Yankin’ Rankin

I have just finished reading Exit Music, and not only was the last of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels a pleasure to read, but it was especially enjoyable to read in the Eastern Scottish variant of British English that Rebus and most of his associates speak. When Rebus turns off his torch, closes the boot of his car, drives to his flat and talks on his mobile, I know that I am in Rebus’s Edinburgh.

When I began to read the series, about a year ago, I decided to do so in chronological order. It was a good decision, because each book is full of references to events in preceding ones, even when a summary explanation is given by the author.

The first few books that I found in the UC Berkeley library were the original British editions. Then the American editions began. At first they seemed to be simply reprintings, but eventually they began to be Americanized in the form of changes in spelling (colour/color) and punctuation (reversal of single and double quotation marks). That was still no problem.

But somewhere along the way the language itself began to be yankeefied, or “yanked” as I like to put it for short. Especially vocabulary: flat became apartment (though tenement did not become apartment house), torch became flashlight, and so on. By the time the antepenultimate novel was reached, even the title was changed from Fleshmarket Close to Fleshmarket Alley. But the ultimate in “yanking” was reached in the penultimate novel, The Naming of the Dead. Apparently the text was subjected to some sort of search-and-replace macro, and not only was every instance of mobile phone replaced by cell phone, but the word mobile itself, commonly used in Britain as an abbreviation for mobile phone, became simply cell. This is obviously a risky move for a novel dealing with police work, and in fact there is an episode in which Rebus is imprisoned and then released, but without his mobile phone. When the text reads “he left his cell” it is not at all clear if the reference is to getting out of the lockup or not taking the mobile phone.

I don’t know what led the publisher to abandon the “yanking” of Rankin in Exit Music, but I appreciate the gesture.

Setting aside the language issue, I had another reaction when reading The Naming of the Dead. The novel, whichwas published in 2006, deals with a murder investigation by a man-woman team of detectives, DI Rebus and DS Siobhan Clarke, over the background of the massive anti-globalization protests that took place in conjunction with the G8 Conference at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005. The book’s chapters are made up of alternating segments in which the protagonist is one or the other of the detectives.

By sheer coincidence, the novel that I had read just before it was Ça, c’est un baiser by Philippe Djian, a very popular French novelist whose books have, for some reason, not been translated into English, except for one, which served as the basis of the film Betty Blue and was translated under the same title. (The original title of both book and film is 37º2 le matin.)

Ça, c’est un baiser, which came out in 2002, deals with a murder investigation by a man-woman team of detectives (who, unlike Rebus and Clarke, have a sexual relationship) over the background of massive anti-globalization protests  in conjunction with a G8 Conference taking place in an unnamed large city in France. The book is made up  of alternating segments in which the protagonist (as well as the narrator) is one or the other of the detectives, Nathan and Marie-Jo.

Am I accusing Rankin of plagiarism? Of course not. The two novels are very different in plot and spirit. But Rankin, who lived in France for a number of years, may well have read Djian’s novel and been inspired by it. Is it a coincidence that the evil tycoon (a stock character in present-day socially conscious crime literature) is named Brennen in Djian’s book and Pennen in Rankin’s?

Vowels and consonants

The rumor that Andrew Cuomo is likely to become the next junior Senator from New York reminds me of the time, probably in 1991, when his father, Mario Cuomo, was considering a run for the Presidency. I remember someone saying that he had no chance — that Americans would not elect a President with more vowels than consonants in his name.

Of course, when Americans talk about vowels and consonants, they usually mean letters, not sounds. In fact, phonemically Cuomo is /kwomo/ and consequently has three consonants and two (identical) vowels (which are most often realized as diphthongs of some sort). But in common parlance “vowel” means one of the letters AEIOU and “consonant” means any other letter. And except for Monroe and Hoover, whose names have three of each (but in each case two of the vowel letters form a digraph), all other Presidents of the United States had surnames with more consonant letters than vowel letters.

At last, the pattern is broken. In Obama the vowels win, both phonemically and orthographically.

Update. The latest news is that the new Senator from New York will be Kirsten Gillibrand. The consonants win again!

More tilde overkill

In a post of mine of a few months ago, dealing with the Spanish names for the inhabitants of cities, I noted the following.

An inhabitant of Havana (La Habana) is habanero, which is also the name of a variety of chili pepper (the strange American habit of calling it “habañero” — tilde overkill! –  notwithstanding).

A few days ago I came across another example of this overkill. At the New Year’s Eve concert of the New York Philharmonic — which was televised on PBS — Susan Graham sang, among other numbers, the Havanaise or Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. But both the legend onscreen andthe announcer’s voice had it as “Habañera”.

I’ll be looking for more examples.

My H problem

I haven’t posted since August. I spent most of September traveling, and since coming home I’ve been busy with other things.

A part of my travels was in Poland, the land of my birth. My previous visit there was in 1997, and before that I hadn’t been back in over fifty years — since 1944, when I left at the age of nine.

After six years in Germany, my parents and I ended up in Los Angeles in 1950, and soon thereafter they asked me to speak English with them. I already knew the language, and they wanted to learn it. As Polish Jews who survived World War II, we had no great attachment to Poland or the Polish language, and so the change came easy. (I continued occasionally to speak Yiddish with my father.)

On my first return trip to Poland I was surprised at how quickly my fluency in Polish came back. Polish grammar is notoriously difficult, but even without knowing the rules very well I somehow managed to navigate its treacherous waters. Since then I’ve tried to speak a little Polish on occasion, and to learn it a little better by consulting textbooks, teaching aids and books about the language. On my last trip I spoke it well enough to be taken for a Pole.

But in the process of reading about Polish I discovered something strange: according to all the authorities, in Polish the letter H and the digraph CH are pronounced alike, as the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (more or less the way most continental Hispano-Americans — Argentines, Mexicans, Peruvians — pronounce J).

This is not at all how I remember learning the language. In my speech (and my mother’s — she still speaks Polish, and I often overhear her), the sound of H is what it is in English (as in hotel), and that of CH what it is in German in such words as Loch or lachen. Actually, I modeled my pronunciation in these languages (and in others, such as Hebrew and Spanish), as I learned them, on the way I used the sounds in Polish.

When I have listened to Polish-speakers, it has always seemed to be that, with some striking exceptions, their pronunciation of H and CH has been the same as mine. I am now wondering if making the distinction between H and CH is a peculiarity of Polish-speaking Jews, and perhaps a holdover from Yiddish.

Thinking about this problem led me to reflecting about the many roles that the letter H, by itself and in digraphs, plays in the various Roman alphabets, and I turned the reflections into an essay.

Shia LaBeouf, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux

When I first noticed the name of the actor Shia LaBeouf in the media, a year or two ago, I assumed that it was a stage name, and I thought that it was a pointedly funny one: combining the name of a branch of Islam with a caricature of French!

I have since found out several things. One is that Shia LaBeouf is the actor’s real name; another that the first name is pronounced to rhyme with Mariah, not Maria, and that it was given to him by his Jewish mother, supposedly (according to Wikipedia) meaning “gift from God”.

I believe there is some confusion there with the name Shai (שי), which does mean “gift.” Shia’s mother’s name is Shayna, indicating a Yiddish-speaking background. And a name with the same pronunciation as the actor’s (Shaye in the YIVO transcription) was quite common during my Jewish childhood in Poland. In Polish it was written Szaja, but in Yiddish is most typically written in the Hebrew form  ישעיה (Yeshaya), a variant of  ישעיהו (Yeshayahu), the Hebrew name (meaning something like “salvation by God”) of the prophet Isaiah.

As regards LaBeouf, it turns out that Shia’s father is Cajun, evidently descended from a Frenchman with the not uncommon surname of Lebœuf. For a long time Cajuns were a largely illiterate society, and when schooling came to them it was in English, not French, so that when they needed to spell their French surnames they had to do so without knowing how to read or write French.

French surnames, among Cajuns and elsewhere, often end with the phoneme /o/. There are a great many ways in which this ending can be spelled: -o, -od, -os, -ot, -au, -aud, -aut, -ault, -aux, -eau, -eaux, -eaulx. I have not made a survey, but it’s my guess that the most common ones are -eau and -ot, because these ending represent diminutives that were productive in Middle French (analogous to the English -kin or -kins) and are still occasionally productive: Charlie Chaplin is known in French as Charlot (and my wife likes to call me Cobykins).

For some reason Cajuns seem to favor -eaux, perhaps because of the frequent presence of Bordeaux in written media. There are countless Cajun jokes about two characters named Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. The latter would, in France or Canada, be known as Thibaudot or Thibaudeau, a diminutive of Thibaud. The former name I have seem mainly as Boudrot. But jokes about Boudrot and Thibaudot wouldn’t be as funny as ones about Boudreaux and Thibodeaux, would they?

Cerriteño

About a week ago I happened to be in San José, California (the acute accent in the city’s name is official), and while there I picked up a copy of the local free weekly paper. I noticed an article about something happening in the neighboring city of Los Gatos, whose inhabitants were referred to as Los Gatans.

Los Gatans! What a clumsy formation! But then I realized that, since moving from Berkeley three months ago to the nearby city of El Cerrito, I have probably become, at least officially, an El Cerritan. I checked local publications and found out that that, indeed, is the standard designation.

In the 1950s I lived in Los Angeles. At the time the most common term for the city’s inhabitants was “Los Angelean,” until the city council officially adopted “Angeleno”, based in the Spanish angeleño, at a time when tildes (and acute accents) were not readily available to American typesetters or typists. (A vestige of this lack is still found in crossword puzzles, where a clue like “Spanish year” is meant to refer to ano, the Spanish word for ‘anus’.)

Spanish has many possible endings for what in that language are called gentilicios (the corresponding English word “gentilic” is not widely used, nor is the alternative “demonym”). Besides -eño there are -ino, -ano, -ense, -esano (these last two often appended to a Latinized version of the place-name), -és, -ero (especially common in the Caribbean region), -í and possibly others. Thus, the people of the Andalusian cities of Sevilla, Granada, Córdoba and Málaga are known respectively as sevillanos, granadinos, cordobeses and malagueños. An inhabitant of Havana (La Habana) is habanero, which is also the name of a variety of chili pepper (the strange American habit of calling it “habañero” — tilde overkill! –  notwithstanding).

But the ending most likely to be used when the base is a common noun is -eño. So, while the people of Buenos Aires are formally known as bonaerenses (Latin!), the more usual term is porteños, based on the fact that the city is a port (puerto).  In the Spanish town of El Palmar (palmar = palm grove), the inhabitants are palmareños. And those of the Colombian city of El Cerrito (cerrito = little hill) are, naturally enough, cerriteños. There must be some cerriteños somewhere in Spain as well, since Cerriteño exists as a surname.

The reason that angeleño was available as the basis for Angeleno was that Los Angeles was the seat of a Franciscan mission, and it was common practice in the 19th century to name Indian tribes for the nearest mission – thus Diegueños (San Diego), Luiseños (San Luis Rey), Juaneños (San Juan Capistrano), Gabrielinos (San Gabriel) and so on. But, to my knowledge, only Los Angeles took advantage of this practice to name its inhabitants.

If the people of Los Gatos choose to call themselves Los Gatans, rather than Gateños (as the people of Gata in Spain’s Cáceres province are called), that isn’t my business. But for myself, I would rather be a Cerriteño than an El Cerritan.

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.

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?