Cheers to that

If you speak English and you’ve ever consumed alcohol, then I’ll bet that at some point in your life, maybe recently, you’ve yelled out “Cheers!” and clinked your glass to someone else’s.

Have you ever considered how deranged this behavior might seem to an alien?  In what other context do you blurt out an aspirational feeling, one that might not even describe you in that moment?  And you expect someone else to feel the same way at the same time!  Very presumptuous, if you ask me.

And yet, drinkers continue to do it, billions of times per week.   Let’s look at the linguistics of toasting!

(From Nathan Pyle’s Strange Planet)

A hundred years of cheers

Toasting is not limited to “cheers”, of course, and it’s not limited to English-speaking countries. It’s a speech act that goes back millennia and can be seen in every society that drinks, which is to say, most of them.

The origin of the word “toast” in the sense of a pronouncement is directly related to the more familiar sense of “toast” as bread browned by dry heat.  At least as far back as the Middle Ages, people commonly dropped spiced or charred bread into wine to flavor it. The honored person came to be called the toast, and then the act itself, and eventually the word that consummated the ritual.  It’s metonymy in action.

Toasts can be long, heartfelt dedications, but more often they come in the form of a quick set phrase.  “Cheers” is the oddly generic toast that nearly the entire Anglosphere has converged upon. It’s a word that modern Americans share with modern Brits, Australians, Canadians, and others.  This is a rare example of cultural alignment across the English-speaking world; that’s worth a toast in itself!

I’m surprised by how young the word is. “Cheers” wasn’t widely used as a toast until after World War I and it only gained real traction in the 1920s.  Before that, Americans, at least, had been making plenty of toasts – there was even a “Golden age of toasting” -- but the shorthand “cheers” didn’t take hold until later.  

Bread, Breath & Beyond

English is a bit of an oddball with respect to toasting customs.  Toasts in most cultures wish for something more specific than mere cheers.

I looked up the most common “toast words” in the first 20 languages besides English I could think of, and I found that most involved either the word for health or the word for life.  A third category involves neither health nor life, but the cup itself, and the desire to empty it.  Here are my very abbreviated findings:

You’ll notice some patterns: the Romance languages mostly invoke health, East Asian and Scandinavian languages tend to speak of the cup, and a more scattered group call out life itself. (This chart is a simplification, of course. Italians, for instance, sometimes say salute instead of cin cin, which would put them back in the health column.)

The best theory I can come up with is this: toasts focus on health by default, but cultures that gravitate toward “life” toasts often faced big existential threats – exile, survival in harsh environments, or centuries of adversity.  Cultures that focus on the cup place outsize emphasis on communality and ceremony.

But I recognize this is riddled with stereotypes, because every culture has experienced adversity and cares about community to some degree.  While I can’t find any research that explains the evolution of toasting words in different languages, toasting as a phenomenon is well-studied by linguists as a kind of cultural fingerprint of what a community most values.  

As a recent example (2013), I give you a chapter from “Culinary Linguistics” (yum!) by Helga Kotthoff that compares the nature of toasts in Sweden, Georgia, and Russia.  Kotthoff’s work suggests that I might be making too much of these lexical differences.   “Toasts are typical ‘phatic communication’ activities,” she writes.   “Their information value is usually less relevant than the demonstration of mutual esteem.”

Ladin

A brief word about why I started down this rabbit-hole about toasting terminology in the first place. That word is vivés, pronounced VEE-vays.

I heard vivés repeatedly during a week-long trip to the Dolomite Mountains in Italy that I just returned from. Vivés is the way people toast in Ladin, a family of languages unique to the Ladin people who inhabit the valleys of the Dolomites. As you can probably guess, it means “Live!”.   This puts Ladins squarely in the life-affirming column of toasters.

The Dolomites themselves feel like life-affirming places, filled with valleys as vivid as the one pictured above. There are only about 40,000 native speakers of Ladin in the world, mostly in these valleys.  According to our guide, it’s nearly unintelligible to Italians and Germans alike.

Even Google Translate’s 250+ languages do not include Ladin — it’s what language processing people call a “low-resource” language, meaning there isn’t enough online material for AI translation models to train on.

What struck me is that although Ladin is part of the Romance family, it doesn’t share the familiar “health” toast of its cousins (santé, salud, saúde). Instead, it’s got a “life” toast, more like ancient Latin’s vivat. Perhaps that’s a reflection of Ladin’s isolation in the Dolomite valleys — a language and a culture that endured against the odds — although again, I might be reading too much into it.

Nonsense words, redux

While I’m on the topic of Italy:  in Issue #12 I talked about nonsense words. Since then, three different friends (all subscribers to this newsletter!) reached out to tell me about the Italian song Prisencolinensinainciusol.

I’d never heard of it before, but now I keep hearing references to it.  It’s a 1972 track by singer Adriano Celentano in which he imitates what American English sounds like to Italians without using a single real English word.  The result is a funky earworm that feels both familiar and completely unintelligible. It became a cult classic in Italy and has resurfaced online many times as an experiment in how you can use gibberish to “imitate” a language. Give it a listen.  

Word games from around the Web

I know that my newsletter subscribers come for the word games and not for my armchair linguistics!  I’m still in the design phase of that multi-player word game I mentioned a few issues ago and I’m hoping to have it by the end of the year.  In the meantime, there’s way more good stuff that’s not authored by me.  Let me introduce a curious game I found last week:

Puzl:   This one has really captured my interest.  It’s quite difficult, and if you can solve today’s without hints (and if you’re not the author George), let me know for a prize.

Puzle challenges you to find 5 words that fill in the lines in a 5x5 grid where the center column is already frozen in place.  So that’s 20 letters you have to fill in.  The trick is that you can’t re-use any letters within that 20.