Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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On the transmission of ideas: RUKI gets around

April 22, 2024

Today, a long guest posting on intellectual history, specifically on the transmission of ideas in linguistics, in particular on the innovation and spread of linguistic terminology. This is an immensely scholarly follow-up to my 4/15/24 posting “Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class”, in which I reproduced a 1970 Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine with that title and wrote:

and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history [the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell)] has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature)

Today’s guest post is the current fruit of Michael Weiss’s RUKIstorical investigations, with minimal intrusions in his text by comments from me.

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Posted in Historical linguistics, History, My life, Phonology, Russian, Sanskrit, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

Ancestral investigations

March 26, 2024

In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:

First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).

Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.

Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.

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Posted in German, History, Kinship, Memory, My life, Names, Welsh | 2 Comments »

The history-rebooted Easter egg

March 14, 2024

In the Economist‘s 2/10/24 issue, early in the piece “Chronicling the past: The present as prologue” (a review of 2020 by Eric Klinenberg, a book treating the Covid pandemic, still unfolding, as a historical event), this passage:

It has been an alarming few years. History — widely assumed to have stopped somewhere around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Spice Girls’ first record — has got going again, with gusto.

The implicit claim is that any history worth recording came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989 (the end of an old political order), and the Spice Girls’ first record, in 1996 (the end of an old pop-cultural order), but sprung back to life with the onset of the pandemic; things are happening again.

Readers with a keen ear, especially if they are British (the Economist is a British publication), might have detected something vaguely familiar in the way that claim has been worded; it’s a distant, glancing allusion to the first verse of a famous (in some circles) poem by British poet Philip Larkin — easy to miss, especially since it contributes nothing of substance to a review of Klinenberg’s book, but is just a little gift to readers who recognize the allusion to a culturally significant text: it’s what I’ve called an Easter egg quotation.

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Posted in Allusion, History, Poetry, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

Mammoth Drop, near Woolly Hole

January 9, 2024

(Along the way, some direct talk in street language about man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

On AZ’s Astounding Bookshelf, the remarkable Mammoth Drop: Murder, Mammoths, and Mimosas (Kea Wright Mysteries) by R. J. Corgan, independently published in 2022 in paperback and Kindle editions. An ad for the book (supplied to me on Facebook yesterday by Michael Palmer, with a link to the Amazon site for the book):


(#1) Obviously up my alley: as a fan of murder mysteries and a highly visible homo, with a woo(l)ly mammoth as my totem animal (MP has my number)

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Posted in Books, History, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Mammoths, Social sciences | 2 Comments »

No more bunny helmets

August 2, 2023

Dan Piraro’s Bizarro from Sunday 7/30, in which Vikings with bunny-eared helmets demand horned helmets:


(#1) No more eating grasses, it’s time for Viking pillaging and plundering in an appropriately fierce costume (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 10 in this strip — see this Page)

Now, you’re thinking, I’m going to tell you that actual Vikings didn’t wear ornamental horned helmets, just to look fearsome; that instead they wore more effectively protective helmets of thick leather; and that the horned helmet thing is totally an invention of artists — or some disappointing shit like that. And I am.

It’s a good story, and it makes for amazingly impressive operatic scenes and a totally menacing muscle-hunk Marvel comics superhero (among other things), but all that horns stuff is fanciful.

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Posted in Clothing, History, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Music | 3 Comments »

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Peanut

April 17, 2023

— a Wayno  / Piraro Bizarro cartoon from 10/20/21, “Written by Goober Louis Stevenson”, according to Wayno’s title:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

A wonderfully goofy cross between two items of popular culture:

— the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, originally told as a literary tale, a caution about the dark duality of human nature and the danger of aspiring to divine power, but quickly folded into the popular consciousness in many forms

— and the figure of Mr. Peanut, the anthropomorphic mascot of the Planter’s Peanut Company

with the amiable and elegant commercial legume standing in for the evil and murderous Edward Hyde.

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Posted in Books, History, Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Literature, Mascots, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity, Stereotyping | 1 Comment »

In the stones of the street

January 21, 2023

Appearing without comment or context in my Facebook feed on 1/19, this image from Tim Evanson:


(#1) My first thought was: a lizard creature evolving from the bricks; or a bird taking off from the bricks — a playful public artwork — but then the crosspiece looked rigid and inorganic, not like legs or wings

So I queried Tim about  the image; his response assumed that I knew who Jan Palach was — a peculiarity that turns out to be significant in a parallel tale of the dysfunctions of Facebook.

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Posted in Art, History, This blogging life | 1 Comment »

Shouting songs

May 19, 2022

Continuing a series of recent postings on the music of joy, now specifically joyous praise to God, and even more specifically “shouting songs” from the Sacred Harp tunebook.

This is loud, passionate praise, rooted in the evangelical camp meetings of early 19th-century America (and England and Scotland before that), capable of seizing your body and sliding you towards ecstatic engagement with the message and the music. Somewhat tamed by being captured on the pages of a hymnbook rather than being created live in the fervor of a camp meeting, but still standing out as something special in the Sacred Harp.

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Posted in History, Language and religion, Language of sex, Music, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Turkish earworms of joy

May 4, 2022

More joyous music encountered in the middle of the night, via my Apple Music (formerly iTunes), this time very familiar and beloved music, which has given me a pair of intractable earworms for two days now:

Mozart, Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), Act 3 Vaudeville “Nie werd’ ich deine Huld verkennen” — an ensemble song of joyful thanks — and then the joyous triumphal finale of the opera / Singspiel, the Turkish Chorus

I have loved this music since the early 1960s, when I encountered the opera in a Mozart and Haydn course at Princeton (a course I have been pretty much continuously grateful for these past 60 years — even more, since I had to fight the mathematics department to be allowed to take the damn course). But these two short numbers, wonderful though they are, are fiercely sticky. Alas, writing about my mental-music affliction for you is only making it worse.

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Posted in History, Music | 1 Comment »

Garden Prince

February 27, 2022

A Vicki Sawyer greeting card (on Sawyer’s animal art, see my 2/5/22 posting “The groundhog and the scallion”) from Ann Burlingham, Troublemaker (that’s what it says on her business card) — written on the 20th, postmarked in Pittsburgh on the 22nd, arrived in Palo Alto on the 26th — with a reproduction of Sawyer’s composition “Garden Prince”:


(#1) The Garden Prince wears a crown of carrots and a royal neckchain of peapods, which together serve both as symbols of his authority and as indicators of his tastes in food (also note the conventional simile like peas and carrots ‘getting along well together, being compatible’)

In #1, Ann “saw something akin to a Renaissance portrait. Crossed with Watership Down?” YES!

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Posted in Art, Books, History, Language and animals, Language and food, Movies, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetic form, Poetry, Simile | Leave a Comment »

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