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Victor Mair at the Log has a very useful roundup of the connection between the words slave and Slav; I’ll quote the section on Proto-Slavic slověninъ, from Wiktionary, and send you to the link for those on English slave and Ancient Greek Σκλάβος:

Roman Jakobson insists on this etymology: from *slovo (“word”); with link to Old East Slavic кличане (kličane, “hunters, who raise game by shout”) : кличь (kličʹ), and also on the opposition *slověne vs. *němьci.

Trubachev (Трубачёв): Jakobson’s etymology is promising, with the verb *slovǫ, *sluti (“to speak (understandably)”).

Vasmer: it has nothing to do with *slava (“glory, fame”) which influenced it in terms of folk etymology later. *slověne can’t be formed from *slovo because *-ěninъ, *-aninъ only occurs in derivations from place names, however local name *Slovy is not attested. Most likely it’s derived from a hydronym.

Compare Old East Slavic Словутичь (Slovutičĭ) ― Dnepr epithet, Russian Слуя (Sluja) ― affluent of Вазуза (Vazuza), Polish river names Sława, Sławica, Serbo-Croatian Славница and others which brings together with Ancient Greek κλύζω (klúzō, “I lave”), κλύζωει (klúzōei) · πλημμυρεῖ (plēmmureî), ῥέει (rhéei), βρύει (brúei), κλύδων (klúdōn, “surf”), Latin cluō (“I clean”), cloāca (“sewer pipe”). Other etymologies are less likely.

Otrębski brings up an interesting parallel ― the Lithuanian village name Šlavė́nai on river Šlavė̃ which is identical to Proto-Slavic slověne.

Бернштейн repeats this etymology: from Proto-Indo-European *slawos (“people, nation, folk”).

Maher agrees with Trubachev’s connection of it to *sluti (“to be known”), on the grounds that *slovo (“word”) is an s-stem, *sloves-, which would have led to an expected form *slovesěni (compare Russian слове́сность (slovésnostʹ)

Messy, but fun.

Kifikmi Sigum Qanuq Ilitaavut/Wales Inupiaq Sea Ice Dictionary (pdf, Google cache) is an impressive document of a bit over a hundred pages. Igor Krupnik, in his introductory essay, says “In the community of Kifigin, also known as Wales, Alaska, over 120 words have been documented for various types of sea ice (sigu) and associated phenomena in the local Kifikmiut dialect of the Inupiaq language,” and the book documents them with both verbal explanations and pictures. It begins with a summary in Inupiaq and continues with “Qanuq Ilitaavut: How We Learned What We Know” by Winton (Utuktaaq) Weyapuk, Jr.; some excerpts:

People often intersperse Inupiaq into their everyday conversations. Exclamations, endearments and teasing in Inupiaq can be heard among young adults. The few Elders still carry on their conversations totally in Inupiaq. The Inupiaq language in Wales has been severely impacted, but it survives. […]

The people of Wales have continued to hunt and use other subsistence resources even as the changes described above have taken place. The animals, plants, invertebrates, and environmental conditions remain the same. Global warming may have changed the timing of sigu, or sea ice arrival, the formation, departure and the thickness of the ice, but basically the environmental conditions are unchanged.

Scientifically there are many words and phrases, in English, to describe sea ice conditions. There are just as many, perhaps more words in Inupiaq for sigu, the sea ice. On St. Lawrence Island, hunters use more than one hundred words in their Yupik language to describe various forms of sea ice in their area. In Wainwright, over eighty words have been documented. The number of Inupiaq words for sea ice in Wales is, perhaps, comparable to that in Wainwright. […]

It is our hope that our Inupiaq words for sea ice and the English translations we collected here can help young hunters supplement what they have learned in English about sea ice in our area. Using the English translations they may begin to understand the changing conditions as they are affected by winds and currents. It is also our hope that they can learn and begin to use some of the Inupiaq words as a way to teach those younger than themselves.

The explanations are in both languages, e.g.:

Ikalitaq – Puktaaq ikaliruaq immami isruvaufituami.
A grounded floe berg that is in a shallow part of the ocean.

I approve of this sort of thing. (Thanks, Yoram!)

Sarah Zhang uses the recent appearance of a mandarin duck in Central Park as a springboard to share an interesting bit of etymology:

Yes, true, mandarin ducks are native to China, where Mandarin is the official language. But the word mandarin has a more roundabout origin. It does not come from Mandarin Chinese, which refers to itself as putonghua (or “common speech”) and China, the country, as zhongguo (or “Middle Kingdom”). It doesn’t come from any other variant of Chinese, either. Its origins are Portuguese.

This one word encapsulates an entire colonial history. In the 16th century, Portuguese explorers were among the first Europeans to reach China. Traders and missionaries followed, settling into Macau on land leased from China’s Ming dynasty rulers. The Portuguese called the Ming officials they met mandarim, which comes from menteri in Malay and, before that, mantrī in Sanskrit, both of which mean “minister” or “counselor.” It makes sense that Portuguese would borrow from Malay; they were simultaneously colonizing Malacca on the Malay peninsula. […]

Over time, the Portuguese coinage of “mandarin” took on other meanings. The Ming dynasty officials wore yellow robes, which may be why “mandarin” came to mean a type of citrus. “Mandarin” also lent its names to colorful animals native to Asia but new to Europeans, like wasps and snakes and, of course, ducks. And the language the Chinese officials spoke became “Mandarin,” which is how the English name for the language more than 1 billion people in China speak still comes from Portuguese.

(For more on the history of Mandarin Chinese itself, see the very interesting comment by Bathrobe in this LH thread.) Thanks, Trevor!

Jonathon Green, the great slangographer I have posted about many times (e.g. here and here), reports on his search for a patron saint of lexicography. After dismissing Saint Nicholas, Bibiana, St. Francis de Sales, and various other candidates (I was struck by “the great Ambrogio Calepino, a lexicographer-monk, and still memorialized in the French calepin: a notebook”), he settles on St. Giles:

After all, doesn’t St Giles Greek itself mean slang, while a St Giles’s bird is a criminal and thus one of St Giles’s breed, while a St Giles buzzman is a pickpocket who specializes in stealing handkerchiefs and a St Giles’s carpet a sprinkling of sand on the street, presumably to mask the puddles of blood and vomit.

St Giles was the 18th and early 19th century’s most notorious criminal slum, found at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. […] By 1750 merely impoverished St Giles had become notoriously criminal St Giles. It was the first, or most celebrated rookery, which meant a criminal slum and plays either on some metaphorical, avian criminality (and perhaps blackness), or on the verb rook, to cheat.

There are lively descriptions of the low life found there (one local entertainment was called the buttock ball), and it ends:

Like Egan’s fictional Tom and Jerry (of Life in London) Dickens – as Boz – visited St Giles but less tolerant than Egan, or more bound to the evangelical moralising of his time, he shuddered at the ‘filth and squalid misery’ but admitted to the excellence of its gin palaces, selling ‘The Cream of the Valley’, ‘The Out-and-Out’, ‘The No Mistake’, ‘The Good for Mixing’, ‘The Real Knock-Me-Down’, ‘The Regular Flare-Up’ and ‘a dozen other, equally inviting and wholesome liqueurs’. But by Dickens’ time St Giles was already suffering architectural assault: New Oxford Street was driven through in 1847, removing as it came the riper alleyways. That Mudie’s, the epitome of Victorian sanctimony, established its first lending library there is suitably ironic. Its reputation is slightly improved by the weekly appearance of the scholar Frederick Furnivall who recruited at the local ABC teashop for the rowing eight of shop-girls whom he coached on the Thames. While thus employed Furnivall did other things, among them founding the Oxford English Dictionary.

Following which there’s a delightful photograph of Furnivall with his rowing eight. Thanks, Yoram!

Søren Wichmann, a Danish linguist, discusses a perennial problem and presents a promising solution; after describing the many ways in which it’s hard to pinpoint the difference between a language and a dialect, he continues:

Recently, two major obstacles in distinguishing language from dialect have been overcome. The first is how to measure differences between speech varieties – finding a value for D. In 2008, a number of linguists came together to form the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), of which I am the daily curator and a founder. The ASJP painstakingly assembled a systematic, comparative dataset of languages that now contains 7,655 wordlists from what would be two-thirds of the world’s languages, if we assume for our purposes that languages are defined as in the ISO 639-3 code standard. Since each wordlist contains a fixed set of 40 concepts and are transcribed in a uniform manner, they can easily be compared, and a measure of difference can be obtained. The measure of difference between two words that has become most used is a version of the Levenshtein distance, named after Vladimir Levenshtein, a Soviet computer scientist who in 1965 devised an algorithm to compare two strings of symbols. He defined ‘distance’ as the number of substitutions, insertions and deletions needed to turn one string into the other. The Levenshtein distance can usefully be divided by the length of the longest of the two strings, because this puts all the distances on a scale from 0 to 1. This has become known as the normalised Levenshtein distance, or LDN.

The second obstacle is that perhaps ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ are concepts can that be defined only arbitrarily. Here, there is some more promising news. If we look at all the language families in the ASJP database for which database contributors have included a healthy portion of close varieties, we can begin to look for different behaviours of languages and dialects. An intriguing picture emerges: the distances tend to hover around either a relatively small value or a relatively large one, with a valley in between. As it turns out, the valley tends to lie in a narrow range around a mean of 0.48 LDN. Without losing significant precision, we can say that speech varieties tend to not be halfway similar in their basic vocabulary. Either they will tend to be more similar, in which case they can be defined as different dialects, or less similar, in which case they can be defined as different languages. Herein lies the distinction between language and dialect.

The phenomenon is probably a result of social circumstance. Dialects will drift apart as people settle in new places and shape new identities but, if there is still some contact, convergence can also be present so that speech varieties remain less than halfway similar (and therefore the same language). A small push in the direction of divergence, however, might cause the varieties to drift apart relatively rapidly, raising their Levenshtein distance, thereby qualifying them as distinct languages. Possibly there is a connection between the cut-off for distances between words on the standard list used by ASJP and corresponding distances in other parts of language structure that make for a point of serious loss of mutual intelligibility. In other words, the threshold for mutual intelligibility might correlate with the threshold between languages and dialects. We don’t know that yet, but it’s something to look into. […]

Finally, a technique derived from the datasets, called ASJP chronology, can be applied to establish the amount of time it takes for dialects to drift far enough apart to qualify as separate languages. The answer we have found, ignoring some margin of error, is 1,059 years. These findings can be corroborated by looking at how long it typically takes for an ancestral language of a language family to break up into daughters that subsequently become ancestors of subfamilies. This requires other techniques, but the results are similar: it takes about a millennium for dialects to become languages. We know this because we can now distinguish the two.

Thanks, jack!

Having advanced to the year 1873, I’ve read Nikolai Leskov‘s famous novella Запечатленный ангел (The Sealed Angel), and I have a question and a complaint. The question is a simple one, addressed to my Russian-speaking readers: how do you pronounce the word запечатленный? I had always assumed it was запечатлённый [zapechat-LYON-ny], as in the Wiktionary entry, but when I looked at the Wikipedia articles I linked to the titles above, I saw that they claimed it was запеча́тленный [zape-CHAT-lenny], the Russian one explaining that it was from the verb запеча́тывать, which as far as I can see doesn’t work morphologically (“В названии повести обыгрывается многозначность слова «запечатленный», причем основное значение — производная от «запеча́тывать» — накладывать печать”). Huh, I thought. And then I found this audio version, where the reader says запечатле́нный [zapechat-LEN-ny]. So which is it?

The complaint has to do with the ending. (Warning: spoilers!) Up till then, the story is great: the narrator tells a group of travelers at an inn his tale of a group of Old Believer traveling workmen he belonged to. When their revered icon of an angel was confiscated by officials and sealed with wax while they were building a bridge (apparently in Kiev in the early 1850s), they hatched a plan to replace it with a copy. It’s a gripping account told in a wonderful skaz style, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then at the end an apparent miracle causes the leader of the group, and then all the rest, to give up their heresy and join the established church. It’s exactly like all those unconvincing endings where criminals go straight or (to use a Soviet example) when former Mensheviks, SRs, or other heretics see the light and join the Bolsheviks. The English Wikipedia article says: “The story’s finale, where the Old Believers’ community all of a sudden return to Orthodoxy, was criticized as being unnatural. Ten years later Leskov conceded that, while the story itself was mostly based on real facts, the end of it was made up.” The problem isn’t in the conversion per se but in the fact that it was so obviously required by both official tsarist censorship and the sensibility of the reading public of the day, and thus wasn’t artistically motivated but tacked on dutifully. I highly recommend the story, with the caveat that the ending is a letdown.

A site search shows that Broca’s area has been mentioned a few times around here (e.g., “Unless the child has received damage to Broca’s area, how exactly does a child not know the grammar of her native language?”) but we’ve never discussed it in its own right. Since Trond Engen has sent me a link to “Cortical thickness of Broca’s area and right homologue is related to grammar learning aptitude and pitch discrimination proficiency,” by Mikael Novén, Andrea Schremm, Markus Nilsson, Merle Horne, and Mikae Roll (Brain and Language 188 [2019]: 42-47), this seems like a good occasion for it. Trond says:

Short version: A Swedish group of scientists show that the thickness of the frontal cortex in and asound Broca’s area is associated with grammar learning and that the mirror area in the right hemisphere has to do with pitch perception. Also a training effect: The more grammar you process, the thicker the cortex, which is good for grammar learning but seems to be bad for pitch perception.

Have at it!

I yield to no one in my high regard for Annie Proulx (see this 2005 LH post), so it was a shock to read the following section from Ian Frazier’s appreciative but unawed NYRB review of her novel Barkskins:

So you have the setting, the first of many through which the story moves, all of them drawn with vividness and unexpected similes. The dialogue, though, is another matter. Historical novels present their writers with a challenge, because they never heard their characters’ real-life semblances actually talk. No one really knows how Indians of seventeenth-century Canada talked. Maybe they really did say things like “Bad plant grow where step whitemen people,” as the Mi’kmaw Indian, Mari, who becomes the wife of René Sel, tells him when he points to a stinging nettle. Maybe someone like Mari would have said, “No him child. No-bébé medicine know me,” as she says when reassuring René that she never had a child by Trépagny. But me reader kind of skeptical be.

Sentences spoken by certain characters can be reverse-engineered perhaps from writing of the time, but they sometimes come out clunky, too. At moments of excitement the Frenchmen exclaim “Zut!” and “Sacrebleu!” and “Mon Dieu!”—all plausible enough. But often you bump into distinctly unlively dialogue:

“This meeting is fortuitous. I have wished often to speak with you about the Maine forests.”

“I have wished often to tell you of the opportunities for the timber business in Maine. Have you visited that region?”

And sentences with an informational purpose end up sounding as if pasted in from a history textbook:

England, he knew, badly wanted naval stores as the endless war had disrupted their heavy Baltic trade.

“That’s that fellow Franklin. I knew his brother James. A family distinguished for their seditious bosoms.”

And that fellow Franklin’s inventions: the lightning rods, which had saved hundreds of churches and houses from destruction, and the stove, which encased fire safely. It was an exciting time to live.

I just… how can anyone with Proulx’s feel for English write like that? Frazier is being too kind when he writes “plausible enough”; what he should say is “exactly the kind of tired cliché stage Frenchmen are made to utter, as Irishmen say begorra and Scotsmen hoot mon.” And as soon as I read something like “This meeting is fortuitous. I have wished often to speak with you about the Maine forests” I close the book and move on; life is too short to subject oneself to that sort of thing. (See my remarks on Historical Novelese in this 2006 post.) The past is a foreign country; they speak cardboard sentences there.

Anatoly Vorobey has a post, idioms are hard, in which he compares translations of this passage from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye:

I read this book once, at the Whooton School, that had this very sophisticated, suave, sexy guy in it. Monsieur Blanchard was his name, I can still remember. It was a lousy book, but this Blanchard guy was pretty good. He had this big chateau and all in the Riviera, in Europe, and all he did in his spare time was beat women off with a club. He was a real rake and all, but he knocked women out.

He quotes the classic Russian translation by Rita Rait-Kovaleva, who misunderstood the idioms “beat X off with a club” and “knock X out” and translated the phrases “лупил палкой каких-то баб” [thrashed some dames with a stick] and “женщин он избивал до потери сознания” [he beat women up until they lost consciousness]. He then checks the newer version by Max Nemtsov (see this 2013 LH post) and finds the same errors: “он баб дубинкой охаживал” [he beat dames up with a club] and “баб с ног сшибал будь здоров” [he knocked dames down a lot]. He says he could have stopped there, muttering the usual remarks about the effects of the Soviet school of translation, but it occurred to him to check versions in other languages, and what do you know, the French translators made the same error with the first idiom! Jean-Baptiste Rossi: “… et tout ce qu’il faisait de son temps, c’était de battre les femmes à coups de canne.” Annie Saumont: “… et là il passait son temps à battre des femmes à coups de club de golf.” I wonder how many translators have failed that test? (Though of course it’s idiotic to take it as a sign that the translator is no good, as some of Anatoly’s commenters do; all translators make mistakes, as do we all. Nobody’s perfect.)

Commenters noted other problems with the cited translations, like “как сейчас помню” [I remember as if it had just happened] for “I can still remember” and “храбрый” [brave] for “rake”; I myself was struck by “распутного типа” [dissolute/debauched guy] for “sexy guy.” But then I’m not sure how you’d render “sexy” in Russian (Google Translate gives “сексуальный парень” for “sexy guy”!).

There are great authors I would have loved to help edit, but based on Carol Clark’s description in LitHub (excerpted from the Penguin edition of her translation of La Prisonnière [The Prisoner)], Proust is not one of them:

In the case of Proust, such editorial decisions are much more difficult to make than one might suppose. His composition is very rarely linear or chronological: most of the events described take place in a timeless or repetitive past indicated by the use of the imperfect tense. Only from time to time is an episode narrated in the past historic, indicating that it happened only once. (These alternative past tenses present a real problem to the translator.) In one paragraph the narrator can be years older than in the preceding one or, for that matter, younger. (Evelyn Waugh noticed this and facetiously complained to John Betjeman: “Well, the chap was plain barmy. He never tells you the age of the hero and on one page he is being taken to the W.C. in the Champs-Elysées by his nurse & the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense” (letter, February 1948).) […]

For most of the time this is deliberate. Proust may be showing the passage of time […], or the complexity of human character […]. At other times the same characters can be seen differently by different people, either because some are more observant than others, or because they have had some particular revelatory experience. […] To eliminate inconsistencies like these would be completely to denature Proust’s work.

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