Another Turin

Well, it turns out next to no one actually stresses the second syllable of Turin. 'Cept me. But the Columbia Encyclopedia, that great arbiter, backs me up by allowing it as the third of three variant pronunciations. This reminds me of the time when a friend pointed out that I am the only person who voices the "s" in episode. Merriam Webster was on my side, but in all honesty I've been listening for someone else to say 'epizode' for two years now and have yet to hear it.

But I think that part of why I'd never noticed "TURin" before was because the broadcasters have adopted a new pronunciation: /'tɝən/, as opposed to /'turin/. I must have heard the latter my whole life, and, without the vowel reductions to guide me, I misheard stress on the final syllable. Weird.

Anyways, it seems I'm behind the times, and that the real fight is over Turin/Torino, a fight that was started by the mixed signals sent by the IOC, who advise that the games be called Torino 2006, but the city should be called Turin. Their preference for Torino for the name of the games? A marketing decision -- they felt it sounded all cool and Italiany. Missing from the often heated debate was any mention of the fact that the Piedmontese name of the city is Turin. My guess is that no one noticed this because the language has seen better days; according to the Wikipedia article on the subject:

In 2004, Piedmontese was recognised as Piedmont's regional language by the regional administration, although the Italian government does not recognise it. In theory it is now supposed to be taught to children in school, but this is happening only in a limited way... The current state of Piedmontese is quite grave, as over the last 150 years the number of people with a written knowledge of the language has shrunk to about 13% of native speakers, according to a recent survey Efforts to make it one of the official languages of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics were unsuccessful.

Unlike the article's author, I don't equate a language's vitality with its official recognition or its literacy rate, or whether it is "taught to children in school" -- after all, a non-moribund language doesn't have to be taught to children; they already know it. But I think that what the article's author is trying to get at is that overall Piedmontese is giving way to Italian. I know very little about Italian languages, so I don't know if this is actually true, but if it is it would explain why everyone has been saying that Torino is the "local name" of the city.

Stress and the Olympics

I haven't had a chance to watch any Olympic events yet, but I have heard some highlights on NPR. The real highlight for me, though, is the pronunciation of the place where they are happening. You know, Turin. With the stress on the first syllable. Which is news to me. Although I haven't had much occasion to speak of the town, I always put the stress on the last syllable, i.e. "Shroud of Turin." Shroud of Turin? Can't say I've heard that before, though I'd hate to give in to what the Language Log folks have taken to calling the Recency Illusion. So I'm not going to say that it's a new pronunciation, although I think it is newly dominant.

In doing a bit of research for this post I found an interesting article by Jay Nordlinger in the National Review. It is, of course, cranky and conservative, whereas I am merely cranky. Nordlinger rails against the growing tendency of Anglophone media folks to call the place by its Italian name. "Katie Couric may swing with 'Torino,'" writes Nordlinger, "but ... she probably wouldn't refer back to the (horrendous) 'München' Olympics. Nor would she pretend that the 2004 Summer Games will be held in 'Athena.'"

A good point. But Turin is not like other idiosyncratic English toponyms for foreign cities. Although English tends to be particularly idiosyncratic when it comes to Italy (think of Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, Rome, and of course Leghorn), 'Turin' is not just Anglophones being dense; it's the local (Piemontese) name of the place. So Nordlinger really has a right to complain about 'Torino.' Me, I'm not complaining about Turin; I've got other things to worry about, nor do I object to the pronunciation; I'm no prescriptivist. I'm just curious why 'Turin' is suddenly ascendant, especially since it violates one of Richard Janda's rules of Foreignese, which is that stress is usually the last syllable.

Nordlinger sheds some light on this situation, I believe. He notes that the respective pronunciations of Kabul and Qatar have now become, according to his transcription, "Cobble" and "Gutter;" that is, the stress has moved to the first syllable, accompanied by typical English vowel reductions. Maybe when a foreign city is suddenly thrust into prominence in the news, there is an anti-Foreignese backlash, and the pronunciation gets a fresh coating (and usually a thin one) of Authenticity thrown on it. I remember in 1989-1991 when, along with dropping the definite article from Ukraine (something I always forget to do and always get in trouble for) newscasters started saying "Lithwania." This tendency, then, explains the rise of both 'Turin' and 'Torino;' the former is the anti-Foreignese stress shift, and the latter is an appeal to authenticity.

Nilsson, Newman, Coptic, and other stuff like that

Although Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman have always been heroes of mine, I only just got "Nilsson Sings Newman," the album where (surprise) Harry Nilsson sings Randy Newman songs. It's typical of Nilsson -- he's an amazing songwriter in his own proverbial right. Indeed, in a 1968 Beatles press conference, both Lennon and McCartney named him as their favorite American musician. At the time he was working at a bank. As a former bank employee myself I can only imagine the Monday morning office talk: "So, how was your weekend?" "Oh, pretty good. The Beatles told the press I was their favorite musician. And Ifinally cleaned out the fridge." Yet in spite ofhis formidable songwriting ability he was always eager to record other people's material, with the effect that now he is now known mostly for singing other people's songs, (like Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" and Badfinger's "Without You"). But for an accomplished and rising songwriter to dedicate an entire album to another songwriter's songs speaks both to the quality of the material and the discernment of the performer. I've been listening to this album so much that it's given me severe insomnia, exacerbated by a looming conference paper, which, incidentally, is reducing the frequency of my postings. Overall, though, I've had a small epiphany about the album, which has made me rethink Newman's entire oeuvre, although it hasn't diminished my considerable regard for it.

All the Newman songs Nilsson records can be compared against Newman's own (hey, how 'bout that) versions. I tend to prefer the Nilsson versions, but only slightly. Why? Well, they aren't as nasty. Randy Newman has a way of singing a song that makes it sound almost diabolic in its cynicism. That's why many fans are so alienated by his Disney soundtrack stuff; if "You've Got A Friend In Me" were in "12 Songs" or "Sail Away" it would sound like a stinging denunciation of the institution of Friendship Itself, as opposed to cute Disney stuff. But Newman songs, though his sings them ironically, are decidedly sweet, and Nilsson's sweet voice brings this out. Nilsson's recording of "Love Story" is an idyllic portrait of the simple joys of life, whereas Newman's version exposes the sad hopelessness of those who hope for even humble pleasures. The lyrics, mind you, are the same. It's just Newman's voice that makes everything he sings sound, well, nasty. Nilsson's innovation was to peel back the nasty layer and reveal the sweetness underneath. Newman collaborated on the album; it's basically a duet between Nilsson, who sings, and Newman, who plays piano. As such I think that Newman must not have objected to having his ironic songs sung unironically. It makes me wonder, then, whether I've misunderstood Newman all these years; if he couldn't help sounding biting even when he wanted to sound earnest. It's a definite possibility. Me, I've got the opposite problem; everything I sing sounds earnest, even when I don't want it to. Once I sang Newman's song "Sail Away," and someone said, "That's such a hopeful song!" In fact, it's in the voice of a slaver cynically extolling the virtues of American slavery to Africans. But somehow I made it sound hopeful. Go figure.

In a decent New Yorker article on the figure of Mary Magdalene, Joan Acocella makes an odd mistake. Discussing a cache of texts found in the desert in Egypt, she describes Coptic as "an early form of Egyptian." It is, in fact, the absolute latest form of Egyptian. I'm not hear to rail against Acocella or the copyeditors at the New Yorker; everyone makes mistakes. I mention it because it is hard to imagine how this particular mistake happened. Perhaps it is due to ignorance of the fact that the modern inhabitants of Egypt do not speak Egyptian. Of course the texts, being Christian texts, are from the Common Era, and that the history of Egypt goes a wee bit back from there. Though I never underestimate the amount of ignorance in the world, I have trouble believing that Joan Acocella doesn't know that they speak Arabic in Egypt and also has never heard of the pyramids or hieroglyphics. Here's how I imagine, instead, that this mistake came about, and I'm proud of the theory, which is why I share it now.

She originally had written "late form of Egyptian," and some editor down the pipeline thought, "That'll just confuse readers; how could it be late if it's ancient?" and changed "late" to "early." This makes more sense to me. So I'm not going to foam at the mouth or rail against declining standards, although you can, if you want.

Benjamin Franklin: Talmudist

There's a saying in Yiddish that is based on a Talmudic aphorism: "A word to the wise is enough."

Sound familiar? That's because Benjamin Franklin said the same thing, most famously in his 1758 essay "The Way to Wealth," an essay which is basically a compendium of Poor Richard's sayings strung together. This implies that there is an earlier instance of the phrase in the Franklin corpus, but I don't feel like doing the research to find it.

So does this mean that Benjamin Franklin read the Talmud? Of course not. It doesn't even imply that his use of the phrase has any connection to the Talmud. A clever phrase like that can be invented multiple times, because people are clever. Almost makes you believe in universal human nature, don't it?

I tried to find the Talmudic instance of the phrase and failed, which I don't feel too bad about; after all, the Talmud is traditionally compared to the sea, meaning basically that it is huge. In my search I employed a clever technique, which, though ultimately unsuccesful, led me on an interesting journey, the highlights of which I will now share.

My clue in this search was a bit of information given to me by me colleague Naomi Kadar - "Whoever passes on a teaching in the name of the person who said it brings freedom to the world" - Pirke Avot 6:6. (Ironically, this saying isn't attributed.) She said that the maxim in full is "A word to the wise is sufficient, but for a fool not even a stick helps," and that the word for stick is קונדס, which has come to mean "prankster" in Yiddish. One of the two rival American Yiddish humor magazines in the early twentieth century was called דער גרױסער קונדס, "The Big Prankster," but the English title on the masthead was "The Big Stick," which I always found puzzling, but which this bit of information clarified.

So using this information, I went to Jastrow - that is, to Marcus Jastrow's legendary Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, hoping to get what is known in the yeshiva as a Jastrow Double - a citation of the very passage that sent you to the damn dictionary in the first place. No luck. I learned, not surprisingly, that this is one of many words of Talmudic Aramaic that are not Semitic in origin, which you can tell from the word itself. It comes from the Greek κοντός, which refers to a cavalry lance used particularly on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. Cognates exist in Latin, Hungarian, Turkish and Arabic. All of Jastrow's citations, however, seemed to have to do not with lances, but with poles, and specifically poles used to hold things up, such as wedding canopies and eruvin (boundaries used to turn large areas into "homes," within which the Sabbath restriction on carrying is looser) and in one instance some unfortunate individual's head and hands. It seemed a little odd, though not impossible, that the sense would be so different in the Talmud, but then I remembered that Naomi said that the form of the word was קונדסא, which made sense, since in Aramaic a א at the end of a word is often a definite article. Jastrow does indeed have the word קונדסא, but it is a unit of measurement used for artichokes. Seriously.The word is a corruption of קינרס "artichoke," from the Greek κινάρες (accusative plural), cognate with the word for 'artichoke' in many languages, and familiar to me from my days working in a liquor store, where we sold (though no one bought) Cynar, an Italian apero (bitter apéritif) flavored with artichokes.

At this point I'm tempted to say something flaky about the journey being more important than the destination, although I generally hate stuff like that. So instead I'll quote the Franklin aphorism in full, which like its Talmudic counterpart, has a rarely quoted second part:

"A word to the wise is enough, and many words won't fill a bushel."

And on that note:

"Of making of books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Ecclesiastes 12:12.

A Postscript

Wikipedia gives the following Latin versions of the saying:

Terence Phormio, IIII.3: Verbum sat sapienti.
Plautus Pseudolus, Act I.1: Dictum sapienti sat est.
Thomas à Kempis Imitation of Christ (c.1481), 3.34: Intelligenti satis dictum est.

Franklin could have gotten it from any of these. Or made it up himself. In fact, the Talmud could have gotten it from either of the first two. Goddammit. I wrote my damn BA thesis on the possibility of Greco-Roman influences on the Talmud, and I never knew about this. Just goes to show you: you can't spell "blah blah blah" without BA. Or "a bad grad student" without ABD.

On the other hand, this supports a pet theory of mine that most famous quotations usually have countless antecedents. I have a number of other theories about famous quotations, which will be the subject of my next post, unless anyone has any requests.

What's Been Utzing Me

One of my favorite topics is the peculiar character of English words of Yiddish origin. Nearly all have a different meaning in English than in Yiddish (my sole publication is on this topic), and nearly all have a sort of goofiness or subtlety to them, even if the Yiddish words they come from are completely quotidian. A few examples:

E: shlep: to carry something one doesn't want to carry
Y: shlepn: to drag

E: shmooze: to chat idly
Y: shmuesn: to converse

E: kvetsh: to complain in an annoying way
Y: kvetshn: to squeeze, press or oppress

I'm convinced this contributes to the myth that Yiddish is a particularly nuanced or funny language, since these English words are indeed nuanced and funny.

But then there are those words which everyone insists come from Yiddish, even when no similar Yiddish words exist. I've gotten in a number of arguments over the provenance of futz, schlemiel and shmo. I concede that the second is Jewish in origin, but it simply doesn't exist in what I call Yiddish, i.e. the modern vernacular of Jews in Eastern Europe.

I used to think that I grew up knowing all the Jewish-English vocabulary in common use among non-religious American Jews, but after moving to New York, I've encountered a few supposedly Yiddish-origin English words that I'd never heard either in Yiddish or English. One of these is the verb "utz," pronounced /ʌts/ -- a word New Yorkers with even a minimal exposure to Jewish culture tend to know, as far as I can tell. A little research (okay, googling) revealed that this word's origins were usually described as "Yiddish, from German uzen, to tease." Aside from the specious "Yiddish, from German," there is a problem with this etymology, which is that there is no such word in Yiddish.

Or so I thought. I looked at the Yiddish equivalent of the OED, the incomplete Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, and found the word אוצן, meaning "to tease." With two citations. Both from books printed in what is now Germany -- one in Fuerth and the other in Frankfurt. Here they are:

דו שרײַבשׂ ... גלײַך דו ... פֿיל מאל גישריבן העשׂט ער הלטן ... דו קאנסט אונז ניט אוצין
-י. מאַרשן, חנוך לנער, פֿיורדא 1774

זאָ װערד מער אינס חדר געאוצט
-טענדלאַו, 769

Anyone who knows Yiddish will recognize that both quotations are in "West Yiddish," whose relation to Yiddish is complex and controversial. What I can assert is that this shows the word never existed in East Yiddish. Yet in English it remains a Jewish word, suggesting that it was brought here by German or West Yiddish speaking Jews (probably the former), whose key role in the establishment of Jewish institutions in America had long-lasting effects on the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews who came later and eventually outnumbered their Central European predecessors by at least tenfold. If this is so, it is not the only such word. Others include the above-mentioned "schlemiel," and the noun "nebbish." Speaking of "nebbish," another bit of Jewish English I never heard outside of New York is "nebekh" as a noun.

I am fairly certain that "utzing" does indeed come from either German uzen or West Yiddish/Jewish German אוצן, even though there is a semantic shift from "to tease" to "to annoy." But such a semantic shift is not unprecedented, nor is it improbable. What is somewhat harder to account for is the vowel shift from /uts/ to /ʌts/. I tend to be skeptical of etymologies that rely on such a vowel change. Prominent among such etymologies is the one that traces English "shmuck" to German schmuck, "jewelry." But it is not the vowel change that makes this etymology impossible, but rather that the immediate source, Yiddish שמאָק couldn't be cognate with German schmuck because of the vowel. On the other hand, it is easy to see how the vowel in Yiddish /ʃmɔk/ resolves to English /ʃmʌk/. (In case you're wondering, the Yiddish word probably comes from a Slavic word meaning "snake.")

"Dope, Drink and Tonic" or "The Other Cola Wars"

I was raised by and around linguists, and thus heard murmurings regarding the competing merits of the words "pop" and "soda" throughout my childhood. I never paid them much heed; in fact I suspected it was a fake disagreement, like the University of Chicago's annual Latke-Hamantash debate, or perhaps some epiphenomenon of the then-raging Cola Wars. I thought to myself, "What's the big deal? They're both perfectly neutral and interchangeable terms."

Then I left the comforts of Chicago for college and was confronted by a dormitory full of Californians and Northeasterners who would howl with derision and displeasure any time I said "pop." Suddenly it occured to me that there was something to this matter. I asked around a little, discovered the (to me) surprising Southern use of "coke" as a generic term, as in "7-Up is my favorite kind of coke." Upon further reflection I realized that while "soda" struck me as a neutral term, one that I would never notice someone else using, I would never utter it myself. Ultimately I formed a more-or-less accurate mental map, with "coke" in the South, "soda" in the Northeast and California, and "pop" in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.

Fast forward to last year, when I found the following map, (which the Chocolate Lady mentioned in a recent comment):


Beautiful, isn't it? I should mention that maps are a lifelong passion; give me an atlas and I can stay happy and entertained for hours.

Why do I love this map so much? Mostly because the data is so clearly presented; you don't need any isoglosses artificially thrown in, especially in the East where population is dense and counties small. The quality and clarity of the data is all the more remarkable given the incredibly scientific sampling method: the data comes from a website that had a form for visitors to fill out. That's it. Such beauty from such humble origins. What this shows is that this is an entrenched lexical difference in American vernacular speech, and moreover one that involves frequently used words -- in classical American dialectology, the reliance upon obscure terms borders on the ridiculous: "What do you call an oblong barrel for fermenting barley in -- a jim-wheelie [That's the Midland term] or a huck-pot [the Southern one]?" Okay, I made that up. Anyways, whoever you are, wherever you're from, if you're American you use a word for sweet carbonated non-alcoholic beverages that reflects where you are from more than anything else.

A few remarks about the map itself. First off, the distribution of "coke" is an amazingly good indicator of southernness. Not only does it skip over the heart of Appalachia (West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky), but it includes the "Hoosier apex," that is, the part of southern Indiana that Hans Kurath considered a northerly outpost of Southern dialect. Furthermore, Maryland's Eastern Shore, the most culturally Southern part of the state is an isolated "coke" area. In contrast, the pop/soda isogloss does not fit neatly with any cultural isoglosses I know of. And as a pop-sayer myself, I look with pride on the grand stretch of blue from western New York all the way to Seattle.

Notice also the sort of indeterminate area in North Carolina where "soda" and "coke" meet. This is due to two different local terms, "dope" and "drink." I think this proves what I suspect Walt Wolfram of believing, that North Carolina is the weirdest part of the country, dialectologically speaking. That the Boston area has a lower percentage of "soda" sayers is due to another localism, "tonic." I asked a Bostonian friend if he knew the term, and he said, "Sure. Gym teachers say it." I think that's an interesting sociological observation right there. For my part, I always associated a strong Chicago dialect with car-salesmen. Though now that I think about it, gym teachers weren't far behind. I always thought that Coach Z talked exactly like a coach should. Then I realized he was supposed to have a Chicago accent.

Also noteworthy are the two "soda" islands in the Midwest, one in eastern Wisconsin and another in a large area roughly centered on St. Louis. I can only speculate about why they exist, but I can relate that people from these areas have told me that for them "soda" is a prestigious term that they associate with urbanites, while hicks say "pop." This makes sense, since the eastern Missouri/southwestern Illinois soda island radiates out from a major city (St. Louis), and eastern Wisconsin one divides the more urban, industrial eastern part of the state from the rural, agrarian west.

Finally, I think I now understand why I failed to see any real distinction between "soda" and "pop." While I was from the heart of the "pop" zone, I was exposed to mass American culture, which is produced in the "soda" saying lands of California and the Northeast. Thus "soda" seemed so acceptable to me that I didn't even know I didn't say it.

A footnote about Coach Z: although his Chicago dialect (or maybe just Inland Northern, though his dental fricatives do border on plosives) is not bad -- certainly not much worse than that of the Superfans -- the feature of his speech that gets the most attention is an exaggeration of a Midland one.

Caption Contest #37

"This isn't what we meant by trial in absentia."

A bit obvious, I know.