My wife and I are reading The Betrothed, Michael F. Moore’s translation of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, and I liked this description (from the end of chapter 4) of Padre Cristoforo, who had become a Capuchin monk after killing a man:
Tutto il suo contegno, come l’aspetto, annunziava una lunga guerra tra un’indole subita, risentita, e una volontà opposta, abitualmente vittoriosa, sempre all’erta e diretta da motivi e da ispirazioni superiori. Un suo confratello ed amico, che lo conosceva bene, lo aveva una volta paragonato a quelle parole troppo espressive nella loro forma naturale, che alcuni, anche ben educati, quando la passione trabocca, pronunziano smozzicate, con qualche lettera mutata, parole che in quel travisamento fanno però ricordare della loro energia primitiva.
His whole demeanor, like his appearance, betrayed a long war between a fiery, resentful disposition and the opposite desire, which usually prevailed, always alert and guided by higher motives and inspiration. A fellow friar and friend, who knew him well, once compared him to words that are overly colorful in their natural form, which some people, even the educated, utter when passion overflows, but in a fractured form, with a couple of letters changed for the sake of propriety. Words that, despite this disguise, maintain their original energy.
Moore chooses “original” for primitiva, but I prefer the more primitive “primitive.” I was struck by the word smozzicate: smozzicare ‘to crumble; to mumble, to slur (words)’ is derived from mozzo ‘cut off, docked,’ which is (according to Wiktionary) “From Vulgar Latin *mutius, from Latin mutilus [of unknown origin]. Cf. also French mousse, Spanish mocho.” The only French mousse I knew was the noun meaning ‘moss; foam,’ but this turns out to be an adjective meaning ‘blunt.’
Adopting “to smozzicate” as a loanword meaning “mumble, slur, etc.” would be a great adornment to the English lexicon. Although of course “smozzicated” feels like it ought to mean “mumbling and slurring in the way that suggests an entire pint of gin has been consumed.”
Agree on both counts.
I wonder if “primitiva” is supposed to bring to mind the Primitive Church? Probably not…
Although looking at the passage more carefully, maybe in context “smozzicate” means more “to mince” or “to bowdlerize” when *almost* uttering taboo lexemes?
which would make “primitiva” glossable more as vulgar/coarse/obscene than “original”. and the passage a beautiful description of someone who is a living “jeezum crow!” (can you tell i’ve been to vermont recently?)
(and makes me tempted to interpret “smozzicare” as itself a smozzication of a “castrate” meaning of “mozzo” – but that’s probably my yiddish/nyc “shm-” coming through)
It was written in 20s…
Did the word already have any connotations other than “original” (that is, could it refer to the “original state of man”? People already were writing about this, but…)
Il Padre as a minced oath! What a lovely image, by Jeezum!
Yes, Manzoni is a remarkable writer, even if he does delight in divagating.
Shouldn’t the English borrowing be “exmuticate”?
@rozele:
That’s precisely the simile the passage is making!
Possibly it’s made more obvious by the fact that “anche ben educati” doesn’t exactly mean “even the educated,” but rather “albeit well-mannered.”
Like our host, I find “original” too weak a translation, but I’d think “primitive” has in English, as in Italian, both meanings that Manzoni is playing with: the primary one of “original” and the figurative one of “rough, crude, uncivilized.”
I don’t think that interpretation is possible in Italian. It isn’t in my idiolect and the dictionary doesn’t support it either. I’d venture that mozzare not only doesn’t have but cannot have a meaning of “castrate” because it specifically means “truncate.” It can refer to docking of tails or ears, but also to decapitation, or mutilation of limbs or fingers. Although castration can be performed by resection, I don’t think the underlying anatomy allows viewing that excision as a truncation.
@drasvi:
Written in 1821-42 (I think we’re reading nowadays the revised 1840-42 edition) and by a non-native speaker … Though it need not be completely false that people like me have become native speakers of his written language.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the likes of Hobbes and Rousseau had already been discussing primitive man in earlier centuries.
@Y:
I’d also think not. My sense is that the Primitive Church is not immediately accessible here. First, because the word “primitive” is rather recalling “savage, brutish,” as above. Second, because an Italian reader may well think of it (as I do) as “la Chiesa delle origini” rather than “la Chiesa primitiva.” Third, because the Italian reader is probably just not thinking about it much. I suspect it’s significantly more prominent in the thoughts of Protestants than Catholics.
Thanks very much for those insights — I was hoping you’d weigh in!
I suspect it’s significantly more prominent in the thoughts of Protestants than Catholics
Indeed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Methodist_Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Baptists
I understand the Primitive in Kehukee Primitive Baptist Church, but why Kehukee? Wikipedia is silent…
Presumably a place name.
All google results seem just to lead back to the church, unfortunately.
But this stirring document refers to “the church at Kehukee” as one of the founding members of the Kehukee Baptist Association:
https://archive.org/details/concisehistoryof00bigg/page/n5/mode/2up
They seem to be a hyper-Calvinist outfit (showing that you can too have too much of a good thing …)
Careful! (Nobody expects the Calvinist Inquisition…)
“Primitive Baptists” were unknown to me until today, but their moniker is a perfect illustration of what I was saying above. The first impression it gives me is not “Original Baptists” but rather “Savage Baptists.”
I wonder at what point the English “primitive” moved from the sense “original, pristine” (which it evidently had for these pious eighteenth-century folk) to its current nasty-and-brutish one? I wouldn’t be surprised if it correlates with the rise of pop-evolutionism*, though I suppose the famous Whig view of history also has the tendency to turn words meaning “original” from hooray-words into boo-words.
* Not the actual scientific theory, which has no such teleological baggage, of course.
@David Eddyshaw:
The stirring document reports on p. 36 of the later edition on Google Books:
Their usage of “at Kehukee” sounds strange to me — but what would I know as a foreigner and a Popist? In any case, the church was not named after a settlement but after the Kehukee Creek (a.k.a. Kehukee Swamp).
Another stirring document explains:
This most stirring of documents pleases me greatly with its lack of pedantic concern for consistency in spelling.
The Kehukee Creek is shown on the 1770 Collet Map. Both the Kehukee Swamp and the Kehukee Church are still shown on Google Maps.
Spelling is for Arminians.
“Convened at Kehukee” sounds perfectly unexceptionable to me. What would you have expected?
Meetings often occur at places even if it’s possible for them to be in them, but it doesn’t appear there was even a village named Kehukee for it to be in, so it’s not surprising that Kehukee is treated as a point rather than an area.
Given the information so helpfully cited, I for one would have expected “at Kehukee Creek” or possibly “at the Kehukee.”
Ditto!
Maybe what I’m not getting is that in Baptist usage “meeting at the Kehukee Church” becomes “meeting at Kehukee,” on the lines of “meeting at St. Paul’s.”
The google n-gram viewer shows “primitive church” peaking around 1840 (maybe pamphlet wars occasioned by the Oxford Movement?) before a fairly steep subsequent decline. But earlier English usage can be found among folks quite far removed from the predecessors of the “Primitive Baptists.” So, e.g., the work first published in 1675 titled “The Naked Truth: or, The True State of the Primitive Church,” may have first come out under a pseudonym but was subsequently attributed to so Establishment a figure as the Rt. Rev’d Herbert Croft, Bishop of Hereford. The positive valence of “primitive” can be seen in the book’s assertion that even if the so-called Apostles Creed was not literally composed by any of the original dozen Apostles, it was nonetheless certainly the work of “Primitive and Apostolick Men,” who for that reason should be thought authoritative. Or consider “Thomas Brett, LL.D.,” as he is styled on the title page of his 1714-published “A Further Enquiry into the Judgment and Practice of the Primitive Church, in Relation to Persons being Baptized by Lay-men, &c.” So High Church a fellow was he that on the accession of George I he resigned his living in the Established Church and entered the debatably-legal gray zone of the Non-Jurors, who subsequently consecrated him as one of their bishops. His position is that the practice of the “Primitive Church,” what ever it may turn out to have been, is normative and binding although he is engaged in a disputation with some other polemicist as to what it actually was.
That the Italian calque of “primitive church” does not have this same positive valence might be due to the lack of Reformation influence there, or could just be a more contingent thing. I have no idea whether or not the non-Anglophone Protestant nations of the 17th century embrace whatever their language’s equivalent phrase would be and used it the same way it was used in English.
On the other hand, this wiki article claims that one version of Freemasonry (considered marginal/illicit by the mainstream Masonic establishment in the Anglophone world) bears the full title “The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm” (presumably implying a positive valence for “primitive”) and was originally founded in Italy, with Garibaldi himself as its first “Universal Grand Hierophant.” I can’t immediately find the Italian version of the name, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Memphis-Misraim
@GP:
Ah. The anarthrousness of it all. I see what you mean.
I suppose if there was a locally well-known church at the creek, it would not be too odd if “Kehukee” got promoted into a place name in its own right. And “at Kehukee” might be shortened from “at Kehukee Church.”
The original inhabitants of that area were apparently Tuscarora. Anyone know enough Northern Iroquoian to hazard a guess as to what “Kehukee” actually means?
@GP: It is by the conventions governing the naming of American universities a bit odd-sounding to have one which proclaims itself to be “The University at [not “of”] Buffalo,” but there it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
On the other hand, American real estate developers have become fond of the “The X at Y” locution, so it is unremarkable to find, e.g., “The Cedars at Innsbrook” as the name of “a cozy, 96-home community conveniently located adjacent to the vibrant Innsbrook Corporate Park in the northwestern Henrico County suburb of Richmond, Virginia.” (Saying suburb rather than suburbs sounds unidiomatic in context, but that might have been a typo.)
I can’t immediately find the Italian version of the name, though.
Il Rito Antico e Primitivo di Memphis e Misraim: Gradi dal 1° al 18° (Massonica).
(I’m surprised at Memphis rather than Menfi.)
@J.W. Brewer: The university fits perfectly my own usage habits. It used to be the “University of Buffalo” until 1962, when it merged with the SUNY system and thus had to become the “State University of New York at Buffalo.” I agree, though, that “the University at Buffalo” becomes an unusual abbreviation. I’d say “SUNY Buffalo,” surely betraying my lack of familiarity with the institution.
Anyway, “at Name” works for me if the name is a locality’s: at Buffalo, at Halifax, … I was looking for a village called Kehukee. With a body of water, I cannot do that: *at Mississippi, *at Roanoke, …
I would usually use a “the” in expressions of the form “PREPOSITION the HYDRONYM,” but note the anarthrousness of hydronym-adjacent Old Country toponyms like “Stratford-on-Avon” or “Southend-on-Sea.” And note the name of this venerable old London church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary-at-Hill Admittedly, this usage pattern would sound odd in a U.S. context, at least to my ear.
When I pass a ‘Primitive Methodist’ chapel here in the UK I always have a mental picture of cavemen in animal skins! (The group rejoined mainstream Methodism back in the 1930s.)
many thanks, GP!
to me, “at X” for a locality has a specifically british/commonwealth flavor, or an older/obsolescent u.s.ian one – i would say, and expect to hear from other massachusans, “my sister was married in worcester”; if i heard “my sister was married at worcester”, i would expect a british accent and a marriage nearer birmingham than boston. for streets, “at” works fine for me with either the bare name or the full one – e.g. “that’s the bodega at atlantic [avenue], right?” or “the church at fulton [street]”. but (confirming GP’s instinct) i would need a definite article or a genre-name to use “at” for a natural feature – “at walden pond” but not “at walden”; “at the hudson” but not “at hudson”.
Like the strings of lakes called Havel and Spree and alleged to be rivers so Berlin can have rivers?
“Written in 1821-42 (I think we’re reading nowadays the revised 1840-42 edition)”
@GP, yes, but this specific passage is 20s (I googled an excerpt, limiting the search by 1830…).
Yes, I think primitive man was discussed before. But the question is whether the writer and readers associated the word with anything but its original meaning, namely “original”.
In Russian there are iznachal’nyj, pervonachal’nyj “original”, pervobytnyj (about hunter-gatherers), primitivnyj (1. simplistic 2. also in mathematics).
Only primitivnyj is used to express disapproval. pervobytnyj simply makes you think of Stone Age people.
So in Russian these 3 components of the meaning exist but… went to different lexemes.
pervobytnyj when used to describe emotions, it is often still positive: feelings that arise more immediately from your nature in their undiluted form, not acquired/cultivated.
The word you choose to express fascination. If your intent is preaching refinement and contempt to simplistic feeling or behaviour, you use some other word, e.g. primitivnyj (this one does not refer to the Stone Age).
@drasvi:
I hadn’t checked, but the passage is actually revised and strangely enough the version quoted in the original post is neither in the 1825-27 nor in the 1840-42 edition, if Wikisource is to be trusted.
The 1825-27 edition is the following:
The 1840-42 edition (also reprinted in my own beloved 1912 copy) is the following:
Not coincidentally, focoso and ben educato remain common in Italian, while costumato is uncommon and subito a vanishingly rare archaism in this sense (though it is a very common adverb meaning “at once”).
However, energia primitiva is unchanged throughout, so your question stands.
Looking at French should be informative anyway since Manzoni was in Paris much earlier and for much longer than in Florence. The TFLi has the pejorative meaning since the late 18th century:
I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Battaglia’s Grande dizionario della lingua italiana is finally online. I’m also surprised it cites this Manzoni passage for a special meaning of primitivo:
For pejorative uses, it has:
I posted too early and I’m running out of time to date all the authors. There are 19th century ones.
All the pejorative quotations in the Battaglia dictionary are later than I Promessi sposi — Garibaldi was 22 years younger than Manzoni and only started writing novels in his sixties.
Nonetheless, if indeed the pejorative meaning was current in French at the beginning of the 19th century, it must have been in Manzoni’s mind regardless of which Romance language he was using.
@GP, thanks!
I’d be careful with identifying a meaning as “pejorative”.
1. For me “pejorative” is when you can express disapproval by means of a word alone.
2. there is a different situation as in “primitive tools” – here the original (primitive) speaker may simply mean the initial stage in the development of technology.
But it immediately places tools on the scale [bad – good] – indeed even within history and archaeology later technological stages usually give an advantage (or rather those later stages that don’t give advantage are replaced by selection, which makes us think that ‘later’ is ‘better’).
3. “[original] barbarism” is not like this.
No matter what adjective you use here (“primitive barbarism”, “original barbarism”), but the phrase implies that the original state of the man and her* civilisation is barbarism – but does not impart negative meaning to “primitive” or “original” and does not preclude existence of good-because-primitive/original things.
It is not barbarism which is bad because primitive (or opposed to refined, sophisticated barbarism)
Of course, IF the word systematically appears in combination with barbarism (and never something good), that would be an indication of a drift towards pejorative.
___
* :-p
@drasvi: I’m not sure I follow the distinctions you’re making.
Undoubtedly, all meanings of primitive are derived from the basic one of “original, not derivative.”
Nonetheless, dictionaries separate some further senses in which the word has come to mean “rudimentary, rough, crude, uncivilized”. In French: “simple, grossier, naïf … rudimentaire, sommaire.” In Italian: “Rudimentale, non ancora perfezionato … rozzo, incivile, ingenuo o sprovveduto.”
I’d insist it’s fair to call these the pejorative meanings of primitive. I don’t think I can speak of something being wonderfully rudimentary or someone being wonderfully crude (grossier, rozzo, incivile) without sounding aggressively ironic.
When applied to a tool, I perceive the word primitive to have unambiguously this pejorative meaning. I may be wrong, of course — so few things in life and language are unambiguous! — but the dictionaries seem to support my reading. A primitive tool is a rudimentary tool: not a basic tool, nor a simple tool, nor a pristine tool, nor an ancient tool.
Conversely, I can understand your criticism that the lexicographers at the TLFi have chosen their citations mistakenly because “la foy primitive”, “la simplicité primitive” and “barbarie primitive” are not three distinct meanings but one only: ancient faith, ancient simplicity, ancient barbarity …
I see the logic behind your criticism, but I also see a chance the lexicographers are actually right because they’re seeing the forest although they’re only showing us the trees. We’ve just discussed a long tradition in English-speaking Protestantism of using primitive to imply superiority in faith and grace. Rousseau certainly considered the primitive condition of man to be one of blissful simplicity and advertised it as such. It may well be that by the turn of the century people like Volney (an ardent Voltairean unlikely to be too sympathetic to Rousseau’s ideas) had instead popularized the notion of primitive barbarity enough to make primitive a synonym for barbarous, barbaric already.
It is now, according to the Oxford-Google dictionary, which defines barbaric as “1. savagely cruel. 2. primitive; unsophisticated. – uncivilized and uncultured.” and barbarous as “1. extremely brutal. 2. primitive and uncivilized.”
There are, of course, worse things to be called than “Primitive Methodist”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_People
Sadly, the group seems to have given up this wonderful name nowadays.
Less poetically, there are Strict and Particular Baptists (disappointingly, both adjectives here actually have precise technical meanings.)
Pure free-association from “peculiar people”: “Opposite People” (but not in a good way):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFSRCG4DrmI
(Seun Kuti and Cheick Tidiane Seck.)
https://genius.com/Fela-kuti-opposite-people-lyrics
Fela Kuti himself would probably have been fine with describing himself as having primitive energy, though he would have been taking the piss: “I be Africa man original: I no be gentleman at all-o.”
“I see the logic behind your criticism, but I also see a chance the lexicographers are actually right because they’re seeing the forest although they’re only showing us the trees.”
Of course they can be right. And I do not think that professional lexicographers are worse at philology or lexicography than I am! But writing one (!!!) dictionary definition that will satisfy every researcher trying to identify one of many shades in a word and every grammatical theorist is a very difficult task. A professional lexicographer writes tens thousands of them.
So yes, I usually always check quotations and when we need to tell “‘neutral’ adjective qualifying a ‘bad’ noun” from “ ‘bad’ adjective qualifying ‘bad’ noun“, the adjective itself is known to have been ‘neutral’ in past and to be ‘bad’ today and the quote comes from the time when I expect the adjective to still be ‘neutral’, I do not trust the lexicographer.
Perhaps she merely confused different attitudes to ‘barbarous’ societies with different meanings of the word ‘primitive’.
“Those [feminist, liberal, Muslim, Calvinist] whores!” makes the speaker’s attitude to feminists, liberals, Muslims and Calvinists very clear, and there are a communities of people who use some of these as swear words.
But still the line where “Communist” becomes the same as “Commie” has not been crossed and we can’t add to the entry “feminist” a new meaning “(pejorative): a person, usually a woman, obsessed with … ”
In modern Russian I can just say: “this is primitive!” and the context will make it clear that I’m speaking with disapproval.
A construction “[adj] [bad noun]” simply does not contain information about pejorativity of the adjective: the adjective is unlikely to be ‘good’, but it can easily be ‘neutral’, the phrase will remain ‘bad’ anyway.
From a description on a wine-themed website of the “Primitivo” grape used to make wine in southern Italy, esp. Puglia: ‘The name Primitivo translates roughly as “early one” (there is an obvious link here with Tempranillo, which means the same thing in Spanish), and refers to the variety’s early-ripening nature. One might be forgiven for thinking that the grape was in some way “primitive”, perhaps less refined than other grape varieties. The robust character of much Primitivo wine does little to correct this mistake …’
You can maybe trace the same shift discussed above re “primitive” through the history of Anglophone art criticism. By the 20th century, a “primitive painter” typically meant some folksy untrained outsider like Grandma Moses if not some full-on art-brut madman, but in the age of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the “primitive painters” meant Giotto and other Italian masters of the earlier phases of the Renaissance and it was certainly not meant as a pejorative description. I *think* the title of this classic song (with rather hard-to-parse lyrics*) is alluding to the Ruskinian sense but I could be wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jtejnvza2U
*and we don’t even have the excuse that they’re in a West African pidgin/creole.
I found an example, where “barbarie primitive” translates “the most savage barbarity”. It is still ambigous, because the translation is loose:
The History of Women:
Translation:
barbarie la plus … primitive only appears in 1800s (alongside with barbarie la plus raffinée)
to make primitive a synonym for barbarous, barbaric already
Offhand I can only think of one example of primitive (as an adjective, at least) being used to mean anything like “original; ancient”, as opposed to the modern “basic, rudimentary, undeveloped; (as an insult) stupid” – namely Primitive Irish. (I’m surprised how this thread lasted this long without that example.)
OTOH even as an insult it doesn’t seem to mean “savage”, never mind “brutal”; at most “uncultured” as an extension of the non-insult sense in “primitive societies”.
(And, as I tried to hint with my mention of the adjective specifically, something much closer to the original meaning seems to survive in the noun primitive “(programming) a data type built into the programming language; (semantics) a word that is not derived from another word”. [Not to be confused with the de-adjectival meaning of primitive “a member of an undeveloped society; (as an insult) an uncultured person”.]
I’m not actually sure how that happened – I would have expected those narrow technological senses to have arisen in the mid-20th century at the earliest, well after the original meaning of the adjective had mostly gone out of use. Perhaps there was an intermediate sense – possibly Wiktionary sense 6 “a basic geometric shape from which more complex shapes can be constructed” – that originated before the 1950s but persisted long enough to be used as a pattern for the computing and semantics senses.)
As for barbarous and barbaric, in my idiolect barbarous only has the literal/technical meaning of “relating to the tribes surrounding the Roman Empire, and/or their predecessor tribes; esp. of an imitation”, whereas “cruel, brutal, savage” can not be barbarous but only barbaric. I wonder if anyone else here makes the same (or a similar) distinction.
(Turns out that Wiktionary doesn’t have this sense for barbarous at all! I can’t fit “barbarous imitation”, or any of its variants, into any of their four given senses, which are all variants of “uncultured, cruel”.)
The first five results for google books for примитивные “primitive-PL”, 20th century:
1. (title): Ц-типы н-мерных решеток и пятимерные примитивные параллелоэдры (с приложением к теории покрытий)
2. …. А. Г. Курош в качестве матриц примитивных групп рассматривал только эти нормальные примитивные….
3. ….Определение. Две примитивные формы называются собственно эквивалентными, если одна из них преобразуется в другую с помощью целочисленного линейного преобразования переменных с….
4. … примитивные идемпотенты алгебры А как точки , а примитивные идемпотенты подалгебр из 𝒟 как блоки…
5. .. примитивных культурных форм с признаками дикарей.
6. …. примитивный неприводимый полином. ЛЕММА 3.2. …
# 5 (lit.: “primitive cultur[al] forms with characteristics of savages) refers to….
… to (lit.) “methods applyed in studying origins of domesticated plants and routes of their spread”.
That is, Savages here are wild plants and “primitive cultural forms” refer to early cultivated varieties (and their primitive, that is, early, forms).
I got distracted by the barbarous-seeming usage of “have shook” rather than “have shaken” in drasvi’s block quote. Some inquiry indicates that that was an 18th-century text, and to be fair when the google books n-gram reader picks up in A.D. 1800 the ratio of “have shaken” to “have shook” was only 4:1, compared to its more recent range between lets say 12:1 and 30:1. But FWIW, the KJV consistently uses “shook” only for simple past; perfect-with-participle is “hath shaken.”
Reminds me of an English-speaking South African I once knew, who was expatiating at length on the boorishness of the Boers, claiming that he had heard an Afrikaner at a cricket match heckling the umpire:
“Shook your head, your eyes is stuck!”
Alas, google translate is apparently designed to filter out boorishness and barbarousness rather than preserve it cross-linguistically. When I ask it for “shook your head your eyes is stuck” in Afrikaans it gives me “skud jou kop jou oë sit vas,” which it then back-translates to “shake your head your eyes are stuck.”
“eyes is stuck” counts as code-switching.
“(programming) a data type built into the programming language; (semantics) a word that is not derived from another word”
Oh! Elementary. And I forgot about primitive groups but of course they’re also elementary.
Makes sense as a derivation from “basic” that didn’t necessarily have to branch out of an earlier meaning so much as happen to go backward towards similar concepts…
An addition to the list above: number 8 is a modern translation of “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects”, with chapters like “Why Seek Wisdom from Primitive Races”, “Practical Applications of Primitive Wisdom”.
The (hobbyist) translator’s choices (2015):
– pervobytnaya mudrost’ for “primitive wisdom” (he choose to avoid the oxymoron primitivnaya mudrost’ and used the right word).
– in the title it is primitivnyx. I don’t understand why. I guess he thought that the English word denotes a whole new concept and must be borrowed rather than translated?
Reminded me a passionate speach of a certain nationalist, where he explained the concpet of natsiya [nation]. Apparently the guy finds narod (the root refers to giving birth and the word means “a people, people”) too simple.
– “primitive races” is difficult, because of “race”. He chose primitivnyx narodov, “…peoples”
But natsiya is not at all the same thing as narod.
https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/1495/difference-between-%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%86%d0%b8%d1%8f-and-%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b4
A good discussion.
And they are quoting Prilepin (who seems to share interests with the nationalist I mentioned above) to illustrate “нация”.
“good discussion” – much of the ambiguity is reflected by English “a people” vs. “people”.
(I understand народ in Явление Христа народу (appearance of Christ before the people) as people in general…. but it can potentially be the jewish people…. Anyway, the phrase is sometimes ironically uttered on the occasion of someone’s spectacular apperance:))
“But natsiya is not at all the same thing as narod”
@LH, I am not so sure. Natsiya, nation and other Latinate forms belong to the world of modern nationalism – and may have somewhat different meanings as applied to different countries, because countries and their idologies differ.
But what in the modern English meaning of “nation” is so different from “народ”?
I’m not speaking abotu modern Russian meaning of the word, because it is not too common and often appears in foreignising contexts (e.g. as in the discussion where someone associated it with Nazi). I’m not sure if the Russian meaning is defined. But stylistically they are of course very different.
In “United Nations”, it is, I think, meant to mean groups of people (destined to have a state and having the divine right of self-determination???) which is not far from peoples – even though in practice it is united states (but we still don’t have means of joining peoples in organisations, we only can unite several; organisations in one).
But what in the modern English meaning of “nation” is so different from “народ”?
The primary meaning of “народ” (leaving aside uses for particular peoples, such as you mention) is “the (common) people” — the народ says or does such-and-such, “going to the народ,” etc. It is extended to cover some of the senses of “nation” but the two really have little in common unless you’re squinting and looking only at the similarities, as you seem to be doing.
Now I’m remembering the lines found in some but I reckon not all versions of the antient folk song “John Barleycorn” (Roud 164):
They’ve hired men with the scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the way [or “waist” according to some]
Serving him most barbarously
I think “barbarously” is a little smoother from a prosodic standpoint than “barbarically” would be but doesn’t have a different meaning in context. Of course, that’s not inconsistent with the notion that the two words have semantic scopes that overlap but are not perfectly coterminous.
@LH, I can’t leave it out!
It is THE meaning the nationalist in question could use:/
He needed a word for the Russian nation as opposed to other nations.
Actually, natsiya allows him (by taste) include Jews or exclude Jews. It is a less common word and he can define it as he pleases. Usually the word means “Russians as opposed to Jews” but if he says “no, Russians as opposed to Jews are nationality, not nation!” people won’t object.
If (as nationalists often do) you want to draw lines, a new word is better.
With narod you can’t do this: Russians (as opposed to Jews) are obviously a people, and people of Russia (including Russians and Jews) are a people too.
Once, driving through Appalachian Kentucky, I saw a sign proclaiming (for sale, I assume) PRIMITIVE FUDGE. I immediately pictured a kind of pristine. Giottoesque fudge. Certainly free of walnuts.
I expect it was merely the signature product of the hamlet of Primitive, Ky. (pop. 42.)
That is what the League of Nations was taken to be in German: Völkerbund.
Hmm. Then why is the German for the UN die Vereinten Nationen instead of die Vereinten Völker? Did something happen to the associations and implicatures of “Volk” in the interim?
It is THE meaning the nationalist in question could use:/
I don’t give a damn about the nationalist in question; I was responding to your “But what in the modern English meaning of ‘nation’ is so different from ‘народ’?,” which is not restricted to a particular context.
PRIMITIVE FUDGE
A good name for a bad band.
(h.t. VVN)
You don’t say!
But probably more important was that what had just happened was a good opportunity to question the notion that humankind consists of peoples, or at least that ethnic groups are the relevant units in all contexts.
(Most of the time, the United Nations Organization is simply UNO in German, pronounced like the Italian word.)
PRIMITIVE FUDGE
Fudge is a very lightweight set of rules for tabletop RPGs. It more or less resets role-playing games to a pre-first-edition D&D state, in which the onus is on the games master to figure out what rules apply at every point in the game, but with the benefit of many years of hindsight. “Primitive Fudge” is a specific setting: palaeolithic tech but a later state of social organization. This is probably irrelevant, but this is IrrelevantHat.
but we still don’t have means of joining peoples in organisations
The League for Small and Subject Nationalities (1915-19) was explicitly meant as such a thing. There were only two congresses; attendees claimed to represent “Africa” (the sole representative was W.E.B. Du Bois), Albania, Alsace-Lorraine, Armenia, Assyria, Belgium, Bohemia, China (presumably because of the unequal treaties), Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Greece, India, Ireland, “the Jews”, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Schleswig, Scotland, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Transvaal, Ukraine. A good many of these were small but well-established nation-states; most have become nation-states since then After the collapse of the LSSN, Dudley Field Malone created a successor group called the League of Oppressed Peoples, but it was more conceptual than anything, and eventually either split into communist and fascist wings or was copycatted.
Part of the trouble, of course, is that a people (as opposed to the people of a nation-state) don’t have any well-established way to choose representatives, so the representatives tend to be self-appointed and quarrelsome. The last thing an imperial state wants is political organization among its subject peoples. There have been various “organizations for” as opposed to “organizations of” since then, which do not claim to be representative: the most prominent at present seems to be the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, which is a UN- and UNESCO-recognized NGO, but with minimal web presence (for all I know, it may have collapsed, or be functioning only in French, or who knows what).
du Bois, of course, was not from Africa in a proximate sense but had been born and raised in Western Massachusetts, about 50 miles west of the current Chez Hat. He did visit Africa, but if you trust the internet not until 1923, at 55 years of age, which would be after the period John C. adverts to. I suppose of course he could claim to represent a diasporic “Africa”; you wouldn’t necessarily complain about the self-appointed spokesman for “the Jews” on the grounds he’d never been to Judea.
I am FWIW a theoretical supporter of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONIFA_World_Football_Cup, a World Cup alternative featuring soccer teams claiming to represent “peoples” who currently lack an internationally recognized nation-state of their own.
“I don’t give a damn about the nationalist in question; I was responding to your “But what in the modern English meaning of ‘nation’ is so different from ‘народ’?,” which is not restricted to a particular context.”
@LH, but the exchange was:
“Reminded me a passionate speach of a certain nationalist, where he explained the concpet of natsiya [nation]. Apparently the guy finds narod (the root refers to giving birth and the word means “a people, people”) too simple.”
“But natsiya is not at all the same thing as narod.”
…But what in the modern English meaning of “nation” is so different from “народ”?…
I think I’m right to expect you to keep this in mind.
Thank you, I understand the problem. The meaning you’re referring to is famous indeed. Moreover, if you live in Russia and are not interested in anything foreign, you likely use the word in this meaning more often, because it is the meaning you need most often.
But I don’t feel that one meaning is “main” and the other is unimportant.
Would you agree that “the forest” as in “I went to the forest” (to pick mushrooms) is the “main” meaning of “forest” and “a forest” is not?
I don’t know. All I know is that it’s a mistake to equate “nation” and “народ”; it’s fine to say “this particular guy is using one in the sense of the other.”
‘ it’s fine to say “this particular guy is using one in the sense of the other.”‘
I don’t think that “a people” is a meaning anyhow alien to Russian narod. It is one of its meanings.
The meaning of English “nation” – but famously not Russian natsiya !!! – which is absent in narod is “a state”. And this meaning looks like a transparent metaphor to me: an attempt to refer to a state, but emphasise that it is comprised by people. “The state is not Louis! The state is the French people!”.
Perhaps for you as a native speaker it is different.
The meaning of Russian narod absent in English “nation” is… Consider narodnaya muzyka, “folk music”. But what about natsionalnyj kost’um “folk/national costume”? (Is it because music is a good thing and dress is only a good thing when the weather is cold?)
They are close, I think.
When you contrast a group of something to yoursef, this group is unlimited: the forest.
When you further find that this group has limits, and there are other groups, you have a choice: include all other similar groups – or call this one group “a forest”.
Russian narod can also be contrasted to the rulers, but this does not mean that the meaning “a people” is unimportant. You see it daily: mezhdunarodnyj “international”, druzhby narodov “Peoples’ Freindship [University]”.
Moreover this famous narod from 19th century (contrasted to the rulers) was very markedly Russian.
It appeared in the context of Russia.
People did not even think about Caucasian Muslims or Africans when speaking about narod.
My suggestion is that notions of “narod”, “Volk” and “nation” are related, popularity of “narod” and “Volk” in 19th century discourse in respective countries has a lot to do with popularity of “nation” in Romance and English world, and natsiya mostly entered Russian in reference to various foreign ideologies and entities.
Of course, as “narod” has this shade (“common people”, particularly when you’re speaking – as that nationalist – about “narod” in general, as a notion – here “common people” is indeed first to come to mind!) , it does not sound very fashionable now (as opposed to 19th century). I’m not surprised that the nationalist preferred “nation”.
But I see something comical about that.
“Volk” and “narod” (to my neither german- nor russian-speaking eye) are both explicitly state-centered ideas of people-ness – as is made pretty clear when you look at what they define themselves against. every account i’ve ever read says that “inarodtsy” were/are specifically the peoples who could not be considered to be truly of the russian state: muslims, jews, and non-slavs primarily, but with a fuzzy outer zone including non-russian slavic-speakers and non-russian-orthodox christians. and the german unification movement made it very clear that the boundaries of the Volk were identical to the defining boundaries of the proposed state’s first-class citizenry.
all of that is basically identical to english “nation”: a people defined by their relationship to a state, in contrast to other peoples who could be in that state, and potentially even citizens of it (after a certain point), but could never be considered truly of it.
the United Nations has never even pretended to be an organization of “peoples” – it has only ever recognized states as its constituents; even the groups it recognizes as official “observers” are non-member states (e.g. switzerland), de facto states (e.g. the vatican), states-in-waiting (e.g. palestine or SWAPO), groups of states (e.g. CARICOM), and pretender/residual/paper-maché states (the knights of malta), seasoned with agencies created by interstate treaties, interstate financial institutions, and NGOs that work at the state level. there are no peoples among them.
“inarodtsy” actually, inorodtsy.
Cf.
inostrantsy (strana was borrowed from Slavonic in the sense “country”, Russian storona is used in the sense “side”) “foreigners”
inoplanetyane (planeta “planet”) “extra-terrestrials”.
inoj “other”
(these two words, inostranets and inoplanetyanin actually sound better than English “foreigner” and of course “alien”)
So it is derived from the same root -rod-.
In modern Russian we still have “инородный” in technical contexts: about admixtures or intrusive material (инородное тело “foreign body”). Here -rod- refers to different nature of the element (cf. priroda “nature”, where “nature” is also from the Latin “be born”).
Also -rod- can mean “kind”.
inoj
The funny thing is that the root is related to “one”, and in Slavic also could mean “only” (cf. inok “μοναχός”), so the first appearanse of inorodets is in the sense “the only [born] child” with reference to no one else but Jesus:)
DRL 11-17
Greetings to all from the equatorial town of Kuching, Sarawak (a state of Malaysia), on Borneo. One day in. Dusting the cobwebs off my modest capacity in Malay. Too hot and humid for much cultural investigation yet, but we’ll acclimatise. Malay kucing means “cat”. There are statues of cats here, and many living ones in evidence.
My working of the text (using primal for primitiva):
which some – even cultivated people – might in a surge of passion pronounce mangled by the alteration of one letter
Darn, for example. Or heck. Gosh.. Norman Mailer’s publisher’s word fug lit. ‘stuffy atmosphere’.
Rozele wrote:
to me, “at X” for a locality has a specifically british/commonwealth flavor
Something that has always stuck in my memory from when I was a child taking piano exams set by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music – in their potted biographies of composers, they distinguished between ‘in’ for a city and ‘at’ for a smaller place, e.g. “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born at Salzburg, died in Vienna”. I would certainly say “in Worcester” (the English city).
A quick look at the google books corpus uncovers an 1898 publication authored by the Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mitchell_Ramsay titled “Was Christ Born at Bethlehem? A Study on the Credibility of St. Luke.” Whether he would have in a parallel context used, e.g., “in Jerusalem” because it was a bigger place is not immediately clear to me.
Maybe the act of being born is thought of as occurring at one location, whereas dying is the conclusion of a life spent in an unconfined area?
I don’t understand the use of British in to refer to a street location, as in “They live in the Kings Road” (meaning in a house, not sleeping on the sidewalk.)
In AmEng, you wouldn’t generally use “in” even for the sidewalk. The Clash lyric “Johnny Too Bad meets Johnny B. Goode / In the Charing Cross Road” would from an AmEng perspective imply that they’re out in the middle of the street where they’re likely to be run over by the next passing double-decker bus. If they were encountering each other on a U.S. sidewalk in a symbolic location you’d say e.g. “on Beale Street,” although I guess the meter needs more syllables.
I don’t see why on is any better. Clearly they live beside the road.
JWB: yes, I was just trying to guess the reasoning.
Does that British use of “in” apply specifically to named streets? Or streets named Something Road? And does “Why don’t we do it in the road?” imply the pavement, or could it be on the sidewalk, like decent people?
It’s not that “on” is “better” in the sense of more accurate in some narrow literal sense where “on” = “physically on top of”; it’s that there are various conventions for the use of prepositions in extended senses, and those conventions sometimes differ between AmEng and BrEng. See this vintage LL post by John Lawler for an attempt to organize some of the metaphors. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005225.html
Note that “on” as “beside” is also found in water-adjacent toponyms like the above-referenced Stratford-[up]on-Avon, or, to give a U.S. example, Croton-on-Hudson.
Right, the rule of thumb (for AmE anyway) is, “at” for a point, “on” for a linear or a surface feature, “in” for the interior of a larger feature. I am at the computer, on the second floor, in the house, which is at number 11, on Main Street, in Townsville, which is at Big Lake, on the way to Burg City, in Jones County.
and this may be local or ideolectal variation, but i don’t need a preposition for the house number (“the house is number 11, on main street…” and would say “on big lake” of a neighboring location, and “at big lake” of an event or person (unless they were swimming [“in”] or sailing [“on”]).
Maybe if it was an apartment in a big building? “We’re at no. 11, on the second floor.”
In Hungarian also, people live “in” a street (utcában, where -ban = “in”).
From the LL post by John Lawler:
Hungarian also uses “on” (-on) for public transportation including buses, trains, streetcars, planes, and ships, vs. “in” (-ban) for cars and taxis, but the explanation I’ve seen is that the “on” vehicles have a floor that you walk on to get to your seat — and Google informs me that that explanation is often given for English as well. Seems a lot more plausible than a 2-D passenger list.
Both “on a plane” and “in a plane” are found in English. I would have thought the “on” variant more common, simply overgeneralizing from my own ideolect, but the google n-gram viewer suggests it only became the more common of the two less than two decades ago, so Lawler may have been repeating his own sense of the data that had been formed before the trendlines crossed. Or just overgeneralizing from his own ideolect, which could be different from mine. Thinking about what sort of vehicles can and can’t be direct objects of the verb “to board” seems like it might be relevant here.
And does “Why don’t we do it in the road?” imply the pavement, or could it be on the sidewalk, like decent people?
/me chuckles.
AmE sidewalk = BrE pavement, though I dare say they understand sidewalk well enough by now. So the question sounds wrong in BrE, giving you a choice of synonyms.
See also AmE “He has the credentials, but is he qualified for the job?” vs. BrE “He’s qualified for the job, but can he actually do it?”, where qualified means two different things, ‘ability on paper’ vs. ‘actual ability’.
In a car and in a palanquin, but on a bus, on a plane, and on a train*. I’m guessing it’s because the latter typically require climbing up.
* Though Wodehouse, “He left it in the train.”
Horses and scooters are plain ol’ on-top-ofs.
AmE sidewalk = BrE pavement
Right, and AmE pavement = BrE road, innit?
Admittedly I have put very little thought over the years into exegeting that particular Beatles lyric, but I had always sort of assumed that McCartney had in mind a dirt road out in the countryside which might be marginally less uncomfortable to lie down on than any paved surface, whether a sidewalk or the road proper.
Not at all. Volk just means “ethnic group larger than a tribe”*; it has often been applied, across the ideological spectrum, to quite stateless people in rainforests for example. Primitive Völker is not a contradiction in terms either.
* Stamm “tribe” is of course circularly defined: “ethnic group smaller than a people”.
What do you mean?
Switzerland joined a few years ago.
…Salzburg is noticeably smaller than Vienna, but it’s very much a city…
That’s exactly how it works in German, article included. Auf der Straße, literally “on the street”, is where you get run over.
Not at all.
Same for Russian; “narod” is in no sense state-centered.
Presumably part of the confusion is that while “Volk” can be used in German to apply to any “people” you wanted to talk about there were plenty of contexts, esp. in the run-up to WW2, where “Volk” in context was clearly a reference to das deutsche Volk, without that specification being explicit (because it was so obvious in context). And similarly if in a Weimar-type context you talked about certain political or intellectual figures as being völkisch[e], it was in the context of their attitudes to that specific Volk, not some other Volk.
Tomorrow is what is called in certain Hispanophone communities “El Dia de la Raza,” and it’s the day of a specific raza which you are supposed to be able to figure out from context, not a day to celebrate the other raza of your particular choice.
For me “I’ll meet you at Cardiff” has the implicature that we will then be going on somewhere else (somewhere better, like Swansea), whereas “I’ll meet you in Cardiff” has no such nuance.
@de
I am trying to distinguish usage for pubs, e.g.
Correct
?I was at [NAME](‘s)/the pub last night.
?I was in [NAME](‘s)/ the pub all night
?I met my future wife/husband in [NAME](‘s).
?I met my wife/husband at [NAME](‘s) for a drink before dinner
The more I look at these, the less sure I am.
I could (I think) quite happily use either “in” or “at” for all of those, but if I said
“I met my wife at PlasticPaddy’s for a drink before dinner”
there would be an implicature that we then went on to a restaurant. But part of that is the pragmatics: why would you say that at all unless the drinking was in some way a distinct event from the dinnering?
For me “I’ll meet you at Cardiff” has the implicature that we will then be going on somewhere else
I agree, but I read it as elliptical for “I’ll meet you at (the) Cardiff train station” or “I’ll meet you at St. David’s” or “I’ll meet you at the Castle” or whatever, whereas “I’ll meet you in Cardiff” suggests that the actual meeting place is still open.
My wife and I often met “under the Waverly”, i.e. under the marquee of the Waverly movie theater (now renamed) at 6th Ave and 3rd St.
?I was at [NAME](‘s)/the pub last night.
?I was in [NAME](‘s)/ the pub all night
Generally, the first is more outward-looking. It treats the pub (or wherever) as a mere point location rather than a theatre for actvity. It’s more appropriate when the surrounding action in the narrative is external to the pub: “I was at Young and Jackson’s when I got the call from Government House: they needed an extra hand at bridge.”
Conversely, the second is more inward-looking: “I was in the South Yarra Arms last night enjoying a quiet VB when in walks – you’d never guess – Bathrobe! Well, I ordered a couple more and before you know it Hat himself saunters in, deep in conversation with JC.”
But truly, either would do for either.
“I was at Young and Jackson’s when I got the call from Government House: they needed an extra hand at bridge.”
How distinct, how very distinct this is from “I was at Young and Jackson’s when I got the call from Government House: they needed an extra hand at the bridge.”
Turns everything upside down, Signor Cocles.
…when in walks – you’d never guess – Bathrobe! Well, I ordered a couple more…
For a moment I thought you ordered the extra drinks for yourself. It’s an odd reaction.
CGEL (c. 7, §6.1, p. 650):
You wonder sometimes that anybody can speak English at all.
It would be easier to stick to something straightforward, like Navajo.
I at first thought that CGEL means that if John is standing outside the supermarket, “in” is better (because we can compare John to the supermarket). THAT was horrible.
No, if John is standing outside the supermarket it’s definitely “at”. I thought for a second that was where it was headed too.
Speaking of supermarkets, the canned peas are on aisle 7, but I am in aisle 7. I think?
I at first thought that CGEL means that if John is standing outside the supermarket, …
For a moment I thought you meant “CGEL” means “that if John …” etc. – though we all know it means “critical generalisations emerging from Languagehat”.
It would be easier to stick to something straightforward, like Navajo.
Nah. Malay–Indonesian: world language of the future.
Y:
the canned peas are on aisle 7
I’d always say they’re in aisle 7.
Speak Afrikaans. Be oppie stoep (or oppiestoep as goegl suggests) (op die stoep if you want, but I still recommend wine instead of canned peas.)
The Associated Board made similar distinctions between ‘in’ and ‘at’ for other composers’ places of birth and death – it’s just that Mozart’s happens to be the one I remember. Maybe the 1960s (or earlier) writer of those potted biographies just assumed that Salzburg was merely a town, or maybe it was much smaller in Mozart’s day!
Vienna was likewise much smaller in Mozart’s day. Salzburg was back then a fairly important city by the standards of the day, arguably more important than it is now, since it was the capital of a functionally-independent subpart of the Holy Roman Empire (the Erzstift Salzburg a/k/a Fürsterzbistum Salzburg) rather than just a provincial tourist-trap in a polity ruled from Vienna. That independence did not survive the Napoleonic era, in which the map of that part of the world was transformed by what some would call consolidation and rationalization and others might call opportunistic looting and aggrandizement of the strong at the expense of the weak.
Old book title (American): “Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn, Who Died at Newport, Rhodeisland, on the Second Day of August, 1796. In the Eighty Third Year of Her Age.” Newport FWIW had been the 9th-most-populous city in the entire U.S. as of the 1790 Census, although it was down to 12th in the 1800 Census.
The school text History and Government of West Virginia by Virgil A. Lewis (first published 1896, my copy 1922) frequently mentions the death of some retired politician “at Washington City.” (It’s a history book of the most wretched type, marching chronicle-style from one year to the next.)
@Noetica:
“Primal energy” works for me, though perhaps it’s a tad Freudian?
Objectively, however, I don’t think oppressed translates subita / focosa. The primary meaning of subito as an adjective is “sudden, quick;” whence the now vanishingly rare meaning of “quick-tempered, impetuous, impulsive” that becomes a synonym for focoso, meaning “fiery” and like (I think) the English word having primarily the figurative meaning of “passionate, quick-tempered.”
Subjectively, I also get the wrong impression from confrere. In Italian, confratello is not a particularly uncommon word. It means exclusively* “fellow member of a religious congregation,” so in context “fellow Capuchin.” I understand that English confrere has a transparently identical etymology and once had the same meaning, but the OED marks that meaning as obsolete after the 17th century. They give instead “A fellow-member of a learned profession, scientific body, or the like,” for which they have plenty of 19th century citations. That’s already a fairly different frame of reference, and it’s also not the one I perceive today.
My non-native understanding of English vocabulary is obviously questionable, but in the contemporary usage I’ve been exposed to the closest synonym of confrere is (professional) buddy. Both give me a not so slight hint of inappropriate favoritism. The Oxford/Google Dictionary example of “Pooley’s police confreres” does not instil confidence in Pooley and their buddies on the force. Am I the only one to get this negative vibe? Nothing could be further from Manzoni’s intended description of Fra Cristoforo in particular and his fellow friars in general.
* Or let’s say “almost exclusively” since nothing is 100%. I don’t doubt it’s also (rarely) been used to mean “colleague” more broadly. I also don’t doubt it’s then been used with full (and perhaps ironic) awareness that the word has been taken from its normal and expected religious context.
a provincial tourist-trap in a polity ruled from Vienna.
Not an accurate description. Salzburg is wealthier pro capita than Vienna and is where old money prefers to hang out. Our apartment building in Vienna, for example, is owned by a wealthy Salzburg family who rarely choose to set foot in our multikulti Balkan town. In football Salzburg has absolutely dominated Vienna for decades, thanks to Red Bull. Salzburg also benefits from being next door to Bavaria whereas for decades Vienna was surrounded on three sides by the Iron Curtain. Salzburgers consider themselves normal West Europeans whereas Vienna, like Berlin, is a bit suspect. And it does have a real economy (e.g Red Bull), it’s not just music festivals and Sound of Music tours.
Ah, GP. I was hoping you’d critique my Manzonian effort. Some notes in return:
Primal works with the idea that there is a three-way ambiguity in “la loro energia primitiva”: merely “their original energy” (as in Moore’s translation, and as critiqued by Hat: the energy the words had before their mangling) versus “their vulgar uncouth energy” (touched on above) versus “their property of instantiating primitive, primal energy”. My “primal” tends this third way, and I stand by it as a reasonable acceptation.
I don’t think oppressed translates subita / focosa. The primary meaning of subito as an adjective is “sudden, quick;” whence the now vanishingly rare meaning of “quick-tempered, impetuous, impulsive” that becomes a synonym for focoso, meaning “fiery” …
Yes, I knew all that but decided as a provocation to go one step further in vanishing rarity (ignoring the later focosa on purpose). From this source we see what subire can mean, and it’s a short step to the participle subito being understandable in the way I suggest with “oppressed”. Latin subeo can have such a meaning, and it was apparently a favourite Ciceronian usage (“subire vim atque injuriam”). But of course I’m ready to withdraw on this issue.
I also get the wrong impression from confrere.
Interestingly TLFi has this as the first meaning for confrère: “Personne faisant partie d’un corps social, considérée par rapport aux autres membres de ce corps.” I concede that given only the short text that was to be translated confrere might not be optimal; but let’s remember the context. It’s all about “Fra Cristoforo”, as the larger text continually reminds us. His confrere would be understood as a colleague in his religious order (where else?), so the archaism is harmless and indeed helpful in giving historical flavour (as it is used in many sources). OED? Wiktionary has the religious sense as a current second meaning.
Am I the only one to get this negative vibe?
I have none of that from confrere, though the con- element could I suppose suggest conspiracy and the like, for some.
Or let’s say “almost exclusively” since nothing is 100%.
Then let’s say “since almost nothing is 100%”. Can’t be too careful, round here.
Narcisos i iris en flor.
Re Salzburg, I suppose that in Europe “cities with top-league/division-for-the-country soccer teams” are now what “cities with their own bishops and cathedrals” were in former centuries.
@Noetica:
Italian needs more accents, like Spanish! Manzoni isn’t using the participle subìto but the adjective sùbito. He has to, because that participle doesn’t admit usage as an adjective. Both le umiliazioni subìte and le umiliazioni sofferte are identically the humiliations you suffered. Conversely, una decisione subìta is someone else’s decision you have to endure, but una decisione sofferta is a decision it pains you to make—and una decisione sùbita is a sudden decision (for unexplained reasons, I’d expect sudden humiliations to be le sùbite umiliazioni). Un’indole sofferta is a tormented character, but *un’indole subìta doesn’t exist and if it existed it could at most be an oppressive character others have to endure, not an oppressed character that has had much to endure.
I don’t know … Franklin considered nothing certain except death and taxes, but in Italy taxes are definitely not certain, and plenty of people believe Our Lady didn’t die (though the Church has no dogmatic stance). So what else is left to certain about other than lack of certainty itself?
Franklin considered nothing certain except death and taxes
He certainly wasn’t the first.
Thank you GP. Yes, I got all that. I was being provocative and playful with language. Here at least I’m not the only one so disposed.
I certainly agree: Italian needs more accents. Why not go the way of Spanish? The many useful rules of thumb for stress placement are not laid out in grammars for foreigners. Some might be hinted at, that’s all. The orthography of Italian is at least remediable unlike that of English.
Tell me: Are there other place names (or similar) with unexpected stress on the antepenultimate like Taranto (where “classical” rules would have it on the penultimate)? For z, is alternation pretty well free between /ts/ and /dz/ in many words, or just in a lawless few? Is there a handy guiding pattern for that? In current Italian, how much of a shibboleth is the pronunciation of così, subject to seemingly random fluctuation between /s/ and /z/?
So what else is left to [be] certain about other than lack of certainty itself?
Yesterday in Kuching we met a Canadian man (mid-seventies, hippie appearance resembling my own in earlier times, accompanied by a much younger woman) who was stranded in India at the start of the pandemic and has been wandering around Asia ever since. We sat and chatted, since one delight in travelling is to encounter others doing the same. It soon emerged that he was certain about certain things: Canada, Australia, and other polities are now not countries but “corporations” and we are all slaves; Putin died some years ago, and is now frequently replaced for public appearances by short-lived facsimiles; ditto for Trump, as can be seen by the astute observer watching for the transition; this “chance” meeting of ours was planned and had a definite but unknown purpose. Oddly and a little disturbingly, none of this doxography struck me as especially surprising nowadays. I signalled by use of a few Hebrew and Hungarian syllables to my wife, who was deep in similar conversation with this man’s partner, that we would do well to move on now. And we did.
Liles i flors de prunera.
True Salzburgers support Austria, not Red Bull. Top football teams in Europe have followed the US pro sports in becoming the playthings of the super-rich. When Leicester won the English title, it was a fairytale because their owner was only worth $5bn.
Right, and AmE pavement = BrE road, innit?
The pavement in AmE is the surface of the road, assuming it is not dirt.
McCartney had in mind a dirt road out in the countryside
In India, apparently, and the “we” in question were a pair of monkeys. I, however, always understood it as an urban street, perhaps because of the unofficial fourth verse:
Why did they do it in the road?
Why did they do it in the road?
Right where the dump truck[*] dropped its load
Oh, why did they do it in the road?
[*] Tipper lorry would not scan.
I don’t imagine monkeys paying the least bit of heed to anyone watching them do anything whatsoever.
Italian accents are anybody’s guess when Greek and Latin diverged. I say èdema, metonimìa, sclèrosi, Edìpo, Euridìce but mimési, Esòpo, Giasóne, Pèrseo. For all these words, both pronunciations are normative. Not so for others, among which I suspect Tàranto: Τάρας, -αντος, or if we’re going directly for the accusative: Τάραντα.
Post-classical hiatus resolution turns Puteoli into Pozzuòli.
There must be other cases of divergence between Latin and Italian accents in place names, at least idiosyncratically, but I cannot immediately think of any.
The voicing of sibilants has systematic regional variation, but I don’t think it ever has free distribution like open and closed e and o.
In the North (where I’m from) word-initial z is always voiced (/dz/) and intervocalic s almost always voiced (/z/). I cannot recall any exceptions to the former rule. I’m pretty sure all exceptions to the latter can be interpreted as the start of the second part of a composite word (girasole, unisono). However, I’m afraid there’s no a priori way of guessing which words are etymologically composite enough to avoid voicing (e.g., presidente definitely is but in my experience desiderio is not).
I presume that in the South word-initial z is always unvoiced (/ts/) and intervocalic s always unvoiced (/s/), but I could be missing exceptions since I’ve never lived there.
In central Italy — and thus in the normative standard to the questionable extent one exists — some words go one way and some the other, pretty much unpredictably for speakers from the rest of the country.
This is certainly one way you can tell if an Italian is from the North, the South or the Center. But that’s typically so obvious from the entirety of the accent that I wouldn’t really call it a shibboleth.
The pronunciation of word-internal z is trickier. I cannot think of any word for which I alternate between /ts/ and /dz/, but the only clear rules are for suffixes and even those are treacherous. E.g., the major verb suffix -izzare has /dz/ (analizzare) but then drizzare has /ts/ because its termination is not a suffix (i.e., dritto yields unvoiced drizzare and not *drittizzare, which would be voiced) . With so much variation that cannot be reliably inferred from spelling, I cannot say when my own pronunciation is standard, Northern, specifically Turinese, or even more idiosyncratic than that.
Wow, I had no idea of most of that — thanks for the comment!
Yes, thanks Giacomo. Most enlightening. This general picture of fluidity and variability – and even uncertainty in a highly competent native speaker – makes me even more interested in the stronger normative or regulatory role of orthography for Spanish (not simply the clarifying and presumably standardising role of the tightly rule-governed acute diacritic). I mean, I don’t think I would have asked a sevillano or a madrileño the sorts of questions I have put to you. Of course, Spanish is a “world language” as Italian is not, and also there has been a different history of spelling reform. Interesting to tease out all those factors, some time. There would be questions about the direction of causation also.
Sheltering from the rain today in Kuching we fell in with a group of locals who were doing the same, and they were keen to teach me some local vocabulary variants. I wasn’t sure whether these were considered “compulsory” alternatives to the standard (peninsular) Malay words or simply options for local colour. My memory and my grasp of the language are not sufficient to report details, but I was struck by the general feeling of divergence.
Divergence, certainly. But this is also the will to divergence, which is not everywhere to be found. People with the Northern Cities Shift are notoriously unaware of their accent.
I have no doubt that orthography has a strong regulatory role for Italian pronunciation. All the obvious variation concerns features unmarked or imperfectly marked by spelling.
Most famously and unmarked by spelling, Central Italian has seven vowels, distinguishing when stressed between closed /e/ and open /ɛ/, closed /o/ and open /ɔ/. This distinction again seems to follow no rules: you just have to know; and you would not know the same thing in Florence and in Rome. For me and I’m pretty sure more broadly in the North and the South, this distinction simply doesn’t exist. Whereas we do distinguish /s/ from /z/ and /ts/ from /dz/, we have only five vowel phonemes.
Accordingly, I have no idea if I systematically have /o/ in some words and /ɔ/ in others, or I have free variation. I do think I have the normative /e/ in perché and the like. Not, however, because spelling indicates it (it does, but Italians don’t care and correcting the non-standard spelling *perchè is pedantic) but because after learning Catalan (which has perquè) I realized that /perkɛ/ sounds funnily Milanese.
After the unmarked cases of open and closed vowels and voiced and unvoiced sibilants, the third major variation is in consonant length, which is less then fully disambiguated by spelling in the theoretical standard. As always, the North tend to go one way (short), the South the other (long), and the Center has the maximum complication.
The North has essentially imported consonant length as a spelling pronunciation. We have a long /d:/ in Grazie, addio! (“Thanks, goodbye!”) but a short /d/ in Grazie a Dio! (“Thank God!”). Of course the whole reason addio is spelled that way is that in Florence a Dio is pronounced identically, but this obvious point didn’t occur to me for decades. There’s a myriad of such cases in all sorts of composite words.
That’s because Florentine, and thus theoretical standard Italian, have syntactic gemination of word-initial consonants, mostly when they follow a word whose stress falls on the last syllable or some other triggering particles (which already vary between Florence and Rome), but more precisely under complicated conditions that Northerners like me cannot understand and linguists seem to have trouble describing. Dio might be the only word for which the theoretical standard calls for invisible doubling of the initial consonant without any preceding trigger.
Rome and the South have lots more words whose initial consonant they lengthen automatically, and they tend to intervocalic doubling of /b/ and /ʤ/ even when they aren’t word initial. As a consequence, the general feeling above the Massa-Senigallia line is that speakers from Rome down have a lot of spurious double consonants, and it’s fair to say that is not perceived as a prestigious feature. I suspect plenty of Northerners would gladly suggest it’s wrong (or if we’re feeling enlightened, non-standard) because it contravenes spelling.
On the other hand, I’ll still argue this regional variation in consonant length emerges because spelling is not a perfect guide to doubling. Not only do Florentine and the theoretical standard have unmarked word-initial doubling. They also have automatic intervocalic doubling of /z/ (whether /ts/ and /dz/), even within words. I should think some Norther speakers have the latter too, because I believe I read azione (action) with the same length as assione (axion), and have vizi (vices) and vizzi (withered, m. pl.) as homophones. More important, I seem to recall being taught in school, in Turin, that azione is spelled with a single z though we’d expect two.
Is there any case in which spelling provides an unambiguous guide to pronunciation in the theoretical standard, but regional varieties ignore it? I’m tempted to say no.
There’s regional variation in the length of the digraphs gl, gn and sc (followed by e or ), but is it ever phonemic? I’d rather suspect everyone has a single phoneme for each digraph, respectively /ʎ/, /ɲ/ and /ʃ/, though we don’t consistently realize them as the long consonants of the theoretical standard. I’m thinking I have long /ʎ:/ (cogli as long as colli, not coli) but short /ɲ/ (agnello as long as anello) and /ʃ/ (pasce as long as pace); yet I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I have some free variation.
Surprisingly, although stress is unmarked it isn’t a major source of regional variation. I cannot immediately think of any word for which I have a Northern stress pattern but a different one is widespread further South.
I have no doubt that orthography has a strong regulatory role for Italian pronunciation.
Nor would I have any such doubt. My interest is in what I presume to be the stronger regulatory role of orthography in Spanish: how all that plays out when we compare Italian and Castilian Spanish (Catalan also, I suppose).
All the obvious variation concerns features unmarked or imperfectly marked by spelling.
Yes, particularly since z, s, and the vowels can go their various ways – which you cover so well, along with the complex vicissitudes in gemination (reminiscent for me of Hungarian). But I’m interested to see that you don’t mention a very common deaffrication (far south of Torino) from /tʃ/ to /ʃ/ for intervocalic c: /luʃido/ instead of /lutʃido/ (for lucido). Apart from the unmarked geminations, this differs from all your examples in that spelling could be altered to show the variant perfectly: *luscido.
As for standardly unmarked geminations, it seems that some representations of dialects (southern especially) do mark them by an orthographic doubling – even at the start of a word:
(Or do we call that a different language? Arbitrary, yes?) Is there anything resembling such representation in variants of Spanish? Is there ever any motivation for it, or does spelling “correct” any such variation? Here I can think only of non-high-Castilian pronunciations of consonantal y (showing how little I know about Spanish), which standard orthography could not represent).
Or do we call that a different language? Arbitrary, yes?
Arbitrary, no, not to Italians.
Is there anything resembling such representation in variants of Spanish?
I don’t know for sure if that’s Napulitano or Napulitano-flavored Italian, but assuming it is the former, then there is almost nothing analogous to it in Spain: just Astur-Leonese, Aragonese, and Galician, all of them now spoken over very small areas in Northern Spain and under tremendous pressure from Spanish. (Catalan is another story.) This is of course because Castilian spread south after the Reconquista but the others did not, or if they did they have not held their position.
The most recent quotation in the OED for primitive adj. I.1., defined as ‘original’ is from 1992: “At Stansted, Foster has aimed to reinstate a sense of the primitive purpose of the airport, which is simply a place conveniently to board and alight from aeroplanes.” So this sense is far from dead.
WP s.v. says: “In the mid-1850s the Peculiar People spread deeper into Essex.” This explains much.
@Noetica, just want to note that I wanted to visit Borneo since I was 20-something.
I was more impressed but ess envious when I met (online) a girl from Sulawesi. Less envious because I think she sees nothing unusual in Sulawesi and because she was explaining how arranged marriage is a good thing (she was unmarried and looking forward to have one arranged).
(I don’t find arranged marriages very romantic. I understood the part where loosing virginity looks like an exciting perspective – this part was meant to explain why they are romantic. Yes, every girl and boy’s dream – I did not understand the part about why it is good to marry someone from the same social class (and thus from one of a known set of large families).)
I guess believers in romantic love will keep grumbling at infidels whether they like cultural diversity or not.
I can recommend it, drasvi. Sarawak has a fascinating history, presented at various well-appointed museums in Kuching. We were spell-bound by the cultural and historical displays at the architecturally bold Borneo Cultures Museum (sic). My wife’s attention was captured especially by astonishingly intricate traditional weaving. I revelled particularly in the old maps (British mainly), and documents of the “Brooke Era”.
Wandering in the evening heat yesterday we ducked into a shopping mall for air-conditioned respite. In progress there was a sape recital (sape: an indigenous four-stringed non-chromatically fretted instrument – compare a western dulcimer), with spontaneous sinuous dancing from a young woman. Effectively doubling the size of the audience, we were made warmly welcome. Totally delightful. We should mount a Hatters’ exploration party sometime.
@Noetica:
You’re right I was not thinking of the Florentine gorgia. That’s a whole process of lenition that mostly brings in sounds that aren’t used in Italian outside of Tuscany (most famously /h/ instead of /k/). As you point out, /ʃ/ for /tʃ/ could be captured by spelling, but of course it isn’t.
The reason I was not thinking of it is that I think of it not as a regional variety of Italian, but as an Italian dialect. Needless to say, in this case it’s an arbitrary distinction because Tuscan dialects are the only “Italian dialects” that are unambiguously dialects of Italian—or if you prefer, Italian is a particularly successful Tuscan dialect. On the other hand, it seems fair to say the distinction is pretty standard, because theoretical normative Italian is pretty much defined as Florentine without the gorgia and a few other peculiarities I cannot immediately think of.
One should ask Florentines if they perceive a difference between the pronunciation of Florentine dialect and Italian. Surely some do and some don’t. However, the expat Tuscans I know don’t speak with the gorgia and neither does our Florentine former prime minister Matteo Renzi on the national stage (no idea if he does privately, or in Florence). Conversely, our Roman current prime minister Giorgia Meloni always speaks with all her spurious geminate consonants (frequently of the budget or bilancio as /b:ilantʃo/). And I’m pretty sure no Northern politician in my lifetime has devoiced sibilants for a national audience.
The traditional cakeist (more exactly cerchiobottista, but the two concepts are close) stance is that it’s an “Italian dialect,” but what we’re talking about is not. Recently, I think there’s a pretty solid consensus that “Italian dialects” outside of Tuscany are different Romance languages. Most used to have an army and navy too. The Neapolitan language and navy gifted the Italian navy and language the useful concept of fare ammuina (looking busy doing nothing).
There is of course a continuum transition between regional Italian and the local dialect. Here’s an example from Abruzzo courtesy of Telmon (1993):
(1) ho mangiato troppo ora sono sazio e devo prendere …
(2) ho mangiato troppo adesso sono abboffato e devo pigliare …
(3) sono mangiato troppo mo sso’ abbottato e ho da pigliare …
(4) sso’ magnato troppo mo sso’ abbottato e tengo a piglià …
(5) sto magnato troppo mo sto abbottato e tengo a piglià …
(6) ʃto magnate troppe mo ʃto abbottate e teng a piglià …
(7) ʃto magnète troppe mo ʃto abbottète e teng a piglià …
(8) [ˈʃtɛŋgə maˈɲɛtə ˈtrɔp:ə mo ˈʃtɛŋgə abːoˈtːɛtə e teŋg a piˈʎa] …
Where you draw the line is idiosyncratic: #3 already sounds dialectal to me (sono mangiato is a serious mistake in my grammar, and abbottato means as much to me as smurfed), but a local would surely split further down. However, claiming that #8 is Italian is so foreign to Italian culture that to be such a maximalist lumper you need to be linguist, a foreigner, or most likely both.
I ran these through Google Translate and got this:
(1) I ate too much now I’m full and I have to take…
(2) I ate too much now I’m stuffed and I have to eat…
(3) I’ve eaten too much, stuffed up and I have something to eat…
(4) sso’ tycoon too loose sso’ buttoned up and I’m holding on…
(5) I’m a tycoon who’s too buttoned up and I want to take care of him…
(6) I’m a tycoon too many times buttoned up and I’m holding on…
(7) This magnet is too many now, button it up and hold on to it…
Of course (8) was left alone. What’s curious, though, is that when I accidentally specified French as the source language (rather than “Detect language” which gave the same output as “Italian”), the first two sentences came out thus:
(1) what you eat too much or what you need and what you need…
(2) the food is too much with its added value and must be…
Garbage in, garbage out….
means as much to me as smurfed
*Stutted might be better, by the analogy abboffato : abbottato :: stuffed : *stutted. TIL that in fact smurf v. means ‘split a large financial transaction into smaller ones so as to avoid scrutiny’. Some forty years ago, I wrote a program (for a brokerage house where I was working) to smurf stock trades, not to be sure for illegal purposes, but so that the trade would execute automatically rather than going through a human-staffed trading desk at the exchanges. The maximum size of such an automatic transaction was set by the individual exchanges at a few thousand shares, but my program allowed it to be overridden programmatically for testing purposes.
Among the acceptance tests I performed was to buy 100 shares of a particular stock (Wang Laboratories class A, which was very stable at the time) one at a time and sell them back in a batch, and then to buy 100 shares and sell them back one share at a time. The first transaction was more or less normal, typically representing a purchase of shares to be given as gifts, but after that things looked weirder and weirder to $EMPLOYER’s monitoring systems, and my boss got a phone call from a suspicious person in the compliance department. All was straightened out eventually.
Later on, the trader for whom the smurfer (I wish I had known this verb at the time) was written called me up in a panic: none of his trades were going through. (Traders panic easily.) I went to my boss, and we decided to to test the system by buying one of his portfolios. So as not to get compliance involved this time, we decided to run the trade against an account number of all zeros, figuring that no such account number existed and all the trades would fail at the exchange. Alas, it turned out that all zeros was a special code meaning ‘Account number to be supplied later’, so instead of the expected returns from the exchange of “error … error … error …” we got “bought … bought … bought …”! By the time we got the run to stop, we had bought several tens of thousands of dollars worth of various stocks. Since the account number had never been supplied, the stocks were resold at the end of the day; fortunately, the market was rising, so this was the only time in my career that I ever made a direct profit for my employer.
@jc
This was a great story: jc as super Wall St. shark. And I suppose you did it all without the benefit of cocaine. More seriously, I am mildly surprised you did not have a representative simulated environment to try out stuff before “going live”.
Yeah, that’s a good story but rather alarming from a non-coder’s point of view. It’s a good thing you were just coding for stocks, risking only unanticipated purchases, and not for the Defense Department…
I was only familiar with related senses of smurf (noun or verb) as referring to the practice of using a large number of low-level agents to complete identical transaction, generally in order to avoid regulatory scrutiny. I had assumed that the metaphor involved was of smurfs as small minions. It was used in Breaking Bad to refer to paying a bunch if people each to buy the maximum allowed quantity of cough medicine that could be used as a raw material for making meth; however, I don’t know whether that was an accurate representation of real-world usages.
The earliest use of “smurfing” i am aware of refers to the practice of evading the banking-regulation requirements that cause a lot of paperwork to be required when you deposit $10,000 or more in cash. Those in possession of large sums of cash derived from drug trafficking or other unlawful business ventures generally wish not to do that paperwork, so they developed the practice of breaking up larger sums of cash into sub-$10K amounts to be deposited separately. Once the feds figured out this was happening, this sort of intentional structuring of transaction amounts was made a separate federal crime by Congress. In the first page of hits from a particular legal search engine I have a court opinion from 1988, which quotes 1986 testimony to Congress (by a medium senior DOJ official) saying that the practice they were asking Congress to ban was “commonly known as ‘smurfing.'” A spokesperson for the American Banking Association also used that term in his testimony, and the House of Representatives committee report helpfully explained, for those to whom the reference might be obscure, that the “term is derived from a popular children’s TV cartoon.”
I suppose it’s possible that the money-laundering demimonde borrowed the usage from Wall Street rather than vice versa, although that’s not the way I’d bet if I needed to bet on it. The Breaking Bad usage seems a fairly natural extension even if applied to “withdrawals” rather than “deposits.’
And I suppose you did it all without the benefit of cocaine.
Yet another of those adulty things.
I am mildly surprised you did not have a representative simulated environment to try out stuff before “going live”.
Unfortunately there are no stock-exchange simulators, any more than you can mount a scratch monkey. In any case, the second story was about an ill-judged emergency response rather than a test. I was later given an actually-invalid account number, though I never needed it.
risking only unanticipated purchases, and not for the Defense Department
Indeed. On 3 June 1980, a tape of test data from a wargame was mounted on a production machine at NORAD, with the result that it reported a massive Soviet attack: 200 submarine-launched missiles and over 2000 missiles launched from silos. The bad data was injected high up in the pipeline, so that multiple different systems were reporting it, adding to its credibility Fortunately, just before the President was notified, a cross-check with unrelated systems established that the supposed missiles were a glitch. This was the fourth false alarm in less than a year, and when the Soviets got to hear about it, they registered a stiff (and completely justified) complaint with Washington. Brezhnev wrote (secretly), “I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters.” Indeed there should not, but as far as the open record tells, we are still relying on humans to “watch the skies” (The Thing).
Sounds rather like the plot of the 1983 movie War Games. The WiPe article doesn’t mention the NORAD incident.
Green’s dictionary does not have this meaning of smurf. He does have it, as a noun and a verb, referring to buying the legally allowed small quantities of pseudoephedrine from multiple pharmacies and such, to be used as a precursor for metamphetamine.
@John Cowan: That’s some hilarious Google Translationese and a great story about financial smurfing. Thank you!
I meant, however, smurfing in the sense of the Smurfs. As Wikipedia puts it:
For me, abbottato in the original sentence works exactly like smurfed in the Smurf language. I wouldn’t have known what it means in isolation, but it’s clear from context.
Maybe I should add, to confirm that the upper part of the list counts as regional Italian for most Italians (I’m pretty sure the only place in Italy geographically further from Abruzzo than my corner of the country is the island of Lampedusa), that I can find the word in a Italian dictionary, albeit marked as regional. Funnily enough, the same dictionary does not have abboffato as an adjective, just as the participle of a reflexive verb. I have in active usage mi sono abbuffato (even if the dictionary marks it as regional from the Center-South), but once you change two letters and go from participle to adjective … Google Translate is confused too and runs to abbottonato, which I might have done as well.
GP:
Thanks for your additional intel about matters Italian and para-Italian. I’ve been incom(m)unicado for a few days to conclude my Sarawak visit without distraction. Back in Australia now.
Language versus dialect versus regional variant: Of course there are loose parallels with the situation on Borneo and its region. Indigenous Dayak languages (two broad classes, sometimes called by locals Land Dayak and Sea Dayak; related closely enough to Malay but without mutual intelligibility) and their dialects shade into each other, and influence the kind of Malay that almost everyone speaks. Kuching Malay borrows words and expressions from those less-used languages – and of course from English when and as needed, and quite likely from some of the many varieties of Chinese still in use around town (some speakers reported facility in half a dozen). I was surprised to find how readily my meagre Mandarin was understood and appreciated. There seems to be a strong inculcation of it in supplementary “Chinese schools”.
It’s fun to decipher signs, as if the language were a kind of creole with elements of English and Portuguese (and Dutch, for Indonesian), Sanskrit, and Arabic or Persian words, bound in identifiable Malay patterns:
And so on, in roving amateur etymologist vein.
The registral and other vicissitudes of baharu (“new”: Proto-Malayic and descendants) are intriguing in Sarawak and the whole Malay-speaking region: baru (this is standard in current Indonesian), or bahru and bharu (in some place names like Johor Bahru and Kota Bharu). I heard and saw baru everywhere; but an official sign laying down COVID-avoidance rules was headed Norma Baharu. Compare of course bahasa (“language”), from Sanskrit भाषा (bhāṣā), which turns up around the larger region also as bhasa or basa (note Thai phasa).
Since my Austronesian competence is confined to a little Indonesian, I was pleased that I could usually be understood as if I were in fact speaking Malay. Indonesian mau (“want”) is pretty much how everyone says mahu anyway; and I learned to say esok instead of besok (“tomorrow”). I did some preliminary scoping of the task of learning more. Will I? Probably not. The whole region is too hot. Plenty more world to see and chat with; and word stress is annoyingly less predictable than Indonesian as spoken in Bali (where it’s on the final syllable, under the influence of Bhasa Bali).
circumflex > circumfix
This is fun, and there are links to similar maps for France, Germany, and so on. Click on locations to hear an Aesop fable. The relevant transcription will appear under the map.
That’s terrific!
only the universal-placeholder-word meaning of “smurf” would’ve come to my mind before JC’s story, but now that i’ve been reminded of the other meaning i’m also reminded that i have in my time smurfed (though strictly as an accomplice, not a mastermind in JC’s vein).
it was 2005, and i was at the airport in beijing coming home from a shadow puppetry festival the company i worked for at the time had played in tangshan. the festival had apparently paid my boss the company’s full performance fee immediately before we got on the bus to the airport, in cash. she in turn had not understood that the amount would pose a customs issue until we were in the security line.
picture if you will, fumbling for our passports: four or five recently-emigrated peking and kun opera artists (in nyc, mostly working in delivery or dumpling factories aside from gigs with this company), carrying an array of gongs and drums purchased during the trip; three white u.s.ian puppeteers hauling road cases, none of us with any sinitic lect to our names; one 4th-generation cantonese-speaking new yorker; the company director emerita, white, 80ish, and carrying a spear. and my boss: mildly officious, blatantly taiwanese, and running up and down the line stuffing handfuls of renminbi into everyone’s carry-on pockets. luckily, the chinese customs officials did not care at all about u.s. customs regulations, so no Incidents ensued. jo even managed to bring the spear aboard as a “personal item”.
Atlante sonoro delle linge e dei dialetti d’Italia (@Noetica’s find) — rather crunchy of the Italians to keep the Latin accusative of Atlas in this sense. (English reportedly has atlantes as the plural of the architectural sense, but I can honestly claim that I’ve never seen it).
Ditto in French and Portuguese, but not Spanish (per WIkt) where it has only the architectural sense (a male caryatid).
German has Atlas in the singular, Atlanten in the plural.
Something weird happened to the mountain range and the ocean.
We do not speak of the Spear Incident.
♪♫ ||: Un jour disait Condorcet
à plus d’un confrère : :||
Il nous faut, mes chers amis,
établir dans ce pays
une ré-, ré-, ré-,
une -pu-, -pu-, -pu-,
une ré-, une -pu-, une république
bien démocrati-i-que !!! ♪♫
Accurate.
Austria is almost as federal as Germany. Its nine “countries” are ruled by people who prefer being first in a province over being second in Rome.
Baboons do. They even lie about it.
Contrast German, where the equivalents of all 8, where they exist*, unquestionedly count as German unless of course they’re spoken on the Dutch side of the border, in which case they’re suddenly Dutch. Or double Dutch, I guess.
* Swabia. Keyword “diaglossia” as opposed to “diglossia”. I live in diglossia and have equivalents to 1, 8, and nothing in between.
Baboons do. They even lie about it.
Do tell!
@DM, in Arabist literature (and I think in general discussions of Ferguson’s and Fishman’s concept) “diglossic continuum”.
A different understanding of the situation.
Contrast German, where the equivalents of all 8, where they exist*, unquestionedly count as German unless of course they’re spoken on the Dutch side of the border, in which case they’re suddenly Dutch. Or double Dutch, I guess.
The BCP 47 mailing list, which is responsible for assigning tags at the level below Ethnologue, is now chewing on a bunch of tags for various German Dialekte proposed by the Deutscher Sprachatlas, as follows (originally, these were all subtags of “de”, but we persuaded them to change that):
Subtags of “de”: Upper German, Central German, West German, West Upper German, East Upper German, West Central German, East Central German, High Prussian, Eastphalian, Westphalian, Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian, Central Hessian, North Hessian, East Hessian, Thuringian, North Upper Saxon, South Margravian, Rhine Franconian, Southern Bavarian, Central Bavarian, North Bavarian
Subtags of “nds” (Low German, Low Saxon): West Low German, East Low German, North Low German, Pomeranian, Western Pomeranian, Middle Pomeranian, East Pomeranian, Low Prussian, Brandenburgish
Subtags of “gsw” (Swiss German, Alemannic, Alsatian): Low Alemannic, Middle Alemannic, High Alemannic, Highest Alemannic
Why group the Bavarian varieties with those further north and/or west rather than with “gsw”? The latter would be the taxonomy assumed by z.B. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberdeutsche_Dialekte.
I don’t know.
Note that the varieties East Frisian Low German, Eastern Franconian, Palatinate Franconian, Luxembourgish, Ripuarian[*], Swabian, Upper Saxon, Westphalian[*], and Yeniche are already coded as languages.
[*] These should have omitted above.
Re Salzburg, I suppose that in Europe “cities with top-league/division-for-the-country soccer teams” are now what “cities with their own bishops and cathedrals” were in former centuries.
Accurate.
I suppose. Works for Munich and Salzburg. Not sure that explains Dortmund and Manchester. Also the shocking lack of success of Viennese and Berlin teams.
There’s an opening here for a modernized series of books about the internal politics of the Barchester Wardens FC.
In the latter days of July in the year 202-, a most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the football city of Barchester, and answered every hour in various ways–Who was to be the new coach?
I read about it long ago – young female crouches behind rock, young male grooms her, big boss can see young male but not young female, assumes everything is fine and does not intervene.
Oh, I can imagine monkey duplicity toward other monkeys, but I don’t think they care what people do or think. In general, animals don’t care about what other species of animals do, unless it affects them materially.