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?

There it (the New York Times) goes again!

Alexander Vinokourov is in the news again this week, first for his spectacular victories in Stages 13 (time trial) and 15 (Pyrenees) of the Tour de France, and again today because he was discovered to have benefited from an illegal blood transfusion. And once again the media, with the New York Times in the lead, refer to “Alexander Vinokourov, the Kazakh cyclist.”

When not dealing with Vinokourov, for the past few years media references to “Kazakh” have typically involved Borat. Now Borat Sagdiyev, the character invented and performed by Sacha Baron Cohen, is represented as a Kazakh, but in fact nothing about him has anything to do with the Kazakh people or Kazakhstan. His appearance, and that of the other supposedly Kazakh characters in the Borat film (most of whom are played by Romanians), is typically Southern European, and the supposedly Kazakh language that Borat speaks is in fact Hebrew. Real Kazakhs are Central Asians and their physical appearance is close to East Asian, or what in the United States is called simply Asian.

Vinokourov is blond and looks quite typically Russian. His name is Russian, as is his Russian Orthodox way of crossing himself. He is, in fact, a Kazakhstani Russian — that is, a citizen of Kazakhstan who is an ethnic Russian. Wikipedia gets it right by calling him “a Kazakhstani professional road bicycle racer.”

The fact that in Eastern and East Central Europe, and in most of Asia, nationality is defined by ethnicity and not by citizenship is something that the Western media seem to have a hard time with. I have written a number of essays on the subject. The issue affects me personally because I am a native of Poland, and my ancestors lived in Poland for hundreds of years, but my family and I are Polish Jews and we never regarded ourselves, nor were regarded by others (except ignorant Westerners), as Poles.

But there, again, goes the New York Times. In a recent article titled In Poland, a Jewish Revival Thrives — Minus Jews, the reporter, Craig S. Smith, tells us that “[b]efore Hitler’s horror… [o]ne in 10 Poles was Jewish.”

I sent Mr. Smith a message informing him of his error. Needless to say, there was no response. The high-and-mighty New York Times will publish misinformation, apologize for it if it is blatant enough, and keep on doing it. My nationality issue is minuscule when compared with Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I got a comment!

To my surprise, I got a comment within two days of my first post!

Manuel Romero disagrees with my statement that Michelle Rhee has (as I wrote, based on what I heard on NPR) “absolutely no management experience.” He asks me to “note that Michelle Rhee did not join The New Teacher Project but rather founded the non-profit in 1997 and was the CEO until she recently left for DC.”

Since, as I wrote, I knew nothing about Ms. Rhee, I did a little rudimentary fact-checking. I found on Wikipedia that “Michelle Rhee is [sic] the founder and President of The New Teacher Project.” I followed the link to The New Teacher Project’s Web site and discovered the Michelle Rhee’s name is nowhere to be found. The page giving the history says simply that “The New Teacher Project was formed in 1997.” Has Michelle Rhee’s name been purged, Soviet style, from the organization’s history? (I know that the Soviets didn’t invent the practice — Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors did it too.)

On the page describing the Leadership Team, Ariela Rozman is listed as the CEO and Timothy Daly as the President, so that the two positions are distinct; either Wikipedia or Mr. Romero is mistaken.

The descriptions of the positions don’t make it clear what the CEO’s functions are, but the current holder “began her six-year tenure… as Vice President of Marketing,” a position that seems no longer to exist. It also seems that “TNTP’s largest business line and a growing staff of over 60 individuals” are under the supervision of the Vice President of Teaching Fellows Programs, a position that was also held by Ms. Rozman.

What the President does is manage “TNTP’s efforts to engage the wider educational community in teacher quality reforms, including recruitment, selection, training, and staffing rules.”

Neither the CEO’s nor the President’s position seems to involve the kind of management that even remotely resembles the supervision of thousands of unionized employees and scores of thousands. So, once again, I say: Good luck, DC!

Glib self-promoters

Last Sunday, while I was driving north on Interstate 5 from Los Angeles to my home in Berkeley, I listened to an interview with Michelle Rhee, the newly appointed Chancellor of the District of Columbia Schools, on NPR’s All Things Considered. I had never heard of Michelle Rhee and of course knew nothing about her. But I think I know a glib self-promoter when I hear one, and what Ms. Rhee had to say about her background — which includes absolutely no management experience and is limited to three years of teaching in Baltimore before joining something called The New Teacher Project — left me no doubt. (You can hear the interview by clicking on the Listen icon here.) She says that she “took a group of kids who were very low-performing academically… taught them for two years… through their second- and third-grade year, and just saw incredible gains in their student achievements.” She does not say us how she achieved this miracle, but that after she spoke to a group of parents they went up to her to tell her “We believe in you!”

In the future I’m going to write more about the pernicious role that glib self-promoters have played in managing the United States’ educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. In the meantime, my word to the taxpayers and the parents of public-school students in Washington, DC, is “Good luck!”

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