Archives for May 2011

Those are three names (Spanish, Turkish, and Korean respectively) for what appears to be an amazingly widespread children’s game involving five stones (or similar small objects); you can read about the South American version in detail here (if you know Spanish), and you can read a lively discussion about it in the comments to this post at Poemas del río Wang, the perfect place for such a thing to come to light. MOCKBA (a frequent commenter here) writes:

I’m still puzzled about the Korean five-stone game tradition — which seems to be quite old, with each Korean province developing its own name for this girls’ game which is generically known as gonggi. But there is definitely some continuum of five-stone game traditions, stretching across South and SE Asia (Kallangal, Anchangal in villages of Tamilnadu; Achenagandlu, Achamgilla, Chintapikkalata or Gachakayalata played by girls in Andhra Pradesh; Eidu Kallinnna Atta in Karnataka; Fatranim, a girls’ game in Goa; Txwv — a girls’ game of Hmong; Singaporean five stones; Batu Seremban in Malaysia). I couldn’t find any refs its being played by the Chinese or the Arabs, but Kugelach is known to Israelis and Ashik to Bulgarians (of course that’s Turkic for knucklebone). But just a short distance away, in Hungary or Russia, it’s like never existed at all. What sort of cultural diffusion would have a let a trace so long and so convoluted?

Araz responds, “Silk Road is the only answer coming to my mind immediately. The fact that it is a girls’ game would increase the diffusion, in my humble opinion.” (The fact that it is a girls’ game might also explain why it has been, apparently, so little known to non-girls or studied by scholars, if such is the case. I found a mention of it in Elizabeth Yoel Campbell’s Yesterday’s Children: Growing Up Assyrian in Persia, p. 32: “Homer and Willie bought some balloons, which are actually inflated sheep’s bladders scrubbed clean, some knuckle bones to play besh dash (a game like tossing dice) and beautiful, bouncy string balls.” And googling “five-stone game” led me to the Groot woordeboek, which tells me that it’s called klip-klip [‘stone-stone’] in Afrikaans.) Once again we see that Poemas del río Wang is an intellectual and spiritual Silk Road of our day.

Update. See now the wonderfully illustrated and musically accompanied roundup at río Wang.

If you’re curious how txwv is pronounced, you can hear it sung in this video of the song “Zov hiav txwv tos koj,” where the lyrics are very helpfully scrolled and highlighted as the singer reaches them; I should point out that final consonants in written Hmong words are tone markers (-v is mid-rising).

I don’t play Scrabble much any more, though I’ve always enjoyed it (very amateurishly), so my reaction to the expansion of official vocabulary is muted. My instinct is to resent it (though I do like qin and fiqh), but I recognize that that’s mostly old-fartism at work, and discount accordingly. However, I bring this story about it to your attention for the first sentence: “Scrabble, one of the last bastions of grammatical purism in a world overrun by cell phone text abbreviations, is capitulating to the times.” Grammatical purism? What do people think grammar is, anyway?

Justin E. H. Smith (a professor of philosophy with an interest in literature and a good working knowledge of Russian) has an interesting post on “Reading Ada, or Ardor,” from which I will extract the first few paragraphs:

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say ‘party line’ I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What’s more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it—again, in his words—the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

[Read more…]

According to this story, “Kevin Scannell, a computer science professor at St. Louis University has created IndigenousTweets.com, a website that tracks speakers of indigenous or minority languages on Twitter. The site is generated by a computer program that trawls the Twittersphere to recognise languages. Scannell has been blogging about his project here.” An interesting and unexpected use of social media. And while we’re on the subject of endangered languages, here’s a nice Telegraph story by Richard Alleyne, about an “Oxford University mission to save a language spoken by three people,” namely Dusner. I know some of you are even now grumbling about the waste of resources involved in “saving” a language that’s going to die anyway, but read the story before you dismiss it. Thanks, Jeremy and Paul!

Having taken another course from Professor Sashura, I’m going to pass on some more information that may be of general interest but will certainly help anyone trying to make their way through Life and Fate in the original (the Amazon link is to the Chandler translation my wife gave me for Christmas). In chapter 38, the pilots about to leave the northern village where they have been held in reserve to return to the front are discussing the relative merits of German and Soviet fighters, and one of them says that the German pilot “doesn’t like horizontal fighting, he tries to get vertical.” Someone else agrees, saying “Who doesn’t know that? Even the village girls know he breaks away from tight turns.” Then comes the line I needed help with: “Эх, «чаечек» надо было тогда получше прикрыть, там люди хорошие” [‘Well, then, the chaechki should have been covered better, those are good people there’]. I figured out that chaechki was a diminutive of chaiki ‘seagulls,’ even though it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries (even the ones that have a lot of obscure diminutives), but the only definition for chaika I could find was the literal ‘seagull,’ which obviously (from both context and scare quotes) wasn’t intended here. So I wrote Sashura, who provided his usual full explanation:

Chayka was the nickname of the Red Army’s И-153 fighter plane (И – for истребитель, same as F designation in USAF), a biplane that was the mainstay in the Soviet air force throughout the later 1930s and early 1940s. The nickname is because of the gull-like shape of its wings. While it was superior to Japanese aircraft in 1939, shooting them down at a rate of 3 to 1, it wasn’t an even match for the German Messerschmitt 109. They talk about their engagement near Rzhev, the bloody continuation of the Moscow counteroffensive. By the time of the battle of Stalingrad the Polikarpov-designed Chaykas were mostly replaced by monoplane Yaks and American Airacobras, but many pilots had warm feelings towards the older planes, as the phrase shows (прикрыть – to give cover, covering fire).
This is brilliant, how the scene is built! The pilots are discussing fighting manoeuvres and saying that German pilots don’t like dog-fights involving tight curves (виражи), for which the Chaykas were famous. Then one pilot says, even girls in the village know that ‘he’ (the enemy, Germans) avoids tight turns. Chayka is of course feminine. The gender of the word prompts the next comment about giving better support to Chayka planes. Then they all stay quiet thinking about their girlfriends in the village whom they will leave in the morning.

He’s absolutely right about the brilliance of the scene, and the deeper I get into the book the more I feel its greatness—I’m deeply grateful to Sashura for urging me to read it in the original. (For one thing, I would have missed this line entirely, since Chandler leaves it out, as he tends to do with difficult lines; I don’t want to be overly harsh, since it’s a common practice among translators, it’s a huge and difficult book that presumably, like most such jobs, had a too-tight deadline, and readers won’t notice unless they’re familiar with the original, but it’s a nuisance when you’re reading the original and checking the translation mainly to help resolve just such difficulties. Also, leaving out the line makes the sudden silence in the next line unintelligible.)

A reader sent me a link to Harold Bloom’s 2008 NYRB review (single page) of the new Yale University Press edition (with restored footnotes, “extraordinarily copious and rich”) of Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language (only $300!). I’ve called Bloom a blowhard, and he is, but when he’s talking about Yiddish (of which he is a native speaker, which I hadn’t known), he’s much more interesting than when he’s bloviating about the anxiety of influence. In his discussion of Weinreich’s Chapter 2, “Yiddish in the Framework of Other Jewish Languages,” Bloom says “Hebrew itself probably began as a fusion language” before mentioning Babylonian, Aramaic, Hellenistic Greek, Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino:

Weinreich’s zest for Jewish languages was awesome; you can drown happily in his oceanic discussions of Marranos (converted Jews secretly practicing Judaism) using the Portuguese language, or of deviations from Arabic and Turkish idioms in the other varieties of Ladino. The byways lead Weinreich into folklore, which aids him in asserting that “of all Jewish languages Yiddish has…the largest degree of individuality.” Literary achievement in Yiddish, even now underestimated, sustains the linguistic esteem that Weinreich conferred on a tongue that he himself had not spoken as a child.

He also quotes at length from another wonderful book on Yiddish that I do own and am surprised I haven’t mentioned on LH, Benjamin Harshav’s The Meaning of Yiddish, about which the Times Literary Supplement said, quite accurately, “It is a remarkable feat of high popularization, written with great flair and without a hint of pedantry. . . . The book should be read by all who are interested in language.” An enjoyable review of a book I’ll probably never read; thanks, Rick!

I’m still reading Grossman’s Life and Fate (see here and here), and I’m here to report on another lexical item that required some interesting research. I was proud of myself for correctly analyzing начканц [nachkants] as начальник канцелярии [nachal’nik kantselyarii, ‘chief clerk’] without assistance, but on the very next page I hit матчасть [matchast’] and was lost at sea. The sentence was “Вот уже месяц, как полк вышел из боев, пополнял матчасть, принимал взамен выбывшего летный состав” [‘It had already been a month since the regiment had withdrawn from combat to replenish/restock its matchast’ and replace its missing flight personnel’]; it was clearly part of the makeup of a military unit, but what? It turns out it’s short for материальная часть [material’naya chast’], which means ‘equipment, matériel,’ which makes sense. And in the course of googling it, I found it’s commonly used in the phrase Учи(те) матчасть ‘Learn your equipment,’ and that led me to the wonderful site Луркоморье, “русский lurkmore”—i.e., a Russian version/equivalent of the English-language site lurkmore.com, which apparently deals with memes among other things. What’s wonderful about the Russian site is not just the full explanation of things like the phrase I was researching, but the name, which is a beautiful pun on “lurkmore” and лукоморье [lukomor’e] ‘cove, creek,’ one of the best-known rare words in Russian because of its strategic presence in one of the best-known lines of Russian poetry, the beginning of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila: У лукоморья дуб зеленый ‘By a cove a green oak’ (see the first paragraph of this LH post for some context). This is further proof of the difference between America and Russia: even young Russian snarkmeisters of the type who create and classify internet memes are steeped in their poetic tradition in a way few Americans have been for a couple of generations now.

At any rate, the Луркоморье entry for the phrase not only helpfully equates it (in the appropriate context) to the English RTFM, it mentions that it entered popular culture in part from a 1973 movie «В бой идут одни „старики“» [No rookies in this battle!] and it provides a “bearded joke” from WWII: The Germans carry out a raid on an airfield and capture a technician. The Gestapo torture him: “Give us the specifications of the Il-2!” He says “I don’t know, leave me alone!” This goes on for a day or two, until the technician manages to escape. When he gets back to his unit, they, of course, start asking him about his experiences. He says, “Guys, learn your equipment! Over there, they just keep beating the shit out of you about it.”

Update (July 2023). The Lurkomore site is down, but archives are available here.

I am delighted to report that Helen DeWitt’s new novel, Lightning Rods, will be published by New Directions in October (as reported by Helen here); you can preorder it at that Amazon link, or wherever you like, or simply wait for it to appear at your local bookstore (if such things still exist by then). If you’re not familiar with the author, I refer you to my 2003 rave about her first novel (which has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name). Huzzah for her and for New Directions, which has been doing its damnedest to save American literature for many decades now (note the list of forthcoming publications provided in the second parenthetical paragraph of this post—my, I do seem to be addicted to parentheses).

Thomas G. Lannon of the New York Public Library has posted “A History of the Library as Seen Through Notable Researchers” at the Library blog:

One unique way to trace the history of the Library is through call slips. In order to use books in the research collection, patrons request specific titles by filling out a call slip, which includes the following information: author, title, and call number. Not all call slips have been saved over the years, but some have been preserved for posterity. Here are their stories.

Read about Max Eastman and Aristophanes (1920), Lewis Mumford and Moby-Dick (1928), and other relics of bygone research, each with an image of the bit of paper by which the books were requested, which has changed pleasingly little over the years. (I’m sure I have some of them around the house; I filled out more than I ever actually turned in.) Thanks, Leslie!

You’ve probably seen the touching statement “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy” quite a lot lately, attributed to one of the usual suspects (or “quote magnets,” as Dave Wilton of wordorigins.org calls them); it was actually composed by Jessica Dovey, “a principled and reserved 24-year-old teaching English in Kobe” (according to this interview at The Atlantic). By all means read Megan McArdle’s fascinating account of how Dovey’s Facebook post got reposted without the crucial quotation marks and misattributed and tweeted and retweeted until the entire world seemed to be quoting it; it’s a tale for our hyperconnected times. I made the mistake of reading some of the comments on both Atlantic threads, which are full of the usual asininity and bile; this one (from the interview) illustrates a common confusion about what grammar involves: “I think this young woman’s original post (the words that came from her own mouth) is wonderful. We can’t fault her for a grammatical error made by someone who reposted her comment and lost the original quotation marks.” You’re doing a bad job, English teachers!