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Daiches, Sciennes.
Back in 2014 I posted about Scots Yiddish, saying of David Daiches’ autobiographical Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood “I actually own a copy of Two Worlds, and now I’m even more eager to read it”; over a decade later, I’m finally reading it, and the very first sentence gave me post material. Although the […]
https://languagehat.com/daiches-sciennes/
5 months ago
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Curious Cures.
Sarah Gilbert, Eleanor Parmenter, and James Freeman write about “hundreds of medieval medical manuscripts now accessible” (the MetaFilter post where I found the link calls it a “beautifully designed website”; I find it a bit annoying, but I am a creature of text and prefer it laid out simply and legibly): Over the course of […]
https://languagehat.com/curious-cures/
5 months ago
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Scaliger’s Stuffed Bird of Paradise.
Anthony Grafton, that nonpareil historian of the spread of reading and its associated technologies, reviews two books on Renaissance libraries for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 13 · 24 July 2025; archived); here are a few tasty (and in one case cheesy) excerpts to whet your appetite: Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients […]
https://languagehat.com/scaligers-stuffed-bird-of-paradise/
6 months ago
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Olonkho.
Somewhere I ran across a reference to olonkho, the Yakut epic tradition; I’ve been interested in such traditions ever since (as a wet-behind-the-ears college student) I learned of the existence of the South Slavic epics as described by Milman Parry and Albert Lord (and later of equivalents from Africa and elsewhere), to parallel the Homer […]
https://languagehat.com/olonkho/
6 months ago
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Lunch.
Lauren Collins is a good writer (which is why the New Yorker pays her), but also a supremely irritating one: her articles are frequently random riffs on some subject she feels like writing about, mingling personal experiences with what appear to be the results of a cursory Google search and with little concern for accuracy […]
https://languagehat.com/lunch/
6 months ago
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Frail.
A reader wrote me: My friend came across the following song while doing some background research for his dissertation, and there’s a word that escapes us in the lyrics: in https://youtu.be/qm8vgld7QOs it’s audible around 0:36 (“less than sixty percent go for a ???”) My suspicion is that it’s a contemporary-to-Ms.-Raye term I’m simply not familiar […]
https://languagehat.com/frail/
6 months ago
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Bill or Bull?
My wife was muttering that the mail consisted mostly of bills when I wondered where that sense of bill came from, and a visit to the OED (entry revised 2024!) showed me that it’s complicated. The original sense was “A formal document containing a petition to a person in authority; a written petition” (1384 “A […]
https://languagehat.com/bill-or-bull/
6 months ago
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Uniomachia.
Uniomachia: a digital edition is a splendid scholarly presentation of a text so obscure it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page (as yet). I’ll quote the introduction (the right-hand column at the linked webpage): Uniomachia was composed in 1833 as a response to a schism in the history of the Oxford Union Society, Oxford University’s […]
https://languagehat.com/uniomachia/
6 months ago
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Sex, Queerness, and Gender in Classical Nahuatl.
I shortened the title of David Bowles’ thorough and groundbreaking post, figuring that “romance” was sort of implicit. In any case, here’s his intro: When I started studying Nahuatl almost twenty years ago, I noticed—as a queer man—that most analyses of Nahuatl vocabulary concerning LGBTQIA2s+ identities and practices suffered greatly because they had been carried […]
https://languagehat.com/sex-queerness-and-gender-in-classical-nahuatl/
6 months ago
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The Lost Song of Wade.
Seb Falk and James Wade (no relation) have published an open-access paper in the Review of English Studies, The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited, that is usefully summarized in Stephen Castle’s NY Times article (archived): Geoffrey Chaucer, often regarded as the first great poet in English, drops references at two points in his […]
https://languagehat.com/the-lost-song-of-wade/
6 months ago
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Translation Comparison: The White Guard.
I love translation comparisons, and Erik McDonald’s XIX век has another one (cf. last year’s Translation Comparison: Fathers and Sons), confronting the three English translations of Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard): those by Michael Glenny (1971), Marian Schwartz (2008), and Roger Cockrell (2012). He breaks his post into sections titled Medieval Kyivan allusions, How […]
https://languagehat.com/translation-comparison-the-white-guard/
6 months ago
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Under the X, the Y.
I was reading Daniella Shreir’s LRB Diary: What happens at Cannes (10 Jul 2025; archived) when I was struck by a turn of French phrase in this passage: Some form of disruption looms over the festival every year. Unionised electricity workers, reacting to Macron’s proposed pension reforms, threatened to cut power to venues in 2023, […]
https://languagehat.com/under-the-x-the-y/
6 months ago
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Ancient DNA and Uralic.
Christy DeSmith writes for Phys.org about a new DNA study: Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought. The analysis, led by a pair of doctoral candidates working with ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data […]
https://languagehat.com/ancient-dna-and-uralic/
6 months ago
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Etymology Nerd.
Callie Holtermann writes for the NY Times (archived) about a linguist who posts online as Etymology Nerd and who was mentioned here last year: Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. […]
https://languagehat.com/etymology-nerd/
6 months ago
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Dhofari Deciphered.
Soumya Sagar writes for Science about a new decipherment: Rock faces within the caves and dried riverbeds of Oman’s Dhofar governorate bear nearly 2400-year-old writings that snake across the surface in a mysterious script. For more than a century, these inscriptions—known as the Dhofari script—had defied decipherment. Now, in a study in press at the […]
https://languagehat.com/dhofari-deciphered/
6 months ago
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Lettervoxd.
Josh Sucher writes: Last week, my brother and I took in a screening of the 1976 classic Network that just happened to be captioned. As a result, it really struck me how impressive the vocabulary in that movie is. Immane! Oraculate! Auspicatory! So many of what my dad used to call 50¢ words. So I […]
https://languagehat.com/lettervoxd/
6 months ago
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Pookila.
A news story introduced me to the word pookila, referring to what apparently is more commonly called the New Holland mouse. Naturally I was curious about the word, but it doesn’t appear to be in any dictionaries, not even Wiktionary. A little googling got me to this Australian government document, which says: Since circa 1995, […]
https://languagehat.com/pookila/
6 months ago
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Global Latin.
New Perspectives in Global Latin: Second Conference on Latin as a Vehicle of Cultural Exchange Beyond Europe, edited by Elisa Della Calce, Paola Mocella, and Simone Mollea (de Gruyter, 2025), includes intriguing titles like “Afonso Mendes, the Catholic Patriarch of Ethiopia, and His Debates With Salomon: A Jew From Vienna, at the Court of the […]
https://languagehat.com/global-latin/
6 months ago
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Samatar’s Olondria.
As I wrote here, one of my birthday presents this year was Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria (and I note with a shudder that that Amazon page says “A Stranger in Olondria: a novel (Olondria, 1)” — please don’t let this be yet another trilogy!); I’ve just finished it, and as so often happens […]
https://languagehat.com/samatars-olondria/
6 months ago
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Winging It.
Jen in Edinburgh wrote me to say she’d been wondering “why we say that we’re going to ‘wing’ something […] I have actually looked it up in the OED and found out – but it wasn’t a reason I expected at all, so if it surprised me, maybe it will surprise other commenters!” I looked […]
https://languagehat.com/winging-it/
6 months ago
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Rajomon.
I just watched the “Japanese historical drama horror film” Kuroneko (lots of fun if you like films with samurai and ghosts; this one features Minamoto no Raikō as a character, not to mention the titular black cat), and was struck when a large city gate was shown with the inscription 羅城門, subtitled RAJOMON GATE. “Is […]
https://languagehat.com/rajomon/
6 months ago
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Bullitt.
I rewatched Bullitt and was gripped once more by what this Wikipedia article calls “the first modern car chase movie.” But that is not a topic for LH; it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what kind of a name Bullitt is, and that makes for a post (a thin one, perhaps, but it’s hot […]
https://languagehat.com/bullitt/
6 months ago
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Block Ornaments.
I recently ran across the term block ornament, completely opaque unless you know the meaning; OED (entry revised 2022): slang (British and Australian) Obsolete. A small piece of inferior meat placed for sale on the butcher’s block, as opposed to a joint hung on a hook; cf. blocker n.¹ I.3. 1843 ‘Block Ornaments’ made into […]
https://languagehat.com/block-ornaments/
6 months ago
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Kooloora Revives Darkinjung.
Or, to put it more expansively and comprehensibly, Toukley’s Kooloora Preschool revives endangered Darkinjung Aboriginal language; Sarah Forster and Emma Simkin report for ABC on the kind of program I like supporting (I’ve added links): Students at a NSW Central Coast preschool start their day talking about their feelings in Darkinjung, the local Aboriginal language. […]
https://languagehat.com/kooloora-revives-darkinjung/
6 months ago
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Fuge quo descendere gestis.
Laudator Temporis Acti presents a set of translations of Horace, Epistles 1.20.5, “addressing his soon to be published book”: Indulge the fond Desire, with which You burn, Pursue thy Flight, yet think not to return. (Philip Francis) Well, you’re keen to be off. Goodbye. (Niall Rudd) Off with you, down to where you itch to […]
https://languagehat.com/fuge-quo-descendere-gestis/
6 months ago
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Idiom Shortage.
The Onion has remained amazingly reliable over the decades; back in 1995 they published the immortal Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia, and in 2008 they posted Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies, which I missed at the time but which has now come to my attention (thanks, Sven!): WASHINGTON—A crippling idiom […]
https://languagehat.com/idiom-shortage/
6 months ago
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Some Bagus New Words.
The OED’s June set of New word entries is particularly full of good things, although there are, of course, boring items like “Anglo-Dutch, adj.: ‘Of, belonging to, or involving both England (or Britain) and Holland (or the Netherlands)’” — how did that not make it in until 2025? Some that caught my eye: asweddumize, v.: […]
https://languagehat.com/some-bagus-new-words/
6 months ago
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Arete.
From the About the Project page: ARETE is a project of the UCLAB at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The central result of the project is the interactive visualization of the history of the Latin alphabet. In particular, the visualization shows the temporal and formal relationships of the different scripts and typefaces to each […]
https://languagehat.com/arete/
6 months ago
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Commonly Spoken Languages In Toronto.
Brilliant Maps has a page with two terrific images, one “a colourful map of Toronto’s most widespread languages” shown together, and another, “54 Languages in Toronto,” with separate (tiny) maps for each language showing where in the city each is spoken; they “are both the work of Alex McPhee, aka Pronghorn maps,” and there’s a […]
https://languagehat.com/commonly-spoken-languages-in-toronto/
6 months ago
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Birthday Loot 2025.
As I anticipate my chicken curry and lemon bars, I’ll mention some of the gifts that have come my way. There was a group of movies, for some reason all Asian: two by Tsai Ming-Liang (Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L’amour), Mother by Bong Joon-ho (I loved his Parasite and Memories of Murder), […]
https://languagehat.com/birthday-loot-2025/
6 months ago
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Rhenish.
I just heard an announcer say he was going to play Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, which he pronounced /ˈrɛnɪʃ/ (REN-ish). I was irritated, because I myself say /ˈriːnɪʃ/ (REE-nish), so I looked it up to see what reference works said. Imagine my horror on learning that the OED, AHD, and M-W only give the former version, […]
https://languagehat.com/rhenish/
6 months ago
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Crimping the Bull’s Head.
In my continuing investigation of the movies of Jacques Rivette (lately Jeanne la pucelle and La Bande des quatre), I recently watched Va savoir and enjoyed it enough that I’ll doubtless be getting the Radiance Blu-ray, which has not only the theatrical cut that I saw — a mere two and a half hours — […]
https://languagehat.com/crimping-the-bulls-head/
7 months ago
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Square Theory.
Adam Aaronson (a software engineer who also plays jazz trombone and electric bass) has a blog post with all sorts of Hattic material; it starts with an observation made by Alex Boisvert on Crosscord, the crossword Discord server: JET BLACK and JETBLUE have very different meanings, even though they look superficially similar. Same thing with […]
https://languagehat.com/square-theory/
7 months ago
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Two from Bathrobe.
A couple of links from the Commenter Known as Bathrobe: 1) Can AI help revive Ainu? Jessie Lau writes for BBC Future: There are only a handful of native Ainu speakers left. The language is currently listed by Unesco as “Critically Endangered”. Records suggest that in 1870 – one year after Ezo or Ezochi (now […]
https://languagehat.com/two-from-bathrobe/
7 months ago
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Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?
In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris declared that it wanted no more submissions about the origin of language, and I should probably resist the temptation myself (Betteridge’s law of headlines can be applied here as usual), but hey, it’s a Languagehat tradition — back in 2003, this post, about an “attempt to construct a […]
https://languagehat.com/did-baby-talk-give-rise-to-language/
7 months ago
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Needs Must.
The phrase “needs must” popped into my head, and I realized it was so elliptical I had no idea how it worked grammatically or how it originated. Fortunately, the OED updated the entry needs adv. “Of necessity, necessarily, unavoidably” in 2003, so I can provide a satisfying answer. This is under II. “With the modal […]
https://languagehat.com/needs-must/
7 months ago
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Code Switching in Yiddish.
Jim Bisso posted to the Facebook group The Morphology of Peevology: Code switching in Yiddish by a Chasid youth. So much English, Yinglish, what have you. Anyway, he went to Iran to find the tombs of Ester and Mordekay. https://youtu.be/D5TZPlO4Se8?si=GOLMHQI8TesQjzZr If you know even a tiny bit of Yiddish it’s well worth watching at least […]
https://languagehat.com/code-switching-in-yiddish/
7 months ago
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Borenstein: Back to Blogging.
A decade ago I posted about Eliot Borenstein’s decision to blog his new book, and I took great pleasure in reading the preliminary versions of Plots against Russia and his later Soviet Self-Hatred and Unstuck in Time. Then, alas, he quit: This was for a number of reasons, but two of them stand out: first, […]
https://languagehat.com/borenstein-back-to-blogging/
7 months ago
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Rukeyser, Baraheni.
From Muriel Rukeyser on “The Fear of Poetry“: Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed […]
https://languagehat.com/rukeyser-baraheni/
7 months ago
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Non avveniva agli antichi.
Laudator Temporis Acti quotes a passage from Leopardi that I like both for its main thought, which is a good one I don’t remember seeing elsewhere, and for the final sentence, a splendid example of how inescapable is our sense of “things ain’t what they used to be”: I will say that by their own […]
https://languagehat.com/non-avveniva-agli-antichi/
7 months ago
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Two Ways to Use Etymology.
I enjoyed Merve Emre’s New Yorker piece “The History of Advice Columns” (archived), but first I had to get past my annoyance at its opening: The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice […]
https://languagehat.com/two-ways-to-use-etymology/
7 months ago
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The Peter Putnam Glossary.
Amanda Gefter’s “Finding Peter Putnam” is one of the most remarkable life stories I’ve ever read; here’s a snippet to give you an idea of who he was: His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr […] “Only two or three times […]
https://languagehat.com/the-peter-putnam-glossary/
7 months ago
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Xiongnu / Hun / Arin.
Svenja Bonmann and Simon Fries, “Linguistic Evidence Suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns Spoke the Same Paleo-Siberian Language” (Transactions of the Philological Society, 16 June 2025, open access): Abstract The Xiōng-nú were a tribal confederation who dominated Inner Asia from the third century BC to the second century AD. Xiōng-nú descendants later constituted the ethnic core […]
https://languagehat.com/xiongnu-hun-arin/
7 months ago
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Titivillus.
Nick Jainschigg sent me a link to Jennifer Sandlin’s Boing Boing piece on a demon relevant to my interests: The next time you make a mistake in your writing, or pick up something you’ve published and instantly spot a typo (argh!), don’t fret, it wasn’t your fault! Instead of taking on the shame of not […]
https://languagehat.com/titivillus/
7 months ago
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Inmuidiatmunt.
A piquant bit of anarcho-typographical history from Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist: We started our printing-office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a man from Little Russia, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month. If he could only have his modest dinner […]
https://languagehat.com/inmuidiatmunt/
7 months ago
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Çka Ka Qëllu.
I saw a rave for the restaurant Çka Ka Qëllu and of course my immediate reaction was “What does that mean in Albanian?” A couple of sites claim it’s “an old proverb meaning ‘what we happen to have,’” which I presume is the restaurateur’s explanation; this review has a more elaborate version: When directly translated […]
https://languagehat.com/cka-ka-qellu/
7 months ago
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The Ludicrous Legacy of La Palice.
Yet another great word from Douchet’s Nouvelle Vague (see this post)! In a passage on Jacques Rivette, he writes: “Dire de Rivette que l’Histoire des Treize de Balzac est son livre de chevet, et l’idée du complot la base et de sa vie et de son cinéma, relève de la lapalissade.” [To say of Rivette […]
https://languagehat.com/the-ludicrous-legacy-of-la-palice/
7 months ago
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Latin Adjectives Ending in -ax.
A Laudator Temporis Acti post that will be of interest to those who enjoy fussy poetico-morphological details: R.J. Tarrant, “Silver Threads Among the Gold: A Problem in the Text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Illinois Classical Studies 14.1/2 (Spring/Fall, 1989) 103-117 (at 112-113): For a poet capable of almost any extravagance in coining adjectives in -fer and […]
https://languagehat.com/latin-adjectives-ending-in-ax/
7 months ago
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Aloe, Agalloch, Agila.
I stumbled into an etymological briar patch when I innocently looked up aloe in the OED — it’s one of those words I can never retain a clear image of. The range of senses was confusing enough: 1. In plural (in early use occasionally singular). An aromatic resin or wood; spec. the resin or decaying […]
https://languagehat.com/aloe-agalloch-agila/
7 months ago
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Agree to Disagree.
Dave Wilton’s latest Big List entry is on the phrase “agree to disagree”; he begins by saying Methodists like to claim that the phrase was coined by John Wesley, because the OED has a 1775 letter by Wesley as the first citation, but Dave finds it in Wesley’s 1770 funeral sermon for the Reverend George […]
https://languagehat.com/agree-to-disagree/
7 months ago
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