Hummingwolf's Neighborhood

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/putting-your-foot-in-it/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18450

David Wright Faladé’s “Amarillo Boulevard” (New Yorker, September 28, 2025; archived) is the best short story I’ve read in a while, dealing with family, race, friendship, Texas, and other large matters with no apparent effort and packing a surprising emotional punch. What leads me to post it is a phrase I had to look up, the last one in this paragraph:

Miss Sammie asked, “Do Atlanta Juneteenths be like we do around here, with the collards and the mac ’n’ cheese and the rest? You know, putting your foot in it.”

To me, to put your foot in it means (to quote the Cambridge Dictionary site) “to say something by accident that embarrasses or upsets someone,” which is clearly not the sense here. Fortunately, I found this Reddit thread:

I used to cook food at a shelter and one time a guest told me “you must have put your foot in this!” I had never heard the saying before and thought he was accusing me of adulterating the food. I tried to apologize, but he told me that it was a compliment. Apparently, it is usually used to express satisfaction with a meal/dish, “you put your foot in that” is a compliment to the chef in the southern U.S. Does anybody have any insight on this idiom? From what I can gather by the context of the situation it has to do with preparing a meal with care/dedication, similar to “you put your heart into it.” But why the foot?

whatcarpaltunnel
“You’ve stumpd your toe in this” or “You stuck your thumb in this” are the ones I’m most familiar with being from the south. These two can refer to a range of expression from being too sweet or complementing the chef(cook) on his mastery, in my experience. I’m hoping someone can chime in on the saying for a more detailed history.

zsluggiest1
I was a chef throughout Louisiana for about 20 years and worked with several mid 60-65 year old black women that all said the same thing. They said it came from the days of slavery when there were very limited ingredients left over for the slaves to feed themselves. When someone would get a dish just right they would say that the cook must have “stuck their foot in it” as to say it had a flavor that was better regardless of using the exact same ingredients as everyone else. It makes a lot of sense given how much more common the phrase is in deep south black culture.

It’s pretty much unusable if you’re not part of the relevant cultural group, but I’m glad to know about it. (Yeah, yeah, the folk history of the phrase is probably not accurate, but people love to find satisfying explanations for opaque idioms.)

https://languagehat.com/putting-your-foot-in-it/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18450

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/tolstoevsky-on-peasant-mentality/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18438

I’m only on the first chapter of Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919, which I can already tell is going to be endlessly informative and thought-provoking (thanks, NWU Press!), and the section “Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy Weigh the Two Cultures” is so interesting I thought I’d quote some chunks of it:

While incarcerated in Omsk from 1850 to 1854, Dostoevsky had experienced a range of behavior generally unknown to Russian writers or readers of the cultured classes. He presented House of the Dead as fragments of a manuscript left by a recently deceased landowner who had spent ten years in penal servitude in Siberia. The chapters, written in the first person, purport to be selections from a larger text made by an editor who introduced the work. The memoir rests squarely on the premise that the Westernized classes have no idea how abysmal their ignorance of the peasant is.

[The gentry] are divided from the peasants by the deepest abyss, and this is fully evident only when a member of the privileged class suddenly finds himself, due to the action of powerful external circumstances, completely deprived of his former rights, and turns to the common people. It does not matter if you have dealt with peasants all your life, if you have associated with them every day for forty years in a businesslike way, for instance in regularly prescribed administrative transactions, or even simply in a friendly way, as a benefactor, or, in a certain sense, a father-you will never really know them.

The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that it took imprisonment at close quarters with peasant convicts to make him see how much he took accustomed social roles and privileges for granted. He experienced the greatest difficulty in being treated by the peasants as a person. “The hatred which I as a member of the gentry, continually experienced from the convicts during my first few years became intolerable, poisoning my whole life” (176).

He found his value system to be almost completely alien to that of the peasant prisoners. As he observed them closely he discovered that they were intemperate, blasphemous, and irreverent. Not only were they unrepentant of the crimes that had put them in prison: they seemed immoral beings at heart! To be sure, he found some appealing characteristics, like their shrewdness at sizing people up, and their essential personal dignity. But there was no possibility of abandoning enough of his own cultural sensibilities to merge into the peasant community that welcomed and integrated each new peasant within hours of arrival.

The narrator found association with peasants in the prison so loathsome and debilitating that he regularly retreated into the neutral space of the prison hospital. […]

The prison theatricals function momentarily as a bridge between the peasant actors and the narrator, who has seen professionals perform one of the plays on the bill, Filatka and Miroshka, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Because of their innate sense of quality and the narrator’s expertise, for once the peasant convicts seek his approval.

They recognized that in this [theatregoing] I was better able to judge than they, that I had seen and knew more than they. Even those who were least well disposed toward me were (I know for a fact) anxious now for my approval of their theatre, and without the least sacrifice of dignity they put me in the best place. I see that now, recalling my impressions at the time. It seemed to me at the time–I remember–that in their correct estimate of themselves there was no deprecation whatever, but a feeling of their own worth. The highest and most salient characteristic feature of our people is their sense of justice and their thirst for it. (121)

His judgment on the peasant who played Filatka (“magnificent … a born actor with great talent”) contains a criticism of the professional actors he had seen in the part: “By comparison with him they were too much paysans, and not real Russian peasants. They were too anxious to impersonate the Russian peasant” (124). Even more than the acting, he was interested in the reactions of the audience, who were transported and in complete rapture over one of their own dressing up and playing a gentleman. As he watched the spectacle he could not help pondering how much power and talent in Russia were sometimes wasted in servitude and poverty. He saved his most optimistic conclusion for his summing up of the theatrical: “These poor people were only rarely permitted to live on their own, to enjoy themselves in a human fashion, to live for an hour without care-yet the person was morally changed, if only for a few minutes.” […]

By the summer of 1858 Tolstoy had adopted the dress and gestures of local peasants. He also read the recently published correspondence of Nikolai Stankevich, and conceived a great admiration for this humanitarian who rejected role-playing of any kind and cultivated simplicity and authenticity. Among other things, Stankevich’s example inspired Tolstoy to struggle to break his habit of resorting to physical violence in dealing with peasants. Tolstoy opened his second Iasnaia Poliana school in the autumn of 1859, but interrupted his teaching to accompany his ailing brother to western Europe, where he traveled from May 1860 to March 1861. While abroad he investigated the latest pedagogical theories, inspecting schools and interviewing educators in England, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and several Italian and German states. […]

The reasoning behind Tolstoy’s decision to drop everything and run a school for peasant children was simple. Rapid strides in science and technology at midcentury were widening the gap between the native and Westernized cultures in Russia. In a letter to E. P. Kovalevskii concerning popular education Tolstoy said the signs of progress in Russia, like telegraphs and academies of art, were premature and misleading, when only one percent of her seventy million people could read. “Marfutka and Taraska,” he opined, “must learn at least a little bit of what we know.” Bridging this gap was vital to the national interest. Educated society did not understand the mentality of the people, and existing educational theories that called for molding the child provoked great resistance from peasants and made real learning impossible. Nobody knew how to teach the people. He could perform a brilliant feat by discovering the way.

Tolstoy conceived his school as a laboratory, for he regarded pedagogy as an experimental science (he had earlier spoken of his estate as a laboratory for the study of management). He found works on chemistry, biology, zoology, and geology to be superior to those in all other disciplines in the West. In his diary he expressed his powerful faith in science to achieve his great goal of cultural unification: “We know nothing. The only hope for knowing is for all to know together–to merge all classes in the knowledge of science.” […]

To establish an environment conducive to learning, the Iasnaia Poliana school functioned without corporal punishment. Visitors were astonished at how much learning could be accomplished without beatings. Realizing that peasants had their own body language and gestures, Tolstoy adjusted to his young charges: “Everybody who knows anything about peasant children has noticed that they are not accustomed to any kind of caresses–tender words, kisses, being touched with a hand, and so forth–and that they cannot bear these caresses.” Understanding that they had their own time sense, he refused to structure the school day in fixed periods demarcated by the ringing of a bell. The class would study a given subject only as long as its interest remained high. When attention flagged they would move on to another. Even the length of the class day should remain flexible. If the pupils became restless and nothing was being accomplished, they were cheerfully dismissed.

Yet despite his solicitude for their learning environment, he found to his dismay that his pupils could assimilate almost no science! Tolstoy concluded that it would take them a long time to outgrow the conceptions of the physical world they had learned at home and adopt a scientific worldview. They could absorb no geography at all. Abstractions of all kinds gave them difficulty. Three weeks after Tolstoy worked with them for hours explaining the concept of law not one of them could tell him what law was. They had no historical interest whatever. Lacking autonomy, they had no reason to situate themselves in historical time or any larger world. He made excuses, relating their deficiencies with regard to geography and history to their never having traveled beyond the village that was their universe and to lacking any sense of participation in politics without newspapers or opinions. And he redoubled his efforts to coax his pupils to leap the chasm to his cultural heritage.

One of Tolstoy’s most instructive misadventures involved his choice of an English literary classic for reading to his charges. As a reflective European he found it perfectly natural to turn to a literary work to sharpen thinking on how one faces the world. But they found the adventures of Robinson Crusoe virtually incomprehensible. He dragged them through the work by paraphrasing, but it took a month, and they left it in disgust. Some of the boys wept because they could not understand and retell the story in their own words. […]

Remarkably, Tolstoy’s failure to teach Robinson Crusoe led in an indirect way to his one major breakthrough in the school. In requiring the children to retell the story in their own words he concluded that it was the literary language of the (translated) original that impeded comprehension. To demonstrate his hypothesis that the peasants were as adroit, creative, and original in their own colloquial Russian as the educated were in literary Russian, he found it useful to shift the focus of teaching back to the content of peasant culture. It occurred to him that folk proverbs expressed the tensions felt by peasants in everyday life, and he decided to choose one at random from his copy of Snegirev’s collection and ask his class to “compose a little drama on it.” The results astounded him. When it came to making a narrative faithful to the details of peasant life, each of the students concocted a story superior to the one he himself produced on the theme. Two of the boys stayed late and together with Tolstoy they crafted a story he considered to have real artistic merit, by virtue of its simplicity, its action, and its trueness-to-life. He declared victory, publicized the talent and ability of the best pupils–and closed the school.

It’s easy (and almost obligatory these days) to sneer at aristocrats trying to understand the темные люди (‘dark people’), as they were routinely called at the time — Thurston says in a footnote:

Temnie liudi presents difficulties for translators. […] The phrase can be translated simply as “ignorant,” but I usually prefer “simple folk,” since the Russian indicates more than a lack of knowledge or information.

But I sympathize with their strongly felt desire to cross the gulf that divided them from the vast majority of their fellow Russians, and I’m always interested in such accounts. (I remember a story I read long ago — was it by John Berger? — about a foreigner, perhaps an Englishman, living in a remote French village, who gets checks from abroad and cashes them at the bank in town; a group of villagers, convinced that the checks are magic tokens that will give them all the money they could ever want, kill him and take the checkbook into town — we last see them heading for the bank. Gives me chills just thinking about it.)

I posted about Записки из мёртвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead or Notes from the Dead House) here and here, and in the latter I mention “the wonderful chapter on Christmas” that includes the prison theatricals mentioned above. I really should reread that book now that my Russian is better and I’ve read more Dostoevsky.

https://languagehat.com/tolstoevsky-on-peasant-mentality/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18438

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/gertrude-stein-achievement-of-the-commonplace/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18413

Adam Thirlwell has an LRB review (archived) of “Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas,” and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Stein — it makes me want to go back to an author I read and enjoyed decades ago but haven’t looked at much since. I’ll excerpt a section about her writing, with its “devotion to the cut”:

Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining nothing. The pleasure would have to be elsewhere. This may be the final lesson of Wade’s book, which explores Stein’s biography not for explanations, but in order to better enjoy the pleasure of her sentences as a kind of physical delight. In the end, you have to go back to where you started: the surface and its sentences. ‘All of which was literally true,’ Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘like all of Gertrude Stein’s literature.’

Early​ in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein describes the pictures she and Leo acquired as they began their collection: a Daumier and two Gauguins and a Cézanne landscape along with two ‘tiny canvases of nude groups’ and ‘a very very small Manet’. But two paintings in particular are given special emphasis: Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It’s as though the paintings together offered an ongoing possibility, that the most searching artistic experiments might need to be done through portraits – and that the best subject for an avant-garde portrait is your wife.

Stein wrote her first portrait in 1910, a text in three or four pages about Toklas. She describes Toklas telling stories to her dying mother (like Stein, Toklas’s mother died of cancer when Toklas was young) and then leaving her father and brother for the utopian bliss of the final paragraph, which is her love affair with Stein, a mutual balance of speaking and being heard:

She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing. She was telling some one, who was loving every story that was charming. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was telling about being one then listening. That one being loving was then telling stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending. That one was then one always completely listening.

Stein argued that her major advance was Three Lives, but it’s possible that the true advance in her methods was this portrait, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas the moment is deliberately given its triumphant domestic setting, while Toklas is cooking supper for them one Sunday night:

She came in much excited and would not sit down. Here I want to show you something, she said. No I said it has to be eaten hot. No, she said, you have to see this first. Gertrude Stein never likes her food hot and I do like mine hot, we never agree about this. She admits that one can wait to cool it but one cannot heat it once it is on a plate so it is agreed that I have it served as hot as I like. In spite of my protests and the food cooling I had to read.

In the short portraits Stein continued to write, a series of statements are forced through multiple discriminations. It was a method she had begun in Three Lives and then developed at exhaustive length in The Making of Americans, but it works best in these short works, such as the portraits of Matisse and Picasso that would be published by Alfred Stieglitz in 1912 in Camera Work. Stein seems to have realised that everyone is having portraits made of them all the time, constantly being assessed and reassessed in conversations that go over the same limited ground. So each of her portraits is really a portrait of the way people talk. ‘He certainly very clearly expressed something,’ she writes in ‘Matisse’. ‘Some said that he did not clearly express anything. Some were certain that he expressed something very clearly and some of such of them said that he would have been a greater one if he had not been one so clearly expressing what he was expressing.’ ‘Matisse’ works like a fugue in the intensity of its repetitions, as it goes over and over the dilemma everyone felt about Matisse – was his clarity an emptiness or the form of his mastery? Stein had discovered that we use sentences in conversation with an untenable authority, that often we are using words that have no meaning or are only imposing meaning precariously, and that much of our language is based on minute differences in the placing of minute words, little connecting words such as ‘like’ or ‘some’, the words that are always so invisible and so difficult to assimilate when learning a new language, as in this early passage from ‘Orta or One Dancing’, which is in one sense a portrait of Isadora Duncan but is much more usefully seen as an attempt to define the word ‘one’:

Even if she was one and she was one, even if she was one she was changing. She was one and was then like some one. She was one and she had then come to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like a kind of a one.

The closest analogy to these texts might be minimalism in music: there is the same sense of tension and of excitement when a new note enters – when the word ‘dancing’ enters the vocabulary of Stein’s portrait after three pages it feels like a giant baroque decoration – and also the same danger of slackness or monotony. And they can’t be read quickly; they seem to require deep leisure time before and after, just as they were written, almost as if you have to be in Paris or the South of France, with many parties ahead of you, to be able to enjoy them.

In the summer of 1912, Stein and Toklas travelled to Spain. According to the usual logic of modernism set up by Picasso, where a sunlit holiday led to an avant-garde invention, Stein created a new mode:

hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world. It was a long tormenting process, she looked, listened and described. She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal.

Having explored the idea of the portrait, she moved to the outside world, in a series of texts that became Tender Buttons, a book divided into three sections: ‘Objects’, ‘Food’ and ‘Rooms’. Not that an innocent reader will find their usual idea of description here.

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

This is the first paragraph of a piece titled ‘Roastbeef’, but as a description of roast beef it is useless. As a kind of impressionism, it becomes more interesting, but the larger pleasure is of language working through concrete nouns and abstract nouns, a series of harmonious shocks.

There’s something so physically delightful in the cadences Stein was discovering in the portraits and Tender Buttons that it’s often tempting to compare the way she was writing in 1912 to the way the artists she collected were working. Her friendship with Picasso has led to many comparisons – none of which, I think, is helpful. One giant difference is that in Picasso’s Cubism there was always a decisive move towards reference, as if Cubism offered a delirious scene of representation mimicking itself, but this is not what’s happening in Stein’s writing from the same period. Stein herself always said that Cézanne was formative for her writing (Madame Cézanne with a Fan, she wrote, ‘was an important purchase because in looking and looking at this picture Gertrude Stein wrote Three Lives’), that it was Cézanne who helped her think about composition in a new way because in his paintings ‘each part is as important as the whole’: a kind of all-over effect. But if there’s a real analogy to painting, it is Matisse’s Woman with a Hat that might be the more important. Mme Matisse’s dress has been stabbed and smeared with garish touches of hot pink and red and a kind of absinthe-y green, a multicoloured surface to represent a dress that Matisse boasted was, in fact, black. Colour floated free from any obviously referential function, and I think it’s possible to argue that the painting suggested to Stein that words could be used in the same way Matisse used colour, without any obligation of meaning. In this way, she found a new linguistic musicality, a kind of grammatical structure that functions in the absence of semantics. As John Ashbery wrote in 1957, comparing Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,

If these works are highly complex and, for some, unreadable, it is not only because of the complicatedness of life, the subject, but also because they actually imitate its rhythm, its way of happening, in an attempt to draw our attention to another aspect of its true nature. Just as … life seems to alter the whole of what has gone before, so the endless process of elaboration which gives the work of these two writers a texture of bewildering luxuriance – that of a tropical rainforest of ideas – seems to obey some rhythmic impulse at the heart of all happening.

The sadness for Stein and her future readers is that at the time no one wanted to talk about her with this kind of seriousness: instead, as Wade details, she was endlessly ridiculed in the newspapers […]. Although she is now routinely mentioned in histories of modernist Paris in the 1920s, only Hemingway seemed to read her with any understanding – Eliot and Joyce and Woolf had no idea what to make of her (for Woolf she was mostly a curiosity to be met at an Edith Sitwell party, ‘a lady much like Joan Fry, but more massive; in blue sprinkled brocade, rather formidable’) – and Hemingway didn’t want to talk about her in public. In A Moveable Feast, long after she was dead, he offered only a single sentence of measured praise: ‘She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.’ Stein liked to present an image of herself as grandly aloof – ‘all alone with english and myself’. But in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she makes clear her wish for appreciation: ‘After all, as she said, we do want to be printed. One writes for oneself and strangers but with no adventurous publishers how can one come in contact with those same strangers.’ […]

In her lectures, she argued for her years of abstraction, her effort ‘to tell what each one is’ or to ‘tell what happened’ without telling stories, to show ‘what made what happened be what it was’. But the problem with seeing subjects at such an abstract level – with all its musical syntactic pleasures – is that the largest pleasure of any subject is the gory detail that abstraction disallows. Without it, everything becomes weightless – which leads to Stein’s problem of excessive length. This is why her writing can be so uneven, because it was never clear either for Stein or her reader what a decision in writing for Stein might be.

This​ was also why the crisis between Stein and Toklas in 1932 was so useful. She had to do something for Toklas; she had to do it in a way that other people, not just Toklas, could understand; and she had to do it fast, which meant she no longer had the luxury of infinite length. It forced her writing to approach the things of the world, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas it turned out that her writing could represent the world with poignant comical beauty. ‘I am trying to be as commonplace as I can be, she used to say to me,’ Toklas says towards the end of the book. ‘And then sometimes a little worried, it is not too commonplace. The last thing that she had finished, Stanzas in Meditation, and which I am now typewriting, she considers her real achievement of the commonplace.’ But Stein was wrong. It was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas itself that was the achievement. The ghostly conversational syntax, the manic precision of abstract discriminations, relaxes into an extraordinary mimicry of the way a voice talks when it’s telling a story. Her sentences are at their most beautiful when at their most dishevelled, as in the slouchy, innocent bravura of this from Paris France: ‘Once in talking to the Baronne Pierlot a very old french friend she said about something when I said but Madame Pierlot it is natural, no said Madame Pierlot it may be nature but it is not natural.’ We’re so used to voice as confession, as a form of radical honesty, that it can be hard to appreciate her socialised way of talking, which involves not precision but wish fulfilment, fantasy, repression, a devastating insistence on charm.

That “crisis between Stein and Toklas” is described earlier in the essay, and it’s a doozy: “in 1932, as they were packing to go to the country, Stein found the old notebook in which she had written Q.E.D., the novella about her relationship with May Bookstaver,” and Toklas was so jealous and enraged that she not only destroyed all Bookstaver’s letters to Stein but insisted on the removal of the word “may” from the text of Stanzas in Meditation, which she was then writing: “every instance of the word ‘may’ had been crossed out and replaced with another word (like ‘today’ or ‘day’ or ‘can’), often violating any sense of meaning or rhythm or rhyme.” All this over a decades-old affair! It’s worth reading the passage about how the scholar Ulla Dydo discovered this many years later.

Like many an LRB review essay, it’s more focused on the author’s thoughts about the subject than on the actual book; if you want a more conventional (middlebrow) review, Judith Thurman has one in the latest New Yorker (archived) — it’s lively and informative, but also condescending (“Even among the academics who consider her a pioneer of modernism, or an icon of transmasculinity, or a forerunner of deconstruction, her greatness as an actual writer is generally an article of faith […] Her cult lives on.”). If you want to experience the “mesmerizing voice” Thurman mentions, you can hear it on YouTube here.

By the way, I was pretty sure I’d quoted Thirlwell before, and it turns out it was in this post about Dostoevsky’s Двойник (The Double), in which I wrote “But this repetitiveness is essential to the effect Dostoevsky is aiming for (just as Gertrude Stein’s is to hers)…” It’s all connected!

https://languagehat.com/gertrude-stein-achievement-of-the-commonplace/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18413

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/forgotten-languages/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18408

I have no idea what this site is about other than being a showcase for texts in apparently invented languages; this recent post, for example, begins:

Aża cīfir zuoj

Thorenur khioj thurenur, řa duiker. Siřover taekar ofo, ici se laima şiekhar ifi koiden, siekar, beifir ata zirenur roidir, vu go ifi sibe. Eçe aba diamur ikhi mēli khiari cui ozho, thai mebi, koimir, nofo uzhu, şiala da çuizir reizir, roidir cerenur poi merenur. Seiş lui me khugo eve do feamur soilir. Vēs unu çīmir, ei thoamur imu siekar çafa galu deidir feamur, ethe i vueni çei petenur o apha ucu raifir soelo theamur, lāmur pharenur vai, ri bī vāş boiben thaga morenur ořo eve goekher? Vobe uru zuifir ata çişur laima khoel.

Şarenur udu, zhutenur feamur bamu. Patenur ule reilir ata ucu zuelo bamo goekher? Bui uřu laidir feamur te feuş te, tařover obo uamur ukhu, çui o işi vueni çala ene, şurenur zai mola coekhar lai ifi keala çala khioj ikhi, foimir, efe ukhu mēli noelo otho şarenur noej sibe. Kufa idi çuizir iři imi, řoi vu ono. Uzhu ene zeamur roidir zueş. Da bui eşe sitenur eve rei, khiari ephe theamur ça leilir tuifir işi gaşur zoima thuku, theamur voşur, çofe thuipen khe. Nudo zo goekher? Bai be zhai, çoekar nofo nuima patenur vu feamur kheidir ubu řili rogu ukhu zuelo tāmur eze citenur sibe. Ese vāş neşur. Zirenur khāva şetenur. Şēkhar ethe khiari phī, roidir gifa ucu gei tāmur asa. Zuelo zeizir daimo guşu itenur ru atha feuş khugo akha oco leidir. Ava, ifi aga kufa ephe kāmur řīlir, iekar keka. Ulu fetenur sago da thurenur theidir, zhī boiben, oro khī iamur, vēs, khogo go, ifi rauş siřover ede ephe çuizir pheamur sişur soilir. Coizir phe řuamur, zuoj.

Zuoj indeed, not to mention Iä. Make what you will of it; there are more links, with various speculations, at the MeFi post where I found it. But stay safe out there!

https://languagehat.com/forgotten-languages/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18408

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/john-whitman-on-d-n-alternation/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18396

Victor Mair’s Language Log post starts off with Japanese 奴隷 dorei ‘slave,’ of which Mair says “Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n-” (in Mandarin it’s núlì) and continues “So I started to ask around how is it that Japanese has a d- initial for 奴隷 (‘slave’) and Sinitic has an n- initial?” The heart of the post is a long and interesting response by John Whitman:

The alternation btw d- and n- with 奴 reflects the general alternation between kan’on 漢音 and go’on 呉音; both go’on and kan’on exhibit characteristics of Middle Sinitic (MS) in Sino-Japanese. The kan’on 漢音 for 奴 is do, but the go’on is nu, identical to the usually reconstructed MS nu for 奴. In this case, the go’on reading is relatively unusual on the Japanese side, but it occurs e.g. in the reading 奴婢 (nuhi ぬひ), the category of slaves in the Ritsuryō 律令 Nara Period legal system.

The d-~n- alternation is standard when there is an opposition btw kan’on and go’on readings involving original MS /n/, for example 男性 dansei ‘male’ vs 男体 nantai ‘male body’. The alternation between 女性 zyosei < dyosei ‘female’ vs女体 nyotai ‘female body is the same thing.

This reflects a change in Sinitic, not Japanese. Some northern MS dialects in roughly Tang times depalatalized MS /m/, /n/, /ng/. South Coblin has a detailed study of this, looking not just at the phenomenon in Japanese kan’on but at Tibetan and intra-Sinitic Buddhistic readings. A mystery, unresolved as far as I know, is how this made it into Japanese kan’on 漢音 but not Sino-Korean, which are both held to have been borrowed around the same time, roughly mid-late Tang, perhaps a bit later in the SK case. One possibility is that the denasalizing region included Chang’an; the Koreans were savvy and in constant contact enough with China to understand that the denasalized pronunciation was substandard, even if associated with the capital region, while the Japanese clerics who imported the readings were less with it, or more superliteralist.

In modern Japanese, kan’on readings are vastly less marked, and almost always used in neologized kango 漢音. Go’on readings have a strong association with Buddhism. The 呉 wu2 designation refers most likely not to any region of China (such as Southeastern China/Suzhgou~Shanghai region), but to the Korean peninsula. The kun 訓 vernacular reading of 呉, kure, refers to Korea and is probably the same word as Korean 고려 Koryŏ [koryə] or possibly Kuryŏ [kuryə], what you get if you subtract the flattering 高 from 高句麗, as non-Korean texts often do. This reflects the fact that both Sinography and Buddhism were originally imported to Japan from Paekche.

What bothers me is the reference to Coblin’s “detailed study of this”; Mair has linked it to Academia.edu, but I found it at JSTOR, and it is not at all a study of the phenomenon in question but a general discussion of early Northwest Chinese phonology. I presume the section Whitman refers to is 2.1 (pp. 12-13) on nasal initials, and I also presume by “depalatalized” he means “denasalized” (since that’s the only thing that makes sense in the context of /n/ > /d/), but I don’t see anything in the passage that would explain the Japanese development (he talks about [nd] but not [d]). If anyone has thoughts about all this, let’s hear them!

https://languagehat.com/john-whitman-on-d-n-alternation/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18396

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/language-jones-on-labov/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18378

Taylor Jones, known around the internet as Language Jones, has a twenty-minute YouTube video thoughtfully called “Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??” If I were modeling my style on his, I might have called this post “LINGUISTICS INFLUENCER is TOO WOKE — and WRONG about NAMES!!” But instead I went with the modest title he himself might have used if he weren’t so hungry for clicks and likes. Don’t get me wrong, I basically enjoyed the video, even though I dislike the snark-filled, overemphatic influencer style; Jones studied with the great William Labov (LH obit post), for whom he expresses great affection and respect, and clearly knows his subject. Still, I think he’s wrong about some stuff.

First off, and trivially, he says the name of Michael Lisicky wrong — he gives it initial stress, but Lisicky himself uses penultimate stress (as you can hear in the first few seconds of this video). No biggie, but I would hope that a linguist would take the trouble to get it right.

Now to the meat of the video. He discusses Labov’s famous paper “The Social Stratification of (r) in New York Department Stores,” and his basic claim is that it is fatally flawed because it does not take race into account: in 1962, when the study was carried out, the Great Migration of blacks to the north was going on, and whites were increasingly differentiating themselves from black speech — he cites Gerard Van Herk’s paper “Fear of a Black Phonology: The Northern Cities Shift as Linguistic White Flight.” Very true, of course, but the problem is that Van Herk is talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, whereas Jones is talking about rhotic versus nonrhotic speech, and the fatal flaw in his argument is that nonrhotic speech is not a distinctive characteristic of New York Black English; to quote the very thorough Wikipedia article African-American Vernacular English, “The level of AAVE rhoticity is likely somewhat correlated with the rhoticity of White speakers in a given region; in 1960s research, AAVE accents tended to be mostly non-rhotic in Detroit, whose White speakers are rhotic, but completely non-rhotic in New York City, whose White speakers are also often non-rhotic.” Indeed, nonrhoticity is a notorious feature of old-fashioned white New Yorker speech, which means that the idea Jones is pushing, that the workers Labov interviewed were pronouncing r’s to show they were white, is absurd.

It is, of course, true that Labov’s very short (less than ten pages) paper does not prove some of the things it has been claimed to prove — it is more of a discussion-starter than a thesis — but it holds up better than Jones thinks, and I suspect there is a certain amount of slaying-the-elders going on. That said, Jones makes some good points, and it’s always good to be reminded of Labov’s work. (I should add that Craig, who sent me the link — thanks, Craig! — points out that Jones is an AAVE expert, so he would doubtless nitpick my nitpicking. As always, I welcome correction.)

https://languagehat.com/language-jones-on-labov/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18378