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The great linguist William Labov, who practically invented sociolinguistics, has died at 97; Ximena Conde’s Philadelphia Inquirer obit (archived) is excellent:

Dr. Labov approached language as something that by its nature was variable, not governed by an ideal set of rules of grammar. His work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. The way he saw it, dialects touched everything, from how you’re viewed to how you learn. “He really believed that every single person on the planet is worth talking to and has something to learn from,” said Gillian Sankoff, his wife and fellow sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. The pair married in 1993.

Dr. Labov was born in Passaic, N.J., on Dec. 4, 1927, and raised in Rutherford, N.J. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University but also dabbled in chemistry, which he would use working as an industrial chemist before returning to school to study linguistics. He studied and worked at Columbia University before landing in 1971 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would conduct some of his most lasting work.

Dr. Labov’s influence and innovations in linguistics can be broken into two categories: the technical and conceptual. On the technical side, Dr. Labov relied less on intuition than his predecessors, taking a clinical and statistical approach by recording his subjects and analyzing them on a computer before the technology became ubiquitous. He also transformed how linguists viewed language changes, researching these shifts in real time — like when he found the “Southern-inflected sound” of Philadelphia was slowly turning into a more “Northern” accent.

Bigger still was the choice to study speech patterns and changes in communities that would have been ignored. Dr. Labov took an interest in how Puerto Ricans in New York City talked and what he distinguished as African American English. Dr. Labov believed “everyday vernacular” was worthy of organizing and he didn’t dismiss dialects that might appear to carry errors because they don’t follow mainstream rules, former student and linguist Josef Fruehwald said. “People aren’t chaotic as they’re speaking,” said Fruehwald. “There’s structure to the pattern of variation they’re using.” […]

“Linguists are smart,” was Dr. Labov’s mantra when it came to more esoteric topics, said Fruehwald and others. Dr. Labov didn’t try to poke holes in papers he thought were “wrong”; instead he looked for something worthwhile to take away from them. Sneller, one of Dr. Labov’s last sociolinguistic students at Penn, said he often kicked off reading group discussions with a “what have we learned?” This approach was just one part of Dr. Labov’s never-ending quest for knowledge. Linguists who knew him said he was not one to be stuck in his ways methodologically or technologically, a trap some academics can fall into.

I love that line about not trying to poke holes in papers but looking for something worthwhile to take away from them; that’s how I try to approach what I read. Labov’s name, surprisingly, is pronounced [ləbˈoʊv] (lə-BOVE — see this LH post); there are more links at Mark Liberman’s Log post, as well as an account of the “Bunny Paper” which I urge you to read. He was quite a guy.

Jamais deux sans trois: here’s another post about translation, featuring Joan Acocella’s New Yorker review (archived) of Wayne A. Rebhorn’s new translation of the Decameron. After discussing the Black Death that serves as its backdrop, she summarizes the book itself and then its author’s life:

Boccaccio was not a noble; he was one of the nuova gente, the mercantile middle class, whose steady rise since the twelfth century the nobles feared and deplored. Boccaccio’s father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a merchant, and he expected Giovanni to join the trade. Giovanni was born illegitimate, but Boccaccino acknowledged him. When the boy was thirteen, Boccaccino moved from Florence to Naples to work for an important counting house, and he took his son with him, to learn the business: receive clients, oversee inventory, and the like. Boccaccio did not enjoy this work, and so his indulgent father paid for him to go to university, to study canon law. Boccaccio didn’t like that, either, but during this time he read widely. (The Decameron is, unostentatiously, a very learned book.) He also began to write: romances in verse and prose, mostly. With those literary credits, plus his father’s contacts, he gained entry to Naples’s Angevin court, whose refinements seeped into his work. He later said that he had never wanted to be anything but a poet. In Naples, he became one, of the late-medieval stripe. These were the happiest years of his life.

When he was in his late twenties, they came to an end. […]

Then she moves on to analysis, which is more interesting:

The dominant notes of the Decameron are this realism and cheer and disorderliness, but, whatever you say about the book, something else arises to contradict you. Though Boccaccio insists on Renaissance earthiness, he makes room for elegant medievalisms. The young people often join hands and do the carola, a circle dance born of the Middle Ages. They also, now and then, between tales, deliver long, ornate speeches, full of medieval rhetorical flourishes. You may weary of these refinements and long to get back to the nice, rude tales, but the tension between the two modes is fundamental to the Decameron.

But of course what made me want to post it was the stuff about language:
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Another post about an interesting translator: Michael S. Rosenwald at the NY Times reports that “Shuntaro Tanikawa, Popular Poet and Translator of ‘Peanuts,’ Dies at 92” (archived).

Shuntaro Tanikawa, Japan’s most popular poet for more than half a century, whose stark and whimsical poems, blending humor with melancholy, made him a kind of Everyman philosopher ideally suited to translating the “Peanuts” comic strip and Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese, died on Nov. 13 in Tokyo. He was 92. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Shino Tanikawa, who did not specify a cause.

A perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mr. Tanikawa was revered in Japan, not just in literary circles but also among casual readers. It was not uncommon to see commuters reading his books on the subway. He published more than 60 collections of poetry, beginning in 1952, when he was 21, with “Alone in Two Billion Light Years” — a book that heralded a bold new voice who shunned haiku and other traditional Japanese forms of verse. […]

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Amir Ahmadi Arian writes for the Yale Review about another of those amazing people whose stories I have to share with the multitudes; he starts off with an Iranian series called Women’s Secret Network that briefly shows a translator named Zabihollah Mansouri:

He appears suddenly, talks about something he calls his “philosophy of expansionism” in translation, has an awkward interaction with another character, and then vanishes, never to be seen again. The screenwriters didn’t bother to provide an introduction for him because they knew it wasn’t necessary. Most people in Iran, even those who rarely crack open a book, know who Mansouri is, though he died almost forty years ago.

That’s what I call a hook. He goes on to tell about how he first encountered Mansouri as a child growing up in Ahvaz:

No one in my family or our neighborhood was into books, and there was no internet then. So when I looked at the shelves in the library, I had no idea what any of the books were about and knew nothing of the writers who had written them. I had no sense of good or bad literature, good or bad writing, accurate or inaccurate translation. In this total absence of guidance from the outside world, I took a quantitative approach to measuring the significance of writers: the more frequently a name appeared on the shelves, the more important the author must be. One day, I set out to survey the entire library. The result was undeniable: the most important literary figure in Iran was a translator by the name of Zabihollah Mansouri. Our little library carried far more of his titles than any other writer’s.

Having thus grabbed our attention, he gives a brief history of the “great translation movement in Iran” and says “Translators soon became a pillar of Iranian culture and have remained so ever since. And in his day, no translator was more important, or more prolific, than Mansouri.”
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I’ve long been fascinated by the process of old-fashioned printing (see this 2004 post), and when I used to work in a printing and design shop I liked nothing better than listening to grizzled old printers reminisce. So it is with nostalgic pleasure that I present Peter Campbell’s posthumous LRB essay (it was left unpublished at the time of his death in 2011; he designed the LRB and wrote more than three hundred pieces for it), which begins:

It was noisy​ in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. I worked upstairs in the composing room where the rhythm was set by the Linotype machines: the tap of the keyboard, the rustle of the matrices sliding from the magazine into their place in the line, followed, when the line was full, by a heavy thump as the spaces were wedged home. There were clanks and bangs as the line of matrices was offered up to the mould and the molten type-metal that glistened in the crucible behind was injected. The hot, bright line of newly cast type joined others in the tray with a metallic slither. Meanwhile, we hand-compositors stood at our frames and quietly clicked type into our composing sticks for the odd heading or display line, or dissed it, dropping used type back into the case with a louder click. We assembled the metal lines of type (called slugs) and titles and any other elements of the printed page, and grouped them together with other pages for printing, creating what was known as a forme. From time to time there would be a thump as one of us heaved a forme (four, eight or sixteen pages of type weigh a lot) up onto the stone – the metal table on which they were put together. The pages of the forme were wedged into a metal frame, the chase, where they were held firm by quoins (wedges). A hoist creaked as the finished formes were lowered to the ground-floor press room. That had its own sounds. The hiss of air as suckers picked up a sheet from the stack at one end of the big flatbed press and passed it on to be grasped by the cylinder. The sound of engaged gears as the sheet was rolled against the inked type on the moving bed of the press and then released to be carried onwards and added to the pile of printed sheets at the other end of the press. What had been Linotype slugs, type and illustrations upstairs were now pages of the New Zealand Commercial Grower or a scientific paper on the best way to collect ram semen. Each of the three presses had its own voice. It was an inky world dominated by machines that had been milled and drilled from heavy castings, which needed grease and oil to keep them healthy, and a machine minder who, like a good childminder, had an ear tuned to unexpected sounds as well as an eye tuned to imperfections in inking.

I have spent most of my life following up what I began then. I still work with print and play with words, but the sound of typesetting is now the tapping of a writer at a word processor, and I move pages about on my computer screen not on a stone. The formes we sent down to the press room are now files sent over the wire to a printer. Typesetting, once handwork, is now screenwork, a branch of computer graphics, and the presses that output printed sheets are governed electronically. […] Print itself is losing its primacy; newspapers, book and magazine publishers are looking for ways to defend their properties with web-based versions and extensions. Ebooks have begun to sell better than hardbacks.

It isn’t surprising either that letterpress printing – the essentials of which changed little over the first five hundred years – is dead as an industrial process, or almost dead in this country anyway. Someone who came to printing in the 1950s wanting to make books like the ones he or she had read and admired knows that little remains of the constraints, the rectangular grid imposed by type and chase, the limited number of typefaces and sizes of type, which set limits (including an architecture as orthogonal as the warp and weft of woven fabric) on the look of typeset pages. Hot metal typesetting sped thing up: instead of having to arrange existing metal type by hand, the compositor took prepared lines of text from the casting machine, which created new type as quickly as you could tap out the letters on the keyboard. But printing remained an entirely physical business.

After discussing the history of type (“Many practitioners and historians, including Harry Carter, whose 1968 Lyell Lectures, A View of Early Typography, are still the best account of the early history of type design, have known how to cut a punch”) and the preservation of the past of letterpress printing, he continues:
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Kitty Empire’s “MJ Lenderman review – a shooting star from the American south” begins:

A pedal steel guitar is weeping in one corner of the stage, comforted by a keyboard countermelody coming from the opposite end. Centre stage is up-and-coming guitarist of the moment MJ Lenderman, a study in slackerish nonc muels freewheels by his side, flinging lots of hair around.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what is intended by “nonc muels,” or what it might be a typo for. Mind you, it’s the Grauniad, so anything’s possible; I welcome all suggestions. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Back in January I was asked to continue my Year in Reading series here at LH, and how can I say no? At first I was thinking “I didn’t really read much this year,” but then I looked through my appointment book (if that’s what you call those little week-at-a-glance thingies, which I mainly use to keep track of reading and movies) and discovered that actually I read quite a bit. I’ll list most of them (in more or less chronological order) with cursory evaluations, linking to posts if I’ve written about them, and at the end I’ll be more expansive about a couple I’m reading now with great pleasure.

I enjoyed Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, though it’s not my favorite Sorokin (LH). My wife and I spent many happy hours listening to Zadie Smith read her recent novel The Fraud (LH). I reread Gaito Gazdanov’s Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire], which I last read shortly after moving to NYC in 1981 (I checked it out of the much-missed Donnell, with its superb foreign-language collection); I don’t know why I didn’t post about it, but I enjoyed it even more than I had before, since I had more background, both historical (it’s about the Russian Civil War) and literary, and I’m sure Bryan Karetnyk’s translation is well worth reading if you want to investigate it. I read Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (LH), Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel (my wife and I thought it was very funny, if frequently discomfiting, as he intends), Veniamin Kaverin’s Художник неизвестен [Artist unknown, tr. as The Unknown Artist] (LH), Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (LH), Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (see JC’s 2019 comment; again, I don’t know why I didn’t write about it here, but it was a fun read), Nabokov’s Подвиг [The feat] (LH) and Приглашение на казнь [Invitation to a Beheading] (LH), and Juan Filloy’s Caterva (LH).

One book I really wanted to post about and somehow didn’t manage to was Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. It got rave reviews (you can see some quotes at Mandel’s site), and I’d been wanting to read it for quite a while before it came into my hands as a birthday present this year; I found it gripping and well written, but I somehow couldn’t find anything worth saying about it. If you have any interest in post-apocalyptic fiction that isn’t about zombies or civil war but about ordinary people trying to get by, get along, and deal with their memories, you will almost certainly like it.

I was disappointed by Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental (LH) and by Marietta Shaginyan’s Кик [Kik] (LH) and entertained but not impressed by Irina Polyanskaya’s Читающая вода [(The) reading water; Water that reads] (LH); my wife and I found Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses involving but often depressing (Segal has a very disenchanted view of humanity), and we are now rereading Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in his sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (LH) — I’m enjoying Powell’s leisurely, Latinate prose as much as I did a decade ago.
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I don’t usually repost from Language Log, but this astonished me to such an extent that I can’t resist: this post shows an example of a Chinese signboard in which ’r represents Mr., and in the comments Jonathan Smith links to his comment about the phenomenon in a thread from 2017:

I was suspicious of this [the idea that ’s after a name on a Chinese Starbucks cup represented a genitive] (because totally superfluous) and indeed internet research indicates that in Chinese Starbucks (e.g.) “李’r” = Mr. Li and “李’s” = Mrs. Li. It is not hard to find pictures of X’r / X’R cups online. So it provides real information. Perhaps this makes the biscriptalism even weirder though

As Eidolon then points out:

With these additional examples, Jonathan Smith’s explanation begins to make more sense to me. The reason being, ’s adds no extra semantic value to the cup when combined with a Chinese surname – the barista should be able to tell that the cup belongs to a Chinese person of that surname. But the ’r and ’s make a decisive difference, since when calling out the customer upon the completion of his or her drink, it is customary in Chinese etiquette to avoid personal names and to instead append a gendered honorific: 先生, 女士, etc. This would then require the barista to know whether the customer is male or female, necessitating the use of ’r or ’s. Of course, the choice of the English abbreviation is still for the sake of time and effort.

Both the imported symbols and the imported gender differentiation are of great linguistic interest.

From Susan Tallman’s NYRB review (archived) of a MOMA retrospective now on view at the Museum of Modern Art of the work of Ed Ruscha (an artist I’ve always liked):

For Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), Ruscha mounted a motorized camera on the bed of his pickup truck (Google be not proud) and shot both sides of the two miles of Sunset Boulevard known as the Strip, then arranged the photos in strips along the top and bottom edges of a twenty-five-foot-long accordion-fold leporello.

I was unfamiliar with the term “leporello,” but Google quickly took me to Jill Ehlert’s 2015 “Book works” post, which explained:

The term leporello refers to printed material folded into an accordion-pleat style. Also sometimes known as a concertina fold, it is a method of parallel folding with the folds alternating between front and back. The name likely comes from the manservant, Leporello, in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Famed rogue and lover Don Giovanni (in Italian – also known as Don Juan in Spanish) has seduced so many women that when Leporello displays a tally of his conquests, it unfolds, accordion-style, into a shockingly long list. Many leporellos are used as a way of telling a story, while others are purely visual.

(There’s a nice illustration of such a book that Ehlert herself made; she’s a mixed-media artist in Cobble Hill, British Columbia.) I like the proposed derivation a lot; the word isn’t in any of my dictionaries (even the OED doesn’t know of it), so I can’t find out about its history, though Google Books finds a 1959 use in Ruth Zechlin’s The Complete Book of Handcrafts. Anyone know more about this charming word?

Not worth making a separate post of, but from the French noir Razzia sur la chnouf (chnouf is a slang term for hard drugs, apparently from German Schnupf ‘snuff’) I learned the Breton word kenavo ‘goodbye, au revoir,’ which Wiktionnaire says is “composé de ken, ma et vo.” I expect our resident Celticists to weigh in (is there a Welsh equivalent?).

After seeing Antonioni’s Blow-Up for, I think, the third time (his greatest hit, but not his best movie), I finally decided to read the Cortázar story, “Las babas del diablo” (“The Devil’s Drool”), on which it was partially based; I confess that one reason was that I was curious about the title. Here’s the relevant passage from the story:

Y mientras se lo decía gozaba socarronamente de cómo el chico se replegaba, se iba quedando atrás-con sólo no moverse-y de golpe (parecía casi increíble) se volvía y echaba a correr, creyendo el pobre que caminaba y en realidad huyendo a la carrera, pasando al lado del auto, perdiéndose como un hilo de la Virgen en el aire de la mañana.

Pero los hilos de la Virgen se llaman también babas del diablo, y Michel tuvo que aguantar minuciosas imprecaciones, oírse llamar entrometido e imbécil, mientras se esmeraba deliberadamente en sonreír y declinar, con simples movimientos de cabeza, tanto envío barato.

Here’s Paul Blackburn’s translation:

And while that was getting said, I noticed on the sly how the boy was falling back, sort of actively backing up though without moving, and all at once (it seemed almost incredible) he turned and broke into a run, the poor kid, thinking that he was walking off and in fact in full flight, running past the side of the car, disappearing like a gossamer filament of angel-spit in the morning air.

But filaments of angel-spittle are also called devil-spit, and Michel had to endure rather particular curses, to hear himself called meddler and imbecile, taking great pains meanwhile to smile and to abate with simple movements of his head such a hard sell.

I don’t know why he chose to render “un hilo de la Virgen” (‘a thread of the Virgin’) with “a gossamer filament of angel-spit,” but in any case it’s not clear what the phrase means; fortunately, this site cleared it up:

“El hilo de la virgen” es una teleraña tan liviana y fina que flota por el aire. Según un documental (que vi hace mucho) la propietaria de la telaraña puede viajar muy lejos e incluso cruzar océanos.

“The virgin’s thread” is a spider web so light and fine that it floats through the air. According to a documentary (which I saw a long time ago) the owner of the spider web can travel very far and even cross oceans.

My question is: is there a name in English, or for that matter other languages, for such drifting spider webs?