New evidence for Madagascar settlement history

There’s a fascinating new article in PNAS, ‘Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models‘, outlining a long chronology for the settlement and early habitation of Madagascar.   The traditional wisdom is that Madagascar was uninhabited until around 500 CE when Austronesian speakers from southern Borneo migrated several thousand kilometres westward, and Bantu-speaking East Africans crossed the Mozambique Channel, producing a civilization of iron-using swidden farmers and creating an ecological catastrophe in which many native species went extinct.    The discovery that the Malagasy language is most closely related to the Southeast Barito languages of Borneo, proposed systematically for the first time by Otto Dahl in the 1950s, is one of the most significant and surprising findings in historical linguistics of the past century, given the enormous geographic distance between the two regions.  Later, Dahl helped to establish that Malagasy also has an important Bantu linguistic substratum, and more recent genetic evidence confirms that both African and Southeast Asian migration was involved.

This new study, whose first author, Robert Dewar, unfortunately passed away before its publication, shows the situation is significantly more complex, and that there is a history of hunter-forager habitation in at least some parts of Madagascar going back up to 4,000 years (i.e. 2,500 years more than previously acknowledged by the traditional hypothesis).    I’ve always wondered how it was that Madagascar, which is not that far from the East African coast, could remain entirely uninhabited by humans for so long.   The new study, based on fieldwork conducted a few years ago at two rock shelters in the northern part of the country, shows a vibrant hunting-foraging adaptation with microlithic tool technology to have existed far earlier than previously suspected.   This tool tradition has similarities with both East African and Middle Eastern traditions of the same period, but not with Southeast Asian ones (unsurprisingly).    What this tells us is that there was a previously-unidentified pre-Bantu, pre-Austronesian population on the island, probably of East African ancestry for millennia before the extinctions of Madagascar’s megafauna began in earnest,  It requires that we rethink the model that sees the arrival of humans on Madagascar as the simple direct cause of the extinctions, and forces us to instead ask what sorts of human-environment interactions cause effects, and how.

Phrontistic revisions

For those of you who may not know, I run a sister site to this blog, The Phrontistery, which in one form or another has been around since 1996, and which features an online dictionary of rare words, glossaries on various topics, and other language-related resources.  While the site has been more or less dormant for a few years – mostly I’ve just been keeping the place tidy without adding any new content, I’ve had a slow(ish) summer and so took the opportunity to get things up and running smoothly there again, with a bunch of new content and a new site layout.     Over the years I’ve given a lot of thought to somehow combining the two sites, e.g., by moving Glossographia over there or something, but I’ve never had the energy to figure out how difficult that would be.   Let me know if you think that would be a terrible (or great) idea, in which case I don’t have to think about it any more.

Figurative is my middle name

Stephen Figurative Chrisomalis.  Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

In seriousness, an offhand remark I made to my wife this morning, that “Compliance is my middle name,” led me on a very interesting search for the origins of the figurative use of middle name to refer to a paramount or notable characteristic of a person.  The entry for middle name in the OED has been relatively recently updated, and includes numerous instances of this figurative use going back to 1905, where the New York Journal has “For retiring you’re—well, that’s your middle name.” and other quotations going up to the present.   I did a little further searching around and was able to find an earlier one going back to 1902, in the Manitoba Free Press, quoting a correspondent from Dawson, Yukon Territory (and you’ve got to know that I love it when I antedate something and it turns out to be Canadian):

Source: Manitoba Free Press (Feb 28, 1902), p. 1
Source: Manitoba Free Press (Feb 28, 1902), p. 1

This isn’t quite enough to associate it firmly with the Klondike Gold Rush, but it’s a possibility.  I was able to find some others from the early 20th century (mostly American, but no others from Canada) and then onward from there.  But I also was intrigued when I looked at the Google Ngram for ‘is my middle name’:

Google Ngram search for 'is my middle name' and variants
Google Ngram search for ‘is my middle name’ and variants

That spike peaking right around 1920 is really interesting; equally interesting is that thereafter, it drops back down to relatively modest levels until the 1960s, and then takes off again, reaching its historical peak in the late 1980s and keeping right on going.    Now, it’s clear that the initial rise starts well before World War I, so this isn’t something directly associated with soldiers’ slang or the general mixing of dialects during and after the war, but looking at the Google Books results around 1920, this really seems to have been a fad at the time – most of the uses of “is [pronoun] middle name” are non-literal.  But by the time that Agatha Christie wrote, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926: 144), “‘Modesty is certainly not his middle name.’ ‘I wish you wouldn’t be so horribly American, James.’”, the fad was already on the wane – although it never disappeared entirely, for the next several decades it was quite rare.

I was a little surprised to see that there was no immediate bump related to the country anthem Sixteen Tons, first recorded in 1946, and whose rendition by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955 reached #1 on the Billboard charts for six weeks, but its line, “Fightin’ and trouble are my middle name” is in a middle verse and perhaps had little linguistic effect (although it was re-recorded many times throughout the 60s and beyond).    The post-1965 bump could equally have been inspired by Bobby Vinton’s 1963 single, “Trouble is My Middle Name“, although it peaked only at #33, and, if I may say so, is not really very good.  Regardless of the specific impetus, once it took off, it became strongly idiomatic, and today the phrase has become so well-known that it is covered in TV Tropes and elsewhere.  I’m confident that my readers will regale me with their favourite examples.

How do you pronounce Detroit?

As you may know, I work at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.  Detroit’s been in the news a lot lately, regarding its bankruptcy and a whole lot of other things that, if I were to start talking about them at any length, would just send me off into a rage.  This would not be pretty.

So instead, let’s talk about the language of Detroit.  Detroit has two main English language varieties: first, the local variety of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which has been studied by John Rickford, Geneva Smitherman, Roger Shuy, and others; and second, the variety of English that has undergone the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.    Here, Penny Eckert’s work is of the greatest significance, building on the work of Bill Labov, but with a specific focus on southeastern Michigan.    Most black Detroiters speak the first variety, and most white, locally-born Detroiters speak the second, with some exceptions.    Today I’m going to focus just on the second variety, but I’m not going to talk about the dialect as a whole.  Instead, I want to talk about variation, and some innovations I’ve noticed, in the speech of Detroit-area residents in the pronunciation of a single word – the place-name Detroit itself.

Now, if you’re like me, and like most North Americans, you probably pronounce Detroit something like /dɪˈtɹɔɪt/, or (for those unfamiliar with IPA, di-TROIT, two syllables, with second syllable stress and rhyming closely with adroit (sound sample).   You can hear a clear example of this pronunciation, for instance, in this commercial for the Detroit Zoo.  Other examples could be found pretty readily, so I won’t belabour the point.  This is the standard pronunciation of Detroit and the baseline for today’s discussion.

There is a second variant heard locally, which has first syllable primary stress rather than second-syllable stress, so, in other words, and where the unstressed first vowel becomes /i/, so, in other words, /ˈdiˌtɹɔɪt/ (DEE-troit).    The second syllable then has secondary stress (it can’t be entirely unstressed or the vowel would have to reduce).    You hear this pronunciation sporadically and without any particular association with any class or ethnic group, but it’s less common, and we’ll leave it alone.

Lately, however, I’ve been hearing a third pronunciation in a lot of commercials, local news, and the like, in which white Detroit-area residents pronounce their home city as /dɪˈtɹʌɪt/ or even /dɪˈtɹəɪt/, with the first part of the OI vowel unrounded and fronted almost to a schwa.    For the non-phonologically-inclined,  what seems to be happening is that di-TROIT starts to sound more like di-TRITE.  Here’s a good example from a Youtube video from Detroit Real Estate Investing.  If you’re not convinced, try loading up both this video and the one from the Detroit Zoo, and running them one after the other to compare a couple of times.    Still not convinced?  Try this video for America’s Best Value Inn, for another example.  Still not convinced?  Try this clip from a video made by a local man, with two very clear examples right in a row.

As far as I’ve heard, this variant is only used by people from the Detroit area who have the Northern Cities shift – i.e., it’s not used by people from Milwaukee or Cleveland or Buffalo.    It’s not, as far as I can tell, part of the standard analysis of the Northern Cities shift or the specific changes found in the Detroit area, after a lot of time poking around the sound files on Penny Eckert’s website.  I haven’t noticed this with any other words that contain the diphthong oi.   I wondered whether it might be typical of other words ending in oit or in oi followed by other voiceless stops (e.g. p, t, k).  But the problem is that very few words in English end in oit (really just exploit, which is moderately uncommon, and quoit and adroit, both of which are very rare) or oi followed by any voiceless stop consonant (we could add voip and hoick but that’s about it). So we don’t have a lot of other words to compare it to, without going and doing some sociolinguistic research.  (This is a hint to any of my future students who may be reading this post).

I can’t find any publication discussing this phenomenon – I’m not a phonologist and would love to hear from someone who could link this up to the Northern Cities shift more broadly.  I don’t have any explanation for it, but it’s widespread enough that it deserves some attention.   

But wait – we’re not done yet!  The reason I wondered about the role of voiceless stops is that while I work in Detroit, I live across the international border in Windsor, Ontario, which is essentially Detroit’s Canadian suburb, and I am a native speaker of Canadian English.   Most speakers of Canadian English, including myself, have what’s called the Canadian raising, in which the /aɪ/ diphthong of right and ripe, and the /aʊ/ diphthong of about and house, is raised to /ʌɪ/ or /ʌʊ/ before voiceless consonants and especially voiceless stops – which is why some Americans think that Canadians say aboot or aboat.  We don’t, but it might sound that way.    And because I, like most Windsorites, have a pretty strong Canadian raising, I pronounce right as /ɹəɪt/ or /ɹʌɪt/, starting with a mid-vowel.  Notice that this diphthong is exactly the same as the diphthong in the innovative pronunciation of Detroit.  In other words, the ‘oi’ of Detroit for some Detroiters is the same vowel sound as Canadians have in right or trite.  They start in completely different diphthongs – /aɪ/ and /ɔɪ/ – but end in the same place.

To make things even more complicated, there is a  fourth variant of Detroit used only, as far as I can tell, by older speakers of Canadian English.  This is a three-syllable version,  /dɪˈtɹɔɪ.ɪt/, or di-TROY-it, to rhyme (non-ironically, I promise!) with destroy it.   Most of the users of this variant are Ontario-born native speakers of Canadian English born in the 1950s or earlier.     It can be heard, most famously, in the song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, as heard here.     It is also typical of the Canadian hockey commentator / blowhard / redneck Don Cherry.   I have certainly heard it in Windsor although I suspect it is more common in central and eastern Ontario than here in southwestern Ontario.  To this day, and despite all evidence to the contrary over the five years I’ve worked here, my mother (who is of a similar generation, born and raised east of Toronto) refuses to quite believe me that the two-syllable pronunciation is even acceptable or possible.    I don’t have any explanation for the emergence of this variant either, but it’s obviously been around for many decades.   I’d also love to know whether it’s found widely in any younger Canadian English speakers.

So, in summary, there are four distinct variants of the pronunciation of Detroit, all of which you might hear in the broader Detroit area on any given day:

  • /dɪˈtɹɔɪt/ (di-TROIT), used by locals and most other English speakers
  • /ˈdiˌtɹɔɪt/ (DEE-troit), used by locals sporadically
  • /dɪˈtɹʌɪt/ or /dɪˈtɹəɪt/ (di-TRITE), used by locals who have a strong NCVS
  • /dɪˈtɹɔɪ.ɪt/ (di-TROY-it), used by (some) older Canadians, including some in Windsor.

Glossographic news of the week

Another busy week of news relevant to readers of this blog:

A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement reported on the curious case of A.D. Harvey, who was unmasked as a serial creator of false personae who collectively had created a self-perpetuating network of literary fraud, of course all Harvey himself, until the false story of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoyevsky was unmasked and, with it, Harvey himself.  Now, this week, the Guardian interviews Harvey, giving a fascinating glimpse into the sort of person who would spend decades creating false identities and fictitious scholarship.

Some of my readers who are keen on cryptography have probably already seen this article in Wired, discussing the fascinating Kryptos Sculpture and its secret decipherment by the NSA years before its official CIA decipherment.  The Kryptos Sculpture is one of those things that, in the absence of context, would clearly cause Phaistos 0r Voynich-level excitement in future decipherers.

Not to leave my typography buffs out in the cold, this week the news has been going around about Paul Mathis, the Australian restaurateur who has created a new letter of the alphabet, a logogram ‘Ћ’ for the word ‘the’ to parallel & for ‘and’, at the cost of $38,000.  Alas, I don’t see this one catching on, even though the sign already exists in most character sets as a Cyrillic character.   I just want to know what costs $38,000 to develop an already-existing character.

The always-fascinating Language Log has a post this week about the fascinating Potosí miners’ language, a mixed language of Spanish, Quechua and Aymara used from the 16th century to this day by miners in central Bolivia.    The survival of this fascinating variety is highly dependent on the continuity of traditional mining practices and a multiethnic speech community.

For those of you who have a PhD or are in a doctoral program, you may want to check out this visualization of the lengths of dissertations at the University of Minnesota.  My field, anthropology, is second-longest (after history) and has the widest range of any discipline, unsurprisingly in a discipline that spans both natural science and humanities.   As for me?  My dissertation checks in at 663 pages and is an extreme outlier in any field.  Woohoo!

Great news in Native American baseball sociolinguistics: the Arizona Diamondbacks hosted the first-ever baseball game broadcast in Navajo (or indeed, any other Native American language), in honour of their Native American Recognition Day.    Now if only we could do something about those pesky mascots elsewhere in the league …

You may have heard this week that J.K. Rowling, the author of the blockbuster Harry Potter series, was unmasked this week as the author of a crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under the name of Robert Galbraith.   While some of the evidence leading to the break was ordinary sleuthing, there’s a neat discussion in Ben Zimmer’s column in the Wall Street Journal of the role of forensic stylometry, or the linguistic analysis of texts to ascertain authorship, in confirming and breaking the story, with a complementary essay at Language Log by Patrick Juola, who did the analysis, of the science underlying it.

I was so very pleased to see the first post in nearly a year over at the philology blog, Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa. And this one is great – a historical linguistic analysis of the Finnish expletive used by Linux developer Linus Torvalds, with digressions into Indo-European mythology.   I hate to disagree, with Torvalds, though: there certainly are enough swear words in English, although the Finnish ones sure are fun too!

Stephen Houston and Alexandre Tokovinine write over at the Maya Decipherment blog about some newly-analyzed earspools and a hair ornament bearing Maya glyphs.  It’s a shame to not have any provenance on these, part of the great tragedy that is looting in Mayan archaeology, but fascinating nonetheless to see Maya writing outside of monuments and codices, in a decorative context.

Lastly, Stefan Fatsis, the author of Word Freak and general expert on Scrabble, writes this week in the New York Times about the decision by Hasbro to fold the National Scrabble Association, effectively ending its sponsorship of competitive Scrabble.   While the immediate effect may be slight – Hasbro’s commitment has been waning for several years and the independent NASPA is going strong, as far as I know – it’s sad to see the abdication of responsibility among game manufacturers for the cultures that keep them vibrant.