Trip of the Tongue (40 page)
Read Trip of the Tongue Online
Authors: Elizabeth Little
v
   This idea lives on today in the relatively common perception that there are isolated pockets in Appalachia that still use Elizabethan English. (There aren't.)
w
  Â
Bijou
(jewel),
caillou
(stone),
chou
(cabbage),
genou
(knee),
hibou
(owl),
joujou
(toy), and
pou
(louse).
x
   The demarcation between Francophone and Anglophone areas can still be seen on any map of New Orleans. The traditional boundary of the French Quarter on the southwest is Canal Street, and many of the street names change from Franco to Anglo as you cross this street: Chartres becomes Camp, Decatur becomes Magazine, Treme becomes Liberty.
y
   If I still sound vaguely traumatized, that's becauseâto my everlasting regretâI chose to stay just off Bourbon Street while in New Orleans.
z
   Massachusetts, by the way, is the only other state with an official donut (theirs is the Boston cream).
aa
    The Spanish, in turn, comes from the Quechua
yapay
, “to add.” Quechua, an indigenous South American language, is an official language in Peru and Bolivia and is spoken by upward of ten million people.
ab
    Some would argue that this first requirement is actually
more than two
languages.
ac
    A jargon is similar to a pidgin, albeit with an even more limited usage and lexicon. Jargons and pidgins are perhaps best thought of not as separate phenomena but rather as two ends of a continuum.
ad
    This definition persisted at the legal level far longer than you might expect. In 1970 the Louisiana State Legislature passed Act 46â“Designation of race by public officials”âwhich allowed those classified as white to have as much as
1
â
32
of “Negro blood.” That is to say, you could have one black great-great-great-grandparent and still be white; you could not have two. This law wasn't repealed until 1983.
ae
    In her memoir Laura recounts running into Fortier when traveling home from New Orleans: “Alcée Fortier, a man easily double my age, entered the train and, after saluting Father, took his seat beside me. We chatted the whole two hours until we reached the Vacherie Station on our plantation.” Her father, she related with a characteristic hint of impishness, was piqued by the realization that menâand older men at thatâwere beginning to pay attention to his teenage daughter.
af
    A literal modern Standard French translation might read something like this:
Un jour un chien a acheté cent poules et un coq, et un tigre a acheté cent coqs et une poule. Tous les soirs le chien trouvait un panier plein d'oeufs dans son poulailler, et le tigre trouvait juste un oeuf. Le tigre a dit que le chien les lui avait volés, et il l'a attaché, il l'a mis dans une brouette, et il est parti pour le vendre. En chemin, il a rencontré un chevreuil; il lui a raconté ses affaires et il lui a demandé s'il n'avait pas raison de vendre le chien. Le chevreuil a dit non, alors le tigre l'a tué. Un peu plus tard il a rencontré un lion et lui a raconté son histoire. Le lion a dit que le tigre avait tort, et le tigre a dit, “Vous avez parlé comme ça parce que vous savez que vous êtes plus fort que moi.”
ag
    There is a Louisiana Creole proverb that explains Bouki's lot in life:
Bouki fait gombo; lapin mangé liâ
“The hyena makes the gumbo; the rabbit eats it.” Bouki is, as I like to think of it, a most unfortunate combination of a schlemiel and a schlimazel.
ah
    Sometimes it's difficult to separate the wheat from the apocryphal chaff when it comes to Coincoin, a woman who routinely accomplished the seemingly impossible.
ai
    The origin of the word
Acadia
, meanwhile, is a matter of some debate. There are those who postulate an indigenous American originâ
cadie
, for instance, is a Mi'kmaq word for “place,” which makes for a logical etymology. But
Acadia
also sounds a lot like
Arcadia
, the Greek name Giovanni da Verrazzano's earliest maps gave to the area around modern-day Delaware. It is also a possibility, then, that the name simply migrated north.
aj
    Although different terms can be used to describe the continuum of creole dialects along the Atlantic coast, they are not used interchangeably.
Geechee
seems to be a term used more frequently by older generations and in Georgia;
Gullah
is certainly used more frequently in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
Sea Island Creole
, on the other hand, appears to be favored only by linguists.
ak
    A loose translation: “Br'er Wolf and Br'er Rabbit were courting the same Girl. The Girl was rich and very pretty. They took turns visiting her. Br'er Rabbit went in the morning, and Br'er Wolf went in the evening. The Girl had to make up her mind. She sort of encouraged both of them. One morning Br'er Rabbit was making fun of Br'er Wolf to the Girl, and he told her Br'er Wolf was nothing more than her father's riding horse.”
al
    Nor would it until 1955, when Marian Anderson first performed in Verdi's
Un ballo in maschera
.
am
    Later, in the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, I found and transcribed the following Gullah advice for those with hag problems:
De Hag / de hag binna / Gullah ooman / Wah ride ya de / Whole night thru / One sho way to / Scay de hag binna / Trim ya house / Haint blue.
an
    In his book, Alphonso Brown relates the following story about this pronunciation: “The use of âKillhoun' was sometimes thought to be a speech impediment. An old lady exclaimed, âOh please! We can say “Calhoun,” we mean to say “Killhoun”!' ”
ao
    Der Teufelhund means “Devil Dog,” the famed but questionably grammatical German nickname for Marines.
ap
    In South Carolina the provisions of the 1808 act that banned the importation of slaves were less than successfully enforced.
aq
    This was one of four times during my travels I went into a restaurant thinking I might have found something special and unheard-of only to discover that Anthony Bourdain had already filmed there.
ar
    I like to imagine that something similar happens whenever a Yankees hitter looks up at an opposing pitcher and thinks,
What the hell is that thing on his face?
as
    The Japanese word
(
hanch
Å
) means “group leader.”
at
    For those who might be interested, the festival reinstated the running of the bulls in 2011.
au
    The quotas in the act were calculated as a percentage of existing immigrant populations. For the sake of comparison, the quota for Great Britain and Northern Ireland was 34,007; for Germany it was 51,227.
av
    In Elko a
zahato
was often also called a
bota
bag, which is the Spanish term for the container.
aw
    In
A Basque History of the World
, Mark Kurlansky explains the origin of the
xistera
, the basket-like glove that jai alai players use to hurl the ball at maximum velocity: “In 1857, a young farm worker in St. Pée named Gantxiki Harotcha, scooping up potatoes into a basket, got the idea for killing the ball even faster with a long, scoop-shaped basket strapped to one hand.”
ax
   Â
Euskaltzaindia
means, literally, “group of keepers of the Basque language.” The “Royal” part of its English name is a nod to the Academy's patron, the Spanish monarchy. (The Academy is known in Spanish as
La Real Academia de la Lengua Vasca
.)
ay
    As a result of this schism, Norway today actually has two official written languages:
bokmål
(“book language”), a form based largely on Dano-Norwegian, and
nynorsk
(“New Norwegian”), a form based on rural Norwegian dialects.
az
    Lest you get the impression that Scandinavian languages are a complete package deal, I should point out that Norwegians cannot typically understand spoken Danish. In fact, conventional wisdom holds that no one can understand spoken Danishânot even the Danes. A surprisingly common description of Danish pronunciation is that it sounds as if its speakers are trying to talk with a hot potato in their mouths. I gather this is all very funny to Scandinavians.
ba
    Well, kind of. When North and South Dakota were admitted to the United States in 1889, then secretary of state James Blaine shuffled up the papers before signing them in order to appease parties from both states, each of which wanted to be admitted first. It's possible, then, that North Dakota is actually
officially
the fortieth state. Unfortunately for South Dakota, no amount of diplomatic maneuvering can make
S
come before
N
in the alphabet, and so North Dakota usually comes first in the list anyway.
bb
    In its own language, Haitian Creole is called
Kreyòl
, and this term is being used more and more in English-language texts. However, were I to use
Kreyòl
, then I would feel compelled to consistently use endonymic language names, which might cause some confusion, as Louisiana Creole is called
Kréyol
. So “Haitian Creole” it is.
bc
    The orthography of Haitian Creole wasn't standardized until 1979. This passage, however, dates back to 1929, and so it may look very different from other Haitian Creole you might have seen.
bd
    Most everyone else uses
ustedes
, the third-person plural. This is not to be confused with the use of
vos
as a second-person singular, which particularly common in Nicaragua, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
be
    With one quasi-exception: in 1923 Illinois declared “American” its official language. The measure was brought to the floor by Frank Ryan, an Irish-born legislator from Cook County who may have been taking his cue from a similar bill that had been introduced that year in Congress. According to language policy expert James Crawford, the measure was not taken seriously at the federal level. But the state bill passed by large margins in both the Illinois House and Senate, and it remained on the books until 1969 when the General Assembly approved an amendment replacing “American” with “English.”
bf
    Only twenty-five of these laws are still in effect: Alaska's official-English initiative, passed in 1998, was overturned in state superior court in 2002.
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