This is brilliant

Anyone who thinks seriously about cultural history will probably love this.

Thanks to xkcd!

Beautiful place names in the northern seas

I was away from home for a while, and restricted to using mobile devices. I find it rather aggravating to write a blog post of any substantial nature using the mobiles. Back at home again, I can now conveniently share with you a great entry in a blog goes back to my early days of reading blogs, Strange Maps. 

The maps show the very peculiar place names of the two island groups north of Scotland, Shetland and Orkney. Frank Jacobs, the maintainer and compiler of Strange Maps, says much of what anyone might say about these wonderful names, but he does not address something that I would like to know. How is it that all of these names seem to be English, even if it's a rather peculiar kind of English? When exactly did people in these islands stop speaking some Norse dialect and not only take up English but Anglicize the whole landscape? Of course you could say that the language language of the map is Scots, but then the same question applies with a very minor change in terminology. At what point in Shetland history did somebody look at that rather centrally located site and decide that it was now going to be called Pund of Grutin? If that doesn't mean a pound of something or other, it does a good job of faking it. And what, oh what, was it called before?

The mysterious slash

Anne Curzan in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.”
Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or”—e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”
Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do. A student kindly sent me some real examples from her Facebook chat (shared with her permission):
1. Does anyone care if my cousin comes and visits slash stays with us Friday night?
2. I have been asking everyone I know in the Chicago area if they’re going slash if they’d willing [sic] to let me tag along slash show me around because frankly I’d have no idea how to get around Chicago on my own....
If the story of slash ended there, with a perfectly logical semantic extension of slash from its more conventional use, I wouldn’t be writing about it here on Lingua Franca. But for at least a good number of students, the conjunctive use of slash has extended to link a second related thought or clause to the first with a meaning that is often not quite “and” or “and/or” or “as well as.” It means something more like “following up.” Here are some real examples from students:
7. I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?
8. Has anyone seen my moccasins anywhere? Slash were they given to someone to wear home ever?
9. I’ll let you know though. Slash I don’t know when I’m going to be home tonight
10. so what’ve you been up to? slash should we be skyping?
11. finishing them right now. slash if i don’t finish them now they’ll be done in first hour tomorrow
The student who searched her Facebook chat records found instances of this use of slash as far back as 2010....

 The innovative uses of slash don’t stop there either: some students are also using slash to introduce an afterthought that is also a topic shift, captured in this sample text from a student:

12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you
This innovative conjunction (or conjunctive adverb, depending on how you want to interpret it) occurs, students tell me, even more commonly in speech than in writing. And in writing, it is often getting written out as slash, even in electronically mediated communication, where one might expect the quicker punctuation mark (/) rather than the five-letter word slash.
Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language. This use of slash is so commonplace for students in my class that they almost forgot to mention it as a new slang word this term. That young people have integrated innovative slash into their language while barely noticing its presence is all the more reason that conjunctive slash might have staying power.

It's not cannon law, people

It's more like this...

Qs and Ks and other ways of transliterating Arabic

The Arabist explains:

 I was meeting with a bunch of business people who know no Arabic and little about the Middle East. The conversation turned to Libya and one of them turned to me and asked why there were so many spellings of Qadhafi's name. What follows is what I said, which is very much what Kal of TMND argues, except I put it in laymen's terms, without the phonetics.

In Arabic, Qadhafi's name is spelled القذافي which if you drop the article, means ق - ذ - ا - ف - ي or q - dh - a - f - i. The "q" letter is almost unique to Arabic (sometimes called "the language of the qaf" — sorry, it's the language of the dhad, not qaf!) and often transliterated as a "k", since its pronounciation can be difficult for non-Arabic speakers. It is standard in classical Arabic and places like Fes in northern Morocco, but northern Egyptians, urban Syrians and others often pronounce this letter as a glottal stop, while southern Egyptians and Bedouins most often pronounce as a "g", as in "go". (This is why in Syria upscale Damascenes call the regime "the government of the Qaf", because pronouncing the letter is a country bumpkin thing to do, and Eastern Sunnis and Alawites — long dominant in the regime — often do it). Hence you see Qadhafi, Kadhafi or Gadhafi. The "dh" sound also has no equivalent in many languages as a standalone letter, and to top it off is made emphatic by a shedda — a kind of accent that indicates the letter should be doubled, which is why academics use the unwieldy "Qadhdhafi." And the "dh" is often not pronounced as such — in most colloquial Arabics, it is pronounced "d". I'm not sure why it might be pronounced "th", but perhaps this was used in Qadhafi's passport because it is close to the English sound in "the", which sounds very much like "dh". I always write Qadhafi because it's simple and faithful enough without being completely anal, like Qadhdhafi.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit's (coming) BACK!

"Christ's endangered language," Aramaic. (It may be more accurate to say it's fighting a rearguard action at Oxford.)

It is the language that Christ spoke, but is regarded as "endangered" with ever fewer scattered groups of native speakers.

But in Oxford, Aramaic has been flourishing again, with a course in the ancient language drawing people from as far afield as Liverpool and London. There are now 56 people learning Aramaic at the university, including three classics professors, solemnly completing their weekly homework tasks and regularly attending the free lunchtime lessons, more than the numbers studying Greek.

Their first lesson might have surprised the writers of the books of David and Ezra in the Bible, and of the Talmud, both originally written in Aramaic: the scholars pored over a transcription of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

David Taylor has previously taught the language to groups of two or three people in his study, and was astounded by the turnout for his first public lesson. Though a few fell by the wayside, more than 40 stayed the course until the classes ended in time for Christmas.

More at the Guardian.

Word

On speaking Klingon, or for that matter redoing A Christmas Carol in that language:

"Outsiders think it's weird," says Lawrence Schoen, founder and director of the K[lingon] L[anguage] I[nstitute]. "But it's no different than walking into a sports bar where everyone knows the score of the third game of the 1982 World Series."

More good reading from Phil Paine: "identity," slavery, and genocide

The misuse of identity:

...I tend to get most on my high horse when I feel that some stu­pid or wicked notion is being smug­gled into our sub­con­scious by a turn of phrase or an implied definition.

This is exactly the case with the cur­rently accepted use of the word iden­tity. You see this word used all the time, and phrases like “iden­tity pol­i­tics” are assumed to have an eas­ily rec­og­niz­able mean­ing. I’ve just been read­ing a spate of archae­o­log­i­cal papers which rou­tinely refer to “iden­tity” inter­change­ably with eth­nic­ity. These papers, from a vari­ety of aca­d­e­mics, con­stantly repeat phrases like “nego­ti­at­ing their iden­tity” — inane jar­gon which the field has bor­rowed from soci­ol­ogy, and which is now firmly entrenched. Archae­ol­ogy is impov­er­ished by this kind of rub­bish, and drifts away from sci­en­tific rigour.

When some­one casu­ally refers to reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, or to eth­nic­ity, or nation­al­ity, or gen­der, as being their “iden­tity,” there is an implicit assump­tion that mem­ber­ship in large, for­mally defined or orga­nized groups of peo­ple is the essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic of an “identity.”

Now, I find this a pro­foundly wrong, and extremely offen­sive assump­tion. Your iden­tity, as far as I’m con­cerned, and as I’ve believed through­out my life, is that which makes you uniquely your­self. My “iden­tity” is com­posed of those things which refer to me and only me, expe­ri­ences that occured to me alone, pas­sions and ambi­tions that are mine, pri­vate sym­bols that only I under­stand, inner expe­ri­ences that belong only to me. These unique, indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics form, all together, my Iden­tity. No char­ac­ter­is­tic that I share with some arbi­trary group of other human beings, or that is demanded of me by some col­lec­tive mush, or imposed on me by some pro­claimed Author­ity, can con­sti­tute my iden­tity. Cer­tainly no group that I am merely asso­ci­ated with by acci­dent of birth can ever be my iden­tity. I find the idea that any­one would con­sider their iden­tity to be, say, Nor­we­gianess, or their skin colour, a pro­foundly dis­gust­ing notion. It is to aban­don indi­vid­u­al­ity entirely, to crush and erase iden­tity, not to describe it.

This is a par­tic­u­larly creepy kind of creep­ing col­lec­tivism. The mean­ing of the word iden­tity has been dis­torted, per­verted, inverted. I don’t believe such things are ran­dom acci­dents. There are always pow­er­ful forces that seek to oblit­er­ate respect for, and recog­ni­tion of, the indi­vid­ual human being. If you can pur­suade peo­ple that their “iden­tity” is noth­ing more than their mem­ber­ship in a col­lec­tive blob, that there is noth­ing specif­i­cally notable or sig­nif­i­cant about them­selves, then half the work of enslave­ment has been accom­plished.

Amartya Sen has made a similar point in a recent book Identity and Violence, but his point was that reducing people to a single group identity led not just to enslavement, but genocide.

Similarly, this, from Chimamanda Adichie:



Update: Guy Halsall, anxious to elbow his way into this august company of great minds, recommends that anyone interested in this topic read his book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376 - 568, especially chapters 2 and 14; I would add that you might also want to be interested in barbarian migrations and "the fall of the Roman Empire." Seriously, though, I read Guy's book last month and it is quite fine, and the theme of multiple identities (as opposed to singular, essentialist ones) is surely there. This is not quite what Phil was talking about, but it is interesting and advances the historical debate on the "transformation" of Rome.

Does anyone know about the "Ehs" and the "You-Alls?"

In Afghanada, CBC Radio's excellent drama about Canadian soldiers fighting in Kandahar province, the Canadians call the Americans "You-Alls" and the Americans call the Canadians "Ehs."  Does anyone know if these slang phrases exist, or whether it is just inspired invention?

Image:  Some "Ehs" in Kandahar, some years back.

A change worth noting?

This afternoon, I was comparing two historical groups and their political experience, and wrote down the phrase "brothers under the skin." Although I liked the way came off the tongue, the phrase made me uncomfortable. After all it rather implies that skin is pretty important and that you would expect differences in skin would reflect differences in a lot of other things. Otherwise the phrase "brothers under the skin" has no force.

Since that is no longer my default frame of reference, I got rid of the phrase.

Is there any old, even consecrated language that you are now unexpectedly uncomfortable with?

History of language: higher education can be fun

Stephen Chrisomalis is a fun and spirited guy, as I can attest from personal contact. Read this account of in-class research on the history of the word "chairperson" and see if you don't agree that it sounds like practically the Platonic ideal of an undergraduate course-meeting:

Last week I was running a very similar lecture to the one I always, on language and gender, where we talk about whether there are innate sex differences in language usage (not really), whether there are gender differences (yes, albeit highly context-dependent), blah blah blah. We talk about the myth that women talk more than men and get into some of the issues relating to social power. But that’s it. Even though it’s a topic a lot of students are interested in, I hadn’t ever come out of that session feeling as if we had learned anything in particular, or done anything out of the ordinary.

And then we found chairperson. It had ended up on the list of topics I was preparing on the subject, and when I showed the list to my class, they honed in on it right away. We actually started by investigating ‘chairman’, ‘chairwoman’, and ‘chair’, as well – all three are attested in the OED from the 17th century. ‘Chair’ as a title held by a person was surprisingly early (not just ‘he held the chair’ but ‘he was the chair’) at 1658. This alone, based on two minutes’ search of the OED, was worthwhile as a lesson to the students, because chair, too, has been the subject of some ideologically-charged metalanguage. I had thought that I might show them how we could examine the frequency of the various terms on a decade-by-decade basis. But chairperson, sitting there with its date of 1971, was far too tempting a target.

And so off we went on our lexical excursion. I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”

“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

Read the rest here.

Speaking of early history...

...I have recently been introduced to Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog: The outlandish, the anomalous and the curious from the last five thousand years.

It looks like it will be fun. If you're curious look at the latest post, World’s last Latin speakers in Africa?

Here is an excerpt:

Beachcombing guesses that the latest Latin speakers were those on the outskirts of the collapsing Empire, where there was the need to keep Latin ‘proper’, while these often bilingual invariably barbarian communities grasped onto their fading Roman identity as the world went soggy around them. As such the bilingual inscriptions of sixth- and seventh-century Wales (Irish-Latin) are interesting because the Latin there seems to show characteristics of a spoken language. And this at a date when the Romance languages were becoming increasingly unlatin-like.

For Beachcombing though an even more exciting reference appears in the work of Muhammad Al Idrisi in the mid twelfth century. Al Idrisi, an Andalusan Arab writer, wrote in A Diversion for the Man Longing to Travel to Far-Off Places – a work best known for carrying the earliest reference to Italian pasta – that the inhabitants of Gafsa in what is today Tunisia ‘are Berberised and the majority speak African Latin’. Could these have been the last Latin speakers in the world? It is a nice story, but Al Idrisi then gives the name of the town spring as tarmīd (a word still used today) that does not sound particularly Ciceronian…

Caveat lector!

"Let the reader beware!"

Jonathon Jarrett over at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe critiques a supposed breakthrough in our knowledge of the Pictish language. This excerpt explains why such a critique should be of interest to people who don't care much about Pictish, but might care about some other obscure, pre-modern historical problem:

Okay, here’s another thing I wanted to write up before I went to Kalamazoo. You may have seen, if you are following Archaeology in Europe as you all should be, that there was a recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A that apparently decodes the Pictish language or something similar. I confess to initial scepticism, not least because they inexplicably persist in using the term `Iron Age’ for a people only attested under the name ‘Picts’ from the Roman period onwards, and whose glory days are most definitely early medieval, but I am interested in the Picts, I am in favour of Science! in history and so I thought I’d better have a look. After all, I am developing a blog-tradition of critiquing scientific papers on matters historical, and I’d hate to pass up another opportunity. Now, if those instances have taught me anything, it is these things:

1. articles based on the press release usually massively exaggerate the impact, and indeed the intent, of the actual research;
2. the actual research is usually more interested in proving a method than in its applications, otherwise it would have been published in a historical forum not a scientific one; and,
3. it is unfortunately rare for the authors of that research to have read enough in the field to which they’re supposedly contributing to have an accurate sense of whether or not they really are.

And this particular case ticks all three boxes, which is to say it’s interesting, appears scientifically rigorous at first glance, but sadly isn’t going to add much to the historical or linguistic debates, even though the news coverage would have you believe it’s a revolution in the field.

Like I said, let the reader beware.

One of the problems with work done by "scientists" in historical fields is that they tend to think that one simple procedure or test will cut through all the problems that have puzzled scholars for decades or centuries. But scientific evidence is usually as incomplete as any other kind.

Image: The Pictish symbols.