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Brooke Jarvis’s NY Times Magazine article “What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?” is so fascinating I’m tempted to quote half of it just to boggle your minds (I read large chunks to my wife as she was trying to eat her breakfast), but since this is Languagehat and not Olfactionhat, I’ll only post the section directly related to language and urge you to read the whole thing if you have access to the Times. (OK, just one tidbit: a study “found that we can tell, just from sniffing a T-shirt another person has worn, whether that person’s immune system is similar to our own.[…] But here’s what’s really impressive: Our noses can also distinguish between two groups of mice that have different immune systems.”)

We may not be bad at smelling, but we are bad at putting what we smell into words. (Kant again: “Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense.”) With vision, we have a concrete vocabulary to lean on: red or blue, dark or bright. […] Even if we’re perceiving a color differently from the way someone else is — which is, in fact, pretty often the case — we still have a shared language that we can all lean on to discuss it. With smell, we find ourselves flailing. […]

Our descriptions of smell also lack resolution, [Joel] Mainland, the neuroscientist, notes: Though Pantone lists dozens of shades of blue, each of which can be quantified precisely in hue and saturation, we can really describe a banana scent only as banana-y. (If our experience of vision were as dissolute as smell, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has written, “the sky would go all birdish” when a bird flew by.) Yet the intensity of a smell can completely change the way we experience it. Mainland, who often asks volunteers to describe smells in his lab, told me that he has one vial that is perceived as grapefruit at low concentrations but rotten egg at high ones, and another that slides from black currant to cat pee. As Parma says: “With vision, we agree on where we stand. With odor, it’s like a kaleidoscope.”

That turns out to matter quite a lot. Being able to describe and discuss what we smell helps us smell it better. Think of sommeliers, who learn to pick out the distinct aromas of wine in large part by learning a language for them. Or consider, as the cognitive scientist and philosopher A.S. Barwich explains in her book “Smellosophy,” that beer experts have lots of descriptors for bitter flavors, which they prize, while wine drinkers, who consider bitterness a sign of a failed wine, have few.

Asifa Majid, who studies language and cognition at the University of York, has written about languages in Southeast Asia that have genuine lexicons for odors: sets of words that work much like color words, each describing something inherent in the experience of a smell rather than comparing it to other things. While Westerners trying to describe smells tend to hem and haw and squint into space, searching for descriptors, speakers of these languages are declarative and decisive. (Majid described, to The Atlantic, how her own ability to name smells looked in comparison: “Some kids were following me around and laughing. Like, ‘How can you be such a moron?’”) Huehuetla Tepehua, an Indigenous language in Mexico, likewise has at least 45 different words that express specific olfactory experiences. People who grow up in such cultures are better at detecting, discriminating and naming odors. One also doubts that they would require a scientific renaissance to tell them that smell matters.

We discussed Majid and Burenhult’s research with speakers of Jahai back in 2014 (and Kant in 2017).

I’m no Buddhist or scholar of Buddhism, but even I am familiar with the Heart Sutra, “the most frequently used and recited text in the entire Mahayana Buddhist tradition.” I had assumed that like your average sutra it was originally in Sanskrit or a Prakrit, but Jayarava Attwood, in an essay for Tricycle (primarily about a new way of seeing the text, as “describing the results of a meditation practice—the yoga of nonapprehension”), discusses a different theory:

For a long time, Buddhists believed that the Heart Sutra was composed in India, in Sanskrit. It was then transmitted to China and translated along with the rest of the Perfection of Wisdom literature. An article published in 1992 by a leading scholar of early Buddhist translations in Chinese turned this story on its head. Jan Nattier, then a professor at the University of Indiana, concluded from her research that the Heart Sutra was actually composed in Chinese. Nattier showed that the core passage of the Heart Sutra was copied from the 5th-century Chinese translation of the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sutra by the scholar-monk Kumārajīva (344–413 CE). The text was then back-translated into Sanskrit. More recently, I confirmed Nattier’s conclusions by showing that other passages were copied from the same text and that the Sanskrit Heart Sutra contains a distinctive Chinese idiom. Hundreds of similar texts were composed in China, where they are known as “digest texts” (Chin, chāo jīng), but only the Heart Sutra was translated back into Sanskrit. Nattier speculated that the famous 7th-century pilgrim and translator Xuánzàng may have composed the Heart Sutra, which seems plausible in light of recent work on this problem.

Does anybody know if this idea is widely accepted?

Brian Maye writes for the Irish Times:

Patrick Kavanagh was one of the foremost Irish poets of the 20th century. He is often seen as a “rural” poet but most of his output was produced in the city. […] Kavanagh liked to be different, and this also applied when it came to the poetic convention of rhyming. He said “outrageous” rhyming helped him escape from respectability. Some of the rhyming he indulged in certainly was not respectable.

In The Great Hunger, he rhymes “Dundalk” with “sock”, which maybe works if spoken in the accent of Kavanagh’s part of the country. “Butter” is rhymed with the Monaghan placename “Mucker” in Kerr’s Ass, a poem that tells nothing about the animal in the title and begins with the great expression, “We borrowed the loan of”. And the poem with the elaborate title On Looking into EV Rieu’s Homer has “ravaged” rhymed not very respectably with “cabbages”. (Kavanagh is harvesting cabbages as he reads tearfully Priam’s lament for his dead son Hector – the one who is ravaged.)

In Advent, “talking” is rhymed with “shocking”, as is “searching” with “lurching”, while in A Christmas Childhood, “ditch” is rhymed with “touch”. One of his late poems, the Petrarchan sonnet The Hospital, is a riot of outrageous rhyming: “ward” with “snored”, “bridge” with “pledge”, and “lorry” with “transitory”.

As well as outrageous rhyming, Kavanagh was fond of the odd outrageous neologism (such as “Niagariously” in Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal), and far-fetched comparisons (such as comparing the water falling over a canal lock to Niagara Falls in the same poem, or a Monaghan drumlin to the Matterhorn in Shancoduff, or three “whin” bushes on a hill to the Three Wise Men in a Christmas Childhood).

Sounds like fun; I’ll have to investigate him. (Via Steven Green’s Facebook post.)

Also, The Untranslated has been back for a while, and he’s written about a Finnish novel by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas:
[Read more…]

Michel de Vreeze reports for ASOR on “The Enigmatic Tablets from Late Bronze Age Deir ‘Alla”:

On April 1, 1964 Henk Franken and his Leiden University based team stumbled upon two clay tablets. Two days later a third tablet was found. These tablets still form an archaeological riddle up to this day. At some excavations tablets are a routine find but Franken and his teams were excavating at Deir ‘Alla, a sizeable tell in the middle of the Jordan Valley, just above where the Zerqa river, the biblical Jabbok, confluences with the Jordan River. […] Among the many finds associated with the Late Bronze Age temple were ceramics including goblets and ceremonial vessels, Mycenean imports, scaled armor and scarabs, and faience vessels including a gift from Egyptian Queen Twosret which provided an approximate dating for the destruction not too long after 1180 BCE. But most striking perhaps were some clay tablets which bore a script that still have no exact parallels.

These rectangular tablets were inscribed with a stylus and featured linear signs with dots marking the ends. Franken and his team found a total of nine tablets or fragments, some of which only bear incised dots (in groups of 7 or 8). Throughout the years more tablets turned up in excavations by a joint Leiden-Yarmouk University expedition, also outside of the temple precinct. The total number of tablets found up-to-today is 15, the last consisting of two separate fragments miraculously fitting together although found in separate places.

Soon after the first discovery was published by Franken, a wide range of interpretations was given for the tablets and their script. These ranged from the Sea People who roamed the Levantine coast at the end of the Late Bronze Age and were seen as responsible for the upheaval in the area, to links with South Arabian writing, known from Yemen, with which the script shares a very general resemblance. Other scholars stuck to more local languages such as Canaanite. But a satisfying reading of the tablets was never achieved and the language in which they were written has remained a mystery. […]

In 2014, archaeologist Gerrit van der Kooij published an overview of the tablets bearing script and established the writing direction as left to right. Using these paleographic observations but altering the sign list, new insights could be gained from the tablets. It can now be established that the script was predominantly written from left to right and contained a small enough number of signs (around 29) to justify calling it an alphabet.

Building on these conclusions it seems that the Deir ‘Alla tablets indeed bear a unique form of alphabet that shares similarities with its apparent ancestors (the proto-Sinaitic script) and sister proto-Canaanite alphabets attested at other Late Bronze Age sites and predominantly found in the Shephelah area. These contemporary alphabets allowed for the confident identification of some parallel consonants in the Deir ‘Alla script.

Click the link for more details and a nice comparative chart of symbols; as the LH reader who sent it to me said (thanks, Hans!), “I would have liked to see links published papers or a transcription of the Canaanite reading, but that’s science journalism for you…”

Patricia Claus at Greek Reporter writes Minoan Language Linear A Linked to Linear B in Groundbreaking New Research:

The Minoan language known as “Linear A” may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet, which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language, which developed later in the prehistoric period. […] Linear A, which was used by the Minoans during the Bronze Age, exists on at least 1,400 known inscriptions made on clay tablets. The language has baffled the world’s top archaeologists and linguistic experts for many years.

But thanks to the pioneering work of Dr. Ester Salgarella, a Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College, Cambridge, understanding the Minoans’ most ancient language, used during the period of their civilization’s highest flourishing, may be at hand. Her research breakthrough, which has been hailed as “an extraordinary piece of detective work,” could provide the key for linguists to unlock the secrets of the Minoan language – and learn more about its society and culture. […]

Taking an interdisciplinary approach using evidence from linguistics, inscriptions, archaeology and paleography (the study of the handwriting of ancient writing), Dr. Salgarella examined the two scripts. To compare them more easily, she created an online resource of individual signs and inscriptions called “SigLA – The Signs of Linear A: A paleographic Database.” She explains: “At the moment there is a lot of confusion about Linear A. We don’t really know how many signs are to be taken as core signs; there’s even been a partial misclassification of signs in the past. “This database tries to clear up the situation and give scholars a basis for advancement. We don’t have a Rosetta Stone to crack the code of Linear A, and more linguistic analysis is required, but this structural analysis is a foundation stone.” […]

“What we see with Linear A, Linear B, and the two different languages notated (Minoan and Greek) is that the graphic system (script) was continued without considerable change (but of course there are differences), but the languages differ. Upon the transmission process of Linear A to Linear B there was therefore ‘linguistic shift’. However, the graphic system was not deeply affected,” she says.

Now, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the Linears, but I thought it was common knowledge that A and B were related scripts, and I’m not clear on what the purported breakthrough here is. I got it from the Facebook feed of Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul), and he didn’t mock it, which is some sort of praise considering how readily he mocks things. So what’s the story here? Anybody have more information?

Simon Roper’s YouTube video A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries does what it says on the tin; in less than 17 minutes he goes from 1346 to 2006 in approximately 60-year leaps, showing vowel charts with commentary on the screen. He writes:

If you’d like to read more about the history of south-eastern English pronunciation, I’d recommend the Cambridge History of the English Language series. I used volumes II and III extensively for this video, but if there are mistakes, they’re far more likely to be mine. The chapters on phonology are particularly interesting.

It’s a good idea and he carries it off well — I like his natural-sounding renditions — but I’m not sure why he used such anachronistic texts; e.g., under 1466 he has “He was spooked” (first OED citation 1935 E. Hemingway Green Hills Afr. i. i. 13 “We spooked one [kudu]”), under 1526 he has “We lived in the middle of nowhere,” and under 1886 he has “berks” (first citation in Green’s 1936 J. Curtis Gilt Kid 66: “‘The berk.’ Jealousy and savage contempt blended in the Gilt Kid’s tone”). But never mind, it’s fun and educational. Thanks, Michael!

I received in the mail a copy of one of the most delightful works of historical linguistics I’ve seen, James A. Matisoff’s The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus. As the blurb on that page says:

This pioneering book is the prototype of the etymological thesaurus that has been the goal of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT) since 1987. It presents nearly 170 Proto-Tibeto-Burman etymologies in the semantic area of the reproductive system, along with discussions of possible Chinese cognates. Special attention is paid to patterns of semantic associations between the reproductive system and other areas of the lexicon.

As the LH reader who sent me the book said (thanks, Jack!), “I think it’s a tour-de-force: it illustrates his point that realistic language reconstruction depends on having some control of the underlying semantic field.” To quote the introduction:

In a sense the present work is a companion volume to the Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (HPTB; Matisoff 2003), where TB/ST roots were discussed, sorted, and analyzed according to their phonological shapes, regardless of their meanings. In the present volume, a group of phonologically disparate TB/ST etyma have been assembled according to their meanings, all of which have to do with the body’s reproductive system.²

And footnote 2 pleased me greatly:

My ultimate inspiration for a thesaurus-like approach to the proto-lexicon was Buck 1949 (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: a contribution to the history of ideas), a copy of which I purchased as a graduate student in the early 1960’s, at the then astronomical price of $40. In each section of this great work, arranged Roget-like into semantic categories and subcategories, Buck first lists the forms for each concept in 30-plus modern and ancient IE languages; then he assembles these synonymous forms into etymological groups. Each of these etyma is briefly discussed in terms of breadth of attestation, solidity of the reconstruction, and semantic connections with other areas of the lexicon.

I got my copy of Buck in October 1979 while I was working at Book Haven; the store had ordered two copies which sat around gathering dust (the price by then was an even more astronomical $60), and the owner was going to return them, but I decided to splurge on one for myself (the employee discount made it seem almost sensible), and I consult it to this day — it’s a wonderful work.

But I digress: if I’ve whetted your appetite for the Matisoff book, I have good news for you: it’s freely available online! And the STEDT website itself is a treasure trove, with many more publications available for free download (including Paul K. Benedict’s Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus) and an Electronic Etymologies section. What a wonderful world!

Back in 2006, I alluded to the existence of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, and frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t give it a post of its own, considering its groundbreaking nature and the fact that it combined two of my favorite topics, sf and language. Now, though, it’s been to some extent superseded by a free online resource, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction:

Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower.

The About page explains the history and affiliations of the project. Click on an entry, e.g. actifan, and you get definition (“someone who is actively involved in fandom”), usage note (“Now rare.”), etymology [< active + fan], and citations (from 1942 H. Jenkins Jr. Letter in Super Science Stories May 136/2 “Thought-variant stories…draw popular acclaim as well as response from the actifan” to 1995 Dragoncon: FASFiC? or ComicCon? in rec.arts.sf.fandom 15 July “Most of those who vote are very probably actifen”), just like in the OED. Naturally enough, it has plenty of antedates and updates. But I said “to some extent” above because it unaccountably drops entries that were in the book, like anti-agathic “something (such as a drug) that prolongs life,” created by James Blish and with citations ranging from 1954 to 2004. Never mind the nitpicking, though — it’s a terrific thing to have, and I’m adding it to the sidebar.

And it turns out Jennifer Schuessler has a good NY Times piece about it; thanks, Eric! It includes an important qualification about coverage:

The citations lean toward so-called hard science fiction (defined as science fiction based on hard science, which does not violate known scientific laws), and origin dates thin out in recent decades. The most cited authors are Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov. But if an author is not represented, Sheidlower emphasized, that’s not a value judgment.

“The harder your science fiction, the more likely you are to be using terms other people are using,” he said. But writers of “soft science fiction” (defined in the dictionary as science fiction based on soft sciences like anthropology or sociology, or in which science plays a relatively small role), he said, may actually be more innovative in their language. He mentioned N.K. Jemisin, whose Broken Earth trilogy, published between 2015 and 2017, won three consecutive Hugo Awards. “She’s not, for the most part, using words everyone is using.” he said. “The fact that she’s not in here doesn’t mean she’s unimportant. It can actually mean the opposite.”

A year ago I quoted from an article by Anne Lounsbery about the odd uniformity of “the provinces” (provintsiia) in Russian literature; now that I am enthusiastically reading her book Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 I want to quote the start of chapter 3, “Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or ‘Everything is Barbarous and Horrid’ (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others)” (pp. 54ff.), which explains the origin of that view:

“The provincial ball has been described a thousand times”: by 1840, when Alexander Herzen writes “Notes of a Young Man” (sketches based on his experience in exile in the Russian provinces), he feels obliged to assume that his reader already knows what to expect from any description of “provincial” mores. The same assumption will be implicit in his 1846 novel Who Is to Blame?, which has its origins in the sketches. Here Herzen claims there is no need to specify the location of the town where the action takes place (it “resembles all the others”), though he nonetheless enters into a fairly detailed account of daily life in the unnamed gubernskii gorod. From the 1830s through the 1850s, many writers followed this pattern: they rehearsed what they themselves repeatedly acknowledged to be clichés of provincial life, trotting out the same topoi even as they insisted that everybody already knew all about what they were describing, even to the point that insisting on the banality of the trope became part of the trope itself—and they did this despite the fact that this way of conceiving provintsiia was in fact quite new.

The current chapter considers not only how a new image of the Russian provinces took shape in literary texts, but also how these texts insisted that the image was old: by the 1830s, not only is it assumed that the provinces epitomize all that is grimly familiar; it is further assumed that such has always been the case, and that everyone has always known it. In the texts analyzed here, the supposedly timeless, ahistorical nature of provintsiia becomes both a stereotype and a preoccupation. And in a slightly later period, this is the image of provintsiia that will come to serve as a static non-modernity against which other forms of time and historicalness take on value.

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I just heard a radio announcer pronounce Martha Graham’s surname as /græm/ (like “gram”); the only pronunciation given in the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary, and the only one I remember hearing, is /ˈgrɛɪəm/ (“GRAY-um”). Is this a dialectal thing or his own idiosyncrasy? Also, looking it up I discovered that the surname is “derived from Grantham in Lincolnshire, England.” That’s some serious consonant reduction there.