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Y sent me a link to Cid Swanenvleugel’s The pre‑Roman elements of the Sardinian lexicon (LOT, 2025; free pdf download), saying “It looks ambitious, and if not all true or even verifiable, at least interesting,” and I agree. Here’s the Summary (pp. 535-36):

One of the questions addressed in this study is whether the assumption of a single pre-Roman language, besides Punic, can account for all of the non-inherited lexical material. I have found that there is no geographical patterning in the phonological features found in words of pre-Roman origin. We can, however, discern a near-complementary geographical distribution in the pre-Roman prefixes *k(V)- and *θ(i)-, which have been argued in § 9.1.3 to be variants of one and the same pre-Roman morpheme (cf. also Swanenvleugel 2024). This prefix and other accepted pre-Roman morphemes exhibit an island-wide distribution. Pre-Roman Sardinian words, excluding punicisms with accepted cognates in other languages also occur across Sardinia. All of these findings constitute evidence supporting the hypothesis of a single language, or at least closely related language varieties, having existed all across Sardinia at the time of its romanization. This language coexisted with Punic. The coexistence of other languages with a smaller distribution cannot be ruled out.

The reality of many of the previously proposed phonological and morphological features attributed to a pre-Roman language in Sardinia cannot be confirmed based on the lexical material investigated in this study. This includes the pre-Roman vowel harmony proposed by Serra (1960; cf. § 8.4.2). The same goes for a number of putative pre-Roman suffixes (§ 9.2). What can be maintained is the pre-Roman phoneme *θ, the existence of word-final consonants, and various morphemes, such as *k(V)-/*θ(i)-, *-́Vr, and *-(V)s-.

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Kim Willsher writes for the Guardian:

The French government has been accused of making some of its new language tests for foreigners seeking to stay in the country so hard even its own citizens would fail them.

An impact report on a new immigration law expected to come into force before the end of the year suggested the stricter requirements could lead to 60,000 people being refused permission to remain in France.

The tests, which cost around €100 (£83.20), are part of bill passed a year ago, that includes tighter border controls and tougher measures to expel foreign migrants. Ministers argue its primary aim is to promote greater integration of foreigners. […]

An investigation by FranceInfo suggested the levels required would challenge even native speakers. It sent 10 French volunteers, including a literature student with five years of post-baccalauréat higher education, to sit the tests those seeking French nationality will face. Five failed the written test but passed the oral, while two failed to reach a level necessary to obtain their own nationality.

Félix Guyon, of the Thot school that helps refugees and asylum seekers learn French, said: “The level is far too high for most foreigners who are seeking nationality or papers to stay for a long period in France.”

Bathrobe, who sent me the link, complained about similar tests in English; this kind of thing (Wikipedia) is a convenient and superficially reasonable way for bigots to keep out those they consider riffraff — ou bien, si vouz voulez, racaille.

I was reading Nick Paumgarten’s fascinating New Yorker article “The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate” (archived) when I had to pause to look up a word: “On the other side of the chapel was the swimming pool, surrounded by fig and plum trees and a wire fence vined with grapes, and a kind of galilee that looked out over the foothills of the Pyrenees.” (Emphasis added.) What was this “galilee”? Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “a chapel or porch at the north end of some churches. Its historical purpose is unclear.” (The article is just a stub, but there’s a nice photo of the galilee porch at Lincoln Cathedral.) The OED (entry from 1898) begs to differ:

A porch or chapel at the entrance of a church.

According to some authorities, the Latin word was also applied to the western extremity of the nave, as being a part regarded as less sacred than the rest.

The etymology:

< Old French galilee, < medieval Latin galilæa (Du Cange), a use of the proper name (see Galilean adj.¹). Possibly the allusion is to Galilee as an outlying portion of the Holy Land, or to the phrase ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ (Matthew iv. 15).

It’s certainly an obscure word, and it’s a bit cheeky to use it casually as though every New Yorker reader was familiar with the terminology of ecclesiastical architecture, but on the other hand it’s resonant and works well in the sentence, and I enjoy learning new words, so good for Paumgarten.

Later on he uses an excellent word from an entirely different register:

Schnapsi was the flock’s schlimazel. “In the beginning, you could always tell Schnapsi from the others, a white bird covered in shit,” Babsi said.

If you’re unfamiliar with schlimazel, here you go. (I learned it, along with so much else, from Leo Rosten.) The OED (entry revised 2019) has a good selection of citations:
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Over at Wordorigins, in a thread on the term mind meld, Syntinen Laulu commented:

Surely meld in the card-game sense (it’s used in the game of tarot, too) is an entirely unrelated word, cognate with Dutch and German melden, to report. (Comparable to declare in bridge or bezique.)

To anyone in the Central European side of my family, the word is unshakeably associated with the Good Soldier Svejk, who routinely prefixes anything he says to anyone in authority with ‘Ich melde gehorsamst’ – ‘I report most respectfully’. (I have often wondered if he says it in German in the original – did Czech soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army have to use German phrases such as this? And if not, what dies he say in Czech? Anyone here know?)

I responded:

The full novel in Czech is here; turns out he uses both the German expression (“Ich melde gehorsamst, Herr Feldwebel…”) and the Czech equivalent, Poslušně hlásím (“‘Poslušně hlásím, pane feldkurát,’ řekl Švejk”). I’m glad you asked — what an interesting situation!

I report it here both for the bilingualism and for the fact that the text is online — I no longer have to (very faintly) regret having given away my Czech copy of the novel.

Addendum. Googling turned up this splended occurrence in a (Habsburg) Hungarian context, from Péter Hajdu’s “Hungarian Writers on the Military Mission of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans: Viceroy Kállay and Good Soldier Tömörkény” (Hungarian Studies 21 [2007]: 297-314):
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Bathrobe sent me a link to Joshua Hammer’s Smithsonian article about the decipherment of cuneiform (archived), calling it “not new, but thrillingly written,” and he’s right — I thought I knew the basics of the story, but I now have a much clearer picture (and a burning dislike of the egregious Henry Rawlinson). It starts:

On a late-summer day in 1856, a letter carrier stepped from a mail coach in front of a three-story townhouse in Mayfair, in central London. Crossing the threshold, the courier handed a wax-sealed envelope to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, one of Europe’s leading research institutions.

The postman had no way of knowing that the envelope would help rewrite the story of civilization’s origins and ignite a contest for international renown. At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make a once-in-a-century intellectual breakthrough. Three men—driven by bound-less curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition—were most responsible for making the contest possible.

And here’s a bit from the middle to whet your appetite:

Talbot dispatched a letter—the letter that would change everything—to London’s Royal Asiatic Society, offering to send in his own translation and have a panel of judges compare his work with Rawlinson’s. If the versions turned out to be identical—or even close—“it must indicate that they have Truth for their basis,” he wrote. After a negotiation with Rawlinson and the British Museum, Talbot received a lithograph copy of the inscriptions in January 1857 and got to work.

On March 21, two dozen members of the society converged on 5 New Burlington Street for their regular Saturday conclave, filing through the spacious interior, checking their topcoats and hats, and making their way to a ground-floor gallery.

Go ahead and read it (though you may skim over the background info on Middle Eastern history, as I did, if you’re familiar with it), and remember the name of the brilliant Hincks, cheated out of his rightful glory!

Laudator Temporis Acti sent me to Tom Keeline and Tyler Kirby, “Auceps syllabarum: A Digital Analysis of Latin Prose Rhythm” (Journal of Roman Studies 109 [2019]:161-204), which looks like a useful and well-done study; the abstract:

In this article we describe a series of computer algorithms that generate prose rhythm data for any digitised corpus of Latin texts. Using these algorithms, we present prose rhythm data for most major extant Latin prose authors from Cato the Elder through the second century ᴀ.ᴅ. Next we offer a new approach to determining the statistical significance of such data. We show that, while only some Latin authors adhere to the Ciceronian rhythmic canon, every Latin author is ‘rhythmical’ — they just choose different rhythms. Then we give answers to some particular questions based on our data and statistical approach, focusing on Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. In addition to providing comprehensive new data on Latin prose rhythm, presenting new results based on that data and confirming certain long-standing beliefs, we hope to make a contribution to a discussion of digital and statistical methodology in the study of Latin prose rhythm and in Classics more generally. The Supplementary Material available online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000881) contains an appendix with tables, data and code. This appendix constitutes a static ‘version of record’ for the data presented in this article, but we expect to continue to update our code and data; updates can be found in the repository of the Classical Language Toolkit (https://github.com/cltk/cltk).

But what clinched the decision to post about it was the title; I am not Latinist enough to recognize it, but Prof. Google tells me that auceps syllabarum, literally ‘bird-catcher of syllables,’ has the transferred sense “a person who quibbles over words, argues over semantics or other technicalities; a pettifogger.” Cicero, in de Oratore 1, 55, 236 (about a third of the way down the left-hand page here), calls a lawyer “leguleius quidam cautus et acutus, praeco actionum, cantor formularum, auceps syllabarum” (J.S. Watson: “a sort of wary and acute legalist, an instructor in actions, a repeater of formulae, a catcher at syllables”), and the phrase seems to have appealed to lawyers and others, as you will see from the many uses found in a Google Books search (e.g., from Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Vol. 1 (1825), p. 235: “a study in which more than the mere ‘auceps syllabarum’ might delight”). I will try to remember to add it to my stock of learnèd insults.

For those interested in the article by Keeline and Kirby, here is the start:
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My wife and I are reading Olivia Manning’s School for Love at night and enjoying it, even though it’s very slow-moving (especially compared to her later and classic Fortunes of War series). It’s set in Jerusalem at the tail end of WWII; our hero, Felix, is an innocent and newly orphaned English adolescent in a rooming house run by the awful Miss Bohun (pronounced Boon), who takes ruthless advantage of everyone around her while constantly announcing her self-sacrificing generosity. He is rescued from his bewildered stupor by the advent of the young widow Mrs. Ellis, who drags him out to the cafes where she spends evenings with the louche intelligentsia of the Levant — Arabs, Jews, Englishpersons, and miscellaneous foreigners all more or less getting along and yammering about the prominent new cultural names. Felix, of course, has never heard of any of them, and he whispers to Mrs. Ellis “Who are they talking about?” She “broke up an empty cigarette carton and wrote on the inside: ‘Kafka, Palinurus, Sartre’.” The first and last are self-explanatory, but who or what was Palinurus (other than an obscure character in ancient epic, hardly likely to be on everyone’s lips in the 1940s)? Some googling provided the answer; it was Cyril Connolly, whose The Unquiet Grave was “written in 1944 under the pseudonym Palinurus.”

So that explained that, but why Palinurus? John Leonard, in his NY Times review of a 1982 reprint, says:

If you are soft on your Virgil, be reminded that Palinurus, the pilot, jumped ship just before one of the most important climaxes in the ”Aeneid.” Jung, according to Connolly, would have insisted that Palinurus stood for ”a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-tosuccess, a desire to give up at the last moment.” He opted, instead, for ”the unknown shore,” which perhaps explains why he is usually associated with the lobster.

So, too, did Connolly jump the ship of the novel after ”The Rock Pool.” It was at the beginning of ”The Unquiet Grave” that he made his famous declaration, ”The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.” He had persuaded himself that he could not produce such a masterpiece, even as he was busy doing so, and he retired to grade the papers of his inferiors.

One of my superiors, Wilfrid Sheed, has suggested in a fine essay that Connolly, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, was in ”his pure dedication to Art, his rambunctious melancholia, his rhythm of indulgence and remorse,” some kind of hopeless Celt who might have profited by a training in assertiveness. With respect, I wonder: Fitzgerald drank his way to a suspicious sympathy with characters who were versions of Fitzgerald. Connolly seems to have found in his cups and in his life a failure of nerve, a lack of heroism and of consequence, a longing for ”the role of sucker;” he willed failure.

This frog, this lobster, jumped ship before the moment of victory. If ”The Rock Pool” is not an altogether satisfying novel, it is because its author read and reviewed too many of them by other people, and forgot how good he was. ”The Unquiet Grave” – asking us to listen to the scarifying whisper between chunks of sanctified literature, such a weird amalgam of other voices and other rooms, such a book of uncommon places, so much art, love, nature and religion – sings.

Now that Connolly has largely been forgotten, that eloquent praise seems musty, but hell, Leonard himself, who bestrode the middlebrow American literary world of the late 20th century like a colossus, has probably been forgotten as well, as shall we all be eventually. At any rate, I’ve cleared up a minor mystery, and perhaps at least one reader of Manning will be spared perplexity.

I’m finally working my way through Skaz, the bilingual anthology I got for my birthday in 2020 from my generous wife, and one of the items it includes is Chekhov’s first published story, “Письмо к ученому соседу” [Letter to a Learned Neighbor] (1880), which Simon Karlinsky called “a remarkably old-fashioned piece of writing that imitated the form and standard devices of Russian eighteenth-century satirical journals.” It takes the form of a letter from an ignorant and barely literate retired uryadnik (Cossack NCO) to a scientist who has recently moved to the area, expounding a series of buffoonish ideas about the universe (refuting black spots on the sun: “Этого не может быть, потому что этого не может быть никогда” [That can’t be, because it could never be]). In the final paragraph he invites his neighbor to come for dinner, adding “Через неделю ко мне прибудет брат мой Иван (Маиор), человек хороший но между нами сказать, Бурбон и наук не любит,” which the translator renders “In a week, my brother Ivan (the Major) will arrive—a good man, though, between us, bourbon and sciences he does not love.” The rendering of Бурбон is so absurd (worthy of the uryadnik himself) that I had to post it, especially considering the oddity of the word.

To get the obvious out of the way: yes, бурбон can mean ‘bourbon (whiskey),’ and that is the only definition given in English Wiktionary, but I guarantee you it did not mean that in 1880 Russia. What are the possibilities? In its earliest uses, the Russian word refers to the House of Bourbon (which is presumably the ultimate source of the whiskey name, though the details are unclear); the fact that the word is capitalized in all editions of the Chekhov story I can find might support this hypothesis, except that it makes no sense in context. No, the meaning is clearly that given in Russian Wiktionary: грубый и невежественный человек [rude and ignorant person] (so that the translation should read “he is an ignorant fellow who has no love for science). But where did this come from? Well, Dahl (or rather Baudouin de Courtenay, since the word is in brackets in the reprint of the 1903-09 edition I own) says “офицеръ, выслужившійся изъ нижнихъ чиновъ, изъ кантонистовъ и сдаточныхъ” [an officer who was promoted from the lower ranks, from the cantonists and conscripts], and Makaroff’s Dictionnaire russe-français complet (11th ed., 1908) defines it as “officier de fortune” [officer commissioned from the ranks] (see Charles J. Wrong, “The Officiers de Fortune in the French Infantry” [French Historical Studies 9.3 (Spring 1976): 400-431]), and the transition from this to the “ignorant person” sense is not surprising. The earliest relevant citation I can find in the Национальный корпус русского языка (National Corpus of the Russian Language) is from N.I. Lorer, Записки моего времени (1867): “К людям, подобным Скалозубу, носившим у нас название бурбонов, я не имел никогда симпатии” [I never had any sympathy for people like Skalozub, who we call burbony]. Skalozub is a character in Griboedov’s famous play «Горе от ума» [Woe from Wit], and you can get an idea of him from the image at the linked Wikipedia page. But why burbon? Alas, Vasmer doesn’t include the word in his etymological dictionary (presumably because it’s not in the first edition of Dahl), but perhaps some of my readers will have suggestions.

My brother insisted I watch Compartment No. 6 (Hytti nro 6) because he was so sure I’d like it, and indeed I did: it’s about a Finnish woman, Laura, who takes a train from Moscow to Murmansk to see the petroglyphs and has to share a compartment with a Russian guy, Lyokha (a common nickname for Alexei, though his actual name is never given), played by Yura Borisov, who is excellent (and is now starring to great acclaim in Anora, which I am eager to see). Lyokha seems at first to be a brainless, sexist brute, and our heroine flees the compartment to avoid him, but eventually (of course) he turns out to be more complicated and interesting. The movie is mostly in Russian, which Laura speaks well but not perfectly; at one point a fellow Finn joins them for a while, so they speak in Finnish, to the evident annoyance of Lyokha. The movie starts with a gathering of hip intelligentsia in a Moscow apartment, playing a game in which one person quotes a line and the others have to guess what it’s from (“Pelevin?” “Has to be Pelevin — is it from Omon Ra?” “Think higher…”); poor Laura has her pronunciation of Akhmatova corrected by a snooty young woman (she had put the stress on the penultimate).

All of this is Hattically interesting, of course, but what drove me to post is the bit where Lyokha, trying to chat her up, asks how you say various things in Finnish, laughing raucously at her answers, and when he asks how you say “I love you” she answers “Haista vittu,” giving a little smirk afterwards. Since it was not translated in the subtitles, I paused the movie and turned to the internet, where Wiktionary informed me that it means “fuck you (general insult)” and literally “sniff a cunt” (“Considered more vulgar than haista paska” [‘sniff shit’]). The phrase returns very effectively at the end, but the viewer with no Finnish is left in the dark, so as a public service I am providing enlightenment. (If I’ve aroused any interest in the movie, it’s available for a reasonable rental fee at Amazon Prime.)

I thought this Facebook post by Alin Suciu was interesting enough to share:

I find it striking that most Eastern Christian traditions—with the notable exception of the Syriac—began to explicitly date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century CE. From this point onward, scribes often recorded the date when the transcription of the manuscripts was completed in a colophon. Therefore, manuscripts copied before the 9th century must be dated based on more ambiguous criteria, such as paleography, realia, radiocarbon analysis, and archaeological context. This overlooked pattern of dating manuscripts starting from the 9th century CE marks a shift in scribal culture and may provide significant details about broader developments in book production throughout the Mediterranean world. So it’s worthy of more serious consideration.

The earliest known dated Coptic manuscript is a parchment codex housed in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (M579), which was copied in 822/823 CE. In the Greek tradition, the first manuscript to bear a date is the Uspenski Gospels, copied in Constantinople in 835 CE. Christian Arabic manuscripts follow a similar trajectory, with the oldest known dated example being a Sinaitic codex (Sinai Arabic NF Parch. 3) whose transcription was completed either in 858 or between 858 and 867 CE, depending on how we interpret the second digit of the year recorded in the colophon—a brilliant discovery made by my friends Miriam Hjälm and Peter Tarras [Literary Snippets, p. 58]. The Armenian and Georgian traditions align with the same trend. The earliest known dated Armenian manuscript is the Queen Mlk’e Gospels, copied in 862 CE and now housed in the Mekhitarist Library in Venice. Similarly, the oldest dated Georgian manuscript was copied in Sinai in 864 CE (Georgian 32-57-33).

However, unlike the Coptic, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian traditions, the Syriac stands out as an exception to this pattern, predating all others by over four centuries. There are at least six Syriac manuscripts explicitly dated to the 5th century CE. The earliest is British Library Add. 12150, a manuscript copied in Edessa in 411 CE. It was brought to Egypt in the 10th century by Moses of Nisibis and preserved at the Monastery of the Virgin in Wadi Natrun, the famous monastic hinterland situated west of the Nile Delta. It’s a mystery to me why the Syrians chose to date their literary manuscripts so early, at a time when the practice was most likely unknown elsewhere. The remarkable antiquity of this tradition highlights the unique textual culture of Syriac Christianity.

The fact that all the other Eastern Christian traditions began to date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century suggests that a broader transformation in scribal practices took place all over the Mediterranean during this period. Whether this practice was due to administrative needs, a growing awareness of historical documentation, or external influences, it marks a significant moment in the history of book production. The implications of this phenomenon deserve further scholarly inquiry.

I’ve quoted the whole post; here are a couple of good exchanges from the comment thread for those without FB access:
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