last five minutes or so, rather heating them up a bit than cooking them.
zikh oysbrengen – to squander; firbrengen – to suggest; farbrengen – to pass time enjoyably; umbrengen – to kill; oyfbrengen – to educate (via to elicit); etc
Some of them are similar in German: verbringen “pass / spend time (not necessarily enjoyably), umbringen “kill, murder”.
I suppose I think of chili being an option at a baked potato place being conceptually different from baked potato being an option at a chili place? But come to think of it it’s been a long long time since I ingested a baked potato.
Maybe worth mentioning that brats and metts are almost always grilled over charcoal or propane, sometimes a flat grill, then eaten on a soft bun, maybe with sauerkraut, brown mustard, chopped onions, and/or ketchup (sorry to our German friends). If I were to make a stew or a braised cabbage dish with sausage, I’d use kielbasa or another kind of sausage.
35 years ago when I was a penniless law student living in Chicago some of my equally-penniless classmates of Midwestern upbringing would prepare brats by boiling/simmering them in cheap beer, often on a charcoal grill on the back stairs of a six-flat. Maybe that’s not how they do it in Cincinnati, though?
My Chicago relatives used both methods to cook them. First they boiled the brats in beer (or sometimes just water); then they finished them with a broil on the grill.
The preparation Brett described is the classic way they’d cook ’em in Wisconsin, but those brats are very different than Cincinnati brats and metts. It’s not impossible (the ways of east-siders and Catholics are an absolute mystery to me) but now how we’d make them growing up.
Cincinnati brats are extremely white and relatively bland. The metts are red and sometimes spicy. I don’t know the formatting for hyperlinking here, but hopefully the link to an image below works:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aXskIfN6EqQ/sddefault.jpg
Probably awesome; I didn’t know it at all. Nudel originally referred to anything elongate, thick, and plant-based – this for example (which I know without the sauce and the bacon – just salt).
Ah, Columbo food. Faschierter Braten, as it’s called where I’m from, differs from a meatloaf mostly in size – instead of eating several, you eat a slice or two of the single block, and it’s baked in a rectangular mold instead of pan-fried.
Close to 0, and that was already the case in Yugoslavia, when Cyrillic was taught in Croatia (ethnoreligious Serbs included) for a week near the beginning of elementary school and then never mentioned again.
Best quote: “In contrast to the convention prevalent in Hindi language newspapers, publications in Urdu-in-Devanagari represent the distinctive Urdu phonemes with the bindi diacritic quite religiously.” The pun is definitely intended.
That must be from (higher registers of) German.
“Do in” seems to work well as a translation.
There’s also vorbringen, which is what you can do with an argument; it could be a calque of “proffer” (well, the original proferre).
“Mettwurst” is in DARE (Wisconsin, Michigan, some other states), Merriam-Webster, and the OED (England, Australia, Scotland, US), but “mett(s)” has not yet made it into any dictionary I could find except Urban Dictionary. Is this also local to Cincinnati? Google tells me “metts” can also be found at least as far away as Dayton.
I had some very white and not very good Thuringian bratwurst once. Some of my kids refused to eat them. I wanted to support the guy who had opened the small German cafe and meat market where I bought them, but that wasn’t possible if he couldn’t provide a quality product.
In Urban Dictionary, the first listing reads to me as from a German, but I would assume the second is a Cincinnatian. Yes, “metts” are very much a Cincinnati thing as far as I know. I’ve never been offered one anywhere else in the US. Dayton is still Southwest Ohio and more associated with Cincinnati than any other large city. I assume they have Skyline and everything else too.
“Brats and metts” is not quite a collocation* because you could grill just brats or just metts, but they are frequently used together and always in that order.
*Is this the right word for a pair of words always used together and in a particular order, like inclement weather? A quick google search wasn’t definitive unfortunately.
@JH “the right word for a pair of words always used together and in a particular order.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_binomial
But the words must belong to the same wordclass, such as “here and there.” The collocation “inclement weather” does not meet that requirement.
That’s exactly what I was thinking of, but I was also conflating it with words that mostly only appear in one specific context or pairing in modern English, such as inclement (with weather). Thanks for the find, the term was not coming to me and Google wasn’t working for me.
Googling reveals natural-sounding sentences like “Perfect on American classics like hot dogs and hamburgers, Curry Ketchup* will take your metts and brats to a whole new level of taste,” giving the other order. Maybe to the right native-speaker ear this is as marked as someone saying “pepper and salt,” of course.
*The Zeisner brand, in particular.
To me, that definitely sounds like Cheese and Macaroni. The fact that the product is presumably German but sold at a major Cincy international market, I wonder if some wires got crossed somewhere in translation.
This got me wondering if it was just my idiolect, so I’m running an extremely scientific poll right now (texting friends and family to see if either way is acceptable). The preliminary results are coming in very strongly that it is indeed an irreversible binomial. I may update with final results tomorrow.
@ JH “I was also conflating it with words that mostly only appear in one specific context or pairing in modern English, such as inclement (with weather).”
In that case, maybe you need “fixed collocation.” Then again since there are degrees of fixednes (a phenomenon at which you hint: “mostly only”), maybe you need “collocations of variable fixedness.”
maybe you need “fixed collocation.”
There’s a Bertie Wooster (???) story involving those collocations. Somebody (Jeeves?) volunteers ‘addled’ can be used only of eggs. Bertie is pleased with himself to come up with ‘brains’.
(???) Or it might not be a Wooster story at all, nor even Wodehouse. My brains are addled.
A standard menu describes fixed collations.
Skyline Chili is secretly just a sweeter, more clovey hamshuka, where the hummus has been replaced by massive amounts of cheese.
I thought that term meant a semi-serious religious gathering/get-together — but I guess that’s because the posters I’ve been seeing them advertised on are using it in that sense:
WikiP:Farbrengen
More on Chabad farbrengen:
https://www.lubavitch.com/wordsmith-farbrengen/
“Sie verbringen im Glück ihre Tage” (a random sentence I plucked from Die Jüdische Litteratur) means “they spend their days in happiness.”
verbringen im Glück is a bit too stiff for everyday use in modern German. Nothing wrong with the word Glück, of course. Sentimental old women who read MF romances might say “Sie verbringen im Glück ihre Tage”. Maybe.
Apart from that, the word order is driving without a poetic license. It’s “literary”, as David M likes to put it. More idiomatic is “Sie verbringen Ihre Tage im Glück“. The order given would sound like “They spend in happiness their days” in English.
None of this is helpful to someone wanting to learn more idiomatic German. There is no end to the nanodetails that can be expatiated on. Just keep slogging away without worrying too much.
Yes, that wording sounds like it’s from a poem or a song.
@Hans: Good catch.
Die Jüdische Litteratur was published in 1894, but that phrase is not meant to be an idiomatic statement. It’s a translation of the book of Job 21:9ff (I think it’s specifically from verse 13)
https://archive.org/details/diejudischelitte0001jwin/page/158/mode/2up?q=verbringen
Multiple German translations can be compared here:
https://www.bibleserver.com/LUT.EU.ELB.GNB.HFA.MENG.Ne%C3%9C.NG%C3%9C.NLB.SLT.VXB.ZB/Hiob21,13
None of them have the word order of the quoted phrase, so I guess it was the choice of that one writer.
I just ran across the Volxbibel (sic). Here’s how that part of Job is rendered:
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7 Kann mir jemand auch nur einen Grund nennen, warum Gott die Leute weiterleben lässt, die ständig Kacke bauen? Die werden sogar immer stärker und gesünder, je älter sie werden! 8 Sie erleben noch, wie ihre Kinder und Enkelkinder eine schöne Kindheit haben. 9 Bei ihnen passiert nie etwas Schlimmes in der Familie. Sie leben einfach entspannt und bekommen nie was davon ab, wenn Gott mal sauer ist. 10 Ihre Kohle vermehrt sich, keine Investition geht daneben.
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Isn’t there a “lolcat version” of the bible ?
That is the order of the Hebrew:
It doesn’t for me. Both versions have a (sort-of) anapaestic rhythm, but that seems to be accidental (German bible translations follow an unwritten law never to translate Hebrew verse as verse; in fact, the revised Luther text I read at school had no indication at all that large parts of the OT are in verse.)..
Both versions are equally idiomatic for me. Neither sounds as awkward as that English phrase.
@ulr: Then I can only conclude that my Sprachgefühl is nearer to DM’s than yours wrt this example.
@ulr, hans, dm
I think in earlier generations, people who were exposed to a lot of Latin and Greek carried this over to their German and said things like fürwahr. Not saying this is happening here, but it may be a parallel.
How does it work without figurative in, i.e., is
Sie verbringen ihre Tage im Gefängnis.
less poetic than
Sie verbringen im Gefängnis ihre Tage.
(provided either sentence is acceptable)?
Both would be equally unpoetic in a poem by Rilke. And both could be equally poetic in a poem by Ringelnatz. I mistrust anything that is poetic/unpoetic without any context — at best it’s a cliché.
umbringen “kill, murder”
Which I recognize from one of the few German quotations I sort of know: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker,
Wikipedia says that the name Trois-Rivières resulted from an optical illusion
:
L’origine du nom de Trois-Rivières (prononcé [tʁwɔ.ʁi.vjaɛ̯ʁ] écouterⓘ en français canadien et [tʁwaʁivjɛʁ] écouterⓘ en français de France), qui date de la fin du XVIe siècle, est due en fait à une illusion d’optique. Ce nom fait référence aux 3 chenaux que la rivière Saint-Maurice[9] forme à son embouchure avec le Saint-Laurent en s’écoulant entre deux îles, l’île de la Potherie et l’île Saint-Quentin[10]. La ville occupe un emplacement connu des Français depuis 1535 alors que Jacques Cartier, dans un voyage le long du Saint-Laurent, s’y arrête pour planter une croix sur l’île Saint-Quentin. Son nom Trois-Rivières n’est employé pour la première fois qu’en 1599 par le Sieur Dupont-Gravé, géographe à l’emploi de Champlain[11], lequel confirme le nom en 1603. Sieur Dupont-Gravé, alors qu’il navigue sur le fleuve en direction de Montréal, aperçoit à peu d’intervalles un premier affluent du fleuve, une langue de terre, un deuxième affluent, une autre langue de terre, et finalement un troisième affluent qu’il prend encore pour une rivière différente. Il ne sait pas alors que deux grosses îles divisent le cours de la rivière Saint-Maurice en trois branches à l’endroit où celle-ci se jette dans le fleuve[12].
Isn’t there a “lolcat version” of the bible?
אָמֵן ἀμήν is generally rendered KTHXBYE. This is technically known as Dynamic Equivalence.
K
Found it, LOLCat Bible Translation Project. DM mentioned it here once.
@JWB, I wonder what those numbers are:/ I mean the list in WP.
It seems for Egyptian “L2 speakers” are speakers of of Sa’idi (southern or upper dialects) and Bedouin dialects in Egypt, and L1 speakers are people of the delta.
People from other countries who watch Egyptian TV series, understand everything there and communicate with Egyptians when needed are ingored (TV has made Cairenne the most widely understood variety: Arabs seem to find the idea of watching TV in translation or not watching it if it’s not their dialect weird)
Compare the number of Egyptians as given in WP:Demographics_of_Egypt (119 million. The article “Egypt” has 108) and the percent of speakers of “Egyptian Arabic” as given in WP:Egypt (68).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt
And honestly the promotion of Ethnologue by WP is disgusting. The ONLY good thing about it is that someone in Ethnologue can earn some money.
I don’t mean the list, I mean links in articles about languages. It is NOT normal that they say ‘pay me’ and while links to scientific articles often say it as well (NOT normal too), scientists (a) can’t be replaced by Wikipedians (b) tell their methods.
You can’t check their numbers, you can’t reproduce them, you can’t even understand them.