Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!
We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: Linguistics! I say potato, you say dirt apple. It's time to celebrate all things linguistics. Know a cool story about that time someone misread or misheard a key word or term? Know an interesting detail about overlap between languages or words? Or, do you just want to share cool stuff about language? Unstuck your fingers and spill those wordy secrets!
With a theme like this, I could easily have a field day today. And maybe I will later. But for now, in light of recent political events, I feel compelled to reshare my piece about Láadan, the female-centric language created for Native Tongue, a series of books by Suzette Haden Elgin in the 1980s (and it’s a book about linguists—another tie-in to the theme!)
The books (which I frequently see compared to The Handmaid’s Tale) take place several hundred years in the future, in a society where most women's rights have been repealed and they have little purpose in life beyond catering to men's needs, though some are raised to be linguists and interstellar translators; secretly, though, a group of these women build a female-centric language called Láadan to help them escape their oppression. Elgin explains the philosophy behind such a language:
I saw two major problems -- for women -- with English and its close linguistic relatives. (1) Those languages lacked vocabulary for many things that are extremely important to women, making it cumbersome and inconvenient to talk about them. (2) They lacked ways to express emotional information conveniently, so that -- especially in English -- much of that information had to be carried by body language and was almost entirely missing from written language. This characteristic (which makes English so well suited for business) left women vulnerable to hostile language followed by the ancient "But all I said was...." excuse; and it restricted women to the largely useless "It wasn't what you said, it was the way you said it!" defense against such hostility. In constructing Láadan, I focused on giving it features intended to repair those two deficiencies.
You can learn about the rules of Láadan here to see how it actually rectifies those problems. Our good friend Arika Okrent points out that sometimes it's simply having a more robust vocabulary to frame female anatomical experiences, while "Other words cover a range of situations that could conceivably be experienced by men, but are nonetheless designed to make you want to nod your head and go, 'Uh-huh. Tell it, sister." Such vocabulary includes áazh ("love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now"), rathóo ("nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty"), and perhaps most famously, ásháana, "to menstruate joyfully." […]
But Elgin’s goal with the language wasn’t simply to create a language for her fictional characters. Láadan was part of an experiment, which hypothesized that if exposed to the idea and given the opportunity, real-life women would latch onto a language centered around a female perspective and use it in the real world, or instead develop an even better one.
Some other Láadan words coming to mind today include:
I've written about Stalin's knowledge of languages before, but will re-post it again here:
Stalin indeed was noted for his Georgian-accented Russian, as he was ethnically Georgian and grew up in Georgia. His initial writings were also exclusively Georgian, and he didn't switch to Russian until 1907, in part because his Georgian features made him stand out amongst the Bolsheviks, which while beneficial at times (it was a factor in him becoming the authority on nationality policy), he wanted to fit in more, and Russian would have a far wider audience than Georgian.
And for what it's worth, Stephen Kotkin's Stalin, Volume 1: Paradox of Power, 1878-1928 (2014) provides some information on the languages of Stalin, which I'll quote here (p. 10):
...Georgia was a diverse land and the future Stalin picked up colloquial Armenian. He also dabbled in Esperanto (the constructed internationalist language), studied but never mastered German (the native tongue of the left), and tackled Plato in Greek. Above all, he became fluent in the imperial language: Russian.
Donald Rayfield, also wrote on Stalin’s language abilities in his 2005 book Stalin and his Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him (p. 22):
All that hampered Stalin were his linguistic limitations: only in Georgian and Russian could he cope without a dictionary. Yet here too Stalin was underestimated by his opponents. In the seminary he had learned a lot of Greek (visitors were amazed to find Stalin in his Kemlin office perusing Plato on the original) and afterward a little French and German. For a while, in Siberian exile, he even toyed with Esperanto. Stalin’s interest in Marxism and his first prolonged stay in Berlin impelled him to struggle with German periodicals.
People wrote to Stalin not only in Russian and Georgian, but also, from Baku, in Azeri Turkish (then written in Arabic script). When on the run from the police, Stalin sometimes went under the name Zakhariants or Melikiants; either would have been foolish without a smattering of colloquial Armenian. In 1926 during the British General Strike, and afterward, Stalin perused the British press. His letters to his wife from Sochi express annoyance at her forgetting to send him his copy of A Model Complete Teach-Yourself English Course. In languages, as many other subjects, Stalin’s tactics were to conceal, not display, his knowledge.
Now for some context on the above:
Armenians were the dominant people in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and ran the business interests of the city, and of Georgia as a whole. As Stalin worked (albeit briefly) in a shoe factory (owned by Armenians, like nearly all factories), it is not surprising he picked that up.
Esperanto: This is the first I heard he knew any of that, but its not surprising, considering the purpose of the language (a common language for people) and its interactions with leftist movements.
German is expected, both because of the association with Marx, but also because Stalin lived in Vienna for some time, and dealt with German Marxists frequently.
Learning Greek at a religious seminary should not be surprising, especially when it was a Georgian Orthodox seminary. While the Georgian church uses Georgian in their services, the historic ties of Orthodoxy and Greece (and the Greek language), are strong enough. It would be analogous to learning Latin in a Catholic seminary. There was also a significant Greek minority in parts of Georgia, and while their numbers have decreased substantially since then, they still exist there today. Considering Stalin's frequent travels across Georgia and his mingling with the people in the country, and his reading habits (he would read hundreds of pages a day at times, especially history), again it is not unexpected.
Azerbaijan borders Georgia, and at the turn of the century many ethnic Azeris (especially from northern Persia) went to Baku to work as labourers in the oil fields. They were prime targets for Bolshevik propaganda, and with Stalin spending time in Baku it would be a fair assumption to expect him to learn some of the language. Rayfield also notes that it was written in Arabic script at this time: Azerbaijani was given a Latin-based script in 1929, which was replaced by Cyrillic in 1938. After regaining independence in 1991 Azerbaijan again adopted a Latin script for its language.
English was starting to become an international language at this time, and as Rayfield notes Stalin took active efforts to learn it.
Russian was obviously the language of governance and the Bolshevik movement as a whole. I don't think this needs to be explained.
To try and answer the question now, it is important to note that at his conferences with Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War (and at his meetings with their ministers in Moscow throughout), Stalin always relied on a translator, and never spoke English with them. Whether this means Stalin didn’t understand English, or preferred to rely on a translator, is thus difficult to say with any certainty, though based on Rayfield’s statement I’d be inclined to lean towards no, Stalin did not speak English well (I will also note that Rayfield is a former professor of Russian and Georgian, so I would trust his analysis on language abilities).
This is not unusual either, and has a parallel today: Vladimir Putin is well-known for being fluent in German (he worked in East Germany for the KGB during the 1980s), and is apparently conversational in English, but always uses a translator when dealing with foreign leaders. This is more interesting because Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, grew up in East Germany and is herself fluent in Russian. So both Putin and Merkel can speak to each other in two languages, but use translators.
The Russian word фонарь (fonar') meaning lantern, comes from the greek Φανάρι (Phanari) which is in fact, itself from the turkish Fener. Fener being a district in Turkey. What I like about this is that the russian word for lantern, comes from the fact that Fener was so called due to the huge tower that stood there during the Byzantine period and that lit up the district. Isn't it beautiful? Short fact, but I like it)
Just wanted to share one of my favorite untranslatables: mamihlapinatapai. It's from the indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego, Yaghan (or Yamana). It held the Guinness World Record for "most succinct word" in the 1994 edition of the book, and Yaghan became extinct this year when the last fluent speaker died in February.
It is a meaningful silence between two people; a private moment that defies words. Almost like telepathy. That moment where words are insufficient but you are still present with each other. You share a look, and everything passes between you.
That can be a romantic definition, and it can be used in that sense, but to me, it's just two people sharing a wordless, yet meaningful, moment.
I first came across this wonderful word in Christopher J. Moore's book In Other Words: A Language Lover's Guide to the Most Intruiging Words Around the World -
You know when mamihlapinatapei has just happened. It is that look across the table or the room when two people are sharing a private and unspoken moment. When each knows the other understands and is in agreement with what is being expressed. It may be a romantic moment but equally can be a moment of humor or forgiveness. A delightfully untranslatable word to describe an expressive and meaningful silence.
In doing some further digging, I found these further definitions:
Victor Vargas Filgueira, a Yaghan guide at the Museo del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina - “It is the moment of meditation around the pusakí [fire in Yaghan] when the grandparents transmit their stories to the young people. It’s that instant in which everyone is quiet.”
Thomas Bridges, British missionary and linguist who set up a mission in Ushuaia in the 1860s and compiled a Yaghan-English dictionary - "To look at each other, hoping that either will offer to do something, which both parties much desire done but are unwilling to do." The word itself doesn't appear in Bridges' dictionary, though - he died while working on the 3rd edition.
Yoram Meroz, a Descriptive Linguist who has studied the Yaghan language:
Bridges’ dictionary records ihlapi, ‘awkward’, from which one could derive ihlapi-na, ‘to feel awkward’; ihlapi-na-ta, ‘to cause to feel awkward’; and mam-ihlapi-na-ta-pai, something like ‘to make each other feel awkward’ in a literal translation. [Bridges’ translation] is more of an idiomatic or free translation.
(...)
It could be that he heard the word once or twice in that particular context, and that’s how he wrote it, because he wasn’t aware of its more general meaning. Or that it was only used in this more specific meaning that he quotes,” Meroz explained. “Bridges knew Yahgan better than any European before or since. However, he was sometimes prone to exoticising the language, and to being very verbose in his translations.
However you translate it, mamihlapinatapai is a beautiful word for beautiful moments.
Further Reading:
Mamihlapinatapai: A lost language's untranslatable legacy
Why & when does sociolinguistics have a different definition of positive/negative reinforcement/punishment than psychology and neuroscience?
I took a course in linguistics last year and got this impression, and the instructor wasn’t able to help resolve this for me. My understanding of the psychology & neuroscience definition is that punishment = something the subject doesn’t want / reward = something they do want / positive = introducing/giving it / negative = withholding/taking it away.
However my understanding is that in sociolinguistics there isn’t the same distinction. There doesn’t seem to be the punishment/reward dichotomy, and is somewhat replaced by the positive/negative dichotomy.
Is this true? If so, when and why did it occur?
Apologies for formatting and grammar/phrasing, on mobile and English isn’t my native language. Any thoughts or further reading would be hugely appreciated!
Is it a coincidence that the Latin word for an apple tree (malus) is so similar to the word for bad? Did Romans hate apples for some reason?
Alright, looks like I don't have any new stories to tell today. But my flair is based around linguistics, so here are some of my favorite older answers about languages (check my profile for more).
But sometimes you don't have to turn to another language, and instead just turn
onto your own. […] While Esperanto as a language movement was not officially aligned with any nations or political affiliations, the fact that plenty of Esperantists used it to spread leftist ideals and/or dreamed it would bridge people of the world with some sort of international (or anational) harmony made it pretty antithetical to to Nazi goals. While German Esperantists faced all sorts of verbal and physical harassment and abuse, they weren't persecuted until 1933 when Hitler took over and the German Labor Esperanto Association was outlawed.
What kind of language was the first language?
In 1994, Bengston and Ruhlen published the essay "Global Etymologies" in Ruhlen's book On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy, which essentially tried to prove that, just as you can prove individual languages are related and part of the same family, those same principles can be used to prove that families can be related; so to say, if you stretch back far enough, you can find something that links the Indo-European language family with the Austronesian language family, the Japonic family, the Afro-Asiatic family, the Sino-Tibetan family, the Na-Dene family (a family of Native American languages), the Nilo-Saharan family, the Khoisan family (southern Africa), and a couple dozen others. […] At this hour, I'm struggling to find much on the subject in general, but from what I do find, I'm finding more criticism than support for Ruhlin and friends.
From the 17th century through to the 20th century, a whole bunch of International Auxiliary Languages or “auxlangs” were proposed for this purpose, all with very creative and unique names like… er… Langue Universelle, Lingua Universalis, Lengua Universal y Filosofica, and Langue Universelle (didn’t we do that already?). Okay, there had to be some variety, because we also had… uh… Universalglot, Panglottie, Panglossie, Mondlingvo, and Monopanglosse. Alright, there were some actual unique names, like Ro, Zilengo, and Visona. Much of them took a similar approach to the rest: incorporate vocabulary and grammar elements from a bunch of languages to create a new one, which would have few barriers to entry for new learners, but would still be familiar based on the languages they already know.
Despite all this effort, most of these proposals never took off. As Munroe’s Law of Competing Standards demonstrates, when everybody is trying to produce the thing that everyone would use, all you’re getting is a whole bunch of alternatives with none being the default that it’s intended to be. That is hardly the undoing of Babel that these conlangers wanted.
[F]or the most part, conlangs weren’t reaching the mainstream, so we don’t see this seep into pre-1900 fiction. Those authors took a different tactic, using created languages instead. Ria Cheyne points out several methods that authors use to establish a created language without fully constructing one, such as including a small glossary, describing the language or explaining certain characteristics, or just having some way of translating the language after establishing that the characters aren’t speaking a natural language. As Okrent explains in a separate piece, “Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.”
For years I argued (like a dirty prescriptivist) that people were using it wrong when they described a single image as a meme, but eventually I accepted that while they were wrong at first, the wrong definition became an accepted one as the word evolved in meaning. I feel nothing quite captures this phenomenon quite as well as the experience of reading in 2021 (or 2017, as I initially did) this sentence from Kenneth Pimple's essay, written in 1996:
For thousands of years now, human beings have survived because we have good genes and good memes; we could not have survived without our memes.
In the context it was written, it makes perfect sense, but it is so hard to take seriously now.