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Tessa Koumoundouros at ScienceAlert writes about how “a rare script from a language in Liberia has provided some new insights into how written languages evolve”:

“The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries,” says linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly, now at the University of New England, Australia. “Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing evolves over short spaces of time.” […]

“There’s a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs,” says Kelly. For example, “the iconic ox’s head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician [aleph] and eventually the Roman letter A,” the team explains in their paper. “But there are also plenty of abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start off as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers,” Kelly notes.

The eight Vai creators set out to design symbols for each of their language’s syllables, inspired by a dream. Their chosen symbols represented physical things like a pregnant woman, water, and bullets, as well as more abstract traditional emblems. It was then taught informally by a literate teacher passing their knowledge of the script to an apprentice student (with 200 individual letters that must have been a challenge to remember!). This practice is still used today to teach the written language, which is now even used to communicate pandemic health messages. Kelly and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute analyzed the 200-syllabic alphabet of the Vai people from 1834 onwards using archives across several countries.

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I’ve just finished Victor Pelevin’s 1996 novel Чапаев и Пустота, whose title is (like so many) hard to translate. It looks like it means “Chapaev and Emptiness” (or, if you prefer, “Chapaev and the Void”), but it turns out (quite a ways into the novel) that Пустота [Pustota] is the surname of the viewpoint character, whose full name is thus Pyotr Pustota. Andrew Bromfield translates his name (rather awkwardly) as Voyd (why not Void, if you’re going to go in that direction?), but he renders the title as Buddha’s Little Finger in the US edition and The Clay Machine Gun in the UK. (Those are both references to the same annihilation-producing entity that appears towards the end of the book.) If you want a summary of the novel, which shuttles back and forth between Civil War Russia (it opens in Moscow in 1918) and a psychiatric hospital in the mid-1990s, see the poorly written Wikipedia article (which is oddly titled Chapayev and Void, a title under which the book exists nowhere else). In the Civil War parts, Pyotr becomes Petya, commissar to a very unusual Vasily Chapaev, who in addition to being a Bolshevik commander is an all-knowing Buddhist who tries to share his enlightenment with Pyotr, while in the 1990s the lead psychiatrist Timur Timurovich tries to cure him; both have him write down his “dreams” in detail, and the point of the novel is that neither existence is real — the whole idea of “reality” is demolished, and you achieve enlightenment by realizing that you are no one, you exist nowhere, and the world doesn’t exist. This whole farrago of pop Buddhism didn’t interest me in the least (its natural home is in dorm rooms with some beer and/or pot), and frankly I was thinking of giving up on the novel, but by that point I was three-quarters of the way through and figured I might as well plug away at it; I was rewarded by some excellent Chapaev jokes in the final chapter. Basically, it’s the same story as Hermit and Six-Toes (LH) and Omon Ra (LH), except that instead of the hero seeing the truth of and escaping from a Broiler Combine or the Soviet space program, he escapes from both a psychiatric hospital and the shackles of “reality.” But it’s much longer than either of those — too long, I’d say. Lots of people like it, of course, but I know two people who bailed out on it early.

Mind you, Pelevin is always worth reading, despite the longueurs and silliness. I liked this image from the first paragraph of the novel proper (there’s a preface by an Urgan Dzhambon Tulku VII):

The same old women were perched motionless on the benches; above them, beyond the black latticework of the branches, there was the same grey sky, like an old, worn mattress drooping down towards the earth under the weight of a sleeping God.

На скамейках сидели те же неподвижные старухи; вверху, над черной сеткой ветвей, серело то же небо, похожее на ветхий, до земли провисший под тяжестью спящего Бога матрас.

(The translation is Bromfield’s, and I discovered that you can read most of the first chapter here.) On the next page I thought “пулеметную р-р” [machine-gun r-r] was great, and later on I loved Ебанишада (Upanishad, with the start replaced by еб- ‘fuck’). If cultural references are your thing, there are scads of them: philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Swedenborg, Schopenhauer), musicians (Boris Grebenshchikov, Leonard Cohen), movies (Seven Samurai, Pulp Fiction), and of course writers (Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Bunin, Nabokov, Pushkin in statue form, and Bryusov and A. Tolstoy, among others, in person). I’ll finish with a linguistic puzzle from late in the book; there’s a wonderful story that includes this passage:

He said that the Romanian language has a similar idiom — haz baragaz, or something of the kind — I forget the exact pronunciation, but the words literally mean “underground laughter”.

Он сказал, что в румынском языке есть похожая идиома – «хаз барагаз» или что-то в этом роде. Не помню точно, какзвучит. Означают эти словабуквально «подземный смех».

Now, there is a Romanian haz ‘humor; fun; wit,’ but what is “baragaz”? Fortunately, a Romanian has investigated this very question and decided it’s a distortion of the phrase haz de necaz ‘humor from sorrow/trouble/misfortune.’ Again I am thankful for the wide reach of the internet.

From Alex Foreman’s FB post I learned the following wonderful word:

Kezayit, k’zayit, or kezayis (Hebrew: כְּזַיִת) is a Talmudic unit of volume approximately equal to the size of an average olive. The word itself literally means “like an olive.” The rabbis differ on the precise definition of the unit:

▪ Rabbeinu Yitzchak (the Ri) defines it as one-half of a beytza (a beytza is the volume of an egg).
▪ Rambam specified that a ‘grogeret’ (dried fig) was one-third of a beytza, making this the maximum size for a kezayit, which is smaller. Rabbeinu Tam made the argument explicitly, though, using a slightly different calculation came out with a maximum definition of three-tenths.
▪ According to some interpretations, including the Chazon Ish, the zayit is not related to other units by a fixed ratio, but rather should only be conceived of independently as the size of an average olive.

Stick that in your metric pipe and smoke it! Alex says “Somebody from Ashkenaz just told me that the size of an olive isn’t the size of an olive. Mobius strip in my brain now. What do?”

Unrelated, but I learn from this Baseball Hall of Fame page that there was an old “scruffy, worn out cowboy” character called Alkali Ike, “paired with Mustang Pete in a popular series of silent films in the 1910s,” and that this is the origin of both Ring Lardner’s Alibi Ike and Cardinals pitcher Grover Alexander’s otherwise mysterious nickname “Pete”:

Alex and his regular catcher, Bill Killefer, went on a hunting trip together and after a day on the trail, the catcher looked at his dirt-encrusted friend and hung the name “Alkali Pete” on him. Though hardly appropriate for a successful young athlete, the nickname stuck to the former Nebraska farm boy. Just before Alexander entered the Army in 1918 during World War I, Alexander’s teammates presented him with a wristwatch with that nickname engraved. As more players and reporters began to use the nickname, it morphed into “Old Pete.”

Nicholas Ostler is one of LH’s favorite authors of language books, as I said here (see that post for further links), so of course I was interested in The best books on The History and Diversity of Language recommended by Nicholas Ostler. After an introductory interview, he discusses his five chosen books, Dying Words by Nicholas Evans, La Révolution Technologique de la Grammatisation by Sylvain Auroux, The Stories of English by David Crystal, Linguistic Diversity by Daniel Nettle, and Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ll quote his remarks about the second and leave you to discover the rest for yourself:

The author is a French linguist and historian and this book explores the new view of language which was adopted about the time of the Renaissance. The big figure here is the Spaniard Antonio de Nebrija (1444 – 522). He did two things that nowadays don’t seem so extraordinary but represented at the time a completely new view of language. First, he wrote a grammar of his own language, which was Spanish. Up to this time, the only languages that had explicit grammars were Greek and Latin. These grammars had been written more than 1,500 years earlier.

The Greeks first worked out what the structure of language was with nouns and verbs and inflections of various sorts and how the syntax of sentences worked. Then the Romans came along and it was done for Latin too. You might have thought that people would have come from all directions thereafter and done the same for their own languages, but it stopped dead there. The only languages thought worthy of having grammar were Greek and Latin. Even languages like Hebrew, which you’d have thought would have some credibility, were not analysed in this way.

What Nebrija said was that you could do this for any language, and argued that, above all, any language which is the language of an empire ought to have a grammar. He did this for Spanish, but later, as a result of his work, the Spanish missionaries who went out to the Americas started writing grammars of all the languages they encountered there. This was an amazing thing: Nobody had ever done this with such a wide variety of languages before, and certainly not with languages they considered to be used by savages.

The other thing that Nebrija did was write a grammar of Latin. That had been done before, but he happened to do it at the time the printing press was taking over the production of books, and so effectively he ended up creating one of the first student textbooks. The idea took root that language could now be learnt from books and that there could be a technology or system of learning languages. This began to be applied all over Europe, where all the major powers wanted to analyse the grammar of their language and provide textbooks for students.

Auroux looks at the process of how this development spread across Europe and the world. This is a very important work and I’m just sorry that this book doesn’t seem to be available in English.

I’m sorry too.

From John Emerson’s FB post:

I’ve been studying Classical Chinese and especially the Daodejing for 45 years now, and during the 1990s I even published a few articles about it in legit academic journals. For a couple years now I’ve been gathering and editing my writings with the eventual goal of book publication. I now have a few things ready to go and more will follow.

To begin with, I have an edited text and translation. There are over 300 English translations of the Daodejing available and any new translation makes people ask “Why?” But my version is very substantially different than any earlier version, and I claim that in these respects it is better. To begin with, I have revised the Chinese text with an eye to 4 texts, much older than the traditional Wang Bi text, which have been unearthed by archaeologists in recent decades which are. My goal has not been to reconstruct the “original Daodejing” but to produce an eclectic composite text which lacks the various problems and inconsistencies that each individual text has, and when possible to find new (to us) meanings which have been lost over time.

I have also rearranged the text of the Daodejing, which is acknowledged to be a chaotic hodgepodge, into intelligible historical-topical groups which stand in an intelligible relationship to one another. Most significantly, I have divided the Daodejing into two distinctly different parts, each amounting to about half the Daodejing, which I call Early Dao and Sage Dao. My thesis that the Daodejing is an anthology put together by the followers of “Sage Daoism”, and that about half of the book consists of writings of Early Dao authors who *did not mention the Sage at all*.

My explanation of the Early Dao / Sage Dao division is here. These are final versions, though I am open to editing and proofreading help. My main goal, however, is to find a publisher (or at least an agent). Please share this message and these links with anyone who you think might be interested. (My email address is at the links).

So if you know any agent or publisher who might be interested, do let him and/or me know; the Daodejing is endlessly interesting and needs as many interpretations as it can get.

Eric Margolis in the Japan Times has the kind of close look at hard-to-translate words I love, Translator trip-ups: What do they mean for learning Japanese?:

In the recent issue of the literary magazine Monkey, which publishes new and old Japanese writing translated into English, a dozen literary translators dished out their thoughts on the hardest words to translate from Japanese into English. These choices ranged from the omnipresent いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase), which is used as a greeting when entering a store, to sentence endings like the emphatic よ (yo) and the interrogative かしら(kashira, I wonder?).

Examining the words chosen by these translators can shed light on why communication between languages requires so much more than one-to-one translation. It also demonstrates how important it is to have a high level of cultural understanding for speaking fluent Japanese.

I want to take a look at five of these words and dive into why they’re significant and how Japanese learners can embrace and grow by using them. These words are: いらっしゃいませ、おじさん/おばさん (ojisan/obasan, mister/missus), 懐かしい (natsukashii, nostalgic), はあ(hā, an interjection) and 心 (kokoro, heart). Why did translators choose these words as being hard — even impossible — to translate? As we’ll soon see, the parenthetical definitions are woefully insufficient. We’ll need to dive deeper.

I’ll just quote a couple of passages:
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Via Catriona Kelly’s FB post, some Grauniad letters in which “Readers respond to Adrian Chiles’s article mourning the decline of our most poetic sayings”; the first one drove me to make this post:

My Scottish mother-in-law had a wealth of expressions which she’d use so appropriately […]. One saying that we use now and again, to excuse spending on a treat, is “there’s nae pockets in a shroud”. Another couple of wonderful ones to describe threatening weather are “it’s dark over Will’s mum’s”, plus a particular favourite, “it’s as black as the earl of hell’s waistcoat”. Real poetry.
Catherine Roome
Staplehurst, Kent

Real poetry indeed! My wife and I were both struck by the eerie specificity of “the earl of hell’s waistcoat” — not the more obvious “lord of hell” or, say, “cloak,” but “earl” and “waistcoat.” It sticks in your mind. (I like “Staplehurst,” too.) There are a few more letters, but none as good; the best idiom in them is, I’d say, “more edges than a broken pisspot.” And my favorite from the Chiles piece is “wet as an otter’s pocket.”

A nice piece of etymological discourse from Haggard Hawks (see this LH post):

Last week, a sweary fact about kestrels turned out to be not only HH’s most popular fact of the week, but one of our most popular facts ever. Back in the sixteenth century, kestrels were known as windfuckers and fuckwinds. Having said that however, there’s a theory that claims you should in fact change those Fs to Ss. Some etymologists (presumably looking to make the history of the English language slightly less offensive than it actually is) will have you believe that those windfucker and fuckwind nicknames for the kestrel are actually misreadings: they come from a time when the archaic long S character < ſ > was often used to be used in place of < s > at the beginnings and middles of words, and so it’s entirely possible that that long S was simply misread as a lowercase F < f >.

So those kestrels? Perhaps they weren’t so much fucking the wind as they were sucking it. So to speak. It’s a neat theory, certainly, but alas it’s not the case; these nicknames really were as uncompromising as they sound. Take a look at this page from Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, for instance, and you’ll see under the French word crecerelle—well, pretty clear proof that there was no sucking involved whatsoever […]

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Sarah Anjum Bari wrote for the Daily Star back in 2019 about a subject that interests me on a number of levels:

Think of some of the words we use most often in our daily lives in Bengali. The word for ‘pen’—kolom; the word for ‘sky’—asmaan; ‘river’—doria; ‘land’—jomeen. Think of the standardised farewell greeting of Khoda Hafez even among some non-Muslims in social situations, and the knowledge of most Muslim Bengalis of the Arabic script, even if they do not understand the language. Derived from Persian and Arabic origins, these words, expressions, and practices, among countless others, have become so deeply ingrained in Bengali that we seldom spare thought to their foreign lineage. But a glimpse into the history of these linguistic concoctions reveals just how porous and pulsating language can be, and how rich Bengali as become over the centuries as a result of travelling cultures.

As Suniti Kumar Chatterjee explains in The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language(1926), Bengali predates the age of the province of Bengal in pre-partition India, originally a part of the Eastern Indo-Iranian or Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Having previously settled in Eastern Iran, Aryan speakers supposedly came to India around 1500 BC, when the first Vedic hymns are said to have been produced. Among the oldest references to Bengali include the ancient Brahmi script found in Ashokan rock edicts, the Bengali commercial and industrial works from the Kusana period mentioned in the Greek Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century AD), Bengali place names found in inscriptions of old books from the first half of the 5th century AD, and a glossary of 300 words in a ‘scattered’ Sanskrit commentary on the Amara-kosa by Bengali Pandit Vandhya Ghatiya Sarvananda from around 1159 AD.

The Persian influence on Bengali dates back to the 13th century Turkish invasion of India. The year 1206 saw the migration of many Persian and Central Asian poets to India, resulting in the assimilation of Persian literary trends into the Indian cultural landscape. While the influence on the Delhi headquarters was particularly evident from the development of Urdu—a mixture of Hindi and Persian languages—its impact on Bengal stemmed from a number of sources over several centuries.

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A correspondent writes: “Commonly we speak of felling trees when somebody is cutting them down, but apparently in the logging community it is more common to say things like ‘I’m going to fall that tree.’ I looked into this because somebody on Facebook shared this U. S. Dept. of the interior official sign warning loggers not to fall a tree because it is a seed tree […] There is some discussion of this usage here. (This discussion suggests that ‘fall’ is used informally, out west, mentions a similar image, and says the DoI is adopting the language of its audience, loggers.)” He adds other sites he found using the form; needless to say, I was intrigued, and fortunately the OED’s entry for the verb fall was updated in September 2017, so here’s the subentry:

29. a. transitive. To cut down (a tree, vegetation, etc.); = fell v. 3. Since the 19th cent. chiefly English regional, North American, Australian, and New Zealand.
Quot. a1325 (from a source whose scribal language is placed by Ling. Atlas Late Mediaeval Eng. in Ireland) is perhaps to be interpreted as showing fell v.: compare discussion at that entry.
In quot. ?1440 with the subject of the clause as the implicit object of the infinitive, with the sense ‘timber is to be felled’.
Early 15th-cent. currency of the sense is implied by quot. a1425 at falling n.¹ 3 [Bible (Wycliffite, L.V.) (Royal) (1850) Psalms lxxiii. 6 Thei castiden doun it with an ax, and a brood fallinge ax [L. in securi et ascia].].

a1325 (▸?c1300) Northern Passion (Cambr. Gg.1.1) l. 1246 (MED) In his horcherd a tre grewe..He dide hit falle [c1450 Cambr. Ii.4.9 fellyn] euche a bothȝ. Wan hit was fallid [Cambr. Ii.4.9 I fellyd] þei gon hit wirche.
▸ ?1440 tr. Palladius De re Rustica (Duke Humfrey) (1896) ii. l. 437 Now matere is to falle in sesoun best.
?1523 J. Fitzherbert Bk. Husbandry f. xliiiv To fall the vnder wood.
[…]
1685 in Colonial Rec. Pennsylvania (1852) I. 128 A Penalty to be laid upon such as Cutt or fall Marked..trees.
[…]
1744 R. Molesworth Short Course Standing Rules Govt. & Conduct Army iv. 65 Tools, as well for moving Earth, as for cutting down Hedges or Copsewood, falling Timber.
1803 H. Repton Observ. Landscape Gardening v. 75 The most beautiful places may rather be formed by falling, than by planting trees.
[…]
1875 W. D. Parish Dict. Sussex Dial. 40 These trees are getting too thick, I shall fall a few of them next year.
1883 Harper’s Mag. Jan. 201/1 We must fall a tree straight and true.
1913 U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals Rep. 118 182 The general custom is for the foreman to tell the men who are about to fall timber to be careful about teams and men who are working around.
1974 W. Leeds Herefordshire Speech 61 Fall, to fell (a tree).
1981 in Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. (1991) II. 341/1 They had each fallen a tree.
2010 A. Krien Into Woods 127 Well, of course we’re meant to fall them [sc. a few trees]. That’s why we’re here.

Are you familiar with this transitive usage? (Thanks, Martin!)