Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Linguoboy]

given that we still call Native Americans "redskins"

Who's "we", Kemosabe?

[mèþru]

I think everyone here knows that it is an offensive term. Pabappa was probably referring to the ignorant/racists.

[Linguoboy]

I think everyone here knows that it is an offensive term. Pabappa was probably referring to the ignorant/racists.

And NFL franchise owners...

"Olive-skinned" puzzled me for years as well. I do think the fact that it's often used to describe the complexion of olivivorous Southern Europeans has something to do with its currency, despite the fact that the original metaphor is obscure. (I've never heard it applied to Asians even though a number of them have skin tones of the same hue.)

Speaking of terms for skin complexion, café-au-lait baffled me for quite a while. Even after I learned the literal meaning, I couldn't associate it with any particular shade of brown.

[Zaarin]

"Olive-skinned" puzzled me for years as well. I do think the fact that it's often used to describe the complexion of olivivorous Southern Europeans has something to do with its currency, despite the fact that the original metaphor is obscure. (I've never heard it applied to Asians even though a number of them have skin tones of the same hue.)

I have, but not frequently.

Speaking of terms for skin complexion, café-au-lait baffled me for quite a while. Even after I learned the literal meaning, I couldn't associate it with any particular shade of brown.

The one that gets me is "honey." If your skin is the color of honey, please see a doctor immediately; that's not healthy. Since I used to drink my coffee au lait (I drink it black now) I find the term evocative enough, though I don't think I've ever seen anyone with skin that particular shade of pale brown.

[Pabappa]

Apparently, native Americans were themselves described as olive-skinned (in French) in 1684:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redskin_(slang)

The origin of the term may not be in English. I wouldnt think that the term would be invented just for the Natives, so we should expect to see even older cites somewhere.

[Linguoboy]

The origin of the term may not be in English. I wouldnt think that the term would be invented just for the Natives, so we should expect to see even older cites somewhere.

Why wouldn't you think that?

According to the OED, it originates in Algonkian and entered English via French:

In sense 1 after Mississippi Valley French Peau Rouge (c1769 in the passage translated in quot. c1769), itself apparently after Illinois *e·rante·wiroki·ta American Indian, lit. ‘person with red skin’ (compare nitarante·wiroki I am red, lit. ‘I have red skin’ (a1720 as nitaranteȣirouki)) and similar expressions in other American Indian languages of the region.

[Pabappa]

I mean the origin of "olive-skinned ",... that cite is for red. I don't think we would coin a term based on olives for a New World people, so I suspect it goes back even further than 1684.

[Ares Land]

We have the adjective olivâtre in French and it's just as confusing.
According to this, the earliest attestation is from 1525. https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/oliv%C3%A2tre

That dictionary entry isn't particularly helpful, but I managed to figure out that olivastre was borrowed from Italian, in a translation of Pigafetta's account of Magellan's travels.
I've checked https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Relazion ... o_al_mondo and there it is:
Non sono del tutto negri, ma olivastri; They are not black at all, but olive-skinned.

He's talking about the inhabitants of terra del Verzin, Brazil, that is. So it refers to Native Americans again.
I agree with Pabappa that the analogy looks like it could go even further back, but I'm not sure how to dig further. Does anyone know of a good resource for Italian etymology?

(FWIW, olives can be brownish-yellow. Still nothing like a healthy skin tone, but the analogy makes a little more sense.)

[linguistcat]

In a language that already has tone, can palatalization/velarization on consonants affect the tone of a syllable?

[Travis B.]

In a language that already has tone, can palatalization/velarization on consonants affect the tone of a syllable?

I would presume not, as palatalization/velarization does not really affect phonation. Voicing and glottalization, on the other hand, can certainly affect tone.

[Moose-tache]

I know this discussion has already gone around a few times, but I want to re-iterate: not all olives are green or black! For example, arbequina olives are frequently a beigey-brown tone that looks a little like skin. The explorers from southern Europe would have been intimately familiar with a wide variety of olives, and could use them to create color comparisons that everyone back home would understand. And besides the hue may have been secondary (is the "wine-dark sea" a deep red?).

I think the whole thing about "people from countries which grow olives" is a folk etymology. For one thing, this would give the term very little descriptive power. Telling the people back home that you found a country where the people have skin the color of X only works if they have X back in your country. In other words, it would have to be the presence of olives in Italy, France, and Iberia that allowed these terms to flourish. Second, I can think of no other example of people from a given region being ascribed anatomical traits based solely on their agricultural output. Would you describe people from Indonesia as having skin the color of rice? How about "mango-skinned" to describe people from Ghana? And who could forget those Cuban beauties, with eyes the color of tobacco and skin the color of raw sugar! ... OK, that one's kind of awesome, but generally this pattern doesn't work because it's grossly inaccurate and no one will understand what you're trying to say anyway.

Bottom line, I don't think [olive] > [beige] > [medium skin tone] is a semantic extension that really cries out for a complicated explanation.

[zompist]

I know this discussion has already gone around a few times, but I want to re-iterate: not all olives are green or black! For example, arbequina olives are frequently a beigey-brown tone that looks a little like skin. The explorers from southern Europe would have been intimately familiar with a wide variety of olives, and could use them to create color comparisons that everyone back home would understand.

It's precisely because olives have different colors that using them to describe skin colors is so strange! It's like saying someone is the color of grapes. Does that mean purple, or blue, or green, or yellow, or...? Google "olive color"... if a human was that color you'd have to call a doctor, if not an undertaker.

Again, I'd love to see some actual textual evidence. Ars Lande's cite is a good start; since the text explicitly contrasts the color with black, it seems likely that he's thinking of dark brown, perhaps like Kalamata olives. (That's far darker than Brazilian Indians look to me, but Europeans seem to exaggerate the darkness of other races.)

[linguistcat]

As I had always heard it, being olive skinned was a matter of undertones and not the darkness of the skin (or dark-/lightness being a secondary matter). Olive skinned always meant someone with light to medium skin with blueish or greenish undertones, as opposed to pink/peachy undertones for most Europeans.

The only reason I'd say olive skinned doesn't apply to darker skinned people is the difficulty of seeing undertones as more than warm or cool after a certain point.

[Linguoboy]

I think the whole thing about "people from countries which grow olives" is a folk etymology. For one thing, this would give the term very little descriptive power. Telling the people back home that you found a country where the people have skin the color of X only works if they have X back in your country. In other words, it would have to be the presence of olives in Italy, France, and Iberia that allowed these terms to flourish. Second, I can think of no other example of people from a given region being ascribed anatomical traits based solely on their agricultural output. Would you describe people from Indonesia as having skin the color of rice? How about "mango-skinned" to describe people from Ghana? And who could forget those Cuban beauties, with eyes the color of tobacco and skin the color of raw sugar! ... OK, that one's kind of awesome, but generally this pattern doesn't work because it's grossly inaccurate and no one will understand what you're trying to say anyway.

I think you mean "popular etymology"? My point wasn't that this was the origin of the phrase but that it's helped give it legs. Saying "people from a given region being ascribed anatomical traits based solely on their agricultural output" is moving the goalposts quite a bit, since you can certainly come up with plenty of examples of people's appearance being characterised in terms of local foods, whether it's Midwesterners with "hair like cornsilk", "chocolate-skinned" West Africans, or Arabs with "eyes like dates". Against that background, it's easier to explain why "olive-skinned" has persisted as a descriptor despite the wide range of colours of olives' skins.

[zompist]

A little linguistic curiosity, from an article in Slate comparing war with Iran with war in Iraq:

Its terrain is rougher and more mountainous; Iraq’s was flat and mostly clear desert.

The curiosity is the word was. Iraq's terrain hasn't changed since the invasion. In a past narrative, it's fine to put always-true statements in the past, but this isn't a past narrative. But apparently the author felt that any statement about the Iraq war had to be past tense.

(For anyone who has my syntax book, see p. 251. This would complicate the examples of using past tense for non-past events...)

[Pabappa]

A little linguistic curiosity, from an article in Slate comparing war with Iran with war in Iraq:

Its terrain is rougher and more mountainous; Iraq’s was flat and mostly clear desert.

The curiosity is the word was. Iraq's terrain hasn't changed since the invasion. In a past narrative, it's fine to put always-true statements in the past, but this isn't a past narrative. But apparently the author felt that any statement about the Iraq war had to be past tense.

(For anyone who has my syntax book, see p. 251. This would complicate the examples of using past tense for non-past events...)

i didnt read the article, but i could see "Iraq" being elliptical for something like "the territory we invaded in Iraq". e.g. US soldiers did not need to occupy the whole of Iraq in order to conquer Iraq, we mostly fought in the lowlands where most of the population is. thus the entity itself is past tense and needs a past tense verb.

[Estav]

A little linguistic curiosity, from an article in Slate comparing war with Iran with war in Iraq:

Its terrain is rougher and more mountainous; Iraq’s was flat and mostly clear desert.

The curiosity is the word was. Iraq's terrain hasn't changed since the invasion. In a past narrative, it's fine to put always-true statements in the past, but this isn't a past narrative. But apparently the author felt that any statement about the Iraq war had to be past tense.

(For anyone who has my syntax book, see p. 251. This would complicate the examples of using past tense for non-past events...)

This seems pretty normal to me. Even if it's not embedded in a past narrative, that specific clause is talking about a past (even though not "passed") situation. What's relevant is what the terrain of Iraq was like in the past, during US military involvement; it hasn't changed since then, but if it had, it wouldn't make a difference to the truth of the statement. (I might be misunderstanding the meaning of "always-true statements", but this doesn't seem like a great example of one to me because terrain can and does change over time (even if things like mountainous vs. flat don't change on human timescales); what I first think of when "always-true" is brought up is "analytic" truths like 2+2=4.)

[Moose-tache]

For me, describing Iraq's terrain in the present would be ominous, like the author was describing a current dilemma about which country to attack first. You wouldn't say "The potential amphibious landing sites along the Iranian coast are rocky and treacherous, whereas Juno and Sword beach *are easy to access."

[Kuchigakatai]

An English speaker in another forum I'm in asked people about T-V pronoun usage within families in their languages. I wrote the following:

In El Salvador there has been a generational shift on the use of informal vos and respectful usted within families. I always address my parents with vos, but they address me back sometimes using vos and sometimes using usted (my mother mostly uses vos but my father does use both haphazardly in about equal measure).

In contrast, my parents always address my grandparents with usted, and my grandparents mostly use usted when addressing them back.

I had a classmate who always talked to her mother using usted and we (me and some classmates) would sometimes remark on how odd that was (for someone of our same age).

Usted used to be more common in El Salvador overall, perhaps close to the usage that it has in Guatemala or Costa Rica today (Costa Ricans in particular love using usted in most situations) but now vos has been gaining domains. Some uses of usted remain unchanged though, to the surprise of many other Latin Americans. It is still very common to address your boyfriend or girlfriend with usted, for example. This was hilarious in school because classmates are generally supposed to address each other with vos, so hearing a guy and a girl talking in terms of usted usually implied there was something romantic going on.

Somebody asked:

What about tú? When is it used, if at all?

My reply:

Tú is not used much. We're familiar with it because much of the media and the Internet uses it, since much of it is made in Mexico or Colombia and other such tú-using countries, or is dubbed in Peru or the like. As far as things made in El Salvador go, you can hear it and see it in advertisements and music. When people meet somebody from a tú-using country it's common for us to try to use tú as well.

[Pabappa]

Tú is not used much. We're familiar with it because much of the media and the Internet uses it, since much of it is made in Mexico or Colombia and other such tú-using countries, or is dubbed in Peru or the like. As far as things made in El Salvador go, you can hear it and see it in advertisements and music. When people meet somebody from a tú-using country it's common for us to try to use tú as well.

On that, how do you say the Lord's Prayer? Is it common for worshippers to change the pronoun /tu/ in e.g. "santificado sea tu nombre" to fit the local usage?