languagehat.com

I watched Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (see this post) with great pleasure; not only is it well made (and surprisingly avant-garde for the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era), but it’s in Estonian, which is fun. But not all of it! At one point our hero, Inspector Glebsky, gets an anonymous note in French that warns him of “un terroriste dangereux, connu par le surnom Filine.” The subtitle called him Owl, which puzzled me; when I checked the Russian text of the Strugatsky novel the movie is based on, I found the note read thus:

«Господина инспектора Глебски извещают, что в отеле находится в настоящее время под именем Хинкус опасный гангстер, маньяк и садист, известный в преступных кругах под кличкой Филин. Он вооружен и грозит смертью одному из клиентов отеля. Господина инспектора убедительно просят принять какие-нибудь меры».

In the translation by Josh Billings:

“MISTER INSPECTOR GLEBSKY: PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT A DANGEROUS GANGSTER, SADIST AND MANIAC IS CURRENTLY STAYING AT THE INN UNDER THE NAME HINKUS. IN CRIMINAL CIRCLES, HE GOES BY THE NAME ‘THE FINCH’. HE IS ARMED AND THREATENING DEATH TO ONE OF THE INN’S CLIENTS. MISTER INSPECTOR IS KINDLY REQUESTED TO TAKE SOME SORT OF ACTION.”

So Филин explained Filine, but why Owl? It turns out that филин is the Russian word for Bubo bubo, the Eurasian eagle-owl, a bird with which I was unfamiliar. As for the word филин, Wiktionary sez: “The origin is uncertain. Has been compared to Ukrainian квили́ти (kvylýty, ‘to groan, to moan’).” And it turns out the French equivalent is Hibou grand-duc, which is a splendid name: “Il est possible que les aigrettes proéminentes de cet hibou aient été rapprochées de la couronne ducale.” I have no idea why Billings chose to render it “finch.”

Jonathan Abrams reports for the NY Times (archived) about a worthy attempt at preservation:

While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre. Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.

“I love Dua Lipa,” said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region. That, to some degree, is threatening my hold on these things I love.”

Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered, a notion reinforced by Alexa’s overlooking Balfa.

In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews. Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age. […]

[Read more…]

I had no intention of doing a Fourth-themed post, but JWB slyly sent me a link to Sophie Hardach’s BBC piece “The Viking word hidden in the Declaration of American Independence,” calling it a “simple but not actually wrong BBC piece on the varied etymologies of the lexemes that ended up in the phrase ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ with clickbait Viking headline.” Here’s a sample:

Let’s start with the brief phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

“This iconic line is actually a great demonstration of what a mongrel language English is,” says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.

“Life” is rooted in Old English, a language brought to Britain by Germanic tribes from around AD400-500. “Liberty” and “pursuit” are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066.

And then there is “happiness”: a word echoing with distant voices telling stories of trolls, battles and seafarers.

“Happiness has an interesting etymology, as it comes from Old Norse happ, meaning ‘fortune’ or ‘good luck’,” says Birkett. “When ’happy’ is first attested in Middle English it means ‘fortunate’, or ‘blessed by good luck’.”

Thanks, JW! And if you’re musically inclined, don’t miss Bill Goldstein’s impassioned paean to Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which “may actually be Simon’s single greatest work”:
[Read more…]

My excellent wife referred me to Ben Franklin’s 229 Words for Drunkenness, thinking that it would bring me cheer and perhaps LH material, and she was right on both counts. Jack Shepherd writes:

Anyone who’s had a toad and a half for breakfast, taken Hippocrates’ grand elixir, or been too free with Sir Richard knows that a thump over the head with Samson’s jawbone is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth. If none of that made much sense to you, take it up with Benjamin Franklin, who — when he wasn’t busy drafting the Declaration of Independence or flying his kite in a lightning storm — appears to have spent a surprising amount of time collecting amusing expressions about the dangers of drinking to excess.

Despite his contention that “Drunkenness is a very unfortunate Vice,” Franklin was by no means a teetotaler. […] But as much as Franklin enjoyed a decent French wine, he was also committed to the virtue of moderation, and it was in this spirit that he published his “Drinkers Dictionary” (“gather’d wholly from the modern Tavern-Conversation of Tiplers”) in The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737.

It goes from the A’s (He is Addled, He’s casting up his Accounts, He’s Afflicted, He’s in his Airs) to the W’s (The Malt is above the Water, He’s Wise, He’s Wet, He’s been to the Salt Water, He’s Water-soaken, He’s very Weary, Out of the Way), and one can only wonder why there are no later letters (zounds, say I!). It’s a lot of fun, and I recommend perusing the whole thing. (Ben’s list was mentioned in passing in this 2024 post, but it deserves its own.) Skål!

Alice Dragoon writes for MIT Technology Review about a man of many words:

Brian Sietsema has a favorite word.

It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word earned the top spot on his personal list may well mark the beginning of his unique career path as both a linguist and a Greek Orthodox priest.

In third grade, Sietsema ventured to a garage sale at a friend’s house with 50 cents in his pocket and picked out three books that struck his fancy. Although they were priced at 50 cents each, his friend’s mother said the books he’d chosen were on special and sent him home with all three, including a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories called Masterpieces of Mystery. Knowing it contained macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his own mother told him he’d need to wait a few years before reading it. Naturally, he started it right away.

As he read “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” Sietsema was baffled by the main character’s description of arriving at the moon in a balloon. Pfaall reported tumbling into a crowd of people who were “eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo.” Sietsema had never encountered the word akimbo (with or without a hyphen) and asked his parents what it meant. They didn’t know, and it wasn’t in the family’s dictionary. The question also stumped his teachers, and the dictionaries in his classroom and the school library were no help either. “For years, I didn’t know what this word meant,” Sietsema says. It stuck in his mind that there was a word out there that he, his parents, and his teachers didn’t know. He thinks it wasn’t till he got to college that he finally found a dictionary with the answer: The moon dwellers in Poe’s story had been standing with their hands on their hips, elbows turned outward.

“I credit that puzzle with getting me into dictionaries and being curious about etymology,” he says. It kindled a fascination with words—and an abundance of curiosity—that would shape his life’s trajectory and work.

[Read more…]

The heat here has ramped up to the point where it’s hard to think coherently (we have A/C only in our bedroom), but I wanted to report on the unusually generous load of presents (I’m turning 75, so people have overdone it). My especially over-the-top brother not only gave me the two-ton Centennial King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band set (includes 4 CDs, two vinyl albums, a hardcover book with annotations, and a poster), A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton, and I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Anyan Hu but three Russian movies in classy Deaf Crocodile editions: In The Moscow Slums (Khitrovka. The Sign of Four; characters include Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Anton Chekhov!), the classic White Sun of the Desert (which I saw and loved many years ago), and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (the Estonian movie based on the Strugatsky novel — I read and enjoyed it but don’t seem to have reported on it here). My exceedingly generous wife splurged on Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note: The Complete Recordings, which I am now listening to with supreme pleasure. My sister-in-law and her significant other gave me The Saragossa Manuscript, the crazed and irresistible movie by Wojciech Has (based on Jan Potocki’s 1815 novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which I own but have yet to read), and Franz Koglmann’s Fruits Of Solitude, the most recent album by one of my favorite European jazzmen (I already have over a dozen of his albums, including the long-deleted early hatARTs); Songdog and his family dropped by with the BGO set of John Surman’s first three albums, fabled highlights of British avant-garde jazz (he goes into my small pantheon of jazz baritone players, along with Gerry Mulligan, Lars Gullin, and Serge Chaloff, whose surname I just discovered is ancestrally the Russian-Jewish Халов), as well as a bottle of Connemara. A LH reader sent me Franz Koglmann’s Fruits Of Solitude, the most recent album by one of my favorite European jazzmen (I already have over a dozen of his albums, including the long-deleted early hatARTs) — thanks, David! And Slavo/bulbul gave me Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok, which I’m very much looking forward to (see my rave for his earlier Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia — my god, that post is now two decades old!). Quite a haul, and tonight I get to see the US team play Bosnia!

And if you want to give a present to yourself or a deserving other, may I recommend Michael Erard’s new book The Language Beat: Essays and Reporting on Language and Life? As longtime readers will know, I consider Erard one of the few journalists worth reading on the topic of language — see my reviews of Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (2007) and Babel No More (2011) — and this looks to be an excellent read. The publisher’s description says:

THE LANGUAGE BEAT collects 47 essays and pieces of reporting that he originally published in The Atlantic, Science, Aeon, Nautilus, Lingua Franca, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere.

The topics that he explored range from dialects, language learning, and multilingualism to language policy, sign languages, naming practices, political rhetoric, and the work of linguists themselves. They showcase Erard’s ambition to tease out the language part of the human story and to locate the human in the language world.

Erard says “As a physical book, it would be 450 pages long, so out of a concern for the environment, it will only appear digitally,” and the price is definitely right, so what are you waiting for? Support good language journalism!

A very interesting NY Times piece by Elda Cantú (archived):

I have been speaking Spanish for over 40 years, and practically every day I learn a new word, an unfamiliar meaning or a new slang term.

I grew up on the border between Mexico and Texas, where a gallon container is called a yoga — after the English jug, the name given to milk containers on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.

As a graduate student, I spent a few months among Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, perreando at sweaty parties and soaking up the lyrics of what we’d now call classic reggaeton.

For nearly a decade, I worked as a journalist in South America. I married a Peruvian colleague, and even though we have lived in Mexico City for many years, the Spanish spoken in our home mixes vocabulary from our backgrounds: cuddling is apapacharse, a very Mexican word with Nahuatl roots, but scolding is the Peruvian resondrar. Chiles are called ajíes, as they are in Peru, but if we find them too spicy, we say nos enchilamos, the expression in Mexico.

[Read more…]

Shane MacDonald at The Catholic University of America’s Archivist’s Nook has a post called Title-Pages Through Time – A History of One Page:

When opening a book, typically the first page one encounters is the title page – a separate page that offers several pieces of information about the work, including the title, author name, and publisher information. The presence of a title page seems rather intuitive, but that assumption underlies how common the title page has become in our expectations on the structure of the book. However, the title page’s story is one of centuries of experimentation, often reflecting the commercial and intellectual trends of the time.

Prior to the era of the printed book, manuscripts did not have title pages. The original rationale behind printing a title on the lead page has often been explained by two key reasons tied to the printing of books. The first is that the printed book was a commercial object, and the presence of a title indicating the book’s contents would help advertise the work to consumers. The second reason has more to do with the economics of early book printing, with the printed work not being bound until much later, usually by a separate binder from the printer. As a result, there was a need to be able to easily identify what the contents of a printed stack were for the bindery and possibly protect the work while in storage and transit prior to binding.

These questions of how best to protect the work, how to identify what one has produced, and how to advertise it to consumers were “new needs brought with the advent of mass production.” Thus, when one compares the printed book to the production of pre-modern books – where binding came about right away and works were transcribed one at a time – it makes practical sense that medieval works would lack a title page.

The first several decades of the printed book – the incunabula period – witnessed much experimentation in how to label printed books. In broad strokes, the early development may be highlighted through the following developments: incipits and colophons, label-titles, and woodcuts and borders.

Click through for more history and for some gorgeous images.

I’ve been a huge fan of Gary Saul Morson for a long time (see my too-brief review of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time here) and I’ve been interested in Mikhail Bakhtin for even longer, but I’ve found him a hard nut to crack, so I was delighted to find Morson’s NYRB review (June 25, 2026 issue; archived) of Sergeiy Sandler’s new translation of Rabelais and His World. In the best review-essay tradition, it covers much more than the book under review, and I found it eloquent and informative enough to post some passages. It starts off:

Scholars speak of two Mikhail Bakhtins—on the one hand, there is the author of Rabelais and His World (published in 1965, though he began writing it in the 1930s) and, on the other, the author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art (1929; revised as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963), the essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and various philosophical works. Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote. Bakhtin’s other works focus on our “unrepeatable” individuality as the source of all morals and values, whereas the Rabelais book makes fun of everything of concern to individuals and celebrates instead the collective. Students of Adam Smith who wonder at the apparent discrepancy between his two masterpieces, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), often consider the “Adam Smith problem”; in much the same way the Rabelais book poses a “Mikhail Bakhtin problem.”

After some background on Bakhtin, he continues:

Reflecting his neo-Kantian training, Bakhtin’s earliest works focused on the significance of the soul’s embodiment in a particular time and place, as well as the ethical demands on a person in the “unrepeatable” here and now. Concerned with how people try to avoid their obligations, he diagnosed a syndrome common in Russia: pretending that one is simply acting “representatively,” that is, as the agent of some church, institution, or party that is actually responsible for one’s actions. For Bakhtin, such excuses are always false. People must take responsibility for—in Bakhtin’s terms, they must “sign”—their actions. Responsibility can be neither postponed nor passed on to others because what “I” can accomplish now cannot be accomplished by anyone else. All “alibis” for responsibility fail because, in Bakhtin’s famous phrases, “there is no alibi” and people live in a state of “non-alibi.” When Bakhtin turned his attention to Dostoevsky and other realist novelists, he found these ethical tenets implicit in the very shape of their stories.

Since Bakhtin’s two philosophical treatises were the last to be published and translated, critics, especially in the West, have usually failed to appreciate how his literary criticism doubled as philosophical exegesis. Bakhtin was by no means the first Russian critic to mask philosophy as literary analysis. Before the revolution, almost all the greatest Russian thinkers did so, partly because Russians regarded literature as the most important cultural activity and partly because censors might overlook political ideas disguised as merely literary ones. […]

[Read more…]

Last week Brian Flesser, known in these parts as cuchuflete, let me know that he was in the ICU and not expected to last long (“Have had a good run for 79 yrs, so whatever happens is ok”); his wife Emma has given me the bitter news that his run was ended, and I wanted to share it with the Hattic community. He had been lurking here for many years but only started participating actively fairly recently; he sent me many excellent links for posting, and we exchanged friendly e-mails which on his part usually closed with Saludos or Até (“Brazilians love new slang and clipped phrases. Thus the closing of a letter, fully Até a próssima [until the next time…] is now usually nothing more than Até”). Once I asked him about his background, and he sent this:

Failed phd at hopkins in Golden Age Spanish Philology. Rare book dealer, bartender/waiter for Baltimore slumlord, Wandered southern Europe playing music in cafes for food while learning Portuguese and Italian. Dropped into straight world around age 30. Wharton MBA. Management strategy consultant in US, Europe and south America. Quit job I loved to be present as dad and husband. Industrial marketing and prod. Dev. director mostly logistics software. ~25 yrs until me and x700 best buddies “right sized” com a bunda no ar. So I became a daylily hybridizer cause that’s what you do with a liberal arts degree in Span. Lit. from Dartmouth.

(GT tells me com a bunda no ar is Portuguese for ‘with [our] butt in the air.’) What a pied life! This, from a 2021 e-mail, addresses hats:

Since the late 1960s my head has been subject, four seasons a year, to the benefits of a boina impermeable. It differs from a beret in width, extending out from the skull. Spaniards sometimes call it la boina de ala ancha, cap with wide wing. That helps as a rain shield—just a little—and offers a touch of shade. Looks rakish too, though at my age I doubt anyone notices. If your collection lacks a boina vasca or two, you haven’t yet become a fully fledged mad hatter or Bartholomew Cubbins acolyte.

And when I asked him about his nom de blog “cuchuflete” (I only knew the form cuchufleta ‘joke’), he responded:

The moniker has a literary history. I read it in either Rayuela (Hopscotch in Rabassa’s translation) or some short story by the whacky, wonderful Argentine, Julio Cortázar. When I registered for the wordreference forum, c. 2003, and eventually became the head moderator there, I used it because I liked the euphony of it. At the time, I had forgotten how J.C. used it, but it seemed pleasantly whimsical.

He once signed off: “Regards from Brian (cuchuflete), Emma, and a mob of barn cats including Gatinha, Tomás, Branquinha, Ferri, Ferrita, y demâs reinas y princesas del prado”; I’m glad he had Emma (whom he called “my Royal Britannic Majesty,” she being from Nottingham) and all those barn cats to brighten his life, and I sure will miss him. Saludos, Brian.