Language Log

In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:

Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs person one that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult….

Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced."

What comes next should be utterly predictable to Language Log readers.

I don't know about the languages that Montaigne was thinking of, but the claim that some languages lack a word for lying is one that has continued to crop up. A few months ago Steven Point, who is currently the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, asserted that there is no word for "lying" in his language, Halkomelem. It appears, however, that he is mistaken: my sources say that in his language smétnqən means "to lie, speak falsely" and that q̓íq̓əl̓stéxʷ means "to lie, deceive".

An earlier example of the same theme is due to no other than John Wayne, who in the classic western Hondo asserts that "The Apaches have no word for 'lie'." That is sort of true: the Western Apache dictionary that I own lists not one but two different expressions for lying. There is a verb meaning specifically "to lie", e.g. ɬeíɬchoo "he lies", as well as an expression meaning "to lie, deceive", e.g. bich'ii' nashch'aa "I lie to him".

It may well be true that these cultures have a particularly negative view of lying, but tall tales about the lack of a word for it aren't a good way of making this point.

As we've recently seen, people love the idea that a culture is revealed by its lexicon. The earliest example of this trope that I can think of is in Michel de Montaigne's 1580 essay "Of Cannibals". This is one of the founding documents of the "noble savage" tradition, and presents the alleged lack of certain words for certain bad things as evidence of the essential goodness of humanity in the state of nature:

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them: for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary republic short of his perfection? [emphasis added]

I'd be curious to know whether it's now possible to determine which New World language (or language-family) the "cannibal" that Montaigne interviewed in Rouen in 1562 spoke, so that the truth of his assertions about the lack (for example) of a word for lying could be checked. [Update: it was Tupinambá.] I'd lay my money against him, if there were any chance to settle the bet one way or the other.

Mark has just supplied new Language Log readers with a reference archive of Language Log posts about languages with lots of words for certain things, and languages with no words for certain things. It is a theme that intrigues ordinary folk; it almost mesmerises them. It is clear that nothing Language Log can do will ever discredit the twin notions that (1) lexical abundance correlates with conceptual or environmental or perceptual richness, and (2) that lexical thrift betokens a poorer and meaner experiential world.

Speeding east out of the Amsterdam area along dead straight train tracks beside a broad canal, I saw a huge cargo barge loaded up with giant shipping containers. It had several of the crew's automobiles parked on an upper deck. As the train whizzed past it and I could see the name on the bow, I saw that it was called the Omerta. Omertà? The brutal Sicilian mafia's fiercely enforced code of silence? I really wanted to hop off the train and ask the captain what on earth had led to the boat being thus named. But perhaps he would have turned out to be a Sicilian with an illicit cargo and would have refused to talk to me about it…

It isn't often that I learn a new English word while reading the newspaper, but today's New York Times contains one: snarge. It means "the residue of birds that have struck an airplane" and is used by, and apparently was coined by, the people at the National Museum of Natural History who try to identify the birds that have had fatal encounters with airplanes. I leave to the imagination what future anthropologists will make of the existence of this term. They'll probably decide that 21st century Americans practiced a peculiar high-tech form of divination.

Griffy and Zippy play with the vocabulary of art supplies, and more:

(A crow quill in this context is a crow-quill nib, which — according to Mark Mandel, who's set me straight on this point — is "made of metal, presumably with the same line properties as a literal crow quill but more durable"; illustrated here. And Bristol is Bristol board/paper, a heavyweight paper used by illustrators.)

Last week, there was an interesting Ask MetaFilter thread about how to find "a list of all the English words that can be traced back to a given root word" ("Word histories and dirt lions") , in which Language Hat helpfully linked to the American Heritage Dictionary's "lists of Indo-European and Semitic roots" as a partial answer.

Those interested in such things — and the response to Don Ringe's recent posts here shows that there are many of you — might also want to take a look at some of the explanatory material from the same source: Cal Watkin's article "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and the "Guide to Appendix I", John Huehnergard's "Proto-Semitic Language and Culture" and the "Guide to Appendix II".

Yesterday brought some news about "The Marthambles", a disease mentioned in five of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (DI 123, RM 164, NC 132, 149, WDS 130, YA 226, for the cognoscenti). The earliest of these (Desolation Island) was published in 1978, and is set in 1811 or 1812. Marthambles is not found in the OED, but according to an interview in The Patrick O'Brian Newsletter (volume 3, issue 1, March 1994), O'Brian explained that "Marthambles is a very fine word that I found in a quack's pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century".

However, the word is also used in Dorothy Dunnett's historical novel The Ringed Castle (fifth of the "Lymond Chronicles"), which was published in 1971 and deals with fictional events taking place in the year 1555. This raises a set of questions whose answers must be mildly embarrassing to someone: perhaps the OED missed a world used in English medical practice for three centuries; perhaps Patrick O'Brian learned a word from Dorothy Dunnett but claimed to have found it for himself; perhaps Dorothy Dunnett used a late-18th-century word in a mid-16th-century novel. (Trust me, some people care about these things.)

In connection with my difficult work on Language Log's "Financial Good News" desk, where things have been arduous and slow, I was looking something up in the American Heritage Dictionary earlier today (possibly liberalism, possible lien; to tell you the truth, I have forgotten what — something beginning with L, but I got sidetracked), when I noticed something. In between libretto and lice it has a definition for Libyan Desert. The definition reports (and I just know you are going to get there ahead of me) that it is a desert, and it mainly is in (I know, I know, you are jostling me aside in your eagerness to predict it without having looked) Libya. Parts of it are in Egypt and parts of Sudan, actually; and no doubt there are areas that could be argued to be outlying regions of it that are in Chad (the dictionary did not deny it), but the Libyan Desert really is mostly a Libyan desert. The question that struck me was: wherever the hell it is, what the hell is it doing in a dictionary?

Uri Tadmor has been kind enough to respond to some of the comments on yesterday's post "Borrowability", which described the Loanword Typology project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

In their new book Sense and Sensitivity, Brady Clark and LL's own David Beaver identify and discuss a class of intensives. The items they name are (most) importantly, significantly, especially, really, truly, fucking, damn, well, and totally. Here's one of their examples:

MTV like totally gave us TWO episodes back to back. It was like so random. The more the merrier, but it's like waay too much for one recap.

I'm intrigued by the classification and independently interested in some of words and phrases involved, so I went looking in a large weblog corpus I recently collected, to see if I could gain some new insights into where and why people use these things. This post describes a first experiment along these lines.

One of the most interesting talks that I've heard so far, here at the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting, was Uri Tadmor and Martin Haspelmath, "Measuring the borrowability of word meanings". I haven't yet been able to get a copy of the slides for their presentation here, but web search turned up the abstract for a talk of the same title at the upcoming Swadesh Centenary Conference, and the slides from a talk entitled "Loanword Typology: Investigating lexical borrowability in the world's languages", given at a recent workshop "New Directions in Historical Linguistics"(Université de Lyons, May 12-14 2008).

[Update: the slides from their LSA talk are now here, and additional information is available on the project website. I'll update the rest of this post to match when I have a chance. Meanwhile, Uri emphasizes that the LSA results are preliminary, and the Lyons report even more so.]

[Update #2: Uri answers questions in a guest post here.]

As you can learn from those links, their project investigated the words for 1460 "meanings" in 30 languages, allowing for a many-to-many relationship between words and meanings. They recruited an expert for each language to find the relevant words and to determine various properties for each one, including whether it had been borrowed from another language. The resulting database will be posted on the web at some point in the not-too-distant future.