35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
(whence also English nether) + the zero-grade of the root *sed- (“to sit”) (whence also English sit).
(source)
Martin further suggested that "Gnaizdo" probably comes from a toponym and cited "Swallow's Nest" in Crimea (Ukrainian: Ластівчи́не гніздо́, romanized: Lastivchýne hnizdó; Russian: Ласточки́но гнездо́, romanized: Lastochkíno gnezdó)
So where did that initial "g" of "gnaizda" come from? I surmise that somehow it was picked up from Germanic, which does have words beginning with "gn-" (e.g., "gnat", "gnit", "gnaw", "gnash"); cf. "kn-" words, which are plenteous in Germanic.
It's interesting that it was the initial "gn-" cluster that strongly attracted my attention in the first place. It looked Germanic, but it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the word. Selected readings
* "Whimsical surnames" (3/16/24)
* "Ukrainian at the edge" (10/30/22)
[Thanks to Peter Golden and Mehmet Olmez]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: foolhardy
This word has appeared in 26 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
uncool
not good, not acceptable, not fashionable
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
wait around
If you have to wait around for something, you have to wait a long time for it.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: Delicately Poised – 2024 Champions League Quarter Finals
Читать полностью…
Idiom of the Day
in the circumstances
Due to the conditions or particular situation; such as the case is. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
trawler
Definition: (noun) A fishing boat that uses a trawl net or dragnet to catch fish.
Synonyms: dragger.
Usage: The fisherman boarded the trawler at four in the morning.
Discuss
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ccentuation (or whatever it is) of donc in the first phrase, and focus on the adjectives tous or toutes in the final four phrases. Aligned pitch tracks are given below, and you can hear and see that in each case, the word tous or toutes is "focused", in some sense of that term:
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4A.png Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4B.png Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4C.png Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4D.png Is this just "emphasis"? Or is it indicating the choice of all rather than some or most?
Could the reader have placed the "focus" in those phrases on cours, prétoires, jurys, justices? If she had done so, how would it change the meaning?
I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of French to be sure — but I believe that in an English translation with a similar sequence of phrases, my choice would matter:
… all the courts, all the tribunals, all the juries, all the justice systems
… all the courts, all the tribunals, all the juries, all the justice systems
And I imagine that the French situation is similar.
[Note: this post's title is the common version of what André Gide is said to have said when asked to name the greatest French poet — for more on the folklore and the facts, see Justin O'Brien, "Hugo,-hélas!", French Review 1964.]
[Also, Beth Ann's Lewis Carroll quotes — and a lot of other good stuff — can be found in Chapter VI of Through the Looking Glass.]
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Language Log
Two brushes in one hand — virtuoso calligraphy
Mind-boggling!
Selected readings
* "Robot calligraphy" (12/27/19)
* "Robot philosopher-calligrapher" (5/6/22)
[h.t. shaing tai]
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Idiom of the Day
follow (someone or something) in stride
To follow the direction, lead, or guidance (of someone or something); to act in accordance (with someone or something); to follow suit. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
panpipe
Definition: (noun) A primitive wind instrument consisting of several parallel pipes bound together.
Synonyms: syrinx, pandean pipe.
Usage: When his parents refused to buy him an instrument, the industrious ten-year-old fashioned himself a makeshift panpipe out of string and some pieces of dried bamboo he found in the garage.
Discuss
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ny drugs from India, Persia and Central Asia; that the 16th century was in the midst of a massive influx of silver and goods via South East Asia and the Philippines; and that the 18th century was when European missionary medicine began to enter China. Already from this simple timeline one can put together a potted history of the use of cloves in traditions other than the Chinese, the likely periods and vectors of contact, and use this as a framework for further research.
This project on traditional Asian drug names is a good example of how DH is capable of unlocking, unleashing, and conveniently organizing vast bodies of previously undigested raw data. Selected readings
* "The language of spices" (1/6/24)
* Gábor Parti,“Mapping the Language of Spices: A Corpus-Based, Philological Study on the Words of the Spice Domain", Sino-Platonic Papers, 338 (Jan. 2024), 1-243.
* "Asafoetida: Satanically stinky spice" (12/10/23)
* "Garbler of spices" (8/21/22)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Sophia Benoit Prefers To Read Than Watch (Bless These Braces) #podcast #funnyordie
"When I see people sometimes they depress me." Sophia Benoit explains why there are some things she'd rather read than watch on this week's Bless These Braces with Tam Yajia.
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Idiom of the Day
in (someone's) wheelhouse
In, related to, or matching someone's general interests, abilities, or area of familiarity; in someone's comfort zone. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
surfactant
Definition: (noun) A chemical agent capable of reducing the surface tension of a liquid in which it is dissolved.
Synonyms: wetting agent, surface-active agent, wetter.
Usage: She ordered a new pair of glasses and had the lenses coated with a surfactant that would act as an anti-fogging agent.
Discuss
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Language Log
Nest: a rare and perplexing surname
By chance, I came across the surname "Gnaizda". Its phonological configuration puzzled me for a while, but then I began to formulate hypotheses about its origin. I briefly thought that it might have been Semitic and considered the possibility that it was cognate with "genesis". It was easy to rule out "genesis", though, because that goes back to the PIE root *gene- ("give birth, beget").
Rather than making stabs in the dark about what language Gnaizda might derive from, I thought it would be more sensible to search for individuals with that surname and see whether there were any pertinent biographical, genealogical, or onomastic information available about them.
The most prominent Gnaizda I found was the civil justice advocate, Robert Gnaizda (1936-2020), who was the General Counsel and Policy Director for the Greenlining Institute based in Berkeley, California. There are many references to him on the internet. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on Robert Gnaizda does not provide any etymological information about his surname.
Here's what l could glean from various sources. Robert Gnaizda, the civil rights attorney, passed away in 2020 at age 83. His grandfather was a Russian Jew (from what's now Ukraine) who came through Ellis Island sometime between 1900 and 1910. At the time he didn't speak English, probably only Russian and Yiddish. Upon settling in Brooklyn, the family surname was Gnaizda, but I have not been able to find a record of that surname in Russia or in the Ellis Island records from that decade. I have no idea how the family ended up with that name. There was nothing else for me to do but forge ahead as best as I could on my own.
I was familiar with the Hebrew word "genizah", since Penn houses many volumes of the famous Cairo Genizah, which was discovered in 1896. Moreover, two scholars associated with Penn were awarded MacArthur Fellowships to work on the Cairo Genzah manuscripts, Shelomo D. Goitein in 1983 and Marina Rustow in 2015.
I suspected that "genizah" was an expansion from a hypothetical Semitic triconsontal root g-n-z, and it turns out I was right:
From Hebrew גְּנִיזָה (g'nizá, “archiving, preservation, storage; hiding; genizah”) (plural גְּנִיזוֹת (g'nizót)), from Old Persian *ganzam, from Old Median *ganǰam (“depository; treasure”).
(Wiktionary)
The word genizah comes from the Hebrew triconsonantal root g-n-z, which means "to hide" or "to put away", from Old Median *ganza- (“depository; treasure”). The derived noun meant 'hiding' and later a place where one put things, and is perhaps best translated as "archive" or "repository".
(Wikipedia)
Though it was fun researching the etymology of "genizah", I decided not to pursue it as the source of Gnaizda because, among other reasons, I couldn't determine how, within Hebrew, it acquired suffix -da nor how initial consonant cluster gn- arose within Hebrew.
Martin Schwartz called my attention to Russian "gnezdo гнездо" and Polish "gniazdo", both of which mean "nest".
Here's the etymology of the Russian word:
From Old East Slavic гнѣздо (gnězdo), from Proto-Slavic *gnězdo, from Proto-Balto-Slavic *nisdá, from Proto-Indo-European *nisdós.
(source)
Here's the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European root *nisdós:
From the adverb *h₁ni (“down”), from *h₁én (“in”), + the root *sed- (“sit”) + *-ós. Literally "where [the bird] sits down".
(source)
Cf. English "nest":
From Middle English nest, nist, nyst, from Old English nest, from Proto-West Germanic *nest, from Proto-Germanic *nestą, from Proto-Indo-European *nisdós (“nest”), literally "where [the bird] sits down", a compound of *ni (“down”)[...]
Idiom of the Day
in the eye of (something)
At, in, or amidst the central or focal point of something. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
portent
Definition: (noun) An indication of something important or calamitous about to occur.
Synonyms: omen, prognostication, presage, prodigy.
Usage: The soldier looked to the sky for a portent and was gripped with fear when he read his future in the clouds.
Discuss
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Language Log
LÀ encore…
Continuing my anecdotal exploration of "focus"-like phenomena in French, I dove into a random point in the middle of a random Radio France podcast ("Libre Pensée – L’Europe, l’Union européenne et les élections européennes", 4/14/2024). And within a few seconds, I heard this, where the apparent "focus" on là caught my attention:
Euh mais pour bien comprendre il faut là encore revenir à l'histoire —
décidément nous faisons un peu un cours d'histoire aujourd'hui
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(Google translation for those who need it…)
Zeroing in a bit:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X1A.png The performance of "LÀ encore" (= "THERE again") in that phrase contributed the title of this post, for an obvious reason. Note that in addition to the higher pitch and louder amplitude, là also has about 100 msec of glottalized onset.
The following phrase lacks any obvious "focus"-like elements, but does illustrate some extreme lenition phenomena — more on French lenition in the future…
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X1B.png A little bit later in the same podcast, we get
Certains peuvent le penser.
Mais là encore, je pense que le mieux c'est euh de se rapporter
à la fois à l'histoire et à des faits précis.
L'histoire d'abord.
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(The Google Translate version)
Phrase by phrase, again:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X2A.png Interestingly, here "là encore" is mostly backgrounded, with "là" short, soft, and low in pitch, while "encore" just has the more-or-less obligatory medial-phrase-final rise.
In the next phrase, à la fois and et have the kind of parallel-marking "focus" we saw before with toutes/tous…
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X2B.png And in the last phrase, histoire seems to get a strong prosodic "focus":
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X2C.png Random anecdotes like these are easy to find, and confirm my impression that French speakers make frequent communicative use of the prosodic features — duration, pitch, amplitude — that are associated with (the many meanings of) the term "focus" in languages like English.
That's not to say that French prosodic "focus" is the same as English prosodic "focus". But we'll never learn what's going on if we continue to maintain the fiction that prosodic "focus" doesn't exist in French.
One final note on possible universality. On one hand, these prosodic features are iconic — we are not going to find a language where emphasis, contrast, novelty, etc., are signaled by shorter duration, lower pitch and amplitude, more co-articulation, etc. However, these features are modulations of the basic prosodic systems of the language in question, as we can see clearly in a tone language like Mandarin Chinese, where we have a good idea of what patterns are being modulated. And there do seem to be languages (or varieties) where the uses of such modulations are much more restricted. The dimensions of the relevant typology are mostly unknown — or rather, have been presented in various radically over-simplified and empirically empty ways.
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Language Log
Fish-in-fish matryoshka sinoglyph
Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/fishinfish.jpg
It's cute, clever, fun, but do the Chinese need it as part of their bloated (!) writing system?
Does Unicode need this inessential / nonessential / unessential sinoglyph as part of the world's functional writing systems?
Selected reading
* "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24)
* "Another "variant" character" (4/7/24)
* "Polysyllabic sinoglyphs" (4/11/24)
* "The economics of Chinese character usage" (9/2/11)
* "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
* "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (10/9/20) — with an extremely lengthy bibliography
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
narc | nark
a narcotics officer, a police officer working in drug trade suppression
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rope in
If somebody ropes you in, they persuade you to do something you don't really want to do.
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Language Log
Victor Hugo, hélas
Focus is perhaps the single most perniciously ambiguous word in the field of linguistics. In Beth Ann Hockey's 1998 dissertation, "The interpretation and realization of focus: an experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian", she wrote:
Linguists have associated the word “focus” with a wide variety of phenomena. In addition a wealth of other terms including “new,” “emphasis,” “stress,” “rheme,” “comment,” “accented,” “prominent,” “informative” and “contrast” have been attached singly or in combination to phenomena that seem to be the same as, similar to or overlapping with those that have been called focus.
Beth Ann quotes a few relevant passages from Lewis Carroll, including
‘That's a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’
The other day, a talk about perception of prosodic "focus" by French and English adults and children reminded me of this ambiguity. It also brought up an issue that I've been wondering about for more than 50 years, since Jacqueline Vaissière half-persuaded me that French lacks any prosodic signaling of "focus". I expressed this half-persuasion in "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011, where I wrote
There are some languages (e.g. French) where intonational focus apparently doesn't exist, at least not in the same way as in English. Instead, I'm told, speakers must use cleft constructions ("C'est X qui Y") or other re-phrasing in order to do the things that English speakers can do with intonation alone, such as to adapt a proposition in response to different possible questions, or to underline a parallel contrast.
Because I sometimes hear native speakers of French using what seems to me like intonational focus — sometimes combined with syntactic methods for signaling information structure, and sometimes not — I've wondered whether intonational focus might be stigmatized in standard spoken French, rather than completely absent. But I accept that some things that English speakers are happy to do with intonation are really impossible in French, for example focusing or contrasting prepositions or verbal auxiliaries: "It's *under* the box (not *top* of it)"; "It *was* there (but now it's gone)".
And a few years later, a few of us proved that French speakers encode corrective focus in number strings prosodically, just like speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese do, but unlike speakers of Korean and Japanese (Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE-ICASSP 2015).
Corrective substitution (e.g. "3 1 5 6" in place of mis-heard or mis-remembered "3 1 9 6" is only one of the many things that the word "focus" is used for; and "focus" on one number in a string is a case where there are no easy syntactic solutions. So this is just one small skirmish in the larger "prosodic focus in French?" battle, which in turn is just part of the "prosodic theory" campaign in the "communicative intention" wars.
But anyhow, this encouraged me to finally look for "focus" in some samples of actual French talk. Or at least at one sample — I went to LibriVox, and randomly picked a reading of Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.
I noticed a relevant example in the second sentence of the preface — but a couple of paragraphs later, there's a sentence with a whole bunch of them:
Il le déclare donc, et il le répète, il occupe, au nom de tous les accusés possibles, innocents ou coupables, devant toutes les cours, tous les prétoires, tous les jurys, toutes les justices.
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(If your French is not up to the job, I'll turn you over to Google Translate, which is close enough…)
Let's skip the de-a[...]
Language Log
A very noisy channel
From Breffni O'Rourke:
I thought you might appreciate this effort by Dall.E. The prompt was "Create a diagram of Shannon and Weaver's model of communication."
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShannonWeaverFiction.jpeg
That image is a totally incoherent representation of the "noisy channel model", pictured in a more helpful way in Claude Shannon's 1948 monograph A Mathematical Theory of Communication:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/NoisyChannel1948.png
And a version with some added color can be found in the Wikipedia article on "The Shannon-Weaver Model".
Breffni's comment:
Among other things, it's interesting to see what it's done with the text, which I guess it's treating as a purely visual element, maybe analogously to 'decorative English'.
I'm not sure — my guess was that Dall.E found a lot of web text related to the model, and some relevant images, but totally and completely failed to understand the basic ideas. Then again, maybe it's better viewed as a somewhat creative hallucination.
Of course humans can also get things wrong. The Wikipedia "Noisy Channel Model" article weirdly fails to mention Shannon or his 1948 monograph, which is kind of like an Easter article referencing egg hunts, peeps, and chocolate bunnies, while omitting Jesus and the bible.
More from Breffni:
On the other hand, Dall-E seems to be able to generate images from text explicitly given in the prompt "Can you make me a visual of the words Shannon and Weaver in the style of a neon sign?" I should have put quotes around "Shannon and Weaver", but it handled that ambiguity creatively":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShannonWeaverNeon.png
See "Noisily channeling Claude Shannon" (8/6/2012) for a bit more background.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
joint (1)
a place where people can eat, or drink, or be entertained
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fall off
to become less in amount or lower in level
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Language Log
Digital Humanities for the study of traditional Asian medicines
A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions of Traditional Medicine".
This is a richly detailed article with many links and citations. I will not attempt to cover, much less extensively quote, lengthy portions. Instead, I will begin with the authors' general introduction, note the main sections of the article, refer to the graphs, and quote one typical section to show what the authors' approach can accomplish. Introduction
Digital Humanities is akin to “critical thinking,” so vaunted in the humanities, because it allows us to reinterpret existing primary materials in new ways, according to researchers’ critical interests. These unanticipated new discoveries are somewhat akin to “discovering” existing archaeological materials “in the basement” of museums and archives—already there in the record, but previously unnoticed, quietly waiting to be brought to the fore.
One fundamental way DH does this is by allowing us to re-index old materials in entirely new ways. Mining old texts and organising them according to critical interest is much more powerful than simple “comprehensive” or arithmetic summaries that reiterate old assumptions. It offers the potential to re-discover the past, to re-organise materials and explore them in different ways, making new connections, even without generating “new” information.
The Polyglot Asian Medicine investigates the history of Asian drugs using a philological orientation, by transforming print and manuscript publications into machine-actionable data.In this way it develops new ways to interact with the ancient past, connect it with the lived present, and possibly shape the future development of heritage medicines.
In this post I describe how we modelled the interconnections between different domains of knowledge using tabular data initially, and produced a knowledge graph which allows users to search, navigate, and explore them to make novel discoveries. The digital medium is far more effective than print for reproducing the philological sophistication of local knowledge systems, while also allowing for links to rigorous, valid, modern scientific data. Through modelling and interconnecting different knowledge styles, we can begin to unpack the problems of the current state of ethnopharmacology – the lack of simplistic standardisation of these systems is not a bug, it is a feature. The power of interlinked data and digital multi-media is that they allow us to connect these knowledge scenes without degradation of indigenous knowledge styles. Sections
Verified and Updated Species
Accounting for Pluralism with Critical Philology
Reconstructing Multiple Ontologies with a Knowledge Graph
New Ways to Explore Historical Name Data
Data Confirmation Five graphs and tables, including Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph and emphasizing Synonymy
The authors introduce
an entirely novel way to research the entry of new drugs into the Chinese pharmacopoeic tradition. For example, we can discover the introduction of different uses of the same species, cloves [dīngxiāng 丁香], over time:
Fruit (母丁香): 5th Century 雷公炮製輪
Seed (丁子香): 6th Century 齊民要術
Bark 丁香樹皮: 8th Century 海藥本草
Root 丁香根: 11th Century 開寶本草
Twigs 丁香枝: 16th Century 本草綱目
Essential Oil 丁香油/丁香露: 18th Century 藥性考/本草拾遺
Readers sensitive to the historiography of Chinese medicine will recognise the 8th century Haiyao bencao 海藥本草 which introduced ma[...]
Language Log
Feeling wet
Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet". At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?" "Yes," she said, "wet". I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in the morning and how that would prevent her from doing exercises.
We wouldn't use the English word "wet" to describe a morning condition that would discourage us from doing exercises, so I tried to think of other related words (synonyms or near-synonyms for "wet") that would work better. "Logy"? "sodden"? "heavy"? But I couldn't come up with any equivalent words that would fit the bill. I specifically was disinclined to choose the word "shī 濕", which literally does mean "wet", but didn't believe that's what she meant because it would signify something like "drenched", "dripping", "soaked", not a systemic condition of the body, unless it means something in traditional Chinese medicine that I'm not aware of.
I puzzled over this conundrum for a while without making any significant progress, so today I sent her an e-mail asking the following question: "What Chinese word / concept did you have in mind when you said you felt 'wet' in the morning"?
She promptly replied, "When I say 'wet', it means 'shī 濕'（cháoshī de 潮濕的 ['moist, damp'], shīrùn de 濕潤的 ['wet, humid']) in Chinese, or in English I may say 'moist', 'humid', or 'damp' instead."
I almost fell through the floor.
See the "Selected readings" below.
Selected readings
* "Moist aversion: The twitter thread" (4/28/20) — with nearly a score of earlier LLOG posts on word aversion and related phenomena, some bordering on the scandalous
Here are a couple of additional posts that I dug up on my own:
* "Wet turban needless wash" (8/5/08)
* "The mystery of "mouthfeel'" (11/2/16)
If you look at the entries in this google search, you will find that studies on the phenomenon of "moist aversion" worked their way out from Language Log to the broader internet.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
beef
a conflict with someone; a complaint against someone
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
write up
to write a report or an article based on notes written earlier
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