Because surnames of immigrants in a melting pot like America often end up getting distorted, bowdlerized, prettified, and otherwise transformed from what they were in their original homelands, we cannot take their current form as gospel linguistic truth. Nonetheless, people who encounter them cannot avoid taking them at their face value, which may cause much merriment or consternation. Here I will list several puzzling, unusual surnames I have known, but will not make an assiduous effort to arrive at a definitive explanation of their etymology, morphology, or phonology
In grade school, there was a classmate with the surname "Hassapis". We all assumed that it meant something related to Manneken Pis (like, he couldn't wait), which I wrote about recently. After googling around for a few moments, I found that a lot of people from Cyprus have that surname, but couldn't find a hint of its meaning. After still more googling, I found that a variant seems to be "Hasapis", which may be derived from the Greek word "hasapi", meaning "butcher", though I'm not so sure about that. (source) Other, more fanciful, derivations have been proposed, but I am inclined to believe that it does have something to do with the Greek word for "butcher":
The hasapiko (Greek: χασάπικο, pronounced [xaˈsapiko], meaning “the butcher's [dance]”) is a Greek folk dance from Constantinople. The dance originated in the Middle Ages as a battle mime with swords performed by the Greek butchers' guild, which adopted it from the military of the Byzantine era.
(source)
A distinguished German colleague of mine, who was an Indologist and philosopher, was Wilhelm Halbfass. ("Along with Prof. Ludo Rocher, Prof. Ernest Bender, Prof. George Cardona, and several other Sanskritists, he made the University of Pennsylvania the center of Sanskrit learning in North America" [source], and it was primarily for this reason that I left Harvard to come to Penn.) Most English speakers who knew a smattering of German realized that "halb" meant "half" and somehow (ignoring the "f") thought that the remainder of the name must have been an embarrassment to the man. It turns out that the latter part of the name, "fass", simply means "barrel; drum; cask; keg; vat; tun", so the real meaning of his surname was "half barrel" — quite innocuous after all. And so is the surname Assman, by the way, which comes from Erasmus.
Here at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Seattle, I bumped into a Ming historian colleague from UC San Diego named Sarah Schneewind. Long ago I was fascinated by her surname and could fairly well surmise that it should be rendered as "snow-wind", but that seemed so improbable that I could barely trust my intuition, so I was glad to have my interpretation confirmed by the bearer of that delightful cognomen that it means "blizzard".
I don't know how I stumbled on Hunsucker, but somehow it entered my consciousness (perhaps because I just sat through a panel on the Huns / Xiongnu), and it struck my fancy:
The surname Hunsucker is thought to be a local name; that is, a surname taken on from an existing place name. There is a Hundseck in Germany near the Schwartwald (Black Forest), or the name may have come from a place name in Switzerland. (source)
A lot of these singular surnames are (or seem to be) Germanic. I wonder if there are any profound, philosophical implications in that ostensible fact.
Selected readings
]]>
"On the Origins of the Alphabet: Orion/Osiris in Need of a Head/Seed, the Roots of Writing, the Neolithic Europe Word as Sun/Seed System (NEWS), and a Solution to the Tartaria and Gradeshnista Tablets," by Brian R. Pellar.
http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp341_alphabet_orion_osiris.pdf
Abstract
This paper offers new information supporting the thesis presented in "On the Origins of the Alphabet: The Cycle of Emmer Wheat and Seed/Word Selection within the Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician/Hebrew Alphazodiac and the Chinese Lunar Zodiac" (Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 328). It offers fresh evidence to help prove that the twenty-two-letter Phoenician alphabet is based on the zodiac, which, in turn, is based on Egyptian celestial diagrams and the life-sustaining cycle of wheat-growing and harvesting. Even more importantly, this evidence could shed light on the invention of writing and the alphabet, illuminating its "mythical" (rather than actual) time and location, which appears to have been understood as located at the celestial opening/"gateway" between Gemini and Taurus, where the Milky Way joined and became one with the vernal equinox and the equator – the midway point of the sun's track between upper and lower, the north and the south. That midway gate was the sacred spot where the sun/seed/Word was believed to have been born, and it pre-dates writing itself, since the Gemini Gate goes back at least to the Neolithic village of Catalhoyuk, with the headless Orion symbolizing the "heading stage" and birth of the seed of Emmer wheat. Thus, the Gemini Gate, with its sacred symbolism associated with gates, pi, and the birth of the sun/seed/Word, sheds light on the reasons the inventors of the Phoenician alphabet highlighted it as the juncture between the two loops of the alphabet (the northern and southern). This paper also offers a solution to the Tartaria and Gradeshnitsa tablets, as well as showcases a classification system that explains the origin and use of "select" glyphs/graphemes in Neolithic Europe, i.e., the Neolithic Europe Word as Sun/Seed System – NEWS. This system, which reflects aspects of a true writing system – not proto-writing – is not only apparent within Neolithic China, but the complexity and unification of this system precludes the possibility that it arose independently in China. Furthermore, Appendix 1 will discuss a little known ancient zodiac called the Taghit Zodiac, which contains strong evidence linking it to both the Phoenician alphabet and the zodiac.
Pellar has explored related themes across other issues of Sino-Platonic Papers.
SPP 328:
On the Origins of the Alphabet: The Cycle of Emmer Wheat and Seed/Word Selection within the Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician/Hebrew Alphazodiac and the Chinese Lunar Zodiac
http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp328_alphabet_zodiac.pdf
SPP 296:
On the Origins of the Alphabet: The Rapallo Alphazodiac and the Birth of the Sun as the Seed/Word
http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp296_alphabet_zodiac.pdf
SPP 263:
The Foundation of Myth: A Unified Theory of the Link Between Seasonal/Celestial Cycles, the Precession, Theology, and the Alphabet/Zodiac, Part II
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp263_foundation_of_myth.pdf
SPP 246:
On the Origins of the Alphabet: New Evidence
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp246_alphabet_origins.pdf
SPP 219:
The Foundation of Myth: A Unified Theory on the Link Between Seasonal/Celestial Cycles, the Precession, Theology, and the Alphabet/Zodiac, Part I
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp219_foundation_of_myth.pdf
SPP 196:
On the Origins of the Alphabet
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp196_alphabet.pdf
—–
These and all other issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
]]>
@risthinks ChatGPT chatting each other about AI ! #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #TechTalk #FutureTech #Conversations #Innovation ♬ original sound – RisThinks
]]>
Vernacular Chinese-Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia, edited by: David Holm.
Volume 40 in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures
Keywords: Asia; vernacular; ritual; library collections; recitation
Topics: Asian Literature; Asian and Pacific Studies; Dialectology; Linguistics and Semiotics; Literary Studies; Literature of other Nations and Languages; Southeast Asia; Textual Scholarship; Theoretical Frameworks and Disciplines
Selected readings
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
]]>See the dozen or so US and UK phonetic and phonemic transcriptions and audio clips provided by Wiktionary here. The last of the US audio clips even has the trace of an initial "h", as some people pronounce "wh-" interrogatives.
——————-
From Marc Sarrel
I recently heard about an engraving that is attached to the Europa Clipper spacecraft, to be launched to the moon of Jupiter in October of this year. Europa likely has a large liquid water ocean underneath its shell of water ice. There is more liquid water on Europa than on Earth.
The vault plate features waveforms for the word “water” in 103 spoken languages, plus a symbol that represents the word in American Sign Language. If you scroll down a bit on the page, you can choose one of the languages, see the waveform and hear the spoken word.
I think this is a really compelling way to represent the common link between Earth and Europa.
I agree with Marc.
Now, let's explore some (just a few) of the features of the vault plate (here's NASA's website for Europa Clipper’s Vault Plate if you want to follow along and do some exploring of your own). Those that struck me most powerfully included, first of all, the Waveform Generator. On the left side, it has a menu of 103 spoken languages, from Abkhaz to Yorùbá. Each language has an audio recording that you can play, together with the word for water in the script for that language, if it has one. On the right side, the generator displays the requisite wave form of the language under consideration.
The second language on the list is American Sign Language (ASL). The circular symbol representing the sign for water in American Sign Language was created using a technique in image processing and data compression, called a Fourier transform.
On one side of the plate is an array of all the waveforms of the "water words" created by Waveform Generator. For those who are capable of "reading" the waveforms of words, it must be quite a thrill in one gaze to see more than a hundred words for water "written" in a single universal "script" that presumably could be used to record the languages of extraterrestrials, if any exist.
Speaking of writing, one thing that astonished me as I was examining both sides of the plate is that the poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, titled "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa", is engraved in her own cursive handwriting. Given that practically everything else on the plate is so technist and presentist or futurist, it is a pleasant surprise that the creators of the plate cared enough about the arts to include this touch of the traditionalist and humanist.
To match Limón's poem, though taking up much less space, is the Drake Equation:
where
and
Engraved in the handwriting of astrophysicist and astrobiologist, Frank Drake (1930–2022),
…the Drake Equation is a tribute to the visionary idea that the probability of finding life in the cosmos is something we can estimate. The Drake Equation is a mathematical formula for the possibility of finding advanced, communicating civilizations in the Milky Way. This equation has guided and inspired scientific research in various fields related to astrobiology, which is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe.
(source)
A neat feature of this NASA website is that the two-sided image of the Europa Clipper vault plate is in 3D and is ingeniously designed so that you can spin it around in every direction (up, down, left, right, obverse / reverse), all the while carrying the intricate contents of the two surfaces, no matter which way you turn it. The plate is about 7 X 11 inches in size and .4 inches thick. It is made of tantalum (Ta; atomic number 73).
To conclude, I will bring this post back down to language as it is actually spoken on earth, at least by one person, my granddaughter Samira. When she was young (let's say, ages about 2-8), I thought she had a speech impediment. I knew she was smart because of the clever things she would say and do, but — no matter how patient I was with her and how long I worked with her — simply couldn't get her to pronounce things correctly. For example, once she told me that she wanted a "marmay tay". For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what she wanted. Finally I had to ask my son to interpret. "Oh," he said, "she wants a 'mermaid tail'".
Directly germane to this post, however, is the way she pronounced "water". From Samira's mouth, it came out as "wadduh". Thinking that other people would make fun of her, I despaired.
I said very, very clearly in enPR (like AHD): wô'tə(r) (including the "r", which is the way I pronounce the word.
"Yes, grampa," she said, "wadduh". That went back and forth many times, but she just couldn't hear what I was ever so patiently saying, it was impossible for her to utter the word I begged her to say. That continued for several years of visits, and I would always go back to Philadelphia crestfallen.
Then the pandemic struck, and I was unable to see Samira in Dallas for four years. When I at last had a chance to visit her, Samira was already a teenager, or close to it. I was stunned when I heard her say, "Granpa, would you get me a glass of water?"
!!!
I have gone on at such length about Samira's pronunciation of "water", because what the audio of the Waveform Generator says is pretty close to what she said when she was still a little kid. Listen for yourself here.
Now, after all these exertions, I need a cup of wô'tər.
Selected readings
]]>
That's the "Suggested citation" given within the linked article. To get past the citation, you'll need to expand some abbreviations:
There's a somewhat de-jargonized version of the article's content by Ian Ingram at MedPage Today — "Latest COVID Shots Protect Against Serious Outcomes — Effectiveness against COVID-related hospitalization ranged from 43% to 52%" — which explains that the article means you probably want to consider getting one of the "recently updated COVID vaccines".
But what I've been trying to decode is only indirectly about the article's content.
The last bit of the article's Data Analysis section tell us:
Analyses were conducted using R software (version 4.3.2; R Foundation) for the VISION analysis and SAS software (version 9.4; SAS Institute) for the IVY analysis. This activity was reviewed by CDC, deemed not research, and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.**** This activity was reviewed and approved as a research activity by one VISION site.
And the four asterisks take us to the following endnote [with links added to the two cited C.F.R. sections and three U.S.C. sections]:
**** 45 C.F.R. part 46.102(l)(2), 21 C.F.R. part 56; 42 U.S.C. Sect. 241(d); 5 U.S.C. Sect. 552a; 44 U.S.C. Sect. 3501 et seq.
The cited regulations and laws are meant to explain how "this activity … was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy". The specific point of interest to me was how and why the described activity is "deemed not research".
We can learn about this in 45 C.F.R. part 46, 102(l), which starts by defining "research" in a way that actually seems to cover the described activity: "Research means a systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge."
However, there are four subsections defining specific exceptions to this definition — "For purposes of this part, the following activities are deemed not to be research", and the second of them is
(2) Public health surveillance activities, including the collection and testing of information or biospecimens, conducted, supported, requested, ordered, required, or authorized by a public health authority. Such activities are limited to those necessary to allow a public health authority to identify, monitor, assess, or investigate potential public health signals, onsets of disease outbreaks, or conditions of public health importance (including trends, signals, risk factors, patterns in diseases, or increases in injuries from using consumer products). Such activities include those associated with providing timely situational awareness and priority setting during the course of an event or crisis that threatens public health (including natural or man-made disasters).
As normal lexicography, this is weird — it's like defining mammal in something like the usual way ("A warm-blooded animal that has hair and produces milk to feed its young") and then specifying that certain kinds of mammals, like "Angora goats with brown coat color", are specifically excluded from the category.
But as legal lexicography, this seems to be normal. The motivation, I think, is to avoid more complex re-writing of a law or policy.
In this case, 45 C.F.R part 46 defines policies for the "protection of human subjects", including various sorts of procedures for approving and constraining various stages of various sorts of activities involving those "human subjects". These (evolving) procedures are highly (if variously) complex, and specify elaborate chains of documentation and approval, as well as complex constraints on what sorts of information can be released to whom and when. In that context, the motivation for the four exemptions is clear.
Consider the first exception, covering "Scholarly and journalistic activities (e.g., oral history, journalism, biography, literary criticism, legal research, and historical scholarship)", where recordings and transcripts are often published along with the names of subjects. When the humanities and social sciences first came under the purview of academic Institutional Review Boards, there were several cases where IRBs blindly applied the normal rules for interviews in clinical studies, insisting that the names of oral history subjects could not be published, and that interview recordings and transcripts had to be entirely deleted after studies presenting general conclusions about the "research" in question were completed. (See this 2015 post…)
It would be very complicated to re-write the laws and regulations so that oral history is subject only to appropriate constraints in all of the many places where constraints and procedures are specified — instead, the responsible authorities apparently just decided that oral history is actually just not "research", for the purposes of the regulations in question. (At least they didn't decide that oral history interviewees are to be deemed not human — though they could plausibly have stipulated that they are not "human subjects"…)
As for exemption number 2, covering the cited C.D.C. article, the reasoning seems to be that such work is important and needs to be done and published quickly, without the potentially time-consuming approval process. (This one is the "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report"…) It also happens to be true that the collection and submission of the underlying data was covered by multiple institutional approvals, though the regulation doesn't seem to require that.
And of course, court cases often involve complex lexicographical arguments, in ways that sometimes seem to defy common sense. (See e.g. "Is a fish a "tangible object'?", 4/30/2014; "A result that no sensible person could have intended", 12/8/2005; etc.)
I assume the laws and policies in other traditions (e.g. Napoleonic) use similar techniques, for similar reasons — readers will no doubt be able to enlighten us.
]]>
Bone fragments unearthed in a cave in central Germany show that our species ventured into Europe's cold higher latitudes more than 45,000 years ago – much earlier than previously known – in a finding that rewrites the early history of Homo sapiens on a continent still inhabited then by our cousins the Neanderthals.
Scientists said on Wednesday they identified through ancient DNA 13 Homo sapiens skeletal remains in Ilsenhöhle cave, situated below a medieval hilltop castle in the German town of Ranis. The bones were determined to be up to 47,500 years old. Until now, the oldest Homo sapiens remains from northern central and northwestern Europe were about 40,000 years old.
"These fragments are directly dated by radiocarbon and yielded well preserved DNA of Homo sapiens," said paleoanthropologist and research leader Jean-Jacques Hublin of Collège de France in Paris.
Homo sapiens arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, later trekking worldwide and encountering other human populations, including Neanderthals. The spotty fossil record has left unclear the details of how Homo sapiens spread through Europe and what role our species played in the extinction of Neanderthals, who disappeared roughly 40,000 years ago.
The research, presented in three studies published in the journals Nature showed that the region was colder then than now – a chilly steppe-tundra setting akin to today's Siberia or Scandinavia – illustrating how Homo sapiens, despite roots in warmer Africa, adapted relatively quickly to frigid conditions.
The researchers concluded that small, mobile bands of hunter-gatherers used the cave sporadically as they roamed a landscape teeming with Ice Age mammals, and that at other times it was occupied by cave hyenas and cave bears.
"The site in Ranis was occupied during several short-term stays, and not as a huge camp site," said archaeologist Marcel Weiss of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, another of the research leaders.
Bones and stone artifacts from the cave showed that these people hunted large mammals including reindeer, horses, bison and woolly rhinoceroses.
"It is interesting that the diet of both these early Homo sapiens and late Neanderthals appears to be focused on large terrestrial game, which could have led to areas of competition," said zooarchaeologist Geoff Smith of the University of Kent, who led one of the studies. "However, we still need additional data points to more fully understand the role and impact of climate and incoming Homo sapiens groups in the eventual extinction of Neanderthals in Europe."
The research appeared to resolve a debate over who made a specific set of European stone artifacts – attributed to what is called the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ) culture – including leaf-shaped stone blades useful as spear tips for hunting. Many experts had hypothesized these were fashioned by Neanderthals. Their presence at Ranis with no evidence of Neanderthals instead indicates they were made by Homo sapiens.
"These blade points have been found from Poland and Czechia, over Germany and Belgium, into the British Isles, and we can now assume they most likely represent an early presence of Homo sapiens all over this northern region," Smith said.
…
The cave was excavated in the 1930s, with bones and stone artifacts found, before World War Two interrupted the work. Technology at the time could not identify the bones. Researchers re-excavated it from 2016 to 2022, uncovering more bones and artifacts. DNA sequencing on newly found and previously unearthed bones identified Homo sapiens remains.
"The results for Ranis are amazing," Weiss said, adding that scientists should return to other European sites from this time period to check for similar evidence of an early Homo sapiens presence.
The 47,500 BP C14 date puts the Ranis man considerably before the previous earliest finds for Cro-Magnon man whose dating had been set to the Upper Paleolithic Period (c. 40,000 to c. 10,000 years ago) in Europe. This new dating matches the rise of art, music, and language.
About 35 years ago, I went to a wonderful exhibition of human skulls at the University of Tokyo Museum. They had put together a large collection of skulls from Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and other archaic hominins. They were lined up chronologically in a series from earliest to contemporary times.
I spent a couple of hours in that dramatically dark exhibition room and was stunned by the physically presented visual evolution of humankind. The thing that struck me most was the shape of the Cro-Magnon skull. I stared at it for at least a quarter of an hour and went back again and again to view the Cro-Magnon skull, then repeatedly compared it with all the previous skulls. (The effect was comparable to the first time I beheld Ur-David [who looked so much like my brother Dave] in the Ürümchi Museum in 1988.)
The Cro-Magnon skull was so different in its shape from all of the previous skulls in being elongated, relatively narrow, and tall, with a flat forehead falling straight down and no protruding brow ridge (whereas the other skulls and crania were round, broad, and relatively compressed in depth and length — like a pumpkin — with a backward sloping forehead and massive brows), that I called it the "shoebox skull".
Still to this day, whenever I think of Cro-Magnon Man, that designation — "shoebox skull" — comes into my mind as a powerful image of that early Homo sapiens. Rectangular, with the back of the skull projecting rearward like an extension of the braincase.
When I first started using the expression "shoebox skull" around 3-4 decades ago, it was my own personal neologism. Inasmuch as I've used it continuously since then, it's no longer a neologism for me. That's just what I call it — for myself. Since the discovery of Ranis man, which is of such great importance in human evolution, I might as well go public with what, for many years, used to be a private expression: shoebox skull.
Selected readings
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
]]>This one is from "The Politics of Immigration", 3/3/2024 [emphasis added]:
While Biden patrols the Texas border (taking a wide berth around the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas) he assuages the American voter whose ire toward illegal immigrants under his presidency has doubled. “There were 49.5 million foreign-born residents in the United States (legal and illegal) in 2023,” according to the Center for Immigration Statistics, and the foreign-born population has grown by 4.5 million under Biden's exegesis.
My correspondent identified "exegesis" as a malapropism, but we couldn't figure out what it might be a substitution for. I guess the author might have meant something like "Biden's interpretation (of immigration policy)", though there's nothing else in the article to raise the question of alternative interpretations of such laws or policies.
And here's another odd usage, from "Chasing the Light", 3/10/2024:
The U.S. Senate has passed the Sunshine Protection Act that'll make daylight saving time permanent across the nation. The House has yet to advance the bill out of committee. Likewise, the European Parliament proposed removing daylight saving time altogether across the EU, but the initiative presents challenges for transportation and has yet to be implemented. At the cortex of the debate about clocks lies some science.
Cortex originally meant "the bark, rind, shell, hull", or figuratively "the outward part, covering" of other things, and that seems to be exactly the wrong metaphor for what the Charlatan author had in mind: the fill for "at the ___ of the debate about clocks" should presumably be "center" or "heart", not "rind" or "covering".
Today, cortex is mostly used to mean "the outer or superficial part of an organ or bodily structure", and especially the cerebral cortex. So maybe the author meant to refer somehow to "the brain of the debate" — though that's not a common metaphor. Google finds "about 18,200,000 results" for "at the heart of the debate", and no results at all for "at the brain of the debate" or "at the cortex of the debate".
On the other hand, maybe the article's author is insinuating poetically that sleep science is actually "at the rind of the debate" over Daylight Savings Time?
Charlatan Magazine doesn't provide author information for its articles, but its Editor-in-Chief has the look of someone who might be behind that insinuation:
Update — Readers more creative than I am have suggested that exegesis was a malapropism for "aegis", and cortex was a malaprop/blend of "core" and "crux"…
Meanwhile, maybe someone can give us an exegesis of Charlatan Magazine itself? The production is very polished, and there are lots of contributors and lots of articles, and it's been around since 2007 or so — but there are no ads, no paid subscriptions, no editorial board. Sort of like a blog with a very glossy cortex, though not allowing any comments.
]]>
@max_balegde My favourite interview of all time. She was so sweet and she can talk however she wants!!!! Damsel is out now! @Netflix #milliebobbybrown ♬ original sound – Max_Balegde
There's been quite a bit of media coverage of MBB's accent and the reaction to this interview. This Netflix Film club video gives some commercial background:
Update — See also "Austin Butler dialect coach defends Millie … Accent Changing is Normal", TMZ 4/11/2024.
]]>The author, Bernard Cerquiglini, has some serious credentials, to which he's now added a verified sense of humor. The book opens with a (slightly modified) quote from Montaigne:
« C'est icy un Livre de mauvaise foy, Lecteur.» Il faut de l'audace pour citer Montaigne à rebours; nous aurons cet aplomb: la mauvaise foi est ici proclamée, assumée, réflechie.
"Here is a book in bad faith, reader." It requires boldness to cite Montaigne backwards; we will have this confidence: bad faith is here proclaimed, assumed, and considered.
The initial quote (with mauvaise swapped for bonne) comes from the note "Au Lecteur" at the start of Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne goes on to explain
C’est icy vn Liure de bonne foy, Lecteur.
Il t’aduertit dés l’entrée, que ie ne m’y suis proposé aucune fin, que domestique et priuee : ie n’y ay eu nulle considération de ton seruice, ny de ma gloire : mes forces ne sont pas capables d’vn tel dessein.
Here is a book in good faith, Reader.
It warns you, from the start, that my only goals are domestic and private: I have no consideration for your benefit, nor for my fame: my abilities are not adequate for such a plan.
So perhaps the "mauvaise foy" switch means that Cerquiglini aims his book at our benefit and his fame?
For more information about its contents, see this brief (French language) review in Fabula, or Tom Barfield's (English language) review in Barron's.
Cerquiglini's book has no English translation yet, as far as I know — though we just need to pronounce the French version badly, n'est-ce pas?
Update — D.O. in the comments notes that Alexandre Dumas originated the book's title in his 1845 work Vingt Ans Après [emphasis added]:
D'Artagnan était près de lui. Aramis consultait une carte, Porthos était absorbé dans les dernières délices d'un succulent déjeuner.
— Le parlement! s'écria Athos, il n'est pas possible que le parlement ait rendu un pareil bill.
— Écoutez, dit d'Artagnan, je comprends peu l'anglais; mais, comme l'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé, voici ce que j'entends: _Parliament's bill;_ ce qui veut dire bill du parlement, ou Dieu me damne, comme ils disent ici.
En ce moment l'hôte entrait; Athos lui fit signe de venir.
— Le parlement a rendu ce bill? lui demanda Athos en anglais.
— Oui milord, le parlement pur.
— Comment, le parlement pur! il y a donc deux parlements?
— Mon ami, interrompit d'Artagnan, comme je n'entends pas l'anglais, mais que nous entendons tous l'espagnol, faites-nous le plaisir de nous entretenir dans cette langue, qui est la vôtre, et que, par conséquent, vous devez parler avec plaisir quand vous en retrouvez l'occasion.
]]>After his State of the Union speech, the president was so eager to keep talking to people he didn't care that the lights went down or that hot mics picked him up.
[…]
“Thank you, man,” said Biden, before shaking someone else’s hand and pointing at him. “You know there’s no T in ‘Scranton.’ It’s Scran-un!”
Fact-checking that claim, I did a quick scan of Shuang Li's INTERVIEW: NPR Media Dialog Transcripts dataset, which contains 3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours. That dataset is just the transcripts, but some years ago, Jiahong Yuan and I downloaded the audio and aligned it with the texts. And I wrote a simple search script, so that checking stuff like this is easy.
In that corpus, Biden's assertion does check out — though as we'll see, it's not completely clear what he meant. If anyone can find the full "open mic" recording, including the pronunciation he was reacting to, please let me know.
Here's the first instance I found. And it's really pretty T-less:
Scott Horsley (from "In Kansas, Obama Invites Roosevelt Comparisons", Morning Edition 2011-12-06):
Zeroing in on the audio for "Scranton":
In fairness to the person Biden was (apparently) correcting, most Americans would perform the /t/ in "Scranton" as a bit of glottalization — a bit that was lenited to (near?) extinction in the previous example. Here's a version where more of it survives, from Don Gonyea, "Biden A Vital Surrogate For Obama On Campaign Trail", All Things Considered 12/06/2012:
Zeroing in again on the audio for "Scranton":
Locals (like Biden) are typically prone to greater lenition of the weaker aspects of their home town's phonetic implementation, wherefore (presumably) his correction…
]]>The first one features Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Dickinson, Dr. Seuss, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway:
In the second one, we get we get Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Tolkien, (an interruption by) J.D. Salinger, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien con't, Charlotte Brontë, and e.e. cummings:
The third one features Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Brontë, and George R.R. Martin:
Beyond the evocative parodies of writing styles, it's interesting to consider what she does with performance styles — accent, facial expressions, voice quality. Compare the dialect approximations that she adopts for Agatha Christie and Tolkien:
…with the use of something close to her native American English for Charlotte Brontë and Oscar Wilde:
Perhaps this is because of differences in how strongly she feels the association between authors and speech varieties? Or because of differences in how easily she imagines herself in the authors' roles?
]]>stoned; tipsy; bashed; befuddled; buzzed; crocked; flushed; flying; fuddled; glazed; high; inebriate; inebriated; laced; lit; muddled; plastered; potted; sloshed; stewed; tanked; totaled; wasted; boozed up; feeling no pain; groggy; juiced; liquored up; seeing double; three sheets to the wind; tight; under the influence; under-the-table
(source)
And there are so many others, such as pickled and soused and bombed and high as a kite, which make immediate and obvious sense — to an English speaker.
Lately, I've been seeing official illuminated signs by the roadside that say "BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING", which I take to be directed at people who are high on drugs or the response of law enforcement officers to people who are obviously in an alcoholic stupor and say to the police, "I'm fine, just a little bit buzzed."
When I see drivers going 90+ miles an hour weaving left and right across 2, 3, and 4 lanes of traffic, I know for sure that they are out of their mind.
Once, going with a friend to his home outside of New Haven, we encountered a driver who was slouched down in his seat so far that you couldn't really see him as he sped by so fast on an entrance ramp that he made us feel we were standing still, knocking off our rearview mirror as he squeezed by, and then repeated the same idiotic stunt with several other cars before exploding like a bullet and disappearing down the highway.
Whatever you call such homicidal DUI behavior, there's always room for one more descriptor. Now we have a scientific study that convincingly accounts for the plethora of such terms in English.
The weekend edition (Samstag/Sonntag 24./25. Februar 2024) of the Süddeutsche Zeitung has an editorial on the front page.
Im Wortrausch [In a Frenzy of Words]
Linguists find more then 500 synonyms in the English language for "drunk". And they found out why more are to be expected.
Here's the press release (2/19/24) of the Chemnitz University of Technology:
“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” OR: Can you really use any English word to mean ‘drunk’?
Linguistic study by Chemnitz University of Technology and ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig investigates over 500 English synonyms for “drunk”
—–
The English language is famous for the large number of words that express the idea of being drunk in a humorous way – so-called drunkonyms like “pissed”, “hammered” or “wasted”. British comedian Michael McIntyre even argues in a comedy routine that posh people can use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, e.g. “I was utterly gazeboed” or “I’m gonna get totally carparked”. Is this possibly even true? And how can people understand new drunkonyms then?
Two German linguists, Prof. Dr. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (Chemnitz University of Technology) and Prof. Dr. Peter Uhrig (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg & ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig), took Michael McIntyre’s claim seriously and tested it in a linguistic study. “We were curious to find out if the synonyms of “drunk” are used in similar contexts,” explains Sanchez-Stockhammer. If that were the case, new word formations might inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ automatically from the context.
The study was recently published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. “We found that “drunk” mainly occurs in the combinations “too/so/very drunk”, but unexpectedly not with the kinds of adverb used by Michael McIntyre,” explains Uhrig. By contrast, the drunkonyms ending in ‑ed (e.g. “blasted” and “loaded”) preferably occur with the expected intensifiers “completely” or “totally” (e.g. “completely loaded”).
As expected, the combination of “be” + intensifying adverb + word ending in -ed is commonly used to refer to drunkenness, but not often enough to explain how language users understand new drunkonyms. Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig therefore provide an additional explanation: by the time English native speakers reach adulthood, they have most likely experienced so many different words ending in -ed meaning ‘drunk’ that it allows them to interpret words with unknown meaning ending in -ed (e.g. “pyjamaed”) as ‘drunk’ in many contexts. The appendix of the paper alone contains a list of 546 English synonyms for “drunk” compiled from various sources.
Even though excessive alcohol consumption may come with negative consequences, drunkenness is commonly discussed using a wide range of light-hearted linguistic means in English. Sanchez-Stockhammer observes: “The humorous effect of drunkonyms is often achieved through their indirectness”. What renders McIntyre’s examples “gazeboed” or “carparked” funny is that there is no obvious relation between the base (e.g. “gazebo”) and the meaning ‘drunk’. Indirectness is also present in other types of playful language, like Cockney rhyming slang, which provides the model for English drunkonyms like “Brahms” or “Schindler’s” (short for “Brahms and Liszt” and “Schindler’s list”, both of which rhyme with the target word “pissed”). “The English language also expresses drunkenness indirectly by shortening phrases like “blind drunk” and “nicely drunk” to the corresponding drunkonyms “blind” and “nicely”. All this suggests that drunkonyms fit in well with English linguistic and humorous traditions”, says Sanchez-Stockhammer.
Here is the scientific paper:
“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness
By Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Peter Uhrig, from the journal Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association; published by De Gruyter Mouton February 19, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2023-0007
Abstract
The English language is famous for its large number of drunkonyms, i.e. words that can be used to refer to the state of drunkenness – from blind and hammered to pissed, smashed and wasted. Various lists of words have been compiled in the past (e.g. Levine 1981). However, most of the terms seem to be relatively infrequent, and they also appear to fall out of use relatively quickly. In view of Michael McIntyre’s (2009) claim that it is possible to use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, this contribution therefore approaches the issue from a constructionist perspective. In a corpus-based study, we tested whether it is possible to model the expression of drunkenness in English as a more or less schematic (set of) construction(s). Our study shows that while corpus evidence for truly creative uses is scarce, we can nonetheless identify constructional and collostructional properties shared by certain patterns that are used to express drunkenness in English. For instance, the pattern be/get + ADV + drunkonym is strongly associated with premodifying (and often strongly intensifying) adverbs such as completely, totally and absolutely. A manual analysis of a large wordlist of English drunkonyms reveals further interesting patterns that can be modelled constructionally.
I find this study quite compelling. It is also amusing, especially the Appendix of hundreds of words expressing the state of drunkenness. Many of them are picturesque and downright funny. English-speaking people certainly have a rich, humorous imagination when it comes to expressing the state of inebriation. They have far more words for it than the xxxx do for snow. Ahem!
Selected readings
[Thanks to Klaus Nuber]
]]>