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I was reading along in Colin Thubron’s NYRB review (archived) of four novels by Kapka Kassabova when I got to this passage:

A gleam of such idealism—and an ingrained restlessness—led the poet and narrative writer Kapka Kassabova to join some of the last migratory pastoralists in Europe on their seasonal ascent to the high pastures in the Pirin Mountains of her native Bulgaria. This was not an epic migration like that of Iran’s Bakhtiari people, for instance, some of whom still trek with their goats and high-packed mules between the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf, but a near-solitary journey with a wayward flock of sheep to rocky uplands and a spartan hut.

She was entering a world of old transhumance, of annual migration, for this was the traditional terrain of the nomadic Karakachans, whose lives were grounded only in the last century. Their unseen presence haunts Kassabova’s latest book, Anima: A Wild Pastoral. Most widely studied in Greece, where their elusiveness—they avoided human habitation and often traveled by night—provoked both curiosity and unease, the Karakachans still inhabit mountainous regions in Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania, but their origins are unknown. They perhaps descend from prehistoric Thracian-Illyrian peoples, who were early Hellenized. Their traditions were austerely patriarchal. Elaborately sashed and kilted, they trekked under huge goat-hair capes so coarse and stiff, one traveler wrote, that a man could almost step out and leave it standing like a sentry box. Their spoken Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time, to the excitement of anthropologists, and the geometric patterns of their textiles are teasingly reminiscent of those on preclassical Greek vases.

Who were these Karakachans? If you put it into the Wikipedia search box, it redirects to Sarakatsani, and that name was familiar; the Wikipedia article says:

The most widely accepted theory for the origin of the name “Sarakatsani” is that it comes from the Turkish word karakaçan (from kara = ‘black’ and kaçan = ‘fugitive’), used by the Ottomans, in reference to those people who dressed in black and fled to the mountains during the Ottoman rule. According to other theories, the name could stem from the village of Sakaretsi (the supposed homeland of the Sarakatsani), or from the village of Syrrako.

That’s a lot of hypotheses; Sarakatsani and karakaçan are certainly strikingly similar, but it’s not clear why the k- would have become s-. The OED’s entry for Sarakatsan is from 1993, but the etymology says only “< modern Greek Σαρακατσάνοι the Sarakatsans.” They do not have an entry for Karakachan, and frankly I think it’s unhelpful to use that term in English. As for “Their spoken Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time”: I don’t doubt it, since all of Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time. I guess this is one of those folk-linguistic things like “Appalachian English is full of words from Shakespeare’s time” or whatever.

I’ve long known the term “friends with benefits” — in the words of Wikipedia, “A friends with benefits relationship […] is a sexual arrangement between friends that involves recurrent physical intimacy and varies in its formation, outcomes, and attributes.” But it never occurred to me to wonder how it arose; now I’ve had this section of the Wikipedia article pointed out to me:

Terminology

Some researchers assign the origin of the term “friends with benefits” earliest known usage to Alanis Morissette’s 1995 song “Head over Feet” in the lyrics, “You’re my best friend, Best friend with benefits.”[1] However, others primarily believe it to have originated from the 2011 film known as Friends with Benefits.[1]

That footnote goes to “Have a Friend with Benefits, Whom off and on I See.” Friends with Benefits Relationships, but it’s behind a Springer paywall; in any case, I wouldn’t trust a chapter in the International Handbook of Love to do adequate philological investigation. A Google Books search has turned up a bunch of bad metadata. So I turn to the assembled Hattery: anybody know anything of the phrase’s history? Thanks and a tip of the Languagehat hat to James!

Chris Fitzpatrick reports for ABC Alice Springs on a cheering initiative:

In March, four-year-old Zoday Bearpaw stood before a crowd at a language forum in Alice Springs and told a story in the Native American Yuchi language. “The rabbit went back inside the bag and rolled down the hill. The turkeys wanted to try that too,” he said. It sounds like a simple folktale, but for the Yuchi tribe of Oklahoma, USA, it marked something far more significant. Zoday is among the first new generation in 100 years to speak Yuchi as a first language.

That moment unfolded in Alice Springs, on Arrernte Country, where Yuchi families who had travelled to from Oklahoma to meet with the Pertame people — one of the First Nations groups whose country lies south of the town.

Samantha Armstrong, a Pertame language worker and coordinator of the Pertame school, was in the crowd that day. Despite the distance between them, the Yuchi and Pertame people have discovered deep common ground in saving their languages. “We have less than 31 language speakers of Pertame that grew up only speaking Pertame as their first language — they’re mostly grandparents or great-grandparents,” Ms Armstrong said.

Zoday’s parents, Micha and Keland Bearpaw, are among those leading the revival, raising their children to speak Yuchi as a first language. “We dropped down to one speaker … and from her, we’ve been able to create at least 40 to 60 speakers now,” Yuchi man Keland Bearpaw said. […]

Despite being oceans apart, the Yuchi and Pertame are walking parallel paths — reviving their languages not through institutions, but by raising children to speak, live and dream in their mother tongue. The connection between the Pertame and Yuchi people began in 2019, when Pertame woman Vanessa Fairly and her grandmother, Kathy Bradshaw, attended a UN Indigenous Language workshop in New York. It was organised by Richard Grounds, a Yuchi elder and inventor of the Yuchi’s written language. There, they learned about the Yuchi immersion methods and their shared struggle in saving their languages, sparking a friendship that’s continued across years and continents.

More at the link, including photos. (Yuchi, by the way, is a language isolate; Pertame is Arandic.) I think it’s great that representatives of struggling languages are banding together; we unpowerful folk need to help one another.

Craig wrote me via e-mail (I’ve added links):

Family of mine are going fruit picking today at a local orchard/golf course where they can pick honeyberries, a fruit we had never heard of. The plant Lonicera caerulea is a “non-climbing honeysuckle native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere regions of North America, Europe, and Asia.” (WP)

Its other name “haskap” comes from Ainu. Per Wiktionary, its etymology is “ハㇱ (has) +‎ カ (ka) +‎ オㇷ゚ (op), meaning ‘something that grows abundantly on branches'”. [Ainu is written in modified katakana.] While カ (ka) and‎ オㇷ゚ (op) have entries in Wiktionary as “on” and “spear”, ハㇱ (has) has no entry, making it difficult to judge the rather florid “something that grows abundantly”.

John Batchelor’s 1905 “An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language)” has ハシ (hash) alone and in compounds meaning “scrubwood” or “shrubs” as well as ハツ (hat) meaning “grapes” [all on p. 138].

If any commenters know anything more about the language, I am curious how the etymology actually plays out. One thing is clear: too many websites selling the berry propound a cringeworthy exoticized false etymology of a “berry of long life and good vision” in Japanese!

An interesting question; I know almost nothing about Ainu and would like to hear more about it.

I’ve been on a Jacques Rivette kick recently — he’s one of those directors of whom I can say he’s a favorite only with the important proviso that when his movies are to my taste I like them a lot, but when they’re not (e.g., 1976’s Noroît) I have no desire to see them again. (Contrast with Godard, whose movies I’m eternally interested in experiencing even when I don’t like them very much.) So far my favorites are Paris nous appartient (1961, his first), L’Amour fou (1969), and Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974); I’m likely to add Le Pont du Nord (1981) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991) to the list, but I’ve only seen them once each and can’t be sure. I’m currently watching La Bande des quatre (1989), and I think it too will wind up on the approved list, since it’s got the kind of lively acting and productive life/theater interaction that make his movies work. But I keep having to pause to investigate things vital to appreciating the movie, like Marivaux’s La double inconstance, the play the student actresses in the movie are studying/rehearsing, and just now I had to look up “La prière d’Esther” from Racine’s play Esther (used as an audition piece by a prospective student) and found myself at this page, which is very helpful in explicating the passage. But I ran into a stumbling block here (bold added):

L’alexandrin a des césures qu’il faut faire apparaître : la césure lyrique après « perfide », qui met en valeur l’argument adversatif (après tant de miracles) qui suit, l’arrêt après « anéantir » qui (outre sa rime avec le perfide du vers au-dessus) permet de bien faire apparaître l’importance du cod « la foi de tes oracles » ; et après « aux mortels » : même chose , mise en valeur du complément, la venue du Messie promise, le messie défini par les deux relatives : une promesse et une attente.

What was this “cod” that was so important? It doesn’t even look like a French word! But I let it go for the moment and continued reading, soon getting to this:

Les deux derniers vers sont très beaux avec l’antithèse vains ornements / cendre, le parallélisme « je préfère/ n’ai de goût » et le chiasme : « A ces vains ornements » en tête avant son verbe et « aux pleurs» après son verbe (mais les deux cod se retrouvent chacun à l’hémistiche et ne s’en opposent que mieux), avec la succession de monosyllabes du dernier vers : une pauvreté un dénuement, qui s’oppose aux « ornements » qui en fait sont la réelle pauvreté (« vains ») , les allitérations (G/K) et enfin ce « que tu me vois » : Esther prend Dieu à témoin de sa contrition.

There it was again, and this time the plural turned out to be cod! What was going on? Some googling took me here: “Qu’est-ce qu’un COD ? Complément d’objet direct : Un complément d’objet direct est un mot ou groupe de mots qui vient compléter l’action du sujet dans une phrase.” It would have been helpful if the author of the Esther’s-prayer page (which could use proofreading, e.g. “à al familiarité”) had used capital letters to make it clear it was an acronym, but at least I now knew it was a direct object, and now so do you. But my question for French speakers is this: would you know automatically what was meant by “l’importance du cod,” or would you have had to look it up? And (while I’m at it) do you pronounce it like code or say the letters separately?

David Farrier’s Guardian piece on AI and animal communication is a classic thumb-sucker — take some half-understood and poorly digested scientific news and mix it with wild speculation ad libitum — but the idea at its center is of some interest:

The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.

Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.

The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals’ interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another’s native vocabulary.

The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic “conversation” with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as “whup/throp” with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U.

It goes on to reference the impressively mustachioed Jakob Johann von Uexküll and his notion of Umwelt; does anyone know the derivation of his surname? At any rate, I suspect that, as usual, whatever sounds exciting is wrong or misunderstood, and whatever is accurate is not that interesting (I can well believe that scientists exchanged “whup/throp” with a whale for twenty minutes; did the whale get bored, or did they?). I’m quite sure none of these animals use anything comparable to human language. But still, if the complex calls can be analyzed in any fruitful way, well, that’s a result. Thanks, Trevor!

My wife asked me why the surname Patel was so common; of course I hit Wikipedia, which told me:

Patel is an Indian surname or title, predominantly found in the state of Gujarat, representing the community of land-owning farmers and later (with the British East India Company) businessmen, agriculturalists and merchants. Traditionally the title is a status name referring to the village chieftains during medieval times, and was later retained as successive generations stemmed out into communities of landowners. Circa 2015 there are roughly 500,000 Patels outside India, including about 150,000 in the United Kingdom and about 150,000 in the United States. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, nearly 1 in 10 people of Indian origin in the US is a Patel.

The etymology is interesting: “The Gujarati term paṭel, along with its cognate Marathi terms pāṭel and pāṭīl, are derived from the Prakrit word paṭṭaïl(l)a- ‘village headman’, itself derived from the Sanskrit word paṭṭakila ‘tenant of royal land’, a term first appearing in the Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā.” But I confess what made me unable to resist posting it was the final sentence of the article:

With those who immigrated to Germany during British colonial rule in India, Gujaratis used the variation “Pätel”, with an umlaut, to better integrate with German society.

1) Rivka Galchen’s New Yorker article (archived) on pain and attempts to control it is well worth your while, but it shows up at LH because of a word in its first sentence: “Pain might flicker, flash, prickle, drill, lancinate, pinch, cramp, tug, scald, sear, or itch.” Lancinate! I don’t remember seeing it before, but I like it; it sounds like a word that means what it means, which is (in the words of M-W) ‘pierce, stab, lacerate.’ It’s from “Latin lancinatus, past participle of lancinare to lacerate; akin to lacer mangled.” The OED (entry from 1901) has these citations:

1603 Blacke hel-mettal..to excoriat and lancinate a deuil.
S. Harsnett, Declaration of Popish Impostures 91

1623 Lancinate, to thrust through.
H. Cockeram, English Dictionarie

1876 How had she lancinated the wound, already, as she could see, quick and bleeding!
Overmatched vol. I. vii. 117

Once again I have to chide the OED for leaving the author of a novel unmentioned; in this case there’s some excuse for it, since Overmatched was published anonymously, but with the aid of the internet it’s the work of an instant to discover it’s by Herman Ludolph Prior. If they didn’t know that in 1901, couldn’t they have at least said it was by Anonymous?

2) I recently ran across the word esemplastic and realized I’d seen it off and on throughout my life and could never remember its meaning, so I’m posting it in the hope that that will fix it in my mind. M-W defines it as “shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole” and adds this note:
[Read more…]

Adam Rogers writes for Alta (archived) about a subject some think doesn’t exist:

Penelope Eckert was, like, mad? A now-retired sociolinguist at Stanford University, Eckert studied accents and how they change—particularly the accents of California. This was around 2010, and what was gnawing at her was that a bunch of influential East Coast linguists were insisting that there was in fact no such thing as a “California dialect.” However Californians might fold and squish their vowel sounds was actually—you know, I almost can’t bear to say this—Canadian.

That’s right. The judgment of the East was that if Californians had an accent at all, it was a minor variant of a whole other country. Eckert’s team of linguists wasn’t having it. “We were getting pretty pissed off,” she tells me. Eckert had been researching accents in San Jose and was toh-duhlly sure that she was seeing something unique.

But they needed proof. The scant research that existed on cities like San Francisco wasn’t enough, and it didn’t really answer whether San Franciscans sounded different from Angelenos—much less people from anywhere else. “We thought, Well, if we don’t do it, no one will,” Eckert says.

That realization turned into a project called Voices of California and nearly a decade of fieldwork. Eckert and a dozen graduate students trooped out to Central California—Merced, to be precise—and, eventually, Redding, Humboldt, Sacramento, Shasta, and so on. They’d ensconce themselves in each city for a couple of weeks, interviewing everyone they could, canvassing the local historical association, the library, and museums for volunteers. “Mostly we would just go downtown, walk into stores, and ask people if they’d be willing to participate,” Eckert says. “We’d go to malls and harass people.”

[Read more…]

I’ve been investigating Zamyatin’s early novels (or novellas, if you prefer), and right now I’m reading his 1914 На куличках [The back of beyond], translated by Walker Foard as A Godforsaken Hole (Ardis, 1988), in which Andrei Ivanych Polovets escapes the provincial tedium of Tambov to serve as an officer in a Pacific port (apparently Vladivostok, since Ланцепупы gets a mention), where he encounters drunkenness and debauchery; its publication resulted in judicial proceedings against Zamyatin for antimilitarism. What spurs me to post is a perfect example of something that’s impossible to translate unless you have the appropriate literary/cultural, not just linguistic, background. Here’s the passage (from ch. 9):

Впрочем, протрезвившись, Тихмень костил себя олухом и карасем с неменьшим рвением, чем своих ближних, и исполнялся еще большею ненавистью к той субстанции, что играет такие шутки с людьми, и что люди легкомысленно величают индейкой.

Год тому назад… да, это так: уже почти год прошел с того дня, как ироническая индейка так подло посмеялась над Тихменем.

I decided to check out Foard’s translation because I had a strong suspicion that he’d get it wrong, and sure enough:

However, after sobering up, Tikhmen would curse himself as an idiot and a sucker with no less fervor than he had his neighbors, and he infused himself with still more hatred for that substance that plays such games with people and that they so flippantly nickname “spirits.”

A year ago … yes, that’s right: it’s already been almost a year to the day since those ironic “spirits” had so cruelly made fun of Tikhmen.

Rendering карась, literally ‘crucian carp (Carassius carassius),’ as “sucker” is OK (it has a number of slang senses, and that works for several of them), but “spirits” is flat wrong. The word индейка means ‘turkey,’ which clearly made no sense to Foard; he made the reasonable guess from context that it had to do with booze and rendered it “spirits.” What he didn’t know is that Russians have, for unknown reasons and for at least two centuries (it occurs in Gogol’s The Inspector General [Не судьба, батюшка, судьба — индейка] and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time [Пусть теперь решат философы: или судьба индейка, или человек индюк]), said that fate is a turkey: судьба — индейка. With this in mind, we see that what Tikhmen hates is fate, and what comes to my mind as a possible English equivalent is the fickle finger of fate, which was made famous by the 1966 Broadway musical Sweet Charity but which preexisted it — Eric Partridge in his useful if unreliable Dictionary of Catch Phrases (Google Books) dates “fucked by the fickle finger of fate” (“often in the shortened or allusive form the fickle finger of fate”) to c. 1930, “Adopted in UK by 1960 at latest.” So I would propose “and he was filled with even greater hatred for that substance that plays such tricks on people, and to which people frivolously attribute a fickle finger.” You could then render the second occurrence as “It’s been almost a year since the day when Tikhmen got so meanly fucked by the ironic fickle finger,” but that might be a tad too strong for Zamyatin.