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Joel of Far Outliers has posted some excerpts of Mikołaj Gliński’s contribution to a newsletter from Culture.pl, How much Polish is there in Esperanto?; it begins:

The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later recalled, was his favourite during his early days, as well as the language of the larger part of his linguistic output, Polish was the language spoken in Warsaw, where Zamenhof would eventually spend most of his life. And it’s actually these two languages that make up the 1% of Slavic in Esperanto vocabulary. The problem is that sometimes identifying the original language is very hard if not simply impossible.

While Esperanto words like barakti (to flounder, from барахтаться barahtat’sja), gladi (to iron, from гладить gladit’), krom (except, from кроме krome), or vosto (a tail, from хвост) are easy to identify as of Russian origin (they simply don’t appear in Polish), and others like kolbaso can be considered as coming from Russian based on their phonetic build-up (Rus. kolbasa, compare Pol. kiełbasa), there are also some that can be really problematic. This goes for words like celo (aim), bulko (bun), klopodo (effort), kaĉo (porridge, from kasza / каша kaša), prava (right [in opinion], from prawy / правый pravyj), or svati (to matchmake, from swat / сват svat). Due to their almost identical forms in both languages, it seems hardly possible to tell from which language Zamenhof took the original root.

…

And yet the group of Esperanto words which are usually identified as Polish loan words is significant.

If that interests you, click through for more. And here’s a bit that amused me about a very peculiar feature of Esperanto:
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Adrian Tahourdin’s TLS review of Rebecca Lee’s Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and misadventures in the world of books just keeps getting better:

The title Rogues, Widows and Orphans is slightly misleading. Although rogues abound here, a book that was largely about typographical misfortunes would test the patience of most readers. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a widow as a “short (esp. single-word) last line of a paragraph left at the top of a page or column and considered undesirable” and an orphan as “a word or line undesirably separated by a page break from the paragraph to which it belongs”. Rebecca Lee ranges far more widely, however, taking in “Ick Lit”, censorship, plagiarism, hoaxes, rejection, writer’s block, literary rivalry, hatchet jobs and the “existential challenge posed by AI”.

The typo has a long and venerable role in the history of publishing, dating back, Lee reminds us, to Shakespeare and earlier. In recent years the Guardian (or Grauniad, as it is affectionately known) has done more than most publications to keep the tradition alive, for example referring to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Buy. Typos are every self-respecting editor’s nightmare. They leap off the page at you after the words have gone to press (“‘biogarphy’? How did I miss that?”). Not inappropriately, here we have a reference to “Virgina” Woolf. And while Lee writes that there were more than 2,000 typos in the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), she acknowledges that the story was more complicated.

Arguably, Lee has allowed herself to slide down too many rabbit holes in her quest for “Ick Lit”. Does the unfortunate Harry Stephen Keeler (born in Chicago in 1890), whose plots are apparently “impenetrable”, deserve to have his work re-excavated? Or Amanda McKittrick Ros (born in 1860 in Ireland), known as the “World’s Worst Novelist”, for that matter? Surely her reference to trousers as “the southern necessity” deserves some credit for ingenuity. Aldous Huxley, she remarked to a friend, was “the only critic who understands my writings”, though not, presumably, in the way she intended.

It was when I reached the reference to the divine Amanda that I knew I had to share it; if you missed that 2012 LH post, do click through and acquaint yourself with a truly unique writer.

From Raymond N. MacKenzie’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of David Coward and William Butcher’s new translation of Jules Verne, Journey to the Moon, some passages about how his publisher and his translators treated him:

By the last decades​ of the 19th century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one carefully cultivated by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel – promising a specific mixture of scientific plausibility, adventure and moral instruction. ‘Jules Verne’ told readers roughly what they would get: a journey, maps, technological marvels, diagrams, rational wonder. A Verne book was, arguably, less the expression of a single imagination and more a tissue of scientific discourse and popular pedagogy, garnished with vivid illustrations. From the mid-1860s, Hetzel did not simply publish Verne; he curated him. […]

Sometime in 1861 or 1862, Verne met Hetzel, who had published a wide range of authors, including Stendhal and Balzac. A lifelong republican, Hetzel had participated in the 1848 revolution and served as Lamartine’s chief of staff during the period of the provisional government; following Louis-Napoléon’s coup in 1851, he fled to Belgium, publishing from there Hugo’s fierce denunciation of the new emperor, Les Châtiments. Later in the decade, as the political climate in France calmed, he returned to Paris and resumed publishing, branching out into family-oriented subjects and opening a bookshop specialising in children’s books. He saw great potential in Verne’s balloon novel: it was the kind of high-quality, educational fiction he wanted for a new magazine he was planning. He suggested revisions and soon offered Verne a contract under which he would commit to deliver multiple volumes a year (most accounts say three, one roughly every four months). Hetzel would buy these volumes outright for a flat fee, rather than offering royalties based on sales.

It’s hard to imagine other writers – the likes of Flaubert, Gautier or even Balzac – agreeing to such terms. One thinks of the white-hot letter Baudelaire sent to Gervais Charpentier when the latter altered some of his phrasing: ‘I told you: delete the whole piece if you don’t like a comma in it, but don’t delete the comma itself; it’s there for a reason … I’ve spent my entire life learning how to construct sentences, and I say – without fear of being laughed at – that what I deliver to a printer is perfectly finished.’ Verne, however, seemed to welcome Hetzel’s revisions. As their relationship developed, Hetzel’s interventions became so great that the books often changed dramatically – characters were altered or expunged, dark events were softened and endings became uplifting. Narrative structures were simplified. Sexual references were deleted, as were any political jibes. […]

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From the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project comes Gen Z constructions: an overview:

The goal of this page is to provide a brief, preliminary description of some Gen Z constructions that YGDP researchers are currently investigating. The judgments on this page are mostly from the respective researchers’ own intuition; little to no data has been formally collected as of yet. The YGDP hopes to continue working on these constructions to eventually understand them better and publish individual phenomenon pages for each one.

So far, they’ve got discussions of It’s giving (“It’s giving librarian”), Lonely transitives (“I have an apple. Do you want?”), Response particle bet (“Speaker A: I just ordered us a pizza. Speaker B: Bet.”), and Spotlight not (“Not me going to Starbucks for the second time today”). This is the kind of thing more linguistics departments should be doing.

The papyrus was published in 1940, but I hadn’t seen it until now, and perhaps it will be new to you as well: A 3rd century papyrus conjugating γράφω in the indicative, posted the other day by Roger Pearse on his blog:

Here is a truly fascinating item. It’s a leaf of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. On it, someone has drawn out a table of the forms of the Greek verb γράφω (“I write”)! […] What is displayed here is the forms of the verb, and these are labelled, much as they would be in a modern text. […] The first side of the papyrus, the recto, shows the perfect and pluperfect indicative active forms.

This side of the papyrus, the verso, shows the middle/passive forms. Indeed at the top of the page it states “τούτων παθητικὰ ἐνεστῶτος” = “The present passive forms of these”. Then there is a line of dashes below. In the margins, letters indicating whether each block is singular, dual, or plural.

The first blocks on the left are the present indicative middle/passive. These start with “alpha” – the singular, given as today in order, 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person […] Then a line and a fresh heading, “παρατατικού“, above the “imperfect” forms, this time with a leading epsilon. In the right hand column are more forms. The heading παρακειμένου precedes the perfect forms. Then below the υπερσυντελισκοῦ, pluperfect. […]

Somehow this is just wonderful to see, for anyone who has laboured over a grammar, memorising forms.

It is, sure enough. And the student even made mistakes, which renders it still more poignant.

Ward Farnsworth is an old favorite around here; see my reviews of his Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric (LH, The Millions) and Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor (LH). He has now sent me a copy of his latest magnum opus, The Latin Tamer: Mastering the Language of Rome (cowritten with Sarah van der Pas), which looks ideal for the kind of learner it is aimed at. To quote the Preface (which is available, along with a good many other parts of the book, on the associated website):

The book is distinctive in a few ways. It seeks to spell out the workings of Latin with an extra measure of clarity and patience. It illustrates every point, large and small, with short examples. The examples are mostly from ancient writings and they’re all explained on the spot. That’s the premise of the book: to let you learn Latin by reading and understanding lots of short specimens of the real thing.

This book, and the website that goes with it (along with a lot of practice), will enable you to master Latin if that’s your aim. It can also teach you to understand and appreciate Latin if you don’t have years to spend on it. Since all the illustrations are fully explained, you can (if you wish) wander at will among them and study the grammatical rules when and how you like. The format allows for free-range learning.

This book is especially written to help learners of Latin who like the ideas of the Stoics (another treat for the mind). Many of its examples are drawn from Seneca the Younger and from Cicero, the Roman writers who discussed those ideas the most. You’ll be able to learn Latin by studying samples that especially interest you. And cutting your teeth on authors you want to read later will make it easier when that time comes.

One thing I like about it is the use of actual chunks of Latin (what he calls “illustrations”) to exemplify the grammatical lessons:
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Frequent commenter Y wrote me as follows:

Two interesting bits. I don’t know if they are blog material but I hope you’ll find them interesting in any case:

— First one comes from Pystynen’s Xitter (I don’t have an account there. I use nitter to browse it.) […]:

Has there ever been work in something like documentary linguistics that was not downstream of the European missionary–colonial tradition? That is, someone producing a description/grammar at some detail of a previously unwritten language foreign to the writer?

We find occasional snippets about foreigners’ languages for long time (Greeks writing down a handful of words of Scythian, etc.), but is going beyond that basically single-invention?

Al-Kashgari comes sorta close (at least a dialect documentation pioneer), but he is both a native speaker and this is early enough that presumably most Common Turkic varieties would have been still intelligible with the centuries-extant Old Turkic literary language.

I was curious about that, and after poking around a bit, found this. More specifically, the first Manchu grammar was written by Shen Jiliang, of whom you can read here. He seems to have been the sort of person Pystynen was looking for, a language enthusiast at a time and place when that was unusual.

— Second one is an article in Science, still firewalled. But somehow I was able to get it through this link, from the first author’s LinkedIn. The gist of the article is that there was a peak in global language diversity around 2000 years ago. There are details to quibble about, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

You can learn more about it from the accessible supplementary materials; also from an older article it’s based on, and from secondary coverage:
The lost golden age of language diversity
Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages

Thanks, Y!

PlotLines is a terrific site: “The classics, mapped – every journey in the book, drawn on a hand-tinted period map, with the real 1890s Ordnance Survey wherever the story walks in Britain.” For anyone who, like me, reads novels with maps and atlas at hand, trying to trace the characters’ travels, it’s a godsend, and it’s brilliantly done — check out the way it traces Leopold and Stephen’s crisscrossing paths in Ulysses. It’s got dozens of novels, including War and Peace, which must have been quite a challenge (a minor annoyance: the text talks about Austerlitz, but the map shows Slavkov, with no explanation that that’s the modern name), with “more to come.” It was created by Chris Moran (under the pseudonym Peter Guillam, a character from John le Carré), and you can read about how he did it, using the Claude desktop app, here.

Not gonna make a separate post, because how many people are interested in Proto-Elamite, but in case you are, Kate Kelley’s Proto-Elamite: Writing and Society in Early Iran has been published as a New Cambridge Element (whatever that may be), and it’s available for free for the next couple of weeks. (Via Nelson Goering’s FB post.)

My brother sent me this link illustrating and defining the Scots word sook (SND), given as “sycophant, crawler, toady, to fawn and flatter” with the sample sentence “Ah’ve heard o sookin in wi the boss Smithers but this is takin it ower far. Yir fired!” I enjoyed the word, of course, but I was thrilled that it was from a most enjoyable site I hadn’t been familiar with, Stooryduster:

The Scottish Language is full of attitude, great on the ear, emotive, and the words are not too far from English which makes them globally accessible. I hear and speak Scots every day. Perfect for me to illustrate and translate.

It seems to have been quiescent for over a year — the latest entry is Curl-doddy, from April 22, 2025 (defined as “The devil’s bit scabious, the seed-bearing stem of the ribwort plantain, clover, both red and white and other such round headed flowers”: “Ye canni ca it curl-doddie, that’s for the deil’s bit scabious frae the Scabiosa family, an dinni snigger”) — but the archives go back to the year 2000, so there’s plenty to investigate. Thanks, Eric!

Adam Thirlwell has a wonderful LRB review essay (25 June 2026; archived) of a book I keep meaning to read, Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (the review is of the new translation by Bryan Karetnyk). It opens irresistibly:

In a library​ when I was young I came across a book published by the Hogarth Press. It was so delicate I hardly wanted to touch it. It had a mottled green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of Gorky’s reminiscences: of Chekhov and the less world-famous Leonid Andreyev. I loved the book entirely, and surely any book is lovable that has Tolstoy on the phone to Chekhov? For a while I considered stealing it, this rare object, which seemed to contain answers to the mystery of something called literature. The translation a century ago was by S.S. Koteliansky with Leonard Woolf (Woolf’s contribution presumably being to correct the occasional syntactical blemish), and was only rarely reprinted. Now at last there is a new translation, by Bryan Karetnyk, and everyone can contemplate this strange and moving work.

(Koteliansky was very helpful to Dorothy Richardson [see this LH post], whose experiences with translating you can read about here.) I’ll quote some more good bits and hope you’ll click through for the whole thing:

In the 19th century a new tone emerged in Russian writing and it created much confusion – both in Russia and elsewhere. Everyone was agreed that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. The only Russian who was European was Turgenev, and it made him highly suspicious. But maybe to give it this nationalist tinge isn’t accurate at all. There were basically three or four writers – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov, with Turgenev a possible addition and Gogol an ancestor – who had crafted a form of fiction writing that seemed to offer such a radically fluid and cavernous account of human relations, so much less brittle than Thackeray or Zola, that it no longer seemed to be art at all. Anna Karenina was a ‘piece of life’, Matthew Arnold said, not a novel. Virginia Woolf wondered at Dostoevsky’s naked characters, vessels of ‘this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul’. Everyone else in European literature suddenly seemed ordinary. It was a freak of time and space.

One feature of such apparently exposed writing was to collapse any distinction between life and literature. It seemed natural in this era to covet biographical intimacy, to devour lives and letters, and Gorky’s Reminiscences are especially intense. He believed that no anecdote was too domestic to be meaningful, like this story of Tolstoy praising Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ in front of Chekhov. ‘On that day, Chekhov had a temperature: he was sitting with red blotches on his cheeks and his head tilted forward, cleaning his pince-nez meticulously. He said nothing for some while, then finally, with a sigh, he said quietly and with embarrassment: “There are misprints in it …”’ Gorky writes as if everything private in the lives of these writers were a mystery to be decoded, as if this story of Chekhov might be some clue to his modesty, and therefore his talent. I don’t think he was mistaken. Maybe at a certain point all literature is personal. It’s difficult to admit this because the ideal is of something abstract and therefore perfect. It was the ideal for sure in Paris, where Flaubert proposed that the realist novel was also the impersonal novel, that the personality of the author was of no interest to anyone serious. […]

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