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I’ve made posts involving the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis many times (the first post dedicated to it was in 2003), but I can’t help responding to this long Aeon piece by James McElvenny, “a linguist and intellectual historian” (which I found at MetaFilter). It starts off:

Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?

The only acceptable answer to that last question is “No, it couldn’t.” But McElvenny — apparently more intellectual historian than linguist — doesn’t see it that way; he wants to teach the controversy, and expends many many paragraphs in going through the relevant history (“The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century”) while slipping in sly digs at the position pretty much universally held by actual linguists. Here, for instance, is a paragraph on Indo-European:
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Anyone who is, like me, nostalgic about old-style bookstores will enjoy Bob Egan’s deep dive into the area of New York City once known as Book Row:

Between roughly 1890 and 1980 there were dozens of used bookstores along Fourth Avenue between Astor Place (8th Street) and Union Square (14th Street) in New York CIty. The area was known as Book Row.

The area was at the eastern edge of Greenwich VIllage where it meets the East Village.

This website shows the major bookstores that made up Book Row during it’s heyday – around 1940. The information was taken primarily from 1940 phone books at the New York Public Library, photographs found in the Municiple Archives of NYC, and the book BOOK ROW: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador (2004/Carroll & Graf, NYC; paperback reprint 2019/Skyhorse, NYC).

Used bookstores like to cluster together so those browsing could go from one store to the next until they found the book they liked.

People came from all over the world to shop here, though many customers were New Yorkers passing through Book Row on their way to work, or shoppers walking between the immense Wanamakers Department store at East 9th street and Union Square.

Most stores had bookcarts outside with books selling for as low as five cents. The reason: when these customers came into the store to buy their bargain purchase, they were often enticed to buy more additional higher priced books.

As you can see, the text is full of typos, but never mind — it’s an indispensable guide to that fabled land (which disappeared shortly before I moved to the city). There are maps, descriptions, and many, many photos; I wish there were more interiors (beyond the still from Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters), but I’m sure if such were available he would have used them. (Incidentally, if anyone knows of online images of the interiors of prerevolutionary Russian bookstores, I’d love to see them.)

Elise Cutts reports for Scientific American on an interesting form of borrowing:

Like the ancient Greek of Homer’s time, the Tsimane’ language has no set word for the parts of the color spectrum English speakers call “blue.” Although Tsimane’ does name a number of more subjective hues (think “aquamarine” or “mauve” in English), its speakers—the Tsimane’ people of Bolivia—reliably agree on just three main color categories: blackish, reddish and whitish.

But bilingualism is reworking the Tsimane’ tricolor rainbow, researchers recently reported in Psychological Science—offering a rare, real-time glimpse into how learning a second language can change how people think about abstract concepts and fuel language evolution. The data show Tsimane’ speakers who also speak Spanish are borrowing the concepts of—but not the Spanish words for—new color categories such as blue, green and yellow.

“You could have imagined that they could have just started calling things amarillo and azul” (the Spanish words for yellow and blue), says lead author Saima Malik-Moraleda, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But instead “they’re repurposing their own Tsimane’ color words.”

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If you follow Language Log at all, you’ll be aware of the endless ingenuity of the citizens of the PRC in getting around censorship by means of puns, allusions, etc.; this story by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) of Taiwan News shows that the citizens of Taiwan are equally creative, even in the absence of such censorship:

One of the fun aspects of following Taiwanese politics is the unique and colorful vocabulary. Some of it is practical, some profound, and others downright funny. Much of it is distinct to Taiwan. All of it reflects the passionate interest in Taiwanese elections. […] When more than one person is vying to be the party’s candidate, they may “knead tang yuan,” (搓圓仔湯/搓湯圓/挲圓仔湯/煮圓仔湯) or try offer up something to get a candidate to drop out. […] Sometimes politicians look to a “barrel hoop,” (桶箍) which is a neutral or mutually respected person working to bring candidates together as a team. […] Sometimes a barrel hoop will negotiate with another party to get one party’s candidate to not run to avoid splitting the ticket against the opposition, and “politely yield” (禮讓). […]

It is fairly common in Taiwan for politicians to express public disinterest in running for a post, sometimes for genuine reasons but often it is a song and dance show. If a politician already holds a post it would look bad to step down to run for something else, or if a friend or ally is vying for the same position and it would look like betrayal, or even just to look humble, if the party wants the candidate to run they will “make three humble visits to the thatched cottage” (三顧茅廬). […] Once the candidates are chosen, it is time to use my favorite terms, “hen” (母雞) and “chicks” (小雞). The hen is a candidate at the top of the ticket and chicks are the downstream ones, for example, a presidential candidate is a hen, and legislative candidates are chicks, or a mayoral candidate and city council candidates. […] What the hen is providing the chicks is a “watermelon nestle to the big side (西瓜偎大邊), which means to ride on the hen’s coattails.

Great stuff, and there’s much more of it at the link. (See this 2002 post for an illustration of how proverbs and “four-character expressions” can be used to make conversation livelier and less intelligible.)

My wife and I are about halfway through our reading of Shirley Hazzard’s best-known novel, The Transit of Venus, and I thought I’d provide a sample of her splendid way with language and her raptor-like view of human interaction. This is a good chunk of chapter 17 (set sometime around the early 1960s by my guess):

In the government office where Caroline Bell worked there was a young woman called Valda. That she was called Valda was to the point, for she objected to this. None of the other women there objected to being Milly, Pam, or Miranda with their appointed Mr. Smedleys and Mr. Renshaw-Browns. None of the other women objected, for that matter, to being girls.

By that epoch the men themselves were no longer Bates or Barkham to one another, but instant Sam or Jim. Those who had irreducibly formal names, such as Giles or Julian, even seemed to be lagging dangerously and doomed to obscurity. There was one older man in Planning who would say Mister to his subordinates—”Mister Haynes,” “Mister Dandridge”—like the skipper of an old ship with his first mate or boatswain. But he too, among the women, permitted himself an occasional Marge or Marigold; although at home calling his charwoman Mrs. Dodds.

When Caro asked, “If they make a true friend, what will they call him?” Valda told her: “They’re hoping to put true friendship out of business.” […]

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Late last year Dagmar Divjak, Hui Sun, and Petar Milin released a Journal of Neurolinguistics paper “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” whose abstract says:

Building on the relation between language cognition and the nervous system, we examine whether Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a cardiovascular measure that indexes Autonomic Nervous System activity, can be used to assess implicit language knowledge. We test the potential of HRV to detect whether individuals possess grammatical knowledge and explore how sensitive the cardiovascular response is.

41 healthy, British English-speaking adults listened to 40 English speech samples, half of which contained grammatical errors. Thought Technology’s 5-channel ProComp 5 encoder tracked heart rate via a BVP-Flex/Pro sensor attached to the middle finger of the non-dominant hand, at a rate of 2048 samples per second. A Generalised Additive Mixed Effects Model confirmed a cardiovascular response to grammatical violations: there is a statistically significant reduction in HRV as indexed by NN50 in response to stimuli that contain errors. The cardiovascular response reflects the extent of the linguistic violations, and NN50 decreases linearly with an increase in the number of errors, up to a certain level, after which HRV remains constant.

Now see what Nick Morgan Ph.D. did with it in the pages of Psychology Today:
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Over at the Log, Victor Mair posted a video by Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot, about how tones work in Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese; it’s almost half an hour long, which would normally put me off, but he’s so enthusiastic and informative that I kept watching till the end. His overall point is “Don’t be afraid of tones!”; Mair says:

Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about. […] It’s long and technical, but if you’re truly interested in tones and tonal languages, I would urge you to have a good look and listen to what Stuart Jay Raj has to say about them. He knows his stuff, so even if you’re not specifically interested in mastering tones and tonal language, but are simply interested in the phonological and phonetic principles behind them, you might well learn something useful from this presentation. For example, he has ideas about how creaky voice interacts with the production of tones.

Mair is impressed by “the accuracy of his tones” and “the precision of his pronunciation”; not knowing the languages, I have to take his word for it, but it sounds convincing. His presentation is sometimes odd, and Mair suggests he’s “pretty much of an autodidact,” so you’ll want to read the comments for corrections, but I think it’s worthwhile viewing. Some bits I jotted down: Burmese today is in the tonal evolutionary stage that Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese were in thousands of years ago (18:09); Burmese writing is “round and bubbly” vs. Khmer because the latter was etched in stone, while Burmese was written on palm leaves; “It’s all about the mechanics of the voice”; “If you want to have your mind blown, go and learn Burmese”; “All of these languages are running on the same tonal engine.” If any of that sounds intriguing, check it out.

Stephen Goranson sent me a link to the new online journal Hieroglyphs:

Hieroglyphs is an internationally peer-reviewed open access e-journal aiming to promote the academic study of hieroglyphs in all their dimensions in Egyptology and with a comparative angle extending to other hieroglyphic traditions and writing systems with a strongly iconic component. The journal provides a dedicated home for studies of hieroglyphs in all their semiotic, linguistic, cognitive, aesthetic, cultural, and material aspects.

The first issue, published at the end of December, includes articles ranging from the general (Dimitri Meeks, “An Egypto-Grammatology: Why and How”) to the very specific (Ben Haring, “The Scribe’s Outfit 𓏟 in the Deir el-Medina Pseudo-script: Shapes and Uses”; Philipp Seyr, “Graphetic Compounding in the First Intermediate Period: The Micro-history of [hiero] ḥtr.wy ‘span’ and the Process of Sign Decomposition”). Thanks, SG!

Joel Christensen of Brandeis has a post Where Did Homeric Book Divisions Come From? that discusses “questions about design and the relationship between the parts of the Iliad and the whole”; I’m just going to reproduce a chunk of the conclusion (follow the link for the bulk of the post). He quotes Bruce Heiden as follows:

The analysis will first consider the placement of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’. It will show that all the scenes that immediately precede a ‘book division’ manifest a common feature, namely that they scarcely affect forthcoming events in the story. All the scenes that follow a book division’ likewise display a common characteristic: these scenes have consequences that are immediately felt and continue to be felt at least 400 lines further into the story. Therefore, all of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’ occur at junctures of low-consequence and high consequence scenes. Moreover, every such juncture in the epic is the site of a ‘book division’.

The second stage of the analysis will examine the textual segments that lie between ‘book divisions’, i.e., the ‘books’ of the Iliad. It will show that in each ‘book’ the last event narrated is caused by the first, as are most of the events narrated in between. But the last event seldom completes a program implied by the first. Thus the ‘books’ of the Iliad display internal coherence, but only up to a point. They do not furnish a strong sense of closure. Instead their outline is marked by a sense of diversion in the narrative at the beginning of each.

Then comes this, from Steve Reece:
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TR, who sent me the link, wrote:

This doesn’t seem to have been mentioned on the blog, but the Linguistics Department at the University of Göttingen has put together what looks like a veritable treasure trove of online lectures digging deep into the grammars and histories of twelve early IE languages, presented by an all-star team of scholars including at least one occasional commenter at the Hattery. I have yet to dive in, but it looks very much worth exploring.

It sure does! Their About section reads:

Indo-European Linguistics has produced a wealth of knowledge about the grammars of Ancient Indo-European languages, which has substantially advanced our understanding of the history of language and the human past in general. Since this knowledge is scattered over thousands of scientific publications of the past two centuries (and ongoing), access to these languages and their fascinating features and histories is reserved to specialists. The aim of this project is to help unearth this treasure and to present it to a wider audience in an easily accessible and up-to-date form. In line with this vision, a team of experts on Indo-European languages from all over the world offers courses introducing twelve of the most important Indo-European languages and their grammars.

The list of topics and lecturers is at the link; Old Albanian, for instance, is presented by Michiel de Vaan and Brian Joseph. Thanks, TR!