languagehat.com

It’s always nice to discover a blogging linguist I hadn’t known about [actually I had; see below]; Danny L. Bate (“Linguist, broadcaster, writer, cat fanatic”) has been doing it since June 9, 2020 (I like the way his introductory post lays out “the standard practice among linguists,” so that laypeople can follow along: single quotes for translations, italics for words in a given language, etc.), and his latest post, Vltava, Sázava, Mumlava: A Mumble of Voices Almost Lost, does a nice job of linking local river names to the great sea of Indo-European:

The chief of the rivers that flow through Krkonoše is the Elbe; I’ve previously written about that prince of waterways in great detail. My most recent visit instead inspired linguistic reflections about a considerably less famous river: the Mumlava.

Etymologically, it’s the mumbler (in older German: mummeln; in Czech: mumlat). It by no means ranks among the great rivers of Europe; the Mumlava rises just to the south of the source of the Elbe, mumbles its way for twelve kilometres, then spills out into the Jizera. It wouldn’t be known at all beyond the wardens and fans of Krkonoše, were it not for the Mumlava Waterfall, the largest in the country. […] Given the region’s historical inhabitants, it seems to have been on the basis of the German verb mummeln that the Mumlava was first christened the Mummel. Czech speakers then modelled their own name for it on that German original. This they achieved by adding the ending -ava.

This Czechification of the name brought the Mumlava into line and rhyme with other rivers in the country; there’s the Sázava, the Jihlava, the Úhlava, the Otava, the Oskava, the Opava, the Morava and the Vltava. […] Their common -ava ending was bestowed on the Mumlava, a sort of hydronymic suffix to make it sound like a proper Czech river. The thing is, this ending is not part of Czech’s core of Slavic vocabulary – it’s not something the language has inherited from its prehistoric Slavic origins. Instead, naming rivers with -ava is a later practice that the Czechs-to-be extracted from names already in use when they first arrived in Bohemia and Moravia.

He goes on to describe how Germanic *ahwō ‘river’ “is behind the -ava part of the river’s name,” and how that probably derives from a Proto-Indo-European *akʷā. But “the door is also open to an instance of borrowing”:

This alternative explanation would envision a word, in a language local to central and southern Europe, that was adopted into the Indo-European family from outside. Such an external origin was considered by the scholar Robert S. P. Beekes, for one. In Beekes’ view, *akʷā belonged to the prehistoric language behind so many European river names. It acted as a ‘substratum’ that donated words to the ascendant Indo-European languages. Those words in time became all that remained of it.

I think he explains these things very well (while providing some lovely photos); thanks, Scopulus!

Herewith another Languagehat Poll combined with a Languagehat Gripe. I was reading the latest article about ibogaine, which may or may not be a wonder drug, when it occurred to me to wonder about the etymology and pronunciation. I had always mentally said /ˈaɪboˌgeɪn/ (EYE-bo-gain; I use /o/ because I don’t reduce it as far as /ə/), but I didn’t remember if I’d heard that somewhere or just invented it. So I looked around and discovered that the etymology was (per AHD):

[French ibogaïne, from New Latin (Tabernanthē) iboga, species name of shrub in whose root it is found, probably ultimately from Ghetsogho (Bantu language of Gabon) ibogha; akin to boghaga, to cure.]

So far so good, and it even had a derivation within Tsogo. But I was appalled to see that the pronunciation given was (ĭ-bō′gə-ēn′, -ĭn). Had I been flagrantly mispronouncing it for years? I checked OED: “/ɪˈbəʊɡəiːn/ ib-OH-guh-een.” And M-W? “i-ˈbō-gə-ˌēn.” It wasn’t looking good — I was going to have to retrain my brain. But then I thought “let me check video clips and make sure,” and lo and behold, every one of them, even those with experts speaking, used my untutored version, EYE-bogain. So now I was pissed: the dictionaries were conspiring to hoodwink their users and try to get them to use their fake pronunciation! I turn to the Varied Reader — if you are familiar with the word, how do you say it? And have you heard anyone say it the dictionary-approved (and very unnatural) way (ih-BOH-guh-een)?

I expect DE will have something to say about this:

Kye Kye Kule is a call-and-response song performed in several African countries. The actions of this song are reminiscent of the American song Head Shoulder Knees and Toes. […] I asked a friend of mine, Dr. Sunu Doe, about the origins of this song.  Dr. Doe is an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Ghana specializing in preserving pre-colonial Ghanaian culture through music and music education.  He says Kye Kye Kule is an authentic song that Ghanaian school children learn.

Depending on the source, both on the internet and in print, the song can be found by searching Che Che Koolay or Kye Kye Kule. According to Dr. Doe, the correct way to spell the title is with Ky instead of ch. Ch doesn’t exist in the languages of Twi or Ewe and was unsure about the Fanti language. 

The song is made of meaningless sounds, just as many American songs are. The song has no language, and the use of the name Kofi is thrown in to make it relatable to children. He said other variations of the song use other day names. He surmises that using Kofi could be an alteration of k k sounds…

Thanks, Craig!

Unrelated, but I have to share this delightful bit of Edwardian slang I recently ran across: knut /kəˈnʌt/ (archaic, informal, Edwardian) An idle upper-class man about town.

Oh Hades! the Ladies who leave their wooden huts,
For Gilbert the Filbert, the colonel of the knuts…

Colin Gorrie posts thus at Dead Language Society:

A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.

He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

A good idea, well executed. I admit I suspected a typo in the 1300 passage when I got to “His vois was as þe crying of rauenes, scharpe and schille” — should that last word be “schrille”? — but no, it turns out shrill didn’t enter English for another century or so: c1400 (?c1380) “Wyth a schrylle scharp schout þay schewe þyse worde.” The older word was in fact the OED’s shill ‘Sonorous, resonant, shrill.’ (That entry is from 1914, but the shrill one was revised in 2024, and its etymology section says “Probably an alteration of shill adj., with insertion of ‑r‑, perhaps as a result of association with shrike v. or shream v.”) In the same passage, “Swie!” is the good old Germanic verb ‘to be silent’ (German schweigen). At the end Gorrie explains what’s happened in the later (earlier) bits for those whose linguistic intuition failed them sometime around the fourteenth century. Thanks, Bathrobe!

OK, it’s not actually linguistics (just another dumb headline), but come on, “Super-salty pizza sends six kids to the hospital in Japan, linguistics blamed” (by Casey Baseel, SoraNews24) is a great story, and it does deal with Japanese:

Pizza, famously, is hard to screw up, so much so that “_____ is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good,” became shorthand for things in which acceptable quality is very easy to find. Here’s the thing about something that’s hard to screw up, though: When someone does somehow manage to screw it up, it’s probably going to be really, really bad. Case in point, a half-dozen teens in Japan recently sat down for some pizza, then ended up in the hospital from it. […]

The students had used a from-scratch recipe, with the task for some of the students being to make the dough for the pizza crusts. If you’ve never made pizza dough, you might be surprised to learn that salt is a crucial ingredient. […] The recipe the students were following called for three tsumami of salt. Tsumami is the noun form of the word tsumamu, which means to close the fingertips around something. In other words, “three tsumami” would mean “three pinches” of salt.

However, according to a statement from the Kitakyushu Board of Education following an investigation, the students in charge of making the dough weren’t familiar with the term tsumami, at least in this cooking context, and used a lot more. It’s unclear exactly how much salt they put into the dough, but they might have gotten confused by tsumami’s connection to tsumamigui, a combination of tsumami and an alternate pronunciation of kui/“eating.” Tsumamigui means to “nibble” on something, but by extension it’s also often used when talking about snacking on finger foods, where the image of using just the fingertips can sometimes get a little less ironclad.

With that in mind, it’s likely that the students in charge of making the dough took the recipe’s “three tsumami of salt” to mean not three pinches, but three handfuls, and so the dough contained an amount of salt several magnitudes larger than it was supposed to. Regardless of the exact nature of the misinterpretation, the six students who were hospitalized after eating the pizza were found by doctors to be suffering from symptoms caused by excessive sodium intake.

Thanks, Scopulus!

John Gallagher, the author of Learning Languages in Early Modern England, has a very informative LRB review (archived) of two books on the transmission of information in Early Modern Europe, Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura and The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren. Anyone interested in the topic should read the whole thing; I’ll excerpt a few bits, starting with the onomastic tidbit that inspired my post title:

The early modern postal system had its origins in medieval northern Italy, on the plains south of the Alps where couriers beetled between Milan and Venice, Verona and Mantua, and where guides could be hired to accompany the intrepid traveller or jaded merchant through Alpine passes. Political intrigue and commercial exigency fed the need for a reliable service. A letter might be marked with the words cito cito cito – ‘quickly quickly quickly’ – to spur on its carrier or adorned with a sketched hangman’s noose as a warning to anyone who threatened to delay or disrupt its progress. The speed with which mail came to traverse the region, and beyond, was due in large part to the work of the Tassis family, which began operating a company of couriers in the Italian city states around 1290. Later, as success brought ennoblement and they sought to distance themselves from their humble beginnings, the Tassis would be known as the House of Thurn und Taxis (which operated the Thurn-and-Taxis Post), but their roots were in the Valle Brembana, below the Alps and not far from the roads that linked Milan to Venice.

Readers of The Crying of Lot 49 are, of course, familiar with the Thurn-and-Taxis monopoly and the the post horn symbol that signifies it (we await silent Tristero’s empire); I was struck by the fact that Taxis was apparently a Latinization of the surname Tassis, but the Wikipedia article says the family name was Tasso and provides this dubious information:

When the Brussels line was raised to the hereditary status of counts in 1624, they needed illustrious lineage to legitimize their intended further ascension to the high nobility. Alexandrine von Taxis commissioned genealogists to “clarify” their origin, who until then had only been considered a family descending from medieval knights who had become merchants. They now claimed, albeit without documentary evidence, that they descended from the Italian noble family Della Torre, or Torriani, who had ruled in Milan and Lombardy until 1311. She then applied to the emperor for a name change. With the Germanization, the coat of arms symbol of the Milanese family, the tower (Torre), became Thurn (an older German spelling, nowadays Turm) and was placed in front of the actual family name Tasso, translated with Taxis (an older German spelling for Dachs = Badger). The tower of the Torriani was added to the badger as a coat of arms. They formally adopted the German form of their name in 1650, including the comital Innsbruck line, which also exists to this day.

How can Thurn be “an older German spelling” of Turm? And, even more pressingly, how can Taxis be “an older German spelling” of Dachs? Is this seventeenth-century nonsense or modern nonsense? At any rate, here’s a passage about the “postal wars”:
[Read more…]

Out of the blue I remembered a phrase my mother was fond of — she’d often say things like “He was holding it right in his hot little hands” — and it occurred to me that it must be an idiom she’d picked up somewhere, but where? What was its background? It wasn’t in Partridge, so I turned to the internet and turned up this bulletin board page, where we find:

It seems to turn up first in Victorian fiction. The earliest use of it that I’ve come across is in a short story called “Self-Control”, by Mrs Mary Jane Phillips, published in the December 1857 number of The Ladies’ Repository: ‘”Poor little fellow!” I murmured, and stooped to kiss his fevered cheek, but just then he threw his hot little hands upward, exclaiming, “O don’t, mamma, Feddy didn’t mean to!”‘. Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1863 very popular novel “Sylvia’s Lovers” has this: ‘Sylvia sate down on the edge of the trough, and dipped her hot little hand in the water’.

So it was first used seriously (and mawkishly) about actual feverish children, and of course was repurposed as a humorous reference to such uses. My mother, growing up in the 1920s, probably was unaware of the original Victorian examples, but her parents presumably knew them. I wonder if anyone still uses the phrase?

Mariona Miret interviews a remarkable man:

Fredo Valla has dedicated his life to defending the Occitan language and spreading its history. This year, 2024, he received the Robèrt Lafont Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya, a prize given to people or organizations that have distinguished themselves in the defense, projection and promotion of the Occitan language in any point of its linguistic territory. […] I had the pleasure of interviewing him at his home in Verzòl (Italy), with the late afternoon rays of light bathing the kitchen, while he acknowledged the many contradictions he has faced, with all its personal and collective implications, in order to tell the stories that no one else tells. But be mindful: even though our interview has a strongly Occitan focus, Fredo’s life has taken many turns and has tasted many flavours. Behind the Occitan man hides an extremely multifaceted person. Fredo Valla has been a blacksmith, a geologist, an interior architecture designer, a cultural journalist for the most important Italian newspapers, and a writer of popular books for children. […]

Originally from Sant Pèire (Val Varacha, Italy) and now settled in Verzòl (Piedmont), Fredo Valla has developed throughout his cinema career a line of work marked by the commitment to culture and to personal roots, often in relation to the mountains that have seen him grow, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, or Valadas Occitanas (original Occitan term). Since the 90s, Valla has been a film screenwriter and documentary director, with a detailed approach which strives to be faithful to historical and cultural reality. […] In his latest major work, Bogre (2020), Valla and his team embark on a road trip through Bulgaria, Occitania, Italy and Bosnia to reconstruct the relationship between the Bogomils and the Cathars, the two great heresies that spread across Europe during the Middle Ages.

You can find Fredo Valla’s entire filmography and extensive biography on the website fredovalla.it. The film Bogre is available for streaming and subtitled in English and many other languages at chambradoc.vhx.tv/products.

[Read more…]

Paul Lukas’s H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery will be of interest to anyone with even a casual interest in typefaces; it’s well-written, suspenseful, and amusing. I got to it via chavenet’s MeFi post, which attracted plenty of good comments, including one linking to a handy comparison showing the (very few) differences between Arial and Helvetica. And the Lukas post introduced me to a word I didn’t know (or, he added cautiously, had forgotten): gunite, “A form of shotcrete in which a dry cementitious mixture is blown through a hose to the nozzle, with water injected only at the point of application.” Both Wiktionary and the OED have the obvious etymology (gun +‎ -ite), but only the former adds the crucial information “originally a trademark from 1909.” The OED (entry revised 2024) defines it more wordily and more informatively:

A form of sprayed concrete in which a dry mixture of cement and sand is forced at high pressure through a hose, water being added as it passes through a nozzle at the end of the hose, allowing the resulting concrete to be applied at high velocity to surfaces for which poured concrete cannot easily be used. Frequently as a modifier, designating equipment used in the application of gunite, or something made or constructed using gunite, as in gunite hose, gunite pool, etc. Cf. shotcrete n.

The first citation:

1912 Sealing rock with gunite to stop disintegration at Panama.
Scientific American 27 January 44/2 (caption)

I can’t say I particularly like it, but it’s a short, memorable word, clearly fit for purpose.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a Big List entry on a word that was unfamiliar to me; it begins:

Literally, laneway (lane + way) is a redundant term, and one that is unfamiliar to most Americans. It is found in Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. Originally simply meaning a road, the word in Canadian usage has narrowed to mean an urban back alley.

Today, laneway is chiefly found in Canada, but older instances of the term are found chiefly in Ireland. The oldest example I’ve been able to find, however, is in England’s Lancaster Gazette of 11 May 1822 in a notice of a property sale that describes the bounds of the property: […]

We see the distinctly Canadian sense of an urban back alley in the early twentieth century. From the Toronto Daily Star of 5 June 1911:

The light necessary to the tenants of the offices on the east side of the Traders Bank building is supplied from windows looking out over a narrow laneway and across the roof of the Nordheimer building.

And there is this from the 2 November 1923 issue of the same paper that makes the distinction between a laneway and a street clear:

Juryman: “Do you know if this is a laneway or a street?”

Mr Murphy: “It is a laneway, and has not been opened as a street. Application has been made.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century we get the Canadianism of laneway house or laneway dwelling, referring to a small house built on a laneway behind an existing house. The term is especially prevalent in Toronto and Vancouver.

There’s a fair amount of additional material on Canadian developments; as always in cases such as this, I’m struck by my complete ignorance of a term in common use across the border. Are you familiar with it?