Going Crazy? I Went There

The past few weeks have not been ideal for a novice blogger, but the next best thing to not being able to write for several weeks is, well, writing. Since my February was rife with illness, now would probably be the best time to analyze a certain “out-of-nowhere” word form that has bothered me for years.

Anyone who has studied English has noticed that certain words do not logically follow from their stem. Now, I am not talking about words like take that have ablauted forms in the perfect, took, or words that have irregular plurals like ox (oxen), but the words that make you pound your head against the wall when learning a new language. As a scholar of ancient Greek, one word comes to mind before all others: ‘οράω (horáō). As a native speaker of English, I think of go.

Go maintains the same root (go-)  in the present, future, imperfect, present perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect, wherein gone is formed by the root go- plus the preterit marker –en or (much less likely) it is of an unrelated root of similar meaning. In the simple perfect, English has the wall-head-bang-inducing form went. Went descends from the Germanic root *wind- through its causative form *wend-, which means “to cause to wind, to cause to become wound.” During the time Middle English was spoken, wend became synonymous with go in southern England (the northern regions used –ed suffixation). If you have trouble making the logical leap, think about winding your way through the forest or up a mountainside. The administrative English of London won out and replaced the suffixed form with its wend, which leave us modern speakers confused and enraged with wend’s progeny, went. This process of conflation happens regularly and often ends with pejoration or amelioration, but occasionally the terms are too intertwined and briefly occupy the same semantic locus until one wins out.

Went in the conjugation of go in the simple perfect just shows a vestige of the rich history of wend. The above ancient Greek conjugation illustrates conflation much earlier in the process than our knowledge of go can. The words ‘οράω, *όπω and εἶδω/ ίδεω occupy the same space in pre-Homeric Greek, both meaning “to see, to look (at), to perceive.” By the time Attic became the standard dialect, ‘οράω, *όπω and ίδεω have intertwining roots in their conjugation and only minimal connotative differences; ‘οράω indicates physical sight, *όπω shares the root of “optics” and has to do with physical sight exclusively, and ίδεω indicates physical and mental sight (i.e., understanding). In the perfect tenses, ίδεω exclusively means “to know.”

Greek has six “principle parts” from which all inflected forms are derived.

‘Οράω in Attic with the most common forms bolded:

Present	Future	Fut. Pass.	1st Aorist	2nd Aorist	Perf. Act.	Perf. Pas.
‘οράω					εώρακα	εώραμαι
*όπω	όψομαι	ωφθήσομαι	ώφθην		όπωπα	ώμμαι
εἶδω/ ίδεω				έιδον	οίδα	οίδαμαι

¹Latin tense names will be used for all tenses except for the perfect, which is separated into simple perfect and present perfect.

Sources: OED, thanks again to the University of Pittsburgh

              Wikipedia, well its source page…

              The Middle Liddel & Scott Greek-English Lexicon

              The Perseus Project

Περί Πολυγλωσσίης

I was looking at The Linguist blog today, and I found this title jumped out at me: “Monolingual intellectual elites of the English speaking world.” I first reacted in disgust. As a fledgling classicist and polyglot, I had a visceral reaction upon reading it. The author goes on to give a quotation from From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, by Jacques Barzun, which the blogger is currently reading:

"It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual."

I partially agree with the author of The Linguist when he states that this seems to be true of English-speaking societies but not of other (including Western) societies. Speaking the Lingua Franca as one’s first language has its benefits to an intellectual outside of the humanities.

However, within the humanities, not possessing a working knowledge of at least ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German is a huge impediment to groundbreaking research. Contrary to popular belief within academia, even within some academicians of the humanities, not all important texts exist in translation. Even if they did, translation without an understanding of the source language will not allow the reader to fully understand nuances of meaning and punning. No translation is a perfect translation. One can set himself to preserve all meaning and reuse all poetic and grammatical devices, but he will fail.

For a fun example of the failures of translation, please note the following short poem by Catullus.

            Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Literally:

            I hate and I love. “How do I do it,” you perhaps ask?

            I do not know, but I feel (it) happening and I am tortured.

In lieu of failing to present a translation with the devices and nuances of meaning preserved, please accept this brief analysis:

Line 1:

“Odi et amo.” Read “Od’et amo.” Odi is from odi, odisse, osus, which has a perfect form with present force. It comes out of the thought among speakers of Indo-European languages that one cannot “know” or “hate” in the present. Something must always preface it; in this case, “hate” is prefaced by “love.”

“Quare id” Again elided and read “Quar’id.” Quare is an adverb of incredible variance in meaning: “in what way, how, by which means, whereby; why; wherefore, therefore, hence.” Instead of choosing a word that differentiates between “how” and “why,” the author encourages the reader to ask both questions. “How do I do both?” and “what brought me to this oxymoron of feeling?”

“Faciam” is a subjunctive caused of indirect question started by quare.

“Faciam, fortasse” Fricative /f/ is often used in an alliterative capacity or emphasized during states of heightened emotion. This is partially due to the tightening of muscles caused by the sympathetic nervous system making it difficult to gently push out the necessary air to make the sound normally.

“Requiris” also has multiple meanings “require, seek, ask for; need; miss, pine for.” The first of which is “ask,” which best fits the context, but the reader would instantly understand the association with “longing” as belonging to the author.

Line 2:

“Nescio” literally means “I do not know,” but has the alternate connotation of “I am unwilling to know.” Does the author really not know why he still feels for his lost love or is he unwilling to learn?

“Sed fieri sentio” Note the grouping of fricatives (two labiodentals and one alveolar).

“Sentio et excrucior.” Read “senti’et excrucior” with the elision functioning as an extra link between the author feeling emotion and feeling physical torture.

“Excrucior” Lit., pain as from a cross (i.e., being crucified). Crucifixion in Rome was seen as the worst form of punishment; so much so that the Senate passed edicts prohibiting its use on Roman citizens.

On the whole:

The poem has zero nouns, eight verbs, three conjunctions (two of which elided), two adverbs, and one pronoun (in the neuter). This is not traditional composition.

Note the lack of gender in the poem. Even grammatically, the author seems to have trouble coming to terms with masculinity and femininity.

The extensive use of fricatives and plosives indicated that the author is literally spitting out the passage.

The meter is “elegiac couplet” and is often used in funerary hymns. This would be a firm reminder to the reader of the severity of the author’s sense of loss.

Now that is the analysis of two lines of poetry, and it is not an extensive analysis thereof. It frustrates me to no end to know that my colleagues will probably be even less able to understand primary sources and the foundational works on them without translation. If this movement is an unstoppable force, Western academia will be in need of many immovable objects. I, for one, plan to stand in its way.

Dictionary: William Whitaker’s Words

Fear Here, Get Your Fear Here! Barbarions ARE Coming! These Prices Will Kill You!

Various political strategies and policies over the last decade have me thinking, “What are all the things that can be mongered? How on earth does the term ‘fear-monger’ even make sense given the literal meaning of monger? Does fear really only cost five cents?”

Well, these are the questions meant for idle time. And, as we all know, idle hands either spend time at the genitals and/or surf the internet. Luckily, the Oxford English Dictionary is here to help. Monger is a very old word in the English language with pre-dating cognates in Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and ultimately Latin (possibly of the same PIE root as “merchant”). Although we rarely see monger outside of the context of “fish-monger” or the occasional last name, it has a rich history in English with the connotatively positive meaning of “a merchant, trader, dealer, or trafficker.” This was the meaning and for just over a millennium before the pejorative meaning became the more prominent in the sixteenth century when Anglo-Norman and Old French loan words had been the language of prestige for several generations, starting around 1200CE. Once monger underwent pejoration, it came to mean “a person engaged in a petty or disreputable trade or traffic.” Other than in rare compounds like “fish-monger,” the term almost exclusively exists with its negative connotation.

The earliest use that I can find of a socio-political “X-monger” comes in the sixteenth century in regard to Church officials:

1550. J. Bale, Image Both Churches xviii. sig. Bbvj, “Foule priestes,.. and holy water mongers dayly peruerting the ignorant people.”

The practice of selling indulgences puts this quotation in its context, and the usage fits the literal meaning of “a person engaged in trade” since priests were actively selling blessings. From the OED record, it appears that once statements like the above became popular, the actual “trade or traffic” portion of “X-monger” fell out of favor; whence we get S. Butler’s “States-Monger,” R. Southey’s “humanity-mongers,” C. Kingsley’s (my favorite) “verbal-inspiration-monger,” M. Twain’s “superstition monger,” and a stellar consonant phrase in Face, “nihilistic noise-mongers.” You can really feel the nasals on that one.

As far as “fearmonger” goes, Ngram spits out a rather interesting chart which indicates the word was first used in 1939 and underwent rather unsteady periods of vogue usage. It had an exceptional, printed introduction in LIFE Magazine on January 9, 1939 in a letter to the editor by E. Lloyd Souder Jr., who was criticizing LIFE’s previous article on America’s pre-WWII policy that an outright attack is the best defense. Although LIFE Magazine is a for-profit publication, I doubt that they were literally selling fear. With the help of imminent war political uncertainty, it was an instant success in both the US and Britain. Thus it reaches us today.

Source-mongers:

www.google.com, which provides both Ngram and Google Books.

The Oxford English Dictionary, Web Edition [available thanks to the University of Pittsburgh]

Avestan and Anki, A Match Made by Ahura Mazda

Yesterday was an amazing day for one person with the desire to be a polyglot. I discovered what seems to me to be the best, free SRS software, Anki. I had previously been using analogue flash cards (yes, with paper and everything) and was finding a lot of time wasted and finding myself discouraged.

With the boon of a new toy, I decided to re-take up learning Young Avestan. A task I had given up last summer after a period of intellectual stagnation. Over the next several weeks/months, I will restart  the Harvard course that brought me to Avestan and begin anew with my new favorite grammar text from Avesta.org. The Harvard course focuses on learning by the grammar-translation approach and has so far catered most to my learning styles. Especially important is that it works mostly in the early Persian script - fonts for which can be found here - courtesy of William Malandra and Emily Blanchard West. Having these fonts active on your computer will be necessary to use my Anki flashcards. Unfortunately, all vocabulary appears transcribed, which is know to diminish faculty in the target language. 

If I receive any public interest, I will publish my Anki flash cards for Dr. Ervad Ramiyar Parvez Karanjia’s text as well as those for the Harvard course to the net via Anki and via a page I would create on Language And for this purpose.Good classical flash cards for Anki are hard to come by and even harder to find for a reputable and effective text. 

I wish you all luck on all of your language-learning goals. 

Separation Anxiety

Since the Peripatetics, it has just been taken for granted that what separates human beings (Homo sapiens sapiens) from the animals is language. If you are one to frequent article/blog clearinghouses like linguistics.AllTop.com, you have seen a plethora or articles over the last few weeks on animals that seem to be capable of recognizing and categorizing nouns as well as on those capable of detailed naming.

What does it mean that a border collie knows (and can categorize) more words than the average three-year-old child, or that prairie dogs verbally differentiate a coyote from a dog, a tall man from a short man, a green-shirted man from a blue-shirted man?

As someone who wrote their undergraduate thesis on glottogony, I found these case studies incredibly interesting. It is a popular belief among linguists that human language began with gestures. Grunts, or some other sort of unsophisticated phonemes, often accompanied the grunts. (Think of a child reaching for an out-of-reach object and going “Mih, mih, kooooo!”) The grunts correlated with the gestures and soon the phonemes replaced the gestures altogether (as our theoretical child would come to say, “Mih, mihk” for a milk bottle).

These two case studies, to me, throw a wrench in the gestural theory. In the case of the dog, the owners spent several years training Chaser so one cannot truly say that what the dog learned was a “natural language.” However, the dog learned to categorize the toys on its own, seems to be able to separate nouns and verbs, and does not react to nonsensical commands (e.g., fetch your sit, Chaser). Chaser’s vocabulary can be chalked up entirely to proper training, but in many respects, that is how one learns a language. This is definitely a case study of a well-trained dog more than a case study on languages in animals, but it does present the possibility that dogs do have the capability to learn sophisticated verbal language. Is this capability just an unused linguistic capacity in the wild? Does it need a “trainer” to be unlocked? Have members of the genera Lupis and Canis been passing down simple, verbal communications without using their full potential, or have humans just not unlocked it?

Chaser’s training does not prohibit the possibility of gestural beginnings to the dog’s extensive vocabulary (the owners pointing to or shaking a toy while saying its name to the collie), but the story of the prairiedogs seems to be a strong case for a non-gestural generation of language. Now, it is possible that a prairie dog sacrifices himself by running up to a coyote yelling the “chee” assigned to large, grey coyote and another does the same for small, brownish coyote; or, that one “points” at a blade of grass and “chees” green, but both seem unlikely. The specificity and complexity of the “chees” (especially apparent when broken down by frequency and gradually re-layered, as in the article) indicate that the prairiedogs have a very strong system of nomenclature. A feat considered even more impressive considering that juvenile prairie dogs seem to be rushed into their dens the moment a “chee” indicating a predator is called, this probably before the juveniles can even see from what they are hiding.

These case studies are not proof positive that the gestural theory of language is unlikely, but they do show that perhaps the “language barrier” between human beings and other animals is only present due to a lack of understanding on our part. Perhaps humans had verbal language long before we were Homo sapiens. How far does the lineage go back: Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Ardipithecus, Primata, Mammalia, earlier? It may be time to rethink the vain theory that only hominids have verbal language and time to listen to what biologists have been finding for decades.

What separates humans from animals? Uh, um... Intellectual debate on what makes us different?

“Every clarification breeds new questions.” – Arthur Bloch

The Birth of "Language And"

Although the majority of my life hitherto has transpired without my realizing, I am a “language nerd,” a moniker earned through tiresome discussions on grammar, language change, and philosophy of language.

I have tried to fight it, calling my chosen field of study a pseudo-science with no objective data, but it is no use. I consistently return to my musty, old textbooks full of words articulating someone’s research.

Having to date completed my undergraduate studies in classical philology, I hope to attend graduate school in the fall of 2011 for a doctorate degree in historical linguistics. Quae cum ita sint,* I am not an expert. Instead of expert testimony, this blog will seek to (a) answer your, the reader’s, questions concerning all the language-related topics that you have that certain life-changing search engines do not provide concise enough or comprehensible enough information to be useful, and (b) provide an opportunity for me to “publish” some observations concerning language, from classical to colloquial and everything in between.

My main goal is to impart as much information as accurately and as understandably as possible. When I fail miserably at that goal, I want to know. Such criticism can only improve our collective understandings, but do try to be civil about it.

If this mission interests you, please consider following this blog and telling your friends to pay it a visit. 

*“Since these things are so” Lat.; Marcus Tullius Cicero.

I would not have added any Latin text, but I was inspired by the text Google automatically places in this text box: “Lorem ipsum vim ut utroque mandamus intellegebat, ut eam omittam ancillae sadipscing, per et eius soluta veritus.”