Jacob and James

Last Sunday I watched, on the CBS television program 60 Minutes, a report on the James Ossuary. A voiceover intoned “James, son of Joseph…” while the camera panned over the Aramaic inscription, which I was able to read, since the script is quite similar to that of modern Hebrew. It (or at least a part of it) is יעקוב בר יוסף, whose standard transliteration is y’qwb br ywsp and which I will represent by the vocalized transcription Ya’aqob bar Yoseph.

The importance of the artifact lies, of course, in the seemingly fraudulent (as I had suspected from the outset) reference to Jesus. Since this has no relevance to my post, I will omit it.

It so happens that Ya’aqob (or rather, in a transcription closer to modern Hebrew, Ya’akov) is my Jewish given name. My legal name is the one that my ancestral namesake bears in English versions of the Old Testament: Jacob. Why is it, then, that Jews named Ya’aqob who appear in the New Testament are called James, a word that has not a single sound in common with Ya’aqob?

The answer has three parts. The first part is Hellenism, which can be defined as the adoption of Greek culture (or some of its aspects) by the populations of the lands conquered by Alexander the Great during the centuries following the conquest. Among the Jews, a good part of the upper class became Greek-speaking (they were called Hellenists, ελληνισται in Greek, and it is to them that the King James Version of the New Testament refers as Grecians). And it became customary for them to take Greek-sounding names — either actual Greek names (such as Aristoboulos, Kalonymos or Tryphon) or Jewish names with Greek endings. For example, the famous general-turned-historian named Yoseph, a member of the royal family, identified himself as Iōsēpos (Ιωσηπος) and is known by its Latinized form Josephus, while the Joseph who was the legal father of Jesus — a mere woodworker — is called Iōsēph (Ιωσηφ) in the New Testament, just like his Old Testament namesake.

The New Testament personages named Ya’aqob, on the other hand, were apparently considered important enough to be called not Iakōb (Ιακωβ) like the Old Testament patriarch but Iakōbos (Ιακωβος), with the stress on the first syllable (Ιάκωβος in Modern Greek). Western Christians who adopted the name Latinized it, naturally enough, as Iacobus, with the same stress.

The second part of the answer has to do with the formation of Romance out of Latin. A feature common to all forms of Vulgar Latin was the change of the pronunciation of initial Ia- from /ja/ to /ʤa/. In Gaul, moreover, unstressed vowels tended to be neutralized, and so Iacobus came to be pronounced /’ʤakǝbǝs/. Eventually the first schwa was muted altogether, but since that led to the uncomfortable consonant cluster /kb/, the /b/ was replaced by /m/, and so the oldest form of the name in Old French is Jacmes, /’ʤakmǝs/. (Jacme is still found in Occitan.)

Eventually French people tired of pronouncing the cluster /km/ as well, and so two ways of simplifying the pronunciation arose. One way, which prevailed in most of Northern France, was to get rid of the /m/, resulting in /’ʤakǝs/, spelled Jacques, with the pronunciation ultimately evolving to /ʒɑk/. The other way, which the Normans tried (before eventually accepting the alternative) and which they brought to England with them, was to get rid of the /k/, leading to /’ʤamǝs/, spelled James.

The third and final part of the answer lies in the evolution of English sounds. Just as names changed from Chaucer’s /’namǝs/ to the present /nemz/, so did James become /ʤemz/.

BMI and IPA

A month ago I wrote a post about the BMI, in which I pointed out that an index that was developed — on a sound scientific basis — to help with the design of chairs has been (mis)applied as a measure of obesity.

A few days ago I read, in Language Log, a post by the linguist Sarah (Sally) Thomason titled “Why I Don’t Love the International Phonetic Alphabet,” in which she complains about the IPA’s inadequacies as a medium of field transcription. Two of her main peeves are (1) the IPA’s lack of simple symbols for affricates, requiring the use of digraphs and (2) the IPA’s use of [a] for the fully open front vowel, rather than the open central vowel that is represented by the letter a in an overwhelming majority of the languages that use the Latin alphabet.

As I wrote Sally Thomason in an e-mail message, the IPA was not originally designed for phonetic field transcription, but to help French people to learn foreign languages. (The International Phonetic Association grew out of L’Association Phonétique des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes.) And the French, perhaps more than most other people learning foreign languages, don’t try to master their phonetics, but only to approximate them with French sounds (hence the famous “French accent”).

Now French has no affricates (old French had them, hence the affricates in such English words of French origin as judge or chart). When it borrows foreign words that have them, they are pronounced distinctly as a stop followed by a fricative; one need only listen to a French person saying such words as jazz, pizza, tsar orTchad. It’s natural that this practice would be extended to words in an actual foreign language. There is always some chance of being misunderstood (think catch it vs. cat shit), but it’s slight, and the professeurs de langues vivantes may well have thought that time needed to teach their pupils to pronounce affricates would be better spent teaching grammar and vocabulary.

Similarly, French has no truly central fully open vowel, only a (slightly) front one as in patte and a (slightly) back one as in pâte. As a rule it’s the former that’s preferred in loanwords (as in the four examples above), sο it’s natural that the simpler symbol [a] would denote this sound, and a different one, [ɑ], would be used for the other.

So the IPA is, in a way, like the BMI: a didactic device that was invented in the 19th century for one purpose and that has since been semi-scientifically diverted to a quite different use. In both cases the inadequacies have been masked by fixes, modifications and qualifications, but not eliminated in a way that a complete redesign would do.

Are we 2-D? BMI!

Once again, a rash of media articles about obesity in the United States has broken out. And once again, the obesity statistics are defined in terms of BMI. Here is an example, from forbes.com:

To determine which cities were the most obese, we looked at 2006 data on body mass index, or BMI, collected by the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which conducts phone interviews with residents of metropolitan areas about health issues, including obesity, diabetes and exercise.

In this case, participants report their height and weight, which survey analysts use to calculate a BMI. Those with a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 are considered at a healthy weight, those with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 are considered overweight, and those with a BMI of 30 or higher are considered obese. About 32% of the nation is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control; Memphis ranked above the national average at 34%

Never mind that the city that ranked third in obesity, Nashville, turned up among the 25 “fittest” (as opposed to “fattest”) in a different survey, this one by Men’s Fitness (and, as far as I can tell, not based on BMI). I am not interested in the results, only in the use of BMI. And, what’s more, after entering “obesity BMI” in a Yahoo news search, not one of the first ten articles that I clicked on included an actual definition of BMI.

The BMI, or body-mass index, is defined very simply as a person’s weight (in kilograms) divided by height (in meters) squared. Thus, since I weigh 66 kg (145 lb.) and stand 1.71 m (about 5 ft 7½ in), my BMI is 66÷1.71² ≈ 22.5.

Now anyone with any familiarity with physical science will recognize a quantity defined as force (such as weight) divided by length squared (or area) as representing pressure or stress. For example, for people of different sizes but with similar body proportions, the area of any portion of their body surface – for example, the portion that is in contact with a chair on which they may be sitting – will be proportional to the square of the height. If the chair bears a person’s full weight, then the average pressure on the chair’s seat, equal to the weight divided by the contact area, will be proportional to that person’s BMI.

It is precisely for this purpose – the design of office chairs – that the quantity now known as BMI was invented by the nineteenth-century Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet.

But human bodies are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional. For people of different stature but similar geometric proportions, the body volume is proportional to the cube, not the square, of the height. And if the proportions of the various constituents of body mass (bone, muscle, fat etc.) are similar, then the weight is proportional to the volume, and consequently to the cube of the height. Consequently, what people who are geometrically and physiologically similar have in common is the weight divided by the height cubed, not squared.

What this means is that people with the same build will have a higher BMI if they are taller and a lower BMI if they are shorter. It has already been noted that very tall people who are quite fit — for example, professional basketball players — have BMI values that would rank them as overweight. Thus, an NBA guard who is two meters (about 6 ft 7 in) tall and who has the same build as I do would weigh 66×(2.0÷1.71)³ ≈ 106 kg (232 lbs) and his BMI would be 26.4, in the “overweight” range.

It has also been remarked that in populations that, on the average, are significantly shorter than European (or European-descended) ones, a lower overweight threshold is necessary. For Southeast Asians, for example, it’s 23 (as in this document from Singapore). Were the body types the same, this would be consistent with average height being about 8% less. In fact, the average adult height in China, for example, is 6–7% less than the average of white Americans. But the body types are in fact different (for example, the waist-hip ratio of Chinese men is 0.87 while that of white Americans is 0.98, as given here).

I have no doubt that if an index were defined on the basis of weight divided by height cubed, the discrepancies would become negligible.

Better late than never?

Bernard Kouchner is one of the few people in public life whom I have long admired, whether as a principled humanitarian (he was the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières but left it on a matter of principle) or as a practical politician (he was France’s Minister of Health in several left-wing governments and is now, without compromising his leftist politics, Foreign Minister in a right-wing government). And so, when he said last week that he was “very happy” about the prospects of the Annapolis Conference for peace in the Middle East, I felt at least mildly encouraged.

For seven years I have lived with the embarrassment of having written an essay, “Thoughts on the 2000 Election,” in which I wrote, among other things, that “a Bush – that is, a Republican – administration would have another advantage over Gore: it would not be burdened with the pro-Israel bias of the Democratic Party due (at least in part) to its heavy Jewish influence” and that “the highly effective Israel lobby would [not] altogether lose its clout in a Bush administration…” [but] “such an administration would have more freedom of action in imposing some tough choices on Israel.”

Of course I had no way of knowing that, in matters of international policy and security, the Bush administration would in fact become the Cheney rule, and that the paranoid neo-Nazi fantasy of the Zionist Occupation Government (”ZOG”) would become a reality, with many high-ranking officials (Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams and their ilk) constituting, practically, a Washington cell of the Likud.

Now these people are gone, along with their enforcer Don Rumsfeld, and while Dick Cheney retains his constitutional position, his name is rarely heard outside of jokes. The Annapolis Conference represents the kind of initiative that I was so naively hoping for back in the year 2000.

The impression that I’ve been gathering from the media is that it’s too little, too late. And perhaps late is not better than never. Perhaps a fresh start in a new administration might have a better chance. But it never hurts to feel vindicated, even if very late.

Linguists and word-formation

A little while ago I received a message from the linguist Ben Zimmer (of the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University Press) in regard to my post about localitarian. Ben, one of the people who publicized the “Word of the Year” locavore, commented that he not seen localitarian before, but he had come across locatarian.

That word immediately began to grate on me. One reason is that the obvious connection would be to the verb locate, and a locatarian would be someone who locates something or other. (It could be, for example, a location scout in the movie industry.) But another reason that a francophone reading it might associate it with the French locataire, which means ‘tenant’ or ‘renter.’ It’s what’s known as a false friend.

Anglophones who post on the Web often forget that it’s the World Wide Web, and that the English in which they write is likely to be read by millions of Web surfers for whom it is not the primary language. Of course I don’t expect such awareness from ordinary posters. But I do expect it from linguists. I know that this expectation is naive, since it is not borne out by the record.

The record, in fact, is mixed. When Noam Chomsky decided to use grammatical for ‘idiomatic’ he was being Humpty Dumpty (”a word means just what I choose it to mean”), knowingly and willfully redefining what is meant by grammar. But when Charles Ferguson introduced diglossia — a medical term — for a concept for which the far more canonical diglossy was already in use, he was just being sloppy. (I wrote about this in an essay.)

When William Safire (a “language maven” but not, academically, a linguist) chose to denote an ‘incorrect correction’ by the portmanteau incorrection (rather than the regularly formed miscorrection, since mis-, not in-, is the standard English prefix for ‘incorrect’), he was just trying to be clever, which is his shtick (remember “nattering nabobs of negativism”?). But when Mark Liberman, a prominent linguist (who has often been critical of Safire), propagates the usage on Language Log while ignoring the possibility that the word may be misread by francophones or other Romance-speakers (since French incorrection — along with its cognates — means ‘incorrectness’ or ‘discourtesy’), he is not furthering the cause advanced by much of the posting on Language Log: respect for linguists as the guardians of language. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Localitarians of the world…

I have found the locavore/localvore debate just as amusing as the media-hyped “local foods” fad that it represents, but the selection of locavore as Oxford Word Of The Year is a sad (to me) indication that standards of word-formation ain’t what they used to be, if they ever was (he drawled twangily).

I have been a believer in (if not always a consistent practitioner of) eating locally produced foods ever since in the 1960s I joined an organic foods co-op here in Berkeley (when Alice Waters was an undergraduate French major). One of the duties of membership was driving to nearby farms for bulk purchases of fresh produce, dairy products and meat. Some of us called ourselves (on my suggestion, he noted modestly) localitarians, in an obvious play on vegetarian, and we would use the term in conversation: “Are you a vegetarian?” “No, but I’m a localitarian.”

Vegetarian has long been used as the human equivalent of herbivore, which — along with carnivore — has traditionally been applied to nonhuman animals, for the good reason that vorare means not simply ‘eat’ but ‘eat like a wild animal’ (hence devour). The ending -arian generally denotes a conscious adherence, in contrast to the genetic programming implied by -vore. But then, who cares about tradition anymore [sic, he added sarcastically]?

Afghanistan and Belgium

There is a remarkable similarity between Afghanistan and Belgium with regard to linguistic makeup. In both countries, most of the population is divided into two roughly equal language communities, speaking languages A (Pashto or Flemish) and B (Persian or French), respectively. In both cases, A is a local language without much international standing, and is shared only with another community in a neighboring country (the Dutch of the Netherlands and the Pathans of Pakistan), while language B is shared with another, much larger country and enjoys, at least historically, great international prestige, with a literary tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Moreover, in each case language B was for many years the dominant language of government and culture, and came to be used as the primary language of the upper class of A-speakers.

In both cases, A-speakers refer to themselves by a name similar to that of the language (Pashtuns, Flemings). B-speakers, on the other hand, do not call themselves Persians or French, but, at least for those communities that have traditionally spoken the language or related dialects, have special designations (Tajiks, Walloons).

In both countries, also, the capital is located in what is historically A-speaking territory, but most of its population speaks B. A part of this B-speaking population consists of immigrants (or their descendants) from historically B-speaking territory, but a larger part is made up of descendants of A-speakers, and not only of the upper class.

It is here that the similarities end and the differences begin. The French-speaking Bruxellois of Flemish ancestry (as evidenced by their surnames) do not regard themselves as Flemings but as francophone Belgians. Together with the Walloons proper they form the French Community (Communauté française), where French refers only to language.

Persian-speaking descendants of Pashtuns, on the other hand, retain their Pashtun identity, which includes a knowledge of Pashto at least as a secondary language.

Another difference: in Belgium, the principal minority group alongside the two major groups is the German-speaking Community (Deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft), whose members regard themselves as German-speaking Belgians, not as Germans. The comparable group in Afghanistan would be those who speak Uzbek, but they are not simply Uzbek-speaking Afghans; they are Uzbeks.

We see here the effect of the Seipel line, which separates Western Europe (where citizenship is the primary hallmark of nationality) from Eastern Europe and Asia, where it’s ethnicity that matters above all.

English names of places in Europe

It’s well known that, until the fourteenth century, French was the official language of England, and for several centuries thereafter England’s communication with other European nations was in French. But in the territory around the North Sea and the Baltic, where trade was dominated by the Hanseatic League, it’s more likely that in the Middle Ages such communication was in the League’s official language, Low German, which was probably mutually intelligible with Middle English (its oldest form, Old Saxon, is the direct ancestor of Old English), at least if English-speakers did not overload their speech with French-derived words.

As a result of this dichotomy, many English names of important places in this area and the lands to the north and east tend to be derived from their Low German forms (and quite distinct from their local forms): Norway (Norge), Sweden (Sverige), Copenhagen (København), Poland (Polska), Warsaw (Warszawa), Moscow (Moskva). And, a fortiori, such places as Brunswick (Braunschweig), where Low German was in fact the local language.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, including more southerly parts of Germany, French-derived forms predominate. In many cases the French form survives intact (the accents that might be found in modern French are irrelevant, and I will omit them when I give the French name): Cologne, Nuremberg, Munich; Berne, Lucerne; Seville; Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Syracuse; Prague, Belgrade; Thebes, Crete, Rhodes; Adrianople, Constantinople. The English pronunciation, of course, is what it would be if these were common nouns derived from Anglo-French. (In older times even more cities in the German-speaking world had French-derived names: Aachen was Aix-la-Chapelle, Leipzig was Leipsic, Basel was Basle.)

In some cases there has been a slight change of spelling to accommodate English conventions: Venice (Venise), Greece (Grece). Sometimes the French form has a final weak e (silent in English and in modern French) that is unnecessary in English: Lisbon (Lisbonne), Athens (Athenes), Spain (old French Espaigne).

There are also a good many cases in which the French name ends in a weak e and would produce an oxytone (a word of more than one syllable with the stress on the last) in English. English has traditionally avoided such names, and the tendency has been to replace the e with an a, giving a “schwa” pronunciation resembling that of Middle French (and of modern French as it might be sung, or spoken in Southern France). Some of the resulting names turn out to be identical with the native ones: Barcelona, Siena, Verona, Bologna, Messina. (Seville would seem to be an exception to this tendency, but in fact the traditional pronunciation is SEVil, not seVIL). But often the result is a peculiarly English form: Saragossa (Saragosse, Spanish Zaragoza, old Spanish Çaragoça), Geneva (Geneve), Vienna (Vienne, German Wien), Mantua and Padua (Mantoue, Padoue; Italian Mantova, Padova), Majorca (Majorque, Spanish and Catalan Mallorca), Salonica (Salonique, Greek Thessaloniki, Turkish Selanik).

Genoa is unusual in that it is based neither on the French (Genes) nor on the Italian (Genova), but on the Occitan form, while cities in the traditionally Occitan-speaking part of France are invariably known, as elsewhere in France (except for Dunkirk — see below), by their French names (Nice, Toulouse, and so on), except for the peculiar addition of a final s to Marseille (and also to Lyon).

Interestingly enough, some French regions that were once virtually independent states have English names that are distinct from the French: Brittany (Bretagne), Burgundy (Bourgogne). They are, instead, based on the respective Latin forms (Britannia, Burgundia). Latin-based names of historic regions are common elsewhere as well. There is, for example, Germany (Germania), and within the old German Empire, Saxony (from Saxonia, not Saxe or Sachsen, though the small Saxon duchies have Saxe, as in Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), Bavaria, Franconia, Westphalia, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia. In Spain there is Catalonia (Catalogne, Cataluña, Catalunya), while in Italy there are Tuscany (from Tuscania, not Toscane or Toscana), Apulia (Pouilles, Puglie), Sardinia (Sardaigne, Sardegna).

In the Low Countries, especially Flanders, where historically there has been a mix of Dutch and French, the English toponymy seems to be a hodgepodge. As an example, Ghent (Dutch Gent) was once called Gaunt (French Gand), whence John of Gaunt. Brussels is similar to the Dutch Brussel, but the final s points to its origin in the French Bruxelles (as in many other French words, the x is the result of a misreading of a medieval digraph for ss.) Neighboring Bruges (Dutch Brugge) is still known by its French name. Flanders, the name of the region, seems to be a blend of the Dutch Vlaanderen (a plural form) and the French Flandre (singular). Antwerp, on the other hand, looks like a singular form of the Dutch Antwerpen (the French is Anvers). Mechelen (the Dutch name, now commonly used in English) has also been known as Malines (the French name) and by the specifically English name Mechlin. Dunkirk, in French Flanders (French Dunkerque, Dutch Duinekerken), is perhaps the only city in France to have a peculiarly English name. And, further north, The Hague also seems to be a blend of the Dutch Den Haag and the French La Haye.

Now, if we move from Europe to the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, the pattern changes. For place-names that go back to antiquity and have classical or biblical forms, English uses such forms, whether based directly on the original Greco-Latin (Syria, Damascus, Alexandria, Libya) or Hebrew (Lebanon, Jerusalem), or mediated by French (Tyre, Acre, Palestine, Egypt). But for places with a more recent history, curiously, Italian names pop up: Aleppo, Tripoli, Cairo, Morocco. The only places I can think of with distinctly English names are Tangier(s) and Algiers, and they are probably adaptations of the French Tanger and Alger, with the s added as in (the now obsolete) Marseilles and Lyons.

The bra convention

I am not writing about a meeting of designers, manufacturers or sellers of women’s upper undergarments, but about the convention, common in American film and television productions, that a woman wears a bra while having sex.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the migration of major film actresses to television series, Mary McNamara wrote that “Holly Hunter is taking a fairly ridiculous concept – ‘Touched by an Angel’ meets ‘NYPD Blues’ – and turning ‘Saving Grace’ into a captivating character study.”

I never got a chance to be captivated. I watched only the first episode and saw only the ridiculousness, not only of the concept but of the execution as well. I found one saving grace in Saving Grace: the fact that when, at the beginning of the episode, Holly Hunter was shown in bed with a man, she was not wearing a bra.

The bra convention has become so established that exceptions to it are noteworthy. It is especially striking in series that flaunt their sexual frankness, such as Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives. What these two series, in particular, have in common is that they were created by gay men (Alan Ball and Marc Cherry, respectively), and at one time I formed the hypothesis that perhaps gay men simply don’t know the importance of bare breasts, and the process that leads to them, for horny straight men (since to my knowledge there is nothing comparable in gay sex), or the fact that (in my experience, at least) most women, except those with oversized breasts, feel more comfortable without a bra.

Now, I’m not talking about necessarily showing bare breasts on the screen, which is common enough in European productions (and also occurred, curiously enough, in a Hollywood film about gay sex – Brokeback Mountain, directed by the straight [to my knowledge] Ang Lee). All it takes for verisimilitude is what we saw of Holly Hunter: bare shoulders in bed and, out of bed, a nude view of her (or her body double’s) body.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on the paper’s blog: “In movies, if two people are really hot for each other, they jump into bed and, overcome by passion, they . . . leave their clothes half on. To be specific, the woman leaves her shirt or bra on. Now, am I missing something? Has any man in the history of the world ever been so hot for a woman that he’s not interested in seeing her NAKED? Probably not, and yet you see this in movie after movie. As a reader recently pointed out, this just happened in ‘Knocked Up.’” And in his weekly column, where he directly responds to readers’ columns, he wrote: “It has become a weird movie convention that first-time lovers become so hot for each other that they jump into bed without removing their clothes. This is Hollywood-style sex, where a man can get so attracted to a woman that he loses all interest in seeing her naked. (Huh?) Anyway, if someday this ever happens, somewhere in the known universe, Hollywood can take credit for starting the trend.”

Mick La Salle is a first-rate film historian, and if he gives no indication of knowing how or when the convention got started, then I certainly don’t. And of course I also don’t know if it was gay producers or directors who instigated it. I don’t remember seeing it in the post-code films of the seventies, when sexual frankness returned to Hollywood in the form of R-rated films. I have come across the rumor that certain actresses demand a higher salary for showing their breasts, and that this was why Kate Beckinsale wore a bra in Laurel Canyon not only when in bed with her husband (so that this was, presumably, not even first-time sex) but also when participating in an otherwise skinny-dipping pool party. (In this respect Kate Beckinsale is at the opposite end from her fellow Englishwoman Greta Scacchi, whose appearance in Robert Altman’s The Player was remarkable for her breasts not being shown). But, once again, I’m not talking about showing breasts, only indicating that a bra is not being worn.

Feeling safer

Doesn’t it make us Americans feel safer, having our money spent on fighting a war against a nonexistent, or at least disembodied, enemy — terror, after all, is a state of mind, not an armed force — instead of repairing our bridges?