Papers by Joseph Pentangelo
Folklore, Mar 18, 2021
In Stamford, Connecticut, in 1692, the teenage Katherine Branch was tormented by visions, faintin... more In Stamford, Connecticut, in 1692, the teenage Katherine Branch was tormented by visions, fainting spells, convulsions, and crying episodes. She claimed that she was bewitched. Many neighbours came to see her during her affliction, offering their own suggestions and interpretations of what was happening. One woman, Mrs Sarah Bates, suggested that Katherine’s affliction resulted from a natural illness, and advised that feathers be burnt under the girl’s nose. This article proposes that Mrs Bates supposed that Katherine was suffering from hysteria, or ‘suffocation of the mother’, a medical diagnosis proposed by English physician Edward Jorden in 1603 specifically to address cases of apparent witchcraft.
Language Documentation and Description, Dec 30, 2020
Kanien'kéha is an endangered Northern Iroquoian language historically spoken in what is now the M... more Kanien'kéha is an endangered Northern Iroquoian language historically spoken in what is now the Mohawk Valley of central New York state in the United States of America. Today, it is spoken by about 3,800 people in six communities in upstate New York, USA, and in Ontario and Quebec provinces, Canada: Akwesasne, Kahnawake, Kanesatake, Six Nations, Wahta, and Tyendinaga. The varieties spoken in these communities differ slightly in terms of phonology, vocabulary, and orthography. Robust language revitalisation efforts are ongoing, and the language is of great cultural importance to the Kanien'kehá:ka people.
Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, 2020
In Staten Island, New York, near a derelict building that was once part of the historic Seaview H... more In Staten Island, New York, near a derelict building that was once part of the historic Seaview Hospital, stands a group of beech trees carved with human figures and sacred hearts, each in a consistent but highly distinctive style. Most of these trees are signed by a W. Dixon, and two are dated to the early 1930s. These carvings constitute a previously undiscussed collection of folk art in New York City. This article documents these carvings in detail, while advocating for a broader consideration of tree carvings in folklore studies.
This is a Green Open Access article. Published as Pentangelo, Joseph. 2020. A Grove of Folk Art on Staten Island: Documenting the Carvings of W. Dixon. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 46(1–2), 3–11. © 2020 by the Board of Trustees of New York Folklore.
English Language & Linguistics, 2020
The etymologies of English blood and bone are obscure. Although their cognates are well represent... more The etymologies of English blood and bone are obscure. Although their cognates are well represented in the Germanic family, both lack clear cognates in other Indo-European languages. Various explanations of their origins have been proposed, including that they may be non-Indo-European (e.g. Hawkins 1987). Blood and bone, and their cognates, share an initial /b/ with numerous body-related words (e.g. beard, breast, bosom) throughout Germanic. This initial /b/ constitutes a phonestheme. Phonesthemes-'recurring sound-meaning pairings that are not clearly contrastive morphemes' (Bergen 2004: 290)-are present in many Germanic languages, but their role in lexicogenesis is little understood. I suggest that blood and bone were formed by blending the initial /b/ phonestheme with two preexisting lexemes: Proto-Germanic*flōda-'something that flows' and *staina-'stone.' Phonesthetic blending may be a fruitful avenue for future etymological research.
Folklore, 2019
In the third book of Otia Imperialia (c.1211), Gervase of Tilbury describes numerous wonders, amo... more In the third book of Otia Imperialia (c.1211), Gervase of Tilbury describes numerous wonders, among them an English belief regarding the Grant, a sparkling-eyed entity shaped like a bipedal foal, whose appearance racing through the streets forewarns of fire. This creature, attested to nowhere but in Gervase's work, is something of a mystery for folklorists, who have tried to draw connections to other supernatural beings based on its name and its appearance. What has gone overlooked is the fact that the same elements of the Grant's fire-omen belief existed well into the twentieth century in parts of England, albeit applied to hares. This article suggests that the Grant is an exaggerated hare, while exploring the larger topic of why it is that hares are so often associated with fire in European folklore.
NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics, 2019
Matthew Hopkins, England’s most notorious witch hunter, rested his reputation on his experience i... more Matthew Hopkins, England’s most notorious witch hunter, rested his reputation on his experience in confronting the supernatural. To this end, he greatly exaggerated the intensity of his first encounter with an accused witch, Elizabeth Clarke. In Hopkins’ account, Clarke mentioned a familiar named Grizzel Greedigut. But earlier publications show that this did not happen, and that Hopkins appropriated the name from the dubious confession of another woman, Joan Wallis. Today, we have largely accepted Grizzel Greedigut as a bizarre, nonsensical name, but it would not have been all that absurd at the time. Grizzle often described grey animals, and Grissel was a fairly popular name, an abbreviation of Grisilde. Greedigut meant ‘glutton,’ and was the name English colonials used for the American anglerfish. Without knowing more about the name’s historical context, we fall for Hopkins’ cynical ploy to maximize the strangeness of his encounter.
Vanished Letters
Cricket, 2017
The article presents information on the sections of people called the Angles, the Saxons, and the... more The article presents information on the sections of people called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes native to ancient England who spoke old English, and several symbols of old English which ceased to exist.
(Abstract from EBSCO Discovery Service)
Notes & Queries, 2016
Currently available from around thirty e-book purveyors is a nineteenth-century Spiritualist work... more Currently available from around thirty e-book purveyors is a nineteenth-century Spiritualist work entitled The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism, with Dr. Doddridge’s Dream, generally attributed (as by Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com) to ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe and Phrenological Journal’. This book is a compilation of four independent works previously printed in the Phrenological Journal, published together with added notes by S. R. Wells in May 1872. New editions were printed until at least 1886, yet its proper authors have yet to be fully credited. ‘The Planchette Mystery’ and ‘Dr. Doddridge’s Dream’ are presented without authorial credit, and have been left as such for the last century and a half; thanks to the digitization efforts of Google Books, I have uncovered the author of the former.
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/2/263.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=NzFhzQekkebbOc4
Dissertation by Joseph Pentangelo
360º Video and Language Documentation: Towards a Corpus of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk)
Robust documentation is a major goal of documentary linguistics. Recognizing spoken language as a... more Robust documentation is a major goal of documentary linguistics. Recognizing spoken language as a multimodal phenomenon, researchers working in this field broadly agree that video is an improvement over audio-only recording. At the same time, video is limited by the format’s frame, which permits only a relatively small portion of the visual field to be recorded at any given time. This results in much data being lost, as the documenter must decide where to aim their camera, necessarily leaving out more than they record. In this dissertation, I apply 360º video to language documentation for the first time. 360º video, which is one variety of virtual reality, improves upon traditional video by drastically expanding the frame, recording in all directions surrounding the camera. In this way, a maximum of visual data is recorded, and there is no need for the camera to be redirected as participants take turns speaking or move around the space. I recorded over 10 hours of 360º video with ambisonic audio, containing mostly naturalistic conversation in the Akwesasne variety of Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), an endangered Northern Iroquoian language spoken in New York State, Ontario, and Quebec. Most of the existing documentation of Kanien’kéha outside of this corpus is formal or non-naturalistic. The resulting corpus thus serves a dual purpose: it is both a demonstration of the capabilities of 360º video for language documentation, and a contribution to the documentation of Kanien’kéha. This dissertation includes a brief grammatical description of Kanien’kéha phonology and morphology, a discussion of the interplay between technology and language documentation throughout North American history, an exploration of the significance of 360º video to documentary linguistics, a brief analysis of gesture and intonation in the present corpus, and an assessment of the suitability of ambisonic audio for linguistic analysis. Directions for potential future research are indicated throughout
Talks by Joseph Pentangelo
A brief history of the name of Grizzel Greedigut, a familiar mentioned in Matthew Hopkins' The Di... more A brief history of the name of Grizzel Greedigut, a familiar mentioned in Matthew Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches (1647).
Presented at the SQUID 2018 conference on 27 April, 2018, at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Presented at SQUID 10 conference in 2015 at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Presented at SQUID 9 conference in 2014 at The Graduate Center, CUNY
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Papers by Joseph Pentangelo
This is a Green Open Access article. Published as Pentangelo, Joseph. 2020. A Grove of Folk Art on Staten Island: Documenting the Carvings of W. Dixon. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 46(1–2), 3–11. © 2020 by the Board of Trustees of New York Folklore.
(Abstract from EBSCO Discovery Service)
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/2/263.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=NzFhzQekkebbOc4
Dissertation by Joseph Pentangelo
Talks by Joseph Pentangelo
Presented at the SQUID 2018 conference on 27 April, 2018, at the Graduate Center, CUNY.