Category Archives: Language and linguistics

Qaxal

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(Commenting on Facebook about a photo of a California quail.)

One of my favorite desert birds! And agreed on Qaxal, which looks so lovely spelled out. Alas, it’s probably just about impossible to pronounce for we English speakers, or for just about any speaker of an Indo-European language. From the sounds alone you can feel the thousands of generations that separate the development of the sounds our mouths use to speak English from the sounds a táxliswet (the Chemenuevi word for a Cahuilla person, per Wikipedia) uses to speak the Cahuilla language. Hell, we call the language Cahuilla because we can’t possibly say ʔívil̃uʔat. We call the the tribe Cahuilla because we can’t possibly say ʔívil̃uqaletem. The Spanish called them Cahuilla because the ʔívil̃uʔat word for master sounded something like “cahuilla” to a Spaniard’s ear. That’s right, for master. Amazing the history in a word.

And while we’re not on the subject, though geographically neighbors, the languages the Chemehuevi and Cahuilla spoke are about as far apart from one another as English is from Hindustani. That is both are part of the same language family (as are English and Hindustani) but each gone it’s own way for many thousands of years since they were the same language. Alas, Chemehuevi (which i seem to remember is actually a Mojave word spelled out in Spanish, I don’t know what their own word for their own language was) is now extinct with no living speakers who learned it as children. It survives in academic circles mostly, or in how to pronounce apps (like the one I heard that pronounces “Chemeheuvi” in a beautifully lilting Castilian accent, Spanish music strumming in the background.) Cahuilla is still spoken by a few dozen native speakers but is unlikely to survive them. It’d be nice if either qaxal or kakara, even mispronounced, survived as a name for these desert birds. Neither is likely to. Words from tiny languages tend to disappear with their speakers.

But I digress.

Great post.

Irregulars gone regular

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English loses more and more irregular verbs every generation. I’m forever doing a double take when I hear one. Grinded on just startled me in a linguistics nerd kinda way. Not ground on? For a second I felt a pang of regret for an ancient irregular verb. Yet another Old English declension being regularized. But hell, just about every verb in English that adds an ed to the present tense to make the past tense—and that’s most of the verbs in English—violates Old English declension rules. And if King Harold hadn’t gotten his army destroyed and himself killed by a Norman arrow through the eye at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 then we’d still be speaking a language much closer to the language of his day, much closer to German, in fact. Declensions up the wazoo. But he lost and his valiant army was slaughtered and William the Conqueror earned his name. England was to be ruled in French by a harsh and arrogant Norman hand for centuries, and the bastardation of English began, leaving us with this extraordinary thing we write and speak and abuse so wonderfully terribly today. Like adding an ed to a present tense verb to make it a past tense verb whenever we fucking well please. We’ve been doing so for centuries in a never ending process. Thus the ground of my youth is the grinded on MSNBC today. Which is a good thing, really, it simplifies the language and drives grammar nazis up the wall. Still, though, I allow myself a pang of nostalgia for the old verb form, though even 66 year old me will probably be saying grinded soon enough, and a century from now people will wonder what ground beef means. Ground, like what we walk on? And linguist nerds like me will explain how ground was an archaic form of the past tense for grinded, and it’s not grinded beef because ground beef is a compound noun (two words, but grammatically it’s one noun) and compound nouns in a English tend to retain the archaic form, and often do so for centuries, because nouns in English change little over time. The meaning will change, but the word itself will change little. And they’ll feel so smart, those futuristic language nerds, and grandchildren of grandchildren now will roll their eyes, which humans have probably been doing for a couple hundred thousand years, meaning the same thing now that it did then, back before language was even a thing.

The Battle of Hastings, there goes Old English.

Ishtar

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Easter was not how you pronounced Ishtar. This meme has been reappearing at the end of Lent these past few years and I never say anything but today all those dull linguistics book I’ve read are screaming in protest because Easter was never the way one pronounced Ishtar. Nowhere in the ancient Middle East did Akkadian speakers–and just about everyone in Mesopotamia spoke Akkadian four thousand years ago, it was the hip tongue of early civilization—did people dance and screw and celebrate the goddess of sex and fertility every spring and call her Easter. They called her Ishtar, which was pronounced–hang on– ish-tar. Ish like in fish and tar like in tardy. Ishtar. Akkadian, though long gone, was a Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew and ancient Egyptian, heavy on the consonants, light on the vowels, lots of lip popping and gakking. Dig that crazy voiceless postalveolar fricative. When you shhhhhhh someone you are shaming them with a voiceless postalveolar fricative. No, you don’t need to know that just to get somebody to shut up (though I used to get voiceless postalveolar fricativized during bass solos in jazz clubs.) Easter, on the other hand, is a word that comes from the ancient German (as does English, actually), so it was an Indo-European language, lots of consonants but a lot of vowels, too, and Easter was pronounced something like e-oster, and it contains, instead of a voiceless postalveolar fricative, a voiceless alveolar sibilant followed immediately by a voiceless retroflex stop. That’s the st sound. You don’t really need to know any of that either. But add a voiceless bilabial stop–the p sound–to that voiceless alveolar sibilant and voiceless retroflex stop and you get psssssst, like trying to get somebody’s attention in a library, but not like getting drunk and trying to get somebody’s attention in a library. That would be pssssht, a voiceless bilabial stop-voiceless postalveolar fricative-voiceless retroflex stop, and someone else drunk in the library would voiceless postalverolar fricative back even louder and everything would be all fricked up.

Ishtar was originally the Sumerian goddess of love and sex and fertility (among other things, she must’ve been quite the multitasker) and Sumerian was utterly unlike Akkadian, just as complicated but not the least bit Semitic, words lolling in vowels. Thus Ishtar’s original Sumerian name, Ianna, sort of rolls across the tongue. She was quite the looker, Ianna, if you don’t mind weird bird feet, she was tall and slender and stacked and not too into lots of clothes. One gets the impression the Sumerians really loved love making. And the sounds in Ianna seems to fit her much better than than the sounds in Ishtar. I suppose that’s just my Indo-European prejudices, we like vowels. We like consonants too—consonants are certainly funnier—but vowels seem to do a better job of evoking a tactile feeling. They’re softer, rounder, gentler. Ahhh.

It seems such a shame that the Sumerian language died out, leaving no descendants. Hell, they invented civilization speaking it. They invented writing writing it. Now no one speaks it. No one writes it. A couple English words go back to the Sumerian, though. Canal is one. Five thousand years ago it meant canal, pronounced sort of gina, hard g sound, both vowels short. The Sumerians did wonders with canals. The main drag in Ur wasn’t a street, it was a canal. And they scientifically laid out a network of irrigation canals across the plains, carrying water from the Euphrates into distant, lush fields. They really knew their canals. Some are still in use. Five thousand years later we still use their word, though the hard G has become a hard C sound, and an L sound was attached to the end. Their gina (with the i not an ee, but schwa-ish), our canal. Nearly identical in sound, and completely identical in meaning. That’s some continuity, in sound and concept, a word as old as civilization itself.

Not much else in the Sumerian language survives in English, though, mostly words that began as canal, became metaphors, and wound up things like canonize. There are probably a lot more old Sumerian words in Arabic and Farsi, even Hebrew. Propinquity, you know. But Ianna’s lovely name did not survive the end of Sumerian, and she became Ishtar. Same lovely appearance, same loving and humping and baby making, but with a voiceless postalveolar fricative. Shhhhhh.

Every time I see that ridiculous Ishtar-Easter meme, I wonder how the hell anyone could think an SH was pronounced like ST, unless they were drunk. Drunks would say Eashter. Drunks and people with bad false teeth. Drunks and bad false teeth and Eashter bunnies. Meanwhile somewhere drunk people are writing memes, and the world is believing every voiceless postalveolar fricative of them.

You know, indigenous Australians had neither a voiceless alveolar sibilant (or any sibilants at all) and no voiceless postalveolar fricative, and could not have said Ishtar or Easter, let alone psssst or shhhhhh. They would not have been reading those memes. But they could say ingoorrooloorrloorroona noorroo.

And that you do need to know.

Ishtar. Dig those crazy feet. Though it might be Ishtar’s older sister Ereshkigal, who got the ruling the Underworld gig while her little sister was up above making love and babies. This is from about four thousand years ago and the artist no doubt spoke Akkadian, not Sumerian.

Supposably

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(From 2019, but I apparently put it aside as the epilepsy stirred up. Writing does that. A couple days ago I found it in the drafts folder and, the epilepsy calmed down again, I finished it, a mere four years later.)

Supposably and supposedly are not the same word. Both go back centuries. Originally supposably had a somewhat different meaning than supposedly, apparently a subtle distinction, but what that difference was or why it was important disappeared. By now it’s hard to imagine what that distinction could possibly could have been, but English used to be much more grammatically complex than it is now. Loads more rules, subtleties of what linguists call perspective, your English teacher called cases, and that you never called anything because you had learned the language as a child when our brains learn how to use a language without having anyone label all the different parts and codifying them into rules. But English used to have lots more of those cases and rules. We have vastly more vocabulary now, but lots less rules. Languages lose all kinds of distinctions as they simplify. Languages gain speakers who speak other languages already and the grammatical complexities drop away. Too complicated. The more the language has expanded geographically and increased in new speakers, the more the grammatical subtleties drop away. Few notice. And everyone can communicate perfectly well without all those old cases. So they’re forgotten. Even grammar obsessives forget them eventually. Today’s annoying grammar guy would get yelled at by yesterday’s annoying grammar guy, or would be if yesterday’s grammar guy wasn’t dead and buried and forgotten. Language change has no respect for the dead, and in a few centuries the living speakers can’t understand much of what the dead said long ago anyway. Thus Shakespeare is difficult to understand, Chaucer a hundred years earlier is next to impossible, and Beowulf, from eleven or twelve centuries ago, is impossible. Same language, though, you can look at a schematic that lays out just why It’s the same language, but it’s been tweaked and changed all to hell by forty generations of speakers. And English is a written language. Languages that are strictly oral–which is the vast majority of languages, even now–change much, much faster. If English couldn’t be written down it could have gone from Beowulf to what I’m expressing now in just a couple hundred years. Even something a half century old, the lyrics of Beatles songs, for example, could sound comically old fashioned. Movies from the 1930s could be difficult to understand. Written English slows down that rate of change. But it still changes, and by the time a couple centuries worth of generations have passed, like from the time of your great grandparents’ great grandparents until the English you speak, it’s changed quite a bit.

Which is how I suppose it came to be that we can no longer tell just what exactly was the distinction between supposedly and supposably. The subtle grammatical distinctions between them involved perspectives that English apparently no longer has, nor can English speakers now recognize what those distinctions were once. We don’t know what the difference was between the two words because we literally can no longer hear the distinction. It was a difference in perspective–that is, a grammatical case–that every English speaker could once perceive instantly, and now we can’t at all. We can’t even imagine what that distinction was. An English speaking child would once have had that distinction hardwired right into their brains. They didn’t have to be taught it, anymore than we have to be taught how to make a verb a past tense by adding an “ed” suffix, or how kids know how to state where they are by saying “here” and where you are with “there”. Of course, those kids once knew when to say whither instead of where, and thither instead of there. They don’t know now. It’s very likely you don’t either. I only know because I like this stuff. But the case that once required a whither and a thither fell into disuse some time ago because, frankly, who the hell needs it. And by the same linguistic process somewhere in the last couple centuries we stopped knowing when one says supposedly and when someone says supposably. The meanings were close enough that they were fairly interchangeable if you weren’t too hung up on the finer points of grammar. You can imagine the grandparents grousing about kids these days not respecting anything. But grandparents die and no one remembered their complaining for long afterward and the distinction between supposedly and supposably disappeared with them. If the great grandkids don’t learn the distinction by the time they’re about twelve it’s gone. Two words meaning the exact same thing is one word too many and supposably disappeared, though why it and not supposedly was the one abandoned is a mystery.

And language that is not learned as children is a dead language. When the last of the children who did learn it die of old age, it is officially extinct. And though the distinction between supposably and supposedly was just one infinitesimal grammatical bit in the vastness of English grammar and not the end of the English language, it does give a ghostly glimpse into how languages die. Someday even English will die like that. Languages, like species, only last for so long. Sometimes, like Latin, they survive in other languages. And sometimes they just disappear forever. But we’re not there yet. And of course supposably is just one word that, like junk DNA, is hanging around in the genome of English and, like junk DNA, we don’t really know why. I mean we know why as a process, we know how words like supposably can wind up hanging around in the English vocabulary, we just don’t know why exactly we say supposedly now instead of supposably. No one wrote down the details for us, it just sort of happened when no one was paying much attention until now supposably hangs around in the language and we’d probably never even notice and if the sort of people who get upset at these kinds of things didn’t go on tirades about how it’s not supposably, it’s supposedly, we probably wouldn’t even notice. But then some of us obsess over the etiquette of grammar, and some of us have lives.

Now I suppose it actually is kind of ridiculous to still have a supposedly and a supposably. It’s hard to come up with a noun for supposable (supposableness? Am I missing one?) unless you just state two almost identical nouns with completely identical meanings, and if there were any verbs associated with them that helped distinguish how they differed who knows what they were, especially as there would have had to be a verb to use only with supposedly and another to use only with supposably. But they’re lost now. I mean we still have the verbs, but we have no idea which verb went with supposedly and which went with supposably. Indeed, the whole delicate lattice of grammar that they nestled in has disappeared. The specificity is lost. As is the word supposably for the most part, lost and reduced to a misspelling of supposedly, except in places like Miami where supposedly is the misspelling. Go figure. Words changing meaning over time and taking the place of other words is called semantic drift. And semantic drift is ugly. It’s not like the perfect rules they teach us in school. It’s just people talking.

It’s unnerving when you see a word that you have no idea what it was for or how it was used, but that everyone who spoke English a few hundred years ago knew as children exactly how it was used. Seven year olds knew in what context you’d use supposably, and in what context you used supposedly. They couldn’t explain the rule. They just knew it. They never even thought of them as the same word. And yet somehow in the past few centuries that bit of information that was hardwired into the very neurology an English speaker’s brain and passed along as language always is from mother (mostly) to child from when humans are still in the womb till the onset of adolescence, well, somewhere along there we lost that bit of hardwiring and never even knew it. Vanished, gone, like it was never even there. There’s nothing unusual in that, it’s a constant and continuous process. It’s how languages change, how new languages are born, it’s why humans speak over 7,000 languages now and who knows how many dialects, and why thousands of other languages are dead and gone going back somewhere between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years to when language was invented (or created or developed or evolved or happened.) Tiny incremental bits of grammar disappear and within a couple generations are forgotten, and eventually the old words themselves–words have a much longer shelf lives than unused grammar–are purged. We’re witnessing the purging of of the word supposably now. Really angry purging. Only ignorant uneducated lowlifes pronounce supposedly as supposably, we’re told. But supposably is not merely mispronunciation of supposedly. It’s a relic of English from long ago, though we have no idea what it meant exactly. Still, though, it now makes a perfectly good synonym for supposedly, or would, if it didn’t make some people so damn mad.

Writing pig in cuneiform

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In case you were wondering how to write pig in cuneiform—and who isn’t?—I just saw this on Twitter. And if you were in Ur four thousand years ago you’d see this pig, think “sah”, because that was the Sumerian word for pig, but you probably couldn’t write it because not many Sumerians could. Cuneiform was hard. 12 separate strokes in the clay to write sah. We can write pig in a mere six. Type it in three. Then again, you could have written pig on a tablet in Sumerian on a clay tablet in twelve strokes and somebody could find it four thousand years later and go wow, pig.

Cute pig, too.

From The Sumerian and Hittite Language Page (@SumerianHittite) on Twitter.

Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adapter Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector

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Bought a Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adapter Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector to replace our old Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adapter Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector which no longer sinkwaterfaucettipswivelnozzleadapterkitchenaeratortapchromeconnected, to verb a compound noun. No, it had sinkwaterfaucettipswivelnozzleadapterkitchenaeratortapchromedisconnected, to coin the verbed noun’s antonym, and remained sinkwaterfaucettipswivelnozzleadapterkitchenaeratortapchromeunconnected, to adjectivize the antonym into the state of being sinkwaterfaucettipswivelnozzleadapterkitchenaeratortapchromedisconnected. So if we’d lost WW2 and we’re all speaking German right now then sinkwaterfaucettipswivelnozzleadapterkitchenaeratortapchromeconnected would be one word. If we’d lost WW2 and we’re all speaking Inuit (Greenlandic) right now that first sentence up there could all be one word, though it’s a bit difficult to come up with a scenario where Greenland won WW2.

Somebody has to think about this stuff. It might as well be me, I’m retired.

Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector

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I’d never bought a Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector before. I’d always thought it was a metaphor.

OK, I didn’t think it was a metaphor. That was the opener. It didn’t work. Forget it. But to smoothly segue, Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector would be one word in German. And our brand new Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector works beautifully, without shaking the plumbing to death like the aerator with far fewer syllables I bought last week and wasn’t even pronounceable in German. A 2 Flow Faucet Aerator, that one. Actually if you include the description beyond the comma it was a 2 Flow Faucet Aerator, Dual-function Water Saving Sink Aerator Replacement, which rolls across the tongue with all grace and beauty of a sentence in a technical manual. No wonder the pipes shuddered and belched air. It’s so agglutinatively icky, something better translated into one of those endless sentence-in-a-word Turkish words. There’s something morphologically magical about those endless rows of nouns that we in English insist are just that, rows of nouns, but the German sees as one long glorious compound noun, a single word, but maybe that’s just me, and I seem to have digressed. Getting back to our story, this Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector is so hip and sleekly modern it’s just got to be digital, and I must have wasted ten minutes trying to convince the thing to aerate the water (it’s not named Siri, anyway) till I gave up and used the Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector handle thing. Turns out it’s just as analog as the ancient faucet from 1931 that was here when we moved in thirty years ago. You have to turn it on by hand and water comes out. The one we replaced two nozzles back (was that really only two weeks ago?) could go from gush to spritz with a bump and back to a gush with a tug. Talk about a conceptual step up from the binary gush/no gush. What will they think of next. But the Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector looks digital anyway. A jarring touch of the modern in our Art Deco kitchen. No, I won’t post a photo. I’ll be damned if I’m going to take a picture of a faucet. Writing Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector over and over is embarrassing enough. And Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector embarrassment would be one word in German.

Crows

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This is wild. Crows in this study could tell that recordings of people speaking Japanese (the language of the researchers) was different from recordings of people speaking Dutch. We can’t do that listening to birds. Unless we were a highly trained specialist, we couldn’t distinguish between mockingbird songs in one part of the country from mockingbird songs in another part of the country, though each song has a ‘dialect” that makes them mutually unintelligible. All the mockingbird would know is that another mockingbird is yelling at it. It has to learn to sing in the local dialect (meaning mockingbirds have learned cultures, actually.) But when a crow hears recordings of humans speaking different languages, it can tell that we are not speaking the same language, and it reacts to them differently. They were used to Japanese. They were wary of the recording in Dutch. What were they hearing? Japanese isn’t tonal like Chinese, so it’s not that the crows can tell that one is melodic and the other not. Can they detect the different phonemes (the vowel and consonant sounds) the languages use? Can they distinguish stresses, like what part of a sentence rises or drops? Can they detect the specific rhythms or sound patterns of grammar? How is it that a goddam bird can tell if a person is speaking Dutch or speaking Japanese while we with our enormous brains can’t tell if a recording of a mockingbird screaming at five in the morning is in Southern California Mockingbirdese or Danish Mockingbirdese? I can write about the concept of a crow distinguishing human languages, but damn if I can imagine what it is they actually hear in our human sounds.

Birds singing

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Just posted this on BricksBrain.com:

For a writer I certainly don’t do a lot of writing anymore, then again I’ve never felt less epileptic in my life. Writing sets off epilepsy which creates more writing. The more the epilepsy, the more creative the writing. The more creative the writing, the more the epilepsy. The more the epileptic writing, the more the brain damage. Oops. Thus, sidelined, I just kick back and watch all the shit go down. These are marvelous times for watching the shit go down. Glorious times, even. Watching history happen from our little urban forested haven. Lots of time to read and watch old movies. The less the epilepsy, it turns out, the more the reading. I’m wending my way though stacks of turgid volumes. Don’t even ask. The constant writing in my head got in the way when I was trying to read. It’s good to have the fountain of words turned off. I can listen to people now and not rewrite what they are saying. I can listen to music now and not hear it as writing. I can look at the landscape and not see it as stories. I can listen to birds sing and not hear language. I just hear birds singing.

Mockingbirds

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Listening to these mockingbirds improv reminds me of a factoid I read today in Daniel Tammet’s Embracing the Wide Sky that in order for male songbirds to sing some of the incredibly complex songs which change constantly, up to one per cent of the neurons in their song center are replaced by new neurons every single day, which adds up pretty quickly. That’s what those mockingbird brains are doing, rebuilding themselves continuously. Not adding brain cells to what is there already, but replacing them. It’s as if in order to speak we had to replace 100% of the neurons in our language center every 100 days. (Well, replacing one percent every day is not the same as replacing 100% every hundred days but what the hell, let me run with it.) That is, all the grammar we’ve hardwired into our brain is replaced by entirely new brain cells with all new intricately laced connections between them four times a year. OK, it’s not quite that simple (some of the neurons in the mockingbird’s song center will be replaced more often than others and others are more permanent), but still, our grammar and vocabulary would completely and fundamentally change over a period of a hundred days. Not all at once, but a little everyday so that you’d be speaking a completely different language in April from what you were speaking on January 1. I’m writing this in English now and a hundred days from now I’d be writing this in Armenian, and next year in Sioux. Plus I’d wake you up at five in the morning screaming outside your window.