Some interesting stuff I’ve run across:

1) The Un-X-able Y-ness of Z-ing (Q): A List with Notes: Sean Cotter reports on a translated title that “like a spot of dye, dropped into the flow of culture and altered the hue of English as it diffused downstream.” I had not realized that Milan Kundera didn’t want to use “the unbearable lightness of being” as the title of the English translation of his Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí; he told Michael Heim, the translator, that “for you Americans the title will be a bit hard-going.” Heim said, “We’re not children. If The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the title, so be it.” And a meme was born.

2 De Vulgari Eloquentia: Not Dante, but a board game based on Dante (Suggested Ages: 14 and up; Playing Time: 120 minutes):

Italy, late Middle Ages. The fabric merchants need to write down their contracts in a language that everyone can understand and the literates are looking for an alternative to the elite of the traditional Latin language. So, the Volgare, the language spoken by the common people, taken from the dialects spoken in the various Italian regions, starts to gain relevance. … The players will have to do their part in the creation of this new language! But who will provide them the proper knowledge to understand the manuscripts in the different dialects? Who will succeed to uncover the secrets of the books inside the Papal Library? Who will embrace the religious life and who will remain a merchant? Some of the players can become a famous banker, someone else can climb the church’s hierarchy to be the next Pope! But in the end, who will be the most appreciated and respected for his status and his culture?

3) The Space between Languages is a talk by Herta Müller, a writer born to a German-speaking family in the Banat region of Romania who “learnt Romanian quite late in life, when I left my small village for the city at the age of fifteen to go to high school.” The discussion of her relationship to that language is interesting (“There is not a single Romanian sentence in any of my books. But Romanian is always with me when I write because it has grown into my way of seeing the world”), but the main reason I’m bringing it here is to correct an irritating error. She writes:

A swallow suddenly appeared in a different light in Romanian, where it is called rindunica, “sitting-in-a-row”. The bird’s name suggests how swallows perch on a wire, close together in a row. I used to see them in my village every summer, before I knew the Romanian word. I was amazed that a swallow could have such a lovely name. I became more and more aware that the Romanian language had words that were more sensuous, more in tune with my perception, than my mother tongue.

No. The Romanian word rândunea or rândunica ‘swallow’ is not from rând ‘file, row,’ it is from hirundinella, a diminutive of Latin hirundo. I hate to burst such a poetic, sensuous balloon, but there it is.

4) The ever-readable Gasan Guseinov has a brief post saying that all those who use the blatantly foreign бабуин for ‘baboon’ instead of the good Russian word павиан (which, as of course Guseinov knows perfectly well, is borrowed from German Pavian, which ultimately goes back to the same source, French babouin, as бабуин) should be made to repeat the palindrome А НИ У БАБУИНА НИ У БАБУИНА (something like ‘and neither at the baboon nor at the baboon’). I note that Wikipedia has separate articles for бабуин and павиан. Can my Russian-speaking readers tell me whether these two words are distinguished in ordinary use, and which of them is commoner?

I seem never to have mentioned the Nigerian anti-Western group Boko Haram here, and that’s a good thing, because if I had I would have spread the usual story that Hausa boko is from English book, and that turns out to be mistaken, according to “The Etymology of Hausa boko” (pdf) by Paul Newman, according to Wikipedia “the world’s leading authority on the Hausa language of Nigeria and on the Chadic language family.” Newman points out that:
1) If English book had been the source, it would have been adopted in Hausa as something like [búukùu] (he gives examples of such words).
2) The word boko “has a related morphological form marked by reduplication, short final vowels, and a set low-low-high-low tone pattern, namely bòokò-bóokò ‘deceptive, fraudulent’ … This pattern is found in Hausa with various other words… This reduplicated construction is unproductive and limited to a small set of words, many of which are now obsolete, thereby indicating that boko must be an old Hausa word with considerable ancestry in the language and not a recent loanword.”
3) It occurs with the word biri ‘monkey’ “as part of a fixed compound biri-boko (lit. monkey-fraud). … That biri-boko is found in Bargery’s dictionary… is a good indication that the compound is of considerable age in the language and hardly a recent creation…”
4) The order of definitions in old dictionaries suggests the original sense was ‘fraud.’
5) “It is perhaps worth pointing out that boko in the sense of something western or secular tended not to be used as an independent noun, like English book (as is now often done), but was almost always used as a modifier.”
6) Finally, “it would have been curious indeed for Hausa to have borrowed the English word book (in the form boko) and have it come to represent despised Western education. In the first place Hausa has long had its own word for book (littafi), which was borrowed at a very much earlier period from Arabic. This word was already well established and fully integrated in the language at a time considerably prior to the British takeover of northern Nigeria and the opening of colonial government schools in Kano at the beginning of the 20th century.”

His conclusion: “Hausa boko does not mean ‘book’ and it is not derived etymologically from the English word book. The phonetic and orthographic similarity between the two is purely coincidental. They are what the French call ‘faux amis’ (‘false friends’).” I was particularly impressed with this frank acceptance of responsibility for the error:

This is not a matter of an occasional reporter or amateur linguist going astray. This is a systematic error that we professional Hausa specialists have perpetuated over the years and thus we deserve real blame for having provided other scholars and the general public with misleading information.

(Thanks for the link, Paul!)

Back in 2007 I posted about Justin Rye’s brilliant discussion of proposals for spelling reform, adding that I was doing so thanks to a comment by David Marjanović; now, once again thanks to a comment by David Marjanović (in this thread), I’m posting about Rye’s discussion of “What would English be like if 1066 hadn’t happened?” It’s a lot of fun (except for the inhabitants of London, who get nuked in 1983), and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys playing with sound changes and dialects.

I’ve gotten curious about the first published version of War and Peace, which was titled «Тысяча восемьсот пятый год» [1805] and published in the journal «Русский вестник» in 1865-66; it corresponded to Part I of the final version. You’d think all those nineteenth-century journals would have been scanned by now, but the useful links page at XIX век shows only a few issues for those years, none of which have installments of the Tolstoy novel. You’d also think someone would have put the first published version of the Greatest Novel of All Time online somewhere, but if they have, I can’t find it. It’s not urgent, since I won’t be getting to 1865 in my reading for months, but does anybody happen to know if it’s available?

Update. This (pdf) appears to be it; thanks, Erik!

As mentioned in the Addendum to this post, I’m reading Schiller’s play Don Carlos in Michael Dostoevsky’s translation, and I came across a reference to “Великий комтур калатравский”: the great komtur of Calatrava.” Komtur looked so little like a Russian word I suspected it of being a typo, but when I checked the German original I found “Der Großkomtur des Ordens/ von Calatrava,” so it was a borrowing of the German word, which I looked up in my HarperCollins German Unabridged Dictionary, where it was defined as “commander (of a knightly order).” Googling, I found there was a Wikipedia article for it, which says it’s derived from Latin commendator and “was a rank within military orders, especially the Teutonic Knights. In the State of the Teutonic Order, the Komtur was the commander of a basic administrative division called Kommende (also Komturei).” (The German article has more detail, as well as a photo of George V of Hanover wearing his Komturkreuz des Maria-Theresia-Ordens.)

Once again I discover an obscure lexical field, this one consisting of words known only to aficionados of knightly history; an interesting question is to what extent such words can be considered part of the vocabulary of English. On the negative side, komtur isn’t in any English dictionaries I can find; the OED doesn’t mention it anywhere, let alone have an entry for it. On the positive side, it occurs unitalicized in English books in sentences like “Because of his obsession, the Komtur became seduced by a hunger for that power and what it could afford him” and “Kierkegaard fails to distinguish the Don Juan opera from Mozart’s other work and seems to make light of the Komtur and consequently of the moral formula that demands Don Juan’s punishment.” If it is an English word, it’s certainly about as peripheral a word as one could find. (It’s even more peripheral in Russian, where the Национальный корпус русского языка finds only a few occurrences.)

From the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange (“a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts”), the intriguing question “What is a clyse?“:

I’ve been reading about the recent flooding in Somerset, and came across this:-

Floodwater is removed from many of the moors of the Somerset Levels by pumping stations [...]. Consideration was given to replacing Dunball clyse with a pumping station in 2002…

This word doesn’t appear in any online dictionary I can find[...]

It was well answered by Janus Bahs Jacquet:

According to the OED definition, it is a local/regional word that means the same as clow. There is only one attestation quoted, from Somerset:

1882 Spectator 6 May 595. In the Reports of the Somerset Drainage Commissioners, the sluices and locks under their jurisdiction are called ‘Clyses’.

Obviously, clow is not exactly a common word, either, but it does seem to be more common than clyse, with about thirty or forty attestations [...]

So a clyse would appear to be just a regional Somerset word for a sluice, basically.

It seems that clow is a false singular, based on an earlier form clowes/clowis. This was originally a singular itself (from Old English clūse, meaning ‘enclosure’, and related to ‘close’, both from the nominalised Latin passive participle clausa ‘closed’, from the verb claudō ‘to close’), but was reinterpreted as clow + plural -es around the 15th or 16th century.

Clyse is less certain: it appears to be from French écluse (same word as the Old English cluse), or perhaps it just represents a dialectical nonce rounding of the u in the Old English, yielding regional *clȳse as a variant of clūse.

Nice work! I love those obscure regional words, and it’s nice to see people getting knowledgeable answers to such questions. (Thanks for the link, Paul!)

An Oxford University Press announcement says:

Celebrate National Library Week!
All OUP Online Resources are free April 13-19th

Libraries are a vital part of our communities- they feed our curiosity, bolster our professional knowledge, and provide a launchpad for intellectual discovery. In celebration of these cornerstone institutions, we are offering unprecedented free access to all our Online Resources* [*Excluding journals] to support our shared mission of education. [...] No registration required- simply use the credentials below!
Username: libraryweek
Password: libraryweek

The free access starts on April 13th and will run through the end of the day on the 19th, running for the full duration of National Library Week. Access is available in the United States and Canada only.

The full list of resources is at the link; it includes University Press Scholarship Online, Grove Music Online, the Dictionary of National Biography, and of course the OED. Sorry about the geographical restriction, but for those of you in the US and Canada, enjoy the week!

Last year I quoted (via MacDiarmid) a line attributed to T.S. Eliot, “Bewray the repricon, outstent the naze,” and added that I had no idea where he wrote it, if in fact he did. John Cowan just added a comment to that thread saying he had found via Google Books this snippet from p. 16 of James Devaney’s 1952 Poetry in Our Time: A Review of Contemporary Values:

From the beginning the young poets of modernism put cleverness first. When Spender talks of “the narcine torpesce”, or when Eliot writes the line Bewray the repricon, outstent the naze, we know that he is only striking an attitude [...]

But MacDiarmid and Devaney seem to be the only people who are aware of this alleged line of alleged poetry, and now that I am reminded of it, I thought I’d give it its own post and see if any of my readership might know anything about it. I should add that bewray means ‘expose, betray,’ naze is ‘promontory, headland,’ the OED knows out-stent only as a rare Scots adjective meaning ‘outstretched,’ and it is entirely unaware of any such word as repricon.

I’ve finished Poor Folk now (see this post), and although I got a bit impatient at times, it was enjoyable throughout and frequently moving. I was pleased to see that my prediction here that “the Pushkin story, about the mysterious fate of a young woman the narrator finds himself attracted to, is going to be relevant to the novel” was borne out (Devushkin loses the young woman who is his only joy in life to a sudden and unforeseen marriage, just as the stationmaster loses his daughter), and I enjoyed picking up on the influences from the novels he’d been reading (the insanely doting father of young Pokrovsky is a straight-up copy of le père Goriot) and recognizing his sly parodies of the genres popular at the time (the society tale, the historical romance) and of his main influence, Gogol. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that near the start Devushkin writes “в должность-то я пошел сегодня таким гоголем-щеголем” [I strutted to work today like a dandy-gogol (golden-eye duck)], and towards the end he writes “фрак-то на нем сидит гоголем” [his tailcoat sits on him like a gogol].) I also couldn’t help but notice an early instance of the “double” theme in “Я, Варенька, ничего, по правде, и не помню; помню только, что у него было очень много офицеров, или это двоилось у меня — бог знает” [Truly, Varenka, I don't remember a thing; I remember only that there were a lot of officers at his place, or I was seeing double — God only knows].

But the novel achieves real emotional depth when Varvara reminisces about her youth in the countryside, living a carefree life in a house near a lake (“такое широкое, светлое, чистое, как хрусталь!” [so wide, light-filled, pure, like crystal!]); I won’t soon forget the image of a little girl sitting by the lakeside at dusk, gazing at the fishing boat on the lake and the fire the fisherman have lit on the shore (“и свет далеко-далеко по воде льется” [and the light streams far away over the water]), and listening to a frightened bird darting up or the reeds rustling in the wind or a fish splashing: “всё, бывало, слышно” [you could hear everything]. Later there’s a contrasting urban vision when Devushkin describes a walk he took along the Fontanka canal: “Барок такая бездна, что не понимаешь, где всё это могло поместиться. На мостах сидят бабы с мокрыми пряниками да с гнилыми яблоками, и всё такие грязные, мокрые бабы. Скучно по Фонтанке гулять!” [There are so many barges you can't understand how they can all fit; on the bridges sit peasant women with wet spice-cakes and rotten apples, all those dirty, wet women. It's depressing to walk along the Fontanka!] But then he turns from the Fontanka to walk along Gorokhovaya Street, and we are treated to a bout of moralizing about how rich people have so much and poor people have so little and how awful that is; this is, of course, what warmed the heart of Belinsky and his fellow seekers for socially conscious realism, but it cooled mine right down, and I fear it’s but a foretaste of what will become a flood of such moralizing as I move further into the century. And the epistolary framework gets sillier and sillier (why does she write to Devushkin asking him to tell the dressmaker this and that when she could just write the dressmaker?), and the plot is not provided with enough explanation to make it plausible (why exactly is the wealthy Bykov so insistent on marrying this thin, sickly, bedraggled, depressed woman?), but really, none of that matters. The characters are pure Dostoevsky, even if not as fully developed as they would be later on, and so is the scene when poor Devushkin, having messed up a rush job, is called into the boss’s office and instead of being fired is given a hundred rubles and a respectful handshake by the good-hearted man.

And remember that extract in the earlier post with the fourfold repetition of стало быть ‘therefore’? I was right to take note of it; at the end, in Devushkin’s final despairing outcry of a letter, we find:

Вот я от вас письмецо сейчас получил, всё слезами закапанное. Стало быть, вам не хочется ехать; стало быть, вас насильно увозят, стало быть, вам жаль меня, стало быть, вы меня любите!

And now I’ve gotten your little letter, all spotted with tears. Therefore, you don’t want to go; therefore, you’re being taken away by force, therefore you feel sorry for me, therefore you love me!

That’s what I call a payoff.

Addendum. I just noticed what looks to me like a possible reference to Schiller’s Don Carlos (in Michael Dostoevsky’s translation, which I’m reading now thanks to between4walls in this XIX век thread). In the play, the queen says to Carlos:

…миллионы
Глядят на вас и говорят и ропщут:
«Не в чреве ль матери он заслужил
Стать выше всех других своих собратий?»

…millions
look upon you and speak and murmur:
“Did he not in his mother’s womb deserve
to stand above all others of his fellows?”

And Dostoevsky’s Devushkin asks: “зачем одному еще во чреве матери прокаркнула счастье ворона-судьба, а другой из воспитательного дома па свет божий выходит?” [Why did the fate-crow caw forth happiness for one man in his mother's womb, while another goes forth into God's daylight from the foundling hospital?]

Remember the Great Language Game? Well, its creator, Lars Yencken, has analyzed the over 16,000,000 results and made the results available for download, and you can read a summary, with some nice graphs, here. A taste: “Out of all the 78 languages currently featured in the game, players find it easiest to recognize French (Romance, Indo-European) and the hardest to tease out is Shona (Bantu, Atlantic-Congo). There is so much data, that, at some point, every language has been confused with every other language.”