Jesus, Yeshua

I just read... something. I could go off on various tangents describing it, and get even more worked up than I am, but why? It was... I suppose it was a message which was meant in a very positive way. I suppose it's possible that it was meant in a very positive way. I could go all negative and denounce them as hucksters as if I were a New Atheist, but why? Especially when I'm already getting way too upset on linguistic grounds?

They're fine with the conventional English forms of Sophia, Mary, Magdelene, Sarah, Anne, Brigit, Avalon, Ireland, Joseph, Michael, Catherine, Hilda, Cathars and Templars.

But they have to say Yeshua instead of Jesus. Well, what if I just say "Joshua" and "garbled translation," and "Jacob" and "James" while I'm at it?!

 

Or maybe if I quote from a very silly Wikipedia article entitled... "Yeshua."

"The 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which was made in Aramaic, used Yeshua as the name of Jesus and is the most well known western Christian work to have done so."

Now, while I certainly have a bone or two to pick with Mel Gibson, him calling Jesus Yeshua in The Passion of the Christ is not one of them. Anybody want to guess why? I'll tell you why: because the whole film was in Aramaic and Latin. You see? You see where I'm going with this? Am I all alone here? They didn't just change one word. They changed all of them.

It would be remiss of me if I ended this rant without mentioning that some people who are much better at Latin than I am, are very upset by what they see as the way that Gibson screwed up the Latin in The Passion of the Christ. I know some people who are rather advanced in Aramaic, but, so far, I haven't heard their opinions of the film. Maybe they'll have something to say about the sequel. That's right: there may be a sequel. Jim says Mel just sent him the third draft of the screenplay. The Passion of the Christ 2: This Time, It's Personal.

Languages and Geography

Languages have been expanded and contracting, moving from one area to another, coming into existence and dying, for thousands of years. It is a mistake to assume that this a recent phenomenon, and the association of a certain language with a certain geographic region is, ultimately, arbitrary, because such associations are never permanent. For example, the majority of people in the United States at present speak English. So, there is a tendency to think that our language "came from" England. But one of the ancestors of modern English, Anglo-Saxon, came to England from Germany in the fifth century AD, replacing the Celtic language which had been predominant for some time in the region which is now England. And Saxon, one of the many dialects of German, has itself moved from place to over the millennia, despite their being one clearly-defined geographical region in Germany today called Saxony. (And two more called Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.) The movement of Germanic languages in the 4th to 6th centuries AD was so extreme that Germans today often refer to that period of time as the Voelkerwanderung, the wandering of peoples.

Celtic languages are spoken today in Ireland, the Isle of Man, on the island of Great Britain in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and also in the region of France called Amorica or Brittany. In each of those regions, a Celtic language is the first language of a minority of the population, although recently, after centuries of decline, they all have been making a considerable comeback, being officially protected under law and taught to schoolchildren. These efforts at restoration have been underway for well over a century in Ireland, and  soon, a majority of the Irish population may have at least some ability to understand, speak, read and write Irish. 

2100 years ago, the Celtic language family was one of five major Indo-European Language families, besides the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian families. Celtic languages have been predominant at one time or another not only in Great Britain and Ireland but also in present-day France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, northern Italy, southern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and western Romania. 

The Romance language group at that time consisted mostly of Latin. 2500 years ago, Latin and related languages were confined to a rather tiny region around Rome, which then was more a village than a city. Rome expanded greatly, and the Latin language spread. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC Rome conquered present-day France, Spain and Portugal, and in those regions Latin quickly replaced the Celtic languages. Then in the 1st century AD Rome conquered present-day England, but the majority of the people there continued to speak one Celtic language or another, until the above-mentioned change to Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxons conquered Cornwall in the 10th century, and Cornish declined sooner than the Celtic languages in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which kept their political independence from the English-speakers longer. The Celtic speakers in Brittany in France emigrated from Great Britain in or around the late 5th century. 

To the east of the city of Rome, the Romans established Latin in various regions. In the region known then as Dacia and known now as Romania. Romanian and the closely related Moldovan are the only Romance languages in eastern Europe today. The Romans conquered vast territories to the east which had formerly been under Greek control, all the way to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, to present-day Israel and Syria and Iraq and including present-day Turkey, but in these areas the Latin language did not take over the existing languages. As before the Romans came, the language of government and the upper classes was Greek, while the majority populations spoke a great variety of other languages. 

I can't begin to explain, yet, why political conquest sometimes means the complete linguistic transformation of a region, and sometimes not. At present the best I can do is point out some examples where the language of a region has completely changed under new political leadership, and some examples where it has not. For example: in the Western Hemisphere, in the United States, the languages of the of the inhabitants before the European invasions have been reduced to a much greater degree than the indigenous languages in Latin America. In the US, the most widely-spoken indigenous language is Navaho, with about 170,000 speakers presently. To the south of the US, by contrast, Nahuatl (Aztec) is spoken by nearly 2 million people presently, the Mayan languages by about 6 million, and the Quechan (Incan) languages by 8 to 10 million people. 

Is it so Important that the Dixie Chicks are Now the Chicks?

I'm not asking rhetorically. It's more like I'm asking for people's opinions, because I don't know what to make of the name change. One way or another, their new video, "March March,"



is badass.

Did they need to drop "Dixie" from the name of the band? Are Klansmen very pleased by this change, shouting, "Yes! Finally!" ?

Another thing that it makes me think of is that some people at some times in history would still greatly object to the name Chicks and call it degrading to women. "I'm not a chick -- I'm a WOMAN!" I say "at some times in history" because I don't know whether and/or how much these things have changed. I know that in 1989 and 1990, when I was 28 and 29, I was friends with a 19- and 20-year-old woman who got mad whenever I called her a girl instead of a woman, and the last time she got so angry that for 30 years I've been very careful not to refer to a grown-ass woman as a girl. Well, maybe I've loosened up about that a little bit in the past couple of years.

Anyway, in 1989 and 1990, this 19- and 20-year-old woman was a huge fan of Sinead O'Conner, so big a fan that she was seriously considering shaving her head, which was somewhat more unusual for women to do in 1990 than it is now.

And then in 1992, Sinead O'Conner released her 3rd album, and its title was Am I Not Your Girl? and I laughed and laughed and laughed, although I was still so scared of the white-hot anger of that women whom I had not seen for 2 years that I was still very careful to use the term "woman." In fact, by then it had become ingrained habit. Even though by then the Riot Grrrrl punk rock movement was underway, and then a little later there came the Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks,

and it seemed as if the term "girl" and other similar terms, like "chick," might have changed a bit in their usage. But I haven't actually talked with any feminists about this.

Hey, I could do that now!

We could all do a lot of talking to each other now about language and respect and preferences and whether I should have laughed so much when I heard the title of Sinead O'Conner's third album, and all sorts of stuff.

Be sure and watch that new video by The Chicks.

Computers and Language

So-called artificial intelligence programs are still a long way from tackling language. And by language I mean languages which are spoken by humans, like English or Japanese. "Computer languages," sets of instructions followed by computers, are not the same as human languages. It has not been demonstrated yet that the languages which we speak can be reduced to such sets of instructions. If they can, we're still a long way away from doing it. If they can't, then, in my opinion, that would be one of the reasons not to worry about the machines eventually rising up and killing us all. If a computer was capable of having a conversation with me which was indistinguishable from a conversation with a human, then I'd be startled. And possibly a little spooked as well. I would include written conversations like those in chat rooms.

Math is exact and language is not. Often times letters, the symbols used to record some languages, have been used as mathematical symbols. Roman numerals are one well-known example of that. But while the symbols used in language and math may be the same, what they refer to is not. X + IV = XIV means exactly the same as 10 + 4 = 14, and any number of different systems of notation can be used to express exactly the same thing as 10 + 4 = 14. However, many times the simplest sentences are untranslatable from one language to another. And very many, perhaps most sentences cannot be exactly translated. Furthermore, in many cases, perhaps most, the best translation is a matter of opinion. Highly-qualified experts in linguistics and literature routinely disagree about whether this translation of a poem or novel is better than that one.

As long as we're talking about translation made by humans, that is. With all of the astounding advances made in computing, the best computer translation programs still routinely produce results which are comically bad and far inferior to any work done by any competent professional human translator. The same goes for original written compositions by computers compared with those written by ordinary lit students.

Computers are far beyond humans now when it comes to playing chess. (And if recent headlines have not misled me, computers are about to pass us as Go players as well.) But computers play chess differently than humans, by crunching enormous amounts of data. How do we humans do it? Well, we don't know yet.

Perhaps human intelligence would be less mysterious if the possibility were more often considered that it involves things which aren't reducible to math. Perhaps researchers sometimes resist considering that, because one of the things it would mean is that we're not, in fact, on the brink of developing artificial intelligence. Well, actually, many people think that we're already well past the brink, and that artificial intelligence has already existed for some time.

No doubt, information technology has produced many amazing things, and continues to do so with no end in sight. Maybe there's no reason for me to object to calling some of those things artificial intelligence. I don't go around angrily telling IT people to stop using the term "computer language."

But as I've said, a computer language is a fundamentally different thing than a language spoken by humans. And artificial intelligence, if we want to use that term for things which already exist, and why not -- I mean, people are using that term for things which exist, whether we approve or not -- is still fundamentally different from what human brains do. Playing chess, computers win. Writing poems, computers still have not given us any competition. Perhaps the things needed in order to write great poems are quantifiable. But perhaps they're not.

And perhaps the latter possibility is too often overlooked.

John E McIntyre Is Not Gonna Fix Your Sentence, And Then He's Gonna Make Fun Of You!

A video illustrates very well what I dislike about some -- by no means all -- people who write about writing and speaking English well.

Congratulations, John E McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun: I cannot figure out how to embed your video in a short time, and within a moderate time the Sun's website with its many advertisements threatens to freeze my computer. And so, you've bested me: instead of embedding your video, the most I can do is link the page containing it.

Follow that link if you will, with that warning about the many advertisements. It may be that my PC is far more vulnerable to freezing than are others, because it is old and weak, or who knows why. Or maybe my device is not unusually vulnerable, and we have merely entered an age of great stupidity in Internet advertising, an age in which not just I, but people in general will avoid the websites of great newspapers like the Baltimore Sun, because they're infested with computer-crippling amounts of ads. Ads which thus defeat the very purpose for their existence. I've never believed that advertising people are generally as smart as they're generally thought to be.

Onward.

McIntyre begins the video by describing how Latin is highly inflected -- it has different word endings, not to mention completely different words in the cases of pronouns and irregular verbs, for different quantities, cases, tenses and so forth, and therefore word order is not crucially important to comprehensibility, because inflection in Latin performs some of the functions performed by word order in English -- and then points out that because English is much less inflected, misplaced modifiers can lead to all sorts of spectacular misunderstandings in English sentences. And then he reads a bunch of sentences in which awards appear to be skating on mantelpieces and British MP's to be marauding Vikings and so forth.

Of course, no-one reading those sentences would actually think that the awards were skating or that the MP's were Vikings. McIntyre reads them to the audience of the video because considering what the sentences communicate is not as important to him as making fun of their hapless authors. He is completely correct that the positioning of modifiers is very important in writing English well and comprehensibly. The problem is that he's being a complete dick in a bow-tie about it. If, instead of just reciting all of those sentences like a sneer with legs and concluding, "If you can't tell what's wrong with these sentences, find an editor and ask," he had taken a comparable amount of time to suggest improvements upon a smaller number of examples, I, and other non-language-snobs, might have been less put off, and more inclined to hear or read other things he has to say, and clicked on the link to his column on the Sun website. As it is, it seems that sneering and feeling superior to those whom the positioning of modifiers confuses are far more important to him than being helpful. The world doesn't need more sneering and less helping.

It's possible that John E McIntyre and I would be quite capable of becoming great friends with one another. For one thing, I'm very much interested in the Latin language, it's not exactly as if people with intelligent things to say about Latin are growing on trees these days. Also, in perusing the titles of some of McIntyre's other columns, it seems that he may actually be opposed to some aspects of language snobbism at some times. But this video was my introduction to him, and he got off to a bad start.

PS, 2:06 PM: I myself have language-snob tendencies. I'm trying to overcome them. For example, after writing this post I liked a comment on Facebook which made fun of someone for writing "should of" instead of "should have." I shouldn't of liked that comment for that reason, you know why? I'll tell ya why: 1) The purpose of language is to communicate, and everyone knew what was meant by "should of." No clarity, none whatsoever, was gained by ridiculing the use of "should of." 2) "Should of" and "should've" sound about exactly the same.

It Makes Sense To Call It The Abrahamic Religion. Singular, Not Plural

I know that some of you know all of the following. Indeed, I'm sure that some of you know a lot more about all of this than I. Indulge me while I educate the Great Unwashed.

What I'm suggesting here is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are one religion, not three. Three religions which agree on the basics and squabble over some details.

Jews and Christians (usually) have no problem seeing that they worship the same God. But some of them seem to get tripped up trying to wrap their minds around the concept that Allah is the same God. I don't know whether Muslims suffer from the same confusion at all.

Allah and the Biblical God are one and the same, in fact. In plain and obvious fact. "Allah" is just Arabic for "God." Arabic-speaking Christians (there are currently over a million of them) refer to God as Allah. "Allah" is the Arabic version of the Hebrew "Elohim." (Arabic and Hebrew are closely related. "Salaam" = "shalom.") Some well-known Arabic phrases which are usually translated into English these days as "praise Allah" and "Allah is merciful" have sometimes been translated as "praise God" and "God is merciful," which makes much more sense to me, since that makes it much more plain to see that Jews, Christians and Muslims are all talking about the same God, and especially as we English-speakers have been translating "Elohim" all along as "God."

But you know, this entire post is only going to be of interest to people who actually want to understand what others are talking about. And I know that's not everybody.

I don't know whether this little linguistic difficulty is more or less of a problem in languages besides English. I would guess: even more of a problem in some languages than in English, and less in others. But I'm just guessing.

Jibril is Gabriel, Ibram is Abraham, Yusuf is Joseph, Musa is Moses, Harun is Aaron (Harun al-Rashid was a late-8th-century and early-9yh-century Caliph), Dawud is David, Suleiman is Solomon (Suleiman the Magnificent was a 16th-century Ottoman Sultan. I had thought that "Salman" was another version of the name "Solomon," but evidently I was mistaken about that), Ishiya is Isaiah, Irmiya is Jeremiah, Daniyal is Daniel, Isa is Jesus.

Profanity

Seen on the Internet (and seen by me elsewhere before there was an Internet):

"If you can't be interesting without profanity, then let's face it: you're not that interesting."

My reaction to that is: I'm sure glad I wasn't driving a car or operating a fork lift when I heard that, because it put me straight to sleep!

Yeah, I think I can be interesting without profanity. I think so. I think I can be interesting with profanity too. Sort of the way I can cook an edible meal with or without pepper. I say "edible" instead of "good" because I'm not a sophisticated cook, and I'm sure that some things I cook which taste good to me won't taste particularly good to everyone, especially not to someone who's used to 3-Michelin-star cuisine. My point is that I can do about equally well with or without pepper, and that some people will probably prefer the dishes with pepper while other will prefer those without. But my point also was that I think that "dirty" words are about as dirty or evil as black pepper. Sure: just like pepper, they're not for everybody. Just like pepper, sometimes a little goes a long way. But please, please don't act, in my presence, as if they're the end of the world, unless you're prepared to risk my rolling my eyes and perhaps even muttering under my breath.

But my point especially was this:

If you can complain about profanity and be the slightest bit interesting while doing so, you'll be the first one. Ever. In the world. Since primates first began using words.

"How Many Languages Do You Speak?"

This question, which is naturally frequent in the sort of international groups I like, gave me the topic for this post. The answer to the question, of course, always depends upon how well one must know a language before one is justified in listing it among the languages one "knows," and one always wonders, of course, listening to the group's responses, whether this fellow claiming fluency in 30 languages might not be padding his resumee just a bit, and whether this lady saying she knows only 2 is being entirely too modest by listing 2 languages, her native language and one more, whose native speakers assume she's a native speaker, which is extremely unusual for a non-native speaker. Think of all the people you know who've lived in your native country for decades after having grown up somewhere else, who speak your language wonderfully, with ease and grace and a huge vocabulary -- how many of them entirely lack a charming accent? A foreign actor passing for a native in a movie or TV show doesn't count, even though it's still a remarkable achievement with a script and dialogue coaches and multiple takes.

I'll claim 6: I'll stand here and tell you (I won't look you in the eye and tell you, but that's because I'm autistic, not because I'm a shifty schemer or anything like that.) that I can speak English, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, in that descending order of proficiency. I read and write each of them better than I speak them. I have some rudimentary knowledge of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. I've just started on Hungarian and Armenian.

But of course languages come in families, so my familiarity with Latin, French, Spanish and Italian means that Portugese, Romanian/Moldavian, Catalan, Provencal, Rhaeoto-Romanic and Maltese will not be total mysteries to me. Likewise, my native proficiency in English and a long and intensive study of German mean that I can understand some Yiddish, Dutch/Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian and Luxumbourgian, all of which can not entirely unreasonably be considered German dialects; and to a lesser extent the Scandanavian Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. And that is not an abstract theoretical postulate; it's based on some experience with each of those languages, and having discovered that I could understand some of each of them. So should I have said that I speak 24 languages (or 29?) instead of 6? No, I shouldn't have; because, for example, that might've given someone somewhere the impression that I would be of some practical use if someone were needed to act as an interpreter between someone who speaks Provencal but no Faroese and someone else who speaks Faroese but no Provencal. Okay, I wouldn't be completely useless in such a situation, but, depending on the locale, my skills might be much better employed looking for an interpreter than in taking on the steep-uphill challenge of trying to act as one. I would understand enough to figure out, after some effort, that what we would want, ideally, would be someone fluent in both Provencal and Faroese. I would be able, with some effort, to figure out that those were the native languages of the 2 people who needed to communicate with each other.

(Naturally there's a very good chance that both of them would speak English well enough to make me fully superfluous.)

Rather than saying that I'm competent in 6 languages, I could say that I have some familiarity with the Germanic and Romance languages families, and that I have made some investigations into the history and development of those languages and their relationships to one another. This proficiency has not been acquired more or less accidentally in the course of a life of constant globe-trotting, but intentionally through a love for books. Many a la-dee-da carefree globetrotter who never had any particular ambitions as a scholar would be much more useful than I in many situations calling for a polyglot, especially if he or she had any proficiency whatsoever in Chinese or Russian or Japanese or Hungarian or Turkish or Swahili or Nahuatl, etc, etc, etc; whereas I would have much more urgent need than the average globetrotter to suppress the urge to be a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all and criticize as ahistorical the combinations of spoken and written languages and other cultural phenomena in "Game of Thrones." (The dragons could be considered ahistorical, too, Steven. Ya big goof.)



Ideally, the question "How many languages to you speak?" will not simply be answered with a number, but will be the opening to a long and fascinating conversation.

Don't Be Afraid Of Foreign Languages

I know that fear of the unknown is one of the most basic and primal human fears. And I also know that horrible things can be said in any language. But I also know that paranoia usually doesn't make sense, because most people have other things on their minds most of the time, than you. And whether they speak a language you don't understand or not, if you're nice, you greatly reduce the chances that they'll say nasty things about you. Does it really make much difference if they say something to your face in a language they assume you don't understand, or in your native language when you're out of earshot?

There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?

Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."

Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.



I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:

The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."

But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.

Things I Wish I Knew

For a while -- in retrospect it seems like it was a couple of years or more -- I wished I knew what Charlemagne's native language was. It's possible to read a lot of history about Charlemagne and his realm and his times without coming across any references to language at all. Because most of the people who're curious about Charlemagne aren't curious about languages. The actual historians who write accounts about those things have to have some familiarity with languages, plural, and mostly with Latin, because that was the predominant written language of Charlemagne's empire. During this time, the mid 80's, when I wanted to know, but didn't yet know, what Charlemagne's native language was, I didn't even know about Latin's predominance among the written languages of Western Europe during Charlemagne's reign (King of the Franks from 768 until his death in 814, Holy Roman Emperor from 800 on).

Anyway, eventually I stumbled over some reference to Charlemagne's native language. It was German. The Franks were a Germanic tribe. In fact, the beginnings of written German coincide with Charlemagne's reign, because the establishment of written German was one of the very many substantial things which happened because he ordered that it be so. After having stumbled over a reference to Charlemagne's native language somewhere in some book of history "aimed at a wider audience," as they say, I learned more about Charlemagne's relationship to the development of the German language in the course of getting a Bachelor's degree with a major in German.

If people were sensible like me, things like Charlemagne's native language would be common knowledge, and people professing to be interested in the Middle Ages would learn Latin instead of aping Renaissance English, and people full of the sort of facts I crave would be best-selling authors, as they should be, and Dan Brown and George W Bush would be janitors at best.

But instead it's this world, and people don't know what Charlemagne's native language is, why? Because they don't care. Perhaps in France many people go beyond not caring and actively don't want to know, because they prefer to think of Charlemagne as a Frenchman and the founder of France. It's easy to think that. For a long time "Frank" was synonymous, more or less, with "Frenchman," and I suppose that to many people it still more or less is. The Franks referred to very frequently in accounts of the Crusades did in fact come from France, and when they didn't speak Latin, they spoke French. And in English we know Charlemagne by his French name. People don't care about his native language. Very few of us care. In case you're one of those few and don't know yet: Charlemagne -- Carolus Magnus in most of the writing about him at the time, because most of that writing was in Latin, Karl der Grosse to Germans today, Charles the Great or Charlemagne to us -- couldn't read or write, although he made great efforts to learn late in life. Besides his native German, or Frankish, if you will, he could also speak Latin and Greek, and perhaps French and Arabic as well. His empire was large enough that he had much to do with native speakers of all of those languages.



As with the native language of Charlemagne 30 years ago, so today I'm interested in the language of the Lombards and Lombardy, and like 30 years ago, I'm not sure where to get the answers to my questions. Pretty much nobody knows, because pretty much nobody cares. I know that the Lombards were a Germanic tribe like the Franks and the Goths and the Vandals and others. I know that they had a kingdom in northern Italy from the late 6th century until Charlemagne absorbed that kingdom in the late 8th century. I know that the Germanic Lombard language was never recorded in any written documents except for occasional Lombard words in Latin texts, and those occasional Lombard words are all that scholars have had in their attempts to learn that language. I know that at some point the Lombard language died out and was replaced, in the region of northern Italy still known today as Lombardy, by an Italian dialect.

I do not know how much, if at all, the Lombard Italian dialect has been influenced by the Germanic Lombard language.

I do not know how much of the population of Lombardy was ever the Germanic-speaking people. I do not know whether this Germanic-speaking people ever constituted a majority of the population of the area. In England, the Norman Conquest of 1066 was carried out by French-speaking people. For several centuries after the Norman Conquest, although almost all the writing made public in England was in Latin or French, the French-speaking ruling class was a minority among an English- (or Anglo-Saxon-) speaking majority. Eventually the ruling class adopted the English language. I have no idea what percentage this French-speaking minority was of all the people living in England. Was the Lombard kingdom similarly a Germanic-speaking people ruling an Italian-speaking minority? I don't know.

Some linguists of Italian and historians of the Dark Ages know such things, and soon, I will too. And nobody cares. And people don't know what they're missing, and life is funny that way.

I certainly hope that it goes without saying that if anybody reading this knows all this stuff I hope you'll tell me or at least refer me to some helpful books, and that if you do we'll be best buds forever, because that would mean that I'll know even sooner than I'd hoped I would.

Words, Words, Words

I suppose my Grandpa Bollinger's pool table was made by a company called Brunswick. In any case, the earliest mental association I had with the word "Brunswick" was with big, solidly-made, new-looking pool tables, like the one in Grandpa's basement. We went to Grandpa's house in Fort Wayne every year around Christmastime, and that pool table was there as many Christmases back as I can remember; it was put there either before I was born or within a couple of years after, because I have vivid memories going back to age 3, and I cannot remember a Christmas when Grandpa did not live in that house, nor that house without that pool table.

Later, I learned that "Brunswick" was an area in Germany, and I imagined a place that looked like Grandpa's pool table, clean and solid, dark green everywhere like the felt on the table, dark green cleanly trimmed lawns, dark green tile roofs, all structures indoors and out trimmed with polished wood, with here and there gleaming enamel in colors like those of the pool balls. I assumed, too, the the major industry there was the manufacture of big, high-quality pool tables. By the age of 5 or 6 I had seen a few other pool tables, enough to know that Grandpa's was unusually fancy.

Sometime after I was fully grown and had long realized that my original conception of Brunswick was quite unrealistic -- although I still couldn't completely replace it with a realistic mental picture, and I probably never will -- I learned that "Brunswick" was the English form of "Braunschweig." Braunschweig was not an unfamiliar word: I was familiar with braunschweiger, a spreadable pork liver sausage, a poor man's pate, if you will. "Braunschweig" is always more or less associated in my mind with this sort of liver sausage, although not as intensely as "Brunswick" with the colors and textures of Grandpa's pool table, presumably because I learned the waord "braunschweiger" later in life -- perhaps also because I dislike braunschweiger as a child, whereas that pool table made a remarkably deep and very pleasant impression on me, pleasant in part probably because of the association with Christmas at Grandpa Bollinger's, which was a very good time. Just as I thought of Brunswick as a place of dark green and polished wood and gleaming enamel, so I thought of Braunschweig as a rather coarse and dirty place, where the people could not afford good food. I knew of course that Brunswick and Braunschweig were one and the same place, which probably looked nothing like either my imagined Brunswick nor my imagined Braunschweig -- still, the mind makes associations, even when one knows that the associations are inaccurate.

There's probably a widespread, conscious, if involuntary association among English-speaking people, between Hamburg, the German city, and the hamburger, the ground beef patty on a bun. Relatively few English speakers know that the residents of Hamburg are called Hamburgers; I imagine that that many tourists from the US involuntarily giggle when they learn this; and that the city named Frankfurt, and its residents the Frankfurters, are even more comical to them. Most native speakers of English do not realize that the German name for Vienna is Wien, and that a resident of Vienna is referred to in German as a Wiener.

It seems that the word is getting around, among the Gringos in Los Angeles, that "Los Angeles" means "the angels." But I have to wonder how many people have lived their whole lives in Sn Francisco without realizing that San Francisco is just another way of saying St. Francis. Or in San Antonio with knowing that their town is named after St. Anthony. Does the fact that so many people, completely ignorant of Spanish, have heard of San Francisco, the city, and of St, Francis, of Assisi, but do not associate the city with the saint, mean that "San Francisco" has acquired a new definition, through trans-linguistic ignorance? i suppose it does. I suppose that many, if not most words acquire new definitions through precisely such ignorance. For years I've been complaining that the name of Notre Dame, the university in northern Indiana, is mispronounced by everyone. Maybe I'm wrong to insist that this Notre Dame be associated with the French phrase "notre dame," "our lady," that is, of couse, the Virgin Mary, from whom it originally derived its name. The university was founded by French priests in the 1840's. Despite the derivation of its name, Notre Dame, in the US, as it is usually pronounced in the US, means, in the first place, college football and other college athletics, and in the second place, academics, with a strong emphasis on Catholicism, especially Irish-American Catholicism, with anything French coming in third at best. Detroit and Illinois still have their French names, long after the French pronounciations "day-TWAH" and "ee-yi-NWAH" have faded from the consciousness of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Words mean what people think they mean. A "correct" definition apart and different from conventional usage is an abstraction, a vain conceit of etymologists. Now, etymology is a fine and useful pursuit. But it can have pitfalls. To insist upon some past usage of a word as "correct" is every bit as wrong as ignoring all usages but the most recent. As with definitions, so with pronunciations: there is no "correct" usage existing as an absolute, as there are correct solutions to certain arithmetical problems. One can think of the relatively few English speaker who insist upon an absolutely "correct" English as the speakers of one of the many dialects of English.

Presumably this dialect is based upon one dictionary or another. But even the dictionaries do not always agree with each other; and the best ones, like the OED, tend to allow a much greater flexibility than do some of those people who insist upon "Correctness." (The OED, as its fans often call The Oxford English Dictionary, is a wonderful thing, a mighty achievement, and not all all stuffy, rigid or blind to the flow and change inherent in all language.) The apostles of "correct" language are of course wrong to think that language correctly follows the rules set forth in dictionaries. The truth is exactly the opposite: any dictionary which is intelligently made attempts to follow the language as it is actually spoken and written in the larger world, and freely admits, in the case of English, spoken by several hundred million people in all part of the world, that it is utterly impossible to fully follow the entire language in all of its complexity and diversity. It seems to me that those who insist upon "correctness" in English usage cannot possibly hava a very profound appreciation of all the varieties of Scottish, Irish, American, Indian, Caribbean, Australian and English English, to name but a few. The pedants of "correctness" are correct in pointing out that a firm command of grammar and syntax lends flexibility and grace to one's language. One can learn some things from such people. The problem is that the pedagogy tends to flow in one direction. Relatively few of the language police are themselves eager to learn, and language is an ever-changing, ever-growing phenomenon. No-one ever completely masters it, and and those who think that they already have, and shut themselves off from the new, therefore only fall ever farther behind.