Lost numerals revealed

Marc Zender of the Peabody Museum (I’ve written about his Tolkien anthropology course before) emailed me the other day to let me know about an article in the new American Anthropologist written by Jeff Quilter, Zender, and several additional co-authors, documenting a lost language from northern coastal Peru (you can read the press release here, with a link at the bottom to the full article for those with access). In the course of archaeological work led by Quilter, a letter was discovered, written by a Spaniard in the early 17th century, on whose obverse is a series of numerals in this otherwise unidentified language, as follows:

uno—chari
dos—marian
tres—apar
4—tau
5—himic [?]
6.—sut [?]
7—canchen
8.—mata
9—yucan
10—bencor
21. maribencor chari tayac
30 apar bencor
100 chari pachac
200 mari pachac

From this, we can see that this language apparently had a fairly regular decimal numeral system. The one intriguing feature is the word tayac at the end of the phrase for 21, which the authors sensibly interpret as meaning ‘and/plus’. The words for 4, 6, 7, and 100 are all related to Quechua (the major Inka language, imposed on large parts of the precolonial Andes in the 15th and 16th centuries), but the others are (so far as anyone has been able to tell) unrelated to any other documented language. While the borrowing of ‘100’ is quite typical in cases of imperial conquest – but my suspicion is that what we have here is a record of a bilingual Quechua speaker engaged in a little bit of numerical code-switching – it wouldn’t be typical (though not impossible) for just three numerals for 4, 6, and 7 to be borrowed, leaving the rest intact. Of course, given this one text, there’s no way to tell for sure. A further minor mystery is why the writer chose to write the first three numerals in Spanish, then switched to Western numerals thereafter – possibly just to save time.

Because the pre-colonial local languages of the Andes are extremely poorly documented, this find sheds a little light on the range of linguistic variability that existed in the Americas at and just after the time of the early European conquests. No doubt the historical linguists will attempt to go further with this, comparing these numerals with other documented languages. The article is a great little piece of holistic linguistic, historical, archaeological anthropology and deserves all the attention that it will no doubt be getting in the near future.

‘Chairperson’ and English lexiculture

In the dark days before there were searchable databases of virtually everything, it was hard to know where exactly to look for early attestations of words. It wasn’t just blind luck, but one’s preconceptions really did strongly influence where one was likely to look, and thus where one was likely to find such things. So, for instance, the word chairperson is dated in the OED and other sources to 1971, presumably because the lexicographers who first thought to look for it saw it as the product of second-wave (1960s-70s) feminism. At the time, that assumption was reasonable enough.

But chairperson isn’t just some ordinary word – rather, it’s a word about which a lot of words have been written, largely negative. Among many people, it carries a set of cultural beliefs about language, or metalinguistic commentary, about so-called “political correctness”, gender roles, and the power of language to challenge those roles, and the perception that second-wave feminism has upset the stable balance of the earlier 20th century (HA! … but bear with me). In fact, one of the 1971 references to the word is from an article arguing against the alterations to language brought about by second-wave feminism:

1971 Israel Shenker, ‘Is it Possible for a Woman to Manhandle the King’s English?’, New York Times, Aug 29, p. 58.
Instead of turning up as chairman or chairlady, each will have been transmuted into a sexually obscure “chairperson.”

In an environment where power must be identified by gender, in particular when talking of the marked (feminine) case, chairperson is a threat, and commentary on its novelty is not politically neutral. And thus it matters a great deal, culturally speaking, whether chairperson is a novelty, a product of perceived radicalism in the present day, or whether it has a deeper history in the English language.

Now, to step back a moment:

A couple of weeks ago I started making some open notes here about a potential student project on word histories for use in my undergraduate teaching, which I am tentatively calling the Lexiculture Project. My desired learning outcomes for this course include a) getting students to discover or awaken whatever love of language; b) to get essentially untrained (budding?) linguists to be able to ask and answer interesting questions about language and culture in topics of interest to them. While my students (mainly anthropology majors with a smattering of linguists and others) aren’t mostly ready to undertake original research in most areas, they can certainly be taught the research skills needed to investigate word histories.

Last week I was running a very similar lecture to the one I always, on language and gender, where we talk about whether there are innate sex differences in language usage (not really), whether there are gender differences (yes, albeit highly context-dependent), blah blah blah. We talk about the myth that women talk more than men and get into some of the issues relating to social power. But that’s it. Even though it’s a topic a lot of students are interested in, I hadn’t ever come out of that session feeling as if we had learned anything in particular, or done anything out of the ordinary.

And then we found chairperson. It had ended up on the list of topics I was preparing on the subject, and when I showed the list to my class, they honed in on it right away. We actually started by investigating ‘chairman’, ‘chairwoman’, and ‘chair’, as well – all three are attested in the OED from the 17th century. ‘Chair’ as a title held by a person was surprisingly early (not just ‘he held the chair’ but ‘he was the chair’) at 1658. This alone, based on two minutes’ search of the OED, was worthwhile as a lesson to the students, because chair, too, has been the subject of some ideologically-charged metalanguage. I had thought that I might show them how we could examine the frequency of the various terms on a decade-by-decade basis. But chairperson, sitting there with its date of 1971, was far too tempting a target.

And so off we went on our lexical excursion. I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”
“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

1899 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Dec 1899, 10(1), pg. A32
NOTICE – Members of the East Aurora Don’t Worry Club are notified that there will be no more meetings until Mrs. Grubbins, the Chairperson, returns from the Sanatorium.

1902 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Sep 1902, 15(4), pg. 126
The answer is, I think, that a passion for the Chairperson is hardly possible when any moment you may be ruled out of order, and ordered to take your seat.

1910 Puck Aug 3, p. 68
“Madame Chairperson,” she shouted, “this measure is maternalism, plain and simple!”

All four of these quotations are clearly linked to first-wave feminism, the movement (to oversimplify grossly) for political rights such as the vote led by feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And of course (it almost goes without saying), all four instances are used to describe women – no man is described as a ‘chairperson’ until the 1970s. The first (WaPo) quotation actually is a quotation taken from the (sadly, undigitized) Detroit Journal – my Wayne State students were thrilled to find that chairperson first occurred in a Detroit publication! But the article is no feminist tract, but rather a jocular commentary on first-wave feminists, entitled ‘Indignant Womanhood’. The second and third are from Elbert Hubbard’s The Philistine; among many other causes, Hubbard was a proud early supporter of the suffrage movement. Yet the third quotation is a sad commentary on the perception among many men (in 1902 as today) that a strong woman is by definition unattractive. In other words, chairperson appears in print for the first time in contexts commenting on first-wave feminism. In contrast to the 1970s, its relative absence as a self-identifier by first-wave feminists is notable. Of course, the fact that it was being used at all suggests that it may have been used, just not in contexts that are currently archived digitally (readers: hint hint!). Nevertheless, chairperson was clearly a stigmatized word in this first instantiation, even before feminists adopted the word widely as their own.

But the most interesting thing is not simply that chairperson is associated with cultural commentary on first-wave feminism – although I do think it’s rather fantastic that I was able to show this with such ease in class, and of course I sent the above quotations off to the OED posthaste. It’s that after 1910, I can find literally no further attestations of the word for over half a century. After 1910, we have no further ‘chairperson’ until 1970, when once again (as in 1899) it appeared in the Washington Post, this time associated with Betty Friedan, who used the term to describe herself. After that point, ‘chairperson’ occurs regularly up to the present, although the Corpus of Historical American English data suggest that it is being replaced by ‘chair’ as the gender-neutral form.

The lack of any interdatings between 1910-1970 deserves some attention – why, for instance, did no feminists (apparently) use the term in the interim – its absence is certainly not due to a lack of feminists! – and why did anti-feminists (apparently) cease using it? Was it simply too rare? Four occurrences over a decade is hardly a flood of appearances in print. Was it always more associated with commentary on feminism than with feminist terminology itself? Did early feminists simply feel they had better things to do? While I don’t have any definitive answers, now we’re moving into the realm of the cultural analysis of linguistic change, not merely the history of words – which is exactly what I’m hoping my students will take from the work we’ve been doing.

How to read in grad school

Rex over at Savage Minds has a couple of fantastic recent posts, An article a day and Pacing: work smarter, not harder that every grad student should read, including (especially?) me ten years ago. Of course, during coursework (and for MA students that’s most of the degree) the pace will be different – the ‘article a day’ adage applies best to PhD students past the coursework phase, because you’re already reading a massive amount of material not of your own choosing.

I do think that regardless of level, one of the factors that distinguishes a superlative from a mediocre grad student is the ability to read and synthesize large amounts of material in a self-motivated, self-directed way. Even if you are one of the (majority of) graduate students who has a ‘real’ (non-academic) life with a job or a family or health problems or something else, the ability to pull through and read an article does really make a difference in keeping active and making good progress. As Rex writes, “The number one main job of graduate students is to read. You just have to a read an absolute ton of stuff. There is no substitute for reading. A ton. Of. Stuff.” Hear, hear.

I’m interested in what people think about the balance between books and articles. Obviously a 300-page book is far less work than ten 30-page articles, and the value of the monograph versus the article is discipline-specific. And you may get a 300-page edited volume but only read one chapter, or one chapter plus the introduction. My own graduate training was far more book-oriented than article-oriented, which was partly due to the personalities and scholarly temperaments of my mentors and partly due to my own choices. How to know not only how much to read, but what sorts of things to read?

I’m also curious about the balance between ‘things I need to read for the dissertation’ versus ‘things I need to read to keep up to date in the field’. For me, I spent most of my time on the former to the neglect of the latter – only when I was done the dissertation and on my postdoc could I devote a significant amount of time to the ‘breadth reading’ I’d need to be a good teacher. I still assign readings for courses that I haven’t yet read but would like to – of the eleven books in my grad seminar on writing systems and literacy offered this fall, I’d only read five before putting together the syllabus. I imagine this is fairly standard practice among academics in humanities and social sciences fields.

The other thing I’d add to this discussion is that one needs to avoid wild swings in productivity. I used to be terrible at this, and still am not great. But then there will come a time (and of course, it will come) when you take a week off for vacation, or to get married, or for an illness, or *something*, and it’s easy to feel that now you are ‘behind’. Well, no. You had a gap. It ended. If you beat yourself up over the gap, you just make it longer. And if weeks become months, then hie thee to your professional of choice to help move forward. OK?

What do students want to know about lexicography?

As I discussed in my previous post, I’m thinking seriously about putting together a student assignment for next year where each student (or possibly small groups) investigates the history and context of origin of a particular word, phrase, or group of related words, or a similar etymological puzzle, using online tools like Google Book Search, etc. Some of these might involve antedating – finding earlier instances of old words – while others might be decade-by-decade comparisons of the frequency of two versions of the same word, or investigations of borrowings among English dialects. The idea is to give students exercises that are feasible for people without advanced degrees in the field, but that give them a sense of excitement at making research discoveries. The trick is that most students (really, most people) don’t have a good sense of what constitutes a problem that is both interesting and feasible. I couldn’t possibly just set my students loose with the admonition “Go! Seek!” At the very least, they need guidance to find workable research topics, and some examples of possible topics they might choose or emulate. So this morning I brainstormed up a few ideas of projects that seem interesting to me, but then again, I’m not a good judge of what would be interesting to my students, because to me, virtually anything relating to English lexicography is interesting by its nature.

My criteria are as follows, roughly:
– For most students, the project needs to focus on English words, not those in other languages.
– Really the topics would need to relate to the last 200-300 years, with a heavy emphasis on post-1900 material. Prior to 1800 the full-text searchable databases / corpora are relatively few and inaccessible.
– Ideally I want students to find topics relating to their own interests/hobbies/specialties.

1. What is the origin and history of the wrestling term ‘suplex’?
2. What is the pattern of use of the verbs ‘to unfriend’ vs. ‘to defriend’ in recent usage?
3. When and how did the nonstandard phrase ‘I could care less’ originate?
4. What is the history of the slang terms ‘first base’ / ‘second base’ / ‘third base’?
5. What is the historical and regional distribution of ‘eighth grade’ versus ‘grade eight’?
6. What effect did the movie Crocodile Dundee have on the diffusion of Australian slang into American English?
7. When did the old spelling encyclopaedia lose its ‘ae’?
8. How did the medical term ‘stat!’ (for ‘right now!’) enter more general usage?
9. What is the history of the terms ‘flammable’ vs. ‘inflammable’ vs. ‘uninflammable’ vs. ‘unflammable’?
10. What different spellings of the loanwords ‘quesadilla’, ‘guacamole’ and ‘enchilada’ are attested in their early history in English?
11. When and how did the term ‘Xerox’ become a verb ‘to xerox’ – and is it becoming less common?
12. How and when did ‘donut’ enter English as an alternative to ‘doughnut’?
13. To what extent have coined words from The Simpsons become part of written American English?
14. How and when did the chess terms ‘stalemate’ and ‘checkmate’ become used figuratively?
15. When using a Swiffer cleaner, do you ‘swiff’ or do you ‘swiffer’ your floor?
16. What is the geographical and historical origin of the irregular verb form ‘snuck’?
17. What is the history of the relative frequency of ‘ketchup’ vs. ‘catsup’?
18. How, when, and in what context did the suffix ‘-teria’ develop?
19. How and when did the slang term ‘wife-beater shirt’ arise?
20. To what degree have American mechanical/automotive words like ‘wrench’ and ‘fender’ entered British English?
21. What is the distribution and comparative history of ‘tsunami’ vs. ‘tidal wave’?
22. To what degree did the author H.P. Lovecraft re-popularize rare and obscure words in other printed sources?
23. How, where and when did ‘fridge’ become an abbreviated form of ‘refrigerator’?
24. How and when was ‘gestalt’ borrowed into English from German, and how did it lose the capitalization / italicization that would indicate it is a foreign loanword?
25. Was the word ‘misunderestimate’ really coined by George W. Bush or does it have a longer history?
26. Hanukkah, Chanukah, Hannukah, Channukah, etc? Is there, or has there ever been, any agreement as to how to spell Hanukkah in English?
27. What is the history and distribution of the synonyms ‘Celsius’ and ‘centigrade’?
28. When and in what contexts did committees start to have ‘chairs’ rather than ‘chairmen’?
29. What is the history of the synonymous element names ‘tungsten’ vs. ‘wolfram’?
30. What is the origin and history of the African-American English word ‘dap’ for a fist bump?

I’d be interested in any ideas you have for additional questions / topics, or any comments on the project.
Edited 06/13: Expanded the list to 30 topics.

Honk if you love etymology

I’ve been working for the past month or so on an interesting project involving American dialectology as well as some topics closer to my own disciplinary home, but that is turning into a nice little article-length piece of research. Part of it involves a great deal of searching into the origins of some relatively recent words, using Google Book Search, online newspaper archives, and similar resources. You’ll hear about it here when it’s ready.

I’ve also been puttering for the past two months on a little musing intended for my other place, The Phrontistery, on the degree to which Native American loanwords retain their ‘Indianness’ as opposed to other loanwords. To that end I’ve been reading Charles Cutler’s O Brave New Words: Native American Loanwords in Current English, which is an interesting if generally popular account, mostly consisting of word lists with a few lines apiece devoted to various words of interest. But this isn’t about the other essay either – I’ll crosspost it when it’s ready.

No, this is about the intersection of the two in an unlikely word, honk. Cutler (1985: 115) writes:

Henry David Thoreau introduced the verb honk to describe the clangorous sound of migrating Canada geese. “I was starteld by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travellers,” he wrote in Walden (1854). It seems likely that Thoreau, a connoiseur of Indian speech, adopted this expressive word from Wampanoag or Narragansett honck, gray goose, the Canada goose. (It has been suggested, however, that Thoreau may simply have coined the word as onomapoetic.)

I admit to being extremely skeptical, both because of the lateness of the word’s origin and the obvious onomatopoeia. But that got me to thinking that it wouldn’t be so hard to track down earlier honks. And a little searching confirmed that fact: there are too many honks to mention from English-language publications prior to 1854 – not only could Thoreau not have coined the word, but I think we can figure out where he got it, from work published before his birth.

The earliest honk I was able to track down (which took me all of five minutes) is in fact from 1814, from the eighth volume of Alexander Wilson’s renowned American Ornithology (which I didn’t find directly through GBS, but indirectly since the passage is quoted in an review in the June 1814 issue of the magazine Port Folio, which is accessible:

The flight of the wild geese is heavy and laborious, generally in a straight line, or in two lines approximating to a point, thus, >; in both cases the van is led by an old gander, who every now and then pipes his well-known honk, as if to ask how they come on, and the honk of “all’s well” is generally returned by some of the party.

It’s absolutely crystal clear in the downloadable PDF – so it’s not some wonky OCR giving us a false positive. After that, I don’t find anything until 1825, in an explicit reference to Wilson’s honk, in the discussion of the Canada goose in the journal of Sir William Edward Parry, Appendix to Captain Parry’s journal of a second voyage for the discovery of a North West passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, “The cry of this species is imitated by a nasal repetition of the syllable wook, or as Wilson writes it honk“ (1825: 363).

Now this is interesting – how close were we, one wonders, to wooking geese? At the very least it suggests that however likely English-speakers think it is that honk is onomapoetic, there are numerous other possibilities. After this point, honks abound from 1830-1850. Thoreau was extremely familiar with and owned Wilson’s American Ornithology, so I think it safe to presume that he got it from there. Now the only question is, where did Wilson get it, from an Algonkian source or from an imitative one? The existence of Parry’s wook leads me to lean in the direction of a loanword – honck is, after all, very, very close phonetically and semantically.

So there we have the result of just about an hour’s puttering online. I started searching at 9pm, just before putting my son to bed (which took half an hour out of my research time). We’ve got forty years on the existing OED first quotation, and an interesting intellectual genealogy to follow. And 850 words written, which takes time too.

Beyond this fascinating little story, which after all isn’t of great theoretical or conceptual significance, I wonder whether we (sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, dialectologists, etc.) might use this as a neat little teaching exercise, getting our students to track down old words online. I’d think out of every class of 40 students we could get a couple of publishable articles or conference papers, and make real (if small) contributions to the literature. The training needed to do what I did could be conveyed easily in a 90-minute class period. I’m always looking for ways to inspire my students (for many of whom this will be their only linguistics course) to find some love of language. Maybe I’m naive in thinking that students would get a real thrill of discovery from this sort of work, but I don’t think so.