Archives for November 2013

SYCOPHANT.

I’ve known for a long time that sycophant comes from Ancient Greek σῡκοϕάντης ‘(professional) informer, someone who says bad things about public figures for pay’ (literally ‘fig-shower’: σῦκον ‘fig’ + ϕαν-, root of ϕαίνειν ‘to show’—nobody knows how the sense developed, though there are many theories); what I didn’t realize until now is that French preserves the original sense of ‘informer,’ and that the word originally had this sense in English as well (the OED, in an entry that hasn’t been updated since 1919, traces both “informer, tale-bearer, malicious accuser” and “mean, servile, cringing, or abject flatterer” back to the 16th century, but the first sense died out pretty early, after the 17th century turning up only in phrasing like “the informers, or sycophants as they were called at Athens”). I discovered this via a ТЕТРАДКИ post (in Russian) by Alexander Anichkin, or Sashura as he calls himself around these parts, which discusses a recent contretemps in which one Russian journalist made fun of another for using the word сикофант [sikofant] in the English sense of ‘self-seeking flatterer’ when the Russian word (which is rare enough it’s not included in the Oxford dictionary) has the French sense of ‘informer.’ Sashura points out that the journalist being mocked has English as a primary foreign language, while the mocker knows French. An interesting run-in, and I wonder if the Russian word will develop a confusing double sense because English is now so widely known.

Incidentally, my New Great Russian-English Dictionary (which I made fun of here) has the unhelpful definition “сикофант m sycophant, informer,” and my Kettridge’s French/English English/French Dictionary has the even less helpful entry “sycophante m, sycophant.” Dudes, get your heads out of the seventeenth century!

SPOAQIN SUXW C+SEPCIN’M.

There have been a lot of controversies about sports teams with putatively racist nicknames, mascots, and traditions, most notably ever-louder calls for the Washington Redskins to change their name. Here’s an unusually happy outcome of one such situation:

In the 2006 offseason, the [Spokane] Indians began a process to redesign their logo and uniforms. As per tradition, they began by avoiding the use of any American Indian imagery, but early in the process of redesign, the Spokane Nation contacted the team about officially supporting the team. In the process, the tribe gave permission to the team to adopt subtle and tasteful imagery, in order to pay homage to the team’s history and new connection with the tribe. The cooperation, called “historic” by the team, included the creation of a secondary logo written in Salish, the traditional language of the tribe.

Classy logo, too!

HWÆT.

A decade ago we briefly discussed the famous first word of Beowulf, “Hwaet,” and the various ways translators have dealt with it. Now it seems all previous discussions may have been rendered obsolete by a paper (pdf) by George Walkden, “The status of hwæt in Old English” (English Language and Linguistics 17.3: 465–488); Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a good discussion in which he says:

Walkden makes a compelling, but by no means ironclad, case that hwæt is not an interjection or an adverb, rather it has no independent meaning from the clause it appears in. It combines with the remainder of the clause to produce an exclamatory effect. In this way it is similar to the modern English how, as in “how you’ve changed!” According to Walkden’s conclusion, the opening line of Beowulf would read:

How we have heard of the glory…

[…]The core of Walkden’s argument is a syntactic analysis of the use of hwæt and its Old Saxon cognate huat. He finds that in clauses beginning with hwæt/huat, the verb tends to appear in a later position than would normally be the case for a root clause. Instead, hwæt-clauses follow the pattern expected of a dependent clause. If hwæt were an interjection independent of the clause, it should not influence word order.

As I said in the Wordorigins thread, on a first reading it’s pretty convincing.

LANGUAGES ONLINE.

Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat writes:

Any readers interested in pidgins, creoles, or mixed languages (one of those things is not like the others!) will want to know that the data for the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Languages, APiCS, is finally online and publicly browsable. Think of it as WALS for pidgins and creoles, basically – lots of pretty maps, with the nice bonus that language-internal variation in features like word order can be represented proportionally by a pie graph instead of having to choose a single value per language.

And Stan at Sentence first writes:

Wikitongues has been on the go since 2012, but I heard about it just recently. It’s a project aimed at documenting linguistic diversity and exploring identity, in the form of short videos of people speaking different languages and dialects – about 50 at the time of writing.

Nice idea, but at least when I visited the site many of the videos were by non-native speakers or people who learned the language as kids but mainly speak English now, and frankly if I go to a site like that I’m looking for videos made by native speakers, not people who want to show off a language they don’t know perfectly. Also, as Stan says, “Complete multilingual transcripts (or subtitles) would be a welcome addition.”

BENE RESHEP.

I’ve finally started Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank, very generously given me by Noetica back in 2010; part of the reason for my chronological progress through Russian literature has been to build up a background for reading Dostoevsky in Russian, and now that I’ve gotten up to the 1840s I’ve begun Frank’s magisterial bio. One of the things I’ve learned so far is that unlike every other major nineteenth-century Russian writer, Dostoevsky grew up with a traditional Orthodox religious education (most aristocrats by then “had long since ceased to be concerned about Orthodox Christianity, even though they continued to baptize their children in the state religion and to structure their lives in accordance with its rituals”), and along with the Gospels and lives of the saints, he particularly loved the book of Job (“Years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the book of Job once again, he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of ‘unhealthy rapture’ that he almost cried. ‘It’s a strange thing, Anya, this book is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me; I was then still almost a child'”). Fortunately, the Church Slavonic Bible he would have known is online, so I’ve been reading Job (pdf) alongside my modern Russian Bible (since my Church Slavonic is rusty).

Job has always been one of my favorites, too, and it’s been a pleasure to reacquaint myself with it in its Slavonic guise. But when I got to one of the most famous lines in the Bible, “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7), I did a double take. The Slavonic has “но человѣкъ раждаетсѧ на троудъ, птенцы же соупѡвы высокѡ парѧтъ”: ‘but man is born to trouble; the vulture birds soar high’ (I don’t know how to render же here, so I’m going with a vague semicolon). Vulture birds?? I checked my modern version, which had the expected “но человек рождается на страдание, как искры, чтоб устремляться вверх,” with искры ‘sparks.’ How did those birds get there? The ancient but easily accessible Barnes’ Notes on the Bible (Job 5) says:

As the sparks fly upward – The Hebrew expression here is very beautiful – “as רשׁף בני benēy reshep – the sons of flame fly.” The word used (רשׁף reshep) means flame, lightning; the sons, or children of the flame, are that which it produces; that is, sparks. Gesenius strangely renders it, “sons of the lightning; that is, birds of prey which fly as swift as the lightning.” So Dr. Good, “As the bird-tribes are made to fly upwards.” So Umbreit renders it, Gleichwie die Brut des Raubgeflugels sich hoch in Fluge hebt – “as a flock of birds of prey elevate themselves on the wing.” Noyes adopts the construction of Gesenius; partly on the principle that man would be more likely to be compared to birds, living creatures, than to sparks. There is considerable variety in the interpretation of the passage. The Septuagint renders it, νεοσσοι δε γυπος neossoi de gupos – the young of the vulture. The Chaldee, מזיקי בני benēy mezēyqēy – the sons of demons. Syriac Sons of birds. Jerome, Man is born to labor, and the bird to flight – et avis ad volatum. Schultens renders it, “glittering javelins,” and Arius Montanus, “sons of the live coal.”

That’s considerable variety, all right; can we get a better explanation of what’s going on? The most detailed commentary I could find was in C. L. Seow’s Job 1 – 21: Interpretation and Commentary, which renders the phrase “the offspring of pestilence” (!) and explains:

[Read more…]

GANG CODES.

Eric Jankiewicz has a Nautilus interview with Gary Klivans, a former corrections officer who became an expert in the codes used by gangs:

Codes are substitutes for the letters in our English alphabet. They could be anything—in addition to numbers, they use ornate symbols, a Chinese pictogram, or Mayan or Aztec symbols. Or they create their own symbols. And the languages vary widely. There is no one Blood or Crip gang code or Black Gangster Disciples code that all the members use. The codes are all local. So if you’re a law enforcement officer in Los Angeles or Chicago, you can travel 10 miles away and you’ll find a different code.

His account of how he learned to decipher them is quite interesting. (Thanks, Bob!)

ALTAIC STORYTELLING.

Via this Log post by Victor Mair about a 2004 Chinese novel called Yīnggélìshì 英格力士 (the title is a Chinese rendering of “English”; it’s about a guy named Love Liu who grows up in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, studies English, and “becomes enamored of this new language and attracted to his teacher”), I discovered Bruce Humes’s blog Altaic Storytelling: Tales from Istanbul to Heilongjiang, which is well worth checking out. Humes is now in Istanbul studying Turkish:

The goal would be to get enough modern Turkish under my belt so I could move onto Ottoman Turkish. Eventually, I’d like to be able to carry out research into the history of translation between Turkic languages and Chinese, or even better, re: the current topic of my newly christened blog: Altaic storytelling, particularly the role of itinerant aşık. I don’t know much about it, but it really appeals. The older I get, the more interested I am in oral transmission as opposed to written literature.

A post that particularly intrigued me is about “Evenki Place Names behind the Hànzì” in Chi Zijian’s novel Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸).

TWO MAPS.

Nath of Imprints of Philippine Science has a post called Philippine language relations in a map that shows, well, Philippine language relations in a map. Nath starts off with the disarming confession: “I am not a linguist and I am not a geographer/cartographer. I am a physicist who is in dire need of a stress reliever. Mapping this is therapeutic while in the thick of preparing a manuscript for submission.” If you click on the map, you’ll get an enlarged .jpg, and there’s interesting discussion in the comments.
And then there’s America labelled by an Australian who’s never been there and knows nothing about its geography. No linguistic relevance, but funny as hell. (Commentary, and unlabeled maps of Australian and French national divisions, at the Log.)
Addendum. Make it three maps; here‘s a neat one showing the words for ‘bear’ [and eight other words; thanks, iakon!] in the languages of Europe, with related ones in the same color.

PASSING ENGLISH.

Paul T. sent me a link to the Internet Archive page for Passing English of the Victorian era: A dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase by J. Redding Ware (1909). The preface makes delightful reading:

It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is ‘quite too dull’. Thousands of words and phrases in existence in 1870 have drifted away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added. ‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion. Not only is ‘Passing English’ general; it is local; often very seasonably local. Careless etymologists might hold that there are only four divisions of fugitive language in London—west, east, north and south. But the variations are countless. Holborn knows little of Petty Italia behind Hatton Garden, and both these ignore Clerkenwell, which is equally foreign to Islington proper; in the South, Lambeth generally ignores the New Cut, and both look upon Southwark as linguistically out of bounds; while in Central London, Clare Market (disappearing with the nineteenth century) had, if it no longer has, a distinct fashion in words from its great and partially surviving rival through the centuries—the world of Seven Dials, which is in St Giles’s—St James’s being practically in the next parish. In the East the confusion of languages is a world of ‘variants’—there must be half-a-dozen of Anglo-Yiddish alone—all, however, outgrown from the Hebrew stem. ‘Passing English’ belongs to all the classes, from the peerage class who have always adopted an imperfection in speech or frequency of phrase associated with the court, to the court of the lowest costermonger, who gives the fashion to his immediate entourage. Much passing English becomes obscure almost immediately upon its appearance—such as ‘Whoa, Emma!’ or ‘How’s your poor feet?’ the first from an inquest in a back street, the second from a question by Lord Palmerston addressed to the then Prince of Wales upon the return of the latter from India.

But you mustn’t take seriously the etymological speculations that follow (“‘Dead as a door nail’ is probably as O’Donnel…. the still common ‘Bloody Hell’ is ‘By our lady, hail’, the lady being the Virgin.”). Anyway, it’s great fun to leaf through and see what has survived (“afters” for dessert is, I think, no longer confined to Devon) and what has vanished with little trace (“affigraphy” meaning “To a T, exactly”).

IN THE CITY OF N.

Lately I’ve been musing on general and perhaps unresolvable questions about what might be called the culture of Russian literature. One such topic is the turn to social realism that it took in the 1840s and maintained more or less uninterrupted for generations; all of Europe had a Balzac period, but only Russia was so stubborn about it. (There is an interesting discussion about this going on at XIX век [The tyranny of the radical critics, part 1, part 2].) Now, as I read Sollogub‘s 1841 Аптекарша [The druggist’s wife], another has started vexing me. The story begins in a way that’s become a cliché/signifier for Classic Russian Literature: “Уездный город С. – один из печальнейших городков России” [The provincial city of S. is one of the saddest towns in Russia]. This raised a smile, but when the second section started with a jump in time and space and I read “Городок, в который я вас хочу перенести, читатель мой благосклонный, совсем не похож на тот, которым я так грустно начал повесть свою об аптекарше” [The town which I wish to carry you off to, gracious reader, is completely unlike that with which I began my tale of the druggist’s wife in such a melancholy way], it occurred to me to wonder about that cliché. Why are towns in Russian literature always (or almost always) unnamed? Once you descend below the two great capital cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, there is nothing. In the United States, every city has associated books; we can all think of famous novels set in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but even relatively two-bit regional centers like Albany, N.Y., have dedicated chroniclers like William Kennedy. You can get to know pretty much any city in America by immersing yourself in novels if you’re so inclined; authors love to try to do for their hometowns what Joyce did for Dublin.

Not so in Russia. Ancient towns like Rostov and Pskov; important regional centers like Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan; proud Siberian cities like Tomsk and Irkutsk—none of them, as far as I know, feature in literature beyond occasional mentions. Authors came from them, but they didn’t write about them except in their memoirs (as in Gorky’s autobiography about growing up in Nizhny). Now, one obvious response would be that Russia is far more centralized than the U.S., and all cultural life is concentrated in the capitals; while there’s some truth to that, it needn’t have had such a drastic result. Even if writers had to live and work in Petersburg or Moscow to have a career, why couldn’t they have written with affection (or spite, as the case may be) and deep local knowledge about the places they were from or in which they had spent time? Instead, when they wrote about cities other than the capital it was almost always a generic “city of N” (or S, or whatever other letter caught the writer’s fancy). This seems to be changing (recent novels have been set in places like Kazan and Kaliningrad), but it was true for a very long time, and I think it requires explanation.

Addendum (Dec. 2014): I’ve just found a perfect example at the start of Anastasia Marchenko’s story Гувернантка (“The governess,” from her collection Путевые заметки; see this post):

Три часа пробило на колокольнѣ маленькаго городка, названіе котораго я не нахожу нужнымъ объявлять вамъ, не потому, чтобы я хотѣла скрыть тщательно отъ васъ это названіе, или чтобъ подобная таинственность была необходима для лицъ моей повѣсти; — совсѣмъ нѣтъ я, просто, не хочу пуститься въ географическое описаніе и заставить васъ отыскивать (пожалуй, еще по картѣ) въ такой-то губерніи. подлѣ такой-то рѣчки, незамѣченный доселѣ городокъ… Не все ли равно, въ Сибири, или въ Украйнѣ совершалось это происшествіе нашей вседневной жизни? вѣдь вы не пойдете собирать справки въ вѣроятіи разсказа, а принуждены вѣрить автору на слово.

Three o’clock sounded from the bell tower of a small town, whose name I don’t feel I need to announce to you, not because I want to carefully hide the name from you, or because that kind of secrecy was essential for the people in my story; not at all — I simply prefer not to embark upon a geographical description and force you to track down (maybe even on a map) in such-and-such a province, by such-and-such a river, a town hitherto unnoticed… Isn’t it all the same whether these events of our daily life took place in Siberia or Ukraine? After all, you’re not going to go around collecting information to verify the likelihood of my story, you’ll have to take the author’s word for it.

I note that she uses the preposition в rather than на with the name of Ukraine, as preferred by Ukrainians today; I don’t know what current use was in the 1840s or whether it depended on geography (she grew up in Kovno, now Lithuanian Kaunas, and moved to Odessa as a teenager, shortly before publishing the stories), but I thought it worth mentioning.