languagehat.com

A paper by Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35 1-4 [2017-2018]: 31-42) begins by quoting Roman Szporluk on the origins of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity and asks “If the imagined community began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when did the Ukrainian vernacular begin to delimit itself vis-à-vis its neighbors?” Flier goes on to quote George Shevelov to the effect that “a continuum has existed from the earliest local changes within Common Slavic to the present,” then gets to the meat of his paper:

It is one thing to worry about labels, but it is quite another to examine the typology of the linguistic systems on East Slavic territory and uncover the relationship among specific changes. The goal is to establish not simply a list of distinctive characteristics, as Shevelov would have it, but to reveal a hierarchy of change and therefore a more accurate evaluation of linguistic data.[6] Thus, we are not as interested in registering Change A and Change B as we are in the assertion that Change B implies Change A and if B is in place it is no longer possible to return to the status quo ante, that is pre-A. My intent here is to make use of advances in Slavic historical linguistics since the publication of Shevelov’s encyclopedic Ukrainian historical phonology three and a half decades ago, knowledge that sheds new light on the chronological layering of East Slavic and thus provides a relative time frame for marking such fundamental typological shifts.

I will focus here on internally motivated sound change precisely because it is based on linguistic data least subject to conscious alteration on the part of speakers. We want to consider the language of speakers throughout Ukrainian territory, especially those at a far remove from the scriptoria and bureaucratic offices of urban elites. Members of this latter group are much more likely to be affected by the need for new abstract vocabulary or socially prestigious speech, desiderata that often lead to calques or direct borrowings, particularly from neighboring languages of power such as Polish or Russian. En passant we might note that both of these prestigious and influential languages have had a heavy steady stream of borrowing and calquing of their own. For now we will forget the self-reflective elites: we will be interested in when and how the non-elite speech communities of East Slavic began to diverge phonologically, never to proceed along the same trajectory again.

[Read more…]

I’m almost finished with Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (1, 2, 3), and I was brought up short by this passage in the concluding chapter: “some particularly important manuscripts – including the Codex Venetus A of Homer – can be studied in greater detail in digitized form than by any other means, including autopsy.” Of course I was aware that autopsy is from Greek αὐτοψία ‘act of seeing with one’s own eyes’ (which is why Stan Brakhage called his disturbing 1971 film about forensic pathologists The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes), but I hadn’t known that that sense was used in English. A trip to the OED (entry revised 2011) proved enlightening:

1. The action or process of seeing with one’s own eyes; personal observation, inspection, or experience. Now rare.

1607 It is apparently knowne, especially to them which are skild in the autopsie of Anatomie, the seat or fountaine head of it, is..a great hollow veine.
T. Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors. Or The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or The Philosophers Stone to Make a Golden Temper f. 59

1647 For we question whether..a man by the bare light and instruction of the Book could attaine to a dextrous practice of a trade, whereunto hath been required seven yeares Autopsia.
W. Petty, Advice to Hartlib 19

1651 Or by autopsie [Latin per autopsiam], when by our observation, wee get a certaine knowledge of things.
R. Wittie, translation of J. Primrose, Popular Errours i. xiv. 53
[…]

1722 The extreme Capillaries of these Vessels are not to be prov’d by Autopsy, no more than those of the Veins and Arteries are.
J. Wainewright, Anat. Treat. Liver 60
[…]

1818 It is also this kind of evidence which places beyond dispute the autopsy of a traveller; and distinguishes him from the mere writer of Travels, who never himself saw what he relates.
E. D. Clarke, Trav. Europe, Asia & Afr. Part III (1824) vol. IX. p. viii

1839 The defect of autopsy may be compensated by sufficient testimony of a multitude.
T. De Quincey, On Hume’s Argument in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine July 95/2

1901 The evidence..that he is describing from personal autopsy the scenes of the great events which he narrates is overwhelming.
G. B. Grundy, Great Persian War & Preliminaries vi. 223

1988 [He] has collated (usually from photographs or facsimiles, only rarely by autopsy) all the manuscripts cited except for [etc.].
Classical Philology vol. 83 151

2003 Pliny was procurator of Hispania Tarraconensis, and the Natural History contains information about the area which Pliny seems to have derived from autopsy.
J. N. Adams, Bilingualism & Latin Language iv. 450

Sense 2.a., “Examination of the organs of a dead body in order to determine the cause of death, nature and extent of disease, result of treatment, etc.; post-mortem examination; an instance of this,” only goes back to 1805 (“The distinguishing signs of peripneumony and pleurisy are so uncertain that they have been doubted by some celebrated physicians; they have been so often belied by cadaverous autopsia,” Philosophical Magazine vol. 21 240). I note, more in anger than in sorrow, that they once again show their indifference to authorship; the 1988 citation under 1 is by Donald J. Mastronarde, and the 2.a. citation is from “An Essay on Medical Entomology” by François-Pierre Chaumeton.

The etymology goes into commendable detail on the sense development:
[Read more…]

Joel has another great excerpt from Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (see this post); after a passage on religion, it continues:

Elsewhere, too, the adoption of Indian ideas was selective rather than wholesale. While writing systems were borrowed and Indian languages used for the earliest local writing, the languages both of the court and the common people remained the local Austronesian or Khmer ones. Sanskrit for a while may have served the same priestly and official role as Latin in medieval Europe. But in time Indian Pallawa script was used to write local languages, the oldest found so far being in old Malay dating to the seventh century in Sumatra. The following century saw the development of Kawi script, derived from Pallawa but used to write old Javanese.

This script became the basis for other scripts including later Javanese and Balinese, which are still in use today. The first writing in Khmer also dates to the seventh century and uses an adaptation of Pallawa script. Six hundred years later this became the basis of Thai writing. The origin of Indian language influence also varied. Only Sanskrit words, those of religious and classical texts, not Prakrit or other common Indian speech, entered early writing in Java, but Tamil ones appeared in Sumatra. Despite the import of Indian religions, social structures appear to have remained indigenous. The maritime cultures borrowed Indian ideas in art and architecture but then adapted them so that they have distinctive aspects which are readily recognizable.

Apart from religion and script, the biggest influence was on legal and governance issues. The Indian text on statecraft, Arthashastra, and the ancient Brahman legal code, Manusmriti, were widely studied by ruling elites and had a major influence on the development of state systems. The Arthashastra, written in the fourth century BCE during the north India-based Maurya empire, which supposedly followed the peace-loving Jain religion, required rulers to be ruthless in protecting the interests of the state but disciplined, hardworking and learned. It was a secular recipe for enlightened despotism applicable to rulers of any faith. The Hindu notion of divine kingship was especially attractive to rulers, seeming to make the exercise of power something higher than mere personal leadership: a mandate from above. Buddhism on the other hand (and also Jainism) was more sympathetic to merchant interests and the accumulation of wealth. Its practitioners were also less constrained by caste issues and religious rituals, which for the devout were an obstacle to long sea journeys.

What a fascinating part of the world! For more on its complexity, see my 2005 post It’s Never That Simple.

This is pretty silly, but it amused me, and it will perhaps amuse the Persons of Welshness among us. From Frances Wilson’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis:

Lewis finds Burton in his voice, which Burton himself described as “the deep, dark answer” to the Welsh valleys. “I think our voices were born with coal-dust and rain and some sort of authentic mystery from those dark and tortured valleys,” he told an interviewer in 1974. For Lewis, Burton’s voice is “one of the twentieth century’s great noises,”

roaring, swelling, delicate and bombastic by turns, the articulation and diction very precise—and it’s what I hold most dear, what I find most engaging, about him, too, the inflections, nuances, elaborations and grain of his voice, the fire and the flint of things spoken. Everything one would want to know with Burton is present in the voice, which was rich and artificial, carrying a sense of fracture, of mournfulness.

Welsh was Burton’s first language, and it took years of elocution to iron out his vowels. “Unless you are Welsh,” he said of his friend Stanley Baker, “you couldn’t possibly understand him,” and the same is true of Burton. “He suffers from this intoxication with words,” Taylor said. “It’s Welsh verbal diarrhea.” “The Welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses,” explains Lewis, “because flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.”

I’d never heard of Lewis, and I can’t say I’m pleased to have made his acquaintance; from the review:
[Read more…]

Songdog and I are making some changes that we hope will improve reliability so the site doesn’t keep being unreachable. There may be bumps along the way; be patient!

Another deep dive into an obscure region of typography, With hollow feet and harlequin hats: Tuscan letters, a prank of lapidary origin? (Second part):

Tere Schultz delivers a new literary and typographic divertimento for passionate readers. This time she follows one of her personal fixations: the Tuscan letters. Those ornamental objects, delicate or extravagant, that inhabit streets and typographic catalogs of all times, without losing an iota of expressive force. The product of decorative ingenuity, Tuscan vernaculars dress the street signs of Mexico as much as the stained glass windows of Paris, the ‘fileteado porteño’ of Buenos Aires signs or the hulls of fishing boats in the Amazon waters. However, this decorative ubiquity, notorious and implausible, alarms many. Fortunately, like a healing balm, Schultz will deploy here her original hypothesis, suspiciously unexplored, of how the Tuscan style would have been born from a mischievous interpretation of the stone inscriptions (wrongly) called lapidary. Although perhaps here the term ‘lapidary’ is appropriate, since the idea caught the author strolling through a cemetery. (Warning: sensitive material. Agnostic typographers and designers of little faith, please refrain).

Here’s a definition:

Basically, a typeface is considered Tuscan when its serifs are bi- or tri-furcated (sometimes with a greater number of extensions) to achieve a certain degree of fantasy or ornamentation. The examples are infinite since, apart from the terminals, all the other elements of the anatomy of a letter can vary: the strokes contrast, the ratio of proportions, the absence / presence of diamonds and other elements within the strokes, shadows, textures and other external additions.

And here’s a discussion of the name:
[Read more…]

Just a quick post — we had people over, and it’s late — but I wanted to mention a phrase I was unfamiliar with that turned up in an episode from season 2 of Endeavour (which my wife and I are rewatching after many years). One of the characters is explaining to Morse the nature of a classified ad placed in the Oxford Mail: his group of friends had agreed to use such an ad as an emergency signal to call the group together, and he compared it to a “twilight bark.” I looked it up and it turns out to be from The Hundred and One Dalmatians — it’s an alarm system the dogs use to pass the word about missing puppies. I’m not sure if in the book (1956) or only the movie (1961); the episode is set in late 1966. For those who were as unaware as I was, now you know.

A correspondent asks about the relationship and comparative etymology of smooch, schmooze, and German schmusen, and I thought it was an interesting enough tangle to post. First, smooch ‘kiss,’ which OED (entry from 1986) says is a variant of smouch ‘kiss’ (e.g. 1811 “The little hideous Duc de Berri smouches us all,” Countess Granville, Letters) “Of uncertain origin […] Compare German dialect schmutzen to kiss, to smile.” Wiktionary, on the other hand, says:

Perhaps from a dialectal variation of smack. Compare also Low German smok (“a kiss, a smouch/smooch”), Alemannic German Schmutz, Schmützle (“a kiss, a smooch”).

Wiktionary has nothing on the cited German dialect forms. Now for the verb schmooze; OED (entry revised 2019): “< Yiddish shmuesn to talk, converse, chat < shmues chat, gossip (see schmooze n.).” And the noun:

Either (i) < Yiddish shmues chat, gossip < Hebrew šĕmūʿōṯ, plural of šĕmūʿah rumour < šāmaʿ to hear (see Shema n.),

or perhaps (ii) < schmooze v.

Compare earlier schmoozing n. Compare also (in different senses) smouch n.², smouse n., which ultimately reflect the same Yiddish (and ultimate Hebrew) etymon.

Notes
Compare German Schmus chat, gossip, insincere behaviour, Schmu insincere behaviour, dodgy dealings (both 19th cent.; both < Yiddish, via Rotwelsch).

I doubt Schmu has anything to do with Al Capp’s shmoo, but you never know. Thanks, Peter!

Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from his current reading, Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring, and I found Naming ‘Maritime Southeast Asia’ extremely enlightening:

This region is often referred to as ‘maritime South East Asia’, with the more general term ‘South East Asia’ dating only to World War II. Although Japan used the term ‘Tonan Ajiya’ (‘South East Asia’ [lit. ‘East South Asia’]) from the late nineteenth century, in European languages its use did not become widespread until the 1950s, bringing together mainland states between China and India with the islands. The formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 added to the notion that mainland and maritime were one, yet in practice they have divergent interests and religion, now as in the past.

Europeans had long termed the islands the ‘Indian archipelago’ or ‘Insulindia’. Alternatively they referred to them as the ‘Malay archipelago’, neither term distinguishing between the Indonesian and Philippine island groups. The area corresponded roughly to ‘Nusantara’, a name dating to the thirteenth century and the Java-based Majapahit empire. Nusa is a Sanskrit-derived word meaning ‘island’.

‘Nusantara’ defined the region of islands and coasts over which Majapahit rule, tribute or mercantile influence extended. It covered most of what is now Indonesia, part of the Philippine archipelago, the central Vietnam coast and the Malay peninsula. Beyond its Javanese heart it did not rule directly but held sway over the many small mercantile states of the region. ‘Nusantara’ in Malay today has a narrower meaning: ‘archipelago’, specifically the Indonesian archipelago. So this book uses ‘Nusantaria’ to denote a broader zone, the single maritime region between the northern entrance to the Melaka and Luzon straits, and the Banda islands in the extreme east of the archipelago. While predominantly describing the wider Malay world, and touching too on Taiwan, Madagascar and the Marianas, Nusantaria links to the coastal Thai, Chinese, Tamil and other players in the history of the exchange of goods, people and ideas both within the region and with peoples to the west and north-east. It corresponds also to the use by the distinguished archaeologist of South East Asia, Wilhelm Solheim, of the term ‘Nusantao’ to define the mostly Austronesian-speaking peoples of the ancient trading networks of the islands and coasts (tao [from Proto-Austronesian *Cau — LH] means people in many Austronesian languages).

[Read more…]

Frequent commenter Y sent me a link to Glottle saying “Probably something after your heart,” and boy was he right. The goal is to guess the mystery language; for each guess you are told how close your guessed language is to the target language genealogically (Freezing Cold, Cool, Warm, Hot, Boiling). You can play at various levels of difficulty; here are my results (number of guesses I needed/total number allowed):
Easy 10/15
Medium 18/30
Hard 9/50
Expert 10/75

Don’t do what I did at first and ignore the geographical information (they tell you in small print how many km/miles away the mystery language is, which helps a lot). Good luck, and thanks, Y!