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“The time and place of origin of South Caucasian languages,” by Alexander Gavashelishvili, Merab Chukhua, Kakhi Sakhltkhutsishvili, Dilek Koptekin, and Mehmet Somel (Sci Rep 13, 21133 [2023]), looks quite interesting, and it’s open access, so you can check it out freely. The abstract:

This study re-examines the linguistic phylogeny of the South Caucasian linguistic family (aka the Kartvelian linguistic family) and attempts to identify its Urheimat. We apply Bayesian phylogenetics to infer a dated phylogeny of the South Caucasian languages. We infer the Urheimat and the reasons for the split of the Kartvelian languages by taking into consideration (1) the past distribution ranges of wildlife elements whose names can be traced back to proto-Kartvelian roots, (2) the distribution ranges of past cultures and (3) the genetic variations of past and extant human populations. Our best-fit Bayesian phylogenetic model is in agreement with the widely accepted topology suggested by previous studies. However, in contrast to these studies, our model suggests earlier mean split dates, according to which the divergence between Svan and Karto-Zan occurred in the early Copper Age, while Georgian and Zan diverged in the early Iron Age. The split of Zan into Megrelian and Laz is widely attributed to the spread of Georgian and/or Georgian speakers in the seventh-eighth centuries CE. Our analyses place the Kartvelian Urheimat in an area that largely intersects the Colchis glacial refugium in the South Caucasus. The divergence of Kartvelian languages is strongly associated with differences in the rate of technological expansions in relation to landscape heterogeneity, as well as the emergence of state-run communities. Neolithic societies could not colonize dense forests, whereas Copper Age societies made limited progress in this regard, but not to the same degree of success achieved by Bronze and Iron Age societies. The paper also discusses the importance of glacial refugia in laying the foundation for linguistic families and where Indo-European languages might have originated.

And the introduction ends:

There is linguistic evidence that points either to possible structural relationship or to prolonged contacts between Kartvelian and Indo-European languages in the South Caucasus. This is supported by recently discovered genetic evidence of a ghost population in or near the South Caucasus, which acted as the link connecting the Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya with the speakers of Anatolian languages. In this context our findings will help reduce the search area for the homeland of Indo-European languages and provide more clarity about the nature of ties between Kartvelian and Indo-European languages.

Thanks, Dmitry!

“Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker?” by Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero, and Susan Goldin-Meadow (Psychol Sci. 2016 May;27(5):737-47) is an intriguing study; the abstract:

Speakers of all languages gesture, but there are differences in the gestures that they produce. Do speakers learn language-specific gestures by watching others gesture or by learning to speak a particular language? We examined this question by studying the speech and gestures produced by 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English and Turkish (n = 20/language), and comparing them with the speech and gestures of 40 sighted adult speakers in each language (20 wearing blindfolds, 20 not wearing blindfolds). We focused on speakers’ descriptions of physical motion, which display strong cross-linguistic differences in patterns of speech and gesture use. Congenitally blind speakers of English and Turkish produced speech that resembled the speech produced by sighted speakers of their native language. More important, blind speakers of each language used gestures that resembled the gestures of sighted speakers of that language. Our results suggest that hearing a particular language is sufficient to gesture like a native speaker of that language.

Compare “Why people gesture when they speak” by Jana M. Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow (Nature Vol. 396 [19 November 1998], p. 228): “Gesture does not depend on either a model or an observer, and thus appears to be integral to the speaking process itself.”

I’ve long been interested in spelling bees (see my lament in this 2006 post), and I was fascinated by the Washington Post column by Dev Shah, who won the National Spelling Bee in June and says “This is what it takes to master spelling”:

I never expected to win. I had lost more than two dozen spelling bees since I started competing in the fourth grade, and last year, I didn’t even qualify for the national competition. If that wasn’t enough pressure, this was my final year of eligibility. This spelling bee was my last shot. […]

How did I finally break through? There are almost half a million words in English dictionaries. Add in thousands of roots and hundreds of language patterns, and it is impossible to memorize everything. Once I realized that, I changed the way I trained and started focusing on sharpening my intuition.

The skill of guessing is everything. Though I could — and did — study words for hours on end, I knew my greatest asset would be learning to guess correctly. In stressful situations, sometimes you just have to breathe, steady yourself and leave things to chance.

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Via Ionuț Zamfir’s Facebook post, Blum, F., Barrientos, C., Ingunza, A. et al., “Grammars Across Time Analyzed (GATA): A dataset of 52 languages” [Sci Data 10, 835 (2023)]; the abstract:

Grammars Across Time Analyzed (GATA) is a resource capturing two snapshots of the grammatical structure of a diverse range of languages separated in time, aimed at furthering research on historical linguistics, language evolution, and cultural change. GATA comprises grammatical information on 52 diverse languages across all continents, featuring morphological, syntactic, and phonological information based on published grammars of the same language at two different time points. Here we introduce the coding scheme and design features of GATA, and we describe some salient patterns related to language change and the coverage of grammatical descriptions over time.

It’s open access, so you can read the whole thing; if you have thoughts, please share. (And if you’re curious, Ionuț is the Romanian diminutive of Ion; the English equivalent is Johnny.)

By the way, a public service announcement: Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s given name is properly pronounced /ˈhjuːdi/; the 1900 Census lists him as “Hudy Ledbetter,” and if he’d kept that spelling it would have been easier on everyone. I mention it because I keep forgetting it, and was reminded once again today. So now you know, if you didn’t already.

We were watching the great 1978 series Connections (available at the Internet Archive), and James Burke (the creator, writer, and presenter), discussing the history of timepieces, referred to “verge and foliot clocks.” I was, of course, intrigued, and as soon as the episode ended I investigated. Verge, which can mean any sort of rod, shaft, pole, or wand as well as “The spindle or arbor of the balance in the old vertical escapement,” is from Old French verge < Latin virga ‘rod, etc.’; foliot is more interesting, having the senses “? Foolish matter. Obsolete. rare,” “A kind of goblin. Obsolete. rare,” and “A type of clock escapement consisting of a bar with adjustable weights on the ends. (Disused.)” The etymology:

? < Old French foliot.

Notes
The Old French word is recorded only as meaning watch-spring; but according to Hatzfeld & Darmesteter it is derived from the verb folier to play the fool, to dance about, and so may have had other meanings related to this verb. Compare the surname Foliot, known from 12th cent. in English. How Burton obtained the word there is nothing to show; he evidently connects it with Italian folletto, = French (esprit) follet, hobgoblin, properly a diminutive of fol foolish. Can it be a misprint for follet?

As you can probably guess, that’s an ancient unrevised entry (from 1897). I have to say it’s a very attractive word, and I regret that it’s disused.

Jackie Wattles reports for CNN about an onomastic innovation that is personally pleasing to me:

Not all science is carried out by folks in white lab coats under the fluorescent lights of academic buildings. Occasionally, the trajectory of the scientific record is forever altered inside a pub over a pint of beer. Such is the case for the sweeping purple and green lights that can hover over the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere. The phenomenon looks like an aurora but is in fact something entirely different.

It’s called Steve.

The rare light spectacle has caused a bit of buzz this year as the sun is entering its most active period, ramping up the number of dazzling natural phenomena that appear in the night sky — and leading to new reports of people spotting Steve in areas it does not typically appear, such as parts of the United Kingdom. But about eight years ago, when Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was in Calgary, Alberta, for a seminar, she had never seen the phenomenon in person. And it did not yet have a name. […]

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I ran across a reference to a “salt pig” and was puzzled; Wikipedia has a stub that says, in its entirety:

A salt pig is a container used to hold salt, to make it easily accessible to pinch or spoon measure into dishes. They are available in many materials, but are generally ceramic, porcelain, earthenware or clay. The earthenware construction of a salt pig can help keep the salt from clumping in humid kitchens. According to the blog Mundane Essays, a blog in which writer Muness Alrubaiehis researched the origin of the term “salt pig,” the use of “pig” is found in Scots and northern English dialect meaning an earthenware vessel.

I don’t know why the hell they reference a blog rather than the OED itself, but the pig n.² entry (revised 2006) is quite interesting; the main sense (of which the others are obvious derivatives) is “A pot, pitcher, jar, or other vessel, usually made of earthenware; a crock; (in plural) crockery or earthenware generally.” The first and last citations are:

c1450 Euerilk day..was broght vnto hym a lofe of bread and a pygg with wyne.
Alphabet of Tales (1905) vol. II. 340 (Middle English Dictionary)
[…]

1980 Often they were preserved for the winter..in a big pig or earthenware jar.
D. K. Cameron, Willie Gavin xii. 122

(My favorite in between is from J. Spence, Shetland Folk-lore [1899]: “I’ll creep me up an’ kirn da tip o’ milk, sae dat du gets a aer o’ druttle i’ da pig.”) The etymology:

Origin uncertain; perhaps compare slightly earlier piggin n. [“A (small) pail or similar vessel”] (although see also discussion at that entry), and perhaps compare also prig n.² [“A small metal pan; (also) a small pitcher”]; perhaps originally a transferred use of pig n.¹, perhaps on account of the resemblance of the vessels to a pig.

Is this quaint word familiar to anyone?

Or so say the authors of the study described by Michelle Starr:

Our Neanderthal cousins had the capacity to both hear and produce the speech sounds of modern humans, a study published in 2021 found. Based on a detailed analysis and digital reconstruction of the structure of the bones in their skulls, the study settled one aspect of a decades-long debate over the linguistic capabilities of Neanderthals. “This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career,” said palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University back in 2021.

“The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology.”

The notion that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalis [sic: should be neanderthalensis) were much more primitive than modern humans (Homo sapiens) is outdated, and in recent years a growing body of evidence demonstrates that they were much more intelligent than we once assumed. They developed technology, crafted tools, created art and held funerals for their dead. Whether they actually spoke with each other, however, has remained a mystery. Their complex behaviors seem to suggest that they would have had to be able to communicate, but some scientists have contended that only modern humans have ever had the mental capacity for complex linguistic processes.

Whether that’s the case is going to be very difficult to prove one way or another, but the first step would be to determine if Neanderthals could produce and perceive sounds in the optimal range for speech-based communication. So, using a bunch of really old bones, this is what a team led by palaeoanthropologist Mercedes Conde-Valverde of the University of Alcalá in Spain set out to do. […]

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My wife and I were talking about Wallace and Gromit, of which we are fans, and she asked why Gromit was called that. A quick googling turned up this: “Gromit, meanwhile, got his name after Nick heard his brother, an electrician, talking about ‘grommets’ – rings, or washers, used in the trade.” So that was settled, but then we discussed what exactly a grommet was. AHD says:

1. a. A reinforced eyelet, as in cloth or leather, through which a fastener may be passed.
b. A small metal or plastic ring used to reinforce such an eyelet.
2. Nautical A loop of rope or metal used for securing the edge of a sail to its stay.
[Probably from obsolete French gromette, gormette, chain joining the ends of a bit, from Old French, from gourmer, to bridle.]

Interestingly, the ancient OED entry (anno 1900) has it s.v. grummet, with grommet as an alternative spelling; the first sense is the nautical one (1626 “Grummets and staples for all yeards”), and the washer sense dates only to 1942 (“The power cord should have been threaded through that grommet first”).

On a completely different note, we were listening to a piece by Frank Bridge on the radio, and I took a look at his extensive list of compositions, which turns out to feature an excessive number of entries that sound made for Madeline Bassett: Rising When the Dawn Still Faint Is, Mid of the Night, Music When Soft Voices Die, Harebell and Pansy, Lean Close Thy Cheek against My Cheek, Fair Daffodils… I’ve only gotten up to 1905 and I can’t go on, you’ll have to seek out more yourself. But the cake is taken by a 1916 work called The Graceful Swaying Wattle (“for 2-part chorus and piano or string orchestra”), set to this appalling poem by Veronica Mason, which would have set the golden-tressed Bassett all a-quiver. A sample quatrain:

It seems to be a fairy tree
It dances to a melody,
and sings a little song to me,
the graceful swaying wattle.

If you really want, you can hear it sung here, but I will not be responsible for any medical complications that result.

Back in 2015 I started reading Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (see this post), and I seem to have abandoned it almost immediately for reasons I no longer recall. I got a poke in the ribs about this from Michael Gilleland’s brief post at Laudator Temporis Acti quoting Curtius’s Essays on European Literature:

For previous ages the exempla maiorum were a confirma­tion; for us they are a confrontation, and tradition is reversed into a corrective. We are so far removed from tradition that it appears new to us.

But what are exempla maiorum? Googling finds the phrase translated as “examples from our ancestors” or “the exemplary moral behaviour of the ancestors,” and it is sometimes treated as equivalent to mos maiorum, “the unwritten code from which the ancient Romans derived their social norms” — e.g., in V. Henry T. Nguyen’s Christian Identity in Corinth, p. 75: “Augustus himself recognised the imitative value of the mos maiorum, ‘By the passage of new laws I restored many traditions of our ancestors (exempla maiorum) which were then falling into disuse […]’” — but Claudia Rapp, in her “Old Testament Models for Emperors in Early Byzantium,” explains at length the significance of the exemplum, including the Augustus quote (p. 177):
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