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Back in February I posted about Ross Perlin’s attempt to document endangered languages in and around New York City; now Ian Frazier, perhaps my favorite New Yorker writer, reviews Perlin’s book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (archived). I’ll quote some bits and urge you to read the whole thing:

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. The word “bodega” itself reveals a linguistic nest. It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store), as well as to the French boutique, the Russian and Polish apteka, and the Italian bottega. Perlin writes that “in today’s New York, boutiques and bodegas sit side by side.”

[…] Kichwa, a language descended from that of the ancient Incas, is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in New York. As the Inca Empire spread across parts of South America in pre-Columbian times, it drove out other languages. Now Kichwa qualifies as endangered, although 8,000 to 10,000 New Yorkers may speak it; but in a new country, parents are rarely able to pass along much of their mother tongue to their children. (I asked my dentist, who’s from Ecuador, if he spoke Kichwa or knew any Kichwa speakers. He said that when he was growing up outside Quito, he knew people who spoke only Kichwa, but in the US he seldom hears it. He remembered a few words, like chompa, which means “sweater.” I realized that unconsciously I had always pictured the ancient Incas wearing llama-wool sweaters. “Llama” is a word that comes from Quechua, a language category that includes Kichwa. There are speakers of other forms of Quechua in New York as well.) […]

Looking at the city from a linguistic point of view reveals facts you might otherwise not have stumbled on, such as: when Andy Warhol (née Andrew Warhola) met Pope John Paul II in 1980, he spoke to him in Ruthenian, a language of southern Poland and Slovakia, the region where the Pope and Warhol’s parents came from. Sojourner Truth, the antislavery heroine, grew up speaking Dutch; she was born in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, when it still had a Dutch presence. Yitta Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor and member of a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community in Brooklyn, left maybe two thousand living descendants when she died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. […]

[Read more…]

Ilya Vinitsky at Facebook tells a wonderful story (in Russian) about Roman Jakobson. Apparently Omry Ronen, the great Mandelstam scholar (see this LH post), was a student of his, and used to say that Jakobson was a great teacher despite never reading any of his students’ work — if he decided a student was a genius he would recommend that student for posts and, sight unseen, for publication. As an example he adduced a student whose dissertation on Mayakovsky was published at his insistence; it turned out that the student had mentioned a poem with the strange English title “Hate.” This was, of course, his famous 1913 poem Нате! (text), whose title means “here you are!; there you are!, here! (said formally or to a group of people when giving someone something, i.e., ‘take it!’)” — it’s been translated by Maria Enzensberger (in this book) as “Take It!” The word is often used in an aggressive way (‘Take that!’), and this is how Mayakovsky uses it (“I will guffaw and spit in your face”), so it is not entirely inappropriate that the hapless dissertator mistook the all-capital version in the title, НАТЕ, for the identical-looking English word HATE!

I know what you’re thinking: nice story, but probably invented or exaggerated. That was my reaction too. But no, Vinitsky checked it out and discovered that sure enough, in Lawrence Leo Stahlberger’s The symbolic system of Majakovskij (Mouton, 1964), p. 66, we find “In his poetry of this period, Majakovskij, although expressing his hatred for the bourgeoisie in such poems as Hate (title in English) …” Embarrassing! (Interestingly, Jakobson himself in his French version of another Mayakovsky poem translated «Нате!» as “un mot de dédain” — see the FB post for details.)

I only wish Edwin Morgan had translated this poem in Wi The Haill Voice: 25 poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Carcanet Press, Translations, [South Hinksey, Eng.], England, 1972), recommended here by Geraint Jennings and in the following comment by keith100; his Scots versions are a delight. As a sample, here’s his translation of the brief А вы могли бы? (text):

Wia jaup the darg-day map’s owre-pentit—
I jibbled colour fae a tea-gless;
ashets o jellyteen presentit
to me the great sea’s camshach cheek-bleds.
A tin fish, ilka scale a mou—
I’ve read the cries о a new warld through’t.
But you
wi denty thrapple
can ye wheeple
nocturnes fae a rone-pipe flute?

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Bryan Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume III: Books 9-12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; rpt. 2000), pp. 6-7:

A true hapax legomenon seems to present a special problem for those who believe that the techniques of composition used in the Homeric poems are mainly those of oral poetry. The techniques of oral poetry are generic and formular, the hapax legomenon by definition is not. It may not even bear any relation of sound, sense, or form to the formular part of the diction, and it would be gratuitous and implausible to claim that more than a handful make their sole appearances by chance. On the contrary, hapax legomena, being an aspect of the vitality of the Kunstsprache, and of the willingness of ἀοιδοί to experiment with their lexicon, must be accommodated in any satisfactory account of Homeric diction.⁵ Here then the question is how hapax legomena can be deployed in a sentence otherwise made up of formular elements by a composer who relies heavily on such elements. When it is put in that way the problem posed by a hapax legomenon for the singer is not radically different from that posed by an otherwise unused grammatical form of a regular part of his lexicon. The unique grammatical form will indeed bring with it the verbal associations of the regular forms, but since the associated words and phrases would be built around the particular metrical shape of the regular forms they are likely to be as much a hindrance as a help in handling the unusual form.

The scale of the problem presented by true hapax legomena and by many uniquely occurring grammatical forms is quite serious. The printed text of the Iliad is made up of some 111,500 words, i.e. segments of text marked off by verse-ends or spaces, or about 63,000 if particles, pronouns, and prepositions are ignored. Many of these ‘words’ are repeated, but about 11,000, or more than one in six, are found once only. About 2,000 of them according to M. Pope are true hapaxes, lexical items occurring just once in the poem.⁶

⁵ See M.M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena (Hildesheim 1984) for statistics, N.J. Richardson in Bremer, HBOP [Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry] 165-84, for argument, Edwards, vol. v 53-5. Edwards concludes his discussion of hapax legomena with these words: ‘[Homer] was also completely at ease in employing in his verse words which are not only non-formular but which must be considered (on our limited evidence) foreign to the usual epic vocabulary.’ M. Pope, CQ 35 (1985) 1-8, draws attention to new coinages in Homer.

⁶ ‘Word’ is used here as a publisher might speak of a ‘book of 80,000 words’. The composer’s vocabulary or lexicon of course is very much shorter: ἔγχος is one entry in the lexicon but supplies 205 ‘words’ to the text of the Iliad. Statistics are mine. I am indebted to the Revd A.Q. Morton, formerly of the University of Edinburgh, for making available to me computerized word-lists and indices.

An interesting issue I don’t think I had ever thought about.

I trust we’re all familiar with the phenomenon of English names for animals being good old Anglo-Saxon words (pig, cow, sheep) while the meat from them is called by names deriving from Norman French (pork, beef, mutton); John Cowan quoted the famous passage from Ivanhoe in which Wamba describes it back in 2015. Well, my friend Mapraputa asks “whether there are other languages where the word used to describe a live animal and the word used to describe the same animal when it’s dead (and being eaten) are etymologically rooted in two different underlying source languages.” I thought this was an interesting question, and I figured I’d pass it along in case the Hattery can help her answer it.

I ran across the Russian phrase оконные переплеты, which I knew I’d seen before and looked up, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it meant, so I looked it up again. The dictionary said “window-sash.” I put it down, momentarily satisfied, until it came to me that I didn’t know exactly what a window-sash was either. So I looked that up, and Wiktionary told me it was “The opening part (casement) of a window usually containing the glass panes, hinged to the jamb, or sliding up and down as in a sash window.” (There’s a nice illustration labeled “Woman and boy standing at an open sash window.”) The OED (1909 entry, not yet revised) is wordier:

A frame, usually of wood, rebated and fitted with one or more panes of glass forming a window or part of a window; esp. a sliding frame or each of the two sliding frames of a sash window n. Also (? now only U.S.) applied to a casement.
In early use denoting a glazed frame of wood as distinguished from a leaded window, but now usually applied to a sliding frame in contradistinction to a casement. French sash, a French window (see French window n.).

The etymology is interesting:

From sashes, from French châssis (“frame (of a window or door)”), taken as a plural and -s trimmed off by the late 17th century.

The sad thing is that there was a whole discussion of sash windows at LH in 2010 (starting here), but I had entirely forgotten it.

Another nice etymology I ran across while looking up sash: sassy is “A modification of saucy.” (I probably knew that once, too.)

Anatoly Vorobey has a post (in Russian) that starts with an anecdote about East German students who complained that after six years of learning Russian at school, they went to the USSR and ten times in the first five minutes heard a word that they had never encountered: ладно ‘all right, okay.’ He says it’s an interesting topic: very common words from ordinary speech, not part of high style, that are missing from textbooks and lessons for beginners. He suggests that for Hebrew, a comparable word would be סבבה (sababa) ‘cool! great!’ (from Arabic صَبَابَة ṣabāba). He also brings up a different but analogous phenomenon, unexpected substitutes for expected verbal forms — in Hebrew, ‘to give’ is לתת (latet) and there is a perfectly good imperative תן (ten), but people don’t actually say ten li ‘give me,’ they say tavi li, literally ‘bring me.’ The thread is full of other examples; the first comment adduces the Russian word короче, literally ‘shorter’ but now in common use as an interjection meaning ‘right (signpost word to change the subject)’ or as a request to repeat a statement in layman’s terms, to shorten a speech drastically, or to end it immediately. I did not know that.

Hugh Schofield of BBC News reports on French lexicography:

Forty years after they began the task – and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission – sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary. The full ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings of the 17th century Collège des Quatre-Nations on the left bank of the Seine. […]

“The effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless,” a collective of linguists wrote in the Liberation newspaper on Thursday. This ninth edition replaces the eighth, which was completed in 1935. Work started in 1986, and three previous sections – up to the letter R – have already been issued. Today the end section (last entry Zzz) has been added, meaning the work is complete.

In its press release, the Academy said the dictionary is a “mirror of an epoch running from the 1950s up to today,” and boasts 21,000 new entries compared to the 1935 version. But many of the “modern” words added in the 1980s or 90s are already out of date. And such is the pace of linguistic change, many words in current use today are too new to make it in. Thus common words like tiktokeur, vlog, smartphone and émoji – which are all in the latest commercial dictionaries – do not exist in the Académie book. Conversely its “new” words include such go-ahead concepts as soda, sauna, yuppie and supérette (mini-supermarket).

For the latest R-Z section, the writers have included the new thinking on the feminisation of jobs, including female alternatives (which did not exist before) for positions such as ambassadeur and professeur. However print versions of the earlier sections do not have the change, because for many years the Académie fought a rear-guard action against it. Likewise the third section of the new dictionary – including the letter M – defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which in France it no longer is. “How can anyone pretend that this collection can serve as a reference for anyone?” the collective asks, noting that online dictionaries are both bigger and faster-moving. […]

Among the “immortals” is the English poet and French expert Michael Edwards, who told Le Figaro newspaper how he tried to get the Academy to revive the long-forgotten word improfond (undeep). “French needs it, because as every English student of French knows, there is no word for ‘shallow’,” he said. Sadly, he failed.

Discussions – lengthy ones — are already under way for the commencement of edition 10.

I confess I’ve never been sure what, or who, the Academy’s dictionary is for, but it’s a grand thing to be sure. (Thanks, Trevor!)

This unexpected term was brought to my attention by Jen in Edinburgh here, and I was flabbergasted enough to give it its own post. I knew the word headland, of course, but only as “A steep point of land projecting from a coastline into the sea or other expanse of water; a cape or promontory”; this is the OED’s sense 2, attested from ?c1475 (“Betwene the hedelonde and houndeclif fote, the cours is northwest and southest” in J. Gairdner, Sailing Directions 11), much later than sense 1, which goes back to OE:

1. Agriculture. (Each of) the strips of land at the end of a ploughed field, left for access and for convenience in turning the plough at the end of the furrows or near the border. In early use also: †a boundary formed by this; cf. headroom n. (obsolete).
In some districts the headland is left only at the two ends of the ridges or ‘lands’ (see land n.¹ 7), but in others it runs parallel to the fence round all sides of the field. It is typically ploughed last, with furrows parallel to the fence, crossing the ends of the regular furrows of the field at right angles.
In quot. OE¹ rendering the plural of classical Latin līmes (see limit n.), ult. reflecting Isidore Origines 15. 14. 2 (on field boundaries).

OE Limites, hafudland.
Antwerp-London Glossary (2011) 85

OE Of þam pytte andlang riþiges on þæt heafodlond; of þam heafodon andlang fura.
Bounds (Sawyer 587) in S. E. Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, Part 2 (2001) 294

a1325 Un vileine vint e ma forer [glossed] In myn hevede lond [a1325 Arundel MS. heved-lond].
Glossary of Walter de Bibbesworth (Cambridge MS.) (1929) 319
[…]

1573 Now plough vp thy hedlond, or delue it wᵗ spade.
T. Tusser, Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (new edition) f. 24

1637 There shalbe two Rod of hadland lying next to every mans particular meddow.
in Watertown (Massachusetts) Rec. (1894) 3
[…]

1793 I see no account of the head lands being plowed at any place except River Farm.
G. Washington, Letter 4 August in Papers (2007) Presidential Series vol. XIII. 344
[…]

1863 After the centre of the field has been ploughed, the headlands will remain to be ploughed separately.
H. Fawcett, Manual of Political Economy i. vi. 81
[…]

2010 Our boots sank into the sludge and we slipped and slithered our way back to the safety of the headland.
R. Stirzaker, Out of Scientist’s Garden viii. 72

The etymology is boring (head n.¹ + land n.¹), but the Note is worth reading:

The word occurs frequently as a boundary marker in Anglo-Saxon charters; compare quot. OE² at sense 1. It also occurs as a field name in Middle English (e.g. Hefedlant, Gloucestershire (a1243), Longhadlond, Gloucestershire (13th cent.), The Havedlond, Tilehurst, Berkshire (1462), etc.), and such attestations are sometimes difficult to distinguish from lexical use of the word (in sense 1).
It has been suggested that the early surname John de Hevedlond (1275 in a Suffolk source) perhaps implies earlier currency of the word in sense 2.

As you can see from the 2010 citation, it’s still in use, and it astonishes me that I was completely unaware of it. Are you familiar with the ‘strip of land’ sense?

I watched Alexander Dovzhenko’s famous 1930 movie Земля (Earth), which is terrific filmmaking (it’s “commonly regarded as Dovzhenko’s masterpiece and as one of the greatest films ever made,” to quote that Wikipedia article) and also a celebration of Stalin’s forced collectivization, which killed “on the order of 12 million people” and destroyed Soviet agriculture, so it might well be compared to another famous and morally dubious filmic masterpiece… but I digress. I want to complain about a badly translated word in the version I watched. The hero of the movie, Vasyl, is (of course) a Bolshevik agitprop guy, and he’s convincing the villagers to give up their individualistic fields and flocks and join the kolkhoz; the villains are (of course) the kulaks who don’t agree and want to keep their own stuff. When the community’s first tractor arrives to much fanfare, it eventually (after it stops because of an overheated radiator, which the villagers solve by pissing into it, a scene cut by prudish Soviet censors) starts plowing much more efficiently than the peasants’ horses and oxen, those relics of the outmoded past. And at one point we see a guy rush up to one of the kulaks and holler “Хома! Василь межу трактором переехал!” [Khoma! Vasyl plowed over the field boundary with the tractor!]; later, after the furious Khoma has killed the noble Vasyl, at the funeral service (a Bolshevik service, with singing and dancing and no priest!) a speaker says “Большевистским стальным конем разворотил Василь тысячелетние межи” [Vasyl broke up thousand-year-old field boundaries with his Bolshevik steel horse]. Unfortunately, whoever did the subtitles didn’t understand the word межа́, and rendered it “field” both times, which makes nonsense of the dialogue (and counterrevolutionary nonsense at that — accusing a Bolshevik of destroying the peasants’ fields will get you ten years without right of correspondence, citizen). So if you ever see the movie, remember this post!

I’ve always liked the word aftermath (which sounds so old I’m surprised to learn from the OED it only goes back to 1496: “Item iijs. iiijd. yat ye same Water r[eceyved] of Recharde Andru for aftur mathe of Senjorge Closse” in W. H. Stevenson, Records of Borough of Nottingham III. 296), and I recently learned of a couple of interesting synonyms. Rowen (attested from 1440: “Raweyne, hey [Pynson MS. rawen], fenum serotinum,” Promptorium Parvulorum 424) is from French:

< Anglo-Norman rewayn and Middle French rewaing, revayn second growth of grass, aftermath (c1285 or earlier in Anglo-Norman; compare earlier Old French rewains autumn (mid 13th cent.)), variant of Anglo-Norman and Middle French regain, in the same senses (c1176 in Middle French; French regain) < re- re- prefix + gain harvest (see gain n.²; compare gain v.²); in β forms and probably also in α forms showing folk-etymological association of the first element with row adj. (compare later roughings n.). Compare post-classical Latin rewaynum, reweynum, regainum, rewannum, rewannium, regwannum (frequently from 1230 in British sources).

It’s “Now chiefly English regional (south-eastern and East Anglian) and U.S.”; I’d never seen it, but sure enough, the AHD has it (as New England). And from it, in some obscure fashion, is derived roughings (from c1575: “All the roughen and feedinge of the Edishe is free for the townshippe and parisheners untill Candlemas daye followinge,” Auncient Custoums Dedham in G. H. Rendall, Dedham in History ii. 33), “Originally English regional. In later use also U.S. regional.” That one is unknown to the AHD, but the OED has this citation from the Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Daily News of Aug. 10, 1914: “Plow and harrow the earth very fine and turn under a good fertiliser; some use roughings and manure.”

Huh, and what do you know, there’s yet another word, eddish “Grass (also clover, etc.) which grows again; an aftergrowth of grass after mowing” (from 1468: “Frutex, a styke, a yerde, and buske, vnderwode, or eddysche,” Medulla Gram. in Promptorium Parvulorum 136), but that one is “Of uncertain origin.”