I got the latest (July/August) issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine today, and you can imagine my pleasure when I saw in large letters on the cover “Why ‘bad’ English isn’t.” I turned to page 37 and discovered this article by Peggy Kalb, featuring Yale’s Grammatical Diversity Project: “The group of 12-plus graduate and undergraduate students, led by linguistics professor Raffaella Zanuttini, is compiling existing data on the grammar of many varieties of American English, along with a complete database of their studies. They’re also putting together a map for every piece of data that belongs to a particular geographical region… Unlike the Dictionary of American Regional English, their focus is on syntax, not vocabulary.” Kalb provides a good summary:
Archives for July 2013
A HOMEOPATHIC FOOT.
I’m reading Lazhechnikov‘s second novel, Ледяной дом (The ice house [translated as The Palace of Ice], 1835; Russian text), a great improvement on his first, Последний Новик (The Last Novik), whose beginning was so boring I gave up on it; it’s set in the final year of Anna‘s reign, 1739/40, and has already featured a parade of nationalities, plots in high places, a Moldavian gypsy whose daughter is a confidante of the empress’s, and a man turned into an icicle, all in the first few chapters. But a phrase puzzled me: the gypsy’s daughter, getting into a carriage with the empress, is described as having a гомеопатическая ножка ‘homeopathic (little) foot.’ I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it meant, but when I looked in my New Great Russian-English Dictionary and discovered the second meaning was “fig. minute, very small,” it made perfect sense. The OED tells me the same figurative meaning was once current in English as well: “fig. Very small or minute, like the doses usually given in homœopathy. (Often humorous.).” The citations:
1838 Dickens Oliver Twist III. xli. 102 Mr. Claypole taking cold beef from the dish and porter from the pot, and administering homœopathic doses of both to Charlotte.
1841 J. L. Motley Corr. (1889) I. iv. 70 Prussia is a mild despotism to be sure. ‘Tis the homœopathic tyranny—small doses, constantly administered, and strict diet and regimen.
1876 C. M. Davies Unorthodox London 307 The chapel was homœopathic in its dimensions.
WOOLF’S VOICE.
From Dangerous Minds:
Virginia Woolf discusses words, language and writing in this the only surviving recording of her voice.
Originally broadcast for a programme entitled Words Fail Me, by BBC Radio, on April 29th, 1937. Woolf’s almost regal pronunciation can be heard reading her essay on “Craftsmanship,” which was later published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942).
The transcript of this broadcast can be found here.
It’s somehow astonishing to hear her upper-class accent (though of course it makes sense); somehow one doesn’t expect a writer to sound like that. And after her eloquent and sensible remarks about words and their “need of change” (“It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that…. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive”), it is amusing to hear her say “one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty.” Now, of course, the period she’s lamenting is considered a high point of literature. The more things change…
SUBTLE CHANGES.
Arika Okrent, a longtime LH favorite (see this post), has a mental_floss post called “4 Changes to English So Subtle We Hardly Notice They’re Happening,” and it’s just the kind of language reporting I like to see, focused on something other than the usual funny-word or dubious-press-release material. She starts off:
Everyone knows that language changes. It’s easy to pick out words that have only been recently introduced (bromance, YOLO, derp) or sentence constructions that have gone out of style (How do you do? Have you a moment?), but we are constantly in the middle of language change that may not be noticeable for decades or even centuries. Some of the biggest and most lasting changes to language happen slowly and imperceptibly. The Great Vowel Shift, for example, was a series of pronunciation changes occurring over 350 years, and not really noticed for over 100 years after that. It resulted in an intelligibility gap between Modern and Middle English and created the annoying misalignment between English pronunciation and spelling. But it was impossible to see while it was going on.
These days, however, it is possible to spot subtle linguistic changes by analyzing large digital collections of text or transcribed speech, some of which cover long periods of time. Linguists can run the numbers on these large corpora to determine the direction of language use trends and whether they are statistically significant. Here are 4 rather subtle changes happening in English, as determined by looking at the numbers.
And she goes on to discuss the increasing use of “-ing” complements, the progressive tense, the modals “going to,” “have to,” “need to,” and “want to,” and the “get” passive. Fun and educational!
POETS AND CZARS.
Another fine essay by Mikhail Shishkin (see this post), discussing the history of relations between the intelligentsia (particularly the literary part of it) and the rulers of Russia:
Poets appeared in Russia in the eighteenth century. They wore officers’ uniforms and mostly wrote odes for the accession of German empresses onto the Russian throne. In a country where life was lived according to the wartime principle of unity of command, everyone including poets served the government, which was personified by the autocracy. But everything changed with Pushkin. Born in a country where serfdom was only the formal expression of a deep internal psychological slavery, he achieved the most important Russian coup, the greatest Russian revolution: in opposition to the pyramid of power, at the head of which the Czar administers the fates of individuals and nations, he created an alternative pyramid, at the head of which stood the poet. The juxtaposition of the czar and the holy fool—the old divided paradigm of authority—was exchanged for the juxtaposition of the czar and the poet.
Minor quibble: I think rhetorical effectiveness seduced him into writing “The point of Peter’s reforms was to obtain military technology from the West in order to do battle against that very same West”; Peter didn’t want to do battle against the West, he wanted to do battle against the Swedes and Turks, and he genuinely admired the West (which, for him, principally meant the Dutch). Thanks, Paul!
PERSIAN AS A LINGUA FRANCA.
David Blow has a brief TLS review (subscription only) of what sounds like a very interesting book, Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order
Persian as a lingua franca spread not only through much of the Islamic world, but even as far as China during the thirteenth century, when Iran was loosely incorporated into the Mongol Empire. David Morgan shows how Persian became for a time the most important foreign language in China, where it was used in commercial exchanges with Muslim merchants profiting from the Pax Mongolica. But it was the Muslim realms in India that most fully adopted the Persian language and culture. The high point was reached in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the generous patronage offered by the wealthy Indian courts, and especially the Mughal court, attracted many poets from Iran. Muhammad Aslam Syed traces the decline of Persian in Muslim India and the rise of Urdu, a related vernacular language, to the second half of the eighteenth century. He associates it with the “humiliating” sack of Delhi by the Iranian ruler, Nadir Shah, in 1739, and the rise of a “new nobility” of poets who were merchants and shopkeepers and were uncomfortable with Persian as the language of the “old nobility”. The final blow to the status of Persian in India came in 1835 when the East India Company replaced it with English as the official language and in 1837 with Urdu as the language of the law courts. But for many, the loss of Persian was a cause for lament. Syed quotes the Indian poet Ghalib (1797-1869), who is regarded as the greatest Urdu poet, but who also composed poems in Persian: “If you want to see all the colours of life, read my Persian poetry, my Urdu diwan does not have all those colours. Persian is the mirror (of life) and Urdu is just like rust on that mirror (with which you start but when it is clean, it is Persian)”.
VELTMAN’S KOSHCHEI.
I spent most of June reading Кощей бессмертный [Koshchei the Immortal], an 1833 novel by Alexander Veltman (see this LH post—I translated a bit from the opening of the novel here), and once again I am stupefied that such an enjoyable and unique writer has been so utterly forgotten. I described the plot, such as it is, succinctly in the Wikipedia article I created for him, calling the book “a parody of the historical adventure novels popular at the time”: “Its hero, Iva Olelkovich Puta-Zarev, is a sort of Russian Don Quixote, his brains addled by overexposure to Russian folklore. After his marriage, he imagines that his bride has been captured by Koshchei, and after various adventures the couple are reunited.” But this does not at all represent the experience of reading the book, which after the opening scene with the brainless and brutal young Iva Olelkovich forgets about him for almost half the novel, and the title remains mysterious for even longer. In the twelfth chapter comes the first mention of Koshchei; Veltman has been describing a bit of medieval history, and suddenly he’s interrupted by his readership: “Mstislav was worthy of being called the Great… —Fine, let’s say he was worthy, but what does that have to do with us? Where is Koshchei the Immortal? Where’s Iva?” [Мстислав стоил имени Великого… — Положим, что стоил, да что нам до этого? Где Кощей бессмертный? Где Ива?] He soothingly responds “All in good time!” and continues the history lesson.
As usual, my response to a book that’s difficult to describe is to provide extensive quotes and hope to convey something of the quality. The translations are, of course, mine (none of his novels have been translated, a situation I wish some publisher would remedy); the Russian is at the end of the post. First, a selection from near the end of the first of the novel’s three parts:
Having examined all the manuscripts, plain and parchment, all the ancient legends and rusty Kernels of History [Veltman is referring to the Ядро Российской истории (Kernel of Russian History) composed by the diplomat Aleksei Mankiev around 1715 and published in 1770], I have found in them not a single word about the events which I am handing down to posterity.
This omission should lie especially heavily upon the soul of the Novgorod chronicler.
There was probably some sort of personal animus against someone from the Puta-Zarev family!
But let us leave these investigations. The reader can have no doubt concerning the truth of tradition and of my words.
* * *
“In the year 6728 [i.e., 1220],” says an unknown chronicler, “Iva Ivorovich fared forth from the land of the Slavs toward Jerusalem and nigh adjoinant the marketplace of Chernavets [? (probably this town] was caitived by the Hungarish Aidamaks and affronted and wellnigh done to death, and he made away, and made his way to the marketplace of Roman [? (probably this town)], where for ruth he was taken by an Urmen [?] merchant and carried to Dichin (Dinogetia) and further…” But in the manuscript there is nothing further…
XIX
In 1262—when all the land of Rus was tributary to the Tatars and only the daring Daniel of Galicia had not abandoned his beloved meditations on means of winning freedom from the yoke of the heathen Taurmens, Bessermens, Bakhmits—around the end of Afterlithe [July] or rather around the beginning of Lammas-month [August], in the Downstream [?] region, the lord of a village near the Dana-Stry [Dniester] had his name-day, and while awaiting his guests he was giving orders in his fine lordly estate.
* * *
To provide at least some elucidation of the foregoing, we must tell the reader that the abovementioned lord is in no way a personage extraneous to that generation that is the subject of my lengthy speech, word, song, tale, legend, story, account, fabrication, poem, kernel, novel.
He was dignified by the name of Lord Savva Ivich Puta-Zarev.
And now, from the third and fifth chapters of the second part, showing his way with historical and narrative transitions:
A new ancestor of the lordling, the hero of the tale, as the Chronicler writes, was born in a most ungrateful time for storytelling. The time of wizards, sorceresses, soothsayers, astrologers, and magicians had collapsed with the manifestation of the holy faith. And the time of bogatyrs and heroes had also passed into eternity with the appearance of the Tatars. The last were Alexander Popovich and his servant Torop, Dobrynya Ryazanych of the Golden Belt, and seventy other bogatyrs who were lost at the source of that bloody river which flooded all the land of Rus, but that will not hinder us from passing through the darkness that lay over that expanse which held the cradle of our good forefathers the Scythians.
Everything will be renewed!
* * *
On the left side of the river Dana-Stry, near Studenitsa, on the riverbank’s slope, there is a hill, and on that hill Stano, on her knees, lay her head on the pile of fresh earth and showered it with her tears.
Over her stood [her husband] Lavr, like an enfeebled elder, head and hands hanging.
It seemed as if Stano and Lavr had turned to stone in their positions.
On the right bank of the river Dana-Pry, near Volny-Prag, on the slope, there is a high tomb. On this tomb stood a cross carved from rough stone; leaning on that cross stood Lavr, alone, somber, pale; his heart was filled with tears, his eyes were dry.
It was the year 1320. In Galicia Prince Andrei Yurevich sat on the throne, in Vladimir his brother Lev. […]
Having redeemed his princedom by virtual enslavement to Gediminas, Lev died in 1324, leaving as his heir his son, the wise Georgii, under whose rule came the Princedom of Galicia, after his uncle Prince Andrei Yurevich, and the region of Kiev. He was the last scion of the power of Rus over South Russia. With him ended the tale of its glory as well.
The aged Lavr, as a reward for his service, was granted by Georgii a rich demesne on the banks of the Dnieper. The settlement of Oblazna [Old Russian ‘error, delusion’] with its villages took the place of his inherited demesne on the Dniester. […]
After this weighty acquisition, Lavr passed away, and to Olel Lavrovich was born three years later a son Iva Olelkovich, named Iva in memory of his great-grandfather Iva, who spent forty years walking to Jerusalem.
This Iva Olelkovich is that very lordling of whom we are speaking; he himself is that hero of Rus and mighty and powerful bogatyr whose exploits have until now perished in obscurity.
And thus by a commodius vicus of recirculation we return to the opening of the novel.
Veltman’s love of obscure words and documents, his joyous playing around with form, his refusal to let the reader sink comfortably into a story and forget that it is an artificial creation—all this would have brought joy to the hearts of the Formalists of the 1920s if they had ever read him. Shklovsky would have been thrilled by his use of defamiliarization and his constant baring of the form. But by then he’d been forgotten for two generations.
But Veltman knew how to tell a story as well as play with form. That quiet juxtaposition of the grieving couple on the left bank of the Dana-Stry and the grieving man on the right bank of the Dana-Pry moves me whenever I think of it.
The original Russian for the first selection:
Рассмотрев все летописи, простые и харатейные, все древние сказания и ржавые Ядра Истории, я не нашел в них ни слова о событии, которое предаю потомству.
Это упущение особенно должно лежать на душе Новгородского летописца.
Верно, какая-нибудь личность с кем-нибудь из рода Пута-Заревых!
Но оставим изыскания. Читатель не может сомневаться в справедливости преданий и слов моих.
* * *
“В лето 6728-е, говорит неизвестный летописец, Ива Иворович иде Славенскою землею во Иерусалим и негде у торга Чернавца пленен бысть Айдамаками Угорскими и обьщьствован и вмале не убиен, и убежа, и вбежа в торг Роман, идеже, жалости ради, взят бысть Урменским купцом и везен в Дичин (вер. Диногетия, Галиц) и далее…” А далее в летописи ничего нет..,
XIX
В 1262 году — когда уже Русская земля была данницею Татар и только смелый Даниил Галицкий не оставлял любимой думы о средствах избавиться от ига поганых Таурменов, Бессерменов, Бахмитов — около исхода Червеня [= Июля] или вернее около начала Зарева [= Августа] в Понизовской области, Боярин одного села при реке Дана-Стры был имянинник и в ожидании гостей распоряжался в своем красном Боярском дворе.
* * *
Чтоб пояснить хоть несколько все предыдущее, мы должны сказать читателям, что вышеписанный Боярин, нисколько не постороннее лицо тому поколению, об котором идет моя длинная речь, слово, песнь, повесть, сказание, история, быль, вымысел, поэма, ядро, роман.
Его величали: Боярин Савва Ивич Пута-Зарев.
For the second selection:
Новый предок Барича, героя повести, как говорит Летописец, родился в самое неблагодарное время для повествования. Время чародеев, ворожей, вещунов, звездочетов и кудесников рушилось с проявлением святой веры. А время богатырей и витязей также прошло в вечность с появлением Татар. Последние: Александр Попович и слуга его Тороп, Добрыня Рязаныч Златой Пояс и семьдесять других богатырей утонули в истоке кровавой реки, потопившей всю Русскую землю, но это не помешает пройти нам чрез тьму, которая лежала над тем пространством, где была колыбель наших добрых праотцев Скифов.
Все возобновится!
* * *
На левой стороне реки Дана-Стры, близ Студеницы, на скате берега, есть холм, на этом холме Ст_а_но на коленях склонила голову на насыпь свежей земли и обливала ее слезами.
Над ней стоял Лавр, как обессилевший старец, опустив руки и голову.
Казалось, что Ст_а_но и Лавр окаменели в этом положении.
На правом берегу реки Дана-Пры, близ Вольного-Прага, на скате, есть высокая могила. На этой могиле стоял иссеченный из дикого камня крест; облокотясь на этот крест, стоял Лавр, один, мрачный, бледный; сердце его было полно слез, очи сухи.
Настал 1320 год. В Галиче сидел на престоле Князь Андрей Юрьевич, во Владимире Волынском Лев, брат его. […]
Искупив Княжество свое почти порабощением Гедимину, Лев умер в 1324 году, оставив наследником сына своего, мудрого Георгия, под власть коего поступило и Княжение Галицкое, после дяди его, Князя Андрея Юрьевича, и область Киевская. Он был последнею отраслью власти Русской над Южною Россиею. С ним кончилась и повесть о славе ее.
Устарелый Лавр в награду за службу свою одарен был от Георгия богатою отчиной на берегах Днепра. Погост Облазна с деревнями заменил ему наследственную Днестровскую отчину. […]
После сего важного приобретения Лавр успокоился, а у Олеля Лавровича родился через три года сын Ива Олелькович, названный Ивою в память своего прапрадеда Ивы, совершившего в 40 лет хождение во Иерусалим.
Этот-то Ива Олелькович есть тот барич, о котором мы ведем речь; он-то тот Русский витязь и сильный могучий богатырь, которого подвиги до сего времени гибли в безвестности.
DONER THE HYPERPOLYGLOT.
I’ve posted about Michael Erard’s Babel No More, about hyperpolyglots, a couple of times (project, book); now R.L.G. of The Economist has a wonderful interview with a 17-year-old hyperpolyglot, Timothy Doner. The interviewer is knowledgeable and asks good questions, the interviewee is charming and gives good answers, and it ends with clips of him speaking French, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian; what more could you ask for? (His spoken Russian isn’t great, but it’s perfectly understandable, and he’d be the first to agree it needs work—he’s very modest about his accomplishments.) I hope it gets seen by a lot of people, some of whom might decide studying languages looks like fun and not as hard as it’s cracked up to be!
SONICA.
Having finished Veltman’s Кощей бессмертный [Koshchei the Immortal], about which I’ll be posting shortly, I’m rereading Pushkin’s great story Пиковая дама (“The Queen of Spades“). Every time I read it I find things I’d overlooked before, and this time it’s a strange international word of the day that’s been utterly forgotten. It occurs twice within a few paragraphs at the end of the first section. Tomsky is describing to his fascinated fellow gamblers how his grandmother, as a young beauty in Paris sixty years before (thus presumably around 1770), had managed to win the huge sum she needed to pay back her gambling debts; the Count of St. Germain shared a secret from his fund of occult knowledge, and she went off to Versailles to gamble: “Она выбрала три карты, поставила их одну за другою: все три выиграли ей соника, и бабушка отыгралась совершенно.” [She chose three cards and played them one after the other: all three won sonika, and my grandmother won back everything she had lost.] Later she took pity on a young wastrel named Chaplitsky and shared the secret with him: “Чаплицкий поставил на первую карту пятьдесят тысяч и выиграл соника; загнул пароли, пароли-пе, — отыгрался и остался еще в выигрыше…” [Chaplitsky staked fifty thousand rubles on the first card and won sonika; he doubled the stake, doubled it again, — he won back what he had lost and more…] The notes to my edition explained that sonika meant ‘at once,’ but of course I wanted to know more about the word. It turns out it is, or was, an English word as well; the OED has it under sonica, with just two citations, one given (incorrectly, in my view) as a noun (“In the game of basset, a card having an immediate effect on the game”: 1716 Pope Basset-table 51 The Knave won Sonica, which I had chose) and one as an adverb (“Promptly, at once”: 1748 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 3 May [modernized text] III. 1143 My prophecy, as you observe, was fulfilled sonica). Etymology: “French, of obscure origin.”
So I turned to my French dictionaries, coming up empty (not even the Académie Française had it) except for Littré:
sonica
(so-ni-ka) adv.
1 Terme de jeu de la bassette. Se dit d’une carte qui vient en gain ou en perte le plus tôt qu’elle puisse venir.
2 Fig. À point nommé, justement, précisément. “En étrennes, sonica, Votre bonté coutumière Me fait présent de moka Pour toute l’année entière”, [Chanson de Piron à Mme Geoffrin, dans GRIMM, Corresp. t. I, p. 382] “L’avis que cette résolution sera mise à exécution sonica, si l’on ne reçoit bien vite une réponse satisfaisante à la lettre….” [Rousseau, 2e dial.] “L’aventure de Merlin m’abat l’esprit, au point que je n’ai ni la force de vous répondre sonica sur les projets pour rattraper mon argent, ni celle de rien composer”, [Galiani, Corresp. 7 juill. 1770]
ÉTYMOLOGIE Origine inconnue.
In Russian, aside from the Pushkin story, it occurs only three times, according to the Corpus of the Russian Language: in Zhikharev (1806-1809), Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1835-1836), and Saltykov-Shchedrin (1857-1865). [But there are many more citations in Исторический словарь галлицизмов русского языка.] It came from who knows where, was used for a few decades in chic card-playing circles across the Continent, and then vanished again. Thank goodness for unabridged dictionaries!
Update (Apr. 2023). The OED revised the entry in June 2017, and it now reads as follows:
Etymology: < French sonica (noun) (in the game of basset) a card which has an immediate effect on the game (1681 as sonicat; rare), (adverb) promptly, at once (1706, although earlier currency is perhaps implied by the earlier use as noun), of unknown origin.
Not fully naturalized in English.In quot. 1983 after Russian sonika (1834 in the passage translated; < French).
†A. n.
In the game of basset: a card which has an immediate effect on the game. Obsolete. rare.
1688 tr. J. de Préchac Disorders of Bassett 95 So thinking to have found out a sure Card..he sets all he has left upon it, which is fass’d, or looses the Sonica [Fr. il est facé ou perd sonica].B. adv.
Promptly; at once. Now rare.
Used esp. in the context of a card game (chiefly basset).1688 T. D’Urfey Fool’s Preferment Epil. 86 A Lady too, in Tears has left off Play..for losing Sonica.
1716 Lady M. W. Montagu Basset-table in Court Poems 5 The Knave won Sonica, which I had chose.
1748 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 3 May (1932) (modernized text) III. 1143 My prophecy, as you observe, was fulfilled sonica.
1763 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 14 June in Lett. to Son (1774) II. 460 You arrived sonica at the Hague, for our Embassador’s entertainment.
1983 P. Debreczeny tr. A. S. Pushkin Queen of Spades i, in Compl. Prose Fiction i. 213 She chose three cards and bet on them in sequence: all three won sonica.
I am delighted to see that the Basset-table quote is now properly classified under adv. (does someone at the OED read LH?), and bemused to see that it is now attributed to Lady Montagu rather than Pope. But the word is still “of unknown origin.”
DON’T DROP THE IBN.
Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article about Mali is good, but it made me grind my teeth right out of the gate. It begins:
On the spine of a hogback hill overlooking Bamako, the capital of the West African nation of Mali, is a green sliver of a park, decorated with effigies of Mali’s historic explorers. On a recent visit, I stopped one piercingly hot morning to admire a bronze bust of a turbaned, bearded man set on a plinth. The nameplate was missing, but, judging from the man’s wide brow and Arab features, it seemed likely that this was Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, who journeyed through the Empire of Mali and visited its capital, near the River Niger, in 1352.
When Battuta arrived, […]
“Not ‘Battuta,’ Ibn Battuta!” I hollered (in the privacy of my brain, not wanting to frighten the cats). Since I have a bully pulpit, I’m going to use it: “Ibn” is not a first name, it means ‘son’ and indicates a patronymic, or nasab as it’s called in Arabic. You can no more abbreviate Ibn Battuta as Battuta than you can abbreviate O’Malley as Malley. For more on Arabic names, consult my ancient post on the topic (or Wikipedia, if you prefer, but “This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page”—you have been warned).
Addendum.. Robert Irwin, in his devastating TLS review of Robert Twigger’s Red Nile (if you’re going to write an error-riddled book on Middle Eastern history, Irwin is the very last person you want reviewing it), makes the same point: “Referring to the famous expert on optics, Ibn al-Haytham as Haytham is a solecism comparable to referring to Macpherson as Pherson, or Robinson as Robin.”
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