Well, I had vaguely been planning something special to mark a half-decade of this whatsit's existence: put up pictures of my hats, maybe, or write a sestina. Instead, as coincidence would have it, tomorrow is moving day, and I won't even have internet access. (Today, the 30th, we're closing on the new house in Hadley and returning the modem to Verizon.) So I'm postdating a quick notice of the event, with a warning that I don't know how long it will be before I get hooked up again. I'll see you sometime around the first of August; meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves, and join me in hoping we and the cats survive the move.
A correspondent has created a map of the USA and Canada where people can record their regional accent based on pronunciations of various vowel sounds: "You just click on the map where you grew up, select which accent the quiz said you had, and then a dot color-coded to your accent appears on the map. Pretty neat, isn't it?" To take the quiz, go here or here. And yes, it is pretty neat.
If only they'd had this when I was in school... From Mark Liberman at Language Log:
Tomorrow, Dragomir Radev and eight amazingly smart high-school students will be taking off for St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida), to participate as the American entrants in the 5th International Linguistics Olympiad. There are two teams: the first team is Rachel Elana Zax, Ryan Aleksandrs Musa, Adam Classen Hesterberg, and Jeffrey Christopher Lim; the second team is Rebecca Elise Jacobs, Joshua Stuart Falk, Anna Tchetchetkine, and Michael Zener Riggs Gottlieb.Mark gives a question from last year's competition. What fun!The students won their spots based on their performance in the 2007 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (described in this post from last February). Lori Levin and Tom Payne are the co-chairs of NACLO 2007, and Drago Radev is the U.S. team's coach.
I'm reading an interesting articla (single-page printable version) by Ian Parker in the latest New Yorker ("Swingers: Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?"), and I've just come across an etymological tidbit:
For decades, “pygmy chimpanzee” remained the common term for these apes, even after “bonobo” was first proposed, in a 1954 paper by Eduard Tratz, an Austrian zoologist, and Heinz Heck, the director of the Munich zoo. (They suggested, incorrectly, that “bonobo” was an indigenous word; they may have been led astray by Bolobo, a town on the south bank of the Congo River. In the area where Hohmann works, the species is called edza.)Now, I'm not willing to take Parker's word for this (how could he be sure it's not indigenous?), but it's certainly plausible, and the dictionary etymologies don't inspire confidence: "Native name for the animal" (OED), "Of central African origin" (AHD), and the refreshingly honest "origin unknown" (Merriam-Webster). Anybody know anything more about the origins of the word?
(Takayoshi Kano and Toshisada Nishida propose, absurdly, to replace "bonobo" with "bilia" as the English term because "the term bonobo is not understood at all in the only country where P. paniscus is living, the Democratic Republic of Congo... Here, bilia is the common name for this ape," as if there were only one language in the third largest country in Africa. They add "As a matter of fact, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the single form is elia, and bilia is the plural form. However, we would be able to use bilia as singular and 'bilias' as the plural form since the term would be incorporated into English": they want to use a local word so the locals will be happy, but they want to use it ungrammatically in local terms. At any rate, the proposal is obviously quixotic, but I mention it because it looks to me like their "elia" could be related to the article's "edza.")
(Executive summary of the article: bonobos have been studied mainly in captivity, and excessively far-reaching conclusions have been drawn about their sexuality, peaceableness, and difference from chimps; studying them in the wild is very, very difficult.)
Arnold Zwicky in Language Log quotes a striking pair of sentences from a Palo Alto Daily News story:
This was the first officer-involved shooting in San Mateo since Labor Day, when a homeless man wielding a knife was shot. The last such shooting in the city since that incident was almost 24 years ago, Raffaelli said.As Zwicky says, "In the first sentence we have an ordinary use of temporal since... But in the second sentence the time span is between an anchor time (again, last Labor Day) and an EARLIER time (of the shooting 24 years ago). Time seems to be running backwards; before, not since, is the appropriate P (preposition or subordinator) here." He analyzes it as a deliberate usage ("The writer seems to have generalized since from referring specifically to elapsed time... to referring to any span between two times"), but it seems to me much more likely that it was an accidental result of botched copyediting and that all parties involved, if shown the sentence as printed, would say in annoyance "How did that slip through?" It just seems too far outside the norm to be anyone's actual usage.
But I've been wrong about such things plenty of times, so I ask the assembled multitudes: does it seem likely to you that someone in the normal course of speaking or writing English could use "since then" to mean "before then"?
I'm still reading Shklovsky's A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922
Anyway, I thought I'd quote a bit from his stay in the (briefly quasi-independent) Ukraine in 1919. The German-imposed hetman Skoropadsky has been chased out and the Ukrainian nationalist Petliura is coming in (Kiev changed hands 16 times during this period):
Petlyura's men entered the city. There turned out to be a lot of Ukrainians in the city. I had met them before, working as regimental clerks, etc.I'm not making fun of the Ukrainians, although, in the bottom of all our hearts, we people of Russian background are hostile to any "dialect." How we made fun of the Ukrainian language! A hundred times I heard "Samoper poper na mordopisniu," which means "The automobile drove to the photograph." We don't like what isn't our own. Turgenev's "Grae, grae, voropae" weren't inspired by love, either...
...Meanwhile, the process of Ukrainization went forward."We don't like what isn't our own" is a profound statement about human nature. It's obvious in general, but it bears repeating in all sorts of circumstances, such as those involving prejudice against forms of language, whether those belonging to another people or those that are simply too modern for us. (Hopefully, you're not disinterested.)During those days, all the hard signs in Kiev perished.
The order was given to change all the billboards to Ukrainian.
Not everyone knew the language. We in the units and the Ukrainians sent in from outside talked about technical matters in Russian, occasionally adding a Ukrainian word or two.
Once again, it was "Grae, grae, voropae."
There's a mess of pottage for you!
All the billboards had to be changed to Ukrainian in one day.
It's easily done. All you had to do was change the hard sign into a soft sign, and one kind of i into another kind.
People worked around the clock. There were ladders everywhere.
The billboards were changed. The hard signs had been put up during Skoropadsky's regime.
And the changing of the billboards is a perfect image of the kind of thing that tends to be important to conquerors. People are starving, no one has work, the entire structure of life is collapsing, but the first thing we do, let's kill all the hard signs!
1) Here's an example of why what I think of as the American use of should, exclusively to mean 'ought to,' is preferable to the traditional/U.K. use, in which it is also used in counterfactuals, the equivalent of American would. The first paragraph of Timothy Garton Ash's NYRB review of several recent Günter Grass books begins:
Granted: he was a member of the Waffen-SS. But suppose that revelation had not overshadowed last year's publication of Günter Grass's memoir, like a mushroom cloud. What should we have made of Peeling the Onion? We should, I believe, have said that this is a wonderful book, a return to classic Grass territory and style, after long years of disappointing, wooden, and sometimes insufferably hectoring works from his tireless pen, and a perfect pendant to his great "Danzig trilogy" of novels, starting with The Tin Drum. That is what we should still say, first and last.I'm reading along, mentally translating "What should we have made" to "What would we have made" and "We should, I believe, have said" to "We would, I believe, have said." Then I get to the last sentence: "That is what we should still say, first and last." I think this means "That is what we ought to say [even in present circumstances]," but after that barrage of counterfactual "should" it pulls the reader up short and forces a quick reanalysis. And I'm still not absolutely sure, thanks to that damnable ambiguity.
2) Naked Translations has an interesting post about the word artichoke, which goes back to Arabic al-ḫaršuf. Céline adds a remark about "the French expression avoir un cœur d'artichaut (to have an artichoke heart), which describes someone who falls in love with everything in sight" and adds the question "Am I right in thinking that a similarly colourful English equivalent doesn't exist?" I think she is.
3) Anatol Stefanowitsch in Bremer Sprachblog has a post about an exhibition in Linz that the artist, Folke Tegetthoff, calls, in English, "Six Tales of Time"; Tegetthoff (an odd-looking name, by the way—I wonder where the stress goes?) explains: "An sich bin ich gegen Anglizismen und gegen die Verhunzung unserer sehr schönen, poetischen Sprache, aber ‚Sechs Geschichten über die Zeit‘ klingt technischer und holpriger" ['I'm against anglicisms and the butchering of our very beautiful and poetic language, but "Sechs Geschichten über die Zeit" sounds technical and rough']. Anatol provides a nice chart matching English legend/tale/story/history against German Legende/Sage/Märchen/Erzählung/Geschichte.
And now I must get back to packing...
This wonderful site modestly bills itself simply as "Translations of women's writing before 1700," but this paragraph gives a fuller picture:
Below are links that will take you to passages from over 125 women writers. The entries are on women who produced a substantial amount of work before 1700, some or all of which has been translated into modern English. Each entry will tell you about the print sources from which the translated passages are taken; it will also tell you of useful secondary sources and Internet sites, when those are available.They really do scour both print and the internet; I checked one of my favorite unknown women writers, Olympia Morata, and not only do they have her, their first link is to my post on her! So I heartily endorse this site (which is maintained by Dorothy Disse), and I look forward to discovering many writers previously unknown to me. (Via wood s lot.)
The Welsh Department of Swansea University has put online an edition of the work of the medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym; from here:
Dafydd ap Gwilym composed Welsh-language poetry about love and nature in the mid-fourteenth century, using extremely sophisticated verse forms. He is generally regarded as Wales’s greatest Welsh-language poet, and is a major figure in medieval European literature (as shown by the numerous translations of his poems published both in the UK and the USA). The standard critical edition for the last fifty years is Sir Thomas Parry’s Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym published in 1952. This new edition will represent a substantial advance in scholarship in that it will provide superior texts and new interpretations of these highly complex poems. It will also make the poems accessible to a wider audience, both Welsh and English-speaking, by providing paraphrases in modern Welsh and English translations of all the poems.Here are the poems; pull down the menu at the lower left, choose a poem, and decide which of the options at the bottom of the right half of the window you want (Sources | Stemma | Audio | Edited Text | Welsh Paraphrase | English Translation | Manuscript Texts | Notes | Line Orders | Manuscript Images). It's really very well done. (Via MetaFilter.)
The estimable John Emerson of Idiocentrism has a post pointing out that the Inuit and the Turks have similar words for kinds of boats, both of which have wound up in English:
The word “kayak” came into the European languages in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, probably brought from Greenland by Dutch or Danish whalers. Some version of this word is now used in most European languages for any boat built on the model of Inuit (Eskimo) skin boats... Through Turkish, in the 1500’s the “caique” finally appeared in Italian as the name of a boat found on the Adriatic, and the name spread from there to the other European languages, finally reaching Sweden in the 1700’s. There the boat names “caique” and “kayak” met – albeit as the names of boats of entirely different kinds.His post makes a case for that relationship, and he has added a recent query:The fact that the Turks and the Inuit both had boat names pronounced something like “kayak” seems at first to be a pure coincidence of the type that cranks love and linguists dread. However, a good case can be made that the Inuit and the Turkish words were etymologically related, and that the word probably originated in Turkish.
According to commentor Ruth at GNXP, Turkish qayiq also means "ski", and is an inflected word derived from the root kay- "slide". She wonders whether the Inuit qayaq is also an inflected word. If not, it would seem to be a borrowing from Turkish into Inuit, whereas if it's inflected in both languages, perhaps there was a common Turkish-Inuit ancestor.Anybody know enough Inuit to be able to answer this?
Incidentally, the linked GHXP post mentions that John's book Substantific Marrow is out, with sections on "The Back Door of Europe" (on the Baltic-Black Sea corridor), "The State", and "Love or Money"; he adds: "By Christmas I should have a third book out, about philosophy, economics, and temporality. Sometime next year my book on Inner Eurasian history should be out; this book should be of interest to many people here. I'm going to be spending the next several years gathering and finishing up stuff I've been working on since about 1985." Sounds promising!
The Scottish Corpus (which I blogged here) has all sorts of good stuff, and a correspondent sent me a link to a long document, "Conversation 14: Two male students on university life," with accompanying video that can be accessed by the speaker link (third from the right at the bottom). The neat thing is that the transcript of the conversation moves down to keep pace with the video, so you can watch, listen, and read without any effort. I think I'm sort of getting a handle on what happens to the vowels in the dialect, and as a bonus there's an interesting discussion of attempted gentrification in Glasgow and Edinburgh. And I was amused to see that one of the students had gone to a suburb of Glasgow called Rutherglen and been corrected by the locals when he said (as I would have, knowing what I do of Scots accentuation) "ruther-GLEN"—apparently it's RUTH-ergl(e)n, with a barely perceptible final e. Good to know it's not only clueless foreigners who get these things wrong. (Thanks for the link, Lynsey!)
I'm still reading Shklovsky (see this post), and have gotten to the section where, disgusted with the increasing chaos of the Provisional Government, he "went to the War Ministry at the Soviet and said I would go anywhere, only as far away as possible," and wound up in Persia, "which had already been occupied by Russian troops for ten years" (the northern part, that is). "We had gone to a foreign country, occupied it, added to its gloom and violence our violence, laughed at its laws, hampered its trade, refused to let it open any factories and supported the shah. And for this purpose, we kept troops... It was imperialism—what's more, Russian imperialism, which is to say, stupid imperialism." (Yes, the parallel occurred to me too.) Of the area he was in, around Urmia, he says "A mixed population. Persians, Armenians, Tatars, Kurds, Nestorian Aissors and Jews made up the population." I was, of course, familiar with most of these groups, but "Nestorian Aissors" produced only a faint echo. I knew that the Nestorians were officially the Church of the East and that "Aissors" (usually Aisors or Aysors) was a term for the Assyrian ethnic-religious group of the Middle East, but other than that I had only a vague memory that there had been a massacre of Assyrians in Iraq in the '30s. So I did a little googling and turned up an article by Arianne Ishaya, "From Contributions to Diaspora: Assyrians in the History of Urmia, Iran," where I learned of the astonishing enclave of culture represented by the Assyrian community in that region a century ago:
Until 1918, at which time they were uprooted from the region, the Assyrians lived in compact villages along the three rivers of Nazlu, Shahar, and Baranduz. These rivers flow eastward towards the lake of Urmia from their sources in the Zagros Mountains bordering Turkey. Of a total of 300 villages in the region, 60 had exclusively Assyrian population, and another 60 had a mixed Assyrian, Azari Turkish, and/or Armenian population... The Assyrian population of the town of Urmia itself was only 600 people, or about 100 families. They lived in the special Christian quarter of the town. It is estimated that around 1900, 40% of the population of the region was Christian (Assyrian and Armenian). The uniqueness of the Urmian community was that it was highly urbanized and westernized. This was essentially attributed to the presence of various foreign missions in the region... Although foreign missions brought educational opportunities and a measure of intellectual enlightenment to the Assyrians, they were a mixed blessing. The privileged position of the Assyrians made them a subject of envy and resentment to their Muslim neighbors. The unified Church of the East became dissected into various protestant, Russian Orthodox, and Catholic denominations. Moreover, the younger generation became alienated from their ethnic traditions and was trained in skills for which economic opportunities were scarce.
With the beginning of WWI, the rate of literacy among the Assyrians of Urmia was estimated at 80%. This is a remarkably high rate of literacy for the time even by the standards of an urbanized center in the West, let alone a rural area in the Middle East. At the time, there were more Assyrian physicians in Urmia than all of Iran; Assyrian professionals under the supervision of the foreign missionaries staffed all missionary schools, newspapers and hospitals.Soon after, all this vanished, one small forgotten piece of the unimaginably huge disaster that was World War One.The first mission school opened in 1836 under the direction of Rev. Justin Perkins. Prior to that, the native Assyrians did have a few schools of their own. The one in Urmia was in the village of Gogtapa where Mougdoussi (pilgrim) Hormizd had hired a learned Assyrian from Tyari to educate a number of children there. The missionary Perkins was pleased to see the thirst of the Assyrians for education. He was impressed to find how fast the children learned to read, write, and memorize long verses from the Bible. The first so-called textbooks were in the form of lessons written on cards. In the absence of notepads, children used their fingers to do their manuscript writing arithmetic exercises in small sandboxes. The first Assyrian teacher was Rev. priest Abraham, the nephew of Hormizd, who was educated in the above-mentioned Gogtapa school. After learning to read and write, the Assyrian children began to teach their parents to do so.
In 1843, the American Mission also opened a college in Seir, a seminary for women called Fiske Seminary. Later, in 1880 the Mission opened a medical hospital in Urmia There was also a town college, called Sardari, which was for the rich and admitted Jews, Muslims and Christians alike...
In time, the curriculum of the American Mission schools became westernized. In a 1906 issue Kokhva, the sole Assyrian non-denominational newspaper, published a report with regards to the graduation ceremony of the American Mission College and high school students. While the report praised the high quality of students’ presentations in foreign languages, it lamented the total ignorance of these students about their own history. In subsequent reports we read how parents sat patiently during the graduation ceremonies listening to the presentations of their sons and daughters in English and Farsi, not understanding a word of what was being said. As unlikely as it seems, between 1906-1914, the Assyrians performed Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the village of Gulpashan, several plays by Moliere, translated by Kasha Mushi Babella, in the village of Golpatalikhan where the Catholic mission had built a large school. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and several plays by Gogol... were staged in the town of Urmia. Interestingly, men played the role of women in these plays...
Contrary to the American Mission, the Catholic Lazarists and the Anglicans made the teaching of the classical Syriac and the vernacular mandatory in their schools. The result was the emergence of a group of Assyrian Syriac scholars such as Paul Bedjan, Aba Solomon-d- Tkhuma, Havil Zia d-Mavana, Mir Aziz-d- Khosrava, Shamasha Yossip de Kelata, and others who contributed greatly to the field of Syriac studies. Mar Toma Audo, the Metropolitan of the Catholic Mission in Urmia and Salamas since 1892, was a great scholar who in addition to various publications in classical Syriac, also authored and translated several books in modern Assyrian. The majority of these scholars were murdered during the 1915 massacre, or the 1918 flight.
As to the American Mission schools, they produced hundreds of doctors, teachers, preachers, nurses, and other kinds of professionals. There were almost as many men as there were women. The first women college graduates in Urmia were Sanam, Sarah, and Mourassa all of whom went on to become great educators. Many scholars and promising students were lost along with hundreds of priceless manuscripts and rare ecclesiastical documents in the ravages of WWI. Such losses were a great blow to the Assyrians and the Iranians because they are irreplaceable.
The American Mission acquired a printing press in 1840 at a time when printing presses did not exist in all of Persia. The first Assyrian printer was Yonan of Charbash. He was selected in 1847 along with a few other promising seminary students for this post. Another printer was Ismail. He was a self-taught man, a very resourceful person. As a carpenter he made all the furniture of the printing office together with all the cases and stands. He was a good pressman, foreman, and was responsible for the final proofreading. He was a type-founder, and in short, a jack-of-all-trades. From 1840-1852 eighty works were off the press in both vernacular and classical Syriac, the first being the Bible. Following the example of the American Mission, the Catholic, Russian, and Anglican Missions also acquired printing presses for their own publications.
The image of Urmian Assyrians as an isolated rural community is totally inaccurate. They were fully aware of world events, national political developments, and local news through newspapers and periodicals. From mid 19th century until the eve of WWI, four denominational newspapers were published on a, more or less, regular basis. In 1906 a non-denominational newspaper was added to the group. Zahrira-d-Bahra (Ray of Light) started publication in 1849 by the American Mission. Later, the French Mission published Qala-d-Shrara (the Voice of Truth) began publication in 1897; the Russian Orthodox Mission published Urmi Orthodoxeta; and finally, the Anglican Mission followed suit by publishing the Assyrian Missionary Quarterly. The independent Assyrian periodical was Kokhva (The Star) founded by Qasha Baba Nwyia-d-Wazirabad, a scholar and theologian who, after graduating from Urmia College, had spent nine years in U.S.A. and had obtained two separate degrees in theology and science. He coined the subtitle for Kokhva that reads: “Kokhva, a small lone star in the horizon.” Although he passed away shortly after Kokhva began publication, the editorial staff maintained this publication as the voice of the nationalist Assyrians. It was published biweekly from 1906-1918, with interruptions during the war years. Kokhva had various columns to cover world news, national political developments, and local events. It also published articles related to medicine, literature, sciences, and so on. Examples of articles that appeared in Kokhva are biographies on Joan of Arc; Tolstoy, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Edison; world events such as the Titanic catastrophe, the San Francisco Earthquake, new inventions, political developments in Turkey, Germany, and in the Balkans. There were special articles on the Assyrian language, history, and a debate on the name “Assyrian” versus “Suraya” in several issues. Thus Kokhva kept the Assyrians of Urmia abreast with the latest developments in the world.
In the plain of Salmas, north of Urmia, was located the town of Khosrava, another Assyrian center of population. Khosrava served as the headquarters of the Catholic Mission where it established several schools, seminaries, and a hospital there. The town had a mixed population of Assyrians and Armenians numbering 30,000. The Catholic seminary produced internationally renowned scholars such as Paul Bejan. He was a collector of ancient religious and literary manuscripts. Single-handedly, he edited, compiled, wrote and published 36 volumes of literary material in both vernacular and classical Syriac. Khosrava was called “the little Rome of Persia.” By 1918 there was practically nothing left of the Catholic Mission in Persia. In one report we read: “In 1923 in some places the jungle had returned, full of reptiles, wolves, and savage animals. Churches, schools and houses were in ruin...
American style advertising appeared on the pages of Kokhva beginning in 1912. Consumerism was taking hold among the population. Assyrians were opening stores or stalls in the caravanserai or Middle Eastern style shopping malls. There were advertisements from merchants selling home fixtures such as cabinets, doors, mirrors, and home furnishings imported from U.S.A., Russia, or Europe (primarily Germany). Others opened stores to sell watches, bicycle parts, ladies and men’s wear, cloth, and other imported goods. Optometrists, dentists, and doctors advertised the address of their clinics and medical supplies. Some of the advertisements were in English which indicates the prevalence of this language among the population... There was also advertising for European fashions, and instructions on how and where to wear them. One Assyrian opened a hotel for those coming from villages to town to have a place to stay. Another one invested in an “icemaker.” There is a significant difference in the investment pattern of Assyrians and Armenians. Possessing greater capital, Armenians were involved in overseas trade and were investing in land with mining reserves, flourmills and building modern style bazaars (shopping malls).
As early as 1907 the Assyrian, Yossipkhan the photographer, was showing silent movies or “moving pictures” in a private home... The news of prosperity in Urmia reached other Assyrian communities in the Middle East. Kokhva printed a letter that Rabi Binyamin Arsanis, the head of the village “motvas,” (associations) had received. It was from a man writing on behalf of his Assyrian community in Damascus, Syria. It said, in part: “5000 Assyrians live in Damascus. After hearing about the legendary Urmia, we would like to relocate. We ask permission and your help in immigrating to Urmia.”
Those of you who (like me) were avid readers of Jonathon Delacour's old blog The Heart of Things will rejoice to learn that he's returned to Blogovia. He says:
Whereas the previous incarnation, The Heart of Things, dealt with subjects ranging from CSS to the Iraq War, this time I’ve decided to restrict myself to the things which lie closest to my heart: photography, the cinema, and (indirectly) the Japanese language. We’ll see how it goes…Obviously I'm hoping he'll drop tidbits about Japanese from time to time, but whatever he wants to write about is fine with me. Welcome back.
In the process of packing I keep running across books I'd forgotten about, and one was so pertinent to my recent focus I started reading it immediately, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922
In Russian literature, Shklovsky had as his particular and peculiar predecessor a lonely and almost forgotten genius, Konstantin Leontiev. For many years, Leontiev served as a Russian diplomat in the Turkish Mediterranean. Like the English and French romantics, he was impressed with the variety, the antiquity, the contrasts, the energy, the interlocking layered quality, the bewildering traces of contrasting past civilizations, the color, the vitality, the instability, the unreliability, the extreme cruelty, and the severe contrasts of asceticism and sensuality, the sheer raw material available to feed the imagination. Unlike his western European counterparts, however, Leontiev saw the East as the place where Russian values were fulfilled rather than reversed; the source of all Russian values, for Leontiev, was Orthodoxy, and the possibility of Orthodoxy in the East was a new kind of community very different from the western European power-state. Shklovsky does not exactly share Leontiev's "Byzantinism," but I believe that Leontiev, who was also, incidentally[,] a precursor of formalism in literary criticism, has influenced him in many ways.Intriguing, no? Now extended quotes from two of the best books about Russian culture I know, James H. Billington's The Icon and the Axe
and D.S. Mirsky's A History of Russian Literature. First Billington (pp. 440-441):
In some respects Pobedonostsev's social doctrine resembles the theory of "freezng up Russia to avoid rotting" contemporaneously being advanced by Constantine Leont'ev. He detested the tendency toward uniformity in "the Europe of railroads and banks.... of increasing material indulgence, and prosaic dreams about the common good." Reminiscent of Nietzsche in his aesthetic antagonism to bourgeois mediocrity, which amplifies a sentiment already found in Herzen as well as Pisemsky and other anti-nihilist novelists of the populist era:And here is the extended essay by Prince Mirsky (himself a contradictory and tragic figure, who voluntarily returned to Stalin's Russia to perish in the gulag, and whose book is still to my mind the best history of prerevolutionary Russian literature):Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up on Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments—only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life "individually" or "collectively" on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?There will be no beauty in life without inequality and violence. To pluck the rose, man must be willing to pierce his fingers on the thorns. Even before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in the mid-seventies Leont'ev insisted that "liberal nihilism" has produced such "decrepitude of mind and heart" that what is needed for rejuvenation may well be "a whole period of external wars analogous to the Thirty Years' War or at least to the epoch of Napoleon I."For aristocratic and aesthetic reasons, Leont'ev rebelled at all reforms, proposing a total return to the ritual and discipline of Byzantine rule. He died as a monk in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, bemoaning the end of the age of poetry and human variety.
Constantine Nikoláyevich Leóntiev (1831-1891) studied medicine at the University of Moscow, where he came under the influence of the "philanthropic" literature of the time and became an ardent admirer of Turgénev. In 1851, under this influence, he wrote a play full of morbid self-analysis. He took it to Turgénev, who received him, liked it, and used his influence to place it in a magazine. But it was not passed by the censor. Turgénev continued patronizing Leóntiev and at one time considered him, next to Tolstóy, the most promising young writer of the time. In 1854, when Leóntiev was in his last year at school, the Crimean War broke out, and Leóntiev volunteered for the Crimean army as a military surgeon. He worked for the hospitals—and worked hard, for he was passionately interested in his work. About this time he developed a paradoxical theory of aesthetic immoralism that took strange forms at times—thus on two occasions, as he tells us in his wonderful memoirs, he encouraged marauding in the Cossacks of a regiment he was attached to. But he remained himself scrupulously honest. He was one of the few non-combatants connected with the Crimean army who had the opportunity of enriching themselves and did not.Yet another name to add to my reading list...So when the war was over he returned to Moscow penniless. He continued practicing as a doctor, and published, in 1861-62, a series of novels that had no success. They are not great novels, but they are remarkable for the fierce intensity with which he expressed in them, always in the most striking and provoking manner, his aesthetic immoralism. This strange immoralistic pathos is best of all seen in A Husband's Confession, in which a middle-aged husband encourages the misconduct of his young wife, not from any idea of the "rights of woman," but because he wants her to live a full and beautiful life of passion, ecstasy, and suffering. At this period of his life he began to be attracted by the Slavophils' respect for and love of the originality of Russian life, but their moral idealism remained quite alien to him.
In 1863 he was admitted to the consular service and was appointed secretary and dragoman to the Russian consulate at Candia. He did not stay long at Candia, for he soon had to be transferred for horsewhipping the French vice-consul. This, however, did not impede his career. He moved up the ladder of consular service with great rapidity, and in 1869 he was appointed to the important and independent post of consul at Yanina, in Epirus. All this time his behavior was far from exemplary. His hero was Alcibiades, and he tried to live up to his standard of a "full" and beautiful life. He lived passionately and expensively. He was always in some love affair—and confided them to his wife. She did not like it, and it would seem that these confidences were the cause of her mental illness, for after 1869 she became, with intervals, a permanent mental invalid. This was the first shadow on the wall. In 1871 came the next—the death of his mother, for whom he had a deep affection.
In the same year he was transferred to Salonika and almost immediately had a very severe attack of local malaria. He was in imminent danger, and on his bed of sickness he made a vow to go to Mount Athos to expiate his sins. As soon as he was well enough, he fulfilled his vow and spent about a year at Athos submitting to the severe rule of the monastery and to the strict spiritual guidance of an "elder." From this time he recognized as sinful his life of the previous years and all his immoralistic writings and became converted to the most ascetic form of Byzantine and monastic orthodoxy. But his aesthetic immoralism remained in substance unchanged—it only bowed down before the rule of dogmatic Christianity. In 1873, finding himself in disagreement with Ambassador Ignátiev about the Græco-Bulgarian church schism, he left the consular service. Ignátiev, like the Slavophil he was, and like all official Russia, took the side of the Bulgarians because they were Slavs. To Leóntiev, the Bulgarians—Slavs or no Slavs—were democrats and rebels to their lawful spiritual lord the Œcumenical Patriarch. This was characteristic of Leóntiev—he had no interest in mere Slavdom. What he wanted was a firm conservatism in the matter of national originality and tradition, and of this he found more in the Greeks than in the Bulgarians...
[Here I omit a description of the development of his historical theories and the increasing difficulties of his personal life.]
...Still, in the last years of his life he found more sympathy than before. And before he died he was surrounded by a small number of devoted followers and admirers. This brought some consolation to his last years. He spent more and more time in Óptina, the most famous of Russian ascetic monasteries, and in 1891... he took monastic vows with the name of Clement. He settled in the ancient Trinity Monastery near Moscow, where he died in the same year.
Leóntiev's political writings... are written in a vehement, nervous, hurried, disrupted, but vigorous and pointed style. The nervous uneasiness reflected in it reminds one of Dostoyévsky. But, unlike Dostoyévsky, Leóntiev is a logician, and the outline of his argument through the agitated nervousness of his style is almost as clear as Tolstóy's... He hated the modern West, both for its atheism and for its democratic, leveling tendencies that destroyed the complex and varied beauty of social life. The chief thing for Russia was to stop the process of dissolution and putrefaction coming from the West. This is expressed in the words (attributed to Leóntiev, though they do not occur in his works): "We must freeze Russia, to prevent her from rotting."...
In all Leóntiev did and wrote there was such a profound contempt for mere morality, such a passionate hatred of the democratic herd, such a violent assertion of the aristocratic ideal, that he has been more than once called the Russian Nietzsche. But Nietzsche's impulse was religious, and Leóntiev's was not. He was a rare instance in modern times (the thing was a rule in the Middle Ages) of an essentially unreligious man submitting consciously and obediently to the hard rule of dogmatic and exclusive religion. But he was not a seeker after God or after the absolute. Leóntiev's world is a finite world, a world whose very essence and beauty lie in its finiteness and in its imperfection...
Though Leóntiev preferred life to art and liked literature in the measure it reflected beautiful, that is, organic and varied, life, he was perhaps the only genuine literary critic of his time. For, alone of all his contemporaries, he was capable of going to the essential facts of literary art apart from the message of the author. His book on the novels of Tolstóy... is, for its penetrating analysis of the novelist's means of expression, the masterpiece of Russian criticism...
During the last years of his life Leóntiev published some fragments of his personal recollections, which for the general reader are his most interesting work. Their nervous style, their unlimited sincerity, and the great vividness of the story give them a unique place among Russian memoirs... It is truly "infectious." The reader himself becomes part of the agitated, passionate, impulsive soul of Leóntiev.
There's a wonderful thread at Crooked Timber (which I found via The Tensor): the post involves a (not that amusing) anecdote about a doctoral candidate defending her dissertation on Samuel Pepys and pronouncing the surname wrongly because she's only seen it written, but the commenters provide endless examples of words and names that they or others have mispronounced (as well as names with local pronunciations), and I learned some things. I was unfamiliar with the name Keohane, for instance; apparently it's a variant of the Irish name usually spelled Cohan, and is pronounced either koh-HAN (as in Ireland) or ko-HANE (the version apparently used by the theorist of Utilitarianism). And someone asked about pronouncing Kristeva ("I always assumed that her native land stressed the penultimate syllable and her adopted France the last one, so you could say it either way"), which is something I'd vaguely wondered about on the rare occasions I encountered her name, so I looked it up and composed the following response:
You can’t assume anything about Bulgarian names; the stress can fall on any syllable, and (annoyingly) it’s very hard to find out the correct way—Bulgarian reference works, unlike Russian ones, don’t tend to provide stress marks. Her name in Bulgarian is Юлия Кръстева, for which a standard transliteration would be Yuliya Krŭsteva (another version of the last name would be Krasteva: see Wikipedia); since the Russians stress the name on the first syllable, I make the risky assumption that the Bulgarians do too, in which case it would be pronounced in Bulgarian CRUST-eh-vah. I don’t know why she chooses the i vowel, but I say KRIST-e-va, and that’s the way I like it.My full comment was considerably longer, since there were already 179 before me and I had to respond to a bunch of them.
I had been irritated by this myself when I read Michiko Kakutani's review of A.A. Gill's The Angry Island (and let me add that Kakutani is the most consistently irritating reviewer I know): "he delivers a finely observed monologue on English accents from 'Received Pronunciation' (the sound of the classic novel and the King James Bible) to the increasingly popular Estuary ("flat, unimaginative, diluted Cockney"), adopted by the young who think there is nothing cool about 'sounding like a character from "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."'" This may be stupider than anything William Safire ever wrote, and I do not use such a comparison lightly. Received Pronunciation is the public-school accent that used to be de rigueur at the BBC; it has nothing to do with "the classic novel and the King James Bible," and I find it hard to imagine how Kakutani thought it might. Anyway, I had meant to gripe about it and forgot, but Mark Liberman at Language Log reminded me, so thanks, Mark, and anyone who wants to know more about RP should go to his post and follow his links.
Trevor sent me links to three interesting-looking sites, and since I'm frantically boxing books, I'm just going to throw them up here and hope somebody likes one or more of them. Thanks, Trevor!
Metro Gael: "Gearóid Ó Colmáin's blog consists of articles written for Metro Eireann, The Irish Democrat, and other writings. His interests include current affairs, the arts and languages. ... Gearóid speaks Irish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Swedish and English and has a rudimentary grasp of Latin, Ancient Greek, Welsh and Japanese." A man after my own heart. This post is about leprechauns: "It has become the most effete cliché in our vacuous tourist industry. Yet very few people know what it means, where the word comes from." Yes, some of the posts are in Irish; just scroll down. Unless, of course, you read Irish.
If you do read Irish, you'll get more than I can out of Acadamh Fódhla, according to this page "a steering group on seanós song, music and lore."
Finally, Keltalingvaj Novaĵoj has "Novaĵoj pri keltaj lingvoj, bretona, irlanda, kimra, kornvala, manksa, kaj skotgaela, speciale kiel ili esta parlataj kaj instuataj en Kanado kaj Usono." But don't worry, the actual posts aren't in Esperanto!
By popular demand (well, a couple of comments), herewith two more Prigov poems with my translations. The first is a parody of a Pushkin poem ("The Black Shawl") unknown to English-speaking readers; I've taken the liberty of making it instead a parody of Keats.
Когда я в Калуге по случаю былAnd here's another, perhaps more serious:
Одну калужанку я там полюбилБыла в ней большая народная сила
Меня на руках она часто носилаА что я? – москвич я, я хрупок и мал
Однажды в сердцах я ей вот что сказалМужчина ведь мужественней и сильней
Быть должен – на том и рассталися с нейI met a fair Kaluga maid
As in Kaluga I did dwell
Alone and palely loitering -
I loved her well.She took me in her well-thewed arms
And carried me as I were light,
For she was of the people, with
The people's might.But I, I came from Moscow town
And I was puny, small and weak
And I was wroth and full of rage
And thus did speak:"A man must be the manlier
The stronger of a loving pair -
Farewell." I went my lonely way
And left her there.
Висит на небе ворон-птица
А под землей лежит мертвец
Они друг другу смотрят в лица
Они друг друга видят сквозь
Все, что ни есть посередине
О ты, земля моя родная!
Меня ты держишь здесь певцом
Меж вороном и мертвецом
A raven's hanging in the sky
And underground there lies a corpse
They look each other in the eye
They see each other through the ruck
Of everything that's in between
O you, my own, my native land!
You make me hold a poet's course
Between a raven and a corpse.
I discovered (via Anatoly) that the artist and poet Dmitri Prigov (Russian Wikipedia) died early today following a massive heart attack. It's hard to describe his wonderful little poems; I'm afraid a couple of slapdash translations won't honor his memory very effectively, but I'll do the best I can:
Женщина в метро меня лягнула
Ну, пихаться - там куда ни шло
Здесь же она явно перегнула
Палку, и все дело перешло
В ранг ненужно личных отношений
Я, естественно, в ответ лягнул
Но и тут же попросил прощенья -
Просто я как личность выше был
So a woman kicked me in the subway
Well, a little jostling's not so bad
This woman, though, did it six ways from Sunday
She went too far, and so the whole thing had
To sink to the level of the unnecessarily
Personal - of course I kicked her back
But right away I told her I was sorry -
You see, I as a person am above all that
В пустыне
Большие пустые чужие каменья безводной пустыни
Пустые чужие каменья безводной пустыни
Чужие каменья безводной пустыни
Каменья безводной пустыни
Безводной пустыни
Пустыни
In the desert
Immense and deserted and alien stones of the waterless desert
Deserted and alien stones of the waterless desert
Alien stones of the waterless desert
Stones of the waterless desert
The waterless desert
The desert
This is the first of what will doubtless be numerous reports on Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Totēukyoe, ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih.After the first couple of excerpts, he gives the Nahuatl in footnotes, but it's all there, in "a convenient form of romanised spelling" based on linguistic analysis rather than simply reproducing the inconsistent (and of course hispanicized) transcription of Bernardino de Sahagún. Compare the snippet shown in the right column here ("[first line illegible: thanks, Google snippet view!]...oipan tommovetzitico in mopetlatzin, in mocpaltzin, in oachitzinca njmjtzōnopielili, in onjmjtzonnotlapielili...") to the semi-rationalized version here (499. *oitech*. oitech tommopachihuiltico in matzin, in motepetzin mexico, oipan tommohuetzitico in mopetlatzin, in mocpaltzin, in huachitzinca nimitzonnopielili, in onimitzonnotlapielili...") and Ostler's version (h represents the glottal stop): "ō īteč tommopāčiwiltīko in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihco, ō īpan tommowetziko in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, in ō ačitzinka nimitzonnopiyalīlih, in ōnimitzonnotlapiyalīlih..." ('you have approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you'). The account of Cortés's response is, of course, given in both English and Spanish. And the epigraph to Part I (The Nature of Language History) is a quote from Plutarch, given in both Greek and English. Like Helen DeWitt, I want to see books printed with all relevant languages in their proper form, and I see no reason why this cannot be done with today's techonology. I'm sure it was a nightmare getting the Ostler book typeset (and I think I caught a mistake in the Nahuatl: shouldn't "tommowetziko" be "tommowetzitīko"?), but it's a shining example of what can and should be accomplished.Our Lord, how you must have suffered, how fatigued you must be.
Addendum. Conrad quite rightly asks what Plutarch passage is quoted; it's the one where Themistocles compares language to carpets:
[King Xerxes] gave Themistocles leave to speak his mind freely on Greek affairs. Themistocles replied that the speech of man was like rich carpets, the patterns of which can only be shown by spreading them out; when the carpets are folded up, the patterns are obscured and lost; and therefore he asked for time. The king was pleased with the simile, and told him to take his time; and so he asked for a year. Then, having learned the Persian language sufficiently, he spoke with the king on his own...(Greek here.)
Plutarch, Themistocles, 29.5
As I said in my last post, publishers have sent me several books lately; some will require time to read and absorb, but a couple are so obviously wonderful I can tell you about them right away.
1) Walker & Company's Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed
2) Hippocrene Books, purveyor of references for some very hard-to-find languages (I have their little phrasebook/dictionaries for Georgian and Chechen next to each other on my shelf), have sent me a copy of their Modern Aramaic Dictionary & Phrasebook
Even as I begin the painful process of packing my 5,000 or so books for the move (yes, we've sold our house and found a new one in Hadley) I keep adding to the collection. During one of our trips to the Pioneer Valley I insisted on stopping at Bookends and wound up getting Svetlana Boym's Common Places ("Boym studies Russian culture in a broad sense of the word; she ranges from nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual thought to art and popular culture") and David Shub's classic biography of Lenin (sure, it's out of date, first published in 1948 and revised in 1966, but Shub, born in 1887 in Russia, knew most of the Bolshevik leaders personally, including Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin, and his perspective is irreplaceable). I just finished Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero
I still haven't actually read much of Bakhtin (on whose smoking habits I reported here, and with whose concept of "reported speech" I had fun here), but I keep coming across things that make me want to read more; the latest is Terry Eagleton's article in the LRB (a review of Graham Pechey's Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World). This part is especially intriguing:
Bakhtin’s central concept of dialogism does not mean bending a courteous ear to others, as some of his more liberal commentators seem to imagine. It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism. Language is torn between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces – the former decentring, the latter centralising. National languages aspire to be monological but are in fact thoroughly ‘heteroglossic’, spawning a multiplicity of dialects and speech styles.I don't think I agree that "linguistics can never be entirely distinguished from ethics," but it's an intriguing idea, and I certainly like the concept of "dialogism" as presented by Eagleton. (Via wood s lot.)In all these ways, Bakhtin’s work marks a momentous shift from language to discourse. Whereas Saussure and his disciples reduced language to a formal, contextless system, Bakhtin is seized by everything in language that cannot be formalised: context, intonation, implication, the materiality of the word, the non-said, the taken-for-granted, ideological evaluations and the social relations between speakers. If communication is what makes us human, linguistics can never be entirely distinguished from ethics.
We think of Lafcadio Hearn in connection with Japan, where he spent the last years of his life and wrote his most famous books (notably Kwaidan), but he lived for a dozen years in New Orleans; the Wikipedia entry on him says (as of today):
In the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati for New Orleans, Louisiana, where he initially wrote dispatches on his discoveries in the "Gateway to the Tropics" for the Cincinnati Commercial. He lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the Daily City Item and later for the Times Democrat. The vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs, many of which have not been collected, include the city's Creole population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Voudou. His writings for national publications, such as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine, helped mold the popular image of New Orleans as a colorful place with a distinct culture more akin to Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America. His best-known Louisiana works are Gombo Zhèbes, Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La Cuisine Créole (1885), a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine; and Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella based on the hurricane of 1856 first published in Harper's Monthly in 1888.
A correspondent (thanks, tellurian!) sent me a link to the Internet Archive page for the first-named book, whose full title is "Gombo zhèbes." Little dictionary of Creole proverbs, selected from six Creole dialects. Translated into French and into English, with notes, complete index to subjects and some brief remarks upon the Creole idioms of Lousiana; it's fun to look through, though the racist language of the time is cringe-inducing. (I assume he chose to write zhèbes rather than zèb to reproduce part of the French word herbes, but zh is clearly to be pronounced as simple /z/, since the phrase represents gombo aux herbes /gomboozerb/. I am informed by a commenter that zh may actually represent what it appears to, the sound of j in leisure.) The orthographical principles he used are discussed here; unfortunately, the txt file is chock full of scanning errors, but the correct readings are found in the other formats—I've corrected the beginning of the introduction, reproduced below, from the pdf:
Any one who has ever paid a flying visit to New Orleans probably knows something about those various culinary preparations whose generic name is "Gombo" —compounded of many odds and ends, with the okra-plant, or true gombo for a basis, but also comprising occasionally "losé, zepinard, laitie," and the other vegetables sold in bunches in the French market. At all events any person who has remained in the city for a season must have become familiar with the nature of "gombo filé," "gombo févi," and "gombo aux herbes," or as our colored cook calls it, "gombo zhèbes["]—for she belongs to the older generation of Creole cuisinières, and speaks the patois in its primitive purity, without using a single "r." Her daughter, who has been to school, would pronounce it gombo zhairbes:—the modern patois is becoming more and more Frenchified, and will soon be altogether forgotten, not only throughout Louisiana, but even in the Antilles. It still, however, retains originality enough to be understood with difficulty by persons thoroughly familiar with French; and even those who know nothing of any language but English, readily recognize it by the peculiarly rapid syllabification and musical intonation. Such English-speaking residents of New Orleans seldom speak of it as "Creole": they call it gombo, for some mysterious reason which I have never been able to explain satisfactorily. The colored Creoles of the city have themselves begun to use the term to characterize the patois spoken by the survivors of slavery days. Turiault tells us that in the towns of Martinique, where the Creole is gradually changing into French, the Bitacos, or country negroes who still speak the patois nearly pure, are much ridiculed by their municipal brethren: Ça ou ka palé là, chè, c'est nèg:—Ça pas Créole! [(]"What you talk is 'nigyp.r', my dear: that isn't Creole!") In like manner a young Creole negro or negress of New Orleans might tell an aged member of his race: "Ça qui to parlé ça pas Créole: ça c'est gombo!" I have sometimes heard the pure and primitive Creole also called "Congo" by colored folks of the new generation.(I left one word in its scan-garbled form, but it should be easily deciphered.) I should add that my correspondent got the link from this interesting thread at Undercover Black Man.The literature of "gombo" has perhaps even more varieties than there are preparations of the esculents above referred to;—the patois has certainly its gombo févi, its gom[b]o filé, its "gombo zhèbes"—both written and unwritten. A work like Marbot's "Bambous" would deserve to be classed with the pure "févi";—the treatises of Turiault, Baissac, St. Quentin, Thomas, rather resemble that fully prepared dish, in which crabs seem to struggle with fragments of many well-stewed meats, all strongly seasoned with pepper. The present essay at Creole folklore, can only be classed as "gombo zhèbes"—(Zhèbes çé feuil-chou, cresson, laitie, bettrav, losé, zepinard); the true okra is not the basis of our preparation;—it is a Creole dish, if you please, but a salmagundi of inferior quality.
1) A Wordorigins thread made me realize I didn't know anything about the word candy (I never did have much of a sweet tooth). So I looked it up in the OED:
[a. F. candi in sucre candi; cf. It. zucchero candi [...], med.L. saccharum candi; a. Arab., orig. Pers. qand sugar, the crystallized juice of the sugar-cane (whence Arab. qandah candy, qandi candied); of Indian origin, cf. Skr. khanda ‘piece’, also ‘sugar in crystalline pieces’, f. khand to break. As in the other langs., the full SUGAR CANDY (q.v.) appears much earlier than the simple candy.]I didn't even know it was short for sugar candy. And I wouldn't have been able to make even an educated guess about how it was used in the U.K., if at all; a commenter at Wordorigins who grew up in southeast England knew it only from the phrase candy floss (what we Americans call "cotton candy") and added "when I was small I don’t think I had any idea what the word meant; it was just a name for this particular sugary stuff." Does this accord with the experience of my readers from across the Atlantic?1. Crystallized sugar, made by repeated boiling and slow evaporation, more fully called SUGAR CANDY; also any confection made of, or incrusted with this. (In U.S. used more widely than in Great Britain, including toffee, and the like.)
[c1420 Liber Cocorum 7 With sugur candy thou may hit dowce. 1543 TRAHERON tr. Vigo’s Chirurg. Interpr. Straunge Wds., A syrupe they calle sugre candie.] 1769 MRS. RAFFALD Eng. Housekpr. 241 To a pound of double refined sugar put two spoonfuls of water, skim it well, and boil it almost to a candy, when it is cold, drain your plums out of the first syrup, and put them in the thick syrup. 1808-17 FOSTER in Life & Corr. (1846) I. lxxv. 410 Handing round candies and cowslip wine. 1844 EMERSON Young Amer. in Wks. (Bohn) II. 302 One man buys.. a land title.. and makes his posterity princes; and the other buys barley candy. [...]
2) Eve Kushner, who just got back from what sounds like a wonderful (and multilingual) visit to Europe, sent me a link to this webpage, which itself links to a page (pdf, HTML cache) called "Hawaiian in Kanji." Yes, that's right, Hawaiian written in kanji:
Unlike English, Hawaiian has a structure well adapted to being written in kanji. In some ways, Hawaiian is even better adapted to being written in kanji than is Japanese. Most meanings in Hawaiian are symbolized by a single word, as in Chinese. While resembling Chinese in having meanings symbolized by a single word, Hawaiian resembles Japanese in its sound structure with a concise set of syllables that form words through endless combinations. Dr. Wilson realized that Hawaiian could be written on an East Asian model either syllabically or through single words....Who'da thunkit?Learning to read Hawaiian in kanji has strengthened the overall reading ability of students in Hawaiian since it reinforces the successful Hawaiian system of reading by syllables while pushing students to move on to the larger units of words. Linguists have shown that logographic-based kanji are stored in a separate part of the brain from the phonemic-based letters of the Roman alphabet, thus exercising a different part of their mind. Similarly, cognitive psychologists have shown that learning to recognize and write kanji strengthens cognitive abilities that relate to geometry....
Hawaiian reading of kanji has connected the students of Nāwahīokalani'ōpu'u School with the broader community of descendants of East Asians in Hawai'i and with ancestral homelands in Asia. It has allowed students to see the parallels in the traditional Hawaiian hakalama syllabary with Japanese hiragana and katakana as well. The kanji have attracted considerable interest in visitors from East Asia who can read the Hawaiian logographic kanji with the same meanings as they are read in Hawaiian. There is now strengthened interest in students at Nāwahīokalani'ōpu'u to visit East Asia. There is also a better understanding of how Chinese characters spread out from China to a larger world, that now includes Hawai’i.
Derek Whitehead "has been Director, Information Resources and University Copyright Officer at Swinburne University of Technology since 2000. He is responsible for the university library, the university web site, and copyright." He has a blog whose purpose is "to communicate with ALIA members and canvas issues." Why am I telling you this? Because he's also a sucker for words, and his blog has a word of the day subsection featuring some word he's come across and wants to share. The latest is apophenia, which I wrote about a couple of years ago and still enjoy. The previous was dromology, the "science (or logic) of speed"; it was apparently coined by "cultural theorist and urbanist" Paul Virilio thirty years ago. It's not in the OED, but it gets over 12,000 Google hits, so I have no problem accepting it as a word in good standing, especially since it's impeccably formed from Greek roots, something that can't be said of many words created in these unclassical times.
Yesterday I posted about the German word Handy; today, serendipitously, I have happened on another interesting etymology. I was reading about the history of vampires and wanted to find out where "Medvegia," the site of a famous early-18th-century case was, and the search took me to N. K. Petersen's website Magia Posthuma ("My primary aim is to understand what happened in the 17th and 18th century cases of vampirism, how people viewed and debated these occurrences, and how they are related to the general evolution of ideas, society, and religion"), whose May 10 post discusses precisely that. But he also delves into something else. The post title is "An der Türkischen Granitz," a quote from "the official report about the Medvegia vampire case, Flückinger’s Visum et Repertum": "Über die so genannten Vampirs, oder Blut-Aussauger, so zu Medvegia in Servien, an der Türkischen Granitz, den 7. Januarii 1732 geschehen." Now, when I looked at that word Granitz, I thought "How cute, the German speakers down there in regions abutting Slavic territory borrowed the Slavic word for 'border'!" The Russian word for 'border' being granitsa, this was an easy conclusion to leap to, and as it turns out a correct one. What I didn't immediately realize (being more an aficionado of Slavic than German) was what Petersen saw: "it occurred to me that Granitz must either be a variant or possibly a misspelling of German Grenze." I slapped my head and got out my German etymological dictionary: sure enough, Grenze is from Polish granica and was "verbreitet durch Luther." Anybody know what word Grenze replaced?
The Slavic word, incidentally, is related to German Granne 'awn,' Old English granu 'mustache,' and Old Irish grend 'beard, hair, bristles' (máolais an greann adhuathmar bái fuirre 'lowered its horrible bristles,' Bethada náem nÉrenn, Betha Abáin annso sis 149b). And the Wikipedia entry on Arnold Paole ("Arnont Paule in the original documents; an early German rendition of a Serbian name or nickname, perhaps Арнаут Павле, Arnaut Pavle"), one of the first attested alleged vampires, says his native village of Medwegya is "also rendered as Metwett; likely a German rendition of Serbian Medveđa, not to be confused with the modern Southern Serbian town of Medveđa), located at the Morava river near the town of Paraćin."
Anatol Stefanowitsch in Bremer Sprachblog discusses the question Woher kommt das Handy?: where does the German word Handy 'mobile telephone, cell(ular) phone' come from? After rejecting various theories (such as that it's short for the 1940s term handie-talkie), the floor is thrown open to suggestions, and Detlef Guertler of Wortistik linked to a post there proving to Anatol's satisfaction that it comes from a term for 'hand-held microphone' used in the CB radio community. If you're interested in etymology and read German, I recommend both posts; it's wonderful to see these things hashed out intelligently, with a decent regard for evidence and probability. (And once again I express my regret that Language Log doesn't have comments...)
I knew, of course, that Carthage was founded by Phoenicians who brought their language with them, and I knew that the later stage of that language was known as Punic, but I was not aware that there were a great many inscriptions in the Latin alphabet, known as "Latino-Punic." Lameen has a nice post on the subject, mentioning that "St. Augustine... quotes a number of Phoenician words, such as salus (< shalu:sh < shalo:sh < shala:sh < thala:th) 'three', in his works" and suggesting that "Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD," and linking to bulbul's more extensive treatment (the second part of this post). I did not realize Plautus wrote an entire monologue in Punic; you can see it transcribed and translated (into German) here. If this stuff interests you, be sure to read both posts.
No, not the composer; my title is the Yiddish name of Odessa (pronounced ah-DES). Reading a bad translation of Bunin's Civil War diary has annoyed me but also gotten me interested in Odessa, and my newfound access to JSTOR (achieved by getting an electronic Boston Public Library card, which any resident of Massachusetts can do) has given me lots of reading material. I just found Robert A. Rothstein's article "How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture" (Slavic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 781-801), which has a discussion of the local varieties of both Russian and Yiddish, and I thought I'd pass along some of the details.
Rothstein quotes an 1895 book by Vlas Doroshevich called Odessa, odessity i odessitki ['Odessa and Odessans'] that describes the speech of the city as a "language salad" (vinegret iz yazyka), mentioning a number of distinctive features, some of which have pretty well disappeared (like the use of "monsieur" and "madame" as general forms of address) while others are still going strong, like the use of the preposition za 'behind; after; for (etc.)' to mean 'about, concerning,' "as in a line from the Soviet popular song most associated with Odessa": "Ya vam ne skazhu za vsyu Odessu" 'I won't tell you about all of Odessa.' This is due to Ukrainian influence, but other features are due to Yiddish, including many lexical borrowings:
One Odessa way of saying "leave me alone" is ne dreite me kop, a Russianization of Yiddish dreyt mir nisht dem kop, literally, "don't spin my head." The vocabulary of Odessa Russian includes such Yiddishisms as gesheft (business), mansa or maisa ([far-fetched] story], shabes-goi (errand-boy), golyi gurnisht (a nothing [literally, "a naked nothing"]), and bikitser (make it quick). The Yiddish word purits (or porets) (landowner, aristocrat) is used in the expression velikii purits (an important person)...
There are also examples of intonation (Ya znayu, literally 'I know,' said in an interrogative way to mean "How should I know?"—cf. Yiddish ikh veis?) and phraseology (saying goodbye with bud'te mne zdorovy, literally 'be well for me,' instead of the usual bud'te zdorovy, on the model of Yiddish zayt mir gezunt). Chtob ya tak zhil, a translation of Yiddish zol ikh azoy leben 'so I should live,' is used to emphasize one's truthfulness. And the answer to the common tourist question "How do I get to Deribasovskaya Street?" (the main shopping street of Odessa) may well be either A zachem vam Deribasovskaya? 'And what do you need Deribasovskaya for?' or Idite pryamo, ona sama vas peresechet 'Go straight, it will intersect you itself,' of which he says "one can... feel the influence without any explicit Jewish presence."
He then discusses Odessa Yiddish, which is "unlike the Yiddish of Warsaw or Vilna. In fact, the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language has an entry for adeser yidish, which it explains as 'full of Russian words.'" He quotes a number of Yiddish songs, one of which rhymes Ades with progres 'progress' and another of which refers to Odessa-mame/ a shayne panorama 'Odessa-mama, a beautiful panorama.'
There's a lot more (the article is 21 pages), and it makes me very glad to have access to the trove of JSTOR.
The blog Linguism is updated rarely (only ten entries since last October), but has some interesting stuff, particularly a review of the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation, with the kind of grumpy pickiness I enjoy:
The Earl of Harewood, his home Harewood House (both pronounced ‘har-wuud’) and the village of Harewood (’hair-wuud’) is not listed, but Althorp, the home of Earl Spencer, and the title borne by his eldest son, is there, with some mention of the controversy over its pronunciation. There is a misleading statement here: the authors say that the pronunciation ‘awl-thorp’ is used “in the village”, as if this justifies the pronunciation. But which village? The only village near the estate of Althorp is called Great Brington. The village of Althorpe (note the final –E) is near Scunthorpe, about 120 miles away. The contrast of the situation with Harewood is striking: while the Earl of Harewood calls himself, and his house ‘har-wuud’, the villagers living in Harewood just down the road call their village ‘hair-wuud’. That is their prerogative: they live in the village; he lives at the “big house”, and they each “own” their own pronunciation. The BBC has always respected the distinction. In 1997, when Diana Princess of Wales was killed, the BBC’s senior management ignored all well-established guidelines, and overruled the Earl Spencer’s own pronunciation in favour of the inhabitants of a village with a different name, on very spurious grounds.I deplore, however, their criticism of Mishal Husain's pronunciation. Ms. Husain can do no wrong.
Two fine new additions to the internet:
1) The Snowclones Database. Erin O'Connor, a grad student in computational linguistics, has set up a site "inspired primarily by Mark Liberman et al’s Language Log and Chris Weigl’s Eggcorn Database." As she says:
A snowclone is a particular kind of cliche, popularly originated by Geoff Pullum. The name comes from Dr. Pullum’s much-maligned “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z”. An easier example might be “X is the new Y.” The short definition of this neologism might be n. fill-in-the-blank headline.There are only a few up now, but "at least 30 more... queued up to be posted"; comments are open, and she's taking suggestions.
2) Glottopedia "is a freely editable encyclopedia for linguists by linguists that is currently being built up. It will contain dictionary articles on all technical terms of linguistics and is multilingual. In addition, there are survey articles, biographical articles und language articles, potentially on all linguists and all languages." The editors-in-chief are Martin Haspelmath and Sven Naumann, and they want your contribution (you must sign in with "your real name, or an abbreviation of it, not a pseudonym"). A great idea, and I wish it every success. (Via Anggarrgoon.)
Man, do I wish I'd had this available when I was studying Old Irish several decades ago: the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) "is a digital edition of the complete contents of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials." The About page says:
Despite justified criticism, the Dictionary has been an invaluable tool to scholars and students since its publication began, and it is the most comprehensive and ambitious dictionary of the Irish language ever compiled....The difficulties in using the paper edition are widely recognised. It contains many inconsistencies and inaccuracies... It is the result of the work of generations of scholars and this reveals itself in varying editorial approaches from fascicle to fascicle. These editorial problems are compounded by the huge chronological span covered by the Dictionary (over one thousand years), the variations in spelling in the sources, the complexity of the grammar of the language and its impact on word forms, and the lack of adequate textual editions from which to work. It would have been desirable to arrange forms and senses chronologically, thereby illustrating the historical development of the lexicon, but the problem of dating Irish texts was, and remains, huge, and the editors were no doubt correct in avoiding this hurdle.
This digital edition will ameliorate many of these problems and for the first time users will be able to make complex searches of discrete data types such as translations, citations, grammatical descriptions and sources. It is hoped that the completed work will be of use to a wide range of students and scholars interested in medieval Ireland including linguists, historians, archaeologists, and geographers, as well as those working in Modern Irish. Students and non-specialists will find it a considerable advantage to be able to find the meaning of a word they encounter in a text without having to necessarily know beforehand which headword it will be found under. Editors will be able to search for matches for words which are only partially legible in the manuscript; linguists will be able instantly to compile lists of particular forms of words.
I decided to look up Félire, a word the student frequently runs into because it's the usual abbreviation for The Félire of Oengus mac Ongobann, a verse calendar of the saints compiled around 800 that is frequently cited, and I remember having wondered what it meant exactly and where it was from. I found:
FélireIf you click on the abbreviated source names, a pop-up box gives the full citation (Thes. is Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: a collection of Old-Irish glosses, scholia, prose, and verse, ed. Stokes, Whitley, and Strachan, John, published by Cambridge University Press, 1901-03); if you click on the "1 féil" you get:
io,m. (1 féil) a calendar, almanac: feilere (gl. computus annalis) Thes. ii 34.31. Félire (gl. codice, of an almanac) 16.39 (Bcr 32 a 1 →) = felire Thes. ii 35.31. Esp. a calendar of religious festivals, a martyrology: in titles: Feilire na náomh, Feilire i Ghormáin, O'Cl. Pref. (RC iv 354). f.¤ fírchert, Fél. Ep. 156. ní foigbe ... f.¤ bas certu 148. ap. (?) rotúrsem ... Félire fer nGoídel 144. Félire ro scrútus i céin ┐ acus 109.
féilWhich not only tells me what I wanted to know (it's from Latin vigilia) but gives me a whole bunch of citations from which I could get a complete picture of how the word is used. It's not exactly the OED for Irish, but it sure is a treasurehouse, and I thank wood s lot for pointing me in its direction.
i, f. (cf. W. gwyl), ns. fel (in (Ogham) Sg 70 a marg. feil, Thes. ii 33.30. gs. na feile LL 26 a 50 →. np. feli, Thes. ii 34.29. féli, Fél. Ep. 16. 182. (féli as as. (?) armuinter a ḟéli, Fél. Oct. 2. arricfam a ḟéli, Dec. 30. Possibly ap. though féile occurs later as sg.: go f.¤ an bháis, TSh. 4128). gp. na féle, Fel. Prol. 329. Ep. 80. ndu. dí prím-ḟéil, May 31. féil (gs. np. -i) IGT, Decl. § 14.17. Late pl. féilte, O'Hussey T.C. 160.11. Luc. Fid. 115. A festival, feast-day (almost exclusively of religious festivals): f.¤ ir-Rúaim ... nóeb nEorapa uile, Fél. Ap. 20. féil sruith, Mon. Tall. §15. ind náob asa feil bís for ind láo §8. i féil máir maicc Cula, Fél. Ap. 5. ria fél Petair, MacCarthy 15.5. ier bfel Brigde TBC 2473 St = iar n-imbulc LL. féiltin Seaain (= féil tSin S.), O'Gr. Cat. 319.30. Abbott-Gwynn Cat. 363. láa feili Poil ┐ Petuir LL 309 b 33 (Cog. 227). f.¤ ghabhála Mhuire i mbroinn Feast of the Conception TSh. 3269. geimh- readh an ghalair ┐ féil an bháis 4116. ó lá ḟéle na marbh All Souls' day FM ii 1084.15. ag congmháil láoi féile, Ps. xlii 4. pl. feriae ... .i. fele, O'Mulc. 60. feili noeb n-uag SR 267. hi felib mártir LU 1856. isna sabbotib saeraib | isna felib fírnóebaib SR 4574. do bhennuccadh gach áoin onóraighfes na laithe ┐ na féilte BNnÉ 275.12. d'faghbhail na féilteagh so[cl]aecloithi the movable feasts O'Gr. Cat. 309.3. budh ainfesach cleirigh | fana feiltiph fire ZCP x 50.14. Rarely of a secular or pagan festival: atbail Moingfinn aidhchi Ṡamna ... conid de garar féil Moingfinne frisin Samain icon daescursluagh BB 264 a 6 (SG 332. RC xxiv 178). feli termini feasts of Terminus (gl. terminalibus) Thes. ii 34.29.
1. Inspired by this LH post, Joel of Far Outliers has posted a very useful summary of the history and uses of the Japanese kana syllabaries.
2. It turns out the word ramen does not have a firm etymology. Wikipedia:
Though of Chinese origin, it is unclear when ramen was introduced to Japan. Even the etymology of the term "ramen" is a topic of debate. One hypothesis and probably the most credible is that "ramen" is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese 拉麺 (lamian), meaning "hand-pulled noodles" (a name that is still used in Chinese for these sort of noodles). A second hypothesis proposes 老麺 (laomian, "old noodles") as the original form, while yet another states that ramen was initially 鹵麺 (lúmiàn), noodles cooked in a thick, starchy sauce. A fourth hypothesis is 撈麵 (lāomiàn): 撈 means to "dredge up" and refers to the method of cooking these noodles by immersing them in boiling water before dredging them up with a wire basket.Now, this is Wikipedia, so I'll let those qualified to judge say which of those etymologies are credible and which are just silly, but the OED says "prob[ably] f. Chinese lā pull, stretch, lengthen + miàn noodle," so the basic fact of uncertainty seems pretty certain.
3. I've just run across another piece of incredibly bad annotation in the Bunin diary. In the April 24/May 9, 1919, entry (p. 123) Bunin describes a Bolshevik poster attacking the White general Denikin and finishes up by saying "The inscription says: 'Don't hanker, Denikin, for land that is not yours!' 'Don't hanker' must mean 'don't think to bury yourself.'" Now, think about that for a moment: what would be the point of "don't think to bury yourself"? What is the point of the whole bit I've quoted? In the translation, it's completely unintelligible. But the footnote explains all: "In Russian, "don't hanker" is "ne zaris'," and "don't think to bury yourself" is ne zar'sia." Ahahahaha! So what's happened is that Bunin is correcting the Bolsheviks' bad grammar: the correct imperative of зариться [zárit'sya] is зарься [zár'sya], not the зарись [záris'] of the poster; the hapless annotator, true kin to Kinbote, has mistaken зарься for the imperative of зарыться [zaryt'sya] 'to bury oneself,' which is actually заройся [zaroisya]. The only burying here is the burying of the truth in cartloads of ignorance. (You'd think the fact that Bunin follows this up with "I swear by Michael the Archangel himself that I will never accept the Bolshevik orthography" might have provided a hint that form rather than content was under discussion, even if the incoherence of the "explanation" wasn't enough of a clue.)
4. Helen DeWitt describes the way things used to be in jolly old England:
I went up to Oxford to read Literae Humaniores in 1979. Britain has a higher voltage than the US (230V rather than 120), which means it is possible to heat water quickly in an electric kettle; one of the first things any undergraduate does on going to university is buy an electric kettle. So I went into the Woolworth's in Cornmarket, bought an electric kettle, took it back to my college and took it out of the box -- only to find a cord ending in three wires where an American expects to find a plug.I know this has nothing to do with language, but it's just so batshitinsane I had to pass it on. Does anybody happen to know why appliances were not sold with plugs??Yes. In Britain, in those far-off days, electrical appliances could not be sold with a prefitted plug. The buyer had to buy the plug separately (making sure it had the right number of amps). The buyer ALSO had to buy a tiny screwdriver. The back of the plug had to be unscrewed, tiny screws inside had to be loosened, coloured wires threaded under the appropriate screws, the screws retightened, the back of the plug screwed back on, and an hour or so later the novice electrician was either sitting down to a nice hot cup of ground cockroach or frying on the floor. It's said that electrical fires were a common source of death.
Once you got the electric kettle up and running, of course, you appreciated it in a way that you wouldn't if you hadn't had to work for it. On the one hand, just switching it on was a source of pride; on the other hand, you always wondered if it was about to blow up.
