Alice Dragoon writes for MIT Technology Review about a man of many words:
Brian Sietsema has a favorite word.
It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word earned the top spot on his personal list may well mark the beginning of his unique career path as both a linguist and a Greek Orthodox priest.
In third grade, Sietsema ventured to a garage sale at a friend’s house with 50 cents in his pocket and picked out three books that struck his fancy. Although they were priced at 50 cents each, his friend’s mother said the books he’d chosen were on special and sent him home with all three, including a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories called Masterpieces of Mystery. Knowing it contained macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his own mother told him he’d need to wait a few years before reading it. Naturally, he started it right away.
As he read “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” Sietsema was baffled by the main character’s description of arriving at the moon in a balloon. Pfaall reported tumbling into a crowd of people who were “eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo.” Sietsema had never encountered the word akimbo (with or without a hyphen) and asked his parents what it meant. They didn’t know, and it wasn’t in the family’s dictionary. The question also stumped his teachers, and the dictionaries in his classroom and the school library were no help either. “For years, I didn’t know what this word meant,” Sietsema says. It stuck in his mind that there was a word out there that he, his parents, and his teachers didn’t know. He thinks it wasn’t till he got to college that he finally found a dictionary with the answer: The moon dwellers in Poe’s story had been standing with their hands on their hips, elbows turned outward.
“I credit that puzzle with getting me into dictionaries and being curious about etymology,” he says. It kindled a fascination with words—and an abundance of curiosity—that would shape his life’s trajectory and work.
Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sietsema attended a Dutch Reformed Christian school and recalls taking part in only one spelling bee, in second grade. It was in the 1970s, when everyone was hooked on phonics—so he overthought the sounding-it-out implications when asked to spell of. “I spelled it U-V, and of course, I was wrong,” he says. […]
Switching to the college of literature, science, and the arts, he chose the studies in religion major, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary freedom it offered to take classes in literature, art, and more. He also tucked in courses that would fulfill seminary prerequisites such as knowledge of the biblical languages, studying ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek as well as modern languages that might come in handy for theological scholarship (Dutch, Swedish, and modern Hebrew).
Being in Ann Arbor gave Sietsema “a different understanding of the wideness of the Christian world,” as he puts it, and he gradually became less sure about which church he wanted to work in. As he neared the end of his fourth year at Michigan, he still needed a few more pre-seminary courses—and it dawned on him that he’d taken an “awful lot” of languages and thoroughly enjoyed them. So he stayed on for a fifth year to study linguistics as well as German, ancient Aramaic, and modern Arabic. One of his professors encouraged him to go to grad school and insisted that he apply to MIT, which was considered the top linguistics program in the country. To his surprise, he got in.
At MIT he worked with Morris Halle […]. Sietsema calls Halle “a wonderful mentor,” and the two played well off one another. As he was sweltering in his Central Square apartment while printing the final version of his dissertation, Halle called and asked him to stop by. Knowing that Sietsema read Hebrew, Halle, a Latvian-born Jew who’d learned English as his sixth language, wanted to show him a syllable-counting analysis of the 23rd Psalm he’d just completed; Sietsema answered with his own structural analysis of Psalm 90. “I could tell he was delighted to have this young Gentile boy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had the same fascination for biblical Hebrew as he did,” Sietsema says.
Today, he calls his four horizon-expanding years at MIT a great adventure: “If I could relive them, I would empty out my bank accounts to do so.” Beyond embracing the intellectual stimulation of the Institute, he took advantage of Cambridge’s many cultural opportunities and cross-registered at Harvard to study French and Ugaritic. All told, he says, he’s now studied about a dozen languages, including the Latin he took in high school and the modern Greek he would add to his repertoire several years after earning his doctorate. (“I always feel like I’m leaving one out,” he says.) […]
Shortly after his one-year gig at Michigan ended, he returned to Massachusetts and landed a job as pronunciation editor at Merriam-Webster in Springfield. Although the work was very different from the theoretical linguistics he’d focused on in grad school, “as the guy who had studied a whole bunch of language back in undergrad, it was kind of coming home to old-school philology,” he says. His main job was to ensure that pronunciations—which can change—were up to date. Fluoride, for example, shifted from floo-o-ride in the early 1900s to flor-ide in the second half of the century.
At Merriam-Webster, he made the call on which pronunciations would go into the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—and in what order of preference. The dictionary, he explains, takes a descriptivist approach that reflects common word usage, so he kept a radio and a TV on in the background as he worked. He’d listen for interesting pronunciations and record them on index cards, noting how each such word was said, who said it, where the person was from, and what the context was. These went into Merriam-Webster’s “huge files” of index cards containing citations of words in actual usage.
Sietsema also had a hand in identifying new words and usages that appeared in the 10th edition, which was initially released in 1993—and he was responsible for the inclusion of definitions for interjectional uses of like. He recognized three informal uses: to introduce a quotation (“So she was like, ‘Let’s go eat’”); to give an approximation (“There were like 10 people in line”); and to emphasize (“He was, like, gorgeous”) or convey something apologetically or vaguely (“I need to, like, borrow some money”). While not a fan of such usages, he recognized them as real linguistic phenomena that had earned a place in the dictionary.
During his tenure as pronunciation editor, he introduced the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (a standard phonetic notation for all languages) into Merriam-Webster publications long before it became widely used in American mass-market dictionaries. He also oversaw the recording of pronunciations for digital versions of the dictionary and flew out to a San Diego recording studio to supervise the voice actors. When the actors refused to record certain words that offended them, Sietsema had to step into the breach and do it himself. If you go to www.merriam-webster.com and search for a choice two-part expletive the actor Samuel L. Jackson is famous for delivering, it will be his voice that you hear when you click on the icon of the speaker—offering a decidedly less memorable rendition.
Much more at the link, including the stories of how he became Father Mark (“he used his middle name because Orthodox priests must be ordained with a saint’s name, and there are no Orthodox Saint Brians”) and pronouncer for the Scripps Spelling Bee (“Sietsema got the okay from his bishop and said yes”). A tip o’ the Language Hat to Martin for the link!
He survived MIT linguistics with his enthusiasm for learning actual languages and for descriptive work entirely unscathed, nay, enhanced. Clearly some serious divine protection …
modern languages that might come in handy for theological scholarship (Dutch, Swedish, and modern Hebrew)
Worthy as those languages are, I’d have thought German was rather more useful.
Coincidentally, akimbo is one of the few words that I learned entirely coincidentally from a school dictionary. I was looking up something else, and akimbo was one of the words on the same page in that dictionary edition that got a line art illustration—which I noticed and have remembered ever since.
Separately: I have always disliked the rebranding of the Technology Review I grew up perusing as MIT Technology Review. It changed at some point when I was a student; the magazine is subject to a redesign every few years, and sometimes that changes stick.
David Eddyshaw: In the next paragraph they do mention his studying German. What the article does not answer is the question I was continuously asking myself while reading: What is the origin/etymology of Sietsema’s family name? I am guessing that it is Frisian in origin, but I will not take a stab at guessing what the etymology might be. Also, how is it pronounced by Americans bearing it today? I assume the stress is initial, but is the final vowel /a/ or schwa? I think I write on behalf of a most L2 anglophones (and plenty of L1 anglophones) when I say that IPA really should be used more widely with proper and place names…
I actually knew Robert Sietsema a bit, and he said /ˈsiːtsəmə/, so that’s how I say it. Definitely Frisian, and this site says it’s from the personal name Sietse.
Dutch surnames with -ma are, per WAry, indeed Frisian, the suffix “most likely ultimately from Old Frisian monna m pl (‘the men’s, belonging to the men; one of the men of’), the genitive plural of man.” The epenthetic -e- is not in the examples given there, but that is a small matter.
I once knew a Mexican person with the surname Ledesma, which at the time I took to be Dutch, and that puzzled me. It is not.
how funny, I just had to look akimbo up two days ago when I stumbled over it in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s description of a Sarakatsán wedding in Roumeli: “All were luxuriously asprawl and akimbo.”
asprawl and akimbo
I have no idea what it means to have legs akimbo. That is to say, different authors seem to mean different things, so that the term is useless as regards legs. By extension (heh) it is becoming suspect as regards arms. I surmise an unfamiliarity with the original sense, perhaps because modern people spend less time with arms akimbo than in olden days, perhaps due to a decline in folk dancing and/or maternal scolding.
Vishnu has arms à gogo.
As I said in 2024, I could have sworn I’d posted about “à gogo,” but it seems not.
More details about the name Sietse here (in Dutch only), apparently derived from a cognate of German Sieg, Dutch zege ‘victory’. Sietse is the Dutch spelling, it’s Sytze in West Frisian. The West Frisian version of the surname is Sytsma (which confusingly has a Dutch version Sijtsma possibly due to treating y and ij as interchangeable, at least historically).
In West Frisian orthography <y> = /i/ whereas <ie> = /iə, jɪ/ (link, link). There’s also <ii>, <ea>, <ij> and <ei> for i/ie/ei-like vowels and diphthongs.
>(he) cross-registered at Harvard to study French and Ugaritic
It’s somewhat surprising to me that late 80’s/early 90s MIT didn’t have French. Or maybe there was another reason to take it at Harvard instead.
I remember my curiosity being piqued by the exoticism of those Ugaritic courses in the catalog, but it was so far beyond the horizons uv my intellectual world at the time.
Could Sietse, Sietske, Sietsema be cognate with the West Frisian dialect set of Sjiisk, Tjiisk, Dutsk – German? Or is a plain /s/ not plausible there? A name meaning (the) German seems reasonable.
I suppose the diphthong is also a hurdle.
And whoops, I’d missed Gido’s more learned explanation above. Nevermind.
There is something odd about the Dutch wiktionary link. Can anyone comment on the idea that Sietse could be related to ‘sieg’ but have it’s ultimate origin in the name Caesar?
Explanations as to the origin of Sietse are running wild, i.e. we don’t actually know. Some which I found in a quick search: meaning ‘companion’; derived from sind- ‘travelling’; from Sigitet ‘joy of victory’. The most reliably-looking so far is: from Sigitêt, hypocoristic of Sigi ‘victory’ (link, link).
Linguistic note: that “Holy Friday evening service” in one of the photos in the article is quite often called the “Lamentations” service in English, but in Greek it’s the “Encomia” (Εγκώμια). I think part of the issue may just be that the current English word “encomium” has somewhat different and perhaps narrower semantics from its Greek etymon, although the relevant wiki article doesn’t seem attentive to that possibility.*
Onomastic note: using a pre-existing and common-in-the-US middle name as a “church name” is the lowest-impact way to address that issue if your first name is unsuitable. Other Brians (or whatever) have been known to get more excited about the exoticizing or contrastive possibilities of a church name and emerge as Fr. Seraphim or Fr. Nectarius or perhaps Nektarios. Fr. Mark’s wife Presb. Katherine managed to start life with what’s both a proper saint’s name and a pretty normal-American one, thus parallel to Mark. We don’t read anything about what she may have done with her own academic training as a linguist since her own tenure with Merriam-Webster, but I guess she wasn’t trained at MIT so it’s out of scope for the publication.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaphios_Thrinos The article seems a bit off in various matters of detail and emphasis, but that’s wikipedia for you. FWIW this part is usually significantly abbreviated in ordinary parish practice – a bilingual handout I have at hand provides for only 63 of the “up to 185” Encomia to be used. Not the sort of bilingual edition that leads in practice to 126 because all 63 are sung in both languages; rather, the sort that gives the priest discretion as to when to switch back and forth rather than precommitting to which bit will be done in which language. Although even with such editorial deletions it still ends up being one of the longest services of the year. (Among Greek-Americans it seems to be the one service that’s attended by the secularized slackers who are willing to go to church a maximum of once per year to please their grandmothers – and preferred for that purpose over the Easter service proper.)
Or you can convince some Brian to attain sainthood.
At Marshall U in the 1960s I had an economics professor from Frisia named Max Sytsma. He was proud of his Frisianness, had linguistic interests, and would show me Frisian texts for me to puzzle out. I have to say I found his lectures hard to follow, not because of his accent but because of his involved syntax. (And he wasn’t reading them.)
Unfortunately, Brian was not a saint. He was a very naughty boy.
Apparently in modern-day Brittany there are attempts to connect the now-popular name “Brian” to the comparatively obscure local figure St. Briac or Briag (you, know, the one who was a companion of St. Tudwal?). He floruit in pre-schism days (6th century) so many would accept him as an Orthodox saint even if his name was not contemporaneously known in Constantinople or Antioch or Ohrid etc. His relics may be in Bourbriac/Boulvriag, if you want to make a pilgrimage, and there’s also a Sant-Briag toponym that’s Saint-Briac-sur-Mer in French.
Speaking of French, French wikipedia asserts: “Parmi la communauté des fans des Monty Python, la Saint Brian est célébrée en référence au film La Vie de Brian. Une semaine avant Noël, la Fête de la Saint Brian en reprend les codes en les détournant dans l’esprit parodique des Monty Python : réunion des convives, préparation d’un plat de fromage fondu (type Welsh ou Poutine), et échange de cadeaux absurdes et inutiles ayant un rapport plus ou moins direct avec le Royaume-Uni.”
ETA: Brittany also boasts from the 5th century a Saint Brieg/Brieuc, who may have been Brioc back in Wales before crossing over to the mainland. Also perhaps “close enough to Brian” if you don’t know too many inconvenient philological details.
that “Holy Friday evening service” in one of the photos in the article is quite often called the “Lamentations” service in English, but in Greek it’s the “Encomia” (Εγκώμια).
Of which the second stasis is the Ἄξιον ἐστί, which I associate with Odysseus Elytis. There’s a bilingual pdf of the whole service here.
St. Briac or Briag (you, know, the one who was a companion of St. Tudwal?)
Tudwal’s name yet lives in honour. The best man at my wedding had an uncle Tudwal. Sadly, the best I can muster among my own relatives is an Illtud.
Curiously, nobody yet seems to have mentioned the etymology of “akimbo”, which is obscure, though actually not quite as obscure as I expected:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/akimbo
Chambers also suggests the implausible-looking “can-bow”, i.e. can-handle.
The bilingual pdf hat posted a link to is the exact one I referred to that I have a hard copy of at hand. Trust me, that’s not the “whole service” … It *is* the portion of the service where the congregation might join in but without knowing all the words by heart, thus motivating a standalone handout for just that part. The clergy and members of the choir will have many many many more pages of text to chant/sing from, with this part being part way through, I think more towards the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_League_of_Gentlemen_characters#Legz_Akimbo
@Ryan: MIT has had French classes, up to a pretty advanced level, pretty much forever. However, cross-registration at Harvard (or Wellesley) is essentially unrestricted. In principle, a student is supposed to have a reason they cannot take an equivalent course at MIT, but enforcement of this restriction is lax to nonexistent. If Sietsema said, “I’m already taking a class a Harvard that afternoon, so taking French there too will be more convenient,” that would easily suffice.
BTW, some “AI” feature in my browser that I haven’t bothered to try to disable warns against mixing up Dr. Brian Sietsema with the separate and distinct Fr. Mark Sietsema. Apparently they sometimes get confused, what with both of them living in Lansing.
And they often attend the same gatherings…
@ryan, gido
I looked at Fries names and made two lists (see below)
https://www.friesland-post.nl/friese-namen-op-rij/
What I would say is:
(1) many male names starting with Si correspond to names in other Germanic languages starting with Si(e)g
(2) ts+suffix can be stuck on a one-theme name e.g., Douwe(m) / Doutzen(f), Eabele (m) / Eabeltsje (f); in Fries, this seems to be more typical when ‘feminising’ a male name, although there is Rien(m) / Rients(m). This can be found in German (Heinz, Fritz).
(3) German has a surname Seitz corresponding to Sietse and Seibold/Seibald corresponding to Fries Sibold/Sibald, so loss of g (or weakening to y) may be a general Ingvaeonic thing influencing adjacent dialects)
Based on the above, I would go with Sietse =Si(one theme name ex Sieg) + suffix. If you feel that the t was part of a longer name like Norse Sigtrygg or gido’s Sigitêt, you could maybe argue that. I do not like the Caesar suggestion, because the long list of Fries names includes Celia, Kerst and Krist but no S for Latin C; also Celia is a saint’s name unlike Caesar; you do not find names corresponding to Aurelia, Julius/a, Augustus/Octavius, etc., in the long list.
Male Names with Si
Siard
Sibald
Sibbe
Sibbele
Siberen
Sibold
Sibout
Sibrand
Sido
Siebe
Sieds
Siemen
Sierd
Sietse
Sieuwerd
Siger
Sikke
Sikko
Sil
Sip
Both sexes ending in ds, ts, tz (+ suffix)
Atze (m)
Beitske (f)
Bentse (m)
Doetsje (f)
Doutzen (f)
Doaitsen (m)
Eabeltsje (f)
Eageltsje (f)
Edsard (m)
Edse (m)
Feitse (m)
Ga(a)tske (f), good thing it is not Dutch
Geartsje (f)
Goaitske (f)
Grytsje (f)
Gaatze (m)
Goaitsen (m)
Goaitzen (m)
Grytsen (m)
Haitske (f)
Habeltsje (f)
Hiltsje (f)
Hoatske (f)
Haaitse (m)
Haitsen (m)
Hertzen (m)
Hidser (m)
Hotze (m)
Ibeltsje (f)
Ingeltsje (f)
Jantsje (f)
Jeltsje (f)
Jetske (f)
Jitske (f)
Jetse (m)
Jitse (m)
Lutsje (f)
Ludser (m)
Luitzen (m)
Maartsje (f)
Martsen (f)
Martsje (f)
Matsen (f)
Mijntsje (f)
Mintsje (f)
Martsen (m)
Metse (m)
Otsje (f)
Oeds (m)
Reidsje (f)
Richtsje (f)
Reitze (m)
Rients (m)
Ritsert (m)
Ritso (m)
Setske(f)
Sibbeltsje (f)
Sietske (f)
Sjoerdsje (f)
Swaantsje (f), good thing it is not German
Sietse (m)
Teatskje (f)
Tetsje (f)
Tietsje (f)
Tjitske (f)
Tryntsje (f)
Tjitse (m)
Ultsje (f)
Uitzen (m)
Ultsen (m)
Ûts (m)
Waltsje (f)
Watselina (f)
Watske (f)
Weitske (f)
Wierdsje (f)
Wietske (f)
Woutsje (f)
Watse (m)
Ybeltsje (f)
Ytsen (m)
One of the names in the first list may be related to my surname.
And names with Sig- were already common in the family of the Cheruscan Arminius.
I’m actually a bit surprised that nobody at all in the infant Sietsema’s circle knew what “akimbo” meant. It’s not an everyday word, I suppose, but it’s never struck me as particularly obscure.
Is this yet another of those US/UK divergences we keep stumbling upon?
Come to that, it’s surprising “it wasn’t in the family’s dictionary.” Must have been a wee tiny little dictionary.
There have been quite a few linguist priests, given the association of linguistics with missionary work. A few centuries back there were all those astonishing Catholic priests who worked on Nahuatl and Japanese and Chinese etc etc; in more recent times an example who naturally occurs to me straight away is the indefatigable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Prost
The Berberists have the actually-canonised
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Foucauld
Another is the author of
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803221963/a-grammar-of-crow/
An Orthodox linguist priest who also got canonised:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_of_Alaska
Hey, that’s “St. Innocent, Enlightener of the Aleuts,” not merely “of Alaska” or even the equally-fair “of Moscow.” In a current North American context it is probably fair to say that the Greeks and their local affiliates such as Fr. Mark do not stress the Alaskan narrative as much as the Russians and their local etc. do. The Greek immigrants, through no fault of their own, generally tended to first arrive in parts of North America where any speakers of indigenous languages had already been evicted/suppressed by gun-toting Protestants.
@David Eddyshaw
If you’re Dutch Reformed? (It says he only became Orthodox later.) Intuitively I’d think that’s Dutch and Hebrew, followed by Latin and French, and only then German.
@hat
In Frisian that’s a diphthong /iə/. But I see gido already went into more detail.
It did? I’m staying here in Vilnius, then.
(Amazing place almost devoid of adjectives. More later, I need to go to sleep.)
So much so that he himself has been suggested to be the dragon-killer Si(e)gfri(e)d, the dragon being the worm-shaped legion (Heerwurm). Still Segi- in those Pre-Proto-Germanic times, though.
What’s so bad about a swan?
David Eddyshaw confused me above because this is the League of Gentlemen that I know (and recommend):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Gentlemen_(film)
mollymooly:
The OED’s (2012) second and third definitions for akimbo are “With reference to (other) limbs, esp. the legs: spread or flung out widely or haphazardly” and “More generally: askew, awry; in disorder,” with quotations back to 1833 and c1796 respectively. Some of the quotations for the third definition were added in Burchfield’s Supplement, but he didn’t make a separate definition, only adding “Also transf. and fig.”
David E:
*I* did in 2018, linking to an Anatoly Liberman post that concludes “many hypotheses, none of which should be dismissed as untenable”. That’s also where the OED’s current etymology stands: a paragraph for each of the three most popular hypotheses—the two in Wiktionary and the one in Chambers—each with its pros and cons, enough cons to keep any of them from being picked as the winner.
I’m also puzzled that Sietsema couldn’t find akimbo in dictionaries in his school library; it’s in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for example, not just the Unabridged, including in editions from his childhood in the 60s-70s. Could he have been looking under kimbo? (Which is also in the OED, but “Obsolete. rare.”)
43+ minutes of the League of Gentlemen (1981 edition). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVgh3l6EupU
@dm
Re Swaantsje/Schwan, it’s the tz suffix which is the killer here. But you knew that 😊.
There is a story about a German (or Austrian) tenor, who is playing in a Wagner opera (Lohengrin?), where he is supposed to ride a swanboat off the stage. The operator of the mechanical boat has the boat leave the stage before the tenor has got on it, whereupon the tenor turns toward the audience and sings “Wann fährt der nächste Schwan?”.
@DE, the good thing about religion is that, like science, it is irrational:)
In the sense: motivated by something distinct from making money. (logically, a good company for linguist priests and linguist scientists must be linguist lovers).
I’m also puzzled that Sietsema couldn’t find akimbo in dictionaries in his school library;
Yes, my Chambers Twentieth Century 1972 dead trees edition has akimbo (and my school library had a 2-volume SOE). The Chambers has only the hand-on-hips-elbows-out sense.
The OED’s (2012) second and third definitions for akimbo are—but often it’s impossible to tell which of senses 1, 2, or 3 an author meant. Throw in MW online’s second sense “set in a bent position” with illustrative quote ‘a tailor sitting with legs akimbo’ and there’s hardly any leg position that’s not akimbo other than standing straight.
is in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for example, not just the Unabridged— XKCD’s olivine and one or two feldspars is called to mind. But I checked two “Pocket Dictionary”s, and akimbo is (as I expected, tbf) in both MW 1955 and Scholastic 2012 (“more than 13,000 definitions!”) so the surprise remains justified.
Swaantsje (f), good thing it is not German
The Low German equivalent Swantje is a not unusual first name in Northern Germany.
Atze is also known in German , both as a colloquial form of names beginning with A and as regional slang word meaning “brother, chum”.
mollymooly said:
You’re right, that’s a poor definition by MW. But the OED’s second definition is specific enough to exclude sitting primly on a chair, so I’m not seeing the problem: if standing/arms are mentioned, it’s the original definition; if legs or limbs, it’s the “spread … haphazardly” one; if neither, it’s “askew”. Do you have an example that’s ambiguous?
Checking other dictionaries… AHD is as bad as MW: “Being in a bent, bowed, or arched position”. Doesn’t exclude sitting up straight on a chair!
But dictionary.com is decent:
in the Technology Review story:
Wow, 1993! That was very quick off the mark, considering that quotative “be like” only began spreading ca. 1980 (see e.g. the study referenced in comments here at I’m, Like, “Please.”, or a paper by William Labov that dug up examples as early as 1979 in a corpus of interviews collected by Penn students). Maybe Sietsema was attuned to current speech since he was listening to radio and TV all day while everybody else in the office was reading.
American Heritage wasn’t far behind, either: they added “be like” in their 2000 edition. And I think they did an even better job, putting it under an “Idioms” subheading rather “conjunction”, and taking space for an explanatory box: “Our Living Language … As with go, this use of like can also announce a brief imitation of another person’s behavior, often elaborated with facial expressions and gestures. It can also summarize a past attitude or reaction (instead of presenting direct speech).”
if legs or limbs, it’s the “spread … haphazardly”—‘a tailor sitting with legs akimbo’ suggests cross-legged tailors rather than legs spread haphazardly.
> With reference to (other) limbs, esp. the legs
Agreed. When it comes to limbs other than arms, the legs do merit particular attention.
Profoundly true.
*hopes for opportunity to say that a crab’s claws or a caterpillar’s prolegs are akimbo*
“1979”
ktschwarz, that’s surprising. There is a similar Russian construction
‘а он такой: “….”, а я такая: “чё?!”‘ (and he takój: “…” and I takája : “what!?”) and my impression in 90s (I’m not sure how common it was in 80s) was that it is new, preferred by young ladies, retelling to one friend a conversation with another friend, and perhaps by young ladies not from my bookworm circle.
kakój, takój (fem kakaja, takaja) are Q and T (Wh and Th) interrogative and demonstrative adjectives, based on kak, tak “how?” and “so, thus”. They also can qualify adjectives (kakoj bol’shój! “how big!” takoj bol’shój “so big”) and in “he was, […], gorgeous” (an example for “like” here, idiotically glossed as “emphasis”) you often find takój, though I don’t know if its discourse function is same.
In other words: while English doesn’t have a demonstrative similar in form and functions, I think “like” is among its several translations (others being “such” and “so”, cf. “like this”.) and perhaps the best one here.
This similarity between Russian and English perplexed me. I’m not thinking of calques from English: we borrowed a lot from it in 90s, but mostly new nouns for new things.
“Russian that looks like a calque” and English penetrating Russian grammar is 2020s, which is logical: we have enough fluent L2 speakers today, but NOT in 90s.
Lots of things changed in Russian language in 80s and 90s and lots of things changed in ways contacts between people and information transfer are structured and lots of things changed in Russia that time. However you’re telling that the spread of Russian “like” and English like is simultaneous and I’m twice perplexed.
Iti “like” introduces quotations in Sanskrit. I think this is probably all the Maharishi’s fault (and the Beatles, who were not a patch on the Stones anyway.)
Quotative इति iti usually follows the quoted material and indicates the end of quoted speech or thought. See for example Whitney §1102 here .
I still blame the Beatles.
mollymooly: “‘a tailor sitting with legs akimbo’ suggests cross-legged tailors rather than legs spread haphazardly.”
That’s covered by the “widely” option in the OED’s “legs” definition; I shouldn’t have tried to abbreviate it.
The cross-legged tailor position is a leg analogy to arms akimbo (yoga butterfly pose would be a closer analogy). Spreading seems to be what the various uses of legs akimbo have in common.
‘two “Pocket Dictionary”s‘
I’m amazed, how few dictionaries were available in USSR (I’m not speaking about specialised dictionaries). As a child I knew:
1. Ozhegov’s dictionary. One large volume. They updated but not expanded it. The dictionary of choice for schoolchildren and I can’t see why a native speaker may need anything smaller.
2. Ushakov’s dictionary. 4 volumes. Some people owned it, but I didn’t know that it is from 30s.
3. Dahl’s dictionary. A dialect dictionary from the 19th century.
I didn’t know about two collective projects, the Lesser and the Great dictionaries.
I learned about the Lesser from the Internet (!!!) and it’s the dictionary I refer people to online. Others do not read it and I haven’t heard of a person who owns a paper version.
I saw in a modern dictionary some wreckage of inaccurate copy-pasting from it, so perhaps there are some readers apart of me, namely, lexicographers working on a dictionary.
I learned about the Great from the Internet when I wanted to learn more about history of Russian dictionaries. Some Slavists (not Russians!) scanned it and put scans online, but Russians didn’t find it interesting enough to digitise, or to host those scans or to link those scans or to speak about those scans.
Dahl’s dictionary. A dialect dictionary from the 19th century.
Not a dialect dictionary, though of course it has dialect words — it’s got all the Russian words Dahl could dig up, and it’s the closest thing Russian has to the OED. The best version is the 3rd edition, edited by Baudouin de Courtenay, but it wasn’t reprinted until the 1990s because it had obscene words (I got a reprint from then).
Baudouin de Courtenay
How is his name pronounced in Polish and in English?
@LH, I agree.
A proper dictionary of Russian langauge for Dahl and not a dictionary of dialect words contrasted to some “other” Russian (say, koine).
One reason why it is so enjoyable is that it gives you a glimpse of the (linguistical, lexical) context in which various modern forms arose, that otherwise are detached from anything like говно в проруби.
However 1. most (the wast majority!) of the words there are forgotten and 2. the Russian reflected there is diverse.
___
I think if
1. Arabs came up with one koine (mixing up some vernacular and some literary forms) for the whole Arab world and called it “Arabic”
2. Dahl recorderded vernacular words from the whole Arab world
it could be a much more impressive analogy.
No idea about Polish, and not really about English either — I say it in French (in my head, which is probably the only place I say it), but I’m hardly a representative English speaker. In Russian it’s /boduˈen de kurteˈne/ (no palatalization).
Perhaps I palatalise the /t/. Or perhaps I do not:)
And I think we normally palatalise French de
Found this Polish video, which has [ˈjɐn bɐdɤˈɪ̃n də kʊrtɛˈnẽj] or so (I expect David M. to adjust it.)
most (the wast majority!) of the words there are forgotten
Not true. Most are still in use, although of course there are a lot that aren’t.
Perhaps I palatalise the /t/. Or perhaps I do not:) And I think we normally palatalise French de
You are of course free to pronounce it however you like, but I am going by the pronunciation given in Словарь ударений для работников радио и телевидения (Автор: Розенталь Д.Э.); I’m pretty sure not enough носители языка talk about the man for there to be a popular pronunciation.
@LH, I agree (about Dahl). That is my subjective impression, but I was VERY sleepy and I vaguely remembered some study that said that surprisingly (for me) many are forgotten and for some reason said so. I wouldn’t say so if I weren’t so sleepy, normally I don’t refer to “some studies”, particularly when the vaguely remembered result is counterintuitive:(
The study:
https://yandex.ru/company/researches/2016/ya_dahl
(that is, depending on the meaning of “forgotten” we can or not say “most” – but it is not “vast majority”)
@LH (about B. de C.):
I didn’t mean to argue with you. I thought it is a good idea to ask myself how I pronounce this name, was surprised to find that I’m not sure if I palatalise this t and though it is also a good idea to share this.
As (surprisingly) my school teacher of Russian informed me (privately when they fired her), normally we first borrow /te/ without palatalisation and then with time adapt and palatalise it. “Some young people today even say /t’est/ with soft /t’/!” said she. She finds this soft t’est funny, but that’s how I say the word.
But I wonder about de. It is a French word both Russian and English speaker know very well.
Today I think most Russians think and say soft /d’e/ but I don’t know how that evolved with time.
However, IF some speakers normally (I said “normally” in that comment in this sense: in most contexts) say it with soft d BUT in certain names (say, this one) “forget” about palatalisation and say /de/ with hard d despite having recognised the word de “because that’s a name where we forget about palatalisation”, I personally will find it very funny, it turns palatalisation into somethin suprasegmental.
Further investigating: dictionary.com, based on the 2023 Random House Unabridged Dictionary, gives the American English pronunciation as [boh-dwan duh koor-tuh-ney] /boʊˈdwɛ̃ də ˌkʊər təˈneɪ/. Wordreference.com, based on the 2026 RHUD, gives bō dwa′ də kŏŏr′tə nā′, having given up on the nasalization (“ŏŏ” corresponds to the print version’s “o͝o”.)
As (surprisingly) my school teacher of Russian informed me (privately when they fired her), normally we first borrow /te/ without palatalisation and then with time adapt and palatalise it.
I’m glad to hear that, because that was my impression — nice to have it confirmed!
(I also learned from her “мимо тёщиного дома / я без шуток не хожу / то ей *** в окно засуну / то ей жопу покажу”. She’s a good Russian teacher:-))
According to Avanesov’s <i<Русское литературное произношение, which devotes a whole chapter to the pronunciation of consonants before e in foreign names and loanwords, it’s a bit more complicated. He notes a trend among with younger speakers with a good command of foreign languages to reintroduce non-palatal pronunciation even where the palatalized pronunciation had already become the norm.
I wouldn’t have guessed, but it makes sense — thanks!
Heartwarming bit from the end of the Technology Review article, where Sietsema talks about giving clepsydra (water clock) to a spelling bee contestant:
“a trend” – what year and paragraph (or chapter)?
I don’t see it in the version from 1968 (§§ 94 ff are about borrowings, §§ 98 ff are about consonants with e), the version of 1984 (chapter 18) instead of younger speakers with a good command of L2 speaks about широкие народные массы who осваивают hard consonants with ɛ.
That is, the idea is that [э] entered Russian phonology and pa[n’t’é]ra “panther” turned into pa[ntɛ]ra.
As for speakers with “good command” I agree with that those can pronounce words differently.
(They are able to pronounces English “God” as /God/ instead of /Got/ and if you remember that we devoise not because we “imitate each other” but because we’re unable not to devoice, you’ll wonder if such people can forget to devoise a consonant in a Russian word. I think they can. And I think, same with palatalisation. Also, how do we tell code-switching from borrowing?)
But there were few of them in 1980s specifically. Those with (unlike English readers) a good command of phonology of their L2s were especially few (LH and DE have been to USSR, how many people could speak to you without very thick accent?).
You can find both versions (68 and 84) if you google Русское литературное произношение*.
The link to vk (a Russian social network, but files posted there are browsable)
*The title Russian Literary Pronunciation itself is interesting: where English speakers contrast “written language” and “spoken” we contrast colloquial, vernacular and literary.
Leads to confusion.
English teacher (a native speaker): “we say it, but we do not write it!”
Russian student (who learned the word which they “don’t write” from paper, in written form): *WHAT?!
1984 edition, as far as I can make out (there are two pages missing in the pdf at the beginning), chapter 18.
Thanks! Then I’m reading same pdf.
But it is a slightly different process. He thinks it is a systemic change (see also p. 237, second line from the bottom: “фонетической системы”) in Russian phonology that didn’t allow /te/.
Logically, in 1900 those loanwords with /te/ belonged to vocabulary of educated people (some of them literate in French), but not, say, peasant vocabulary, but in 80s peasants went to school, read books and listened to mass media.
There was serious social change but I’m not sure about changes in the phonological system.
Берберский “Berber” (adj) (an example from Avanesov) with hard b (“[бэ]”) is funny.
That’s not how I say it and maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it in fast speech, but when I’m reading about it, it sounds to me like:
“They are Berbers. But they are fashionable, very French Berbers, if you know what I mean. So they are bЭrbЭrs, not bErbErs. See they’re wearing scarves! On the beach*! In summer!”
*Thinking of the music video for Zina by Babylone, an Algerian hit from 2014. But I don’t know if they’re Berbers and I don’t think it was filmed in the summer. And I don’t mean that they are “very French” – they are the reason why I said “beach”.
Meanwhile scarves worn by North African young men are “hyper-European” for Russians (we wear them under our coats in winters)
Eureka!!!
Russian прЫнц “prЫnce” (instead of prince – cf. ишь прЫнц какой выискался! – when someone can’t get asleep on 20 mattresses because of that pea in them) has long perplexed me.
Now I have a theory. It is an extension of this “they are fashionable … so they are bЭrbЭrs, not bErbErs” logic to [i] sound.
I learned many surprising things from Avanesov, e.g. ‘European’ [l] (neither Russian hard nor Russian soft l!) in some words.
But I’m not sure if people of, say, same age as LH spoke such Russian in 50s or in 1984. I associate it with speech of much, much older people.
@drasvi
Re “Russian English”
What I hear:
Accent
G or kh for h
2-syllable long o (vo-ot kak!)
Palatisation before short e and i
Zh for th (or hard s?) before long e and i
Non penult stress in Latinate words with onset = unstressed prep. (IMportant)
Grammar
No articles.
Incorrect present for past, substituting common for 3p ending and leaving out to in infinitive constructions that require it, e.g., “He tell me go home (pronounced Khe tyell me go-o khom)”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BbcBcmDmDUk
A lot of what he highlights are not specific to Russsian speakers, other L2 speakers have the same problems.
@PP, in USSR you 1. couldn’t learn English (or any other language’s) phonology “naturally”* 2. didn’t need it: few people travelled outside of the Russophone space or talked to travellers.
You could learn it if you love it (DM:)) or if you have a teacher who (a) good (b) very demanding (c) knows it.
Like some teachers in specialised schools and also some who trained professional interpreters.
Speaking of demands, as I noted, I loved my school English lessons: I could read sceince fiction instead of listening to the teacher and he wouldn’t disturb me and I wouldn’t disturb him.
Compare this to me – a very fluent English reader – and my wife who told she doesn’t know it and asked me to translate for her, but it turned out she spoke it (2010) better than me. Because she watched films in English.
My idea is that you can be tempted to adapt borrowings from your L2 to the phonology of this L2, but such people were few in 80s and couldn’t change the norm.
In 2020s they are numerous. In 1910 they were not so “numerous” but they were influential.
I think Soviet accents that LH and DE heard in USSR were thicker than what they hear in 2020s.
*I see something similar in Iran. Teachers who don’t know English well, students who speak with a thick accent, local semantics (“daughter” for “girl”) and structure their thoughts in a funny way.
However they need English phonology (exams, to study in Europe).
I remembered a form which spread widely in, I think 2009, koté котэ “cat, often male cat”. With e and without palatalisation. Neuter. Speakers of my age or younger (I was 30)
From kot “male cat”.
I don’t know the story behind it, but I can guess why people find it funny.
It at once resembles various Japanese words (also pronounced in Russian without palatalisation) which we all heard often because we all watch anime – and French.
Affectionate names in neuter too are a thing (and are associated with a distinctive odd feeling, because neuter in Russian is abstract: “understanding”, “it” as in “it’s sunny” are neuter)
@drasvi
Was it impossible (technically or politically) to get English broadcasts on radio during Soviet times? I remember Radio Moscow (English language) was easy to get in Europe on shortwave or maybe longwave. Was Radio Moscow (English language) not available inside the Soviet Union? The accents were not bad, in fact it was rather funny to hear someone speaking in a broad American accent identify himself as Vasily Strelnikov or whatever.
Was it impossible (technically or politically) to get English broadcasts on radio during Soviet times?
It was definitely possible if you had the knowhow (and a little luck).
I think PP’s question is whether the English-language propaganda broadcasts the Soviets aimed at foreign audiences could be listened to by an unintended domestic audience. I don’t know the answer to that other than at least some of the shortwave transmissions were done from high-powered transmitters that were near the borders (or outside the USSR’s own borders in satellite countries) and were “directional” pointed outward in a particular direction rather than disseminating their signal evenly in all directions. Radio Moscow had a “rival” or “competitor” called Radio Peace and Progress, which also broadcast in English and other Western languages. Although it was of course under common ultimate ownership and control, wiki makes the interesting claim that “Although the themes addressed were standard ones that followed the official line, RPP broadcasts were sometimes notably more tendentious and outspoken than those of Radio Moscow, purveying propaganda lines for which the Soviet government might wish to disclaim responsibility.”
@jwb, hat
I supposed something like BBC World Service or some US-funded services in English were not available to large Soviet audiences for political reasons. But the same political reasons would not apply to Radio Moscow broadcasts in English (which as JWB points out, were of course not intended for a Soviet audience).
@PP: there may be lots of interesting tidbits at the not-very-organized-or-indexed https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/ site.* But I think that focuses on U.S. goverment broadcasts into the Soviet bloc, not broadcasts coming the other way. Presumably the Soviets would not have tried to deliberately jam their own broadcasts to impede domestic listeners but as I noted above they may for technical reasons have been transmitted in ways that did not make them particularly easy to tune in if you were physically in the USSR.
Somewhere in there there’s a chart purporting to show the percentage of the population of Poland that was able to listen to various U.S. government broadcasts at different points in the 1980’s. But our transmitters were in West Germany so the technical aspect of getting a strong signal all the way to Poland’s eastern border was less challenging than covering all of the USSR’s landmass.
On broadcasts: AFAIK, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty produced broadcasts in the languages of the Soviet block and I assume for most people it made more sense to listen to those in order to get a different perspective than to listen to English language broadcasts.
I can confirm that during Soviet times, language instruction was perfunctory except if you trained for a career in academia, international trade, or spying. From all I have seen, the most people having had English or German at school was to be able to read literature, but the level of spoken communication and of writing was very low. I’ve met (ex-)Soviet teachers of German who were able to read Goethe, but couldn’t string basic spoken German sentences together; with that level of language knowledge for teachers, what can you expect from the students?
Of course, there were better schools (e.g., Almaty had the Institute of Foreign Languages that produced fluent English and German speakers, several of whom I have met), and there were language enthusiasts who honed their skills by consuming foreign records and video tapes, but those were a small minority. For most Soviet citizens, learning a foreign language was something you did because it was a required subject in school, not because one could usefully apply the knowledge.
@hans
I see now drasvi switched focus from interest in obtaining “good command” to general resources used in Soviet foreign language education (or I misread his comments). I was asking about what resources were available for those interested in obtaining “good command” (which your answer addresses also, hat’s answer too).
@PP it was possible.
I heard broadcasts in several languages when I was 3, 4 and 5. Even listened to them, in the sense: I didn’t listen to anything in Russian (it was boring) but those voices sounded like music and sparked my curiousity. Mostly in poor quality with lots of noise. (In 6 I went to school and school is poorly compatible with self-education other than in summers)
But it is not same as when my Tunisian friend grew up watching Rai Uno or when my wife watches films. My Tunisian friend learned to understand Italian*, I learned the sound of German, but – without visual context – I couldn’t understand a word and given the noise I would listen to it for minutes, not hours:)
Speaking of films, in Moscow you also could watch films with subtitles in a specialised cinema theatre.
*She’s almost a native Spanish speaker, but some Tunisian kids even learn some Russian.
@Hans, language education for scientists is same. If you are a mathematician, you need to be good at math. You also may want to know some English, so there is a teacher, very undemanding teacher. My wife learned English from films, not from English lessons in university. And that’s Russia, not USSR.
(and I agree with this: I don’t think we need ONE “language of science”)
@drasvi: good to know. The (ex-)Soviet academics I’ve met usually did speak English or German decently, but that may be selection bias.
BBC Radio 4 broadcasts on Long Wave ended on 27 June 2026.
@PP, what I was thinking about is neither interest nor availability. It was how likely you were to have a “good command” of your L2 in USSR. That depends on many things.
Contacts with people (communication with travellers – or locals, career, studying in your L2) is both how and why you learn to speak. Books are how and why you learn to read. Films are how and why you learn to watch and listen to films:)
And your motivation to learn an L2 in USSR was: to read books.
Travellers were few, we couldn’t travel (we wouldn’t even think about career in Europe or studying there – that was absurd), to watch films you needed to be a Muscovite and go to the cinema (Hans said “video tapes” but in 80s recorders were very expensive: I mean your annual salary).
Books and songs were available.
Also: how numerous are fluent L2 speakers? (not very numeorous in USSR) How demanding are teachers? (undemanding) How good are teacher? (I don’t know, but I don’t expect them to be very good)
What people think of people who know or not an L2, are educated people expected to be good at their L2s? (they were not – and are not – expected to know one, but such knowledge impressed – and impresses – people)
However, answering your question: I don’t know if Kazan was any worse than say Trieste in terms of, say, availability of recordings in libraries. I’m not one of those people who wanted “good command”, I don’t know what was available.
I know that there was a Polish English audio-course on 4 vinyl discs.
In Moscow you also could meet a native speaker if you tried, there were places attended by them. You even could dance and sleep and beget a baby with a native speaker if you didn’t mind awareness of Komsomol of your moral flaw (such flaws are not too good for careers…).
You wouldn’t meen one on the street though.
@Hans, 1. even undemanding teachers are teachers, you can learn somethign from them if you want to. 2. apart of my wife many of my friends (math students) gathered to watch films in English, with subtitles. 3. when you read and write scientific articles in English and talk to colleagues at conferences you learn something:) That’s how I learned to read in English.
I was talking about requirements and expectations. If you are good at science and suck at English (or German), you need to take an exam for a degree but most language teachers won’t be demanding.
in fact it was rather funny to hear someone speaking in a broad American accent identify himself as Vasily Strelnikov or whatever
This is not difficult to explain. Over the years and decades various streams of Western communists made their way to SU bringing a non-zero number of L1 speakers available for the outward facing jobs. Some of them were descendants of Russian families who before that traveled the same trail in the other direction. The most famous example is probably Vladimir Pozner. I am not saying that Vasily Strelnikov was definitely not a Roy Arrow in disguise, but it’s also not impossible that he was called VS from birth.
No, I didn’t; that’s why I asked. 😐 What I’m seeing here is the Frisian (and Frisian-in-western-Dutch) version of the ordinary diminutive suffix with *k, Standard German -chen, so I still don’t understand what you mean.
The anecdote about wann fährt der nächste Schwan is awesome, though. I didn’t know it either.
I’m back from Vilnius (where I participated in a conference that was, of course, entirely in English) but exhausted from, mostly, the upheavals of the weather.
@dm
I suppose my point was that Heino => Heinz is OK but *Schwano => Schwanz would be a bit unfortunate for poor *Schwano. Was really just a throwaway observation, and one that has not struck a chord with anyone else.
I am glad you liked the opera story. The tenor was Leo Slezak.
Ah, but Heino is very rare; most Heinz are just Heinrich.
And you can’t just shorten the long vowel of Schwan. You can see it’s long (as it is in the Dutch version where it’s spelled out) because it’s a monosyllabic word that ends in a single consonant.
But Heino aka Heinz Kramm used to be an extremely popular singer….
There are people with the surname Schwanz.
PP: For what it’s worth, I got your joke right off the bat.
I was amused too.
But Heino aka Heinz Kramm used to be an extremely popular singer….
He is the only person I know who goes by that name, while there are a lot of people called Heinz.
What Hans said.
To be fair, I was thinking of single-themed names that got -tz after. I agree that once the abbreviation existed, it could be co-opted for the (more common) double-themed names. In some cases, the abbreviation may have started for double-themed names, e.g., for Fritz and Lutz, there are no Fridos or Ludos.
This is not a suffix, it’s *-T-n- that underwent Kluge’s law (giving PGmc *-tt-) in *n-stem nicknames, followed by the High German Consonant Shift. OK, maybe Heinz is analogical.