You're familiar with the quasi-weekly Hump This and of course you know The Daily Hump, that weekday feature that's been more regular than a sixty-five year old full of prune juice. Well, this week I'm happy to introduce two new features: Mondays' This Week in Endangered Languages (TWiEL) and Wednesdays' I Live for Dead Tongues (ILfDT).

Endangered languages make me sad. Like endangered animals they're just steps away from disappearing from this earth forever. As Wikipedia notes

While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a good scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years.

Sure, unlike extinct animals, we can occassionally resurrect an extinct language but it hasn't happened to often (Wikipedia shows only 13 examples). Some people even argue that language extinction is good

...fewer languages means better and clearer communications among the majority of speakers. The economic cost of maintaining myriad separate languages, and their translator caretakers, is enormous.

Humbug. Languages are invaluable; they are unique and hold within their grammar, lexicon and oral traditions thousands of clues about the identities of the speakers and how they live. To delete a language is to permanently destroy windows into these cultures. This line of thinking condones abuse of the minority by the majority and is nothing more than a form of cultural whitewashing.

TWiEL will be relying a lot on Wikipedia's List of endangered languages so I'll be using their definition for determining whether a language is endangered: it must have less than 1,000 speakers and be in rapid decline. I maintain this column as an appreciation for the shrinking universe which these languages describe. Today we're going to start with the waning Wymysorys.

Wymysorys
Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic, High German
Writing system: Latin alphabet

Where you'll hear it: Wilamowice, Poland


The origins: "Wymysorys appears to derive from 12th century Middle High German, with a strong influence from Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Polish and Old English. The inhabitants of Wilamowice are thought to be descendants of Dutch, German and Scottish settlers who arrived in Poland in the 13th century. However, the inhabitants of Wilamowice always refused any connections with Germany and proclaimed their Dutch origins."
Famous speakers: poet Florian Biesik

The beginning of the end: "After World War II, local communist authorities forbade the use of the language. Despite the fact that the ban was lifted after 1956, Wymysorys has been gradually replaced by Polish, especially amongst the younger generations."
And today: 70 speakers

Example:

Śłöf duy buwła fest!
Skumma frmdy gest,
Skumma muma ana fettyn,
Z' brennia nysła ana epułn,
Śłöf duy Jasiu fest!

Sleep, my boy, soundly!
Foreign guests are coming,
Aunts and uncles are coming,
Bringing nuts and apples,
Sleep Johnny sound

Labels: Dutch, Germanic, High German, Indo-European, Low German, Middle High German, Old English, Old Frisian, Polish, TWiEL, West Germanic, Wymysorys

I've always been a firm believer in never airing one's fears out in public. Perhaps it's unwarranted paranoia but putting this information out there opens one up to mental torture on a colossal scale. But a few years ago my grandmother, after surprising me by suddenly speaking German, told me that one should always know the language of one's enemy. By extension, I've come to realize we should also understand the language we use to identify our enemy, which is what brings me to today's hump, one of the banes of my existence, the caterpillar.

It's not so much I have a fear of caterpillars as much as they simply give me the willies. And I'm an animal person--I don't mind snakes, I like mice and rats, even most insects don't bother me. No, caterpillars (and millipedes and centipedes) hold a special place in my gut. I'm so acutely aware of caterpillars that I'm convinced I can smell their presence; I know this from the series of unscientific experiments I ran while mowing the lawn. I'd get a whiff of larva and shawnuff on a nearby plant would be a thick nasty green tomato caterpillar. Or above my head a colony of tent caterpillars would be weaving their hellish web of arboreal misery. And there, on the driveway, was a woolly bear caterpillar, least offensive of the lot simply because it had the misfortune of being run over by the car. My keen sense of smell protects me from these monsters.

Caterpillar ultimately comes to us from the Old French chatepelose, which literally translates to "hairy cat." You may remember cat from a previous hump but the second element is from the Latin pilosus, meaning "hair." The Italian surname Pelosi comes from this same Latin root. Has the House of Representatives been taken over by a caterpillar masquerading as a San Francisco liberal? Given the facts it seems plausible.

Judge caterpillars for yourself, but remember this;

Our word caterpillar is first recorded in English in 1440 in the form catyrpel. Catyr, the first part of catyrpel, may indicate the existence of an English word *cater, meaning "tomcat," otherwise attested only in caterwaul. Cater would be cognate with Middle High German kater and Dutch kater. The latter part of catyrpel seems to have become associated with the word piller, "plunderer"...[from AHD: emphasis mine]

See? Even our modern day spelling hints to the caterpillar's intrinsic malevolence. Madame Speaker (if that is your real name), I rest my case.

caterpillar [AHD]
caterpillar [Online Etymology Dictionary]
caterpillar [OED]
caterpillar [Wikipedia]
Italian surnames [Italy World Club]

Labels: Dutch, Latin, Middle High German, Old French, The Daily Hump

dop·pel·gäng·er or dop·pel·gang·er (dŏp'əl-găng'ər, -gĕng'-)

n. A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.

[German, a double : doppel, double (from French double; see double) + Gänger, goer (from Gang, a going, from Middle High German ganc, from Old High German).]

[The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition]

Footnote: I remember first coming upon the word doppelgänger in Konami's 1990 NES release Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. Great game!

Labels: German, Middle High German, Old High German, The Daily Hump