GEIST: CANADIAN PHRASEBOOK.

Geist describes itself as "A Canadian Phrasebook-in-Progress" that "explores the regional variations in Canadian speech." Its list has entries for Toronto, Vancouver, Cape Breton, and Dundurn, Saskatchewan ("Just 20 minutes outside the City of Saskatoon"), but people write in with additions from all over Canada. I don't know if I believe all the entries (a cafe au lait is said to be called a "latte au mug" in Vancouver), but it's fun to browse, and you can see more entries in the Letters to the Editor section. Furthermore, the Thinkubator Lexican aims to "create an online community based on the ongoing Geist Cross-Canada Phrasebook project. We will use state-of-the-art web-based technologies to create an interactive and user-friendly website that facilitates easy access to the existing archives and fosters a creative space to add, comment on, edit, and enjoy the Phrasebook."

Thanks for the tip, Grant!

ACADEMIC BLOGS.

Henry Farrell has set up an academic blog portal: "With the exception of a few pages..., it is freely modifiable, so that users can themselves add blogs and other forms of content that may be useful to academic bloggers and academics academics more generally." (I'm pleased to see someone has added LH to the Linguistics and Philosophy page.) Henry says in his Crooked Timber post about it:

I’d like the list to be even more comprehensive than it is. The only way to do this is to get the word out, so I’m politely asking people who like the general idea of this resource to consider linking to it, in a post, in their blogroll, or (ideally) in both. The more people know about the wiki, the more people are likely to enter in details of academic blogs that they write themselves, or read. What I’d like to do in a few months is use the information in the wiki as the initial basis for a rough census of the academic blogosphere; who is blogging in what disciplines, at what stage of their careers and so on. I think this would make for pretty interesting reading, and the more comprehensive the wiki is as a map of the academic blogosphere, the more accurate the census will be.

So if you read such blogs (or maintain one yourself), you know what to do. Me, I'm adding it to the blogroll so I don't forget to check it regularly. I Am Not An Academic, but I like hanging out with them.

AKIVERNITOS.

This is one of the more perplexing translation problems I've run across lately. As I mentioned in this LH thread, I've long been interested in Stratis Tsirkas' trilogy Akyvernites polities (Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες), but having had only the second and third volumes and not being particularly fluent in Greek, I never got around to it. But I recently discovered that there was a one-volume translation (by Kay Cicellis), Drifting Cities, available for just a few dollars, I immediately ordered it, and now that it's arrived I've begun reading it. It's set in Cairo, Alexandria, and Jerusalem in 1942-44, exactly the setting of Olivia Manning's superb Levant Trilogy (which I highly recommend, but do read the Balkan Trilogy first), which gives it an added interest for me. So far I'm enjoying it greatly; I like the technique of telling the story from the viewpoints of different characters and the close attention paid to geographical setting.

But now to the title. You notice that I quoted Jimmy Ho's citation of it (from the earlier thread) as Akyvernites polities, a simple transliteration; what's that in English? Good question. The phrase is difficult if not impossible to translate usefully in this context. Politia (πολιτεία) is the origin of English polity and is similarly multifaceted: it can mean 'form of government,' 'state, nation, country,' 'conduct, behavior, adventures,' or 'town.' The last is not as common a sense, but since the novel focuses on three cities and the title is taken from Seferis's poem "Ο Στράτης Θαλασσινός στη Νεκρή Θάλασσα" [Stratis Thalassinos on the Dead Sea], which begins "Ιερουσαλήμ, ακυβέρνητη πολιτεία" [Jerusalem, akiverniti politia], it can safely be translated city here. Now, what about the first word? Basically, it means either 'without government' or 'ungovernable': it consists of the privative prefix α- [a-] plus the root of κυβέρνηση [kivernisi] 'government.' But! The word κυβέρνηση is based on κυβερνήτης [kivernitis] 'leader, ruler, governor' (the root of cybernetics), which in Ancient Greek originally meant 'steersman,' and it has not lost that basic sense, so that ακυβέρνητος can also mean 'not being steered, rudderless, adrift.' This is, of course, most common in conjunction with words like πλοίο [plio] 'boat, ship,' but Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, the much-praised (overpraised, in my view) translators of Cavafy and Seferis, have chosen to render the Seferis line "Jerusalem, drifting city," whence the title Drifting Cities used for the translation of the trilogy. I can sort of see the reasoning—drifting is much more "poetic" than ungoverned or ungovernable, and the poem deals with refugees and migratory birds and ships—but it's not the obvious reading (cf., for example, this Greek newspaper article, which calls Iraq "μια ακυβέρνητη πολιτεία" 'an ungoverned/ungovernable polity/nation'), and it seems to me it softens and "poeticizes" Tsirkas's title in much the way Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past does Proust's. Tsirkas is very much concerned with politics, and it seems to me "ungovernable cities" would be more to the point. But the choice may well have been approved by Tsirkas himself, since the French version (Cités à la derive, translated by Catherine Lerouvre and Chrysa Prokopaki, Éditions du Seuil, 1971) takes it the same way, and for that matter Seferis may have approved the Keeley/Sherrard rendering. But I take comfort in the fact that Rex Warner, quoted in Ammiel Alcalay's essay "My Mediterranean," translated the Seferis as "the ungovernable city."

"INIMICABLE" AND THE MAVENS.

Arnold Zwicky has a good Language Log post on the word inimicable (significantly rarer than its synonym inimical, but attested since 1805) and the odd fact that the language mavens didn't start bashing it until quite recently, the first basher apparently being Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1998). On the issue of its place in the language, Zwicky points out that "there is a very close parallel to inimical/inimicable, namely unseasonal/unseasonable, and here both variants are standard." But once Garner decided the word "should be extinct," Robert Hartwell Fiske jumped on the bandwagon in his Dictionary of Disagreeable English: A Curmudgeon's Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar (2004), calling it "a nonword." I think Zwicky's conclusion is indisputable:

Once a proscription — even a silly one, like Dryden's Rule, banning stranded prepositions — is in the marketplace, it tends to persist. But where do the proscriptions come from? Here, there's an enormous amount of randomness: somebody in the usage community happens to notice something that offends him (it's almost always a man) in some way — often because he views it as colloquial or innovative or regional or used by the wrong sort of people, occasionally because that's not the way you do things in Latin — and writes or teaches about it. We then end up with a collection of personal quirks and accidents of history, a big grab-bag of assorted stuff. Speaker-oriented hopefully gets excoriated, while speaker-oriented frankly and so on get a free pass. Sentence-initial linking however is judged to be poor style, while sentence-initial linking consequently and so on escape the red pencil. I could go on like this for quite some time.

It looks like inimicable got by uncensured until recently simply because no one was particularly offended by it. Not any more.

MED FREE ONLINE.

As reported by the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org (the latter now with a shiny new domain!), the complete Middle English Dictionary from the University of Michigan is now free online:

The print MED, completed in 2001, has been described as "the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America." Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.

The interface is, as aldi says, clunky, but really, who cares? What a treasure! The press release says:

The database includes information on the origins of technical writing, popular culture, notable literary works, medicine, law, science, ship-building, encyclopedias, translations of the Bible, maps, letters, wills, acts of State, recipes, philosophy, mathematics and numerous other subjects, providing a distant mirror of Medieval culture and society. In addition to the linked information, the dictionary also provides the full, searchable text of more than 100 important Medieval documents in their entirety.

"We've always wanted to see an interlinked web of dictionaries that together cover the very multilingual world of medieval Britain along with antecedent and successor languages," said Paul Schaffner of U-M’s Digital Library Production Service. "The division between dictionaries has always been rather artificial in a multilingual society where words tend to slip back and forth between languages. There are many words, especially commercial and legal words that cannot be easily assigned to one language or another."

The need for free access to this resource was made apparent by inquiries from around the world. Now the English teacher in Uganda can finish a translation of a Middle English mystery play for his students, the English gentleman attempting to determine the origin of his surname on behalf of a society of those with the same name will find an easier path to success and independent scholars and emeritus faculty will have full access for their research. Students at various colleges and universities who use the Middle English Dictionary for class assignments will be able to complete their assignments from home computers...

ACADEMIC OPENINGS.

No, not job openings (sorry, recent PhDs!) but opening paragraphs. A post at Crooked Timber admiringly quotes the first paragraph of Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence:

Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.

and asks "Other great academic first paragraphs?" At the moment there are 72 responses, of which I'm afraid I'm afraid eight are from me—I found it an irresistible opportunity to rummage through my shelves looking for treasure. (My all-time favorite is probably the start of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era: "Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things.") Feel free to leave your own candidates either here or there. A word of warning, though; as I said in the MetaFilter thread where I discovered it, "the whole point of this exercise is to find great openings to academic works. Orwell is a wonderful writer, but hardly an academic. I have the same problem in the Crooked Timber thread: people are quoting Nietzsche and The Communist Manifesto and George MacDonald Fraser (fer chrissake). If you don't have to blow the dust off the volume before quoting it, it doesn't count!"

CHARLES DUFF.

On the LibraryThing page for Charles Duff I noticed that alongside Russian for Beginners, the book from which I taught myself Russian, were listed German for Beginners, Spanish for Beginners, French for Beginners, and Italian for Beginners (not to mention A Handbook On Hanging: Being A Short Introduction To The Fine Art Of Execution). How did this guy manage to write textbooks for all those languages? Who was Charles Duff? Well, there's not a whole lot on the internet, but the NYRB (which republished the hanging book) says "Charles Duff (1894-1966) served as an officer in the British Merchant Navy during World War I and then in the intelligence division of the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service. After retiring, he taught linguistics and languages in London and Singapore while writing travel guides, histories, satires, and a series of text books." And this Spanish book catalog (pdf) suggested that Carlos Prieto, author of Spanish Front (1936), was a "posible seudónimo de Charles Duff," which led me to this page of Prieto books, where a copy of Spanish Front is described as "Inscribed To David from Carlos Prieto (Anglican Charles Duff) 8/7/37"—I assume "Anglican" is a misunderstanding of anglicè 'in English,' which would tend to support the pseudonym theory. And the first page (all you can read without a JSTOR subscription) of the Oct. 1948 review by Robert J. Clements in The Modern Language Journal of Duff's 1947 book How to Learn a Language adds more information: Duff "for many years trained language teachers at the University of London" and "was active for eighteen years in the Foreign Office and is author of a series of seven basic and minimal foreign language grammars sponsored by the Orthological Institute." (The Orthological Institute was a creation of C. K. Ogden, the Basic English guy; I'm glad to see they sponsored more useful things as well.) Duff sounds like an interesting fellow (he seems to have appreciated Finnegans Wake when it was still Work in Progress); too bad there isn't more available on him.

NO TALKIN LICHT.

A Telegraph story by the wonderfully named Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent, discusses efforts to record the dialect of Cromarty in Scotland:

A rare dialect that is only spoken by two elderly brothers is to be recorded for posterity before it disappears.

Bobby Hogg, 87, and his brother Gordon, 80, are believed to be the last fluent speakers of the "Cromarty fisher dialect"...

It evolved when local fishermen in the town of Cromarty, on the Black Isle north of Inverness, picked up words from English soldiers based in the area in the 17th and 18th centuries...

A spokesman for Am Baile, a Highland internet archive, said it was important to capture a recording of the last two speakers.

Robin McColl Miller [sic: should be Millar] of Aberdeen University's English department said the Cromarty fisher dialect was the most threatened in Scotland, and one of five different dialects once found in the same small area.

The story has a selection of dialect phrases (Thee're no talkin' licht 'You are quite right'; Ut aboot a wee suppie for me 'Can I have a drink too?') and a link to an audio sample.

Thanks for the link, Paul!

MOSCOW.

A commenter on an earlier post suggested that the word Moscow (as opposed to Russian Moskva) is due to "the Germans hired by Peter the Great in the 1700's." This is not true—Moscow long predates Peter—but it's plausible enough, and the actual explanation is interesting enough, that I thought it was worth blogging. The OED has a draft entry (Dec. 2002) for Moscow, which makes it in not as a place name but as "Originally: the government (ideology, etc.) of the Soviet Union (now hist.). Now also: the government of Russia," and the etymology gives a clear explanation of the origin of the different forms:

[< Moscow (Russian Moskva: see etymological note below), the name of the capital city of Russia and of the river on which it stands (also, formerly, the name of the capital city of the Soviet Union (1922-91), and a name for the principality of Muscovy and its capital: see MUSCOVY n. and cf. note at sense 1 below).
Moscow is first mentioned in Russian chronicles in 1147, but the modern Russian form of its name, Moskva, dates from the 14th cent. The Old Russian name for the river, principality, and city is recorded as Moskov´, accusative (1177 in this form; earlier in locative na Moskvě ‘on the Moscow river’ and in other oblique cases with loss of the second o). It is the fully vocalized form of the name that gave rise both to English Moscow (perh. also influenced by the Russian adjective Moskovskij) and to post-classical Latin Moscovia, Muscovia (see MUSCOVIAN n. and a.).
Moscow is recorded as a place name in English sources from the 16th cent....]

For more detail on the business of the "fall of the jers" and the alternation of voweled and vowelless syllables in Russian, see Renee's post from a few years ago.

Incidentally, I wish the OED would get around to rewriting this sentence from later in the entry: "The centre of revolutionary activity in the Russian revolution of 1917, Moscow became the capital of the Soviet Union and the seat of Communist government in 1922." There are two errors there: Moscow wasn't by any stretch of the imagination the "centre of revolutionary activity in the Russian revolution of 1917" (every other city followed behind the capital, St. Petersburg), and the capital was moved in 1918, not 1922. Tsk.

PERSIAN ETYMOLOGY.

Polyglot Vegetarian has another superb post, this one on the linguistic history of Persian پنیر panir 'cheese,' which like many Persian words has spread throughout Western Asia (it will be familiar to many as the "paneer" of Indian restaurants). I wasn't going to blog it, because I could easily wind up just serving as a PV reprint service, since pretty much everything there is worth telling people about and I assume that anyone who reads LH will have bookmarked it by now anyway. But then I got to the part where he mentions the Etymological Dictionary of the Persian Language being prepared at Yerevan State University and the Этимологический словарь иранских языков [Etymological dictionary of the Iranian languages] that's so far published two fascicles (up through d) and links to the 1890 Grundriss der neupersischen Etymologie by Paul Horn on Google Books, and I couldn't resist passing that along. And of course there are the usual side trips into things like Armenian proverbs and the Bhagavata-purana (भागवत पुराण) and the egregious (in every sense) Sir Richard Burton:

Reading The Lake Regions of Central Africa, Burton of course has much to say about the native cuisine. But in particular for this topic, he mentions (p. 52),

The mutunguja (the Puneeria coagulans of Dr. Stocks,) a solanaceous plant, called … by the Baloch panír, or cheese, from the effect of the juice in curdling milk, …

and again (p. 464-5),

Milk is held in high esteem … mtindi (curded milk), the laban of Arabia, and the Indian dahi. … [T]hey consider cheese a miracle, and use against it their stock denunciation, the danger of bewitching cattle. The fresh produce, moreover, has few charms as a poculent among barbarous and milk-drinking races … On the other hand, the curded milk is every where a favorite … [They] do not … make their dahi …, like the Arabs, with kid's rennet, nor like the Baloch with the solanaceous plant called panir.

Much of this is the usual Victorian racism, though the notion of milk-drinking races survives a bit in the conclusion that a difference between cheese and tofu cultures is genetic lactose intolerance in Asia. The observation here is that there is a plant called panīr used as a vegetable rennet. Vegetable rennet is important to lacto-ovo vegetarians. It can be tricky to discover how the cheese in prepared cheese foods was made and the conservative assumption always has to be that “enzymes” means animal rennet. Commercial vegetarian rennet is made from molds, but there are plant alternatives.

Keep up the tasty work, MMcM!

HENRI/HENRY.

This is the kind of picky detail most people don't even notice, but that drives editors (and those with editorial brains) crazy. I just noticed that the LibraryThing page for Hilary Ballon's The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism gave the king's name as "Henry IV." (It doesn't now, because I changed the entry for my copy, and I'm the only one at LT who owns the book.) That's odd, I thought, why would the book spell a French king's name à l'anglaise? I walked the three feet or so to the history shelf and found the book: sure enough, it said Henri—not only on the cover, but throughout. But Amazon.com has it as Henry (which is why LT had it that way, I presumed). Bad Amazon.com! But wait: it seems the publisher's page for the book also has Henry! What's going on here? How on earth has such a blatant error stuck around since 1991 (when the first edition came out)?

Update. A self-described "loyal MIT alum" wrote me to say he'd notified MIT Press of the problem and they've now corrected the website (as of Feb. 27). We'll see if Amazon.com follows suit.

KITTO.

Probably everyone who's ever taken a course equivalent to History of Civilization has read (or at least been assigned) a book by H.D.F. Kitto, probably The Greeks. I was looking at the latter entry in LibraryThing when it suddenly struck me: what the heck kind of name is Kitto? It looked vaguely Hungarian, but I suddenly needed to know. So I looked it up, and to my surprise it's Gaelic, from ciotóg 'left-handed person.' Or at least so my reference books tell me; his Wikipedia entry says he was of Cornish ancestry, and I find online sites (like this) that imply it's a Cornish name. Anybody know further details? (Fun fact: Mancini is from an Italian word meaning 'left-handed.')

PINYIN QUIZ.

If you're at all familiar with pinyin, this is a nice little game:

OK, here are 30 Western writers:

(1) Camus. (2) D.H. Lawrence. (3) Bunyan. (4) Trollope. (5) Pushkin. (6) Edgar Allen Poe. (7) Donne. (8) Rousseau. (9) Yeats. (10) Cervantes. (11) George Bernard Shaw. (12) Wells. (13) Dante. (14) Chaucer. (15) Dostoyevsky. (16) Kipling. (17) Goethe. (18) Kafka. (19) Dos Passos. (20) James. (21) Fitzgerald. (22) Keats. (23) Aristophanes. (24) Gogol. (25) Hardy. (26) Charlotte Brontë. (27) Johnson. (28) Thackeray. (29) Flaubert. (30) Shelley.

Now here, in a different order, are the pinyin transcriptions of their Chinese names.

(a) Guogeli. (b) Xiaobona. (c) Alisituofen. (d) Saiwantisi. (e) Zhanmeisi. (f) Gede. (g) Danding. (h) Yuehansheng. (i) Puxijin. (j) Qiaosou. (k) Duosi-Pasuosi. (l) Jiamiao. (m) Tangen. (n) Tuosituoyefusiji. (o) Yezhi. (p) Fuloubai. (q) Feicijielade. (r) Xialuoti-Bolangte. (s) Jici. (t) Kafuka. (u) Sakelei. (v) Jibulin. (w) Ailun-Po. (x) Xuelai. (y) Teluoluopu. (z) Hadai. (aa) Lusuo. (bb) Banyang. (cc) Weiersi. (dd) Laolunsi.

Your task is to match off the second list with the first. You have five minutes to do this, starting� now.

I got them all, but managed Tangen only by process of elimination, and I'm still not sure how it works. (Via Odious and Peculiar, who got it from John Derbyshire.)

Warning: Don't go into the comment thread if you're still working on the puzzle; the first commenter posted the answers!

DIAPER(S).

An interesting Language Log discussion focuses on the word diaper and its tendency to be used in the plural:

Viewed historically, diaper and nappy were originally construed as singular, but plurally marked diapers and nappies in singular contexts became more frequent by the mid-20th century. An example from 1960 appears in the OED draft entry for mess, taken from A.S. Neill's Summerhill (a popular account of Neill's pioneering Summerhill School). The quote voices a boy's thoughts about his younger brother: "If I am like him and mess my trousers the way he dirties his diapers, Mommy will love me again." (That's from the U.S. edition — the U.K. edition, reprinted here, has nappies instead of diapers.) The parallel structure here is telling: "mess my trousers" vs. "dirties his diapers/nappies." The plurally marked diapers and nappies appear to be influenced by pants and trousers — words that almost always appear in the plural, or pluralia tantum as they're technically known...

Even though diapers and nappies have gone a long way to joining the pants family, they remain something of a special case since they'll never be pluralia tantum. When it's not worn, a diaper is just a diaper: a piece of fabric with no leg-holes. Only when it's worn and transformed into something "pants-like" can all of those -s forms exert their analogical influence, leading to a preference for diapers over diaper. But it remains only a preference, since even when worn a diaper can still be construed singularly.

There is further discussion of U.K. and Australian usage, and of distinctions between cloth diapers and disposable diapers and between infant diapers and "pullup" diapers, not to mention diaper covers. Anyone who has had occasion to discuss diapers is welcome to weigh in with their own usage.

KAMUT.

Another amazingly detailed post from Polyglot Vegetarian: everything you could want to know about k3mwtt and other Egyptian words for wheat and similar grains, complete with excursuses into Wallis Budge, Unicode, and Afro-Asiatic cognates. I am in awe of this man, and hope I get to eat his cooking someday.

Y'ALL ANTEDATED.

David Parker, Professor of History at Kennesaw State University in Northwest Georgia, writes another history blog, which is well worth reading if you're interested in American history. Of linguistic interest is his post from last Christmas on the meaning, spelling, and history of that great American pronoun y'all (discussed here and here on LH). The OED's first citation is from 1909; he antedated that by over half a century:

I came across a citation to the Southern Literary Messenger from 1858. The piece was written by "Mozis Addums," penname of George William Bagby, one of the humorists of the mid-nineteenth century who thought spelling everything phonetically was funny. Mozis described the crowded conditions in the boarding house where he was living: "Packin uv pork in a meet house, which you should be keerful it don't git hot at the bone, and prizin uv tobakker, which y'all's Winstun nose how to do it, givs you a parshil idee, but only parshil."

There's a lot more (in his words, "More than y'all wanted to know about 'y'all'"), so y'all head on over and enjoy!

SIGHTSAW.

From an e-mail I sent yesterday: "[I] had to stay in the hotel while everyone else... sightsaw? sightseed? sheesh, what is the past tense?... Merriam-Webster says 'sightsaw,' but that sounds awful to me..." My correspondent agreed it sounded wrong, and said he'd say "went sightseeing," which I realized immediately was the past tense people actually use. But what an odd verb! Does anybody find sightsaw normal and use it naturally? And does anybody know if there are other verbs whose regular past tense is on the fringe of acceptability?

DODO.

I'm still working my way through the Jan. 22 New Yorker, and I just finished "Digging for Dodos," by Ian Parker (not online). It's fairly interesting (though presumably more so if you care more than I do about dodos), but the linguistically significant bit was this, from p. 66:

On later visits, the Dutch came to refer to the birds as dodaersen—fat-asses. In English, "dodo" was in use by the sixteen-twenties, perhaps through a simple process of linguistic evolution; but [Julian] Hume [a British paleontologist and dodo authority] likes the idea that the coinage was inspired, or at least reinforced, by the bird's call.

I have two problems with this. In the first place, dood does not mean 'fat' in Dutch, it means 'dead' or 'death' ('fat' is dik or vet). More importantly, every other etymology I've seen for dodo (for example, Merriam-Webster's) derives it from Portuguese doudo 'silly, stupid.' My default assumption here is that the author listened to somebody who didn't know what he was talking about (presumably one of the Dutch scientists he traveled around with) and that the magazine, as sadly often these days, fell down on fact-checking, but if anyone knows differently, please speak up.

PHELPS HIS LUCK IN COLUMBIA.

A MetaFilter post by the consistently interesting Kári Tulinius, aka Kattullus, alerted me to Writers on America, an online book sponsored by the U.S. State Department with essays by "American poets, novelists, critics, and historians what it means to be an American writer." Some are better than others, of course, but I was particularly struck by Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, which nicely brings together two recent LH posts, on Chabon and on street names, not to mention my love for maps. Chabon grew up in a planned community, Columbia, Maryland:

The power of maps to fire the imagination is well known. And, as Joseph Conrad's Marlow observed, there is no map so seductive as the one, like the flag-colored schoolroom map of Africa that doomed him to his forlorn quest, marked by doubts and conjectures, by the romantic blank of unexplored territory. The map of Columbia I took home from that first visit was like that. The Plan dictated that the Town be divided into sub-units to be called Villages, each Village in turn divided into Neighborhoods. These Villages had all been laid out and named, and were present on and defined by the map. Many of the Neighborhoods, too, had been drawn in, along with streets and the network of bicycle paths that knit the town together. But there were large areas of the map that, apart from the Village name, were entirely empty, conjectural — nonexistent, in fact.

The names of Columbia! That many, if not most of them, were bizarre, unlikely, and even occasionally ridiculous, was a regular subject of discussion among Columbians and outsiders alike. In the Neighborhood called Phelps Luck, you could find streets with names that were anglo-whimsical and alliterative (Drystraw Drive, Margrave Mews, Luckpenny Lane); elliptical and puzzling, shorn of their suffixes, Zen (Blue Pool, Red Lake, Spiral Cut); or truly odd (Cloudleap Court, Roll Right Court, Newgrange Garth). It was rumored that the naming of Columbia's one thousand streets had been done by a single harried employee of the Rouse Company who, barred by some kind of arcane agreement from duplicating any of the street names in use in the surrounding counties of Baltimore and Anne Arundel, had turned in desperation from the exhausted lodes of flowers, trees, and U.S. presidents to the works of American writers and poets. The genius loci of Phelps Luck — did you guess? — was Robinson Jeffers.

The combination of the last two quoted sentences seems to imply that "Phelps Luck" is from the work of Jeffers, but apparently it's just near Jeffers Hill; this site says "'Phelps Luck' is a modification of the original land grant, 'Phelps His Luck', a 238-acre plantation patented by Walter Phelps on December 10, 1695."

I also recommend Bharati Mukherjee's On Being an American Writer; I'm still working my way through the others.

LOCAL MEMORY.

I'm still reading Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower (and liking it more and more), and I reached a section on street names that pushed my buttons and that I want to share here. This is from the section "Naming the Mahala," which starts on p. 227:

The old streets within the walls were tortuous, narrow, and mostly unnamed. There were no maps and navigation was difficult for strangers... Residents were classified by Ottoman officials, and identified themselves, by their neighborhood (mahala) whose nicknames made no sense to outsiders. Kaldigroç was a corruption of the Judeo-Spanish Kal de los Gregos, the Street of the Greeks; Bedaron, an abbreviation of the synagogue Beth Aron. There was the "Quarter of the Three Eggs"—named after a decorated marble slab on the façade of an old house—"At the Fire" (after an especially bad one) and "Defterdar," because a treasurer of the province had once lived there. Other neighbourhoods were known after local places of worship and their nicknames. There was the "Red Mosque," the "Mosque of the Clocktower" and the "Burned Monastery" district, from the destruction caused by a Venetian bombardment two centuries earlier. The Ashkenazic synagogue was known as "Russia" or "Moscow," Poulia as Macarron, from its members' supposed fondness for pasta; the salt-farmers' synagogue, Shalom, was called Gamello, after the camels who carried the salt (but also local slang for a dullard or idiot)...

Places thus acquired names according to an entirely locally generated logic. Many small alleys and cul-de-sacs were nameless, or known by such helpful terms as "Rocky Place," or "Behind the Square of the Graveyard." Larger streets changed name several times as they wound their way past mosques and shrines...

But at the very end of the nineteenth century, this localized way of naming space was challenged by new conceptions of what place-names should do... The municipality eventually issued the first street names [i.e., official markers] in May 1898, although their usefulness for strangers was initially limited by their being written only in Turkish. A more fundamental problem was that those choosing the new names had not properly understood the logic which was supposed to lie behind them. It was as well they had only been in Turkish—for what would Europeans have made of the "Street that Leads to Miltiades' Coffeeshop," or the "Street of the Greengrocer Constantine"? Local journalists tried to explain to the authorities the error of their ways:

We know that in Europe streets are given names of celebrated men whose memory it is wished to honour or those of noble citizens who have rendered useful service to their country. But we do not see how the said Constantine with his plums and his bad coffee, or M. Miltiadis, pouring out his raki, can raise the prestige of the city so far as to be honoured by the municipal scribe.

In Europe, squares and wide avenues carry as an honorific title the dates of national triumphs, the names of cities where the national army covered itself in glory, or where great generals are illustrated: the Boulevard Magenta and the Avenue de la Grande Armée in Paris, the Strada Manin in Venice, Trafalgar Square in London, are monuments which speak to the hearts of patriots. Each crossroads is a lesson and History is written on the walls. And is the history of our dear country so lacking in these glorious occasions? ["Les noms de Rues," Journal de Salonique, 26 May 1898]

One conception of the past—the past which linked the city dweller's pride in his country to that in his city—was coming to impose itself on another—the past as local memory. No longer was it thought appropriate to commemorate random fires, the Old Horsemarket, the Old Quarantine, the Pasha's Baths or the Old Telegraph Station. Emperors, notable officials and elevated political values would be written over the plane trees, the bath-towel makers and the religious benefactors of the past who had made the city their own. These names were stamped with the authority of the new municipal bodies and conformed to European norms. Ironically, although they were more transparent than those they replaced, they proved far less durable. In the twentieth century, wars, revolutions and sudden changes of regime led names to be discarded and replaced with ever-increasing frequency. The civil servants and bureaucrats were kept busy, but the city's inhabitants were left little if any better off than they had been before.

How I hate those modern names, the Street of the 37th of Octember, the Avenue of Marshal X, the Boulevard of Our Glorious National Uprising! If countries can't inspire loyalty without that kind of propaganda, they don't deserve it. Better cities should commemorate the long-gone inns, horse markets, and residents who made them what they are than try to keep up with the twists and turns of politics. Long live the Quarter of the Three Eggs!

YAKUT BLOGGER.

John Emerson has alerted me to the existence of Katerina Potapova, who at My Polyglot Dictionary says "During my study of the Mongolian language I've noticed that a lot of words in Mongolian and in my mother tongue - Yakut (a Turkic language in Eastern Siberia) - are of the same origin. And now I've decided to make a list of them." Now, that's my kind of project! There aren't many words yet, but you can see them in Yakut (саха тыла), Classical Mongolian in its beautiful original script (UM) and in transliteration, and Khalkha Mongolian, with Russian, German, and English translations. The page has a bibliography and a set of links, and she also has an Online library with materials on Yakut (Sakha) language (Сахалыы-нууччалыы онлайн-библиотека) with links to materials in Russian and Yakut and audio for Pronunciation guide, Yakut proverbs, and Music sample. Good work, Katerina!

INTERACTIVE ALR.

The American Language Reprint series reprints historical vocabularies of Native American languages; starting with "A Vocabulary of the Nanticoke Dialect" in 1996, they've added at least thirty more, and now they've put a searchable database online: you can search for words, phrases, and letter sequences; create your own linguistic atlas by plotting native terms on any of seven topographical maps, and build custom dictionaries. Thanks for the link, tellurian!

WIKIGADUGI.

Trying to find information on a town in northern Greece, between Kilkis and Thessaloniki, called Strezovo in Slavic and apparently Argiroupolis in Greek (it's not on my most detailed map of Greece, and there are several other towns of that name, including a fairly well known one in Crete, so it's a frustrating thing to google), I happened on an apparent Wikipedia entry in a language I couldn't recognize at all. I went to the home page and found no enlightenment there; I did notice, though, that it wasn't actually part of Wikipedia (even though the layout is identical): the URL has wikigadugi.org in it. So I googled "gadugi" and found a Wikipedia entry (real this time) explaining that "Ga-du-gi is a term used in the Cherokee language which means 'working together' in a community sense." Cherokee! Damn, and I'm even part Cherokee myself; I've really got to work on my Native American language awareness. And there's a Cherokee Wikipedia out there, with a long article on Gjirokastër of all places! What a wonderful world!

(Needless to say, I will be grateful for any concrete information on Strezovo/Argiroupolis, especially if it helps me locate it on my map.)

THE FRIDAY CIRCLE AND OB-UGRIC.

I don't know how many people out there are interested in Ugric (the part of the Finno-Ugric family more closely related to Hungarian), but The Friday Circle, a group blog focused on "Hungarian studies in London" (read about the members here), has a series of posts on it: II, III, IV. (Don't ask me what happened to Ob-Ugric I is here—thanks, Gwen!) Even if you don't have a special interest in the languages, you can pick up nuggets like "the word ‘Ural’ itself comes from Mansi: ur (mountain) + ala (roof)" and "Mansi for clitoris translates into Hungarian as picsanyelv, that is, c*nt-tongue." Also, Dan Abondolo taught me how to make coffee, thirty-odd years ago in New Haven, so he deserves special respect. Check out this lively blog (named, if you're curious, after the Sunday Circle, "a group of young philosophers, musicians and artists whose weekly meetings provided a forum to discuss questions of ethics and aesthetics, from 1915 to 1919").

OLD SLAVIC ONLINE.

I just discovered (by looking down the long list of languages at the left of the Thessaloniki article) that there's an Old Slavic Wikipedia (the discussion page, in Russian, sternly warns against confusing Old Slavic with "a ghastly blend of languages and personal fantasy"). From there I got to Cтарославянские памятники, a great collection of Old Slavic links; somebody will probably inform me that I already blogged it back in 2003, but I figure if I've forgotten it, maybe others have too.

Incidentally, I note the Russian Wikipedia article on Salonica/Thessaloniki, which Russian treats as a plural Салоники (the Greek feminine ending being reinterpreted as plural), uses the endingless genitive Салоник, whereas my 1984 Словарь ударений gives Салоников; what do my Russian-speaking readers prefer?

BIRCH BARK BOOKS ONLINE.

The site "Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus: Contents and Contexts" has put online all the extant birchbark documents unearthed in Novgorod; as they say, this "will constitute a qualitative leap forward in the development of the study of birchbark documents by laying a reliable foundation for the further research into the texts and rendering the material accessible to an international medievalist audience of different backgrounds." Thanks to Paul, Claire, and John for alerting me to this!

REGIONAL SYNONYMY.

Joel of Far Outliers, who posts excerpts from the books he reads, has an entry on a problem I hadn't really thought about, the meaning of synonym in a situation where there are many distinct dialects. From his translation of a section in Probleme de sinonimie, by Onufrie Vinţeler:

Sever Pop (cf. 1929) used to note that, within the territory of Romania, the following terms can be found to denote the concept of ‘horse trader’: barâşnic, craşcadău, cupeţ, factor, fleşer, geambaş, gheşeftar, ghiambabău, gârgez, făznar, hendler, herghelier, hâmbluitor, liverant, mecler, năstrăpaş, negustor, peţer, pilar, potlogar, precupeţ, precupitor, semsar, sfârnar, sfârnăroiu, şmecher, ţânzar, ţigan, tuşer. No one doubts that all the terms listed denote the same concept. The question that arises is the following: can each and every one of these words be considered synonyms? According to some definitions, still in circulation, all words that express the same notion are considered synonyms. Glancing over the list of words above, we observe that only the word negustor, which is the general term, and to a certain degree the word geambaş, are more widely known and can be considered synonyms; the rest are known only in more or less restricted areas. For the great majority of Romanians, words like barâşnic, gârgez, hendler, mecler, tuşer, and so forth do not mean anything; they are just as unintelligible as any others in a foreign language. Of course, in many places negustor can be a synonym of făznar, and geambaş with herghelier [‘herder’], and so on, but this only happens in certain places and not across the whole territory where Romanian is spoken.

These examples prove once again that for two or more words to be considered synonyms it is not sufficient that they express the same notion. And in cases of regional synonymy, the notion of synonym must be localized and made concrete.

There's further discussion of words for 'corn, maize'; the "standard" word porumb (which, oddly, used to mean 'pigeon, dove'; the latter meaning is now expressed by porumbel) has several widely known equivalents, as well as (in one region) the loan word tenchi (borrowed from Hungarian tengeri, itself a synonym in Hungarian of kukorica, which is presumably from Slavic). It certainly makes sense to consider as synonyms only words that are in competition with each other in the same dialect; I can't go along with Joel, who doesn't "have any problem with considering terms in different languages to be synonyms"—that seems to me to stretch the sense of synonym beyond the bounds of usefulness.

LANGUAGE HUMOR.

1) I've recently started reading Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower (thanks, Mel!), and I just got to this on pp. 100-01:

In the meantime, the remedy for janissary violence was often worse than the disease. Unable to rely on the troops supposedly under their command, many pashas kept armed retinues of their own. Mostly they recruited young Albanians from impoverished mountain villages, who brought with them an aggressively uncomplicated approach to life. An Ottoman traveller among them a century earlier had warned others what they might expect in the way of Albanian greetings and salutations. His list included the following useful expressions: "Eat shit!" "I'll fuck your mother," "I'll fuck your wife" and "I'll fart in your nose."

As you can see, the author is both learned and a delightful writer (I particularly like "an aggressively uncomplicated approach to life"); I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the history of cities.

2) Carpetblogger has a post called "Thinking About Learning Turkish" which provides the following excellent pair of anecdotes:

It's hilarious to see the look on Turks' faces when you tell them you lived in Azerbaijan. Sometimes, they simply cannot contain their amusement at the thought. It's like telling an American you spent a year learning English in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Last night at a party, an actual Turk confirmed the veracity of a Turkish/Azeri language anecdote I have used as cocktail chatter for years, always prefaced with the caveat that it's "probably apocryphal." It's always satisfying to find out a rumor you spread turns out to be true.

Here goes: The pilot of Turkish Airlines plane full of Azeris announces he is preparing to land the plane. The passengers panic. Why? Because the verb in Azeri for "to land" is the same as "to crash." I crack up every time I tell this. I'm not sure if it's funnier or not now that I know it's true.

I can pinpoint the exact minute that Russian sapped my will to live. Vexed with some horrible twist of grammatical logic, I implored Yelena, my fifty-something, chain-smoking, university-level linguist teacher, to make it make sense to me.

"Carpetblogger," she said, pushing her huge, round glasses down her nose. "English is for conveying information. Russian," she said with intense Slavic pride, "is for conveying philosophy."

(Latter link via Far Outliers.)

PINDOS.

Looking up something else in my largest Russian-English dictionary, my eye lit on the entry пиндос [pindós] m obs colloq pindos (term of abuse used by Russians of Greeks). I love ethnic slurs in foreign languages, so of course it caught my attention, and I googled it, wondering if this obsolete term for a Greek would have any sort of online presence. Indeed it did, but only glancingly in relation to Greeks: the first hit, the Russian Wikipedia article, explained that it had originated in southern Russia as an insult for Greeks (where of course there was more opportunity to interact with them) and had been used in that sense by Chekhov, Fazil Iskander, and Konstantin Paustovsky, among others, but that with the passage of time it had lost its ethnic specificity and come to mean 'any foreigner from the south, especially one seen as physically and morally weak.' In this sense it passed into military and criminal jargon of the 1950s-'80s (aided by its phonetic resemblance to various Russian swear words), and by the time of the Kosovo crisis of the 1990s it was available to fill a new slot, becoming an insulting term for American soldiers serving abroad, and by now (according to Wikipedia) refers to any American. (There's a great deal of discussion in the article about the origin of the word, but I don't see how it makes sense to see it as derived from anything but Pindos [Πίνδος], the name of a Greek mountain range.) This is a fascinating semantic development, reminiscent of the etymology of Tajik: an Arabic term for a member of the tribe of Tayy became first a Persian term for any Arab and then a Turkish term for an Iranian Muslim, winding up as a specific term for the Iranian population of Central Asia (mainly in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). I'd be curious if Russian-speaking readers are familiar with пиндос and if so, in which of its senses?

POTPOURRI.

1) The Scots Language Centre: "It's yer ain tongue."

The site contains lots of interesting information about Scots, the language spoken throughout Scotland from Shetland to Galloway and Aberdeen to Glasgow. You can read about the history of Scots and find out about the people that speak it today. Almost everything on the site is available in English too. Just move between the two languages if there are Scots words that you don't understand.

Thanks, Mike!

2) Languages on Wikipedia presented as an array of circles. (I would have thought Russian would have a larger circle, but I guess that's because I consult it so often.) This comes courtesy of John Emerson, who has a new post on The Consonantization of America, investigating the changes in American baby names since the 1880s from the point of view of initial consonants, discovering (among other things) a reversal of Grimm's law: "Goodbye, Frank and Harold and Florence and Harriet; hello, Kevin and Peter and Karen and Pam!"

3) Lexicographer Grant Barrett (blog, word site) told me he's become a cohost of the radio show A Way With Words, which you can listen to from the linked page. Fun stuff!

THE ORIENTALIST.

I just finished Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, a book I had been eager to read ever since learning that it existed—I've loved Ali and Nino for years (it was the subject of one of my first LH posts), and Reiss's 1999 New Yorker article "The Man From the East" whetted my appetite for more about Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote the novel under the pseudonym Kurban Said in Vienna in 1937. He did a lot more research after the article came out and scored some lucky interviews with nonagenarians who'd known Lev or his family, and the book is enlightening, gripping, and very much worth your while. (Furthermore, it has a very well done website, with lots of pictures.)

I emphasize that because I'm going to spend the rest of this post complaining about it, and I wouldn't want you to think this was comparable to my blasts at David Brewer or Simon Winchester, which were designed to discourage anyone from suffering through the books involved. No, this is a fine book that anyone who is interested in quirky personalities, the fate of rootless cosmopolitans in the Europe of the 1930s, or of course Ali and Nino will certainly enjoy. But it could have been better, and I'm going to explain why.

Basically, it's suffering from excessive ambition on the author's part and insufficient attention on the publisher's part. This is a classic example of a book that needed the kind of detailed, knowledgeable editing publishers no longer provide. I can understand why Reiss wanted to widen the scope and talk not just about Nussinbaum's life but about the historical events that determined its course: the Russian revolutions (he was born during the 1905 one and had to flee Baku after the October 1917 one), the Kemalist uprising that drove him (and many other non-Turks) out of Constantinople in the early '20s, the rise of Nazism, and so on. The problem is that he simply doesn't know enough to do a good job. He's a reporter, not a historian; he's great at unearthing documents and getting people to talk, but his instinct is to tell a clear, easy-to-follow story, and history doesn't provide many such. Furthermore, he's completely dependent on his sources; when he has a good one, like Philip Mansel's Constantinople: city of the world's desire, 1453-1924 for late Ottoman Constantinople, he does a good job, but when he depends on random interviews, memoirs, and so on, not to mention Nussimbaum's own throughly unreliable novelized autobiography, he gives simplistic accounts riddled with errors.

Examples: On p. 42, he says "In August 1914, the czarist state mobilized its vast army—the largest in the world—and swept westward, gloriously defeating Austrian forces in some of the first great battles of the First World War. But by the end of Lev's first year at the Imperial Russian Gymnasium, the Germans had turned Russia's spectacular advances into a rout reminiscent of the debacle against Japan nine years earlier." This exactly reverses the situation: the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg (in which Russia's 2nd Army was wiped out by the Germans) took place at the same time as the defeat of the Austrians, the last few days of August, but it was the latter (especially the capture of Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv) that mitigated the sting of the former. On p. 130 he describes the October Revolution thus: "While Lenin rallied his commissars, Trotsky led a ruthless attack with armored cars, machine guns, and artillery on the new democratic government offices in the Winter Palace" and adds in a footnote "The defenders of Russian democracy that day happened to be one of Russia's first all-female army detachments, stationed around the palace in a largely formal capacity; the Bolshevik machine gunners made short work of them." This is so bizarre I can only imagine his research consisted of watching old movies (there are no sources given in the Notes at the end); in fact, after a desultory bombardment that did hardly any damage, the Bolsheviks basically strolled into the Palace and marched the hapless ministers out. (I've never understood, by the way, what on earth those ministers thought they were doing sitting around the Winter Palace all day, waiting for the barbarians; you'd think they'd have either tried to organize a real defense or, like Kerensky, left town.)

When Lev and his father flee Baku in the summer of 1918, they do so by boat, crossing the Caspian and landing at a port town Reiss calls "Kizel-Su." I presume he takes this term from Nussimbaum's memoirs, but there is no such town on the map. He does provide a footnote saying "Kizel-Su is now Turkmenbashi, in the post-Soviet state of Turkmenistan," but the town was not called Kizel-Su (or, in a more accurate orthography, Kyzyl-Su) before its megalomaniacal renaming, it was called Krasnovodsk. Yes, Krasnovodsk is the Russian translation of a preexisting Turkic name Kyzyl-Su 'red water,' but so what? That quaint local name does readers no good; it gives them an exotic frisson at the cost of making it more difficult to figure out what's going on. This is a problem throughout—on p. 96 he refers to the "Jezids," which is a cropped form of the Teutonic version of Yazidis, a (mostly Kurdish) Middle Eastern sect frequently known by the misnomer "devil worshippers." They're a fascinating group, but if you google Reiss's term you won't find anything but references to his book and a bunch of German pages. (This is the same uncritical use of German orthography I complained about here.)

And there's plenty of plain old sloppiness. He refers to "Ku Damm" [sic: should be Ku'damm] and "Kurfürstendamm" as if they were two different Berlin streets. He says "Leonid Pasternak" when he means Boris (Leonid's son). On p. 147 he says Lenin was sent through Germany "in a special sealed train"; the train was not in fact sealed, and this has been known for decades. (And on the previous page he says "the centrist democrats in Moscow had allowed Lenin to operate in Russia in the hope that he would defend constitutional government," which seems more than dubious no matter what he means by "centrist democrats in Moscow" and "allowed.") On p. 153 he says the Freikorps "insisted on referring to [the Baltic states] not as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania but by their Germanic names: Kurland, Livonia, and so on." This is ridiculous: Latvia did not exist as an official entity until it proclaimed its independence on November 18, 1918, and it was not recognized internationally until 1921. Before that "Latvian" was an ethnic designation, and the people so named lived in the Russian provinces of Kurland (Courland, Курляндия) and Livonia (Ливония, Лифляндия). These were not "their Germanic names," they were their names, and nobody called them anything else. On p. 170 he refers to "the surrealist poet Andrei Belyi." On pp. 224-35 he discusses "the Valley of the Khevsurs, or Khevsuria" in terms that make it seem like an invention of Nussimbaum's, and makes fun of a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune for trying to "pinpoint it on the map," when in fact the Khevsurs are a real people living in a real region (Georgian Khevsureti) north of Tbilisi, near the Chechen border. On p. 231 he gives Vámbéry's original name as "Wamberger" instead of Bamberger, and the plural of Bildungsroman as "bildungsromanen" (instead of -romane). And so on.

In general, there's a lot of what he doubtless thought of as useful background material but comes across as padding. He can't mention a person, place, or event associated with his subject without going into a long (and frequently error-ridden) excursus on it, to the point where the reader can lose sight of poor Lev altogether. None of this is fatal; as I say, the life he's describing is a fascinating one, and the reader can skim as necessary (and take the historical asides with several helpings of salt). But a good editor would have trimmed the book by fifty to a hundred pages and fixed a lot of the errors in the remaining text, and I wish Random House (a great old name in publishing) had seen fit to provide one.