Friday, December 30, 2005
The FUDGERY of neologisms
Mark Liberman at LL:
Ben Zimmer has promoted Alan Metcalf’s five FUDGE factors for predicting the success of neologisms (Frequency of use, Unobtrusiveness, Diversity of users and situations, Generation of other forms and meanings, and Endurance of the concept), adding his own sixth factor Resistance to public backlash. This gives us FUDGER, and I don’t see any graceful way to add another pronounceable letter (maybe fudgery?), so I’ll give up on the acronymic theme, and just add my suggestion in plain prose.
Multiple sources, interpretations and resonances increase the fitness of a word or phrase. Regionalisms, archaisms, technical terms, substrate influences and euphemistic (or scatalogical) alternatives can all help.
Mutual intelligibility across the Finno-Ugric family?
Geoff Pullum at LL:
The Finno-Ugric family of languages contains Finnish, and its close relative Estonian, and Sami (the language of the Lappish people of the far north), and various related languages languages in Russia (Komi, Mari, Udmurt), along with a distant southern relative, Hungarian. It’s actually not that easy to show with clear etymologies and sound changes that Finnish and Hungarian really are cousins. There are maybe 200 solid cognates. (A cognate is a word showing in both its pronunciation and its meaning or grammatical properties that it was ancestrally shared by the relevant languages, and was transmitted in altered phonological form down the centuries rather than being directly borrowed between modern languages.) The Economist (December 24th, page 73) has a very interesting article about the way Finno-Ugric languages are dying in Russia. In connection with the discussion of linguistic relatedness, it cites Estonian philologist Mall Hellam as having come up with a sentence that should be intelligible to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian speakers alike:
Finnish: Elävä kala ui veden alla.
Estonian: Elav kala ujub vee all.
Hungarian: Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.The translation is “The living fish swims in water.” ...
I have already heard from a Finn living in Hungary, Vili Manula, who says no Hungarians understand the Finnish sentence, and certainly no Finn would understand the Hungarian one.
‘On Language’ 12/28: words of the year
`Podcast’ is lexicon’s Word of the Year
‘On Language‘
Chicago Tribune
December 28, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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The “pod” in “iPod” suggests Apple’s device is small and compact but chock full of good contents, like a pea pod. The word “pod” began as “cod” in Old English, meaning “the husk or outer covering of any fruit or seed.” The “pod” spelling isn’t recorded until 1688, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.(The “pod” that comes from the Greek word for “foot,” as in “podiatrist” and “tripod,” is unrelated.)
Dictionaries list the origin of the word “pod” as obscure or unknown.
Etymologists say the letter “P” gradually replaced the word “C” in “cod,” but they aren’t sure why.
Anatoly Liberman, author of “Word Origins and How We Know Them” (Oxford University Press, 312 pages, $25), says people may have favored the “P” in “pod” because it matched the sound of “pea,” which is often paired with “pod.”
More subtly, Liberman says, “pod” might have emerged because it sounded similar to words such as “pad,” “pudge,” “pot” and “pudding.”
“Numerous English words referring to swollen objects, protrusion, and the like have the structure P + Vowel + Consonant,” Liberman writes by e-mail. This sound structure, he says, may have “suggested fatness to the speakers of Germanic [languages].”
If Liberman is right, and “pod” did emerge in English because it sounded similar to words meaning “fat” or “full,” then it would be ironic that Apple markets products in the iPod line that are distinctive for their thinness.
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‘On Language’ 12/21: books of year
This holiday season, turn page to the new world of words
‘On Language‘
Chicago Tribune
December 21, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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‘Tis the season of year-end lists and last-minute shopping, so here are the 10 best language books of 2005:
10. “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods” (St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $24.95). Wex takes a colorful look at Yiddish words and phrases for food, sex and other things to kvetch about, providing a lively addition to Dovid Katz’s more straightforward history published last year: “Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish” (Basic Books, 430 pages, $26.95).
9. “A Natural History of Latin: The Story of the World’s Most Successful Language” by Tore Janson (Oxford University Press, 305 pages, $24). What a long, strange trip it’s been for Latin, from its origins in Rome to its use in the medieval church to its current job helping us name new technology (“television,” “video,” “digital”). Janson tells this intriguing story as well as anyone.
8. “Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others?” by Edwin L. Battistella (Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $29.95). This book reminds us that language is the basis of the last acceptable prejudice: There is no snobbery as safe as looking down your nose at people for their grammar, vocabulary or accent. As Battistella shows, this kind of condescension often comes from misunderstandings and myths about the way language works. An even better myth-buster is still the 1999 book “Language Myths,” edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin, 188 pages, $14).
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