languagehat.com

Looking at a map of Switzerland, I noticed a town called La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva and wondered how it was pronounced. Wikipedia told me it was [la tuʁ də pɛ] (ah, the transparency of French spelling!), but then I wanted to know where the name was from, so I proceeded to French Wikipedia, where I found this:

Dans son livre « Noms de lieux des pays franco-provençaux », Georges Richard Wipf écrit que « le gallois blaidd (loup) étant à l’origine des termes bela, belau, bele et bel, ce qui postule ble → bel, on peut penser que *bleiz a aussi pu évoluer […] en *beilz, d’où *peilz. » L’auteur prend toutefois soin de préciser qu’« il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse, mais elle expliquerait le nom de Peilz (La Tour-de-Peilz, VD). »

Cette étymologie est toutefois controversée et plusieurs autres explications ont été avancées. Celle retenue de préférence aujourd’hui est une origine remontant à un gentilice latin Pellius, hypothèse confortée par le lieu-dit En Peilz, à l’est de la ville, où ont été retrouvés de nombreux vestiges romains.

I mean, I’m all for trying to peer into the past of words, but the pile-up of “ce qui postule … on peut penser … a aussi pu évoluer” hardly needs to be clarified by “il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse.” I am irresistibly reminded of the insufferable Brichot.

But that Welsh word blaidd ‘wolf’ is interesting; it goes back to Proto-Celtic *bledyos (etymology unknown: “Probably borrowed from a non-Indo-European substrate language”), whose Old Irish descendant bled (eDIL) means ‘sea-monster; whale.’ There’s a fine piece of semantic development for you! I deduce that the Irish, not having wolves, applied the inherited name to their native sea-monsters. (The modern term for ‘wolf’ is mac tíre ‘son of the land’; make of that what you will.)

I’ve started watching Jacques Rivette’s Jeanne la pucelle (it’s almost six hours long, so I’m taking it in chunks, which fortunately it breaks easily into); it’s gorgeous, and Sandrine Bonnaire can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, but the subtitles are occasionally iffy, and I’m here to complain about one that particularly irritated me. Someone is talking about the warring forces in France and mentions a group that the subtitle calls “the Godons.” I thought I knew a fair amount about the period, but that didn’t ring a bell; after some googling I realized that it was this. OK, apparently “godons” was a variant form of the more familiar “goddams” (though I note that the Wiktionary article says “speculatively connected to English God damn, although the profanity is not attested in Middle English” [see Xerîb’s comment below for further demolition]), but what a lousy way to render it! “The English” would be preferable, but even “the goddams” would give more of a hint to the viewer not versed in Medieval French obloquy. And this from a subtitler who, when Jeanne tells her uncle she wants to go to see the Dauphin and he says “Qui — le roi de Bourges?” renders his response “the Well Served?” Which is not only unintelligible to the non-specialist viewer but misses the entire point of mockingly calling him “King of Bourges”!

Dave Wilton has a Big List entry tracing the history of the word callow:

Callow is a word that dates back to the beginnings of the English language, but it has shifted in meaning significantly over the past eleven-hundred years. Today it means inexperienced or naive, and it often appears in the phrase callow youth. But way back when it was associated with aging, for in Old English the word calu meant bald. […] The meaning of callow remained stable through the Middle English period, but in the late sixteenth century the word began to be applied to young birds, who were unfledged, that is without feathers. […] And by the end of the seventeenth century, callow was being used to refer to young and naïve people without allusion to fledgling birds. […] This inexperienced sense would quickly overtake the bald sense, driving the latter out of the language.

I’ll add this to my stock of ammunition to be used against those who object to semantic change (my go-to example has been bead, originally ‘prayer’): “Oh, so you think callow should only mean ‘bald,’ then?”

I was wondering if it was related to Russian голый ‘naked’; Wiktionary says yes, but the OED (entry revised 2016) is more cautious:

Cognate with Middle Dutch calu, cāle (Dutch kaal), Middle Low German kale, Old High German kalo (Middle High German kal, German kahl); further etymology uncertain.

Notes

Further etymology
Perhaps < the same Indo-European base as Old Church Slavonic golŭ naked, bare, or perhaps an early borrowing into Germanic of classical Latin calvus bald (see calvity n.).

Trevor Joyce sent me a link to Danica Salazar’s Guardian piece on an OED update a couple of years ago, but it slipped to the unseen recesses of my inbox before I got around to it, and I hereby abashedly retrieve it for your delectation. After an introit on how “English spread across the globe,” we get to the good stuff:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has documented many of the words that these new communities of English speakers have added to the vocabulary. Many of these words are borrowings from other languages with which English is in constant contact, such as lepak (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, deurmekaar (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, kaveera (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and whāngai (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, which may be unfamiliar to British English speakers but are words characteristic of Malaysian English, South African English, Ugandan English and New Zealand English respectively.

Speakers of world varieties of English are remaking its vocabulary to better express their identities, cultures and everyday realities. In Hong Kong, people exclaim add oil as a show of encouragement or support, an expression literally translated from the Cantonese gā yáu, with reference to petrol being injected into an engine. In the Philippines, many houses have a dirty kitchen, which is not actually a kitchen that is dirty in the sense you think, but a kitchen outside the house where most of the real cooking is done – a necessary convenience in a tropical country where it is best to avoid trapping heat and smells indoors. In Nigeria, a mama put is a street-food stall, and its name comes from the way that its customers usually order food: they say “Mama, put …” to the woman running the stall, and point to the dish they want so it can be put on their plate.

Meanwhile, the Japanese have invented, and South Koreans have popularised, the word skinship, a blend of the words skin and kinship that refers to the close physical contact between parent and child or between lovers or friends.

What great expressions! (Yes, I know some of you feel strongly that such terms are not part of English as you conceive it; we can take the objection as read.) The etymology for kaveera (East African English /kaˈvera/) actually provides a morphological analysis in Luganda, though it would have been nice if they’d ventured a guess as to where ‑veera comes from:

< Luganda (a)kaveera < (a)ka-, singular class prefix + ‑veera (single-use) plastic bag (plural (o)buveera buveera n.).

Compare buveera n. (which is also used as a plural of kaveera n. in English).

Belated thanks, Trevor!

Dennis Duncan’s LRB review-essay on Raymond Queneau’s life and career (Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024; archived), formally a review of The Skin of Dreams (Loin de Rueil), translated by Chris Clarke, begins with the language angle:

‘Si tu t’imagines,’ Juliette Gréco sang. ‘If you imagine.’ It was her first time singing in public, on 22 June 1949, at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret, the beginning of her seven-decade reign as the first lady of French chanson. Both the venue and the song were selected by Gréco’s unlikely svengali, Jean-Paul Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.

But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think coming if you imagine that … That what? The next line is the song’s best, a sound poetry joke. Over the music-box twinkle, Gréco suddenly glitches, ‘xa va xa va xa’, clicking plosives like the needle skipping on a record, until the line resolves: ‘va durer toujours’. If you want to be boring about it, ‘xa va’ = ‘que ça va’: ‘If you imagine/That this will, that this will, that this/Will last for ever …’ But the poem that Sartre chose, and had set to music, was by Raymond Queneau. And Queneau spells it ‘xa’.

Ten years later, in the summer of 1959, the French edition of Elle magazine reported on a new and virulent linguistic disease sweeping the country. ‘The Zazie phenomenon is ravaging France like an epidemic. In the streets and on the métro, from the mountains to the beaches, we are all “speaking Zazie”.’ That summer, simply everyone was imitating the insouciant, potty-mouthed heroine of Queneau’s latest novel, Zazie dans le métro. ‘Unbearable’, Elle’s columnist mock-harrumphed.

[Read more…]

We’ve had a number of posts on printers’ terms (e.g., Wayzgoose, Printer’s Pie), but this one has leaped to near the top of my list of favorites:

Zwiebelfisch

German

Etymology

Zwiebel (“onion”) +‎ Fisch (“fish”), originally “fish of low quality”, then “low quality, clutter”.

Pronunciation

IPA(key): /ˈt͡sviːbl̩ˌfɪʃ/

Noun

Zwiebelfisch m (strong, genitive Zwiebelfisches or Zwiebelfischs, plural Zwiebelfische)

1. (printing) A character that is by mistake printed in a font different from the rest.
2. misprint

That’s great on so many levels I can only doff my hat in awe. Also, Zwiebel is from Late Latin cēpulla, diminutive of Latin cēpa ‘onion,’ which makes sense but is unexpected. (The Latin word is “A borrowing from an unknown, possibly Anatolian source.”)

Elyse Graham writes for the Princeton Alumni Weekly about the strange fate of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career:

At the start of the 1940s, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 was, as the kids say, in his flop era. In the first year of that decade, the total sales for all of Fitzgerald’s books, from This Side of Paradise to The Great Gatsby, were a whopping 72 copies. The amount of scholarly ink spilled on him could fit into a thimble. When Fitzgerald died in December 1940 — of a heart attack, at the age of 44 — the world’s verdict on the author was that he was a tragic figure: a sort of literary sparkler who burned too bright, too young, then fizzled out when his decade did, enjoying great celebrity during the Jazz Age and losing it all in the 1930s when the public had too many worries to care about flappers and champagne.

His early death was all the crueler, critics said, because it came late enough for him to see the collapse of his youthful promise. On his 40th birthday, the New York Post published a profile that depicted him as a washed-up alcoholic who knew his best days were behind him, interesting only as a symbol of the failures of his generation […]

As artists even better than him have done — Mozart is an example — Fitzgerald died in penury. He was living in a girlfriend’s apartment in Los Angeles, drinking too much and scratching up a bare living by writing screenplays. At the time of his fatal heart attack, he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Just 30 people came to his funeral. The newspapers covered his death, but the story they told was a tragedy of youthful talent squandered: “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties,” said The New York Times. “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” “Poor Scott,” Ernest Hemingway said of him, and the label stuck. Poor Scott, who died in the worst way an artist can die: too early, but late enough to see himself forgotten.

[Read more…]

Y writes: “From Lameen’s Bluesky I learned of this paper. There was some discussion (or several?) at the blog of the subject of language naming, but this is so extensive and detailed, I thought you might want to have a post on it, rather than just a comment.” I agree, so here’s the post. The paper is “Towards a typology of language names” by Pun Ho Lui; the abstract:

Although language names (i.e. glottonyms) are often mentioned in descriptions of individual languages, the general patterns underlying them are understudied. To narrow the research gap, this study explores four aspects of glottonyms. First, the definition and linguistic properties of endonyms and exonyms are examined. Morphemes meaning ‘our’ and ‘true’ are commonly found in endonyms, while some exonyms have a negative connotation. Second, language markers—items signifying a glottonym—are categorized into lexical and grammatical language markers. Lexical language markers are subsequently classified based on their meanings. Third, glottonyms are classified into 19 types based on their meanings. Some types are further categorized into subtypes. Fourth, the naming motivations of glottonyms are explored, e.g. some glottonyms are used for disambiguating the glottonym meaning from other meanings. Finally, the challenges faced in constructing this typology are discussed.

You can see a more detailed list, with discussion, at Lameen’s post. Here’s a bit I found interesting:

A derogatory exonym may undergo amelioration, i.e. the connotation becomes less negative. Lepcha is derived from the Nepali word(s) lɑ̄pce or lɑ̄pca ‘inarticulate speech’ with a derogatory connotation, but now Lepcha is used without this connotation (Plaisier 2007). There is no known glottonym in which the connotation has undergone pejoration, i.e. the connotations have become (more) negative.

[Read more…]

I recently saw a reference to the Dispilio Tablet, about which I knew nothing, so I thought I’d quote some bits of that Wikipedia article and see if anyone knows more:

The Dispilio tablet is a wooden artefact bearing linear marks, unearthed in 1993 during George Hourmouziadis’s excavations of the Neolithic site of Dispilio in Greece. A single radiocarbon date from the artefact has yielded a radiocarbon age of 6270±38 radiocarbon years, which when calibrated corresponds to the calendar age range of 5324–5079 cal BC (at 95.4% probability). The lakeshore settlement occupied an artificial island near the modern village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria in Kastoria, Western Macedonia, Greece. […]

The archaeological context of the tablet is not known, as it was found floating on the water that was filling the excavation trench. The tablet itself was partially damaged when it was exposed to the oxygen-rich environment outside of the mud and water in which it was immersed for a long period of time, and so it was placed under conservation. As of 2024, a full academic publication assessing the tablet apparently awaits the completion of conservation work.[citation needed]

Despite the lack of proper context, and the fact that no dedicated scientific paper has ever explained the tablet in detail, various archaeological and unofficial interpretations have surfaced, including the interpretation of the markings as some form of early writing.[citation needed] […]

A large number of sources in popular and social media, and even some scholarly articles, show a wrong image of the tablet, specifically, the modern artistic recreation. This photograph portrays an object which is a modern recreation of how the tablet may have looked like originally. It is an object hanging from the wall in one of the reconstructed house in the open-air museum nearby the archaeological site. The lines on the modern recreation bear little resemblance to the markings on the original artefact.

Sounds like a mess, with plenty of opportunities for ill-informed analysis. I am, of course, inherently skeptical about these things; does anyone think it’s likely to actually represent writing? (Dispilio, incidentally, has final stress: Δισπηλιό; before 1926 it was known as Δουπιάκοι. See this 2002 post for my objections to that sort of renaming.)

The eudæmonist has a splendidly detailed post on what is to me (though not to my wife) an arcane subject:

Dino Buzzati’s short story ‘A Boring Letter’ – included in the recently translated collection The Bewitched Bourgeois – contains part of a knitting pattern for a three-color ‘Peruvian poncho’. The story takes the form of the letter, so the voice of the pattern is thus (hopefully) that of the letter writer, rather than Buzzati’s. The relevant passage is:

So pay attention: You’ll need about two balls of gray (or beige) Shetland wool, another ball of the same wool in black (or tobacco), just over half a ball of the same wool in white (or cream), and number 3 knitting needles. You work in two parts, decreasing one stitch per row for every plain-stitched row. […] For the first part: With the gray wool cast on 262 stitches and knit for ten rows in plain stitch; then, still with the grey wool, knit sixteen rows in purl stitch. […] The twenty-seventh row: * one stitch in white wool, three stitches in gray wool *; repeat from * to * until the end of the row, finishing with one stitch in white wool. The twenty-eighth row: * three stitches in white wool, one stitch in gray wool *, repeat from * to * until the end of the row, finishing with three stitches in white wool. […] The twenty-ninth to the thirty-second rows, in white wool. The thirty-third and thirty-fourth, in grey wool. The thirty-fifth to the thirty-eighth, in black wool. The thirty-ninth and fortieth, in grey wool. The forty-first and forty-second, in white wool. […] Thus you’ll have 226 stitches to a row. The forty-third and forty-fourth rows, in black wool. The forty-fifth… (p. 298)

The omissions leave out the spoilers, of course, but even allowing for the fragmentary nature of the pattern, there is something not quite right here. I will set aside the decrease instructions for the moment (they are odd, but not impossible). What is meant by working in ‘plain stitch’? Generally, plain knitting would refer to stockinette stitch, which is knit on the right side and purled on the wrong side, but that seems a bit odd for starting out, because it would curl up. What is meant by working in ‘purl stitch’? If you purl every row, then you just get garter stitch, but more annoying to knit. It could also mean reverse stockinette, which is purling on the right side and knitting on the wrong side, so some ambiguity remains (and doesn’t solve the mystery of the curling hem).

The row-by-row instructions are unobjectionable. But we can get back to those decrease instructions, because it is odd that thirty-six stitches have been decreased after forty-two rows, when the instructions state that one should decrease one stitch at the end of each ‘plain-stitched’ row. As only ten such rows have (apparently) been worked, this suggests either a relic of the ‘new math’ or some derangement on the part of the letter writer.

Now, Italian is not among the languages in which I have any kind of competence, but in the course of working with knitting patterns, I have had the opportunity to format pattern translations from English into a variety of languages, each of which has their own conventions for how the instructions are presented in terms of vocabulary, abbreviations, level of detail, and designer idiosyncrasy. So although my knowledge of Italian is pretty much nil, it still seemed worthwhile to look up the original […]

Click through for much more arcana, e.g. “‘Knit in two parts’ could also mean ‘worked back and forth’ here, and it is also possible that dritto here is ‘right side’ [of the work] so it could mean one stitch is decreased (although the patterns I’ve seen generally use diminuire/diminuendo rather than calando) at the end of each right-side row […].” I love this kind of thing, even when I have only the foggiest notion of what’s going on.