Monthly Archives: January 2012

There’s a couple things about this…

Posted on January 20, 2012 | 4 comments

Quick: How many things are wrong with the above sentence?

Those who know me will not be surprised when I say that it depends on the variety of English you’re using. In casual English, it’s fine, though the speaker may be aware that it’s non-standard (“not good English”). But it presents a few interesting issues. I’m going to start at the end.

I’ll leave off any real address of ending a sentence with ellipses (…), which some people dislike; I used it because I intended it to be “leading,” and that’s different from a flat-out statement.

But there are many people who will insist that a couple things is wrong and should be a couple of things. This is based on couple being a noun. The thing is, though, so is dozen, and we no longer (as we once did) say a dozen of things; so, too, is a million, and actually, in English, so too are numbers generally, though they are a special class of noun. (Numbers are not adjectives in English. Try using them in all the various places where you can use adjectives and you will see that.)

We no longer say a million of people, though we still say a milli0n of them. And couple is coming to be like other numbers, as dozen has and myriad is in the process of doing; you still can say a couple of things, but you can also say a couple things.

Can you say it when there are actually more than two things, as in fact there are with this sentence? Shouldn’t we say several things if there are three or four? Well, if you wish to be precise, yes, but several gives a sense of significant quantity, whereas couple downplays it. Like it or not, a couple is in use as an informal indefinite quantifier. True, it’s a bit weaselly. But English is a very weaselly language – or can be when we want it to be.

The interesting thing is that many of the people who will insist on a couple of will also insist, in this sentence, on There are rather than There’s. Now, if couple here really is a singular noun (like pair or brace), you might think it would take the singular. But of course with collectives we will use the plural when we are emphasizing not the totality but the mass of individuals. So There are a lot of paintings means there are many paintings, but There is a lot of paintings means that there is a lot, probably for auction: a single group.

Likewise with, for instance, the majority of voters – you may say The majority of voters decides the vote, because it is the fact of a majority that is decisive, but it is only (and not always) in newspapers and similar places where a writer is striving to be correct but doesn’t fully understand the grammar that you will see The majority of voters doesn’t want this rather than don’t want this.

So, since I have already said that a couple here is equivalent to “two”, “roughly two”, or “a few”, you would expect that it should be There are a couple rather than There’s a couple, right? And in fact in formal standard English that is so, because in formal standard English we match the number in there is/there are to the number of the predicate. But in casual English we often don’t do so, and it’s not because we’re ignorant or illiterate – it’s because it’s an arbitrary decision.

There is is really just an existential predicate, and there’s nothing other than convention that forces us to match it to the object. Spanish and other languages that use a version of “have” rather than “is” don’t do it (Hay dos cervezas sobre la mesa; Il y a deux bières sur la table); German doesn’t do it with its “give” verb (Es gibt zwei Biere auf dem Tisch); even some languages that use a version of “is” don’t do it (Tá dhá beoir ar an mbord – Irish).

Remember that what comes after there is is structurally the object. In normal usage (in English), objects have no effect on the number or person of the verb – it matches the subject. We don’t normally force the copular verb to match its object, even when adhering to the nominative object “rule”: not It am I but It is I, and not It are we but It is we… which, of course, normal people say as It is us, even when the It is empty. The famous quote from Pogo (appropriate with respect to grammatical confusion and disputes) is “We have met the enemy and he is us,” not “he are us.”

It’s just because the there in there is is just a placeholder, and not even a noun or pronoun, that we have the habit of matching the number of the verb to the object – the object is the only noun in the area, so we conclude that it must be the subject. There is also a mistaken belief that There is a person is an inversion of A person is there; this is not true – there is no spatial reference in there is. When we use there to point to a location, we have to have a location to point to, either present in context or established in text. If I say There is a mistaken belief, there is no “there” there.

In some languages, a subject isn’t even supplied for existential predicates; there’s just a verb. English doesn’t like bare verbs, so we always put something – there or it – in the subject position. Which works fine until someone stops and says “What is it? Where is there?” It gets to be like a person who starts analyzing the muscle movements in walking and finds he/she can’t remember how to simply walk anymore.

Thus, the use of there are rather than there is with plural predicates is learned behaviour, and is not truly natural – as witness the fact that even highly literate people often use the singular in casual use or unguarded moments. That doesn’t make it correct in formal English, but it does explain a couple things about it.

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Koocanusa

Posted on January 19, 2012 | 5 comments

After I tasted Spuzzum, Jim Taylor sent me an email listing a bunch of other delectable B.C. place names. Of one of them, he wrote, “no one has ever known how to pronounce the lake near Cranbrook, formed by the dammed and backed-up Kootenay River.” The name of the lake? Koocanusa.

The non-word-geek might quite reasonably assume that Koocanusa is, like many a place name in B.C., taken (probably somewhat mutated) from one of the local indigenous languages. There probably would not be a question on the order of “If there’s a K to stand for /k/, what does the c stand for, given that these place names are as a rule meant to be at least roughly phonetic representations? Why would c stand for /k/ there when k stands for it elsewhere? But would it really be used to stand for anything else in this context?”

But, word geek though I am, I didn’t even get to that question; just about the first thing I saw, when looking at it, was the canusa: I’ve seen that sort of thing before. Canada and USA. Given that the lake straddles the border, that seemed immediately plausible. But the Koo? I didn’t get that part right away because Koo for me is a recognizable surname – actually, I have a friend of that name who was born in south central BC, but I didn’t think that the lake was named after her family. No, of course, the lake is on the Kootenay river. The name for it was the winner of a contest to name it; it was submitted by Alice Beers of Rexford, Montana. I don’t know what other names were submitted, but Koocanusa has, aside from a nice portmanteau kind of quality, a look and sound that seem to fit in with other place names in the region that are based on indigenous words. (One such is Okanagan, which, amusingly, has in at least one place been made into a spurious Irish name, O’Kanagan.)

And, after all, Kootenay is a word from an indigenous language – it’s the Blackfoot (Siksika) version of the name of the local Ktunaxa people. Come to think of it, Canada is generally thought to have come from an indigenous word, too (Iroquois, likely). Anyway, if Koocanusa had been entirely fake-indigenous, it still wouldn’t have been the first. Two great examples of words that were made up because they sounded “Indian” are Nakiska (the ski area that was built to host the 1988 Olympic alpine events, near Calgary) and Idaho.

Have you noticed, by the way, how often faux-Indian words have /k/ or /h/ in them? They seem to somehow be stereotypical “Indian” sounds (from the view of Anglophones), earthy or “authentic” or whatever – at the back of the throat, close to the source of breath, not on the dainty “civilized” tip of the tongue. True, they are both pretty common sounds; any given sentence of reasonable length in English is likely to contain one or both, perhaps several times. But I do feel – I don’t have survey data to back this up, but it’s an impression, so take it as you will – that they seem overrepresented in “Indian” words (names used with an intent of signifying some “Indianness” for non-Indian people). In actual indigenous languages, of course, /k/ and /h/ are present in a much more reasonable proportion (for a quick lesson in some of the Nakoda language, for instance, see “Meaning of a Nakoda Stoney prayer and âba wathtech”).

What Koocanusa is, anyway, is something not really new in place names. Not new at all, in fact. It’s a syllable acronym – well, except for the usa part, which is a letter acronym, so really Koocanusa is a mixed acronym, like canola. We all know what an acronym is; a syllable acronym is one that uses whole syllables rather than individual letters. Other examples include Kenora (Keewatin, Norman, Rat Portage – they left off the final t), Soho (South of Holborn in London, South of Houston in New York), Tribeca (Triangle below Canal), Soweto (South West Township)… Oh, there are a great many. An interesting variant is the spelled-out pronounced acronym; the first example that comes to my mind is Ceepeear, the name of a neighbourhood in Calgary that was built near the CPR railyards (I once heard a newsman mangle it as “si-pee-er” in an evident attempt not to say it like “C P R.”)

So how do you say Koocanusa? Heck, if Jim isn’t sure, neither am I. But I rather suspect the split is between those who say “coo canoe sa” and those who say “coo can you sa” (cool! can you canoe in the lake, sir?). Perhaps someone local to the area can say more.

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How possessive should you be?

Posted on January 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

A colleague has asked about whether it’s better to use, for example,

a close friend of Jack’s and Diane’s

or

a close friend of Jack and Diane

She notes that the first one looks a bit funny, but that you’d use possessive (genitive) with the pronoun:

a close friend of theirs

In fact, both are actually correct. With pronouns, we use the genitive (but see below); this is a holdover from when English had a more thoroughgoing use of case (and indeed in German, which kept the inflections, you would use just the genitive and no preposition: ein enger Freund Jacks und Dianas). We used to match case variably to prepositions; this is why we can see from whence in old texts as normal.  But we have moved away from heavily inflecting nouns in general, and we no longer generally vary case according to preposition, which is why those who “stop and think about it” sometimes declare that from whence is redundant — we think of case as a paraphrase of preposition plus noun, or vice versa, which it isn’t really. To return to the issue at hand, in Modern English, as a standard rule (to which the genitive pronoun structure shown above is an exception), the complement of a preposition is structurally in the accusative case (though non-pronouns don’t manifest a difference morphologically between nominative and accusative), and so the non-’s version works.

There is a distinction that can be made in some contexts: compare

that criticism of his

with

that criticism of him

We use the possessive (genitive) in cases where there is a sense of belonging or attachment; we use the accusative where the of is functioning not as a genitive but as another kind of relation. In theory we can make the same distinction with regular nouns, and it works in some cases:

that criticism of John’s

that criticism of John

But in the case of a word such as friend there is no important distinction to be made. And in fact we can get away with the accusative even on the pronoun:

a close friend of them

It’s not quite as nice as

a close friend of theirs

but it is acceptable. When you go over to the actual nouns, however, it tends to be more natural the other way. Adding the ’s on the names might give a greater sense of belonging or attachment (and without it of a greater unidirectionality), or it might not; your results will vary.

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musk

Posted on January 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

This word has an unmaskable manly, musty smell to it. It has the urging /mʌ/ like the sound a man may make when hefting some heavy thing, and the abrupt rustling stop of the /sk/; it rhymes with husk, rusk, tusk, and has a rough, brusque thrust to it, that musky scent perhaps mingled with labdanum… It starts with the m like muscles or a moustache (or mom, of course, but any manly man loves his mom) and ends with that hard, kicking k. The word is soaked in testosterone, or something like it (though it probably appears more often in romance novels than anywhere else).

And look what terms it shows up in. There are many compounds, certainly, that involve musk; the OED gives a long list, including musk apple, musk beaver, musk bladder, musk buffalo, but also musk carnation, musk cherry, musk geranium, musk hyacinth, musk orchid, musk-perfumed… well, no one talks about those, really – although, as we shall see, musk orchid is quite apposite.

But musk also shows up as a pseudomorpheme in assorted other manly words: imagine going out hunting for muskrat and musk ox and even muskwa (black bear) out on the muskeg with a musket and fly fishing for muskellunge like a musketeer… Hm, well, mustering that much muscular manliness may require a few mugs of muscatel or perhaps the influence of Amanita muscaria, the toadstool also known as fly agaric.

Not that flies seem all that manly. Except for fly fishing. But, then, Latin musca “fly” served as the basis for muschetta “sparrowhawk”, which came also to refer to an arrow from a crossbow, and then, it seems, from that it referred to a crossbow and (by this time having passed through the mutations of time and language transfer) then to a gun, specifically a musket. So when firing a musket you let fly from a little fly, so to speak.

This is not the origin of musk, however. Musk, I should first say, is specifically originally a greasy, odorous substance secreted by the male musk deer from a gland that hangs like a sack under its abdomen. The word comes all the way from Persian mušk and is related to or possibly even comes from Sanskrit muṣka, which means “scrotum, testicle” (the Greek word for which is the source of our word orchid, so, as I said, musk orchid is apposite – or perhaps redundant; nuts).

So you have flies, and you have what lies behind many a fly. And you have a word that sounds like heavy breath and presents a manly scent that will probably lead to the ripping of bodices…

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toadstool

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 3 comments

One of my favourite translation fails was in an article on food poisoning. There was a list of things that one might eat that could cause poisoning. In the English, one of the items was toadstools. The French translation rendered this as excréments de crapaud. That’s French for “toad excrement” – i.e., toad stools. Ah, yup, that will probably make you sick too, but…

They might about as readily have translated it as outils de crapaud, “toad’s tools”, I suppose. But, then, why didn’t the original English just have mushrooms? The translator probably wouldn’t have mistaken that for “rooms of mush”. (What kind of mush? um, could be toad stools, I guess… or are those the furniture in the mush room, put together with the toad’s tools? or held together with metal ribbets, I mean rivets?)

Thing is, toadstool and mushroom aren’t perfectly fungible. I mean, they do refer to the same thing, broadly speaking. But you don’t eat steak and toadstools or cream of toadstool soup. Toadstools tend to be thought of as the poisonous counterpart of edible mushrooms (yes, people will sometimes speak of poisonous mushrooms, but edible toadstools? not really). This may be related to the fact that toads were long thought of as poisonous – though toadstool has been around since the 1300s (the earliest spelling is tadstole), and the specifically “poisonous” sense didn’t start to stick to them until around 1600.

And toads are ugly. Frogs may be nice and green (and sometimes poisonous, too), but toads are nasty-looking things, the amphibian equivalent of those decorative gourds you see all over the place in later October. Toadstools, by comparison, are often seen as particularly garish. And always, of course, shaped suitably for sitting on. It’s true that there is a stereotypical image of mushrooms, but try this: do a Google image search on mushroom. There’s a certain amount of variety: white, brown, some polka-dotted. Now do one on toadstool. You will see almost nothing but red ones with white polka dots.

Trippy, eh? Why is that? Who came up with that stereotype? Well, if you look over the pictures, you will notice that some of them are photographs. There’s an actual kind of mushroom that is red with white polka dots. It’s Amanita muscaria. Ah, Amanita! Deadly, right? Actually, the deadly kind of Amanita is the plainer-looking Amanita phalloides, along with a few other types. Amanita muscaria is quite unlikely to kill you. But it will take you on a trip, and not just to the emergency room. It’s a hallucinogen. Eat it and you may see all sorts of vivid things, not limited to polka-dotted mushrooms with toads on them.

Funny thing, though. Look again at all those pictures of toadstools. A lot of them are freakin’ cute. Check out this little girl in a toadstool costume. And all those little houses in toadstools, and that little Nintendo toadstool guy. Come to think of it, my mom’s kitchen always had – still has, I think – flour and sugar jars shaped like toadstools. What other poisonous or psychoactive thing would you model food containers on?

So we have a bit of a bivalency here. We have this word that really is trying to be ugly – toad is a word that names an ugly creature and sounds kind of like turd but with that groaning /o/, and stool is at best a dull, serviceable word and at worst, well, we’ve already covered that – and it names something that is poisonous, but something that is also magical (the old word for “hallucinogenic”) and kinda girly-pretty. And those polka dots are even visible in the word, those little o’s. (Are the t’s like fungi? Is the d like a toad or bunny or the l like a rearing caterpillar? Your call.)

I guess what flavour you get from toadstool depends on which side you eat… Go ask Alice.

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xylol, xylyl

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 4 comments

Yes, you’re right, I’m doing these words because of how they look. Seriously, xylol looks like a web-geek way of referring to a “guy joke” (laddish humour), since xy can refer to male chromosomes (while xx is of course female, but XXX would be laddish for sure), and lol is “laugh(ing) out loud”. I think lol also looks kind of like the entrance to a temple – or perhaps to a tunnel, with columns or trees flanking it. And xy is also the ending of sexy and a few other things (such as apoplexy).

And xylyl? No lol, but otherwise even better. Nothing but straight lines! It’s almost architectural, like iron bridge buttresses. Or like the crossed swords and various other weapons of an enemy army heading your way – probably more in the line of how welcoming the word would be to many people’s eyes. Seriously, it starts with x, and then it has that ylyl. If you tried to say it with the usual consonant value of each word, [ksjljl], it would sound like a sound made by someone who’s being strangled. (Or a Czech name, of course.)

Because, really, xylyl? Ths wrd hs n vwls! Except that, as we know, it does. It’s not that, as is often said, “y is sometimes a vowel.” It’s that y sometimes represents a vowel. Letters are not sounds. A special thing about xylyl is that, while it has five tokens of three types of letters (types x y l, and there are two tokens each of types y and l), it has four distinct phonemes and five actual different sounds (counting a diphthong, /aɪ/, as one sound – it’s really a moving sound, one that starts in one place in the mouth and moves to another, but it’s not two sounds actually).

The first sound, /z/, is not even the sound x is supposed to represent, but in English we think we can’t say /ks/ at the beginning of a word. (It’s just a mental block, not a physical inability, but it’s quite a solid block for many people.) Then the y comes in as /aɪ/. Then the /l/ in its more front version (not as purely front as in some languages, such as Spanish; the tongue still rises a little in the back, and it touches at the tip but not around to the sides, usually). And then another y but this one standing for /ɪ/. And then that final /l/, which is actually an allophone – a different version of what we consider the same sound: the tongue is raised higher in the back; in many British accents the tongue doesn’t even quite touch at the front in the /l/ that comes after a vowel. So the International Phonetic Alphabet representation is /zaɪlɪl/, which is also kind of cute, but has nothing on xylyl.

Can you guess what xylol and xylyl are? The two are (unsurprisingly) related. If you conclude from the forest of x’s and y’s and l’s that these are chemical names, you’ll be right. The yl and ol endings are pretty reliable, modifications of Greek and Latin roots used as standard suffixes (the ol originally a reference to oil, but now often an echo of alcohol; the yl from ὕλη hulé, originally “wood, material” and seen in ylem as well). If I tell you that xylol is a synonym of xylene, you’ll be even more certain. But the xyl? Where have you seen that before? Right, xylophone. What’s a xylophone? The one you played in kindergarten may be metal, but originally they made their sound (phone) from wood: Greek ξύλον xylon. (Now, doesn’t that look like some sci-fi cartoon character, or a commercial product, or maybe some Niagara Falls attraction?)

So, um, xylyl is wood wood? Well, no. Wood comes into it in the original source of these (sometimes way back there, since they can also come from charcoal or petroleum). To cut to the chase, xylol is a clear solvent, not highly toxic (but of course don’t drink it), highly flammable, with a sweet smell that would probably seem oddly familiar to you; it’s used in the printing, rubber, and leather industries, among others; in dentistry, it can be used to dissolve gutta-percha, which is sometimes used for root canal treatments. It is actually a mixture of three isomers of dimethylbenzene, and if that means nothing to you, I’d say it’s best for you to look up further details if you’re interested, because it gets pretty abstruse pretty quickly.

And xylyl? It’s a radical formed by removing a hydrogen from an isomer of xylol. What’s a radical? A molecule (or atom) with an unpaired electron, which makes it highly reactive. It’s denoted by the formula (CH3)2C6H3, in case that means anything at all to you. Or it might be all Greek to you. Which would be fitting.

Words like this are examples of what makes English orthography so much fun and so much trouble. But there are so many different accents of English, and so much existing printed material, a complete reform of the spelling would be a senseless undertaking. There is no solution for English spelling. But there is a solvent: xylol.

LOL. TTY. XO.

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spoffle

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 3 comments

Put the palm of your hand right in front of your mouth. Say skill. Now say kill. Do you notice a difference? Try still, then till. Now spill. Now pill. Feel it that time?

It’s a feature of English phonology that we aspirate our syllable-initial voiceless stops. What that means is that when a /p/, /t/, or /k/ is at the beginning of a syllable – the very beginning, not after /s/ – and especially when it’s at the beginning of a stressed syllable, we puff out a little breath of air, like a short /h/ added after it – actually, like devoicing the start of the vowel. We do this even if the stop is followed by a liquid (/r/ or /l/). Try it with tree and plea.

Most languages don’t do this. (It’s a good way to sound like an Anglophone when speaking Spanish or French, for instance.) In fact, in some languages, the two sounds (aspirated and unaspirated) are considered as different as /p/ and /b/. This is why, in a language such as Thai (when you see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet), you see things like ph and th that seem to be said like p and t.

One quite marked bit of evidence of these aspirations is the sound they make when you’re speaking into a microphone. Most of us have had an occasion at one time or another to discover what “popping the p” means, possibly by doing it ourselves and possibly by hearing it at someone’s wedding or a high-school assembly. And you may have noticed spongey things that go over microphones to help prevent this effect. What are those things called?

That’s what Stephen Fry said, or words to that effect, when he and Hugh Laurie were in a recording studio some years ago: What’s that thing called? And Laurie said that it’s called a spoffle.

Several years after that session, Laurie and Fry were in the studio again, and the engineer came over to the microphone and said he was just going to adjust the spoffle. The what? Laurie asked, incredulous. The engineer explained. Laurie laughed and declared that he had made the word up on the spot.

So there it is. It popped into his puckish pate and he spat it out. Stephen Fry says so in his book Paperweight, and why would we doubt his word? It’s a perfectly plausible explanation, and there’s no other proposed etymology.

But if it’s just a word he made up, then it’s not a real word, is it? Well, it is now. It’s an industry-standard term, even.

It’s simple. There was a thing that needed a word, and someone made one up. (Well, it’s also called a pop-shield, but, really, spoffle is better. Anyway, we know that just about any absurdity about language, confidently asserted, can be very convincing; there’s a lot of rubbish – and some rather good stuff, now and then – floating around out there just because someone decided it should be so.) And spoffle seems a perfectly suitable word for a soft baffle to muffle the pop and spit of aspirations, given its sound and the words it sounds like.

Most people, remember, are not all that aware of the various meats that go into the sausage that is a word, and don’t really think about them that much even when they do; they just bite in and see how it tastes. Would we have words like chocoholic if etymological morphology were a primary consideration for the average user? Every now and then a made-up word just sounds right. Like blurb. Or grawlix. Because while words don’t always wear their sources on their sleeves, they always have the flavour their sounds give them (unless you can’t hear them, of course). And sometimes a word just, you know, pops.

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Sanskrit

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 3 comments

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Question: from GoLeefs95
OK so my friend dragged me to see this opera movie thing today called Saythagr or sumthin like that and it was dum, they just stood around singing for like OMG FOUR HOURS, but anyway it was all in sandscript, and the interviews were talking about how hard it is to learn and sing this language because it’s like, from nowhere and ancient and everything. And it had no verbs or someting. So what is it? And why do they call it sandscript?

Answer forum:

HedKrushr
Its not sandscript you dumb blond its sans script cuz it has no writing. OK? Sans, like not have. Script, like writing. Learn French. Duh.

Trevs
It too is Sandscript! They wrote it in the sand. India is a desert country and all they had to write in was sand. So they would take their notes in sand and then at the end of class they would open the door and it would all blow away. Which is why it took them so long to learn anything. I saw this in a movie about the Dolly Llama, called Sanddune.

Aleeshya21
Actually, it’s Sanskrit. It’s a really ancient language. A lot of world wisdom was written in it. It was the language that the Buddha and Gandhi spoke. The word Sanskrit is a Sanskrit word for “written together,” because it was written all joined up. If you learn it to perfection you get to see Nirvana.

HedKrushr
OMG Aleeshya21 ur so dumb! Nirvana sang in English and Kurt Kobain is dead. Learn some music!

Sesquiotic
Aleeshya21 is right that it’s Sanskrit. The word Sanskrit comes from the roots sama “together” and krta “made” and means not just “put together” but “well put together”, i.e., perfected. Sanskrit is basically the Latin of India – it’s even related to Latin. Its grammar is quite similar in many ways to that of Latin, and was analyzed and refined into a formalized standard by Panini, who was really the first linguist. There was, as you say, a school of thought that it was the language of the divine and proper usage was a path to divinity; similar attitudes can be seen towards modern English in some quarters. And, like Latin, Sanskrit is the classic language of many sacred texts and religious observances. Just as Latin developed more common forms that eventually became modern Italian, French, Spanish, etc., Sanskrit had common forms called prakrits, among which was the language the Buddha spoke (Pali), and many modern languages are descended from Sanskrit, including Hindi. It originally evolved as a purely oral language, and its great texts have traditionally been passed down orally, but it has been written in all the different writing systems of India, and is commonly written now in the devanagari alphabet, which is what Hindi is written in.

GoLeefs95
TLDR.

HedKrushr
WTF OMG ur so dumb. Panini is a kind of samwich, not samscratch. Learn Italian!

RachelleJrnl
How can you say something so racist as that Sanskrit comes from Latin! Sesquoitic you need to learn some things. You think that all knowledge has to come from the Europeans. Well, I’ve been to India, and it’s nothing like Latin. They have a deep wisdom that no one in the west understands. That’s the whole point of Satygrha and what Ghandhi was saying. You have to have freedom of the spirit and be who you are and follow your desires and stand in the way of western racism.

Sesquiotic
Sanskrit is not descended from Latin; they come from the same source, as do Greek and of course all the other Indo-European languages. Sweden is nothing like Italy, but Swedish and Italian are both Indo-European languages. There is a lot of great wisdom to be found in Sanskrit literature, although there is much in it and in Hinduism in general that probably does not match your values, for instance the caste system. The Bhagavad Gita, which was very important to Gandhi and which is used as the text for Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha – which I also saw today, and I really loved it, but different people like different things – has a central lesson that you must be who you are, yes, but that means doing your duty and surrendering the ego and desire. Your duty done poorly is better than another’s done well. It, and Gandhi’s following of it, has played an important role in many movements for freedom and equality; Martin Luther King Jr. was also influenced by Gandhi, as Satyagraha indicates. At the same time, the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita can be read in a few different ways. But there is far, far more in Sanskrit than just that one text.

RachelleJrnl
Sesquotic you are such a hateful racist. How dare you invent this Indo-Europan idea. Sanskrit isn’t from Sweden! Look it up! How dare you say I value the caste system! It’s things like that that Sanskrit works against. You haven’t been to India. You need to go and see. And how can you talk about grammar when you write such bad English. You need to take a couse in grammar. GoLeefs95 Sanskrit is so hard to learn because it’s like no other language. It is sans kriteria, which means unequalled. It is the language of the divine. You need to find the divine in yourself and put yourself first. And by the way Buddhism uses Tibetan which is not the same.

qwaardChthulhu
It’s sam’s skirt cuz the guys wear skirts and the girls don’t.

HedKrushr
Rachelle u need 2 get laid.

Sesquiotic
Sanskrit isn’t actually that hard to sing for the most part, though it does have some sounds Anglophones will have to put some effort into learning. Russian is at least as hard for Anglophones. If, at any time, you would like to stop screaming at people and start reading things, start with something like this useful brief run-down of the connections between Sanskrit and European languages and how they were discovered. And if you’re interested in the English versions of the texts from the Bhagavad Gita that were used in Satyagraha, the Metropolitan Opera has a nice PDF of them. Here’s one great quote: “Let a man feel hatred for no being, let him be friendly, compassionate; done with thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ the same in pleasure as in pain, long suffering.”

RachelleJrnl
Sesquitic you should know you can’t trust everything you read on the web. And thanks for the sexism “let a man.” You should go to India and open your eyes. HedKrushr: DIE.

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Favourite responder chosen by GoLeefs95: RachelleJrnl.

Favourite answer chosen by GoLeefs95: “Sanskrit is so hard to learn because it’s like no other language. It is sans kriteria, which means unequalled. It is the language of the divine.”

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eulachon

Posted on January 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

Toss this word on the table in front of me and I would, without any prior knowledge of it, say “That’s Greek.” Easy-peasy: the eu is a good start – actually a “good” start, since eu is a Greek-derived prefix meaning “good”. So, now, what’s this lachon? It may remind me of Laocoon, the Trojan priest to whom is attributed the line “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” (that was actually Virgil who put those words in his mouth – “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” “I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts”). But clearly it’s not related to him. The first hint of something fishy comes when I pull my Classical Greek dictionary off the shelf and find lakhanon “vegetables” and lakhos “lot, section; fate” but no lakhon.

Hm. So good vegetables, or good lot or good fate, or a good lot of vegetables, but with that morphological or inflectional change… no, I really don’t think so. Perhaps my Classical Greek dictionary isn’t comprehensive enough.

Well, no, it’s not… It doesn’t include words from Chinook.

Yes, this word only looks like Greek. It’s a sort of linguistic Trojan horse, faking one thing to get in the gate but actually being another. But, oh, heck, it has other forms too… It also fakes Irish, or fake Irish English: the same word has also shown up as hooligan. But not as in thug – just a homonym. And it is also seen as oolachon, oolichan, oulachon, ulchen, uthlechan, eurachon, eulakane, olakon… It’s quite mercurial, a mockingbird, a Morpheus, a trickster. By now you surely will have smelt a fish.

Well, a fish will shed some light on this: specifically, a candlefish – a small fish, a kind of smelt, that is so fatty during spawning that you can dry it, stick a wick in it, and burn it like a candle. Yes, really. It gets up to 15% body fat. That’s why its real Greek name is Thaleichthys pacificus – from thaleia “rich” and ichthus “fish” (the pacificus is not Greek-derived; it’s Latin and would mean “peaceful” except it really just means the fish lives in the Pacific Ocean – though it spawns in North American rivers). The very word thaleichthys seems thick, rich, spreadable or burnable, with all those fricatives. But why burn this fish’s fat (or grease, as it’s often called in this case) when you can eat it? It’s pretty much the colour and consistency of butter, and has been a staple of the diet of the First Nations of the western coast of North America since, well, forever, pretty much.

But will it remain so forever? Never mind changing tastes; this fish may be facing a less happy fate than that of, say, vegetables. It has experienced dramatic decreases in populations and is now a threatened species. Why? It’s still being figured out, but in such cases, the threats tend to come largely from things humans have brought in that certainly looked appealing and helpful – hydroelectric dams, large-scale fishing, logging, factories… they feed people and create jobs, yes, but will they produce bad long-term effects in exchange for good short-term effects? Sometimes you luck on and sometimes you luck out; some of the fabulous things we have brought through our gates might make a Trojan hoarse shouting “Beware”. Is the eulachon a canary in a coal mine, or perhaps a candlefish in the wind?

I am grateful to several colleagues from the Editors’ Association of Canada, whose discussion of this word tipped me off to it.

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vaccine

Posted on January 12, 2012 | 1 comment

Dianne Fowlie has noticed I haven’t tasted vaccine yet, and asks whether it’s a tasteworthy word. Well, in my view, all words are tasteworthy – though I might have more ideas about, or inclination towards, one or another at a give time. Some words I take a long time to get to because I can see that there’s so much to taste, it will take me quite a while to write the note.

And some words I shy away from because I don’t really want to have to deal with the reaction some people will have to them. I don’t mean just vulgarities, and not just those and other offensive words such as racial epithets either. There are some words that are not per se offensive, but they are strongly charged because of a vigorous polarity of opinion on them. I have no immediate plans, for instance, to taste abortion. I simply don’t want my comments section to become home to a raging debate between assorted people who have happened by and have little to say about linguistics and phonaesthetics and so on but a whole lot to say about the word’s referent. It’s not that there’s no place for that debate; it’s that this is not the place for it.

Certainly, vaccine is not as much of a lightning rod as abortion – or I wouldn’t be tasting it today. But there has been a lot of upset about vaccines in some quarters. I don’t just mean the scurrilous rumours passed around in some third-world countries that the polio vaccine is really a means of infecting people with AIDS. I mean such things as the idea that there is a link between some vaccines and autism – a hypothesis at one time supported scientifically by just one study, but even that study has now been withdrawn by the journal that published it, nearly all of the co-authors have repudiated it, and the lead author (Andrew Wakefield) has been found to have committed fraud (and had a significant undeclared conflict of interest: he stood to profit from lawsuits that it would have supported) and was stripped of his medical licence. So far no other scientifically reliable evidence has been published. None of which has kept many people from feeling strongly convinced that there is a link, and in general that vaccines are not trustworthy, and voicing their conviction vehemently. And those on the other side of the question often mirror the strength of feeling and expression in response.

But why such strong feelings? Why such fear about something that has such an excellent track record over all, statistically among the most persuasive track records in all of medical treatment? Many preventable diseases have been virtually eradicated by vaccines, and where vaccination rates reduce, the diseases reappear – in Ireland in 2000, for instance, the vaccination rate for measles fell to 76%, and the number of cases rose from 148 to more than 1200 – and several children died. In 1995, a routine diphtheria vaccination was cancelled in Russia, and deaths from diphtheria rose from none to around 1500. Nor has there been any documented significant rise in other health problems correlated reliably with vaccines – with most drugs, long-term problems caused by them surface within a decade or two at most; vaccines have had up to two centuries of use now. When we look at the success rates of many medications, and the overall gain versus harm, a great many of them – common treatments that many, many people take – come nowhere remotely close to the success rate of vaccines. And yet some people – quite a few people, in fact – have very strong, emotionally charged, opposition to them. Not just the sort of cautious reserve you see in regard to most medications. The kind of passion more often reserved for religion, politics, and sports.

I can only make guesses as to why the emotional component is so strong for some people, but two factors that come to mind are that vaccines are often universally or broadly required and enforced by government, and vaccines are made with the same things that cause the disease, being injected right into your (or your child’s) body (or sometimes put in the mouth). Many people are reflexively mistrustful of government – I probably don’t even need to point that out. And the idea of having pathogens injected into you surely must by horrifying to many people, especially if they don’t know that, for most vaccines, the pathogens have been “killed” – well, viruses aren’t live per se (they’re bits of genetic material and protein, not cells), but they have been broken up. For some people, there are further specifically religious reasons for resistance, but those don’t seem to be strongly evident in the loudest voices against vaccination. I’d be interested in further insights to the strong emotional level of the resistance – though not in raging arguments in the comments section.

Actually, what’s in the vaccine isn’t always the same thing that causes the disease it’s being given to prevent. For instance, the first real vaccine prevented smallpox by using cowpox. It had been noticed that people who had gotten cowpox had immunity to smallpox. And cowpox isn’t nearly as nasty as smallpox – smallpox had a 30% fatality rate and was a very widespread cause of disfigurement and blindness as well, while cowpox is a blister at the site of infection, and it goes away. A little mild cowpox, just enough to stimulate the immune system, turned out to be an excellent way to keep from getting smallpox. (This is one case of a “live” virus being used for vaccination.) With the aid of cowpox, smallpox was wiped out – the disease was declared completely eradicated in 1979. I guess the scientific way of putting it is that infection with Variola major and Variola minor was eradicated through inoculation with Vaccinia.

Ah, yes, we’re back to the word: Vaccinia is the formal name for cowpox; vaccine is a Latinate word meaning “of, or relating to, cows” (compare bovine, which is based on the Greek root), and is also the French name for cowpox. (Cowpox is not limited to cows and people, but at the time vaccination was discovered – just before 1800 – it was most noted as something milkmaids got from cows’ udders.) It is something of a bovine coincidence that vaccination programs can produce a “herd immunity” effect: it is not necessary for absolutely all of a population to have been vaccinated as long as a substantial minority have; any new case introduced will almost certainly be limited to one or a few people. Likewise coincidental, of course, is the fact that some people have a cow about the idea of themselves or their children being herded into vaccination.

Aside from all that, what tastes does the word vaccine have? It starts with a bite of the lip, /v/, and then leaps to the back and rolls on the tongue from back to front – /k/, then /s/, then it releases a little to the tight high front /i/, then the nasal /n/ on the tip. In vaccine you see the sharp tooth or open collar of v at the start, and the two hooks or two soft curves of cc (which, come to think of it, is also a measure of fluid for injectable fluids such as vaccines – the usual term now is mL, though). And the a, the i, the n, the e – to my eyes they look like a cast of servants from a drawing-room comedy, but, then, so do a lot of other things. It’s all innocuous, hardly smacking of inoculation.

And the overtones? Vacuum, accident, accede, obscene, accuse, scene, maybe even cinema… If you swirl it on your tongue for a bit, and in your head, you can find a fair bit you don’t notice at first. We are exposed to some words so much that we don’t really notice their aesthetic potential – it’s sort of like drinking lots of wine without stopping to savour it. I won’t say we become immune to the word’s effects – indeed, at least some of them are persistently there, if at a low level. But we do tend to fix our attention much more on what they signify than on their aesthetic properties. It’s nice to be able to pause and look at all aspects of what a word brings, if we can.

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