Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa

Donkey Anaphora and the King(s) of France

2012-01-26T09:32:00.000-06:00

An end-of-the-semester gift from one of my semantics students:

A t-shirt for a (as yet fictitious?) band. Started as an in-class joke which arose from the juxtaposition of two topics:

(1) presupposition failure in sentences like "The king of France is bald", and

(2) issues involving the binding of pronouns in sentences like "Every farmer who owns a donkey_i beats it_i."

Lizards, Walls, Dragons: on an apparently undocumented Nepali lexeme (भित्ति)

2011-09-20T20:47:00.001-05:00

I have not posted in some time due to dissertating, searching for (and thankfully finding) a job, and subsequently moving. Here's a short posting on a Nepali word which I heard from my wife which I can't find in any Nepali dictionary.

When we moved into our new house, we discovered that there were a number of house-lizards already resident (and, less amusingly, quite a few German roaches), which our cat has really enjoyed hunting down. I remembered having such lizards in our house in India, and immediately I saw them remarked to my wife "देखो! छिपकली है!" (Look! There's a lizard!"), using the Hindi word for "lizard", छिपकली [chipkalī]. My wife replied, "in Nepali we call them 'bhitti' (भित्ति)."

I'd never heard this word before, and was curious. I checked Turner's A comparative and etymological dictionary of the Nepali language as well as his mammoth four-volume A comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan languages. Neither mentions bhitti or anything like it. I also checked a number of Hindi dictionaries, none of which turned up anything. Except for Platts' A dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi, and English, which has an entry for भित्तिका bhittikā:

S بهتکا भित्तिका bhittikā, s.f. Wall (=bhīt, q.v.); small house lizard.

This isn't quite bhitti, but it's close. I had already supposed (and my wife had already suggested) that bhitti was connected with the word for "wall" (in Nepali, भित्तो bhitto or भित्ता bhittā), given that they're often found on walls. So bhitti is something like "wall-(related) creature". [Turner does have an entry for bhitti, but he gives the meaning "wall".]

Platts' entry indicates a Sanskrit origin, and indeed bhittikā looks awfully Sanskritic, with the "diminutive" -(i)ka suffix, which is not really always diminutive, but rather can also attach to words with no change in meaning. But here perhaps a diminutive based on "wall" makes sense.

Interesting, the Sanskrit word for "wall, panel, partition", bhittí, comes from a root √bhid- "to split", which is very dear to my heart (part of the Proto-Indo-European dragon mythology).

So there's a "new" Nepali word: bhitti "house-lizard", which doesn't seem to have been recorded before. It may be dialectal (i.e. I'm not sure that Kathmandu Nepali speakers would use it), and that's perhaps why it wasn't previously recorded. In any case, I think it's a cool word, given that it does sort of connect lizards and dragons, indirectly.

[Incidentally, Platts suggests that Hindi छिपकली [chipkalī] derives from the root chip- "to hide", which is what I always assumed (going back to an early Indo-Aryan *chapp- "press, cover, hide". Turner, on the other hand, derives it from Sanskrit शेप्या śepyā which means "tail" (and "penis", but I think "tail" is what is relevant here). The (potential) Nepali cognate of Hindi छिपकली [chipkalī] is छेपारो chepāro, though the latter might be more plausibly derived from Sanskrit शेप्या śepyā "tail", especially as छेपारो chepāro seems to refer to outdoor lizards (while माङ्सुलि māṅsuli is used for house lizards).]

Some ponderings on Google's research on inter-language linking (Bengali <-> Swahili, Nepali <-> Marathi)

2011-07-08T12:52:00.000-05:00

On the Google Research Blog, the latest post (by Daniel Ford & Josh Batson) concerns inter-language linking, i.e. looking at webpages' off-site links which go to a page in another language. From the post:

Most web pages link to other pages on the same web site, and the few off-site links they have are almost always to other pages in the same language. It's as if each language has its own web which is loosely linked to the webs of other languages. However, there are a small but significant number of off-site links between languages. These give tantalizing hints of the world beyond the virtual.

I'm particularly interested in the data on Indian language webpages' inter-language linking, especially as there are some perplexing findings. But let's start with some findings which aren't really that surprising.

One of the features measured is the degree to which webpages in a particular language are "introverted" or "extroverted", where more "introverted" webpage languages have fewer inter-language off-site links. The data are summarised here:

Webpage languages which are higher (on the y-axis) are more introverted; webpage languages which are further to the right (on the x-axis) represent languages with a greater number of total webpages.

First, a word about the apparently high degree of English-language webpage "extroversion". The relatively high percentage of English-language websites which link to non-English websites is unlikely to represent a high percentage of native English speakers who are linking to non-English websites. Rather, this would seem to simply reflect English's status as a/the world language, so that even sites whose audience may largely consist of non-native English speakers may choose to create English-language websites simply in order to have a larger audience. And I suspect the "extroverted" English-language webpages are of that type: English is the language chosen for this type of website due to its ability to reach a more "universal" audience, but the site itself may have "local" interests, reflected by its linking to non-English language websites.

But it's the Indian languages that I really want to talk about. Given the large number of Hindi speakers, one might at first be surprised at the relatively small number of Hindi language sites (compared to say Japanese). This, I think, is easily explained by the status of English in India, especially amongst people who would be more likely to create and use Internet sites. In another words, many native Hindi speakers would choose to create English- rather Hindi-language webpages. The high degree of insularity ("introversion") of Hindi-language webpages in terms of inter-language linkage is likely not unconnected. In the context of modern India, choosing to create a Hindi- rather than English-language website is already a more "insular" choice, given the widespread use of English in India itself. Those website content creator who choose Hindi medium over English medium are likely to have more "insular" interests, and thus would not be as likely to link to non-Hindi sites (and even less likely to link to non-Indian language sites).

So, thus far, there isn't really anything terribly surprisingly about these findings. But when we look at the particular inter-language link connections which are strongest, especially in the case of Indian languages, there are some weird data:

[The arrows indicate directionality of linkage; red connections are stronger than green connections.] As Daniel Ford and Josh Batson point out:

Surprising links include those from Hindi to Ukrainian, Kurdish to Swedish, Swahili to Tagalog and Bengali, and Esperanto to Polish.

I would add that the Swahili-Bengali and Swahili-Tagalog links are not only strong (red), but also bidirectional (e.g. Swahili pages are linking to Bengali pages, and Bengali pages to Swahili pages). It is hard to think of convincing explanations for the connections between Swahili and Bengali (or Swahili and Tagalog). One possibility comes to mind, which is that, in terms of total Internet representation, the number of pages in Bengali, Swahili, and Tagalog is relatively small. Here the Google researchers' webpage selection criteria is presumably relevant:

The particular choice of pages in our corpus here reflects decisions about what is `important'. For example, in a language with few pages every page is considered important, while for languages with more pages some selection method is required, based on pagerank for example.

This means that for languages with a smaller Internet population individuals could have a greater effect on the particular inter-language linkages than is the case for languages with larger Internet populations. And thus perhaps the existence of a few creators of Bengali webpage content who happen to live in central eastern Africa could be responsible for some these unexpected inter-language linkages. I would be curious to what sort of Bengali sites link to Swahili sites (and vice-versa) to see if this is a plausible idea.

There is something which worries me about these data though: look at the linkages between the Indo-Aryan languages (Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Nepali, Hindi). Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and Nepali all have strong bidirectional links with Hindi, which is to be expected given Hindi's status as a Indian lingua franca. Notice however that other than being linked with Hindi, none of the other Indo-Aryan languages are inter-linked with each other: except for Nepali and Marathi.

In India,there are large Nepali communities in West Bengal and other eastern parts of India.Marathi is spoken in Maharashtra in the far western part of India. I would be unsurprised if there were strong Marathi-Gujarati inter-language linkages (since these two languages are spoken in the neighbouring states), or if there were a strong inter-language linkage between Nepali and Bengali. But a Nepali-Marathi link doesn't make sense, at least in absence of other intra-Indo-Aryan linkages.

There is one property which I can think of which does link Nepali and Marathi, namely the fact that they both are written in Devanagari script (also used for Hindi). Gujarati, Punjabi, and Bengali, on the other hand, are each written in their own scripts (distinct from Devanagari). So I wonder if there is any possibility that the script is creating "false hits" when the off-site link connections for Nepali and Marathi are being computed.

That also makes me worry about the other surprising inter-language linkages, such as Bengali-Swahili, Swahili-Tagalog. Not, obviously, that these languages share a common script, but whether some of the apparent connections are artefacts of the algorithm, whether due to use of a common script or some other factor. If they're not simply artefacts, then it certainly would be interesting to find out why, for instance, Bengali-language and Swahili-language webpages are linking to each other.

What speechitatest you? On engineered language change amongst high schoolers

2011-07-03T10:16:00.000-05:00

The latest Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, on high school language change:

Note:
The type of language change the students are shown undergoing would require more than a source of new lexical items, I would think.

We find morphological change: Wouldsest for 2nd person singular present of "would".

And syntactic change: What speechitated Harvard? for "What did Harvard say?" (note the necessity of do-periphrasis in modern English).

How could a thesaurus (of fake synonyms) drive these sorts of changes? [Of course, under Minimalism, parametric variation, including differences in word order, is theorised to be a reflex of formal features which are borne by lexical items. So perhaps if the thesaurus had some way of encoding abstract syntactic features in such a way that they would be picked up along with the phonological and semantic aspects of the lexical item....]

The Rapture, now with more Harpies

2011-05-18T11:39:00.009-05:00

The latest xkcd:

[click to embiggen]

(Mouse-over text: But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6Â±2.)

The first panel is really the funniest bit: a pun on raptor (referencing the Jurassic Park movie). But in fact, rapture and raptor are not only phonologically similar, they're also etymologically related: both deriving from Latin rapt-, the past participial stem of rapere "to seize, to snatch, to carry off".

Also from Latin rapere are subreptitious "snatching under", rapacious "(greedily) snatching (with the intent to eat)", and rape (originally "carrying off", then "carrying off, esp. with the intent of sexually despoiling", later coming to refer specifically to "forced sexual intercourse").

Raptor in classical Latin meant "robber, thief", which is its meaning also in early English, later on in English it can also mean "rapist". From the 18th century, it was applied to "birds of prey", whence its later extension to refer to a particular "dromaeosaurid dinosaur", the Velociraptor "swift seizer".

Rapture, on the other hand, is not found in classical Latin, though it does appear in mediaeval Latin. The earliest citation the OED provides is from an 8th-century British text, in the form raptura, referring to "poaching". Its use in English, however, originally is confined to the sense (attested from the 16th century) of "extreme joy, intense delight". Though it was also used in the 17th and 18th centuries to refer to the "carrying off" or "rape" of women.

And not until the 18th century does rapture acquire its Millenarial sense (associated with ideas originally advanced by the Puritans Increase and Cotton Mather in Massachusetts). The word rapture in this Millenarial philosophy apparently picks up on the Latin word rapiemur (from rapere, see above) used in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 to refer to the faithful being "carried up" into the air (to meet Christ) in the Latin Vulgate:

deinde nos qui vivimus qui relinquimur simul rapiemur cum illis in nubibus obviam Domino in aera et sic semper cum Domino erimus

The Latin Vulgate of course is a translation of the Koine Greek text, and in this passage Latin rapiemur glosses the Greek ἁρπαγησόμεθα "we shall be caught up":

ἔπειτα ἡμεῖς οἱ ζῶντες οἱ περιλειπόμενοι ἅμα σὺν αὐτοῖς ἁρπαγησόμεθα ἐν νεφέλαις εἰς ἀπάντησιν τοῦ κυρίου εἰς ἀέρα: καὶ οὕτως πάντοτε σὺν κυρίῳ ἐσόμεθα.

Interestingly, Greek ἁρπάζω "catch up, snatch up"---of which ἁρπαγησόμεθα is the first person plural future passive indicative form---originates from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the Latin rapere which St Jerome uses to gloss it: PIE *h₁rep- "to snatch" (also the source of English reap).

From the same Greek root as ἁρπάζω "catch up" is the word which comes into English as harpy: Greek ἅρπυια "the snatcher". So, with that, I leave you with some Harpies to flavour your Rapturous visions, courtesy of Gustave Doré:

engraving by Gustave Doré illustrating Canto XIII of Divine Comedy, Inferno

[Edit (20 May 2011): Now see Mark Liberman's "No Word for Rapture" on Language Log for further etymological discussion of rapture.]

λ♥[love] (Linguistics Love Song)

2011-05-16T00:58:00.000-05:00

See the Sentence First blog for the lyrics and also Language Log for comments and explanation.

[I'm currently dissertating, thus the lack of posts.]

Linguistics Behind the Wicket (LBW) #1: Shahid Afridi and Free Love Friday

2011-03-23T13:22:00.003-05:00

In belated celebration of the breaking of Australia's 34-match unbeaten run in World Cup matches by Pakistan, I offer the first in what I plan to be a recurring series of cricket-related linguistic investigations. I'm dubbing this series LBW ("Linguistics Behind (the) Wicket").

Shahid Afridi during the Pakistani World Cup 2011 match with Australia

This first investigation is a study in onomastics, taking as its subject the name of the skipper of the Pakistan team: Shahid Afridi (Urdu: شاہد آفریدی). To find out the connection between Afridi and free, "love", and Friday, read on!

[A brief word about the sources of Hindi/Urdu words: alongside of the native Indo-Aryan vocabulary (inherited, ultimately, from a vernacular cousin of Sanskrit), both the Hindi and Urdu varieties of Hindi/Urdu employ a large number of Persian and Arabic words (as a result of the Mughal invasion of India).]

Shahid (Hindi: शहीद; Urdu: شاہد) is an Hindi/Urdu word of Perso-Arabic origins, meaning "martyr" (religious or political). It derives ultimately from an Arabic root شہد, which Platts[1] glosses as meaning "to give testimony". Not being a semiticist, I cannot offer any further interesting discussion.

It is rather the name Afridi (Hindi: आफ़्रीदी; Urdu: آفریدی) which is of more interest for me. Jokingly, I have sometimes referred to Afridi as "Afriti", since his aggressive cricketing (Afridi holds the record (37 deliveries) for fastest century in one-day cricket) and mercurial temperament is suggestive of an Arabian Afreet (an angry sort of djinn): Arabic ʻIfrīt عفريت, pl. ʻAfārīt عفاريت. [The origin of this word is rather opaque to me: Platts[1] derives it from an Arabic root عفر meaning "to roll in the dust"; the Wikipedia article suggests that it comes from عفرت (`afrt) meaning "the evil"; the translation of the Qur'anic passage, Sura An-Naml (27:39-40) seems gloss it as "strong one". Maybe semiticists could enlighten me here?]

However, Āfrīdī, in fact, has no connection with Arabic "Afreet". Rather, it is a word of Iranian origin, which, being the name of a certain Pathan tribe, is thus presumably indicative of Shahid Afridi's ancestral origins.

Some afridis in the Khyber Rifles

In terms of its etymology, the word āfrīdī can be derived from the Persian word آفريده āfrīda, which means "creature" (noun) or "created" (adjective). (The āfrīdīs are thus perhaps "the created people".)

Āfrīda itself can be derived as the past/perfect participial form of the Avestan root frī- "love" combined with the prefix ā- (theoretically contributing a sense of "near, towards", but sometimes resulting in idiosyncratic meanings). Avestan āfrīda would corresponds to Sanskrit āprīta, both meaning "gladdened, joyous" etc.

The semantic change from Avestan "gladdened, joyous" to Persian "created" is intriguing. The earlier meaning of "joy" still seems to be present in Persian (and Hindi/Urdu) āfrīn/āfirīn, which can be used to mean "bravo! well done!" (though it too can have the "create" sense, at least in the compound jahān-āfirīn "creator of the world").

The root underlying both Sanskrit āprīta and Avestan āfrīda is Proto-Indo-Iranian *prī-, which itself can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *prī- whose most basic sense is "to love".

The PIE root *prī- (see Watkins[2]) is also the source of English free (from Old English frēo, derived from the verb frēon "to love, to set free"), friend (from Old English frēond "friend, lover"), and Friday (from Old English Frīgedæge "Frigg's day", where Frigg, the name of the Scandinavian goddess of love, Odin's wife, derives from Proto-Germanic *frijjō "beloved, wife"); as well as Old English frioðu "peace", which sadly has no direct reflexes in modern English.

In fact, PIE *prī- underlies not only the Persian tribal name Afridi, but also a variety of Germanic-derived names (see Watkins[2]), including:

Siegfried, from Old High German Sigi-frith "victorious peace"
Godfrey, from Old High German Goda-frid "peace of god"
Frederick, from French Frédéric, itself a borrowing of Old High German Fridu-rīh "peaceful ruler"
Geoffrey, from Old French Geoffroi from mediaeval Latin Gaufridus, itself a borrowing from Germanic *Gawja-frithu- "(having a) peaceful region"

Thus perhaps Geoffrey Boycott can mention his "prī-" connection with Shahid Afridi if he ever needs some filler material when commentating a Pakistan match...

So, this concludes the first LBW. I'm open to suggestions for other cricketers or cricket terminology to etymologise for future episodes.

Bibliography:

[1]Platts, John T. 1884. A dictionary of Urdū, classical Hindī, and English. London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1884. (Reprinted, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000.) [online]

[2]Watkins, Calvert. 2000. The American Heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn.

[3]McGregor, R.S. 1993. The Oxford Hindi-English dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Indian edition: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.)

Indian voices from 1913-1929: Gramophone Recordings from the Linguistic Survey of India

2011-03-08T14:26:00.005-06:00

George Grierson pioneered the vast Linguistic Survey of India in 1894, an immensely useful resource for anyone working on languages of the Indian subcontinent. A set of recordings were also made as part of the survey, which were recently uncovered in the British Library. These recordings are now freely available from the University of Chicago's Digital South Asian Library at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/lsi/

In order that the languages might be more easily compared (and because "it contains the three personal pronouns, most of the cases found in the declension of nouns, and the present, past, and future tenses of the verb"), Grierson chose to use translations of the Biblical "Parable of the prodigal son", and many of the recordings are of speakers reciting this parable in their native language.

Here is the recording of the "Parable of the prodigal son":

In Hindi (one of the major languages of India)

In Khasi (a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Shillong, Meghayala, [the former capital of Assam])

OPEN Magazine has a great article about these recordings, their rediscovery and content, available here: Voices from Colonial India

It's well worth a read, but here are a few highlights. For instance:

Some of the Sanskrit recording took a bit of doings. Background: strict followers of the Vedic/Hindu tradition are supposed to safeguard the Vedas from the ears of those who are not dvijas ("twice-born", those who wear the sacred thread). This prohibition was taken seriously by some authorities, for instance, in the Gautama Dharma Sutra we find:

अथ हास्य वेदमुपशृणवतस्त्रपुजतुभ्यांश्रोत्रप्रतिपूरणमुदाहरणे जिह्वाच्छेदो धारणेशरीरभेदः
"Now if he [a Shudra = a non-dvija/untouchable] listens intentionally to (a recitation of) the Veda, his ears shall be filled with (molten) tin or lac. [Gautama Dharma Sutra 12.4]

From the OPEN Magazine article:

...All of this, of course, could not have been accomplished without some Brahminical drama. The scholar Ganganath Jha, who was approached for the Sanskrit reading, was scandalised to learn that a mlechha [Sanskrit for "barbarian", "foreign devil", and thus by definition a non-dvija] would be privy to his chaste Sanskrit. A demand was made for a certifiably Brahmin gramophone operator. The Raj, almost as unbending as Brahmins, refused. A compromise was reached: Jha sat in a room and spoke into a large horn-like object that projected his voice into another room where the operator sat. Communication between the two was by means of a complicated system of switches to ensure that the operator didn’t physically hear the Sanskrit. And that was enough to assuage the Brahmin guilt about speaking Sanskrit into a device that held the power to broadcast it to the world...

Jha's recording must have been of some Vedic text, because I am unaware of any general prohibition against speaking Sanskrit in the presence of non-dvijas. Sadly, I cannot find this recording on the University of Chicago's Digital South Asian Library site (they do have a general entry for Jha here: https://coral.uchicago.edu:8443/display/lasa/Ganganath+Jha+Ken.+Sanskrit+Vidyapith+%28Allahabad%2C+India%29).

[Brahminical rationalisations can be both amusing and creative: My advisor, who is a (German) Sanskrit scholar, once told me about one spoken Sanskrit conference he attended (where, I believe, he was the only non-Brahmin/non-Indian) at which there was one attendee who was a bit unhappy with the presence of a non-Brahmin, and was careful not to let my advisor's shadow touch him... Other attendees came up with rationalisations: German sounds a bit like Sharma, a Brahmin surname, and so they theorised that Germans are perhaps "long-lost" Brahmins, and therefore my advisor's presence could be a acceptable.]

Another interesting bit from the OPEN Magazine article:

Many of the speakers chose to sing or recite poems or limericks. Particularly lingering is the voice of Hassaina of Delhi who has clips in the Ahirwati and Mewati languages. Who was this girl who sang with such sang-froid of love and waiting on 26 April 1920? Nothing is known of her. She survives only as a voice.

Here is Hassaina's song: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/lsi/6838AK

[27 May 2011: Nepali is actually represented too, hidden under "Khaskura", including both the parable of the prodigal son translation, and a delightful song sung by a Shillongwala Nepali, Babu Dhan.]

Minecræft. (Minakraft?)

2011-02-10T12:35:00.010-06:00

The biggest indie game of 2010: Minecraft. Since it shares half a compound noun with the title of this blog, that seems as good an excuse as any to look at the "etymology" of Minecraft.

First, in case you're unfamiliar with Minecraft, here's a video:

In terms of Minecraft's design inspiration, its creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, attributes its origins to Infiniminer, Dungeon Keeper, Left 4 Dead, and Dwarf Fortress (the last has been described as a mixture of Nethack, Oregon Trail, The Sims, and Lemmings).

Etymology 1: "the art of mining"
If Minecraft were truly parallel to stæfcræft, then it would be what is referred to in Sanskrit grammar as a tatpuruṣa (तत्पुरुष) compound , that is, a compound of the form YX, where X is the head noun and Y relates to X as if it were some non-nominative case form, e.g. a genitive, dative, etc. For example, the tatpuruṣa compound mousehunter is a hunter (=X) of mice (=Y). If this were the case then Minecraft would mean something like "the craft of mining", i.e. "the art of mining",---which in fact is an analysis which makes eminent sense, given that mining is a major component of the game.

Etymology 2: "mining and crafting"
Another possibility, however, is that Minecraft is what is referred to in Sanskrit grammar as a dvandva (Sanskrit द्वन्द्व dvandva 'pair') compound, that is a compound of the form YX, where X and Y could be otherwise expressed as X and Y. For example, the dvandva compound producer-director (duo) is ~~someone who is a producer and a director~~ a pair of people, one of whom is a producer, and one a director [examples: (1), (2), (3), (4)]. This would also seem a plausible analysis, given that aside from mining, crafting items is the other major component of the game (well, alongside trying not to get eaten by zombies or blown up by creepers).

An excursus on mine and craft
A third possibility, which presents itself in view of the fact that the game's creator, Persson, is Swedish, is that it is indeed a tatpuruṣa compound, but a Swedish compound rather than an English one. To explore this possibility, it's worthwhile to delve deeper into the etymologies of mine and craft.

Mine, in English, derives from an Anglo-Norman word mine, which was more or less a form of Old French (the word mine is found c1220 in Old French with sense 'underground cavity or excavation where metals and minerals are found'). The Old French/Anglo-Norman word itself was most likely borrowed from some continental Celtic language (compare Welsh mwyn 'mineral, mine' (14th cent.); Old Irish méin 'ore, metal'; Scottish Gaelic mèinn 'ore, mine'; further etymology of the Celtic words is uncertain). A Swedish cognate, mina, is attested from the 17th century; cognate forms appear in other Scandinavian and Germanic languages, as well as in other Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), but all appear to ultimately be borrowings from the French. The Scandinavian words are likely to have been borrowed from German Mine (itself, of course, also originally borrowed from the French word).

Craft is an interesting word. Like mine its ultimate ancestry is uncertain (i.e. there is no obvious reconstructable Proto-Indo-European source for either mine or craft), it appears only in Germanic, with no apparent cognates in other Indo-European languages. The origin sense of craft is "power, might, strength". This was one of the prevalent senses of craft in early English (the last attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary for this sense is from 1526, W. Bonde Pylgrimage of Perfection ii. sig. Kviii, "By the craft [=power] of nature."), and this is in fact the only sense borne by its cognates in other Germanic languages.

Etymology 3 ("the Swedish etymology"): "the power of the mine"
The development into the more familiar English senses of craft, e.g. "skill, art" is a solely English development---though it took place very early in English, as evidenced by an abundance of words in Old English of the type stæfcræft ("skill of letters; grammar"). This development seems to have involved a metaphorical extension of craft's original sense "(physical) power" as "intellectual power" and therefore "ability, skill, art". Thus, its Swedish cognate, kraft, has only the more original sense "power, might, strength". Therefore, if Minecraft were to be actually be a Swedish coinage (or, at least, an anglicisation of such a compound, which, I think, would have been Minakraft), then it could be treating as a (tatpuruṣa) compound meaning something like "power of the mine".

The real etymology
However, none of these proposed etymologies appear to in fact be correct. Persson on his blog (14 May 2009) originally proposed to call the game "Minecraft: Order of the Stone", a name "awesome but insane people in #tigirc helped [him] come up". Further investigation reveals that "[it was] RinkuHero...who suggested "Minecraft" (as an analogy to "Starcraft"), having not played the game and knowing nothing about it other than that it was a type of strategy game involving mines."

So Minecraft is simply an analogical form based on Starcraft (Starcraft is a game having to do with stars, and therefore a game having to do with mines is Minecraft). Now, Starcraft itself appears to be analogical form based on the title of one of Blizzard Entertainment's other games(/game franchises): Warcraft. If the compound type (tatpuruṣa) is carried over in the analogical process, then, in a sense, Minecraft should indeed mean something like "art of mining", which was the first of the proposed etymologies.

Miscellany: wars and crafts
The word warcraft itself is of course not a new coinage specific to the Blizzard Entertainment series. Interestingly though, warcraft does appear to be a relatively recent coinage (recent compared to the history of English at least), with the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation being from around 1660 (T. Fuller Worthies (1662) Lanc. 124 "Duke Hambleton‥had Officers who did Ken the War-craft, as well as any of our Age."). Though warcraft itself appears relatively late in the history of English, there are earlier formations ending in -craft which bear the same meaning that appear in Old English, including beaducræft(ig), gūðcræft, and wīgcræft (the last is the most widespread; the first two occur only in Beowulf).

Incidentally, war is a word with a weird history, it's a "returnee"-type borrowed word: it derives from a Germanic word, borrowed into French, and thence "given back" to English (a Germanic language). [It appears in late Old English (c1050) in the form wyrre, werre, a word borrowed from North-eastern Old French werre (cp. modern French descendant, guerre "war") which itself was borrowed from Old High German werra "confusion, discord, strife", related to the Old High German verb werran "to bring into confusion or discord" (cp. modern German wirren "to confuse, perplex"), ultimately from a Proto-Germanic root *werz-, *wers-, which is the origin also of the modern English word worse.]

Anglo-Saxon Minecraft
Returning to Minecraft: what---you didn't ask---would be the Old English form of Minecraft, given that we have determined that it must mean "art/skill of mining"? Probably Delfingcræft.

Thus, on that note, we close with some gratuitous screenshots of Heorot, the famous meadhall of Beowulf, as constructed in Minecraft:

Trocheeotomy? Trocheeectomy.

2011-02-04T08:40:00.006-06:00

The latest xkcd:

Click for larger image

Trocheeotomy? Or should it be trochee-ectomy? (~trocheeectomy)

[Some additional things:

Here's an interesting chart of trochee bigrams from the xkcd blag:

[again, click for larger image]

And Mark Liberman on Language Log offers some discussion here. (I imagine xkcd is thinking of Snow Crash rather than The Big U. By the bye, the linguistic-y part of Snow Crash I've always felt to be the weakest part of the book.) ]

The alt-text:

If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.

Good-bye, Good Luck, and Godspeed: On linguistic (de)secularisation

2011-01-24T13:03:00.011-06:00

Godspeed
What exactly does someone mean if they wish you Godspeed? Here's one answer, courtesy of comedian Eddie Izzard:

Source: Eddie Izzard, Circle (2000)

In fact, the speed of Godspeed refers to one of speed's other early senses, namely "success" or "(good) luck, fortune, prosperity". The OED's [1] earliest citation for Godspeed is from Tyndale's Bible translation:

[1526] Bible (Tyndale) - 2 John 10 Yf ther come eny vnto you and bringe not this learninge him receave not to housse: neither bid him God spede.
(Roughly: "If anyone comes to you who does not bring this (Christian) learning, don't let him into your house, nor wish him Godspeed.")

In such early uses of Godspeed, it appears that spede is used as a subjunctive verbal form, so that God spede means something like "may God speed (you)", i.e. "may God grant you success/prosperity".

[1597] Shakespeare Richard II i. iv. 31 A brace of draimen bid, God speed him wel.

More familiar is the use of Godspeed as a noun-noun compound, as in:

[1865] J. R. Lowell Polit. Ess. (1888) 229 Every humane and generous heart‥has wished us God-speed.

However, I have reason to suspect that examples like those from Tyndale and Shakespeare represent a later refashioning: in Old English, the verb spēdan does not seemed to have been used a causative (nor does there appear to be any other causative form of it), while the 16th century examples treat it as such (i.e. X speed Y as "may X cause Y to be speedy/to succeed").

Rather Old English spēdan meant simply "to speed, to be successful, to have good fortune", in which case, the later Middle/Modern English God spede should have meant something like "may God be successful" (or "may God go really fast"?!). The equivalent of "God causing someone to be successful" in Old English required a periphrasis of the sort "God gave speed (i.e. success) to someone", as in:

Exodus 153b-4b: þær him mihtig god on ðam spildsiðe spede forgefe
("if Mighty God would grant them success on the destructive quest")

I argue that the origin of Godspeed is in fact as a compound word, formed of good+speed, which was later reanalysed as God+speed, whence back-formations like God spede (ye), with spede being reanalysed as a causative (i.e. "may (he) cause you to be successful").

Before turning to details of the analysis proper, a quick lesson on some Middle and early Modern English sound changes.

First, the Great English Vowel Shift. I won't go into all of the details here, for they don't concern us, but in general the Great English Vowel Shift raised all long vowels (and diphthongised /ī/ to /aɪ̯/ and /ū/ to /aʊ̯/). More relevantly, Old English gōd "good" (noun and adjective) became /gūd/. By other sound changes, Old English gŏd "god" (originally a neuter noun, but a masculine form was innovated in Christian contexts) became /gɔd/, which by later changes became /gɒd/ (British) or /gɑd/ (American). There were yet later changes affecting ū which caused various (and somewhat sporadic) shortenings, sometimes to /ʌ/ (e.g. blood /blʌd/ from OE blōd) and sometimes to /ʊ/, as in the case of good /gʊd/.

Additionally, in Middle English a phonological change occurred which shortened long vowels in closed syllables which preceded another syllable. For example, consider the changes which occurred in vowel of the first member of the compound words shepherd and wisdom, contrasted with the lack of change in the simplex words sheep and wise, as summarised in the Table below.

Old English	Middle English
scēap	sheep [shēp]
scēaphirde	shĕpherd
wīs	wīs
wīsdom	wĭsdom

Here the simplex words wise and sheep thus remained unaffected (and became, by the Great English Vowel Shift, /waɪ̯s/ and /ʃīp/, respectively), but the vowels of first component in shepherd ("sheep-herd(er)") and wisdom were shortened.

With these sound changes in mind, let us consider what would have happened to a hypothetical Old English compound *gōd-spēd ("good fortune, good luck"): by the Middle English closed-syllable-before-another-syllable rule, this would become /godspēd/, which would thus have become Modern English Godspeed: /gɒdspīd/ (British), /gɑdspīd/ (American).

If this etymology is correct, then the original sense of Godspeed is good speed, in other words good luck---which makes eminent sense as a formula of well-wishing (note above in the above video clip, Izzard in fact glosses "good luck" as "Godspeed").

In fact, an Old English form gōd-spēd is not entirely hypothetical: the adjectival form gōdspēdig is recorded in the verse "translation" of Genesis A:

Genesis A 1008b-9b: Him þa brego engla, godspedig gast geanþingade, "Hwæt...'
("The Lord of Angels (i.e. God), the "good-speedy" spirit, answered him: 'Listen...'")

[This is God addressing Cain, right after Cain utters his signature "I am not my brother's keeper" line.]

The question is how to translate godspedig (though, as is typical of Old English manuscripts, the vowel quantity is not indicated, it is fairly obvious that it is in fact gōdspēdig and not gŏdspēdig, given that it characterises God himself). If it is an adjectivalised noun-noun compound (as Bosworth and Toller treat it in their dictionary [2]), then perhaps "rich in good(ness)". But it could be based on an adjective-noun compound gōdsped "good fortune", and thus mean something like "one is good at success, full of good fortune".

In any case the occurrence of gōdspēdig in Old English strengthens the case for Godspeed as originating from gōdspēd "good luck" with god spēde "may God speed/grant good fortune to (you)" being a later reinterpretation (with reanalysis of spēde as causative).

Gospel

Another word which has a similar history is gospel. The original form in Old English was gōdspel "good news", glossing Latin ēvangelium, (from Greek ευαγγελιον (evangelion), from eu- "good" and angelion "message"; but which in classical Greek meant only "a reward for bringing good news," and in the plural "a sacrifice offered on receiving good news"). Now, by the Middle English shortening rule described above, gōdspel would have become gŏdspel, and thus Modern English gospel /gɒspɛl/ (ignoring the loss of the d).

However, in this case, the word was in fact actually reanalysed much earlier, at some point in Old English, as gŏdspel "news about God", apparently based on the written form (which would not have usually indicated vowel quantity), as evidenced by the forms in other Germanic language (the other Germanic peoples were evangelised by Anglo-Saxons): Old Saxon godspell, Old High German gotspell, Old Norse guð-, goðspiall.

Good-bye
Assuming the above proposed etymology for Godspeed is correct: that the original was good speed "good luck" and thus secular in nature, it is interesting to note that exactly the opposite change occurred in the case of Good-bye: an originally religious formula was secularised. Good-bye is a shortening of God be with you(/ye). Here God has been substituted by Good, presumably by analogy with/contamination by other leave-taking formulae like Good Day, Good Night, Good Morning etc.

Summary
Godspeed likely originated as a secular formula "good speed" (i.e. "good luck"), but due to a phonological change in Middle English affecting long vowels in close syllables followed by one or more syllables the vowel of the first word was shorten, becoming homophonous with God, thus giving rise to a reinterpretation of spede as a causative verb meaning "cause to succeed" and resulting in formations like God spede "God prosper (you)". While Good-bye originally had religious connotations, being a shortened form of "God be with you/ye", but by analogy to other leave-taking formula like Good Night, God was substituted by Good.

One secular formula, go(o)d-speed, was thus reinterpreted as religious in nature, and the other, originally religious formula, go(o)d-bye, took on a secular nature.

[Updates (04-Feb-2011):

Some new information gleaned from the comments at languagehat's blog:

I. MMcM points out that:
(1) Webster (ca. 1830) glosses godspeed as "good speed" [link to Google Books page here].
(2) Tyndale's Bible translation (whence the first citation of godspeed, see above), also includes good speed [link to Google Books page here]: "LORde God of my maſter Abrahã, ſend me good ſpede this daye, & ſhewe mercy vnto my maſter Abraham".

II. Goodspeed also appears as a surname, e.g. Ben Zimmer's maternal line [hattip Ben Zimmer], the author of the 1923 American Translation of the New Testament, Edgar J. Goodspeed [hattip John Cowan].

]

References:
[1]The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

[2]Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

On analogy: Octopuses, Octopi, Octopodes, Emacsen

2011-01-12T10:15:00.004-06:00

From a post on boingboing.net, Merriam Webster editor Kory Stamper discusses the "correct" plural of octopus:

Octopus:octopi is a standard example illustrating ("false") analogy that I've used in class before. The story I've told goes like this: Octopus sounds like a Latin word, and so by analogy to Latin borrowings like syllabus:syllabi, alumnus:alumni, people often form its plural as octopi. But, so the standard story goes, it's not a borrowing from Latin, but rather from Greek, so octopi is technically incorrect. The proper Greek plural is rather octopodes.

[More technically, it is a borrowing from Latin, but the Latin word itself is a borrowing/coinage from Greek, and the Greek word would be (in nominative singular) ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), whose (nominative) plural would be ὀκτώποδες (oktṓpodes). Given that it's a scientific name, it will in fact be a Latin word (albeit one of Greek origins). By modern Latin rules for Greek borrowings, it should be a third declension noun, and form its plural with -es. Thus the Latin forms are octopus:octopodes.]

In the video, however, Stamper makes the following arguments: (1) octopodes sounds rather pedantic (I think a good compromise here though is to pronounce it to rhyme with nodes), and (2) once a word is borrowed into English, it becomes an English word and so should form its plural according to the standard English rules for pluralisation, i.e. it should be octopuses.

In fact, though it is true that -s is the dominant plural ending in English, and thus the one usually used for borrowings and new coinages, it is not the only possibility. Even coinages don't always form plural with -s. For example, there is a powerful text-editing program called Emacs. Different varieties of this program have arisen, and thus a plural form is sometimes called for. And the standard plural used is Emacsen (by analogy to ox:oxen; cf. boxen and VAXen). The point being simply that if even coinages don't always use the -s plural, then we needn't expect that borrowings should either. And therefore, nothing forces us to accept octopuses as the "correct" plural. [Caveat: of course there is no real "correct" plural for any word, aside from whatever people accept/use.]

But, as it stands, it would seem that the "correct" pluralshould be either octopuses, since that conforms to the dominant pluralisation rule for English, or else octopodes, since octopus is a coinage made from Greek components.

As one of the commenters to the boingboing post (Anon #80) points out though, there is in fact a case to be made for octopi as the "historically correct plural". The case is as follows: Linnaeus may have coined octopus ("eight foot (creature)") by analogy to the old Latin word for "octopus", namely polypus ("many foot (creature)"). Now polypus is obviously also a borrowing from Greek, but in Latin the normal plural of polypus was in fact polypi! (And, likewise, the plural of the modern scientific term polypus is also polypi).

[The commenter goes on to add that even the Greeks sometimes treated πολύπους (polúpous) as a second declension noun (which would give it a nominative plural of πολύποι (polúpoi). So even the Romans might have had a precedent for their -i plural of polypus.]

So if octopus is seen as a modern "updating" of the original Latin word for "octopus" (polypus), then there is an interesting case to be made for octopi as the (historically) "correct" plural.

Free OED

2011-01-06T14:06:00.001-06:00

Indulge your thirst for etymology. Use the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary free (for a month; until 5 February 2011).

Login with "trynewoed"/"trynewoed."

From languagehat.

Philology and (La)Tex: on Proto-Indo-European dragon-slaying and Hittite ḫ

2010-09-16T10:11:00.009-05:00

A couple of years ago I made the switch from Word to LaTex. At the time I was in the middle of writing a paper on formulaic language in Proto-Indo-European, specifically working on the reconstruction of formulae connected with the PIE dragon-slaying mytheme. Though the (first draft of the) paper was mostly written, I decided I would reset it in LaTeX. This was a rather labourious task, but resulted in much more aesthetically-pleasing document, and LaTeX allows for a much easier system of referring to numbered examples than does Word (amongst other benefits of the LaTeX type-setting system). [I use Wolfgang Sternefeld's linguex package for example numbering.]

As this was a philological paper dealing with a number of different languages (Old Irish, Old English, Old Saxon, Gothic, Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Avestan, Pahlavi, and Hittite), special diacritics and characters were required. Rei Fukui's TIPA package handles almost all of the characters/diacritics which were needed. The one exception was the Hittite "laryngeal ḫ" and polytonic classical Greek.

I. How to typeset Hittite ḫ in LaTeX:

The character ḫ may be defined by the following macro (assuming that the TIPA package has been loaded in the preamble by \usepackage{tipa}):

\newcommand{\hith}{\tipaLoweraccent[+.1ex]{\u{}}{h}}

Then whenever ḫ is required, it may be called via the command {\hith}, as in the following text:

n=an=za namma \super{\sc{mu\v{s}}} illuyanka$[$n$]$ tara{\hith}{\hith}\={u}wan d\=ai\v{s}

which results in:

n=an=za namma ^MUŠilluyanka[n] taraḫḫūwan dāiš

(meaning "He (the storm god) began to overcome the serpent"; from KBo. 3.7 iii 24-5)

II. How to typeset classical Greek in LaTeX:

In the philological tradition, the only language using a non-Latinate script which is not transliterated is Greek (I've always found this a bit unfair: why isn't Sanskrit rendered in Devanagari?). To typeset polytonic (ancient) Greek in LaTeX, we'll need the following packages: babel, teubner, fontenc, cbgreek. Defining a macro \greekfont then allows us to switch to polytonic Greek.

A minimal example illustrating the usage:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[polutonikogreek,latin,english]{babel}
\usepackage{mathptmx} %OPTIONAL, in order to set Latin/English in Times font
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{teubner}
\usepackage{tipa} %OPTIONAL, for typesetting diacritics/special characters for other lgs.

\newcommand{\greekfont}[1]{\fontencoding{LGR}\fontfamily{cmr}\selectfont\foreignlanguage{greek}{#1}\normalfont}

\begin{document}
{\noindent}From Pindar's \textit{Olympian} 13.63--4:
{\noindent}\greekfont{\Ar{o}c t\cap{a}c \s{o}fi\'hdeos u\r{i}\'on pote Gorg\'onos \cap{\s{h}} p\'oll> \s{a}mf\`i krouno\cap{i}c\\P\'agason ze\cap{u}xai poj\'ewn \Gs{e}pajen}
\end{document}

produces:

(meaning "who (rel. pro.) beside the Springs, striving to break the serpent Gorgon's child, Pegasos, endured much hardship")

You'll need to make sure you have the full cbgreek package, otherwise the Greek font will be blurry and ugly.

III. Post scriptum
Here's the rub (of course): having produced a beautifully typeset document, I submitted it to Historische Sprachforschung (Adalbert Kuhn's old Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung). It was accepted, but the journal could only process Word documents. So I had to go back and retypeset the whole thing in Word (again). This involved a lot of using find-and-replace (to turn LaTeX code/macros into Unicode characters or Word formatting or example numbers etc.) Unfortunately, this almost meant that the table I had managed to fit on a single page (in order that the various formulae could be easily compared) using smaller font sizes and rotating it horizontally using the package lscape, thus

is in HS split across three pages...

Happily, the original LaTeX-produced version did in fact appear earlier in Studies in the Linguistic Sciencies: Illinois Working Papers 2009 (who do accept LaTeX submissions (since I designed a LaTeX style file for the journal...)).

References:

[1] Slade, Benjamin. 2008[2010]. How (exactly) to slay a dragon in Indo-European? PIE *bheid- {h₃ég^whim, k^wŕ̥mi-}. Historische Sprachforschung 121: 3-53. [link]

[2] Slade, Benjamin. 2009. Split serpents and bitter blades: Reconstructing details of the PIE dragon-combat. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers 2009: 1-57. [link]

English "like" can, like, function like Sanskrit "इति"

2010-09-08T09:07:00.013-05:00

In a recent blog post, "How Old is Parasite 'Like'?", Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explores the history of (modern) English like when used as a type of filler/discourse-marker. However, modern English like has another function, which I think is often conflated with filler like (presumably because it commonly occurs in the speech of people who also use filler like): namely, as a sort of quotative marker (also noted by commenters Mike Gibson and Charles Well s).

She was like OMG! And then I was like wow!

The above sentences might be "translated" as:

She said, "Oh my god!" And then I said, "Wow!"

Or (since there seems to be some ambiguity):

She said, "Oh my god!" And then I thought, "Wow!"

This use as a sort of quotation mark is a separate function from its pragmatic discourse-marking use (which Liberman focusses on) in examples like:

You wanna, like, go see a movie?

Which might be uttered by a teenage boy asking a girl out on a date , where like can either act as a "hedge", foreseeing the possibility of rejection ("....it's ok if you don't want to"), or to allow for the possibility of other activities ("...or get some ice cream").

Both uses of like are stigmatised; again, the stigmatisation of "quotative" like is probably via guilt-by-association with the discourse-marking/filler like. I'll admit that, like Liberman, I find both uses rather aesthetically displeasing (which doesn't mean that I never use them---they are, as Liberman suggests, somewhat viral). But the "quotative" like is interesting. Though Liberman remarks that:

Particularly disconcerting is the fact that the analogs of like swamped other languages at roughly the same time or a few decades later. Germans have begun to say quasi in every sentence. Swedes say liksom, and Russians say kak by; both mean “as though.” In this function quasi, liksom, and kak by are recent. The influence of American like is out of the question, especially in Russian. So why, and why now? Delving into the depths of Indo-European and Proto-Germanic requires courage and perspicuity. But here we are facing a phenomenon of no great antiquity and are as puzzled as though we were trying to decipher a cuneiform inscription.

Interestingly, however, the "quotative" function of English like has a couple of parallels in Sanskrit. One is these---the one most closely resembling English "quotative" like, at least in its frequency---is the Sanskrit particle iti (इति).

Both Sanskrit iti and English like can occur in the following contexts:

A. When quoting words actually utttered, alongside a verb of speaking:
(Skt-1) kathitam avalokitayā "madanodyānam gato mādhava" iti
"Avalokita had told me that Madhava was gone to the grove of Kama." [Mālatīmādhava I, p. 11; cited from Speijer[1]:§493a]

(Eng-1) "She said like 'I want to go too'."

B. Expressing the contents of one's thought:
(Skt-2) manyate pāpakam kṛtvā "na kaścid vetti mām" iti
"After committing some sins, one thinks 'nobody knows me'." [Mahabharata 1.74.29; cited from Speijer[1]:§493b]

(Eng-2) “And I thought like 'wow, this is for me'.” [OED, 2nd Supplement[2]; 1970, no earlier citations]

C. More general setting forth of motives, emotions, judgements etc.:
(Skt-3) vyāghro mānuṣam khādati iti lokāpavādaḥ
"'The tiger eats the man' is slanderous gossip." [Hitopadesha 10; cited from Speijer[1]:§493c]

(Eng-3) "I was like 'wow'!"

There are obvious differences between English quotative like and Sanskrit iti, including the fact that English quotative like precedes the "quotation", while Sanskrit iti follows it (in conformity with the general left-branching nature of Sanskrit syntax).

Further, Sanskrit iti doesn't have any of the other functions or meanings associated with English like. English like derives ultimately from Proto-Germanic *lîko- "body, form, appearance", while Sanskrit iti is built from the pronominal stem i-. In fact, iti still has pronominal uses, even in Classical Sanskrit, as in the following example.

(Skt-4) tebhyas pratijnāya nalaḥ kariṣya iti
"Nala promised them he would do thus." [Nala 3,1; cited from Speijer[1]:§492]

Amusingly, I find that (pretending that a parallel development has taken place in English) replacing "quotative" like with thus actually seems grammatical to me---though wholly unidiomatic, e.g.:

(Eng-4) "I was thus: 'Wow!'"

(Somehow I imagine that if thus had been recruited as a quotative in English rather than like, the use of a quotative marker wouldn't be so stigmatised, since there would be no association with filler like and, moreover, thus is largely used in formal registers of English.)

However, there is another element in Sanskrit which---though not as frequently used in this function as iti---actually is more similar to English quotative like in its syntax and semantics: yathā. Yathā is, properly speaking, a relative pronoun and is often part of relative-correlative constructions of the form yathā X...tathā Y "As X...., so Y". However, it can occur without correlative tathā, and in fact can have the meaning "like", as in the following example:

(Skt-5) mansyante mām yathā nṛpam
"They will consider me like a king." [Mahabharata 4.2.5; cited from Speijer[1]:§470a]

Yathā can also function as a sort of quotative, but---unlike iti and like like---it precedes rather than follows the quoted discourse:

(Skt-6) viditam eva yathā "vayam malayaketau kimcitkālāntaram uṣitāḥ".
"It is certainly known (to you) that I stayed for some time with Malayaketu." [Mudrarakshasa VII; cited from Speijer[1]:§494]
(Or, maybe: "You certainly know, like, 'I stayed for some time with Malayaketu'.")

(Yathā and iti (since they occupy different syntactic positions) can also co-occur.)

So there is at least one antique parallel for the development of modern English like as a quotative marker.

Returning to the more commonly used iti, the following Sanskrit example---occurring when one of the heroes of the Mahabharata has performed an act of generosity so great that even the gods are impressed---I think is a great parallel for examples like "I was like, 'Wow!'":

(Skt-7) tato 'ntarikṣe vāg āsīt "sādhu sādhv" iti
"Then a voice in the sky was like 'Wow! Wow!'" [Mahabharata 14.91.15]

This line might be more usually translated as "then a voice in the sky said 'Bravo! Bravo!'", but there is actually no verb of speaking: āsīt means "was".

References:
[1] Speijer, J.S. 1886. Sanskrit syntax. Leiden: E.J. Brill. [reprinted, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973.]
[2] The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

Co-ordination fail

2010-08-30T10:42:00.010-05:00

One of the first topics in intro syntax classes is the notion of constituency, including a variety of tests which can be used to determine constituency. One of these tests is the co-ordination test: generally only items of the same syntactic category can be conjoined. Thus the following examples are fine: fresh and clean (coordination of adjectives), mad dogs and Englishmen (coordination of nouns [DPs]), (to) serve and protect (coordination of infinitive verbs). But verbs can't be conjoined in the same way with nouns, e.g. *I like mad dogs and to serve is bad; and prepositional phrases don't conjoin with nouns, e.g. *I like mad dogs and on top of the Empire State Building is also bad.

Here's a label I noticed which violates the co-ordination constraint:

*[_DP Side Dish], [_DP Soup Mix], [_PP Over Rice]

Computational approaches to understanding language evolution [video]

2010-08-03T11:26:00.007-05:00

In her recent ILLS talk, Tandy Warnow discusses computational approaches for inferring language evolution and linguistic relationships:

Computational methods for inferring evolutionary histories of languages

A page with links to various publications associated with this project (and the datasets used) is available here: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/.

One of the interesting points of this study is the relationship of Germanic with respect to the other branches of Indo-European. Germanic, at least when the morphological data is given more weight, is not particularly closely related to Italic or Celtic, though it shares a number of lexical similarities with these groups. This is suggestive of a later migration of Germanic-speaking peoples into an area where they came into contact with Italo-Celtic speakers. In any case, it's an interesting approach to historical data.

For more ILLS2 videos, see this link: http://ills.linguistics.illinois.edu/current/showcase.html.

Logic, Language, and Information: Summer course at Bloomington

2010-02-12T07:52:00.000-06:00

The North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) is a summer school with classes in the interface between computer science, linguistics, and logic.

After previous editions at Stanford University, Indiana University, and UCLA, NASSLLI will return to Bloomington, Indiana, June 20–26, 2010. The summer school, loosely modeled on the long-running ESSLLI series in Europe, will consist of a number of courses and workshops, selected on the basis of the proposals. Courses and workshops meet for 90 or 120 minutes on each of five days, June 21–25, and there will be tutorials on June 20 and a day-long workshop on June 26. The instructors are prominent researchers who volunteer their time and energy to present basic work in their disciplines. Many are coming from Europe just to teach at NASSLLI.

NASSLLI courses are aimed at graduate students and advanced undergraduates in wide variety of fields. The instructors know that people will be attending from a wide range of disciplines, and they all are pleased to be associated with an interdisciplinary school. The courses will also appeal to post-docs and researchers in all of the relevant fields.

We hope to have 100-150 participants. In addition to classes in the daytime, the evenings will have social events and plenary lectures. Bloomington is a wonderful place to visit, known for arts, music, and ethnic restaurants. All of this is within 15 minutes walking from campus. We aim to make NASSLLI fun and exciting.

Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~nasslli/

Ill Linguistics and Novel Technologies (Call for papers: 28 Feb '10 deadline)

2010-02-02T05:50:00.000-06:00

Illinois Language and Linguistics Society 2

ILLS2 (28-30 May 2010) is a student-run conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The theme for this year's conference is Novel Technologies and Methodologies in Linguistics Research. The purpose of this theme is to inspire ideas and create enthusiasm for the ways in which we pursue research in Linguistics. Talks will involve the creation of new tools for Linguistic research, the novel use of old tools, experimental methods, studies of validity or authenticity, and, otherwise, studies that cause reflection in Linguistic research.

Talks from all subfields of Linguistics are welcome.

Invited Speakers:
Wayne Cowart (University of Southern Maine)
Bryan Gick (University of British Columbia)
Tania Ionin (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Richard Sproat (Oregon Health and Science University)
Tandy Warnow (University of Texas at Austin)

Conference Chairs:
Tim Mahrt (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Megan Osfar (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Call for Papers

Call Deadline: 28-Feb-2010

The online submission form can be found on the conference website:

http://ills.linguistics.illinois.edu/

ILLS welcomes the submission of general empirical and theoretical papers relevant to the field of linguistics and the language sciences. Special consideration will be given to applicants whose research fits within the conference theme of Novel Technologies and Methodologies in Linguistics Research. Relevant talks for this theme would involve at least one of the following: the use of new tools for Linguistic research, the novel use of old tools, experimental methods, studies of validity or authenticity, and, otherwise, studies that cause reflection.

ILLS requests the submission of abstracts summarizing the main points of the research paper, including hypotheses, methods, and conclusions.

ILLS also welcomes the submission of workshop proposals on advanced, emerging, or domain-specific applications, particularly where there is little available existing documentation. Where applicable, we invite those with a related paper to consider submitting a workshop proposal--however, independent workshops are just as welcome.

Suitable topics could involve technologies such as PRATT, eyetrackers, or EMA.

Abstracts are to be submitted in PDF format, and should be no more than 500 words in length, including examples (encouraged) and in-text citations. Full references are not necessary; please use the (Author, Year) format.

See the LSA model abstracts page for guidance in building an acceptable abstract.

You may submit at most: one single-author abstract and one multi-author abstract, or two multi-author abstracts. Additionally you may submit one workshop proposal. For abstracts co-authored with a faculty member, the student should be the primary author and should have carried out the bulk of the research and analysis. In addition, the student will be responsible for the presentation of the paper at the conference.

Abstracts are to be uploaded through the conference interface on the Abstract page.

Accidental sarcasm: On focus semantic values and hotel lifts

2010-01-24T11:49:00.000-06:00

Earlier this month I was in Baltimore for the annual LSA conference, and gave a talk on why wh-words (e.g. who, what, when etc.) need ordinary as well as focus semantic values (in contrast to Beck 2006, Cable 2007). Relevant to the calculation of focus semantic values, I spotted this notice in the conference hotel elevator:

The relevant bit: "protecting and empowering Marylanders....in SO many ways".

Here so is focussed; presumably to emphasise the variety of ways in which Marylanders are protected and empowered. However, I can't help but read the focus on so as sarcastic (I can imagine someone saying "Oh yeah, you were SO helpful to me."), though I'm not sure why.

[Update (30.1.10): Does DLLR monitor the activities of this construction site?

from a post on Arnold's Zwicky blog.]

References:

Beck, Sigrid. 2006. Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 14:1–56.

Cable, Seth. 2007. The grammar of Q: Q-particles and the nature of Wh-fronting, as revealed by the Wh-questions of Tlingit. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Overstand the downpression of the kin-dread by outformers: On what to call "reverse eggcorns" in Dread Talk

2009-12-18T07:21:00.001-06:00

The language of reggae music is filled with examples of linguistic creativity, including what we might call "puns". One example is Rastafari reanalysed as Rasta Far Eye. Tafari was Haile Selassie I's pre-king name, and since he was of Ethiopian nobility he had the title Ras, an Amharic word roughly translatable as "prince". One of the central tenets of the Rastafarian movement (which obviously takes its name from Ras Tafari) is that Haile Selassie I is an incarnation of God (Rastafarian Jah, cp. Yahweh). Rastafari is thus (intentionally/knowingly) reanalysed as "far-seeing Haile Selassie I/God/Jah".

Another interesting example of this sort is found in the lyrics and title of the song "Kin Dread" (Midnite[1]):

Here singer/lyricist Vaughn Benjamin intentionally reanalyses kindred as kin-dread, and, amusingly, he appears to overtly reference this linguistic remaking, as towards the end of the song (~5.00) he says:

Well, how come family mean "kin" and "dread"? Enough with them the vernacular etymological syntax.

Does vernacular etymological syntax = "folk etymology"?

Kindred historically derives from OE. cynn-rǣden: cynn "family, race, blood-relations" (OED[2]) and rǣden "condition, reckoning" (modern English read and riddle come from the same root); the -d- of kindred is epenthetic (cp. Modern English thunder from OE. þunor, ME. þoner).

Benjamin's reanalysis of kindred as kin-dread I assumed would mean something like "fellow Rastafarians" (dread can mean "Rastafarian"; from dreadlocks, "uncut, unwashed, uncombed hair worn 'in dread of the Lord' [cf. the Nazarite vow]"), but from the context of the song it seems to simply bear the standard sense of kindred, metaphorically extended as "fellow human beings", since it is obvious that usually the kin-dread he refers to are not necessarily fellow Rastafarians, as shown by:

Hear a small story, me a-tell you a sad story about a farmer. Planted the most italful garden, but [the youth them]_i only want soft drinks in Babylon-flavour. But yeah, you know, them_i are me kin-dread.... Full-fledgèd.

[Babylon is a standard Rastafarian term for "(corrupt) western society". Ital (cf. italful) is roughly "kosher (for Rastafarians)", excluding tobacco, alcohol, pork (and often meat altogether), and preservatives/artificial ingredients (and thus soft drinks....).]

Examples like Rasta-Far-Eye and kin-dread appear to be largely nonce-formations, akin to puns. However, Rastafarian English (or what Pollard[3] calls "Dread Talk", defined as an example of "lexical expansion within a creole system" [2:24]) is full of entrenched examples of remakings which are similar to (though not typically paronomastic in the same way as) kin-dread and rasta-far-eye.

Pollard[3:24,46] refers to such examples as "Category II: words which bear the weight of their phonological implications". I'm not sure that this is the clearest definition or the best analysis of the linguistic change involved in such remakings. Let's examine the some of the most common of these entrenched reanalyses:

Downpress(ion) = "oppress(ion)"
Overstand = "understand"
Outformer = "informer"
Livicate = "dedicate"
Blindgarette = "cigarette"

All of these involve remakings which seem add or remove a pejorative sense (as appropriate):

Oppress treated as if up-press (though really from Latin ob- "against" + premere "press"). Uppress would seem to mean "lift up"; thus reformed as down-press.

Understand is of somewhat obscure origins. Other Germanic languages use stand with other prefixes for the same sense (cp. German vorstehen, as if English forstand). The prefix perhaps reflects not PIE *ndher "under" (cp. Latin infrā), but rather PIE *nter "between, among" (cp. Latin inter), see further Liberman[4:210-5]. Whatever the etymology, other words in modern English with the prefix under- tend to indicate either "subordinate", e.g. underling, or "insufficient", e.g. underfunded; thus understand is reanalysed as "low comprehension, insufficient comprehension", and remade as overstand.

Informer: in often has positive connotations (e.g. in-group); out negative ones (e.g. outsider); thus remade as outformer (cp. perhaps to rat (s.o.) out).

Dedicate actually from Latin dē "out" + dicāre "say, proclaim", but analysed as if connected with English dead (with negative connotations); so remade as livicate (from live).

Cigarette: analysed as see-garette, where see has positive connotations (cp. above Rasta-Far-Eye), but tobacco is considered by Rastafarians as polluting/unclean; thus reformed as blind-garette.

These reanalyses are reminiscent of folk etymology or eggcorns (see also Liberman[5], Pullum[6], Zwicky[7]), but unlike eggcorns they appear to be intentional. That is, Rastafarians obviously recognise that in standard English people say oppress, understand, informer, dedicate, cigarette etc., and thus these aren't misunderstandings like elk for ilk. And they don't seem to be what Zwicky[8] calls "mock eggcorns". Rather the above remakings involve an intentional re-etymologising, as if the standard English forms were the eggcorns.

What do we call this sort of morphological/semantic change?

~~("Reverse eggcorn" is the best I have, but that doesn't seem quite right.)~~

[Update (30.12.09): Arnold Zwicky suggests these sorts of changes should be called overstandings. I like it.]

References:

[1]Midnite. 2006. Jah Grid. Christiansted, St.Croix (US Virgin Islands): I-Grade Records.

[2]The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

[3]Pollard, Velma. 2000. Dread Talk: the language of Rastafari. Kingston, Jamaica & Montreal, Canada: Canoe Press & McGill-Queen's University Press, rev. ed.

[4]Liberman, Anatoly. 2008. An analytic dictionary of English etymology: an introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[5]Liberman, Mark. 2003. "Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???" Language Log. September 23, 2003.

[6]Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2003. "Phrases for lazy writers in kit form." Language Log. October 27, 2003.

[7]Zwicky, Arnold. 2003. "Lady Mondegreen says her peace about egg corns." Language Log. November 02, 2003.

[8]Zwicky, Arnold. 2009. "Mock eggcorns and their kin". Arnold Zwicky's blog. August 29, 2009.

Nepali, Nez Perce, and Na'vi: On alien-language in Cameron's Avatar, with remarks on etymology and "Universal Grammar"

2009-12-09T07:09:00.002-06:00

In order to lend authenticity to his film Avatar, James Cameron had the language of the alien Na'vi people designed by linguist Paul Frommer, as reported by Benjamin Zimmer[1] in his 4 December article "Skxawng!" (in his New York Times column "On Language"). Cameron apparently choose Frommer partly on the basis of his co-authored textbook Looking at Languages[2], where one of the exercises involves deciphering Klingon word order [spoiler: it's object-verb-subject] (Klingon is another linguist-designed language).

An interview with Frommer is available at the Unidentified Sound Object blog, in which Frommer reports on some interesting features of the language he developed. The language of the Na'vi (who look sort of like blue cat-people, see above) involves some typologically-unusual linguistic features, including: the presence of ejectives in the phonological inventory, specifically [k'], [t'], and [p'] (click to hear what these sound like), and---more interesting to syntacticians and morphologists---a tripartite system of case marking.

Like ejectives, tripartite case-marking is present but rare in human languages, found in the Australian languages Wangkumara and Kala Lagaw Ya (though these two languages are apparently unrelated) as well as in the Amerindian language Nez Percé spoken in the northwest of the USA (on which see further Cash Cash[3]). The tripartite case-marking system involves differences in morphological case-marking on (a) agents of transitive verbs [agentive/ergative case], (b) objects of transitive verbs [objective/accusative case], and (c) agents of intransitive verbs [absolutive/nominative case].

However, there are languages which are much less exotic (at least to me) that could also be seen as employing tripartite case-marking, including many Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Nepali:-- see examples below (where nom=nominative/absolutive case; acc=accusative/objective case; erg=ergative/agentive case).

Hindi:
(1) लड़का कल आया
laṛkā-[Ø] kal āyā
boy-nom yesterday came
"The boy came yesterday."

(2) लड़के ने लड़की को देखा
laṛke-ne laṛkī-ko dekhā
boy-erg girl-acc saw
"The boy saw the girl."

Nepali:
(3) केटा हिजो आयो
keṭā-[Ø] hijo āyo
boy-nom yesterday came
"The boy came yesterday."

(4) केटाले केटीलाई हेर्यो
keṭā-le keṭī-lāī heryo
boy-erg girl-acc saw
"The boy saw the girl."

[Though the "accusative" case-marker (Hindi ko, Nepali lāī) in Indo-Aryan is not straightforwardly a marker of objects of transitive verbs, rather it tends to occur particularly on objects which are animate and/or specific--see Bhatia[4].]

The fact that the Na'vi language shares this feature with Indo-Aryan perhaps makes all the more appropriate that the name of Cameron's film is also Indo-Aryan. Avatar, from Sanskrit अवतार (avatāra), is usually translated into English as "incarnation", used to refer to gods assuming human bodies (e.g. the god Vishnu becoming Krishna). It also has an extended use in the world of cyberspace, where it refers to the graphic representation of a user or his alter ego. The sense in Cameron's film, I take it, actually draws on both of these meanings, as some of the human characters control Na'vi-appearing bodies.

Interestingly, in the Mahabharata, one of the two major Indian epic poems, where avatars are a cental concept, the term avatāra is actually never employed (Sutton[5]:156-7); however the concept is frequently alluded to (Biardeau[6]:1621n2, Hiltebeitel[7]:109n56) by usages of the verb avatr̥̄-, which literally means something like "stepping down" (prefix ava- "down, off" + √tr̥̄ "to cross over"). In fact, the verb avatr̥̄- is conventionally used in the Mahabharata to refer to people "stepping down from their chariots" (Hiltebeitel[7]:232).

Returning to Na'vi, in his Unidentified Sound Object interview, Frommer remarks that:

As I mentioned, there’s nothing in Na’vi that couldn’t be found in some human language—and that’s important, since humans have learned to speak it.

I found this idea that the Na'vi language is learnable by humans rather intriguing, since part of the Chomskian notion of (natural human) language is that it relies on biocognitive structures which are unique (at least on Earth) to humans (i.e. not present in any other Terran creatures). Would/could language as developed in an extraterrestrial species rely on biocognitive structures which would be equivalent to those underlying human language?

This reminds me of a story that Prof. Peter Lasersohn told in one of his semantics courses; paraphrased (as well as I can remember it):

Logicians and philosophers had long treated human language not being expressable in terms of formal logic. Richard Montague famously developed a system of formal semantics for language (Montague[8,9,10]); in one of the earlier accounts he states: "There is in my opinion no important theoretical difference between natural languages and the artificial languages of logicians; indeed, I consider it possible to comprehend the syntax and semantics of both kinds of language within a single natural and mathematically precise theory. On this point I differ from a number of philosophers, but agree, I believe, with Chomsky and his associates" (Montague[8]).

However, the Chomskian notion of "Universal Grammar" involves an abstract (but biocognitively instantiated) system which underlies all human language but is unique to humans. Montague, on the other hand, used "Universal Grammar" in the sense of a formal syntax and semantics which would be truly "universal", that is, applicable to any language, human or otherwise.

When Barbara Partee (a semanticist who was instrumental in popularising Montague-Grammar among generative linguists) explained Chomsky's sense of "Universal Grammar" to Montague, he was perplexed, remarking that he did not understand why linguists would adopt a human-only conception of "Universal Grammar" which would thus automatically disqualify them from being the ones the world would to turn to---in the event of humans making contact with aliens---for the decryption of extraterrestrial language.

References:

[1]Zimmer, Benjamin. 2009. "Skxawng!" On Language, New York Times, 4 December 2009.

[2]Frommer, Paul R. & Finegan, Edward. 2004. Looking at languages: A workbook in elementary linguistics. Boston: Wadsworth, 3rd edn.

[3]Cash Cash, Phillip. 2004. "Nez Perce verb morphology". Ms., University of Arizona, Tucson.

[4]Bhatia, Archna. 2008. "Animacy, specificity and overt object case marking in Hindi". Ms., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

[5]Sutton, Nicholas. 2000. Religious doctrines in the Mahābhārata. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

[6]Biardeau, Madeleine. 1999. Le Rāmāyaṇa de Vālmīki. Paris: Gallimard.

[7]Hiltebeitel, Alf. 2001. Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A reader’s guide to the education of the dharma king. New Delhi: Oxford University Press [Indian edition].

[8]Montague, Richard. 1970a. “Universal grammar”. Theoria 36: 373-398.

[9]Montague, Richard. 1970b. “English as a formal language”. In Bruno Visentini et al. (ed.), Linguaggi nella società e nella tecnica. Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 188-221.

[10]Montague, Richard. 1973. “The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English”. In K.J.J. Hintikka, J.M.E. Moravcsik, & P. Suppes (eds.), Approaches to natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel, 221-242.

Hot for Words: On titillating etymologies and pop philology (with some remarks on Beowulf movies and sex thrown in for good measure)

2009-12-07T07:51:00.000-06:00

I came across an article by Marc Bousquet, "Teaching for Lust" on Brainstorm, the blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, discussing Marina Orlova (Марина Орлова), a self-employed philologist who produces a YouTube series "Hot for Words".

Apparently Marina started her YouTube channel back in 2007, but I'd never heard of her until this week. I haven't seen her discussed in any of the usual places (Language Log, languagehat, etc. [update: "Hot for Words" was actually discussed a couple of times at the blog bradshaw of the future{sweostorword}; I overlooked these posts obviously.]). I'm usually on the lookout for video clips having to do with language but somehow I missed this series.

Here's the first video she posted (the more recent videos are much more polished):

And a blurb from her website:

Marina Orlova, known to millions of fans around the world as a sexy master of language, HotForWords, is a 28 year old Internet “sensation”. Hailing from Moscow, Marina has two degrees in philology which is the study of linguistics and origins of words. Back in Russia Marina taught English and World Literature to high-schoolers. She came to the United States six years ago to improve her English skills and prepare for her Ph.D., but she ended up staying in the U.S. simply because of the warmer weather. Two and a half years ago, Marina burst onto the YouTube scene. Her initial goal was to reach more people with her language knowledge...In each video she takes word requests from YouTube users and discusses their meanings and origins. Something that might, at first, seem boring, but when a buxom blonde with a Russian accent teaches you anything, it can be quite educational, thus proving, as her tag-line states, that “Intelligence is Sexy.”

Obviously part of her popularity is simply because sex(iness) sells. But is this a bad thing?

I had some concerns about whether her philology would be sound, especially as she's apparently a recurrent guest on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor---and I don't associate Fox News with "truthiness".

The few "Hot for Words" videos I watched, however, seemed largely accurate. I mean, they weren't deep, and I'm guessing Orlova takes a lot of etymologies straight from the OED, but I didn't notice any serious misinformation. Etymologies seem to be her main trade, though she does have a video which touches on sound change, dealing with the pronunciation of kn-initial words (where knife is illustrated by a khukuri!), and a bit on neologism.

Turning back to the "Teaching for Lust" article, Bousquet's comments on Orlova are rather perplexing:

Youtube phenom “Hotforwords” raises the ante on the “teaching for love” canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really can realize the administration’s dream in the form of the ultimate “quality” process.
The 27-year-old Russian philologist is a former Ph.D. aspirant and high-school literature teacher with nearly 30 million views of her videos explaining various linguistic puzzles, such as — in the featured clip — how “dope” can mean both stupid and excellent.
One might ask the same about the term “quality,” which for administrators means, well, this.
Seriously, there’s no disputing her metrics. It’s teaching as “vaudeville,” as The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan points out, but her curriculum is customer-defined and market-oriented. She is a self-funding responsibility center. She gets great student evaluations. Her teaching methods are susceptible to straightforward assessment instruments. There isn’t a “quality” complaint to make about her.
Oh yeah, and it’s totally exploitative, which makes a nice fit with all the outsourcing and permatemping.
Marina’s teaching for love (of fame) is not entirely divorced from the phenomenon that Michelle Masse analyzes as the feminization of the humanities — the reduction of whole fields of faculty work to second-class status by way of the gender economy: part of the cheapening and degradation of the work is the tacit recognition of it as women’s work, as a service, compensated by something other than wages. In connection with her forthcoming SUNY collection Ten Million Served with Katie Hogan, she observes how the call to “service” is one of the most compelling vectors of exploitation in academic life.
Masse points out that “secretary” and “nurse” used to name well-remunerated, well-respected positions for men. Kinda like “professor of language.” Now that it’s women’s work, it’s best done as a kind of lightly-paid volunteerism — for love, or, as in Marina’s, case, something closely allied to it.

Now, Masse's remarks (see link above) seem to be on target, but I'm not sure how this relates to sexed-up YouTube mini-philology, as Bousquet suggests. [Update: Orlova actually replied to Bousquet's commentary: see here.]

Orlova doesn't seem to be teaching just for "love": she's a revenue-sharing YouTube partner, she's signed an endorsement deal with "coComment", and she's published a book with HarperCollins. If she started out teaching for "love (of fame)" as Bousquet argues, I assume it was because she figured she could parlay that fame into money.

But how does this affect academics? Bousquet seems to imply that university administrations are going to outsource philology/historical linguistics to "Hot for Words". Now, admittedly university administrators often make stupid decisions, and many linguistics departments aren't refilling their historical linguistics posts---but I don't think it's because they believe they can outsource philology to Orlova.

I think, rather, such things can act to spark people's interest in a topic, and thus have a positive effect for academics: if even a small percentage of young people who watch Orlova's series become interested in etymology, some of them may decide to enrol in an historical linguistics course that they wouldn't have otherwise. Higher enrolment in historical linguistics courses = less possibility of departments deciding not to refill their historical linguistics positions.

I won't deny the vaudeville-angle of "Hot for Words", but that's why it works of course. I play YouTube clips for my students, like "A Bit of Fry and Laurie (on Language)" during my discussion of generative vs. formulaic language; and this clip from an old Fawlty Towers episode when discussing language contact. The clips don't substitute for course material, but rather supplement it by serving to maintain students' attention and get them interested in the topic we're discussing.

It seems to me that "Hot for Words" does something similar: the scantily-clad buxom blonde draws the audience in, but at least they get taught a bit of etymology. For example, in one video, Orlova answers a viewer's question about whether titillating has anything to do with tits (tits can be titillating is the logic behind the question). Now, obviously in part the viewer's question was motivated by a desire to hear a busty Russian woman talk about tits, but Orlova does answer the question, explaining that titillate derives from Latin titillāre "to tickle", and (briefly) discusses the semantic changes leading to the predominant modern sense. (Her discussion of tits was, I think, a little off, as she derived the word ultimately from Old French tete, tette, taite, but the development appears to be more complicated than that, since Old English has tit(t) and the modern form seems likely to derive from some mixture of both of the Old English and the Old French.)

A parallel that comes to mind is the effect on Anglo-Saxon studies of Beowulf movies--which have also tended to use sex to draw viewers in:

While none of the recent Beowulf-based films are particularly faithful to the original poem, they increase awareness of Beowulf and thus have the potential to raise enrolment in Old English courses.

"Hot for Words" would seem to have a similar potential effect: to arouse interest in philology, and thus perhaps get a few more bodies into historical linguistics classrooms.

So, this maximal projection walks into a V-bar, and says...

2009-12-03T14:38:00.000-06:00

So, this Maximal Projection walks into a V-bar, and says: “Give me a little vP!”

The bartender asks: “Really? That’s not your usual order.”

And the Maximal Projection replies: “I know ... maybe it’s just a phase.”

[from Amy Fountain's cafepress site, with hattip to the Eternally Stressed Semanticist.]

Now illustrated:

Riding the gallows, nor fending off ravens: Another nother from Old English

2009-12-02T08:21:00.001-06:00

Perhaps an even better example than the Beowulf example of an early instance of noþer/nother (~ nor) used in an equivalent manner to "The snow fell, nor did it cease to fall" appears in the Old English poem The Fortunes of Men (ll.33-42):

Sum sceal on geapum galgan ridan,
seomian æt swylte, oþþæt sawlhord,
bancofa blodig, abrocen weorþeð.
þær him hrefn nimeþ heafodsyne,
sliteð salwigpad sawelleasne;
noþer he þy facne mæg folmum biwergan,
laþum lyftsceaþan, biþ his lif scæcen,
ond he feleleas, feores orwena,
blac on beame bideð wyrde,
bewegen wælmiste. Bið him werig noma!

"One (man) must ride the gaping gallows,
hang to death, until his soul-hoard,
his bloody bone-coffer, becomes broken.
There (on the gallows) the raven takes his eye,
the dark-cloaked one tears at the soulless;
nor is he able to ward off that evil,
that loathsome thief of the air,
with his hands-- his life is fled,
and he, senseless, without hope of living,
pale on the tree, awaits his fate,
covered by the mists of slaughter. His name is cursed!"

Here it is clear that noþer cannot be read in the sense "neither (...nor)".

Incidentally, the scene, combining gallows and ravens, recalls Odin (as "the hanged god", with his ravens Huginn and Muninn).

Nother post on nor

2009-11-30T06:56:00.002-06:00

A recent Language Log post discusses the use of nor in the sentence:

"The snow fell nor did it cease to fall."
(The Road, Cormac McCarthy)

Since this topic touches on disjunction and ultimately on wh-words (interrogative pronouns), central issues in my dissertation, I can (almost) justify taking the time to investigate some of the antecedents of McCarthy's use of nor. Nor in the above sentence, as Mark Liberman observes, conforms to the sense in the OED's[1] entry 5a. for nor:

5. And — not; neither. In later use normally with inversion of subject and verb.

a. Following an affirmative clause, or in continuing narration. Obs. (chiefly poet. in later use).

Liberman offers discussion of modern and (late) early modern English examples in the aforementioned Language Log post; I shall concentrate on earlier examples, such as:

[1423] Guildhall Let.-bk. in R. W. Chambers & M. Daunt Bk. London Eng. (1931) 114 He shalle wirke..without fraude..nor he shall nat entermete of sekenes, sore, or hurte..vnknowynge to hym in eny maner.

[1492-3] in T. Pape Medieval Newcastle-under-Lyme (1928) 180 The aforesaid William shall delyuer all evedence and writings that belonges to the lands in the Newcastle, nor hurt nor truble the aforesaid John Leighton.

[1523] LD. BERNERS tr. J. Froissart Cronycles I. cxxxv. 162, I greatly desyre to se the kynge my maister, nor I wyll lye but one nyght in a place, tyll I come there.

These are the three earliest examples the OED gives for sense 5a. It is interesting to note that the first two appear to come from legal documents.

The OED suggests that nor derives from earlier nother¹ (a contracted form of Old English nōhwæðer "neither", on which more presently), for which its earliest example means "neither of two preceding things or persons":

[eOE] KING ÆLFRED tr. Gregory Pastoral Care (Hatton) li. 399 Ne fornime incer noðer oðer ofer will butan geðafunge.
"Let neither of you deprive the other without consent."

As Mitchell[2]:§§1847-51 observes, OE nohwæðer/noðer cannot always be interpreted as a pronoun, as in:

[Blickling Homilies[3]:45.14]...þæt hi þonne ne mihtan nawþer ne him sylfum ne þære heorde þe hi ær Gode healdan sceoldan, nænige gode beon.
"[For the good teacher has said that, when the priest or bishop was led into eternal perdition,] that they could not be any good, neither for himself nor for the flock which they previously should have kept for God.",

where it plays a similar role to modern English neither.

This nother¹ is not to be confused with a nother [sic] development which led to a form nother: namely the reanalysis of another/an other as a nother², for which we find early examples such as:

[c1390] MS Vernon Homilies in Archiv f. das Studium der Neueren Sprachen (1877) 57 280 He wolde him say his onswere on a noþer day.

And, of course, this nother²is frequent in the collocation (that's) a whole nother story, but it may be found outside of this formula, as in:

[1977] C. MCFADDEN Serial (1978) xxviii. 62/2 I'm in a whole nother space.
[1993] Wired Dec. 18/3 A new direction and a new name seem inevitable. But ‘tekkies?’ It seems too much like ‘Trekkies’, which invokes a whole 'nother set of connotations.

Interestingly, there is also a dialectal English (apparently particularly in Southwest England, if the prominence of Zomerzet zs in the last two examples is any indication) development which the OED suggests represents convergence between nother¹ and nother²:-- neither nother, originally "neither one nor another", and thence "no other":

[?a1425 (c1380)] CHAUCER tr. Boethius De Consol. Philos. V. met. iii. 52 Who so that sekith sothnesse, he nis in neyther nother habit, for he not nat al, ne he ne hath nat al foryeten.
[1533] T. MORE Apologye 180 There are fewe or none good in neyther nother parte.
[1640] R. BROME Sparagus Garden IV. v, No sir, we come with no zick intendment on neither nother zide.
[1888] F. T. ELWORTHY W. Somerset Word-Bk. 523 There idn nother-nother lemon vor to be had in the town, nit vor love nor money, zo Mr. Baker zess.

Neither nother is also prominent in West Indian English, with the sense "no other":

[1957] F. A. COLLYMORE Notes for Gloss. Barbadian Dial. (ed. 2) 59, I ain't got neither-nother sixpence.
[1975] T. CALLENDER It so Happen 99 He never going look at neithernother girl again.

Nother¹also appears with the OED's nor sense 5a., as far back as the Old English of Beowulf:

Swā wē þǣr inne andlangne dæg
nīode nāman oð ðæt niht becwōm
ōðer tō yldum; Þā wæs eft hraðe
gearo gyrnwræce Grendeles mōdor
sīðode sorhfull; sunu dēað fornam,
wīghete Wedra; wīf unhӯre
hyre bearn gewræc; beorn ācwealde
ellenlīce; þǣr wæs Æschere
frōdan fyrnwitan feorh ūðgenge.
Nōðer hӯ hine ne mōston syððan mergen cwōm
dēaðwērigne Denia lēode
bronde forbærnan nē on bǣl hladan
lēofne mannan; hīo þæt līc ætbær
fēondes fæðme under firgenstrēam;
þæt wæs Hrōðgāre hrēowa tornost
þāra þe lēodfruman lange begēate.
Beowulf ll.2115-30
"We were happy therein all day long,
and enjoyed ourselves, until another
night descended on man. Then suddenly
Grendel's mother, ready to revenge her sorrow,
journeyed, sorrowful--- death had taken her son,
the war-hate of the Wederas [=Beowulf]. The ghastly woman
avenged her child, slew a warrior
boldly. Thus from Ashhere,
the wise counsellor, life departed.
Nor could the Danish people, when morning came,
cremate the dead one in the fire,
could not lay on the funeral pyre
the body of the beloved man: she had carried off the corpse,
held in fiend's embrace, beneath the mountain-stream.
That was for Hrothgar the most bitter grief
which had long befallen the ruler of the people."

Thus this use of nother¹/nor (in the OED sense 5a. for nor) appears to have a long history in English. [Additional note: Nōðer here does not seem to mean "neither", in the sense "neither...nor", despite the present of nē in the sentence (see this comment on Languagelog), since on bǣl hladan "lay/load (his body) on the pyre" is really just a variation of bronde forbærnan "cremate in the fire" --- these aren't two different funerary options that the Danes have. But see this post for what is perhaps a clearer example from The Fortunes of Men.]

Old English nōhwæðer, originally a pronoun meaning "neither of two persons or things", from which nother¹ (OE nōðer) derives, is itself etymologically-interesting. Nōhwæðer is morphologically composed of ne "not" + ā/ō "always" + hwæðer "whether". Without ne we find āhwæðer (with contracted forms āwðer, ōwðer, āðer), with essentially the sense of modern English either:

[KING ALFRED, Trans. of Orosius, 290.21] Þa oferhogode he þæt he him aðer dyde, oþþe wyrnde, oþþe tigþade...
"Then he scorned to do either, forbid it or grant it..."

More interesting is the original sense of hwæðer (ancestor of modern English whether): "which of two", as illustrated by Beowulf's speech to his men before his fight with the dragon:

'Gebīde gē on beorge byrnum werede
secgas on searwum hwæðer sēl mæge
æfter wælrǣse wunde gedӯgan
uncer twēga; nis þæt ēower sīð
nē gemet mannes nefne mīn ānes.'
Beowulf, ll.2529-33
"'Wait you here in the barrow, wearing mailcoats,
warriors in armour, (and see) which of the two can better,
during the slaughter-race, survive wounds,
of the two of us; this is not your adventure,
nor in the power of any man, save mine alone.'"

The predominant modern use of whether for introducing indirect yes/no questions was originally only one of its many functions, which including introducing alternative questions (note that, like other wh-words, in matrix questions it triggers verb-raising to the second-position):

[c1000] Ags. Gosp. Matt. xxi. 25 Hwæðer wæs iohannes fulluht, þe of heofonum, þe of mannum?
"Was John's baptism from heaven or from man?"
[1595] SHAKES. John I. i. 134 Whether hadst thou rather be a Faulconbridge,..Or the reputed sonne of Cordelion?
[1713] BERKELEY Hylas & Phil. I. (1725) 5 Whether does Doubting consist in embracing the Affirmative or Negative Side of a Question?
[a1822] SHELLEY Ion Pr. Wks. 1888 II. 115 Whether do you demonstrate these things better in Homer or Hesiod?

As well introducing as indirect alternative questions:

[c1000] ÆLFRIC Hom. II. 120 Eft ða Gregorius befran, hwæðer þæs landes folc cristen wære ðe hæðen.
"Then Gregorius asked whether the people of the land were christian or heathen."
[1610] SHAKES. Temp. V. i. 123 Whether this be, Or be not, I'le not sweare.
[1849] MACAULAY Hist. Eng. iv. I. 464 His neighbours might well doubt whether it were more dangerous to be at war or at peace with him.

The modern function as introducing indirect yes/no questions is attested early as well:

[c1000] Ags. Gosp. Matt. xxvi. 25 Cwyst þu, lareow, hwæðer ic hyt si?
"Do you say, teacher, whether it is I?"
[1470-85] MALORY Arthur VII. xx. 244 He mette with a poure man..& asked hym whether he mette not with a knyghte.

All of these functions can be seen to derive from the original sense "which of two". The morphological formation of hwæðer is curious however: it derives from Proto-Germanic *χwaþaraz (with cognates in other Germanic languages, e.g. Old Frisian hwedder, Old Saxon hweðar, Old High German hwedar, Old Norse hvaðarr (> Swedish hvar), Gothic hwaþar), which itself can be traced to PIE *k^wo- "what, who etc." + the comparative suffix *-tero-.

What is curious is the use of the comparative suffix: all of these forms would literally be something like "what-er" ("more what")! (Though of course, since hwæðer etc. are used to inquire about "which of two", the comparative suffix, which compare two things, does make a certain amount of sense.)

Proto-Germanic *χwaþaraz has cognates in other old Indo-European languages, e.g. Greek πότερος, and Sanskrit katará-, the latter is found for example in the Rgvedic hymn on "Heaven and Earth":

katarā́ pū́rvā katarā́parāyóḥ
RV 1.185,1a
"Which of the two is earlier, which of the two is later?"

In Sanskrit, the interrogative pronoun can also combine with the superlative suffix (PIE *-temo-), to mean "which amongst many", as in the following Rgvedic passage praising Varuṇa:

kásya nūnáṁ katamásyāmŕ̥tānām
RV 1.24,1a
"Who now is he? Which among the many immortals?" [Lit. "Whichest of the immortals?"]

We're now of course a long way from the snow fell nor did it cease to fall, but following nor back along the path to nother "neither of two", and then off on the side path of its component morpheme hwæðer (mod. Engl. whether) "which of two", originally "what-er"(!), seemed an interesting enough detour.

References:

[1]The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

[2]Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

[3]Morris, Rev. R. 1880. The Blickling Homilies of the tenth century. London: Early English Text Society.

[4]Graßmann, Hermann. 1873. Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Condos, Buttocks, and Thorns: On the development of some vulgar Indo-Aryan words and some amusing English-Nepali homophony

2009-11-25T08:27:00.000-06:00

The first Nepali word I recall learning in a natural language context (i.e. not from a grammar) is कण्डो (kaṇḍo), for which Turner[1]:70 gives the following definition: "(vulgar) s. Buttock, bottom, rump, anus".

What has provided me with many moments of childish amusement is that this word is essentially homophonous with English condo, the truncated form of condominium: "(N. Amer.) An apartment house in which the units are owned individually, not by a company or co-operative; an apartment in such a building", OED[2]. Thus overhearing people talking about selling their condos for $150,000 etc. always affords me a good (though usually silent) chortle.

Condominium is itself an interesting word, deriving ultimately from a modern Latin formation con+dominium, literally meaning "joint rulership" and appearing with that sense early on:

[a1714] BURNET Own Time (1823) IV. VI. 412 The duke of Holstein began to build some new forts..this, the Danes said, was contrary..to the condominium, which that king and the duke have in that duchy.

The use of condominium (and its truncation condo) to refer to an "individually-owned apartment" appears to be mainly a (recent) North American development; the earliest citation from the OED dates to 1962; the abbreviated condo appears soon after in 1964 (attributed to Chicagoans):

[1962] Economist 31 Mar. 1255/1 The legal concept of buying a single flat, instead of a share in the whole building, is just making its way in the housing field in the United States where it is known as a ‘condominium’.
[1964] Financial Times 27 Nov. 3/6 The condominium or the ‘condo’ as Chicagoans have come to know it is essentially a development from the co-operative concept.

The semantic development from "jointly ruled" to "individually-owned" is rather interesting, indicating that in modern usage the word must be have been reanalysed as monomorphemic (as the sense of "joint, together" of the prefix con-/com- is obviously no longer present).

Returning to the heart (or perhaps 'rump') of the matter, let us consider the etymology of Nepali kaṇḍo "buttock(s)". Turner[1] notes that in Western dialects of Nepali it means "back, spine" and thus compares it to Sindhi kaṇḍo masc. "backbone", Lahndā kaṇḍ fem. "back", Hindi kā̃ṭā masc. "spine", Gujarati kā̃ṭo masc. "backbone", Marathi kā̃ṭā masc. "backbone". He notes if Nepali kaṇḍo is to be considered cognate with these words, it exhibits irregular phonetic development, for the expected form in Nepali would be *kā̃ṛo. He indicates this is not problematic given that "words denoting parts of the body often show irregular phonetic development, whether owing to deliberate deformation or borrowing from other dialects".

Turner[1] suggests that, given this caveat, all of the above words could derive from Sanskrit kaṇṭa-, kaṇṭakáḥ "thorn, fish-bone", with later semantic widening/reanalysis to "bone, back-bone, bottom" etc. These Sanskrit forms are probably also the source, he notes, also of Romani kanro masc. "penis", Bengali kā̃ṭ "clitoris", and (with a much less naughty sense) Oriya kaṇṭi "the wooden part of a plough".

Given the apparent irregularities in the development of Nepali kaṇḍo, Turner[1] also proposes a possible alternative etymology, from unattested Old Indo-Aryan *kāḍa-, citing modern forms: Romani kar m., Sindhi kāṛu masc., Gujarati kāḍ masc., all meaning "penis". This seems less likely to me, as the semantic development from "thorn, fish-bone" > "bone" > "backbone" (as in Western dialects of Nepali) and thence to "buttock(s)" in standard Nepali is much more natural than supposing that a word meaning "penis" developed to mean "backbone, spine" in Western Nepali. Plus, given the hypothetical ancestor *kāḍa, the nasal in Nepali kaṇḍo would be unexpected.

Development from "thorn" to "backbone" and thence to "buttocks" in standard Nepali is easily explicable. The tip of the backbone could be metaphorically conceptualised as a "thorn" (cf. the yogic concept of kuṇḍalinī "the corporeal energy residing in the base of the spine"). From "tip of the backbone" the sense could have been reinterpreted alternatively as "backbone, spine" in Western Nepali, and as "buttock(s)" in standard Nepali.

The other semantic developments in apparently cognate Romani kanro "penis" and Bengali kā̃ṭ "clitoris" represent alternate metaphorical extensions of the original sense "thorn". The naturalness of the metaphorical extension from "thorn" to "penis" is clear in the (nonce?) Hindi usage of कांटा (kāṇṭā) "thorn" in the song Kaanta Laga ("Pricked by a Thorn"):

Where the relevant line is बंगले के पीछे, तेरी बेरी के नीचे, हाय रे पिया, कांटा लगा ("behind the bungalow, beneath your jujube tree, oh darling, (I got) pricked by a thorn").

References:

[1]Turner, Sir Ralph Lilley. 1931. A comparative and etymological dictionary of the Nepali language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. [Reprinted, Mumbai: Allied Publishers, Ltd., 1980.]

[2]The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

"Path of Fire" and other dangerous paths: a translation of Bachchan's अग्नि पथ and some philological discussion (including Proto-Germanic *paþaz)

2009-11-24T07:58:00.000-06:00

Harivanshrai "Bachchan" Shrivastav (November 27, 1907 – January 18, 2003) was a poet of Chhayavaad literary movement. One of his poems is अग्नि पथ ("Path of Fire"), which was used as the title for the award-winning film of the same name, starring his own son, Hindi film superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

अग्नि पथ

अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ!

वृक्ष हों भले खड़े,
हों घने, हों बड़े,
एक पत्र-छाँह भी माँग मत, माँग मत, माँग मत!
अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ!

तू न थकेगा कभी!
तू न थमेगा कभी!
तू न मुड़ेगा कभी!-कर शपथ! कर शपथ! कर शपथ!
अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ!

यह महान दृश्‍य है-
चल रहा मनुष्‍य है
अश्रु-स्वेद-रक्‍त से लथपथ, लथपथ, लथपथ!

अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ! अग्नि पथ!

Path of Fire
The path of fire! The path of fire! The path of fire!

There may stand excellent trees,
they may be dense, they may be big.
But don't ask, don't ask, don't ask,

even for the shade of a single leaf!
The path of fire! The path of fire! The path of fire!

You will never tire!
You will never halt!
You will never turn!--

Give your word! Give your word! Give your word!
The path of fire! The path of fire! The path of fire!

This is a mighty sight--
Man is walking,
Drenched, drenched, drenched,

by tears, sweat, and blood!

The path of fire! The path of fire! The path of fire!

Some philological analysis:

Bachchan employs a high level of तत्सम (tatsama) vocabulary (words borrowed from Sanskrit), in preference to tadbhava (तद्भव) vocabulary (native Hindi/Urdu words inherited from Sanskrit) and borrowings from Persian and Arabic, in this poem. Thus:

Sanskrit अग्नि (agni) "fire" rather than the Hindi tadbhava (तद्भव) word आग (āg)
Sanskrit वृक्ष (vr̥kṣa) "tree" rather than something like Hindi पेड़ (peṛ)
Sanskrit मनुष्‍य (manuṣya) "man" rather than Hindi/Urdu आदमी (ādmī) [borrowing from Perso-Arabic]
Sanskrit पत्र (patra) "leaf" rather than Hindi पत्ता (pattā)
Sanskrit अश्रु (aśru) "tear (as in crying tears)" rather than Hindi आंसू (āṁsū) [Both Sansrkti aśru and its descendant Hindi āṁsū derive from PIE *dak̂ru "tear", which is also the source of English tear and Latin lacrima (> English lachrymose)]
Sanskrit रक्‍त (rakta) "blood" rather than Hindi/Urdu खून (khūn) [borrowing from Persian]
Sanskrit स्वेद (swed) "sweat" rather than Hindi/Urdu पसीना (pasīnā) [note that Sanskrit swed is obviously cognate with English sweat]
Sanskrit पथ (path) "path" rather than something like Hindi/Urdu रास्ता (rāstā) [borrowing from Persian]

Note that the last word is obviously cognate with English path, but this does not reflect a common inheritance. Rather English path is the result of a very early borrowing into Germanic (as Proto-Germanic *paþaz) from some Iranian language (cp. Avestan pɑntɑ, genitive pɑθɑ 'way', Old Persian pɑthi-), possibly Scythian, due to early contact between Germanic and Iranian peoples. Sanskrit path and the Iranian forms like Avestan panta/pɑθɑ (and thus the Proto-Germanic borrowed *paþaz) are all ultimately from PIE *pent (which is also the root underlying English find; see Watkins[1]:65).

We find this borrowed word path used early on in English (OE pæð), one of the few p-initial words in Old English (due ultimately to the rarity of the phoneme*b in PIE). One very evocative use of pæð in Old English is found in the following passage from the epic poem Beowulf, describing the hero's approach to the fen-lair of the troll-woman:

Oferēode þā æþelinga bearn
stēap stānhliðo stīge nearwe
enge ānpaðas uncūð gelād
neowle næssas nicorhūsa fela.
Beowulf ll.1408-11
The noble prince then traversed
the steep stone slopes, the narrow ways,
the tight single-file paths, the uncanny fords,
the precipitous headlands, the many nests of water-monsters.

These two poems are thus linked in their descriptions of difficult paths...and even employ the same word, path: due to the fact that Bachchan avoids the Iranian (Persian) borrowing rāstā "path", and because the Beowulf-poet opts for the Iranian borrowing path.

References:

[1]Watkins, Calvert. 2000. The American Heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn.