SERGEI DOVLATOV.

Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung has an excellent review of Sergei Dovlatov’s Ours: A Russian Family Album, which I had no idea was so hard to get hold of: the NYPL only has one copy (which Chung had been hogging), and so, at the moment, does it's pretty expensive at Amazon. Chung doesn't understand it, and neither do I; Dovlatov is one of the funniest and most likable writers I know, and I'm sure Americans would love him if he were properly introduced. Here's a snippet of Chung's review:

Ours is composed of 13 stories, each about a different Dovlatov family member (the collection was published as fiction but is quite evidently based on Dovlatov’s real-life family). There is Grandpa Isaak, a Jew of enormous physical stature, who was mysteriously arrested for espionage and killed in a prison camp; Grandfather Stepan, an Armenian Georgian, who threw himself into a ravine; Dovlatov’s bastard cousin Boris, handsome and talented, who courted danger and whom “life turned into a criminal”; Uncle Leopold, a “hustler,” who disappeared from their lives for over 30 years before being rediscovered in Belgium. Mother and Father, an actress and a theatre director, “often quarreled,” and divorce when Dovlatov is eight years old; and of course there is Lena (pronounced “Yenna”—more on Lena later), Dovlatov’s wife, who emigrates with their daughter Katya years before Dovlatov, the two of them estranged by then. In the opening of the story that describes their courtship and marriage, the narrator Sergei Dovlatov tells us, “I emigrated to America dreaming of divorce.”

Would you guess that Ours is essentially a comedy? The humor is exhilarating, in a specific way that I find hard to describe. It’s likely there is something that Russians who experienced the Stalinist and Soviet eras first (or at least second) hand recognize as “Russian humor,” and as a Westerner I am just an enthusiastic tourist, smitten by an approach to the terrors and darkness of life that is both sharp and silly.

Read the whole review, then pester any publishers you know to get Dovlatov out before the English-speaking public. This is one of those times I'm especially glad I can read Russian.

PEEVERY IN SHAKESPEARE.

Over at the Log, Mark Liberman adduces a nice bit of language peevery from Love's Labour Lost, where Holofernes complains about Armado's pronunciations:

I had forgotten the passage where Holofernes complains about Armado's pronunciations. The complaint is not about Armado's Spanish accent, but about his unetymological pronunciations — omitting the 'b' in doubt and debt, and the 'l' in half and calf; leaving out the reflex of 'gh' in neighbor and neigh; inserting (or removing?) [h] in abominable:

He draweth out the thred of his verbositie, finer then the staple of his argument. I abhor such phanaticall phantasims, such insociable and poynt deuise companions, such rackers of ortagriphie, as to speake dout fine, when he should say doubt; det, when he shold pronounce debt; d e b t, not det: he clepeth a Calf, Caufe: halfe, haufe: neighbour vocatur nebour; neigh abreuiated ne: this is abhominable, which he would call abhominable: it insinuateth me of infamie: ne inteligis domine , to make franticke, lunaticke?

The text fails to make it clear whether the alleged flaw is adding or lacking an [h] in abominable, since both Holofernes' own pronunciation and his presentation of Armado's pronunciation are spelled "abhominable" in the text...

Read Mark's post for explanation of the history of the unetymological "abhominable"; he ends by saying "In any case, this passage is the earliest example of linguistic peeving that I can think of. Can anyone give me an example before 1598?" I've quoted Catullus and Aristophanes in the comment thread.

LANGUAGE CRAZINESS.

Reddit has a thread started off by this post:

I am a student studying ancient greek and am consistently blown away by its difficulty and triviality. The construction I mentioned in the title is the word ὡς (pronounced os) plus a participle. Please, kind redditors, comfort me and show me that there is a more arbitrary and capricious rule or language. Thanks so much... :)

This, of course, is very silly—what's so difficult, trivial, or capricious about ὡς or any other linguistic phenomenon? (of course, I suppose the emoticon at the end is supposed to convey "I know it's silly, I'm just being funny, so don't take it seriously and mock me")—but there are a few nuggets of interest among the drearily predictable complaints about cases, tones, and the like; I particularly liked "Of all languages, Russian has probably the most developed cussing. You simply have no idea how strong and elaborate Russian cursing could get until you've spent some serious time in Russia. Say тримандоблядская пиздопроебина (tri-man-da-blia-tska-ya piz-da-pra-yo-bi-na) a dozen times."

What drew the attention of Avva (from whom I got the link), however, was this subthread, in which "maloney7" says: "The Russian word for 'stop' has 7 syllables - 'ost-an-av-le-va-yet-yes' - which always made me laugh it's so impractical." The first respondent, "lampochka," says, quite correctly, "It's not 'the' Russian word for 'stop', it's the longest you can deliberately drag it out. Ostanavlivaytes' is a way to tell several people to stop several times or to be in the habit of of stopping. Even so, it has 6 syllables, not 7." Another commenter points out that the seven-syllable version is indicative ('you (plural) are stopping'), and lampochka adds that "there is a convenient monosyllabic bark, stoy." Throughout all this, maloney7, while admitting the truth of what the others are saying, refuses to let go of the misguided attitude: "it just seemed odd that a word often used in emergencies was so long. And yes, you can say it shorter, but you get my drift." No, not really, unless your drift is equally willing to make fun of English because you can say "Will all of you please be stopping, please?" Which is probably used in emergencies about as often as останавливаетесь.

THE BOOKSHELF: WRITE IT RIGHT.

Jan Freeman has long been a LH favorite; her Boston Globe language column has been in my blogroll for years. Now she's come out with a wonderful book her publisher, Walker & Company, was good enough to send me: Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers. When I first heard about the book, I assumed it would be a reprint of Bierce's crotchety but amusing 1909 usage guide Write It Right (Project Gutenberg edition) with a well-written, sensible introduction. When I got it, however, I discovered that besides the well-written, sensible introduction, each of Bierce's entries was followed by Freeman's well-written, sensible update, saying pretty much what I would have wanted to say about each of his rants and shibboleths. Under "Less for Fewer," she starts off discussing the history of the prohibition (which goes back only to the 18th century), goes on to describe the history of the usage (citing my preferred authority on these things, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage), mentions modern mavens who didn't subscribe to the consensus disapproval, and finishes by talking about how it's actually used ("when the number is thought of as a limit").

The next entry is short enough I'll quote the whole thing; the first paragraph is Bierce, the second Freeman:

Liable for Likely. "Man is liable to err." Man is not liable to err, but to error. Liable should be followed, not by an infinitive, but by a preposition.

The critics of Bierce's day worked hard at fine-tuning the uses of liable, likely, and apt, but the notion that liable could not be followed by an infinitive seems to be Bierce's own hallucination. In fact, the construction had been in use for more than two centuries: "All would be liable to die," wrote Thomas Creech, a British scholar, in 1682, and writers ever since have followed his example.

Anyone who enjoys well-grounded usage discussions and/or the great Bierce should run out and get this delightful little book.

COMRIE ET AL.

Back in June I discovered a book I immediately lusted after, The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century by Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky. Alas, list price was $260.00, and used copies started at over $100, so I sighed and tried to forget it. But recently I revisited the Amazon page and found that a seller was offering it for a little over $20, and I jumped at the chance. It arrived and I plunged in; so far I've just read the first chapter, on pronunciation, and I'm sure I'll have more to report later, but I wanted to share some striking bits I've run across so far. Just about every page has something that makes me revise my ideas; these are a couple of passages I think might be of more general interest. From page 44:

However, for a significant period in the history of the Soviet Union, the palatalized pronunciation of -изм served as a sign of solidarity among the party élite, which led to an unusual case of intertwining of politics and pronunciation. The trend was probably started by Stalin, hardly a bearer of standard Russian, of whom F. Burlackij writes: 'I fail to understand why he so stubbornly pronounced коммунизьм with a soft з ... I am a hundred per cent sure that he did this on purpose, creating a certain standard, to be followed by all the initiated . . . One after another, all the members of his inner circle, including those with university education, leaned towards that pronunciation. This jargon was a sort of key to the room at the top, into the narrow circle of people closely knit to one another both by shared activities and also by shared cultural background.'...

[footnote:] Stalin's accent, a research question in its own right, was most likely a combination of spontaneous Georgian accent and some deliberate mannerisms, possibly including the pronunciation -зьм. The soft pronunciation of з was expectably apparent in the speech of NS Xruščev, who was a speaker of southern Russian and Ukrainian. A popular joke of the 1960s was that Xruščev's contribution to Marxism consisted of the soft sign (мaркcизьм).

And from page 60, in a discussion of loan words:

Polivanov (1974 [1931]: 211-19) noted that in the following loan-words, the retention of the non-Russian nasalized and front-rounded vowels was obligatory in the speech of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia: [õ] in бомонд 'beau monde', лонгшез 'lawn chair'; [ã] in шансонетка 'frivolous song; female music-hall singer', рандеву 'rendezvous'; [œ] in бретёр 'swash-buckler', блеф 'bluff'; [y] in ревю 'revue', парвеню 'upstart', and меню 'menu'; to this list may be added портфель [port'fœj] 'briefcase', [ẽ]нтерьер 'interior decoration' (Panov 1990: 51].

[footnote:] Panov (1990: 53 n. 40) quotes the following exchange between two famous Russian philologists, B.V. Gornung (b. 1899) and A.A. Reformatskij (b. 1900): while Gornung pronounces [blœf], following the French pronunciation, Reformatskij replies using the English pronunciation [blʌf]. Since they belong to one generation, the difference in pronunciation reflects the speakers' personal preferences. Both pronunciations contrast with Vladimir Majakovskij's (b. 1893) nativized бл[е]ф.

BORIO-BOOLA-GHA.

A reader writes:

The other day the expression "borio boola gha" popped out of my subconscious and just sat there, so I looked it up, and find myself puzzled about its origins. It's not in Brewer's Dictionary, at any rate... I half suspect maybe a music hall song lyric, but I have not found the origin.

Here are the earliest of the examples she turned up, from archive.org and Google Books:

From Harper's magazine, December 1867 to May 1868:

I mean some day to marry somebody who will indulge my likings; and how am I to find him in this benighted place, where the only men I meet are schismatic fledgelings, every other one preparing himself for the Gaboon mission or Borio-boola Gha? Do I look like a female missionary? No, I thank you!"

From Lichen Tufts: From the Alleghanies, 1860:

And this was not in Tartary, nor "Borio-boola Gha," nor in the dark ages, but in the United States, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

So does anybody know where this piquant expression originated?

SLOVARUS.

Another serendipitous discovery while googling: Slovarus.info (or Словарный запас), a collection of searchable dictionaries of English, Greek, Georgian, Icelandic, Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, Sanskrit, Ukrainian, Faroese, Hindi, Romanes, and Estonian; some of them (e.g., Mongolian, Sanskrit, and Hindi) are searchable in English as well as Russian.

And I'll toss in another random dictionary find on Google Books (I had actually been looking up a Russian word, but a Greek word had been mis-scanned): Dictionnaire grec moderne français by Félix Désiré Dehèque (1794-1870), from 1825; naturally, I looked up the dirtiest word that came to mind, and sure enough, there it was on page 144: "Γαμῶ, expr. obscène, avoir commerce avec une femme." By 1825 the Greeks had been in revolt against the Ottomans for several years and Philhellenism was sweeping Europe, which explains why a dictionary was published, but who Dehèque was and how he came to write it I have no idea.

NAGY ON ANCIENT GREEK.

This is one of those discoveries you can make serendipitously while googling: Gregory Nagy has updated his contributions to Greek: A Survey of Recent Work, a book he coauthored with Fred W. Householder in 1972, and put them online. There's all sorts of good stuff in there (and I am pleased to see that he quotes my mentor Warren Cowgill); I'll reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from his conclusion that emphasize the importance of continuity in scholarship, of not forgetting what our forebears knew in the excitement of current research:

A cautionary note is in order here: with the passage of time, certain early compendia on Greek grammar and dialectology have tended to become neglected or even forgotten by succeeding generations of scholars, despite the value of these works not only for linguistic insight but also for a conscientious assimilation of the extant grammatical and dialectal testimonia of the ancient world; representative of such compendia are those of Lobeck 1853 / 1862 and Ahrens 1839 / 1843. Drawing attention to these is all the more relevant because later treatises tend to betray far less appreciation or even awareness of the ancient testimonia. Another problem of obsolescence is that certain reference-manuals slated for replacement remain useful; for example, despite the admirable additions, improvements, and streamlining in Frisk’s etymological dictionary of Greek (1960, 1961-), the details collected in Boisacq’s reputedly obsolescent manual (1950) retain their value as possible points of departure for further investigation. Then too, Chantraine’s etymological dictionary (1968-) should not be viewed as a replacement of Frisk’s in turn, but rather as a complement to it; each has its own value, practically its own genre: one is, straightforwardly, ein griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch - was der Titel besagt, while the other, transcendentally, aspires to be une histoire des mots. Chantraine apparently succeeds. [...]

In the best of possible worlds, scrutiny of the Greek language will become such a discipline that it will impel its scholars to ever greater efforts at consolidating both the relevant textual material and the analytical contributions. The format of these contributions, furthermore, will eventually require that authors explain any grammatical phenomenon cited by them and essential to their arguments but likely to be unknown or unfamiliar to their readers; in other words, there would be no more relegations of such phenomena to obscurity by the expedient of cross-referencing to another remote work for an explanation and then expecting the reader to consult immediately in order to understand the argument at hand. If knowledge of the given phenomenon is not commonplace, then an immediate summary of it - though it may not be original - is nonetheless a contribution to the continuity of Greek study.

LANGUAGE ATLAS OF CHINA.

The Language Atlas of China ("Its aim has been the graphic presentation, on 36 large multi coloured maps, of the many languages and dialects spoken by the non-Han Chinese people in China who have largely been included in a number of National Minorities and of the numerous large and small dialects of Chinese itself") was published two decades ago; I am pleased to discover that some of the most useful maps from it are online here: Languages in China, Chinese Dialects in China, Minority Languages in China, Chinese Dialects (Southeastern China), Chinese Dialects Overseas: Insular Southeast Asia, Chinese Dialects Overseas: Other Parts of the World, and Minority Languages in Southern China. I found it via an excellent MetaFilter post that focuses on linguistic change in Chinese communities abroad:

"Chinatown" communities across the United States (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco) are undergoing a shift in linguistic identity, as recent immigrants are more likely to natively speak Mandarin (the official spoken language of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) instead of Cantonese.

There are plenty of interesting links in the post and thread; one commenter links to Victor Mair's recent Language Log post about the "injunction to speak Mandarin at the expense of the regional Sinitic languages," with several long quotes from relevant articles in the South China Morning Post.

EMBUGGERANCE AT GOOGLE SCHOLAR.

Stephen Chrisomalis reports on a Google Scholar screwup that produced the following citation:

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

It is, of course, hilarious, but the fact that it (along with many other similar, if more prosaic, screwups) exists is not. Not only is the author listing wrong, the review is from 1985, not 2008. Google has a serious metadata problem (see Geoff Nunberg's discussion), and it needs to work harder on fixing it. I don't understand Chrisomalis's "I don’t mean this as an indictment of Google Scholar," which smacks of forelock-tugging and/or Kool-Aid drinking; of course it's an indictment of Google Scholar, and Google needs to be slapped around, not coddled, if this sort of thing is to stop. (I got to Chrisomalis's post via the Log; In case you're curious, the actual author of "The linguistics of laughter" is Walter Nash.)

IS IS, WAS IS.

For years now I've been noticing the increasing prevalence of the grammatically unmotivated doubling of is, as in "The thing is is that..." This is not a matter of insufficient education or literacy; President Obama does it so regularly it could be considered part of his idiolect. Mark Liberman at Language Log wrote about it back in 2004; at that time he thought that this was "the result of a non-standard conception of English grammar, rather than just a faulty implementation of standard English grammar," which is interesting but would require a lot of research to substantiate. At any rate, I was recently watching a Nova program about the mission to repair the Hubble when I heard astronaut Mike Massimino say "My point was is..." (Or, as the transcript punctuates it, "So my point was, is, out of all the stuff we're doing, the thing I really need is a light.") This absolutely astonished me, and I record it here as a data point for the further grammaticalization of this phenomenon. It's now developed a past tense.

EHEES.

In checking the bibliography of a book I'm copyediting, I hit an article titled "La typologie des catalogues d’Éhées: un réseau généalogique thématisé." I was stopped in my tracks by the bizarre (to me) word Éhées; I could make no sense of it and could barely pronounce it (/ee/ sounds very strange all by itself, though of course it's common in words like créé). Was it a typo? But Google and Wikipedia came to the rescue (what did we do before them?)—Éhées redirects to Catalogue des femmes, which links to the English Catalogue of Women, where the alternate name of this ancient poem is explained thus:

In antiquity the poem known as the Megalai Ehoiai (Greek: Ἠοῖαι or Ἤοιαι; Latin Eoeae, Ehoeae, Eoiae, etc.), from the formula ἢ οἵη (ē hoiē), "or such a woman (as)", which introduces new sections within the poem, is also possibly the same, unless there are two poems in the same style - we know both only from quotations.

The French article is more certain of their identity: "Il est également connu sous le nom d’Éhées ou Éées..." The form Éées looks even stranger. At any rate, a unique name with a unique etymology. (And how to pronounce it in English—ee-HEE-ee? Yikes!)

FILIUS LUNAE.

Back in 2004 I announced a new blog on the Romance languages called Romanika; sadly, it fell by the wayside, but I am pleased to announce that its author, Eddie V. Mataochoa, has restarted it as Filius Lunae, a phrase (Latin for 'son of the moon') which has become his online pseudonym over the years. In his Relaunch post, he writes of the hiatus:

During this time, I can say I have become more seasoned and more acquainted with the different languages, especially the minority Romance languages, such as Catalan, Occitan, Galician, Asturian and Romansh. I also have a very good grasp of Romanian, which I didn't have back I started this blog under the name of Romanika. My Latin has improved vastly as well, up to the point of considering it a Living Language, and using it for composition and communicating with others who have attained this level of proficiency in the Roman tongue. Thus, my posts will definitely seem more mature (as I, myself, have matured, of course), and I will be able to relate the Romance languages I write about back to their roots in Latin more often and more deeply than before.

Welcome back!

THE MADNESS CONTINUES.

The following letter, from Andrew Charig, appeared in yesterday's New York Times Magazine:

I was very sad to hear of the death of William Safire, who most likely was the foremost expert on the American language.

In “Error-Proof,” Ammon Shea suggests invoking Chaucer and Shakespeare as a defense against criticisms of bad grammar because they used so many obsolete forms that almost any error can be found among their works. But Shakespeare wrote before English was standardized; Chaucer before it was English at all. Both are loved for what they said, not for their use of grammar. Their eloquence in usage should not make their grammar a standard for ours.

With computer communication threatening to corrupt our language beyond intelligibility, it is more important than ever to uphold usage that has precedent and to limit change to what is sensible and useful. Our criteria should be Fowler, Strunk and White, the O.E.D., Webster — not Chaucer.

I too was sad to hear of Safire's death, but this letter gave me a wry laugh and reminded me that the worst aspects of his punditry are exactly what were appreciated by many of his fans. This letter is so full of nonsense it's hard to know where to start; since Language Log has covered the "expert" claim, I'll point out that the idea that Chaucer wrote "before it was English at all" is ridiculous and the desire to "limit change to what is sensible and useful," however attractive to a certain regimentation-loving cast of mind, is (fortunately) a hopeless one. Also, "the O.E.D."? Is Mr. Charig under the impression that that magnificent work of lexicography supports his prescriptivist views? He should try actually using it someday, instead of invoking it as an idol.

This seems a logical place to insert a silly quote from David Runciman's LRB review of Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, by Josiah Ober: "He also describes Athenian democracy, in the hideous modern jargon, as 'scalable', meaning that lessons learned on the local level could be generalized across the government system." The word scalable is "hideous," apparently, because Runciman did not grow up with it and it is not part of his professional vocabulary, and we all know that professional vocabulary that is not ours is by definition hideous. Seriously, what's wrong with it? It's short, reasonably euphonious, and (most importantly) provides a handy way of referring to a complicated idea. Does Runciman want writers to say "capable of being easily expanded or upgraded on demand" (M-W) every time they need to refer to it? What fools these language moralists be!

STÆFCRÆFT.

Ben Slade, a grad student in linguistics, has started a blog, Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa (linking Old English and Sanskrit words for 'linguistics,' or as close as those languages get to the concept), and it's a gem. His last two posts are about the "likkle law" of Jamaican Creole English and the etymology of khukuri (a traditional Nepalese knife). I look forward to his future investigations.

TRANSLATION LINKS.

The Commenter Known As Bathrobe recently sent me a collection of translation-related links, and I thought I'd share them here:

The TLS Translation Prizes 2007 (Anybody know anything about Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, "a writer from the 1920s who has only recently been rediscovered in Russia"?)

British Council page on literary translation

Book Trust - Translated Fiction

And, as Bathrobe says, for the possible interest of Mr A.J.P. Crown: German literature translated into Norwegian

Coincidentally, the NY Times today published American Literature: Words Without Borders by Liesl Schillinger, on the international aspects of America's National Book Awards, which reminds me that this would be a good place to link again to Words Without Borders, "The online magazine for international literature" (which I originally wrote about here).

VIOLENCE.

My brother is on his way back to California after a week spent letting us show him the delights of autumn in New England, and one of our field trips was to Historic Deerfield, which was an enlightening experience (although it would have been more enjoyable if we hadn't been getting increasingly hungry for lunch and the last docent hadn't been quite so long-winded and repetitive). Eager to read Francis Parkman's classic account (Chapter 4 of his 1892 A Half Century of Conflict) of the Deerfield Raid of 1704, I pulled my Parkman Reader off the shelf and plunged in. After raising my eyebrows at the description of the native allies of the French as "these savages" in the first paragraph, I was soon immersed in a lively description of the winter attack and its aftermath. About halfway into it, however, I ran into a word usage of such euphemistic dissonance that it not only jolted me out of the narrative but made me laugh and run to my wife's study to read it to her.

Here's a selection of snippets from the chapter, for context (warning—snippets contain much violence): "Nevertheless, in the first fury of their attack they dragged to the door and murdered two of the children and a negro woman called Parthena, who was probably their nurse.... Meanwhile the Indians and their allies burst into most of the houses, killed such of the men as resisted, butchered some of the women and children, and seized and bound the rest.... After a time, however, they hacked a hole in it, through which they fired and killed Mrs. Sheldon as she sat on the edge of a bed in a lower room.... She had fallen from weakness in fording the stream, but gained her feet again, and, drenched in the icy current, struggled to the farther bank, when the savage who owned her, finding that she could not climb the hill, killed her with one stroke of his hatchet.... on the day following, Friday, they tomahawked a woman, and on Saturday four others.... More women fainted by the way and died under the hatchet...." Now comes the dissonance:

"During the entire march, no woman seems to have been subjected to violence; and this holds true, with rare exceptions, in all the Indian wars of New England."

For those not familiar with Victorian squeamishness as reflected in language, Parkman is here referring to rape, a subject so beyond the pale, so unspeakable, that he cloaks it with a word so general as to be incomprehensible if you don't know the code. What's amazing to me is that neither he nor, I presume, his readers of the day were bothered by, or even (I suppose) noticed, the blatant inappropriateness of the literal meaning of the word to the terrible events he has been describing.

Addendum. I forgot to mention that at the visitors' center I picked up a brochure in Russian, titled Исторический Диирфилд [Istoricheski Diirfild], with an absurd transliteration of the town's name (which should be Дирфилд [Dirfild]). Why don't people get their foreign-language material checked by people who know the language?

Those wanting a less biased account of the raid should visit Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704, a very well done site that tries "to tell the story of the Raid on Deerfield from the perspectives of the five groups who were actually present at the event: Wendat (Huron), Kanienkehaka (Mohawk), Wobanakiak (Abenaki), French, English." I particularly recommend the maps.

EFTO.

I believe I mentioned that after finishing War and Peace I decided to read the much shorter Fathers and Sons, which I'm greatly enjoying, and I was delighted to run into this linguistically interesting passage (Russian below the cut):

"We've heard that song many times," said Bazarov, "but what do you want to prove by it [etim, literally 'by this']?"

"Eftim ['by this'] I want to prove, sir" (Pavel Petrovich, when he got angry, intentionally said eftim and efto [rather than the standard etim and eto 'this'], when he knew very well that such words are not allowed by grammar. In this caprice was expressed a remnant of the traditions of Alexander I's time. The bigwigs of that day, on the rare occasions when they spoke their native tongue, used [nonstandard forms]: one would say efto, another ekhto, as if to say "We are native Russians [using the colloquial form Rusaki], and at the same time we are grandees, allowed to scorn the school's rules"), "by this I want to prove that without a feeling of one's own worth, without respect for oneself — feelings that are developed among aristocrats — there is no firm foundation for public... bien public, public order."

The only parallel that occurs to me in English (where of course the element of not speaking your native language does not exist) is the nineteenth-century use of ain't by British aristocrats, well after it had been deemed unacceptable by grammarians.

While I have your attention, I'm puzzled by the idiom "до положения риз," which I encountered in chapter 21: "— Ах, Аркадий! сделай одолжение, поссоримся раз хорошенько — до положения риз, до истребления" ["Ah, Arkady, do me a favor, let's have a real fight — do polozheniya riz, to destruction"]. It means 'to the limit, to the finish' (commonly in the context of drinking: напиться до положения риз 'to get dead drunk'), but its literal meaning is 'to the polozheniya of cassocks chasubles [d'oh!].' Polozheniya means 'position, condition, state,' and a number of other things, but "to the condition of cassocks chasubles" doesn't seem to make much sense. Can any Russian speakers explain it to me?

— Слыхали мы эту песню много раз, — возразил Базаров, — но что вы хотите этим доказать?

— Я эфтим хочу доказать, милостивый государь (Павел Петрович, когда сердился, с намерением говорил: «эфтим» и «эфто», хотя очень хорошо знал, что подобных слов грамматика не допускает. В этой причуде сказывался остаток преданий Александровского времени. Тогдашние тузы, в редких случаях, когда говорили на родном языке, употребляли одни — эфто, другие — эхто: мы, мол, коренные русаки, и в то же время мы вельможи, которым позволяется пренебрегать школьными правилами), я эфтим хочу доказать, что без чувства собственного достоинства, без уважения к самому себе, — а в аристократе эти чувства развиты, — нет никакого прочного основания общественному... bien public, общественному зданию.

BOOK.

Alexander Anichkin at Tetradki ("A Russian Review of Books: Non-Russians writing about Russia and Russians writing about themselves and the world around them") has a post about Bunin's 1924 mini-story Книга (Kniga, 'Book'), which I am very fond of myself, and says "I searched for an English translation of this short story on the internet, but could not find one. Please let me know if there is one." I thought I might as well give it a try, though Bunin's late, pared-down style shows a mastery of Russian prose that is impossible to adequately render, and I'm pleased enough with the result to reproduce it below. It makes a nice contrast to my recent post about bibliophilia. (My thanks to jamessal for his help whipping it into shape.)

A note on a phrase: the Russian does not say "with a beginning and an end" but с завязкой и развязкой 'with a beginning [literally 'tying-up'] and a denouement [literally 'untying,' which of course is also the literal meaning of denouement],' and a denouement is not necessarily an ending. But I thought it was more important to preserve the natural pairing than the literal sense, since the distinction between an ending and a denouement is not significant in this context.

BOOK

Lying on a stack of straw on the threshing floor, I had been reading for a long time – and suddenly I revolted. Once again reading all morning, once again with a book in my hands! And it’s been that way day in, day out, since I was a child! I’ve spent half my life in a world that doesn’t exist, among people who never lived, invented people, being as agitated about their fates, their joys and sorrows, as if they were my own, linking myself to my dying day with Abraham and Isaac, Pelasgians and Etruscans, Socrates and Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Dante, Gretchen and Chatsky, Sobakevich and Ophelia, Pechorin and Natasha Rostova! And how can I now distinguish between real and imagined companions of my earthly existence? How can I divide them, define the degree of their influence on me?

I was reading, living on other people’s inventions, but the field, the estate, the village, the peasants, horses, flies, bumblebees, birds, clouds – everything lived its own real life. And I suddenly felt that, and I awoke from my bookish hallucination, I threw my book into the straw and with astonishment and joy, with new eyes, I look around, I see, I hear, I smell keenly, above all I feel something uncommonly simple and at the same time uncommonly complicated, that deep, miraculous, inexpressible thing that is in life and in myself and that they never write about properly in books.

While I had been reading, in nature things were secretly changing. It had been sunny, festive; now everything had grown dark and still. In the sky, little by little, clouds had been gathering, in certain places – especially to the south – still light and lovely, but to the west, beyond the village and its willows, rain-laden, bluish, depressing. Warmly, mildly, it smells of distant rain in the fields. In the garden a single oriole is singing.

Along the dry violet road running between the threshing floor and the garden, a peasant is returning from the churchyard. On his shoulder is a white iron spade with rich blue earth clinging to it. His face is rejuvenated and bright. His cap is pushed back off his sweaty forehead.

“I’ve planted a jasmine bush for my girl!” he says cheerfully. “I wish you good health. Still reading, still making up books?”

He’s happy. Why? Just because he’s living in the world; that is, accomplishing the most incomprehensible thing on earth.

In the garden the oriole is singing. Everything else has become still and silent, not even roosters can be heard. She alone is singing, unhurriedly spinning out playful trills. Why, for whom? For herself? For the life that the estate and garden have lived for a hundred years? Or could it be that the estate is living for her fluted song?

“I’ve planted a jasmine bush for my girl.” But does the girl know? The peasant thinks she does, and perhaps he’s right. By evening the peasant will have forgotten about the bush, so for whom will it blossom? Because it is going to blossom – and it will not seem to blossom for no reason, but for someone and something.

“Still reading, still making up books.” But why make things up? Why heroines and heroes? Why a novel or a story, with a beginning and an end? The eternal fear of seeming not bookish enough, not similar enough to the famous ones! And the eternal torment of being eternally silent, of not talking even once about what is truly yours and the only real thing, most justly demanding expression, demanding to leave a trace, incarnation and preservation, if only in a word!

THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD.

One specialized topic that's always fascinated me within the large topic of language is food-related language; MMcM's Polyglot Vegetarian has been a favorite for a long time (I keep checking on it even though it hasn't been updated in months), and now it has a companion in Dan Jurafsky's The Language of Food, which started auspiciously with a detailed post on the history of the word entrée and how it changed from meaning 'a hot meat course eaten after the soup and before the roast' to 'main course' in America and 'first course' in France. Since then he's investigated ketchup and dessert. Keep up the good work, Dan! (Via the Log.)

FORBIDDEN LANGUAGES.

The NYRB now has a blog, which is pretty nifty, and a recent post by István Deák is called Slovakia: The Forbidden Languages. It sounds like a bad situation:

On September 1, the Slovak parliament made it largely illegal for its citizens to use any language other than Slovak. The use of minority languages in “official” situations is now punishable by fines of up to €5,000 (US $7,270)—and possible offenses include:

a fireman responding in Hungarian to a call for help from a person in a burning building; a civil servant discussing job opportunities with an unemployed Roma in Romany; a German book club discussing a book in German without first introducing it in Slovak; a [train] conductor addressing a passenger in Hungarian on a train from Slovakia to Hungary; a radio station broadcasting in English without Slovak translation; failure to re-carve a 50-year-old grave marker [into Slovak]

(I know from experience that not even manhole covers in Slovakia are allowed to display the old Hungarian-language inscriptions.)

How these rules will be enforced in daily life is another matter; the law appears to rely, at least in part, on denunciations. It’s enough to scare public employees in Slovakia—including even doctors, teachers, postal workers, and railroad clerks—into self-censorship.

Visit the post for Deák's discussion of the depressing politics involved. (Thanks for the link, Jim.)

Important update. It would seem that Mr. Deák (whose writing I have enjoyed in the past) is lying and/or wildly exaggerating to express/stoke Hungarian fears. See bulbul's detailed post on the subject.

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM.

How can I resist sharing Roger Ebert's essay on the books in his life? Not only will it set off sympathetic vibrations in anyone who loves owning books (I don't understand you "I can get it at the library" people—what do you do when it's late at night and you suddenly have to read Pound or Hammett or Tolstoy right now?), but it has illustrations of many of the items he mentions, not only editions of Shakespeare and Shaw but his student housing from the '60s, Hob Nobs (plain and chocolate), and above all, bookshelves overflowing with books. A sample:

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best-seller by James Could Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read all the way through that year's list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. It and the other books on the list have been rendered obsolete, so that his essay is cruelly dated. But I remember reading the novel late, late into the night when I was 14, stirring restlessly with the desire to be by love possessed.

I cannot throw out these books. Some are protected because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word; they're like little shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most are used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady book store on the Left Bank in 1965 (Obelisk Press, $2, today $91). The Shaw plays from Cranford's on Long Street in Cape Town, where Irving Freeman claimed he had a million books; it may not have been a figure of speech. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used book store.

I must say, though, I'm shocked and a little abashed that I have more books than he does... and that's after culling my collection as ruthlessly as I could for the last few moves. I'm hopeless, and my wife is a woman of superhuman tolerance.

In googling for more information on Cranford's, I found Alf Wannenburgh's reminiscence of old Cape Town bookstores, which has several paragraphs on Cranford's (ending with this sad note: "When Mr Simonawitz retired, the shop was taken over by Irving Freeman, a booklover whom it was difficult to separate from his books. He had more than a million of them when he was obliged to close in 1993 – when 6000 cartons of books weighing 195 tons were auctioned off for a song") and is well worth reading in its own right.

VERNER'S LAW.

Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org posts a delightful video by Ari Hoptman about one of the great discoveries in historical linguistics. Disclaimer: I have a copy of Braune’s Gotische Grammatik within arm’s reach and I have spent considerable time dusting off and reading copies of the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, so some of the jokes may be funnier to me than they are to you. But remember, the more you know about the rules of early Germanic prosody, the more rewarding life can be!

THESE UNITED STATES.

Mark Liberman has a post over at the Log investigating the question of how the United States changed from a plural subject to a singular one. There's an idea floating around (popularized by Shelby Foote) that the change was due to the Civil War; this is certainly not true (see Mark's earlier post on that subject—briefly, it all came from a 1909 joke by Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve that got taken seriously: "It was a point of grammatical concord which was at the bottom of the Civil War — 'United States are,' said one, 'United States is,' said another"), but how and when did the change happen? It turns out Minor Myers has studied usage in opinions of the United States Supreme Court from 1790 to 1919 and found that "the plural usage was the predominant usage in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Only in the beginning of the twentieth century did the singular usage achieve preeminence and the plural usage disappear almost entirely." Mark reproduces a very nice graph that shows the changing trends, with singular usage becoming briefly popular in the 1860s but then falling back again; there's good discussion in both post and comments.

INSTANTSIYA.

I keep forgetting to mention this post by Anatoly Vorobey from a week ago: he links to this discussion of Soviet language use, and quotes a particularly striking observation (the original is below the cut):

Naturally, in internal Party questions the directive activity of the Central Committee was self-evident and was not hidden from anyone, but that key decisions in diplomatic, police, censorship, and similar questions are not taken under the directions of the corresponding establishments but of the Central Committee was considered as a secret... For this reason, in internal secret correspondence, when it was necessary to refer to a decision of the Central Committee, it was necessary to write "instantsiya" ['level of authority, chain of command'].

Oh, what a tangled web we weave!

Естественно, во внутрипартийных вопросах директивность ЦК была самоочевидной и ни от кого не скрывалась, но вот что ключевые решения по дипломатическим, полицейским, цензурным и аналогичным вопросам принимаются вовсе не руководством соответствующих учреждений, а ЦК - считалось как бы тайной... Поэтому во внутренней секретной переписке, когда надо было сослаться на решение ЦК, предлагалось писать "инстанция".

REVIVING MANCHU.

A couple of years ago, in this post, I linked to a NY Times story about an "isolated village in northeastern China" with eighteen residents, "all over 80 years old, who, according to Chinese linguists and historians, are the last native speakers of Manchu"; now Ian Johnson at the Wall Street Journal has "In China, the Forgotten Manchu Seek to Rekindle Their Glory," about Hasutai, who "along with a band of like-minded young people in half a dozen Chinese cities" is trying to reconnect with his Manchu heritage by gathering materials and running classes. He's heading to the far west of China to try to solve this problem:

Indeed, with virtually no native speakers left, it isn't always clear how to speak the words. In the Qing dynasty, a textbook had been developed for Chinese wanting to learn their rulers' languages, with Chinese characters to suggest how to pronounce Manchu letters. That helped, as did a system of transcribing Manchu script into Roman letters devised by European missionaries and academics. But even today, Manchus can't agree on how to pronounce one of the vowels, let alone how to make the language flow naturally.

Hasutai decided the answer lay in a remote corner of China: Qapqal, a county on the Kazakh border. In the 18th century, one of China's most famous emperors, Qianlong, sent members of the Xibe tribe to the newly conquered steppes of Central Asia. Close Manchu allies, the Xibe spoke what essentially was a dialect of Manchu. Isolated from the currents that wiped out Manchu speakers in their heartland, the Xibe kept the language in this remote region.

Thanks for the heads-up, MV!

Also, I'd like to extend hearty congratulations and a warm thank-you to Mark Woods, whose wood s lot is nine years old today. Keep up the good work, and thanks for all the hats!

ANATOLY KIM.

As I plow on with an insane project I've assigned myself (creating a year-by-year chronology of Russian prose literature), I'm discovering all sorts of writers I didn't know anything about, and I just came across this interesting story in a 1999 piece by Peter Rollberg:

Anatoly Kim lost [his cohesion with a location] twice, and both times years before he was born. For him it was a trauma (I called it the "prenatal author's trauma" in one of my articles--as opposed to the actual personal or historical traumas such as Pak Wan-sô 's experience of the Korean war). As the offspring of the Korean minority on the Far Eastern island of Sakhalin--several hundred thousand people whose ancestors had once fled Japanese troops--Kim knew about Korea only from his family members. But in the fall of 1937, Stalin's government decided to deprive this minority of their newly acquired homeland of fifty years. Supposedly because of a possible fraternization with Japanese military in the pending war, those hundreds of thousands of people were ordered to leave their homes on Sakhalin overnight; they were handed out coupons for the harvest that they had just gathered--those coupons later turned out to be invalid--and loaded on trains that took them to Kazakhstan, thousands of miles away. Those without college education were dropped off in the middle of the steppe where thousands died in the first rough winter. The more privileged ones--Kim's parents among them--were given permission to settle in Kazakh towns.

Until the age of eight, Anatoly Kim spoke only Korean. Then he learned Russian and unlearned his native language forever. Studying painting and later literature in Moscow, Kim's short-stories and novellas have as varied geographical backgrounds as his own life. In some narratives, Kim alluded to the Korean community on Sakhalin or in Kazakhstan, but he never told of the horrible events of 1937. And only when he was in his fifties--after the Soviet Union crumbled--could he visit Korea for the first time. This voyage, as well as his subsequent stay there for a number of years as a professor of Russian, proved a veritable revelation. For Anatoly Kim's discovery of the real Korea was that same "voyage in search of a continent," only that it was not an entirely new one. It was the continent of his roots.

(Via Far Outliers.)

WOTCHER.

The Phrase Finder has a good entry on what is now perceived as the Cockney exclamation "Wotcher," which is actually the much older "What cheer?" in disguise; the latter goes back to at least the fifteenth century (York Mysteries, circa 1440: "Say Marie doghtir [daughter], what chere with ye?"). There are all sorts of goodies there, including this list of greetings my parents probably chuckled over in their youth:

In the mid-20th century, there was something of a fashion in the US for jocular greetings, in the same vein as the nonsense 'enthusiasm' phrases like the bee's knees, the cat's pyjamas etc.

  Hello Joe, what d'ya know?
  What's buzzin' cousin?
  What's knittin', kitten?
  What's steamin' demon?
  What's tickin', chicken?
  What's your story, morning glory?
  What's your tale, nightingale?
  What's on the agenda, Brenda?
  etc, etc.

And at the end it explains why it's now thought of as Cockney (it all has to do with Albert Chevalier, "The Singing Costermonger," and his signature tune "Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road"). This comes courtesy of a MetaFilter post (by the wonderful Jessamyn West) on a San Francisco institution forgotten for a century or more, Woodward’s Gardens (1866-1891), which developed from a temperance hotel called the What Cheer House.

SEX IN THE DICTIONARY.

Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower has a nice piece in Slate, "Can a Woman 'Prong' a Man? Why it's so hard to put sex in the dictionary. It starts off with a great anecdote:

In 1966, Jess Stein, the editor-in-chief of the major Random House Dictionary of the English Language, told the New York Times about a meeting he convened with the company's editorial and sales staff to discuss the words cunt and fuck. "When I uttered the words there was a shuffling of feet, and a wave of embarrassment went through the room," he said. "That convinced me the words did not belong in the dictionary, though I'm sure I'll be attacked as a prude for the decision."

Stein did not have to wait long to be proven right on the last point: A mere two weeks later, the Times' own book reviewer wrote, "Unfortunately, a stupid prudery has prevented the inclusion of probably the most widely-used word in the English language. The excuse here, no doubt, is 'good taste'; but in a dictionary of this scope and ambition the omission seems dumb and irresponsible."

Needless to say, I agree with the reviewer, but the idea of the Times, one of the most prudish publications on the face of the earth, making that particular complaint is pretty hilarious. (It must have taken considerable restraint on Jesse's part not to point that out; I am incapable of such restraint.) Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff in there (and, of course, lots of swear words).

INFINITESIMAL.

I usually nod in recognition when I see odd verbal usages in my reading—"ah yes, "penultimate" for "ultimate," an old acquaintance. But this, in Andrew O'Hagan's review essay "The Powers of Dr. Johnson" in the Oct. 8 NYRB, is truly weird:

He used Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden at the head of an army of brilliancy; he sourced and copied over 100,000 examples for the Dictionary to best illustrate the meanings and uses of English words. In doing so he revealed a republic of letters as a rich, voluble, human culture, a summit of what men might do to civilize their days and exalt their common circumstances. The Dictionary indeed is a work of art, encapsulating an almost infinitesimal belief in the magic of poetry and prose. The book reveals nothing less than a living culture represented by marks on paper.

What on earth could he mean by "infinitesimal" here?

FORA READER.

A reader sent me a link to Fora Reader, which calls itself "a foreign reading tool with a simple-dedicated-embedded browser, rapid word translations, dictionary management, and text annotation for viewing with any web browser":

Written in the Java programming language, Fora is cross-platform and internationalized. It works on Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems and currently available in English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Arabic and Portuguese interfaces (note that the translations are in beta stage). Currently it has only one comprehensive English-English dictionary out-of-box due to file size and bandwidth constraints.

Fora uses various types of inline tooltips to display translations and never suspends reading/browsing activity by using well-tailored tooltips right around the word to be translated.

Being too lazy to download and try the thing myself, I thought I'd ask if anyone else has done so, and if so what they thought of it.