From 74774.157@compuserve.com Sat Sep 2 15:00:16 1995 Date: 02 Sep 95 00:54:14 EDT From: Jeffrey Henning <74774.157@compuserve.com> To: BlindCopyReceiver: ; Subject: _Model Languages_ Issue 4 Part 2 [CONTINUED] Radiation Radiation is metaphorical extension on a grander scale, with new meanings radiating from a central semantic core to embrace many related ideas. The word _head_ originally referred to that part of the human body above the rest. Since the top of a nail, pin or screw is, like the human head, the top of a slim outline, that sense has become included in the meaning of _head_. Since the bulb of a cabbage or lettuce is round like the human head, that sense has become included in the meaning of _head_. Know where I'm headed with this? The meaning of the word _head_ has radiated out to include the head of a coin (the side picturing the human head), the head of the list (the top item in the list), the head of a table, the head of the family, a head of cattle, $50 a head. But I'll stop while I'm ahead. Other words that have similarly radiated meanings outward from a central core include the words _heart_, _root_ and _sun_. Specialization The only specific subtype of specialization that I have identified is contextual specialization. Contextual Specialization The word _undertaker_ originally meant "one who undertakes a task, especially one who is an entrepreneur". This illustrates contextual specialization, where the meaning of a word is reshaped under pressure from another word that had frequently co-occured with it: thus _undertaker_ acquired its meaning from constant use of the phrase _funeral undertaker_; eventually, under the pressure towards euphemism, the word _funeral_ was dropped. Another example of contextual specialization is _doctor_, which originally meant "a teacher" and then later "an expert", where it came to be used in the phrase _medical doctor_; now of course this is redundant and _medical_ is omitted, with the primary sense of _doctor_ having become more specialized. Word Old Meaning _undertaker_ "entrepreneur" _doctor_ "teacher" Shift "I heard an American student at Cambridge University telling some English friends how he climbed over a locked gate to get into his college and tore his pants, and one of them asked, 'But, how could you tear your pants and not your trousers?'" - Norman Moss, _British/American Language Dictionary_ Shifts occur when the sense of a word expands and contracts, with the final focus of the meaning different from the original. For some reason, words describing clothing tend to shift meanings more frequently than other words, perhaps because fashion trends come and go, leaving words to seem as old fashioned as the clothing they describe. Who today wants to wear bloomers, knickers or pantaloons? The word _pants_ has an interesting history. It's ultimate etymon is Old Italian _Pantalone_. In the 1600s, Italy developed commedia dell'arte, a style of comedy based on improvisation using stock characters. Pantalone was a stock character who was portrayed as a foolish old man wearing slippers and tight trousers. Through regular metyonmy, speakers of Old French borrowed his name to describe his Italian trousers. Their word was then borrowed into English as _pantaloon_, which in time was shortened to _pants_ and came to mean trousers in general. British speakers of English have modified the meaning again to the sense of "underpants", resulting in the confusing situation described in Norman Moss' quote above. Cast like discarded laundry along the divide separating British and American English are quite a few words for clothing, as the following table shows. Word Meaning ------------------------------------------------------------------ _jumper_ Etymon: English dialect _jump_ Original: "loose jacket" American: "pinafore" British: "a light pullover" _knickers_ Etymon: _knickerbockers_ Original: "breeches banded below knee" American: "boy's baggy trousers banded below knee" British: "bloomers, old-fashioned female underpants" _pants_ Etymon: _pantaloon_, from Old French _pantalon_ Original: "men's wide breeches extending from waist to ankle" American: "trousers" British: "underpants" _suspenders_ Etymon: _suspend_ Original: (unchanged) "straps to support trousers" American: (unchanged) British: "garter" _tights_ Etymon: _tight_, adj. Original: (unchanged) "snug, stretchable apparel worn from neck to toe; typically worn by dancers or acrobats" American: (unchanged) British: "pantyhose" _vest_ Etymon: Old French _veste_ < It. < Lat. _vestis_ Original: "clothing" American: "waistcoat" British: "undershirt" Amelioration Suffield's poem gave many good examples of amelioration, including _priest_ from "old man". A complementary term, _pastor_, likewise underwent amelioration, originally meaning "shepherd" (a sense surviving in the word _pastoral_), but coming to mean its current sense of "minister" by the extensive Christian references to "the Lord is my shepherd" as a call to ministry. The following table shows other examples, including _pluck_ in the sense of _He has a lot of pluck._ Word Old Meaning _enthusiasm_ "abuse" _guts_ ("courage") "entrails" _pastor_ "shepherd" _pluck_ ("spirit") "act of tugging" _queen_ "woman" Pejoration King James II called the just completed St. Paul's Cathedral _amusing, awful and artificial_. Call the just completed rock and roll museum in Cleveland _amusing, awful and artificial_, and you may be accurate but you will mean something quite different from King James. When he lived, those words meant that the cathedral was "pleasing, awe-inspiring and artful" respectively. The meaning of each word has grown more negative with time. People seem much more likely to drag words down than to lift them up, to build museums instead of cathedrals, as the following examples may demonstrate. Word Old Meaning _crafty_ "strong" _cunning_ "knowing" _egregious_ "distinguished, standing out from the herd" _harlot_ "a boy" _notorious_ "famous" _obsequious_ "flexible" _vulgar_ "popular" Semantic Reversal Occasionally a word will shift so far from its original meaning that its meaning will nearly reverse. Fascinatingly enough, the word _manufacture_ originally meant "to make by hand". Word Old Meaning _counterfeit_ "an original" _garble_ "to sort out" _manufacture_ "to make by hand" Contronyms A contronym is like a word that has undergone semantic reversal, only the tension has not eased: the word still preserves its original meaning, along with a contradictory -- if not exactly counterposed -- meaning. Word Meanings _bimonthly_ "happening every other month", "happening twice monthly" _biweekly_ "happening every other week", "happening twice weekly" _ravish_ "to overwhelm with force, especially rape"*, "to overwhelm with emotion, enrapture" _sanction_ "authoritative measure of approval"*, "coercive measure of disapproval of nation against nation" _table_ Brit. "to put on the table for discussion", Amer. "to set aside a motion rather than discuss it" *The older of the two senses given. Interestingly, _biannual_ means only "twice each year", with no recorded sense of "every other year" in _Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary_. The word _cleave_ (meaning "to split or separate" or "to adhere or cling") is actually two different words, both from the Old English (_cle_ofan_ and _cleofian_ respectively) but by changes in pronunciation, these words have evolved the same current form. Meaninglessness The nadir of semantics is meaninglessness. The final semantic change. The death of meaning. The defeat of sigor. The word _sigor_ is Old English for "victory". It is now meaningless to almost all English speakers, except for those familiar with Old English or with German (where its cognate survives in _Seig_). Few now know what _sigor_ means. Is this a change in its meaning or a change in the very state of the word? Is death part of life? Meaning Change Across Languages Imagine for a moment that _sigor_ had survived. It might have been changed to _siyor_, and its meaning could have generalized to "success". It would then stand in contrast to the German _Seig_. Sister languages, or dialects of a language, often have the same basic word with different meanings. These word pairs then become known as "false friends" to speakers trying to learn the other language. For instance, German _Lust_ means "pleasure", which is in fact the original meaning of the English word, which comes from the same common ancestor as _Lust_. In English, _lust_ underwent specialization and pejoration, as speakers associated it with only one type of pleasure. The British and American English clothing terms also show how related languages can send words off in different directions over time. As you develop your model languages, you should have words in related languages undergo different semantic changes. Situations where a word's meaning changes in two related languages are relatively rare, the example of the Irish and Gaelic words for "sun" evolving into "eye" notwithstanding. When languages borrow words, they frequently change the meanings of those borrowings, typically making generic words more specific, in the same way that one language's place names often grew out of another language's generic words for concepts such as "hill", "river" and "town". Take the history of the Low German word _spittal_, derived from a generic Romance word for "hospital" but then applied to "a hospital for lepers". Meaning Change Through Time Future Meaning Change Words are slowly changing in meaning even now, though the changes happen at the speed of continental drift rather than with the sudden jolt of earthquakes. To conclude this issue, and to summarize the types of meaning change discussed here, I have extrapolated how some words might change meanings in the next 25 years. Generalization: _entrepreneur_, "small-business owner or worker" (because of its favorable connotations, this word was widely adopted as a label, even by those who were not risk takers). Metonymy: _sun-cell_, "electric car" (so called because of the prominent solar cell on the roof of the vehicle). Metaphorical Extension: _surfaced_, "checked all Internet messages, including e-mail, voice mail and video mail" (originally popularized in the phrase _I just surfaced from checking my flood of e-mail_; given added cachet under the influence of _surf_, which see). Radiation: _Internet_, "Internet, narrowcast television, narrowcast radio, virtual reality, videoconferencing" (because it all was added onto the 'Net). Specialization: _surf_, "navigate the Internet" (traditional "water surfing" becomes called _sea-boarding_). Contextual Specialization: _candidate_, "political candidate" (the word _contestant_ began to be used instead of _candidate_ for non-political contexts). Shift: _fax_, "point-to-point e-mail" (e-mail gradually superseded fax). _post-modern_, "modern" (by calling everything modern _post- modern_, this change was inevitable). Amelioration: _temp_, "specialist". Pejoration: _liberal_, "idiot" (this term was used as an insult as early as 1988 and was gradually abandoned as a label by the Democrats it originally described). _job_, "drudgery". Semantic Reversal: _modern_, "obsolete" (thanks to the change in meaning of _post-modern_). _putrid_, "cool" (slang). Contronym: _communism_, "communism, capitalism" (courtesy of the Hong Kong communists). Meaninglessness: _perestroika_ (this word was used only by historians interested in how the Russian economy followed that of Sicily). If you want to create a slang or jargon, besides coining new words you should change the meanings of current words, much as these examples did. Just be aware that it is easier for an outsider to pick up new words than old words whose meaning has changed, since the outsider will bring all his assumptions from past experience to bear, so that when he hears a teenager call something _putrid_, he will assume that it _is_ putrid. The History of Meaning Change "To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him." - J.R.R. Tolkien, _The Hobbit_ If the history of semantic change had to be summed up as one process, it would be that of specialization. The Anglo Saxons 1500 years ago made do with perhaps 30,000 words in their complete vocabulary, while Modern English has anywhere from 500,000 to a million words, depending on whether or not scientific vocabularies are included. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God." It could be argued that originally there was one word, from which all others have sprung. The origins of language will never be known, but the first language probably had a vocabulary of a few hundred words, providing a rich enough vocabulary for a primitive people who had few materials and fewer abstract concepts. Many of the words of the first languages had very broad senses of meaning. For instance, the word _inspire_ is from the Latin _inspirare_, which literally means "to breathe into". Its archaic meaning is "to breathe life into", with newer meanings like "to be the cause of", "to elicit", "to move to action", "to exalt" and "to guide by divine influence". Now if a minister were to speak of Adam as _dust inspired_, he might mean by that not just that the dust is having life breathed into it (the original etymological meaning), but also that the dust is being exalted and given form, that it is being moved to action, and that it is being divinely guided (these are the metaphorical or extended meanings). In other words, this minister might not mean just one of the definitions of _inspired_ but all of them simultaneously. The extended meanings are branches that have split off from the trunk, and our hypothetical minister has simply traced them back to the root. If you seek to create a language from an earlier time, you should probably develop a small vocabulary, with it words having much more overlapping of meaning than the vocabularies of modern languages. Imagine a word _spiratholmos_ -- an ancient ancestor to Latin _inspirare_ -- meaning "wind, breath, voice, spirit." A speaker who used the word _spiratholmos_ would regard the wind in the trees as the breath of the earth, the voice of God, the spirit animating each of us. This is different way of looking at words, and prompted Tolkien to write, "There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful." What Tolkien's elves might have expressed in one word, resonant with meaning, Tolkien's diminutive man cannot express at all. Semantic change can be viewed dispassionately as a natural process, but it can also be invested with a spiritual significance, as Tolkien and Suffield have done. A model language is an art form and its crafting can even convey this theme of spiritual isolation. As Ronald Suffield wrote, "no word is still the word, but, a loafward has become lord." *** HELP! This newsletter was published late because of continued difficulties I have been experiencing in managing this list. We now have 201 subscribers, more than I can easily handle through CompuServe with my half-manual, half-automatic, custom-written list processor. I'm looking for a volunteer with a mailbot to manage this list. Thanks! *** You have just finished reading _Model Languages_, a regular on-line newsletter published monthly and provided free to all interested parties as part of the "gift economy" of the net. Feel free to post this newsletter on BBSes or on-line services and feel free to e-mail it to others, so long as you include this trailer. To subscribe, send a message with the text "SUBSCRIBE MODLANG \4 [your name]" in the subject header to 74774.157@compuserve.com. To cancel a subscription, send a message with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE MODLANG" in the header. I look forward to all comments, including the inevitable corrections, and am always interested in possible articles for inclusion in future issues. To retrieve back issues, send a message with the text "RETRIEVE MODLANG #(-#)" in the header, replacing the number signs with the number of the issue or issues you want to retrieve; e.g., "RETRIEVE MODLANG 1" for the first issue, "RETRIEVE MODLANG 1-2" for the first two issues (you are reading issue 3). Retrievals are processed once a month (until I find a volunteer to set up a mailbot). NOTE: This document looks best when formatted with a monospaced font such as Courier. Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved.