My wife asked me, out of the blue, why we refer to old jokes and stories as "chestnuts." The short answer is, nobody knows. The OED says: "Origin unknown: said to have arisen in U.S. The newspapers of 1886-7 contain numerous circumstantial explanations palpably invented for the purpose. A plausible account is given in the place cited in quot. 1888"; that account is the one you can find in many places, for instance here:
In a play called 'The Broken Sword', by William Dimond, produced at Covent Garden in 1816, a character called Captain Xavier is always repeating unlikely stories about his exploits. On one occasion, talking to a character called Pablo, he mentions a cork-tree. Pablo corrects Xavier, saying that the tree was a chestnut, and 'I ought to know, for haven't I heard you tell this story twenty-seven times?'That's probably as good as we're going to do. Eric Partridge in Origins: An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English says it "prob comes from roasted chestnuts eaten at the gossipy fireside," which is the kind of vague guess I expect of that genial old soul. The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn't venture an explanation but does show it as being chiefly in the Northeast and North Midlands. For me it's part of core vocabulary; I wonder if younger people use it?The play was soon forgotten, but many years later in America, an actor named William Warren Jr recalled this episode at an actors' dinner, where another speaker had told a stale old joke. The actors who were present picked the phrase up, and 'an old chestnut' became a synonym for 'an old joke'.
I learn from Geert Jan van Gelder's TLS review that there is a new, three-volume "complete" edition of the Arabian Nights (subtitled "Tales of 1001 nights," thus covering all bases) published by Penguin and translated by Malcolm C. Lyons. The review has a useful summary of the history of the collection in Arabic ("It was anonymous, its language was not sufficiently polished, and it was too obviously fictional and fantastic in parts, all of which precluded its acceptance in highbrow circles. At the same time it was never as truly popular, in the sense of widespread among and beloved by the illiterate, as the monstrously lengthy and equally anonymous epic tales such as Sirat Antar or Sirat Bani Hilal.") and in its European avatar, sparked off by Antoine Galland's French translation:
Galland did more than merely translate: he shaped the text into what became a more or less canonical form; as a result the Nights are as much a part of Western literature as of Arabic. To Western readers, the stories of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad belong to the core of the Nights and are among the best-known tales; but they did not belong to the Arabic text until Galland added them. There is, in fact, no known Arabic text of the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories that predates Galland, and elements in the story of Aladdin suggest that it may have been a European fairy tale rather than an Arabic one.The reviewer thinks very highly of the translation, but he notes a couple of things at the end of the review that bother me more than they apparently do him. First off, Lyons does not render Arabic obscenities with English ones, either substituting formal words ("vagina") or simply transliterating the Arabic (he refers to the porter’s "zubb"); as van Gelder says, "Some readers will be delighted to learn some naughty Arabic, but surely English has a profusion of equally vulgar words for the sexual organs." Not a big deal, especially since there are apparently few obscene words in the original, but irritating. But the fact that there are no indications of vowel length really annoys me:
Already I imagine, with horror, how the name of the beautiful Badi’ al-Jamal will be pronounced by future readers as if she had something to do with a camel (jamal, different from jamâl, “beauty”), or how the name of the slave girl Hubub would sound like “hubbub”: it should be stressed on the second syllable and rhyme with “boob”, and I believe the correct reading would actually be Habub. The general reading public is supposedly averse to diacritical signs, but I have personally never met a “general reader” who abhorred macrons or circumflexes, and “Habûb” cannot look too off-putting.And there is a minimum of annotation; again, I agree with the reviewer: "When, for instance, someone walks in one of the streets of al-Hira, the reader may want to know where that place is, but neither the maps nor the glossary will help. A reference to the 'Abjad-Hawwaz alphabet' may suggest a secret or cryptic script; a note could have explained that it is the ordinary Arabic alphabet in the old 'Semitic' order, as still used in Hebrew." If you're going to produce a massive, presumably definitive version of such an important work (and charge £125 for it), it seems to me foolish and counterproductive to skimp in such ways.
(Incidentally, I didn't realize the TLS was online until jamessal mentioned it; I'd looked years ago, not found a web presence, and given up on it. Thanks, Jim!)
Lisa Hayden of Lizok's Bookshelf has started her promised blogging of her fourth (!) reading of War and Peace; she's reading it in Russian, but her discussion so far isn't language-specific and should be interesting to anyone who's read the novel (or wants to start and read along with her). Here's her first post, on the opening soirée (when she said "don’t panic if you don’t love the soirée scenes: I never have, either," I was reminded of the endless such scenes in Proust), and here is a page with all posts she's tagged "War and Peace"—you can visit it any time to see where she's gotten to. Myself, I'm almost finished with the first half (I'm at the scene where Natasha goes to the opera and "sees through" its "artificiality"—I must say, I've never found it as effective as so many critics do, because it seems to me a case where Tolstoy is blatantly pushing his own point of view using a character as his mouthpiece, and frankly the whole Salingeresque "people are such hypocrites, man" approach to life palled on me once I graduated from adolescence); I would have been farther along by now except that I keep taking breaks when I find myself too put off by the bad behavior of some of the characters. Really, old Prince Nikolai (father of gloomy Andrei and poor unattractive Marya) is a complete bastard!
Incidentally, long-time LH readers will know that I read books to my wife at night; I've discussed our experiences with Doughty and Proust, and some of you may have idly wondered what we've been reading since last April. The answer is the Cairo Trilogy
We finished it the other night, and to follow it up my wife, on the spur of the moment, pulled off the shelf Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual
In a thread from the other day, L. Fregimus posted a very useful limited Google search for the word притин, which led me to this poem (about Grigory Skovoroda) by Arseny Tarkovsky (a wonderful poet probably best known as the father of the director Andrei Tarkovsky), whose ninth and tenth lines are "Есть в природе притин своеволью:/ Степь течет оксамитом под ноги" ('There is in nature a confine for willfulness: the steppe flows like oksamit underfoot'). Oksamit? Off to the dictionaries; it turned out to be a variant of aksamit, an old word for a kind of velvet, and Vasmer said it was from Greek ἑξάμιτος [hexámitos], literally 'six-thread,' which also gave rise to German Samt. Wait a minute, thought I, that rings a bell... Sure enough, English samite (OED: "A rich silk fabric worn in the Middle Ages, sometimes interwoven with gold") is from the same source ("The med. Gr. name, lit. 'six-threaded', has been variously explained. Usually it has been supposed that the original 'samite' was woven of thread composed of six strands of silk; but according to Middleton in Encycl. Brit. XXIII. 210/1 it 'was so called because the weft threads were only caught and looped at every sixth thread of the warp, lying loosely on the intermediate part'"). In English it has indelible associations with King Arthur (1470-85 MALORY Arthur I. xxv. 73 "In the myddes of the lake Arthur was ware of an arme clothed in whyte samyte"); in Russian I know it occurs in the Tale of Igor's Campaign («...помчаша красныя дѣвкы половецкыя, а съ ними злато, и паволокы, и драгыя оксамиты», "They seized the fair maidens of the Pólovtsy, and with them gold and cloths and costly samite"), but I don't know what if any associations it has for a modern reader.
I'm sure you all know by now that John Updike has died; I grew impatient in recent years with his ubiquitous, endlessly fluent and charming reviews and essays that said nothing much in particular, but at his best he was a superb writer of novels and short stories, and quite a decent poet as well. Here's a poem from Americana
A Rescue(Thanks, Eric!)Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe they will last "forever" in that
someone will read them, their ink making
a light scratch on his mind, or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction
upon a yellow bird—a goldfinch?—
that had flown into the garden shed
and could not get out,
battering its wings on the deceptive light
of the dusty, warped-shut window.Without much reflection for once, I stepped
to where its panicked heart
was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy soft hands
pinned it against a pane, held loosely cupped
this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door released it,
like a self-flung ball,
to all that lovely, perishing outdoors.
Anatoly mentions what he calls "the funniest sentence in the Russian language," "Коза закричала нечеловеческим голосом" ('the goat cried out in an inhuman voice'). I googled it and discovered it's from the notebooks of Sergei Dovlatov, a wonderful writer I discovered for myself back when I was wandering the Russian shelves of the late lamented Donnell Library pulling out books at random. Dovlatov attributes the sentence to "писателя Уксусова" ('the writer Uksusov'); this story by Mikhail Okun repeats Dovlatov's quote but attributes it to one Ivan Muskusov, "one of the most ancient members of the Union of Writers," whose only remembered work was the two-volume Наш великий век (Our great century/age), from which he claims the quote is taken... but "Не исключено, впрочем, что Сергей Донатович мог придумать это сам. Но не перечитывать же теперь весь Наш великий век для установления окончательной истины!" ('It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Sergei Donatovich thought it up himself. But who's going to reread the entirety of Our great century to determine the definitive truth?'). Since I can't find any other trace of the existence of either Uksusov or Muskusov, I'm guessing they're inventions of Dovlatov and Okun respectively. In any case, it certainly is a funny sentence.
Back to Russian, and I'm afraid this is rather specialized, but when I gotta know, I gotta know. So: in Mandelstam's poem "Чуть мерцает призрачная сцена," he writes "Из блаженного, певучего притина/ К нам летит бессмертная весна" [Iz blazhennogo, pevuchego pritina/ K nam letit bessmertnaya vesna] "From [the/its] blessed, singing pritín, immortal spring flies to us." Now, pritin is apparently an obsolete word and isn't in most bilingual dictionaries. Dahl defines it as "a place to which one is attached or confined, limit of one's movement"; you can say a tree has a pritin, meaning it's taken root, or an animal doesn't have a pritin, meaning it's wild or free, and "the sun's pritin" is an obsolete phrase meaning 'zenith.' In military use, it refers to a sentry post.
So my questions to Russian speakers are: 1) are you familiar with this word, and if so do you consider it obsolete or just unusual? and 2) what do you think it means in this context? Steven Broyde, who's usually very accurate, translates it as "cozy shelter," which seems like overinterpretation to me, but what do I know?
The only other place Mandelstam used it is in his translation ("Мой шаг звучит поутру рано," not online) of this wretched poem by Max Barthel, a "proletarian poet" of Germany whose 1920 book Arbeiterseele Mandelstam was presumably assigned to translate to keep him occupied and out of trouble in the mid-'20s (when he became unable to write poetry of his own). Barthel writes "Ein Stern strahlt noch,/ In sich verloren," "A star shines still, lost in itself" (whatever that's supposed to mean); Mandelstam renders it (pleasing himself, if not the author, who had spent time in Russia and might actually have seen the translation) "Еще дрожит/ Звезда в притине," "A star still shivers v pritine," which I guess is "in its confines" or "at its post." Incidentally, Barthel, like Phil Jutzi, made an indecently hasty transition from Communism to Nazism as soon as the weather changed in 1933. He managed to stay out of the Soviet zone after the war and lived until 1975. I have no idea how his work is regarded, if anyone still reads it.
Continuing our focus on the lighter side of language, we bring you Mark Liberman's report on the "Top 10 translation fails of 2008″; the most entertaining to me is a more general fail, the frequent use of "bowels" as a translation of Russian недра [nedra], 'depths (of the earth),' obviously via a dictionary translation "bowels of the earth." For example, "The Summary of the Energy Strategy of Russia for the Period of Up to 2020" (a 2003 document, online as a pdf here) has a section "Bowels' Use and Management of the State Bowels' Fund," which includes sentences like "The main task of the public energy policy in this sphere is the reproduction of the mineral-raw base of hydrocarbon and other fuel-energy resources and rational use of Russian bowels for providing the stable economic development of the country." I can't resist reproducing Mark's final zinger: "I note that this offers a new linguistic perspective on the recent Russian gas crisis."
I've been posting a lot of Deep Thoughts lately, so I'm glad to take the opportunity to turn to the lighter side of language with a NY Times article by Sarah Lyall called "No Snickering: That Road Sign Means Something Else," about "embarrassing place names" in Britain: "These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent." An anecdote:
Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.(Thanks, Bonnie!)The name most likely has to do with the spot’s historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.
“If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn’t deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name,” Mr. Hurst said. “People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other’s naked buttocks.”
The couple moved away.
Some years ago I did one of my more bravura posts on the image of the black sun in Mandelstam, and now that I'm delving more deeply into Mandelstam and reading a shelf of books on him, I'm accumulating more background on the image. If you're interested, go read the earlier post first, because this one is basically going to be an infodump without any attempt at connection or context.
Clarence Brown, in Chapter 11 of Mandelstam
In any case, the point is that the black sun furnishes us (line 13) with 'guilty love,' put literally, after Racine, as 'black flame.' After the refrain this has become, in line 15, a funeral torch. The black sun in ancient usage was the opposite of the sun of day, i.e. it was the night. And that is what Phèdre herself becomes in line 18: she is the night, and immediately says: 'With my black love I have soiled the sun.'Omry Ronen, in a long essay at the end of my one-volume edition of Mandelstam (an expanded Russian translation of his essay in European Writers, The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade, Vol 10, NY, 1990, 1619-1651, which I haven't seen), has a short but intriguing discussion of the image (my translation):Night 'falls' in Russian as it does in English, and to 'fall upon' is to attack. The night, the black sun, that has overcome Hippolytus, falls also upon Theseus, the hapless mourner of two deaths at the end of the tragedy. The black sun that arose in the first choral speech, gleamed darkly amid the broad daylight of the second, now lights the funeral of the last. In the final line, it is extinguished. The Russian verb uniat', meaning 'to calm, cool, assuage,' has seldom had so sinister a meaning as here, where it refers to the death of Phèdre by her own hand, the final 'cooling' of her hot passion, for in this transformation of imagery, she has become the black sun, the night.
The eschatological image in this poem ["Эта ночь непоправима" "Nothing can be done for this night"], undoubtedly, goes back to "Temnyi lik" ['Dark face'] (1911), by Vasily Rozanov, the heretic-philosopher and brilliant writer who had studied the mutual links between Judaism, Christianity, sex, and human sacrifice. Asceticism in Russian Orthodoxy, he wrote, was a black light "around the Black Sun... It is this Black Sun, great Death in the world [великой мировой Смерти], metaphysical death, that is worshiped by the monks who by their very garments are called 'black robes.'" (If anyone has access to the original English of this passage, I'd love to see it, because I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly.)
From Ch. 3 of Gregory Freidin's A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (with gratitude to UCal for putting it online free):
Mandelstam's fundamental assumption about Pushkin was not radically different from that of Gippius or Rozanov;[74] nor was his view of an artist unrelated to Ivanov's Orpheus participating in the "divinely erotic process." Where he differed from them was in his pattern for presenting Pushkin's "passion" or "pathos." Developing his main thesis that the death of an artist "from a fully Christian point of view" represented his ultimate and central creative act, Mandelstam recalled the government's shameful concealment of the place and time of Pushkin's funeral service:Here are the two footnotes relevant to the image:
Pushkin's funeral was held in the night. It was a secret funeral. The marble St. Isaac's—a magnificent sarcophagus—waited in vain for the solar body of the poet. It was at night that the sun was placed into the coffin, and it was in freezing January that the sleds creaked, taking the poet's remains to an out-of-the-way church.I am recalling the picture of Pushkin's funeral in order to evoke in your memory the image of the night sun, the image of the last Greek tragedy created by Euripides—the vision of the unfortunate Phaedra.[75]
It has been noted that Euripides' Phaedra had no such vision,[76] but the meaning, at least in the most immediate sense, is not hard to come by. Whatever else Mandelstam may have had in mind, the image of the "night sun," although most likely borrowed from the vocabulary of Viacheslav Ivanov,[77] is emblematic of Hippolytus, who in chastity and innocence had to suffer for the most unchaste of crimes. Taking his cue in part from Gippius and in part from Annenskii's interpretation of Euripides, Mandelstam presented Pushkin as a martyr to the cause of sublimating sensuality into Passion (the "fiery asceticism" of Gippius) and freeing humanity from, in Annenskii's words, "the yoke of the vegetative form of the soul." Furthermore, as in Euripides, the one who set the fatal trap for Hippolytus was herself an innocent and tormented victim. Now, in 1915, Phaedra's vision had returned once again: "In the fateful hours of purgation and storm, we have raised Skriabin over our heads, his sun-heart burns over us; but—alas!—this is not the sun of redemption, but the sun of guilt. Affirming Skriabin as her symbol in the hour of a world war, Phaedra-Russia . . ."[78]
The extant manuscript breaks off at this point, but the overall context allows one to reconstruct with some certainty the symbolic meaning that "Phaedra-Russia" was meant to convey: Hippolytus was to Phaedra what Pushkin and Skriabin were to Russia. Although Mandelstam may have intended to be no more than suggestive, his analogy between the relationship of Hippolytus to Phaedra in Euripides and that of the two symbolic figures of Russian art to their country was quite deliberate. Indeed, the enigmatic and unexpected Phaedra is invoked in the essay four times, whereas the Orpheus of Viacheslav Ivanov, who provided Mandelstam with the image of the "sun-heart,"[79] appears only once, and in a negative context at that.
76. In his introduction' to SS 3, Iurii Ivask suggests that the image of the "black sun" may have been associated with Nerval's "soleil noir" from "El desdichado" (SS 3, pp. xxii). Mandelstam was certainly aware of Nerval, whose work appeared in translations in Russia in early 1910, for instance in Severnye zapiski, in which Mandelstam was frequently published. Many possible sources of Mandelstam's image are offered by the editors of SS 3 (pp. 404-411), from antiquity through the Old and the New Testaments, the Talmud, and early Christian literature to The Lay of Igor's Campaign and Avvakum's autobiography. Kiril Taranovsky pointed to Viacheslav lvanov's poetry as a possible source (Essays on Mandel'stam [Cambridge, Mass., 1976], p. 87). Nadezhda Mandelstam gives particular emphasis to Avvakum's Life ("a book he was always reading"), The Lay of Igor's Campaign, Gogol's words about Pushkin's death, and, finally, the eclipse during the Crucifixion in Matthew and Luke (NM 2, pp. 127-128). As she has also pointed out, the association of Pushkin with the sun being buried may go back to Gogol's lamentation after Pushkin's death (NM 2, p. 127). Contrary to her assertion, however, a careful perusal of Annenskii's critical prose yields no instances of "black" or "night sun." The image, however, was common enough in contemporary poetry, and it appears in a Briusovian poem by Mikhail Lozinskii, "West"' (1908; in Gornyi kliuch, 2d ed. [Petrograd, 1922], p. 73). I have narrowed my discussion to the sources that help define the "trajectory" of Mandelstam's usage without attempting an exhaustive catalog of possible allusions.The "SS 3" he keeps referencing is the first complete edition of Mandelstam by Struve and Filippov: Осип Мандельштам, Собр. соч., в четырёх томах под редакцией проф. Г.П.Струве и Б. А. Филиппова, Межд. Лит. Содружество, 1967-1981. I'd sure like to read the discussion there, which is apparently quite comprehensive.77. Cf. Viach. Ivanov's "Serdtse Dionisa" (The Heart of Dionysus, 1910) from Cor ardens: "Oh Parnassus, . . . offering a sacrifice, thou concealed in the solar sepulcher the heart of the ancient Zagreus . . . the heart of Sun-Dionysus." Or consider his "Orfei rasterzannyi" (Orpheus Rent) from Prozrachnost' (1904): "O night sun, sing to thy dark music the testament of day in the tears of darkness." A more recent relevant text: "The lyre-player [Orpheus], both as Phoebus and as the creator of rhythm [Eurhythmos], sang in the night the harmony of the spheres, setting them in motion and thereby calling out the sun. He himself was the night sun, like Dionysus, and, like him, he was a martyr. The mystical Musagetes is Orpheus, the sun of the dark depths, the logos of the profound, internally empirical knowledge" (Viach. Ivanov, "Orfei," Trudy i dni 1 [January-February 1912]: 63). Taranovsky suggests Racine's flamme funeste and limits Mandelstam's usage in "Fedra" to the "black sun of wild and sleepless passion" (Essays on Mandel'stam, p. 150n. 6). Note that a good key to Mandelstam's usage of the image may be found in Vladislav Khodasevich's "Ballada," which thematizes the same usage in reverse: a sixteen-watt bulb of prosaic and meager existence is replaced by the lyre-playing astral Orpheus.
Addendum to the Addenda. For reggae/dub lovers, "black sun" in an entirely different context: "Every morning the black sun rise. It shines out of the Ark of the Covenant..." I hadn't been familiar with The Congos, but I like them.
Further Addenda. I've turned up a whole article by Victor Terras on this subject, "The black sun: Orphic imagery in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam" (Slavic and East European Journal 45 [2001], pp. 45-60):
The myth of Orpheus and Euridice has found an echo in many works of world literature, including Russian. It also appears in Mandelstam, but it is not per se the source of orphic imagery, such as that of a black sun. Rather, orphic imagery is derived from religious cults founded by Orpheus. The evidence on these cults from classical antiquity is sparse and contradictory. In particular, Orpheus's relation to Dionysus is problematic. Legend has it that Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads for favoring Apollo over Dionysus, but then, too, he is often identified with Dionysus, "the suffering god." The pursuit of moral and physical purity is "orphic," but so are Dionysian revels. The orphic tendency to a dualist worldview leads to an ambivalence of opposing principles, such as life: death, day: night, and heaven: nether world. Specifically, a Dionysus-Nyctelios is venerated as an antipode of Apollo-Helios. A distinctive trait is an apparent preference for the nocturnal and a fascination with the nether world. Orphic cosmogony has Night for the mother of Ouranus and Gaia (Heaven and Earth), with Zeus and Hera only the fifth generation. Night is personified and very much the supreme deity.[...]Nyctelios (νυκτέλιος) is just a Greek adjective meaning 'nocturnal,' but it looks, especially in transliteration, where you don't notice the difference in vowel length, as if it might mean 'night sun' (νύξ + ήλιος); Terras makes this mistake, as does Vyacheslav Ivanov in "Две стихии в современном символизме," p. 555: "тот же Дионис, что доселе известен был только как Никтелиос, ночное Солнце" ('that same Dionysos hitherto known only as Nyktelios, the night Sun'). There is also a discussion of the "black sun" image in Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned, in chapter 13, "The Young Levite," on pp. 108-14 in my Atheneum paperback: "When the sun is combined with blackness..., it means that life is ebbing, nearing its end, sinking into twilight as freedom is extinguished...."We know that precisely at the time of Mandelstam's intensive contact with [Vyacheslav] Ivanov, the latter was lecturing on Novalis and translating his poetry and, in particular, his Hymnen an die Nacht. In the very first of these hymns we find a "liebliche Sonne der Nacht," translated as Mne solntsem ty polunochnym siiaesh', "You shine for me as a midnight sun" (Ivanov, Sobranie 4: 185). The not inconsiderable role played by Novalis in Mandelstam's thought (see Terras) is surely due to Ivanov's mediation. All of the examples of orphic imagery which appear in Mandelstam's poetry appear in much greater concentration in Ivanov, where they are an integral part of an organic worldview. In the following brief poem the entire worldview of classical Orphism is expressed:
The Sun of NightOrphic truth is paradoxic: It is a luminous gift, yet it is a gift of nocturnal Love. Love is a hypostasis of Night. The light that will not set - the Sun of Night - is Dionysus-Nyctelios, as we learn from several other poems. The conflict of Euripides' Hippolytus is suggested in the lines that the truth of Day bans love, and is countered by the black magic of Night: the pure but loveless follower of Artemis, Hippolytus, falls victim to the machinations of vengeful Cypris-Night. In this, as well as in several other poems, the Sun of Night is said to be superior to the Sun of Day. It is sole splendidior, candidior nive, as the epigraph to "De Profundis" asserts (Sobranie 2: 237).[...]Truth is a luminous gift,
A gift of nocturnal Love.
Do not believe the truth of day;
Fear dark magic.
In the former, love is banned;
In the latter, there is no truth.
At midnight call the never setting light!
(Sobranie 4: 53)There are more instances of a "black sun" in Mandelstam than in Ivanov. But there is a difference: Mandelstam's orphic imagery does not reflect an organic worldview. Each appearance of the "black sun" is a conceit in its own right, used for the particular effect of the poem. This accounts for the varied contexts in which the "black sun" appears.
Another fascinating post by Mark Liberman at the indispensable Language Log, linking to an article published today in Science, "Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement," by R. D. Gray, A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill. The abstract:
Debates about human prehistory often center on the role that population expansions play in shaping biological and cultural diversity. Hypotheses on the origin of the Austronesian settlers of the Pacific are divided between a recent "pulse-pause" expansion from Taiwan and an older "slow-boat" diffusion from Wallacea. We used lexical data and Bayesian phylogenetic methods to construct a phylogeny of 400 languages. In agreement with the pulse-pause scenario, the language trees place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan approximately 5230 years ago and reveal a series of settlement pauses and expansion pulses linked to technological and social innovations. These results are robust to assumptions about the rooting and calibration of the trees and demonstrate the combined power of linguistic scholarship, database technologies, and computational phylogenetic methods for resolving questions about human prehistory.I'm glad they came down on the side of Taiwanese origin, because that's how I've always understood it, and it would have been a painful effort to dislodge the idea. Mark adds "An unusually clear explanation of the project, along with a great deal of background information, is available on the web here," describes some earlier work, and invites comment, as of course do I (I hope the recent spate of Russian-related posts hasn't driven off the Austronesianists!).
Joe Clark has very kindly put up a snatch of an interview in Occitan on Flickr. As he says, "Do not be surprised if Occitan sounds like French as spoken in a Spanish accent." If you can't understand it, no problem: there are subtitles... in Breton!
Clarence Brown, writing about Mandelstam's early poems, says (on page 177): "One quickly becomes aware that the voice uttering these poems is quite clearly an 'Alice,' to use Auden's marvelous term. It is very Alice, this fastidiousness, this dainty swoon. And yet one is just as quickly aware that the whole Alice tonality is a sort of trick; to be more precise, it is a gambit, a shrewd surrender of material in the expectation of gain. For the speaker ends his poems too often with very confident assertions of superiority..."
Google has failed me, so I turn to the Varied Reader. Are any of you familiar with this allusion? (Yes, I thought of Alice in Wonderland, but it's not at all clear that that's what Auden had in mind, and I'd like to know the passage Brown was so confidently alluding to a generation ago.)
Here's a passage from Brown's Mandelstam that strikingly illustrates how presuppositions can affect a translation. He's discussing the poem "Silentium" from Mandelstam's first book; here's his translation and discussion (pp. 165-166):
It has not yet been born,(I don't know which version is better, but I enjoyed the argumentum ex silentio pun.)
it is music and the word,
and thereby inviolably
bonds everything that lives.The breast of the sea breathes tranquilly
but the day is brilliant, like a fool,
and the pale lilac of the foam
lies in a bowl of cloudy blue.May my lips acquire this
primeval quietness
like a crystal note
congenitally pure.Remain foam, Aphrodite;
and return to music, word,
and heart, be ashamed of heart
when blent with life's foundation!The first word is something of a problem, though it never was until a friend of mine, Richard McKane, presented it to me in a translation different from the one I had always mentally been using. The word is a Russian pronoun that can mean 'it' or 'she' depending upon the antecedent, which is of course the problem. The 'it' of my translation means 'silence'; the 'she' of his meant 'Aphrodite.' I discover from this provocative conflict what provocative conflicts are best at disclosing, namely, the assumptions that I had made without being really aware of them. 'Silentium' is a neuter noun in Latin, but its Russian equivalent, tishina, is feminine, to which one refers by the feminine pronoun. That is one assumption, that Mandelstam had named his poem 'Silentium' but had thought of its subject, 'silence' or tishina, in his native Russian. The other assumption is much broader and involves my whole conception of his image of silence as something that pervades and unites everything in existence. That seems to me fundamental.... McKane evidently thought that the reference was to Aphrodite, who is after all the principal feminine person (and noun) in the poem and who has in fact, in the poem's chronology, not yet been born, for the speaker asks her to 'remain foam.' But is she the other things represented by those predicative nominatives? Is she both 'music' and 'the word'? Is she that which connects all living things? Love?
Finally, I am not sure, nor do I believe that anyone ought to be. The argument from the gender of a word that remained merely latent, tishina, is not, now that I am aware of having made it, unassailable. It is — I hesitate to say, knowing that some readers detest even innocent puns — the argumentum ex silentio, a feeble one at best. But the problem, if it is a problem, lies more in the translation than in the original, it being one of the penalties of speaking English that one must resolve an ambiguity of which the Russian reader may hardly be aware. In English the Russian ona is either 'it' or 'she'; it cannot, as in Russian, be both it and she.
For years I've read articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates and mentally pronounced his name /ˌta-nǝˈhisi/ (i.e., tah-nǝ-HEE-see), which seemed obvious enough. But this evening Terry Gross interviewed him on Fresh Air, and she introduced him as /ˌta-nǝˈhasi/ (tah-nǝ-HAH-see). My first thought was that she was misspeaking, but then she did it again, and I did a little investigating, and lo:
Also for the record Ta-Nehisi (pronounced Tah-Nuh-Hah-See) is an Egyptian name for ancient Nubia. I came up in a time when African/Arabic names were just becoming popular among black parents. I had a lot of buddies named Kwame, Kofi, Malik (actually have a brother with that name), Akilah and Aisha. My Dad had to be different, though. Couldn't just give me a run of the mill African name. I had to be a nation.Now, leaving aside the Egyptological side of it (the hieroglyphs transliterated as nḥsy and translated "Nubian" cannot, of course, be confidently provided with vowels, and I don't know where the "Ta" comes from), I think it's pretty nifty that there is a name in which graphic i is pronounced /a/; anything that adds to the weirdness and unpredictability of English orthography is fine by me. (I added the pronunciation information to his Wikipedia entry.)
The Romani Morpho-Syntax Database (part of the Romani Linguistics Page) is operated by
the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. According to Anggarrgoon, where I found the link, it features:
* Comprehensive documentation of over 150 varieties of the language
* Phrase exemplification of all data in sound, transcription, and translation
* Browse, search, and query facilities
* Dynamic map-generating function that plots the distribution of features
* Extensive Help menu
* Link to Romani Linguistics Page with
** background information on the Romani language
** bibliographical database of Romani linguistics
** downloadable DVD presentation in 17 languages on the historical development of Romani
It took me a while to figure out how to search, but you can do it from this page; the maps of dialectal variants are here. It would be nice if they made it more obvious how to use the site, but I'm glad it exists!
I finally got my very own copy of Clarence Brown's classic Mandelstam
1) From page 2:
...it was in fact [his wife Nadezhda] who had insisted to Mandelstam himself that the poems be written down. In the most literal sense, he was no 'writer.' He was contemptuous of paper and ink, kept his poems in his head, and believed so strongly in their objective existence that once he had finished them he had no fear of losing them.... In the autobiographical Chetvertaia proza (Fourth Prose) he furiously megaphones:A writer who doesn't write!I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives. I have no handwriting because I never write. I alone in Russia work from the voice while all around the bitch-pack writes. What the hell kind of writer am I?! Get out you fools!
2) From page 89: "Mandelstam despised translation, especially translation in verse, even though Innokenty Annensky, a poet revered by Mandelstam and himself a masterful translator, had urged him to practise that discipline as a means of learning verse technique." One result (Nadezhda is speaking):
In Voronezh, he and I translated some Maupassant. I think he did 'Yvette.' I took the manuscripts to Moscow and sat down to correct them and proofread what the typist had done, and suddenly I realized that some sort of butler was talking in the story. There wasn't any in the text. I thought it must be another edition. Took another edition out: no butler. Then it dawned on me what had happened. Mandelstam hadn't even translated — he'd described one of the illustrations! There was an illustration in the book showing some sort of very dignified butler. I mean, he was so bored by translation that he couldn't even read the text!
3) Mandelstam kept falling in love with other women, which naturally put a strain on his marriage, though Nadezhda won out in the end. On pages 121-22 Brown writes, "At about this time Mandelstam fell in love with Olga Vaksel, about whom little is known except that she later emigrated to Norway, where she died. He wrote a number of poems to her.... His affair with her, though evidently brief, was very serious. Nadezhda Yakovlevna told me: 'It was the one occasion in our life when we were on the verge of getting a divorce.'" But now we know quite a bit about Olga; I've discovered by googling around that she was Olga Aleksandrovna Vaksel (1903-32), known to her intimates as "Lyutik." Her father, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, was from an old military family and kept "hussar habits" in his retirement; her mother, Yulia Fedorovna Lvova, was from an old Petersburg family of the intelligentsia (she was a pianist and composer, and her father had been a political exile). Her parents got divorced in 1905. Lyutik had light brown hair and dark eyes—Akhmatova later called her a "blinding beauty." She had literary and artistic interests; she fell in love quickly and deeply but fell out of love suddenly and irrevocably. Mandelstam's brother Evgeny was briefly engaged to her and lamented that she had "slipped away." In 1921 she married Arseny Fedorovich Smolevsky and had a son, but felt trapped and got a divorce. She got a job with the film studio Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), where she became friends with Mandelstam and his wife (they had previously all met at Max Voloshin's place in the Crimea). Mandelstam fell madly in love with her, but she was did not want to betray Nadezhda and refused him. She wound up marrying the Norwegian vice-consul in Leningrad, Christian Irgens Hvistendahl (1903-1934), and going with him to Oslo, where she dictated her memoirs to him, wrote some final poems, and on October 26, 1932, shot herself with his revolver. (If you read Russian, there's more about her here.)
In the early '30s, Mandelstam fell for the poet and translator Maria Petrovykh, who turned out to be interesting enough, and a significant enough person in Russian literature, for me to spend part of today writing a Wikipedia article about her.
Don Ringe has been doing guest posts at the Log (I linked to them here and here); he's posted a final one on Wanderwörter (words that travel between languages in a region) before vanishing into the maw of the new semester, and I thought I'd bring it to your attention.
And on the historical linguistics front, it occurred to me that some might be interested in the question of how to find English words that descend from a common root, explored in this AskMetaFilter thread.
I had intended to post a translation of this excellent post ("о норме": 'on the norm') over at Anatoly Vorobey's blog, but my computer crashed when I was almost done, and I don't have the heart to do it all over again, so I'll just say that he's explaining the poor correspondence between the alleged "rules" propagated by alleged purists and the actual rules of the language, and pointing out that the situation in Russia is still worse because there even the linguists largely subscribe to the shibboleths—a sad situation indeed. (And I note comments in the thread like one saying sure, there are educated people who use the "illiterate" verb ложить, just as there are educated people who consult horoscopes, and I sigh.)
Anyway, John Emerson in this thread kindly links to a post by Rohan Maitzen at The Valve, Make loudest possible proclamation of your Hat!, and I enjoyed it so much that as a substitute I will copy the passage from Carlyle found there:
Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now perambulates London Streets. . . The Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends a man to drive it through the streets, hoping to be saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very probably have done; but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such! He too knows that the Quack has become God. Laugh not at him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be comic; he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafening blast of Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous, of poor Heart-Atheism fallen now into Enchanted Workhouses, sounds too surely like a Doom’s-blast! . . .I have long since made proclamation of my Hats, and I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that there are not finer hats in the realm!We take it for granted, the most rigorous of us, that all men who have made anything are expected and entitled to make the loudest possible proclamation of it, and call on a discerning public to reward them for it. Every man his own trumpeter; that is, to a really alarming extent, the accepted rule. Make loudest possible proclamation of your Hat: true proclamation if that will do; if that will not do, then false proclamation,—to such extent of falsity as will serve your purpose; as will not seem too false to be credible!
Back when I read Döblin's novel and saw Fassbinder's movie (discussed in this post), I had little access to the internet and it wasn't what it is today (no Google, no Wikipedia), so a lot of stuff went over my head. Now I can get background information on just about anything, and oh what a difference it makes! Two samples from the Second Book of the novel and the second episode of the Fassbinder:
1) On page 90 of my F. Unger paperback, when our man Franz and his girlfriend Lina approach the newsvendor who pressed sex manuals on Franz, gravely upsetting Lina when Franz tried to explain to her what he had been reading about the oppression of homosexuals, he lets her go on the attack while he hangs back, and we get this: "In the fighting zone, Lina, the hearty, sloppy, unwashed, weepy little girl, made an offensive of her own à la Prince of Homburg: My noble uncle Friedrich von der Mark! Natalie! Let be! Let be!" And the scene ends with this fairly impenetrable paragraph:
Oh immortality, thou art my very own, beloved what sheen is now outspread, hail, all hail, to the Prince of Homburg, victor in the battle of Fehrbellin, all hail! (Court ladies, officers, and torches appear on the castle terrace.) "Waiter, how 'bout another Gilka."The only thing I could have looked up at the time was the battle of Fehrbellin, whereupon my old standby Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary would have told me Fehrbellin, a town northwest of Berlin, was the "scene 1675 of victory of Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg over the Swedes under Karl Gustav Wrangel." Which would have meant nothing to me (except that it would have occasioned a brief perplexity as to why they translated Friedrich Wilhelm's name but not Karl Gustav's).
Now I can go to Wikipedia for a full account of the battle, but that's not really so important, because it turns out Döblin is referencing not the battle itself but Heinrich von Kleist's last play, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin (the link is to the German Wikipedia article; there's no English one, but a couple of reviews of Neil Bartlett's revival give a good idea of what it's like: Independent, Guardian). The Wikipedia article links to a Project Gutenberg text, where one can find the originals of the quoted bits: Natalie (knieend). "Mein edler Oheim, Friedrich von der Mark!" Der Kurfürst (legt die Papiere weg). "Natalie!" (Er will sie erheben.) Natalie. "Laß, laß!" (Act IV, Scene 1); Der Prinz von Homburg. "Nun, o Unsterblichkeit, bist du ganz mein!" (Act V, Scene 10); Der Prinz von Homburg. "Lieber, was für ein Glanz verbreitet sich?" ... Kottwitz. "Heil, Heil dem Prinz von Homburg!" ... Alle. "Dem Sieger in der Schlacht bei Fehrbellin!" (Act V, Scene 11, the last scene of the play). Oh, and Gilka (which Franz pronounces "Yilka") is a Berlin-made kümmel aperitif.
2) On page 104, in the midst of an argument between Franz and some acquaintances of his, whose Communist sensibilities were offended by seeing Franz wearing a swastika armband and hawking the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter (he's not a Nazi, but he has feelings of confused resentment about the war and needed the job), there occurs this mysterious sentence: "Blood must bubble, blood must bubble, in currents muggy and thick." Huh? I guess I took that as some sort of quasi-poetic expression of how he was feeling, but it turns out that "Blut muss fließen, knüppelhageldick" is from a storm trooper marching song—you can get a full set of the disgusting lyrics here, with translation. But a search on "knüppelhageldick" revealed that the Nazi song is simply a rewrite of the earlier "Die Konkubine," a revolutionary song that specifies "Fuerstenblut muss fliessen" ('princely blood must flow'), and that in turn is reworked from the song immediately preceding it in that very useful and compendious Chansonnier international du révolté, "Das Lied der '48," better known as the Heckerlied, a revolutionary song from 1848. (Somewhere in my meanderings I found a web page where you could hear a chorus singing it, but I seem to have lost it.) Did I ever mention that I love the internet?
Michael Erard, one of LH's favorite journalists because he writes knowledgeably and sensibly about language (not coincidentally, he has an MA in linguistics), is working on Babel No More, "a book about language superlearners and the upper limits of the human ability to learn and speak languages." He's started a website to aid him in his research; it links to a survey for people who "can speak six or more languages." If you fall into that category (I'm afraid I don't), help the man out—it's confidential, but you can give him your e-mail address if you want to see the results, and you can enter a drawing to get a copy of the book.
Oh, and check out his home page: the latest post has an awe-inspiring image of the demon warrior Ravana, whom Erard has designated the god of hyperpolyglots.
I rewarded myself for finishing some work by watching the 1931 Phil Jutzi version of Berlin Alexanderplatz (with dialogue by Alfred Döblin, the author of the novel). Years ago, when I read the novel, I was frustrated trying to track down images of Alexanderplatz and Berlin from those days; it's amazingly satisfying to see a whole movie filmed on location at the time, with the actual streets, squares, and bars of the day. The Jutzi movie is just one item on the supplementary disc 7 of the Criterion set (see my Christmas post), but I'm glad I watched it first, because it's been long enough since I saw the Fassbinder that I wasn't mentally comparing it, and I thoroughly enjoyed this in its own right (so much so that I created a Wikipedia page for Jutzi, who started out a leftie and wound up working with the Nazis). The acting is good, especially Heinrich George as the protagonist, Franz Biberkopf—he's exactly right physically, with his bull torso and squinty eyes, and he does the role proud, conveying poor doomed Franz's good-hearted idiocy and baffled affection for the women who love him.
And yesterday I followed up by watching the first segment of the Fassbinder version
I had always taken gazebo to be, in the OED's words, "a humorous formation on GAZE v., imitating Lat. futures like videbo ‘I shall see’ (cf. LAVABO)," but the OED goes on to say "but the early quots. suggest that it may possibly be a corruption of some oriental word," and William Sayers, in "Eastern Prospects: Belvederes, Kiosks, Gazebos," Neophilologus 87 (2003): 299-305, tries to pin down that "oriental" origin. As the abstract says:
An etymology for gazebo is sought in Hispano-Arabic and a likely candidate meaning 'mirador, viewing platform' is found in the work of the medieval Cordoban poet Ibn Guzman. The eighteenth-century British occupation of Tangiers may have provided an avenue for the importation of this lexical isolate, although the architecture of the octagonal garden pavilion now designated gazebo would have had multiple paths to Britain.You can only read the first page at that link, but Dr. Techie at Wordorigins.org quotes a good chunk of the remainder of the article, which discusses two possible sources, North African and Hispanic Arabic qasbah 'citadel' and Ibn Quzman's qushaybah. The discussion is interesting from both philological and cultural points of view.
Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies is published by the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza; they have two series, "Language and Linguístics" and "Literature, Film and Cultural Studies," and a bunch of issues of each are available online, the current issues here and back issues here. If you click on a particular issue, say Vol. 33 (2006), you get titles and abstracts of all the articles on the web page, and if you're interested in one, e.g. "Sexually explicit euphemism in Martin Amis's Yellow Dog: Mitigation or offence?" by Eliecer Crespo Fernández, you can click on the Full Text / Texto completo link to get a pdf of the whole article. A well-done site with some interesting material. (Via wood s lot.)
Dave Bonta was kind enough to send me a link to the memorial site for John DeFrancis, who died January 2. I, like uncountable others, used his Beginning Chinese
He had been born nearly a century earlier and a continent away, on August 31, in 1911—the year of China’s republican revolution—in Bridgeport, CT. His childhood was impoverished: his father was a laborer and his mother illiterate, but, against all odds, John learned to love books. The first in his family to attend college, he graduated from Yale University in the spring of 1933 with a bachelor’s degree in Economics. In the depths of the Great Depression, he looked for a job but found none. A dorm-mate from a missionary family in China persuaded him to travel to Beijing to learn Chinese and make himself more marketable. So in September that year, John boarded a ship for the month-long journey to China...
Returning to the US with Kay [his wife], John, now a confirmed Sinophile, began graduate studies as the first PhD student in the new program at Yale in Chinese Studies, establshed by the linguist George Kennedy... In 1947, he landed a job as an Assistant Professor in the Paige School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, the director of which was the unfortunate Owen Lattimore. The only other employee of the School was a secretary. John completed the requirements for his doctorate in 1948, and settled down to a good life teaching language and history alongside Owen, and conducting research on language policy issues.A life well and courageously lived. I wish I had known him.With the “loss” of mainland China in 1949, Owen Lattimore became the target of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who in the early 1950s charged that Lattimore was America’s leading communist agitator. Subpoenaed, John, who was as yet untenured, spoke out vehemently in defense of his boss, and in 1954 ended up losing his job.
Dozens of unsuccessful attempts to obtain a new China-related position made John realize he had effectively been black-listed by American universities. Embittered, he abandoned Sinology. Under pressure to support his wife and young son Chuck, he tried making a living as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, but failed in some misery. He eventually landed a job as a math instructor at a private school in New Haven.
The China field found him again in 1961, after the “Red” panic had abated. John B. Tsu, head of Chinese Studies at Seton Hall University, wrote him a letter offering to meet with him about a possible job. John, still pessimistic, pitched the letter into the nearest trash can, but was convinced to reconsider by Kay and Chuck. He and Tsu met on New Year’s Eve in New York City, when Tsu offered him a six-month contract to write a first-year textbook of Mandarin Chinese. John accepted and delivered his manuscript right on schedule, and Tsu used that success to obtain additional federal funding for a textbook at the next level up. Eventually Tsu was able to parlay Seton Hall’s initial six-month commitment into hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal support for a project that produced the twelve-volume series Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Chinese published by Yale University Press. Generally called “the DeFrancis series,” the books were well-known to a generation of China scholars and loved by many....
Update. Victor Mair has written a memorial post at the Log that's well worth reading; it starts: "My old friend and comrade-in-arms, John DeFrancis, died at the age of 97 on January 2, 2009. The cause of his death was a bizarre, tragic accident, yet one that is supremely ironic for someone who devoted his entire adult life to the study, teaching, and explication of Chinese language: John choked on a piece of Peking Duck at a Christmas dinner in a Honolulu restaurant." There's a lot of information about his career and books, as well as a great photo.
Don Ringe has a new post at the Log (a followup to the one I posted about here) in which, in answer to a question by David Marjanović, he discusses in detail the histories of the IE words for 'wheel' (PIE *kwékwlo-s, collective *kwekwlé-h2) and 'horse' (PIE *éḱwos). He starts off with a general discussion of the issues involved that should be accessible to anyone; here's a sample:
Nonspecialists sometimes think of languages, including reconstructed languages, as sets of words; but that’s somewhat less than half true. Yes, every language does have a distinctive lexicon, but the structure of the language is even more distinctive; you can replace a large proportion of the lexicon with words borrowed from other languages without any significant effect on the language’s structure. (Modern English is an obvious example.) Historical linguists reconstruct a protolanguage’s system of sounds and system of inflectional morphology as well as its lexicon. In some cases the sound system and inflectional system turn out to be complex and intricate, and PIE happens to be one of those cases. Moreover, because we reconstruct protolanguages by exploiting the regularity of sound change, competent reconstructions are mathematically precise. Under those circumstances, when we reconstruct a word which fits perfectly into the sound system and inflectional system, with no hint that there is anything out of line, the default hypothesis has to be that it’s an inherited word, simply because the odds that a word borrowed from some other language would fit in well are significantly lower.He goes on to a detailed analysis of the two words in question, which may be tough sledding for someone with no background in the subject but which gripped me like a good detective story. But this paragraph from his conclusion shouldn't present problems and is of great theoretical interest:
This raises a methodological point that we can no longer avoid. Is there any difference between a word which is reconstructable for a protolanguage and a word which spread from dialect to dialect of the protolanguage as it was breaking up? As usual, it depends on the individual case. If the real-world separation of the daughters was genuinely abrupt—that is, one group picked up and moved within a generation or so, and subsequent contacts were infrequent and brief—then there is a clear difference between the two scenarios. But most disintegrations of speech communities don’t happen like that; dialects remain in contact as they diverge, continuing to trade linguistic material until some event finally makes them lose touch altogether. (The best discussion of these processes is Ross 1997.) In such cases the “protolanguage” which we reconstruct is most unlikely to correspond to a single, completely uniform dialect that existed in the real world before its speaking population became large enough to exhibit significant linguistic diversity; it almost inevitably corresponds to a dialectally diversified speech community, still unified but no longer uniform, simply because we can’t tell the difference between words and grammatical forms which had been in the language for generations and those which had arrived very recently. It is also likely that our reconstruction will be temporally “out of focus”, including some inherited words and forms which were no longer characteristic of all the dialects and some new words and forms which were still spreading from dialect to dialect. There are good reasons to suspect that our reconstruction of PIE is like that.Don promises at least one further posting, and I hope there will be many more.
Tomasz Kamusella, besides being an LH reader and commenter (see his very interesting contributions to this LH thread), is a scholar of language and nationalism, and his book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe
Although the Western European pedigree of politics of language is at present conveniently forgotten, the phenomenon of language politicization is said to be now most visible in Central Europe. It is so because after World War I, the formerly multilingual Western European powers of France and the United Kingdom with the support of the United States chose to delegitimize the existence of Austria-Hungary on the account of its multilingualism and multiethnicity. By the same token, the victorious powers legitimized various ethnonational (formerly, often marginal) movements, which defined their postulated nations in terms of language. The national principle steeped in the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity allowed these movements to carve up Central Europe into a multitude of ethnolinguistic nation-states. What followed with vengeance was forced ethnolinguistic homogenization pursued to assimilate ‘non-national elements’ within a nation-state. The intensity and human costs of this project were much higher than in Western Europe, because there the process of ethnolinguistic homogenization was spread out over two or more centuries, and conducted mostly prior to the rise of the bureaucratic state and industry, which provided the means of making millions conform with the central government’s will. ...In the second half of the 19th century, European scholars and statisticians, confronted with the non-national character of Central and Eastern Europe, believed that the nations, which ‘had to exist there,’ could be brought out from the ‘ambiguity of multiethnic populaces’ using statistics. In the subsequent censuses, one had to declare one’s language, variously interpreted as mother tongue, family language, or language of everyday communication. The declaration of more than one language per person was not permitted, which by default excluded the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism from official scrutiny. The logic of this exclusion stemmed from the conviction that a person can belong to one nation only. By the same token, declarations of variously named dialects, already construed as ‘belonging to’ a national language, were noted as declarations of this national language. ...
At the beginning of the 19th century, the idea of popular literacy as the prerequisite of ‘civilizedness’ appeared in Western Europe (Astle 1784). During the 20th century, this concept extended to all the corners of the globe (Illich and Sanders 1988; McLuhan 1962). From that time on, it was insufficient just to speak and communicate successfully. People had to speak something recognized as ‘a language,’ reified by writing (Anderson 1991; Billig 1995: 31). The illiterate speech of those not conforming to this new communication pattern was dubbed as ‘a dialect’ and became subordinated to ‘a language.’ Dialects created in this manner were made into a language’s oral, that is, ‘uncivilized,’ patrimony or anachronistic offspring14 (cf. Bloomfield 1926: 162). ...I was amused by this anecdote:Nowadays, in comparison to the majority of extant polities worldwide, most of the nation-states of Central Europe are unnaturally homogenous in their ethnolinguistic composition. Non-Polish-speakers constitute less than 1 percent Poland’s population, non-Magyar-speakers amount to 2 percent of Hungary’s inhabitants, non-Czech-speakers are less than 3 percent in the Czech Republic’s populace, non-Romanian-speakers constitute less than 11 percent of Romania’s inhabitants, and non-Slovak-speakers amount to less than 15 percent of Slovakia’s populace. But the vast majority of the minority non-national language-speakers could not help acquiring this language at school within the nation-state of their residence. In most cases, it will ensure their assimilation in the near future (Eberhardt 1996: 128, 135, 138, 244, 250). This unusual homogeneity was achieved at a stupendous human cost. The borders of new nation-states founded on the rubble of the destroyed multiethnic polities after 1918 were drawn and re-drawn after both World Wars. These ethnonationally motivated and legitimized changes made tens of millions into foreigners without their need of moving to a different country and tossed tens of millions across the changing borders in forced population exchanges, internationally agreed expulsions, unilateral schemes of forced emigration, deportations, internal dispersals, and due to the denial of citizenship, among others. The interwar descent of the region from democracy into authoritarianism, the wartime Holocaust of Jews and Roma perpetrated by the Third Reich, and the post-war imposition of Soviet totalitarianism facilitated this process of ethnolinguistic homogenization by loosening and nullifying established social bonds and absolving national leaderships from observing the conventional moral norms. Finally and ominously, one could be true to one’s nationalism, which made one’s own nation into the highest good to be fortified and cherished at whatever cost and suffering it could mean to other nations and national minorities (Magocsi 2002: 191; Ther and Siljak 2001).
When I did research in Vienna in 2005, I ran a small experiment. I asked Austrian, German, and other Western colleagues in the Institute of Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) how far Vienna was from Bratislava. The usual guesses were 200 to 500 kilometers. In reality, it is 66 kilometers by car from city center to city center.And I was thunderstruck by the parenthetical remark at the end of this:This clearly shows how much even an educated Austrian or German sees her or his country as part of the West, even to the defiance of actual geography.
All other post-Soviet states still aspire to the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, including the Russian Federation, where Russians make up more than four-fifths of the population, and practically all non-Russians speak Russian and are not allowed to use any other script but Cyrillic for writing their national languages as long as they enjoy their own autonomous republics. (The Jewish Autonomous Region Birobidzhan is the sole exception, as Yiddish written in the Hebrew script is employed there in official capacity.)But sure enough, the Wikipedia article on Birobidzhan (Russian: Биробиджа́н; Yiddish: ביראָבידזשאַן) says that "Yiddish and Jewish traditions have been required components in all public schools for almost fifteen years, taught not as Jewish exotica but as part of the region's national heritage." Somehow I thought the whole "Jewish Birobidzhan" thing was a Stalinist initiative that failed half a century ago. (Of course, there are only 4,000 Jews in Birobidzhan, but that's a lot more than I would have expected.)
The book seems to be quite well proofread, but in that long a book there are bound to be typos, and here are a few I noticed that should be corrected in the next edition: "In 1774, Austria annexed northern Bukovina (today in southeastern [should be southwestern] Ukraine)"; "southern Kosovo went to Italy, which had already annexed Albania and the northern Greek territory around Prága" [s/b Párga]; "Chereso [s/b Cherso] (Cres)"; "Thessalonicae" [s/b Thessalonica]; "ruskaia dusha" [s/b russkaia]; "Tuscanian" [s/b Tuscan]. This isn't a typo but a misleading geographical designation: "Between 1555 and 1713, Spanish was the official language in the Low Countries" [s/b in the Spanish Netherlands]. Also, in an English-language book it's odd to see Preßburg rather than Pressburg for the German name of Bratislava.
I was reading Michael Massing's "Obama: In the Divided Heartland" in a recent NYRB when I was struck by the following sentence (in the first paragraph of section 2): "With a population of 17,000, Perrysburg has a storybook feel to it, with a charming main street lined with restaurants, pubs, a bake shop, a knitting shop, and a coffee shop named My Daily Grind." Pubs? My first thought was that Massing might be British, but although (according to his Wikipedia entry) he's studied at the London School of Economics, he's definitely American, as you can hear from this YouTube interview. So I did a Google search on Perrysburg+pubs and got over 55,000 hits: "Bars Grills And Pubs in Perrysburg OH," "Perrysburg, OH Bars, Pubs, & Clubs," "Perrysburg Coupons: Pubs," "Perrysburg Beer Taverns & Pubs".... it's clearly not Massing's invention. They have pubs in Perrysburg, Ohio, and by extension (since the very reason Massing is reporting from there is that it's an example of the "real America") all across the country.
But when did this happen? I think of pubs as an exclusively British and Irish institution, and when I think of a pub on American soil my image is of a place that serves warm beer and has a name like the Kings Head or the Spotted Pig, catering to people from across the Atlantic, and presumably those are found primarily in cities like New York and Boston. Is "pub" now what "tavern" used to be, a vaguely upscale equivalent of "bar"? My barhopping days are fifteen or so years behind me, so I appeal to those with more recent experience in this field.
Don Ringe's The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe is probably the most interesting thing I've read on the Log (no knock on the other stuff they write about over there, it's just that they tend to be into phonology and comic strips and political use of language, and I'm into historical linguistics). Ringe and I were grad students in Indo-European together, and reading him gives me a pang of regret that I left academia; the reality-based reconstruction of earlier linguistic situations is exactly the kind of thing that got me excited about linguistics in the first place. Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite:
The basic fact of pre-state language distribution is that no single language can occupy, for more than a few centuries, an area too large for all its native speakers to communicate with each other regularly....He goes on to show how "what we actually know about the distribution of languages in Europe at the dawn of history" fits with this picture, and concludes:Thus in pre-state communities every language spread automatically results in language fragmentation. Of course not all the fragments survive; pre-state language communities sometimes gradually abandon their native language and adopt the language of another community with which they are in intimate contact, as linguists working in the highlands of New Guinea have observed (Foley 1986:24-5). But the fragments that do survive continue to diverge, century after century, until the original connections between them can no longer be discovered with any certainty....
But not all pre-state areas are equally diverse linguistically; that was one of the many interesting findings of Nichols 1990... As Nichols herself notes (p. 488), it all boils down to scale of economy: in areas where a small group can support itself in a small area, small groups do exactly that, and over time their languages steadily diverge; in areas in which populations must range over a large area in order to survive, we find lineages occupying correspondingly larger areas—though the languages in question are not necessarily spoken by larger populations....
In prehistoric Europe, then, we should expect to find the following pattern of languages and families, roughly speaking:
* numerous languages, belonging to many families not provably related to each other, in the Mediterranean coastal zone, including virtually all of Greece and Italy;
* somewhat less, but still notable, diversity along the cooler Atlantic coast, including the British isles;
* still less diversity in the interior of the continent (though not markedly less, given the adequate rainfall that Europe enjoys)—except probably for the Alps and the mountainous parts of the Balkan peninsula, which are likely to have been refugia for small and linguistically diverse populations, much like the modern Caucasus;
* fairly little diversity in Scandinavia—though probably not less than exists today, with two different language families belonging to different stocks (!).
Given the number of areas that should have promoted modest diversity—the Atlantic coast, the Alps, the Balkans—it would be no surprise if the rest of the continent together exhibited a linguistic diversity similar to that of the Mediterranean region, with little overlap of families or stocks between the Mediterranean and the rest of the continent: perhaps sixty languages in Europe altogether, representing some forty families and thirty stocks... In the most general terms, aboriginal Europe should have exhibited a degree of linguistic diversity comparable to that of western North America, with the Mediterranean region comparable to aboriginal California, the Atlantic coast comparable to the northwest coast of North America, and the hinterlands very roughly comparable.He then goes on to provide the most convincing short discussion of how the Indo-European languages spread across Europe, and finishes with this admirable peroration:
I find it hard to see what relevance anything much earlier than the Roman Empire can have for modern Europe; but if you’re a European and you see things differently, maybe you should think about the following. Unless you speak Basque, your native language was brought to where you live by immigrants — and unless you speak Greek or Irish Gaelic or Welsh, or are a native of one of a few selected provinces of Italy (such as Tuscany or Lazio), they weren’t the first known immigrants, either. Your ancestry is almost certainly mixed, possibly as mixed as mine. (I have known ancestors from Ireland, Spain, France, the Kingdom of Hannover, the Rhineland, southern Germany, the Italian Alps, Croatia, and Serbia. God only knows what mixture lies behind each of those lines of ancestry) You are the product of diversity because Europe has always been diverse.My only quibble, really, is that he refers to "The language of the stele of Novilara (east of San Marino) and a few other fragments"; I had to google to find out he was talking about North Picene, as it's generally known (or North Picenian, as it's called in the wonderful Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe).
Oh, I should warn readers that the LL thread is disrupted by one of those annoying Dissenters who feels obliged to register his dissent repeatedly and at great length. I hope he doesn't notice this post, but if he does: please, professor, no need to make the same points here, we can read them at the Log. Yes, not everyone accepts the standard picture of language development and of Indo-European; duly noted, and thanks in advance for your restraint in staying out of this thread.
Jan Freeman, the excellent Boston Globe language columnist, spent a couple of recent columns relentlessly mocking the absurdity of invented diktats about what shouldn't be said. "Rule by whim," from December 21, gives examples of some of the things crazed rulemongers have pulled out of thin air: not should not conclude a sentence, we should "reserve wholesome for food, healthful for living conditions, and healthy for living beings," you can't use over for more than, and my personal favorite:
It reminded me of a recent e-mail from Kevin, whose high school English teacher had a similarly inventive usage theory. She rejected the sentence "The pitcher threw no strikes," he recalled: "She asked me to show her how to throw 'no strike.' She said the correct way to say it would be, 'The pitcher didn't throw any strikes.' "Mind-boggling! And in her December 28 column, "The language dustbin," she goes back a century to look at some of the things the pedants of yesteryear tried to get us to eschew, like "presidential campaign" and "blame on": "Indefensible slang. We blame a person for a fault, or lay the blame upon him. Not, as in a New York newspaper, after the last Presidential election, 'I do not blame the defeat on the President,' but 'I do not blame the President for the defeat.'" Again, my favorite bit:This doctrine, of course, was just plain nutty. No in this construction means "not any," as it has since Old English. No grammarian or usagist has banned it. Yet Kevin was successfully browbeaten: "For years I avoided writing things such as "The store had no bananas," "I have no opinion," "I ate no onions," he wrote.
Sleuth "denotes the track of a living creature, in particular the track of a wild animal. . . . In a semi-humorous way the newspapers commonly mention a detective as a sleuth; their readers, not thinking of the humor, take sleuth to be a regular synonym of detective. The only meaning the word has in sober English is track or footprint." (Joseph Fitzgerald, "Word and Phrase: True and False Usage in English,"1901)Keep it up, Jan!
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (which I highly recommend you visit if you're ever in New Haven, which, incidentally, is a much nicer city than some people think) has produced a wonderful lexicographical blog called Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary:
Welcome to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, a word-a-day dictionary from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, [1755]), one of the first dictionaries to document the daily working life of the English language.They're also going to be "offering an exhibition on the writing of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in July - September, 2009, drawing on the Beinecke’s Boswell Family Papers collection. As a contribution to the tercentenary festivities, and in support of scholarship on Johnson and Boswell, the Beinecke will be scanning the entire James Boswell segment of the Boswell Family Papers and making the collection available in its Digital Images and Collections." Now, that's the way to share your rich holdings with the public! (N.b.: They call it "a word-a-day dictionary," but it's arranged in reverse chronological order and allows comments, so I say it's a blog.) Thanks for the link, Paul!In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth in 1709, a definition from the first edition of the dictionary will be posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight, beginning on January 1, 2009. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections, which is held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
I don't know if anyone younger than me and a few of my similarly well-aged readers remembers Victor Borge, the musical comedian; he had a routine called "Inflationary Language" in which he added one to numbers embedded in words, so that "once upon a time" becomes "twice upon a time," "wonderful" becomes "twoderful," and so on. (You can read a version of the routine here and see him performing it via YouTube here.) I just ran across a parallel game played in Russia a century ago in Teffi's memoir (in Russian) of Fyodor Sologub (whom I wrote about here). She writes (original Russian below the cut):
We [those gathered at one of Sologub's literary evenings] decided to write a novel in the new style [this would have been after the 1905 revolution, when informality and popular language were all the rage]. It started like this:"На улицу вышел человек в синих панталонах" [Na ulitsu vyshel chelovek v sinikh pantalonakh] ('There came out onto the street a person in dark-blue pants').
In the new style it was written like this:
"На у-роже ты-шел лоб-столетие в ре-них хам-купо-нах" [Na u-rozhe ty-shel lob-stoletie v re-nikh kham-kuponakh: here улицу [ulitsu] 'street' is analyzed as containing a form of лицо [litso] 'face' and thus the latter is replaced by the slang word рожа 'mug'; вышел [vyshel] 'went out' is taken as containing вы [vy], the polite form of 'you,' which of course is replaced by the informal ты [ty]; человек [chelovek] 'person' is analyzed as чело 'forehead' (archaic) + век 'age, century' and replaced by the standard words for 'forehead' and 'century,' лоб [lob] and столетие [stoletie]; the си in синих [sinikh] 'dark blue' is taken as "si" of solfège (i.e., B) and replaced by "re" (i.e., D)—I confess I don't understand the rationale for this; and панталонах [pantalonakh] 'pants, trousers' (at the time—now it refers to women's undergarments) is taken as пан [pan] 'gentleman' + талон [talon] 'coupon,' which are replaced by хам [kham] 'boor' (reflecting the trendy new anti-bourgeois feeling) and купон [kupon] 'coupon' (newer word).]
The game was thoroughly stupid, but terribly captivating, and many of our circle of writers eagerly took part in this nonsense. And many serious and even gloomy people, like Sologub himself, at first shrugged their shoulders doubtfully, then, as if unwillingly, thought up a word or two, and off they went. They got into it.
Teffi's Russian:
Решили писать роман по новому ладу. Начало было такое:"На улицу вышел человек в синих панталонах".
По-новому писали так:
"На у-роже ты-шел лоб-столетие в ре-них хам-купо-нах".
Игра была из рук вон глупая, но страшно завлекательная, и многие из нашего писательского кружка охотно разделывали эту чепуху. И многие серьезные и даже мрачные, как и сам Сологуб, сначала недоуменно пожимали плечами, потом, словно нехотя, придумывали слова два-три, а там и пошло. Втягивались.
As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws near its close, there is still no accepted way to refer to it (parallel to "the teens," "the twenties," and so on), and perhaps there never will be. But on the radio today I heard a startling abbreviation for the coming year; an economist talked about the prospects for "oh nine and oh ten."
Bill Poser sent me a link to Our Ninilchik Language, "an online dictionary of the old language of Ninilchik, Alaska"—said old language being Russian! From the Introduction by Andrej Kibrik Wayne Leman [thanks, Peter!]:
In 1847 Gregorii Kvasnikoff, a Russian Orthodox Church missionary, brought his wife Mavra of Kodiak Island, half Alutiiq and half Russian, and their large family, to Ninilchik. They settled into the valley at the mouth of the what is now called the Ninilchik River and stayed. Not long after Kvasnikoffs arrived, Oskolkoff sons came with their mother and stepfather. Oskolkoff sons married Kvasnikoff daughters and all the old families of Ninilchik descend from these unions.What a remarkable find! Once again my hat is off to someone who took the time and trouble to record an obscure and "useless" form of language, this one of particular interest to me. I should add that the words are spelled phonetically: "So the word for 'dog' is written in this dictionary as sabaka, which is how it is pronounced in Ninichik as well as in Moscow." Here's the A section of the dictionary, from which we learn that initial y- gets dropped (az'ík ЯЗЫК. n. tongue, language). I had no idea Russian Alaska had left this heritage behind. Thanks, Bill!The Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs brought the Russian language to Ninilchik. Russian continued to be spoken in the village long after Alaska was purchased by the U.S. from the Russians in 1867. There was a Russian school in the village which taught basic Russian literacy to the children and probably schooled them some in the Old Church Slavonic language used in the Russian Orthodox Church services in the village church...
This dictionary is an attempt to preserve some of the language of the people of Ninilchik. Our village language was mostly Russian, reflecting the vocabulary of Russian spoken by the Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs in the late 1840s. It is Russian unaffected by the changes which have occurred in the Russian language (in its various dialects) in Russia through the tumultuous years of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist era, modern technological advances, and the fall of Soviet Communism. Our village language also included some words from southern Eskimo dialects as well as borrowings from Athabaskan dialects...
I grew up in the 1950's hearing Russian spoken a great deal in Ninilchik. Villagers regularly spoke Russian to each other. My father spoke Russian to his mother and siblings. Some of my cousins spoke some Russian if they came from families where Russian was spoken in the home. I did not; my mother had come to Ninilchik from California. But I learned a number of Russian words and could understand some of what I heard of conversations.
Then, suddenly, in the mid 1950's, Russian stopped being spoken in public. My father stopped speaking Russian to his siblings and his mother (until just before she died).
I have done my best to spell and record the words of our village...
