languagehat.com

A pendant to yesterday’s thread, in which both Min/Hokkien and Xiamen/Amoy were discussed; first, the beginning of the preface to Carstairs Douglas’s Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular Or Spoken Language of Amoy: With the Principal Variations of the Chang-chew and Chin-chew Dialects (Trübner & Co., 1873):

The vernacular or spoken language of Amoy, which this Dictionary attempts to make more accessible. than formerly, has been also termed by some “The Amoy Dialect” or “The Amoy Colloquial;” and it partially coincides with the so-called “Hok-kien Dialect,” illustrated by the Rev. Dr. Medhurst in his quarto Dictionary under that title. But such words as “Dialect” or “Colloquial” give an erroneous conception of its nature. It is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois; it is spoken by the highest ranks just as by the common people, by the most learned just as by the ignorant; learned men indeed add a few polite or pedantic phrases, but these are mere excrescences (and even they are pronounced according to the Amoy sounds), while the main body and staple of the spoken language of the most refined and learned classes is the same as that of coolies, labourers, and boatmen.

Nor does the term “dialect” convey anything like a correct idea of its distinctive character; it is no mere dialectic variety of some other language; it is a distinct language, one of the many and widely differing languages which divide among them the soil of China.

The so-called “written language” of China is indeed uniform throughout the whole country; but it is rather a notation than a language; for this universal written language is pronounced differently when read aloud in the different parts of China, so that while as written it is one, as soon as it is pronounced it splits into several languages. And still further, this written language, as it is read aloud from books, is not spoken in any place whatever under any form of pronunciation. The most learned men never employ it as a means of ordinary oral communication even among themselves. It is in fact a dead language, related to the various spoken languages of China somewhat as Latin is to the languages of South-western Europe.

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Having loved A City of Sadness (see this post), I decided to read Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 by Seiji Shirane and now that I’ve finished it, I’m impressed enough to recommend it to anyone interested in the topic (according to that Amazon link, the Kindle version is free at the moment). I’ll quote some passages of linguistic interest:

Although Taiwanese interpreters left few written accounts from Xiamen, recollections published in The China Incident and Kyokuei Academy (1940) provide a brief glimpse—albeit through the lens of Japanese censors—into their activities. According to Xu Rongzong, he and his Taiwanese colleagues in Xiamen translated for the navy and helped supervise Chinese construction workers. Xu’s Japanese colleague, Gotō Kaoru (also a teacher from Xiamen Kyokuei Academy), recalled that their duties included interpreting for Japanese interrogators of Chinese prisoners and spies; serving as local guides for military personnel; and promoting Japanese war propaganda.

There were occasions when Taiwanese interpreters could not understand the spoken Chinese of GMD soldiers, whether it was Mandarin or a dialect from outside South China. Most Taiwanese had never received formal Mandarin education in Taiwan, and their spoken Chinese was generally limited to the southern Chinese dialects. In Guangzhou, they also had trouble with the Cantonese dialect, which was mutually unintelligible with the Taiwanese dialects. Indeed, some Japanese army commanders complained that most Taiwanese could not understand Cantonese. In cases where Taiwanese had problems understanding the Chinese, they resorted to “brush talk” (J. hitsudan, C. bitan)—written communication through Chinese characters.

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We hereby fulfill the hat portion of our mandate with this passage from Zachary Fine’s “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (New Yorker, August 31, 2026; archived):

Matisse was no stranger to hats. His grandmothers were hatmakers, his aunts were hatmakers, his mother was a hatmaker, and so, too, was Amélie. She opened her own shop in Paris, on Rue de Châteaudun, the year after she and Matisse married, and they lived in the attic above it. One can imagine the kitchen table littered with bobbins, pins, and feathers, as the paraphernalia of the milliner’s life floated up into their private quarters. These were hard years for Matisse: years of professional failure and doubt, when his father shamed him for being an artist and cut off support; years of bronchitis and insomnia, when Amélie would stay up until dawn and read to him; and years of financial strain, when her trade effectively subsidized his. The hat business sustained Matisse and their three children, at least until 1903, when Amélie, in poor health, was forced to close the shop.

Matisse couldn’t have felt neutrally about Amélie making crowns for the same class of wealthy patrons who refused to support him. In the portrait, there’s more than a touch of resentment in the object on her head (Enough with the hats, Amélie!)—it’s ridiculous even by late-Belle Époque fashion standards—and there’s some lingering ressentiment, too. As a law student in the eighteen-eighties, Matisse lived on the sixth floor of a cheap hotel in Paris and would use a glass peashooter to fire little balls of putty at the hats of people on the street below. Even before he was “bitten by the demon of painting,” he chafed at the constraints of bourgeois respectability while feeling compelled to uphold them. Hats were a convenient target.

For those who, like me, are interested in such things, rue de Châteaudun, named for a battle and massacre, was originally rue Ollivier, named for a banker and politician. It’s too new to have a truly interesting name.

I discovered that the Godard movie Bande à part/Band of Outsiders, normally untranslated in Spanish, was marketed in Mexico as Iban por lana, ‘They went for wool,’ which confused me, so I did some digging and discovered this was an allusion to a saying “ir por lana y volver trasquilado” (‘to go for wool and return shorn’), which Oxford translates as “to be hoist by one’s own petard” and Harper-Collins as “get more than one bargained for.” Not a bad title, if you ask me (see Foreign Films, English Titles for more).

Lagniappe: the word trasquilar ‘shear’ is a prefixed form of esquilar, “from Old Spanish esquirar, from Gothic *𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌰𐌽 (*skairan), from Proto-Germanic *skeraną,” so it’s a cognate of English shear. I did not see that coming.

Addendum. Pancho provides important information in the comments:

“Lana” as “money” is very common in and distinctive of Mexican Spanish (South Americans would say “plata” or “silver” instead.) Reading about the movie on Wikipedia, that it’s about an attempt to steal a pile of money, has me convinced that the Mexican title was chosen with that allusion in mind along with or instead of the old saying.

Makes sense to me.

Danny Hieber, “a Ph.D. in linguistics who works with indigenous communities to help them document and revitalize their languages,” has a long post called Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek. Here are some excerpts:

The peoples who preceded the Indo-Europeans—called Early European Farmers—spoke any number of Paleo-European (a.k.a. Old European) languages. Very few of these left any written evidence (just Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian, and a handful of others), and only one survives today (Basque). Even so, these Old European languages left an indelible mark on the Indo-European languages that succeeded them.

Imagine you’re a band of early Hellenic (Greek) speakers whose ancestors had migrated over generations from the Pontic–Caspian Steppe into the eastern Mediterranean. Along the way, those ancestors encountered all sorts of novel foods, plants, animals, and terrain—things like olives, hyacinth, figs, and cypresses. Even the sea was unfamiliar at one point, migrating as your ancestors did from a landlocked steppe. What do you call all these things?

One option is to recruit existing vocabulary for new purposes. […] This strategy of coining new terms for novel experiences was, however, the minority one. Why invent new words for things the local Paleo-Europeans already had names for? Why not simply adopt the local name? That’s exactly what Indo-Europeans did as they settled across the continent, casually borrowing hundreds of words for plants, animals, types of terrain, places, and other natural phenomena. […]

Because the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived outside the native range of these plants, their language lacked words for them. They only borrowed the words upon arriving in the eastern Mediterranean. Speakers coin or borrow new words as they need them, and migration events often trigger such a need, leaving a trace of that migration in the language’s lexicon (and grammar, but that’s a point for another article). In this way, all languages contain a fossil record of their history. They are a catalog of what the population lacked when they arrived in an area or came into contact with new peoples. In this article, we’ll use that linguistic fossil record to discover what the language that existed in the Aegean prior to the Greeks—which we’ll call Pre-Greek—was like.

He defines superstrate and substrate languages, then continues:
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From this Facebook post by Sarah Thomason I learned the word hoghenhine; OED (entry revised 2010):

Law. historical.
A person who has stayed in a household for three nights, and so becomes the legal responsibility of the host; a member of a household; a dependant.

1607 Hoghenhine, is he that commeth guestwise to a house, and lieth there the third night. After which time he is accounted of his familie in whose house he lieth.
J. Cowell, Interpreter sig. Mm2ᵛ/1

1630 He which commeth guest-wise to an house..the third night, is called an Hoghenhine (or Agenhine;)..and if he offend the Kings Peace, his Oast must be answerable for him.
M. Dalton, Countrey Justice (revised edition) xl. 98

1753 Agenhine, in our old writers, signifies a guest that has lodged at an inn for three nights, after which time he is accounted one of the family.
Chambers’s Cyclopædia Suppl. (at cited word)

1848 The third night, an agenhinde, a domestic.
J. J. S. Wharton, Law Lexicon 662/2

1959 Agenhine, otherwise, but less correctly ‘Hogenhine’, and also ‘Third-night awne hine’, a guest at an inn, who having stayed there for three nights, was then accounted one of the family, and if he offended the king’s peace, his host was answerable for him.
Earl Jowitt & C. Walsh, Dictionary of English Law vol. I. 85/1

2007 The dulcet word hoghenhine..denotes a houseguest who stays more than two nights.
A. Freedman, Party of First Part 7

I’m not sure I’d call it dulcet, but it’s definitely a great word. And the etymology is interesting:
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I finally watched a movie I’d been wanting to see for years, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城市 Bēiqíng chéngshì). It’s famous as the first Taiwanese movie to deal openly with the Kuomintang government’s brutal takeover of Taiwan, in particular the February 28 Incident (about which I was told in whispers when I was teaching college in Taiwan in the ’70s), but that’s unimportant compared to the fact that it’s a great film — to my mind, up there with Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day at the peak of Taiwanese cinema. What brings it here, however, is something that struck me forcibly while watching it, the linguistic complexity. To quote Bérénice Reynaud’s A City of Sadness (British Film Institute Publishing, 2002; review):

From the beginning (Hirohito’s speech) to the end (Tachikawa’s music), A City is permeated through and through by Japanese sounds. Not only is the moody, emotional theme music heard at key moments, creating an aural scansion that contributed to the aesthetic success of the film, but a number of diegetic songs, in addition to Aka Tonbo, are Japanese. When Wen-ching is in jail, in a distant background, unseen prisoners break into a Japanese song, mourning the fate of young men going to war. That, at the moment of dying, victims of the Kuomintang repression turn to Japanese culture to express their feelings, is no accident. Like all film-makers forced by censorship to use subtle forms of expression, Hou resorts to discreet, apparently ‘non-political’ elements to make a point. The ‘official history’ the Nationalist Party sought to carve, in blood if necessary, onto the ‘recovered’ island was that Taiwan was an integral part of mainland China: the rupture in historical continuity created by 50 years of Japanese occupation had to be denied. Consequently, Japanese language and culture became the signifiers of the specificity of the Taiwanese experience. Which Kuomintang official could guess, by listening to an apparently innocuous nursery rhyme, that its hidden meaning was ‘We are Taiwanese, not mainlanders’?

Taiwanese from all walks of life were deeply marked by Japanese culture. The ‘Taiwanese dialect’ itself, as it is spoken by the ‘native’ characters in the film, is laced with Japanese words and phrases. Moreover, among intellectuals and politically active people – like the ones most likely to be in the same jail as Wen-ching – turning back to Japanese culture meant taking a certain stance in relation to their own agency. As expressed many times in the film, by Hinoe’s bookish friends as well as by the grass-roots ‘Big Brother’ Wen-heung, Taiwan kept being ‘handed over’ without being consulted, first by the Qing Dynasty to the Japanese and then by the Allies to the Nationalist Party. Kept in a state of submission by the Japanese, the Taiwanese had hopes of becoming full citizens once they were reunited with the motherland. Instead, mainlanders were behaving in Taiwan as if in occupied territory. Reverting to Japanese mores and culture, to the language of the previous occupying forces, now defeated, was an understated way of making a choice, of rejecting the present occupation, of defiantly asserting that the gap between Taiwan and the mainland was unbridgeable.
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As a fan of both Jean-Luc Godard and typography, how could I resist Paule Palacios-Dalens’ 2019 article Jean-Luc Godard, the Typographer with a Movie Camera (originally Jean-Luc Godard,le typographe à la caméra)? Here’s the introduction:

If Jean-Luc Godard is the cinema itself, he is also heir to the printed page. Layout design, and in particular typography, is for him the privileged means of experiencing at every opportunity the paradoxical relationships of text and image. A particular facet of his graphic work concerns the use he makes of type fonts. Three stages emerge through his filmography, marked by the use of a unique typography, whose subtle choice indicates significant aesthetic and political stakes.

For the first two phases it is about the very French Antique Olive, designed by Roger Excoffon between 1965 and 1967, which was followed by the symbol of Swiss typography, Helvetica, from the 1980s to 2010. The third phase is distinguished by the use of so-called screen fonts (Tahoma or Verdana) designed by Matthew Carter. Godard uses them in his last two works to date, Adieu au langage (“Farewell to Language”, 2014) and Le Livre d’image (“The Picture Book”, 2018). If the primary function of typography is to show the text, Godard’s underlying question, whatever the medium (video, paper or film), is a painter’s preoccupation: How to represent thought and what colour (political and pictorial) to give it. How to print a thought in movement and free oneself from the fixation of the text on the page? How to make a book while making a film? Typography is the privileged visual mediation through which Godard tries to put an end to the competition between text and image in the production of thought.

She goes into detail about the history and nature of the typefaces and the use Godard made of them; here’s a bit from her discussion of Antique Olive:
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I was describing someone (OK, a chipmunk I’d been feeding) as “cosseted” when it occurred to me to wonder where that word came from. The answer is simple, interesting, and (to me) unexpected: a cosset is ‘a pet, usually a pet lamb’ (first in 1579: “I shall thee give yond Cosset for thy payne,” Spenser, Shepheardes Calender). That explains that, but where does the noun come from? That’s unclear; Wiktionary repeats Skeat’s suggestion that it’s from Old English cotsǣta ‘cottager,’ but I find that highly unconvincing. Somebody should look into it.

Not worth making a separate post of, but I have a complaint about the OED’s entry (entry revised 2016) for filmstrip, defined as “A length of film bearing a sequence of still frames.” Here are the three citations:

1896 The camera is provided with a continuous strip of sensitive film, and..a negative is made of it upon the sensitive film strip.
Weekly Irish Times 9 May 3/9Citation details for Weekly Irish Times

1962 Three new filmstrips, intended for training student electronic engineers.
Engineering 16 November 649Citation details for Engineering

2004 Each page is a ‘time slice’—like a still frame in a filmstrip.
B. Greene, Fabric of Cosmos (2005) i. iii. 53

Now, technically of course any strip of film is “a length of film bearing a sequence of still frames,” but in fact the word filmstrip has a more specific sense, well described in this NY Times piece by Christian Kriticos (archived) about collector Mark O’Brien:

Originating in the 1920s, filmstrips were a low-budget cousin to the movies. “You can think of them like slide shows,” O’Brien said. They contained 30 to 150 still images on a single roll of film, which was advanced manually frame by frame. The content was often educational, covering subjects as varied as teenage acne and the metric system. Teachers would project the pictures on classroom walls, while vinyl or cassette soundtracks provided narration, music and regular beeps to prompt the move to the next frame.

Obviously the 1896 citation does not refer to this but to a plain old strip of moving-picture film; to lump them together is like including a quote about a very warm canine in an entry for hot dog ‘frankfurter.’ Come on, OED, you can do better.

A paper by Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35 1-4 [2017-2018]: 31-42) begins by quoting Roman Szporluk on the origins of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity and asks “If the imagined community began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when did the Ukrainian vernacular begin to delimit itself vis-à-vis its neighbors?” Flier goes on to quote George Shevelov to the effect that “a continuum has existed from the earliest local changes within Common Slavic to the present,” then gets to the meat of his paper:

It is one thing to worry about labels, but it is quite another to examine the typology of the linguistic systems on East Slavic territory and uncover the relationship among specific changes. The goal is to establish not simply a list of distinctive characteristics, as Shevelov would have it, but to reveal a hierarchy of change and therefore a more accurate evaluation of linguistic data.[6] Thus, we are not as interested in registering Change A and Change B as we are in the assertion that Change B implies Change A and if B is in place it is no longer possible to return to the status quo ante, that is pre-A. My intent here is to make use of advances in Slavic historical linguistics since the publication of Shevelov’s encyclopedic Ukrainian historical phonology three and a half decades ago, knowledge that sheds new light on the chronological layering of East Slavic and thus provides a relative time frame for marking such fundamental typological shifts.

I will focus here on internally motivated sound change precisely because it is based on linguistic data least subject to conscious alteration on the part of speakers. We want to consider the language of speakers throughout Ukrainian territory, especially those at a far remove from the scriptoria and bureaucratic offices of urban elites. Members of this latter group are much more likely to be affected by the need for new abstract vocabulary or socially prestigious speech, desiderata that often lead to calques or direct borrowings, particularly from neighboring languages of power such as Polish or Russian. En passant we might note that both of these prestigious and influential languages have had a heavy steady stream of borrowing and calquing of their own. For now we will forget the self-reflective elites: we will be interested in when and how the non-elite speech communities of East Slavic began to diverge phonologically, never to proceed along the same trajectory again.

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