OTTOMAN TURKISH.

Another quote from Farewell to Salonica (earlier discussed here):

Ever anxious to increase his proficiency in literary Turkish, Father read the works of Dumas in that language, translating into Spanish as he went along, for our benefit. Every now and then he would interrupt himself to find the exact meaning of a word in a thick dictionary, while we waited in silence.

Wherever Father went he took with him one or another of these novels, studying the language assiduously. Once, on a trip to Albania, alone in the compartment of the train, he was reading The Queen's Necklace when, at a small station, a venerable old Turk entered his compartment and took a seat opposite him. After the usual polite greetings Father closed the book on his lap and placed it on the seat next to him. From across the way the old Turk surveyed him for a moment, then, arising, he picked up the book, kissed it reverently, and laid it on the rack above Father's head. "My son," he remonstrated kindly, "praised be Allah! It is praiseworthy of you to be reading the words of our prophet. But you should never treat the Holy Book with such disrespect as to place it where people sit."

"Why didn't you tell him it was a novel?" Mother asked.

"A novel!" Father exclaimed smilingly. "To the simple old man, what other book could I have been reading but the Koran? What other book is there but the Holy Book?"

Besides his study of Turkish, Father was working to perfect his Bulgarian...

I don't know what "thick dictionary" the elder Sciaky was using, but the standard in English for well over a century has been that of James Redhouse (English-Turkish 1861, Turkish-English 1890); imagine my delight to discover both parts have been digitized by Google and are online and searchable! Even the reprints cost over $100 on the used-book market. I'm also pleased to discover that there's a Turkish site on the Ottoman language (with its own dictionary, though the words are written in the modern alphabet and of course defined in Turkish), a University of Michigan resources page (with links to texts where you can mouse over a word or phrase to see the transcription and modern Turkish and English meanings, e.g. a fairy tale and a poem), and a University of Leiden course page where you can not only see "Leiden is where you study languages" in Ottoman Turkish, you can hear a .wav file of it read aloud (as you can for all their other languages, even Akkadian!). I'm glad to live in a time when even a defunct language like Ottoman Turkish, which I had assumed was receding into oblivion despite the centuries during which it was a major world language, has so many resources available for the prospective student.

Incidentally, Charles Wells's Introduction to the second edition of Redhouse (pp. v-xi? [Google has unfortunately omitted one or more pages after x]) is well worth reading, giving a sad picture of the state of Turkish studies in the late nineteenth century:

Persons wishing to become student-interpreters, or officials in any part of Turkey, in Asia Minor, or in Cyprus, should be required to possess, at least, some knowledge of Turkish before being appointed and before leaving England, as they will find the want of proper teachers in Turkey an insuperable barrier against beginning its study in that country. The only persons who teach Turkish in the East are Greeks and Armenians, most of whom appear physically incapable of pronouncing Turkish correctly [!], and possess in general little or no knowledge of the literary language... It is a strange fact that the number of Englishmen who can read and write Turkish is so small that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

GXDDBOV XXKXZT PG IFMK.

I don't know how I've made it into my mid-50s without having seen this story before, but I love it. In the course of Mark Liberman's Language Log post on "typographical bleeping," he quotes the American Heritage Dictionary as follows:

The obscenity fuck is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, "Flen flyys," from the first words of its opening line, "Flen, flyys, and freris," that is, "fleas, flies, and friars." The line that contains fuck reads "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk." The Latin words "Non sunt in coeli, quia," mean "they [the friars] are not in heaven, since." The code "gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk" is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and vv was used for w. This yields "fvccant [a fake Latin form] vvivys of heli." The whole thus reads in translation: "They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge]."

If only I'd known that in seventh grade! (The OED apparently doesn't consider this an actual attestation, because their first citation is "a1503 DUNBAR Poems lxxv. 13 Be his feiris he wald haue fukkit"; I don't know whether that's because of the code or because it's fake Latin rather than straight English. And a correspondent cites the lines in Notes and Queries for Oct. 13, 1855 without the encoded words, saying "My omissions are put in cypher by Mr. Wright, and are not producible [sic]." He has misunderstood Wright's own fastidious words in his Reliquiæ Antiquæ: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts: "The expressions concealed by the cypher, as in the MS., are rather gross, and do not speak much for the morals of the Carmelites of Cambridge." At any rate, at the last link you can see the entire poem, such as it is, with the further encoded line "Fratres cum knyvys goth about and txxkxzv nfookt xxzxkt.")

Oh, and for the Latinists among you, Marie Borroff, in a footnote to her Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, & Beyond (p. 209), says "The incorrect form cœli may have been substituted for cœlis for the sake of the rhyme with heli." I'll point out also that the h of heli is a purely orthographical flourish, not to be pronounced; the town of Ely derives its name from eels, not heels.

NAVEGANDO CON LA FORTUNA.

Having finished the Papashvily book, I've moved on to another memoir, published a year later (1946) and also borrowed from my mother-in-law, Farewell to Salonica by Leon Sciaky (pronounced SHOCK-ee), born in 1893 in what is now the Greek city of Thessaloniki but was then the Turkish city of Selanik, known in the West as Salonica. Diane Matza wrote in 1987 that "Lists of autobiographies by immigrant Jews in the United States do not include Sciaky's work, nor does criticism of Jewish autobiography mention it" and says "this error must be corrected" because "Farewell to Salonica is the only autobiography written by a Sephardic immigrant who came to the United States in the 1880-1924 period." Aside from its historical importance, it's a wonderful read, bringing to life a privileged childhood in a privileged community that had recreated its lost Iberian homeland in the Ottoman Empire (as Mazower says in his Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, about which I wrote here and here, "For this home was not only their 'Jerusalem'; it was also a simulacrum of the life they had known at the other end of the Mediterranean. They worshipped in synagogues named after the old long-abandoned homelands... Their family names—Navarro, Cuenca, Algava—their games, curses, and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past... When Spanish scholars visited the city at the end of the nineteenth century, they were astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul Hamid.") I'll quote from Chapter Three, in which the five-year-old Sciaky visits his great-grandmother Bisnona Miriam (born in 1804) and her sister Tia Gracia (born in 1796) in their house, a block south of his parents' on Sabri Pasha Street (now Venizelou) in the Muslim center of the city:

"Bisnona, why don't you sing a romanza?"

"Do you like romanzas, little soul of mine? People don't enjoy them any more."

"Nona Plata sings romanzas, and I like them better than Sarica's songs."

Bisnona would sigh a deep sigh, a far-away look would come to her eyes, and softly she would croon old songs, songs brought from Spain by our hidalgo forefathers centuries ago. She would sing of Queen Isabella at her embroidery frame, working with needle of gold and threads of love; of Parisi, her first-beloved, and of his ships and sails of silk and purple riggings. She would sing of the son of the good count, a page in the court of the king; of the plotting of the jealous courtiers; of his melodious singing which saves his life when the passing king reins his horse to listen and exclaim:

"Si Angel es de los cielos,
O sirena de la mar?"

"Is it an angel from Heaven
Or a siren from the sea?"

"Another one, Bisnona, please!" I would beg at the end of each. "The one about Julian, Bisnona!" Her eyes sparkling with excitement and with a flush on her wrinkled face, Bisnona would adjust the chiffon kerchief on her snow-white hair and oblige her "little lamb."

Very little sense did I make of the words of these songs. They were couched in old Spanish and told of situations which I could not understand. But the melodies stirred in me something warm and tender.

Andando por estas mares,
Navegando con la fortuna,

Sailing on the seas,
Battling with the storms,
I fell on foreign lands
Where I was not known.
Where the rooster did not crow
Nor even did the hen cackle,
Where grew the orange,
And the lemon and the citron.
Ah, Julian, false and treacherous,
Cause of all my misfortunes!

It mattered little that I did not know who Julian was or what he had done. It was as if an unaccountable nostalgia came over me, an ancestral nostalgia which made me sad and happy at the same time.

(You can read all 13 lines of the ballad in Spanish on page 347 of Antología de poetas líricos castellanos desde la formación del idioma hasta nuestros días (1890-1908) by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo; it has a whole section of "Romances castellanos tradicionales entre los judíos de Levante.")

TOWERY CITY AND BRANCHY.

William Meredith's 1976 essay "The Luck of It" begins with this meditation on how poems and poets work:

A poet approaches language in the spirit of a woodman who asks pardon of the dryad in a tree before he cuts it down. Words are inhabited by the accumulated experience of the tribe. The average poet adds about as much to the language as he adds to the nitrogen content of his native soil. But he can administer the force that resides in words.

It is the magic inhabiting the language that he administers, all the lived meaning that the noises have picked up in the days and nights since they were first uttered. He finds ways to revive that total meaning, or a part of it he wants to use, as he makes his verbal artifacts. His very attentive use of a word, associating it with other words used with equal attention (for no word is an island), astonishes us the way we would be astonished to hear a dryad speak pardon out of an oak tree. And as if this were not all elfin enough already, he does the job largely at a subconscious level. His intelligence stands around, half the time, like a big, friendly, stupid apprentice, handing him lopping-shears when he wants the chain saw.

In "Duns Scotus's Oxford," Hopkins demonstrates this magic of association in the tremendous energy of the opening and closing lines. "Towery city and branchy between towers;"—who would have imagined there was all that going on in those six words before they were joined in that sequence? And of Duns Scotus himself, the final line says, "Who fired France for Mary without spot." Kinesis is all, and the energy is in the words rather than in the thinky parts of man's mind.

He goes on to discuss his own poetry and my attention wanders, but I like that opening. (Via wood s lot.)

E-ZISS AND THE FREISING MSS.

From the e-ZISS website:

The e-ZISS digital critical editions of Slovenian literature offer selected Slovenian texts with integrated facsimiles, transcriptions and scholarly commentary, in some cases including audiovisual recordings.

The e-ZISS project strives to create a synthesis of three components. The first one is the tradition of Slovenian literature, reaching from medieval manuscripts and folk songs to works of literary art. The second component is ecdotics – the tradition of philological study of texts and their presentations in critical editions. The third component is modern information technology... Digital critical editions do not supersede classical printed editions, but offer several additions, and a way to a more varied reader's reception.

There are a number of items at the site, but the one my correspondent Paul alerted me to is particularly striking, the Freising Manuscripts:

The Freising Manuscripts are the earliest document of Slovenian culture. They are the earliest preserved writings in Slovenian as well as the earliest Slavic texts, written in the Latin alphabet....

The present edition offers a historical overview of the most important scholarly editions of the Freising manuscripts. It contains several diplomatic, critical and phonetic transcriptions and translations of the manuscripts into Latin and five modern European languages. This edition also contains a series of studies and commentaries, a glossary of the words used in the manuscripts, a bibliography and other appendices. The electronic edition is also enriched with a spoken reconstruction in early Slovenian, integrated with the transcription of the manuscripts eg. in modern Slovenian.

Even if you have no particular interest in Slovenian, the presentation of text in facsimile and various transcriptions and translations, with glossary and other apparatus, is exemplary, and I hope to see this kind of thing become more and more common.

Thanks, Paul!

THE SOUND OF HOME.

I'm reading a charming book called Anything Can Happen by George Papashvily (with his wife Helen, but it's told in the first person by George); it's the reminiscences, hokey and in sometimes overly cutesy "immigrant English" but heartfelt, funny, and moving, of a man who left Soviet Georgia for America in the early 1920s. (I have the first edition from 1945, borrowed from my nonagenarian mother-in-law, but as you can see from the Amazon link it's been much reprinted and is still easily available, which testifies to its irresistible quality.) I thought I'd quote some of Chapter IV, "The Sound of Home":

In all that time except for those first few months in New York I never heard one word spoken in my own language—Georgian... Once when I was still in Pittsburgh a Turk told me his cousin in Wheeling knew a man who could speak Georgian. So when was my day off—I was still in glue factory this time—I rode over on the bus and found this cousin. But it turned out his friend had been in Batum only a week or two in 1918...

Then one day I heard about the big professors at the university. They were writing books and speaking many languages... So I thought—such big professors—maybe one of them can speak Georgian.

On my day off I took plenty of time and got dressed up and went over to the university. High up in a marble building I found two men. Syrian, Russian, Greek, Persian, Armenian, Tartar, they were speaking all those languages like English—but Georgian, no, not a word.

They shook their heads and one took down a big book from the shelf. He said, "Do you know you speak one of the few tongues in the world that is unrelated to any other language group?" [!]

"Traces of Sumerian may be noted in it, I believe," said the other.... [!!]

I was singing [a Georgian song] the day I went down to the new laundry for my shirts... The lady behind the counter stared when she took the ticket from me, but I was getting used to that.

"You sing in a funny language?"

"Yes, madam," I said.

"My father speaks a funny language, too. A very funny one. He put a piece in the Sun Telegraph once. Ten years ago. 'I pay one thousand dollars anybody can speak my language' was what he said. 'Signed Al Monteaux.' A few people came, but nobody spoke it. It's a funny language."

"I guess all languages are funny to those not speaking them, madam. Nourts Gaprindebe, Nourts Moprindebe." ("Fly, butterfly, fly.")

"I call him anyway. Papa! Papa!!"

"Skals Napoti, harali haralo. Skals Napoti—" The tunes wouldn't stay out of my mouth.

"Pa——pa!!"

The door of the back office opened and an old man popped out. "Skals Napoti? Who sings Skals Napoti?" His voice creaked on the song like a dry ox-yoke.

I went toward him. "Gamarjueba, batano." ("May yours be the victory in battle, sir.") [Actually, gamarjoba (the modern form of gamarjveba), though etymologically it means 'victorious,' is the normal word for 'hello' in Georgian—LH.]

And he opened his arms and kissed me, and the tears rolled down his cheeks so fast they almost drowned his answer.

"Gagemarjos, Shvilo. Madelobtbele wart." ("Thank God that the sun rose on this day, my boy.")

"So, at last! I hear my own language again after three years," I said...

"Three years," he said in Georgian. "Three years and yet you complain! Think of me, my son. Today I have heard the sound of home for the first time in thirty years."...

After that almost every night when my work was through I stopped by the laundry for Papa Monteaux and we bought dry olives and salt cheese and cucumbers and bread and went home to his basement and tapped a barrel. For in all the thirty years when he never heard our language, still he never forgot how to make good wine.

Evening after evening we sat in his cellar doorway under the arbor and sang and told stories and Keento jokes and histories. We took turns reciting "The Man in the Panther's Skin" to each other. [A kinto is a street merchant; apparently they were traditionally known for telling stories and jokes. The Man in the Panther's Skin (ვეფხისტყაოსანი, Vepkhistqaosani) is the national epic of Georgia.]

We talked and talked...

The book was successful enough that it was made into a 1952 movie starring Jose Ferrer, and a user comment at IMDb says "It is initially hard to accept Jose Ferrer playing a Slav..." I hope I don't have to tell anyone here that Georgians are not Slavs!

MASHUP.

For a long time stately, plump Buck Mulligan used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when he had put out his candle, a yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. And half an hour later he held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare dei; he would try to put away the book which, he imagined, was still in his hands, and he would peer down the dark winding stairs and call out coarsely: Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!; he had been thinking all the time, while he was asleep, of what he had just been reading, but his thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest: a church, a tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. This impression would persist for some moments after he was awake; it did not disturb his mind, but, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he would bend towards him and make rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Then Stephen Dedalus would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would lean his arms on the top of the staircase and look coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him; and at the same time his sight would return and he would peep an instant under the mirror and then cover the bowl smartly. He would peer sideways up and give a long slow whistle of call, then pause awhile in rapt attention, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed.

(My deepest apologies to two authors whose nibs I am unworthy to sharpen.)

IMAM BAYILDI.

A correspondent named Dave wrote me with the following query:

It's about "Imam bayildi", a fantastic Turkish eggplant dish that I learnt recently, usually translated as "the imam fainted" with a convoluted folkstory explaining the name (these stories are funny and cool: the imam fainted when he realised the amount of olive oil in the dish, the imam fainted because of how exquisite it tastes etc). Helping my sister-in-law record an evolving recipe, I came across this blog entry with a comment that suggests two meanings for bayil ("The verb BAYIL-MAK has 2 meanings in Turkish. 1. fainted 2. enjoy something very much..."), the second of which, if good, sacrifices fun for sense... What do you think?

What I thought was "Damn, I've been telling that story about the imam fainting for years—you mean it's just bad definition?" I looked in my Langenscheidt and sure enough, it said "bayılmak 1. to faint, to swoon; 2. to like greatly, to be enraptured (by)." So, Turkish speakers: does the dish's name mean simply 'the imam enjoyed it a lot,' or is 'fainted' what native speakers understand by it?

MANA, MANYOGANA.

Brian of What is food for language? has a post called "Mana 101" that gives good examples of the early early Japanese writing system called mana or man'yōgana. As the Wikipedia entry says:

Man'yōgana (万葉仮名) is an ancient form of Japanese kana which uses Chinese characters to represent Japanese sounds. The date of its earliest usage is not clear, but it seems to have been in use since at least the sixth century. The name man'yōgana is from the Man'yōshū (万葉集, "Anthology of Myriad Leaves"), a Japanese poetry anthology from the Nara period written in man'yōgana.

(I was familiar with that name, but not with mana, and I'm curious to know if there's any distinction between the terms, and who uses which when.) Brian writes:

Matt at No-Sword introduced me to a text called the Shinji (or Mana) Ise Monogatari, an edition of the Tales of Ise written entirely in kanji... The text is written in “mana,” sometimes called “man’yôgana” in modern scholarship, but the meaning of these terms can seem very fuzzy at times, so I thought it would be useful to go through a section of it to introduce some of the orthographic techniques it uses.

He quotes the first few lines with a kana gloss, a modern text, an English translation, and a photo of the actual book, giving a thorough explanation of how it works (with some nice crunchy Early Middle Chinese reconstructions) and concluding "This text is a great example of the richness of premodern Japanese writing practices, and of the problems with trying to draw a neat line between kana and kanbun writing." Should be good reading for anyone interested in Japanese writing.

LUSOPHONE NATIONS UNITE.

In spelling, anyway, according to this Diário de Lisboa post (in Portuguese), which says:

O português é a terceira língua ocidental mais falada, após o inglês e o espanhol. A ocorrência de ter duas ortografias atrapalha a divulgação do idioma e a sua prática em eventos internacionais. Sua unificação, no entanto, facilitará a definição de critérios para exames e certificados para estrangeiros. Com as modificações propostas no acordo, calcula-se que 1,6% do vocabulário de Portugal seja modificado. No Brasil, a mudança será bem menor: 0,45% das palavras terão a escrita alterada.

[Portuguese is the third most spoken Western language, after English and Spanish. Having two orthographies confuses the propagation of the language and its use for international events. Its unification will facilitate the definition of criteria for exams and certificates for foreigners. With the proposed changes, calculations show that 1.6% of the vocabulary will be changed in Portugal. In Brazil, the change will be less: 0.45% of words will have their writing altered.]

You can see the details of the changes there; the odd thing is that "Portugal keeps the acute accent on stressed e and o before m or n, while Brazil continues to use circumflex in such words: académico/acadêmico, génio/gênio, fenómeno/fenômeno, bónus/bônus." You'd think if they were going to unify, they'd go all the way. But as Antonios Sarhanis, who sent me the link, says, "It must be that the Brazilians are as attached to their hats as you are to yours." Thanks for the link and the laugh, Antonios!

Antonios provides an interesting aside: "Only about 2% of East Timorese speak Portuguese, but it's East Timor's official language along with Tetum... And to make matters more confusing for the East Timorese, there were reports that Finnish was being learnt in East Timor."

FEDOR EMIN.

When I saw Anatoly's post (in Russian) about some amazing finds on Google Books, notably the first edition (1800) of the Slovo o polku Igoreve (the classic Old East Slavic epic poem known in English as The Tale of Igor's Campaign or The Lay of the Host of Igor) and the first Russian novel, Fedor Emin's Nepostoyannaya fortuna ['Inconstant fortune'] (1763), I knew I was going to blog it. But it was when I started investigating the latter that I really got hooked. In the first place, it surprised me that I'd never heard of Emin. I looked him up in my Russian biographical dictionary, but he wasn't there—the author of the first Russian novel didn't merit an entry? Then I went to D. S. Mirsky's superb A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 and found only this brief mention: "The first Russian novelist was Fëdor Emin (c. 1735-70), who wrote didactic and philosophical romances of adventure in a florid and prolix literary prose." The first Russian novelist disposed of in one sentence, without even a mention of the name of the first Russian novel? (This in a book that devotes a long paragraph to Vasily Narezhny, 1780-1825, before concluding "He was in fact little read, and his influence on the development of the Russian novel is almost negligible.") What's going on here?

Fortunately, Brockhaus and Efron (published a century ago and still as invaluable as the 1911 Britannica) has a good article (in Russian) on Emin, which answered some of my questions and told a fascinating tale. It seems Emin (whose name and patronymic are given as Fedor Aleksandrovich) was not Russian at all, and little is known of his life before he arrived in Russia in his mid-twenties. B&E surmise that he may have been of South Slavic origin and mention that he spent eight years wandering in Austria, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Portugal, and France, perhaps visiting Algiers and Tunis. In Turkey he converted to Islam and became a janissary. In 1761 he turned up in London at the doorstep of Prince Golitsyn, the Russian ambassador, converted to Orthodoxy (!), and was sent to Russia, where he quickly learned Russian and became first a teacher at the Corps des Pages (where the nobility were trained to be officers) and then a translator in the Foreign Ministry. He also became a prolific littérateur, turning out "satirical works," novels both translated and original, and "an interesting Description of the Ottoman Porte," edited the satirical journal Adskaya pochta ['The Infernal Post'], and finally produced "the patriotic but strange Rossiiskaya istoriya ['Russian History'] in three volumes, in which he referred to nonexistent books and evidence" (!!), as well as "a book of theological-philosophical content, Put' ko spaseniyu ['The Path to Salvation'], which continued to be reprinted until recently."

Of his seven novels, say B&E, "six belong to the type of 'adventure novel' widespread in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the reader knows the hero will emerge triumphant from the most difficult circumstances, virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. Only the novel Pis'ma Ernesti i Doravry ['The Letters of Ernest and Doraura'] was composed under the influence of the new currents, notably La Nouvelle Héloise of J.-J. Rousseau. The novels of E., the first Russian novelist, had undoubted success, some of them even having new editions; in memoirs can be found references to the heroes of his novels; Karamzin in his youth could not tear himself away from them... His theory of the usefulness of literary works was an undoubted service to Russian society... E. touched on the acute problems of his day: the horrors of serfdom, disorders in law courts and administrative institutions, the general servility towards all sorts of benefactors. The pages dedicated by E. to these painful issues are distinguished from the articles in satirical journals by their considerably greater sharpness. The novelist placed his ideas in the mouths of heroes carrying on their activities in Greece, Algiers, and so on, which enabled him to speak more freely. In some novels (the autobiographical Nepostoyannaya fortuna, ili Priklyucheniya Miramonda ['Inconstant Fortune, or the Adventures of Miramonde'], Priklyucheniya Miramonda ['The Adventures of Miramonde'], and others) entire social programs are provided." There is a discussion of his satirical writings, his relations with other authors of the day (he and Sumarokov had particularly fraught relations), and his Adskaya pochta, which they call "one of the best satirical journals of that time"; they end by saying "The literary activity of E. has been little studied," and that apparently continues to be true.

And why is that? He was clearly an active participant in the literary life of his day, with an influence that considerably outlasted the few years given to him. He was much read and reprinted. And he wrote the first Russian novel, for Pete's sake. I think the answer is clear: he wasn't Russian. He was not only a foreigner but a convert, and Russian was probably not among his first half-dozen languages—yet he learned it well, and in an amazingly short time. How embarrassing for national amour propre! Best to sweep him under the carpet with a muttered sentence or two and hurry on to Karamzin. Me, I'd like to see a full biography. Why did he decide to convert to Orthodoxy on a visit to London, and spend the rest of his career in a Russia viewed as irremediably backward by the rest of Europe? And what's the story with the invented historical evidence?

Incidentally, I started reading Nepostoyannaya fortuna and found myself caught up in the adventures of its hero, brought up in Constantinople and sent off to Algiers to adopt a new identity with the intention of being educated in Europe (where no one would teach him anything if they thought he was a Turk); it's a good thing I don't have time to read any further, because the copy at Google Books is wretchedly scanned, with some pages completely illegible (as you can see from the selected pages shown here.) I suppose it's too much to hope for an improved scan...

MALAYA.

Continuing my Alexandrian sojourn with D. J. Enright's Academic Year, set in the late 1940s, I was stopped in the first paragraph of Chapter 4 (page 70 in my Oxford paperback) by the italicized word in the following sentence: "It was the precise kind of weather, Packet grumbled, for which the city had not been intended, neither the malayas of the women, whipping against their sad splashed legs, nor the windows of his flat, which let in draughts at every joint." It clearly referred to some kind of garment, but there was no entry in either the OED or Webster's Third International—except, of course, for the similarly spelled name of a former part of what is now Malaysia, from which I assumed it must derive. The similarity made for difficult googling, but I was able to separate out the term I wanted (which occurs, on the internet anyway, mainly in conjunction with belly dancing), which turns out to be more properly spelled milaya and has nothing to do with Southeast Asia: it is the Egyptian form of Arabic mula'a (from the root ملأ 'to fill') and means 'long black cloak or shawl traditionally worn by Egyptian women' (a longer form is "malaya-leff" from milaya laff 'milaya wrapping'). This entry is brought to you by the Languagehat Department of Disambiguation.

While I'm at it, this quote from further down the page puzzled me for different reasons: "A couple at the next table were wrangling desultorily in a debased English. Neither was exactly English, but possibly both belonged to that outcast category which the English abroad were scrupulous to avoid, the British. The woman, little with small malevolent features and intensely black hair and eyes, might have been Maltese..." I had always thought "British" referred to inhabitants of the British Isles, but apparently there was, in the days of the Empire, a wider sense referring to anyone holding a U.K. passport.

CONCLUSORY.

Well, I learned something today. Mark Liberman has an extended discussion at Language Log about the word conclusory as used by lawyers, discovering that it means "asserting conclusions without evidence." (This came up in connection with Sen. Arlen Specter's skeptical assessment of what Alberto Gonzales has said about the firings of the U.S. Attorneys: "Those statements are very conclusory.") I'm happy to say I don't spend a lot of time reading material written by lawyers, but it's always good to learn something about another dialect.

USING LEME TO EDIT SHAKESPEARE.

A Sunday Times article by Jonathan Bate explains how he investigated word use for his new edition of Shakespeare:

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: everyone knows the phrase. And most people know where it’s from: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles . . .”

What does it actually mean? Something about being buffeted by bad luck and worldly troubles, obviously. But the image is curious. Fortune, who dishes out our luck, is traditionally personified as a woman. If she has arrows, shouldn’t she have a bow rather than a sling? Why didn’t Shakespeare write: “The bow and arrow of outrageous fortune”? Or for that matter, “The slings and stones of outrageous fortune”?

Shakespearian commentators have puzzled over this conundrum for centuries, even going so far as to suggest that the inconsistency of weapon may mean that “slings” is a printer’s error for “stings”. Now, however, we have a solution. Almost every book written in the age of Shakespeare has been made available in digitised form. So you can go to an amazing website from the University of Toronto called Lexicons of Early Modern English and type in the word “sling”. Within a second the search engine will have worked its way through more than 150 dictionaries, glossaries and word lists from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Up pops a citation from Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611), the first English-French dictionary: “Mangonneau: An old-fashioned sling, or engine, whereout stones, old iron, and great arrows were violently darted.”

So arrows can be fired from a sling. Fortune doesn’t have a puny little hand sling — rather she is firing off a huge catapult, a mighty engine of siege warfare. Hamlet’s image in this line is as strong as that in the next, where the hero imagines battling against an entire sea of troubles.

Unfortunately, it costs $75 a year to subscribe to LEME, but I imagine many of you have access to institutions that have subscriptions. (Thanks for the links, Glyn!)

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF LINGUISTS.

A while back Mark Liberman had a series of Language Log posts quoting excerpts from J. Milton Cowan's "American Linguistics in Peace and at War" about how linguists were mobilized for language instruction in World War II (1, 2); the third post, The Burmese story, had a highly amusing description of how William S. Cornyn, Leonard Bloomfield, and Cowan scoured New York City looking for possible Burmese speakers and found one called Alamon who was willing to come to Yale but needed a higher salary than envisioned because "he had been running a little numbers racket in lower Manhattan," ending with this tantalizing zinger: "Alamon's successor, the other Burmese-sounding name on the Roster, gave rise to an embarrassment of the Yale linguists and the University which was as funny to outsiders as it was painful for those involved. But enough for Burmese." As Mark says, "No, I'm sorry, that's NOT enough for Burmese — we need to know more about the 'embarrassment of the Yale linguists and the University' than that it 'was as funny to outsiders as it was painful for those involved'! I mean, like, what happened?" I suppose it may be too much to hope that anyone will have the answer after 65 years, but hope springs eternal. Maybe a telltale bit of graffiti still lingers in the dusty back rooms of Sterling Memorial Library?

MEH.

The dismissive exclamation meh has been cropping up all over recently (see Ben Zimmer's Language Log post); it was popularized by The Simpsons, but it goes back before that, and Nathan Bierma has done a Chicago Tribune column on it (here's an American Dialect Society Mailing List posting of the column in case the first link is inaccessible for any reason). Here's the heart of it, as far as etymology is concerned:

The Simpsons get credit for helping "meh" go mainstream, but they didn't invent the word; the show just brought it out from some hidden corner of the culture. As early as 1992, "meh" shows up on a fan discussion board for the show "Melrose Place." "Is [he] cute?" one fan asks about a character. Another writes back: "Meh .. far too Ken-doll for me."

That's one of the earliest available written examples of "meh," but the word probably existed in speech long before. How long? That stumps etymologists.

But Nathan writes me that after the column appeared, he got an e-mail from a correspondent who said it sounded to him like a variant of the Yiddish "mnyeh," to which Leo Rosten apparently devoted considerable space in Hooray for Yiddish (which I don't own), and googling tells me that the suggestion was made over two years ago in this IRC log from 2/28/2005:

21:17:32 <sbp> http://www.langmaker.com/db/eng_meh.htm
21:17:39 <sbp> via http://www.onelook.com/?w=meh&ls=a
21:17:44 <sbp> but again, not easy to use*
21:17:59 <jcowan> Looks like an anglicized form of "mnyeh".

I think that's extremely plausible, and I look forward to seeing the results of serious etymological research (which should certainly involve trawling fifty-year-old issues of Mad, where I'm pretty sure I learned about "mnyeh" as a goyish youth).

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE LEVANT.

My recent immersion in multinational Alexandria has turned up some interesting sources; I'll link to a couple of them here.

Racheline Barda's "Egyptian Jewry in modern times" (.doc file, HTML cache) begins with a description of the varied origins of the community:

The face of the small indigenous Jewish community of 5-7,000 at the beginning of the 18th century, was therefore dramatically altered by the newcomers’ diverse ethnic backgrounds and was gradually transformed into a multicultural and multilingual mosaic. As a matter of fact, the Jews of Egypt’s main characteristic was their diversity, diversity in culture, ethnic origins, nationalities, rituals and languages.

Thus, on the eve of the 1948 war with Israel, the Jewish community was made up grosso modo of three different ethnic groups, each with their own customs, language and rituals:

1) A core of indigenous Jews with a Judeo-Arabic culture, divided by two different religious traditions, the Rabbanites and the Karaites, belonging mostly to the lower socio-economic strata, apart from a small privileged elite. Their mother tongue was Egyptian Arabic whereas immigrants from the other Arab countries (Syria, Morocco, Irak, Lybia) spoke their own Arabic dialect...

2) The second and largest group: the Sefardim (literally from Spain), included different ethnic clusters. They initially spoke Ladino but were also familiar with French, Italian, Turkish, and Greek depending on which part of the old Ottoman Empire they came from...

3) The third group was the Ashkenazim (about 6000 in the interwar period) originally from Eastern Europe plus a small cluster who came from Germany just before WWII. Spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German...

Apart from these three categories, there were other smaller categories – not strictly Sephardim or Ashkenazim - such as:

* The Italian Jews (8 to 10,000), originally from Leghorn sometimes via Lybia. Spoke Italian. Felt very close to the mother country until Mussolini enacted the Racial Laws in 1938. They were well established in business and financial sector and belonged to the upper and middle class. Some of them had no Ladino or Sephardi tradition. My husband’s family for instance could trace its origins back to Livorno in Tuscany in the early 1800s and had been in Egypt for four generations, and still maintained the use of Italian at home.
* A small group of Greek Jews or Romaniot, who strictly speaking, were not Sephardi. They came from mainland Greece or from the old Ottoman Empire, still maintained the use of Greek. They are believed to be the descendants of Hellenised Jews.
* The Corfiote Jews (from the Greek island of Corfu), who spoke a Ven[e]tian dialect (Corfu had been under Venetian domination for centuries before passing onto French and then British and then Greek domination)...

All these different ethnic groups were mostly educated in French, English or Italian private schools (secular and religious). Those who could not afford private schools sent their children to the Jewish communal schools where the main language of tuition was French apart from Arabic and Hebrew.

So Aciman is, if anything, downplaying the diversity in his memoir, with his references to the different nationalities found in his family!

The other item is Alexander H. de Groot's "Dragomans' Careers: Change of Status in Some Families Connected with the British and Dutch Embassies at Istanbul 1785-1829" (pdf; there doesn't appear to be a cached version). Primarily concerned with diplomatic history and the divisions in the European community of Constantinople caused by the Napoleonic Wars, it presents a dizzying mix of nationalities and ethnicities among the dragomans who served as intermediaries between the European powers and the Porte, and concludes with this admonition:

The difficulty of grasping the complexity of the multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural and multilingual Ottoman historical reality of the past remains an obstacle to a proper understanding of the situation of the original dragomans. Those western and Middle Eastern historians of today who limit their studies to the agents (dragomans and other protégés, barattaires) of one particular foreign power are guilty of a false historiographical approach. They ignore their political, juridical and social status which implied that these middlemen were not subjects of the states employing them but Ottoman subjects. They were only seemingly binational because of the status they had acquired of protégé of a foreign capitulatory power. But this status had, after all, to be granted by the Ottoman Porte upon the request of the foreign ambassador concerned.

The dragoman families were interrelated across all European national boundaries, irrespective of their original descent. It is therefore historically meaningless to try to establish their single national standing, to define them as foreigners, as westerners or orientals, or as native Ottomans. Historians should take the Levantines as they were.

Addendum. A quote I just found in Aciman's essay "Alexandria: The Capital of Memory" (in his collection False Papers; the start of the essay is online here):

The Alexandria I knew, that part-Victorian, half-decayed, vestigial nerve center of the British Empire, exists in memory alone, the way Carthage and Rome and Constantinople exist as vanished cities only—a city where the dominant languages were English and French, though everyone spoke in a medley of many more, because the principal languages were really Greek and Italian, and in my immediate world Ladino (the Spanish of the Jews who fled the Inquisition in the sixteenth century), with broken Arabic holding everything more or less together.

A useful summary of the linguistic situation.

IN MY LANGUAGE I AM SMART.

Dragan Todorovic is a Serbian journalist and editor who emigrated in 1995 from Yugoslavia to Canada, where he wrote in English and did multimedia work, winning various awards. His latest piece is "In My Language I am Smart (The Immigrant Song)," which is linked from this page of his website; it's an audio clip a few minutes long consisting of him talking about having to communicate in a new language, mixed with various sounds. It's very effective; I particularly liked this bit, addressed to a woman he's trying to make time with: "If we spoke in my language, you would have fallen in love with me three hours ago. Can you just love me now and understand me later?" Oh, and "HMS Concise Oxford comes to my rescue."

Even if you don't have the time or inclination to listen to the clip at the moment, read the Notes a bit further down the page:

...Language is acquired with its sound, and the sounds I had picked from records and movies were harsh, aggressive, and presented me in a very different light from who I was and am. Suddenly I realized that somewhere in the process of acquiring the tone of modern English I had lost my identity. It was painful to realize that in my language I was smart, but I sounded stupid in English. Example: while walking with my Canadian friend one day by a church, he started talking about the architecture of that particular building, and while I wanted to say a few things about how I liked the Gothic details on the arch at the entrance, and how I admired the intelligent choice of stones, all I could squeeze out was, “Yeah, it’s cool”.

Acquired meaning is superficial. Sound puts word into context, but the deeper shades of expression are not learned. I responded the way that Clint Eastwood, or some other action hero, would in one of their roles. Back in Serbian language I was connoisseur of arts; in my newly acquired language I was a cop...

(Via wood s lot.)

TWO GREAT TASTES.

It's time once again for me to renew my genuflection before the wonder that is Polyglot Vegetarian. MMcM doesn't post often, but considering that each post is the length of a small book and packed with detailed and recondite information, that's entirely understandable. In the last month he's made two posts, but each is on a topic so basic to any food lover, treated with such loving attention to history, geography, and relevant literature, that to read the first two paragraphs visible on the main page is automatically to click on the "Read More." The first is on garlic, and it goes into leek, clove, allium, and many other words from many other languages, not to mention quotes from Horace, Byron, Herodotus, Pliny, and Bram Stoker, along with less famous sources; you can see words in Ancient Egyptian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Nepali, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Konkani, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Badaga, Chinese, Thai, and Japanese, to name only languages in non-Latin scripts that my browser will display. He finishes up with Dracula and nosferatu.

The second is on chili; it begins with the earliest OED citation, from 1662, continues through quotes from Columbus, Alvarez Chanca, de Las Casas, Peter Martyr, Bernardino de Sahagún (in Nahuatl and English), and many others, with a side reference to the Three Stooges, and finishes up with a 1604 antedate the OED will presumably incorporate. I won't even try to hint at the varied riches therein; I'll just say nostalgically that I remember the ají de gallina I had at a long-vanished Peruvian restaurant on Houston Street in Manhattan as if it were yesterday.

SUICIDE IN THE DICTIONARY.

No, it's not a microcosmic tragedy, it's a Language Log post by Geoff Nunberg about how Merriam-Webster dictionaries wound up with a definition of suicide that includes the phrase "especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind," which is (as Geoff says) plainly wrong. It's a fascinating account, written with the usual Nunberg clarity and elegance, of how incautious editing and condensation can create blatant error.

A LANGUAGE OF LOOSENED NECKTIES.

I've finished Durrell but am still fascinated with Alexandria, so I'm reading Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman, a saga of his family's life in the city covering most of the twentieth century. It's apparently somewhat fictionalized, but that neither surprises nor distresses me—all memoirs are to some extent, and he writes so well I don't really give a damn, not to mention that nobody disputes the accuracy of his portrait of the city. Anyway, I wanted to quote here an interesting discussion (from Chapter 2) of the languages of Jewish Alexandria:

To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one's sheets, of one's closets, of one's cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.

All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greek—that is, better than the Athenians—gliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess [his paternal grandmother] herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. "Spanish, on the other hand, réveille l'âme, lifts up the soul." And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point...

The Saint's husband [these are the maternal grandparents], a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. ... "Spanish, Spanish," the Aleppid would mutter as he and his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, "always your damned Spanish," while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour...

Monsieur Jacques... despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind him—as her father had reminded her to remind him—that Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!

For more on the languages of Sephardic Jewry, see here.

N.b.: Tomorrow morning my wife is undergoing minor surgery which will, nevertheless, keep her in the hospital until Tuesday morning; I will be coming home when they kick out the visitors, but I may or may not be in the mood to post, so you have been warned. Go read some Proust or something if this space is silent, and if you feel like it, send good wishes towards western Massachusetts.

Update. Thank you all for your good wishes; they seem to have worked, since my wife came through with flying colors—in fact, the nurse who took her to the recovery room said in 37 years of nursing she'd never seen anyone emerge from surgery so chipper. She was, in fact, so feisty she insisted on sending me home to relax and have a timely dinner so I could get to bed early and have a good night's sleep for a change. And my dinner will center around a large tamale I got from a Salvadoran eatery around the corner from the hospital; I don't remember having had Salvadoran food before, and the pupusas I had for lunch were delicious. Pupusa, now there's an odd word—I'll have to look up the etymology...

Further update (Aug. 2008): Thanks to shmegegge in this MetaFilter thread (which links to this Aciman article), I have learned that Aciman's name used to be pronounced the Turkish way (Adjiman), but is now officially pronounced as an English-speaking reader would expect ('æs-i-mæn). So now we know.

BORN TO KVETCH.

I was ransacking Michael Wex's Born to Kvetch for the Yiddish entry in the curses-and-insults book I'm working on when it occurred to me that I'd never gotten around to mentioning it here, so I'm remedying the omission now. Wex's website has links to articles of his as well as brief excerpts from each chapter of the book—Origins of Yiddish, Yiddish in Action, and so on. The first can serve as a sample of the style:

Yiddish started out as German for blasphemers, as a German in which you could deny Christ without getting yourself killed any more often than necessary. From day one, once they started to speak "German" to one another, the Jews were speaking German aftselakhis, German to spite the Germans, a German that Germans wouldn’t understand—the argot of the unredeemed. Don't think of Yiddish as a union or melding of German and Semitic elements; think of it as a horror movie. Think of Hebrew as an aristocrat with a funny accent, a mysterious old language no longer used in conversation, the linguistic equivalent of the Undead. It needs body and blood to return to spoken life, the body and blood of a living language that can be taken over and put to use in the service of the Jewish brain.

If you like that, you'll probably like the book. It's overwritten, sure, but in much the same way the pastrami sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli are too big to eat; they're tasty and irresistible anyway. The guy's both scholarly and funny, a rare combination. And he knows some good curses, like a kazarme zol af dir aynfaln 'a barracks should collapse on you'; as he says, "Having a building of any kind collapse on top of you is never pleasant, but if that building is a barracks, then you're probably in the army—the last place any Eastern European Jew wanted to find himself." And how can you not love a book that quotes Mickey Katz? "You'll love it in the South Pacific,/ Some enchanted evening with Moyshe Pipik." Can I get an Oy?

BREMER SPRACHBLOG.

Andreas Ammann and Anatol Stefanowitsch of the University of Bremen started the Bremer Sprachblog back in January and Andreas wrote me about it in February, but I didn't have time to investigate it then and it got lost in the shuffle. Fortunately, I just ran across his e-mail again and am finally able to wholeheartedly recommend the blog to any German speakers interested in linguistic topics: it's knowledgeable and fun! I particularly enjoyed their April Fools post, which asked readers to decide, without googling, which of these four "facts" is actually a joke (I've abbreviated the items here):

1) The Mapuche Indians of Chile have sued Microsoft for releasing a version of its Windows XP operating system in their language without their authorization.

2) Noam Chomsky believes that children come preprogrammed with the rules for all human languages.

3) The language of the Bhutija of Tibet corresponds so well with the categories of formal logic, with a notable absence of ambiguity, that it is of interest to specialists in computer linguistics.

4) The Belgian linguist Johannes Goropius Becanus announced that Flemish is the oldest language in the world, basing his argument on its simplicity (e.g., short words).

Regular readers of LH should be able to handle this one; the answer is in the extended entry. Anyway, a belated thanks for letting me know about the blog, Andreas, and I'm adding it to the blogroll forthwith.

The fake item is #3. Like one of the commenters on the original post, I'm particularly delighted by the fact that Chomsky's crackpot theory seems perfectly at home in this context! (LH: Mapuche, Chomsky, Goropius.)

CALL FOR CURSES.

Attention all cacologists: I am currently copyediting and supplying additional text for a book of international curses and insults, and while I have a goodly store myself, I would be glad of help if any of you happen to know such expressions in the following languages: Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, and Norwegian. Extra points if you can give me an idea of the general place of cursing and insults in the relevant cultural/literary context. (Juicy examples from other languages would also be welcome!) Direct offers of assistance to languagehat at gmail dot com, and thanks in advance. (But do you kiss your mother with that mouth?)

SOUNDS FAMILIAR?

Sounds Familiar? is a new site created by the British Library; according to a Guardian story by John Crace:

Made up of recordings from the 1950s Survey of English Dialects and the 1999 Millennium Memory Bank, Sounds Familiar incorporates more than 600 audio-clips to create a unique sound map of spoken English, past and present. "Some of the oldest recordings are of men and women who were in their 80s in the 1950s," says Jonnie Robinson, curator of english accents and dialects at the British Library, "so it's like hearing an echo from the past. We also have a real mix of cultures, regions and generations, which allow us to chart the variations and changes in vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar through time."...

Language doesn't always change in the way we might think. Not so long ago some academics argued that estuary English (or non-standard southern English, as linguistics experts prefer to call it) was, thanks to TV shows such as EastEnders, slowly taking over the whole country and that some northern accents - particularly Glaswegian - were being diluted. But Robinson points out that this latest version of the imperialist south has turned out to be a false alarm.

"There is no doubt the London dialect we have come to call estuary has spread out across the south-east," he says, "but research has shown that northern accents and dialects have withstood its spread. Language is a great deal more robust than we imagine."...

There are interesting observations about population change, cultural perceptions, and the reasons for the Great Vowel Shift, as well as this sentence: "Academics have noticed that many young women in Yorkshire have changed their vowel sounds in certain words; instead of Cooca Coola, they now say Cerka Curla - simply because they imagine the new accent to be posher." Cooca Coola? Cerka Curla?? Yes, I realize the r's are not pronounced, but still, those are some weird pronunciations.

I like the concluding quote (from Clive Upton) very much: "We're not in the business of preservation. The only language that doesn't change at all is a dead one."

There's also a BBC News article by Joe Campbell; all links are courtesy of Benjamin Zimmer of Language Log—thanks, Ben!

CORRECTION.

I keep forgetting to mention an incident that happened the other day while my wife and I were waiting in the waiting room (in the immortal words of the Buzzcocks). It was a tiny waiting room, with two chairs across from us and three on our side (one of them strategically placed beneath the receptionist's window so that it was unusable), and when two women entered and sat opposite us it was impossible not to overhear their conversation. One of them was eighty (she gave her birthdate to the receptionist), the other perhaps in her forties—they were on good terms but didn't seem to be close friends or relatives (the younger woman said "my husband" rather than mention him by name). There were some striking moments, as when the octogenarian said "They give you last rites in the machine that kills you" (and no, I don't know what she was talking about), but the one of Languagehat relevance came a little later, when the younger woman was telling a story and the older one interrupted: "You made a mistake." The younger woman looked puzzled. "You said 'all them boys.' It should be those: 'all those boys.'" "All those boys," the other repeated obediently, with an air of gratitude, and continued her story.

It was the perfect distillation of prescriptivism, the pure essence. This was not a parent or teacher correcting a child, preparing him or her for the demands of society, nor was it an editor fixing up a bit of wayward prose; there was no rational excuse for it, no clarification of an ambiguous reference or anything else that might fall under the "communication" rubric trotted out by the mavens as they insist on their shibboleths. This was two adults talking as equals, communication was perfect, a story was being told, and yet this woman felt the need to interrupt the storyteller with what from any rational standpoint was a completely gratuitous "correction." And yet neither party felt it as such; the older woman clearly expected her interlocutor to accept the rebuke without demur, and she was not disappointed. If I could understand exactly what was happening there on both ends, I would have a better handle on what usage griping is all about. But I don't.

While I'm here, let me apologize for the outage this morning; my domain had expired (warnings were sent to a defunct e-mail address, it's a long story), and I had some anxious moments before gandi.net, my domain name provider, fixed things, excellent fellows that they are. I was terrified some internet vulture was sitting around just waiting to scoop up my helpless domain and I'd never get it back; I had to contemplate the horrible prospect of Life Without Languagehat. It made me realize how much a part of my life you are, Gentle Readers, in your capacities as charming players of conversational badminton as well as providers of nuggets of elusive fact—and I seek those nuggets as eagerly as my cat Pushkin seeks lost corks and artificial mice, I claw at Google and reference works as assiduously as he claws at the gap under the refrigerator (where such things so often wind up), and I am as grateful to those of you who provide them as Pushkin is to my wife when she fetches the broom, sweeps the handle under the fridge, and pulls out the ardently desired playthings. And if in aught I have given offense, I do heartily repent me. I seem to have lost at least one internet pal of whom I was inordinately fond, owing to some pronunciamento I don't even remember pronouncing, and I've had enough friends and acquaintances drift away in the course of my life not to want to lose more. I grew up arguing with brothers and friends, and self-assured ideamongering is the stuff of lively conversation to me, to be enjoyed as sportier folk enjoy a good game of handball; I tend to forget that when the ball bounces wrong, people can get hurt. If bluff and bluster be a fault, God help the wicked! No, my good readers; banish Kos, banish Wonkette, banish Instapundit: but for sweet Languagehat, kind Languagehat, true Languagehat, valiant Languagehat, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Languagehat, banish not him your company!

THE DREAM OF THE POEM.

A new anthology called The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, edited by Peter Cole, looks to be well worth investigating. Marjorie Perloff's Bookforum review begins:

In the middle of the tenth century, a young Moroccan Jewish poet named Dunash ben Labrat arrived in the Andalusian city of Cordoba, then ruled by the blue-eyed caliph of Spanish-Basque descent 'Abd al-Rahmaan III. Dunash had studied in Baghdad, then considered the most spectacular city in the world, with the head of the Babylonian Jewish academy of Sura, Sa'adia ben Yosef al-Fayuumi, a man of great learning, who taught him, among other things, a keen appreciation of Arabic and its notion of fasaaha (radiance, clarity), as well as its importance for the understanding of Hebrew Scripture. Tenth-century Cordoba was a second Baghdad: a sophisticated city, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in relative harmony and Arabic was the dominant language. "By the mid–tenth century," writes Peter Cole, "Jews, Christians, North-African Berber Muslims, and Christian converts were competing with the Arabs themselves for mastery of that most beautiful of languages, which became both the lingua franca of al-Andalus and the currency of high culture." Indeed, conditions for the Jews were so favorable that the conversion rate was low: They spoke Arabic, adopted native dress, and worked side by side with their Muslim neighbors. Dunash, settling in Cordoba and adapting the inflections of Arabic poetry to his native Hebrew, declared, "Let Scripture be your Eden . . . and the Arabs' books your paradise grove."

She goes on to say that the book "represents poetic scholarship at its best" and quotes a number of short tzvi poems (the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic ghazal). The Princeton UP web page for the book generously provides links not only to the table of contents and introduction but to pdf files of the Hebrew texts (Muslim Spain, Christian Spain & Provence). Thanks for the link, Trevor!

I HAVE THREE COWS TO FEED.

This is a very funny (four-minute) video in which the Norwegians mock the Danish language. In English. Thanks, Kári!

Q BEFORE U.

One thing that annoys me in reading Durrell is the invariable insertion of u after q even when the q represents Arabic qāf. This is not unique to him—it exists in many books written about the Middle East before, say, the '60s—but he's particularly thoroughgoing about it; for instance, the OED entry for qasida 'an Arabic or Persian panegyric or elegiac poem or ode' has a bunch of citations, ranging from 1819 to 1971, but only one with the qu- spelling:

1958 L. DURRELL Balthazar iv. 82 He was delighted to hear some music and listened with emotion to the wild quasidas that the old man sang.

Another example from Balthazar (on the penultimate page, p. 242 of my Dutton edition): "I was terribly upset when Balthazar told me that he had fallen down those stairs at the central Quism and killed himself" (qism 'part, section' being an Egyptian term for a police station). I simply don't understand the rationale. If you want to provide a folksy anglicized version, why not use k? The vast majority of your readers won't know the difference between Arabic qāf and kāf, and wouldn't be able to pronounce the qāf correctly anyway, so why not write "kasida" and "kism"? If you want to be scientific and use the q, why on earth toss in that pointless u, which adds only the certainty of mispronunciation?

While I'm at it, there's an interesting word in a description of the Alexandria harbor in the first chapter of Clea (yes, I've reached the last book of the Quartet; the quote is from p. 34 of the Dutton edition): "Framed by the coloured domes there lay feluccas and lateen-rig giassas, wine-caiques, schooners, and brigantines of every shape and size, from all over the Levant." When I couldn't find giassa in the OED or Webster's Third International, I started to worry, but the internet came through again—the Project Gutenberg text of R. Talbot Kelly's Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt (1916) contains this very illuminating sentence: "These native boats are of several kinds, from the small 'felucca,' or open boat used for ferry or pleasure purposes, to the large 'giassa,' or cargo boat of the river." But it will surprise no one to learn that I'm still curious about the word itself. It looks Italian, but it's not in the Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana or my own dictionaries; it looks like it should be pronounced /jasa/, but Egyptian Arabic does not use the /j/ sound. Any information will be much appreciated.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BERBER IN ALGERIA.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has a couple of posts reviewing الأمازيغية - آراء وأمثال (تيبازة نموذجا) [Tamazight: Views and Proverbs (the Example of Tipasa)], by Mohamed Arezki Ferad; as he says, it "is unlikely to come to most English-speakers' attention," so he's rendering a public service in giving us an idea of its contents. The first post is a general review, the second focuses on "a collection of more than 150 Tamazight proverbs from the Tipasa area (specifically the village of Bou-Smail)." Tamazight is the language of the Amazigh, the Berbers of Algeria (if I have that right), and the author "argues that Algeria's Amazigh identity is undeniable, is relevant to the whole country and not just the minority that speak Tamazight, and complements rather than contradicts Algeria's Arab identity." Lameen translates a section that provides a moving reminiscence of how things used to be a couple of decades ago:

I remembered being excluded from the university and forbidden to teach in the history faculty in the early 1980s simply because I presented a thesis for my certificate of advanced studies on Amazigh history in Andalus in the period of the petty kings (reyes de taifa), and my viva was not scheduled until after great efforts, only to yield a blow that hit me harder than a thunderbolt: being excluded from the university and not hired by it! For the decision-makers back then thought that the thesis's topic reeked of anti-Arabism and encroachment upon the sanctity of this language which could never accept a rival! How great was my disappointment - I, a Kabyle born in a conservative environment built on Islam as its religion, Arabic for its writing, and Tamazight for its speech! I remembered - from as far back as I can recall - how we would study Arabic in Kabyle - yes, we studied Arabic in Kabyle, by the method of alif u yenqeḍ ara, ba yiwet s wadda, ta snat ufella... (ا alif has no dot, ب ba one underneath, ت ta two on top...) I remembered how we used to venerate the Arabic language and hurry to gather papers with Arabic writing on them when we found them scattered on the ground, for fear that some passer-by might tread on them with his feet... I remember how the name of "Mohamed Larbi" (lit. Muhammad the Arab) was on every tongue, with scarcely a family not using it, and the name of "Fatima" as a blessing for the Prophet (PBUH). For all these personal reasons, I couldn't understand the viciousness of the assault on the Amazigh dimension of the Algerian personality...

LOREM.

Cursor Mundi 25464: "Nu ask i noþer gra ne grene, Ne stede scrud, ne lorem scene."

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Addendum. Related posts at Language Log (Grammatical Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Leohtenen hired at North Orizen Junior Tech), Avva (Anatoly has realized that his true homeland is the USSR and is renouncing Israeli citizenship), Varieties of Unreligious Experience (Yiddish in Shakespeare)..