logopandecteision as many of you have read in the tabloids, i lost my virginity to rabelais’ the life of gargantua and pantagruel. what you may not know is that sir thomas urquhart, the english translator of the book was a rascally rascal in his own right. get a load of this shenanigan » Logopandecteision is a 1653 book by Sir Thomas Urquhart, disingenuously detailing his plans for the creation of an artificial language by that name. The book is written in several parts, most notably including a list of the language’s 66 unparalleled excellences; the rest is made up of rants against his creditors, the Church of Scotland, and others whose neglect and wrongdoings prevent him from publishing this perfected language. Urquhart was fond of this kind of very elaborate joke, sometimes so elaborate as to be taken by his contemporaries as in earnest. In this case, it is posterity which mistakes his intention. He promises twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, &c.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices. you can peruse this short book for $0.00 here; in these tough economic times, that is a deal that even you cannot lightly refuse.

logopandecteision

as many of you have read in the tabloids, i lost my virginity to rabelais’ the life of gargantua and pantagruel. what you may not know is that sir thomas urquhart, the english translator of the book was a rascally rascal in his own right. get a load of this shenanigan »

Logopandecteision is a 1653 book by Sir Thomas Urquhart, disingenuously detailing his plans for the creation of an artificial language by that name. The book is written in several parts, most notably including a list of the language’s 66 unparalleled excellences; the rest is made up of rants against his creditors, the Church of Scotland, and others whose neglect and wrongdoings prevent him from publishing this perfected language.

Urquhart was fond of this kind of very elaborate joke, sometimes so elaborate as to be taken by his contemporaries as in earnest. In this case, it is posterity which mistakes his intention.

He promises twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, &c.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices.

you can peruse this short book for $0.00 here; in these tough economic times, that is a deal that even you cannot lightly refuse.

October 28, 2009
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tags
1600s language linguistics literature conlang

provincial f-words from the 14th century

bros, i started the f-word series as a way of showcasing some choice morsels from specialised dictionaries. i chose words that start with f partly because of my infantile preoccupation with labiodental fricatives but also because enabling limits on my search meant that i would have more free time to hang out with my buddies at applebee’s and talk about witty hollister t-shirts. this system had been going swell until my good friend orson, dropped this onto my desk and my world shattered.

its full title is: a dictionary of arcahic and provincial words, obsolete phrases, proverbs, and ancient customs, from the fourteenth century (1850)—and it is worthy of a 5 part series within a series.

[part the first: FADGY to FELSH]

  • FADGY. Corpulent; unwieldy
  • FAEGANG. A gang of beggars
  • FAFF. To move violently
  • FAIR-TRO-DAYS. Daylight
  • FAITOUR. An idle lazy fellow; a scoundrel; a flatterer; Hence, a general term of reproach
  • FALDORE. A trap-door
  • FALLE. A mouse-trap
  • FALLINGS. Dropped fruit
  • FALLOWFORTH. A waterfall
  • FAMBLE. To stutter, or murmur inarticulately
  • FANGAST. Fit for marriage, said of a maid
  • FANOM-WATER. The acrimonious discharge from the sores of cattle
  • FANTICKLES. Freckles
  • FARAND. Used in composition for advancing towards, or being ready. Fighting farand: ready for fighting. Farand-man: a traveller or itinerant merchant
  • FARREL. The fourth part of a circular oatcake, the division being made by a cross
  • FARTHINGS. Flattened peas
  • FASGUNTIDE (1) Trouble; care; anxiety; fatigue (2) The tops of turnips
  • FASYL. A flaw in cloth
  • FEANT. A fool
  • FEATLET. Four pounds of butter
  • FEELDY. Grassy
  • FEER. to run a little way back for the better advantage of leaping forwards
  • FELSH. To renovate a hat
October 21, 2009
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tags
esoterica f-words linguistics mediæval oulipo words ap f-words

word salad -or- semi-semiotics

i was throwing back apéritifs with an associate the other day and realised that through the course of our conversation i kept using ridiculous placeholder names like whats-his-name, doohickey, and watchamacallit. in fact, using placeholders is nothing new for me, but this time i became acutely aware of how much my associate probably thought that i was an unlettered boob.

thus i resolved that in the future when my brain is not able to keep up with my patter, i would say WHATEVER word came into my head regardless of the consequences. after a week of following through on this promise, i was shocked by the tame results:

  • i said chrysanthemum → when referring to pickled sushi ginger
  • colander → cheese grater
  • mittens → slippers
  • mowing → vacuuming
  • foie gras → hummus

what is striking to me is how literal these metaphors really are (eg. a colander and a cheese grater are both punctured metal cooking apparati). i’m no ramachandran, but my conclusion after one week is that one’s brain is indexed by the signified (meaning of a word) rather than the signifier (the word itself). i didn’t say clippers, or slipping, or slappers when i meant slippers—i used the word for another type of garment that covers one’s extremities. to alter the old adage: it is not “the word is on the tip of my tongue” but “the meaning is on the tip of my angular gyrus.”

i was really hoping that my resolution would force me to bark obscenities to my superiors or blabber incongruous nothings to the sunbathing babes in the library courtyard—no such luck for raynor ganan. i am however, just as pleased with these results.

September 24, 2009
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tags
being raynor horatio linguistics the brain
cracher par terre ridiculous french schoolyard sign reads: “no spitting on the floor or speaking breton.” because, you know, as indicators of your barbarous habits go, speaking the noble language of your elite 10th century forefathers is more or less on par with blowing snot rockets onto your school’s marble floor and using pencil nubs to dredge the waxy seepage of your inner ear. more about the systematic attempt to eradicate the breton language here (including a quote from sociologist fañch elegoët which i deemed too depressing to excerpt on the ragbag on a monday morning).

cracher par terre

ridiculous french schoolyard sign reads: “no spitting on the floor or speaking breton.” because, you know, as indicators of your barbarous habits go, speaking the noble language of your elite 10th century forefathers is more or less on par with blowing snot rockets onto your school’s marble floor and using pencil nubs to dredge the waxy seepage of your inner ear.

more about the systematic attempt to eradicate the breton language here (including a quote from sociologist fañch elegoët which i deemed too depressing to excerpt on the ragbag on a monday morning).

September 21, 2009
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tags
linguistics language 1800s early 1900s

today's todo list

Develop a new non-verbal system of communication independent of all known linguistic models. Estimate the impact this form of communication would have had on the oral tradition in literature if it had developed instead of speech.

keith mountford in lingua pranca (1978).

September 15, 2009
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tags
language linguistics conlang
news bulletin (for immediate release): my former boy-bandmates, rafi kam and dallas penn, who style themselves the internets celebrities, have just released a new video on the topic of street vending called the vend diagram for which they approached me to concoct some venn diagrams (wordplay!). the above chart is perhaps my favourite as it deals with creole and mixed languages and ends rather absurdly where it all began—with a ginormous slice* of pie. rafi and dallas’ investigation into how the economy is effing up the most micro of businesses—the street vendors, can be found here. i made the charts for it, but i will not now confirm (nor double confirm) that i made a cameo in it. __ *properly speaking, the shape of this slice is a reuleaux triangle (maths!)

news bulletin (for immediate release): my former boy-bandmates, rafi kam and dallas penn, who style themselves the internets celebrities, have just released a new video on the topic of street vending called the vend diagram for which they approached me to concoct some venn diagrams (wordplay!). the above chart is perhaps my favourite as it deals with creole and mixed languages and ends rather absurdly where it all began—with a ginormous slice* of pie.

rafi and dallas’ investigation into how the economy is effing up the most micro of businesses—the street vendors, can be found here. i made the charts for it, but i will not now confirm (nor double confirm) that i made a cameo in it.

__

*properly speaking, the shape of this slice is a reuleaux triangle (maths!)

September 2, 2009
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tags
$ data viz linguistics math venn video wordplay cc
dear twitter: just as those oh-so-clever corner kids in baltimore grass-rootedly nominated yo as a gender-neutral pronoun, me and my bud have grass-rootedly decided to make the above edit* on your awful emails. [inflator alert]: fastfriend, alex whines sends word that i may have been too hasty yesterday in deflating you. yo points to this language log post that finds some convincing uses of the invented pronoun in the dialogue of the wire. __ *developing the nominative yo a step further yields: objective yom, possesive yos, and reflexive yoself.

dear twitter:

just as those oh-so-clever corner kids in baltimore grass-rootedly nominated yo as a gender-neutral pronoun, me and my bud have grass-rootedly decided to make the above edit* on your awful emails.

[inflator alert]: fastfriend, alex whines sends word that i may have been too hasty yesterday in deflating you. yo points to this language log post that finds some convincing uses of the invented pronoun in the dialogue of the wire.

__

*developing the nominative yo a step further yields: objective yom, possesive yos, and reflexive yoself.

August 28, 2009
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tags
house style language linguistics things to look at

yo looks like a freak

here is some interesting news about kids in baltimore [deflator alert: it has nothing to do with the wire or omar little]. it concerns a grass-roots trend of adopting yo as a gender neutral pronoun.

[The] Street term ‘Yo’ is being used by kids as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, according to researchers.

Language experts in the US say since at least 2004 students have been saying “yo” as a substitute for gender specific pronouns and the trend is growing. The study, published in this week’s New Scientist, found middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore, Maryland, used the word in sentences such as, “Yo put his foot up” and “Yo looks like a freak”.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has written extensively about the failure of invented words that have not been picked up as pronoun substitutes. He described the emergence of “yo” as significant because it has not been planted and was a grass-roots phenomenon.
He said: “Most of the gender-neutral pronouns are artificial coinages that are then marketed - unsuccessfully - to users”.

i have not been this jazzed up from the linguistic inventions of children since the genesis of nicaraguan sign language. but then i read the following line WHICH TOTALLY BLEW MY BUZZ:

feminist scholar Brenda Wrigley said “yo” sounds “crass and disrespectful. It is something a younger person would shout down the street as a greeting, but not something I’d like to see used in writing.”

as far as i am concerned: this world needs more innovative baltimorean teenagers and fewer feminist scholar brenda wrigleys.

[source]

August 27, 2009
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tags
house style language linguistics

tomorrow's to-do list

work the word, ostrobogulous into a conversation of any type. it is used to describe something that is “bizarre, unusual, or interesting.”

if there is such a thing as mouthfeel for word pronunciation, ostrobogulous would rank up there with ineluctable.

August 18, 2009
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tags
house style linguistics words

yo mama jokes for linguists

  • English is essentially German spoken in the mouth rather than the throat.
  • Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language. It’s just that the Norwegians can’t spell it, and the Danes can’t pronounce it.
  • Spanish is what happened when Moors tried to learn Latin and said “screw it.”
  • Tagalog is essentially Visayan spoken by Kapampangans.
  • Franche est essentialement englaishe ouithe les endinges funnies et lottes de vowelles et les adjectifs en alle les places ronges.
  • Czech is essentially Russian with beer instead of vodka.
  • Korean is essentially being caught in a syllable-diagramming exercise gone horribly, horribly wrong.
  • Esperanto is essentially Indo-European pidgin.
  • Klingon is essentially Orkish with fewer vowels and more spitting.

oh no you didn’t! how incendiary, perhaps this post needs a disclaimer.

from the essentialist explanations website edited by john cowen. which entry is the biggest diss to a language that you are fond of?

August 3, 2009
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tags
language linguistics
cryptophasia » Cryptophasia is a peculiar phenomenon of a language developed by identical twins that only the two children could understand. The word has its roots from crypto meaning secret and phasia meaning speech disorder. Most linguists associate cryptophasia with Idioglossia which is literally the same, but also includes mirrored actions like twin-walk and identical mannerisms. Little is known about cryptophasia even with today’s means of scientific research. i would get a charge out of reading any academic investigations into this freakishly cool phenomenon. perhaps i will google scholar this.

cryptophasia »

Cryptophasia is a peculiar phenomenon of a language developed by identical twins that only the two children could understand. The word has its roots from crypto meaning secret and phasia meaning speech disorder. Most linguists associate cryptophasia with Idioglossia which is literally the same, but also includes mirrored actions like twin-walk and identical mannerisms. Little is known about cryptophasia even with today’s means of scientific research.

i would get a charge out of reading any academic investigations into this freakishly cool phenomenon. perhaps i will google scholar this.

July 31, 2009
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tags
language linguistics the brain conlang
the great bowel shift as i have not officially called off show and tell day, i am still receiving the odd submission. and thus i have recently received a hot lead on the great vowel shift from an internet celebrity of such magnitude that i’m not even going to say his name, nor am going to link to a picture of him in camo pants holding a dead snake. anywho, while i have always been captivated with the great vowel shift and the mystery behind it (which is referenced in the dinosaur comic above), my favourite part has always been the EXCEPTIONS and the eventual spelling fallout that would soon take place. wikipedia elaborates: Not all words underwent certain phases of the Great Vowel Shift. ea in particular did not take the step to [iː] in several words, such as great, break, steak, swear and bear. Other examples are father, which failed to become [ɛː] / ea, and broad, which failed to become [oː].Shortening of long vowels at various stages produced further complications. ea is again a good example, shortening commonly before coronal consonants such as d and th, thus: dead, head, threat, wealth etc. (This is known as the bred-bread merger.) oo was shortened from [uː] to [ʊ] in many cases before k, d and less commonly t, thus book, foot, good etc. Some cases occurred before the change of [ʊ] to [ʌ]: blood, flood. Similar, yet older shortening occurred for some instances of ou: country, could. if the history of the english language is your bag (it is the bag of the ragbag), you might enjoy the following (raynor recommended) books. they are written for the general public and are a real gas. the mother tongue by bill bryson (1990). the adventure of english: the biography of a language by melvyn bragg (2006). if you want to skip the foreplay and go right to the authority, then look no further than a history of the english language (5th edition) by albert c. baugh & thomas cable (1951).

the great bowel shift

as i have not officially called off show and tell day, i am still receiving the odd submission. and thus i have recently received a hot lead on the great vowel shift from an internet celebrity of such magnitude that i’m not even going to say his name, nor am going to link to a picture of him in camo pants holding a dead snake.

anywho, while i have always been captivated with the great vowel shift and the mystery behind it (which is referenced in the dinosaur comic above), my favourite part has always been the EXCEPTIONS and the eventual spelling fallout that would soon take place. wikipedia elaborates:

Not all words underwent certain phases of the Great Vowel Shift. ea in particular did not take the step to [iː] in several words, such as great, break, steak, swear and bear. Other examples are father, which failed to become [ɛː] / ea, and broad, which failed to become [oː].

Shortening of long vowels at various stages produced further complications. ea is again a good example, shortening commonly before coronal consonants such as d and th, thus: dead, head, threat, wealth etc. (This is known as the bred-bread merger.) oo was shortened from [uː] to [ʊ] in many cases before k, d and less commonly t, thus book, foot, good etc. Some cases occurred before the change of [ʊ] to [ʌ]: blood, flood. Similar, yet older shortening occurred for some instances of ou: country, could.

if the history of the english language is your bag (it is the bag of the ragbag), you might enjoy the following (raynor recommended) books. they are written for the general public and are a real gas.

if you want to skip the foreplay and go right to the authority, then look no further than a history of the english language (5th edition) by albert c. baugh & thomas cable (1951).

July 13, 2009
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tags
1600s history mediæval raynor recommends show and tell day linguistics

sound advice

this week’s f-words come from charles harrington elster’s big book of beastly mispronunciations (1999). while my own strong opinions about orthoepy vacillate between yes! and who-cares?, i have found this book to be (if nothing else) 1—a valuable bet settler and 2—a great way to show your barbarous buddies how much a pedant you can be.

  • feral: FEER-ul. this pronunciation is favored by all 4 major american dictionaries.
  • fifth: FIFTH or FITH. if you can pronounce the second f, good for you. but there’s nothing slovenly about dropping it… it is biestly however, to drop the h and say FIFT or drop the th and say FIF.
  • finis: FIN-is (occasionally, FY-nis). the popular variant fee-NEE is wrong. finis is not french for “finished,” as many apparently imagine. it comes through middle english from the latin word meaning “the end, conclusion.”
  • flaccid: FLAK-sid, not FLAS-id. apparently the flabby FLAS-id has been limping around in educated circles for most of the 20th century. webster 3 was the first dictionary to recognize FLAS-id, labeling it with its esoteric symbol of disrepute, the obelus [÷]. flaccid is a book-learned word which may explain why so many educated speakers have swallowed the beastly FLAS-id without giving a second thought to the pronunciation of analogous words. consider: accident, succeed, eccentric, etc.
  • forbade: fur-BAD. in 1961, webster 3, in opposition to all previous authority, arbitrarily indicated that forbade should be pronounced fur-BAYD. the controversy may soon be academic: the evidence of my ears says that forbid is fast replacing forbade as the past tense of forbid.
  • formulae: FORM-yul-LEE, not -LY. as any science savvy person knows, antennae, larvae, papillae, and so on have a long i sound at the end, right? wrong. words borrowed from latin that form their plurals in -ae properly have a long e sound at the end. that’s why, for example we say AL-jee for algae.
  • forte (strong point): properly FORT, now usually FOR-tay.
  • fracas: FRAY-kis. the first a is properly long. when you enter the fray, you enter a fracas.
  • fungi: FUN-jy (j as in judge), never FUN-gy (g as in gout).

and for another look at how everything that you are saying, you are saying wrong, there is this and this.

July 3, 2009
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tags
f-words linguistics words lists

in honour of bollywood*

here is a list of modern causal suffixes and what they have come to mean:

  • -aholic: an addiction (or exaggerated fondness for) (from alcoholic)
  • -athon: any type of repetitive endurance activity (from marathon)
  • -gate: a scandal, usually political in nature (from watergate)
  • -nik: adds an ironic connotation to an agent noun (made popular by sputnik)
  • -ollywood: a location associated with the film industry (from hollywood)
  • -tini: a mixed drink (from martini)
  • -wad: a pejorative suffix (probably from dork wad, but the o.e.d. is not totally clear on the etymology)

now go forth and neologise.

*each post on the ragbag today will be in honour of the one before it.

June 9, 2009
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tags
linguistics lists words etymology

fousty bologna

oh my garsh! who less-than-sign-numeral-threes folk dictionaries? raynor ganan, that’s who. here are some of the most obscene f-words that the dictionary of newfoundland and labrador has to offer.

  • fairy breeze: a squall of wind on an otherwise calm day.
  • fallish: the feeling of autumn in the air.
  • firk: to scratch or dig gingerly, “the hen is firking the ground for a bit of seed.”
  • flanker: a spark from a fire, ” the wind was blowing the flankers from the chimney across the harbor.”
  • flick: a short distance away, “lewisporte is just a flick from here.”
  • float: to shoot a seal in the throat so it doesn’t sink.
  • floption: in a state of confusion
  • flounce: let oneself fall into a lying position, “i was so tired when i came back from hunting that i just flounced on the bed.”
  • founder: of a ship, to fill with water and sink.
  • fourer: an alcoholic beverage or snack at 4:00 p.m.
  • fousty: having a foul-smelling odor, “that bologna is starting to smell fousty.”
  • fudge: to manage daily chores by oneself, “my wife is in the hospital having a baby so i have to fudge.”

a sapir-whorfian investigation (for those not in the know, whorf is the klingon from reading rainbow) yeilds the newfoundland zeitgeist: sailing, domestic drudgery and shooting seals in the throat so they don’t sink.

May 12, 2009
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tags
f-words words lists linguistics