HOW MANY TIBETAN LANGUAGES?

Victor Mair has an interesting post at the Log about an article (in this 2008 book) by Tibetanist Nicholas Tournadre in which Tournadre says that there are 220 "Tibetan dialects" derived from Old Tibetan:

In a forthcoming work, Tournadre states that these "dialects" may be classed within 25 "dialect groups," i.e., groups that do not permit mutual intelligibility. According to Tournadre, the notion of "dialect group" is equivalent to the notion of "language," but does not entail standardization. Consequently, says Tournadre, if the concept of standardization is set aside, it would be more appropriate to speak of 25 languages derived from Old Tibetan rather than 25 "dialect groups."

This fascinates me; does anyone know how controversial it is?

CHEVENGUR.

As I wrote here, I'm reading Platonov's novel Chevengur (written in 1927-28 but not published until 1988 in the USSR; the English translation is long out of print, but apparently Robert Chandler is working on a new one). Having reached the halfway point, with the scene about to shift to the titular city (fictional, but located in Platonov's homeland, the Voronezh black earth region), I thought I'd give a preliminary report.

The most surprising thing about it, to me, is its humor. At times it reminds me of Ilf and Petrov (especially since I'm concurrently reading The Little Golden Calf to my wife at night): a couple of guys are wandering around the still youthful USSR, having often absurd adventures and conversations accompanied by ironic sociopolitical commentary. But Platonov sets up the picaresque portion of his novel with a harrowing beginning in which he shows how his protagonist, Alexander Dvanov, barely survives a childhood marked by the suicide of his father (who drowns himself to see what it's like) and being raised as a barely tolerated extra mouth in a poor household during the hard times of the early twentieth century. You don't get any psychological analysis (and a good thing too), just an accounting of his behavior, sometimes inexplicable but usually motivated by a strong impulse towards what he understands as socialism (and "what is socialism?" is one of the main themes of the novel). As always with Platonov, the language is fresh, varied, always a joy to read (though sometimes requiring a lot of work with dictionaries and Google to figure out).

Here are a couple of passages, fifty pages apart, that illustrate Platonov's remarkable gift for physicalizing abstract concepts (my translations; the Russian is below):

But in a person there lives a small observer – he takes part in neither actions nor sufferings – he is always cold-blooded and always the same. His employment is to see and to be a witness, but he has no vote [literally 'voice'] in the life of the person and it is not known why he, lonely, exists. This corner of a person's consciousness is illuminated day and night, like a doorman's room in a great house. For days on end this doorman sits awake in the entrance, he knows all the inhabitants of his house, but not a single one of them asks the doorman's advice about his own affairs. The inhabitants come and go, and the doorman-observer accompanies them with his eyes. Because he is well informed but powerless he sometimes seems sad, but he is always polite, solitary, and has a room in another house. In case of fire the doorman calls the firemen and observes the subsequent events from outside.

. . .

Dvanov lowered his head, his consciousness diminished from the monotonous movement along level territory. And what Dvanov felt now to be his heart was a dam constantly shuddering from the pressure of a rising lake of feelings. The feelings were raised high by the heart and fell on its other side, already converted into a stream of alleviating thought. But above the dam there always burned the fire, always on duty, of that watchman who takes no part in a person, but only dozes within him for little pay. This fire sometimes allowed Dvanov to see both spaces - the swelling warm lake of feelings and the long rapidity of thought behind the dam, cooling because of its speed. Then Dvanov forestalled the work of his heart, which nourished itself but also put the brakes on his consciousness, and he was able to be happy.

Incidentally, if anyone can explain to me the word распоминался in "Кто-то тебя распоминался так?" (you can see it in context most of the way down this page), I will be grateful.

The Russian:

Но в человеке еще живет маленький зритель – он не участвует ни в поступках, ни в страдании – он всегда хладнокровен и одинаков. Его служба – это видеть и быть свидетелем, но он без права голоса в жизни человека и неизвестно, зачем он одиноко существует. Этот угол сознания человека день и ночь освещен, как комната швейцара в большом доме. Круглые сутки сидит этот бодрствующий швейцар в подъезде человека, знает всех жителей своего дома, но ни один житель не советуется со швейцаром о своих делах. Жители входят и выходят, а зритель-швейцар провожает их глазами. От своей бессильной осведомленности он кажется иногда печальным, но всегда вежлив, уединен и имеет квартиру в другом доме. В случае пожара швейцар звонит пожарным и наблюдает снаружи дальнейшие события.

. . .

Дванов опустил голову, его сознание уменьшилось от однообразного движения по ровному месту. И то, что Дванов ощущал сейчас как свое сердце, было постоянно содрогающейся плотиной от напора вздымающегося озера чувств. Чувства высоко поднимались сердцем и падали по другую сторону его, уже превращенные в поток облегчающей мысли. Но над плотиной всегда горел дежурный огонь того сторожа, который не принимает участия в человеке, а лишь подремывает в нем за дешевое жалование. Этот огонь позволял иногда Дванову видеть оба пространства - вспухающее теплое озеро чувств и длинную быстроту мысли за плотиной, охлаждающейся от своей скорости. Тогда Дванов опережал работу сердца, питающегося, но и тормозящего его сознание, и мог быть счастливым.

MORION.

There are two nouns morion; the first, meaning a kind of helmet, does not concern us here (it is probably from Spanish morrión), but the second, a variety of smoky quartz, has an interesting etymology: it is from a Latin word morion that is a misreading of Pliny's mormorion. I wrote here about collimate, from an erroneous reading of Latin collineare; I wonder if there is a list somewhere of words with similar histories?

THE LONDON LIBRARY.

I had never heard of the London Library, but an article by Nancy Mattoon makes it sound like a very attractive place:

The London Library bills itself as "a university library for people who are no longer at university." It is the largest independent lending library in the world, with over one million books and periodicals housed on some 15 miles of open-access shelves. Over 95% of the collection may be freely browsed, and 97% is available for loan. The central tenet of the library is that since "books are never entirely superseded, and therefore never redundant, the collections should not be weeded of material merely because it is old, idiosyncratic or unfashionable: except in the case of exact duplication, almost nothing has ever been discarded from the library's shelves." This has resulted in a library chock-full of books, ten floors of them and growing, with another half-mile of shelving required every three years. And all of this in a library that has been located in the same London townhouse on posh St. James Square since 1845.

Read all about the history (it was founded by Thomas Carlyle, who was pissed off at the British Library's "closed stacks and non-circulating collection") and careful remodeling of this London institution. And they've got a very nice website, too. The catch? It's members-only, and very expensive (according to Wikipedia, £395 a year—the library's own site seems to take the attitude that if you have to ask, you can't afford it). But I'm glad it exists; I understand why ordinary libraries feel they have to get rid of so many books, but I still hate the practice and am glad there is a holdout.

THE NEO-ASSYRIAN EMPIRE ONLINE.

The website Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (a project of the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies of the Higher Education Academy) is a treasure trove of information; the Essentials section "provides a series of short overviews of the political and intellectual contexts of the letters, queries, and reports," Cuneiform Revealed is "an introduction to cuneiform script and the Akkadian language," and the Highlights section presents a small selection of the many texts on the site (given in transcription and translation, with enticing names like "Give Straw or Die!"). An excellently designed site, and I thank Kattullus at MetaFilter for bringing it to my attention.

LOUIS JAY HERMAN.

One of my regular diversions is checking the "Random books from my library" list on the lower right and visiting any author pages that I think might be obscure enough to have information missing (which, given my collection, is a lot of author pages). I've gotten very good at googling up birth/death dates, information on colleges and spouses, and so on, and I take great pleasure in adding them to LibraryThing so the information will be readily accessible; in a way, I feel it helps these forgotten authors to live on. Sometimes I pull off a real coup, like finding that the mysterious "Lee Eun" who coauthored my First Book of Korean was actually Un Yi (1897–1970), Crown Prince and the last surviving son of His Late Majesty Emperor Kojong. (How he came to write an introduction to Korean I still don't know.) And sometimes I run across a man so remarkable I'm glad to have acquired one of his books; such a man is Louis Jay Herman, "Linguist And a Devoted Man of Letters" as the NY Times obituary calls him (it's by the best obit writer America ever produced, the superb Robert McG. Thomas, 60, Chronicler of Unsung Lives, who also did the best weather stories I've ever read). I have Herman's Dictionary of Slavic Word Families, an amazing book that I knew I had to have as soon as I saw it at the Strand: it contains, as the subtitle says, Groups of Related Words in Russian, Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, for each root lining up first the root word and then derivatives with equivalent prefixes in each language, giving the meaning of each and in the Notes at the end of each root explaining whichever semantic developments Herman found most interesting or unpredictable. I happily paid $15 for it in 1994; it now costs considerably more, but I still am amazed that I am the only LT member with a copy. (More than one visitor to my various dwellings has gasped enviously on looking through it.)

At any rate, the obit makes clear that this is a man who truly loved languages:

Mr. Herman discovered his aptitude for languages at Friends Seminary, a Quaker high school in his native Manhattan. He later received intensive linguistic training at Cornell and was an Army interpreter in Europe in World War II; he did not seem to know how to stop acquiring languages.

He kept on learning them during his years at New York University, while earning a master's degree at the Columbia School of Journalism, while working as an associate editor at The New Leader and even after becoming a translator at the United Nations. By the time he finished, he had mastered more than 25 languages, a feat that seemed all the more remarkable because Mr. Herman, who worked exclusively on written documents at the United Nations, generally learned to speak them so well that he got the accents as well as the vocabularies down pat.

And he had a second career as "one of the most indefatigable letter writers to The New York Times":

When an article in The Times noted that words like "charisma," "pragmatist" and "demagogue" were of Greek origin, for example, Mr. Herman hastened to correct the implication that Greek imports were all "polysyllabic mouthfuls," and ascribed Greek parentage to such ordinary, everyday words as "air," "box," "cane" and "chair."

A mere dateline, on an article from Tbilisi in Soviet Georgia in 1988, was enough to set off Mr. Herman against "some cartographic czar" who had decreed that the long-sanctioned "Tiflis" should be replaced by the "jaw-breaking" native version. What next, he wondered? "Will such traditional names as Moscow, Prague, Naples and Cologne soon vanish to make way for indigenous Moskva, Warszawa, Praha, Napoli and Koln?"

Mr. Herman caught so many errors in William Safire's "On Language" column in the Sunday magazine that Mr. Safire named him the "capo di tutti capi" of the Gotcha! Gang, which Mr. Herman cherished as the ulimate accolade.

Yet another of those people I wish I had known.

NA'VI COMES TO LIFE.

The wonderful Arika Okrent (see this LH post) has an article in Slate about the craze to learn Na'vi, the alien language used in Avatar (which I briefly reviewed here). She writes about Prrton (real name Britton Watkins), who "formulated a paragraph in Na'vi without a complete grammar or dictionary. And he didn't just stick a few words from the movie into random order or repeat lines that had occurred in the film. He produced an original and grammatically correct statement."

At this point, you might be wondering how that's even possible. But it is, because Frommer developed a complex system of rules that determines the "correct" form for Na'vi sentences. And fans who pay close—very close—attention, can figure out those rules just by listening to the dialogue. They can take the information available and back-engineer the system, like anthropologists jotting down field notes in the jungle. Fans of The Princess and the Frog, which came out the same week as Avatar, could not do the same with the made-up language spoken by the frog-prince, who hails from the imaginary kingdom of Maldonia. He utters a few vaguely "European"-sounding phrases, but there is no system behind them. Aspiring Maldonian princesses can exclaim "Ashidanza!" when they think something is "cool," but they can't produce never-before-uttered Maldonian sentences.

Aspiring Pandorans, however, can introduce themselves, give opinions, make requests, and even write poems in Na'vi. This, in fact, is what they are doing at learnnavi.org. The forum there already has 153,000 posts by 4,300 people—aficionados who chat, translate, and encourage novices who have never even studied a foreign language. [...] Na'vi, it would seem, has been taken over by the Na'vi speakers. While waiting on Frommer's full lexicon and grammar, Na'vi enthusiasts have produced their own study guides, word lists, and audio samples. They have posted guidelines for picking a "correct" Na'vi name and compiled warnings about common beginners' errors.

But here's the catch: These budding Na'vi speakers don't want full control over the language. Although it's possible for them to create the language from the ground up using the little information they have, they'd rather Frommer direct them. After Prrton asked the "Hollywood bosses" for a grammar and dictionary, he started a Web petition asking for the same. As of this writing, there are 3,868 signatures.

She goes on to talk about the desire for a language authority ("If Na'vi speakers just made up words as needed and settled questions of grammar on their own, they would no longer be speaking the language of Pandora") and Frommer's pride in his creation and desire to provide more information; in this wonderful corporate world in which we live, however, this cannot be done until the Hollywood bosses take time out from their shmoozing and backstabbing to give a moment's thought to the issue, decide whether the potential profit justifies allowing Frommer to publish more on his own—excuse me, I mean of course their—language, and issue a ukase accordingly. (Via Ben Zimmer at Language Log.)

MILLRIND.

This is a tangled tale that will teach you nothing useful, but I have to share it because it took me so much time to untangle; its moral (like that of many of my posts) is that the internet is a good thing, which you already knew. At any rate: I'm reading Platonov's first novel, Chevengur (I wrote about his later The Foundation Pit here), and I'm exhilarated by his creative use of language; that creativity also means I'm spending a lot of time looking things up, and sometimes it takes me a long time to find out what I want to know. This is one of those times. Platonov refers to a "пал-брица" that is apparently necessary to the functioning of a mill—in the section I've just reached, he says that some villagers were repurposing military equipment for civilian use, one example being "из замков пушек делали пал-брицы для мельничных поставов" [from the (firing) locks of guns they made pal-britsy for millstones]. So what are these pal-britsy? Well, the word wasn't in any of my dictionaries, presumably because it was pretty technical. When I googled it, it seemed to occur only here, which was a bad sign. But Google Books found a snippet from E. A. Yablokov's На берегу неба that told me it was an искажение (distortion/perversion) of параплица [paraplitsa], other distortions of which were порхлица [porkhlitsa] and поролица [porolitsa], and a параплица was a piece of metal that was used to connect a vertical shaft or spindle with the horizontal millstone. This was excellent, and I really had all I needed to understand the passage, but I also wanted to know what it was called in English, for which it seemed I would need a large technical dictionary from an era when people needed words for millstone accessories. Lo and behold, Google Books turned up just such a thing, P. P. Andreev's Dictionnaire technologique français-russe-allemand-anglais, contenant les termes techniques, employés dans líndustrie, les sciences appliquées, les arts et métiers (publié par La Société Impériale Polytechnique en Russie, Saint-Petersbourg 1881), which on page 52 has the entry "Anille, Nille f. Meun. [pièce de fer encastrée dans la meule courante et le gros fer] порхлица, порплица, параплица; die Haue, Kugehaue; rynd." And that last "rynd" gave me what I needed; a brief session with the OED told me the preferred spelling was rind, and Webster's Third New International told me the preferred American usage was millrind, which they defined as "an iron support fixed across the hole in the upper millstone of a grist mill." So there you have it, and if I were trying to translate the book my only problem would be coming up with a convincing deformation of millrind. There are probably not many people around any more who would know what country folk used to call them.

Now if only I knew what отпузырьтесь (in "Ребята, идите отпузырьтесь на ночь") and котма (in "Я, земляк, котма качусь... Стану отдыхать - тоска на меня опускается, а котма хоть и тихо, а все к дому, думается, ближе") meant, I'd be a happy man!

APOLOGIES.

Sashura sent me a link to today's program, on apologies, of Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth. It's all worth hearing, but the segment of most LH interest is the first (9 minutes), a talk with linguist Eva Ogiermann, whose thesis was on British, Polish and Russian apologies, all of which she discusses knowledgeably. After her come Mark Stephens, a lawyer talking about apologies in court and the media; Will Riley and Peter Wolf (Will broke into Peter's house) discussing "restorative justice"; and the founder of apologycenter.com.

Sashura says that after that came another program on Russian literature; I hope he'll post the link when it's available online.

CHINESE ENDANGERED?

Spoiler: the answer is "No." But a Telegraph story has been making the rounds that features Huang Youyi, chairman of the International Federation of Translators, allegedly proposing to "ban [Chinese] publications from using English names, places, people and companies." Actually, according to syz in the Language Log thread on the topic:

I *have* read a bit of what Huang actually said, as opposed to what the headline writers are hyping. In this Chinese article, for example, he seems to say that he just wants things to be written in the local script, Chinese characters: “国际上通用惯例是把外来语变成自己的语言吸纳进来，而不是生搬硬套地直接嵌入。”

Very roughly: "The international standard is to absorb foreign borrowings into one's own language, not to copy them over unchanged."

Hardly the language of a xenophobe rooting for a China where residents are "no longer … permitted to speak of 'lion' dances, 'honey' and 'honeymoons'…"

So once again what appears to be a loony proposal by a wacky scholar turns out to be another case of hype and misrepresentation by a sloppy journalist.

But the thread did bring forth this great anecdote from Ray Girvan, quoting J.J. Pierce's introduction to The Best of Cordwainer Smith:

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for 'love', 'duty', 'humanity' and 'virtue' - words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like "I surrender" in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.

Ray adds: "My employer's daughter (who is fluent in Mandarin) confirmed that this makes sense in Mandarin": ài zé rén dé. (Incidentally, for those not familiar with Cordwainer Smith, a pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, he was not only one of the most remarkable writers ever to grace the field of science fiction, he had an amazing life as well, starting with his godfather being Sun Yat-sen.)

THE LITTLE GOLDEN CALF.

Anne O. Fisher has done a translation of Ilf and Petrov's Zolotoi telyonok called The Little Golden Calf, and she was kind enough to send me a copy (even though I tried to dissuade her, telling her I was too busy reading other things!). I've been reading it to my wife in the evenings, and we're enjoying it terrifically; the story is great, the translation is fluent and accurate, and best of all (from my admittedly peculiar point of view) it's got all the apparatus you could want: over 300 endnotes explaining cultural references, an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, Fisher's own foreword, a bibliography, an appendix explaining characters’ names, and (mirabile dictu) a bilingual appendix of phrases from the novel that have become popular among Russians. You can, of course, skip all that (I'm not burdening my wife with footnotes), but if you want to understand the book in its full cultural and historical context, this is an ideal version. Fisher is a scholar of Ilf and Petrov, and she is in the middle of working on a translation of I&P's Dvenadtsat stulev (The twelve chairs), which should be equally good.

There's a blog post by Anna Clark in which she reproduces a long and interesting letter from Fisher, and if you like tempests in teapots you can read the dustup between Fisher's publishers Russian Life Books (1, 2) and Chad W. Post, who published a rival translation by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson almost simultaneously at Open Letter Books (hopping-mad response). The more translations, the better, of course; I'm just glad to see the masters of Soviet satire getting something of their due.

THE END OF PUBLISHING?

A clever ad from Dorling Kindersley Books. Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.

Addendum. Today is the seventh anniversary of The Cassandra Pages. Congratulations, Beth, and keep staving off the end of publishing!

LAUDATOR PERSTAT.

I was recently looking at an old post and ran across a link to Laudator Temporis Acti, and when I clicked it I was very pleased to see that Michael Gilleland is still at the same old stand, posting on Greek scholarship, portraits of readers, word histories, and all manner of other things likely to appeal to LH readers. And he'll frequently quote a piquant sentence from his current reading, such as this from Oliver Rackham's The History of the Countryside: "Furze is an important and widely-used fuel; it produces a quick hot blaze suitable for heating ovens, getting up a fire in the morning, or burning heretics." In fact, one of his first posts presented this quote from Jasper Griffin's Homer on Life and Death: "Heroes do not, in general, turn into anteaters, or make themselves buttocks out of mashed potatoes..." He calls it "one of the strangest sentences ever to appear in a scholarly work," and I can't disagree.

WHITNEYS, BOOKPLATES, HOT DOGS, AND YANKEES.

The March/April 2010 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine is particularly rich in LH-related items. First comes a nice writeup of William Dwight Whitney, "who served for four decades as the University Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale":

Whitney had been one of the early students at Yale’s Graduate School (then called the Department of Philosophy and the Arts) and became a great teacher of a variety of ancient and modern languages. Nineteenth-century Americans, who wrote to him from all over the country with their questions about language, knew him as the foremost U.S. philologist, an expert grammarian, and the lexicographer who took up Noah Webster’s torch to edit the multi-volume Century Dictionary....

Whitney went on to publish 360 books and articles, including Sanskrit Grammar—still in print—and German and English editions of the Atharva Veda, one of the four principal sacred texts of Hinduism. As a teacher, said Yale president Timothy Dwight, he “had unusual gifts and a singular ability” to help students develop their talents. Whitney also served for three decades on the governing board of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, and he became a major force in transforming Yale into a modern and internationally known university. (His siblings shared his extraordinary gifts. Josiah Dwight ’39, the Harvard geologist for whom Mount Whitney is named, headed the 1860s survey of California. James Lyman ’56 and Henry Mitchell ’64 became leaders in the library profession. Maria held the first professorship of modern languages at Smith College.)

Maria Whitney was a friend of Emily Dickinson's and (according to Martha Dickinson Bianchi) "keen, scientific, agnostic, schooled in German criticism, a cool thinker... rational, calm, true as steel to friend or conviction..."; one would like to know more about her.

Then there's a feature on bookplates from Yale University Library's Arts of the Book Collection; you can click the first link here to see a slideshow. And finally, Fred R. Shapiro, who writes a regular column on quotes for the magazine, discusses two discoveries by Barry Popik, "the restless genius of American etymology": the term hot dog, long thought to have been invented by cartoonist "Tad" Dorgan around 1900, in fact goes back to at least 1893 (Popik found a September cite from the Knoxville Journal, and Shapiro a May mention in the Daily Times of New Brunswick, New Jersey), and the first use of the name Yankees for the new American League team in New York was a headline in the New York Evening Journal of April 7, 1904 (YANKEES WILL START HOME FROM SOUTH TO-DAY):

The sports editor of the Evening Journal in 1904, and the man Popik credits for the headlines, was Harry Beecher ’88. Beecher, great-nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was captain of the national champion Yale football team in 1887. Hobbyists believe that the first football card ever printed was an 1887 Goodwin & Co. card—with Harry Beecher’s picture on it. To this distinction can now be added the likelihood that Beecher coined the name of the most storied franchise in all of sports.

Thanks for the heads-up, Jake!

CREW.

Another interesting etymology (this is the kind of thing that catches my attention when I'm copyediting a dictionary): crew originally meant 'reinforcement(s)' in the military sense, as can be seen from the first citation in the OED, "1455 Rolls of Parl. 34 Hen. VI, c. 46 The wages of ccc men ordeigned to be with him for a Crue over the ordinary charge abovesaid." It quickly started being used for any "body of soldiers organized for a particular purpose" (which would doubtless have upset sixteenth-century prescriptivists, had there been any) and then for any gathering or grouping of persons, especially one "engaged upon a particular piece of work." It's from Old French creue 'augmentation, increase,' the feminine past participle of croistre 'grow,' from Latin crescere. (Note that it's not from the Latin past participle, cretum, which left no descendants in French, but was reformed on the basis of other verbs with past participles in -u.) This means that it's historically the same word (except for gender) as cru 'vineyard'—a word which, however familiar to wine buffs, hasn't made it into Merriam-Webster's Collegiate.

COUNTERPANE.

I always liked counterpane, an old word for a bedspread, but I never knew its etymology, which is quite unexpected: it's an alteration of earlier counterpoint (due to an association with obsolete pane 'cloth'), but that counterpoint is an entirely different word from the one you're thinking of—it's from Old French contrepointe, which is an alteration of coultepointe, from Medieval Latin culcit(r)a puncta 'pricked (i.e., quilted) mattress.' That word culcit(r)a is the etymon of quilt, so counterpane should really be quiltpoint.... and the OED tells me that in fact that form did exist ("1386 Will in T. Madox Formul. Anglic. 428 Item lego ... 1. lectum rubeum quiltpoint cum i. testro de eâdem settâ.").

Entirely unrelated, to either quilts or the basic mission of LH, but too good not to share: the Telegraph's obituary for the Dowager Duchess of St Albans. The Brits do obits better than anyone. One tidbit: "The writer Graham Greene, in search of material for a film, reduced the future duchess to giggles with his anecdotes, but it was left to Beauclerk to introduce him to the Sewer Police, thereby handing him the seeds of a plot for The Third Man." Thanks, Nick!

GROAK.

This week's NYT "On Language" column is by Ammon Shea, an enjoyable but scattershot writer who takes on the issue of vocabulary size: not, this time, "what language has the most words?" but another perennial favorite, "does a bigger vocabulary make you a better person?" The discussion is fairly predictable and the conclusion unexceptionable (you should learn new words because they give you "something pleasant to think about"), but I was quite taken with one of his examples, groak, which he defines as "staring silently at someone while they eat"; my wife and I realized immediately that we should have named our cat Pushkin "Groak" instead. Of course, I checked to make sure there actually was such a word; it's not in the OED, but it is in Cassell's Dictionary of Slang: "groak n. also growk [20C+] (Ulster) a child who sits watching others eating, in the hope of being asked to join them. [synon. Scot. groak]." It's also in the Dictionary of the Scots Language:

GROWK, v., n. Also grook, grouk, groak, groke, groach. [grʌuk, gro:k] I. v. 1. To look at someone with a watchful or suspicious eye; to look longingly at something, esp. of a child or dog begging for food ... †By extension: to come thoroughly awake after a sleep, sc. by focussing the eyes on surrounding objects (Dmf. 1825 Jam.).
  *Ags. 1808 Jam.:
  Grouk is often used, as denoting the watchfulness of a very niggardly person, who is still afraid that any of his property be given away or carried off.
  *Gall. a.1813 A. Murray Hist. Eur. Langs. (1823) I. 393:
  To groke, in Scotish, is to stretch for meat like a dog.
  *Ags. 1894 J. B. Salmond My Man Sandy (1899) xviii.:
  Nathan was stanin’ at the table as uswal, growk-growkin’ awa’ for a bit o’ my tea biskit. “I dinna like growkin’ bairns,” I says to Nathan.
  *Per. 1900 E.D.D.:
  There’s the gamekeeper groakin’ aboot.
  2. To look intently or wistfully so as to attract attention.
  *Rs. 1944 C. M. Maclean Farewell to Tharrus 79:
  She grooked a little, and tried to lick my chin. “Where’s Laddie?” I whispered to her. She whined and ran off.
  II. n. 1. “A child who waits about at meal-times in the expectation of getting something to eat” (Ant. 1892 Ballymena Obs. (E.D.D.)).
  2. “A mute, wistful look by a child on any article greatly desired” (Ags.4 1920).

Also, if I were writing a sentence beginning "In 1664 an anonymously written pamphlet, 'Vindex Anglicus,'..." it would continue "...urged that the window of English be wiped clean of absurd Latinate words."

HONGOR OULANOFF, RIP.

Over the years I've had occasion to investigate various of the Russian writers known collectively as the Serapion Brothers (the most prominent of whom were Mikhail Zoshchenko and Victor Shklovsky), and I kept coming across the name Hongor Oulanoff, which always gave me a smile—there was something so incongruous about the combination of the Russian-sounding Oulanoff (Ulanov) and the very un-Russian Hongor. He turned up because he had written the first book-length study of the group, The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice (Mouton, 1966), and contributed several articles to the Handbook of Russian Literature (Yale University Press, 1990) edited by Victor Terras, a book I frequently use in my research.

Today, reading the front section of the NY Times, I found his death notice, from which I learned that he was an ethnic Kalmyk, a western Mongolian people (hence the name Hongor), and that he was born in Prague and studied in Paris before moving to the U.S. and teaching Russian literature at Vanderbilt and Ohio State. The notice says:

In the 1950s he helped his father Badma Badmanovich successfully petition the Eisenhower Administration to accept the Kalmyk refugees living in Western Europe, a people who had been purged and deported to Siberia under the Stalin era. As a result, many of the Kalmyks settled in the New York and New Jersey area. In 1990 Professor Oulanoff was honored at the 550th Year of Djangar Commemorative Festival in Elista, capital of the Autonomous Republik of Kalmykia, in Russia. There he presented the University in Elista with his compiled work of B. Kotvich's linguistic study of the Kalmyk language, the only existing study at the time.

"B. Kotvich" is Władysław Kotwicz (Russian Vladislav Kotvich), whose book on Kalmyk grammar was published in Petrograd in 1915 (2nd ed. Řevnice, Czechoslovakia, 1929—the same year Oulanoff was born).

At any rate, Oulanoff seems to have been a good man as well as a good scholar; my condolences to his family.

BATUMAN AND SHVARTS.

Last month I posted a link to a review of Elif Batuman's The Possessed; here's her list of "four Russian modern classics that you’ve probably missed," and it makes me even more interested in her. The woman has taste: Shklovsky (Zoo), Platonov (Soul), Mandelstam (The Noise of Time), and Kharms are unimpeachable choices and not as well known as they should be, and I like her statement "Zoo is at once incredibly funny and incredibly sad, like all my favorite books."

I got the link from Lizok, who also reports on the death last Friday of the poet Elena Shvarts (whose Wikipedia page, oddly, is under the spelling "Schwarz," which I've never seen used for her). Shvarts is much anthologized and widely respected, but her poetry has never done that much for me—too much flayed skin and bloody sacrifice and demonic rage ("И новых демонов семья в голодной злобе/ Учуяла меня. Все та же мука" ["And a family of new demons in hungry rage/ Caught my scent. Still the same torment."]), not enough... whatever it is I'm looking for in a poem. Still, царство ей небесное (RIP).

COMPOUND A FELONY.

It's rare for me to discover that I've been completely wrong about the meaning of a reasonably common word or phrase, so I was shell-shocked just now when I read this definition of the verb compound: "Law forbear from prosecuting (a felony) in exchange for money or other consideration." But... but... I always had a vague idea that it meant 'worsen, aggravate'! So I googled around and discovered that I was so far from being alone in my misapprehension that the definition I just quoted seems to be out of date. Bryan A. Garner, in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, defines it as "to forbear from prosecuting for consideration, or to cause (a prosecutor) so to forbear" and says:

The word has been sloppily extended because "nonlawyers have misapprehended the meaning of to compound a felony .... [The word] is now widely abused to mean: to make worse, aggravate, multiply, increase." Philip Howard, New Words for Old 19 (1977). Examples of this looseness of diction abound now even in legal writing. [...] It is not quite true, then, at least in the US, that "to write 'he compounded the offence' (when what is meant is that he did something to aggravate the offence) is to vex every lawyer who reads the sentence, and to provoke numbers of them to litigious correspondence in defence of their jargon." Philip Howard, New Words for Old 20 (1977). Nevertheless, we may justifiably lament the fact that generations of young lawyers will not understand the phrase to compound a felony when they see it in the older lawbooks.

So I ask the Varied Reader: were you aware of this? And if you are a lawyer, or familiar with legal usage, how widespread is the new ("sloppy") extension of meaning—sporadic, frequent, or general?

ZIMMER AT THE TIMES.

Excellent news from the NY Times: they've settled on a replacement for the late William Safire as their language columnist, and it's linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer!

In making the announcement, Gerald Marzorati, editor of the magazine said, “Ben brings both an academic’s deep knowledge and a maven’s eye, ear and passion to his commentary on the way Americans write and speak now. We welcome him to our roster and know our readers and ‘On Language’ devotees will greatly enjoy his columns.”

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be welcomed in the space that William Safire called home for thirty years,” Mr. Zimmer said. “I look forward to continuing this fine tradition with my own take on how language shapes our past, present and future.”

May he serve as long (thirty years!) as Safire; my only faint regret is that I won't have the pleasure of giving him the kind of beatdown I did his predecessor (God love him), since Ben will actually know what he's talking about. But my loss is the Times readers' gain. Congratulations, Ben! (Via the Log.)

COMMUTE.

Do you know why someone who regularly spends a certain amount of time traveling back and forth between home and work is called a "commuter"? It's because the first people so called were using commutation tickets, what we now call season tickets, that commuted ('changed,' from Latin commutare) a bunch of daily fares into a single payment. (If you check the foreign equivalents linked at the left of the Wikipedia article, you find that a number of languages use a word or phrase meaning 'pendulum migration.')

SYNONYMS.

Back in 2003, Songdog alerted me to a pair of synonyms, gennel and snicket (and the resulting post sparked off almost three years' worth of enjoyable discussion); now he draws my attention to an interesting column by lexicographer Erin McKean (discussed many times on LH, e.g. here and here) about synonyms:

Distinguishing between close synonyms (is the ground marshy or boggy?) is a point of pride for the word-minded, and being able to argue whether someone was nonchalant or blasé is a pleasurable parlor game, made all the more fun by there being no “right” answer. We may not agree as to the exact shade of difference, but we’re sure there is one.

Our desire for each different word to have its own meaning has deep roots. When children first learn language, one of the tenets of the language-acquisition process is a learning strategy called the “principle of contrast,” which posits that two words should never have the same meaning - and if they do, there’s something wrong with one of them. Children internalize this principle and eventually, with enough reinforcement, replace nonstandard forms with the correct ones. When a child says, “I did that goodly,” an adult will usually respond, “Yes, you did that well!”, and well eventually bumps goodly from its slot in the child’s vocabulary.

All well and good, but she goes on to discuss a phenomenon I find bizarre, the attempt to find semantic distinctions between spelling variants:

There are those who feel that grey is lighter than gray, or cooler, or yellower. One believer in the difference, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1902, suggested that gray was for “fur, and Quaker gowns, and breasts of doves, and a gray day, and a gentlewoman’s hair; and horses must be gray,” but that grey is for eyes (especially those of witches) and cold mornings.

There are other pairs, too, where what should surely be mere quibbles about spelling - ax or axe, omelet or omelette, catalog or catalogue - are taken to stand for perceptible differences in meaning. Omelette is held to sound “more sophisticated” than omelet (although they are pronounced in exactly the same way); to those who see a difference, a catalog is defined as a colorful publication listing things you can buy, but a catalogue is a list of (usually important) things, whether or not they are for sale. It wouldn’t surprise me to run into someone declaring that an ax is sharper than an axe, or bigger, or more useful.

Mind you, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with finding such differences; people do what they want with language, often unpredictably, and that's great, I wouldn't have it any other way. But finding a difference in meaning between grey and gray? Like I said, it seems bizarre to me.

Oh, and happy birthday, Songdog!

NORSK NOVELISTS IN THE WOODS.

Silje Bekeng is a young Norwegian writer/journalist/critic who gives (or once gave) her location as "Brooklyn/Oslo"; she has a funny essay at N1BR ("the book review supplement to n+1 magazine") called Into the Woods, about the peculiar obsessions of Norwegian literature going back to Hamsun. I'm sure she exaggerates for effect, but she provides a great series of "excerpts from the jacket copy of novels published by young(ish) writers in recent years" that certainly seem to illustrate her point, which she states here:

One character keeps showing up in our books: the young man having a breakdown in the woods. The plot goes something like this: the young man has never left his hometown, or has returned (because of the death of a parent) after an unsuccessful attempt at life in the big, unruly world. He has some problems communicating. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder if he might be mentally retarded.

He might meet a traditional animal, like a dog or an elk, that plays a significant role in the novel.

He listens to the silence, falls apart. The story mostly stays within the tradition of realism, though it sometimes flirts with surrealist tendencies. How crazy is he really? Would he ever hurt himself—or someone else? Toward the end, he might seem about to regain his composure. He will probably decide to remain in the countryside. Norwegians resemble Americans in this respect: we know that truth is something people find while walking in golden fields of wheat, that small-town life is more real than city life, and that real people are those who grow up with dirt under their fingernails.

She concludes that Hamsun was a great writer, but they need some other role models; it's hard to disagree. And she mentions Jante Law, a series of ten rules that all boil down to "Don't think you're someone special," which according to Bekeng "is commonly used to describe how provincial and intolerant other Norwegians are"; it was invented by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose (not, as the N1BR text has it, "Sandemo"). I wish I could ask my late mother about it; I suspect it had not lost much of its force in the tiny Norwegian-American Iowa town she came (I almost said "escaped") from.

A side note: Silje is originally a Finnish name, Silja, that was popularized throughout Scandinavia by its use in Frans Eemil Sillanpää's 1931 novel Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja); it's a vernacular form of Cecilia.

KHAMO AND THE LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT SCALE.

Nick at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος has an informative and amusing post answering a question a reader asked in the comment thread to an earlier post, Generalised use of να in Early Modern Greek (which itself is well worth your while if you're interested in the development of Greek syntax): "My aged relatives also say, or used to say, χάμω [khámo] for 'down' and ολούθε [olúthe] for 'everywhere.' Are these hopelessly rustic?" Nick disposes of the second question in a few paragraphs (summary: "it sounds literary or folksy in Modern Greek" and "it's not a word I'd use casually") and devotes the rest of the post to an exegesis of the word χάμω, beginning with its history:

Ancient Greek distinguished between κάτω "down" and χαμαί "on the ground" (as in the last oracle Julian heard from Delphi that all Greek schoolchildren know, χαμαὶ πέσε δαίδαλος αὐλά, "fallen is the splendid hall"). In Modern Greek, χαμαί has survived as χάμω (remodelled after κάτω "down" and [ε]πάνω "up"), and still means "down" as in "on the ground". So κάτσε κάτω means "sit down", on a chair; κάτσε χάμω means "sit on the ground".

He goes on to explain that in fact "Modern Greek" here means the southern form of that language, the variety he (as a Cretan) speaks:

...the word is completely absent in Northern Greek. It's so absent, Salonicans calls Athenians χαμουτζήδες.

There's two ways of understanding the word. The first, which I'd always assumed, is "the people who say χάμω" (with the same Turkish -τζής suffix as in opoudjis [Nick's online moniker]). Actually, it's more like χάμου, which is an (even more colloquial) variant of χάμω.

The second isn't the primary way of understanding the word, but it's a cute pun. Southern Greece is down below Northern Greece; and Salonica, which is acutely aware of being in second place to Athens, gets its revenge by calling the Athenians "down-below-ers".

If they're thinking that, it's revealing. Southern Greek makes a semantic distinction between "down" and "on the ground" which Northern Greek doesn't. Somewhere south of you is never χάμω, it's always κάτω, because the Peloponnese is not sitting on the ground. But to Northern Greek, both are κάτω, and χάμω is just that funny Southern way of saying κάτω.

He then proceeds to translate a discussion of the word on slang.gr, culminating in xalikoutis's "scale of linguistic moral development, where stage 1 is total linguistic autism":

1. There's no such word as χάμω.
2. The words I don't know are not words.
3. Words in other dialects are not words.
4. The words used by speakers of other dialects are words, but they're wrong.
5. The way they talk elsewhere is not wrong, but it is less proper than ours.
6. Languages and dialects are situated in a clear hierarchy according to how much they have contributed to Humanity.
7. I recognise that all languages and dialects are creative expressions of societies and communities, but some of them seem lacking in quality and poetry.
8. Language is an act of creativity, and I enjoy it in both its high and its daily manifestations. Any language and dialect you can become familiar with has its own beauty.
9. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
10. slang.gr FTW

I note that in the original, point 10 is "Το slang.gr γαμεί," literally "slang.gr fucks." Ah, the varied metaphorical extensions of the sexual lexicon!

PULP DICTION.

John McIntyre, a truly old-school copy editor (the man wears a bow tie, for God's sake), has a delightful hard-boiled detective story celebrating National Grammar Day, Pulp Diction. To whet your appetite, here's a bit from Chapter 2, "The last copy editor":

At the old Sun building on Calvert Street the front door yielded with a rusty creak. Dust lay thick on the guard’s desk, and small birds flew through broken windows. Bundled stacks of the last print edition displayed the headline: SEE US ON THE WEB.

Windows were out on the second floor, too, and scurrying and skittering sounds preceded me as I rounded the corner into the main room. Row on row of cubicles stretched out, each with a computer terminal like a headstone, each with a sad little collection of photos, figurines, long-dead plants. It was like walking the deck of the Mary Celeste.

On a bulletin board near the old copy desk, dangling from a single push pin, a yellowed memo listed a set of banned holiday cliches. The office next to the bulletin board was empty except for a Webster’s New World College Dictionary missing its cover.

A quavering voice asked, “Who’s there?”

A stooped figure, brandishing a red stapler, rose from one of the copy desk work stations where he had been dozing on an improvised pallet of final-edition bundles. His hair was white, his beard untrimmed, his gaze wary. He wore a green eyeshade, and I recognized my quarry: the last copy editor.

He spends his time "writing in a small, crabbed hand" in a beat-up copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, "fixing all the stuff those arrogant fools got wrong for years." It's a terrifying glimpse at what I might have become if I hadn't been rescued by the love of a good woman.

MORE ETYMOLOGIES.

More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths:

colon 'part of the large intestine' goes back to Greek κόλον [kolon], but colon 'punctuation mark (:); rhythmical unit' is from κῶλον [kōlon] 'limb; part of a strophe.'

coma 'cloud of gas and dust around a comet; optical aberration' goes back to Greek κόμη [komē] 'hair,' but coma 'state of unconsciousness' derives from κῶμα [kōma] 'deep sleep.'

colporteur 'peddler' is straight from an identical French word, but that in turn is from Old French comporteur, someone who "comports" in the etymological sense, carrying things with them (comporter from Latin com-portare 'carry with'); the American Heritage Dictionary says that it's "influenced by col, neck, from the idea that peddlers carry their wares on trays suspended from straps around their necks."

Finally, a funny-sounding word that looks like it should be Latin but in fact has no known etymology: colugo, a kind of flying lemur.

Oh, and I keep forgetting to mention that MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian, after months of radio silence, has burst out with three new posts, Pineapple, Zapiekanki, and Bhut Jolokia; hie thee thither for more multilingual etymology than you can shake a stick at!

CURSES ALL AROUND!

I've left the topic of my book unaddressed for too long, preoccupied as I have been with more highfalutin' topics, but thanks to the indefatigable John Emerson I hereby bring you Русский Мат.net! Don't worry, it's not just Russian, though it does have a nice Russian as they speak it section from which I've already learned a lot (I've seen ыыыы but had no idea it represented laughter); there's a useful section where you can search "Argot français classique" in dictionaries ranging from 1827 to 1907. I looked up pine 'cock' and got this delightful quote from Delvau (1864): "L’outil masculin, l’engin avec lequel l’humanité pine et se perpétua. On n’ose pas prononcer le mot, mais on adore la chose..." [The male tool, the appliance with which humanity screws and has perpetuated itself. One does not dare pronounce the word, but one adores the thing..."] Thanks, John!

WHAT LANGUAGE IS THIS?

The answer requires both an ability to read Arabic script and a knowledge of West African languages, so I'm not especially hopeful that even my Varied Readers will be able to provide it, but it's such an interesting puzzle I can't resist passing it on. Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat, in his latest post, says:

A scan of much of the manuscript MS Leiden Or. 14.052 is available online [pdf]. The main text of this manuscript is in a rather poor Arabic. The marginal and interlinear notes, however, are "in one or more West African languages", as yet unidentified. My best guess is that they're in Mandinka, based on the orthography's use of tanwīn and on the frequent word-initial a/i (suggestive of Mande's 3rd person subject pronouns), but I'm not sure; I haven't been able to decipher any phrases. Anyone else feel like having a look?

You have to scroll down a couple of pages to get to the reproduction of the MS. Good hunting!

BIBLIOCLAST.

I just discovered that Open Library ("One web page for every book.") has a blog, and it has an entry that will upset any bibliophile, The Enemies of Books by George Oates:

I learned a new word today: biblioclast, or destroyer of books. Found it on the frontispiece of The Enemies of Books by William Blades.

As you can see from its Table of Contents — Fire, Water, Gas and Heat, Dust and Neglect, Ignorance, The Bookworm, Other Vermin, Bookbinders, Collectors & Servants and Children — the author, William Blades, has spotted elemental, entomological and occupational enemies, even as far back as 1880.

John Bagford, “shoemaker and biblioclast,” appears in the chapter about Collectors. He apparently “went about the country, from library to library, tearing away title pages from rare books of all sizes,” intent on creating a key to the history of printing, but detaching key bibliographic information from parent works. You can see glimpses of The Bagford Fragments on the British Library’s website.

He has a touching quote from the conclusion, "A Reverence for Old Books," beginning: "It is a great pity that there should be so many distinct enemies at work for the destruction of literature, and that they should so often be allowed to work out their sad end. Looked at rightly, the possession of any old book is a sacred trust, which a conscientious owner or guardian would as soon think of ignoring as a parent would of neglecting his child...."

COLLATION.

Copyediting dictionaries is tedious work but I always learn things. I just discovered that the word collation, in the sense of 'light meal,' comes from the title of John Cassian's early fifth-century work Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences with the Egyptian hermits), which was read in Benedictine communities before a light meal.

Another etymology that stunned me: collard, as in collard greens, is just a slightly collapsed version of colewort, an extension of cole 'cabbage-like vegetable,' which we know today primarily as part of coleslaw. I love collards (it's part of the Southern half of my heritage), but I never knew that.

CREELEY ON BUNTING.

Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Basil Bunting, one of my favorite poets; I've devoted three posts to quoting him (1, 2, 3) and several others to discussing him. He's obviously one of Mark Woods' favorites too, because wood s lot commemorates him every year, and today's post is particularly full of rich links and quotes. I'll just pass on one, A Note on Basil Bunting by Robert Creeley (from his Collected Essays, available in their entirety online—bless you, University of California Press!):

I am curious to know if an implicit quality of language occurs when words are used in a situation peculiar to their own history. History, however, may be an awkward term, since it might well imply only a respectful attention on the part of the writer rather than the implicit rapport between words and man when both are equivalent effects of time and place. In this sense there is a lovely dense sensuousness to Bunting's poetry, and it is as much the nature of the words as the nature of the man who makes use of them. Again it is a circumstance shared.
...

But the insistent intimate nature of his work moves in the closeness of monosyllables, with a music made of their singleness:

Mist sets lace of frost
on rock for the tide to mangle.
Day is wreathed in what summer lost.
(Briggflatts)

Presumptuously or not, it seems to me a long time since English verse had such an English ear—as sturdy as its words, and from the same occasion.