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I’m afraid it’s another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (cf. Abbots and Beavers, Textual Criticism as Rhetoric) — I just can’t resist this stuff!

Disputes about the text of Propertius involve many of the issues discussed in earlier chapters, for example, recension (specifically, disagreement over the shape of the stemma), the proper scope of conjecture, weighing of an author’s habits of expression as they can be elicited from a controversial transmission, the place to be given to interpolation. But because Propertius is agreed to be a major poet, even a great one, the disputes surrounding so many of his lines can also show how textual and literary considerations interact. That topic will be the focus of this chapter, after a brief review of Propertius’ recent editorial history.

For a few decades in the mid to late twentieth century, the text of Propertius seemed to have attained a degree of stability after a period marked by extremes of conservatism and scepticism. The most widely used text from that period is the OCT of E. A. Barber (1953, revised 1960). In producing his 1960 revision, Barber was influenced by the work of Shackleton Bailey, especially his Propertiana of 1956, a textual commentary on all of Propertius that contributed a number of brilliant conjectures but was characterized overall by restraint: confronted with an unreliable manuscript tradition and an author believed to cultivate an idiosyncratic style, Shackleton Bailey often concluded that the transmitted text might well be corrupt but that no attempt to correct it commanded assent. He was also dismissive of hypotheses that postulated widespread relocation of couplets or that bracketed large numbers of couplets as interpolations. Barber’s editorial policies followed similar lines: while accepting numerous conjectures and a smaller number of transpositions and deletions, he confined many plausible suggestions to the apparatus, producing what might be described as a moderately conservative text. The other noteworthy edition from this period, Paolo Fedeli’s Teubner of 1984, is markedly more conservative than Barber’s without displaying the extreme resistance to conjecture manifested by some editions of a century earlier.

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Raymond Chen writes about a man whose work affected us all:

I recently learned of the passing of someone whose work nearly everybody knows, but nobody knows his name. Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack.¹ But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people. Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors). […]

Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony. I think he’d appreciate it.

Thanks, Tony! I know a lot of people hate those squiggles, but I love them (and so, according to the linked post, did Penn and Teller). As a copy editor (ret’d), I appreciate anything that helps people keep their writing free of unintended errors. And I deliberately misspelled the post title so I could bask in the red squiggle it provokes.

I just realized I’ve had a link to this post by bulbul sitting around for months, and by gad I’m finally gonna share it!

In the history of native Syriac linguistic tradition [1], Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn (d. early 13th century) is the odd man out. It is not that he is unknown or forgotten: his grammatical works are preserved in a not insignificant number of manuscript copies and his name is listed with other grammarians in overviews of Syriac literature compiled by modern scholars, as well as his contemporaries. Of the latter, the testimony of ʕAbdīšōʕ Bar Brīḵā’s (d. 1318) Catalogue of Books is particularly telling: where Eliya of Ṭirhan (d. 1049) and Yōḥanan Bar Zoʕbī (d. 13th century) are described as having composed grammars or grammatical treatises, of Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn and his grammatical works we only learn the following:

ܡܳܪܝ ܝܶܫܘܽܥܰܝܲܗܒ ܒܰܪ ܡܰܠܟܳܘܢ ܕܰܨܘܒܳܐ ܐܝܺܬ ܠܶܗ ܫ̈ܘܽܐܳܠܐ ܓܪܰܡܡܰܛܝܺܩܳܝܶܐ

“Mār Išoʕyahḇ bar Malkōn of Ṣōḇā [Nisibis]: he has some grammatical questions…”

Whether this refers to a specific genre, is meant to be read generally or anything else, that’s it as far as grammar is concerned. This lack of specificity with regard to Bar Malkōn’s work as a grammarian is also typical for modern sources. When consulting one, the reader typically learns no more than that he authored at least one treatise on points and one grammar (both unedited) [2], and that in his grammatical analysis, he followed the Arabic model [3]. One prominent example is Baumstark who describes Bar Malkōn’s grammar as “sachlich ganz die Methode der arabischen Grammatik befolgend” (“in terms of content, it entirely follows the methodology of Arabic grammar”) [4]. Over time, this simple observation – repeated uncritically – morphed into a judgment and finally into a condemnation: Talmon notes of Išoʕyahḇ bar Malkōn – and his contemporaries (or fellow travelers) like Yōḥannan bar Zoʕbī and Eliya of Ṭirhan – that they “exhibit either a servile attitude to Arabic grammar or poor coverage of grammatical issues.” [5]

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I ran across the term Чермное море in my Russian reading; for a moment I was confused by its resemblance to Черное море ‘Black Sea,’ but it turns out чермный is an old (Church Slavic) word for ‘(dark) red’ which Vasmer derives from an IE word for ‘worm’ (cf. Lith. kirmìs, Skt. kŕ̥miṣ, Alb. krimb, OIr. cruim, Welsh рrуf). So far so good, but is this red sea the Red Sea? Who knows? The Russian Wikipedia article links to English Yam Suph, a term I was unfamiliar with (though I’d doubtless seen it before):

In the Exodus narrative, the Yam Suph (Hebrew: יַם-סוּף, romanized: Yam-Sup̄, lit. ’Reed Sea’), sometimes translated as Red Sea, is the body of water where the Crossing of the Red Sea happened in the story of the Exodus. This phrase appears in over twenty other places in the Hebrew Bible. This has traditionally been interpreted as referring to the Red Sea, following the Septuagint’s rendering of the phrase. However, an appropriate translation remains a matter of dispute, as is the exact location.

I’ll be interested to see what the Hattery has to say about all this.

Erik McDonald at XIX век has been posting translation comparisons at a rate of about one a year, and even though there’s been little response to my previous posts about them (Fathers and Sons in 2024, The White Guard in 2025), I’m going to keep doing it, because they’re so valuable and so much fun (for me, obviously, and I hope for anyone who likes thinking about translations). This time he tackles one of my favorite works of Russian fiction:

“Of all the works of nineteenth-century Russian literature I have translated, without doubt Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground [Записки из подполья, 1864] remains the most challenging,” writes Michael R. Katz, rather to my surprise (xi). Shouldn’t a short work dominated by one voice, the voice of a disaffected educated man in a confessional mood, be easier than many things?

Apparently not. The voice of this “half-crazed, embittered cynic” (Hogarth ix) is full of “obvious stylistic infelicities or outright ineptitudes” to be turned into “stilted English” (Matlaw xxiii). There are allusions now obscure (MacAndrew 237–38). The narrator’s language gets “careless and confused” when he is excited, above and beyond his usual “peculiar, untidy, and colorful idiom” (Shishkoff xxxiii–xxxiv). A direct contrast between zloi ‘wicked’ (but also ‘spiteful’) at the beginning and dobryi ‘good’ at the end is often lost as translators try to convey the multiple meanings of zloi (Ginsburg xxviii–xxix), evidence of a “habit of substituting the psychological for the moral” (Pevear and Volokhonsky xxiii). Even the title is hard, since podpol’e is not an abstract “the underground” or even a cellar but “the space beneath the floorboards,” a place where vermin might live but not people (Ginsburg xxix, Aplin xiii, Zinovieff and Hughes xiii). The language is coarse: “if the Underground Man were writing today, many of his ‘viles’ and ‘fouls’ would be replaced by words far nastier than any I know” (Jakim xxv), and if he comes “as close as makes no difference to using the word ‘shit’” only once, “there are several occasions when the translator finds himself reaching for it” (Zinovieff and Hughes xiii). And there are the usual linguistic issues: what is the best way to translate the diminutives of the words for not just ‘horse,’ but ‘vice’ and ‘passion’? Is soznanie ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’? Is mokryi sneg ‘sleet’ or ‘wet snow’ (Zinovieff and Hughes xiv–xv)?

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I know some of you will complain that this site is amateurish and doesn’t use IPA, but I don’t care — I’m a sucker for these things (North Carolina, Colorado, Wyoming, UK), and I can’t resist passing them along. So herewith please find Pronunciation of Suffolk place names; some particularly unexpected or entertaining ones:

Alpheton is Al-fee-t’n, with the stress on the middle syllable.
Athelington can be Al-ing-t’n, but most Suffolkers call it Ath-ling-t’n.
Bramfield is Bram-feeld and Brampton is Bram-pt’n, but Bramford is Brar-m-f’d!
Bures is Bew-ers, but Suffolkers tend to call it Boo-ers.
Chelmondiston is as it looks, but the stress is on the third syllable.
Cowlinge is Koo-linj
Halesworth is as it looks, but becomes Harls-w’th in the local accent!
Heveningham can be Henning’m, but is more often Hay-v’ning’m or Hev-ning’m
Hoxne is Hox-un, rhyming with oxen.
Monewden is Mon-a-d’n
Onehouse is as it looks, but locals call it Wun-uss!
Saxmundham is Sax-mund’m, but, unusually, the stress is on the second syllable.
Thorpe Morieux is Thorp M’roo
Wissington can be Wiss-t’n, more commonly Wissing-t’n these days.

Note to Yanks: The “r” is a lie — for “ar” read “ah.”

Remember the old web directories (Yahoo, DMOZ)? They were a great way to find your way around, and thanks to the usual nostalgia cycle there are some new examples. Here are a couple I’ve run into:

1) Early Web Links: “Before the internet went corporate, it was weird, wonderful, and deeply personal. People built websites just because they had something to share. This directory is full of sites that bring back that feeling.” Results for “language.”

2) Curlie: “Collect the best websites for any topic!” Results for “Russian literature.”

Update. More:

3) Bubbles: “5054 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.”

4) ooh.directory: “A collection of 2,433 blogs about every topic”

5) tildeverse.org: “we’re a loose association of like-minded tilde communities.”

K. R. Callaway reports in the NY Times about some interesting new research:

Speak a language your whole life and its grammatical rules become ingrained. That’s why you might correctly guess that the present participle of the verb “absquatulate” is “absquatulating,” even if you are completely unfamiliar with the word. But the rules of grammar can vary widely between languages, and neuroscientists long theorized that bilingual speakers must process different languages with separate patterns of brain activity.

In a new study, however, researchers found that these patterns were more alike than had been expected. When deciding how to make a word singular or plural, for instance, bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language. “It wasn’t obvious that it was going to be so shared,” said Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, a psychologist and neuroscientist at New York University and an author of the study, which was published on Monday in the journal JNeurosci. “I think this is arguably one of the first very fine-grained findings of how truly integrated two languages in the brain are.”

Early research viewed bilingualism as an “add on” or “disruption” to the processing of one’s native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study. Subsequent studies have found that bilingual brains tend to display physical differences, such as more efficient white matter and changes to the gray matter, and to perform better on memory and concentration tasks.

Now scientists are probing further, to understand whether core aspects of the brain’s neural network does double or triple duty to process multiple languages.

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By popular demand, another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers. From ch. 3 “Establishing the text 1: recension”:

Although the ideal of the recoverable original is impossible to achieve, the concept still has a useful part to play. One of its benefits is psychological: it seems unlikely that scholars would be willing to devote themselves to editorial projects that often span decades if they were not sustained by the hope of recovering the author’s text. It may also be necessary for critics to operate as if a single recoverable original existed, in order to avoid a bedlam of competing reconstructions.

From what has been said it follows that the notion of a definitive edition is even more a myth than the concept of the recoverable original. No edition of a classical text can be definitive, in part because the possibility of new and convincing conjectures can never be ruled out, but also because in any text of some length there will be places where different editors can reasonably make different choices, either by preferring one manuscript reading to another, or by adopting a conjecture instead of the transmitted reading(s), or by judging the text corrupt and using the obelus. There is also the fact that almost no edition of a classical text so far published cites the manuscript evidence in a comprehensive manner. (I will return to that issue in Chapters 7 and 8.) At the moment, therefore, the most that an edition can aim to accomplish is to report accurately the essential manuscript evidence and faithfully to reflect the present state of understanding of the text, in order to serve as an instrument of research and as a basis for further discussion. To fulfil the latter purpose it will signal the places where the text is most in doubt, in the hope of stimulating new attempts at solution. As a result, every important edition is at the same time a point of arrival and a point of departure. In Gian Biagio Conte’s elegant formulation, ‘a critical edition is only a working hypothesis’. […]

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I’m back to reading Zamyatin’s early novellas, and have come to the last of the pre-revolutionary ones, the 1915 Алатырь (Alatyr′). It doesn’t seem to have been translated or much talked about, but it’s interesting in several respects; it’s a sort of magic-realist account of a provincial town built “on the very spot where countless mushrooms once sat in a circle around the Alatyr stone” (На том самом месте, где раньше грибы несчетно сидели кругом алатыря-камня). I’ll provide the description given by Alexander Voronsky in his 1922 article on Zamyatin (in Krasnaia nov’ No. 6) as translated by Paul Mitchell (in Russian Literature Triquarterly No. 2 [1972], 153-175), which begins by quoting the passage following that first sentence:

Among those inhabitants—needless to say it was inherited from mushrooms—there came to exist a downright unrestrainable fecundity. They baptized children wholesale, by the dozens. There remained only one street passing through: a decree came out forbidding travel along the others, in order that the babies crawling in abundance through the grass would not be crushed.

However, the paradise at one time passed away. The Turkish war was on, many people were killed, and the maidens of Alatyr remained without eligible young men. From here the dreams of Alatyr became reality. Glafira, the daughter of the district police officer, moans for eligible young men and awaits a love letter from a handsome stranger. The district police officer, after unsuccessful attempts to marry off Glafira, settles himself still more firmly in his study and invents things. His latest discoveries are the secret of baking loaves of bread not with yeast, but with pigeon dung, and how to prepare waterproof cloth from ordinary unbleached linen. The archpriest Father Peter converses with devils when drunk and when sober; his daughter Varvara also becomes possessed in the absence of eligible young men. Rodivon Rodivonych, the inspector, delights in reading Almanach de Gotha. And then there is Kostya Edytkin, who works at the post office. He has a secret notebook in which is written “The Works of Kons. Edytkin, that is, mine.” And verses: “In my breast there lies a dream, but dear Glafira disdains me.” At night he writes with excitement and great love. In a word, each one has his dreams. Further, a prince arrives in the capacity of postmaster. True, he has a nose with a hump and has no chin—he is an oriental prince, but a prince nevertheless. And here is what happens: Glafira, Varvara, and the maidens all go out of their minds. And the pri[n]ce also has a most noble dream: all should speak one great language, Esperanto, and then the brotherhood of peoples would be realized. The district police officer, the inspector, Glafira, Varvara, the maidens, and others all study with the prince. The dreams end lamentably. Glafira and Varvara arrange to fight it out; Kostya endures a most cruel failure with the composition “The Internal Feminine Dogma of Godliness,” and failure in love also; the prince suffers failure with his Esperanto; the district police officer suffers failure with his experiments; and so forth. […]

In “Alatyr” the basic features of Zamyatin’s artistic talent are those which appear in A Tale of the Provinces [Уездное, 1913]. The tale is somewhat less vivid, but there is in it the same enthusiasm for the word, the same craftsmanship, the same oblique observation, the same smirk and ironical smile, the same anecdotal quality (more, perhaps, in “Alatyr” than A Tale of the Provinces), the same sharpness, abruptness, and prominence of device, the same careful selection of words and phrases, a great force of picturesqueness, unexpectedness of similies, the isolation of one or two traits, and restraint.

As you can see, Zamyatin has the usual literary fun with the presumed features of provincial life: failure, drunkenness, pie-in-the-sky ideas, graphomania, and so on. But it’s the details that make it work; the prince’s Esperanto lessons are described, including a dictation (“Leono esta forta. La denta esta acra…”), and at first they are packed, because everyone wants to get in good with the only aristo within many versts, but finally the only students left are Glafira and Varvara, the gals who are madly in love with him. I love the name Rodivon Rodivonych, which is Rodion Rodionovich with the peasant insertion of -v- to avoid hiatus. As usual, Zamyatin employs obscure words that require much research to decode; it turns out that тусменный means тусклый (‘dim, dull’), but I still can’t identify the баклановка Father Pyotr tries to cure the ailing Kostya with, except that it contains vodka (“of course”) and herbs. In general the brio of the language carries you along, and the last paragraph is so fine I have to quote it; Kostya has been arrested, and the watchman Ipat (a peasant form of Ipatii, i.e. Hypatius) feels sorry for him and hands him a пятак (pyatak, five-kopeck piece):

Kostya humbly took the pyatak and smiled humbly. But there and then he opened his hand. And Ipat’s pyatak disappeared: it was trampled.

Костя покорно взял пятак, улыбнулся покорно. Но тут же и разжал руку. И пропал Ипатов пятак: затоптали.

I tried to keep something of the alliteration and rhythm, but it’s much stronger in Russian; it reminds me of the last line of Мы (We): “Потому что разум должен победить.” (Because reason has to triumph.) What a writer!

Oh, and the title, Алатырь, is of mysterious origin; you can see a few suggestions at Wiktionary and more (if you read Russian) at Wikipedia.