Arnold Zwicky's Blog

This is going to take us surprising places. Our guide will be the distinguished Slavist Wayles Browne, in (edited) excerpts from e-mail he sent me on 10/9:

I discovered your blog when [WB’s Cornell colleague] Michael Weiss wrote about early attestations of the term ruki rule [in Sanskrit and elsewhere: see the 4/22/24 posting “On the transmission of ideas: RUKI gets around”]. Since then I’ve been looking at older postings as well as your day-to-day ones. On 1/9/14 [in the posting “A recent birthday”, on the birthday of Nikolai Marr], you wrote, after quoting this from Wikipedia:

Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four “diffused exclamations”: sal, ber, yon, rosh.

that

Marr eventually fell out of favor with Stalin.

Quite true, and there’s more to the story than that. After Marr died, his follower Ivan Meščaninov and others managed to get Marrism accepted as the official Marxist approach to linguistics, but finally in 1950 a Georgian linguist went to his fellow-Georgian Stalin and persuaded him that it was all fatuous and bad for the whole science of linguistics. Stalin then published an article in Pravda with essentially common-sense views of language. The name of the Georgian linguist? He was a namesake of yours: Arnold Chikobava.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, the language(s) that I work on the most, ‘name’ is ime, ‘namesake’ is imenjak, ‘surname’ is prezime, and a person you share a surname with is, quite logically, prezimenjak. It would be nice to introduce surnamesake into English too.

So we start in Ithaca NY (with the Cornell Indo-Europeanist scholar Michael Weiss), pass through Ancient India (and the Sanskrit language, which was the topic of my PhD dissertation, back in the Cretaceous Period) on our way to the Soviet Union under Stalin, where we encounter the nutcase linguist Nikolai Marr, who takes us to Soviet Georgia (in the Caucasus) and the linguist Arnold Chikobava, whose name, coupled with mine, reminds WB that the Slavic language(s) BCS (in the Balkans) have the eminently useful term prezimenjak ‘surnamesake’. In this is concealed a good bit of complexity in the notion of namesake (which I have, in fact, posted on, so we’ll get to that eventually), plus a wonderfully sly choice of wording in WB’s reference to BCS as

the language(s) Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

(which will require some explanation for readers who are not entirely up to date on the linguistic situation in the Balkans).

And then things get hairier still in the second half of WB’s e-mail, which is all about the Welsh language and Welsh popular culture, and which would just look bizarre without some account of how WB and I came to know each other: as grad students together at MIT (back in the early Cretaceous), when I was an assistant teaching a field methods course that happened to be about Welsh, in which WB was a student (a course that kicked off 25 years of work, on and off, with the language for me). But all that will have to come in another posting. There’s plenty for today.

About WB. From Wikipedia:

Eppes Wayles Browne III ([known as Wayles Browne] born July 19, 1941, Washington, DC [AZ: so just a year younger than me]) is a linguist, Slavist, translator and editor of Slavic journals in several countries. Browne is a professor emeritus of linguistics at Cornell University, with research interests in Slavic and general linguistics, notably the study and analysis of Serbo-Croatian, where he is one of the leading Western scholars.

… Browne’s Slavic studies began with his undergraduate career at Harvard University (A.B., 1963, in linguistics and Slavic languages), and continued with graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Novi Sad (then in SFR Yugoslavia), culminating in a Ph.D. degree (dated 1980, defended in January 1981, and awarded in 1983) from the University of Zagreb.

WB is a true scholar, a master of texts and many languages and literary traditions, plus the literature in theoretical linguistics. (I am, in contrast, a half-educated butterfly.)

Then on the language(s). From Wikipedia:

Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin [AZ: associated in complex ways with three different religions and two different orthographies as well as different geographical areas, political entities, and literary traditions].

Back in the old days we called it Serbo-Croatian. For linguists, it’s one language, but pluricentric — hence WB’s language(s). Many speakers are convinced that their languages are distinct, and will trot out lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic differences (of the sort that you could display to show the difference between American dialects, or (more relevantly) the difference between standard US, British, Australian, and New Zealand English).

I was close to linguists working on Serbo-Croatian for many years — my man Jacques’s 1967 MA thesis in Slavic at Ohio State was on Serbo-Croatian; my OSU colleague Ken Naylor, Professor of South Slavic Linguistics at OSU, was a specialist on the dialects; and my old friend, sponsor, and linguistics department chair, Ilse Lehiste, was an expert on Serbo-Croatian phonetics. But I never studied the language myself. Possibly because I was daunted by all that variability.

Now on namesakes. From my 8/15/22 posting “Fame-naming and family history”, on the general case of after-naming, naming something after something else, and the special case of fame-naming (after-naming using a famous name):

There is one bit of English vocabulary customarily used for talking about X being named after / for Y; the noun namesake is often used in describing this relationship, with the noun used for what I referred to above as the nominant [the thing named in after-naming, as when I am named Arnold after my father] in this relationship: I am my father’s namesake.

Alas, usage is divided as to whether X or Y in after-naming is called the namesake (X is the older usage, and still the standard usage, but the converse usage [with namesake used for the nominifer, the model in after-naming] is very common); in addition, there’s a British usage in which two people who merely have the same name are namesakes (this is the usage supplied by NOAD, I see; meanwhile, AHD5 has only my nominant usage); a difference in usage on whether the relationship holds only between people or can hold between a person and some entity (a place (Charlotte NC),  a company (the Ford Motor Co.), etc.); and a difference on whether namesake names must be identical or can be derived from their models (Carlito, the son of Carlo; Charlottetown PEI; etc.).

The usage clashes between nominant namesake, nominifer namesake, and name-sharing namesake are pretty damning; I don’t think I can actually use the item namesake any more.

On reflection now in 2024, I think I’d like to use namesake as in British usage, and in WB’s usage above: for name-sharing, however it arises. In the case of names of people in most European naming schemes — where binomial names, personal name (or forename or first name) + family name (or surname or last name), are the rule — namesake refers only to the name-sharing of personal names. So I and the British historian Arnold Toynbee, the fictional sci-fi character Arnold Rimmer, and my long-ago Ohio State English Department colleague Arnold Shapiro are all namesakes. Meanwhile, I share the family name Zwicky with the Australian poet Fay Zwicky, the Swiss classical musician Conrad Zwicky, and the now-Canadian entrepreneur Richard Zwicky; we are all, in the terminology WB suggests, surnamesakes. (Meanwhile, there’s a Page on this blog about my postings about people named Zwicky, mostly family-named Zwicky — that is, mostly about my surnamesakes.)

This entry was posted on October 12, 2024 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Dialects, Linguists, My life, Names, Naming, Serbo-Croatian, Variation, Zwickys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.