Archives for December 2016

Kurvafix!

Jonathan Bousfield’s essay on the “almost unknown” Czech underground writer and philosopher Egon Bondy is long and interesting from a sociological perspective, though Bondy doesn’t sound like my kind of writer (“he wrote a tremendous amount, but never appeared to edit”) or my kind of person (he collaborated with the secret police, and yes, I know these things were complicated). But he did invent a great swear word, for whose sake I will quote the beginning of the essay:

Nobody could write about beer and sausages with quite as much spiritual devotion as the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal. One of Hrabal’s most famously beer-soaked scenes comes from the 1973 novel Nežny Barbar (The Tender Barbarian), in which a character named Egon (based on Hrabal’s real-life colleague Egon Bondy) lovingly smears the foam from a half-litre of beer all over Hrabal’s face.

Written in 1973, Nežny Barbar is the largely autobiographical account of a three-way friendship between Hrabal, Bondy and painter Vladimir Boudnik in the early Fifties. It was a time when they led a vagabond, bar-crawling existence on the fringes of a society just waking up to the realities of communist power. Filmed in 1990, it is a story that many Czechs remember for Egon’s repeated use of the expression Kurvafix!, a term the real-life Bondy invented by stitching together “kurva” (“whore”) and “crucifix” to create a swearword of comic absurdity. “Crucifuck!” might serve as a freely-translated English alternative.

There is also mention of U dvou slunců, where I may well have had a beer when I was wandering the Malá Strana district of Prague a couple of decades ago. Thanks, Trevor!

Who Still Speaks This Language?

[The back page (subscriber-only) of the August 19, 2015, TLS ends with a piece of snark whose humor is cheap and obvious but which I can’t resist anyway:]

Incomprehensibility lives! Barbara Vinken writes in German, but Aarnoud Rommens and Susan L. Solomon have translated her book Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity crossed out into English. So they claim. They must know of a remote tribe hiding in an inaccessible university that still speaks this language:

The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.

Little more? Oh dear, it tells a story. Help us locate the last remaining speakers of this lesser used language. Flaubert Postsecular is published by Stanford University Press.

How to Spell Nahuatl?

Magnus Pharao Hansen says of himself:

I am an anthropologist and linguist with a broad set of interests in what it means to be human – including language, culture, history, politics and evolution and how they interrelate.

In my research, I study the indigenous languages and cultures of Mexico and their history and the relation between lives, language and politics. My dissertation “Nahuatl Nation”, is about the political roles of the Nahuatl language in Mexico and beyond.

I’ve recently discovered his blog Nahuatl Studies, and the latest post, How to spell Nahuatl? Nawatl? Nauatl?, is an excellent introduction to it. He says “In this blog post, I describe the many different conventions for writing Nahuatl using the Latin script,” and boy, does he ever. He starts off with the two main types of Nahuatl orthographies, classical and modern, gives an introduction to each type, and plunges into detailed analyses of all of them, ending with a brief and sensible conclusion (“regardless of which orthography you use someone will inevitably tell you that you are using the wrong one”). Here’s his introduction to the classical type, to give you an idea of the flavor of his writing:

Sometimes people talk about “classical orthography” as if it is a single well-established standard. Really it is not, and it never was. In the 16th century when Nahuatl was first written alphabetically, the idea of a standardized orthography didn’t even exist – and there was no established orthography for any of the spoken main languages such as English or Spanish (as anyone trying to read Shakespeare or Cortés’ letters will realize). Authors writing in any of these languages simply used the writing conventions they learned from their teachers and put them to the best possible use to get their points across in the easiest way. They tended to write these languages as they were spoken, representing the sounds more or less as they pronounced them. And when they began writing Nahuatl they did the same, tried to use the conventions they knew from writing Spanish to represent the sounds of Nahuatl. This is why the only thing that is really shared by all “classical orthographies” is the fact that they represent the sounds that exist both in Nahuatl and in Spanish using the letters that were most commonly used in Spanish to represent these sounds. For example, Spanish had adopted the Latin convention of writing the sound [k] with the letter <c> before the vowels [a] and [o] but with the letters <qu> before the vowels [i] and [e]. Luckily, actually most of the sounds in Nahuatl are also found in Spanish, which meant that this method was fairly succesful. And in fact in the 16th century, Spanish phonology was even more similar to that of Nahuatl – because at that time Spanish didn’t have the harsh j-sound (like in scottish Loch), but instead had a soft sh-sound as in fish which also exists in Nahuatl. They wrote this sound with the letter <x>, because that is how they generally wrote the sh-sound in Spanish. Only over the next century did Spanish gradually change the sh-sound to the harsh j-sound (and eventually began writing it with a j). (This, incidentally, is why the x is pronounced harshly in words like Mexico/Mejico, Oaxaca and Xalapa/Jalapa – but not in the corresponding Nahuatl versions which are pronounced meshi’ko, washakak and shalapan).

However there are some sounds that are found in Nahuatl that do not exist in Spanish: Primarily, the Nahuatl signature sound the tl (written in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [t͡ɬ]), but this turned out to be easy to write with the letter combination <tl>. The sound [kw] (as in queen) likewise turned out to be easy to write, since this sound also existed in Spanish as (although in Spanish it is a combination of k and u, and not a single consonant sound) so they wrote it <qu> or <cu>. The Nahuatl consonant [t͡s] also didn’t exist in Spanish, but the Friars knew the sound from Hebrew and wrote it in the same way they would when transliterating the scripture using the letter combination <tz>. Nahuatl also had the consonant sound [w] (as in “wat?”) which was not found in Spanish – friars couldn’t quite decide on how to write this one, but usually they simply represented it with the vowel letter <u> – sometimes combined with a consonant letter such as <hu> or <gu> (More about this below, under Canger’s orthography).

But the most difficult sounds to write were the glottal stop (or h) neither of which existed in Spanish; and the distinction between long and short vowel duration. At first most friars didn’t even realize that these sounds actually existed in Nahuatl, so they simply didn’t write them! This is the main difference between the orthographies of the Franciscan friars and the Jesuits.

I love this kind of thing. Thanks, Yoram!

Vedekos.

This is such an obscure puzzler I suspect it’s going to remain unsolved, but it never hurts to try. I’m still reading Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Губернские очерки (see this post), and a repentant scoundrel is talking about how he’d made his way home after he’d lost his ill-gotten gains and his life had come crashing down around him and he’d taken to bed with some sort of unidentifiable illness: “Голова не болит, а словно перед тобой в тумане все ходит. То будто кажется, что вдруг черти тебя за язык ловят, то будто сам Ведекос на тебя смотрит и говорит тебе: «И приидут вси людие со тщанием…»” [Your head doesn’t ache, but it’s as if everything before you is in a fog. Sometimes it seems as if devils are pulling at your tongue, sometimes as if Vedekos himself is looking at you and saying “And let all people come with zeal…”]. The only Google Books hits for Ведекос are from this passage, and the same goes for the Church Slavic expression in quotes. Does anybody have any idea who this Vedekos might be? If it helps, the scoundrel is from an Old Believer community, and the pre-reform spelling is Ведекосъ (i.e., no yat is involved).

30 Medieval Texts Translated in 2016.

This list from Medievalists.net makes me want to spend a week or two ensconced in a really good research library (ideally, Sterling Memorial, where I spent so much of the 1970s), pulling down one book after another and reading to my heart’s content. I can’t even pretend I want to own them — they’re almost all so far from any foreseeable reading pattern that they would glare even more reproachfully than the currently ignored piles of books. But what fun to browse them if I didn’t have to have them on my own shelves! The Faroe-Islander Saga (Faereyinga saga), Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle (which “traces the history of Florence, Italy, and Europe over a vast sweep of time-from the destruction of the Tower of Babel to the outbreak of the Black Death”), The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga, Petrarch’s My Secret Book, A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea, John Benet’s Chronicle, 1399-1462 (by “a Londoner who was exceptionally well-informed about events and people in the period of the Wars of the Roses”), A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650… I’m afraid even to click through to the publisher/Amazon pages to see how much they cost, but it’s fun just to riffle their pages in my imagination. Thanks, Trevor!

Gorky and Tolstoy.

Aaron Lake Smith has a good piece for Lapham’s Quarterly about Maxim Gorky, focusing on his “troubled friendship” with Leo Tolstoy; it makes me want to read his 1919 reminiscence about the older writer:

His essay on Tolstoy is one of the most complex depictions of the love and hate that intertwine within a friendship that I have ever read (I wish all magazine profiles—of celebrities, politicians, writers—could be so good). Such portrayals run against the popular conception of Gorky as a black-and-white zealot who sought to erase all human complexity.

Nowhere is he more complex and self-honest than in this sketch, with its delicate handling of the class and power dynamics. Gorky’s evident awe and respect for his hero are undercut by his descriptions of Tolstoy’s rampant sexism—“He speaks about women readily and at length, like a French novelist, but always with the crudeness of a Russian muzhik, which in the beginning used to bother me extremely”—and unabashed cultural appropriation. Tolstoy informed Gorky, “I am more of a peasant than you, and can feel things the way peasants do better than you can.” In the essay, Gorky protested, “My God! He shouldn’t boast of that! He mustn’t!”

Gorky “never tires of marveling” at Tolstoy, but the elder writer also evokes

something close to hatred for me, much like an oppressive burden on my soul. His hypertrophied personality is a monstrous thing, a thing almost deformed…He has often struck me as a man who is fundamentally, in the depth of his soul, indifferent to people, being so much higher and more powerful than they that they all seem like midges to him, and their frantic concerns ludicrous and pitiable…It’s difficult to see him too often, and I could never live in the same house—let alone the same room—with him. That would be like trying to live in a desert where everything has been burned by the sun, while that sun itself is also burning down, threatening a dark night without end.

About his first meeting with Tolstoy, Gorky wrote: “It was as if I had met not the author of The Cossacks, ‘Strider,’ and War and Peace, but rather a condescending nobleman who felt constrained to speak to me like ‘an ordinary fellow,’ in ‘the language of the street,’ and this tended to upset my idea of him.” Sounds plausible to me. Thanks, Paul!

Butcher Bird.

I’m reading the early stories of Wallace Stegner; so far they’ve mostly taken place in the hardscrabble farmland of southwest Saskatchewan, where he spent part of his youth, and they’re as grim as life there must have been (though lightened by the irrepressible spirits of his young viewpoint characters). The latest, the 1940 “Butcher Bird,” has a number of words and phrases of LH interest. On the first page, the boy reflects on the possibilities of the weather: “If it was rain everything would be fine, his father would hum under his breath getting breakfast, maybe let him drive the stoneboat or ride the mare down to Larsen’s for mail.” Stoneboat? Turns out it’s (per the OED, entry from 1917) “U.S. (chiefly north.) and Canad. A flat-bottomed sled used for transporting or removing stones, and for other purposes.” The first and last citations:

1859 N. P. Willis Convalescent 75 A stone-boat would run glibly over such a shallow snow!
[…]
1962 J. Onslow Bowler-hatted Cowboy viii. 79 A stone-boat is best described as a heavy wooden sled, on which can be hauled rocks and stones..dead cows, sick cows, or other heavy objects.

The earlier sense (dating back to c. 1336) is “A boat for transporting stones”; there’s no indication of how it got transferred to the new sense.

There are a couple of odd expressions used by the boy’s brutal father and presumably peculiar to him: “I hope to whisk in your piskers” and “Just thinking about [X] gives me the pleefer.” And the title of the story is itself interesting; it’s a regional expression for the shrike (as the boy’s mother explains to an English neighbor, “They kill all sorts of things, snakes and gophers and other birds”), and the OED dates it back to 1668 (Bp. J. Wilkins Ess. Real Char. 146 “Lanius or Butcher bird, is of three several kinds”), in the etymology saying “Compare French bouchari ‘un des noms vulgaires de la pie-grièche.’”

Saving Language.

I may have mentioned before that one of my favorite radio programs is To the Best of Our Knowledge, which consistently features the most interesting and thought-provoking interviews around; almost every time I listen (it’s on Saturday mornings from 6 to 8 on our local PBS station) I learn new things or new ways of looking at things. This morning when I staggered into the living room, my wife (who gets up earlier than I do) said “You’re just in time, they’re going to do an hour on languages!” And so they did; the show, “Saving Language,” is available here, and I particularly recommend the first two segments, David Harrison on documenting endangered languages and Danna Harman on the Yung Yiddish library in Tel Aviv.

Related: Pablo Helguera’s Conservatory of Dead Languages (“In building his Conservatory of Dead Languages, Helguera has created a kind of symbolic museum of dying languages by recording them on wax cylinders, using the method invented by Thomas Edison in 1877”). Thanks, Trevor!

The Licentious Thrush.

I’ve been reading Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Губернские очерки [Provincial sketches] (1856-57), a now-forgotten work consisting of delightful descriptions of the endemically corrupt town of Krutogorsk (a lightly fictionalized version of Vyatka, where he had spent seven years in exile), and at one point a character mentions a woman who sang “гривуазные песни” like “Un soir a la barrière” (a song which, alas, has been even more thoroughly forgotten, so that I have been unable to find out anything about it). Now, the adjective гривуазный was clearly borrowed from a French grivois, but I was unfamiliar with that word; when I looked it up, I discovered it meant ‘saucy, smutty,’ so the Russian phrase meant ‘smutty songs.’ It’s first recorded in 1690 as a noun, meaning ‘soldier,’ and then in 1696 meaning ‘person of free-and-easy morals’ (« personne de mœurs libres et joyeuses ») — a natural semantic transition, I fear. By 1707 it was an adjective (« très libre, hardi »), and the phrase cited as an example is chansons grivoises, a French equivalent of the Russian phrase that started me off.

But where did grivois itself come from? That turns out to be quite interesting. It’s derived from grive ‘thrush’ (or, in the words of the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, “Oiseau de l’ordre des Passereaux, proche du merle, au plumage blanc et brun, dont la chair est appréciée des gastronomes”), which is from Latin graecus ‘Greek,’ because apparently the Romans thought the thrush, a migratory bird, wintered in Greece. Grive developed, for obscure reasons, the slang sense ‘war; army; corps de garde,’ hence the original sense of grivois. Now, that’s a well-traveled word.

A Year in Reading 2016.

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year; my contribution is up, featuring my review of Aileen M. Kelly’s great biography of Herzen, The Discovery of Chance, as well as my other favorites of the year, including some I’ve discussed here at LH.