Red-faced hunter

Crowd Science's end-of-year round-up led me to this 2017 article in The Conversation, which - among other things, recounts this astronomical symbolism from the aboriginal lore of Australia:

A Kokatha oral tradition from the Great Victoria Desert tells of Nyeeruna, a vain hunter who comprises the same stars, in the same orientation, as the Greek Orion.

He is in love with the Yugarilya sisters of the Pleiades, but they are timid and shy away from his advances. Their eldest sister, Kambugudha (the Hyades star cluster), protects her younger sisters.

Nyreeuna creates fire-magic in his right hand (Betelgeuse) to overpower Kambugudha, so he can reach the sisters. She counters this with her own fire magic in her left foot (Aldebaran), which she uses to kick dust into Nyreeuna’s face. This humiliates Nyreeuna and his fire-magic dissipates.

<idle-musing>
I wonder why both the Aborigines and the Greeks a few thousand years later decided that this constellation represented a hunter. No time for further research though.
</idle-musing>

The title of this paper rather gives the game away. 

Yes, Aboriginal Australians Can and Did Discover the Variability of Betelgeuse

<comment>
No prizes for the sequence of tenses, but it is only a preprint – not that that makes much difference...

<editorial-note>
In my experience as a technical writer (what I did didn't undergo  'peer-review' – in name, at least – but it was reviewed by my peers), peer review doesn't improve the writing; quite the reverse – it invites the influence of numerous mutually-exclusive grammatical bugbears. It may improve academic rigour, but it doesn't improve readability. 

</editorial-note>

... Come to think of it, hasn't it been peer-reviewed yet? 
</comment>

Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing Betelgeuse in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely. Given that the discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is that the Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do indeed vary in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century ago from many Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal Australians could and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Antares.

L'Envoi

Interesting pattern in the waxing and waning (see what he did there?) of interest in Harmless Drudgery, not boding well for January 2024😗:

Signing off for 2023.

b

Update: 2024.02.22.10.00 – Typo /format fixes.

A tradition resurrected

Angelus ad virginem subintrans in conclave

Virginis formidinem demulcens inquit 'Ave' ...    

...as we sang last Saturday at All Saints Wokingham (at a concert that I did mention last time (so if you missed it you've only yourself to blame [and the 200+ people who came had a marvellous time]).

Resurrecting a practice observed several times in the early days of this blog....

<rip>

The earliest instance is here. I was reminded of it by the passing of a friend and erstwhile colleague {and long-valued commenter on this blog}, who would surely have ticked the No publicity box, so I shan't name her.

</rip>

... when I marked the festive season by taking a carol to bits, I am today looking at Angelus ad virginem; but just the first two lines as there's plenty to detain me there; and I'll begin in medias res, or more accurately in medias primae lineae: subintrans. Like the first word of that sentence ("resurrecting") it's a way of referring to an event without saying '<x> happened'. It's a present participle, or – to use the CELTA-approved abomination – "the -ing form". And it kicks off with two prepositions. the second one belonging to the verb intrare, which means, as you may have guessed, "to enter". But before that it says sub-, referring to the direction adopted by any angel worth his salt: downwards. He (it was a feller – you can tell that from the -us) came down into the conclave.

<anachronism-warning>
I am anything but an expert on domestic door furniture in nought-th-century Palestine, but I suspect Mary's room was not lockable. Readers of a musical bent will know from klavier and clef and clavichord that the -clave bit of conclave is a key. The clavicle is so-called because of its shape (not a Yale of course; more the sort of thing you might see on a medieval jailor's keyring.) And followers of papal doings will recognize the word 'conclave'; when the cardinals are electing a new Pope there's a lock-in to concentrate their minds.

<equivalent-anachronism>

The  one that everyone quotes is Shakespeare's clock  chiming the hour in Julius Caesar. And the one in this Annunciation  scene involves a similar timespan: from the year dot (when the angel comes down) to a medieval technology (when they have doors with locks).  Caesar's Rome did have an audible marking of time, just monthly rather than hourly, and not mechanical: the ritual calling out of the new month, which gives us the word calendar, as noted by Etymonline:

</equivalent-anachronism> 

</anachronism-warning>

 Whereupon the girl had ants in her pants....

<autobiographical-note>
(at least, I suppose that's where formidinis gets its meaning – from formis [=ant]). By using this colloquialism I would no doubt incur the wrath of Mrs Batty, a primary school teacher who thought that my daughter's "Mary was gobsmacked" (in a retelling of the Annunciation) was inappropriately irreverent. In my view it was a brilliant use of the vernacular, showing extraordinarily rich vocabulary in a 6-year-old (though maybe I'm biased).
</autobiographical-note>

... and the angel showed remarkable obtuseness in assuming that a simple "Ave" would demulcere anyone... 

<gloss>
The -mul- part of demulcens is presumably related to our "mollify".
</gloss>

...They'd win no prizes for self-awareness, these angels. 

That's enough for now. I'm half-expecting a review of the concert, but if it happens it'll have to go in an update.

b

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill

 In last Sunday's The Week in Westminster they were discussing the rights and wrongs of the Rwanda 'policy'...

<oh-yeah>
(less of a policy, it seems to me, than a gamble on the possible outcome of a tiny symbolic gesture)
</oh-yeah>

.... Sir Robert Buckland ...

<autobiographical-note>
(any relation, I wonder, of Graham Buckland, with whom I used to sing in Corpus Chapel Choir?)
</autobiographical-note>

... repeated the view reported in the Evening Standard last week:

“The ECHR [HD: European Court of Human Rights] underpins the very fabric of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement,” he told the BBC Sunday Politics programme.

He added: “To ignore that reality in the context of a debate about migration would be to threaten and endanger the Good Friday/Belfast process and once again undermine the position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.

“I think it would be a foolish or rash move… the wrong step and a very un-Conservative step for colleagues to take bearing in mind it was Conservative lawyers and politicians who helped draft the convention in those years after the war.

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill responds to the Supreme Court's ruling that the policy would be illegal because Rwanda was not safe, by hastily throwing some more money at Rwanda...

<weasel-words>
(Of course the official line is that they're not spending any more. But there are new procedures and restrictions that will inevitably mean more money is spent – not to mention the ongoing legal costs (millions) foreseen by Geoffrey Robertson KC in a recent World at One.)
</weasel-words>

 ...and decreeing that oh yes it is, so that's all right

But this one will run and run; it's a moving target. Latest news is that the Immigration Minister...

<parenthesis>
(whose name I can't dissociate from the smell of pilchards, because of a near-pun: 

 

</parenthesis>

... having introduced the Bill, has disavowed it as insufficiently inhumane and done a runner to the back benches to plot with Attila the Hen.

It's hard not to agree with Alastair Campbell in last week's The Rest Is Politics that the Tories have given up on governing and are spending their inevitable last few months laying political traps for an incoming Labour administration.

<image authorship="mine not Campbell's>
(Not unlike the Wagner group pulling out of Ukraine but leaving behind a devil's brew of booby traps and landmines)
</image> 

But I've got better things to do than chart the hissy-fits of HMG, notably, preparation for this:

It's already selling well, and should be a blast. Hokum all ye faithful.

b

So farewell then, Twittter

 I have had a presence on Twitter since 2009.  I wrote about it here:

<pre-script>
I came late to Twitter, though late is relative (I followed Stephen Fry ...

<apologia>
Don't judge. I'm not just a star-struck celebrity-stalker. we are fellow near-contemporaries (a few years apart) at CU Footlights, and have a number of connections and interests in common.
</apologia>

...before he reached 20,000 followers and he's now at about 13 million). At the 2008 Language Show I saw a talk given by the amazing Joe Dale, and he recommended it. But I resisted until I saw him again at the 2009^PPS Language Show, and since then I've been an aficionado and a user (rather more than some might wish....) 

... 

^PPS With some regret, I have cancelled my @BobK99 account (because of Twitter's new Ts&Cs, the gist of which is "Everything you write or link to is ours to do with as we will, and we have the right to pass it on willy-nilly to third parties of our choice"), keeping my toe in the water ...

</pre-script>

That 'toe in the water' was an account called @leBobEnchaine. (Sadly, twitter tags couldn't handle diacritics.)

<aha> 
A cheap alternative to a guard dog is a chained duck, which makes a fuss when anyone comes near. 

Hence, I realized when coining this monicker, Le Canard Enchaîné (which shouted out a warning whenever poiticians did their usual thing). Maybe there was a tradition in France of using chained ducks like this, or maybe the satirical periodical just thought it would be a good idea. For Further Study...

 

 

</aha>

<aha2 type="totally irrelevant”>    
It's just struck me that the dunnock is the original 'Little Brown Job', as birders say; dun means brown and  -ock is a diminutive suffix. They don't come littler or browner than a dunnock.
</aha2>

Then along came Elon Musk, wantonly (not to say wastefully) changing the name and disturbing his neighbours' sleep patterns with a garish sign that trumpeted his wastefulness. NBC News reporrted:

Flashing 'X' sign at Twitter building is taken down

The flashing “X” sign above the San Francisco building formerly known as Twitter’s headquarters has been removed, video shows, days after it went up and caused complaints about the nighttime display.

... San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection issued a notice of violation Friday after the "X", which did not have a permit, was erected on the roof, department spokesman Patrick Hannan said.

There had been 24 complaints made about the sign over the weekend, including because its lights, he said

Not only conspicuous consumption but conspicuous waste. 'I've got money to burn and I don't care if the great unwashed can't get to sleep.'

But much worse than this was his evisceration of the staff that kept the lid on the most flagrant hate-speech, generally firing the starting pistol on a race to the bottom. This has made it less and less comfortable to be a part of the community.

Meanwhile, Newscast has for several months been espousing an extension to its community, based on an app with the unpromising (not to say unappetising) name discord; so unappetising is it that until now I have resisted Newscast's repeated invitations to sign up. I don't want discord (the abstract noun, not the app); that's what the new Twitter is about – discord and trollery and unbridled misinformation and ill-informed reflex pile-ons.

<parenthesis>
When I first met this neologism (fairly recently) I tried to make the meaning of pylon fit; and I think the term 'neologism' is justified. The verb 'pile on' has been around for over a century: Etymonline says 

'Figurative verbal phrase pile on "attack vigorously, attack en masse," is attested by 1894, American English

But this excerpt from  Collins suggests that the noun (hyphenated if you don't mind) is a much more recent coining: 21st century, I'd say.

</parenthesis>

So I'm leaving Twitter to its own devices and dipping my toe in discord (the app, not the abstract noun)

b.

Easy enough for YOU to say

Many years ago I wrote here about an interesting experiment involving speakers of a second language (and newish readers may want to catch up there). But since that post several more reports have appeared, notably these three:

• One in 2017 (which I mentioned in an update to that old post). It asked:

If you could save the lives of five people by pushing another bystander in front of a train to his death, would you do it? And should it make any difference if that choice is presented in a language you speak, but isn't your native tongue? 

Psychologists at the University of Chicago found in past research that people facing such a dilemma while communicating in a foreign language are far more willing to sacrifice the bystander than those using their native tongue. In a paper published Aug. 14 in Psychological Science, the UChicago researchers take a major step toward understanding why that happens.

"Until now, we and others have described how using a foreign language affects the way that we think," said Boaz Keysar, the UChicago psychology professor in whose lab the research was conducted. "We always had explanations, but they were not tested directly. This is really the first paper that explains why, with evidence." 

• This, in 2018 which said

Whether you’re speaking in your native tongue, or in another language, being understood and believed is fundamental to good communication. After all, a fact is a fact in any language, and a statement that is objectively true should just be considered true, whether presented to you in English, Chinese or Arabic.

However, our research suggests that the perception of truth is slippery when viewed through the prism of different languages and cultures. So much so that people who speak two languages can accept a fact in one of their languages, while denying it in the other.

• A 2019 article nearly lost me at the first headline:

If you speak multiple languages, 

which words get lost in translation

Um... This is a bugbear (and one that I'm not proud of, but Hier stehe ich; ich kan nicht anders...

<silly, moi?>
(Luther's way of denying all knowledge of anyone called Andrew? [Note: kan/kann pun.]
</silly, moi?>

...) I don't speak 'multiple languages' (sic). I speak SEVERAL. I know I'm swimming against the tide here, and many dictionaries disagree; but in my view a 'multiple pile-up' is one that involves several vehicles. It seems to me lazy and irresponsible to take one word, meaningful in its own context, and pass that meaning willy-nilly onto a passing word that just happens to be in the vicinity. The dictionaries are licensing Humpty-Dumpyism. (I know...).

But luckily I managed to ignore the sub-editor's contribution and read about the actual research:

A new study has demonstrated that while words for emotions such as “fear”, “love” or “anger” are often directly translated between languages, there can be differences in their true meaning, depending on the family the language belongs to. 

For example, while the concept of “love” is closely linked to “like” and “want” in Indo-European languages, it is more closely associated with “pity” in Austronesian languages.

This looked worthy of note. But unfortunately the article was just a filler, and was simply a vehicle for a vox pop inviting speculation about the difference between heraeth (Welsh nostalgia) and saudade (Portuguese nostalgia)

<ducking_and_covering>
Pacete Welsh and Portuguese separatists, I KNOW. I just find all this 'Fifty words for snow' stuff rather tiresome. Natural languages are uniquely expressive, each in its own way. End of. If you want to amass examples, immerse yourself in one (or more).
</ducking_and_covering>

I imagine there are some post-pandemic contributions to this issue, but there are things to do, so they'll have to wait for an Update.

b

We'll see about THAT

Writing in an online forum for learners of English (usingenglish.com) earlier this week I asserted "the subjunctive is much less common in British English than in American English". I was supported by people whose views I have learned to be sound, but I still felt that an assertion like that needed some quantitative support.

As usual my first port of call was the British National Corpus. The search string I used was that there be – a fairly crude choice, but an unquestionable one. The BNC is a 100 million word corpus, and in all that text (mostly written...

<parenthesis>
BNC has 90% writtten sources, and only 10% spoken. But my guess is that the subjunctive is more common in formal writing rather than in speech. This search in the (very much bigger) Hansard corpus supports this preference:  

</parenthesis>

....) it found only 69 instances:

There are various ways of making up for this uncommonness, but probably the most popular is the interpolation of 'should'  – which yields nearly 8 times as many hits:

 

That's the picture for British English. The Corpus of Contemporary American English is much bigger than BNC – 10 times the size, and more recently updated – but the figure is impressive:

The 'should' workaround, on the other hand, is less common (just over twice as many hits in a corpus 10 times the size): 

So speakers of American English use the subjunctive more readily than speakers of British English, and use an interpolated 'should' to avoid it much less often.

Translation News

Winners of the Stephen Spender Translation Prize 2023  have been decided and will be announced next Thursday. Winners have already been notified, but my letter seems to have been lost in the post. I shan't be attending the online announcement shindig next week, not because I'm washing my hair but because it's the first rehearsal with my choir's new MD. (Our old MD's swansong is tomorrow, and there are still tickets:

To judge from lasr night's rehearsal it'll be well worth a visit.)

Right, I know the notes; now it's just the words (and where to put them) ...

b

How do you solve a problem called Suella

What can Rishi do with her? Thursday's Newscast was all about the Home Secretary, who – I was disappointed to learn – is pleasant and personable. I say 'disappointed' because her views and interventions and general vitriol are so odious.

First ...

<parenthesis>
(this week; her trail of destructive stupidity goes back much further including such ridiculous populist nonsense as the wasteful and self-defeating [not to say illegal] Rwanda policy)
</parenthesis>

... it was 'hate marches'– an irresponsible ...

<why>
There are a few hate-filled people on the Palestinian side, but it takes two to tango and they won't get to exercise their hatred (in terms of actual violence) unless there's a counter-demonstration (which Braverman, for self-serving political reasons, is taking care to stir up).
</why>

...and bare-faced attempt to foment disorder. And fomenting disorder isn't in the job description of Home Secretary.

<stop-press reason="just heard the news">
It worked. She must be proud of herself.
</stop-press>

Then it was 'a lifestyle choice'  – a heartless and stupid contribution to the politics of homelssness. And heartless stupidity isn't in the job description of Home Secretary.

Then came the kicker: her unconstitutional attempt to undermine Mark Rowley, in her letter to The Times on Thursday. The  editor of GB News, speaking on that edition of Newscast, said he had received numerous phone calls from people who couldn't understand what was wrong with what she had said. What was wrong with it  was that she is Home Secretary and it's not her job to stir up trouble by undermining the police force who have an incredibly sensitive situation to police. The fact that consumers of GB News don't see what's wrong with it is simply a reflection of the degree of political naivety of those consumers. Not surprising really: the politically naive express politically naive opinions.

<background> 

Nick Robinson, although not always entirely convincing in his  expressions of shocked propriety,  had some interesting things to say about who was sending what coded messages to whom in Thursday's The Today Podcast. 

</background>

She's behaving like a  spoilt teenager, pushing the envelope of tolerability further and further in order to get a reaction form the people who have her best interests at heart: "Aren't I awful?". She wants to be sacked, to become a martyr on the back-benches and whip up support from her extreme right-wing chronies.  And for her it's Win:Win: if she's sacked she becomes more of  a right-wing pin-up; if she's not sacked after so bare-facedly defying No.10's authority (by trampling on the ministerial code ...

<ministerial-code relevant-section="8.2">

Media interviews, speeches etc

8.2 In order to ensure the effective coordination of Cabinet business, the policy content and timing of all major announcements, speeches, press releases and new policy initiatives should be cleared in draft with the No 10 Press and Private Offices at least 24 hours in advance. All major interviews and media appearances, both print and broadcast, should also be agreed with the No 10 Press Office. 

</ministerial-code>

...and not making the required edits before submitting her letter for publication) then the PM is shown to be weak. Either way she has a head start in the post-election race to ba leader of His Majesty's Opposition.

The last word goes to Dominic Grieve, a good man thrown out of the party by a brainless nincompoop who should never have got his hands on the levers of power. Grieve wrote, in the Independent: 

Suella Braverman must resign now

The home secretary has undermined the independence of the police and weaponised Remembrance commemorations for her own political ends. She must not be allowed to represent us at the Cenotaph on Sunday, writes former attorney general Dominic Grieve

In haste

b

Update: 2023.11.14.12:30 –  Added PS

PS Well, she didn't; I don't think it was ever likely that she would; yesterday she was sacked (by telephone, according to Jacob Real-Smug, speaking on last night's News – Bad Form, he thought).

Taking his cue from Gordon Brown's Government Of All the Talents Rishi Sunak has announced another GOAT, but with a twist that makes it all his own: it's a Government of the Absolutely Talentless, starring the author of the Brexit debacle and the pointless and self-defeating austerity programme..