GENROKU CHUSHINGURA.

That's the original Japanese title (元禄忠臣蔵) of the 1941 Kenji Mizoguchi film known in English as The 47 Ronin; I finally watched it (it's hard to fit a four-hour slot of time into one's day) and enjoyed it greatly. I've long loved the 1748 puppet play by Takeda Izumo et al. (which I have in this translation), which changes the historical names and dates because it was too close to the incidents of 1701-03 (the Tokugawa shogunate, like many governments, was made nervous by topical art), while the Mizoguchi film reverts to the original ones, but the basic story is the same, simple and effective: a rash young noble is ordered to commit suicide after attacking an older one, and his faithful retainers (now masterless samurai, or ronin), after going their ways and waiting over a year to dispel suspicion, rejoin and avenge their master. I enjoyed the film a great deal, though I was taken aback when after three hours and what I thought was the climax it went on to explore a completely unexpected and rather kinky romantic subplot. But I'm left with a couple of language-related questions.

1) The title means 'the Chūshingura (treasury of loyal retainers) of the Genroku era," but what does "Genroku" mean? The Random House Dictionary says it's from "M[iddle]Chin[ese], equiv. to Chin yuán original, first + lù good fortune," but A dictionary of Japanese loanwords (1997) by Toshie M. Evans says it's "gen big + roku fortune": is the first element 'original' or 'big'? Or is there no way of knowing what they meant by it back in 1688?

2) The suicides involved are by seppuku, and that is the word used almost all through the movie—but when the ronin gather before their master's grave, they start using the word harakiri, which surprised me, as I always thought it was a vulgar term (used by ignorant Westerners). Is this a case of warriors letting their hair down once they've achieved their goal, or is something else going on? As always, I will be grateful to those willing to share their knowledge.

DESERT.

My wife and I have been watching the new Ken Burns series on the national parks (nice images to take to bed), and tonight's episode had quite a bit about Mount Desert Island. Half the time they pronounced it DE-sert and the other half de-SERT, so I went to Wikipedia and found this:

Some natives stress the second syllable (de-ZERT), in the French fashion, although many others pronounce it in a fashion similar to the English name of a landscape devoid of vegetation (DEH-zert). French explorer Champlain's observation that the summits of the island's mountains were free of vegetation as seen from the sea led him to call the island "Isles des Monts Desert", or Island of the bare mountains.

Dammit, people, get your story straight! Seriously, though, I don't know of many place names that locals pronounce two different ways.

MIME OR MEEM?

I recently mentioned mimes (probably, I fear, in a disparaging way) and my wife said "Isn't that supposed to be /mimz/ [i.e., as if written meems]?" I was astonished and said I'd never heard or imagined such a pronunciation, and of course ran to research it. Daniel Jones's Pronouncing Dictionary, my guide to Received Pronunciation, has only /maym/ (i.e., the usual pronunciation, the way it looks), but Merriam-Webster has "\ˈmīm also ˈmēm\." So I turn to you, Varied Reader: are you familiar with this frenchified "meem" pronunciation? Do you use it yourself?

WILLIAM SAFIRE, RIP.

My wife just told me that William Safire has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79, and I was shocked and saddened by the news. Long-time readers may be surprised by the elegiac tone of this post, because in the early years of LH I used to take great and unholy glee in ripping apart his language columns in the NY Times; it still annoys me that the Newspaper of Record handed such a potentially powerful educational tool over to someone with no qualifications other than a love of language and writing, who frequently made the kind of obvious errors that set my teeth on edge. But I came to realize that it was not, after all, his fault that he didn't have the appropriate background; he did, after all, have a strong love of language and writing; and despite it all he did dig up plenty of interesting information. More importantly, from my own selfish perspective, two years ago Oxford University Press had me copyedit the latest edition of his Political Dictionary, and it was one of the best editing experiences I've had. He fully appreciated my pickiness about details and had no hesitation making changes I recommended, even occasionally adding chunks of text I provided; what's more, he credited me by name in those entries and added this heartwarming text to the acknowledgments: "For this fifth edition, Stephen Dodson provided the kind of creative copy-editing and a lust for historical accuracy and semantic precision that a political slanguist expects in dealing with the Oxford University Press, world’s greatest lexicographic organization." He took to calling me up and we were soon on a "Bill" and "Steve" basis, and the last time we talked he promised to buy me a beer if we were ever both in New York at the same time. I'm sorry we won't get the chance to have that beer, Bill, and especially that we won't get to work together on another book.

The NY Times obit is by one of my favorite Times reporters, Robert D. McFadden, who's been with the paper since 1961 and covers disasters like nobody else; I winced, of course, at the phrase "a talented linguist," but appreciated writing like this:

He was hardly the image of a buttoned-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

And I was delighted to learn that he was born Safir: "The 'e' was added to clarify pronunciation." Goodbye, and thanks for the fun of both bashing you and editing you.

TRUMBULL STICKNEY.

I had never heard of the poet Trumbull Stickney, which is not surprising, since he died in 1904 at the age of thirty having published only one volume of verse (Dramatic Verses, Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902). I discovered him, as I discover many good things, at wood s lot, where you can find two of his poems in today's post (the sonnet "The melancholy year is dead with rain" and "Mnemosyne"); they are as good as anything Pound wrote before he discovered his true voice in Cathay, and what might Stickney's true voice have turned out to be like once he'd shaken off the clinging tendrils of the nineteenth century? Fruitless speculation, of course, but one late fragment raises the hair on my neck in the way only true poetry can:

Sir, say no more.
Within me 't is as if
The green and climbing eyesight of a cat
Crawled near my mind's poor birds.

TALKING TEXAN.

Maud Newton had a post back in May in which she quoted some of the pungent phrases her Texan granny used to use; most of them are familiar (He cleans up real nice, Ain’t neither one of them got a lick a sense, I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, He’s meaner than a junkyard dog), but there are some new to me (including the alarming He’s rich enough to burn a wet dog). Now she's added some more in a follow-up post; again, some are well known (She couldn’t find her butt with both hands, He’s all hat and no cattle), but some are quite striking: You sound like a dying cow in a hailstorm (said to a whining child), Don’t that just take the rag off the bush? (isn’t it appalling?), Don’t just sit there looking like a tree full of owls (don’t look so surprised; said to a group). This is the kind of thing that makes lovers of vigorous speech mourn the homogenization of language.

ANTIPKA BESPYATY.

One of the good things about doggedly investigating all references in the books I read is that I get introduced to some obscure byways of Russian culture. In Notes from the Dead House one of the convicts says contemptuously (addressing the aristocratic narrator, in the last line of this section) "Под девятую сваю, где Антипка беспятый живет!" ("[Go] under the ninth pile, where heel-less [bespyaty] Antipka lives!") The first part, about the ninth pile, occurs only here as far as I can tell, but it's on the model of a number of Russian expressions indicating a far-off place and is presumably a quaint phrase Dostoevsky heard from someone in his own Siberian prison. It's the second part that interests me here—who might "heel-less Antipka" be? (I'm assuming беспятый is from пятка 'heel'; if I'm wrong, please let me know.) Well, it turns out he's the devil, and an online excerpt (pdf) from the Иллюстрированная мифологическая энциклопедия [Illustrated mythological encyclopedia] explains the odd modifier:

Прибавка же "беспятый" характеризовала одну из существенных деталей в облике черта. Крестьяне повсеместно верили, что черт, хотя и прикидывается иногда человеком, всегда "неполон" и обладает какими-то нечеловеческими признаками, например, лапами животного или птицы.
[The added "heel-less" characterized one of the essential details in the devil's appearance. Peasants everywhere believed that the devil, even though he sometimes pretends to be a person, is always "incomplete" and has some inhuman signs, for example the paws of an animal or bird.]

I'm curious as to whether modern Russians recognize the allusion here, or has Antipka (the name is modeled on Antichrist) been completely forgotten?

IBN HAZM AND CYPRIOT ARABIC.

A few years ago Lameen had a post on Ibn Hazm, "comparative linguist of the 11th century" (I wrote about it here); now he follows up with Ibn Hazm again, and Cypriot Arabic, whose first paragraph links to "a full translation online of the fifth chapter of Ibn Hazm's ... Iħkām fī Uṣūl al-Aħkām, ...a chapter remarkable for anticipating the ideas of a language instinct and of conlanging, and for clearly stating the relationship between Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac" and whose second describes a remarkable Cypriot variety of Arabic (Ethnologue's Arabic, Cypriot Spoken—I regret to report they misspell the village where it is spoken as "Kormatiki" rather than Kormakiti), which he says "is far more incomprehensible to me than any mainstream Arabic dialect I've ever heard, including the Levantine Arabic from which it presumably derives - a remarkable case study in how much isolation from related varieties speeds up language differentiation." He links to a YouTube program called Sanna (لساننا - our language) where you can hear it spoken. In case anyone isn't already aware of Lameen's blog, it's well worth bookmarking.

SEJARAH MELAYU.

The amazing Sejarah Melayu (Malay History) Library "is perhaps the largest public on-line collection of books and other documents on the history of the Malay archipelago and its surrounding region. Consisting of over 700 books and academic papers in electronic PDF format, the library is divided into seven broad sections"—General, Histories, Travelogue, and so on. The one of most immediate interest to me, of course, is Language; they have PDFs of A Dictionary of the Malay Language, A grammar of the Maguindanao tongue, A lexilogus of the English, Malay, and Chinese languages, A Vocabulary of the English, Bugis and Malay Languages, and dozens of other books. Via Macvaysia, and I second Jordan's conclusion: "Do check out this fascinating (and free) resource if you’re interested."

GRAUNIAD.

I have always loved the humorous reference to the Guardian as the "Grauniad" (and have used it on LH from time to time), and I always believed the explanation that it arose from the paper's unique propensity for typos. Not so, as I learn from Wikipedia:

In fact, the paper was not more prone than other papers to misprints but because the paper was printed in Manchester, Londoners saw the first edition printed each night. National papers in Britain at this time contained large numbers of "typos" which they removed progressively as the night wore on and they were noticed. Thus a paper like The Times would have as many mistakes in the North of England as The Guardian did in London. However, because media opinion was set in London, only The Guardian got a bad reputation.

Sure, [citation needed] as they say, but it makes sense, and it made my day.

THE GERMAN INVASION OF PARIS.

No, no, not that one, a peaceful one a century earlier. My pal Jason at Henry Holt sent me a copy of Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt, which arrived at the perfect time, just when I was finally trying to understand the various turns of the German philosophical wheel from Hegel to Schelling and beyond (having read Isaiah Berlin's "The Counter-Enlightenment" and gotten a running start). Hunt has a nice description of the young Engels attending Schelling's 1841 Berlin lectures (as a partisan of Hegel, he was there to "shield the great man's grave from abuse") along with Jacob Burckhardt, Mikhail Bakunin (who called them "interesting but rather insignificant"), and Søren Kierkegaard (who said Schelling "talked 'quite insufferable nonsense' and, worse, committed the cardinal academic crime of ending his lectures past the hour: 'That isn't tolerated in Berlin, and there was scraping and hissing'). But what I came here to pass along is this fascinating passage about Paris in the 1840s, where Engels went to hang out with Marx and spare his pious German family the disgrace of his increasingly notorious presence:

In 1848, Paris had 350,000 workers, with one-third of these engaged in the textile trades and much of the remainder divided between construction, the furniture trade, jewelry, metallurgy, and domestic service. A large part of the workforce was made up of Germans—Engels described them as being "everywhere." By the late 1840s, there were some sixty thousand of them, and such was their strength that in certain Parisian quarters barely a word of French was to be heard.

I had no idea, and I love learning this kind of forgotten detail from history books.

MOTIVATED GRAMMAR.

I can't believe Motivated Grammar has been around for over two years and I haven't heard of it until now—its tagline, for Pete's sake, is "Prescriptivism Must Die!"—but thanks to an e-mail from peacay, my ignorance has been remedied. It's written by Gabe Doyle, a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego (here's his academic website: "My research mostly relates to the issue of what it means to know a language. How is a language represented in the mind? How does one decide what to say in a given situation, or whether a sentence is grammatical? Where, if anywhere, should a distinction be drawn between competence and performance?"), and his motto is "Grammar should not be articles of faith handed down to us from those on high who never split infinitives but always split hairs." And in a recent post, as a public service, he has assembled a resource I will be sending people to:

I’ve wanted for some time to have one place to send everyone who complains about singular they, a single page that can debunk whatever junk they’re peddling against it. There’s been lots of great stuff written about why singular they is acceptable, but every time I want to smash the arguments against it, I have to waste time jumping through old Language Log posts and books and whatnot, so I figured I’d finally go about summarizing it all. Without further ado, here’s the evidence for singular they, and why you ought to stop “correcting” it.

I like his style, and I offer him a sadly belated welcome to the linguablogosphere.

MOUNT HOLYOKE INTERNATIONAL.

Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts (just a few miles south of where I live) has put up on its website a marvelous set of videos, called "For Parents" (presumably so that prospective students from one of the countries represented can show the appropriate clip to their parents and say "See, there are people there who speak our language and recommend the school!"), in which two or three students spend a few minutes chatting in their native language about how great Mount Holyoke is (I must say, they're very convincing—after watching a few, I wanted to enroll myself). So far, they have videos labeled Bengali, Български (Bulgarian), 中文 (Chinese), ქართული ენა (Georgian), हिन्दी (Hindi), नेपाली (Nepali), اردو (Urdu), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), 日本語 (Japanese), Ghana, Português, 한국어 (Korean), Español, and العربية (Arabic—one girl is from Algeria and the other from Egypt); they all have subtitles, which is what makes it such a joy for those of us who aren't part of the target audience. It's a great way to spend a few minutes immersing yourself in a language you half know or have an interest in; listening to Georgian made me want to pick up the language again (for the fourth, I think, time). I presume "Ghana" represents an Akan language (I wonder if using the country name is a result of some controversy about language labels?); I'm guessing Twi, but I'd be glad if someone who actually knows would chime in.

WHO'S ON FIRST?

One doesn't think of Dostoevsky as laugh-out-loud funny, but this passage from Notes from the Dead House (see here and here) had me doing just that (Russian below the cut). A policeman has caught some tramps trying to rob a house and is questioning them:

- Who are you?
- Cut-and-run, your honor.
- That's your name? [Or: "That's what they call you?" Same thing in Russian.]
- That's it, your honor.
- OK, fine, you're Cut-and-run. And you?
- I'm after him, your honor.
- But what do they call you?
- That's what they call me, your honor: "I'm after him."
- And who calls you that, you rascal?
- Good people have called me that, your honor. This world is not lacking in good people, your honor, it's a known fact.
- So who are these good people?
- Well, that's slipped my mind a bit, your honor, begging your noble forgiveness.
- You've forgotten them all?
- I've forgotten them all, your honor.
- But you must have had a father and a mother, right? You remember them at least, don't you?
- You have to assume I had them, your honor, but you know what, they've slipped my mind a bit too; I may very well have had them, your honor.
- So where have you been living until now?
- In the woods, your honor.
- The whole time in the woods?
- The whole time in the woods.
- How about in winter?
- I haven't seen any winter, your honor.
- All right, how about you, what's your name?
- Hatchet, your honor.
- And you?
- Sharpen-and-be-quick, your honor.
- And you?
- Sharpen-for-sure, your honor.
- None of you remember a thing?
- We don't remember a thing, your honor.

At this point everyone has a good laugh, though the convict telling the story points out that on another day the policeman might have given him one in the teeth instead.

The original:

- Ты кто?

- Махни-драло, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Это так тебя и зовут Махни-драло?

- Так и зовут, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Ну, хорошо, ты Махни-драло, а ты? - к третьему, значит.

- А я за ним, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Да прозываешься-то ты как?

- Так и прозываюсь: "А я за ним", ваше высокоблагородие.

- Да кто ж тебя, подлеца, так назвал?

- Добрые люди так назвали, ваше высокоблагородие. На свете не без добрых людей, ваше высокоблагородие, известно.

- А кто такие эти добрые люди?

- А я запамятовал маленько, ваше высокоблагородие, уж извольте простить великодушно.

- Всех позабыл?

- Всех позабыл, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Да ведь были ж у тебя тоже отец и мать?.. Их-то хоть помнишь ли?

- Надо так полагать, что были, ваше высокоблагородие, а впрочем, тоже маненько запамятовал; может, и были, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Да где ж ты жил до сих пор?

- В лесу, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Все в лесу?

- Все в лесу.

- Ну, а зимой?

- Зимы не видал, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Ну, а ты, тебя как зовут?

- Топором, ваше высокоблагородие.

- А тебя?

- Точи не зевай, ваше высокоблагородие.

- А тебя?

- Потачивай небось, ваше высокоблагородие.

- Все ничего не помните?

- Ничего не помним, ваше высокоблагородие.

THE RUSSIAN ARCHIVE.

Paul W. Goldschmidt, aka Paul Wickenden of Thanet, is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism who founded the Slavic Interest Group, which "promotes amateur research into medieval life in Eastern and Central Europe"; in consequence of his interests, accompanied by an admirable doggedness about detail, he has created The Russian Archive, a collection of links to his pages about all manner of topics related to medieval Russia, from beasts and monsters to weddings to wills. But most of the pages are about Russian names, and his Dictionary of Period Russian Names ("Being a compilation of over 25,000 Russian names, taken from period sources") is a remarkable resource. Thanks for the link, Bathrobe!

UTAL AND NINETUMA.

This is one of those posts where I take shameless advantage of the Varied Reader to solve a mystery for me. In reading Isaiah Berlin's excellent essay "Herder and the Enlightenment" (I'm finally overcoming my aversion to trying to wrap my mind around what the thinkers of two centuries ago were thinking about), I'm realizing that Herder and I have much more in common than I had thought: e.g., "to the end of his life he detested and denounced every form of centralisation, coercion and conquest, which were embodied and symbolised both for him, and for his teacher Hamann, in the accursed state... True human relations are those of father and son, husband and wife, sons, brothers, friends, men; these terms express natural relations which make people happy. All that the state has given us is contradictions and conquests and, perhaps worst of all, dehumanisation." But I've just hit the sentence "[Herder] dreams of a visit to the Northern seas reading 'the story of Utal and Ninetuma in sight of the very island where it all took place'," and not only do I have no idea who Utal and Ninetuma might be, Google only sends me back to that essay. (You can see the context here, but it doesn't really help.) So I turn to you lot: does anybody have any idea which heroes of myth or epic these exotic names, so casually tossed out by the erudite Berlin, refer to?

Update. Thanks to the learned and indefatigable MMcM, we learn that the personages involved are actually Uthal and Nina-thoma, from the Ossian tales.

SOLET AND KEMACH.

Balashon, a Hebrew-oriented blog with a focus on etymology (see here), has a new post discussing the Hebrew words solet סולת and kemach קמח, both meaning 'flour.' Since MMcM is on extended hiatus, it's good to have someone else doing that kind of detailed historical investigation; here's a taste:

So actually both those that say that solet was coarse and those that say that it was powdery were correct. In the beginning of the process, solet was coarser than the kemach that would result from a standard milling. But by the end of the process, solet was powdery, whereas the kemach would have been comparatively coarse. Nahum Sokolow (in Bemarot Hakeshet, pgs 552-4) distinguishes between the two stages, by calling the first one "solet" and the second one "kemach solet", which was later abbreviated to simply "solet", adding to the confusion. But in the end, what distinguishes solet from kemach is quality more than granularity.

As a bonus, there's an excursus on how "Aramaic semida סמידא gave us the Greek semidalis and the Latin simila," the latter in the north of Italy becoming "'powdery flour' (Italian semola, German semmel, Yiddish zeml, and later the English word 'simnel' - cakes or rolls made of fine wheat flour)" and in the south "progressed in the other direction, to the coarser 'bran.' From here came the diminutive 'semolino' (from which came the English 'semolina') - little bran, i.e. a coarser flour than the generic Italian word for flour 'farina.'" Fun!

IF THIS IS TUESDAY, I MUST BE SPEAKING ARABIC.

I'm reading a book that's alternately irritating and fascinating, Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich. It's one of those "I decided to cure my first-world angst by impulsively moving to someplace new where I would be thrown into a completely unfamiliar environment and have to deal with raw authentic life and become a new, more mature person" books, and frankly my interest in the genre is minimal. But in this case the pretext for her moving to Udaipur in India was to learn Hindi, and along with the fairly banal account of what it's like to learn a new language ("The more Hindi I understand, I find, the more perplexing my life becomes") she passes along tidbits she picks up from linguists she interviews after her return to New York, and these are often quite interesting. Early on, she cites Michel Paradis, a neurolinguist who specializes in the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, on a couple of striking cases: an Austrian, "once fluent in German and Italian," who after a head injury "was able to speak to his wife only in the remnants of his Italian, to his doctors only in what was left of his German," and a Moroccan nun who after an accident "could still speak French and Arabic, but only on alternate days." This last seemed so unlikely I googled for backup, and found the story with more detail in François Grosjean's Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism:

In one case a forty-eight-year-old nun in Morocco, who was bilingual in French and dialectal Arabic, had a moped accident and became totally aphasic. Four days after her accident she was able to utter a few words in Arabic but could not speak French, although her comprehension of the language was quite good. However, two weeks later she spoke French quite fluently. One day later, much to the interviewer's surprise, her French was extremely poor, and her Arabic was once again quite fluent. The next day, the reverse was true: poor, dysfluent Arabic and good spontaneous French. To add to this complex recovery pattern, whenever she had difficulties speaking one language, she had no problems translating into it. However, she could not do the reverse, that is, translate into the language she spoke spontaneously! Thus, her translating ability was completely divorced from her speaking ability.

The brain and language are both amazingly complicated, and I'm glad they're starting to figure out the connections between them.

WHAT IS LEFT?

I've run across another book I'll have to acquire someday, linguist A. L. Becker's Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology. It's a collection of essays that describe "Becker's experiences in attempting to translate into or out of Burmese, Javanese, and Malay a variety of texts... emphasize important kinds of nonuniversality in all aspects of language and look toward a new theory of language grounded in American pragmatism." I was immediately smitten by this passage in the introduction (Becker has returned to Burma a quarter of a century after studying the language in the late '50s):

I have always kept field journals about learning languages in various parts of Southeast Asia.

That evening I wrote in my journal, "If you take away grammar and lexicon from a language, what is left?"

Then I wrote, "Answer: Everything!"

At that moment, as I was trying to remember the Burmese I thought I had once known, grammars and lexicons seemed beside the point, just things we do with languages, not things that are somehow within languages, not part of their being as languages. People like me make grammars and dictionaries — these artifacts are not in the minds of the users of languages. Grammars and dictionaries were not what was buried in my memory. This came to me with the force of a revelation.

I was by then a professional linguist, and these questions were important in my profession. I wrote them down, then went back to remembering Burmese words. After a while a doorway opened — a curtain parted (there is no nonmetaphoric language for this) — and some of the Burmese I once knew came back to me.

What I remembered were not patterns and definitions, certainly not rules, but particular things. First of all, a children's song — the tune something like "Polly Wolly Doodle": "A poh gyi oh ... kha khohn khohn ... m'thay ba hne' ohn ... nowght hnit ka . . . t'saung mohn . . . pwe kyi ba ohn." ['Old man, bent back, don't die yet. Come back next year, month of Tazaungmon, see the play.'] I sang it to myself with almost no hesitation, sounding it in my mind. [...]

I got the words for 'back' (kha), 'bent, convex' (khohn khohn), 'old' (oh), and 'year' (hnit) not separately but together. The tune helped me remember. I am sure everyone has a story like this to tell, some old remnant of learning a language. I think the particularity of it made it memorable. It came with so much particular context: the other teachers, the written words, the children singing, the familiar tune, the rhymes, the story. The particularity made a unique place in my memory for "it," the little text.

Yes, particularity is vital, and as he says, surely everyone who has learned a language has such remnants, redolent of their first acquaintance with it; for me, a much-anthologized little Pushkin poem plays that role in Russian, and the song "Mo Li Hua" in Chinese.

MUTE INGLORIOUS NABOKOVS.

Helen DeWitt, the wonderful writer who blogs at paperpools, has an intriguing idea in her post mute inglorious Nabokovs: spend a few hours introducing people to three different languages, just enough to read a few lines by a great writer in each (her examples are Italian and Calvino, Greek and Homer, and Arabic and Ibn Rushd). Her post title is explained thus:

Nabokov was taught English and French from an early age; this early exposure to languages other than his mother tongue seems to have been important in his formation as a writer. In Speak, Memory he talks about the entertainment offered by working through a little grammar book, in which the student started on simple sentences, could look forward to ever more exciting grammatical features, and at the end was able to read a simple story. He remembers sitting inside while a servant swept the gravel walk outside; he wonders whether she might not have been happier sweeping the walk than driving a tractor in later years under the Soviets.

That last sentence is a reminder of Nabokov's least appealing side, the smug aristo; Helen responds: "But perhaps she was a mute inglorious Nabokov. Perhaps the servant, too, had gifts which would have benefited from reading an introduction to English culminating in an adventure for little Ned."

Incidentally, she ends by welcoming "visitors from Guardian Books Blog"; out of curiosity, I visited that fine site and discovered that that in their latest post they link to both Helen and me ("The slightly disappointing subject of the sentence: 'It's the only thing I read on the train apart from the Talmud'"). So: Hello visitors from Guardian Books Blog!

AS WELL AS.

I was reading Tony Judt's NYRB "Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009)," an obituary for a man I was not as aware of as I should have been, when I was caught up short by this quote from Kołakowski: "A mere feeling of responsibility is a formal virtue that by itself does not result in a specific obligation: it is possible to feel responsible for a good cause as well as an evil one." I had to reread it to realize what he was saying, and I wasn't absolutely sure until it was glossed by Judt in the following paragraph:

This simple observation seems rarely to have occurred to a generation of French existentialists and their Anglo-American admirers. It may be that one needed to have experienced firsthand the attraction of utterly evil goals (of left and right alike) to otherwise responsible intellectuals in order to understand to the full the costs as well as the benefits of ideological commitment and moral unilateralism.

The ironic thing is that the phrase I've bolded uses "as well as" in the way I'm used to and understand easily; A as well as B puts the emphasis on A, the marked element, while B is the unmarked, expected term. If I were editing the first quote, I would automatically rewrite it to "it is possible to feel responsible for an evil cause as well as a good one."

Now, of course you could say that Kołakowski was not a native speaker of English, but it seems to me I've seen this use fairly frequently in recent years. So I turn to the Varied Reader: which form seems more natural or transparent to you?

HAMANN AND HERDER.

Johann Georg Hamann is probably best known for being a godfather of Sturm und Drang and for saying poetry was the earliest form of language, but he wrote about all sorts of things (usually in brief articles packed with allusions), and one of his early pieces was "Vermischte Anmerkungen über die Wortfügung in der französischen Sprache" (Miscellaneous Notes on Word Order in the French Language, 1760), which George Steiner in After Babel calls "turgid" and "erratic" but says "contains premonitions of genius," anticipating both Lévi-Strauss and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: "Hamann is arguing that neither Cartesian co-ordinates of general, deductive reasoning, nor Kantian mentalism will serve to account for the creative, irrational, and manifold proceedings through which language—unique to the species but so varied among nations—shapes reality and is, in turn, acted upon by local human experience." (Hamann's main point is that the free word order of German and Latin is enabled by their declensional endings, which French lacks; I have no idea whether this too was a precocious insight or whether it was already a commonplace among specialists.) This leads Steiner into a discussion of Herder, and in fact Herder quoted, or rather misquoted, a striking aphorism from the end of the essay: "Die Reinigkeit einer Sprache entzieht ihrem Reichthum; eine gar zu gefesselte Richtigkeit, ihrer Stärke und Mannheit" ('the purity of a language detracts from its richness; a too fettered accuracy, from its strength and manliness'). Herder opens one of his Fragments on Recent German Literature by saying "Es bleibt überhaupt wahr: »die Richtigkeit einer Sprache entzieht ihrem Reichtum« ('It remains true, at any rate, that "the accuracy of a language diminishes its richness"'), mixing up the original thought; how much is lost thereby I leave to the reader to decide.

READING UNDERGROUND.

A nice NY Times story by Alexis Mainland about New Yorkers and their subway reading. One sample:

B train at 96th Street, 10 a.m.

To learn the Talmud, many of its students read one of its 2,711 pages each day. And it helps to have a chevruta, or study partner. Harry and David Zinstein, brothers from Washington Heights, generally conduct their Daf Yomi — page of the day, in Hebrew — study sessions en route to work on the Upper West Side.

Except on Wednesday, which turns out to be a kind of day of rest for Harry, the elder of the two Zinsteins at 28. A manager at Mike’s Bistro, a kosher restaurant on West 72nd Street, Harry Zinstein forgoes his subway Talmud study those days to read the Dining section of The New York Times.

“It’s the only thing I read on the train except for the Talmud,” he said, his thick, leather-bound Babylonian text tucked inside his messenger bag for later consumption. “And it’s the perfect length for the commute.”

David Zinstein, 19, who is studying in Israel but spent the summer working for his brother, sat to the right, reading his Aramaic tractates (with English translations). “I always read the Talmud on the subway,” he said. “Even on Wednesdays.”

Makes me nostalgic.

ORIENTALISM AND THE END OF EUROCENTRISM.

I just ran across a very interesting talk (pdf, Google cache) given by Suzanne L. Marchand in 2001; called "German Orientalism and the Decline of the West," it's apparently a teaser for a book she's currently writing "about the study of the Orient in Germany, 1750-1945." Her main point is that nineteenth-century German Orientalism "did not function exclusively to perpetuate Eurocentric views. On the contrary, it is my contention that, though focused on the languages of the ancient world, German orientalism helped to destroy Western self-satisfaction, and to provoke a momentous change in the culture of the West: the relinquishing of Christianity and classical antiquity as universal norms." I'll quote some passages to give you a sense of her argument:

Institutions fix norms and career paths, and the appointment of Sanskrit philologists A. W. Schlegel and Franz Bopp at the universities of Bonn and Berlin in 1818 and 1821 set a lasting pattern. While English, French, and Dutch orientalists of this generation made the Orient a career by going there, as officials or travelers, German orientalists in this period made the Orient a career by becoming academics, and especially by becoming scholars of Sanskrit, Sumerian, and other safely dead oriental languages.... It is in the study of the ancient Orient—and especially its languages—that Germany made its orientalist fame, and it is here that the field exerted its primary cultural shocks....

What finally forced open the sluice gates at the bottom of conventional human history was, however, the next generation of orientalist scholars. We have, heretofore, failed to appreciate the colossal scale of their discoveries, decipherments, and specialized studies, and the effect of this new material in opening up the ancient Orient to European view in the period between 1880 and 1914. As scholars ransacked a vast quantity of new textual and archaeological documents, they discovered the powerful influence of Zoroastrian Persia, the esoteric depths of ancient India, and the primeval innovations of the Assyrians and Sumerians. These new cultures, appealing in their antiquity, spirituality, and apparent purity, made the well-known “orientals”—especially the ancient Israelites and Egyptians—seem derivative, corrupt, and banal.

Assyriology, in particular, worked a destructive magic on older forms of orientalism, allowing scholars to tread with philologically supported security into the non-biblical ancient East. The discovery of pre-biblical accounts of “God,” “the Flood,” and “the Sabbath” generated new mythographic speculation, some of it innovative and some of it bizarre, but all of it unflattering from the point of view of conventional classicists and Christians. Thanks to the Assyriological discoveries
between about 1885 and 1908, the great historian Eduard Meyer testified, everything he and his contemporaries had known about the ancient Orient from the Old Testament and the Greeks had been called into question, and indeed mostly destroyed.

What I call “vitalist orientalism” had many manifestations in the Weimar era, only a few of which can be mentioned here. Many in the audience may think of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha of 1923, or Thomas Mann’s Egyptian novels, begun roughly a decade later. C. G. Jung’s critique of Western philosophy is also an obvious manifestation of this worldview....

The image of the Orient had changed. Nineteenth-century platitudes invoking oriental stagnation were repeatedly challenged by those who now admired the East’s resilience as against the constant revolutions of fortune in the West. The Greeks had once stood for youth. Now a primitivist aesthetic, the new orientalist scholarship, and the critique of Western decay made the Orient seem more authentically and enviably youthful.... It was impossible to go back to the nineteenth century; the explosion of specialized knowledge about the East had destroyed the biblical foundations of European identity, and exploded the Graeco-centric world of the nineteenth century.

Who knew Assyriology had such wide-ranging effects?

One additional idea I got from her talk (though she didn't say anything about Russia) was that Russia, which got its mid-nineteenth-century official obsession with classics in the universities from Germany, also seems to have gotten its early-twentieth-century fixation on the Orient ("Yes, we are Scythians!") from the same source.

CROWDSOURCING TRANSLATION.

Gawker is normally a fluffy, snarky "look at what these bad boys and girls in Washington/New York are up to" site. But when GQ tried to bury Scott Anderson's investigative report at Putin's behest, Gawker crowdsourced a translation:

In an act of publishing cowardice, Condé Nast has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent Russians from reading a GQ article criticizing Vladimir Putin. As a public service, we're running it here and ask for your help in translating it.

Saturday afternoon update: Just over 24 hours after we asked for your help, you've given us a pretty much complete Russian translation of the story. Thank you to everyone who pitched in.

"Никто не осмелится назвать это тайным заговором" immediately became a hit on the Russian blogosphere. Both repressive governments and greedy, cowardly businesses are finding it ever harder to suppress information. (Via MetaFilter.)

NO WORD FOR ADDICTION.

I just discovered that, as far as I can tell (and of course I welcome correction), Russian does not have a word for 'addiction.' Dictionaries translate the English word by пристрастие 'weakness (for); partiality (towards)' or влечение 'attraction (to),' and the Wikipedia page is titled Вредные привычки 'Harmful habits.' Of course, this is not fodder for the usual words-for-snow nonsense, because Russia has as many addicts as anywhere else, and there are perfectly good words for drug addiction (наркомания) and alcohol addiction (алкоголизм). But the lack of a general word presumably keeps Russians from indulging in the American habit of accusing each other of being addicted to whatever pleasure or pastime they indulge in to a greater degree than the accuser would like.

WHO ARE THE SAKHATAIOI?

Nick over at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος has been slaving over Byzantine place names for the TLG, and he's written a post that starts off musing on the relative frequencies of locations mentioned ("The outside world for Byzantines—and I start counting after Justinian—was the Caliphate, Bulgaria, occasionally Italy, Russia once or twice. Western Europe? They didn't even notice it was there."), goes on to explain the Hellenizing impulses of learnèd Byzantine writers, who used the spelling correspondences between Latin and Classical Greek despite the fact that the result didn't sound much like the modern names they were trying to reproduce ("So Dublin is written Δουβλίνο(ν), which is pronounced /ðuvˈlino/ but written in historical orthography as <Dublinon>"), and ends with a quiz that presents some European (including the Caucasus) place names and peoples that gave him trouble in the text of Chalcocondyles and asks us to figure out (without doing the googling that eventually led him to the answers) what they might be. A few are obvious if you happen to know the place name involved (Καχέτιον [Kachétion] is clearly Kakheti), but there are some real stumpers. What is Γαΐτια [Gaï´tia], and who are the Σαμῶται [Samōtai]? Go over and give it a try!

BLOOM'S CANON.

I tend to find Harold Bloom a tedious windbag, but there's no denying he knows his stuff when it comes to world literature, and I'm reluctantly impressed by the bibliography appended to his The Western Canon; The Books and School of the Age (1994), which The Booklist Center has put online. It includes a few clunkers (like Nikolay Chernyshevsky's dreadful What Is to Be Done?), but on the whole it's a well-thought-out list. (Click on the "Continue on with" link at the bottom of each page; it's broken into four segments.)

MORE FROM THE DEAD HOUSE.

I'm about halfway through Dostoevsky's Записки из мёртвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead or Notes from the Dead House; see this LH post), and I wanted to quote a passage that made me suck in my breath and think "That could only be Dostoevsky"; it's from the end of Ch. 5, "The First Month," and he's talking about convicts who live peacefully and obediently for years, perhaps even being made foreman, and then astonish everyone by bursting out in some violent act with little or no provocation (Russian below the cut):

But it may be that the whole reason for this abrupt explosion in that person, from whom it was least to be expected, is a miserable, convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive yearning for one's own self, the desire to declare oneself, one's humiliated personality, suddenly making its appearance and reaching the point of malice, of fury, of reason going dark, of paroxysm, of convulsion. So, perhaps, a person buried alive and waking in the coffin will pound on the lid and try his hardest to throw it off, although of course reason could convince him that all his efforts would be futile. But that's just the point: here reason is not involved, here are convulsions.

I'm now in the middle of the wonderful chapter on Christmas and very glad I embarked on the journey.

Incidentally, does anyone know where I could hear at least snatches of the songs he quotes the prisoners as singing in this section—"Я вечор млада," "Свет небесный воссияет" (apparently from «Не в Москве, не за Москвою»), and "Не увидит взор мой той страны" (from «Добрая ночь»)?

А между тем, может быть, вся-то причина этого внезапного взрыва в том человеке, от которого всего менее можно было ожидать его, - это тоскливое, судорожное проявление личности, инстинктивная тоска по самом себе, желание заявить себя, свою приниженную личность, вдруг появляющееся и доходящее до злобы, до бешенства, до омрачения рассудка, до припадка, до судорог. Так, может быть, заживо схороненный в гробу и проснувшийся в нем, колотит в свою крышу и силится сбросить ее, хотя, разумеется, рассудок мог бы убедить его, что все его усилия останутся тщетными. Но в том-то и дело, что тут уж не до рассудка: тут судороги.

WHATMOUGH AND THE VALUE OF PHILOLOGY.

A visit to Language Log (where there is a lively discussion going on about the bad metadata at Google Books, in which an actual Google honcho has joined) landed me at Mark Liberman's Joshua Whatmough and the donkey, which sent me to Steve Cotler's Prof. Joshua Whatmough — Linguistics 120, a lively reminiscence of a hapless Harvard chemistry major in 1962 plunged into the dark and turbulent waters of Whatmough's course on Comparative and Historical Indo-European Languages, where he found himself sadly out of his depth ("I could not even read question 1, which included words written in a character set that I had never seen before"), and Cotler in turn directed me to William Harris's A Requiem for Philology, which is primarily what the title suggests, giving a history of the specialty that "reigned unchallenged for a hundred years as Comparative Philology, or under a more modern name as Historical Linguistics," but which uses as its primary exemplum the selfsame Whatmough, citing an examination paper from 1947-8 that presents a barrage of detailed questions about Osco-Umbrian ("Translate the following passages, assign each to its locality and dialect, give its approximate date, indicate the character of the object, and write brief notes on matters of linguistic interest. 1) puponehe.x.orakoh.e. kupethari.s; 2) metelui maesilaui uenia metelikna asmina krasikna...") that would have made me quail back when I was most immersed in such things; Harris asks "what kind of a teacher, working with students in what kind of a class, would be writing such an examination?" and goes on to describe the value of what the Germans used to call statarische Lektüre, in which a small quantity of text is read thoroughly (opposed to kursorische Lektüre, which scanted the details to emphasize historical context and aesthetic impact). I particularly like this eloquent paragraph:

First, the careful reading of obscure and at times inscrutable texts, done word by word and hour by hour, gives the kind of close-reading technique which is absolutely needed if one is going to read an ancient Classical author. We have learned to skim-read the vast and exponentially expanding written materials which our society has collected, especially now in the days of the Internet. We are expert at getting the ideas out of written texts while we discard the actual words, their forms, sounds and arrangements as the disposable chaff. But it is in this chaff that the art and artistry of the writing lies, that is the matrix for support of the meaning, and meaning is not complete or significant without the matrix. The slow reading craft of linguistic philology gives us the capacity to pore deeply on a text. Unless you have pored with care you are not authentic, you are not reading in the tradition in which Plato or Vergil wrote. Philology, without saying so, confers on modern readers that requisite degree of intense concentration.

Unfortunately, he rather spoils the effect by going on to say "Reaching a focused state of 'close reading' takes time, effort and imagination, but that is the way you have to read a classical author. If not thus, don't read it at all." But elitism is always a danger for those who take the difficult path, and better there should be a few elitists seeking for hard-won truths in a world of happy skimmers.

Incidentally, in an Addendum at the very end of the (long) page, Harris writes:

It was in 1955 when Whatmough was at Berkeley under the Sather Fellowship, that I came over from my office at Stanford to see him and hear his Sather Lecture on Latin Poetry. After the lecture we walked around a bit, until he inquired where the Mens Ro[o]m was, adding as he read the letters MEN over the door "unde omnes cogimur". You would have to know your Horace well to get the full sense of this capped quotation.

I assume he's referring to Odes II.iii, the last stanza of which begins "omnes eodem cogimur" 'we shall all be herded/driven there [to Orcus, i.e., death],' Whatmough's variant with "unde" meaning 'whence we are all herded/driven,' but I suspect I am missing "the full sense of this capped quotation," since all I get is a banal image of a crowd of people leaving a men's room. And I don't even know what a "capped quotation" is. Eheu!

JOÜON.

I have a simple question today. I'm copyediting a book on early modern Hebrew and Biblical studies, and the author cites Paul Joüon's A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew in a footnote. Here's what I've been able to find out about Joüon: he was born in Nantes in 1871, he was a Jesuit, he taught Hebrew at the University of St Joseph in Beirut (1907-14) and at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome; and he died in 1940 (also in Nantes, judging by this Polish snippet from Google Books: "Paul SJ, ur. 26 II 1871 w Nantes, zm. 18 II 1940 tamże"). My question is, what the devil is that diaeresis doing there, and how (if at all) does it affect the pronunciation?