USAGE UKASES.

Jan Freeman, the excellent Boston Globe language columnist, spent a couple of recent columns relentlessly mocking the absurdity of invented diktats about what shouldn't be said. "Rule by whim," from December 21, gives examples of some of the things crazed rulemongers have pulled out of thin air: not should not conclude a sentence, we should "reserve wholesome for food, healthful for living conditions, and healthy for living beings," you can't use over for more than, and my personal favorite:

It reminded me of a recent e-mail from Kevin, whose high school English teacher had a similarly inventive usage theory. She rejected the sentence "The pitcher threw no strikes," he recalled: "She asked me to show her how to throw 'no strike.' She said the correct way to say it would be, 'The pitcher didn't throw any strikes.' "

This doctrine, of course, was just plain nutty. No in this construction means "not any," as it has since Old English. No grammarian or usagist has banned it. Yet Kevin was successfully browbeaten: "For years I avoided writing things such as "The store had no bananas," "I have no opinion," "I ate no onions," he wrote.

Mind-boggling! And in her December 28 column, "The language dustbin," she goes back a century to look at some of the things the pedants of yesteryear tried to get us to eschew, like "presidential campaign" and "blame on": "Indefensible slang. We blame a person for a fault, or lay the blame upon him. Not, as in a New York newspaper, after the last Presidential election, 'I do not blame the defeat on the President,' but 'I do not blame the President for the defeat.'" Again, my favorite bit:

Sleuth "denotes the track of a living creature, in particular the track of a wild animal. . . . In a semi-humorous way the newspapers commonly mention a detective as a sleuth; their readers, not thinking of the humor, take sleuth to be a regular synonym of detective. The only meaning the word has in sober English is track or footprint." (Joseph Fitzgerald, "Word and Phrase: True and False Usage in English,"1901)

Keep it up, Jan!

DR. JOHNSON'S BLOG.

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (which I highly recommend you visit if you're ever in New Haven, which, incidentally, is a much nicer city than some people think) has produced a wonderful lexicographical blog called Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary:

Welcome to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, a word-a-day dictionary from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, [1755]), one of the first dictionaries to document the daily working life of the English language.

In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth in 1709, a definition from the first edition of the dictionary will be posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight, beginning on January 1, 2009. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections, which is held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

They're also going to be "offering an exhibition on the writing of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in July - September, 2009, drawing on the Beinecke’s Boswell Family Papers collection. As a contribution to the tercentenary festivities, and in support of scholarship on Johnson and Boswell, the Beinecke will be scanning the entire James Boswell segment of the Boswell Family Papers and making the collection available in its Digital Images and Collections." Now, that's the way to share your rich holdings with the public! (N.b.: They call it "a word-a-day dictionary," but it's arranged in reverse chronological order and allows comments, so I say it's a blog.) Thanks for the link, Paul!

INFLATIONARY ENGLISH AND REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN.

I don't know if anyone younger than me and a few of my similarly well-aged readers remembers Victor Borge, the musical comedian; he had a routine called "Inflationary Language" in which he added one to numbers embedded in words, so that "once upon a time" becomes "twice upon a time," "wonderful" becomes "twoderful," and so on. (You can read a version of the routine here and see him performing it via YouTube here.) I just ran across a parallel game played in Russia a century ago in Teffi's memoir (in Russian) of Fyodor Sologub (whom I wrote about here). She writes (original Russian below the cut):

We [those gathered at one of Sologub's literary evenings] decided to write a novel in the new style [this would have been after the 1905 revolution, when informality and popular language were all the rage]. It started like this:

"На улицу вышел человек в синих панталонах" [Na ulitsu vyshel chelovek v sinikh pantalonakh] ('There came out onto the street a person in dark-blue pants').

In the new style it was written like this:

"На у-роже ты-шел лоб-столетие в ре-них хам-купо-нах" [Na u-rozhe ty-shel lob-stoletie v re-nikh kham-kuponakh: here улицу [ulitsu] 'street' is analyzed as containing a form of лицо [litso] 'face' and thus the latter is replaced by the slang word рожа 'mug'; вышел [vyshel] 'went out' is taken as containing вы [vy], the polite form of 'you,' which of course is replaced by the informal ты [ty]; человек [chelovek] 'person' is analyzed as чело 'forehead' (archaic) + век 'age, century' and replaced by the standard words for 'forehead' and 'century,' лоб [lob] and столетие [stoletie]; the си in синих [sinikh] 'dark blue' is taken as "si" of solfège (i.e., B) and replaced by "re" (i.e., D)—I confess I don't understand the rationale for this; and панталонах [pantalonakh] 'pants, trousers' (at the time—now it refers to women's undergarments) is taken as пан [pan] 'gentleman' + талон [talon] 'coupon,' which are replaced by хам [kham] 'boor' (reflecting the trendy new anti-bourgeois feeling) and купон [kupon] 'coupon' (newer word).]

The game was thoroughly stupid, but terribly captivating, and many of our circle of writers eagerly took part in this nonsense. And many serious and even gloomy people, like Sologub himself, at first shrugged their shoulders doubtfully, then, as if unwillingly, thought up a word or two, and off they went. They got into it.

Continue reading "INFLATIONARY ENGLISH AND REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN."

TIME OUT OF JOINT.

As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws near its close, there is still no accepted way to refer to it (parallel to "the teens," "the twenties," and so on), and perhaps there never will be. But on the radio today I heard a startling abbreviation for the coming year; an economist talked about the prospects for "oh nine and oh ten."

NINILCHIK.

Bill Poser sent me a link to Our Ninilchik Language, "an online dictionary of the old language of Ninilchik, Alaska"—said old language being Russian! From the Introduction by Andrej Kibrik Wayne Leman [thanks, Peter!]:

In 1847 Gregorii Kvasnikoff, a Russian Orthodox Church missionary, brought his wife Mavra of Kodiak Island, half Alutiiq and half Russian, and their large family, to Ninilchik. They settled into the valley at the mouth of the what is now called the Ninilchik River and stayed. Not long after Kvasnikoffs arrived, Oskolkoff sons came with their mother and stepfather. Oskolkoff sons married Kvasnikoff daughters and all the old families of Ninilchik descend from these unions.

The Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs brought the Russian language to Ninilchik. Russian continued to be spoken in the village long after Alaska was purchased by the U.S. from the Russians in 1867. There was a Russian school in the village which taught basic Russian literacy to the children and probably schooled them some in the Old Church Slavonic language used in the Russian Orthodox Church services in the village church...

This dictionary is an attempt to preserve some of the language of the people of Ninilchik. Our village language was mostly Russian, reflecting the vocabulary of Russian spoken by the Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs in the late 1840s. It is Russian unaffected by the changes which have occurred in the Russian language (in its various dialects) in Russia through the tumultuous years of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist era, modern technological advances, and the fall of Soviet Communism. Our village language also included some words from southern Eskimo dialects as well as borrowings from Athabaskan dialects...

I grew up in the 1950's hearing Russian spoken a great deal in Ninilchik. Villagers regularly spoke Russian to each other. My father spoke Russian to his mother and siblings. Some of my cousins spoke some Russian if they came from families where Russian was spoken in the home. I did not; my mother had come to Ninilchik from California. But I learned a number of Russian words and could understand some of what I heard of conversations.

Then, suddenly, in the mid 1950's, Russian stopped being spoken in public. My father stopped speaking Russian to his siblings and his mother (until just before she died).

I have done my best to spell and record the words of our village...

What a remarkable find! Once again my hat is off to someone who took the time and trouble to record an obscure and "useless" form of language, this one of particular interest to me. I should add that the words are spelled phonetically: "So the word for 'dog' is written in this dictionary as sabaka, which is how it is pronounced in Ninichik as well as in Moscow." Here's the A section of the dictionary, from which we learn that initial y- gets dropped (az'ík ЯЗЫК. n. tongue, language). I had no idea Russian Alaska had left this heritage behind. Thanks, Bill!

COLLECTING MANDELSTAM.

It's very strange: I've been reading and memorizing great swatches of Mandelstam (I'm working on "Tristia" now), and just last night I was thinking that perhaps he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century; today I ran across an essay "Collecting Mandelstam" (pdf, Google cache) by R. Eden Martin (in the Caxtonian, November 2006) that makes the same suggestion:

Who was the greatest poet writing in any western language during the 20th Century? Many would answer: Osip Mandelstam...

Russia produced many excellent poets during the past century. Cab drivers in Petersburg regularly quote Pushkin at length. The very best Russian poets of the 20th Century would certainlyinclude Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva—and one could make a case for dozens of others. I believe that many of these Russian poets were greater artists than any poet writing in America at the time, including Frost and Stevens. And some experts in a position to make such judgments believe that Mandelstam was the greatest of them all.

You needn't agree with such an extravagant claim, however, to enjoy Martin's essay, which provides a handy summary of the poet's life and—since he is a book collector—includes photographs of some rare editions and (perhaps my favorite) an enticing one of a complete run of Apollon magazine ("the greatest Russian literary and arts journal of the pre-War era"), 1909-1917, as well as the title page of the August 1910 issue that included Mandelstam's first published poems. I've just sent off for Clarence Brown's 1978 biography Mandelstam; I'll have to take Omry Ronen's widely praised An Аpproach to Mandelstam (Jerusalem, 1983) out of the library, since it doesn't seem to be available for love or money.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of Russian literature, I also ran across a blog I'm surprised I haven't seen before, Lizok's Bookshelf, written by Lisa Hayden Espenschade, who says "I'm a writer and Russian tutor/teacher who loves reading fiction, particularly Russian novels," and has very informative notes on Russian books she's read or that have won prizes. Definitely worth a bookmark.

Oh, and happy new year! May 2009 be better for all of us.

WHY CZAR?

Ben Zimmer has a Slate article about the use of "X Czar" to mean "official in charge of dealing with X" ("drug czar," "energy czar," etc.). There's all sorts of interesting history in there, but what grabbed me was this:

Czar first entered English back in the mid-16th century, soon after Baron Sigismund von Herberstein used the word in a Latin book published in 1549. The more correct romanization, tsar, became the standard spelling in the late 19th century, but by that time czar had caught on in popular usage, emerging as a handy label for anyone with tyrannical tendencies.

As it happens, Herberstein's book, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, is online (you can find versions in other languages linked from the end of the Wikipedia article), and sure enough, he writes "Czar Rhutenica lingua regem significat" ['in the Ruthenian language czar means king'; the entire paragraph is below the cut].

The question is: why on earth did he choose such an odd spelling? (Incidentally, there's an amusing dispute about the proper rendition of the word at Latin Vicipaedia.) Any ideas?

Continue reading "WHY CZAR?"

FORVO.

A simple idea, well executed:

Forvo is the place where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others recording your pronunciations in your own language.

When I visited, the "Language of the day" was Slovenian, and one of the "Top pronunciations" was Ljubljana; I clicked on the little triangular symbol and heard "ingridzb (Female from Slovenia)" say it. Addictive and educational. (They're coy about what "forvo" means, but apparently it's something close to "FOR-VOcalization.") Thanks, Kári!