BEGGING THE QUESTION II.

A few years ago I had a post about this annoying expression (annoying both because it's strangely worded for its normal use—"invites the question" would be much better—and because it brings all the petitio principii pedants out of the woodwork); there I linked to a comic strip for amusement, now I link to Mark Liberman's definitive explication of the history and uses of the phrase, from Aristotle's τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι (not, as the Log has it, αἰτεσθαι—it's from the start of Prior Analytics ii:16) to the present. His conclusion:

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use "assume the conclusion" or "raise the question", depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

Which makes sense.

SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY HISTORY.

I've loved libraries as long as I can remember (they were homes away from home during my peripatetic childhood), and I'm particularly fond of college libraries, so I'm very glad that Leslie Fields, Records Service Archivist at Smith College, has put online the excellent exhibit she created on the history of the Neilson Library at Smith that I saw in person a few months ago. Leslie is very good at this sort of thing (I still remember an exhibit on William Henry Jackson's Yellowstone photographs she put together almost a decade ago for the Morgan when she worked there), and she's assembled "letters, photographs, architectural drawings, ephemera, and much more" to give the viewer a good idea of what the library was like a century ago and how it's changed since. The photograph of the stacks of the brand-new library makes me want to dive into the image and start pulling books off the shelves, the reading room of 1910 was light-filled and inviting, and this 1937 carrel (note the "hat" tag) is a timeless image of college life. Click on any of the images to enlarge them; some are quite spectacular. (Should anyone feel tempted to try doing something similar, Leslie used Omeka to create the online exhibit, and the results are certainly a good advertisement.)

THE WORLD'S LANGUAGES IN NYC.

An article by Sam Roberts in today's NY Times describes some of the many obscure languages spoken in New York City, and the efforts to document them before they disappear. I knew there were a lot of languages spoken in the city, but I had no idea of the variety: the article mentions Vlashki ("a variant of Istro-Romanian"), Garifuna (an Arawakan language now "virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize"), Mamuju, Ormuri ("believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan"), Massalit (from Darfur)...

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan), Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands), Irish Gaelic, Kashubian (from Poland), indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch, Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland) and Romany (from the Balkans) and Yiddish.

There are some interesting personal stories, and an amazing coincidence. Thanks, Bonnie!

Update. There's a great video (four and a half minutes) associated with the story in which you can hear several of the languages spoken. Thanks, Gary!

LINGUOS.

Venkat Ramdass sent me a link to his site linguos with the following explanation:

Linguos is unique in its function as phonetic search engine. Sort of a 'soundex' for non-Latin scripts/languages. It lets you spell terms phonetically and using the English alphabet. For example, if you want to search for the equivalent of 'book' in Arabic, you would pick Arabic, type 'kitaab' and search. The idea is to eliminate the need for complex keyboards and transliteration schemes. Linguos also handles English phonetics well when searching. For example, 'george' instead of 'jorj' will still find the right results in your target language. An additional, experimental feature is the ability to input your search terms in one language and search in another language. Basically a true cross-language or "any to any" language search. This works best in alphabetic and syllabic languages.

If I click on the "Cyrillic" tab, I can type on my Latin keyboard and it will search the web for the equivalent in Cyrillic, saving me a trip to translit.ru, and it can do this for Indic, Semitic, CJK... Well, check it out. It's quite wonderful. And it has no ads!

CEMENT.

Fedor Gladkov's Cement was on the reading list in my college days, forty years ago, and my memory was that it was nearly unreadable, a dreary mass of Socialist Realist rhetoric and cardboard characters. I'm glad I've taken the opportunity to reread it (a copy having been practically forced on me by a bookstore owner who saw me fingering it reminiscently), because I've revised my opinion. Not that I think it's a good novel—it's terrible, from an esthetic point of view. But it's a fascinating depiction of the initial period of the New Economic Policy and its effect on loyal Party members (like the author) who hadn't fought the Civil War so that a bunch of "blackguards and vampires should again enjoy all the good things of life, and get fat by robbery" (Mandelshtam, though neither a fighter nor a Bolshevik, felt pretty much the same way); it's set in the period from February through November, 1921. (There's a slight problem with chronology in that characters are talking about the NEP before the Tenth Party Congress, held March 8-16, at which it was announced.) It also has a genuinely moving depiction of the relationship of its main protagonists, Gleb and his wife Dasha; the novel opens with Gleb's return, after three years of fighting, to find his wife completely changed; she is unemotional, refuses his advances, and seems uninterested in anything but Party work. Furthermore, she has put their daughter Nyurka into a children's home and only sees her on occasion; she says Nyurka is no better than other children and should get the same treatment.

So far, so formulaic (the Party trumps sex every time, and individual happiness means nothing beside the work of reconstruction, comrade!), but Gladkov shows a real concern for the situation of women caught between the demands of family life and those of the Revolution, and in a powerful chapter later in the book he has Dasha reveal how she was tortured and raped by the Whites and how torn she feels about Nyurka. And it is not only the enemy who are portrayed as capable of such behavior: the Party chairman, Badin, is a serial rapist, and one of his victims, Polya Mekhova, tells Gleb: "There's something frightful in men. It seems to me now that there's a Badin in everyone of you." (I quote the translation by Arthur and Ashleigh; I haven't found a Russian text online, which probably is an indication of how the novel has fallen from popularity since its heyday in the Stalin era—it was a favorite of Uncle Joe's, and reprinted often, with emendations by the author, who was happy to follow the twists and turns of the Party line.) In the opening scene Dasha is seen reading Bebel's Woman and Socialism, with its insistence on the equality of women, and it's a real pleasure to see feminist principles upheld in a Russian novel of the masculinist 1920s, when far greater writers like Babel and Platonov basically saw women as distractions from the manly, important things in life. [I am reminded by a commenter that I have neglected to explain the title: the plot of the novel is driven by Gleb's attempt to get the cement factory he used to work at in operation again, despite opposition by Party bureaucrats and attacks by bandits.]

As for matters of linguistic interest, Gladkov was criticized by Gorky for overuse of dialect, and after the first edition "Gladkov replaced the regionalisms of Novorossiysk (a southern Russian port near Krasnodar) with standard-literary language" (Thomas Lahusen in V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., Nations, Identities, Cultures, p. 131). And this sardonic early passage could almost come straight out of Platonov:

They had carried all the books from the houses of the vanished officials into the director's library. They were beautiful books, with shining gilt covers, but mysterious: they were written in German.

Gromada was elected club manager, and when he was reporting on the library, at a meeting of the workers, he said, "Comrades, we have a wonderful library, whose books have been confiscated and nationalised from the bourgeoisie and the capitalists — but they're all of German origin. Now, according to proletarian discipline we must read them, because we must remember that, as workers, we belong to the international masses and therefore, must command every language."

There are some excerpts from the translation here, and if you're wondering what it's like in Russian you can get a pretty good idea from the parody by A. G. Arkhangelsky (1889-1938), which you can read here (scroll down a bit). Here's the first section:

  Ф. Гладков
  ГЛАВЦЕМЕНТ

  1 БРАЧНАЯ НЕУВЯЗКА
  Как и тогда булькотело и дышало нутряными вздохами море, голубели заводские трубы, в недрах дымились горы, но не грохотали цилиндры печей, не барахолили бремсберги и в каменоломнях и железобетонных корпусах шлендрали свиньи, куры, козы и прочая мелкобуржуазная живность.
  Глеб Чумалов вернулся к своему опустевшему гнезду, на приступочках которого стояла жена Даша и шкарабала себя книгой "Женщина и социализм" сочинения Августа Бебеля.
  У Глеба задрожали поджилки и сердце застукотело дизелем. Рванулся к ней.
  -- Даша! Жена моя!
  Обхватил могучей обхваткой так, что у нее хрустнули позвонки, и с изумлением воскликнул:
  -- Дашок! Шмара я красноголовая! Да ты никак дышишь не той ноздрей?
  Ответила строго, организованно:
  -- Да, товарищ Глеб. Ты же видишь, я -- раскрепощенная женщина-работница и завтра чуть свет командируюсь лицом к деревне по женской части. Успокой свои нервы. Не тачай горячку. Заткнись.
  Глеб вздохнул тяжелым нутряным вздохом. Натужливо хмыкнул от удивления.
  -- Шуганула ты меня, Дашок, на высокий градус, так, что и крыть нечем. Ну что ж, займусь восстановлением завода на полный ход.

SEMANTIC DICTIONARY OF HEBREW.

"The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (henceforth SDBH) project is carried out under the auspices of the United Bible Societies. It was launched in the year 2000. Its aim is to build a new dictionary of biblical Hebrew that is based on semantic domains, comparable to Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, which was first published in 1989." So says their About page; I'm not familiar with the Louw-Nida work, but the definitions here are broken down by semantic categories, so that the first sense of אָב /av/ is given as "(a) Kinship = direct male progenitor; ► who normally provides protection, care, instruction, and discipline; ≈ is usually regarded with respect and associated with wisdom, security, and comfort - father," with what other dictionaries would give as the definition coming last. If anyone is familiar with this sort of dictionary, I'd appreciate hearing how you use it; it's certainly interesting to glance through. (Thanks for the link, Paul!)

THE FIRST RUSSIAN STUDENTS IN ENGLAND.

Cathi Szulinski did a lot of research and wrote up her findings:

This extraordinary story was brought to my attention by an intriguing footnote. It told me only that four young Russian men had been sent to England by Tsar Boris to learn English, but that the Time of Troubles had prevented their return.

What initially intrigued me about this remarkable early foreign-exchange project were the individual stories. If the young men had not returned to Russia, then what had become of them? I decided to try to find out. The quest has led to some surprising places. ...

It's long, but if you have any interest in 17th-century England, well worth your attention. (I found it in an annotation at Pepys' Diary.)

KABUKI.

Jon Lackman has a very interesting discussion at Slate of the history of the word kabuki in English; I did not know this background:

...the word didn't appear in print in English until the late 19th-century, and then only rather infrequently. That changed when, following World War II, Japan's government tried to shed its image as a global marauder by touring its best Kabuki troupes. ... Although America's urban theatergoers lauded Kabuki, their good opinion did nothing to improve ties between the United States and its one-time enemy. Indeed, relations worsened due to drawn-out treaty negotiations. When American official James C. Hagerty visited Tokyo in 1960, protesters surrounded his car, broke its windows, and nearly flipped it.

According to my research, it was in this hostile atmosphere that Kabuki acquired its modern derogatory meaning. Writing in 1961 about a State Department plan to revise its security measures, Los Angeles Times writer Henry J. Taylor declared, "[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan's kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki." Six months later, Taylor struck again, "Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes' political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and 'had mentioned it informally to the president.' " Writers have enlivened their prose with Kabuki ever since.

Unfortunately, Lackman spoils the effect of his historical research by insisting that current speakers of English should adjust their usage to reflect the Japanese cultural value of the institution. This would not matter so much except that Slate is billing him as a language columnist. Go to the back of the class until you master the concept of the loan word, sir.

GLOBAL ENGLISH, GLOBAL FRENCH.

A New York Times piece by Michael Kimmelman is about the French language, which, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, among others, is "under siege." This is, of course, the usual xenophobic idiocy (though in Sarkozy's case it probably has more to do with wanting to pick up the votes of xenophobes than personal belief), but fortunately it's not what Kimmelman is primarily interested in, which is the majority of French-speakers who are not from France:

The fact is, French isn’t declining. It’s thriving as never before if you ask Abdou Diouf, former president of Senegal, who is the secretary general of the francophone organization. Mr. Diouf’s organization has evolved since 1970 from a postcolonial conglomerate of mostly African states preserving the linguistic vestiges of French imperialism into a global entity whose shibboleth is cultural diversity. With dozens of member states and affiliates, the group reflects a polyglot reality in which French is today concentrated outside France, and to a large extent, flourishes despite it....

The French language is a small but emblematic indicator of this change. So to a contemporary writer like the Soviet-born Andreï Makine, who found political asylum here in 1987, French promises assimilation and a link to the great literary tradition of Zola and Proust. He recounted the story of how, 20-odd years ago, his first manuscripts, which he wrote in French, were rejected by French publishers because it was presumed that he couldn’t write French well enough as a foreigner.

Then he invented the name of a translator, resubmitted the same works as if they were translations from Russian, and they won awards. He added that when his novel “Dreams of My Russian Summers” became a runaway best seller and received the Prix Goncourt, publishing houses in Germany and Serbia wanted to translate the book from its “original” Russian manuscript, so Mr. Makine spent two “sleepless weeks,” he said, belatedly producing one.

“Why do I write in French?” he repeated the question I had posed. “It is the possibility to belong to a culture that is not mine, not my mother tongue.”

Nancy Huston, a Canadian-born novelist here, put it another way: “The world has changed.” She moved to Paris during the 1970s. “The French literary establishment, which still thinks of itself as more important than it is, complains about the decline of its prestige but treats francophone literature as second class,” she said, while “laying claim to the likes of Kundera, Beckett and Ionesco, who were all born outside France. That is because, like Makine, they made the necessary declaration of love for France. But if the French bothered actually to read what came out of Martinique or North Africa, they would see that their language is in fact not suffering.

He goes on to quote "Yasmina Khadra, the best-selling Algerian novelist, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul," who says "I decided to become a novelist in French partly because I wanted to respond to Camus, who had written about an Algeria in which there were no Arabs. I wanted to write in his language to say, I am here, I exist, and also because I love French, although I remain Arab. Linguistically it is as if I have married a French woman, but my mother is still Arabic."

And Dennis Baron makes a similar point about English in this blog post:

No matter how much we object to "mistakes" in other people's language, there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it. Plus English speakers, who can't effectively control the English of fellow anglophones, are actually in a much weaker position when trying to control the English of foreigners. And objecting to the English of advertising seems hopeless. To anglophones, "Yes, we want" may seem funny, and Spanish authorities may even find it embarrassing, but whatever happens to the slogan, its very existence is one more sign that English, now that it's global, is no longer the exclusive property of English-speaking nations.

The ancient Romans may have felt a similar loss of linguistic control as their empire slipped away and Latin started its long segue into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and the other romance tongues. For now it doesn't look like English is breaking up the way Latin did. But it could. As the Queen might put it, it's early days yet. And that's British for "it's too soon to tell."

(The second link via MetaFilter.)

CHEVENGUR II.

I gave my impressions of the first half of Andrei Platonov's Chevengur here, and I'm glad I did, because the novel takes a sharp turn when it settles into the titular village at that point, and my feelings about it changed accordingly. Now that I've finished it, I'll give a brief account of them (brief because I'm trying to make a Friday deadline on the book I'm editing).

First off, Platonov, like Proust and Tolstoy, could have used an editor. Until the various characters converge on Chevengur, the book is tight and compelling; at that point, it's as if Platonov relaxed and started tossing in every bit of ironic observation on village life and popular misunderstandings of communism he'd been saving up for years. I will probably read it again at some point, and perhaps then I'll see more of a point to some of the vignettes and repetitions, but this time around I got a little impatient. And then, as if he'd suddenly realized he had to end the damn thing somehow, we get Cossacks ex machina to bring it to a close. The scene of Dvanov and his fellow orphan, the horse Proletarskaya Sila ("Proletarian Power"), returning to his native town is touching, but would have been more so if the preceding two hundred pages had been ruthlessly tightened up. It makes me appreciate even more the ferocious concision of Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), which says and does more in 150 pages than the earlier novel in three times as many.

One thing that bothered me (as it did in Proust) was the attitude toward women, who are treated as irrelevant distractions to the important thoughts and activities of men. Platonov himself was married (and wrote his wife about one of his stories "You won't like it, but that's how it has to be") and presumably appreciated the women he knew in what we think of as real life, but intellectually he took part in the masculinist strain that dominated Soviet culture in the 1920s. There's a whole book on this topic, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929, which I've ordered and will doubtless be reporting on in due time (along with Platonov it discusses Babel and Olesha, both of whom I expect to be reading soon).

WHY WE CURSE.

The New York Times recently had a symposium headlined "Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words?" For the most part it's fairly predictable thumbsucking on the part of a bunch of intelligent people (John McWhorter, Deborah Tannen, Tony McEnery, Lee Siegel, Ilya Somin, and Timothy Jay) who don't really have anything interesting to say about the topic ("swear words are linked to emotion in a visceral way"—well, duh), but McEnery, who wrote the classic Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present, has a nice summary of some of his findings:

Purity of speech has been associated for so long with power in public life in the English speaking world that it is almost inconceivable that it could ever have been different. Yet it was — a powerful example of this comes from James I’s participation in an ecclesiastical debate in the early 17th century. When he said that he did not give a “turd” for the argument of a leading cleric, James did not attract opprobrium. He attracted praise — those present were impressed by his debating skills, not appalled at his choice of words. This is unimaginable now. How did the change come about?

Starting in the late 17th century a movement swept the English speaking world which firmly linked purity of speech with power. Groups like the Society for the Reformation of Manners in the British Isles and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the colonies began to fight against sin in all of its forms by preaching and prosecution. A main target for them was bad language....

The hypocrisy of public purity but private impurity also has deep roots. Eighteenth-century campaigners gave up on any attempt to regulate behavior in the private sphere, quickly accepting that people could use whatever language they wished in private as long as their public speech was pure. It is to such campaigners that we can ascribe examples such as Richard Nixon, who simultaneously managed to crusade for an improvement in public morals while revealing himself on the White House tapes to have a full command of bad language.

The campaigns of the late 17th and early 18th century that linked bad language with moral degeneracy, low education and general brutishness were incredibly successful in forming views of bad language that endure in the English language to this day. They were also successful at establishing the nascent middle classes of the English speaking world as a locus of purity and hence a locus of power....

(I stole from McEnery shamelessly in the introduction to the English section of my own curses book.)

THE GOOGLE BOOK SETTLEMENT.

I've read a fair amount about the Google Book settlement, but I haven't seen a more helpful explanation than Annalee Newitz's "5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading." After a history of how the settlement came about, she discusses it under the following headings:

1. It may become harder to get information online about books from writers you love.
2. You will find yourself reading free books online, by authors who have disappeared. And Google will make money when you do.
3. Google will be competing with Apple and Amazon and everybody else to be your favorite online bookseller.
4. Libraries and bookstores will be the same thing.
5. Pulp science fiction will make a comeback in ways you might not expect.

Her conclusion:

We can once again have access to weird, unusual stories that are both awesome and not sustainable under publishing's current blockbuster model. Writers of small and midlist SF books could start making money on their writing again. This is a good thing for authors and readers who love imaginative fiction.

I want to live in a future where I can find the lesbian alien "Journey To My Tentacle Cave" series on the shelves next to Stephenie Meyer's latest celebration of vampire celibacy - and one click away from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. That is a future of economically-sustainable openness in the stacks. And I think, with careful regulation, the GBS could be the first shaky step on the road that will take us there.

I'm sure some of you know a lot more about this than I do and have thought more about it; I'll be glad to hear your reactions.

LANGUAGE PORTAL OF CANADA.

The Language Portal of Canada "is a Web site that showcases Canadian expertise in the area of language." According to the About page, it offers:

* free access to language tools online;
* articles and writing tips, word games and exercises (the Well Written, Well Said section);
* a collection of links to language-related works and sites (the Discover section);
* Canadian writing tools and content produced by governments, universities, and others;
* language-related articles signed by our contributors;
* information in English and French, and in some Aboriginal languages;
* and much more.

The French equivalent is Le Portail linguistique du Canada. I don't have time to investigate it thoroughly now, but it's clearly packed with goodies. Thanks, Paul!

EYJA-FAIL.

Admit it, you have no idea how to say Eyjafjallajökull. That's OK, neither do I and neither do the announcers who are so valiantly trying to report the news of its eruption and consequent disruption of air travel while inwardly wishing it were named something more like Vesuvius. Well, now we can at least hear it said properly, even if we have a hard time reproducing it (for values of "we" that do not include actual Icelanders, of course), thanks to Mark Liberman at the Log.

Addendum. It turns out the Russians write Эйяфьядлайёкюдль [Eiyaf'yadlayokyudl'], which enables them at least to get the -dl- thing right.

SAVE THE SAMURAI!

One of the best books of the last decade is in danger of going out of print, which, aside from being a crying shame in its own right, would make it harder for its author, Helen DeWitt, to get another book into the marketplace. But it doesn't have to happen. As her latest post says:

Suppose one reader in each state and province persuades a non-bookselling outlet to stock 5 copies of The Last Samurai. Maybe you go to the same café every day, maybe you work in one; maybe you have a yarn shop, or a hardware store, or a motel; maybe you're a vet or a dentist or a hairdresser with a waiting room and captive audience; maybe you're an academic with helpful students; maybe you know of a Kurosawa festival, or a screening of Seven Samurai; or maybe you fall in none of these categories but you have persuadable friends or family who do. A couple of hundred or so books leave the warehouse. Paperpools publishes the details of the locations; we set up a Google Map; more copies are out in the world.

That may not sound like much. In the great scheme of Nelsen Bookscan (if you don't know, you don't want to) it isn't much. But it does, obviously, represent a change of direction from steadily decreasing sales it puts the book in places where it can be recommended by people who like it; it would be a big help.

So if you'd like to help out an author who's had more than her share of bad luck and could use a break, as well as make it more likely that we'll all get a chance to read more of her work, give it a try; she says "The people to call are Customer Services, 1-800-242-7737." (And if you know of a good agent, she could use one.)

Q: CHINESE? A: YES.

Victor Mair has a Log post going into great detail about the many uses of the symbol Q in Chinese. I had been familiar with it only from the title of Lu Xun's famous "The True Story of Ah Q" (阿Q正傳), but it has many other uses:

If anyone should try to outlaw Q from all Chinese writing, then there would be no way to talk about the most famous work of modern Chinese fiction or the best-selling Chinese mini-car, and one would not be able to describe the texture of mochi, gummy bears, and lots of other delectables, nor would one be able to ask one's friend to Q him on QQ, and you'd never be able to get out of Warcraft II.

And it is used for a basic Cantonese swear word: "the Q is read as [lan2] ('vulgar morphosyllable for male sex organ'). Since lan2 does not sound at all like Q, the Q is not being used for phonetic purposes, but may perhaps be graphically suggestive."

ENCYCLOPEDIA IRANICA.

I have more than once had occasion to use the online Encyclopædia Iranica; I have been grateful for its amazing compilation of information, but frustrated by the user interface and the problems with scanning and character reproduction. Now peacay (of the superb Bibliodyssey) informs me that it has relaunched with much improved functionality, or as their about page puts it: "This digital version was developed in 2009-2010, in collaboration with the web design company Electric Pulp, to provide a more user-friendly interface for accessing the Encyclopædia's online content." To give you an idea of the riches it contains, here are a few paragraphs from (more or less at random) the DĀḠESTĀN article:

The increased prestige of the Persian language and Persian culture in the intellectual life of the entire Near East in the 17th century also had an impact on the social attitudes of the eastern Caucasian peoples, par­ticularly noticeable in folk poetry and literature. For example, devs (see *daiva) are common characters in the archaic folklore of the peoples of Dāḡestān, a complex synthesis in which the dominant influence was Iranian. In the oral poetry of the Avars, Darghins, Turkish Qumuqs, Laks, Lezgians, and others the devs usually appear as anthropomorphic one-eyed giant brothers, most often with a mother and one sister; they live in a cave, invincible fortress, or palace and engage in hunting. Sometimes beneficent white devs also appear in Dāḡestānī folklore. Equally common is the dragon aždaḵa, which is, particularly among Turkish­-speaking peoples, most closely related to the dragon from the Avesta (cf. Av. Aži- Dahāka-; see AŽDAHĀ). In the most common version a dragon with three, seven, or nine heads lives in a subterranean realm, guarding a spring and demanding maidens in payment for use of the water. The hero slays the dragon and also saves the young of a magical bird (sīmorḡ, Turk. karakuš), who then helps him to find his way out of the subterranean realm. The Nart epic, containing ele­ments traceable to Ibero-Caucasian-, Turkish-, and Iranian-speaking tribes, was the common heritage of the varied peoples of the northern Caucasus. Although it is no longer current in Dāḡestān, studies of the folklore of Qumuks, Avars, Laks, and Darghins attest that tales from it were formerly common there. Similarities in features of the Dāḡestānī and Ossetic versions apparently reflect the presence of Scythians and Alans in the northern Caucasus and direct contacts between the peoples of Dāḡestān with Ossetians.

. . .

Particularly vivid evidence of the importance of the Persian language in Dāḡestān is provided by a unique Persian-Arabic-Turkish dictionary, Jāmeʿ al-loḡatayn, compiled in the late 18th century by Moḥammad Šafīʿ, known as Dabīrqādī Avārī, of Khunzak (b. 1176/1762) at the suggestion of the Avar ruler Ommo Khan (H.L.L. Institute, ms. F. 14 no. 535; Figure 32). To prepare the dictionary, Dabīrqādī traveled to Persia and other countries to master the lexical wealth of the three languages. Mīrzā Jamāl Javānšīr (1187-1269/1773-­1853), secretary to Ebrāhīm Khan (1169-1221/1756-­1806) of Karabagh (Qarābāḡ), spent six years in Khunzak after his master’s death, studying Arabic with Dabīrqādī; he also mastered the Lezgin and Avar languages. In return he tutored his teacher in Persian, giving him a taste for its vocabulary and style, which helped him in compiling his dictionary. Dabīrqādī noted, “As a result, I achieved, with the help of the Almighty, a level sufficient for understanding and conversing in these two languages [Persian and Turk­ish] to a degree that the guests of Ommo Khan need no other translator and interpreter but myself in order to translate Persian missives and explain Turkish mis­sives . . . ” (Saidov, pp. 37-40). Dabīrqādī also wrote a manual on Persian conversation and a popular Per­sian-language textbook. His translations included a rendering of Kalīla wa Demna (the “Pañcatantra” version, probably after a Persian translation), which thus became accessible to the Avars for the first time. The plots and motifs of this work were incorporated into fables and tales by many later Dāḡestānī poets, particularly the satirist Gamzat Tsadasa (1294-1370/1877-1951). It was also Dabīrqādī who devel­oped the ʿajam system of writing, based on Arabic letters but adapted to the phonetics of Dāḡestānī languages; it consists of thirty-eight letter symbols.

. . .

A powerful factor in national literary culture was translation. The Darband-nāma, for example, was translated, complete or in abridged form, into Turkish, Arabic, Russian, English, and a number of Dāḡestānī languages, including even Sirkin (Siṛḫin) and Kubačī (now dialects of Dargva). In the early 19th century stories from the Qābūs-nāma, excerpts from Leylī o Majnūn, and other Persian works were translated into various Dāḡestānī languages. Several lyrical poems by Saʿdī were translated into Lak and Avar by ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān b. Jamāl-al-Dīn Qāżī-qūmūq in the 19th cen­tury and into Lak by Yūsof Murkeli (1270-1336/1854-­1918). The manuscript collection of Dāḡestān state university includes an original letter from Bugdan of Kumukh, written in the early 19th century to a con­noisseur of the Persian language and requesting a copy of ʿOmar Ḵayyām’s poems. Of particular interest to literary scholars is Antologiya persidskoĭ literatury (XVI-XVII vv.) (Anthology of Persian literature [16th­-17th centuries]) with an interlinear Avar translation (in the collection of M. Nurmagomedov, Makhachkala). The well-known Arabic medical treatise Toḥfat al-­moʾmenīn by Moḥammad Deylamī became available to Kumykh readers through a translation from the Persian made by the Avar Nurmagomed of Khunzak; the work was also translated into Lak (H.L.L. Institute, ms. F. 14 no. 189).

I wrote about the Narts here and here (and glancingly here, a thread notable for Ruslan's recipe for Chechen lamb and millet pasta.)

COUNTERFEIT TRANSLATION.

I'm slowly making my way through Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, and I'm now on Ronald LeBlanc's "A la recherche du genre perdu: Fielding, Gogol, and Bakhtin's Genre Memory." One of LeBlanc's points is that the undoubted influence of Fielding on Gogol was mediated by translations, and he has some eye-opening things to say about the translations that would have been available to Gogol (and the other Russian writers of his day, none of whom read English easily, if at all):

...Gogol, like other readers in early nineteenth-century Russia, was likely to have been acquainted not with Fielding's History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), but rather with counterfeit versions: La Place's Histoire de Tom Jones, ou L'Enfant trouvé (1750), or even Kharlamov's Povest' o Tomase Ionese, ili Naidenyshe (1770).

I use the word "counterfeit" to characterize La Place's translation because even a cursory textual analysis reveals that the French version of Tom Jones (and Kharlamov's later Russian version, patterned with scrupulous fidelity on that French translation)⁴⁸ inflicts serious damage — both stylistically and thematically — upon Fielding's original text. Although the extreme distortions that were authorized by the liberal translation theory regnant in eighteenth-century France have been examined elsewhere, we should recall briefly the extreme liberties that were regularly committed during this period. These liberties were largely authorized by the neoclassicist theory of bienséance, an aesthetic notion that allowed translations into French to become, in essence, adaptations, as its governing principle was to preserve the proprieties of artistic decorum. In order to spare highly civilized French readers the need to expose themselves to the literary "barbarism" perpetrated by "vulgar" novels imported from Spain and England, translators in eighteenth-century France felt justified in adapting foreign works to suit the sophisticated tastes and refined sensibilities of their native reading audience. ... The process of modifying Spanish and English works in order to have them please Gallic literary palates generally entailed two main operations: first, a foreshortening of the work, by eliminating unnecessary digressions, lengthy descriptions, or moral commentaries; and, second, its refinement, by expurgating vulgar imagery, unsavory details, or inelegant language. The eighteenth-century practice of bienséance resulted in bowdlerized French editions of such seminal works of modern European literature as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Fielding's Tom Jones, foreign novels that were considered too virile and too primitive to be read in France in their original form.

That footnote 48 is quite striking in its own right:

48. As an example of just how scrupulously faithful Kharlamov is to La Place's French translation of Fielding's novel, consider how at one point in his own Russian translation he includes the following: "The English author of this story provides a great and very lengthy description of the beauty of the person, morals and traits of our Heroine; but, in order to spare our French readers [sic]—who are less patient than our neighbors—the boredom that is always connected with length, I will say quite simply that Sophia was beautiful and worthy of love."

And I agree with LeBlanc's opening adverb in the following remark: "Astonishingly, Desfontaine's 1743 translation of Fielding's Joseph Andrews continues to be published in France even today."

POSTDICTIVE.

When I copyedit dictionaries, I find lots of material for LH. When, as now, I edit a collection of historiographical articles, it's slim pickings, but I did run across an interesting term that was new to me. In one article, the author used the word "postdictive"; I was all set to write a query suggesting an actual word be used instead, but Google informed me it is in fact a word, though not a common one. As this Wikipedia article explains, retrodiction or postdiction "is the act of making a 'prediction' about the past. ... One speculates about uncertain events in the more distant past so that the theory would have predicted a known event in the less distant past. ... Postdiction, in a slightly different sense, is used to evaluate speculative theories such as those formulated by theoretical physicists. In this case it refers to predicting known (but not necessarily past) events." An awkward term for a useful concept.

Addendum. See this 2011 post for a nice use of postdiction.

THE LANGUAGE(S) OF SOVIET GREEKS.

Helen's Steakhouse—sorry, I mean Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος—is one of those blogs whose irregular schedule of publication always throws me for a loop. It'll go for days and days without change, and I'll get tired of clicking on it and ignore it for a week or so, and then I'll go back and discover a spate of (invariably fascinating) posts, and I'll have to drop everything and catch up. This is one of those times, and I really didn't have the time to read all that, because I'm working against a tight deadline on a massive editing job, but it was such irresistible material that, well, I couldn't resist. It's actually a good thing that I let them pile up, because if I'd read them one at a time I'd have wanted to blog each one, and LH would have turned into a reprint service. As it is, all I can do is point you to them and tell you to go read the posts and the conversations that develop in the comment threads. So, in chronological order, here they are:

Soviet Orthography of Greek, about the spelling reform that took place in the USSR in 1925.
Demotic in the Soviet Union, about the two major groups of ethnic Greeks in the USSR—the Pontians who migrated to Russia and the Caucasus in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Mariupolitans, who originally lived in the Crimea—and the debate over what form of Greek to use as the official language of the Soviet Greek nationality.
Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum, which presents translations of a famous Ukrainian poem into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum Greco-Tatar.
The status of Urum: "How it came to pass that a group of Christians spoke Tatar and followed Greek-speakers to the Ukraine is a question we're not equipped to answer." The question is, why didn't they become a separate nationality during the Springtime of the Nationalities, which "was all about splittism, raising new national consciousness where there was none before"?
Mariupolitan transcribed through Russian ears, a rather technical post about the phonemes of that variety of Greek.

I won't try to quote enticing bits from each, because I'd wind up reproducing reams of Nick's prose; instead I'll just tell you that if you're at all interested in this stuff, you need to go over there and stay a while. The one bit I will quote is a question for which I too would like an answer:

Agtzidis' article ends with a question: Soviet language policy was eager to split ethnicities within the USSR from their kin outside: Moldavian differentiated from Rumanian, Buryat from Mongolian. Why then did Moscow affirm Demotic in 1934, instead of encouraging local norms of Pontic and Mariupolitan—which would inevitably have separated the local Greeks from the Downlanders? I don't know, and I'm curious if readers that know about the politics of the time have any opinion.

And I'll pass along a passage from a powerfully written post, Greeks speaking the wrong language, from his other blog, opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr:

The Christians of the Ottoman Empire had to be taught they were Bulgarians, or Greeks, or Macedonians, or Albanians. What the people of village X thought they were 500 years ago is different to what they thought they were 100 years ago, and often what they think they are now. And the change was often enough initiated, because someone from Athens or Sofia came to town, and told them so; or because the local landlord made a choice, and his villagers followed suit.

But the question of what people "really" are, of how their language or quirks or DNA contradict their current self-identification, is pointless. If for whatever reason the villagers of X or Y now consider themselves Greek, well, they're Greek; telling them a hundred years on they've been brainwashed means nothing. (The same goes for the search for Greeks in FYROM, it should be said: the Vlachs there in particular have changed their minds too.) Telling the Karamanlides they should have held on to a Turkish-speaking identity in Greece means even less. They suffered for being Christian in Turkey, they suffered for being aliens and speaking the wrong language when they fled to Greece: if they've come to hate their mother tongue, they aren't obligated to hold on to it for my linguistic edification.

Finally, I'll put in a plug for the one novel I know about the Soviet Greeks, The Proofreader, by Alexis Parnis.

DIGGING THROUGH THE DICTIONARIES.

Some years ago Edith Grossman translated Don Quixote, and she has an interesting essay about the process in the latest issue of Guernica. I particularly liked this passage on dealing with difficult words:

What was I to do about the inevitable lexical difficulties and obscure passages? These occur in prodigious numbers in contemporary works and were bound to reach astronomical proportions in a work that is four hundred years old. As I’ve said, normally when I translate I dig through countless dictionaries and other kinds of references—most recently Google—for the meaning of words I don’t know, and then my usual practice is to talk with those kind, patient, and generous friends who are from the same country as the author, and preferably from the same region within the country. As a last step in my lexical searches, I generally consult with the original writer, not for the translation of a word or phrase but for clarification of his or her intention and meaning. But Don Quixote clearly was a different matter: none of my friends came from the Spain of the early seventeenth century, and short of channeling, I had no way to consult with Cervantes. I was, I told myself in a tremulous voice, fervently wishing it were otherwise, completely on my own.

Two things came to my immediate rescue: the first was Martín de Riquer’s informative notes in the Spanish edition of the book I used for the translation (I told García Márquez, whose Living to Tell the Tale I worked on immediately after Don Quixote, that Cervantes was easier to translate than he was because at least in a text by Cervantes there were notes at the bottom of the page). Riquer’s editorial comments shed light on countless historical, geographical, literary, and mythical references, which I think tend to be more obscure for a modern reader than individual lexical items. Throughout his edition, Riquer takes on particularly problematic words by comparing their renderings in the earliest translations of Don Quixote into English, French, and Italian, and I have always found this—one language helping to explicate another—especially illuminating. The second piece of invaluable assistance came from an old friend, the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, who sent me a photocopy of a dictionary he had found in Holland when he was a diplomat there: a seventeenth-century Spanish-English dictionary first published by a certain gentleman named Percivale, then enlarged by a professor of languages named Minsheu, and printed in London in 1623. The dictionary was immensely helpful at those dreadful times when a word was not to be found in María Moliner, or in the dictionary of the Real Academia, or in Simon and Schuster, Larousse, Collins, or Williams. I do not mean to suggest that there were no excruciatingly obscure or archaic phrases in Don Quixote—it has a lifetime supply of those—but despite all the difficulties I was fascinated to realize how constant and steady Spanish has remained over the centuries (as compared with English, for example), which meant that I could often use contemporary wordbooks to help shed light on a seventeenth-century text.

Thanks for the link, Denny!

GUBBINS.

Just now I called our cat Pushkin a gubbins, and my wife said "That's a good word, what does it mean?" I said I didn't know; she asked if I'd made it up, and I said "That, or it's bubbling up from childhood reading." Must be the latter, because the first thing Google handed me was the Collins English Dictionary definition:

gubbins [ˈgʌbɪnz]
n Informal
1. an object of little or no value
2. a small device or gadget
3. odds and ends; litter or rubbish
4. a silly person
[C16 (meaning: fragments): from obsolete gobbon, probably related to gobbet]

So it turns out my use of it was perfectly appropriate, even though I had no conscious awareness of the meaning of the word (and still don't know where I picked it up); the mind is a funny thing. (The OED's first definition is "Fragments, esp. of fish"; the second is the unusually vehement "A contemptuous name formerly given to the inhabitants of a district near Brent Tor on the edge of Dartmoor, who are said to have been absolute savages. Obs. except Hist.")

Are you familiar with this delightful word, and if so, in which senses (and what variety of English do you speak)?

WELL, THAT WAS FUN.

Not really. Apologies for the lengthy absence, caused almost entirely by my own inability to deal with the technicalities of the infrastructure that supports this wonderful internet age. (I finally grasped that I could pay for renewal of my domain name without technically owning the domain; I can now deal with the latter problem without the pressure of LH being offline.) Thanks to all for your supportive posts and e-mails, and we now resume our normal broadcast day.

A WIDE BERTH.

So I'm flipping through the NY Times 2010 Baseball Preview and trying to ignore the terrible things they're saying about my team ("For Mets, Gloom and Doom..."), and I start reading a story by Billy Witz about a "recently formed 14-member committee of managers, general managers, owners and others who are exploring ways in which the game may be improved," and I hit the following sentence:

Though the committee has been charged with examining the on-field product, it has been given a wide berth, and includes some of baseball’s more renowned names and influential thinkers: Joe Torre, Tony La Russa, John Schuerholz, Frank Robinson and the columnist George Will.

It took me a minute to parse it, because to me, to give someone or something a wide berth can only mean to stay well away from it. Here, however, it clearly is intended to mean what I would call a broad mandate or a wide scope of activity. My first thought was "tsk, what bad writing," but if there's anything I've learned from running this blog and following language-related discussions elsewhere, it's that the older I get, the less I can trust my own judgments about such things. So, as I tend to do, I turn to you, the Varied Reader, and ask: are you familiar with "a wide berth" used in this sense? Is it a simple slip on the part of Witz and his editors, or is it a new usage that has just swum into my ken?

Update. Reader Breffni points out a Language Log post (that I somehow missed) on this very issue, in which Mark Liberman points out enough examples of this construction ("a US public eager to give the president-elect a wide berth," "Until now, Russ Pennell has been given a wide berth," etc.—see the Log post for context) to make it clear that it is in fact a new usage aborning and not a simple mistake. I don't like it, but such is life.

And commenter Ran in the thread says it sounds perfectly normal. I guess it'll be in the next edition of Merriam-Webster, so I'd better get used to it.

BIRD NAMES IN IRISH.

From Scotland we move to Ireland, where Colm Ó Caomhánaigh from Dublin is compiling a Dictionary of Bird Names in Irish. He writes:

Reading W.B. Lockwood’s The Oxford Dictionary of British Bird Names (Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-866196-7) inspired me to look into the meaning and origin of bird names in Irish. I do not speak Irish, though I learned it at school like everyone else. Most of my research on the bird names has been through the dictionaries and other books noted in the texts. I am hoping to get access to some older dictionaries which may yield more results.

I have organised my information into a dictionary form and would be very pleased to hear opinions on the theories. In particular, in the Irish-English section I have tagged with an * names for which I have no probable explanation – many of them the more common names which have probably changed most over the years. The pictures are my own.

Well, I say "is compiling," but the latest update is from 25 February 2002, so it may be fair to say this is an ex-project (having kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible), but it's still a nice thing to know about. Thanks, Bathrobe!

PRECIOUS AND THE PUGGIES.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the very popular "No1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series, and he has a new book coming out... in Scots. As David Robinson's article in The Scotsman says:

The idea for the book came about a year ago. [James] Robertson had already translated works by Roald Dahl and AA Milne into Scots for Itchy Coo, and his original request to McCall Smith was to ask if he could do the same for one of his children's stories.

Instead, McCall Smith suggested writing a brand new tale [Precious and the Puggies (Precious and the Monkeys)]... "The fact that so many of my books have been translated into so many languages is a source of great delight," said McCall Smith yesterday, "but the fact that this new story is appearing in Scots is the icing on the cake."

McCall Smith, who is not a native Scots speaker, wrote the story in English and gave it to Robertson to translate, along with exclusive rights for a year.

He is, however, a keen supporter of the Scots language. "Every language has something to offer," he said, "a different way of looking at the world, a stock of poetry and song. The disappearance of a language is like the silencing of some lovely bird."

Good for him! (Via MetaFilter.)

USEFUL SCOTS WORDS.

Betty Kirkpatrick, "the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus," is doing a nice series of "Useful Scots words" for the Caledonian Mercury; they don't seem to have a convenient group URL, but you can do pretty well with a site search on her name. Here, for instance, is her March 27 piece on boorach:

Boorach means mess, a state of great untidiness or confusion – like guddle but more so.

A good example of a boorach is the kitchen of an enthusiastic but disorganised cook who leaves the kitchen sink and cooker hob piled high with every single pan and utensil in the place and the worktops a sea of half-spilt packets and bottles and dirty plates. A boorach can also be applied to a scheme, often one involving several people, that might have started out as well-intentioned but got horribly complicated and ended up in an almighty muddle. Several official schemes turn out to be boorachs...

As is the case with many Scots words, boorach has several alternative forms, including bourach. The ch is, of course, pronounced in the same way as the ch of loch. I had always assumed that the word was Gaelic in origin and was associated with the Gaelic word burach, to dig up. However, I see that an Old English connection has been suggested.

Before it came to mean a shambles, it meant a mound or a heap of something, such as stones or peat. Then it came to mean a crowd or group. It also took on the meaning of a particularly humble dwelling house and developed into a play house, often of sand, built by children. It has had an eventful life.

The word boorach was very familiar to me when I was a child, but I have not heard it for a long time. I hope it is still alive and well.

I like that combination of the personal and the lexicographical. Thanks, Huw!