“Captain Joe,” whispered Alex, patting the dog on the head, “you’re the candy kid! That’s Clay, without the shadow of a doubt. Now you tell him that we want to come aboard.” (Harry Gordon, The River Motor Boat Boys on the Ohio, 1913)
“Dear Sweetheart: ‘Ive watched You for a long Time, and I have decided that you’re the Candy Kid for sure.’” (Mattoon [Illinois] Morning Star, April 18, 1907, p. 1)
“You’re the candy kid!” (line of dialogue from The laughing cure, a comedy in two acts [c. 1916])

But where did it come from? I checked Eric Partridge’s indispensable (if unreliable) A Dictionary of Catchphrases, but he didn’t have it, and the same is true for the others I’ll mention. 1909’s “go to and stay put” is short and memorable (cf. the recent “keep calm and carry on”) and was used for some time (Dorothy Speare’s Dancers in the Dark [1922], p. 117: “I told him to go to and stay put”; John Bernard Mannion, “Pointers on Business Letter-Writing,” Postage and the Mailbag, Sept. 1921, p. 341: “We’d really like to have told our reader to go to and stay put”), but who came up with it? The same goes for 1912’s “You know me, Steve”; a good example with a doubtless fictional origin story is in M. H. Hirst’s “A Study in Contrasts,” The Central Literary Magazine, Vol. 23, p. 646:

He never moves even now, without a loaded automatic; and there are certain phrases of his which have become current coin in the mess — such as, in quick staccato accents, “ Got yer covered ” ; or “ You know me, Steve ! ” in tones of quiet menace.

“So I took the fifty thousand” (1926) is presumably from the 1923 song (YouTube); “Faw down and go boom” (1929) is from the Eddie Cantor song “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom!” (1928). Somebody should really do a proper historical catalogue, comparable to Green’s Dictionary of Slang; catchphrases are just as interesting as slang words!

Origin uncertain. Perhaps < cod n.¹ + ‑ling suffix¹.

Compare cod n.² and codfish n., which may both derive ultimately from this word.

Notes
The original sense was perhaps ‘fish found in the cod end of a trawl net’: compare cod n.¹ 5a and cod net n. As a demersal fish, cod was made more accessible by the development of the trawling technology, and would have been found often in the cod ends of trawl nets. (Perhaps compare similarly dogdrave n. [A marine fish used for food … Sometimes identified with the cod])

Earlier currency is implied by the following example, showing a Latin borrowing of the English word:

  1289 In .v..xx. x. codling’ empt’ Glouc’ xvij.s.
     in J. Webb, Household Expenses R. de Swinfield (1853) 31

Perhaps attested earlier as a surname: Robert Codling (1275, Lincolnshire).

And for cod n.¹ ‘bag; purse; pod; scrotum’ we have:

Cognate with early modern Dutch kodde testicle (1599 in Kiliaan, in isolated attestation), and further with the Scandinavian forms cited at cod n.³ [A bearing or supporting piece on which an axle or other moving part rests; A cushion; a pillow] (which is borrowed from these), and probably also with Middle Dutch codde (Dutch kodde) in the sense ‘club’ (compare codd n.¹); probably < an ablaut variant (zero-grade) of the Germanic base of Old English cēod bag, pouch, Old High German kiot pouch (see note); further etymology uncertain and disputed.

Compare post-classical Latin coddus in the sense ‘bag, measure of grain’ (from 1158 in British sources; < English).

Perhaps compare kid n.³ [A seed-pod of a leguminous plant], kid v.³ [Of plants: To form pods]

Notes
Although Old English cēod is rare and its attestations disputed, evidence for the same base in continental West Germanic languages is more plentiful; in addition to Old High German kiot, compare the derivative formations Middle Dutch cūdele cod end, cod net (Dutch kuil), Middle Low German küdel bag, container (also used in fishing), Middle High German kiutel dewlap (German Keutel in the specific senses ‘fish net, bowel, swelling’, now regional); compare ‑le suffix. With the use of these derivatives with reference to fishing nets compare sense 5 and cod end n., cod net n.

That’s quite a tangled net, and I don’t know what to make of it, but I herewith cast it upon the waters.

One warm summer evening in 2008, when Mohamed Sultan Baqavi was a 26-year-old student at Arabic College in the South Indian town of Vellore, he made a remarkable discovery. After offering prayers in the city’s Labaabeen Qabrusthan mosque, where generations of his spiritual gurus were laid to rest, he caught sight of a man sweeping the courtyard.

The man gathered the debris – scraps of paper, rubble and leaves – and piled them up beside a dried-up well near the mosque’s entrance to set alight. As Baqavi was preparing to leave, a gentle breeze blew his way, carrying with it a page from the rubbish heap. When he pried it from his face, Baqavi was startled to find that the scrap of paper was a part of a book. He knew that some mosques used their dried-out wells as storage for rare manuscripts, and stray pages from these often littered courtyards. Could this be one of them, he wondered?

Baqavi took a closer look at the now-burning heap of rubbish and hurriedly fished out an entire book from the bonfire. After dousing the flames, he opened it to find pages of rare script that he immediately recognised. It was written in the long-lost language of Arwi.

Baqavi, now a professor at Jamia Anwariyya Arabic College in the South Indian state of Kerala, had been reading Arwi literature since he was four years old. But very few people, even among Muslims who read Arabic, could recognise this script.

Arwi dates to the 8th Century CE when travel and trade in the medieval world sparked a curious intermingling of tongues. It leapt to prominence in the 17th Century, when more Muslim Arab traders landed in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which was full of Tamil speaking people. The traders brought with them rich tapestries and the finest textiles and perfumes like frankincense and myrrh – records say they longed to establish a deeper connection with the local people because they felt connected by a common religion but spoke two different languages.

The Arabic that the traders spoke intermingled with the local language of Tamil to create what scholars call Arabu Tamil, or Arwi. The script employs a modified alphabet of Arabic, but the actual words and their meanings are borrowed from the local Tamil dialect.

“Arabic Tamil, called Arwi, was just one of the many languages that found expression in Arabic script,” explained Mahmood Kooria, a lecturer in the history of the Indian Ocean world before 1750, at the University of Edinburgh. “The Indian Ocean trade at the time was dominated by Arabian and Persian traders who landed in India before European colonialists,” he said. “Travel and trade shaped how these languages evolved.” […]

Arwi extended to nearby Sri Lanka, which had its own Tamil-speaking population too. And though the language was thought to be on the brink of extinction after the 18th Century, when European colonial powers began to dominate the Indian Ocean trade and native speakers began to dwindle, today it’s facing a curious revival. University graduates are studying it, and in a handful of villages along the coast, many Muslim women pride themselves in singing prayer songs in the ancient tongue. […]

Some scholars believe that Arwi’s popularity during the 17th Century was due to the inter-marriage of Arab seafarers and local Tamil Muslim women, and also because it helped the traders deepen business ties – they were able to master a complex language like Tamil using the Arabic script that they were already familiar with.

“Tamil has 247 letters. Arwi had a much more manageable alphabet – just 40 letters – perfect for medieval seafarers who wanted to quickly pick up proficiency in the tongue… enough to trade and earn their livelihood in a new land,” said K MA Ahamed Zubair, associate professor of Arabic at The New College in Chennai, who teaches the Arwi script to his students.

I was particularly pleased to see the centering of women in the story:

As a result of colonialism, manuscripts also found their way to the British library in London, where they are housed today. Kooria, who reads and writes Arabic Malayalam, has been assisting the British Library in cataloguing these texts for the last four years. “I was stunned to find so many on history, religion, medicine and culture; [and] many of these were written by women,” he said.

A significant number of these books by women authors were written for other women, addressing issues such as childbirth and sexuality, and reflecting on domestic issues or discussing cuisines and culture, said Ophira Gamliel, a lecturer in South Asian Religions at the University of Glasgow. “It’s proof of how Muslim women had a strong voice and identity and were part of a matrilineal tradition,” said Gamliel.

And while these fusion dialects are not spoken on a daily basis anymore, Arwi and Arabic Malayalam still live on today because of these books and songs. […] Getting together to sing these songs is a big social event. “It’s like a women’s club,” laughed 18-year-old Khizr Magfira, who is studying a bachelor’s degree in commerce at a local college in Kayalpatnam. “Every household has at least one member who knows Arwi well and speaks fluently,” she added.

“In the narrow lanes between our homes, groups of women gather during special occasions such as the birth month of Prophet Mohammed (during the third month in the Islamic calendar, roughly in September) to sing these songs together,” said Magfira. “When I see tears in their eyes as they sing these songs, I know how deeply they understand and cherish it. It’s very therapeutic.”

Links and images, as well as more information, if you click through. Thanks, Trevor!

Resurrection is not a perfect work of art: the moral idea, profusely supported by texts from the Gospels, is not organically fused into the fabric. The story of Nekhlyúdov’s conversion is on an inferior plane to that of Tolstóy’s own in A Confession, or of Iván Ilyích’s, or of the merchant in Master and Man. It is not a revelation of inner light, but a cold decision to adapt himself to the moral law so as to escape the stings of conscience and acquire inner peace. Resurrection presents Tolstóy and his teaching from the most unattractive side. For all that, it is a book by Tolstóy. But its best qualities are not characteristic of the later Tolstóy: they are rather, in a minor degree, those of Anna Karénina and War and Peace. The best thing in the novel is the minor realistic details he condemned so severely in What Is Art? The early story of Máslova is the best part of the book. It is full of that elusive poetry which reminds one of the subtle poetic atmosphere that accompanies Natásha in War and Peace. The account of the trial is excellent — sustained, concentrated, unexaggerated satire. It has not been surpassed by Tolstóy, except perhaps in the second part of the same novel, where he satirizes the bureaucratic society of Petersburg.

The style is severely impacted by all the moral tales he’d been cranking out for the edification of children and peasants; here’s a sample, from Louise Maude’s widely read translation (which came out the same year as the novel, 1899in 1900):

This is how the things he saw during these three months impressed Nekhludoff: From among the people who were free, those were chosen, by means of trials and the administration, who were the most nervous, the most hot tempered, the most excitable, the most gifted, and the strongest, but the least careful and cunning. These people, not a wit more dangerous than many of those who remained free, were first locked in prisons, transported to Siberia, where they were provided for and kept months and years in perfect idleness, and away from nature, their families, and useful work—that is, away from the conditions necessary for a natural and moral life. This firstly. Secondly, these people were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary indignity in these different places—chains, shaved heads, shameful clothing—that is, they were deprived of the chief motives that induce the weak to live good lives, the regard for public opinion, the sense of shame and the consciousness of human dignity. Thirdly, they were continually exposed to dangers, such as the epidemics so frequent in places of confinement, exhaustion, flogging, not to mention accidents, such as sunstrokes, drowning or conflagrations, when the instinct of self-preservation makes even the kindest, most moral men commit cruel actions, and excuse such actions when committed by others.

Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with others who were particularly depraved by life, and especially by these very institutions—rakes, murderers and villains—who act on those who are not yet corrupted by the measures inflicted on them as leaven acts on dough.

And, fifthly, the fact that all sorts of violence, cruelty, inhumanity, are not only tolerated, but even permitted by the government, when it suits its purposes, was impressed on them most forcibly by the inhuman treatment they were subjected to; by the sufferings inflicted on children, women and old men; by floggings with rods and whips; by rewards offered for bringing a fugitive back, dead or alive; by the separation of husbands and wives, and the uniting them with the wives and husbands of others for sexual intercourse; by shooting or hanging them. To those who were deprived of their freedom, who were in want and misery, acts of violence were evidently still more permissible. All these institutions seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

One can share his indignation at society’s sins without wanting to be browbeaten while reading a novel. (I should mention that over half a century ago Tolstoy’s writings on pacifism and anarchism were extremely helpful to me in forming my own views, and I remain grateful to him; I simply think he should have kept his fiction and his propaganda apart.) I don’t know that I can recommend this novel to anyone (as Lizok reports, George Saunders called it the darkest novel he’s ever read), but I’m glad I got through it.

As matters of linguistic interest, there are a couple of mentions of Siberian dialects (the only actual example is Tolstoy’s footnote explaining that лопоть is a Siberian word for ‘clothing’) and the occasional appearance of English phrases and sentences (one of the characters is modeled on George Kennan); also, the Russian word for ‘resurrection,’ воскресение, is only slightly different from the word for ‘Sunday,’ воскресенье.

Either (i) < Middle Dutch doten, to be deranged, to become light-headed, dutten to rage (early modern Dutch doten, dutten (1588 in Kiliaan)), cognate with Middle Low German (rare) dōten to be out of one’s mind (rare), further etymology uncertain (see note),

or perhaps (ii) the reflex of an unattested Old English verb possibly related to these.

Notes

It is unclear whether Dutch dutten ‘to take a nap’ (c1599) shows the same word as Middle Dutch doten, dutten. Compare also Middle High German totzen to take a nap, Icelandic dotta to nod from sleep. If the two Dutch verbs do show the same origin, the likelihood is that they are < the same Germanic base as theoten [“To howl”] v.

Compare also Old French, Middle French, French radoter to become childish or senile (late 12th cent.), to waffle (1613), a remodelling (after prefixed verbs in ra-) of Old French redoter to become childish or senile (c1100; < re- re- prefix + an unattested simplex verb *doter ‘to rave, to be out of one’s mind’, either directly < Middle Dutch doten or < its Germanic base).

With the β forms compare doited adj. [“Foolish, crazy; (also) having one’s mental faculties impaired, esp. by old age”] and discussion at that entry [“Apparently a variant or alteration of doted adj.¹, although the quality of the stem vowel (which is a true diphthong and not a digraphic representation of long ō) is difficult to account for; perhaps after doiled adj. (although this is first attested slightly later)”].

(There was a brief mention of dotard here in 2018.) I find that “perhaps the reflex of an unattested Old English verb possibly related to these” somewhat odd; do they do that sort of thing often?

For a year and a half, a baby named Sam wore a headcam in weekly sessions that captured his world: a spoon zooming toward his mouth, a caregiver squealing “Whee!” as he whizzed down an orange slide or a cat grooming itself. Now, scientists have fed those sights and sounds to a relatively simple AI program to probe one of the most profound questions in cognitive science: How do children learn language?

In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers at New York University report that AI, given just a tiny fraction of the fragmented experiences of one child, can begin to discern order in the pixels, learning that there is something called a crib, stairs or a puzzle and matching those words correctly with their images. […]

Linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and — increasingly — AI developers have all been puzzling over how humans learn language.

For years, scientists have been trying to understand how children’s minds take shape through carefully controlled experiments. Many involve toys or puppets that allow researchers to probe when various cognitive skills come online. They’ve shown that 16-month-old babies can deploy statistical reasoning to determine whether a noisemaker is broken, and that babies as young as 5 months know that an object still exists even when they can’t see it, a key developmental milestone called object permanence.

In addition, some individual babies have been closely followed over time. Deb Roy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set up overhead cameras in all the rooms of his house in 2005 and recorded his son’s linguistic development, providing a massive trove of data that chronicled the acquisition and evolution of words. That work suggested it was not how many times a word was repeated that predicted whether Roy’s son learned it early, but whether it was uttered in an unusual spot in the house, a surprising time or in a distinctive linguistic context.

The innovative use of headcams has given researchers an even more intimate view of early childhood. Since 2013, several families have contributed to the SAYCam database, a collection of audiovisual recordings from individual babies and toddlers over a crucial period of cognitive development, between 6 and 32 months. Families of the babies, who are identified only by first name, put cameras mounted on headbands on their children for about two hours a week.

Scientists can apply for access to the data, which provides a unique window into each child’s world over time and is intended to be a resource for researchers across a variety of fields. Sam, whose identity is private, is now 11 years old. But the recordings of his early life in Australia provided Lake and his colleagues with 600,000 video frames paired with 37,500 transcribed words of training data for their AI project.

They trained their relatively simple neural network on data captured when Sam was between the ages of 6 months and 2 years. The AI, they found, learned to match basic nouns and images with similar accuracy to AI trained on 400 million images with captions from the web. The results wade into, but don’t solve, a long-running debate in science about the basic cognitive skills humans need built into their brains to learn language.

There are various theories of how humans learn language. High-profile linguist Noam Chomsky proposed the idea of a built-in, innate language ability. Other experts think we need social or inductive reasoning skills for language to emerge. The new study suggests that some language learning can occur in the absence of specialized cognitive machinery. Relatively simple associative learning — see ball, hear “ball” — can teach an AI to make matches when it comes to simple nouns and images. “There’s not anything inbuilt into the network giving the model clues about language or how language ought to be structured,” said study co-author Wai Keen Vong, a research scientist at NYU.

The researchers don’t have comparable data on how a 2-year-old would perform on the tasks the AI faced, but they said that the AI’s abilities fall short of those of a small child. For instance, they could track where the AI was focusing when prompted with various words and found that, while it was spot-on for some words such as “car” or “ball,” it was looking in the wrong area when prompted with “cat.” […]

The AI picked up its vocabulary of objects from being exposed to 1 percent of Sam’s waking hours — 61 hours of footage accumulated over a year and a half. What intrigued outside scientists about the study was both how far the AI got based on that, and how far it still had to go to recapitulate human learning. “It’s really important and new to be applying these methods to this kind of data source, which is the data from a single child’s experience, both visual and auditory,” said Joshua Tenenbaum, a computational cognitive science at MIT who was not involved in the work. […]

Michael Tomasello, a developmental and comparative psychologist at Duke University, said that the AI model might reflect how a dog or a parrot can learn words. Experiments show that some dogs can learn more than 100 words for common objects or stuffed animals. But, he pointed out, it remains unclear how this AI could take sensory input and glean verbs, prepositions or social expressions. “It could learn that a recurrent visual pattern is ‘doll’. But how does it learn that that very same object is also a ‘toy’? How does it learn ‘this’ or ‘that’ or ‘it’ or ‘thing’?” Tomasello wrote in an email.

The AI model trained on the child’s experience, he noted, was able to identify things that can be seen, and that’s just a small part of the language that children hear and learn. He proposed an alternative model, where instead of simply associating images with sounds, an AI would need to make inferences about the intention of communication to learn language.

It’s interesting stuff, and seems like a case where AI (as I suppose we must call it) might actually be useful.

2) I love the word numbat ‘A small marsupial carnivore, Myrmecobius fasciatus, endemic to western Australia, that eats almost exclusively termites,’ and the creature itself is quite fetching (there’s an image at that link). Although that Wiktionary article is missing an etymology, the OED (entry revised 2003) says it’s “< Nyungar (Perth–Albany region) nhumbat.”

As lagniappe, I recently learned the phrase argue the toss ‘to disagree with a decision or statement’; it’s one of those UK idioms that doesn’t seem to have made it across the Atlantic.

Sign languages are naturally occurring languages. As such, their emergence and spread reflect the histories of their communities. However, limitations in historical recordkeeping and linguistic documentation have hindered the diachronic analysis of sign languages. In this work, we used computational phylogenetic methods to study family structure among 19 sign languages from deaf communities worldwide. We used phonologically coded lexical data from contemporary languages to infer relatedness and suggest that these methods can help study regular form changes in sign languages. The inferred trees are consistent in key respects with known historical information but challenge certain assumed groupings and surpass analyses made available by traditional methods. Moreover, the phylogenetic inferences are not reducible to geographic distribution but do affirm the importance of geopolitical forces in the histories of human languages.

In their conclusion, they say “most notably, we found a closer relationship between the Western European sign languages and British and New Zealand SL than has been previously assumed and present a Western European sign language family tree that better reflects the broad scope of influence of French SL.” I don’t know enough to have any idea whether they’ve done a good job (although previous experiences with phylogenetic analysis, e.g., have jaundiced me); I hope better-informed Hatters will be able to say more. Thanks, Y!

Gladstone, who is thirty-seven, was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, in Montana, the daughter of a white mother and a father of Blackfeet and Nez Perce ancestry. […] When we spoke recently, she was in Washington, D.C., for a screening of “Killers [of the Flower Moon]” at the National Museum of the American Indian, along with the Osage musician Scott George, who is nominated for his original song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People).” […]

As a student of Oscar history, I know that it’s been a mixed experience for people who have been the firsts in their categories. […] I’m curious if you’ve felt that tension of being out here as an actor, but also as the face of a community. And, in addition to that, you’re playing an Osage woman, so it’s not even quite your community.

That’s something that I try to highlight first. There’s just the roadblock that a lot of Natives have in representation, that people don’t even think we’re still here. There’s some empirical data out there, some surveys—in one study I was reading, forty per cent of people didn’t think that Native Americans still existed. The perception of who we are, which has largely been shaped by Hollywood—it’s very narrow. There’s an assumption that we just disappeared.

There’s an incredible diversity in Indian country. I’m not Osage, but as a Native actor I’ve played a lot of roles now that required that I speak another Indigenous language. And I’m by no means even fluent in Blackfoot! I can introduce myself. I have a few words and phrases. I know some of the bad words.

Can you please curse in Blackfoot right now?

I’m just gonna drop this for my Blackfeet folks, but I’m not going to say what it means. Siksimiisii was one of the worst and funniest things you could say about somebody. It’s a fairly PG thing, but it’s my favorite word in our language. Good luck trying to phonetically transcribe it!

Another film that I did last year was “Fancy Dance,” which premièred at Sundance. Isabel Deroy-Olson, the actress who plays my niece, and I were playing Seneca-Cayuga, and our director and co-writer, Erica Tremblay, is Seneca-Cayuga. Erica was going through a three-year-long language-revitalization program and wanted to make a film where she saw modern characters speaking Cayuga. So, when Isabel and I were at this talkback, a woman very sweetly asked if it felt good for us to be able to speak in our native language. And Isabel and I looked at each other. Neither of us is Seneca-Cayuga! It was really difficult for us to pick up the language, and to get to the point where we could act in it as well. Tribal languages are incredibly different from each other. The perception that we all speak one Native American language is very commonly held. Most of us are not fluent even in our own languages.

That’s an aspect of Native performance that I think a lot of people take for granted. We celebrate other actors for picking up European languages for a role and sounding proficient, but for some reason that same awe and credit are often dismissed for Native actors, because people assume, “Oh, you all speak that.”

In your Golden Globes speech, you talked about how your mother had advocated for your school to teach Blackfoot when you were growing up. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

It was in second grade, when [the educator] Edward North Peigan came into our classroom. I didn’t really know what my mom was up to. I just knew that she was doing everything she could to help in community-building, and she had a degree in early-childhood education. She remembers having to find the funding to pay for a language teacher to come in. The school was fairly mixed—majority Blackfeet students, but a lot of non-Blackfeet students—so there was a little bit of pushback. And my mom was saying, “Well, we’re on Blackfeet land, and most of your students are Blackfeet, and it’s important for brain development, it’s important for sense of self, it’s important for connection to community.” I’m so grateful to her. My dad would come into the classroom and record when Edward was speaking so that we would have an archive of some of our language. But I just remember sitting there and learning how to count, learning how to introduce ourselves. […]

I graduated already cast into a touring theatre production with Montana Repertory Theatre, which is a company attached to the University of Montana actor-training program. […] After that, I decided to stay in Montana instead of going to L.A. or New York. My scene work in class was always praised, but I also got a little bit disillusioned with the whole casting process. If I had gone to L.A. or New York and done the classic [route]—audition endlessly, get an agent—just thinking about it was starting to kill my passion for it. So I stayed in Montana, where I had built some connections with local filmmakers. In between the theatre tours, I auditioned for a one-woman show that toured schools. […]

Before I got cast in the Montana Repertory touring show, I was consulting with an old professor about maybe doing a Ph.D., developing performance-based pedagogy for language revitalization. My primary language teacher on “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Chris Côté—this is his life. He’s a language revitalizationist. He and I would have conversations about how I was excited to test out some of my early theories that performance is a really valuable tool for language revitalization. The first [Blackfoot] language-immersion school, Niitsiipoowahsiin, or Cuts Wood School, was established in the model of the Kamehameha schools, the immersion schools in Hawaii. And one thing that I’ve heard is that these programs were very successful at graduating fluent speakers at the middle-school level, but then the retention rate was fairly low. Having come out of a performance background, I was noticing how being physiologically based sounded like a lot of the practices of total physical response that you hear about in language immersion. When you’re learning the words “to sit,” you’re sitting down. You’re getting the concept in your body, in your movement. I felt like that was a key, maybe, to the next step of what could help with language retention, if you can express emotion in your language.

My great-grandma Lily, the one that I’m named after, was a fluent speaker. She and her family relocated from our rez to Seattle in, I believe, the nineteen-thirties, like a lot of Natives who got relocated to urban locations during that period. I remember my dad saying that other Blackfeet would come over to Grandma Lily’s house because they’re, like, “Oh, that old lady speaks Blackfoot! Let’s go visit with her!” People would talk about how good it felt physically to speak the language. Your whole world view and sense of self are based in language.

You’ve talked about how many Native languages don’t have gendered pronouns, and how that has shaped your own sense of gender. Can you talk a little more about that?

Blackfoot has gendered verbs, which is an interesting concept. There are definitely gendered roles in our communities, but gender is not a prescriptive sort of thing. Our gender is implied in our name. So my name, Piitaakii, means Eagle Woman. And the aki part is what makes it feminized. But a lot of those things aren’t exclusive. One of our heroes in Blackfeet history, Piitamakaan, means Running Eagle, which is a man’s name, but it was held by a woman because she was a really good warrior. And the verbs that she would have used, the things that men do, are gendered, but gender is not really a binary in that way. So when you think about the pronoun usage, when you’re talking about people, it’s just “this person,” “this one,” “that one.” The easiest reach in English would be “they.” It’s different for every tribe. I mean, Navajo Nation has multiple words for multiple genders. So does Crow Nation, I’ve heard.

(Yes, of course a lot of languages have gendered verbs; cut her some slack, she’s an actress, not a linguist.) Needless to say, if anyone can analyze siksimiisii, I’m all ears. Thanks, Eric!

Since the word “cock-tail” was first defined in The Balance, and Columbian Repository in 1806 [vol. 5, p. 146], bartenders and drinkers alike have played a role in developing a unique, varied and at times amusing lexicon to describe the budding world surrounding the “stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.”

The late 1800s gave us words like “syllabub,” “smash,” “sling,” “pony,” “toddy” and “nightcap” to describe popular serves and measurements of the era. The cocktail dark ages of the 1970s and ’80s, meanwhile, saw the rise of free-pouring and flair—two common bartending methodologies—and the use of “’tini” to mean anything but a genuine Martini.

Now, with cocktail culture saturating the country anew, we’re in the middle of a glittering renaissance of bar lingo. The most common terms thrown about today are both functional and fun; they also offer a vivid snapshot of the current state of the industry in the U.S. and the way it is evolving. Reflecting the increasing crossover between restaurants and bars, for instance, many of-the-moment twists of the tongue are pulled directly from the restaurant industry (think “86’d,” “heard” and “behind.”). At Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., for example, bartenders address each other as “chef,” as a sign of deference and respect, an organic evolution of their in-house language that predates The Bear. And as bars continue to adopt high-level scientific techniques, the nuances of redistilling, centrifuges, rotovaps and clarification demand their own attendant terms. “Recomposed lime,” for instance, is the name given by London bar Shapes to leftover lime juice that has been vacuum-distilled and then adjusted with salts and acids to replicate fresh lime juice as closely as possible in a shelf-stable form.

Much of today’s insider slang and phraseology originates from specific bars, organic developments born out of the culture and clientele of a particular outpost. Some of these terms have gone on to become universal (like the Ferrari, a 50/50 mix of Fernet-Branca and Campari), while others remain no-less-compelling localized oddities (see: “black toothpaste,” the term given to Fernet by Salt Lake City’s Water Witch). Inside jokes and shorthand abound.

She then provides “a non-exhaustive guide to the new vocabulary of cocktails” that is a lot of fun, with entries like amaroulette (“Originated at the Fifty Fifty Gin Club in Cincinnati, this term is used by guests when they want the bartender to pick what shot of amaro they’ll drink”) and close-looping (“The practice of using ingredients in their entirety to create a zero-waste drink”). Skål!

Two thousand years ago, a volcanic eruption buried an ancient library of papyrus scrolls now known as the Herculaneum Papyri. In the 18th century the scrolls were discovered. More than 800 of them are now stored in a library in Naples, Italy; these lumps of carbonized ash cannot be opened without severely damaging them. But how can we read them if they remain rolled up?

On March 15th, 2023, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge to answer this question. Scrolls from the Institut de France were imaged at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford. We released these high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls, and we offered more than $1M in prizes, put forward by many generous donors.

A global community of competitors and collaborators assembled to crack the problem with computer vision, machine learning, and hard work. Less than a year later, in December 2023, they succeeded. Finally, after 275 years, we can begin to read the scrolls […]

Go to the link for images and descriptions of the process, as well as a bit on what the scroll appears to be about (“music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures”). As Don.Kinsayder says at MetaFilter, where I got the link, “The promise here is stupendous. We could recover so many lost texts! It’s a good time to be a Classicist. It’s a good time to be alive.”

With its credulity and willful obliqueness, Platonov’s prose in the opening chapters of Chevengur inherits the gloriously weird intimacy that is so central to the Russian novel, an intimacy the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler occasionally muffles. In the above passage, for example, their punctuational choices add a breathlessness to the original’s patient plod. No doubt there was a pragmatic dimension to this change (Russian-to-English translators frequently use punctuation to give shape to the long sentences that, in Russian’s inflected grammar, make perfect sense on their own). But the tonal shift is noticeable. The passage loses some humor and, along with it, a certain amount of the original’s subtle irony—the sense that Platonov is encouraging us to maintain a certain critical distance from the childishness of Dvanov’s vision of the world, a vision that will later be developed into the muddled communism that he and other characters inhabit.

This fuzziness of tone is barely noticeable at the beginning of Chevengur, but it accumulates by the book’s middle chapters, in which the beautiful nightmare of the early postrevolutionary years moves to scenes where we see the characters talking and thinking in the language of communism as it is wrestled into being all over the Russian countryside. Platonov’s great revelation about this language is that it is not a break from Russia’s prerevolutionary past but a continuation of it—that is, an extension of exactly the poetic gawp that saw in Dvanov’s village twilight a “children’s birthland.” And yet sometimes it can be difficult for the reader of Chevengur in English to trace this connection:

The modest Great Russian sky shone over the Soviet land with as much habit and monotony as if the Soviets had existed since time immemorial and the sky were in perfect accord with them. Within Dvanov there had already taken shape an immaculate conviction: that before the Revolution, the sky and all other spaces had been different, less dear to people.

Reading this translation side by side with the Russian, it is hard not to feel sympathy for its translators. Platonov’s untranslatability is frequently the main subtext of those few statements made about him in English—Joseph Brodsky’s comment “Woe to the people into whose language Andrei Platonov can be translated,” for example, or Tatyana Tolstaya’s 2000 essay in The New York Review of Books. The general success of the Chandlers’ Chevengur proves that this untranslatability has been exaggerated—and yet, in passages like the one above, it is easy to see how even extremely accomplished efforts can run into trouble with Platonov’s nuances, making it hard for us to understand whether the description we are reading is meant to be satirical or poetic, or some highly original combination of the two.

It’s important to be as precise as possible about how this happens. Typically when we think or speak about a text being untranslatable, what we’re saying is that a certain amount of its aesthetic persuasiveness has been sacrificed or simply lost in the effort to retain a literal argument. But in Platonov, it is exactly the “unbeautiful” aspects of the prose that carry the book’s larger message. Over and over again, his Russian prose comes across as flat, awkward, vague—or rather, it manages to communicate these impressions while itself remaining sculpted and interesting. The effect is something like the deformation of classical painting found in modernists like Pablo Picasso or Henri Rousseau: an extremely sophisticated verbal technique evoking a world in which language is constantly being broken, abused, or just used inaccurately, to establish an unreality whose relationship to reality is not representational at all.

Language for Sasha Dvanov is not scientific; on the contrary, it is pragmatic and mythological—closer to the “bricolage” that Claude Lévi-Strauss identified in the tribal societies of Brazil than the dialectical Hegelianism the communist intellectuals of Chevengur pretend to be practicing. Looking at the sky, Dvanov sees “the modest Great Russian sky”—a phrase straight out of a Soviet propaganda pamphlet. And yet, even at its most cliché-ridden, the language of Chevengur impresses us as being highly artistic and indeed beautiful—not because of the way it allows us to see the world more clearly than we had before but because of how perfectly it depicts language’s ability to colonize and distort reality, turning a sunset into a kind of bloated Blakean sunflower. The challenge for the translator of Chevengur, then, is to retain the layered ambivalence of Platonov’s original as fully as possible, without ever allowing the reader to feel that these complications are a result of the translation itself.

The Chandlers’ translation does this remarkably well, for the most part, but there are several places where their small adjustments to the text add up to large effects—often paradoxically. For example, directly before the passage quoted above, they introduce one of the chapter breaks that are clearly meant to break the flow of Chevengur’s Russian original into more comprehensible chunks, but which instead disorient the reader, making it momentarily difficult for us to recognize whose “modest Great Russian sky” this is. The narrator’s? Dvanov’s? The break is dramatic and noticeable, turning what should be a ravishing use of free indirect discourse into something sloshy and bifurcated. Again, the thing that breaks is exactly what is most important to the book as a whole—that is, the richly self-contradictory tone that makes Platonov’s satire feel loving and his poetry refreshingly, almost unbearably haunted. We need to hear that voice, but in places like this, the translation feels frustratingly imprecise.

Nevertheless, by the time we reach the final third of Chevengur, the Chandlers have provided us with enough examples of its unique combination of parody and poetry that we start to feel both edges of the sword. […]

Is Platonov being sincere? Or is he baiting us—inviting us to adopt an ironic relationship to his language, the way that, say, an Aldous Huxley or George Orwell would? The prose itself does not tip its hand, or rather, it tips it over and over again, making it impossible for us to establish a comfortable critical distance. The possibility it opens for the reader is that the feeling Platonov’s awkward, clichéd language describes the others experiencing here is, in fact, a real one. Communism in Chevengur really may be “happening,” in the only way that it can—that is, not because of the whimsical decrees of its implementers but in spite of them, as an occasional communion. […]

Moments like this—which arrive with greater and greater poignancy as the book draws to its apocalyptic close—are what make Chevengur stand out as a compelling reading experience, even for readers who might be fairly familiar with the idea that large-scale utopian social projects end in shambles. It shows us communism’s dream of changing the world from the inside, bringing us so close to its roots in alienation and ordinary human loneliness and fellow feeling that we occasionally sense our own convictions starting to shake. In this way, it runs counter to the current of practically all anti-totalitarian literature of the 20th century, transforming the closed question of “why did this happen?” into something open and alive—often disturbingly so. For in the blasted, starved, utterly unrooted vacuum of Platonov’s postrevolutionary Russia, we can feel, almost viscerally, why human beings would use the most powerful tool at their disposal—language itself—to replace the rational, religious, or political structures that history had destroyed. Barbarism in these circumstances is not a rejection of meaning at all; it is a creation of it, an invention as necessary and predictable as a pup tent or a wheelbarrow. […]

If there is a consolation in Chevengur, it is this: that, try as we might, humankind can’t escape the complicated, disappointing, ultimately partial condition of our own existence, and that, therefore, all our misguided attempts to transcend ourselves will eventually fail—no matter how formidable they appear in the moment.

One measure of Platonov’s brilliance is the thought-provoking writing he inspires in his interpreters. Thanks, Peter!

To reconstruct the indirect connections of history to narrative is finally to bring to light the intentionality of the historian’s thought by which history continues obliquely to intend the field of human action and its basic temporality.

Try as I might, I could make nothing of “to intend the field of human action and its basic temporality,” so I managed to locate the original French, which reads:

Reconstruire les liens indirects de l’histoire au récit, c’est finalement porter au jour l’intentionnalité de la pensée historienne par laquelle l’histoire continue de viser obliquement le champ de l’action humaine et sa temporalité de base.

I don’t know why McLaughlin and Pellauer didn’t reproduce the italics, but never mind that: why the devil did they render viser ‘to aim at’ by “intend”? It’s true that that English verb has a sense (OED III.8.a.) “To direct the mind or attention; to pay heed; to exert the mind, devote attention, apply oneself assiduously,” but it is labeled Obsolete and has not been used since 1589. Is this some piece of philosophical jargon even the OED is unfamiliar with, or were the translators puckishly determined to make an already difficult text even harder to understand? (I note also that, in an apparent attempt to obey the absurd dictum about not splitting infinitives, they have rendered “continue de viser obliquement” as “continues obliquely to intend,” which will inevitably mislead the reader into taking the adverb with “continues.” And people wonder why I rant about peevers!)

Salish-Ql’ispe has this wonderful structural rule: “Delete everything after the stressed vowel if you want to, but you won’t want to if there’s crucial grammatical information after the stressed vowel.” Thanks to this rule, many nouns are lexicalized in truncated form and no one now remembers the original long form; verbs, not so much, because verbs tend to have a lot of crucial information in suffixes. The elders used to comment occasionally on the shortened words. Pat Pierre, in a eulogy at the memorial event for Clarence Woodcock (1945-1995), urged the people not to cut off their words: If you keep doing that, he said, pretty soon the words will disappear into nothing. And in my continuing effort to wrestle my dictionary files into submission, I just came across this exchange from 2005, with an example of a word shortened drastically even before the stressed vowel:
JMcD: “We try to remember the long forms so our grandkids can learn them.”
JQu: “Kids use REALLY short forms.”
Me: “Any examples?”
JQu: “They just say “kw es” for `you’re a liar, you’re lying!’ It’s short for “esyoqwi”.”
JMcD: “Lotta times we just tell our young people, Just make the sign!” — And she made this sign: Right hand points across the body with index finger and second finger forked. It means `you’re lying’.

I have a very few other examples of similarly drastic shortening — nothing at all regular, unlike the optional “everything after the stressed vowel” rule. Oh, and in that example, es- is an aspect prefix; yoqw is the root for `tell a lie’.

Ql’ispe (also written Ql̓ispé [qəˀlispe]), anglicized as Kalispel, is also known as Pend d’Oreille; it’s a dialect of the Salish–Spokane–Kalispel language. We had an example of the language used in a sports logo back in 2013.

In the FB comments, Bill Poser said “What they fear is kind of like what happened to Latin in Gaul, e.g. augustus -> [u]”; there follows an interesting back-and-forth with Marie-Lucie Tarpent about whether people say [u] or [ut]. Bill found a source that says:

Aujourd’hui, la plupart des dictionnaires donnent deux prononciations possibles : [u] (« ou ») et [ut] (« oute »). Elles sont toutes les deux correctes. Au Canada, c’est la forme [u] qui est la plus utilisée, [ut] ne se dit presque pas. En France et en Suisse, c’est l’inverse : [ut] est majoritaire alors que [u] reste peu employée. En Belgique, c’est également [ut] qui domine, même si [u] s’entend plus qu’en France, notamment dans la bouche de personnes âgées.

(I don’t know why Marie-Lucie has stopped coming around these parts, but I wish she’d return.)

Jack Sharkey not only won the world heavyweight championship but was responsible for the classic sports expression: We wuz robbed. […] He was born Joseph Paul Zukauskas on Oct. 26, 1902, in Binghamton, N.Y., the son of Lithuanian immigrants. As a young boy his family moved to Boston.

He ran away from home as a teenager. […] He took up boxing in the navy, where he won 38 fights. His ship’s home port was Boston, and he fought for pay on liberty in the city. He was told he couldn’t fight under the name Joseph Zukauskas, so he chose the names of his boxing idols: Jack Dempsey and Tom Sharkey. By the time Sharkey was honorably discharged, he was earning write-ups in the Boston newspapers and earning good money for boxing. […]

In 1930 he lost a fight for the vacant heavyweight championship to Max Schmeling on a foul. The referee ruled he hit Schmeling below the belt. Sharkey described Schmeling as ‘a methodical, cruel, terrific puncher.’ Two years later, they faced each other again, and Sharkey was declared the winner though Schmeling seemed to have outboxed him. After the match, Schmeling’s manager, Joe Jacobs, uttered those classic words, “We wuz robbed.”

(“Zukauskas” should, of course, properly be Žukauskas, which is clearly related to Polish Żukowski and Russian Zhukovsky — see the table here.) In retirement, when he pursued his love of fly fishing, he came up with another memorable line:

He and Ted Williams teamed up to promote the sport at sporting shows. He was asked at one show whether he preferred fishing to boxing. “It doesn’t pay as much,” he replied, “but then the fish don’t hit back.”

Thanks, Trevor!

Fred Saunders’s​ wheelwright shop in the village of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, stood not far from the forge and next to the paint shop, where his finished waggons were painted in colours declaring their high Cotswold origins. Fred kept the oak spokes of his wheels narrow and light because the waggons were destined for use in the elevated fields, unlike those made in the Severn Valley, which needed to be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the stress of use in the fields. A circle of interconnected ash felloes capped the spokes, forming the circumference of the wheel. The final component was the tyre, made of a loop of iron, half an inch thick. It was placed in the fire until sufficiently expanded, then lifted out with great tongs called tyre-dogs and dropped over the outside of the wheel. Wheel and tyre would then be doused with cold water so that the metal shrank back to its original size, squeezed tightly about the wheel, never to be rattled free by stone or pothole. Fred made haywains, muck-carts and drays, as well as the everyday wooden items required by his neighbours – and their coffins when they died.

But I’m bringing it here for a paragraph that taught me a new word:

The psalter also offers readers an image of a quintessential medieval feast. The manuscript’s patrons, Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife Agnes Sutton and his daughter-in-law Beatrice Scrope, sit with their fellow diners, their hands placed on a long tabletop that rests on decorative, braced trestles (this suggests the top of the table might be lifted off, presumably to make room for dancing). On the facing page is an image of the kitchen, where servants are preparing food and drink, transferring it to dishes and mazers and carrying it across the page gutter to the nobility. Because the kitchen tables are lowly fixtures, and likely to rest on an uneven floor, they are three-legged and simply built: you can see where the top of one leg, the kind rounded off in a lathe or on a shave-horse, pokes through the tabletop.

I hadn’t known mazer, which turns out to be (OED, entry revised 2001) “Maple or other fine-grained hardwood used as a material for making drinking vessels. Obsolete.” or “A bowl, drinking cup, or goblet, usually without a foot, made from a burr or knot of a maple tree and frequently mounted with silver or silver-gilt bands at the lip and base. Also: a similar vessel made of metal or other material. Now archaic and historical.” There’s a nice, detailed etymology:

Probably < Anglo-Norman mazer, mazere, mazre, macere, maser, masre, madre maple (the wood and the tree), mazer, goblet, drinking bowl (end of 12th cent.) and Old French mazre, masdre, madre wood with veined grain used for making vessels, vessel made of this, maple (also end of 12th cent.; Middle French, French madre; compare post-classical Latin mazer, earlier masarus maple wood (9th cent. in a French charter; in various forms in British sources from 13th cent.), drinking vessel (in various forms in British sources from 1300)) < a form in a Germanic language cognate with Middle Dutch māser knot or swelling of a tree, especially a maple, Old Saxon masur swelling (Middle Low German māser curly-grained wood, also glossing post-classical Latin murra maple), Old High German masar knot or swelling of a tree (glossing Latin tuber, nodus; Middle High German maser curly-grained wood, excrescence on the maple and other trees, drinking cup made of curly-grained wood, German Maser curl in grain of wood), Old Icelandic mǫsurr maple tree, veined wood, Swedish masur curly-grained wood (compare masur n.); probably ultimately from the same base are mase n. and measles n.; compare also maple tree n. and discussion at that entry. Compare also Norwegian regional (perhaps archaic) masa to paint with a pattern of flames or with curving stripes, Danish mase veining in wood (probably < Middle Low German).

Notes
The word may have existed already in Old English: Maserfelth, the site of a battle mentioned in Bede (Maserfeld in the Old English translation; doubtfully—but at an early date already—identified with Oswestry in Shropshire), may perhaps show the noun as its first element, and a corrupt form of a derived adjective *mæseren may perhaps be shown by the following (although others suggest instead a connection with maslin n.¹):

OE VI mæsene sceala.
Rec. Gifts of Bishop Leofric to Exeter Cathedral (Bodleian MS.) in A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters (1956) 226

With this perhaps compare Old Icelandic mǫsurr skál maplewood vessel, found in church inventories.

The statement in N.E.D. (1906) that Welsh masarn, in the sense ‘maple, sycamore’ (1425) is ‘certainly’ a loan < English overstates the case somewhat (it is at least as likely that it was borrowed directly < French), and the existence of a Welsh example from c1300 in this sense cannot therefore be reliably used as the basis for concluding that sense 1b [“The tree yielding this wood; a maple tree”] might have been more common in Middle English than the surviving evidence suggests.

The conclusion of the review is also interesting linguistically:

Smith gives examples of work now being undertaken to reconstruct craft practice using historical books of art, recipes, tip sheets and treatises. She herself, partaking in a revival of interest in craft practice across the humanities, has collaborated with practitioners and museum scholars to explore the life casting techniques described in a late 16th-century collection of texts about the making of art objects. Conducting practical studies from the treatise and accompanying sketches transformed her understanding of the manuscript. Smith came to see it as the written manifestation of the repetitious, tireless, real life experiments of the maker. Her findings and those of the other projects she cites shed light on ‘the dynamics of collaborative practice’, artistic intention – a concept not usually applied to crafters in this period – and on the limitations of the written word in articulating practical knowledge. Her title may seem at first to prioritise language, but in the end her book demonstrates its inadequacy. She admits that we must accept ‘approximating concepts and terms’: ‘skill’, ‘Kunst’, ‘cunning’, ‘working knowledge’ and ‘artisanal epistemology’.

The field of medieval studies offers a few useful terms. One is ‘orthopraxis’ (practice according to a rule or tradition, in the sense of ‘making straight’), thought to have been coined by Raimon Pannikar and used by Paul Gehl and Mary Carruthers in their studies of monasticism. In her book The Craft of Thought (1998), Carruthers writes: ‘Any craft develops an orthopraxis, a craft “knowledge” which is learned, and indeed can only be learned, by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarisation of exemplary masters’ techniques and experience. Most of this knowledge cannot be set down in words; it must be learned by practising, over and over again.’ Binski enlists the classics: ‘When it comes to making something, the matter to hand is always shaped by hard knowledge (‘episteme’, Latin ‘scientia’), talent (‘empeiria’) and method (‘techne’ or ‘ars’).’ The most subtle of these, scientia, he defines as knowledge of the ‘whys’ of method, a more complex form of comprehension than the ‘hows’.

Fred Saunders’s son Graham learned the wheelwright’s trade at a time when tractors and metal trailers were becoming affordable to British farmers. In his lifetime, the forge, wheelwright’s shop and paint shop all closed down. By the time he was middle-aged, Sherborne had become the property of the National Trust. In later life, Graham used his knowledge to work on the waggon collections held by stately homes and museums, like the one at the Old Prison in Northleach. I met him at his stand at Frampton-on-Severn Country Fair a decade ago. Not long afterwards, he showed me how to make the undercarriage (never a chassis) of a traditional waggon, using draw-knives and axes, chisels, saws and froes to make the frame, then scraping the surface to a sheen with shards of broken glass. It was 18-foot-long and fashioned from green oak and poplar, complete with a decoratively chamfered turntable fixed to the front axle. Graham told me that it was smooth enough ‘to ride bareback to Brighton’ – or so his father would have said.

барышня ‘girl of gentry family, miss’ – барышеНЬ
боярышня ‘boyar’s daughter’ – боярышеНЬ
кухня ‘kitchen’ – кухоНЬ
деревня ‘village’ – деревеНЬ

And the pull of these exceptions, with the “expected” palatalization, can attract other words, for example башня ‘tower,’ for which Anatoly uses the “incorrect” genitive plural башень in place of the traditional/”correct” башен in speech, which led him to write it that way in a recent post. And he’s not alone: “поиск в корпусе русского языка находит небольшое, но реальное количество старых книг и авторов, которые предпочитали писать именно “башень”, очевидно потому, что так говорили” [a search in the Russian language corpus finds a small but real number of old books and authors who preferred to write “башень,” obviously because they said it that way]. I love this stuff.

2) The delightful NY Times story “A Monkey Is on the Run in the Scottish Highlands” (archived) explains that the Japanese macaque in question “escaped from an enclosure in the Highland Wildlife Park in Kingussie, Scotland, and fled into the Scottish highlands,” later adding:

Amused residents, who have given the animal the nickname “Kingussie Kong,” have found themselves invested in its fate, and journalists have followed animal keepers as they have swept the hills.

I assumed Kingussie was pronounced kin-GUS-si and thought “Kingussie Kong” was slightly off, but then I looked it up and discovered it’s actually /kɪŋˈjuːsi/ (king-YOO-see), representing Scottish Gaelic Ceann a’ Ghiùthsaich. Now “Kingussie Kong” makes perfect sense, and I thought I’d pass along that unusually unexpected spelling/pronunciation matchup.

My name is Amarens, and I started this project in 2019 after I graduated from my Bachelors in Portuguese and Spanish Linguistics. I have since received an MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and a MSc in Computational Linguistics.

I originally raised money for the project through a Kickstarter campaign, and learned to program from scratch in order to create this website.

Alas, when I click on “Languages” I get taken to this page, which seems to provide access to a list of languages… but when I click on it (in Firefox) nothing happens. Let me know if you have better luck!

A British wildlife park has hatched a new plan to rehabilitate its potty-mouthed parrots after they unleashed a tide of expletives.

Back in 2020, five foul-mouthed African gray parrots, donated to Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England, were isolated from the flock in an attempt to improve their language. But, from Tuesday, the team is adopting a different, riskier approach of integrating three newly donated, cuss-happy birds – named Eric, Captain and Sheila – alongside the original five miscreants into the flock.

“When we came to move them, the language that came out of their carrying boxes was phenomenal, really bad. Not normal swear words, these were proper expletives,” the park’s chief executive, Steve Nichols, told CNN. “We’ve put eight really, really offensive, swearing parrots with 92 non-swearing ones,” he said.

If the new strategy works, the eight parrots could learn “all the nice noises like microwaves and vehicles reversing” that the other parrots in the flock favor, Nichols added. But if the other 92 instead pick up the expletives, “it’s going to turn into some adult aviary.” […]

The park has installed large signs warning visitors about the parrots’ language, but Nichols said it hasn’t received a single complaint. In fact, historically, “we did hear a lot more customers swearing at parrots than we did parrots swearing at customers,” Nichols said.

More details at the link if you need them. Thanks, Bonnie, Eric, cuchuflete, and whoever else I may be forgetting!

Addendum. Actually, cuchuflete sent me a different link, to Bill Chappell’s NPR story about the parrots, which has the following memorable ending:

All of this raises a key question: Are the parrots teaching all of these foul words to each other? Or is the profanity coming from humans?

“It’s certainly down to humans,” Nichols said. “And what makes it funnier is that this particular species actually replicates the person’s voice exactly.”

Illustrating his point, he tells the story of the lady who spoke to him about donating her parrot. Her husband had taught the bird all the profane words it knew, she said.

There was just one snag, Nichols said.

“It was quite easy to hear she wasn’t telling the full truth as it swore in her voice.”

In the past, there have been scholars who argued for a genetic relationship between the Semitic languages and the Oceanic family of
languages, of which Polynesian is a sub-group (e.g., Macdonald 1907). Such a theory is quite fantastical, of course. A connection of sorts between Hebrew and Polynesian does exist, however, although it is not genetic. Indeed, few Hebraists and Semitists are aware of the fact that a significant number of Hebrew words have been borrowed into several Polynesian languages, including Samoan, Tahitian, and Hawaiian. These Hebrew words made their way to Oceania not through direct contact between speakers of Hebrew and Polynesian, but rather through the efforts of a few 19th-century missionaries.

British missionaries began branching out to the Pacific islands in the 1790s, under the auspices of the Missionary Society (known from 1818–1966 as the London Missionary Society). The first mission was established in Tahiti, and Tahitian is the first Polynesian language into which the Bible was translated. The missionary translators needed many words and concepts not found in Tahitian, and, curiously, they chose to use Hebrew and Greek as sources for these new words. This was, at least in part, because certain Hebrew and Greek words were more easily adaptable to Polynesian phonology (Williams 1837: 528), though certainly religious enthusiasm also played a role. The missionary translators in Samoa and Rarotonga used the Tahitian Bible as a model, and so many Hebrew words were incorporated into the Samoan and Rarotongan Bibles as well.

Many of the Hebrew words used in the Bible translations are terms for flora (e.g., Samoan ‘ārasi ‘cedar’ < Heb. אֶרֶז ’εrεz), fauna (e.g., Samoan nāmeri ‘leopard’ < Heb. נָמֵר nå̄mēr), precious stones (e.g., Samoan pereketa ‘emerald’ < Heb. בּרֶקֶת bå̄rεqεṯ), weights and measures (e.g., Samoan sekeli < Heb. שֶׁקֶל šεqεl), and constellations (e.g., Samoan kīsila ‘Orion’ < Heb. כְּסִיל kəsīl). The Polynesian biblical translations had a profound influence on the respective languages, in no small part because until well into the 20th century the Bible was the only written material to which much of the population had access in most Polynesian islands. Even so, the great majority of the borrowed Hebrew words are found only in their biblical contexts, and did not actually make their way into the spoken language. This is usually because the Hebrew words referred to foreign or outdated biblical concepts (e.g., ancient weights and measures), or flora, fauna, and other materials unknown in the Polynesian islands. In some cases, the biblical loans were simply replaced by native terms, by subsequent loans from modern languages, or by a combination of both. For example, where biblical Samoan has takesa ‘dolphin’ < Heb. תַּחַשׁ taḥaš (e.g., Num. 4.10), modern Samoan uses the native term mumua; where biblical Samoan has kofi ‘ape, monkey’ < Heb. קוֹף qop̄ (e.g., 1 Kgs 10.22), modern Samoan uses manuki (< English monkey); and where biblical Tahitian has sumi ‘garlic’ < Heb. שׁוּם šūm (Num. 11.5), modern Tahitian uses ‘oniāni piropiro ‘stinky onion’ (< English onion + native piropiro).

Some words of Hebrew origin did enter the spoken languages, however. For example, one Hebrew word that was incorporated into spoken Samoan is limoni or limogi [limoŋi] ‘pomegranate’ (biblical Samoan rimoni, e.g., Deut. 8.8) < Heb. רִמּוֹן rimmōn. Hebrew words fully incorporated into Tahitian include ‘oire ‘town, city’ < Heb. עִיר ‘īr; melahi/mērahi ‘angel’ < Heb. מַלְאָךְ mal’å̄ḵ; medebara ‘desert’ < Heb. מִדְבָּר miḏbå̄r; ture ‘(a) law, rule’ < Heb. תּוֹרָה tōrå̄. (At least ‘oire and ture are also current in Rarotongan, nowadays often called Cook Islands Maori). Other loanwords are connected to religion, e.g., Samoan (āso) sāpati ‘Sabbath’, Tahitian and Rarotongan tāpati (biblical Tahitian/Rarotongan sapati) ‘Sunday’ < Heb. שַׁבָּת šabbå̄ṯ; and Samoan Sātani, Tahitian Tātane (biblical Tahitian Satani) ‘Satan, devil’ < Heb. שָׂטָן śå̄ṭå̄n. These religious terms might equally be considered loans from English, though their ultimate source is Hebrew (as is Samoan rapi ‘rabbi’).

An occasionally encountered folk etymology notwithstanding, the well-known Hawaiian word kahuna ‘priest’ (often met in the English expression big kahuna) does not derive from Heb. כֹּהֵן kōhēn ‘priest’, but rather is from a native Polynesian lexeme *tafuŋa ‘priest; craftsman, expert’ (cf. Samoan tufuga, Rarotongan taunga, Tahitian tahu’a).

Rebecca points out that the Comparative Māori-Polynesian Dictionary disagrees that ture ‘law’ is a loan: “This is said to be an introduced word, but is Polynesian.” Also, why would you give up a nice short word like sumi ‘garlic’ for a phrase four times as long like ‘oniāni piropiro?