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A guest post by Tsu-Lin Mei at the Log describes work he has been doing on Tibeto-Burman cognates and Old Chinese:

The work is quite interesting. It involves the internal history of the Tibetan language, internal history of Tibeto-Burman, etc. Some of these areas have been covered by James Matisoff, and others are terra incognita. My young colleague Jackson Sun at Academia Sinica has been working on comparative Tibetan dialects as well as Proto-rGyalrong 嘉戎。 I am making up the phonological history as I go along. The final product will be 100 cognate sets, supported both by philological evidence and by evidence from living Tibeto-Burman languages. […]

Why am I doing this? While there are many books on Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics, there is no succinct account of the reasons why we believe Sino-Tibetan-Burman are genetically related. The answer is quite simple. (1) There are between 140 to 300 cognate sets involving Old Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages. (2) Sino-Tibetan has a causative *s- and a nominalizing *-s. Both (1) and (2) have been in the literature since 2000, but nobody took the trouble to give a short, easy-to-understand account. This is what I am doing and I am writing in Chinese.

I have always thought that in Chinese lexicography there should be a section which tells the reader which Chinese words have Tibeto-Burman cognates and which do not. The American Heritage Dictionary does that for English; for every English word, the Dictionary gives its Indo-European root, if any. We should be able to do that for Chinese.

That’s exciting stuff to me, and I presume to anyone interested in historical linguistics. (We discussed Rgyalrongic languages here a bit last year.)

For anyone who reads Russian, by the way, Sashura has a very interesting interview in Ogonyok with Dmitry Bobyshev on the occasion of Bobyshev’s eightieth birthday; I translated a poem of his five years ago.

Rebecca Tan’s “Accent Adaptation” (“On sincerity, spontaneity, and the distance between Singlish and English”) is an interesting account by a college student of her struggle with adapting her Singaporean style of speech to American norms:

Every international student will surely find this idea of performance familiar. The most difficult thing about speaking in a foreign country isn’t adopting a new currency of speech, but using it as though it’s your own—not just memorizing your lines, but taking center stage and looking your audience in the eye. It is one thing to pronounce can’t so that it rhymes with ant instead of aunt, but a whole other order to do that without feeling like a fraud.

I got the link via Mark Liberman’s Log post, in whose comment thread you will find a good discussion of the fact (which had never occurred to me) that US can and can’t are frequently indistinguishable, or hard to distinguish, for foreigners. And anyone interested in the general topic of the problem speakers of localized forms of language have with standard languages should read Lameen’s recent posts at Jabal al-Lughat, “Lexical gaps in diglossia: When you can’t write what you know” (“even well-educated Algerians don’t know enough Fusha to adequately describe their daily life, much less to write all they know”) and “School in a language you don’t speak” (“Even the most divergent Appalachian or inner city dialects are closer to standard English than the home language of the most highly educated middle-class Algerians is to standard Arabic”).

An Adam Taylor story in the Washington Post, to be filed under “About time!”:

Politicians in the Czech Republic are set to put decades of debate to an end this week by officially announcing a new name for the country: Czechia.

In a meeting with reporters this week, Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said he supported the move, suggesting that foreigners often mangled his country’s name when he met them abroad. “It is not good if a country does not have clearly defined symbols or if it even does not clearly say what its name is,” Zaoralek said, according to the Czech News Agency.

When the decision does go through, Czechia will officially become the conventional short-form name for the country, while the Czech Republic will remain the conventional long-form name.

As always, not everyone is happy (Karla Šlechtová, the minister of regional development, says the change will mean wasted funds in rebranding and the new name is too close to Chechnya), but I am. Thanks, Eric!

The excellent archivist Leslie Fields (whose work you can read about here) has reminded me of the excellent word wayzgoose, which I’ve always loved; a moment’s work showed me that 1) I have never mentioned it on LH, and 2) the OED just updated their entry last December, so without further ado, here ’tis:

wayzgoose, n.

Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈweɪzɡuːs/, U.S. /ˈweɪzˌɡus/
Inflections: Plural wayzgooses, (rare) wayzgeese.
Etymology: Apparently a variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymon: waygoose n. [s.v. waygoose: It has been suggested that a goose was the main dish served at such an event, but this cannot be substantiated, and it is unclear whether the second element is to be identified with goose n. There do not appear to be plural forms of this word modelled on geese, plural of goose n. (but compare the plural forms cited at wayzgoose n.).]
Apparently an alteration of waygoose n., after wase n., originally as an attempt to provide an etymology (by Nathan Bailey; compare quot. 1731 at main sense).
There is no secure independent evidence for the sense ‘stubble goose’ posited by Bailey.
The rare plural form wayzgeese (after geese, plural of goose n.) usually appears alongside wayzgooses in contexts showing uncertainty over the correct form.

An entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen around St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August), marking the beginning of the season of working by candlelight. In later use: an annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country. Cf. earlier waygoose n.

1731 N. Bailey Universal Etymol. Eng. Dict. (ed. 5) Wayz, a Bundle of Straw. Wayz-goose, a Stubble-Goose, an Entertainment given to Journeymen at the beginning of Winter.
1837 Colonial Times (Hobart, Tasmania) 12 Sept. 300/2 It is customary, all over the world, for journeymen printers to give their masters a dinner, on a fixed day, which dinner is called a ‘Wayse Goose’.
1875 J. Southward Dict. Typogr. 137 The wayzgoose generally consists of a trip into the country, open air amusements, a good dinner, and speeches and toasts afterwards.
1895 Surrey Mirror 23 Aug. 2/7 The members of the typographical staffs of the Surrey Advertiser (Guildford) and the Surrey Mirror (Redhill) had their wayzgoose on Saturday last, when they journeyed to Brighton.
1956 Yale Univ. Libr. Gaz. 30 133 This wayzgoose of the Honorable Company of College Printers affords a most appropriate time..to speak about Franklin and his press.
2005 Cheshire Life Aug. 285/1 The staff of WH Evans & Sons Ltd, Printers, enjoy a wayzgoose (traditional printers’ outing) at Ristorante Sergio.

The first two cites for the earlier waygoose are:

1682 in W. R. Scott Rec. Sc. Cloth Manuf. New Mills 31 To write to the master to give the servants there way-gouse the night befor the fareiday of Haddington and bestow upon itt 15 s. sterling.
1683 J. Moxon Mech. Exercises II. 361 These Way-gooses, are always kept about Bartholomew-tide. And till the Master-Printer have given this Way-goose, the Journey-men do not use to Work by Candle Light.

As I told Leslie, I’ve never had the opportunity to take part in one, but I fervently support the institution. Long live wayzgeese!

George Szirtes saith:

1.
The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks.

2.
Je est un autre, said the translator. Try next door.

[…]

6.
A poet and a translator walk into a bar. Give me a beer, says the poet. I suppose you’d better give him a beer, says the translator.

Via, bien sur, wood s lot; if you like the Szirtes, there’s more of it at the first link, and if you don’t, there’s more translation- and language-related material at the second link, and if you don’t like any of it, hang in there, another post will be along tomorrow.

John Cowan sent me a link to this webpage, which, alas, I have been unable to access, but the quote is too good not to repost, so I’m copying it from his e-mail:

In Gelett Burgess’ 1911 novel Find the Woman, a truck driver blocks the way of a parade organized by a society to ban profanity. He is addressed by Dr. Hopbottom, the society’s head:

See here, you slack-salted transubstantiated interdigital germarium, you rantipole sacrosciatic rock-barnacle you, if you give me any of your caprantipolene paragastrular megalopteric jacitation, I’ll make a lamellibranchiate gymnomixine parabolic lepidopteroid out of you! What diacritical right has a binominal oxypendactile advoutrous holoblastic rhizopod like you got with your trinoctial ustilaginous Westphalian holocaust blocking up the teleostean way for, anyway! If you give me any more of your lunarian, snortomaniac hyperbolic pylorectomy, I’ll skive you into a megalopteric diatomeriferous auxospore! You queasy Zoroastrian son of a helicopteric hypotrachelium, you, shut your logarithmic epicycloidal mouth! You let this monopolitan macrocosmic helciform procession go by and wait right here in the anagological street. And no more of your hedonistic primordial supervirescence, you rectangular quillet-eating, vice-presidential amoeboid, either!

The truck driver apologizes: “I see a plain, sea-faring man has no show with a doctor when it comes to exhibiting language in public. … If this here society what’s running this here procession can turn out graduates of the noble art of profanity like you are, I want to say this: Give me the pledge, and I’ll sign it.”

Ian Johnson’s NYRB review of Sarah Allan’s book Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts discusses an exciting find I was unaware of; it begins with the discovery of “hundreds of strips of bamboo, about the size of chopsticks, that seemed to date from 2,500 years ago” and their painstaking decipherment (even knowing it comes out OK in the end, my heart was in my mouth reading about the strips “developing black spots—fungus that within a day could eat a hole through the bamboo”), and continues to the heart of the matter:

The manuscripts’ importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality. These ideas underpinned Chinese society and politics for two thousand years, and even now are touted by the government of Xi Jinping as pillars of the one-party state.

The newly discovered texts challenge long-held certainties about this era. Chinese political thought as exemplified by Confucius allowed for meritocracy among officials, eventually leading to the famous examination system on which China’s imperial bureaucracy was founded. But the texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously competing views—the sort of robust exchange of ideas rarely prominent in subsequent eras. […]

These are not China’s oldest writings. Chinese characters first appeared on “oracle bones”—tortoise shells that were used for divination, mainly in the Shang dynasty (circa 1600–1050 BCE). They are useful for understanding that era, but the core texts of Chinese civilization came later. They were written on bamboo or wood strips that could be bound with string and rolled up, allowing for the creation of complex works of legend, philosophy, and history.

These are not easy manuscripts to decipher. They contain many irregular characters, leading paleographers to debate the exact meaning of important passages. The Tsinghua texts, for example, are being issued in volumes with a version agreed upon by Professor Li’s team but also with dissenting views. (Only about a third of the Tsinghua slips have been published, with one volume released each year. Another ten are projected.)

Academics in China have responded with thousands of books and articles, discussing every detail of the new texts. Western scholars have joined in a bit more slowly. But, perhaps with the benefit of distance, they are drawing broader and more provocative conclusions. One example is The Bamboo Texts of Guodian, an epic, 1,200-page annotation and translation of all eight hundred slips from Guodian by Scott Cook of Yale-NUS College in Singapore. This is the most complete rendering of the Guodian discovery in any language, including Chinese, and is an example of the sort of cross-cultural work now possible among paleographers who share their ideas and views on blogs and in chatrooms.

Most notable among the Guodian texts is a version of the Daoist classic, Laozi’s Daodejing (better known in the West by the older Romanization form as Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, or “The Way and Its Power”). Cook writes that the discoveries at least partly confirm traditional views of the antiquity of the Daodejing, a hotly debated subject for the past century, especially in the West.

There’s a good deal about the political implications of the texts; I was quite moved by this bit near the end:

Paleography is a popular field, attracting some of the best young Chinese academics. When I asked Professor Liu about this, he told me that up until the 1970s, “We had these classics like the Shangshu [the Ancient Documents], and for two thousand years they didn’t change. Now we can see them before that and the texts are different!”

The texts are different, the past can’t be taken for granted, we have to think and analyze rather than accept and memorize: sapere aude, as they said back in the Enlightenment. (Via MetaFilter.)

Back in 2005 I posted about a language spoken in a remote corner of Brazil, Nheengatú (Tupi: [ɲɛʔẽŋaˈtu]); now it’s the subject of a study by Simeon Floyd of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, “Modally hybrid grammar? Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú,” published in the March 2016 issue of Language (preprint pdf). The Linguistic Society of America press release says:

A new scientific study documenting the linguistic practices of the Northwestern Amazonian peoples uncovers an unusual method of communicating the human concept of time. […] The article examines how the Nheengatú language includes both auditory and visual components to express the time of day, even though it does not have any numerical or written system for telling time. Speakers of Nheengatú talk about time of day by pointing at where the sun would be in the sky at that particular time. For speakers of Nheengatú, this is the same as saying things like “nine o’clock” in English. This practice is notable because many linguists have assumed that users of auditory languages would not also develop visual language like that seen in sign languages, but this phenomenon shows that this is not necessarily the case.

When humans conceive of grammar we might think of categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that people communicate by vocalizing. Research with speakers of Nheengatú reveals that this is not always the case, however, and that in some languages it is possible to communicate some of these concepts, by combining movements of the hands and body with speech in systematic ways. In this case visual elements play a role comparable to that usually played by spoken adverbs, adding information about time to the verbs they occur with.

These Nheengatú physical expressions are the type of visual language we expect to see in sign languages, but for spoken languages it is often assumed that all of the words should be audible, not visual, and that the gestures that come along with speech only give extra, peripheral meanings, and not the main information about the topic of talk. These practices seen in small communities in the Amazon have the potential to change how scientists think about the modalities in which language is expressed, because they show that humans don’t necessarily have to choose between speaking and signing and are capable of doing both simultaneously.

Interesting stuff; thanks, Trevor!

I found Imre Kertész’s 2002 Nobel lecture a good and thought-provoking read, and I hope you will too. A couple of language-related bits:

Consider what happened to language in the twentieth century, what became of words. I daresay that the first and most shocking discovery made by writers in our time was that language, in the form it came down to us, a legacy of some primordial culture, had simply become unsuitable to convey concepts and processes that had once been unambiguous and real. Think of Kafka, think of Orwell, in whose hands the old language simply disintegrated. It was as if they were turning it round and round in an open fire, only to display its ashes afterward, in which new and previously unknown patterns emerged. […]

It makes me especially happy to be expressing these thoughts in my native language: Hungarian. I was born in Budapest, in a Jewish family, whose maternal branch hailed from the Transylvanian city of Kolozsvár (Cluj) and the paternal side from the southwestern corner of the Lake Balaton region. My grandparents still lit the Sabbath candles every Friday night, but they changed their name to a Hungarian one, and it was natural for them to consider Judaism their religion and Hungary their homeland. My maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust; my paternal grandparents’ lives were destroyed by Mátyás Rákosi’s Communist rule, when Budapest’s Jewish old age home was relocated to the northern border region of the country. I think this brief family history encapsulates and symbolizes this country’s modern-day travails. What it teaches me, though, is that there is not only bitterness in grief, but also extraordinary moral potential.

Makes me want to read his work. The Nobel site has the speech in Swedish, French, and German, as well as Kertész’s native Hungarian (“Külön öröm számomra, hogy ezeket a gondolatokat az anyanyelvemen, magyarul mondhatom el…”); I got the link from the indispensable wood s lot.

I recently ran across the word pagoda in a sense unknown to me (in the OED’s words: “A gold or silver coin of higher denomination than the rupee, formerly current in southern India”), so of course I looked it up, and found that it’s a much more complicated word than I had thought. Hobson-Jobson has a long entry beginning “This obscure and remarkable word is used in three different senses,” which you can see at Google Books here and at Digital Dictionaries of South Asia here (scroll to the bottom, and keep hitting “next page”); the OED (entry updated March 2005) has the following etymology:

< Portuguese pagode (1516 in sense 2a [an image or carving of a god; an idol], 1525 in sense 1a [a Hindu or (in later use esp.) Buddhist temple or sacred building, typically having the form of a many-tiered tower with storeys of diminishing size, each with an ornamented projecting roof], 1697 in sense 3 [A gold or silver coin of higher denomination than the rupee, formerly current in southern India]), of uncertain and disputed origin (see note below). Compare French pagode (1553 in Middle French in senses 1a and 2a; 1545 as paxode in sense 1a), Italian †pagode (1554 in sense 1a, 1587 as pagodo in senses 2a and 3; also †pagod (a1652 in sense 3), pagoda (18th cent.)), Spanish pagoda (1585 in sense 1a in the source translated in quot. 1588 at sense 1aα.; 1563 as pagode), Dutch pagode (1596 in sense 3 in the source translated in quot. 1598 at sense 3α., early 18th cent. or earlier in senses 1a and 2a; also as †pagood (1726 or earlier)), all apparently < Portuguese.

The ultimate origin of the Portuguese pagode is uncertain and disputed. It was once thought to be < Persian but-kada idol temple < but idol + kada habitation, but now seems more likely to be either < Tamil pākavata devotee of Vishnu ( < Sanskrit bhāgavata pertaining to the Lord (Vishnu), worshipper of Vishnu or the goddess Bhagavati: see below), or < Tamil pakavati (name of a) goddess ( < Sanskrit bhagavatī goddess, alternative name of the goddess Kali). Sense 3 arose from the fact that the image of the goddess was stamped on the coin (compare quot. 1598 at sense 3α.).

The stressing of the α forms has varied: ˈpagod occurs in Butler’s Hudibras (compare quot. 1664 at sense 2aα.); Pope has paˈgod as well as ˈpagod.

The initial stress in pagod can be seen most delightfully in Butler’s Hudibras (1664: “Their Classique-model prov’d a Maggot/ Their Directory an Indian Pagod”). Of the other citations, I think my favorite is:

1950 O. Sitwell Noble Essences 11, I beheld opposite.. the lean, elongated form of Lytton Strachey, hieratic, a pagod as plainly belonging as did the effigies to a creation of its own.