bleedin pony, innit?

We all know that English is going to wrack and ruin, and that the road to its destruction was paved by descriptivist linguists and skulking lexicographers. And the media are doing their part preaching to choir:

It had four wheels and cost a lot of money but, sadly for one impatient teenager, the similarity ended there.

A teenager was greeted by a display cabinet instead of a taxi because her Ali G-style slang confused a series of phone operators.

The girl hurriedly dialled directory inquiries to book a taxi from her home in London to Bristol airport, using the cockney rhyming slang Joe Baxi.

Yesterday when the “story” broke, there were along a score or so of ghits. Today, we’re up to 2,670 ghits. More blogging and bloviating. But there is some debunking is going on, too, at Five Chinese Crackers (link), Obsolete (link), and Chimp Media Monitor (link) blogs. A likely origin seems to be a press release (link).

baqaqi ts'qalishi qiqinebs

There is a Georgian tongue-twister: ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (baqaqi ts'qalishi qiqinebs) ‘the frog in the water croaks’. (If the Georgian alphabet probably doesn’t display properly, one may download and install the BGP Classic font.) Here’s a video of an interview with Katie Melua, where she pronounces the phrase. The characters transcribed as q and ts' are a uvular ejective (stop) and alveolar ejective (affricate) respectively.

rope butt

More than three years ago, Languagehat had an entry on the Suidas On Line project. Suda (‘fortress’) is a huge 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedic lexicon of the Classical world. I browsed around it at the time, but had pretty much forgotten it until today, when on a logophiliac forum (Word Origins), a thread was started regarding rich people getting into heaven and camels threading through the eye of a needle (cf. Matth. XIX.24: et iterum dico vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum). One of the standard interpretations (from rich hermeneuts, no doubt) is that kamēlon ‘camel’ is an error for kamilon ‘rope’. Others argue lectio difficilior lectio potior (‘the more difficult reading is the more probable one’). Others point out that a similar bit of hyperbole exists in the Talmud (Berachos 55b and Bava Metzia 38b) where it is an elephant going through the eye of a needle. (Interestingly, in the second citation, Rabbi Rava [ca.270–352 CE] asks Are you from Pumbedita, where they make an elephant pass through the eye of a needle?; Pumbedita, a center of Babylonian Talmudic scholarship, is the modern-day Fallujah.) It is interesting to note that camel is associated with the letter ג (gimel or g) in Hebrew and eye of the needle with the letter ק (qoph or q), and that the former is a voiced velar stop and that the latter is a voiceless uvular one. Least you think it’s only of concern to theology students, let me point out that kamelos occurs in Aristophanes’ The Wasps (l.1035) where one reads of prōkton de kamēlou (‘the arse of a camel’), besides the stench of a seal and the unwashed balls of a Lamia.

what are you packing trickster?

I was googling around, looking for information on Hermann Güntert’s 1916 monograph, Indogermanische Ablautprobleme, Untersuchungen über Schwa secundum, einen zweiten indogermanischen Murmelvokal, when I ran across this folktale, called Trickster Loses Most of His Penis, in the Ho-Chunk (aka Hotcâk, Hotcąk, or less politely Winnebago) language. The tale was written down by Sam Blownose in 1912 transcribing an older tribe member’s telling of the tale. Mr Blownose used the Hotcąk alphabet which in turn derives from the Fox (aka Mesquakie) syllabary. The tale was subsequently translated by Oliver LaMère.

There as he was going about, there, unexpectedly, as he was going, something right by his side sang, saying,

What are you packing Trickster?
It’s your penis that you’re packing!

“Howá!” he said. “What a bad one he is. Furthermore, what does this one mean to say? He himself has full knowledge of what I am carrying,” he said.

The story is a little hard to follow, but it seems that Trickster is walking around with his genitalia in his pack. (I am reminded of the song Detachable Penis by King Missile.) I suppose this tale would be classified as coming under motif number S176 mutilation; sex organs cut off.

Another link turned up was Bruce Lincoln’s “Hermann Güntert in the 1930s: Heidelberg, Politics, and the Study of Germanic/Indogermanic Religion,” in Horst Jünginger, ed., The Study of Religion under the impact of National Socialist and Fascist Ideologies in Europe (forthcoming). Güntert was also one of Georges Dumézil’s influences.