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This is one of those words I thought I knew, but it turns out I had only a partial view of. My wife and I were watching the making-of extra for I, Claudius when one of the actors talked about how food was brought to the dining table from “dumbwaiters.” From the context it didn’t seem possible that the word was used in the sense familiar to me (Wikipedia: “a small freight elevator or lift intended to carry food”), so I looked it up and discovered a quite different sense — to quote the OED (which has it as two words, dumb waiter; the entry was revised in 2023) “1. Chiefly British. A movable table, typically with revolving shelves, used for serving food and drink” (first citation from ?1730: “Two fine India japan dumb Waiters”). Then we get:

2. Originally North American. A movable platform or compartment inside a vertical shaft, used to deliver items between floors in a building, esp. food or empty plates between a kitchen and a dining area, and accessed through a hatch in a wall. Also occasionally: such a hatch itself.

1833 On the side and in the centre of the main stairway, the dumb waiters rise, by the aid of the steam-engine in the basement, to the tower.
G. M. Davison, Traveller’s Guide Middle & Northern States & Provinces Canada 109

So what Brits call a dumb waiter, we Yanks call a lazy Susan; is there an alternate UK word for the American sense? And are you familiar with both meanings, or does each side of the pond rest in blissful ignorance of the other side’s usage?

A MeFi post by clavdivs (who’s been a member even longer than I have, and whom I think of when my wife and I watch an episode of I, CLAVDIVS) sent me to Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s long poem “Satan Absolved,” written in odd-for-English Alexandrine couplets, and there I found this passage:

Tʜᴇ Lᴏʀᴅ Gᴏᴅ
And thou wouldst be incarnate?

Sᴀᴛᴀɴ
            As the least strong thing,
The frailest, the most fond, an insect on the wind,
Which shall prevail by love, by ignorance, by lack
Of all that Man most trusteth to secure his back,
To arm his hand with might. What Thy Son dreamed of Man
Will I work out anew as some poor cateran,
The weakest of the Earth, with only beauty’s power
And Thy good grace to aid, the creature of an hour
Too fugitive for fight, too frail even far to fly,
And at the hour’s end, Lord, to close my wings and die.
Such were the new redemption.

I was pretty sure I’d never seen the word cateran before; the OED (entry from 1889) has:
[Read more…]

I was intrigued by Martin Haspelmath’s Facebook post:

What’s the most user-friendly corpus site? Maybe Abdulaev et al. (2022)’s corpus of the Dagestanian language Tsez (78 texts, almost 5000 text units, 2388 morphemes)? Which other corpus site is as user-friendly as this one? (Admittedly, it does not include sound.)

Since I presume I’m not the only one curious about Dagestanian languages, I thought I’d share The Tsez Annotated Corpus Project:

The texts that constitute this corpus were collected by Arsen Kurbanovič Abdulaev and Isa Kurbanovič Abdullaev and published with Russian translation as Abdulaev and Abdullaev (2010). The intended audience of this book publication was primarily the Tsez-speaking community and Russian-speaking readers interested in folklore. Work on the book was sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) and part of the agreement was that the institute would be allowed to post on-line a version of the text suitable for scientific use by linguists, with morpheme glosses and an English translation added to the materials available in the book.

The first text is Allahes ašuni: The rainbow; click through and you’ll see it is indeed beautifully presented. I presume esin šebi xecin šebi ‘What is to be said, what is to be left out’ is the local equivalent of Georgian იყო და არა იყო რა [iqo da ara iqo ra] ‘it was and it wasn’t’ and similar “once upon a time” formulas mentioned by me here and discussed later in the thread, beginning here.

From the home page:

“Starobulgarska Literatura” (“Medieval Bulgarian Literature”) is a specialized peer-reviewed journal dedicated to medieval Bulgarian literature and culture and their Byzantine and European contexts. Since Medieval Bulgarian literature constitutes an important segment of the European cultural heritage, our journal is addressed to an international audience and highlights the work of both Bulgarian and foreign scholars. The journal publishes original research in the fields of literary and interdisciplinary studies of medieval Slavic literatures, as well as editions of unpublished old Slavic literary works and their newly-discovered copies, critical reviews, surveys, information on national and international medievalist events, and current bibliography.

“Starobulgarska Literatura” is published in one issue per year. It contains materials in Bulgarian, Russian, English and German.

The current issue (Issue 71-72 [2025]) has some interesting-looking articles, like Dobriela Kotova’s “Constantine of Preslav as Translator and Preacher: Emotion and Reason in the Uchitel’noe Evangelie” and Lora Taseva’s “Old Bulgarian Translation Correlates of ἀμφιβάλλω ‘doubt; disagree, quarrel’.” Thanks, V!

A great site I recently learned about: Визуализация переписи населения Российской империи 1897 года [Visualization of the 1897 Russian Empire Census]. You can look up individual cities or guberniyas or see the overall imperial statistics. This is going to be a tremendous boon to anyone interested in Russia at the turn of the previous century.

1) Jeanna Smialek, “What French Romance Novels Could Tell Us About A.I. and Translation Jobs” (NY Times, Feb. 15, 2026; archived):

The European Union, with its 27 nations and two dozen official languages, is a center of the translation and interpretation industry. That is why, in Brussels and The Hague and Paris, a recent nugget of literary news has generated so much conversation.

Harlequin France — purveyor of titles like “Médecins et Célibataires” (“Doctors and Singles”) and “Passion Pour un Inconnu” (“Passion for a Stranger”) — recently confirmed that it would be running tests with Fluent Planet, a company that uses A.I. to make translation cheaper and faster. The move was met with both outrage and resignation within the industry. Translator groups called Harlequin’s decision to cut ties with some human translators “unacceptable.” Translators themselves posted about the “sad news.” […]

Harlequin France’s story is an example of how artificial intelligence is sweeping the translation field, rapidly improving machine translation, particularly for popular language pairs like English and French.

Reports of the death of human translation are exaggerated, as the piece goes on to say. But “outrage and resignation” about sums it up. Thanks, cuchuflete!

2) Kashmir Hill, “They Are in Love but Don’t Speak the Same Language” (NY Times, Feb. 14, 2026; archived):
[Read more…]

Hermione Lee’s NYRB review (February 12, 2026 issue; archived) of Francesca Wade’s new life of Gertrude Stein starts with a pleasing quotation:

As part of her account of how amazingly well-known Gertrude Stein had become in America by the mid-1930s, Francesca Wade refers to, but doesn’t quote, this exchange from Top Hat (1935) in which Ginger Rogers’s dressmaker is reading her a telegram:

“Come ahead Stop. Stop being a sap Stop… My husband is stopping at your hotel Stop. When do you start Stop.” I cannot understand who wrote this.

Rogers: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.

The review is admirably even-handed, and anyone interested in Stein and her shifting reputation might want to read it; I’ll post a couple more bits I liked. After mentioning Stein’s bullying father, she quotes this, from Everybody’s Autobiography (1937):

Fathers are depressing. There is too much fathering going on just now…. There is father Mussolini and father Hitler…and father Stalin…. Fathers are depressing.

Perhaps a touch overgeneralized, but one can sympathize. And this is a delicate skewering:

Sometimes the praise feels excessively solemn, as when Wade comments on Stein’s late-1920s essays on grammar: “She moved increasingly away from nouns, whose meanings were disappointingly preordained, and from punctuation, which she found didactic.”

From Laurence Anthony’s Website (“Welcome to AntLab! This site showcases my various software tools, publications, and presentations”) comes WordFamilyFinder: “Look up words in the 30 baseword lists (and 4 supplementary lists) to find all associated family members. Each list contains 1000 word families.” I got there via Anatoly Vorobey, who suggests trying to get a word in each successive baseword list. He found one in each of the first ten; I got the first five (plus one I didn’t expect to be as low as 33: “weekend”) and thought I’d post it before trying more, since it gobbles up time without your noticing. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve discovered I don’t have a very good sense of relative frequency (“eagle” is 4 and “pigeon” is 5? really?).

Yiddish Empowerment Coach has an interesting Facebook post:

What if I told you that sometimes, transliteration is more authentic than using the alef-beys?

We’re often taught that “real” Yiddish lives in the alef-beys. And those who can’t read it yet? They often feel ashamed. Unskilled. Left out of classes and locked out of literature.

And yes — the alphabet matters. Standardization matters. It lets us teach, publish, and build a shared language in an ancient script dripping with heritage. But standardization also smooths. It evens out quirks. It blurs regional music into one correct, homogeneous voice.

Which is why I love a little joke book called Royte Pomerantsn.

In the early 1900s, the ethnographer Immanuel Olsvanger collected Jewish folk humor in Lithuanian shtetlekh — and published it in transliteration. Not neat, standardized YIVO transliteration. A quirky, phonetic system that captures the Litvish dialect of his storytellers. So you see:
– dar instead of der
– id instead of yid
– nit instead of nisht
– zakh instead of zikh

[Read more…]

Margherita Bassi reports for Smithsonian magazine on another remarkable development in decipherment:

A little more than a thousand years ago, monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert removed Western Palestinian Aramaic and Greek writing from animal-skin parchments. They replaced the words with a Syriac translation of writings by John Climacus, also known as Saint John of the Ladder. […]

The original text, however, might not be completely lost. That’s good news, because it seems to contain copied portions of a second-century B.C.E. star catalog with maps originally created by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, known as the “father of scientific astronomy.” Researchers are now using a type of particle accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to uncover the hidden words.

“X-ray beams from our synchrotron at SLAC are helping uncover the long-erased and overwritten star map by scanning for trace metals left behind by the original inks,” reads a social media post from SLAC.

Previous work has revealed that many pages of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus come from a fifth- or sixth-century C.E. book, which included a copy of an astronomical poem titled Phaenomena. It was originally written by the Greek poet Aratus in the third century B.C.E. Alongside the poem appear to be transcriptions from Hipparchus’ star catalog, which was completed around 129 B.C.E. The work represents the “earliest known attempt to record accurate coordinates of many celestial objects observable with the naked eye,” researchers wrote in a 2022 study investigating the Codex Climaci Rescriptus’ original writings. […]

Last month, researchers at SLAC began scanning 11 pages of the codex, which were sent to the laboratory in Menlo Park, California, by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., reports KQED’s Ayah Ali-Ahmad. The facility’s synchrotron lightsource instrument produces intense X-ray beams that can unveil the document’s hidden text based on the ink composition, which differs from that used by the monks. The work has already revealed the ancient Greek word for “Aquarius” and details about stars within the constellation, Victor Gysembergh, a historian of science at the French National Center for Scientific Research who is leading the project, tells the outlet.

More info, and images, at the link. Today Hipparchus, tomorrow the world Archilochus!

I was reading Noah Shachtman’s NY Times piece on Bad Bunny (archived) when I hit the following passage and had to pause:

The United States is different, and more complicated. It’s really multiple markets in one, each developing and growing side by side. Spanish speakers might be watching música Mexicana videos while Caribbean immigrants and their kids are listening to dancehall, and members of the African diaspora are streaming amapiano. “When you’re that big and that culturally diverse,” Mr. Page says, “it can all happen within your borders.”

Amapiano? It looked Zulu, but there was something odd about it. So I googled, and Wikipedia explained:

Amapiano is a genre of music from South Africa that became popular in the early 2020s. It is a hybrid of kwaito, deep house, gqom, jazz, soul, and lounge music characterized by synths and wide, percussive basslines. The word “amapiano” derives from the IsiZulu word for “pianos”.

Pianos! That’s what I call a fun etymology. (I may actually investigate the music one of these days…)