languagehat.com

Back in August 2015, Dave Sayers had a bracing post on a contentious topic:

“Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research, but surprisingly little time is spent actually defining those terms. In general, “indigenous” tends to encompass two features: a long heritage in a place; and some form of contemporary disadvantage, usually associated with prior colonisation/invasion. But those criteria are seldom explicated.

I particularly like these examples:

Take the creole Nouchi, in the Ivory Coast, arising in the 1980s through contact between French and various Ivorian languages. Nouchi is indigenously Ivorian but has no obvious ethnic pedigree. It arose because street traders, itinerant workers, and others in the Ivorian grey economy – who didn’t share a common language – needed to communicate. From a rich mix of diverse people striking deals, talking shop, agreeing, disagreeing, socialising, eating, dancing and falling in love, came about a more distinctive set of words, phrases, and grammatical features. This story of language genesis is as old as human speech itself. And in the worldwide context of overwhelming language death, Nouchi could be celebrated as a new indigenous minority language.

So is it celebrated? Not quite. Although a vibrant feature of Ivorian popular (sub-)culture, Nouchi is typically looked down on by mainstream media and other guardians of all that is right and good in the world, as broken French and/or a subversive subaltern code. That even includes minority language sympathisers. In a book-length discussion of Ivorian minority languages, Ettien Koffi (2012) mentions Nouchi only once (p. 207) and then only as a kind of curiosity. (See my somewhat irritable review of Koffi’s book here.)

The same fate has befallen Tsotsitaal in South Africa, another recently born creole “including elements of Zulu and Afrikaans … from the working class outskirts and townships of Johannesburg … used by (would-be) gangsters and rebellious township youth. … [L]anguages like Tsotstitaal are not legitimated … and their speakers are marginalized” (Stroud & Heugh 2004: 202).

Dynamic urban vernaculars also have a tendency to change and transform much more quickly than older languages. That is of course part of the appeal for their speakers, but another reason for indifference among those who prefer languages to sit still.

Hurray for dynamism, and fie on sitting still!

This is an interesting piece about an illustrator named Lou Marchetti and a writer named David Markson, but I’d link it just for the magnificent reproductions of the front and back covers of the anthology of Russian stories whose title I have borrowed for this post. Thanks, Trevor!

While the rest of you are celebrating the turning of the calendar page to the year 2017, I am celebrating my own advance to 1858. Yesterday I read Turgenev’s Поездка в Полесье [A journey to Polesia], in which a hunter gets gloomy in the pine woods one day and meets a local robber the next (apparently there were supposed to be more installments, but that’s all that got printed, and pretty trivial stuff it is), the last of my 1857 reading, and today I began on his much-loved story Ася [Asya (a woman’s name)], published in January 1858. To provide a brief roundup of the 1857 items I read in the preceding days, in Pavel Melnikov (Pechersky)’s Медвежий угол [Bear’s Corner (i.e., ‘godforsaken hole’: nickname of the provincial town Chubarov)] the narrator visits a sleepy town created not for any economic reason but because someone pointed a finger at a map and said “Let there be a town there,” and the honest old contractor Gavrila Matveich explains how local corruption works; in Dostoevsky’s unexpectedly charming Маленький герой [A Little Hero] the narrator recalls a summer he spent at a country house when he was 11, tormented by the jokes of one woman and involved in the romantic travails of another; and in Tolstoy’s Люцерн [Lucerne] the narrator (essentially Tolstoy himself — he had recently visited the Swiss city) treats a wandering street singer from the Aargau to champagne at the fancy Schweitzerhof, hears his life story, and is enraged at the contempt shown by staff and guests to the ragged fellow — he is itching to use his fists on one or more of them but they don’t give him the satisfaction of an open insult. I enjoyed them all, but wouldn’t wish any of them to be longer than they are. Next (after the Turgenev story) come Goncharov’s Fregat “Pallada” [The Frigate Pallada] (about an 1852-55 expedition to Japan — it’s been called “his second-best book”); Aksakov’s Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka [The childhood years of grandson Bagrov, tr. A Russian Childhood], which I’ve read in English and am looking forward to experiencing in the original; and Pisemsky’s Boyarshchina (name of a region) and Tysyacha dush [One Thousand Souls]. I was pleased, on going back over my reading record of the year, to see that I covered almost a decade (I started the year in 1851), so I should get well into the 1860s in 2017.

For a Robert Louis Stevenson quote suitable to the occasion, see this post, and a Happy New Year to you all!

I don’t normally post about things hidden behind paywalls, but Yiyun Li’s “To Speak Is to Blunder” (New Yorker, January 2, 2017) is so good I’m making an exception. It’s one of the best things I’ve read about someone’s personal relationship to language; I’ll provide a few excerpts so you can get the feel of it:

Years ago, when I started writing in English, my husband asked if I understood the implication of the decision. What he meant was not the practical concerns, though there were plenty: the nebulous hope of getting published; the lack of a career path as had been laid out in science, my first field of postgraduate study in America; the harsher immigration regulation I would face as a fiction writer. Many of my college classmates from China, as scientists, acquired their green cards under a National Interest Waiver. An artist is not of much importance to any nation’s interest. […]

Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom.” That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in and claims understanding and empathy do people call it a tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.

I often feel a tinge of guilt when I imagine Nabokov’s woe. Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can be comforting and irreplaceable, yet it can also demand more than what one is willing to give, or more than one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to be honest, my private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody’s concern, is that I disowned my native language. […]

The tragedy of Nabokov’s loss is that his misfortune was easily explained by public history. His story—of being driven by a revolution into permanent exile—became the possession of other people. My decision to write in English has also been explained as a flight from my country’s history. But unlike Nabokov, who had been a published Russian writer, I never wrote in Chinese. Still, one cannot avoid the fact that a private decision, once seen through a public prism, becomes a metaphor. Once, a poet of Eastern European origin and I—we both have lived in America for years, and we both write in English—were asked to read our work in our native languages at a gala. But I don’t write in Chinese, I explained, and the organizer apologized for her misunderstanding. I offered to read Li Po or Du Fu or any of the ancient poets I had grown up memorizing, but instead it was arranged for me to read poetry by a political prisoner.

I love the deadpan “instead it was arranged” of that last sentence (no, you can’t read the great poetry you love, you must read the politically relevant stuff we want to hear). The whole thing only takes up four pages in the print version, and I personally think it’s worth getting the magazine to read it. And this (one of several quotes from Katherine Mansfield’s journal) makes me want to read Mansfield:

It is astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it. I expect the bird knows it and feels immensely arrogant.

Another great language-preservation initiative, from Mexico, as reported by Andrew S. Vargas for Remezcla:

Sesenta y Ocho Voces, Sesenta y Ocho Corazones (also known as 68 voces), is a new initiative from Mexico’s government Fund for The Culture and Arts (FONCA) that seeks to elevate Mexico’s 68 indigenous languages by preserving their myths, legends, poems, and stories in the form of beautifully animated short films. Their goal is to foment pride amongst speakers of these languages, and respect among those who don’t, under premise that “nadie puede amar lo que no conoce” (no one can love what they don’t know.)

There are currently seven of these short animated films available, covering dialects of the Huasteco, Maya, Mixteco, Náhuatl, Totonaco, Yaqui and Zapoteco languages. Ranging from two to three minutes, each film employs a different designer to give powerful expression the wisdom contained in these indigenous languages. From reflections on life and death, to vividly recounted myths of the ancient times, these films give Mexico’s indigenous languages their due place amongst the great treasures of human civilization. Check them out below (for English translations, look on their Vimeo page.)

An update says they’ve added videos in Mayo, Ch’ol, Tseltal, and Ayapaneco. Thanks, Trevor!

Another word I’ve learned from Mating (see this post) is merchet, in the words of the OED “A fine paid by a tenant or bondsman to his overlord for the right to give his daughter in marriage”; their etymology:

Origin: Probably a borrowing from Welsh; modelled on a French lexical item. Etymons: Welsh merched, merch.
Etymology: Probably < Old Welsh merched, plural of merch daughter, girl, wife (attested from 12th cent.: see marry v.), perhaps via Anglo-Norman merchet or post-classical Latin mercheta, merchetum, marchettum (from 13th cent. in British sources; late 12th cent. as mercheitum). Compare Welsh gobr merch merchet (14th cent.).

I still have the copy of Branwen ferch Llŷr [Branwen, daughter of Llŷr] we studied in my Middle Welsh class over four decades ago (ferch, i.e. /verχ/, is the lenited form of merch). I can’t remember the last time I had to look up so many words and phrases, English and foreign, when reading a novel in English; I trust no one will be under the misapprehension that this is a complaint. It really is a very good novel, and I’m sorry the end is drawing near.

Steven Petrow writes for the Washington Post about an issue that has occasionally intrigued me over the years, the distribution of the pronunciations “pih-KAHN” and “PEE-can.” I’ve always said the former, but I’m not sure now whether it’s from my father’s (Ozark) side of the family or my mother’s (Iowa) side. Petrow (who got in trouble for saying it that way) carried out some informal research:

My own “investigation” corroborated the pecan pickers’ poll. Jimmy Holcomb, who grew up in eastern North Carolina, defiantly says “PEE-can,” while the Mississippi-born wife of a colleague says “puh-KAHN . . . and if you say PEE-can, watch out.” Kathleen Purvis, author of the 2012 cookbook “Pecans,” wrote in a North Carolina magazine: “Conventional wisdom holds that the difference is regional, one more thing separated by the Mason-Dixon Line. Sorry, but that’s just not so. I’ve listened to people from all over. And in my experience, this pronunciation isn’t North versus South.”

Okay, then what is it? Josh Katz, author of “Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk,” has studied dialects far and wide, including — no surprise — the pronunciation of “pecan.” His book and a corresponding map actually detail four ways to say it, since the emphasis can be on one syllable or the other, though for the life of me I’ve never heard anybody say “pee-CAN.” Katz says the “urban-rural” fault line “is a big part of a lot of dialect variation, in particular pronunciation.” With that distinction in mind, urban dwellers in North Carolina are more likely to say “PEE-can,” while country folk generally say “pih-KAHN” (his take on “puh-KAHN”). Purvis agrees, “It’s urban versus rural.” […]

Exhausted and getting hungry for some pie, I decided it was time to use my “phone-a-friend” lifeline and called William Ferris, one of the country’s greatest folklorists and an expert on all things Southern. (His official title: senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill.) Ferris grew up on a farm outside Vicksburg, Miss., and shocked me — and no doubt some of my well-schooled friends — when he claimed that how you pronounce pecan is connected to “class and education.”

He doesn’t come to any real conclusion, and I’ll be glad of whatever enlightenment my readers can shed. (Thanks, Eric!)

Peter Adamson writes at Aeon about the “well-funded translation movement that unfolded during the Abbasid caliphate,” which “sought to import Greek philosophy and science into Islamic culture”:

[…] A well-heeled Muslim who moved in court circles, al-Kindī oversaw the activity of Christian scholars who could render Greek into Arabic. The results were mixed. The circle’s version of Aristotle’s Metaphysics can be almost incomprehensible at times (to be fair, one could say this of the Greek Metaphysics too), while their ‘translation’ of the writings of Plotinus often takes the form of a free paraphrase with new, added material.

It’s a particularly dramatic example of something that is characteristic of the Greek-Arabic translations more generally – and perhaps of all philosophical translations. Those who have themselves translated philosophy from a foreign language will know that, to attempt it, you need a deep understanding of what you are reading. Along the way, you must make difficult choices about how to render the source text into the target language, and the reader (who might not know, or not be able to access, the original version) will be at the mercy of the translator’s decisions.

Here’s my favourite example. Aristotle uses the Greek word eidos to mean both ‘form’ – as in ‘substances are made of form and matter’ – and ‘species’ – as in ‘human is a species that falls under the genus of animal’. But in Arabic, as in English, there are two different words (‘form’ is ṣūra, ‘species’ is nawʿ). As a result, the Arabic translators had to decide, every time they came across the word eidos, which of these concepts Aristotle had in mind – sometimes it was obvious, but sometimes not. The Arabic Plotinus, however, goes far beyond such necessary decisions of terminology. It makes dramatic interventions into the text, which help to bring out the relevance of Plotinus’ teaching for monotheistic theology, repurposing the Neoplatonic idea of a supreme and utterly simple first principle as the mighty Creator of the Abrahamic faiths.

What was the role of al-Kindī himself in all this? We’re not entirely sure, actually. It seems clear that he did no translating himself, and he might not even have known much Greek. But it is recorded that he ‘corrected’ the Arabic Plotinus, which could have extended to adding his own ideas to the text. Evidently, al-Kindī and his collaborators thought that a ‘true’ translation would be one that conveys truth, not just one that has fidelity to the source text.

Very interesting stuff. Thanks, Paul!

An enjoyable but long and tiring day, so just a brief mention of a few items of LH interest:

Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671

Michael Emmerich, The Tale of Genji (see this LH post)

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (this will be my first Chinese sf novel)

Doctor Zhivago, directed by Aleksandr Proshkin

I wish everyone a merry/happy Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, or just a good late-December day, depending on how you roll. And so to bed!

Update. And jamessal gave me The Adventures of Augie March; he calls it “from what I can tell thus far, the best novel written by the best American English prose stylist.” Thanks, Jim!

Another bit of ostentatious erudition from the narrator of Mating (see this post): she says “Clearly the living quarters were just another part of the silva rerum,” and of course I had to investigate. I knew it was Latin for ‘the forest of things,’ but there had to be an allusion there; it turns out Cicero refers to “Silva rerum et sententiarum” (though I don’t know what exactly that means), and in early modern Poland a silva rerum was “a specific type of a book, a multi-generational chronicle, kept by many Polish and Lithuanian noble families from the 16th through 18th centuries” (to quote Wikipedia, which oddly has no other sense of the phrase and no explanation for why it came to mean that). If anyone knows more about the history of this phrase, please share.