Archives for January 2011

Another book I’ve just finished (it’s good to have some time off from editing!) is Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. I’ve posted enthusiastically about it several times already (1, 2, 3), and I will reiterate that it’s one of the best works of historical scholarship I’ve ever read, exhaustive without being exhausting, lively and constantly illuminating (this sentence from page 334 memorably sums up the psychology of the purges: “In other words, we have injured some Koreans, therefore we can assume all Koreans are now our enemies”). If you have any interest in the topic, you must read this book. I’ll just add some language-related bits from the last section. On the beginning of the change from Latin alphabets to Cyrillic for minority languages (p. 421):

The attack on latinization came from local party leaders, who appealed to central party organs over the head of TsIK [the Central Executive Committee, the Soviet legislature] and the Soviet of Nationalities. The test case for the reversal of latinization proved to be the Kabardinian alphabet. VTsK NA [the All-Union Central Committee of the New Alphabet] was aware of the Kabardinians’ desire to shift to Russian already in 1933 but successfully stalled action on it for three years…. The Soviet of Nationalities … endorsed the shift on June 5, 1936, making Kabardinian the first Soviet language to be officially delatinized.

[Read more…]

Last month I wrote an annoyed post after reading a chapter or so of The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge. Now I’ve finished the book, and those initial irritations have faded from my mind, in part because they seem to have been concentrated in the early pages and in part because I was too gripped by the novel to care any more. It’s not a great novel in Nabokovian terms; the characters are memorable but one-dimensional, and the prose is only serviceable. Furthermore, it will frustrate people who need a central protagonist to bear the weight of the story—Serge didn’t believe in the importance of the individual (including himself), and he keeps jumping from one character to the next in order to give as full a picture as possible. But that picture is overwhelming and unforgettable; Serge was in Stalin’s prisons for years (saved only by a campaign by Western writers), he talked to everyone and remembered everything, and he was determined to tell the world about it. I would tell anyone interested in Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s to read Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, the classic factual account, and Serge’s novel, which will make you feel what it was like for both the victims of trumped-up cases and the government functionaries who created the cases and then as often as not were arrested themselves. Now I’m very much looking forward to Serge’s World War II novel The Unforgiving Years.

No, not the Kurosawa movie (which I highly recommend; I mentioned it briefly here); I’m just giving a brief description of two books I finally ordered after wanting them for ages, that happened to arrive together in today’s mail: Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953, edited by James Von Geldern and Richard Stites, and Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905-1940, edited by Catriona Kelly. The first is the companion volume to Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life 1779-1917, which I discussed here, and it looks just as wonderful; the second overlaps in temporal coverage but not otherwise, because it is an anthology of snippets of Russian modernism, a purely high-culture phenomenon. In fact, it’s just the kind of book I’d been idly thinking of putting together myself someday, with a mix of the famous (Bely, Blok, Nabokov) and the forgotten (Shershenevich, Yutkevich, Poplavsky); being fundamentally lazy, I’m glad Ms. Kelly did it for me. I’m sure I’ll be posting about both as I make my way through them, which I intend to do at night after my wife has fallen asleep to my reading (which is currently The Master and Margarita—I’m reading it to her in English and reading along in Russian on my own, and I’m sure I’ll be posting about that as well).

Everybody loves quotations, but most people are content to attribute them to the first famous quote-provider that comes to hand (Twain, Wilde, Churchill, the usual suspects). A few intrepid souls undertake the hard work of tracking down who actually said it first; the most prominent in my mind is Fred R. Shapiro, who created the great Yale Book of Quotations, a long-needed replacement for the worthy but unreliable Bartlett’s. But a book either has the quote you want or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t you’re thrown on your own resources; now (since last April) there is a new resource, the Quote Investigator (“Dedicated to the Investigation and Tracing of Quotations”). The first post said “This blog tries to track down correct information about the provenance of sayings by utilizing the massive text databases that are being constructed right now along with other quotation history resources,” and the About page tells you a bit about Dr. O’Toole, who created it. He has the dogged attention to detail and accuracy necessary for the work, and I’m glad he’s taken it on. Send him your dubious quotes!

Erin McKean, always a LH favorite, has a Boston Globe column on “a year’s worth of the best and worst stories about words”; it’s a nice rundown, except that I wish she hadn’t given a certain self-promoting nitwit more of the publicity he craves. Since I don’t wish to give him any myself, I’ll just say you can read about him and his stupid site here.
While I’m at it, another favorite, Michele A. Berdy (who comments here as “mab”), has a Moscow Times column on “The Top 7 [Russian] Words of the Year”; even if you don’t know Russian, it will give you a useful summary of what Russians in general and Muscovites in particular have been obsessing about. Congratulations on surviving the аномальные погодные условия, mab!

The Telegraph has a fine obit of a man I’d never heard of and am glad to know about, Gene Smith, “long regarded as the most knowledgeable of all Western scholars of Tibet and as the person who almost single-handedly ensured the survival of Tibetan literature after the Chinese invasion in 1950.” I’ll let you read about his remarkable work of finding and copying manuscripts there (“As a sideline Smith wrote introductions to the copied texts which far outstripped existing Western knowledge of Tibetan literary history and rapidly acquired cult status among academics”); here I’ll just quote this bit about his education in languages:

He was formidably intelligent as well as enterprising, and went on to study at small colleges in the north-west of the United States and at the University of Utah before turning to Asian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1960. There, studying with Deshung Rinpoche and other masters who had escaped from Tibet, he became fluent in both colloquial and classical Tibetan.
In 1964 he travelled to Leiden in Holland for advanced studies in Sanskrit and Pali (the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures) before winning the fellowship from the Ford Foundation which enabled him to go to India a year later.
Professionally, Smith was a librarian, and after leaving the New Delhi office of the Library of Congress in 1985, he went on to serve with it in Jakarta (1985-94) and in Cairo (1994-97), becoming expert in Indonesian and Egyptian cultures too (he was said to have been able to read in 32 languages).

(Thanks, Paul.)

James Davidson, a classicist of wide-ranging interests, frequently writes for the LRB, and last October he had a long review of a book that would normally get covered in a brisk paragraph or two in the TLS (“…worthy continuation of a valuable series… a few minor lapses should be noted…”), A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia, edited by T. Corsten (Oxford, 496 pp, £125.00). Mind you, he doesn’t actually get around to Greek names until the halfway point, and doesn’t get to the book being reviewed until perhaps the three-quarter mark, but a detailed review of Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia is not really the LRB’s remit. The whole thing is a mine of informative and delightful tidbits; I’ll quote a few to whet your appetite:

It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of J-names for boys in English-speaking countries is very ancient. A more recent trend is for names that end in -an or -en. This may be enough to account for the meteoric rise on both sides of the Atlantic of Jayden, coming soon to a playground near you, a lovely sounding name, without history or significance, which first entered the US top 1000 only in 1994. Or perhaps the -en sound has become a masculinising suffix, so that Jayden is a male form of Jade. An ‘ee’ sound has also become dominant in the top ten of girls’ names, assisting the revival of Ruby, Lily, Chloe and Sophie/Sophia – which currently enjoys remarkable popularity all over the world, from Russia to Argentina and from Germany to New Zealand. …

This fluidity is enabled by a traditional freedom in naming. The Rev. Easther noted – merely as a curiosity – that already in early 19th-century Yorkshire, children were being baptised with diminutives: Fred, Ben, Willie, Joe, Tom. Everywhere, some names could be given to both girls and boys – Hilary, Evelyn, Lesley, Happy, Providence – and the practice of using surnames as forenames was well established. Particular groups have periodically used this customary licence to bestow unusual names. Thus the sloganeering names of Nonconformists: Freewill Shepherd, Praisegod Silkes, Feargod Hodge, River Jordan and, reputedly, Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon, whose father, Praise-God Barebone, lent his surname to the Barebones Parliament of the mid-17th century. An American dialectologist noted that in the southern Appalachians in the early 20th century,

One girl was named Vest for no other reason than that her father wrapped her in his vest when she was only a week old and carried her proudly across the hollow to display his first-born before admiring neighbours … Three brothers in the little settlement of Shawnee bear the names Meek, Bent and Wild. Lem and Lum are the names of twins. One young man carried the substantial name of Anvil, and another that of Whetstone. A small mountain boy has Speed as his Christian name.

Until very recently, most European countries fiercely resisted such typically English laissez-faire. You could not use surnames as forenames; you could not register diminutives; names must be taken from the calendar of saints or the otherwise illustrious of the nation’s past; names must be either masculine or feminine, but not both; names had to be given in the correct form of an official language. So, while Friday has occasionally been used as a forename in England and America for several centuries, when, in 2006, an Italian couple wanted to name their child Venerdì, a judge refused and took it on himself to rename the boy Gregorio; the name Friday carried negative, potentially damaging, connotations, he argued, citing Robinson Crusoe, Friday the 13th and the Crucifixion. Some countries, notably Germany, Sweden and Denmark, maintain approved lists, cared for in the last case by academic specialists at the University of Copenhagen, and parents must go through a special and sometimes expensive appeals procedure if they wish to name their child something off-piste.

However, licence is spreading rapidly. The number of appeals against the name-lists has increased rapidly in recent years and threatens to overwhelm the system, causing even Hans, Jens and Jørgen to wonder if this might not be a waste of government time and taxpayers’ money. Recently, the Danes have allowed Christopher and Swedish courts have allowed Google, Metallica and Q, though not Albin spelled Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssql-bb11116 in a vain attempt to test the law; even the laid-back English registrars insist a name must be readable and contain no numbers; it should also contain no titles, which leads one to wonder how Princess Tiaamii passed.

Now, here I (tentatively and deferentially) take issue with him:

An interesting case is the name Alexander. It looks very much as if it is a typically Greek dithematic compound of alex (‘defend’) and andr (‘man’). In the Iliad it is an alternative name for Paris, prince of Troy. There was therefore some excitement in the 1920s when a long Hittite document was found to be a treaty between a Hittite king and one Alaksandu lord of Wilusa – now almost universally accepted as the Hittite name for Ilion/Troy. Alexander could therefore be an example of a foreign Anatolian name being Hellenised into Greek-sounding syllables or, just as intriguingly and rather more probably, a 13th-century BC Greek (or Greek-named) ‘Alexander’, Hitticised as Alaksandu, a name that would be the 17th most popular in the far distant British Isles in 2010, approximately 3300 years later.

How can he say “rather more probably” about names from over three thousand years ago, given in circumstances totally unknown to us? The reverse has always seemed probable to me, that an Anatolian name Alaksandu got Hellenized and eggcornized to Alexandros. But we’ll never know. Anyway, here’s a bit on the actual book being reviewed:

In this region, somewhat unusually, the most popular name, by far, was Apollonius, pushing Dionysius into second place; Demetrius is in third place and Artemidorus fourth. Alexander is in fifth place, with two examples from little Ilium, seat of prehistoric Alaksandu. The region seems even more fond of god-names than elsewhere, and some of them throw interesting light on local cults. The popularity of Apollonius and Artemidorus shows the importance of Apollo to the Ionians and of the great shrine of Artemis in Ephesus. The importance of Cybele, the local Mountain Mother, and the Phrygian moon-god Mēn is reflected in the frequency of the names Metrodorus (sixth most popular) and Menodorus. Greeks generally avoided names associated with underworld divinities such as Hades and Persephone, so the popularity of Hecate-names, including ‘Gift of Hecate’ Hecatodorus, confirms other evidence that the goddess of witchcraft had a more benign aspect in this part of the Greek world.

Even the most popular name, Apollonius, was shared by barely 2.5 per cent of the population, while the top ten male names accounted for about 15 per cent, the top ten female names for about 12 per cent; most of the top ten female names are Lallnamen (‘baby-babble’): Ammia, Tatia, Apphia. But there are also virtue-names such as Virtue (Arete), Justice and Peace (Irene). Well over half the names are attested only once in the region. These include a Sappho, an Ophelia, a Stephane, a Priam (from Pergamum), a Boar, a Quail, a Sparrow, a Foam, a Pebble (or Vote) and an Amazon, an Encolpius (whose father may or may not have read Petronius’ Satyricon), a Wonderful (or Miraculous: Thaumasios) and a Shitty (Copreus) of Teos, an Old Woman (Graus), who is male, and a man named Named (Onomastos) from Smyrna, a Ioseph, a Samouel, a Nigella, an Aemilia, a Martin, a Loukipher and a Christopher.

The online version has appended a very interesting letter from Stephen Oren of Chicago about a possible a connection “between James Davidson’s observation, in his review of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, that the name Jesus/Joshua is missing among Greek personal names ‘in all regions’ and David Nirenberg’s statement in the same issue that Moshe/Moses was an unusual name for Maimonides.” And the twins Lem and Lum reminded me of the brilliant poem at the end of this post by The Growling Wolf:

On a Frostly Snowly Dawn
by Elmer Snowedin, The Daily Growler Poet Laureate

Snooding, grumpy, porcupinish Lum limping sledlike
to plough towards his fainting light, that held high by his
crying wife on a porch that is swaying as the snow dumps
itself blindingly between the man who’d gone a’fore and now
is coming back the vision of a holy ghost
on a snowy white apparitional steed unleashed from
God’s open refrigerator door…yes, there is a light in Heaven.

I’ve been muttering “Snooding, grumpy, porcupinish Lum” to myself ever since I read it.

Addendum. I forgot to mention the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names website, which is well worth checking out.

For a month, anyway. They’re having a free trial of OED Online through February 5; login with “trynewoed”/”trynewoed.” Hat tip to Ben Zimmer.

I’ll bet you thought (if you ever gave it any thought) that short s (the s we know today) was used at the ends of words and long s (the one that looks like an f to us: ſ) everywhere else. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not nearly that simple, and I know because Andrew West of BabelStone wrote a long, long post about it back in 2006 (now updated with n-grams!) providing all the information you could possibly want about usage not only in English but in French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages, with many images. Enjoy (if, of course, this is the sort of thing you enjoy)!

Anatoly has a hilarious post describing his desperate attempts to figure out what was amiss with his incorrectly remembered Russian word дикозабр [dikozabr]. He saw a picture of one, wanted to know how to say it in English, looked it up, and quickly realized he must be mangling the true word… but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what that was. He tried changing some of the sounds around in his head, but got nowhere. Googling only got four results, but one of them was very promising; a woman wrote: “Сказала слово ‘дикозабр’ и долго не могла понять, что же в нем не так….” (“I said the word ‘dikozabr’ and for a long time couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it…”). However, when he visited the site, he discovered that the end was “…and only by looking through an alphabetical encyclopedia of animals was I able to find it”! He objurgates her for not writing down the word, adding “How are we to build a brighter future with such people?” Then he asks his wife, and she tells him the answer. He ends his post:

In a minute I’ll click on the Publish button, this entry will appear in the journal, and soon it will appear in search results on the word “dikozabr.” I know, I believe—there will be someone tomorrow, or next month or next year, who will be as I am today, rushing around the net to find the correct name of the dikozabr. I can see him opening this post, impatiently scanning the text, getting a sneaking suspicion that I will spite him the way devushka.ru did me and I won’t say the secret, coveted word here… Fear not, future reader! To describe the whole story only to maliciously stand you up in the end—I couldn’t do that. The word you’re craving is дикобраз [dikobraz, ‘porcupine’].

The odd thing is that дикобраз has never seemed a suitable word to me somehow. I absorbed other animal names without a problem: sobaka ‘dog,’ koshka ‘cat,’ loshad’ ‘horse,’ sure… but for some reason dikobraz just didn’t sound like a porcupine.