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This is one of those posts about a very obscure term that took me some trouble to elucidate, so that I want to save others the trouble should they run across it. I’m reading Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s short novel Петрович [Petrovich], a series of episodes in the life of a young boy, and in the course of a description of Persia in the early twentieth century there is a mention of “кровавая процессия «шахсей-вахсей»” [the bloody shakhsei-vakhsei procession]. There’s a Wiktionary entry for «шахсей-вахсей» which told me that it meant “a Shiite religious ceremony imitating the suffering and death of Imam Hussein” and had the stress on the final syllable of each half of the compound, but of course I wanted to know the origin, and Wiktionary just said “Происходит от ??” Some googling turned up Muharram in Iran, which includes this enlightening section:

Tabriz

Another glorious ceremony held during the mourning days of Imam Husayn in Iran is the “Shah Husayn” ceremony in Tabriz. This ritual, called “Shakhsi” in the local dialect, begins a few days before Muharram and continues until the noon of Ashura.

In this ceremony, the mourners in the black form a human path. They move a special stick from head to toe. These movements follow a chant “Shah Husayn” (Shakhsi) and “Vay Husayn” (Vakhsi) of the mourners. Shah Hussein’s religion is a symbolic behavior; It seems that the mourners are leaving for Karbala and standing next to the companions of Imam Husayn.

So there you have it; it’s Tabrizi and formed from “shah” and “vay” [‘alas’]. I have no idea how widespread it is, but if it made its way into Russian usage it seems to be worth noting.

Some decades ago, back when Tillie Olsen was a big name in American literature (in the sense that everybody who read the classier book reviews felt obliged to read her), I read several of her books, perhaps including Yonnondio — I frankly don’t remember. But the name has always stuck with me, and it recurred to me just now as I read Why the Lakota Migrated West, the latest in Joel’s extraordinarily interesting sequence of Far Outliers posts with excerpts from Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale UP, 2019). The final paragraph begins:

By the mid-eighteenth century the Sioux had shifted shape many times over. They had opened their lands and villages for real and potential allies—Sauteurs [Ojibwe], Cheyennes, Mesquakies [Fox], Frenchmen, and many others—while contending with numerous rivals as they struggled to find a place in the rapidly changing world. They had reached out to Onontio [‘Great Mountain’, the French colonial governor] far in the East—Sioux visits to Montreal had become almost commonplace—while expanding aggressively in the West.

“Onontio sounds like Yonnondio,” thought I, “but that must be a coincidence.” Apparently not, though; googling turned up Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun, “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case” (Duke Law Journal, Sept. 1990: 625–659), which says:

When Walt Whitman wrote his poem Yonnondio for the collection Leaves of Grass, he added the following parenthetical explanation under the title: “The sense of the word is lament for the aborigines. It is an Iroquois term; and has been used for a personal name.”‘ In fact, Yonnondio also is the title of a long narrative poem by William H.C. Hosmer published in 1844 with the subtitle Warriors of the Genesee: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century. That poem, Hosmer wrote, is a description of “the memorable attempt of the Marquis de Nonville, under pretext of preventing an interruption of the French trade, to plant the standard of Louis XIV in the beautiful country of the Senecas.” In a note following the poem itself, Hosmer explained that “Yonnondio was a title originally given by the Five Nations to M. de Montmagny, but became a style of address in their treaties, by which succeeding Governor Generals of New France were designated.”

It is easy to understand that Whitman took “Yonnondio” to signify “Lament for the Aborigines”; if “Yonnondio” was indeed the word the Iroquois used to address the state, then as Whitman says in his poem, its mere mention “is itself a dirge.” For the Iroquois, “Yonnondio” itself took on new meaning as the relation to which it referred shifted. Even as the word became a greeting, its meaning was different for the Iroquois than for the French and other Europeans with whom the Iroquois had contact. This cascade of meanings reflects the highly volatile system of relations produced by contact between the Iroquois and the various Europeans intent on “opening up” or “claiming” the “New World.”

We know that Olsen took her title from Whitman, so the provenance is clear, and the Wikipedia article Onontio (which should probably link to Yonnondio) says “Onontio is a Mohawk rendering of ‘great mountain’, the folk etymology translation of ‘Montmagny,'” so it all fits. But does anybody know how exactly onontio means ‘great mountain’? What’s the morphology?

Philip Terry writes for the LRB (“Diary,” Vol. 44 No. 2, 27 January 2022; archived) about a remarkable discovery:

In​ August 2006 I visited an architect friend called David Martin who lived near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. He was in the middle of a complicated job converting the interior of a nearby château, which had been acquired by a wealthy Japanese client. One evening he produced a large and rather dirty wooden crate. ‘I found it tucked away at the back of a cupboard in the château. They’re the papers of a local poet who used to live there, Jean-Luc Champerret. Have you heard of him?’

The crate, when I finally opened it, contained papers, some loose, some tied in bundles, all covered with thick brown dust, along with a few rusty pens, some pieces of charcoal, several bundles of letters, three small notebooks – one black, one grey, one blue – and six copies of a volume of poems by Champerret, Chants de la Dordogne, published in 1941 by a small press in Perigueux, Editions du Noir (presumably a reference to Perigord Noir, the region south of Perigueux, which takes its name from the black oaks that grow there). The poems were written in rhyming alexandrines, and were based on, or attempted to re-create, peasant songs from the region. The papers were fragile, and some of the leaves turned to dust when you picked them up. What survived included notes, and more poems, written in much shorter lines, accompanied by diagrams reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy, and a number of abstract drawings in charcoal done on standard Bureau de Poste blank postcards. There were also a number of visual poems with words and letters of various sizes distributed sparsely across the page, perhaps indebted to Apollinaire, certainly influenced by Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, of which they seemed a belated imitation. The grey notebook, the first I opened, had the title ‘Notes sur Lascaux’, and was written in pencil. The first 36 pages were filled with writing and diagrams in a diminutive and impenetrable script. The rest of the notebook was blank.

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Just a tweet incorporating a video of less than a minute, but it’s remarkable:

1929 video of 94-year-old Rebecca Latimer (born 1835), talking about the world changing.

Note the accent and vocabulary — she has a manner of speech rarely seen today

She was from Georgia; Luis says in the Twitter comments:

Accent seems to be very similar to the UK accent (London area). Born in 1835 in an area probably populated by many British descendants !? Since then, English US has been influenced by the waves of migrants coming from Europe (Germany, Nordic countries, Italy, etc) and elsewhere.

I’ll be curious to see what Hatters think of her manner of speaking. It’s quite something to hear the voice of someone born in the 1830s; thanks, Trevor!

Among the presents my generous brother gave my wife and me for Christmas was a DVD of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (whose Japanese name is a transliteration of the English phrase: ドライブ・マイ・カー Doraibu Mai Kā). I’d been eager to see it, and we watched it yesterday (when we had time for a three-hour movie); it was even better than I expected, and I recommend it to all lovers of cinema. But what brings it to LH is the linguistic element, for which I quote Nina Li Coomes’ Atlantic article (archived):

Though the film is mainly about the close friendship that forms between an actor and director named Yusuke Kafuku and the young woman, Misaki Watari, who is hired as his driver, it also follows Kafuku’s efforts to stage a play in Hiroshima. Specifically, he’s directing a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with a cast composed of actors who speak English, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese, and Korean Sign Language; during rehearsals, not all the actors can understand what the others are saying. But the task Kafuku lays out for his multilingual cast is the same one that Hamaguchi lays out for his multilingual audience: Even if you don’t understand all the words being spoken in the script, trust that the emotional response you have will be genuine.

In many scenes, the dialogue has nothing to do with the real drama taking place. For example, during table reads for Uncle Vanya, Kafuku asks his performers to practice their lines by delivering them in their mother tongues with as little acting as possible. The idea seems to be to first have the actors memorize the rhythm of the script, reducing it to an instinctive ebb and flow of sound rather than meaning. A young actor named Takatsuki, who is cast as Uncle Vanya, chafes against this directive, adding too much feeling to his lines; an exasperated Kafuku asks him to try again and again.

The multilingual element is brilliantly done (and I was awestruck by the actress who uses Korean Sign Language — one is used to seeing interpreters for the hearing-impaired, but this really brings home the difference between interpreting and acting); I love movies that throw various languages into the mix, like Godard’s Contempt (see this LH post from 2003). And Godard had exactly the same attitude: “Don’t try to act, just say the lines!”

Also, I had somehow never gotten around to reading the Chekhov play, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. It too (you will not be surprised to hear) is excellent.

Laudator Temporis Acti has a brief quote from Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve’s “Brief Mention” (American Journal of Philology 30.2 [1909]: 225-236):

But to the true scholar no blunder is small. He insists on immaculate cleanliness. If ex pede is a good motto, why not ex pediculo? To him any and every mistake is a sin.

Eric Thomson responded: “Gildersleeve’s witty ex pediculo is an excellent riposte to the charge of nitpicking. Lousy scholars should have fine-toothed combs.” It is indeed witty: pēdiculus is Latin for ‘louse’ (OED: “perhaps < the same Indo-European base as pēdere to break wind […] and also Avestan pazdu- small harmful insect”). But I hadn’t been familiar with the scholarly tag ex pede, which turns out to be short for Ex pede Herculem ‘from his foot, [we can measure] Hercules’: “The principle was raised to an axiom of biology by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in On Growth and Form, 1917; it has found dependable use in paleontology, where the measurements of a fossil jawbone or a single vertebra, offer a close approximation of the size of a long-extinct animal, in cases where comparable animals are already known.” I’m guessing that by now it’s dusty enough that few scholars but traditional classicists would recognize it.

As for the sentiment about immaculate cleanliness, of course I would be the last person to deprecate close attention to detail, but it can be carried too far — my dissertation adviser, Warren Cowgill, one of the great Indo-Europeanists, never published a book because of his perfectionism. (I never finished the dissertation because of his perfectionism as well, but the academic world would have been a bad fit for me, so I have no resentment about it.)

Emily Feng writes for NPR about a Taiwanese woman who sings in her indigenous language:

At 41, Abao — her full name is Aljenljeng Tjaluvie — is one of Taiwan’s most beloved music stars. Her chart-topping tunes have swept the island’s top music accolades. And she’s done it all by singing in the Indigenous Paiwan language — not Chinese, which dominates Taiwan’s competitive music industry.

“When people think of Indigenous music, they think of some elder pounding a drum. That’s important too, but young Indigenous people have their own way of living and their own community and they want to be able to mix their culture with what they like,” she says.

The Paiwan people are one of 16 officially recognized Indigenous tribes in Taiwan, and the second-largest. Taiwan’s President Tsai Yingwen is one-quarter Paiwan.

Taiwan has long had an outsized musical influence on the Mandarin Chinese-speaking world. Despite the island’s small population (just over 23 million as of this year), it has generated abundant talent who, for decades, have graced music charts from mainland China to Hong Kong. Especially popular are Taiwan’s Mandopop hits — Mandarin Chinese power ballads and disco-inspired dance songs from singers like Teresa Teng, whose saccharine love songs are now classics in China.

Artists like Abao are at the forefront of a whole new generation of Taiwanese musicians who do not sing in Mandarin Chinese, but rather their own Austronesian languages, native to Taiwan. Their popularity reflects changing tastes in Taiwan, away from an exclusively Chinese-centered pop culture toward one that is uniquely Taiwanese. The shift has been further fueled by an overdue recognition of Indigenous culture and language in Taiwan, and a growing mainstream awareness of the island’s Austronesian roots.

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Just today I learned that there was such a thing as Ladino written in Cyrillic script; Michael Studemund-Halévy has published “From Rashi to Cyrillic: Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish (Judezmo) Texts in Cyrillic” (chapter in a Brill book: “The Cyrillic alphabet was used for notes and letters, and later increasingly used in printing, especially for religious writings”), and you can see a page of “Ла салидура де Мицраимъ” (La salidura de Mitsraim ‘The exodus from Egypt’) at the Gorazd.org Facebook page: “Mainly in the 1st half of the 20th century, numerous books were issued in Sofia (Bulgaria) in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish).” It’s very odd, and nifty, to read what might as well be Spanish in Cyrillic!

Daniel Monterescu, Rafi Grosglik, and Ariel Handel investigate for Haaretz (archived) an Arabic term that has diverged in usage in Israel. After describing its use as an upscale signifier in Tel Aviv restaurants (there’s one called Baladi Chic) and as a down-home symbol among Palestinians, they continue:

Is baladi in Hebrew identical to baladi in Arabic? How did the term evolve from signifying rural domestic produce into a sexy trend in Tel Aviv – and what does that say about Israeli identity? […]

The term baladi is derived from the Arabic word “balad” (بلد), which means village, city or geographical area.

Balad, explain Orphee Senouf Pilpoul, Jad Kaadan, Vered Shimshi and Ido Fuchs in an article recently published in “Mafte’akh: A Lexical Review of Political Thought,” symbolizes multiple meanings that denote “place,” but also the dim and at times ambivalent attitude toward place. Balad is the village (الكفر), the city (المدينة), the land (الأرض), but never the state (الدولة).

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Last year I wrote about my experiences with the early work of Mikhail Shishkin, particularly praising his first published story, “Урок каллиграфии” (“Calligraphy Lesson”), and saying of his first novel, Всех ожидает одна ночь (One night awaits us all), “It was perfectly pleasant reading, but I kept asking myself ‘Why is he telling me all this?’” Last April I was cryptic about his second novel, Взятие Измаила (The taking of Izmail): “I find I don’t have anything coherent to say about it except that it’s long and difficult and I’ll doubtless need to reread it to get anything useful from it.” Now that I’ve finished his third, Венерин волос (translated by Marian Schwartz as Maidenhair), I’m starting to feel that that first story will always be my favorite Shishkin; I don’t seem to connect well with his novels. Or they don’t connect with me. Bear with me while I try to sort out my reactions.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. After an epigraph from 2 Baruch (“And the dust shall be called, and there shall be said to it: ‘Give back that which is not yours, and raise up all that you have kept until its time’”), the first line is “У Дария и Парисатиды было два сына, старший Артаксеркс и младший Кир.” This is the beginning of Xenophon’s Anabasis: “Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο, πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης, νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος” (translated by Carleton L. Brownson as “Darius and Parysatis had two sons born to them, of whom the elder was Artaxerxes and the younger Cyrus”). We then get something completely different: “Интервью начинаются в восемь утра” [The interviews begin at eight in the morning], followed by several Q&A exchanges between Russians claiming refugee status in Switzerland and interviewers trying to evaluate their claims, mediated by a толмач [interpreter] who turns out to be the main protagonist of the novel. After a few pages of that, we get the start of a letter from the interpreter to his son, who he calls Навуходонозавр [Nebuchadnezzasaur]; then comes a third-person narration about the interpreter, followed by another Q&A session where the first question goes on for fifteen unparagraphed pages, then some more Xenophon, another letter in which the interpreter tells his son about being commissioned to take down the reminiscences of an aged singer named Isabella, and eventually (almost a hundred pages in) we get the singer’s diary, which begins in her pre-WWI childhood in Rostov-na-Donu and continues through war, revolution, musical education in the capital, a growing career, a visit to Paris, and the loss of an infant son (the last datable entry is from 1936). But the diary, though it forms the largest part of the novel, is frequently interrupted by various other elements, and the reader is sometimes at a loss as to what exactly is going on and who is involved; the book ends with a tissue of fragments consciously modeled on Joyce (José Vergara has a chapter on the novel in his excellent All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature — see this LH post). In short, a defiantly modernist novel that you’d think would be for a limited audience of cognoscenti.
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