We've been out spending New Year's Eve with the kids and grandkids, and I'm too replete and tuckered out to do any fancy posting, so I'll just point you towards Mark Liberman's roundup of the history of Urdu (word and language) and wish you all a very happy 2008!
Mina Loy is being featured at wood s lot, and among the links is a long essay by Marjorie Perloff about her autobiographical poem "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" (first published 1923-25). It's an informative and interesting piece; what I want to highlight here is a remarkable quote from an essay this English-born poet who was seen as American even when she'd only spent a year in the country wrote about the American language:
It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English — English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races . . . Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve "God's English," the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting pot.I'm not a big fan of her poetry, which is too unmusical for my ear, but I like the quote a lot. (If you're curious about her poetry, you can read her 1923 book Lunar Baedecker [sic] here.)—Mina Loy, "Modern Poetry," Charm 3, April 1925
Incidentally, her name was originally the Austro-Hungarian-Jewish Löwy, which I presume was pronounced LOW-ee in Victorian London; she changed it when she moved to Paris at the age of 20 in 1903. Other onomastic oddities: her first husband's family name, Hawies, is pronounced HAW-iss and is apparently from a Norman female personal name, Haueis (from Germanic Haduwidis: hadu 'strife, contention' + widi 'wide'—I take this information from the entry on Hawes in Patrick Hanks's Dictionary of American Family Names); her second husband (and the great love of her life) Arthur Cravan, who disappeared off the coast of Mexico in 1918, was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd (the Lloyd/Loy similarity was important to the poet), and (in the words of Wikipedia) "changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France. Why he chose the name Arthur remains unclear." I have no idea if this invented name was pronounced KRAV-ən or krə-VAN (or some other way) by him and those who knew him; I'm also not sure how to pronounce the poet's given name. I always said MY-nə, which seemed the obvious Victorian English pronunciation, but Carolyn Burke's remark (in the introduction to her biography of Loy) that "in some moods she announced contrarily that it was pronounced 'miner,' British style" implies that it was normally pronounced MEE-nə. (Burke also says "Rexroth, who knew both women, told me that the actress [Myrna Loy], née Williams, named herself after the poet, but efforts to have this story confirmed went unrewarded.")
Being immersed in classic Russian literature, thanks to Jim (see my Christmas post—and another box came today, with Batyushkov, Kuprin, Akhmatova, and lots and lots of Turgenev!), I've branched out from the books actually on hand and investigated other early poets, like Gnedich, author of the classic Russian translation of the Iliad. As soon as I read the opening few lines, I was hooked; it creates a poetic force worthy of the original while remaining admirably true to the meaning:
Гнев, богиня, воспой Ахиллеса, Пелеева сына,(I note, incidentally, that the Грозный [grozny] that opens the second line translates the Greek οὐλομένην 'destructive,' which suggests that the often-repeated warnings that the same adjective in Иван Грозный [Ivan Grozny] 'Ivan the Terrible' really means 'awe-inspiring' or the like are overstated.)
Грозный, который ахеянам тысячи бедствий соделал:
Многие души могучие славных героев низринул
В мрачный Аид и самих распростер их в корысть плотоядным
Птицам окрестным и псам (совершалася Зевсова воля)...
The amazing thing about this translation, aside from the quality, is that Gnedich spent years composing an entirely different one, in alexandrines. In 1813, when Gnedich had already completed eleven books, Uvarov, an unpleasant reactionary but a sound classical scholar, convinced him that only hexameters (hardly used until then in Russian verse) could properly represent Homer. Gnedich destroyed everything he'd written over the previous six years and spent another decade and a half rewriting it; the whole translation finally came out in 1829. Now, that's dedication to your art.
Incidentally, if you can stand having your salivary glands violently stimulated, check out what Jim's been eating; he has the good fortune to share the table of the Clumsy Cook. We should all be so clumsy.
If you've read much Nabokov, you've undoubtedly run across the Russian word poshlost'—or "poshlust," as that incorrigible punster Vladimir Vladimirovich liked to render it. He called it "smug philistinism" and wrote an entire essay, "Philistines and Philistinism," about it (which you can read here): "Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust." It's a useful and appealing word, and it's been picked up by others, some of whom are to be found in the Wikipedia article.
But it's more complicated than that. Poshlost' (пошлость) is the abstract noun from the adjective poshlyi (пошлый), which has a long and winding history, nicely summarized by Michele Berdy in this column:
The original sense was something that had "come into existence," something customary, the way of doing things. In time it came to mean something "ancient" or "usual." When Peter the Great was cutting short beards and kaftans, what was customary (пошлый) became negative. For a while it meant "low quality" (in other words, what's old is no good). And then it came to mean something "devoid of meaning" or "trivial": meaningless custom observed by habit.(In Old Russian it was пошьлъ /poshĭlŭ/, derived from the verb 'to go' and virtually identical with the modern verb пошел /poshol/ 'went.') If you read Russian, there's a good discussion of the history by V.V. Vinogradov here.
So the Nabokovian meaning is relatively recent, probably not much older than Nabokov himself. In the mid-nineteenth century it meant 'common, banal, trivial,' without the implication of philistinism that became attached to it later. When Baratynsky says, in his poem Осень (1836-37), "Глас, пошлый глас, вещатель общих дум" ('Voice, poshlyi voice, prophesier of common thoughts'), he is using the older meaning, and so are Gogol, Pushkin, and other writers of the day. I fear that the prevalence of the Nabokovian meaning in the modern mind makes it easy to misread earlier writers.
Kerim Friedman was curious about Emperor Hirohito's famous remark, while announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage" (in the usual translation). So he asked Matt of No-sword to explicate, and the results are enlightening:
...since the speech was in court Japanese (obscure even in 1945), exactly how to interpret this line is not clear. Some modern commentators do accept the "understatement" reading that Krugman uses. Some people claim that that passage…'means "things have definitely not gone well for us" (usage of 必ずしも, the key word corresponding to "not necessarily" in Krugman’s version, has changed slightly over the years), some say it means "[despite everyone’s efforts] things will not necessarily improve for us".He also points out that "most Japanese in 1945 would have found the Emperor’s announcement very difficult to understand in the first place."I lean towards the latter interpretation myself. By the time Hirohito delivered this speech (via a recording broadcast over the radio), central Tokyo had already been burned to the ground; I don’t think that even the Japanese leadership of the time could seriously have written a speech that could call this "not necessarily to [our] advantage". Implicitly admitting that things are going badly, and then adding "and, contrary to expectations, they are not likely to improve" seems much more likely.
I also seem to recall hearing that the original version of this line was something like "the war situation gets worse every day", so it could just be the tortured result of a fierce edit war within the bureaucracy.
My wife left me in Amherst Books recently while she got a haircut, and when she came to pick me up she found me drooling over Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape
The other present of Languagehat relevance is a box of books that arrived on the 21st from my pal Jim Salant (author of Leaving Dirty Jersey
I also got wine, food, an incredibly warm shirt, and from my excessively generous brother Eric a bunch of DVDs (four Almodóvars and The Motorcycle Diaries) and CDs, among other things. Oh, and we got a gift certificate to Kiva.org, a wonderful site that lets you provide microloans ($25) to small businesses in developing countries: "By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can 'sponsor a business' and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back." And then you can loan it to someone else. Let me tell you, it feels great to hit that button and know that you're helping someone make their way out of poverty. Give it a try!
Over at Language Log, Arnold Zwicky wondered about the history of the expression be that as it may/will, the will variant being stigmatized in his newly acquired 1915 usage guide Faulty Diction. Mark Liberman does the research and discovers that the will variant was more common in the early 18th century, but at midcentury may started catching up, around 1775 their graphs cross, and the 19th century sees a remarkable spike in the use of may (presumably accounting for the book's confident pronouncement). By century's end, both have sunk into the desuetude in which they languish to this day. The ability to easily do this kind of historical legwork is one of the blessings of our own century.
Heidi Harley says she is "not the kind of linguist who is heavy into antedating and sourcing," but she happened to run into a citation for eggnog that beat the OED's 1825 date and posted on Language Log about it: a poem by 18th-century clergyman and philologist Jonathan Boucher contained the lines
Fog-drams i' th' morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,The poem seems to have been written around 1774, but as Joel S. Berson points out in this guest post at the Log, the OED would use the date of publication, 1807, rather than the apparent (but unprovable) date of the poem. Not to worry, however, because Joel found a nice citation from the Oct. 16, 1788 issue of the Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia):
At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,
My palate can regale:
Rummaging now the brain, many conceits may be found, much truth of all kinds, whole store rooms of curses and unmentionable damns, with devils of all shapes and colours, thousands of encomiums on oysters, hot suppers, and devilish fine wines; and there are so many different qualities and dispositions that intestine wars are never over; when wine and beer, punch and eggnog meet, instantly ensues a quarrel, and it is raised so high, that the brains boil like mush in a pot with heat, and was it not for the holes I before mentioned, which let out the steam, the skull must be cracked.Now, the odd thing is that the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate gives the date of eggnog as "ca. 1775." Are they also working from the Boucher poem, or do they have an early citation they're keeping to themselves?
Utterly unrelated, but I have to share something I ran across in the OED while perusing the latest list of new additions (PURPRESS to QUIT SHILLING). They give the etymology of Q-tip as "the initial letter of QUALITY n. + TIP n." and then add in small type: "The product was app. invented in 1923 by Leo Gerstenzang, a Polish-born American, who initially named them Baby Gays. In 1926 the name was changed to Q-tips Baby Gays, and later shortened to Q-tips." I'll bet they thank their lucky stars every day that Gerstenzang decided to change the name.
I've used the phrase "playing fast and loose" all my life without ever knowing what its history was; now, thanks to Wordorigins.org, I know, and it's very interesting:
The proximate origin is the name of a con game, along the lines of three-card monte (in spirit, not in actual structure of the game). From George Whetstone’s 1578 The Right Excellent Historye of Promos and Cassandra:Who'da thunkit?At fast or loose, with my Giptian, I meane to haue a cast.The game is undoubtedly somewhat older than this, as the metaphorical sense predates this citation by some decades. From Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557:Of a new maried studient that plaied fast or loose.The game is described in this quote from James O. Halliwell’s 1847 A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century:Fast-and-loose, a cheating game played with a stick and a belt or string, so arranged that a spectator would think he could make the latter fast by placing a stick through its intricate folds, whereas the operator could detach it at once.
Here's a pledge encouraged by the American Speech Committee that made the rounds back in 1918, an astonishing medley of patriotism and linguistic purism:
I love the United States of America. I love my country's flag. I love my country's language. I promise:Courtesy of Geoff Nunberg's Quotes page, where you will find many more fine citations (e.g., "We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them." Middlemarch, Ch. LIV).
1. That I will not dishonor my country's speech by leaving off the last syllable of words.
2. That I will say a good American "yes" and "no" in place of an Indian grunt "um-hum" and "nup-um" or a foreign "ya" or "yeh" and "nope."
3. That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud, rough tones, by enunciating distinctly, and by speaking pleasantly, clearly and sincerely.
4. That I will learn to articulate correctly as many words as possible during the year.
Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous ("Feeding on itself"—the name is a play on the rare word fimicolous 'inhabiting or growing on dung') has posted his list of the "Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading"; one entry is:
6) SnowclonesI was delighted to see Erin O'Connor's Snowclones Database get the recognition, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't equally pleased to see LH keeping it company. Thanks, Rex! (And Nancy Friedman's Away With Words is well worth checking out as well.)
A snowclone -- says Wikipedia, cuz it outta know -- is "a type of formula-based cliche that uses an old idiom in a new context." The best example is the rampant usage of "X is the new Y." But there are so many others, such as "Don't hate me because I'm X," "In X, no one can hear you Y," "Not rest for the X," "To X or not to X," "Xgate," "Xcore," "Got X?" -- and many more. The site is so diligent in its pursuit of the cliche and the trite that you might fall stricken with a loss of words, gasping "This is not your daddy's snowclone." (See also: Language Hat and Away With Words.)
A language-learning site, Digital Dialects, "contains free to use interactive activities for learning languages and links to study resources." The word games they offer to make use of the vocabulary and phrases are fun but on the simple-minded side, and I probably wouldn't blog it if it were just the usual French/German/Spanish, but it has Basque, Cantonese, Cebuano, Mongolian, Maltese, all sorts of uncommon languages. Check out the list and see if any of them appeal to you. (Thanks, Trevor!)
I just ran across the name of the late historian Kenneth Cmiel, and of course wanted to know how to pronounce it. A little googling turned up this page, which shows that the Polish pronunciation is (more or less) "chm(y)el," though I don't know how he pronounced it. But what struck me is that "it comes from the noun trzmiel, which means 'bumblebee.'" Aha, said I, and that's the same word as Russian шмель [shmel'], which means that Cmiel is etymologically the same name as Шмелев (Shmelev or Shmelyov), as in the unjustly neglected writer Ivan Shmelyov.
This goes into my mental list of pairs like Calvinist/chauvinist and Soraya/Subaru (the Persian and Japanese names, respectively, for the Pleiades [not etymologically connected, of course!]), along with one I just discovered the other day: the Russian city Chelyabinsk takes its name from a fortress called Chelebi, from a Turkish personal name meaning 'prince,' itself borrowed from Arabic and identical to the Iraqi Arabic name Chalabi. (There's a saying "Halabi—chalabi," meaning 'a person from Aleppo is a gentleman.') Isn't etymology fun?
I was going to wait until the US edition came out before doing this, but Grant Barrett writes me that he read about the Australian edition of the book (published by Allen & Unwin) in a column by Dianne Bardsley of The Dominion Post, and within the hour Slavomír Čéplö (who was an extremely helpful informant) wrote me that he'd actually seen a copy in a Bratislava bookstore (unfortunately it's the UK edition, which doesn't have my name on it except in tiny type on the copyright page), and I figured I might as well let it all hang out. So:
My name is Steve Dodson, and I've coauthored a book of "insults, put-downs and curses from around the world" called Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit which was packaged by Elwin Press in England; you can see their page for the book here. The US edition will feature my lively introduction, in which I quote Pushkin, Mark Liberman, and my nonagenarian mother-in-law; the editions available now carry an introduction by my coauthor, Robert Vanderplank. I will, of course, make an announcement when the US edition comes out, but for now I will leave you with a couple of choice tidbits from the book:
pissant
This satisfying word came over from England as a mere name for an ant, but Americans made it a contemptuous epithet for an “insignificant, contemptible, or irritating person”. From H.L. Davis’s 1935 novel Honey in the Rock, about pioneer Oregon: “Anybody who called owning horses disorderly conduct was a liar and a pissant.”
Icelandic:
prumphænsn (PRUHMP-hine-s’n)
This delightful insult literally means ‘fartchicken’.
And a Slovak one they cut from the manuscript:
Pojebali kone voz! (POH-yeh-buh-lee KOH-nyeh VOHZ) (Slovak)
This lively expression, ‘May the horses fuck the carriage,’ illustrates the fact that Slovak cursing makes greater use of sexual terms than that of the Czechs.
If you're in Australia or New Zealand, look for it at your local bookstore; if you're in the US... hey, if I can restrain my impatience, so can you!
Libraries of Timbuktu is "maintained by Alida Jay Boye at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo as part of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project financed by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD)"; it's got a Visit the Libraries section with great photos, a bibliography of "books and articles about the city of Timbuktu and the area adjacent to it," links to resources and websites, and much more. Thanks, Paul! (I had to double-check to make sure this wasn't a third repost of Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu, but it's not, so if you're interested you should visit that as well.)
Totally unrelated but fun: a music video celebrating the many spellings of the recently ended holiday of (C)Hanuk(k)ah. Thanks, Songdog!
You've all seen the Cortina Method language courses, right? Cortina's [Language Name] in 20 Lessons, Intended for Self-Study and for Use in Schools? Did you ever wonder who Cortina was? I just tried to find out, and was amazed to discover that the only biographical information I can find online beyond his name (Rafael Díez de la Cortina) is this Spanish Wikipedia article, which doesn't even have a death date! I realize the guy didn't get a Nobel prize or anything, but he founded a very successful series of language courses; how could he have disappeared without trace? If anybody knows anything about his fate, please share; I'd like to do at least a skeletal English Wikipedia article, but I'm damned if I'm going to produce one without a date of death. (For that matter, there doesn't seem to be anything online about the publishing company, either; googling "Cortina Method" just gets individual books, and the Wikipedia disambiguation page has nothing relevant.)
I've been enjoying these, and I thought I should pass them along:
Greater Blogazonia is subtitled "Language and Society in Greater Amazonia"; its creator, Lev Michael, says "My research focuses on Amazonian languages, and I am particularly interested in the strategic use of grammatical resources in interaction, language documentation and revitalization, and language politics." He has long, meaty posts like Genetics meets Voodoo Historical Linguistics: Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans, discussing a study that "that sought to use information on genetic variation in Native American populations to develop and test hypotheses about the question of prehistoric migration in the Americas" but used some very dubious linguistic theories (with interesting comments by David Marjanović, who frequently shows up around here); the latest post is about a movie, The Linguists (trailer here), which "follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction." It's been accepted for Sundance; I certainly hope I get to see it some day!
bradshaw of the future focuses on the history of words—mainly those derived from Indo-European, though the latest post features orange, which can be traced back only as far as Sanskrit नारङ्ग nāraṅga 'orange tree' ("The trail ends there, altho the AHD says 'possibly of Dravidian origin'"). If you like etymology, you'll want to bookmark it.
My latest Russian history reading is Richard Pipes' Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime
One of the more eccentric members of Proletkult was Aleksei Gastev, a metalworker turned poet and theorist. An early follower of Bogdanov, in the first years of the Bolshevik regime he wrote verse and came to be known as the "singer of steel and machines." After 1920 he concentrated on applying Frederick Taylor's "time-motion" methods of industrial productivity to improving efficiency of everyday life. Members of his "Time League," which had branches in every major city, were required to carry watches and to keep "chronocards," on which they recorded the exact use they made of every minute of the day. Ideally, he would have had everyone go to sleep and rise at the same hour. To economize on time he proposed to "mechanize speech" by replacing the long expressions customary in Russian with shorter ones, and by resorting to acronyms, for the widespread use of which in Soviet Russia he bore much responsibility.Oh those awful abbreviations! Just a few pages earlier I'd run across a hideous one new to me, Uchraspred [Учраспред], which a helpful Glossary of Russian Abbreviations and Acronyms expands to Учетно-распределительный отдел 'registration and distribution section' (Pipes says they were "responsible for assigning party functionaries"). I don't know whether to dislike Gastev for encouraging them or thank him for inspiring Zamyatin's We (discussed here), with its Taylorized society and its protagonists D-503 and I-330. I guess I can do both.In moments of visionary exaltation, Gastev proposed to mechanize man and his activities in accord with the time-motion experiments carried out at his Central Institute of Labor (Tsentralnyi Institut Truda). He had visions of a future in which people would be reduced to automatons known by ciphers instead of names, devoid of personal ideas and feelings, whose individuality would dissolve tracelessly in collective work:
The psychology of the proletariat is strikingly standardized by the mechanization not only of motions, but also of everyday thinking. . . . This quality lends the proletarian psychology its striking anonymity, which makes it possible to designate the separate proletarian entity as A, B, C, or as 325, 075, and 0, et cetera. . . . This signifies that in the proletarian psychology, from one end of the world to the other, there flow powerful psychological currents, for which, as it were, there exists no longer a million heads but a single global head. In the future this tendency will, imperceptibly, render impossible individual thinking.This nightmare, in which one Western historian perceives a "vision of hope," provided material for Evgenii Zamiatin's anti-utopian novel, We, and Karel Capek's R.U.R., a play that popularized the word "robot." By a strange inversion, a flaw Communism attributed to capitalism, namely the dehumanization of the worker, became for some Communists an ideal.
Addendum. Dmitri Minaev, at his blog De Rebus Antiquis Et Novis, has added a post on Gastev, providing more information (Lenin had one of his reference cards pinned on the wall; Gorky said "I can see now why you have left literature") and translations of two of his immortal poems; here's one:
Order 04
Prisms of buildings.
Pack of twenty blocks.
Put it under the press.
Flatten it to a parallelogram.
Squeeze it to 30 degrees.
Remake the block-tank
into a worm-gear.
Diagonal movement.
Cut the streets without a shudder.
One thousand calories more for the workers.
The AP story Merriam-Webster's Word of '07: 'W00t' brings us this welcome news:
''W00t,'' a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness, topped all other terms in the Springfield dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.There's a lot of "l33t speak" I don't care for, but I've always liked w00t; there's something primally yawpish about it, and I'm glad to see it get this recognition. (Thanks, Bonnie!)Merriam-Webster's president, John Morse, said ''w00t'' was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.
''It shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other,'' Morse said.
We recently discussed the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace; Sam Sacks has alerted me to a review (in Open Letters, of which he is the Fiction Editor) by the puckish Steve Donoghue (who claims he "served as an Assistant Government General in Mandalay following the Third Anglo-Burmese War"; he is in reality the Nonfiction Editor of the journal). The review is pretty negative, though largely, as far as I can tell, on the odd grounds that the translation retains the French: "nobody can read French anymore (except possibly the French)." There are some useful comparisons of passages in three translations, but the most interesting feature to me was this discussion of the history of the text, which has "no definitive form of its own":
Tolstoy serialized the first few sections of the novel for a Russian periodical in 1865 and 1866. He then brought out the whole work in 1868 and 1869, with emendations and revisions. Then in 1873 the entire work was published again, but in a substantially different form than those previous, with a very large and very invasive set of textual changes by the author (the French passages, for instance, were removed, and most of the philosophical and expository arias were hacked out of the main body of the text and annexed to appendices).If I ever knew any of that, I'd forgotten it.A fourth edition reprinted this one. A fifth edition appeared in 1886 under the direction of Tolstoy’s wife (Tolstoy himself had by this point come to hate his magnum opus, calling it rubbish and washing his hands of it, which was certainly not a helpful thing to do, like the enthusiastic organizer of a 20-person hayrack ride who five minutes in withdraws in a pout over some trifle and leaves everybody else to jolt awkwardly along, singing half-hearted jingles and picking spiders out of their pants), and this edition ignored all the textual changes Tolstoy made in the third edition, choosing instead to adhere to the second, 1868-69 edition, only not quite, since some of the textual changes Tolstoy made for that edition were ignored for this edition. The Count was still no help, hunkered down in his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana teaching his serfs to find God while everyone else in the world, quite probably including God Himself, was grappling with this bizarre drinking-game of a textual history he’d left behind him.
Translators must therefore not only grapple with the oddities of Tolstoy’s prose, they must perforce become textual scholars as well as orthographical sleuths (or perhaps psychics), since Tolstoy’s handwriting was very nearly indecipherable – a fact that comes into play not only with his wife, who copied out his day’s work each evening (making who knows how many innocent but perhaps telling mistakes), but with his publishers, who had to deal with that handwriting in the form of endless line-edits.
A new language blog, الف لسان mille langues χιλιοι γλωσσῶν, looks very promising. The first post begins:
A thousand and one tongues shall be the name of this polyglot blog (though most of the writing will be in English, I hope to have snippets from numerous languages), and this tithe of the myriad manners of expression upon the earth shall consist of lesser-known languages, dialects, creoles, “extinct” and contact languages. My personal contributions will gravitate toward languages from majority arabophone countries, though I invite the contributions of others from spheres and climes beyond my reach and ken.Check out the Nubian text and khawaji's attempted decipherment. Welcome, and happy blogging!
I've written here many times (e.g., here and here) about the Donnell Branch of the NYPL, one of my favorite hangouts from my first broke and lonely days in New York. I could go to the third floor, turn left into the amazingly extensive foreign language collection, and while away hours or find an armful of books to take home (I learned Romanian that way shortly after arriving in the city). Now I discover, via Lucette Lagnado's elegiac Books of the New World and the Old, that the building it's in (considered by the developer "poor, shabby"—it doesn't "measure up to its neighbors on tony West 53rd Street") is to be demolished. The library will survive "in a considerably smaller form. It will be lodged on the ground floor and a couple of subterranean levels, with a modern luxury hotel sitting above." I'm willing to bet the great foreign language collection will be reduced to a bunch of Spanish books and a token scattering of others; gotta be relevant, after all, and who needs all those books in weird languages? One more reason not to grieve that I left what I used to consider the greatest city in the world. (Thanks, I think, for the link, Paul!)
The always entertaining xkcd has a perfect encapsulation of the asininity of the usual simplistic "if you come here, you should speak English" attitude. (Via Eric Bakovic at Language Log.)
Anyone interested in Ezra Pound should read Jonathan Morse's depressing but enlightening essay The Startle Reflex: Some Episodes from the Lives of Ezra Pound’s Language (from Jacket 34, October 2007). He starts off with a visit by Louis Zukofsky to Pound in St. Elizabeth's (the Washington loony bin into which Pound was placed after WWII in lieu of execution for treason) and Pound's report on it to a correspondent, and plunges into the morass of Pound's crazed notions about Jews: "But the word ‘Jew’ was a preemptive significance. It filled the cell of Pound’s mind with horror and silenced the echo of the violin."
More: for Ezra Pound, by the time he had reached St. Elizabeths, the word ‘Jew’ was experienced with a fully developed history of its own. It wasn’t just a defined sound with an immediately understood meaning; it was the trace of a number of meanings, slowly developed over time. In fact, we may learn to read Pound better if we think of that development as a verbal complex generated in response to a new word, and deployed by the same linguistic mechanism that brings forth poetic language itself. Specifically, the pair of phonemes that sound out the word ‘Jew’ may have functioned for Pound as an index, in Charles Sanders Peirce’s sense of the word: ‘A rap on the door is an index. Anything which focusses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience. Thus a tremendous thunderbolt indicates that something considerable happened, though we may not know precisely what the event was. But it may be expected to connect itself with some other experience’ (‘Logic as Semiotic’ 108-09).There's much more about poetry, influence, and madness ("a single magic word, Roosevelt, possessed the power to transform Ezra Pound from a lord of language to a gibbering, shrieking lunatic who couldn’t stop raving until he jammed his thumb into his mouth and bit down hard"); it's not pleasant reading, but it helps ground our understanding of a great poet in his appalling context. (Via wood s lot.)Pound never read Peirce, so far as I am aware, but the ‘luminous moments’ in The Cantos — those flashes of detail whose part in the poem’s great design is to signal that our sense of the numinous has acquired one more meaning — do function as indices. When he was writing poetry, Ezra Pound seems sometimes to have experienced words directly, without reference to their immediate denotative contexts. That is why some of the most vividly realized images in The Cantos are pure sound effects, like the circular saw in Canto 18 (‘whhsssh, t ttt’) or the loom in Canto 39 with its shuttle moving back and forth and its harnesses moving up and down: ‘thkk, thgk . . . thgk, thkk.’ Such words perform their work of meaning by evoking with a sense impression, not denoting with another word. The context of these evocations isn’t the locality of the sentences or paragraphs in which they are imbedded; it is the whole historical lexicon of language as such, in all its complex harmony. In that harmony the saw’s sound functions as an index, marking one of the moments when Pound’s incantation, ‘Make it new,’ has embedded itself in the sound structure of a new language, the language of economics. (Pound translates the saw’s economic onomatopoeia himself in the next line: ‘Two days’ work in three minutes.’) The sound of the loom in Circe’s palace is an index, too; it is a reminder of Penelope and the home to which Odysseus must return if his wife’s fabric is to be completed and western civilization is to have a written history. In general, it may be useful to consider Pound’s ideogrammic method as a way of moving through poetic space in a saltatory way, from index to index.
Matt of No-sword has an essay of that title over at Néojaponisme ("We too are non-Japanese inspired by Japanese culture, and we too hope to advocate Japanese products and creative culture that may have been devalued or ignored in Japan"), and it's a corker. Nanpa is familiar as a term for guys offering public compliments to gals (what they call piropo in Argentina), but it started out very differently:
Nanpa apparently dates back to Edo time but was certainly in popular use during the Meiji period. Back then, it was written in kanji (軟派) and used in relation to its antithesis — kōha (硬派). The words mean “soft faction” and “hard faction,” respectively, and at the time, denoted diametrically opposed philosophical outlooks. Softs were thoughtful, introverted and open to compromise; Hards were aggressive, inflexible, and beat up Softs for kicks.Read his piece for more of this fascinating history.You can find numerous examples of the words nanpa and kōha being used to bisect various social groups, ranging from newspaper reporters (Softs did society and the arts, Hards did politics) to black marketeers operating in early 20th-century China (Softs dealt drugs, Hards ran guns). The usage that eventually evolved into the modern meaning, however, was the one that applied to young men. Simply put: Softs liked women, and Hards didn’t.
I'm reading Dmitry Bykov's gutsy essay Опыт о страхе, on the state of things in Putin's Russia, and I just realized that although the title has to be translated "Essay on fear" (his thesis is that Russia is gripped by an omnipresent, unreasoning, Kafkaesque fear), none of my dictionaries, even the multivolume ones, gives any meanings for опыт [opyt] other than 'experiment' and 'experience.' But Google tells me that Pope's "Essay on Man" is "Опыт о человеке," and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is Опыт о человеческом разуме, so it's clearly an existing usage; my question to Russian readers is: how marginal is this sense of the word? Is it felt as foreign, or do the dictionaries omit it out of laziness?
(The word essay itself, of course, originally meant 'experiment, trial, testing': 1631 HEYLIN St. George 247, "I will make bold to venture on it, by way of tryall and essay." ... 1704 ADDISON Italy (1733) 195 "After having made Essays into it, as they do for Coal in England." 1745 De Foe's Eng. Tradesman I. xii. 98 "He has made an essay by which he knows what he can, and cannot do." The literary sense comes from Montaigne, whose Essais are called "Опыты" in Russian.)
C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they've read and enjoyed during the previous year:
The reading choices available to us are almost too broad to fathom. And so we pick here and there from the shelves, reading a book from centuries ago and then one that came out ten years ago. The "10 Best Books of 2007" seems so small next to that.It's a great idea and the posts are always interesting (the complete list is here); this year he's done me the honor of making my (excessively long, I'm afraid) post the first in the series—I've discussed the language books at LH, but not (I believe) the Russian history ones.But with so many millions of books to choose from, where can we go to find what to read?
If somebody hasn't already coined this phrase, I'll go ahead and take credit for it: A lucky reader is one surrounded by many other readers. And what better way to end a long year than to sit (virtually) with a few dozen trusted fellow readers to hear about the very best book (or books) they read all year, regardless of publication date.
Robert Edward Auctions report on their blog that they were sent a delivery of "odds and ends from the estate of baseball historian Al Kermisch." One of the items was an 1898 document titled "Special Instructions To Players," deploring "the use of obscene language by players at the ballpark, to intimidate umpires and opposing players, and to verbally battle with unfriendly fans." They say:
This piece is ironic as it provides many examples of exactly the kind of “brutal language” that was being outlawed. In fact, it is so over the top that at first we thought it was some type of a joke. But as we examined the paper, found that this language did exist in the 1890s, considered that general rowdiness and the use of obscene language by players were big issues in baseball in this era, and noted that the accompanying items were all from the same era, we soon realized that that this was not a joke at all. This was actually a fascinating and historically significant baseball document, distributed to National League players, that captures an aspect of professional baseball from the rough-and-tumble single-League 1890s era that is not well documented. Granted, in terms of language, it is also the most offensive official Major League baseball document that we have ever seen. That makes it all the more amusing to us, but we also recognize that maybe this is a piece that isn’t for the entire family. Truck drivers, yes, sailors, yes, ballplayers in the 1890s, obviously yes. But probably not everyone.They solicit opinions as to whether they should include it in their spring catalog. Not having to worry about family values, I can take unalloyed pleasure in it, and recommend it to anyone with a taste for vile language. At the end of the document is the line "UNMAILABLE. Must be forwarded by Express"—presumably the National League could have been prosecuted for sending obscenities through the mails. (Via MetaFilter, where one commenter suggests that it is a printer's joke from the 1890s, which is certainly possible but doesn't detract from the humor.)
Mark Liberman at Language Log discusses a question that had never occurred to me but that I now desperately want an answer to: why, around two centuries ago, did people start writing American Indian names and words with hyphens between the syllables? They hadn't done so earlier; John Eliot's Massachusett Bible of 1663 (Book of Ruth) writes the words as single units ("Kah ìwesuonk noh wosketomp Elimelek, & ìwesuonk ummittamwussoh Naomi...""), and Mark provides images from Benjamin Smith Barton's New views of the origin of the tribes and nations of America (1797), which does the same. But Edwin James's Account of An Expedition From Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819, 1820 ... , published in 1823, occasionally hyphenates: "whether it would be proper to ascend Running-Water creek, (Ne-bra-ra, or Spreading water), or the Platte, (Ne-bres-kuh, or Flat water), or hunt the bison between the sources of those two streams..." Soon it becomes extremely common; for instance, from A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830): "The Indians who seized me were an old man and a young one; these were, as I learned subsequently, Manito-o-gheezhik, and his son Kish-kau-ko."
There are various suggestions at Mark's post, but here I just want to highlight one very funny anecdote:
One case arose on the Pawnee Reservation, Oklahoma, where an indian was named Coo-rux-rah-ruk-koo. Commonly he was known as Afraid-of-a-bear. A literal translation of his Indian name was "fearing a bear that is wild." From this translation the agent recorded him as Fearing B. Wilde.
