CHUKOVSKY I.

First off, Happy New Year! And now, on with our regularly scheduled post, the first in what will doubtless be a series drawn from Kornei Chukovsky's Diary, 1901-1969 (see my Xmas post); I've just started it, and I've already hit a couple of entries I want to share [Russian below the cut]. From February 20, 1909 (Chukovsky's son Nikolai, or Kolya, is about five, his daughter Lidia, or Lida, about two):

I'm surrounded by Ukrainian books and, oddly enough, as I read them I start thinking in Ukrainian. And what's even odder, when I've been reading all day I dream in Ukrainian. And even odder than that: the Ukrainian verse I knew as a child but have completely and utterly forgotten—pushed into the background by Blok and Bryusov—is surfacing, coming back to me.... And even odder than that: I feel a sort of Ukrainian naïveté, artlessness welling up in me—in my mood, my spirit. So not only does the soul create language; language (in part) creates the soul.

Lida put on Kolya's brown coat today and refused to take it off, even inside. It's odd: her language is developing in an entirely different way from Kolya's. Kolya creates his own words, but retains only a few of them; he increases his vocabulary gradually. Lida can pronounce all words more or less properly and has an enormous vocabulary, but they are not so much words as their shadows. That is because she doesn't create them; she merely reports what she hears.

And from July 15, 1910:

Went out on a boat with Korolenko. ... Here is what he said about Leskov: "When I was a proofreader for Novosti, we heard a rumor that our paper, which had never been subject to censorship, was going to be visited by a censor. I was on my guard. We were running Leskov's Items from the Diocese. One day an official-looking man came in and said, 'Let me have a look at Leskov's Items.'

'I will not.'

'And how will you keep me from seeing them?'

'Simple. I'll tell the typesetters not to give them to you.'

'But why?'

'Because our paper has never submitted to censorship, and censors...'

'But I'm not a censor. I'm Leskov!'"

Russian original, 1909:

Я обложен хохлацкими книгами, читаю, и странно: начинаю думать по-хохлацки, и еще страннее - мне на хохлацком яз. (как целый день начитаюсь) сны снятся; и еще страннее: те хохлацкие стихи, которые я знал с детства и которые я теперь совсем, совсем забыл, заслонил Блоками и Брюсовыми, теперь выплывают в памяти, вспоминаются, и еду на лыжах и вдруг вспомню Гулака, или Kвiткy, или Кулиша. И еще страннее: в характере моем выступило - в виде настроения, оттенка - какое-то хохлацкое наивничанье, простодушничание и т. д. Вот: не только душа создает язык, но и язык (отчасти) создает душу. Лидочка сегодня надела коричневое Колино пальто и не хотела даже в комнате снять его. Странно, как у нее речь развивается совсем не тем путем, что у Кольки.

Колька создавал свои слова, запоминал только некоторые, расширяя постепенно свой лексикон. Лидочка все во одного слова может выговорить приблизительно, у нее огромный лексикон, - но это не слова, а как бы тени слов. Это потому, что она не творит, а повторяет вслед за другими.

1910:

Катался с Короленкою в лодке. Т[атьяна Александровна], Оля (Полякова), Ася и я. О Лескове: "Я был корректором в "Новостях" у Нотовича, как вдруг прошел слух, что в эту бесцензурную газету приглашен будет цензор. Я насторожился. У нас шли "Мелочи Архиерейской Жизни". Вдруг входит господин чиновничьего виду.

- Позвольте мне просмотреть Лескова "Мелочи".

- Нет, не дам.

- Но как же вы это сделаете?

- Очень просто. Скажу наборщикам: не выдавать вам оттиска.

- Но почему же?

- Потому что газета у нас бесцензурная, и цензор...

- Но ведь я не цензор, я Лесков!

ZHIVAGO'S CHILDREN.

As I mentioned here, one of the books I got for Christmas was Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok, and since AJP and jamessal thoughtfully had Amazon leave it unwrapped so I could get started on it as soon as it arrived, I've already finished it, and am as wrung out as if I'd been reading a great, tragic novel.

That may raise doubts about either my judgment (it's just a book about how some intellectuals dealt with the last decades of Communism in Russia, after all) or the book itself (you don't usually want a history book to be like a novel), but I stand by it. Zubok has accomplished a near miracle, making an intellectual history both gripping and accurate (every paragraph has several footnotes referencing histories, diaries, and other sources in both Russian and English—the author seems to have read everything available on the period, and talked to some of the participants as well). Every page provides fresh insights; he mentions many people and events I was to some extent familiar with (along with many unknown to me—for instance, he describes the huge MGU dormitory on Stromynka Street where many of the book's characters lived during their college years), and always puts them in a context that makes me understand them better. Furthermore, dealing with a subject that lends itself to one-sided presentations, his perspective is impeccable—he has a clear-eyed sympathy for all his protagonists, and every time you think you know how to feel about them he provides a view from another angle that makes you think twice, and then think again. Zubok, in his epilogue, sums up his book this way:

It is a story about the struggle of intellectuals and artists to regain autonomy from an autocratic regime seeking to control society and culture. Yet it is also a story about the heavy price they paid for this autonomy, and above all about the slow and painful disappearance of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people, beliefs and values inherited from the milieu of the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century.

I would urge anyone with any interest in that story to read this remarkable book. To give some idea of its riches, I'll quote a few snippets. Here is a surprising result of Stalin's Great Terror, which in the 1930s wiped out so many Old Bolsheviks:

Most of the survivors of the terror at universities and other cultural institutions were, paradoxically, the professors who did not share the communist idealism. They, who had instead been brought up in the nineteenth-century traditions of liberalism and humanism, could not help passing on to their students their manners, habits, ethical standards, and aesthetic attitudes — while keeping their political views to themselves.

On the stilyagi (whom he calls alternately stiliagi and "style apers"):

From the start, the admirers of American style and jazz, as well as their broader following of imitators, engendered a dual conflict: between children and parents and between them and Soviet institutions, especially the school and the Komsomol. At the same time, identities were not black and white. Most jazz lovers and famous future guitar balladeers, among them Vladimir Vysotsky, Yuri Vizbor, and Alexander Gorodnitsky, had never been style apers, although they absorbed some of their language and manners. And some of the Komsomol oppressors of stiliagi would later become avid advocates of Western-style openness and liberalization. American cultural influences did not lead automatically to anti-Soviet views among the young. Paradoxically, many of them recalled that love of jazz and fashionable clothing coexisted with unquestioning acceptance of the cult of Stalin.

On the first cracks in the Iron Curtain (and it astonished me that most Russians had no contact with Eastern Europe for a decade after WWII):

The first layer of the Iron Curtain that Russians might penetrate, the first boundary to cross, took the form of the border with the "fraternal" countries of the Soviet bloc. After 1955, newspapers from "people's democracies" were available on some newsstands in Moscow and Leningrad, including on university campuses; those papers provided the first alternative source of information to reports in the Soviet media. At the same time, Soviet tourism to Eastern Europe grew rapidly; in 1957 more than half a million Russians traveled to Poland, Romania, China, East Germany, and other communist countries.

Poland was especially important. One linguist and poet from Moscow recalled that "for a certain part of intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, Poland after 1955-1956 served as a bridge to Europe, to European culture — beginning with the general culture of ideas and ending with political culture." Some poets and other writers, budding intellectuals, and scholars learned Polish before they learned other foreign languages. Polish newspapers and books on philology, art, philosophy, and sociology were like a secondhand version of the Western original, yet they provided a good start. Some American and European authors, such as William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce, were banned from Russian libraries, yet available in Polish translation.

On the wildly popular 1957 World Youth Festival (about which I knew nothing, and which I learn was the source of the popularity of the song "Moscow Nights" [Подмосковные вечера]):

The festival was a time of revelation and, for a brief moment, liberation for Russian fans of "style," especially young musicians and artists. In their eagerness to demonstrate the diversity and creativity of "Soviet life," the party and Komsomol authorities suspended the ban on "Western" and formalist styles in music and pictorial art for a week, and suddenly Moscow was jolted by Scottish bagpipes, Spanish and Hawaiian guitars, and jazz saxophones. On Pushkin Square, in the middle of Gorky Street in the center of the city, bands from different countries played, day and night. Americans and other Western youth taught Russian volunteers how to dance rock-and-roll and boogie-woogie, dances that were forbidden in the USSR and practiced only at the style apers' private parties. Russian formalist and abstract artists, the persecuted underdogs of the Soviet art world, were able to participate in international art competitions and publicly display their works. The variety of artistic styles contrasted sharply with the customary oppressive monotony of official Soviet art. The traditional Russian-Soviet cultural hierarchy with its top and bottom, the refined and the vulgar, began to erode. The idea of a multiplicity of cultures, and cultural pluralism, which had been excluded by socialist realism, returned.

That's all from the first half of the book, filled with the illusory optimism of the late '50s and early '60s; I don't have the heart at the moment to go on and transcribe from the second, darker, half, in which the best lose all conviction and the antisemitic nationalists are full of passionate intensity, but I hope I've given an idea of what is to be found here.

DANCING IN THE STREET.

I'm almost halfway through Andrei Bely's Peterburg (complete Russian text of the earlier, longer 1913 version, with introductory essay by Igor Sukhikh)—I've read it before in English, but this is my first time reading it as Bely wrote it—and I'm perfectly willing to go along with Nabokov in calling it one of the great novels of its century. Its prose is even more mesmerizing than that of The Silver Dove (discussed here), with brilliant use of repetition (all of Bely's prose works on the incantatory principle), and the plot is far more interesting, with intertwining strands on the generational theme (still productive a half-century after Fathers and Sons), the theme of love and marriage (two very different things in Bely), and the prescient theme of red revolution, all played against the backdrop of a murky and frightening city that Bely knew well but didn't like (he was a proud Muscovite). I'll probably have more to say when I finish it, but right now I just want to share a sentence that struck me with its inadvertent foreshadowing of Martha and the Vandellas and the Rolling Stones: "Apollon Apollonovich thought [while watching the dancers at a party in the revolutionary October of 1905]: just let these seemingly innocent dances go on here, and, well, of course these dances will continue in the street; and the dances will end, of course—there, there." (Russian below the cut.) The final "там, там," literally 'there, there,' carries the sound of тамтам 'tomtom,' and in general is meant to bring to your ears (if you will) the sound of marching, charging feet, boy.

Аполлон Аполлонович думал: допусти только здесь эти с виду невинные пляски, уж, конечно, продолжатся эти пляски на улице; и окончатся пляски, конечно, -- там, там.

UPPER-CLASS NON-DECLENSION LIVES ON.

A couple of months ago I wrote about The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century by Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky; I've continued working through it, and I thought I'd pass on this interesting bit from the chapter on morphology:

Analyticity in the Nominal Paradigm
Indeclinable nouns

The most distinctive feature of grammatical change in the twentieth century has been the growth of analyticity—the increasing tendency for the grammatical meaning of words to be expressed by their context rather than their form and for the expression of separate meanings by separate words that can be used on their own, in isolation. An obvious aspect of this tendency is the growth of indeclinability among nouns. With the increase in the number of indeclinable nouns in the twentieth century growing account has to be taken of them in describing the morphological system....

Some [indeclinables], but not many, were borrowed as long ago as the eighteenth century, including депо [depo 'depot'] and бюро [byuro 'bureau']. The habit of not declining them grew up in the first half of the nineteenth century among the upper class, but declined forms too, such as на бюре, на фортепиане are attested from that period... Only certain members of the intelligentsia and upper class, owing to their knowledge of Western languages, were conscious of the foreign origin of these words, and it was only in upper-class circles that they were not declined....

The vast majority of the population were ignorant of the Western languages from which these words came, and, on the rare occasions when they knew and used such words, they declined them. At the time of the Revolution non-declension of neuter loan-words had acquired prestige among the ruling class, but to the illiterate masses it was unknown or (if known) incomprehensible. It would therefore have been quite possible in the early years of Soviet power to codify declension of these words as standard, approximating Russian practice to that of most other Slavonic languages. Only a small minority of the population would have been offended.

After 1917, however, non-declension continued its progress under the impetus of the pre-Revolutionary prestige structure. And so, when in the 1960s, as part of the RJaSO [Русский язык и советское общество] project, a survey was carried out in which 1500 Russians were asked: 'Do you accept the possibility of declining ... nouns ... of the type пальто, депо?' only 3 per cent said 'Yes'. The actual text of the replies received indicates that most of the informants were quite indignant at the thought of declining them.

So non-declension, like classical music, was an upper-class preference continued by the Soviets.

XMAS BOOKS.

Finally got my computer back, but I'm still recovering from the holiday, so I'll just list the books I found under the Xmas tree (a balsam this year—we decided fragrance was important to us):

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow, by Anders Nilsen (thanks, Eric!)

The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated, by Nabokov (thanks, Brooke!)

And two from those commenters sans peur et sans reproche, AJP and jamessal (you guys are nuts, but I'm not about to sic the nice men with the butterfly nets on you):

Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok

Diary, 1901-1969, by Kornei Chukovsky

I'm almost done with the Zubok, one of the best books I've ever read on Russian cultural history, and will be reporting on it shortly; there will doubtless be more to say on the others as I get to them. Books always put me in that ho-ho-ho spirit!

MORE ON CIA-CIA.

Back in August I posted about an odd development by which a minor Indonesian language, Cia-Cia, was using Korean hangul as a writing system; Victor Mair has an update at the Log. (I apologize for scanty posting; my computer is still hors de combat, and I've been trying to get a book edited. Hopefully regular languagehatting will resume shortly.)

THE BOOKSHELF: MISCELLANY.

I've got a small stack of books that publishers have sent me and I've enjoyed looking through, but for one reason or another haven't written posts about. Here's a brief description of each; any of them would make a good stocking-stuffer if you're stuck for a last-minute giftie.

The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, by Chris Baldick, is a nice, compact reference work that includes entries as general as "romance" and as specific as "rispetto" ("An alternative name, especially in Tuscany, for the Italian verse form more widely known as the strambotto"). The entry for skaz is quite well done; the heart of it reads: "The term is now used more generally in studies of fictional prose for the exploitation of colloquial speech in first-person narratives, especially where the narrator's language is marked by non-literary or indecorous features such as slang and dialect terms, expletives, solecisms, malapropisms, hesitations, and other indications that the narrative is to be understood as being 'spoken' rather than written down." Of course, these days one is likely to reach for the computer if one wants to know this kind of thing, but if you like actual books to leaf through, this is a good one.

Curse and Berate in 69+ Languages is just what it sounds like, and would make a fitting accompaniment to my book except for the minor detail that it's thoroughly unreliable. I have no idea how thoroughly the entries for languages like Sinhala, Slovenian, and Northern Sotho were vetted (though I suspect the answer is: not very thoroughly), but the ones for languages I know are full of typos, misspellings, and other blemishes. (On page 30, the names of three different Soviet general secretaries are misspelled in inventive ways; Yeltsin, for instance, becomes Ыелтзен.) If you know someone who is more concerned with fun than accuracy, this book is a hell of a lot of fun.

Lost In Translation: Misadventures in English Abroad, by Charlie Croker (website), is a collection of signs found abroad in amusingly off English. Samples:
Barbershop in Zanzibar, Tanzania: Gentlemen's throats cut with nice sharp razors.
On a Taiwanese shampoo: Use repeatedly for severe damage.
The trouble with this, as with collections of Things Children Say, is that you can never be sure if the items are real or invented, and for me that drains a lot of the pleasure out of it. But I suspect I am in the minority here, and apparently lots of people have enjoyed it, because there's a sequel (Still Lost in Translation).

I wrote about Charles Hodgson's History of Wine Words: An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology and Word Histories of Wine, Vine, and Grape from the Vineyard, Glass, and Bottle in this post; his earlier book Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia is also excellent, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of body-related terms.

And with that, I wish everyone a happy holiday season, and for those of you who will celebrate Christmas tomorrow (or, if you're over there beyond the date line, are already celebrating it): Merry/Happy Christmas!

POLICE, ADJECTIVE.

A. O. Scott's review of the new Romanian movie Police, Adjective makes it sound like something I'll have to try to see:

True to its title, the new Romanian film “Police, Adjective” is a story of law enforcement with a special interest in grammar. Its climactic scene is not a chase or a shootout, but rather a tense, suspenseful session of dictionary reading. I’m not being in any way facetious.... The dictionary in that scene is a versatile comic prop, and also an instrument of instruction and humiliation....

At another point, as Anca, a teacher and something of a linguistic pedant, listens to a romantic pop song over and over on her computer, she and Cristi have a debate about images and symbols in literature. Why, he wonders, don’t people just stick with the literal meanings of words, and forget about all the fancy stuff.

Sounds like my kind of cop movie. (Thanks go to LobsterMitten, aka LobboMobbo, for the link.)

I THINK THAT CLEARLY THAT IT'S WEIRD.

I recently posted about the "is is" phenomenon, which has been much discussed (see this Language Log post, for example); people may find it more or less acceptable, but one could hardly be surprised by its existence. Now, however, Logger Mark Liberman has written about a construction that I find so improbable I'm amazed it's as common as it apparently is, the doubling of that around an adverb. Examples:
"There are statements that obviously that she has made that the president doesn't agree with..."
"... knowing that in most cases that they will mess up the drawings."
"...it seems that apparently that they just wanna be me..."

I assume, perhaps too hastily, that no one will find this grammatical, but is anyone familiar with it? Do any of you find yourself occasionally producing a sentence like this? It may be an up-and-coming phenomenon that I just haven't noticed, geezer that I am.

DIFFICULT LANGUAGES.

I know we've covered the topic recently, and I wasn't going to post about The Economist's longish article on difficult languages, even though it has a lot of interesting examples and doesn't get too gee-whiz about it, but when I hit this part I couldn't resist:

For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

A language that gives you a lump on your larynx just from speaking it—now that's badass. (Thanks, John!)

MULTILINGUAL COFFEE LOVE.

I love coffee, I'm not ashamed to admit it, and as a result I love good music featuring the love of coffee. I often sing Bach's Coffee Cantata around the house: "Ei! Wie schmeckt der Coffee süße!" Now I've discovered a Korean song that is just as catchy: "Love Is Coffee." Enjoy either or both, depending on your musical tastes.

LA FANGE DU MACADAM.

I've finished reading Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air (see this recent post), and I'm already looking forward to rereading it in a few years—it's one of those books you keep going back to as you accumulate more knowledge and understanding. It makes me interested in Goethe's Faust in a way I've never been before (and now I can't find my copy, which I dragged around for years despite being sure I'd never get around to reading it), gives me new insights into Dostoevsky (and makes it clear how Notes from Underground is in some respects a response to Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, in particular the Crystal Palace rant), and confronts Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in new and interesting ways, among many, many other things. I won't even try to summarize his argument; instead, I'll quote a brief bit about language from the Baudelaire chapter:

Consider a phrase like la fange du macadam, "the mire of the macadam." La fange in French is not only a literal word for mud; it is also a figurative word for mire, filth, vileness, corruption, degradation, all that is foul and loathsome. In classical oratorical and poetic diction, it is a "high" way of describing something "low." As such, it entails a whole cosmic hierarchy, a structure of norms and values not only aesthetic but metaphysical, ethical, political. La fange might be the nadir of the moral universe whose summit is signified by l'auréole ['the halo': Baudelaire's prose poem "Loss of a Halo" centers on a poet whose halo "slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam"]. The irony here is that, so long as the poet's halo falls into "la fange," it can never be wholly lost, because, so long as such an image still has meaning and power—as it clearly has for Baudelaire—the old hierarchical cosmos is still present on some plane of the modern world. But it is present precariously. The meaning of macadam is as radically destructive to la fange as to l'auréole: it paves over high and low alike.

We can go deeper into the macadam: we will notice that the word isn't French. In fact, the word is derived from John McAdam of Glasgow, the eighteenth-century inventor of modern paving surface. It may be the first word in that language that twentieth-century Frenchmen have satirically named Franglais: it paves the way for le parking, le shopping, le weekend, le drugstore, le mobile-home, and far more. This language is so vital and compelling because it is the international language of modernization. Its new words are powerful vehicles of new modes of life and motion. The words may sound dissonant and jarring, but it is as futile to resist them as to resist the momentum of modernization itself.

And in a footnote on the same page, he mentions the Brooklyn Dodgers as an exemplar of modernism: "The name expresses the way in which urban survival skills—specifically, skill at dodging traffic (they were at first called the Trolley Dodgers)—can transcend utility and take on new modes of meaning and value, in sport as in art. Baudelaire would have loved this symbolism, as many of his twentieth-century successors (ee cummings, Marianne Moore) did." I love this guy, and I thank Noetica again for the book.

I do have some minor gripes about his dealings with Russian literature. He admits up front that he knows no Russian, so his mistakes are forgivable, but I still want to correct them. For some reason he thinks Neva (the name of Petersburg's river) means 'mud'; he says this twice. It doesn't. He treats Edmund Wilson's prose translation of "The Bronze Horseman" as though it were Pushkin's text, which is understandable but leads him into error when he quotes "he had to work for decent independence" and adds "irony here, because we will see how indecently dependent he is forced to be": the Russian has nothing corresponding to "decent." He refers to "Znaniemsky" Square (should be Znamiensky) and Gogol's character "Pishkarev" (should be Piskarev or Piskaryov). Most seriously, on page 201 he quotes this line from Gogol's wonderful story "Nevsky Prospect" (which he analyzes brilliantly): "Don't look into the shop windows: the frippery they display is lovely, but smells of assignations." He then says "Assignations, of course, are what this whole story has been about." Unfortunately, the Russian text says "пахнут страшным количеством ассигнаций": 'they smell of a frightful quantity of banknotes'—literally assignats. I don't know where he got "but smells of assignations" (he drew on several translations, but Google finds that phrase only in his book), but it's a mistranslation plain and simple.

BARABTARLO.

One of the major Nabokov scholars these days is Gennady Barabtarlo, Professor of Russian at the University of Missouri, who studied Russian literature at Moscow University, got a PhD at the University of Illinois (his dissertation was on Pnin, which he has since translated into Russian), and has published poems and short stories alongside his articles on Nabokov; most recently, he has translated the posthumous semi-demi-novel The Original of Laura into Russian, in connection with which he was interviewed by Dmitri Bavilsky for Chastny Korrespondent. The most immediately striking thing about the interview (which was linked by Anatoly) is that Barabtarlo's portion of it is in the old, prerevolutionary orthography (see this LH post, and note that the reform was actually promulgated by the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917, not by the Bolsheviks, which makes Barabtarlo's position even odder than it would be anyway); he explains it thus (Russian below the cut):

It would help the rebirth not only of writing but of Russian civilization in general if there were an unconditional and decisive mass recoiling from everything produced by Soviet power, as people recoil with disgust from corruption [porcha] or infection, and this applies in the first place to speech in all its forms, including its written form (literary language is the last and least concern).

He has much more to say about translating in general and translating Nabokov, and I was greatly interested in his answer to the question "Which is closer to you, the Berlin Sirin [who wrote in Russian] or the American Nabokov, who wrote in English?" He begins by saying he doesn't know any Russian emigrant—including Nabokov's sister Elena, who knew English very well—who wouldn't prefer the Russian Nabokov, "which is natural enough," but goes on to say he himself believes the American Nabokov went farther artistically.

However, what concerns me at the moment is the name Barabtarlo: what is it from, and how is it pronounced? I say to myself /barab'tarlo/ (bah-rahb-TAR-low), but with very little confidence. The only thing I've found online is this brief Q&A, which says "On Ancestry.com, Barabtarlo turns up in listings as 'Bessarabia (now Moldova).' Many of them are identified as Jews." My wild guess would be that it is derived from a Hebrew abbreviation, as the family name Barabash is from Ben Rabbi-Bunim Shmul, but I'd love to have something besides a wild guess to go on.

Помочь общему возрожденію не только словесности, но и вообще русской цивилизаціи могло бы безусловное и массовое отшатываніе рѣшительно отъ всего, произведеннаго совѣтской властью, какъ отшатываются съ отвращеніемъ отъ порчи или заразы, и это едва ли не въ первую очередь относится къ рѣчи, во всѣхъ ея формахъ, въ томъ числѣ и письменной (литературный языкъ — послѣдняя и наименьшая забота).

ONE CHILD'S LANGUAGE.

Joel of Far Outliers has helpfully compiled all of his posts about his daughter's early language development into one post, taking her from 8 months ("Also this week, she finally came up with her first honest-to-goodness consonant, /b/") to 47 months ("She is rapidly expanding her vocabulary, stopping to ask us the meaning of any word she doesn’t know yet"); she is now a 24-year-old teacher. Anyone with any interest in how we learn to talk (and deal with multiple languages—the Outlier family was in China during her first years) will find the series of great interest.

STANLEY ELLIS, RIP.

The Telegraph obit leads off with the basic story: "Stanley Ellis, who has died aged 83, was Britain's best-known dialectologist and phonetician, and pioneered the forensic analysis of voice recordings, among them the hoax tape that derailed the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry." If you're interested in the forensic stuff, there's lots of it there; me, I liked the dialect bits:

In his series Talk of the Town, Talk of the Country, Ellis illustrated his theme with examples, explaining the derivation of Yorkshire dialect words such as "fraunge" (to stroll about); "femmer" (young or tender); and "fettle" (the old word for a strap, which came to mean "get, make, prepare, put right").

He discovered that a runt – the weakest in a litter of piglets – was a "crit" in Northumberland, a "wreckling" in Lincolnshire, a "nizgul" in Herefordshire and a "nestle-tripe" in Dorset.

He also found that north country people were more inclined to cling to dialect than those in the south, who regarded such speech as "non-U"; men, he found, were more likely to stick to the old words than their womenfolk.

Among thousands of regional variations, Ellis noted 88 different words for left-handed, ranging from "gibble-fisted" to "squivver-handed"; while someone silly might be "hatchy", "dibby", "dummy", "half-sharp" or "daft as a dicky-docket".

Once again, I deplore the all too widespread idea that language should be made uniform; how can anyone resist terms like "gibble-fisted" and "daft as a dicky-docket"? (Thanks, Paul!)

RIDLEY.

Looking up something else in my Merriam-Webster, I ran across ridley, the name of two varieties of sea turtle. What struck me was the conjunction of the etymology and the date, respectively "unknown" and 1926. There are lots of words with unknown etymologies, of course, but you'd think that recent a word would not be a total mystery. Wikipedia, in its Kemp's Ridley article, says:

These turtles are called Kemp's Ridley because Richard Kemp (of Key West) was the first to send in a specimen of the species to Samuel Garman at Harvard. However, the etymology of the name "Ridley" itself is still in question. Prior to the term being popularly used (for both species in the genus), L. kempii at least was known as the "bastard turtle".

I wonder if the OED will turn up anything more when it gets to this word in its ongoing revision?

LUNA MEZZO MARE.

At the wedding reception in The Godfather, while Marlon Brando is making someone an offer he can't refuse, the guests are singing a catchy (and salacious, if you know Italian) song that begins "C'è 'na luna mezzo mare" [There's a moon in the middle of the sea]. There's quite a backstory to the song, which you can read here:

Paolo Citorello was a Sicilian seaman who would pass the time on long voyages by playing and singing folk songs from his native land. Paolo didn't read music, so he strummed his guitar by ear, singing what he could remember and improvising the rest. After one memorable ocean trip, in the late 1920s, he returned with what he viewed as his own composition of one of those songs: "Luna Mezzo Mare"...

It goes back to Rossini and forward to Rudy Vallee (who recorded it as "Oh! Ma-Ma! (The Butcher Boy)"), the Andrews Sisters (who added a surprise ending), Lou Monte (in 1958 as "Lazy Mary"), and CBGB (in 2001, "when the group Collider decided to end 'a decades long draught of Italian wedding music in the New York underground rock scene'"). Furthermore, there's a careful transcription and analysis of Lou Monte's lyrics, along with a discussion of Italian dialects, a biography of Monte, and various audio links, here, and YouTube has the Monte hit, with onscreen transcription but no translation. Thanks, LobsterMitten!

THE GENIZAH PROJECT.

Yaniv Fox has a History Compass post called "The Digitization of the Cairo Genizah," about the Genizah Project, "which aims to digitize the entire corpus of finds included in the Cairo Genizah":

The Cairo Genizah is a staggering amount of fragments of documents (some 250,000 in total), quires and books found in a locked synagogue room toward the end of the 19th century in Egypt. Most of the documents, ranging in date of production from the 9th to the 16th century, were taken from Egypt to England by Professor Schechter of Cambridge, and are still kept there today. The remainder was eventually dispersed throughout the world... The fragments range in topic from Rabbinical to liturgical, biblical and Talmudic works, on a variety of subjects, and are in a generally deteriorated state, due to the conditions in which they were stored....

So far, the team has managed to scan some 85,000 pictures, and have now begun scanning the largest repository of fragments, found in Cambridge, at a rate of 10,000 per month.

The second stage of the project is perhaps even more ambitious. The Friedberg Genizah team intends to add a second layer of information to the existing scans. This layer will include, when complete, an identification, transcription and translation of the fragment. Since there are so many of these fragments, there arose a need for an identification system, in order to catalog the pieces by their various attributes, but also as part of an attempt to match separate pieces which once belonged to a single, original manuscript... The second layer also contains a collection of all the research literature ever published on the subject of the Cairo Genizah, as well as software designed to navigate through it.

Things like this help me remember that the twenty-first century has its good points. Thanks for the links, Jonathan!

SIKBAJ, CEVICHE, FISH & CHIPS.

Another fantastic post from Dan at The Language of Food; he takes us from "a dish of sweet and sour stewed beef called sikbāj, from sik, Persian for 'vinegar', and bā 'broth'," which "must have been amazingly delicious, because it was a favorite of kings and concubines for at least 300 years" (I want some!), through escabeche—and the perhaps cognate ceviche—and the Sephardim, who brought their pescado frito with them when they returned to England after a centuries-long ban, to the English adoption of "Fried Fish, Jewish Fashion" and the fish and chips we know today. A great read, and I love his conclusion:

I'd like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island, that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions... I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are about nothing more significant than where to go for tacos.

Amen!

MY OWN PRIVATE BERMAN.

I just got a package from Amazon that turned out to contain a gorgeous paperback copy of Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (the cover is this one, not the gray one shown at the Amazon page), a book I've been wanting to read for almost three decades now. What's more, it arrives at the perfect moment, since its longest chapter (over a hundred pages) is on Saint Petersburg, and a section of that chapter is on Bely's Petersburg, the very novel I'm now reading in Russian. There was no indication of who was kind enough to send it; I offer my fervent thanks to the anonymous donor, and assure them that the book will warm and brighten this dark, cold month!

Update. It turns out the book was a gift from Noetica, who writes to inform me of the fact and suggests that I tell people "that this silent southerner still exists" and (excellent news) that he will be "back soon!" So I can now direct my thanks to him in particular, and I look forward to his reappearance in the Languagehat Café.

YUDIFOVNA.

My latest historical reading is a book about a nearly forgotten episode: Lesley Chamberlain's Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, about the 1922 expulsion of many of Russia's most prominent anti-Bolshevik intellectuals. I'm not even halfway through it, but I wanted to mention an onomastic oddity I encountered on page 14, where the wife of Nikolai Berdyaev, the most famous of the expulsanty, is referred to as Lidiya Yudifovna. There must be some mistake, thought I: Yudif is the Russian equivalent of Judith, and Russian patronymics are called that for a reason—you're not named after your mother. But I learn from this site (apparently the only place on the internet that mentions the fact) that her father was Юдиф Степанович Трушев, Yudif Stepanovich Trushev. How he wound up being named Judith is a story probably lost in the mists of time.

There are, as is typical these days, an unfortunate number of typos, including repeated references to Tsarskoe Selo as "Tsarskoe Tselo" (and the amusing "The whole auditorium applauded when the Russian flat was unfurled in a burst of gunfire"), as well as a few simple blunders, one of which affects Chamberlain's argument on page 130, where she suggests that the Lithuanian poet and diplomat Jurgis Baltrušaitis "might have been instrumental in helping Sorokin, since Sorokin wrote in his autobiography that at the railway station in Moscow 'I carried our two valises into the Lettish [Lithuanian] diplomatic car.'" Alas, Lettish is an old term for Latvian, not Lithuanian.

ALIEN LANGUAGES.

I'm so out of touch I knew nothing about James Cameron’s forthcoming science fiction movie Avatar, but I'm happy to learn from Ben Zimmer's latest "On Language" column for the NY Times that Cameron has taken the trouble to commission linguist Paul Frommer to create a coherent, plausible language for its aliens the Na’vi, "with mellifluous vowel clusters, popping ejectives and a grammatical system elaborate enough to make a polyglot blush." Ben discusses the history of alien languages onscreen (the first linguist to be commissioned for such a purpose was apparently Victoria Fromkin, "a U.C.L.A. professor who fashioned a language for the apelike Pakuni creatures on the 1970s children’s TV series 'Land of the Lost'") and quotes my pal Arika Okrent, and the whole column is worth your while (especially, of course, if you have a fondness for sf).

LATE TALKING.

A fascinating AskMetaFilter thread set off by the question "Why didn't I say anything until I was three?" It's full of interesting anecdotes and references to studies, and one commenter quotes this great Einstein story:

Otto Neugebauer told the writer the following legend about Einstein. It seems that when Einstein was a young boy he was a lake talker and naturally his parents were worried. Finally, one dat at supper, he broke into speech with the words "Die Suppe ist zu heiss." (The soup is too hot.) His parents were greatly relieved, but asked him why he hadn't spoken up to that time. The answer came back: "Bisher war Alles in Ordnung." (Until now everything was in order.)

I think I once knew how old I was when I started talking, but I've forgotten. Anyway, late talking doesn't seem to be a cause for concern.

MIKY AND THE RABBI.

Miky (pronounced Mikey) is a recent immigrant from Israel who has wound up in Helena, Montana. Did you know that Montana had a substantial Jewish population in the nineteenth century? And "in a minor revival, Montana now has three rabbis, two in Bozeman and one (appropriately) in Whitefish," according to a NY Times story by Eric A. Stern: "Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis in Montana." Read it: it doesn't go where you think it's going. (Thanks, Eric!)

THE SILVER DOVE.

In case anyone was wondering what Russian novel I turned to after finishing Fathers and Sons (discussed here), it was Andrei Bely's 1909 Серебряный голубь (Russian text; translated as The Silver Dove). I had actually been planning to tackle Bely's Петербург (Petersburg), which Nabokov called one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century, but since it had been intended as a sequel to The Silver Dove and I had a copy of the latter, I decided to start with that and get acquainted with Bely's prose style, and I'm glad I did, partly because it's a wonderful read and partly because the Russian is so difficult just about anything I read next is bound to seem like a cakewalk.

I wouldn't call it a great novel, because the plot is slender and pretty silly: a soulful young aristocrat, Daryalsky, is lured away from his virginal young fiancée Katya by a pockmarked village woman, Matryona, whose husband, the leader of a messianic/revolutionary cult called the Doves, wants them to have a child together for vaguely apocalyptic purposes. There's a good deal of mystical hugger-mugger, and it's impossible to take the characters very seriously, but who cares? The real hero of the book is Bely's prose, and it's mesmerizing, an astoundingly accomplished variant, sophisticated and flexible, of Gogol's early village-bumpkin style. The novel is the first of what Bely intended as a trilogy on the East-West theme so dear to the Russian intelligentsia of a century ago; Petersburg, with its pastiche of official jargon, represents the West, and The Silver Dove the East, with its backwoods village of Tselebeevo, located (as is frequently pointed out) to the east of westernized Gugolevo, home of the forsaken Katya. The whole thing is told in the cheerful voice of a narrator from Tselebeevo (the first chapter is called "Our Village"), and it slides from thick dialect to highfaluting prose-poetry and back, depending on the situation. The opening paragraph will give an idea of the style:

Еще, и еще в синюю бездну дня, полную жарких, жестоких блесков, кинула зычные клики целебеевская колокольня. Туда и сюда заерзали в воздухе над нею стрижи. А душный от благовонья Троицын день обсыпал кусты легкими, розовыми шиповниками. И жар душил грудь; в жаре стекленели стрекозиные крылья над прудом, взлетали в жар в синюю бездну дня, - туда, в голубой покой пустынь. Потным рукавом усердно размазывал на лице пыль распаренный сельчанин, тащась на колокольню раскачать медный язык колокола, пропотеть и поусердствовать во славу Божью. И еще, и еще клинькала в синюю бездну дня целебеевская колокольня; и юлили над ней, и писали, повизгивая, восьмерки стрижи.

[Again and again, into the dark blue abyss of the day, filled with hot, cruel brilliance, the Tselebeevo bell tower sent forth loud cries. Hither and thither in the air above it fidgeted the martins. Whitsunday, sultry with fragrance, strewed the bushes with light, pink dogroses. And heat stifled the chest; in the heat dragonfly wings were glassy over the pond, they flew up into the heat into the dark blue abyss of the day, there, into the blue peace of emptiness. With a sweaty sleeve a perspiring villager diligently spread dust over his face, dragging himself to the bell tower to shake loose the bronze tongue of the bell, to sweat through and show diligence for God's glory. And again and again, into the dark blue abyss of the day, the Tselebeevo bell tower pealed forth, and above it fussed the martins, shrieking and inscribing figures of eight.]

Besides the obvious repetitions of phrases, there is a subtler repetition of perhaps the most important word of the novel, дух [dukh] 'spirit,' hidden in воздух [vozdukh] 'air' and душный [dushny] 'sultry' and душил [dushil] 'stifled.' And many words and phrases from this prelude are repeated at significant points throughout the novel. Bely had been writing "symphonies" that were narratives in verse; in his first novel he turned to prose but kept the arsenal of techniques of manipulating sounds and senses he had learned, to superb effect. As I say, it's not an easy read, full of dialect, idiosyncratic usages, and made-up words like росянистые [rosyanistye] and зызыкнет [zyzyknet], but it's well worth the effort. (And for the benefit of those of us with philological leanings, at one point characters are said to be making clever remarks about Wilamowitz-Moellendorff "and even Brugmann.")

I'll add a little about the real-life sources of the novel. In the years before the 1905 Revolution, Bryusov and Bely quarreled over the affections of the young poet Nina Petrovskaya, a woman whom Kristi A. Groberg, in her essay on Petrovskaya in the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (pp. 500-02), calls a "Symbolist groupie" who "had affairs with Bal'mont, Belyi, Briusov, and Sergei Auslender in that order. In 1903-4, she was involved with Belyi, whom she saw as her spiritual salvation, the New Christ. When the romance faltered, she turned to Briusov." She divorced her husband Sergei Sokolov in 1906 and tried to shoot Bely in 1907; the next year she moved to Paris, converted to Catholicism, and started calling herself "Renata" after the character (a witch) based on her in Bryusov's novel based on "the stories Petrovskaia told Briusov about her fascination with Belyi," The Fiery Angel, set in 16th-century Germany and full of mysticism and demonology. Her memoirs "treat the relationship with Briusov as the great event of her life and him as a man of spiritual depth, yet she describes it as a pact with the Devil." Bely (who gave the novel a rather condescending review in the Symbolist journal Vesy) obviously read it attentively, and Groberg says The Silver Dove "can be read as his polemical answer to The Fiery Angel."

KANINCHEN.

I recently acquired a copy of Our Man in the Crimea: Commander Hugo Koehler and the Russian Civil War, a fascinating look at the final stage of the Civil War through the eyes of an unusually observant American naval officer. I bought it for the Russian material, of course, but before he gets there the book takes him from his youth (he was told at some point that he was the illegitimate son of Archduke Rudolf!) to Annapolis to his first mission abroad, up the Yangtze in the fall of 1911 (just in time to witness the Wuchang Uprising that began the Chinese Revolution), and after a stint with the Atlantic Fleet during World War I he turns up in defeated and resentful Germany, where in a letter (24 February 1919) written from Hamburg we find this piquant paragraph:

It is not difficult to get inaccurate impressions of the scarcity of food. I heard several of our officers and men mention they had seen dog meat and dog sausages for sale in shops at Hamburg and Bremerhaven. I insisted this was not possible, but they insisted they had seen such placards announcing dog meat for sale and had seen the sausages. I was finally led to a shop where the placard in question was triumphantly pointed out. The sign read "Kaninchen Wurst." He knew that "kanine" meant dog and "wurst" meant sausage and thereby followed the deduction the sausages were of dog meat. Though this officer spoke some German, he apparently did not know that "Kaninchen" happens to be German for rabbit...

(My apologies for not posting yesterday; my laptop is on the fritz, and when I use my wife's desktop I spend most of my time editing, so until I get my computer back my time here is limited, and sometimes it's all I can do to clean out the spam. I may miss further days. Talk amongst yourselves.)

A YEAR IN READING 2009.

C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they've read and enjoyed during the previous year, and in previous years he had gotten into the flattering habit of beginning the series with my contribution; this year, alas, my habitual feckless procrastination combined with limited computer time (most of which had to be spent editing) meant that my contribution was both late and unwontedly rambling. At any rate, here it is; LH aficionados will have read longer discussions of most of the books here, but I would direct their attention to the last review, of The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary B. Nash. I haven't posted about it here because there isn't even a tenuous LH connection (though I did find an amusing misprint on page 380: "a Russian nobleman, Count Rosenberg, who had fled his country after a dual"), but it's the best history book I've read in a long time, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the Revolution in anything other than the usual triumphalist terms.

THE MOST INTERESTING LANGUAGE.

Over at linguaphiles, ein_wunderkind asks: "What is the most interesting language you know of and why? I'm bored and need some reading material." The mischievous Anatoly, from whom I got the link, answers "English" ("Just about the most weird-ass grammar out there, a vocabulary that reads like a Wal-Mart shopping list, and don't even get me started on spelling, 'cuz maaaaan!"), but there is discussion of the intricacies of languages like Navajo, Hebrew, and Tibetan ("This is how you can have, for instance, words that are spelled bka’ brgyud or 'bras spungs and pronounced, respectively, [kacy] and [tʂɛpuŋ]"). Makes me want to start learning another language.